Deconstructing the Mango Pop

"Come spirit come. Our hearts control. Our spirits long to be made whole."

The delegates at the Unitarian Universalist General Assembly last June voted to select a new Study/Action issue. We select only one such issue every two years. The issue selected was “escalating inequality,” thereby urging UU congregations to make it topic of concern and engage it, reflect on it, learn about it, respond to it, comment on it, and take action—each in their own way. So let us reflect.

The great catcher for the New York Yankees, Yogi Bierra, got his start in the minor leagues. Once, the team bus was winding its way through the hinterlands looking for some small town where the team was due to play. Yogi was studying the road map. He looked at his watch. "We're lost," he announced. "But we're making good time."

Our economy for the last 75 years -- the recent recession notwithstanding – has been making good time. But we got lost. We took a wrong turn when we decided that the measure of how well we’re doing is our total wealth rather than how it is distributed. We take a wrong turn every time we look at our national mean per capita income, or mean per capita spending, or mean per capita productivity, but don’t look at the standard deviation, don't look at the growing gaps between us and how that gap corrodes our common life.

There is an argument that we should be concerned with poverty, but not with inequality. It’s our business as a society to make sure that everybody has enough, but not our business how much more than enough the rich have. Comedian Louis C.K.’s illustrates that point. In one episode of his show, Louis is making dinner. There’s an extra slice of mango, which he gives to his older daughter, Lilly, and goes back to making dinner. The younger daughter, Jane, appears and says, “Can I have a mango pop?”

Louis says, "There was only one." Jane says, "Why does she get one and not me? It’s not fair."

Louie squats down to be face-to-face with his daughter at her level. He says, “Listen. The only time you should look in your neighbor’s bowl is to make sure they have enough. You don’t look in your neighbor’s bowl to see if you have as much as them.”

That sounds wise and mature. Envy, after all, is one of the seven deadly sins, right?

Here’s the thing. What we want is to care and be cared for. We want to be in relations of mutual care. We weren’t built to keep caring and caring if others just take advantage of us, use us, and care nothing for us in return. That’s not healthy. We need to care – and we also need some level of mutuality and reciprocity. Reciprocation need not be exact – we don’t keep score – we just need some sign that caring about each other does go both ways.

When Jane asks for a mango pop because her sister has one, it’s not about the mango pop. That’s just a symbol to test whether she’s being held in a relation of mutual care. I don't see envy going on here -- though over time, if Jane is systematically excluded from the full participation in the family's circle of care, envy might emerge. In the moment, I simply see a little girl who needs affirmation that she counts. If she gets it when she needs it when she's young, as she gets older she won't need that affirmation as immediately. She'll begin to see that, as her father says (see the full clip, below), sometimes her sister is the luckier one, and sometimes she is, and over the longer term, it balances out.

Right now, Jane's developmental stage requires a more immediate "evening of the score." Our fairness needs gets looser as we mature, but we retain them in some form. We have a need to be in relations of mutual care. And when that need is not met, it makes anxiety, depression, and social alienation more likely.

This segment from Louis C.K.'s show has been getting attention on the blogosphere and in social media. Most of that attention has focused on what a great lesson Louis offers when he says "The only time you should look in your neighbor’s bowl is to make sure they have enough." And that is a lovely ideal. It's worth saying even though Jane is not at a developmental stage to hear it right now. (Which is OK -- if the lesson is repeated regularly, she'll remember it when she is ready to hear it -- though, really, how many of us ever become spiritually advanced enough to truly follow that lesson?) For me, though, the greater wisdom comes a moment later, when Louis accedes to Jane's plea for fairness, grants Jane some "calcium chocolate" -- and adds, thus reinforcing the very need for fairness Jane was expressing, "make sure your sister gets one, too." So now Lilly gets a mango pop AND a calcium chocolate while Jane gets only a calcium chocolate. But that's OK. Jane's happy with that because she doesn't need precise score-keeping. She just needs to know her Dad cares about her, too.

There’s a joke about a mother explaining to a little boy, "We are here to care for others."
The little boy says, "What are the others here for?"

The answer, of course, is, we’re all here to care for each other.

It does me good to care for others, and part of that caring is wanting them to also have the good of caring for others – which, for them, includes me. Systems of mutual care are good for all of us -- not just because we all get cared for, but because we all have opportunities for the joy of caring for others.

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This is part 1 of 4 of "Income Inequality"
See also:
Part 2: It's Getting Worse
Part 3: Inequality Harms Social Health
Part 4: Equality Is Good for Us

This Week's Prayer

Source of healing and wholeness we call by many names:

The rich and the poor have this in common: on this pale blue dot, we are all passing wisps of bone and hope. Let us not lose an instant of this brief chance to be present.

Let the yearning of our heart be spoken, made conscious, and guide our actions.

We want the compassion to comfort the afflicted. We want the courage to afflict the comfortable. Everyone we meet is both: afflicted by something that bothers them and complacent about something about which they could be bothering. We want the wisdom to respond skillfully to both. We want the grace and love that will make us brighter lights in the darkness.

We remember and celebrate with same-sex couples in Florida which this week became the 36th state to afford civil recognition to their marriages.

The police slowdown in New York City weighs on our minds. It is difficult to know what to make of it. Many fewer citations are now being given for the sort of infractions for which, in the last decade, 80 percent of those penalized were black or Latino. Many officers are trustworthy and fair. We yearn for a police force in which many more of them are.

We remember today the lives of those displaced across the Middle East.

We remember the dead, massacred at the Charlie Hebdo offices in Paris.

We remember the teachers and educators in northern Nigeria, Afghanistan and Somalia in their challenge to provide education and to make a difference in lives lived in extreme conditions.

As winter descends in earnest, we remember those at risk in the cold.

So may compassion and wisdom guide our words and actions to make of us more effective agents of care.

Service to Transform 4

There remains much to do. Most of the gains we've seen in recent decades (such as worldwide reductions in extreme poverty, hunger, child labor, child mortality -- and increases in life-expectancy, literacy, and democracy) will turn around if the climate change trend is allowed to continue and droughts, floods, and rising sea levels lead to hardships and political instability.

Women’s reproductive freedom is under assault. Forty-one years ago this month, Roe v. Wade was an epic win for abortion-rights activists. We’ve been losing ever since.

2014 was also the year a lot more people began to notice how problematic it is that many of our police departments have developed a self-supporting and insular culture that teaches that no one understands police work except fellow officers; doing the job means bending the rules; the real law is the law of the jungle; and there are only two kinds of people — cops and jerks. Some departments don’t have such a culture, and some fine officers resist that message even in departments that have such a culture. Yet too often that culture plays out in unnecessary police violence against pretty much anybody – with the possible exception of white, middle-aged white-collar professionals – and disproportionately against young African American men.

There remains much to do.

What are you up for?

God knows, and I know, we’re all way too busy. We're stressed from overwork and overscheduling. Still. I see numbers that the average adult American watches more than 20 hours of live TV every week. Maybe we do have a little bit of time for justice. I know I don’t watch anywhere near that much TV, and probably many of you don't either. Still. There may be some time in the day for things we really want to do – if it energizes us and fulfills us, if it’s enriching and meaningful. More stuff that’s a drag to do and wears us out – no, we surely, indeed, do not have time for that.

Community Unitarian Church has said that engaging in service to transform ourselves and our world is what we’re here for. It’s our mission. How shall we do that?

What projects of transformation of yourself and your world would be energizing and fulfilling for you? Community Unitarian Church could:

• Host a dinner once a month free to all in the community
• Focus on being more welcoming and supportive of people with mental disorders.
• Expand and strengthen our “welcoming congregation” status for LGBT folk.
• Prepare for mobilizing in greater numbers for marches that represent UU values
• Advocate for more community-oriented policing and reduced racial profiling
• Address climate change and environmental justice
• Develop a prison ministry
• Prepare ourselves to respond to disasters
• Explore ways to deepen our reverence for life and expand compassion to nonhuman animals
• Get training in restorative justice and make ourselves a community resource for restoration
• Organize support for the Unitarian Universalist Service Committee
• Join Westchester United and team up with other faith organizations on issues of shared importance
• Work closely with the local chapter of Planned Parenthood to advance access to birth control, sexuality education and information, and abortion services.

That’s just a starter list – there are many others that you might suggest.

We probably can’t do all of those things – but we could do some of them. Which ones would you be interested in being a part of?

Our theme of the month for January is Justice – and developing a plan for Social Justice is a goal this year that the CUC Board set last summer. Our Journey Groups this month on the topic of Justice will afford you more opportunity to think through what justice means to you and what direction living your Unitarian faith might take you.

In the next few months you’ll see and have chances to participate in the unfolding of a congregational plan to engage in service to transform ourselves and our world.

For we must stand on the side of love – and justice is what love looks like in public.

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This is part 4 of 4 of "Service to Transform"
Previous: Part 3
Beginning: Part 1

Service to Transform 3

In the 20th century, Rev. John Haynes Holmes famously – or notoriously – led opposition to World War I. He also lived his Unitarian faith as co-founder of both the NAACP and the ACLU.

Unitarian minister, Rev. Gordon Gibson, right, with
Dr. Martin Luther King, after Gibson and a fellow
UU minister were released from jail in Selma, in
1965 after a voter registration drive

In 1965, the call went out to Unitarian ministers across the land to join Martin Luther King in his march from Selma. At least one-fifth of them set aside their busy schedules and went to Alabama to do that. And some of those who stayed home did so because they were lead organizers in the parallel marches for civil rights in their own cities at the same time. Our Rev. James Reeb was beaten to death by white thugs at in Selma. Viola Liuzzo was fatally shot as she participated in the demonstration. These Unitarians lived their faith, and died for it.

Nationally prominent civil rights leader Whitney Young was a member of Community Unitarian Church at White Plains, worshipping on Sundays in the sanctuary in which we continue to gather and worship today. Sometimes activist values lead a person to become a Unitarian, and sometimes Unitarian values lead a person to become an activist. Often it’s a little of both. Whitney Young was speaking a religious truth of his Unitarian faith when he said:

"Every person is our brother or sister, and every one’s burden is our own. Where poverty exists, all are poorer. Where hate flourishes, all are corrupted. Where injustice reins, all are unequal."

Whitney Young on cover of Time in 1967

I cannot brag about our participation in Selma and in the civil rights movement generally without also mentioning the conflict that rived our General Assemblies in 1968 and 1969 where black and white Unitarian Universalists were torn apart over how best to address racism. We are a people who so want to do what is right, but we are not without our own blindspots – then and now.

I remember the 70s as a time when our congregations were active in the anti-Vietnam war effort, and in organizing support for the Equal Rights Amendment.

Our churches have been at the lead in the effort to end LGBT discrimination. A few of our churches and ministers were quietly performing same-sex ceremonies of union as far back as the 50s. By the 70s, more of our churches were doing that, and more publicly. Eventually, we stopped calling them ceremonies of union and started calling them marriages – distinguishing civil from religious marriage and proclaiming that civil marriage is a civil right, religious marriage is a religious choice. In 2004, the Massachusetts Supreme Court made that state the first to civilly recognize same-sex marriage. In that case, Goodridge v. Department of Public Health, the lead plaintiff, Hillary Goodridge, her partner Julie, and a total of seven of the 14 plaintiffs were Unitarians living their faith.

Our Standing on the Side of Love campaign was begun in 2008 following the hate-motivated shooting at Tennessee Valley Unitarian Universalist church that killed two and wounded several others. It’s a campaign that has focused on issues where the national discourse is most distorted by hatred. Through this campaign, Unitarian Universalists, wearing the distinctive yellow shirts, stand on the side of love with immigrant families, with LGBT folk – and, more recently, African American communities subjected to police abuse.

Let us remember who we are as Unitarian Universalists. We are a people of activism. We are here, Unitarian Universalists gathering week after week, in order to nurture our spirits and help heal our world, for we have discovered that those are not two separate things but that each reinforces the other. We help heal our world by nurturing our spirits, and nurture our spirits by helping to heal our world.

I told a little of the story of me, and some of the story of us. Let us turn to the story of Now. How do things stand?

A lot of things are getting better. Worldwide in the last 25 years we’ve seen worldwide extreme poverty (living on less than $1.25 a day), the Global Hunger Index (a measure of undernutrition), child labor, child mortality, maternal mortality in childbirth are all substantially down and life expectancy is up by about 9 years in low-income countries. More people are going to school for longer, and literacy rates are up. More and more countries are democracies.

War is actually on the decline. Steven Pinker writes,

"The rate of documented direct deaths from political violence (war, terrorism, genocide and warlord militias) in the past decade is an unprecedented few hundredths of a percentage point."

World stockpiles of nuclear weapons peaked in 1986 and have sharply declined.

In the US, homicides, violent crimes, teen births, smoking, the unsheltered homeless population are all down.

2014 was quite the banner year for marriage equality. The District of Columbia and 35 states now recognize same-sex marriages – up from 16 states one year ago -- and Florida will become number 36 on Tuesday.

And there remains much to do.

* * *
This is part 3 of 4 of "Service to Transform"
Next: Part 4
Previous: Part 2
Beginning: Part 1

Service to Tranform 2

My time as a professor at Fisk University, an historically black school, had brought to my attention the central role of the black church in caring for and supporting African American families and in being institutions at the center of social change through the civil rights movement. Churches, I saw, can indeed be transformative – transformative of their members and transformative of society. I felt a call to be a part of that – of an institution that transformed itself, its members, and the world, and moved our conflicted species, so prone to violent and exploitative power, toward greater justice and more substantial peace.

So here I am, to serve in what ways I can the mission of Unitarian Universalist congregations, including the part so aptly articulated in this congregation’s mission: to engage in service to transform ourselves and our world.

I began a serious and daily spiritual practice fourteen years ago – and that, too, has been of a piece with my social justice orientation. What was an agreeable but occasional and fleeting idea – that there are no others, that I am all of life, that all suffering is my suffering – has slowly become a more abiding constancy of consciousness. Living this truth in my actions, my service, no less than seeing it in the times set aside for still silence, transforms me, solidifies the awareness of our interconnection and, indeed, our interbeing.

At Marches, rallies, or vigils – visiting legislators to urge certain actions – contributing volunteer labor at a homeless shelter and writing checks to various charities – in service, education, advocacy, organizing, and witness -- living my faith changes me. It’s the way I become who I am.

That’s my story. It’s a tiny part of our story. Our story, the Unitarian Universalist story, is a long history of living our faith.

Lydia Maria Child, 1802-1880

From the very beginning of Unitarianism as a distinct religion in Europe over 400 years ago, and the somewhat independent re-beginning on American soil over 200 years ago, ours is a tradition that has always said that faith must be lived. We have emphasized this life, rather than the next. We have said that it’s the way Jesus lived, rather than the way he died, that offers us a way to be saved. From the days when we more frequently invoked God, we said that God calls us to love one another, and we recognized, as Cornel West would put it centuries later, “justice is what love looks like in public.” So we are called – tugged by something we did not put there -- to the work of building justice – making our institutions more fair and inclusive.

In the 19th-century Unitarians were at the forefront of the Abolition movement to end slavery. Lydia Maria Child lived her Unitarian faith, publishing widely about the evils and extent of racism. Frances Ellen Watkins Harper lived her Unitarian faith as an influential poet and orator for antislavery. Rev. Theodore Parker lived his Unitarian faith, founding and leading the Boston Committee for Safety and Vigilance, which was dedicated to defying the 1850 fugitive slave law. Robert Gould Shaw (played by Matthew Broderick in the film “Glory”), a colonel in the Union Army, lived his Unitarian faith by committing himself with all his heart to the command of the Fifty-fourth Massachusetts regiment, the first all-African-American regiment.

Unitarians were at the forefront of the women’s suffrage movement. Lucy Stone, Susan B. Anthony, and Rev. Olympia Brown each lived their Unitarian faith as ardent and passionate leaders for the right of women to vote.

Bronson Alcott and Elizabeth Parker Peabody lived their Unitarian faith in their work for education reform to facilitate greater flourishing for more people.

Unitarians George Ripley, Margaret Fuller, and others lived their Unitarian faith by organizing Brook Farm, an experiment in communal, egalitarian living to make our ideals real.

Henry Bergh, 1813-1888

Dorothea Dix lived her Unitarian faith fighting for people with mental illness.

Samuel Gridley Howe lived his Unitarian faith as the first director of this country’s first school for the blind.

Rev. Joseph Tuckerman served a Unitarian congregation in eastern Massachusetts for 25 years, and then became minister-at-large to Boston’s poor. He has been called the Father of Social Work because his ministry first articulated and demonstrated that field’s fundamental principles and practices. That’s how he lived his Unitarian faith.

Henry Bergh lived his Unitarian faith writing the first law against animal cruelty, passed by the New York legislature in 1866. He then founded the Society for prevention of cruelty to animals and campaigned successfully to get his anti-cruelty law adopted in 38 additional states. Those laws then, with Bergh's help and leadership, led to laws against cruelty to children.

And that's just the 19th century!

For each of these leaders, there were hundreds of rank-and-file Unitarians, clergy and laity, also at work in these efforts.

Next: Unitarian activism in the 20th century.

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This is part 2 of 4 of "Service to Transform"
Next: Part 3
Previous: Part 1

Service to Transform 1

Happy New Year!

Well, here we are.

And why is that?

We are mothers and fathers and aunts and uncles, sons and daughters, husbands and wives, brothers and sisters. We are students and workers and retirees – doctors, lawyers, chiefs and underlings, teachers and counselors, writers and editors, and quite a number of other things. Whatever else we may be, those of us who are members here have decided to be Unitarian Universalists. What for? Aside from how nice it is, and how fun, to be together, what are we here for?

Last January, a year ago, Community Unitarian Church answered that question. That's when we officially adopted a mission statement. We decided then, and have been saying every Sunday since, that we are here to:

"Nurture each other in our spiritual journeys; foster compassion and understanding within and beyond our community; and engage in service to transform ourselves and our world."

That’s what we’re here for. Nothing else.

Our mission statement is our congregation’s way of articulating what we understand all of Unitarian Universalism to be about, and I have seen enough of a number of Unitarian Universalist congregations to know that, though articulated in slightly varying ways, this is indeed the mission of all Unitarian Universalism. Nurture each other in our spiritual journeys; foster compassion and understanding within and beyond our community; and engage in service to transform ourselves and our world.

We, here at Community Unitarian Church, nurture spiritual development in a variety of ways. If you’re in one of our journey groups, which got started last September then you’re part of the most significant way that we nurture one another in spiritual development. That’s a slow, lifelong process – and doing that is what we’ve said we are here for. We also foster compassion and understanding in a variety of ways. And we engage in service to transform ourselves and our world. Twenty-five percent of our plate collection is given away to one good cause or another – a different one each month. For the holiday season we particularly geared up for service. The mitten tree collected mittens, scarves, hats. We contributed to the ecumenical food pantry. We collected gifts to be given to children, and toiletries, socks and men’s underwear for those who might be facing a shortage of those essential items.

When it comes to justice work, there are five types.

• Service – like directly helping out those in need in the ways I listed.
• Education – because learning more about and finding ways to teach others about climate change and police procedure and the state of reproductive rights and the prison industrial complex and the military industrial complex and immigration and LGBT issues and so on is crucial for change.
• Advocacy – marches, demonstrations, letter-writing, and lobbying for policy change.
• Organization – Collaborating and partnering with other groups to work together on projects we agree on. We can do a little bit by ourselves. We can do a lot more as part of a coalition.
• Witness – that is, publicity. Media coverage and advertising of our action is a part of the justice action itself, a part of making that action effective.

Service, education, advocacy, organization, and witness. To engage in service to transform ourselves and our world, we must engage in all five. Service to transform includes direct service, and also includes serving the needs for education, advocacy, organization, and witness. That matters to me, and it matters to us.

Let me say a little bit about how it came to matter to me.

I was born and raised a Unitarian Universalist, a child of two teachers. Gathering with other UUs for rallies or teach-ins against the Vietnam war was part of what we did. The idea of a better system – a system that would give everyone the advantages that I’d had – captivated me from an early age. I grew up in the 60s, and for me the take-away message of those times was: “There’s a better way for humans to be together.” I knew that before I started high school. I was interested in communes – still am. For all their difficulties, making them usually short-lived, I have been fascinated with the possibility of that level of equality for all. In grad school, I studied political theory – exploring that question of how to arrange things better, socially and politically, so everyone could flourish. And when I left teaching college to become a minister, it was partly because I saw congregations as a form of humans being together that was profoundly valuable and worth spending a life preserving and strengthening.

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This is part 1 of 4 of "Service to Transform"
Next: Part 2

This Week's Prayer

Ground of Being and of Truth,
Our lives are new every morning.
Each day we are given opportunities to love life and to love the people, the life around us, and this good Earth.
As we begin a new year, we take a moment to rededicate ourselves to service, to rededicate our gifts and talents towards creating a world of justice and peace.

We rededicate ourselves to compassion.
May we have courage when we find ourselves encountering pain and suffering in others and in ourselves.
May we be free of judgment and self-righteousness.
May we bring humility to all we do.

We rededicate ourselves to reconciliation.
Let us ask for forgiveness of those we have hurt.
Let us open our hearts to possible paths toward forgiveness of those who have hurt us.
Where there is division between individuals, races, or tribes, let us be bearers of light and understanding.

We rededicate ourselves to hope.
When we hear of wars that seem unending and see scars of conflict that run to the bone, or natural disasters, or calamities that we ourselves have made, may we find the strength to continue to seek the way of understanding and love.

We rededicate ourselves to justice.
Let us resist unfair and unequal laws and treatment.
Let us expose systems that benefit those who have much and penalize those who have little.
Let us have the wisdom to hold our leaders accountable for their actions.

We rededicate ourselves to peace.
May we respond to hatred with love, to anger with kindness.
May we be filled with inner peace that spreads peace wherever we go.
May our witness and our actions bring peace to fill the whole world.

We rededicate ourselves to faith – the opening of our hearts to the unknown and the commitment to whatever lifts us from material or social status concerns.

So may it be.