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.

Hope 4

I see that our police culture often turns closed. Columnist David Brooks wrote that

“a self-supporting and insular police culture develops: In this culture no one understands police work except fellow officers; the training in the academy is useless; to do the job you've got to bend the rules and understand the law of the jungle; the world is divided into two sorts of people -- cops and a-holes.” (New York Times, 2014 Dec 8)

I think I understand what would cause that culture to develop: it’s a protective strategy in a really tough and dangerous job. It’s a culture in which there’s not much joy, peace, or love -- not a happy place for the officers to be in. I think I understand why the stresses and horrors they regularly deal with would cause them to “emotionally armor up” and develop, as Brooks describes,

“a cynical, dehumanizing and hard-edge sense of humor that was an attempt to insulate themselves from the pain of seeing a dead child or the extinguished life of a young girl they arrived too late to save.”

If we don’t find a different way of policing, it’s inevitable that some officers will act out their frustrations, stress and fear in the direction of whatever group it seems easiest to blame.

Fortunately, there are alternatives. Chris Magnus took over as chief of the Richmond, California police department in 2006. He changed the department from one that focused on "impact teams" of officers who roamed rough neighborhoods looking to make arrests to one that required all officers to adopt a "community policing" model, which emphasizes relationship building. Magnus, who is white, draws on and depends on broad community support. He seems committed to combatting racist tendencies. In fact, I learned about Magnus when I saw a picture of him, in uniform, standing on a street corner holding a sign that said “#BlackLivesMatter.”

Magnus’ community policing approach is credited with driving down crime in a notoriously tough city. The Richmond police department hasn’t lost an officer or killed a citizen since 2007. As one Richmond police officer said:

"We had generations of families raised to hate and fear the Richmond police, and a lot of that was the result of our style of policing in the past. It took us a long time to turn that around, and we're seeing the fruits of that now. There is a mutual respect now, and some mutual compassion."' (Contra Costa Times, 2014 Sep 6)

There are better ways, but the self-supporting insular culture that persists in so many of our police departments -- however understandable the development of that culture may be – will have a hard time changing on its own. These things take public pressure.

The compassionate thing, it seems to me, toward both our officers and the people they serve, is to be a part of that public pressure for a different approach to policing. Joining the public outcry is, for me, an act of open hope since I don’t know what the path ahead looks like.
I just know that whatever happens, it needs to emerge from relationship-building between police departments and communities.

A number of the people on the Millions March on Sat Dec 13 were expressing a more closed hope. There was anger and blame and judgment of police officers as inherently racist and oppressive. I understand that reaction, too -- though I don’t share it. And maybe you reacted against that judgment and blame by wanting to have no part of any demonstration in which some participants were like that. If so, I understand your reaction, too – though I don’t share it.

I believe our place is standing in solidarity with those who have felt the brunt of systems imposing power-over – and understanding why compassion for their oppressors might be difficult for them. I believe our place is standing on the side of love. Our place is standing for hope – an open hope grounded in embracing reality just as it is and flowing from compassion and understanding for all sides.

Walking a path of open hope surrounded by reactivity and blame on all sides is not an easy thing. It’s just the necessary thing. I know we can.

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This is part 4 of 4 of "Hope."
Previous: Part 3
Beginning: Part 1 (No Hope?)

Our Holiday

Historians have no idea what time of year Yeshua (Jesus) was actually born. The early Christian church celebrated his birthday in April at first, and then in June for a while, before settling on a strategy of co-opting yule and winter solstice. The first December Christmas wasn't celebrated until around 380 CE. Then, for about the next 14 and a half centuries, Christmas was a reverent and austere occasion -- far from the celebratory and commercial bonanza it is today. In the US, prior to 1850, Christmas celebration was

"culturally and legally suppressed and thus, virtually non-existent. The Puritan community found no Scriptural justification for celebrating Christmas, and associated such celebrations with paganism and idolatry." (Wikipedia)

All that began to change around the middle of the 19th century, when a radical transformation of Christmas began.

Unitarians were at the forefront in most of the transforming. Christmas! It’s OUR holiday.

What do you mean?

Unitarians made this season what it is. Consider: what does Christmas mean?

It means the mass of Christ, the celebration of the birth of a Palestinian prophet named Yeshua, or Jesus.

But what exactly does that mean?

Well, one thing it means is that we put a tree indoors, and we decorate it.

Right! It was a practice in Germany, brought to the United States in the early 1800s by the Unitarian minister Reverend Charles Follen.

Christmas means dashing through the snow, one-horse open sleighs. It means bells that jingle, and it means laughing, all the way.

OK. That’s the song “Jingle Bells,” by the James Pierpont. James Pierpont was a Unitarian.

Christmas means lots of other music, too. Like "I Heard the Bells on Christmas Day”

By Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, a Unitarian.

“It Came Upon the Midnight Clear”

By Rev. Edmund Hamilton Sears, a Unitarian minister.

"Watchman Tell Us of the Night"

By John Bowring, a Unitarian.

"Do You Hear What I Hear?"

By Noel Regney, a Unitarian.

“Rudolph the Red-nosed Reindeer.”

By Johnny Marks.

Let me guess – a Unitarian.

Actually, no, he was Jewish. I’m not saying we wrote ALL the Christmas songs.

Besides the songs, Christmas means Old Ebenezeer Scrooge’s heart opens up to compassion and joy.

Indeed it does – at least, that’s what it has meant for much of the world ever since 1843. That’s the year when a Unitarian named Charles Dickens published A Christmas Carol. In Dickens' tale, Scrooge confronts his past, when as a young man, his need for money, security and status caused him to lose his fiancee. He is shown the present reality of joy in gatherings of families, whether they are poor like Bob Cratchit's or relatively well off like Scrooge's nephew Fred. Then he is brought to an awareness of his own impending death. Scrooge had pushed the fact that life is temporary out of his mind. In pushing away death, he had pushed away life. Dickens' novella received immediate popular and critical acclaim, and almost as immediately shifted the way that Victorians celebrated Christmas. Over the next years, Dickens received hundreds of letters from complete strangers "writing all manner of letters about their homes and hearths, and how the Carol is read aloud there, and kept on a little shelf by itself." A Christmas Carol was regarded as a new gospel. Critics noted that the book was, in their experience, unique in that it actually made readers behave better. A Christmas Carol remains the most widely read-aloud book in the English-speaking world. It is theatrically performed in hundreds of venues around the country every year. It has been made into numerous movie versions. Other popular Christmas tales such as It's a Wonderful Life and How the Grinch Stole Christmas are but re-workings of Charles Dickens' Unitarian gospel. “According to historian Ronald Hutton, the current state of observance of Christmas is largely the result of a mid-Victorian revival of the holiday spearheaded by A Christmas Carol." The Christmas gospel of generosity, gratitude, and the joy of family gathering is fundamentally Unitarian.

Christmas also means a focus on ending war and violence. “Peace on Earth, to all goodwill.” That’s in the Gospel of Luke. You’re not going to tell me Luke was a Unitarian, are you?

No, not Luke. But let me tell you about one of the songs we mentioned before: “It Came Upon the Midnight Clear.” In 1849, just six years after Dickens wrote A Christmas Carol, a Unitarian minister, Edmund Hamilton Sears, wrote the words to "It Came Upon the Midnight Clear." With the war in Europe and the US war with Mexico weighing on his mind, Rev. Sears wrote a carol that urges us to hear the angels sing of peace on earth, to all goodwill. The Gospel of Luke tells of angels proclaiming Peace on Earth -- but for most of the history of Christendom, that has been taken as referring to a private, personal peace. Few imagined that peace on earth actually meant we should stop killing each other. Rev. Edmund Hamilton Sears, however, called us to task for not heeding the angels’ call to peace. "Beneath the angel strain have rolled two thousand years of wrong, and man at war with man hears not the love song which they bring," he decried. His lyrics raised objections from a number of Christian conservatives of the time. Many people said, contemptuously, that Sears’ hymn was just the sort of thing you would expect of a Unitarian. Yes, it is. If Christmas season today is a time when our hopes turn to ending war and truly bringing peace on earth, it is because a Unitarian minister wrote a song inviting us to imagine the day, "when peace shall over all the earth its ancient splendors fling, and the whole world give back the song which now the angels sing."

This really is our holiday.

From the Christmas tree, to the jingling bells, to the Scrooge story, to the message of peace on earth, Unitarians made Christmas what it is today.

This Week's Prayer

Christmas: the anniversary that we, by convention, celebrate -- of the time when, according to legend, God became flesh and was simultaneously human and divine.

Like those shepherds in the field in the story of the first Nowell who looked up and saw a bright light in the east, our eyes, too, are cast to the east, looking for a star.

We look east, where there is fighting, unrest, and political manipulation in Syria, Turkey, Iran, Iraq, the West Bank, Israel, Afghanistan, Somalia, and tragic violence in Pakistan and Nigeria.
We look also to Ferguson, Missouri, and Staten Island -- and Brooklyn -- wherever violence erupts between police officers and citizens.
We look to Lima, Peru, where the Climate Change conference did little, but might have paved the way for something more.
We look to Cuba, where a new period of relations with the US now begins.

Our eyes scan all around the horizon for signs of hope -- for the rising of some kind of star.

We pray that love can, indeed, somehow become flesh and dwell among us.

We perceive that the divinity of humankind is the humanity of God, that everyone who serves love is the child of God, and everyone who bears love is the parent of God.
We celebrate the discovery of such fact in the garment of legend for God is not greater than life, and life is not less than God.

In this season, in these times, then, let every cradle be visited by the three good monarchs: Faith, Hope, and Love. Then Christmas will be with us always, every birth the birth of God among humankind, every child a Christ child, every song a song of angels.

Hope 3

Embracing reality just as it is doesn’t mean we don’t work for change. Indeed, as we practice loving what is, we become more engaged with that reality in ways that can lead to our own and our world’s transformation. You might think that if I love what is, then I’ll be complacent. The opposite is true. Complacency is a symptom of disengagement, and love pulls us toward engagement.

Millions March NYC protesting police violence on Sat Dec 13
(Kena Betancur/Getty Images)

Embracing reality awakens compassion. Those areas where we don’t fully accept exactly what is -- either through clinging to something we see as possibly slipping away or through aversion to something we see possibly coming we don’t want -- are called attachments. Attachments are our retreats from reality, and embracing reality naturally entails a compassionate response.

To illustrate this, let me ask you to recall a time when you weren’t compassionate -- a time when you missed an opportunity to be kind and caring. Ask yourself, why did that happen? Bringing compassion and understanding to yourself, look at what was going on in you that at that moment blocked your compassion.

What I think you’ll find, if you examine that, is that some kind of attachment was at work: something you had you were afraid of losing, something you didn’t want you were afraid of getting. Maybe you simply thought you didn’t have time -- which is a way of saying you were attached to your pre-existing plan for how your time was about to be spent.

We never let go entirely of our attachments. At best, we learn to hold them more lightly. When we do that -- when we loosen-up, a bit, the vice-like grip we habitually have on our attachments -- we are more open to the inexorable yet unpredictable flow of change: things passing from us and new things arising. We more readily adapt to whatever circumstances bring. And we’re more ready to respond in compassion -- because we aren’t clinging so hard to any reason not to. When you love what is, you’re more ready to care for it -- while at the same time more flexible about what the outcome of your caring might look like.

If working for change means having a very specific, detailed picture of what you want, then that’s not loving what is – it’s rejecting what is in favor of this other thing that you want in place of reality. Working for change doesn’t have to be that kind of attachment to a certain outcome. Working for change might instead be an open engagement that isn’t sure exactly what the outcome will be but works creatively with the situation to uncover possibly-surprising ways that needs can be better met. That kind of transformative engagement is the manifestation of loving what is.

Let’s call it closed hope when it’s an attachment to a specific outcome, when there’s demand energy, when center-stage is occupied by upset, blame, and judgment, about reality as it is. Closed hope is a desire for change without accepting what is.

Call it open hope when it’s open-ended, reality-affirming, creatively transformative engagement for change that better meets needs without pre-commitments to any particular strategy for how that should happen. Open hope is engagement for change while at the same time letting go of attachment to results and fully embracing, loving, things just as they are. If you can imagine such engagement -- work and commitment yet without desires, motivated ultimately by the impulse not to make things different but to express your true self in the world, trusting that simply manifesting your authentic caring self will be transformative in unpredictable ways beyond your control -- then you have imagined open hope.

Walking the path of open hope for our society, open hope for justice, sometimes means walking with others whose hopes are more closed.

For example.

On Sat Dec 13, I was at the Millions March NYC in protest of police brutality – along with, the New York Times reported (CLICK HERE), about 25,000 others, including (the New York Times did not report), a couple dozen or so Unitarian Universalists, many of us in our yellow "Standing on the Side of Love" shirts. Myself and four others from Community Unitarian Church marched. I think I understand why some UUs might have wanted no part of it: the predominant mood was demand, blame, judgment, nonacceptance. For me, though, loving what is – this dear planet and all its beautiful people trying so hard in such diverse ways to bring flourishing to their lives – called me to care for their well-being in this way: to stand, without blaming, in solidarity with the oppressed, though they, in their oppression, do cast angry blame; to stand for understanding and accountability without having a demand for a specific strategy or outcome; to stand engaged and ready to engage with an open-ended process of healing, connection, and care; to stand for reconciliation in the midst of the injured who, for now, think only of retribution. I stand with that anger because it is a phase, it will ultimately transcend itself, but right now the force of its energy is needed.

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This is part 3 of 4 of "Hope"
Next: Part 4
Previous: Part 2
Beginning:Part 1 (No Hope?)