shaktinah's blog

That was the title of and the highlighted quote from a recent HuffPost piece talking about new approaches to church that included Unitarian Universalism.

UU Buddhism Is Foreign to Me (2013) - in Buddhist Voices in Unitarian Universalism, edited by Sam Trumbore and Wayne B. Arnason (Boston: Skinner House)

What Will We Be and For Whom? (2010) - in A People So Bold: Theology and Ministry for Unitarian Universalists, edited by John Gibb Millspaugh (Boston: Skinner House)

Immigration as a Moral Issue Resource Guide (2010) - UUA.org

Namaste.  I am the U.S-born daughter of Chinese immigrants, growing up with Chinese Buddhism and folk traditions inside the home and Christianity and civic religion outside, including five years in a conservative Lutheran school.  I began adulthood as a neurobiologist, and worked as a postdoctoral fellow at SUNY Stony Brook. It was at Stony Brook where I first stepped foot in a UU congregation, and where I first encountered the field of Religious Studies (altho those two events are not related).  After realizing that I preferred chasing uncertain answers to big questions over certain answers to smaller questions, I moved to DC to pursue Religious Studies at Georgetown. There I discovered All Souls Church, Unitarian and that's when I truly "found religion," becoming a committed UU.

A Tidal Wave of Migration

It sounds very simple but there is actually a great deal of confusion around the term “illegal immigrant.” Being in the country without documentation is illegal but not criminal. It is a civil offense, much like exceeding the speed limit while driving. If you’re going 50 mph in an 35 mph zone, you are breaking the law, but does that make you an “illegal driver”?

Ever since April when Governor Brewer signed SB1070 into law in Arizona, I have been following developments down there with rapt attention – checking the updates of various facebook groups, scanning online news headlines, reading analyses… With each new day the news seemed to get worse and worse. First, there was the passage and signing of SB1070 itself. Before the worst parts of the legislation were suspended in July, SB1070 directed officers of the law to investigate the legal status of people “where there is reasonable suspicion” that they may be undocumented.

Let me start by saying that I am not a “protest” kind of person.  My experience with numerous protests is that a lot of people assemble, shout angry slogans, maybe sing a few songs, and then go home, leaving piles of garbage in their wake.

In the early 1800s, U.S.Americans started settling into a territory of Mexico known as Texas.  Alarmed by the fact that the immigration rate was so high that U.S. settlers were starting to outnumber Mexicans, Mexico closed the territory to further legal immigration.  But U.S. settlers continued to pour in illegally.  Rather than attempting to learn the language and culture of the country to which they had immigrated, U.S.American immigrants in Texas declared independence from Mexico in 1836.  (One has to wonder what the Mexicans whose families had already been living in Texas thought about that.)

It was a family tradition when I was growing up that almost every summer we would pack the car and drive from San Francisco where we lived, to Yosemite National Park, then Lake Tahoe, then Reno. The city of Lake Tahoe is bisected by the border between California and Nevada. The first time I saw the Cali/Nevada border, I was disappointed and confused over the lack of a big black line, as I had seen on the map. Instead, there was only a small sign on an otherwise normal looking street. As an adult, I can now see that one direction has casinos and the other only the cheesey tourist shops, but as a kid I would look down the road in one direction and then the other, and it would pretty much all look the same to me. If the little sign were not there pointing it out, I would not have known that there was a border at all.