Unitarian Universalism
The Common Good
We breathe the common wind of the earth
no matter where we live, who we love,
what language we speak.
We drink the common water of the earth
no matter what our color, how long we live,
the coverings we drape on our forms.
We travel the common paths of the earth
no matter our beliefs, how far we move from home,
the gold that we carry, or its lack.
May we live from these truths: our hearts
open to the holiness all around us,
and our hands turned always toward the common good.
Coming of Age, UU Style
This past Sunday, our congregation had its annual Coming of Age worship service. I've been thinking about this since Sunday, and have hesitated to make a big deal out of it because: 1) there is so much other painful stuff going on right now; and 2) I suspect that this will hurt some people, including people I care about. But I'm going to talk about it anyway, because things keep calling me back to it.
Let me start by saying that I am all for rites of passage, communal rituals that mark changes in our lives. In fact, I think UUism should have more of them. That is why I attended our congregation's annual Coming of Age worship service, even though I suspected that I would be squirming in my seat for the same reasons that I've squirmed during previous ones I've attended. I've been a member of two congregations, and the annual Coming of Age worship service has essentially been the same in both, so I infer that both congregations are following some kind of curriculum/blueprint that is either association-wide or at least prevalent. I don't know what the curriculum is leading up to the annual service - having never taught (non-adult) RE - and some people might argue that means I don't have the right to be critical. But I would argue that an outsider can see things that people enmeshed on the inside cannot.
In every Coming of Age service I've attended, the youth (who are always great! - this is in no way a knock against them!) each present a short homily on what it is that they believe, and within that statement of belief there is almost always a mention of whether they believe in God (yes, no, or I don't know). And more often than not there is reference to having learned about other religions and a compare-and-contrast about what elements they liked.
I squirm for so many reasons. For one thing, I do not care whether or not you (proverbial you) believe in God, whether you are an adult or a youth. Why do we teach our kids that this is the most important question to ask themselves?! (That was rhetorical. I know that this is a fixation of North American and Western European liberals.) Whether or not you believe in God or gods has no bearing on what kind of person you will be; it's what you believe that God/those gods call you to do that shapes your behavior. So tell me about what you're going to do with your beliefs. *IF* you believe in God or gods, what do they inspire you to be like? If you don't believe, what are you inspired to be like?
For another thing, it is good to learn about and appreciate other religions. Orders of magnitude better than remaining ignorant and suspicious about them. But the impression I get - and I can see this happening so easily given the UU emphasis on "deciding for yourself" - is that it's almost like going shopping. "I've looked at all the religions, but none of them really fit my needs." Or "I like the generosity of Islam and the compassion of Buddhism and the earth-centeredness of Paganism and the..." Religion is not a product, like laundry detergent, where we read the ingredients and claims of various brands and then decide which one we like best. That's a consumerist mentality into which we've all been indoctrinated. It's also a colonial mentality, to think of different cultures as just things that we can adopt to suit our needs and tastes.
And third, while I heard a lot of appreciation for the congregation being an accepting place that allows spiritual exploration, what I did not hear was a sense of belonging, a sense of UU identity. Personal statements of belief are very individualistic things.
Again, I'm not criticizing the youth - they did a great job with the material they were given. (And if they think of our UU congregation as a safe place from which to explore other religions, well that's our fault, not theirs.) Nor am I criticizing the teachers. Hell, I'm not really criticizing anybody. I used to do all of the above. I used to think answering whether I believe in God or not was important. I used to compare and contrast the positives and negatives of different religions to try to decide which one to choose. These are the waters into which we've all been inculturated. I squirm in my seat in recognition and alarm that we're training/indoctrinating another generation to make the same mistakes.
Ironically, it was becoming a UU, along with studying religion at Georgetown, that turned me around. It was committing to a religious community that helped me to realize that community is more important than individual beliefs. After doing a survey of different religions and not finding any that matched my exact criteria, I settled on UUism as the "least bad" of all the options. "At least," I thought to myself, that since UUism has no dogma, "there would never be anything in it to offend me." Boy, was I wrong! But having made a commitment to UUism I learned to stay even when things are said that offend me, even when there is difference of belief.
Within our congregations we have Christians and atheists, Jews and Buddhists, Pagans and Muslims, Hindus and just plain UUs with no other religious identity. We of all people should know that it's not a set of beliefs that makes a religion. Through interfaith work that I did as a UU, I have met atheist Christians who claim the Christian identity as part of the culture that they were born into and the community that they continue to be in covenant with, evn if they don't share certain core beliefs. It was also through UUism and our ongoing racial justice work that I came to see that culture permeates religion. (UUism is White Anglo-Saxxon Protestant in culture, regardless of how many athiests and/or Pagans sit in our pews.) Religion isn't just a set of beliefs. It's culture. And it's community. Figuring out what it is that you personally believe is important, but equally important is a sense of UU identity - a connection to the larger tradition and to the community.
Again, I am all for rites of passage, communal rituals that mark changes in our lives. I think UUism should have more of them. But is this really is how we want to mark coming of age for our youth - to stand in front of the congregation and make a statement about individual beliefs. Admittedly, the program does a good job of enculturating them into the the dominant UU white culture, which emphasizes individualism and intellectualism. But is this really what we most value? Is this what we want to teach our kids to value? Can we envision a different coming of age program that instills a deeper sense of UU identity? What if, instead of asking each youth to write about what they personally believe we asked them to write about what they see for the future of UUism, what role they play in it, and what role UUism plays in the world?
- shaktinah's blog
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What if?
What if we are simply acting as parasites fighting with each other to devour the earth? What if our galaxies are like mitochondria, the power houses of cells? Thus, in the metaphor, we, are solar system, is contained within a cell. We are intimately connected with each other, so much so that our actions and decisions reverberate out affecting every one else, as everyone else's affects us. Still, we continue to duke it out as if subjugating or rejecting or killing those of another group is not killing us, and the organism that serves as host. What does it take to see the larger picture that we are so infinitesimally small in the larger universe, that the divisions we perpetuate are ludicrously petty. Would we treat one another better then? Would tribalism, nativism, nationalism, racism, sexism, fill-in-the-blank-ism ad infinitum, cease?
What if we dedicated ourselves to the betterment of all of our solar system, our galaxy, knowing that to be the only way to ensure our own survival. What would we lose? What would we have to give up? Could we find less destructive ways to create, build, feed, house, clothe, and deal with waste, that would be good for each occupant and the earth as well? There are so many pieces of the puzzle that the entire planet population could be occupied. We would not leave space junk, or litter on Mt. Everest, symbolic of our Western use abuse and discard ethos, recycling all that we use.
So, too, What if there was a change in consciousness about our effect on everyone and everything else on the planet, a mindfulness, if you will. Would it make a difference? Would we as a human race then change for the better?
- kady's blog
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If Not Church, Then Where?
This is a sermon that I gave at Emerson Unitarian Universalist Church, Canoga Park, Los Angeles, California on August 13, 2017.
Thank you for inviting me to preach today. I am a great fan of Rev. Ann Hines, and I have so enjoyed getting to know Rev. Matthew this past year, We are fortunate to have another woke minister who is committed to social justice in Southern California. That is as much a reflection on this congregation, as on the man himself. I met a number of you at the District Assembly in Tucson and Nogales this year, and I expect a number of you are up at DeBenneville Pines this weekend for the Justice Camp.
When I guest preach, I tend to tackle the difficult topics that often are not spoken of in the pulpit. Today, I am going to address domestic, or intimate partner violence. It relates to the congregational community both as spiritual care issue, and an issue of participating in our larger world. Unitarian Universalists are terrific about wanting to fix our outside world, but for this sermon, we will look within. We will look at domestic violence, and signs to look for. We will look at the wider context of domestic violence in the political sphere, and how that affects us, and we will look at spiritual self care that will be useful to those of us who need it for ourselves and/or to support and sustain our community.
This past weekend has been a hellish example of violence getting out of hand, due in large part to abusive bullying language and actions becoming the norm. Oh, who am I kidding? This weekend it is racism and anti-semitism, but the underlying culture of supremacy, that is kyriarchy, patriarchy, Christian dominionism, a specific kind of white masculine pride of having to be one up and controlling another, are the roots which manifest in the smallest unit of society, a couple or family. I preached on this topic earlier this summer. The circumstances were different with the leader of our country was merely posting mysogynistic tweets about the female half of a news show couple. Words affect on the psyche. We are all surviving domestic style verbal abuse, at this point.
So, starting with some statistics, we'll start with these from the Centers for Disease Control enumerated a little more clearly in the Huffington Post:
- 3; That is the number of women killed this week by a current or former intimate partner.
- 18,000; The number of women who have been killed by men in domestic violence disputes since 2003.
- 6488; That is the number of U.S. military troops killed from 2001 to 2012 in Afghanistan, and Iraq.
- 1 in 4; The number of women who will be victims of severe violence by an intimate partner in their lifetimes. Not to leave out men,
- 1 in 7; That is number of men who will be victims of severe violence by an intimate partner in their lifetimes.
- 8 Million; The number of days of paid work women lose every year because of the abuse perpetrated against them by current or former male partners. This loss is equivalent to over 32,000 full-time jobs.
- 50; The percentage of lesbian women who will experience domestic violence (not necessarily intimate partner violence) in their lifetimes.
- 2.6 times; How much more likely a transgender person of color is to become a victim of intimate partner violence than a non-LGBT person.
Unfortunately, we are currently living in a society that is fighting to restore and enforce the binary between women and men. The prior statistics focused mostly on female victims, and rightly so. However, bathroom laws aside, no where is attempt of erasure of gender queer people more apparent than the murder of transwomen and transmen. The number killed in 2016? Twenty three were killed last year, the most EVER recorded. The youngest this year, Ava Le'Ray Barrin, 17, was shot and killed in Athens, Georgia on June 25 during an altercation in an apartment parking lot. Human Rights Campaign reported,, "In an online obituary, friends remembered Barrin as a 'social butterfly' and an "amazing girl" who 'loved to make people laugh.' Last year, nearly two per month were murdered. Sadly, 2017 has already seen at least 16 transgender people fatally shot or killed by other violent means and we are on track to equal or raise last year' number in 2017. Once again, we need to acknowledge race. Every single transperson murdered this year was black, with one exception. She was Native American.
Even after high profile instances of domestic abuse has been witnessed in the media, intimate partner violence continues to be a taboo topic. Professional athletes continue with impunity after public abuse of their intimate or former intimate partners. Once the survivor manages to extricate themselves from the relationship, they enter the most dangerous time in the relationship. Not only are they at risk of being murdered, according to Liz Roberts, the chief program officer at Safe Horizons, "even after a survivor has removed [themself] from their abusive relationship and gotten [the] kids to safety, [they]may be met with hostility and mistrust from the children [they've] been working so hard to protect. . . . Kids sometimes play into the victim-blaming that they learned from the abusive parent who was left behind."
Roberts explains further:
Abusers typically actively undermine the children’s respect for and confidence for the adult victim,” Roberts said. “They’ll say things like, ‘It’s your mommy’s fault that this happened’ or ‘Your mommy is stupid, that’s why she did that.’ Or the children will overhear the put downs directed at the adult victim herself.” Plus, "Victims of intimate partner violence typically face high levels of stress, which can exacerbate any chronic health conditions they may have already had. After they separate from their abusive partner, they remain at risk for mental health issues like depression, anxiety, and post-traumatic stress disorder.
In addition to physical violence, here is financial abuse, which is using money to control. Indeed, control a huge part of psychological abuse. I have a list of twenty one warning signs of an emotionally abusive relationship. See if any of these sound familiar. Here is a sampling:
1. Humiliating or embarrassing you.
2. Constant put-downs.
3. Hypercriticism.
4. Refusing to communicate.
5. Ignoring or excluding you.
6. Extramarital affairs.
7. Provocative behavior with opposite sex.
8. Use of sarcasm and unpleasant tone of voice.
9. Unreasonable jealousy.
10. Extreme moodiness.
11. Mean jokes or constantly making fun of you.
12. Domination and control.
13. Making everything your fault.
Is any of this beginning to sound familiar yet? Currently, it feels as if the American public is being held against its will in an abusive relationship. There is this gigantic game of chicken that our leader is gambling our lives by playing with a tiny, admittedly hostile at best, country who does have nuclear technology. Bullying, much? Then, the hateful rhetoric, false equivalencies, and isms of members that have been installed in the administration, have emboldened the angry white men, who at one time had enough shame to wear sheets, to bully those who do not fit that categorizations. The bullying that began during the primaries has ratcheted up, up, up. Now that they are empowered, there is no need for sheets. (Update: 8/14/17, I learned that covering ones face in public is against the law in Virginia, with the exception of Halloween).
Keeping up with the news, I am feeling battered day in and out. This is why I am choosing to focus on self-care and our congregational community. After admittedly relying on the comfort foods method of coping after the election, I'm going to share other methods that are so much more helpful. Contemplative practices are what that I focused on in seminary. Contemplative practices is a blanket term to encompass praying, meditating, keeping one's focus on the immediate present, and task at hand, another form of meditation, which is lately called mindfulness. When I started seminary a number of years ago, I would download pages off the internet, to color and offer fellow students to color as we learned. Now, you cannot leave a check stand without having seen a coloring book. I saw one at the hardware store in Glendale, last weekend.
I learned about, and then taught a Unitarian Universalist form of prayer beads. Having grown up with the rosary, it was natural to look for some equivalent that was not loaded with the baggage I had imbued my early faith. My classmates and I would make stations where our fellow stressed out students could color, draw, sculpt or make prayer beads. We had a drumming group, and because Claremont is a Methodist Seminary, we learned the prayer practices of the early Desert Father Christians, and many other Christian prayer practices that can be adapted, as necessary, to the pluralism that flourishes within Unitarian Universalism.
There is a wonderful book by Rev. Erik Wikstrom, who is a UU minister back east called Simply Pray. This was the most life-giving book through the stressful times that followed during my second year. While he did outline a UU prayer practice, he also suggested rewriting prayers to make them more familiar and beloved. He rewrote the twenty-third psalm substituting dog metaphors for the pastoral imagery of that psalm. That one prayer was worth the price of the book. After all these years, I recently used the structure of the Prayer of St. Francis of Assisi, to write the prayer in the Zen Buddhist language of Thich Nhat Hanh. That felt good. One of the simplest meditative practices that I use is to make a gratitude list in my head, in alphabetical order. I'm grateful for asparagus, and brussel sprouts, and my cat Chuy, and my dog Celie and electricity, and fiber optic networks... If I really cannot sleep after going through the list twice, I start backwards with "Z." My mind is so focused on finding a word that begins with a particular letter, that there is no room to worry about anything else. I've yet to get through the alphabet backwards.
I am a great admirer of another minister back east, Naomi King. She has a wonderful online ministry of prayers, chalice lightings, chalice closings, and blog posts giving inspiration on Twitter, as @revnaomi, Tumblr, and Facebook. She wrote a blog post recently, that I shared with the other congregation. In it she addressed coping in the fraught world that we find ourselves in. Before I share that, her twitter posts from her account @revnaomi yesterday, 8/12/17, read thus:
- Love gather us in our grief. Help us hold fast to supporting equality & inclusion. #defendcville #prayer
- #Love unite us in stopping hate with compassion, care, & hope. #prayer
- Breath of Being call us into this life of courage, faithful risk, & generous joy. #chaliceout #uu
(Silence, 3 beats)
So, as a UU nerd that one inevitably turns into when pursuing ministry, Rev. Naomi ministers to those tender places that I will admit that I hide while being in a congregation. As a ministerial candidate there is a required distance, but we UU's, in general, do spend a lot of time in our heads rather than our hearts. In these trying times, we must challenge ourselves to make it a both/and, rather than an either/or.
In her blog post called 3 Spiritual Practices for the Long Haul, Rev. Naomi challenges us first to allow ouselved to grieve. Let us acknowledge and mourn for the injustices that grow day after day. Only then can we have compassion. Some days, compassion has been a big challenge for me, probably because I have not allowed myselt to grieve as much as I could. When I am lacking compassion, I do use a Buddhist prayer(practice) for each person to be happy, healthy and free. One must include oneself, which can often be the hardest part. This practice is called metta in the Buddhist tradition.
Next, Rev. Naomi challenges us to practice gratitude. I already gave you the alphabetical practice, but writing down what I am grateful for makes a growing list of the things that have the potential to make me happy in the moment. I cherish the list, and those stolen moments of happiness. I would be of no use, or really help, to others if I was angry all of the time. Another practice is the Ignatian Examen, a Christian practice, in which, one thinks of what one is most grateful for and least grateful for at the end of the day. It is great to do in the family or with a partner. What you are least grateful for will at least give you something to sleep on, or work on the next day. If you want to make your gratitude practice even more spiritual, just light a candle, and be fully present.
Last, Rev. Naomi challenges us to "live with reverence and awe." Back to those tiny moments of happiness: my particular moments inevitably come in nature. Fluffy clouds, a wild animal, trees, I'm a tree hugger literally and figuratively, plants, happy children, beloved pets; All of these are gifts that can heighten our spirituality, and make us aware that we are part of the interconnected whole, the web of life of our seventh principle.
As a part of the interconnected whole, we are part of an association of Unitarian Universalist Congregations. If not at church, where can we discuss the tough topics, like domestic violence, racism, homophobia, islamophobia and anti-semitism? If not at church, where can we build a community that is accountable beyond our family of origin, or our chosen family? If not at church, where can we tend to our spirit, as we face yet another justice issue, and keep faith in humanity? One of my favorite ministers preached that Unitarian Universalism is where we practice right relationship, allowing us to further offer those skills to the rest of the world.
Finally, I'd like to close with a short reading from one of our Unitarian Universalist Minister/Professors, Rev. Dr. Mark Morrison Reed. He writes:
The central task of the religious community is to unveil the bonds that bind each to all. There is a connectedness, a relationship discovered amid the particulars of our own lives and the lives of others. Once felt, it inspires us to act for justice.
It is the church that assures us that we are not struggling for justice on our own, but as members of a larger community. The religious community is essential, for alone our vision is too narrow to see all that must be seen, and our strength too limited to do all that must be done. Together, our vision widens and our strength is renewed.
Living in Non-White Whiteness or White Non-Whiteness or ...
"What do you like about being white?"
The anti-racism training facilitator chose me to go first. My view of myself as multicultural Latinx, with indigenous heritage and light skinned privilege, was discounted a room full of other participants. Every struggle of not being white enough, or Latina enough flew up to my throat into a knot. I could not get past the word "multicultural," because the facilitator, an African American man, kept interrupting, insisting I was white. I thought my story about my grandparents and great grandparents had explained who I was the day before. The Latina facilitator said in a stage whisper, "She's Latina." The white facilitator said in a stage whisper to the Latina, She's white!" Whispering ensued between them. The facilitator who asked the question more than once said, "Fine, let's move on. We'll get back to you." I sat in shock. The next white individual, somewhat understandably, did not want to claim he was white either.
When I had gone to a people of color retreat last summer, the speaker, Zenju Earthlin Manuel had brought up an example that made sense. In 2013, Black Girl Dangerous blogger, Janani, published, "What's wrong with the term 'person of color?'" In it, they wrote about an exercise about race in an anti-oppression youth camp in the South, in which they, along with two other Asian attendees, were put in the white group rather than the black group. Janani wrote,
I want to return to that moment of racial ambivalence, and why it happened. That moment was unsettling precisely because even if Black and Asian kids had a common experience of being racialized, we didn’t have a common racialized experience.
It seems as if it should be obvious, but upon hearing it the first time, my heart opened with more compassion for we of whom are not of the dominant culture. In our workshop, every single person had been racialized as a consequence of living in the United States. Each one is racialized based on their geography in the country, in addition to the relationships to friends, relatives, loved ones, institutions and society. Not one person's early soul tenderness was battered by racism the same way. I have no claim to the experience of being black, but navigating La Frontera, the borderlands as explained by Gloria E. Anzaldúa, is its own experience. I grew up occupying that liminal space of in between, not pale enough to be white, but without the Spanish language, unable to navigate in the Latinx sphere either. How you were treated could turn on a dime. Especially, if your name changed from European to Hispanic or back. I was punished a whole school year for a surname change and return. My mother experienced it, and my sister, who has fairer skin than mine with dark hair and eyes, experienced it.
As the daughter of a Mexican American mother with the black hair and beautiful brown skin of her father, I was the first of sixteen grandchildren with the black hair and dark brown eyes that favored him. Unfortunately, he died before the year before. As the daughter of my Irish, Scandinavian, Northern European father, I'd never quite fit in. The McGregor family loved me anyway, often pointing out how smart I was, or tall I was, even though my build was more solid, and I tended to be chubby and darker. My heart and self-esteem suffered each time others were disparaged for gaining weight by the weight and look obsessed white women in the family, or how "Mexicans" or worse, "wetbacks" were disparaged by my new German stepfamily, most often by my stepmother.
If I had been asked a different question, the rest of the workshop might have gone differently. Instead, I became the female example of white denial. The trainer said to the group, "We people of color see you as white. You are not fooling us." My shutting down served as another sign of whiteness. In truth, I was in shock. Every misgiving about not being a person of color enough, was laid bare. I did not speak out about myself, nor with anyone else, the rest of the workshop. So, was he right? In a way, yes. And in a way, no.
I have much baggage: growing up in colonialized geography, feeling less than, being a widow of a small, dark, non-gender conforming, Filipina, a raw recent falling out with a relative, being enraged by my late beloved's treatment in the world, the traumatic death and aftermath, being an outcast accused of being unfeeling because I was white, and as such, had no culture, a coopted memorial. To say anything would have sounded like an excuse, or worse, as if I was trying to divert the discomfort, to make the conversation about my feelings, or separate myself from other whites by claiming I had suffered more, or that I had my own oppression, and therefore understood people of color's experience. Diversionary tactics are not new, and I've witnessed each one more than once.
For the evening and the next day, memories of scenes in the hospital, the funeral, and the aftermath haunted me. PTSD is real. When the other facilitator discussed what ends up lost to whites for opting to participate in whiteness the next day, I still could not trust myself to speak. When she blamed herself, her white privilege and ignorance, for the early loss of her own spouse, I just felt ill. I'd just managed to work past the survivor's guilt, stopped finding reasons to blame myself for my beloved's early death.
Going in to anti-racism work the decade before, I needed to be clear in my identity. I considered myself one of the mestizaje, on the border. After much discussion with my minister of color, I took on "person of color" identity as a political statement. That meant the battles are mine. Every single day, I choose not to walk away. My liberation is inextricably woven into the fabric of all people of color. Although there are days I hate the injustice too much to be healthy, I am committed. I'm committed to being open, learning, and to defer to the leadership of those people of color most affected by the intersecting issue at hand. I'm committed for all the multiracial children who do not quite fit into either family, and do not understand why race is such a big deal. I'm committed for gender nonconforming people of color, who are the most vulnerable, the most in danger, in our society. I'm committed for queer people of color, who are nearly as vulnerable. I am especially committed now for queer and gender nonconforming immigrants .
I'm grateful to have recently married, to a partner who works with me and learns with me. Still, I have married back into white privilege. So, what do I like about being white? I like that in passing, I can use the privilege I do have to speak out, protest, agitate, and put my body on the line for those who cannot. I like that in passing, I see and hear white people for who they are with each other. I like that in passing, my privilege can be used for the common good, rather than to get ahead in the capitalist white cultural narrative.
- kady's blog
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Left-Wing Credentials
I have a lot of pet peeves, I know. I’m also aware that often times the things that peeve us do so because they remind us of something we don’t like about ourselves.
One of my pet peeves is that every time there is a story about a conservative who has had a change of heart because of personal experience — whether it’s someone who initially opposed Obamacare until they got sick, or someone who was trans/homophobic until they learned their child is trans/gay — every time there is a story like that, a lefty inevitably snarks about how the person should have known better in the first place.
My question is: Do you really think that you are an *inherently* better person? That if you had grown up in a conservative environment, been taught by your parents and teachers/clergy and everyone around you that there is only one way to be, gender/orientation-wise, and that big govt was not to be trusted… are you certain that despite all that you would have inherently known in your heart a better path? Because I’m not at all certain what I would be like if I’d grown up under different circumstances and had different experiences. True, there were times when I was taught hate and either immediately rejected it or eventually did, but I always had counter examples from which to draw. I’m not saying that there are no people in existence who would always reject exclusion and self-interest. But I question whether the majority of us on the left would have the same values had we been enculturated differently.
From my perspective, this idea that some folks are inherently “good” while others are inferior sounds a lot like the Calvinist theology I was taught in middle school and which so many lefties vociferously reject. From a Buddhist perspective, which is echoed in the UU 7th principle and backed by science, people are the result of a complex combination of a great number of things, including genetics, enculturation, and individual experiences. Even if you were born with a greater tendency towards empathy and altruism, that is the result of genetics - a gift from your parents and ancestors before them - not something that you “earned” yourself. And if you were taught to value diversity, that too was a gift from your community around you. Or if you learned from personal experience — whether because you’re a person of color, LGBTQ, religious minority, or have a disability — that it hurts to be discriminated against so you vowed not to do it to others, that was due to your personal experience. It is no different for the conservative mom who learned to respect trans people only after the personal experience of having a trans son. She just gained that personal experience later in life. And isn’t it wonderful that she was able to change? Because we know that countless other parents would instead disown their children.
Obviously, I don’t know anyone else’s heart except my own (and even then we often deceive ourselves). Maybe the folks who disparage people who didn’t “see the light” earlier truly are inherently superior and would have held the “correct” positions no matter what circumstances they grew up in. Maybe the snarky comments only bother me because I’m not as certain about my own goodness. Otoh, maybe people make snarky comments because the people who’ve had a change of heart later in life remind them of what they easily could have been like under different circumstances.
- shaktinah's blog
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The Physics of Congregational Singing, Or Why I Go To Church
When I was a kid, especially in middle school, I used to love to sing. To myself. All the time. It was in junior high that my depression first manifested, tied with fears of inadequacy and failure – but the act of singing lifted my spirits, momentarily melting away whatever cares I had. Even when I graduated to high school, I still loved to sing. Until one day my mother said to me, “You have such an awful voice. I don't know why your voice is so hard to listen to; your father and I both have good voices.”
It didn't happen immediately, but over time I sang less and less, becoming more and more self-conscious about it, and eventually stopped. The things I struggle with – perfectionism, fear of failure, fear of looking foolish – these are things that I know many of us struggle with to varying extents. And sometimes, unfortunately, these fears cause us to give up things that we actually enjoy doing.
For years, I avoided singing at all except for the obligatory “Happy Birthday”, and even then I'd mumble along hoping others would pick up my slack. Better to not sing than to ruin the sound with my awful voice.
I stopped singing until the Fall of 2003. That's when I first stepped in to All Souls Church, Unitarian in DC and was so moved that I immediately committed to becoming a UU.
At first the hymns were painful. It'd been so long since I'd sung, and as y'all probably know, like everything else singing is a skill that requires practice. The less you do it, the worse you are at it. I could hear my weak voice wavering. I could feel as I ran out of breath before the end of a note. But something about doing this painful, potentially embarrassing thing in the context of a UU church made me want to persevere.
See, I had bought in – heart and soul – into the vision of the Beloved Community that All Souls preaches, the vision that Unitarian Universalism preaches, that UUSF preaches – come, with all your imperfections, your weaknesses, and still be embraced into community. The only thing that we ask in return is that you commit to creating this community with us.
So I sang, without fear of judgment, and without judging others. And lo and behold, together the congregation actually sounded pretty good. The All Souls Choir even recorded a CD that included the entire congregation on a couple of tracts.
There's a scientific explanation for why untrained people singing as a group sound better than untrained individuals. In physics, when two sound waves vibrate in the air at the same time they get "added" together. The parts of the two waves that are in sync with one another get amplified and the parts of the two waves that are out of sync get canceled out. (As an aside, that latter part is how noise canceling headphones work.) If instead of only two sound waves, we have multiple waves, the same thing happens to an even greater extent. When a person sings, especially an untrained person, there are usually fluctuations in the pitch. But with a whole group of people singing together, all our fluctuations happen more or less randomly and thus cancel out, whereas the good, on-pitch parts strengthen each other. The over all effect is that weaknesses are minimized and strengths are amplified.
I think that is a good metaphor for a congregation in general, not just while singing hymns.
Some of my unchurched, “free-range” friends sometimes ask me about my involvement with a congregation. “Why do you bother going to church?” It's a legitimate question. After all, I can hold the same UU values by myself, and be able to sleep in on Sundays, and not have all those committee meetings....
I go to church because it's in church that we actually get to practice living those values, knowing that we'll make mistakes. If there is any place in which it is safe to make mistakes, then church is it. (Or at least it should be.)
In community, all our fluctuations – our momentary lapses and bad days - happen more or less randomly and thus cancel out, whereas our good, on-pitch parts strengthen each other. Weaknesses are minimized and strengths are amplified.
I go to church because we have the potential to be better together than apart.
- shaktinah's blog
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There Is Always A Reckoning
The theme for this second week of Commit2Respond's Climate Justice Month is reckoning. Reckoning, as in being held accountable. Each time as I've read the word I think of another, karma. Not karma as it is popularly known in the West – a system of punishment and reward meted out for good and bad behavior respectively – but karma as I learned it from the Dharmic perspective – the consequences of one's actions. Karma is as natural and as inescapable as Newtonian laws (at the macro level). For every action, there is a reaction. For every action, there is karma, which is the consequences of action.
Karma is the ultimate accountability. Sooner or later, the consequences of our actions must be faced. There is no supernatural exemption, no way out of a mess except through.
This is in stark contrast to the traditional Christian view of sin and salvation, in which we are born guilty (of original sin) even before we've done anything, and yet we can escape the consequences of our guilt (even extreme guilt) via the sacrifice of another. This second week of Climate Justice Month also coincides with Holy Week in the (Western) Christian tradition. Today, Good Friday, we remember that Jesus was brutally tortured to death. Whether one believes that the ultimate cause was the Roman empire squashing an insurrection or a wrathful God demanding appeasement, Jesus too faced consequences for past actions.
The traditional (Protestant) Christian view is that because Jesus died for you, you do not have to face what would otherwise be the consequences of your sins. Even though many people have since rejected the theology, I think that a version of it continues to permeate the Western world. That is, people widely hold the belief that it's possible to avoid the consequences of actions, even if they no longer believe in God(s). Somehow, no matter how dire the situation seems to be, there can be some seemingly miraculous way out, such that we don't have to make a sacrifice ourselves. Our movies feed us this message over and over again. A supporting character takes the bullet for the main protagonist so that the latter can drive off into the sunset. Advertisements perpetuate the same message. A diet pill where “the pounds just melt off” rather than us having to exercise. Is it any wonder that we hope, somehow science will find ways to magically sequester carbon, or generate unlimited energy, or take us to another planet? We hope that something will save us so that we won't have to do it ourselves, won't have to change our ways. Indeed, the task of addressing climate change seems too big, too daunting to accomplish ourselves. And thus even in the undeniable face of the urgent need to act, we continue as we've been doing, simultaneously feeling hopeless and clinging to hope for miraculous salvation.
In the Buddhist view, however, there can be no miraculous salvation because there is karma, the consequences of our actions. There may be seeming temporary reprieves, but such measures only delay the inevitable. For example, finding a new place to dump garbage doesn't clean up the previous place; it only means there is now one more polluted place that we'll eventually have to clean. The use of extreme forms of fossil fuels - mountaintop removal coal, deep sea oil, fracked gas, tar sands oil - may seem like a reprieve from having to find alternative, renewable forms energy, but all these practices wreak even greater ecological havoc that we will have to address. Putting coal-burning plants in poorer neighborhoods and communities of color may seem like a way for those of us who are not living in those areas to avoid the consequences, but eventually they catch up with all of us, as they are doing now, AND we'll also have to make amends for systemic racism and classism.
We have cut down and burned forests that would clean our air. We have sent tons of CO2 and other greenhouse gases into the atmosphere. We have filled the seas with oil spills, and the rivers with mountaintop debris. Our glaciers are melting. Our seas are rising. And weather patterns that we've relied on for millennia and built our civilizations around have drastically changed. Our collective karma has caught up with us ad we are in the reckoning. There is no way out of our situation except through it.
The good news, however, is that karma goes both ways. If we dug the hole we're currently in, we can also climb back out and fill it in. Our salvation, our liberation, is in our own hands, by our actions. And just as it was possible for us to do something as big as change the climate of our Earth, it's just as possible to do something as big as to repair it. "Drop by drop is the water pot filled." But it will require different action on our part.
- shaktinah's blog
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Water Interconnection
When we turn on a faucet, clean water comes to us almost miraculously, and just as conveniently dirty water gets taken away. But not without effects that we usually don't see. This meditation is intended to help us see them.
For the purposes of this meditation, fill a large bowl with water. Use a cup to pour water over hands as you recite the words in italics. Conversely, if you're doing this solo, you can just turn on the faucet, let the water flow over your hands, then turn it off.
Water flows over these hands.
May I use them skillfully
to preserve our precious planet.
- Thich Nhat Hanh
The water that has run over your hands came from a faucet. Picture it flowing from a faucet into the bowl (or over your hands).
Follow the flow backwards, up, through the pipes in your home.
Follow the sound of running water through pipes out of your home, underground, to the water lines outside.
Follow the flow, back, along the waterlines as they run for miles under ground.
Maybe the water was treated before it came to you, adding fluoride and chlorine. Maybe not. Where did the water come from?
Perhaps it came from a local reservoir, a lake, collecting rain as it fell on a watershed. Picture the rain, individual droplets hitting the ground, rolling along the surface, meeting each other and coalescing into rivulets, running downward together, and collecting into a common place.
Perhaps it came from an aquifer, underground water flowing through and filtered by porous rock. Picture the raindrops this time not rolling on the surface but rather sinking into the soil. Sinking deep, further down, past the dirt, past the sand, geting purer as it sinks, leaving particulates behind, seeping into the rock, where is stays held like a giant sponge.
Perhaps it came from a river, flowing from a mountain to the sea. Follow the river up, against the current, up, into one of its tributaries, the stream of water getting smaller, clearer. Follow the flow backwards, up into the mountain, to the drip, drip, drip, of melting ice and snow.
Perhaps your water came from a mixture of these sources, blending together on its way to your home.
What happens to the places where life-giving water has been diverted? More water for you means less water somewhere else, especially in times of drought, which is increasing with climate change.
Consider the affects less water could have on the plants and animals along the river, or along the lake.
Picture people living near the river who depend on the plants and animals. What effect does it have on them?
What other activities use and impact your water supply? Farming, manufacturing, and fossil fuel extraction all require water. Often those activities take water away from people, or pollute water so that it isn't safe to use.
Bring your mind back to where you are now, in your home, with faucets that bring clean water and drains that take away dirty water.
Now follow the water that has gone down the drain.
That water flows out of your house through a different set of pipes.
Waste water from your house is joined by that from all the houses around you, creating a foetid underground river.
All that sewage flows to a treatment plant. Do you know where yours is? Usually, these plants are in poorer neighborhoods. Communities of color.
Imagine the people living near the treatment facility. What is it like for them? Around many of the older facilities, the smell of sewage hangs in the air. Flies gather.
After treatment, the water is released into a river or ocean. Is it clean? How does it affect the temperture? What effect does that have on the wildlife there?
The water in the oceans evaporates with the sun and wind. Humidity forming over oceans. Lifted into the air as clouds and traversing over land. To fall as rain or snow. And the water cycle starts over again.
But it takes energy to divert water away from where it naturally falls, and energy to treat waste water. The more water we use, the more energy we use and potentially contribute to climate change.
Which changes the rainfall paterns upon which we've gorwn to depend. Such that rain falls in different places - drought and flood.
Bring your mind back to where you are now.
Know that all that you have seen and more is connected to the water that pours out of the faucet when you turn the knob.
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A Person Will Worship Something
A person will worship something, have no doubt about that. We may think our tribute is paid in secret in the dark recesses of our hearts, but it will come out. That which dominates our imaginations and our thoughts will determine our lives, and our character. Therefore, it behooves us to be careful what we worship, for what we are worshipping, we are becoming.
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