Reflections on Religious Democracy

I am currently attending my sixth consecutive General Assembly (GA) of the Unitarian Universalist Association of congregations (UUA). 

Unitarian Universalism is a "covenantal" religion. There is no agreed upon "creed", no religious test of faith required for membership. There are Buddhist UUs, Pagan UUs, Humanist and Atheist UUs, and yes, even Christian UUs!

What holds us together are covenants, at the congregational level between congregants and, at the denominational level between the separate congregations. These covenants are not at all about what we "believe" in a religious context. Instead they're about how we agree to be in community together as congregants and as an association of self-governed congregations. 

The congregations agree to the seven principles. The seven principles start at the individual level (we affirm and promote the inherent worth and dignity of all people) and progress to the communal (we affirm and promote the interconnected web of life, of which we are all a part), each of the principles existing in a precarious tension: How do you affirm the inherent worth and dignity of a Hitler or a Manson? Is, the mosquito as integral to the web of life as a human being? But, we often don't think about the tension inherent in our fifth principle (we affirm and promote the right of conscience and the use of the democratic process within our congregations and in society at large). 

The sounds so simple! How else would a group as diverse as UUs get anything accomplished without using a good and fair democratic process? But, think for a moment: is democracy always good, is it always fair? 

Democracy, to paraphrase Winston Churchill, is the worst form of government, except for all the others.  While a democratic process might be good at getting near a concensus (arguable) that "consensus" is usually that of the least marginalized subgroups in any polity. 

How inclusive is our American democracy to indigenous people, to people of color, to women, to the poor, to our LGBTQAI siblings? It is very inclusive if you're white, and a man, and cis/het, and upper middle class. But it is pretty clear that we (America, the collective) have done a piss-poor job of supporting and providing for those on the margins. Sadly, I have too often seen that same dynamic play itself out within my religion. 

Our General Assembly is a meeting of UUs from all across the country and from all aspects of UU identity including ethnicity, gender expression, sexuality, family structure and on and on. But, as with American society writ large, the voting body of GA is primarily white, primarily middle class (or above) and primarily over the age of fifty. 

It is too often concerned with money (or lack thereof), too often concerned with propriety (G_d forbid there be conflict). And, although UUs, in general, are rabidly in favor of being anti-racist and anti-oppressive, that too often only goes as far as can be accomplished without actual systemic change. 

This post isn't a treatise on the bad old UUs though. What I really want to ponder and what I really want my UU siblings to ponder is this: can our democracy, as we practice it today, ever lead us to the beloved community to which we aspire? Can Roberts Rules (revised or otherwise) ever really address the needs and concerns of our most marginalized groups without substantial change in their implementation. Personally, I am really on the fence as to that notion. 

And here is why that's so concerning to me: ours is not a nation state or a municipality, ours is the governing body of a religion. Let me state that again for emphasis. Ours is a religion! We come together once a year to guide the fate of an institution devoted not to meeting the physical needs of protection and defense but the SPIRITUAL needs of protection and defense. There is no higher calling. We are in ministry to each other and to our religion as a whole. When we miss the voice of the voiceless in these halls we can take away hope. We can destroy trust. We can insert our need for "process" between our siblings and their higher selves, their higher spirits, their deity!!!

We have choices in how we engage in our denominational polity. We can choose to let every voice have its say. Or we can listen to the voices that are, even in our houses of worship, far too seldom heard. We can listen to those voices first; we can give weight to those needs first; we can step back from our own need to be heard or counted and make sure that they are heard and counted. First. 

As we move forward as a denomination and yes, even within our congregations, may we make that choice. After all, what would Jesus do?

#1 May Nothing Evil Cross This Door

May nothing evil cross this door,

and may ill fortune never pry

about these windows, may the roar

and rain go by.

By faith made strong, the rafters will

withstand the battling of the storm.

This hearth, though all the world grow chill,

will keep you warm

Peace shall walk softly through these rooms,

touching our lips with holy wine,

till every casual corner blooms

into a shrine.

With laughter drown the raucous shout,

and, though these sheltering walls are thin,

may they be strong to keep hate out

and hold love in.

~words: Louis Untermeyer, ©1923, 1951

This lovely tune is the first hymn in the UUA hymnal, Singing the Living Tradition (StLT). I think it is very fitting from a spiritual, or rather, a ritualism perspective that this is the first hymn. It invokes the circle if you will, asking the universe for guidance and protection for what is to come. It builds from that invocation to statements of intent describing the purpose of the gathering and the hoped for outcomes. A fine invocation and a fitting beginning to my journey through the Living Tradition. 


The first statement of intent is in the second verse: "by faith made strong, the rafters will..." Religion, at its best, calls us to live a life of deepening faith. We are called to strengthen faith's foundation so that through all the storms of life, though they may batter and shake our walls, the fire of our commitment will remain a living ember within our hearts that should "all the world grow chill" we remain warmed and can share that warmth with others through our love and our actions.


But, I have trouble with that word: "faith". As I have mentioned before, I consider myself a Humanist. I don't believe in a God per se, at least not a personal God. I believe that if there is a manifest God we are her. Whatever good that may happen in the world, or, for that matter, whatever evil, that others might ascribe to God happens at the hand of mankind. Thou are God - grok it. 


The idea of faith seems to me to be an invitation to turn off one's intellect and accept, without proof. That seems not only dangerous but perhaps even negligent. Accepting things on blind faith leads to things like the Salem witch trials, the ravages of the church in "frontier" nations, the Jamestown massacre and suicide bombings to name just a few.


So, although I do feel called to live a life of deepening faith, my faith is not in a higher power but instead rests on what I perceive to be an inherent "goodness" in humankind (perhaps I will tackle what I mean by "goodness" in a future post). I have faith that, when given the opportunity and barring hardships such as poverty and ignorance, the "goodness" will win out over the "evil" in our natures and in society at large. I find that the faith I need to depend upon is a faith in humanity, both individually and as a whole. I need faith that each day we recognize more and more our undeniable interconnectedness, and that some day, hopefully very soon, we will come to recognize as a species that we are all one and that "inasmuch as ye have done it unto one of the least of these my brethren, ye have done it unto me."

I have not yet reached a place of faith in humanity so strong it can withstand the battering storms of life. I see lines of hate reaching around the block to a Chik-fil-A and I lose faith. I read stories of Olympic athletes tweeting racist messages and I lose faith. I hear stories of damaged individuals expressing their pain and illness in mass shootings and I lose faith. Daily, I lose faith. 

That is why I think it is so important for me, for everyone really, to build a spiritual practice. It is like building muscle memory. I hope that through this exercise I can grow a spiritual armor of sorts, to guard myself when I am confronted by bigotry, hatred and "evil" (again, perhaps I will tackle my ideas of "evil" in another post), so that, through practice, I am girded to withstand the battering.

The second statement of intent, in the third verse, speaks to what the Rev. Dr. Earl K Holt III, interim minister of my spiritual home Valley Unitarian Universalist Congregation, spoke of in the blessing with which he ended each of his services. The blessing included the phrase from Philippians: "the peace that passeth all understanding"... 


I have felt that peace only a few times in my life, a sense that all is right with the world and with me, a feeling of wholeness and simplicity so strong that I cannot mistake it. These are the times I've come closest to what others would call a spiritual experience. One example in particular comes to mind.

When I was young I was heavily involved in a Methodist church in my home town. During the summer of my 15th year, an older couple, leaders in the church, asked me if I would like to come with them on their annual camping trip to Michigan's Upper Peninsula. It was my first experience with real camping and is still one of my most treasured memories. During that trip we made the 10 mile hike along the Pictured Rocks National Lake Shore, a breath taking trail along cliffs above Lake Superior. 


At one point we came to the heights above Grand Portal Point and found it shrouded in a fog so thick that, to my adolescent and city-bred mind, it seemed as though we were walking through a cloud. We stopped there to eat our lunch before resuming the hike back to our camp ground. While we were eating, encased in white, the sounds of the surf below us and the raucous calls of gulls from a nearby rookery on the cliffs came to us, muted by the fog. For just a brief moment, I felt as though that was exactly where I was supposed to be. It seemed like all my life had been leading to that moment, there on those rocks, so that I could experience the beauty of nature in a way I was sure no one else ever had.


Perhaps that is another goal of maintaining a spiritual practice: finding the "peace that passeth all understanding". It may be that through that peace we can find the faith called out in the second verse.


The last verse seems to be a call to action of a sort. "With laughter drown the raucous shout". With laughter, with joy, we keep the wolves at bay. With laughter we can even "fake it 'til we make it". It often seems to me that we find joy not by looking for it but by being joyful, as strange as that sounds. 


I once gave a sermon about happiness called the Happiness Habit. In it I related a story about going in each day to a job I hated with a false smile plastered on my face and that, strangely, by the time I got to work that false smile had become real. I found through that silly, simple action of faking myself out a small measure of the happiness I was seeking found me. It may be that by greeting life with joy, joy finds us.


Perhaps I will never find a faith like that which others, usually Christians, claim to have. It may be that I will never find the "peace that passeth all understanding". But, as a dear friend who collects oddball quotes is fond of saying: "you should always reach for the stars, at least you won't end up with a handful of mud."


How do you get to Carnegie Hall?


How do you get to "heaven"?

Of Hymns and Humanism

 

When forced to define them, I most often describe my religious beliefs as a Humanist.  In fact, my beliefs are somewhat more complicated that that simple label.  I am still in the process of finding my own truth, which is why I am so glad to have found Unitarian Universalism.  My faith tradition calls me to an active participation in the development of my ethics.


The third and fourth principles of our Unitarian Universalist covenant between congregations call respectively to affirm and promote "acceptance of one another and encouragement to spiritual growth in our congregations" and "a free and responsible search for truth and meaning". Unitarian Universalism isn't a faith where you can believe anything you want to as some people would have you think. Rather, it is a faith that requires you to constantly question what it is that you believe, to hold your truth up to the bright light of discernment and actively look for it's flaws. Unitarian Universalism is a faith that requires practice, spiritual practice. 


That is hard for someone who identifies as a non-theist. I don't meditate or pray. I don't write daily or even weekly but only as the mood strikes me. I would find it hard to identify any activity in my life that I would call a spiritual "practice". And yet, I find that I want one.


Since I found UUism I have felt called to deepen my exploration of my Humanist values in a spiritual context. To gain a greater understanding of how the inherent goodness I see in humankind can inform my worldview and help me to live a more fulfilling and connected life.


Music has always been a friend to me and I have felt most connected to what I would call the divine when I am singing, listening or playing music. So, I thought that might be a good place to start in developing a regular practice of thought, examination and introspection on how Humanist values inform my spiritual path.
Singing the Living Tradition (StLT) is the official hymnal of the Unitarian Universalist Association of Congregations. Although there is no defining doctrine or creed that binds us, these songs, many derived from our Unitarian and Universalist Christian roots may come closest to being such a common prayer book. So, that is where I am going to start. 


I am committing to a minimum of a weekly post looking at the hymns within StLT. I hope that this will spur even more writing than a weekly post, but I will hold myself to at least a post a week. I hope that those reading this will enjoy the journey with me and will hold me accountable to my spiritual growth. 


Please feel free to comment, challenge, and in all other ways prod me to better articulate and define what it is that I hold to be true. I hope you can find some truth along the way yourself.

Bumbling Our Way to Beauty

Sermon given at Valley Unitarian Universalist Congregation, in Chandler, AZ, July 17, 2012

When I set out to write this piece I wasn't sure how it would turn out. I wasn't even sure exactly what it was I wanted to say. I wasn't sure of the structure, or the contents, or even the stories I wanted to include. In fact the only thing I did know was the title: Bumbling Our Way to Beauty. And so, I hope you’ll indulge me as I bumble my way through this. Perhaps, by the end, we’ll find a little beauty along the way.

The first time I remember hearing the term beloved community, was in a sermon during the Sunday service at the General Assembly of the Unitarian Universalist Association of Congregations in Minneapolis, Minnesota in June of 2010. I was taken by the phrase, “beloved community.”  To me it evoked the very ideal of what a community of spirit and love could be, a community in which all are valued, all are worthy, all are recognized and all are loved. In other words, the kind of community we hope to model within Unitarian Universalist congregations and outward into the world beyond.

I was also taken by a kind of blind allegiance to the phrase itself. It seemed, at the time, as though the speaker took for granted that everyone he was talking to would immediately understand it, would know without any explanation, what he meant and would not have any of their own preconceived notions about the meaning of the phrase. It was almost jargon, or cult-speak.

I thought at the time that using the phrase in that way worked against the very idea of inclusion and recognized worth inherent in the beloved community. It was almost as though since everyone knew what the phrase implied, we could just move on, and anyone not already on that same page was just a little “less than”...

I retrospect I am sure I have heard the phrase beloved community before because in researching the term for this piece I found it over and over in the writings and speeches of the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and even further back into early christian writings.

Those who've studied Dr. King of course recognized the phrase from his writings, and will surely know the goal of which he spoke: a just society of equals “where people are judged not by the color of their skin but by the content of their character” and, moreover, a society built through Redemption and Reconciliation.

In an essay written in 1957 Dr. King said:

“Love is creative and redemptive. Love builds up and unites; hate tears down and destroys. The aftermath of the ‘fight with fire’ method...is bitterness and chaos, the aftermath of the love method is reconciliation and creation of the beloved community. Physical force can repress, restrain, coerce, destroy, but it cannot create and organize anything permanent; only love can do that...”

He spoke about the beloved community again in an address given to the Conference on Christian Faith and Human Relations in 1957 entitled: The Role of the Church in Facing the Nation’s Chief Moral Dilemma, saying:

“...the end is reconciliation; the end is redemption; the end is the creation of the beloved community. It is this type of spirit and this type of love that can transform opposers into friends. The type of love that I stress here is not eros, a sort of esthetic or romantic love; not philia, a sort of reciprocal love between personal friends; but it is agape which is understanding goodwill for all men. It is an overflowing love which seeks nothing in return. It is the love of God working in the lives of men. This is the love that may well be the salvation of our civilization.”

Woven throughout Dr. King's writings when he speaks of the beloved community is a call to action, a call to create the beloved community. I don’t believe that Dr. King thought beloved community would simply manifest after enough speeches had been given or enough sit-ins had been staged, that after one last march on Washington America would rise up as a body and declare an end to hate. Nor do I think that Redemption and Reconciliation meant only with our enemies.

In his essay Nonviolence: The Only Road to Freedom, Dr. King said:

“Our goal is to create a beloved community and this will require a qualitative change in our souls as well as a quantitative change in our lives.”

I believe Dr. King understood that creating a beloved community begins with ourselves. It begins first with accountability to others and ourselves. It begins by seeking first to focus on people through trust, engagement and empowerment. It begins by acknowledging that beloved community is not a destination, it's a journey of constant learning recognizing that even best intentions are sometimes hurtful and that when those hurts happen we need to return to King’s principles of reconciliation and redemption, that forgiveness is holy and so is asking for it.

I went to that General Assembly in 2010 full of what I thought were good reasons. In April of 2010, while my wife Carolina and I were attending the District Assembly of the Pacific Southwest District of the UUA, Arizona Governor Jan Brewer signed SB 1070 into law. The next day the board of the PSWD made a motion to ask the UUA board to instruct the General Assembly planning committee to move General Assembly away from Phoenix in 2012. It seemed at the time, to both my wife and me, that the vote was taken in haste and without much room for debate. In fact, the only person to speak against the motion was Carolina. As many will know, the motion passed.

She and I talked about the vote the entire drive home from Santa Barbara to Phoenix. We felt that a boycott, two years out, would be meaningless, too late to matter and too small to be noticed. Wouldn't it be better to bring several thousand UUs to Phoenix instead and protest the law, to stand in solidarity with those most affected by the law? We thought so.

And so, we started a lobbying campaign. We lobbied our friends. We lobbied the board of our congregation. We lobbied the congregation itself. We lobbied on Facebook, and twitter, through blog posts and email. By the time of the General Assembly in Minneapolis, in June of 2010, we had, through the contributions of many people in our congregation, received a mandate in the form of a congregational resolution, buttons to hand out to anyone who would take them, and, for the first time in the congregations history, a full boat of delegates with a mission to keep the 2012 General Assembly in Phoenix.

When we got to GA the lobbying started all over again. We left our hotel rooms each day in a block, matching t-shirts, pockets of buttons and talking points at the ready. We talked to anyone who would listen. We spoke in the mini-assemblies, and anywhere else we thought it would matter. We drafted a counter resolution asking the delegates at GA to instruct the planning committee to keep GA in Phoenix. And after a LOT of hard work and partnering we were able to be in the room and have an influence when a new compromise resolution was drafted.

In the end, we won. General Assembly 2012 would be held in Phoenix but it would be a new GA, a Justice GA. Instead of only one witness event during all of GA, as had often been the practice in the past, there would be many witness events throughout the week. Instead of a theme that guided GA programming there would be a focus, Justice, specifically around immigration and migrant communities.

We had given the UUA board and the planning committee their marching orders. They were to create something new, something transformative, something inclusive. But we didn’t tell them how to do it. And, as often happens in such cases there was a lot of stumbling and bumbling along the way. As UUA Moderator, Gini Courter, recently posted on her blog:

“Following GA 2010, months passed with little activity toward Justice GA. At the January 2011 UUA Board meeting held in Phoenix, Arizona, and at a pre-meeting border visit with our Tucson congregation, board members heard questions and concerns voiced by local clergy and lay leaders about the lack of Justice GA preparation. I cannot speak for the whole board, but I was personally uncomfortable with the answers our local leaders were given, and I did not have better answers.”

But in the end, come together it did.  The UUA chose several local organizations to work with including Todos Somos Arizona, Tonatierra and the Puente Movement, whose leader, Salvador Reza, had spoken at the closing of the Minneapolis convention asking UU’s to come and help them make a difference.

Several witness events were planned, including a mass protest outside the Maricopa County jail known as Tent City. And workshops were planned, some in conjunction with local movement leaders to highlight injustices in our immigration policies, and others to train in skills and tactics that those attending could take home to their own congregations so that Justice GA would not be a singular event that happened in the desert of Arizona, but a catalyst for change within UU congregations and the communities they serve all around the nation.

For many of the people who attended Justice GA it accomplished all its goals. It was something new, it was transformative, it was inclusive. For them this GA deepened their faith and called them to a new awareness and a stronger level of commitment. For many people Justice GA was a rousing success, a shining example of the beloved community made real.

We had won. But, hindsight being 20/20 and reflection being a part of my spiritual practice I have come to ask myself, at what cost. Did we keep the idea of beloved community foremost in our hearts along the way?

Accountability is, at all times a difficult tightrope to walk. Being in accountable relationship to others means including them in your process, even deferring to them as you strive to put them first, to trust them first, to engage and empower them. First. And so, I ask myself, in hindsight, how did we measure up on the accountability scale? 

Well, we can start with the District Assembly meeting that started this whole thing. In looking back I remember several people speaking about the resolution. All of them speaking for the idea of a boycott. There were people saying things like “we speak with our pocketbooks” and “the only thing those people understand is money”. Around 7-8 people spoke for the resolution, but only one of them was a person of color. She also spoke in favor of the boycott, but wanted some changes in the resolution to highlight that not only Latin@ people would be harmed by SB 1070 but that native people of the area, like her, would also potentially be harmed. A relatively minor change in wording that would have made her community more visible and would have validated her experience. In the end, with very little debate, her motion failed.

I think back to the debates leading up to GA that raged like a wildfire on Facebook and in blogs. Throughout, people of color told us that they wanted to boycott. In fact the largest organization for people of color within the UUA, the Diverse Revolutionary Unitarian Universalist Multicultural Ministry (DRUUMM), the largest organization of Latin@ people,the Latin@ Unitarian Universalist Networking Association ( LUUNA), and their sister organization of white allies, Allies for Racial Equity (ARE) consistently told us that they wanted a boycott. It was with these groups that the final compromise resolution was crafted. How accountable were we to them?

Even at Justice GA itself, the UUA planning committee chose several organizations to partner with. But there are MANY voices in the migrant community, many more voices in the Latin@ community and many voices in allied organizations that never got a seat at the table. We could have invited them. Why didn't we? How accountable were we to them?

Move forward to the vigil at Tent City. Many UUs here in Phoenix and and around the country are unaware that some of the groups we had partnered with at protests from the passage of SB 1070 up to just a few weeks before Justice GA came to the protest in solidarity with the local UUs they had come to know and trust and were asked to leave, by representatives from Justice GA. How accountable were we to them? I can tell you they didn't see much accountability. It is only through some hastily called meetings and hand wringing and open, honest mea culpas that local UUs were able to stitch together some level of trust again with these groups. But there will be a lot of work in rebuilding those relationships still to come.

And what about Trust? In those Facebook posts and on the blogs we were continually told that many people of color would never feel safe in coming to Phoenix. They feared for their physical safety and their spiritual safety. I can only truly speak for myself here but I, and I think many others, thought these fears were not only not justified but were a smokescreen and a way of shutting down debate. How trusting is that? I am a white, middle class, heterosexual, cisgender, man. I cannot , EVER, claim to understand the experience of someone of color. I can sympathize, but I can’t empathize. I just can’t. I have never had to worry about driving while white or had to endure a stop and search. And, likely, I never will. This is a privilege that comes at no cost to me as a matter of course.

So, how can I, as an accountable ally, come to understand the position and experience of a person of color? I have to trust that the experiences they relate to me are their authentic experiences. That when they tell me that they have reason to fear for their physical or spiritual safety those feelings are built upon their truth. Anything else is dismissive and disempowering.

How well did we do at engagement? Well again going back to the early debates, I don’t remember asking, perhaps we did, but I don’t remember asking DRUMM, LUNNA or ARE, at any point prior to the Minneapolis GA, what, if anything, would make it possible for them to accept keeping GA 2012 in Phoenix. My recollection is that the only engaging we did with them prior to Minneapolis was engaging in debate, sometimes heated debate about why a boycott was a bad idea. In fact, even at the Minneapolis event itself, I don’t think we really engaged with them until Gini Courter, to her credit, realized that bringing competing resolutions to the floor of the plenary sessions would be harmful and that there really was a lot of common ground, forced both sides into a hotel room and told us to hash it out and come back with something we could both agree on. So, not so much with the engagement.

I could go on with many more examples of the missteps we made along the way to Justice GA. But my goal here is not to point fingers. It is not to say “shame on us”. In the end, I think Justice GA was a success. It did empower people. It did engage with the local community. It did transform what some have called in the past "a business meeting with singing", into something new, something bold and something that I hope will not be a unique event for our faith. It really is my hope that GA moving forward has been changed, for the better.

My goal is really to make the point that although the end might have been a success we can always do better. And that reflection, sincere, honest, soul-searching reflection is a necessary part of creating beloved community. And I am concerned, deeply concerned, that we Unitarian Universalists, more often than not, don’t take the time for that reflection.

When things “go right” or at least they seem to be a success we all too often rest on our laurels. We don’t take the time to ask ourselves what could we have done better. What questions could we have asked? Whose opinion should we have sought? Did we listen more than we talked? What more could we have done to engage with others and empower them?

My goal throughout this piece is to prompt that reflection within ourselves and within my own congregation and faith tradition particularly. I know, again from personal experience, that this can be and is an issue right here at home.

One example that leaps immediately to mind is our congregation's participation in the Phoenix Pride Parade this year. In the last three years we have gone from 85 people at our first showing at Pride to over 100 this year (although I might have to chalk that up to our new Minister, Andy Burnett, marching with us).

We also split the cost of a booth at the festival itself with the other valley congregations and had a UU presence there for the entire festival. I think we might have talked with two or three hundred people from around the valley. For many, if not most of them, it was their first experience with Unitarian Universalism. That was a good weekend.

Water is always an issue at an outdoor event in the Phoenix heat. So, to be sure there was enough water for everyone, on the Monday before the march I put a call out via email asking for donations of bottled water. This was a Monday following a Sunday service put on by our Green Sanctuary team where one of the things they talked about was how bad bottled water is for our environment. They talked about the Great Pacific Gyre, an island of plastic in the middle of the Pacific ocean that some scientist say may be twice the size of the continental United States, caused by our reliance on plastics. They asked us all to think about how we could reduce the use of plastics, specifically bottled water, on Sunday, and on Monday I put out a call for bottled water. All in all they were very nice about my misstep. They politely asked if some other means of getting water to the parade goers could be arranged and we found a way to do it.

But it made me think. Why had Green Sanctuary been an afterthought? Why had I not reached out to them early in the planning process to talk about environmental impact and how we could address that in the march? Why, for that matter, had I not reached out to the YRUU group, or to the choir, or to the social action committee and engaged them in the planning process? I can tell you they will be involved this year, at least if they want to be.

Pride was a rousing success. But even so, there were miscommunications, mistakes and perhaps even hurt feelings as a result. For that I am sorry. I can do better. We can always do better. But it’s only by asking the sometimes very hard questions about our process that we can improve it.

Beloved community begins first with accountability to others and ourselves, it begins by seeking first to focus on people through trust, engagement and empowerment, it begins by acknowledging that beloved community is not a destination, it's a journey of constant learning recognizing that even best intentions are sometimes hurtful and that when those hurts happen we must remember that reconciliation is about receiving forgiveness and redemption is about asking for it. These are holy aims.

I close with the words of the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. from his essay “Facing the Challenge of a New Age,”:

“...the end is reconciliation; the end is redemption; the end is the creation of the beloved community. It is this type of spirit and this type of love that can transform opposers into friends. It is this type of understanding goodwill that will transform the deep gloom of the old age into the exuberant gladness of the new age. It is this love which will bring about miracles in the hearts of men.”

Namaste and Blessed Be

Yesterday was the beginning of a new near, an opportunity to take a pause from the rush of our work-a-day lives and catch our breath, a time to reflect on the successes and failures of the passing year. Not so that we obsess on our shortcomings more to allow us to take stock of those areas in our lives that would benefit from greater attention. Our home lives, our work lives, our congregation life, our inner life - all of these are areas to which we "should" be devoting time and attention. Each can potentially be made better through a focused concentration and forethought on what it is we want from them.

I don’t pretend to be a marriage counselor or a life coach. But, I hope that as a Unitarian Universalist I can take seriously the third Unitarian Universalist Principle of “acceptance of one another and encouragement to spiritual growth in our congregations”. So, that’s what this essay/homily is all about: the tenets of my liberal faith as embodied in our seven Principles. For those of you who, like me, are new to Unitarian Universalism, unfamilliar with the Seven Principles, or, also like me, are getting a little long in the tooth and somewhat forgetful you can find the Seven Principles on the UUA website at uua.org/beliefs/principles/index.shtml.

As a UU minister with whom I am a Facebook friend said in a recent post, the Principles are not a covenant of faith nor could they really be called a theology in and of themselves. The Principles are instead a set of guidelines, ideals of right relation to ourselves, our congregation and the world around us. And as Rob Smith and Dipak Panchal, the co-chairs of the Standing on the Side of Love team at Valley Unitarian Universalist Congregation (www.vuu.org/ssl), wrote in an article in the congregation's December 2011 newsletter, these Principles, all of them, are rife with contradiction or rather with paradox.

To quote that article in part: “it is in these very paradoxes that true power for growth and forward movement lie”. They go on with the example of the First Principle, our affirmation and promotion of the inherent worth and dignity of every person, saying that through this Principle “we are simultaneously asked to believe two things: that we are called toward unconditional love for others and, that we are to have that same unconditional love for ourselves.”

This is a difficult challenge, to love others as you love yourself... It seems to me I’ve heard that phrase before somewhere...

Many of us are really good at sharing and showing our love for others. Our partners, our children and our friends know beyond knowing that we love them. We’re able to show the love of others to the stranger on the bus, the waiter at the restaurant and even to those with whom we disagree but we’re not so good at the loving ourselves part. Self love sounds just a little too much like self important or self centered.

We give others of our time and effort but we pay little heed to taking the time to meet our own needs. Time enough to read that book, time enough to get some exercise, time enough to take that class we’ve always wanted to take, time enough for self reflection and spiritual practice, time enough for a walk in the park, or a hike on the mountain, or a run alongside the canal. As my favorite author put it in in the title of his seminal work, “Time Enough For Love”. Self love.

Perhaps, like me, you often spend too much time idle and leave the little things to build, one sock on the floor becomes a pile of clothes at the bedside, one day without skimming the pool becomes a weekend without skimming and the pool becomes a close approximation of leaf stew...this too is a form of denial of self, as contradictory as that seems. We really do feel better about our world and about ourselves when the environment we inhabit is well tended, and not seeing to that need is just another way to deny your love to yourself, at least, I think, it is for me.

Our second UU Principle calling us to justice, equity and compassion in human relations again presents us with a paradox, does “in human relations” mean when in direct relationship person to person, or does in mean in all relations? Plus there’s the whole “how-well-do-i-know-that person-and-how-well-do-I-like-them” dilemma. I know that I find it much easier to engage with compassion toward those with whom I agree than those with whom I passionately disagree. I think there’s a little bit of human nature in that, sadly. An example that comes to mind is the tragedy that recently befell the Duggar family.

For those who don’t know them, the Duggars have a reality show called “18 Kids And Counting” that airs on TLC. The Duggars have a deeply held religious belief in the sanctity of children. As Michelle, the mother, puts it: “saying there are too many children is like saying there are too many flowers”. So strong is that belief that their family now numbers 19 children. To them every child born is a blessing from God and a testament to his Grace. Contraception, therefore, is blocking the will of God and something they will not use. Although I deeply disagree with them and there are a great many studies that show that the quickest way to eliminate poverty and suffering in the world is to give women control over their reproductive freedom, the Duggars hold childbirth and child rearing as a sacrament. So, imagine their grief when, in early December of 2011, Michelle miscarried their 20th child. Heart stricken and grieving the Duggars named their unborn daughter Jubilee Shalom Duggar and held a memorial service on December 14th.

In most cases the news reports were less than kind and online commentary from the public was brutal to say the least. Comments ranged from “having 19 children is criminal” to “what did they expect” to “this is God’s way of telling them to stop having children” and worse. Not all the comments were this heartless but most were.

I tell this story to emphasize that compassion for many people, I might even hazard most, depends both on proximity and on agreement. And that justice and equity are often built upon our own biases. That’s certainly been my struggle with this particular Principle in the past year and I imagine it will be my struggle in the coming year as well: understanding how my own biases and privilege as a white, heterosexual, upper-middle-class man influence what I consider justice and equity and finding compassion in my heart for everyone in the family of humankind both known to me and unknown.

Our third Principle: acceptance of one another and encouragement to spiritual growth, is as challenging as the first two. Is acceptance in this sense related solely to someone's spirituality? And what defines spiritual growth? I think this is especially difficult for a faith without creed or even a coherent and communal theology.

An atheist friend and I had a conversation recently in which I told him that a place like VUU might be just the thing for him, that there were, in fact, many people in our congregation and in UU congregations around the country who identify as non-theist or even atheist. In the study our search committee did last September fifty-nine percent of our congregation listed Humanism as their spiritual identity. That’s fairly consistent with UU congregations around the country. So, an atheist would likely feel quite comfortable in our company.

But not this particular atheist. For him, rationality is his “religion” (note: those are my words, not his). Faith in a higher power, or in anything outside the realm of direct human experience and unprovable through empirical evidence is giving one’s self over to irrationality which, in his mind, is unacceptable. His question to me was “isn’t one of your Principle’s an acceptance of another person’s spiritual path and an encouragement to their spiritual growth?” Of course I answered yes. “Well then”, he said, “that counts me out.” Not only would he have had a hard time “accepting” someone's desire to forgo rationality in favor of magical thinking but he couldn’t imagine encouraging such a thing.

Another UU friend of mine had a different take on it in a recent Facebook post. She said: “As a UU I know what I believe and can tell folks in 2 or 3 sentences. I can also tell folks succinctly what our Unitarian and Universalist ancestors believed. But when people ask me what UUs believe today I invariably end up hemming and hawing and rambling out something semi-academic and utterly uninspiring.”

Reverend Peter Boulatta, a UU minister in Minnesota, might have said it better in a post on his blog (http://bit.ly/tAgovp): “...many thoughtful UUs (talk) about our creedless religion, our covenanted communities in which one is free to search for truth and meaning. It’s likely that thoughtful UUs (explain) being gathered around basic principles and values rather than beliefs and doctrines. But what (people hear is): We don’t believe anything. We’re just making this stuff up as we go along to suit ourselves.”

Now while that might be true for many, it doesn’t have to be. The UUA and VUU have a great set of tools to help congregants come into a deeper understanding of their own spiritual truth. One of those is a class called “Building Your Own Theology”. But that class is just a start, and we have ongoing work to do as individuals, in covenant together, to grow our spiritual armor and refine our own truths. UUism isn’t a blanket to believe anything you want without examination. In my mind it’s a framework to help guide you along a never ending road of self discovery and moral development.

I wonder if we do too little encouraging and too much accepting...

The fourth UU Principle says we affirm and promote a free and responsible search for truth and meaning. Free and Responsible. We have a right to a community of peers that won’t tell us what the One Real Truth is, and we expect that. But, with that right comes a responsibility to own the truth to which we come, to own the defense of that truth, to constantly test it, distill it, filter and refine it to ensure that it is in fact a real truth and not a convenient hat rack on which we hang our preconceptions. And, with that right also comes another responsibility, to hold each other accountable for taking that journey and finding that truth. After all, right there in the the covenant of our congregation, printed in our order of service every week, we say that the quest for truth is oursacrament...our sacrament...our sign of inner grace...our thing of sacred character.

A religion, any real or meaningful religion, should give us a frame of reference that informs our lives in a positive way, that helps us be better people, more loving people, more grounded people, kinder, more compassionate people. We owe it to each other to hold ourselves up to the light of discernment and to challenge others to hold themselves up to that same light.

If the other Principles are rife with paradox, the fifth UU Principle is a Gordian knot. To go back to the newsletter article from the SSL@VUU co-chairs "“the right of conscience and the use of the democratic process within our congregations and in society at large” ...includes both the importance of democracy and the right of conscience. The tension in that statement, between the value of individual thought and action and the value of group consensus, is similar to the tension between the value of talking and the value of listening. Both are important, but they stand in fundamental opposition. We cannot do both at the same time. Which should we do more?”

UUs believe, and rightly so, in the precept of congregational polity. Each congregation is a petri-dish of democracy in action but it’s a democracy where each person is encouraged to find their own personal truth. We are all acknowledged to have a right of conscience - we can abstain, absent, disagree, and in all other ways advocate our own position but at the end of the day we take a vote and majority rules. Even among our congregation's board and the UUA board in the end, we vote. And voting takes time... a LOT of time...

So, we’re called to take action in the world but constrained by the democratic process from moving quickly. We’re asked to come to agreement through polity but we come with our own truth. It’s a wonder that buildings stay standing and we somehow have services every Sunday!

Our sixth Principle leads us toward the goal of world community with peace, liberty and justice for all. Well...we talked earlier about justice and its subjective nature. Here, in America, we call killing in the name of punishing killers "just". In Afghanistan they call caning a women who refused to marry her rapist just. In France they use a Napoleonic system of justice - guilty until proven Innocent.

I often wonder if my donations to Amnesty International or Amfar or the Unitarian Universalist Service Committee will ever do more than move us just a little farther toward a peaceful world. Still, I’m optimistic in my cynicism. As Dr. King said: the arc of the moral universe is long but it bends toward justice. And so, I’ll continue to do my small part, to learn about the world so that it becomes a little smaller, to use my privilege to make the opportunities for others a little bigger and I’ll continue to hope that, together, our efforts bend the arc a little farther.

The last of our UU Principles says that we "affirm and promote respect for the interdependent web of all existence of which we are a part". Affirm and Promote - I really worry that although we affirm this loudly, we promote it softly. I see the world we are creating when, every day, the food we eat and the goods we purchase are packaged for mass consumption and I worry about the coming-of-uppance humanity faces on the near and immediate horizon where sea levels and global temperatures rise while clean living spaces and arable land shrink. Are the small changes we make in our own lives: recycling, driving a hybrid, composting, reusing and re-purposing enough to change the tide? I’m not so sure. But I am sure there’s more that we can do.

So where is the paradox in this Principle? Where is the tension? Well, I’m still working on this one. Perhaps, I need to attend a few Green Sanctuary meetings...I’ll try to work that in to my schedule this year...

Our Unitarian Universalist Principles, or at least most of our Principles, are filled with paradox. But, such is everything in life. By facing that paradox we come away strengthened in our understanding and so the choices we make moving forward are better informed and hopefully better in affect.

I said at the outset that the New Year was a time of reflection and renewal. It’s a time where we examine the past and plan for the future. It’s a time when we pause and take stock, where we try, if only for a short time, to gain clarity. So, I leave you with a charge. Take time this month, perhaps even this week to think about your own truths, your own spiritual path, whatever that may be.

As you think about what you want from the coming year in your career, your relationships, your family life, think too about your growth in spirit. How will you grow your understanding and enrich your way of being in the world? And how will this new year be different for you on that spiritual sojourn? Perhaps, as I do, you can use the UU Principles as guideposts on the walk. And remember as you stumble along your path that even if you fall, you can always begin again. And you don't even have to wait for New Year's Day to do it!

I wish you light and love. Blessed Be.

Faces of Fatherhood

Happy Father’s Day. Whether you celebrated the day with a special dinner or just a lazy day off, if you received that special gift you wanted or got yet another un-wearable tie, given in love, I hope your Father’s Day was exactly what you wanted and that you know the joyous feeling of appreciation your family feels for the gift of your presence in their lives.

As I began to think about this message I wanted to share, I felt myself becoming more than just a little bit afraid. How does a single, childless man, the son of a single mother, someone who has never known a father in his own life, even begin to find the authority or context to speak about fatherhood? How is it possible for someone who has never seen a father of his own in action to have any idea of what's expected or required from a dad?

When I was very young, I often longed for the father I never had - usually after I’d had some sort of run-in with my mom. I would sometimes lie in bed staring out the window to the sky and romanticize my mythical father; in my childish mind he took the shape of a fighter pilot in the foreign legion, or a famous actor, or an independently wealthy super-spy. 

Or, an independently wealthy, former fighter pilot turned super-spy working undercover as a famous actor. 

In any case, I was sure that someday he would return to find my mother and me and we would live out our own happily ever after. It was the stuff of fantasy in the way that only children can create it.

Later, in elementary school, I found myself becoming just a little bitter about my lack of a dad. It made me different. And as we all know, difference is death in the Petri dish of social Darwinism that is the schoolyard. Then there were the activities: the father-and-son picnics I could never go to, the Pinewood Derbies where I stood on the sidelines and watched, while super-dads helped their sons race their wooden masterpieces to the finish line. There were the family softball games where I played (or rather watched) from right field as dads cheered on their sons. And yes, there was Father’s Day.

“My dad is and accountant”

“My daddy is a lawyer”

“My dad is a construction worker”

“My dad can beat up your dad!”

“What does your dad do Jimmy?”

I am not looking for sympathy here. I don’t want it and I have never needed it. I may not have had a father, but I had and have the single most awesome mom a person could ever want. She gave me more love than I could've expected if I'd had twenty parents. And, it is her I celebrate today.

My goal in telling you a little of my story is to provide some context. It is clear to me, from my own experience and the experiences of millions of kids all over our country, that fatherhood comes in many forms.

I just have to take a look around the congregation of my place of worship to see that. We celebrate and worship each Sunday with many so called “traditional” families and they sit side-by-side with many “post-modern” families. There are kids in our congregation with two dads or two moms. There are kids in our congregation who have step-dads and there are kids who, like me, have no dad. There are even one or two kids with no moms or dads! 

Is there a way that all of the kids in the Valley Unitarian Universalist Congregation (VUU) can celebrate Father’s Day with authenticity? That's my question to you.

The role of father has evolved over time. The first modern celebration of a "Father's Day" was held on July 5, 1908, in Fairmont, West Virginia, in the Williams Memorial Methodist Episcopal Church South. Grace Golden Clayton, the originator, chose the Sunday nearest to the birthday of her father, whom she was mourning, as the date. In December of that year a mining disaster in nearby Mon-on-gah had killed 361 men, 250 of them fathers, leaving around a thousand children fatherless. Clayton suggested to her pastor that they honor all those fathers. Of course as it was the first event of it's kind no thought was given to promoting the event, and as a consequence Father's Day wasn't celebrated again for many years. In fact, the original sermon was never reproduced and has been lost to time.

The first "official" observance of Father's Day is believed to have been organized through the efforts of Sonora Smart Dodd of Spokane, Washington. Having heard a church sermon at the local Episcopal Church in 1909 about the newly recognized Mother's Day, Dodd felt strongly that fathers shood also be recognized. The following year she took the idea to the Spokane YMCA and their Ministerial Alliance. They endorsed Dodd’s idea, and helped it spread, by celebrating the first Father’s Day on June 19th, 1910. however, it took many more years to make the holiday official. 

Whether we count the first Father's day as happening in 1908 or in 1910 matters little except to historians; either way it was a long time ago. The Great Depression was still a generation away, the term "nuclear family" had not yet been invented, women’s suffrage was still being debated state by state, and Stonewall was more than fifty years away. These were a far different times than our own. The world was a very different place. The American family was a very different entity, and so were American fathers.

At the turn of the 20^th century, the commonly understood role of the father was the stern disciplinarian: stoic, remote, and terrifying. With a fourteen or sixteen hour workday, particularly for rural farm families, a man might start his day long before his children woke and return home well after they had gone to bed. A child might interact with her father only when receiving discipline or on holidays and otherwise might only interact with her mother. A father was responsible for the support of his family, and often that was where his duties ended. The rearing of children was the province of their mother and, if the family was wealthy, the servants.

The idea of fatherhood really began to change in the years following the Great Depression and World War II. Industrialization and the growth of the middle class meant that fathers were spending less time toiling to support their children and more time parenting them. Evenings and weekends became family time, and fathers engaged with their children much more often and in new ways.

The fifties and sixties brought us Father Knows Best and Leave It To Beaver.  Dad was not only authoritarian he was also wise. He could deliver a baseball, a life lesson and a spanking with an equal amount of love, sometimes in the same 30 minutes. But the sixties also brought us My Three Sons, a clear departure from the nuclear family.

By the time that Richard Nixon made Father’s Day official in 1972, the idea of fatherhood and the role of fathers had changed even more. As women began to take a much more active role in the working world, men were called upon to take a more active role in the rearing of their kids. They were being asked to help nurture their children along side their wives and to help to foster an atmosphere that promoted intellectual and emotional growth.

During the eighties, the American family saw further changes.  Children raised by single parents became much more common and the term “latchkey kid”, first coined during World War II when one parent would be off fighting the war the the other would be working became, a much more common occurrence. 

The late eighties and nineties saw a widespread call for equality from LGBT couples and many began to build families of their own through adoption, fostering or natural means. In recent years laws banning gays from foster care and adoption are being challenged in the courts. More and more, children are being raised in families built on love without a care for the conventions of the past. 

Today it’s not at all uncommon for children to be raised in a non-nuclear or postmodern family structure. According to the 2000 census approximately forty percent of American children are being raised in families without both a mom and a dad. Again, I ask how do those families share in the celebration of Father’s Day?

Another title for this post could be: The Story of Two Jacobs. Both of them are wonderful little boys, each with a different type of Father.

Our first Jacob is  a regular fixture at VUU, the son of Linda and Anne. Linda and Anne tried very hard for a quite a while to conceive Jacob. He was very much wanted and they dedicated themselves to bringing him into their lives. There were many trips to the doctor and many long nights spent talking about what it meant to bring a child into their lives especially. They asked the same questions every prospective parent asks. Could they provide for him the life they hoped he'd have? Could they give him they strength of character that every child needs? 

Although they have never really worried about Jacob needing a father per se, they definitely worried about him having male role models. They have made sure to encourage strong relationships between Jacob and the men in theirs and his life. His grandparents, family friends, and others have all played a role in giving Jacob the confidence he needs to grow into a boy of conviction.

Once, when Jacob's preschool asked the class to talk about what they wanted to be when they grew up, Jacob answered without missing a beat: "I want to be a mommy when I grow up!" And when the other kids in his class insisted that he couldn't be a mommy because he was a little boy, he countered with unassailable kid logic: "I can be anything I want to when I grow up, my mommys told me so!"

Our second Jacob, a beautiful little boy, was 22 months old and a victim of neglect and abuse when he entered the home of Karen, as her foster child. In a very sort period of time Karen fell in love with little Jacob and adopted him, binding him with love to her heart and home to share her life with her partner who, as it happens, was also named Caren. 

As a result of his treatment before he came into these women's lives, Jacob was slow to develop. It took him longer than most kids to begin speaking. When he finally did begin to speak he would often call out to men with whom he came in contact, mistakenly calling them "daddy". This happened several times in restaurants and other public places much to the embarassment of his mothers.  

Jacob's moms struggled with how they should each be addressed. Since they both shared the same first name having little Jacob call one of his mommies "Mommy Karen" and the other "Mommy Caren" clearly wouldn't work. One day, after spending the day painting and working on things around their home, Caren came downstairs, in her overalls, and a flannel shirt, a baseball cap sitting backwards on her head. Jacob, looked up in surprise said "daddy"! From that day forward, our second Caren was Jacob's daddy. 

Jacob referred to her as daddy to his friends, his family and his teachers. Once, when his preschool class made their family trees as a class project Jacob did his too, confidently placing Caren as his "daddy" at the top of his tree next to his mommy, Karen. When his classmates told him that she couldn't be his daddy because she was a girl, he confidently and without any sense of difference firmly told them: "she's my daddy!" And that was that.

And that was that. Caren, took to the role like a duck to water. Jacob was as much her son as he was her partner's even though as a gay woman the law said she had no standing. In her heart and in her action, she was Jacob's daddy. In fact, so much so that her biological niece's and nephews began to jokingly call her "Uncle Caren". 

Caren helped to shepherd a child, once so scared of the world that even getting him to dip his toe in the water to take a bath was too much for him, into a healthy, loving little boy. That is love, that is nurturing, and that is Fatherhood, gender be damned.

I believe its possible for an adult of any gender or familial relationship to help a child to learn the lessons typically ascribed to a father: Courage, Commitment, Honor, Steadfastness. Anne Geddes, the famed photographer of babies and moms, once said: "any man can be a father but it takes someone special to be a dad." I couldn't agree more. But, I would urge us to take that further and remember that much like children themselves, fatherhood comes in all shapes and sizes, all colors of the rainbow and, that in whatever form its found, biological father, uncle, grandfather, "big-brother", sister, aunt, mother or grandmother, it is the love, the nurturing, the support and the guidance that matter.

On this Father's Day let us celebrate all of those in our lives and in the lives our kids who willingly take on the role of father. Let us revel in the diversity of our community. All of our kids can and should have someone with whom they can share this Father's Day. To paraphrase a famous movie line: father is as father does.