2022 Response to Berry Street Essay: Deborah Coleman

Deborah Coleman, Lead Coordinator of BLUU Haven Richmond; member of First Unitarian Universalist Church of Richmond.

Hi, Michael, first let me say how honored I am that you asked me to speak following your address. It’s very impressive and you gave me a lot to think about. So I’m just going to comment on a couple of things that really hit home and resonated from your talk. I love that you talk about the word that you use about Unitarian Universalism more than one time, was the possibility of Unitarian Universalism.

It reminded me of my origin story, as I call it, about how I came to be Unitarian Universalist, because it was the Principles that I saw hanging in an alcove, in a Unitarian Universalist church that stopped me in my tracks and made me want to find out who these people were, who held these values, who held these principles as the guiding force of their faith.

And this is after I have tried many, many, many other options for a spiritual underpinning for my life. I was really caught up in the principles because those principles, the possibility of Unitarian Universalism for me, is a world where I, and people like me, and people who have been marginalized for much of our lives, in probably all of my life, have a home.

The principles basically say that if you show up, we will hold you in dignity and respect, and we care about justice and equality. We want to see a world where people who have been downtrodden and who have been put upon and treated unfairly, are treated in a way that they deserve. And for me, Unitarian Universalism is the first place where I saw an intentional focus on those things. So I was drawn to it and I joined the Unitarian Universalist Church because of it. And when I got familiar with the church, I was brought up short by, when I was talking to other congregants about the principles, and the word that was used was, well, there are principles, but they’re aspirational.

That stopped me again, made me really stop and think, because I’m thinking, what is an aspirational principle? What does that mean? And so when I think about something that’s aspirational, I think about it as a hope, something that you hope will happen at some point in time, but you’re not really committed to it.

Folks have heard me use this analogy of somebody who aspires to be a doctor who doesn’t want to go to medical school and then wants to invite people in for heart surgery. And so for me, having aspirational principles or aspirational covenants says that we want to be Unitarian Universalists,
we want to hold ourselves up as people who are fair and equitable and will work for that, and fight for that in the world, but don’t hold us to it because maybe we don’t want to do the work that it takes to become that. So when you talk about my expectations of ministry in this faith, which by the way, I am still fully, wholly in love with and committed to, but the leadership for me is a leadership that will hold us accountable for living into those principles for actually being who we say we are as Unitarian Universalists.

I love the phrase that you used in your talk, “Unitarian Universalism lives where people are actually living it out.” That is what I want to see. I want us to be living, breathing the principles of Unitarian Universalists. So when folks show up in our company, when they show up in our midst, they feel it to be different.

They feel the love and the welcoming and the equality, and the idea that everyone, everyone in this faith has the same level of value, and that everyone will be recognized and treated with that in mind. So that’s what I would offer in terms of my expectation of Unitarian Universalist ministry.

So thank you for your work, thank you for everything that you do. Michael, I know that you are as committed as I am to this faith, so I appreciate you.