2022 Berry Street Essay: The Reverend Mykal Slack
More Faith, Power, and People: Breaking the Cycles That Separate Us From Unitarian Universalism
202nd Berry Street Essay
Delivered by The Reverend Mykal Slack
Portland, Oregon
June 22, 2022
Lineages
Hello, family and old friends, colleagues and co-conspirators, new and not yet friends. Those physically present here and those lovely folks who are watching via livestream. What a profound moment this is, to be the first BLUU minister to address this body as lecturer for the Ministerial Conference at Berry Street. I feel pretty certain that those gathered in 1820 could not, in their wildest imaginations, have contemplated the presence of Black Lives of Unitarian Universalism, and based on what I know and believe, there will be more BLUU ministers down the road who will bless moments like this one, as I hope to today. So I give thanks for the opportunity to share this time with you.
In a recent podcast called “Let Us Make Sanctuary,” Tami Simon, host of Insights At the Edge, spoke with Dr. Bayo Akomolafe, a philosopher, writer, activist, and professor of psychology, who spoke powerfully about how we have to slow down enough to touch our indebtedness, get wrapped up in the entanglements that connect us to the earth, to ancestry, to the modern human, the non-human, the not-yet human.
And so we are going to do some of that slowing down this afternoon. Part of my entanglements begin with where I come from. I am the great-grandson of Beula and Cecil Williams and Viola and Rossie Jeffries, the grandson of Elijah, Sr. and his wife, Louise, Wylene and her husband, Henry Lester, Sr., all of whom are now ancestors. I am the son of Wilma and Elijah, Jr. (may he rest in peace), the brother of Magan and Monica, spouse to LeLaina, Daddy to Zora, and colleague and friend to many in this room and beyond it.
This slowing down that truly honors the full-bodiedness of our energy and spirit and our capacity for wholeness and love calls me to name some things and some people, and I invite you to join me in this place of honoring.
It has been a long time since we’ve been together as a whole body, from both Ministry Days and General Assembly; a lot has happened over these last two and a half years in our physical absence from one another. Too much. It matters that there are colleagues, friends, and family of all kinds who have died since we last gathered. And so I invite all of us to call their names aloud. Allow your voices to overlap; speak as you feel led, so the great swell of voices can invite their presences into this space.
Lewis Howard Latimer, Florida Ruffin Ridley, Marjorie Bowens Wheatley, Egbert Ethelred Brown, Fannie Barrier Williams, John Cashin, Frances Ellen Watkins Harper, Lewis A. McGee, and both of the Revs. Jordan - Joseph F. and Joseph H. I come calling the names of Chester McCall, Hope Johnson, Tony McDonald, Elandria Williams, Kimberly Rochelle Hampton, and Mathew P. Taylor.
Thank you for naming them. As Ministry Days come to a close and as General Assembly gets underway, may their energy and spirit enliven us and help us stay clear about and committed to our task today.
I was recently speaking with Ms. Jacqui Williams, a member of the First Unitarian Universalist Society of Albany, New York and a longtime participant in UU communities, conversations, and writings about the impact of race in our UU faith, and I said to her that I would not likely have been here had she and others not been here before me. And so, because they went unnoticed and unacknowledged for far too long at this gathering, I would also like to take a moment to acknowledge Black UU elders in this room and at home. First, BLUU’s 360 Council of Elders, who I’ve had the pleasure of getting to know in my role on the Organizing Collective Board of BLUU – Carol Carter Walker and Carmelita Carter-Sykes are here with us. And at home, from the 360 Council, are Elizabeth Ann Terry, Dr. Paula Cole Jones, Dr. Leon Spencer, and Dr. Mtangulizi Sanyika. There are also many other Black UU elders who are in this room and at home, including Ms. Jacqui. If you are here, would y’all be willing to rise in voice, hand or body, and if you’re at home, shout out in the chat, so we can all acknowledge you and your presence with us?
Entering With Intention
I want to name some things today. It matters that we’ve had to minister in the ways we’ve had to minister. And no…I’m not just talking about those of us with “Rev” in front of our names. If you have done or said anything in service to a UUism that offers more hope than harm, more substance than staleness, more…then you have ministered to somebody here and I say thank you for your service. And I am sad right along with you that our work has been this hard for so long.
It matters that there are religious professionals who were on staff the last time we gathered and are no longer.We feel their absence. As much as we as a body rail against the racism and systemic oppression that lives and breathes in our country and world, it matters that some of those religious professionals, whether they be ministers or relig educators, or membership professionals, or youth leaders, are no longer with us in that capacity because of that same racism and those same oppressive systems.
It matters that we have shut down physical spaces and opened them back up and closed them again…with all the people and logistics and stuff it takes to make all that happen. What it means to be home has been redefined over and over and over again over these last few years.
It matters that our seminary students and seekers and learners and educators have been put in sometimes precarious positions relative to their own and their families’ care. Do I have to be inside, without adequate protocols and air filtration, to learn something, or to teach somebody? And if I have to, what exactly are we learning? And what, pray tell, are we teaching folks?
It matters that we are grieving a sickness in this country that most often manifests itself in the untimely deaths of children, queer and trans people, people struggling with mental illness, and Black and Brown people. And it matters that not nearly enough so-called leaders are doing nearly enough about it.
And last, but certainly not least, it matters that we have been, and continue to be, at a crossroads in our movement, when we have to decide if we are going to actually be the robust, innovative, dynamic, and worthwhile for ALL of us faith we say we want to be, or if we are going to coast along in the muddiness that both conflict- and praxis-avoidance builds and, therefore, lose the people who I would argue Unitarian Universalism is actually built for.
All of it. All the things that matter bring an energy along with them that is also present here. We are not just people in a room, and we are so much more than the words that are in our heads and make their way out of our bodies. Unless you’ve done some deep, intentional cleansing before you arrived (and even if you did), that energy lives in our bodies and exists here.
And I don’t want to do what we tend to do, and fixate so much on what’s “supposed to happen” in here, and focus so hard on the forward thinking that we’re here for, that we forget what actually has taken up residence here…in our bodies, in this place that is our shared faith, that we lose connection with our story and what we are actually carrying.
Rather than do that, I want us to exist at the speed of our presence. And just be here, in as much of what I’ve shared that resonates with us.
Be here.
Even if it’s uncomfortable and doesn’t make sense yet, be here.
Honor that energy. Hold it with care and concern. Let the tears come, if they need to. Be angry, if that feels right. Connect with someone else in the room, or in the chat, who you know will appreciate it. Be mindful of what the person next to you (or in the chat with you) may be carrying and appreciate that they were willing to be here anyway.
Be here. And let us bring the spirit of connection into the room and into our own hearts, wherever we happen to be. And, if you’re not quite ready, take your time and come on in when you can.
Opening Reflections
Perhaps more than any other time, it is crucial that we go beyond the surface of what our Unitarian Universalism espouses to be on paper and into who it calls us to be within ourselves, in the communities we call home and are called to serve, and out in the world. What does it mean to give our bodies, minds, and spirits over to the possibility of a faith…because we ARE a faith, friends…living out the very best parts of itself? And how do we support one another, as religious professionals, lay leaders, congregants, and community partners, to not just envision, but actually live into a Unitarian Universalism that is EXACTLY what we say we want it to be? I believe that disrupting the cycles of usual understanding and influence is a meaningful start.
And I want to begin that disruption by telling you how I got here. I hear constantly about the work that everybody’s doing, or the mess that too often gets us into trouble, but I rarely hear people’s stories of entering into our faith. So here’s mine:
On a chilly Sunday morning in November, in 2010, I decided that I would spend my birthday in Boston with this really lovely human named LeLaina who I’d started dating a few months before. Being in Boston meant that I would be going with LeLaina to First Parish in Cambridge; she was a member there. I remember exactly where I was sitting in the meetinghouse and exactly what I was wearing, which is weird for me. This was the service for Dia De Los Muertos, the Mexican tradition of celebrating and honoring the dead, which I knew about only because of my seminary friend, the now Rev. Marisol Caballero.
So I was…curious; an ofrenda had been built on the chancel by folks who clearly understood their assignment. I feel pretty certain that the Rev. Dr. MariaCristina Vlassidis Burgoa and others were there and a part of that powerful offering. But, other than these few folks, I was surrounded by a sea of white people, so I was also a little confused about how all this would go down. Thankfully, my own love for and commitment to meaningful worship helped me remain open. And I’m so glad I did…because what happened next truly changed me.
As we moved through the service – with all its music, meditation, and prayer and with the honoring of people who’d gone on; with the movement in the sanctuary from pew to ofrenda and back; the emotions clearly expressed; the reflections offered – I began to feel the presence of my grandmother Wylene, who had died just three years before. She was everything to me; aside from my own parents, I loved her more than anyone else on earth. This was the woman who would bake 10 pies at a time for special Sundays at church and who would sit in her porch swing singing “Swing Low, Sweet Chariot.” She was the one who told me time and again that “the way you love God is to love yourself, love others, and love the Earth.” And I literally began to feel her presence beside me in this UU church, the history of which was unknown to me at the time. I started to cry and didn’t stop for a long time. I felt an ease in my body that was unexpected, but welcome, a comfort that washed over me that I could not explain, but felt really clear about, all at the same time. It was a deeply spiritual experience and one that I will never forget for as long as I live.
After that, LeLaina didn’t have to beg me to go to church with her whenever I was in town. I went happily and experienced more things that were equal parts confounding and delightful. In my own journey of becoming ordained in Metropolitan Community Churches, I had to manage quite a bit of uncertainty from others about my calling to pastoral ministry because 1) I pissed off the wrong people for all kinds of reasons and 2) my spirituality was expansive in a way that didn’t match what was typical. What mattered to me was that love and liberation, and real care and accountability be central to the project of spiritual formation and growth, however you get there. And the more I visited First Parish, the more I learned, the more I experienced, the more Unitarian Universalism became a place of spiritual grounding and a deeply resonating force in my faith journey.
And then…something else, that will shock almost no one, started to happen. I began to share more about my journey. And the more I shared, the nicer people claimed to be, and the less kindness and clarity I found. There’s no reason to tell all the stories; they wouldn’t be unfamiliar. Suffice it to say that I found myself in some pretty terrible situations with some pretty racist, transphobic, and ableist people. Racist people in places that claimed to have done deep work in anti-racism and that were intentionally multicultural. Transphobic in places that had big Welcoming Congregations plaques on the walls. The more I spoke with people and really listened, and the more I led worship and facilitated spaces where UUs showed up invested in being better UUs, the more I began to wonder the extent to which religious professionals and congregants alike were all on the same page about what Unitarian Universalism is and calls us to do and be.
And where I have landed time and again is that we far too often move through cycles of influence and understanding that actually have the effect of keeping too many of us, ministers and congregants, alike, from the power of Unitarian Universalism and from the possibility of it being fully realized in our congregations, communities, in our seminaries, our homes, and out in the world. In other words, what we tend to rely on does not actually support UU spiritual formation in the here and now, and, in fact, causes the kinds of harm that weakens a foundation that I believe many of us want our kids and our kids’ kids to be able to build upon.
And so, I want us to take a closer look at some of those cycles of influence, recognizing that working to detangle ourselves from THOSE first might actually support the broader project of dismantling white supremacy that has been a particular focal point for our Association, congregations and UU leaders since 2017. And I would be remiss not to give thanks to Christina Rivera and Aisha Hauser for their ministry in the public square because it has significantly moved the needle farther along than it had been moved up to that point.
Now, I know that it is scary work to go deep enough to fully understand and acknowledge what influences us in our faith, especially if we find that those influences neither serve us, nor the wider project of liberation. Alexis Pauline Gumbs, poet, healer, scholar and activist who some of us got to know a bit when she participated in the COMPASS event last December, and who some of us know through her writing, once wrote:
It can be dangerous to investigate what our lives depend on, to recognize that freedom requires a species-scale betrayal of our founding mythologies.
But it is in the interrogation and disruption of those founding and festering mythologies that we can begin to uproot what has rooted us down into ground that can sometimes be too hard and too cold to move ourselves from.
“It’s All About Covenant”
So much of our foundation as Unitarian Universalists, in a faith that is supposed to be grounded in relationship, centers around covenant. This idea that we have all made choices about being here together and that we are prepared to make certain agreements about how we are going to be in the spaces where we congregate. I like the idea of covenant. I believe it always has the potential to be a deeply grounding and caring exercise in relationship building. I appreciate all the work of the Commission on Appraisal to help all of us understand the history and care that has gone into ensuring that the covenants that we make to one another have meaning.
While it is interesting to think about all the ways that we have engaged in the act of covenanting with one another, the truth is that I struggle. I struggle, not with what our aspirational covenants can help us move toward and help us get back to when we get off track, but with how we help ourselves and others hold fast to a commitment to be in covenant. I have been in a particularly unique position over the last five years (as of three days ago, in fact) serving as BLUU’s Community Minister for Worship and Spiritual Care. To bear witness to an utter lack of investment in covenant and in covenanting has been painful and hard. Imagine my role in BLUU, a space and an organization that is intentionally grounded in unapologetic Blackness. Part of my work is to be a pastoral presence for Black people, to listen to folx as they tell their story and as they grapple with what it means to be Unitarian Universalist and Black. Not as an afterthought, or in any assimilating kind of way, but as our whole selves with hopes of our UU spaces reflecting our lived experiences in some meaningful way because we’re here. What happens in those moments of presence is pretty striking and even a little terrifying, and I want to offer up one such moment to illustrate my point. And before I go on, I believe it is worth offering a content warning around behavior that is patronizing and steeped in racism:
I received a pastoral call one day from someone about a town hall meeting where folks were gathered to talk about the 8th principle. At that gathering, a well-respected retired UU minister actually suggested that the 8th Principle wasn’t necessary because Black people did not have the intellectual capacity to actually be UU.
I don’t actually want us to take that in, like we sometimes invite one another to do. What I do want is for us to rip open the comfort of civility and wail and scream about that mess. I need us to lament the deep disrespect and cruelty hurled at human beings in our faith. I need us to talk about and help our people reflect on just how close to the surface this kind of behavior is for too many of the people who call Unitarian Universalism home. And part of how we do that is 1) to name that these moments happen and to name them publicly, and 2) not force people to hold them in their bodies for days, weeks, months, and years at a time because of systems set up to reward our silence.
Now, I understand my role as a minister is to hold that space with care and with clarity and intention. I understood my assignment that afternoon, and I did what was needed.
And I am also a Black person whose life I know matters in this faith and everywhere I go. But I didn’t always know that; I didn’t always believe that, and it took me cultivating community and being in very particular spaces, including space in BLUU, for me to have full clarity about that. So, I was crying on the inside with her. It doesn’t matter what she does for a living. It doesn’t matter how much money she does or doesn’t make. But suddenly, the ground, that these covenants are supposed to help hold steady, was suddenly shattering underneath her.
There are two things that I want us to think about here:
It is a problem that we, on purpose or inadvertently, suggest that the only UUism people can know is one that can be found in congregations where harm is being done to people on the margins. Unitarian Universalism lives where people are actually living it out, and we have to account for that in our systems and in our relationship building.
We cannot hold fast to a Unitarian Universalism that is grounded in love, justice and liberation for help when we put so much emphasis on our individual paths that we lose sight of how the whole of UUism can build a more robust foundation for healing, care, and accountability. More on that a little later…
So, perhaps, the work that we do to continually rely on covenant to help us do this thing better, to be in right relationship in ways that are meaningful and that aren’t just performative, needs some reconsideration. Because, if a commitment to covenanting in community only extends as far as anyone’s comfortability, as far as anyone’s racism, as far as our ableism, as far as anyone’s homophobia or transphobia will take them, then once anyone becomes confronted with lived experiences outside their purview or comfort zone, covenant goes out the window, Right relationship goes out the window. Good intentions go out the window. And then what does it all mean when we recite the words that so many of us know:
Love is the spirit of this church, and service is its law; this is our great covenant: to dwell together in peace, to seek the truth in love, and to help one another.
If “the practice of promising to [journey] together is the precious core of our creedless faith,” then how strong can our core be with countless stories like the one I just shared?
Speaking powerfully about where our strength comes from and where it may not, is Ms. Deborah Coleman, my first responder, who is the lead coordinator of BLUU Haven Richmond and a member of the First UU Church of Richmond.
Thank you so much, Deborah, who I know is watching from home, for your story and your hope for us. I am deeply grateful for your ministry.
“We’re Doing Alright.”
If we’re going to talk about committing to a Unitarian Universalism of the here and now, and weaving deeper care and accountability into the fabric of our faith, then we also have to talk about standards in a way we typically do not. We have ideas about how we are going to be in our spaces together. There are practices we can put in place and actions we can take to live into those ideas. But there has to be a process by which we get from one to the other! This is where a reshaping of care and accountability in community is supposed to live and where new standards take shape.
Recently, a dear friend, Dr. AndreAs Neumann-Mascis, a psychologist and educator from Boston, shared with me a conversation he’d had with a doctor who supports his care as a person with Cerebral Palsy. They were talking about the fact that standards of care for adults with CP are generally new and revolutionary. If you go to the emergency room for a heart attack, for example, there’s a particular standard of care that doesn’t take the needs of adults with CP into account. AndreAs clarified for the good doctor that this is so because, if you’re a straight, white, temporarily able-bodied man, people have an idea of what care and comfort looks like and that medical interventions are organized around the comfort of those specific people. That this is where standards of care actually come from.
But now, 30+ years into the Americans with Disabilities Act, there is an entire generation of people who have a cultural expectation of having a life with a disability. The fact of this new generation’s existence changes what medicine can do, but, more importantly, it changes what medicine expects of itself and is supposed to be able to do. And here’s why…
The ADA was and still is a radical idea in that its very existence means that, in the living of everyday life, we need to involve everyone in the human community who is in the human community! Everyone. And so, the existence of greater access, so that everyone in the human community can live life, changes fundamentally a standard of what we think living with disability means and changes fundamentally how we think about health and how we think about well-being. Yes, medicine changes, not because it evolved, but because the very existence of every person in the human community makes it not only possible, but necessary.
Friends…what we expect of one another as UUs and what we ask of ourselves and our people has to shift. After an abundance of work – research, interviews (countless interviews that have forced people to recount instances of horrific spiritual violence in our UU spaces), theological reflection (although, not nearly enough of that, IMHO), departments of the UUA being opened and closed, and reports being published, there are generations of people now expecting a fullness of life and spirit here in Unitarian Universalism that is different from decades passed. There does remain a line of thinking that suggests that, if we (meaning anyone on the margins of race, sexuality, gender identity, wealth, ability, etc.) are going to be here, then we should just expect to simply settle into what has always been. There are some who have even been explicit in their belief that we should not only adjust, but make our way out the door to go be who we are somewhere else.
But the ADA’s lessons and AndreAs’s conversation with his doctor are instructive here. It’s not about simply changing environments to make people more welcoming. It’s about the fact that our congregations and affiliated organizations are already being RESHAPED by the people who are a part of them. In having access, as part of the whole human community, we make possible opportunities for people to have deeply meaningful spiritual lives as their whole selves. And by having lives in this here place, our existence as people who show up with our various identities and lived experiences has the ability to change and reshape what Unitarian Universalism can and should expect of itself and what we can and should expect from one another. The very ACT of being and becoming changes what serves. It changes the food, or the existence of food. It changes the environment. It changes what we experience with all of our available senses.
And so we, as religious professionals of every stripe, must enter into shared ministry with this idea in mind. We have to be clear and unequivocal in our articulation of a Unitarian Universalism that is beautiful enough and powerful enough to be made all the better by this reshaping. And we have to tell a fuller, richer story about how old this reshaping and rebuilding from the margins really is, so that our folks (yes, our white folks, our cis folks, our temporarily able-bodied folks, our folks with wealth) don’t get stuck in false narratives about what Unitarian Universalism is or is not and who it is or isn’t for. I’m thinking, in particular right now, about people like Annie Bizzell Jordan Willis, whose work as an educator, from childhood in 1904 until her early 80s in 1974, left an indelible mark on children everywhere, while using an anti-racist pedagogy and a Universalist Sunday school curriculum. And we have to understand how racist, ableist, transphobic and other ideas exist and operate and put a stop to them. We can’t actually publicly proclaim to live out values that center and support the lives of people on the margins, especially in a time of increasing hostility to those values, when we cannot or will not offer that clarity, tell our whole story, and disrupt what neither serves us, nor aligns with those values.
Let’s hear from my second responder, my colleague and friend, Jen Hayman, who is the Director of Music and Arts at All Souls Church, Unitarian in DC, as she talks about disrupting the messages we carry and the power that can come from the disruption.
Deep Thanks to Jen, who I know is also home watching, for your response and your ministry.
UUs in this 21st century believe in showing up unapologetically as we are and have an expectation of care and concern…”brought toward our very best” because THAT is the Unitarian Universalism most of us long for and all the people need.
“Our UU Culture and Values Are One in the Same”
In ministry, I wear many hats. So, while I am BLUU’s minister, I am also one of the co-founders of the Transforming Hearts Collective, a group of really beautiful humans whose primary work it is to both support spaces of spiritual resilience for LGBTQ folks and resource congregations and organizations in the work of radical welcome (that really shouldn’t be all that radical in our spaces, but somehow is) and culture shift.
Back in November 2019, Alex Kapitan, another co-founder of THC, and I co-led a daylong training for a Large Church retreat on the kinds of work needed for our congregations to be the places where all of us could show up fully as our whole selves. As part of that training, we asked a salient question that we all need to be asking ourselves and that we have to be brave enough to ask our congregants and community members. And that question is this:
What are the ways UU culture is aligned with U.S. dominant culture by default and, therefore, not actually aligned with UU values?
As Alex can attest, that question struck a chord in the room. I think there was a sense in that room, filled with staff teams from all over MidAmerica, that UU culture and UU values had always been naturally aligned and the idea that they may not be was…destabilizing. How could they not be, right?! We’re UUs, after all.
Some of those aspects of culture are above the surface and easily noticeable. We even laugh about some of them – Priuses, NPR, Coffee hour. [I actually don’t find the coffee hour thing funny at all. We should be feeding people way more on Sunday mornings than we do. That would be a whole different lecture!] Some are just below the surface and barely noticeable, but can be spotted if we’re paying enough attention. And some – some of the values, symbols, history, attitudes, behavior and so on are so deep below the surface that they are working to fuel the inner- and outer-workings of whole communities without anyone even noticing that those aspects of culture are even present.
But the not-so-hard-to-grasp truth is that we humans show up with what we show up with. Yes, in UU spaces, most of us show up with a sense of justice and a desire to be welcoming. We show up wanting to do our part to build a caring and spiritually grounded community. It is also true that, if any of our lives are grounded in whiteness, we also show up with the social, economic, and political impacts of whiteness and, consciously or not, all the ways whiteness can get used as a tool to stifle voices, limit possibility, champion mediocrity, and otherwise suck the life out of shared power.
What is whiteness, just so we’re all on the same page? Whiteness and white racialized identity refer to the way that white people, their customs, culture, and beliefs operate as the standard by which all other groups are compared. Remember, we talked about standards and standards of care earlier. James Baldwin, in his essay, “On Being White…and Other Lies,” names the “necessity of denying the Black presence and justifying Black subjugation” as the primary reason for white people being white in America. In the face of unthinkable atrocities committed against Black and Indigenous people from long, long ago up to this moment, at the core of whiteness is the myth of purity and goodness and an unwillingness to tell the whole truth about those atrocities.
There are few things worth naming here. As I talk about whiteness, I’m not just talking about white people. Right? Whiteness breeds anti-blackness in white people, Black people, and non-Black people of color. It breeds assimilationist notions in Black folks, especially, because of our particular history of slavery and colonization, that plays out as a need or desire to either fit into predominantly white spaces or stand out just enough to perpetuate white comfort. And every person impacted by whiteness and every person perpetuating anti-Blackness has a responsibility to own the part they play in the harm that gets done as a result of them both.
All of this can and does overlay what serves as the foundation for the culture of most UU spaces, “expressed and passed on through language, values, symbols, history, attitudes, behavior, food (or a lack thereof), music, art, understandings about child rearing, and how love gets expressed.” It’s why only one gospel service a year should be sufficient, as if gospel music is the only music that brings life to every Black person in church and as if one service would be enough to enliven the spirits of Black people or anyone else for whom it is. It’s why congregations fixate on how many BIPOC folks are coming to church, rather than how to ensure that BIPOC folks’ voices are at the center of helping communities become what they can become. It’s why too many BIPOC and trans and disabled folks’ ministries end in negotiated resignations. It’s why that 100 Famous UUs poster is still hanging prominently in UU spaces all over the country, despite the fact that there are racists and enslavers featured on them. All of this and so much more represents harm.
And even recognizing the impact of whiteness on all of us, we know that Black people have always been here, from Gloster Dalton, who helped found the first Universalist church in the U.S. in 1785, to Dr. Paula Cole Jones, who has been a lifelong UU and is STILL doing life-changing racial justice work within the confines of our UU congregations. Trans people have always been here, from Rev. Erinn Melby, the first openly Trans UU seminarian we know of to yours truly. No matter who we are, where we come from, and what our lives are like, we’re here, and we’re not going anywhere. One of the things that has shifted over the years is a willingness of congregants and lay leaders to tell the whole truth of their lives and their needs in these spaces that too often have not, and still do not, adequately support people’s lived experiences.
But we, as ministers and religious educators and musicians, administrators, lay leaders and congregants alike, have a responsibility here. It is up to us to lay claim to our highest good as Unitarian Universalists, to make this not so new reality, grounded in commitment, reshaping, and UU culture that matches the values we proclaim, stronger and help lay clearer pathways for it to be realized. It is critical that we do this work, so that we can very plainly and continually state that there is no place and no room for the white nonsense that we know is running amok in our Association right now.
This shift to unapologetically live into our fullness will keep us alive and usher us into deeper thriving as a faith. But we have to stop saying that UUs can believe whatever they want or nothing at all. We have to proclaim a belief in the power of stories, be-ologies and do-ologies that both uplift the very best of who we are and who we are becoming, and also do no harm.
Closing Reflections
We are understandably weary from every single thing happening in our country and the world, and in our own lives. And…
As fatigued as we are, we have to loose ourselves from what keeps us stuck.
As uncertain as we may be, we have to loose one another from what keeps us stuck.
Hear me. I’m not saying don’t be afraid or unsteady. That fear and ungroundedness is real. All of this can be scary without the right tools and solid enough support from all directions. But we cannot afford to stay stuck like we have been.
The experience I had on that first day at First Parish in Cambridge was a Unitarian Universalism that had worship and veneration of my ancestors at its foundation. My interpretation of that moment was distinctly tied to my Black-identifying experience and Black radical thought, more broadly, about what is possible with Spirit and Truth. And nobody can take that experience from me, anymore than we can take covenant and toss it out the window. It is an expansive expression of our faith as UUs that we need more of because more of us are hungry for this in a world where…. That expansive expression offers a power and sense of possibility in our faith that, quite frankly, I did not experience in its fullness until my time with BLUU began, but that I know is possible across our faith. Because I have seen it in action, and I have seen people fired up and ready to make it happen.
This work is not easy and it takes everyone working in concert with one another. The contours of our faith can vary among us, and at the same time, we HAVE to be of one accord now. There are forces, not just out in the world, but right here in our midst, that would seek to muddy the waters of our clarity about whether or not we are called to a Unitarian Universalism of the here and now. Part of how we stay clear and support one another in our clarity is to recognize that our UU theology is communal and calls on all of us to be in ministry together in an informed, honest way. For this reason, I asked several people this year – a congregant, a musician, a minister, and a religious educator to offer responses today. We have already heard from lay leader, Deborah Coleman, and music director Jen Hayman, and now I’d like to invite Rev. Sam Teitel and the Rev. Dr. Natalie M. Fenimore to share their responses, in that order.
I typically begin my time with folks singing this song of prayer. I wrote it one morning sitting in the pulpit, inspired by the work I could feel the congregation doing. But today, I’m going to end our time with it, as a hope and a prayer that it can ground us in the relationships and the work ahead. Join me as it becomes familiar to you. The words should be on the screen.
May I Be Light in you
May you be Light in me
Into our hearts
Into our souls
Let love abide
May I be Love in you
May you be Love in me
From this place
Out to the world
For all time
Responses to 2022 Berry Street Essay
Response 1 of 4 by Deborah Coleman