2019 Response to Berry Street Essay: The Reverend Sofia Betancourt

Response to the 2019 Berry Street Essay
Rev. Sofía Betancourt
June 19, 2019

Every time I go to see Alvin Ailey I know that my heart will break open, that I will be
called back into my body, and that the truths of my living will be returned to me.
This is a priceless gift that my parents gave me. I don’t know if it was my love of
dance, or their ability to witness how my heart returned to its rightful rhythm in
those seats at City Center, but I saw more Alvin Ailey performances as child growing
up in New York City than anything else.
This saved my life.
There is a particular disconnect that happens when you are the first generation
child of immigrants on both sides of your family. My ancestors certainly knew
unspeakable suffering, and there is intergenerational trauma in my family that
expresses itself in complicated ways. My parents are Chilean and Panamanian,
though some of you know my bloods and lineages are richer and more complex than
that. Suffice it to say that U.S. imperialism and ideological violence play a strong role
in my understanding of myself.
I offer you this snapshot so that you can know a bit of the worldview that buoys my
theoethical sensibilities. You will hear me use that word – theoethical, because I
believe that our theologies and our ethics, our beliefs and our values, are intricately
intertwined. Contrary to what is often taught in mainline traditions, I do not believe
that theology comes first, and ethics second. Yes our beliefs should provide a
foundation for our values, and, our values must provide an intentional
accountability check for our beliefs. If either strand cannot support the other, we
have work that we need to do.
Pause
This past April I found myself sitting with my beloved housemate Shannon in
Zellerbach hall in Berkeley. We were there to see Alvin Ailey perform a piece I had
never seen before: Lazarus. Lazarus is the final part of a trilogy that honors the life
and legacy of Alvin Ailey himself, whose vision and creative genius gave us the first
dance company centered on African American culture in the United States. The
theater lights went down, the curtain rose, and almost immediately my heart broke
entirely open. I thought I was ready. I thought a company whose wisdom and
witness has pushed me to new understandings for most of my lifetime was a
worshipful space with an embodied theology whose movements I already knew. I
wasn’t ready.
Lazarus begins with choreography that reviewers have described as nightmarish.
The company’s movements are slow at first, and they remain slow for a long time.
2
Several reviewers describe the work as arcing not only through Ailey’s lifetime but
also through a history of black movement and dance, where the early expressions of
life and living are laced through with traumatic experiences. Where they described
nightmares, I saw common themes of living. I saw my community and my people.
Generations of brutalization, generations of parents’ wailing at the loss of their
children to violence, generations of making a way out of no way.
And just as I thought I could not bear any more depictions of pain, just as I was
beginning to ask myself why the company and hip-hop choreographer Rennie Harris
felt they had the right to show us that much pain (more on that in a minute), we got
to a moment of dance that flung my soul forward in time to this moment. To
Juneteeth. To the Berry Street essay and our beloved colleague’s brilliance.
There are a few moments in Lazarus where a single dancer walks across the stage in
a spotlight. And all around them and especially in their wake are about fourteen
other dancers, lying on the ground rolling. There is no movement in the walking that
does not seem to be driven by the rolling of bodies on the ground.
Some of you have heard me say that we have made measurable progress on racial
justice in particular in Unitarian Universalism, and that such progress is too often
made at the expense of the bodies that we leave in our wake. Leaders, lauded for a
time, expected to do the impossible, and left behind as we make incremental
progress seemingly one body at a time. I know this is true for more than the just the
colleagues of color among us.
I have no idea what Rennie Harris was trying to teach us in this moment because I
lost my place in the dance for a while. But when I returned to my heart broken open
with grieving determination, resounding with faithfulness of all things, I
remembered that I had just been wondering why these prophets in motion felt they
had the right to show us so much pain.
Beloveds when I tell you I wasn’t ready for Lazarus, it is because Lazarus showed
me in a way I couldn’t escape how accustomed I have become to sanitizing the
reality of pain in this space. And to any of you whom I have harmed by choosing
words that I considered “hearable,” I am truly sorry.
Pause
And of course this piece was created for Ailey’s 60th anniversary and Rennie Harris
choreographed Ailey’s first ever ballet in two acts and so I had to sit through the
longest intermission of my life. I didn’t even leave my seat. What the company
offered in act two was a level of survival, resilience, praise, and resurrection of a
people that could barely be contained by the incredibly fast dancing that still
contained notes of the movements and dance styles that earlier held such grief. One
reviewer described this ballet as being composed of isolated shards that can still be
recognized in the exhilarating complexity of the remainder of the piece.
3
This, to me, is liberation theology.
Pause
Leslie has beautifully offered us a road map to the realities of the work that lies
before us as religious leaders in these days. We must delve into the inherited
legacies that complicate our relationship with truth. We must become trauma
informed as part of everyday competence in ministry, to say nothing of excellence.
And we must not only offer opportunities for transformation, we must empower
others and ourselves with tools for transformation, lest the possibilities in our
movement be limited by our current imagination.
As Leslie says, “the truth has been smashed to pieces all around us.” Thank God.
Some of us likely feel as if we have been scrambling after the shards for a while now.
I want to boldly name the religious progressivism that insists that God has ordained
us to continually improve upon humanity, as a site of inherited trauma. Please don’t
misunderstand me. The idea that it is ours to live a faith-filled life that increases
justice and amplifies mercy is a beautiful catalyst to some of our best service in the
world. But taken to extremes, taken to the place that only one truth can prevail, only
one culture can define moral correctness, only one people can be ordained to be in
control… here is where the true nightmare of domination, oppression, and systemic
violence thrives.
I know we wrestle with seeing ourselves in the long cultural history that creates
what environmental philosopher Val Plumwood defines as a master narrative of
domination. Every false binary that pits one identity over another, is an historic site
of violence through the working of domination. I think it is truly fair to say that
Unitarian Universalists in the present day recoil from domination itself. And this
reality makes it hard for us to see ourselves in the inherited legacies of white
supremacy and institutionalized violence that impact so very many of our lives. The
problem for me, is that we are deeply invested in a master narrative of control.
It matters a lot to us who gets to define our priorities, how we should be with one
another, where authority lies in our movement, and how to best utilize our
resources to say nothing of leadership opportunities, access to information,
who gets to tell their truth, and whether or not that truth is ever shared with the
broader community. Control and Domination are siblings on the White Supremacy
family tree and we do not get to absolve ourselves of responsibility by silencing
those among us who would do the sacrificial emotional labor of reflecting back to us
the impact of systematic harm.
The dominant social location can no longer be a placeholder for what we believe.
4
Beloveds, you have the right to express your pain. And you have the right to journey
faithfully with that pain to a place of transformation without anyone consuming
your story for their own benefit.
Every religious leader in this room has a professional obligation to empower our
community to do the work of transformation. This means we must shake the last
remnants of dust from our feet and leave our fear of theology and our fear of faith
formation behind for good. There is a reason why people seek religious community
to live lives that more closely reflect their values in the world. If we were all good at
it, we wouldn’t need to support one another through it. The irony is that most of us
are really practiced at recognizing a master narrative of control when it comes in
theological form. Maybe that ability can center us in a practice of embracing
multiple truths without undermining how we make meaning together.
Ada María Isasi-Díaz, whom we were blessed to have on our board at Starr King
before she died, was a Catholic theologian who gifted us with her work on Mujerista
theology. This labor, drawn in relationship with womanist theologians yet centered
on Latinidad, is explicit in its insistence on multiple truths. Her feminist response to
a deeply creedal tradition still models for us what it means to put the lived
experiences of those who offer the wisdom of a survival faith at the center of the
theological task. Isasi-Diaz wrote about el proyecto historico, which in her words
means the “hopes and expectations of Hispanic women as grounded in reality and
aimed at historical fruition.”1 Essentially her work centered the lived experiences of
women whom she called grassroots theologians to shape a vision of a collective
future of wholeness, faith, and justice for all. This is just one example of the kind of
liberation theology that we should be engaging as we work to understand the
“power of we.”
I invite us to re-engage our theoethics, to revitalize this tradition that we love, by
exchanging our obsession with control for faith in a collective future. Then, like
Lazarus, we might rise again and continue the sacred work.
Thank you.
1 Ada María Isasi-Díaz, “Defining Our ‘Proyecto Histórico’: ‘Mujerista’ Strategies for Liberation,” Journal
of Feminist Studies in Religion Vol. 9, No. 1/2 (Spring – Fall, 1993), pp. 17-28, 17.