2021 Berry Street Essay: The Reverends Janne Eller-Isaacs and Rob Eller-Isaacs

JANNE Introduction

Rob and I come to you today honored and humbled by the request to deliver this year’s Berry Street Essay. I want to acknowledge the reality of the year we have all just lived through. I have watched with awe and admiration as you all pivoted, answering the call to minister to people in new and often completely unfamiliar ways.
This has been a year of collective grief. It could be said that collective grief is a significant part of every year of ministry. That grief has been heavier and more widely shared than usual, as we have tried our best to respond to the demands of the pandemic, the uprising in the wake of George Floyd’s murder and the deep divisions that continue to plague our Nation.

It is our intention to be as honest and as vulnerable with you as we are able. We hope and pray our words, experiences and understandings of ministry are supportive of you and yours.

Rob and I have been in the ministry a long time. This Essay speaks to the struggles at the heart of both our marriage and the ministry we share. I stand before you today grounded in my own call to ministry as well as in my ministry with Rob. I recall too many moments when colleagues have failed to recognize me apart from Rob. I have felt invisible and at times erased.

We have been blessed as co-ministers to serve two remarkable congregations, The First Unitarian Church of Oakland and Unity Church of St. Paul. Today we will address some of the significant changes we have witnessed and been a part of in these years of unfolding.

This is an essay about shared ministry: the ministry Rob and I have shared together for 36 years; the ministry into which we invited the laity and the impact of that shared ministry as we worked side-by-side to shape congregations which, in turn help create a more hospitable, just and equitable world. All of this is grounded in a longing for the experience of the holy in our lives. We need to develop pratices and rituals that help us, as ministers, learn to testify to that experience and encourage others to do likewise.

I share this image. Redwood trees reproduce in a number of ways. The most common way that redwoods reproduce is for new growth to sprout where ancestral trees once stood. This life generating, dead or dying tree is called the root crown. Have you ever been in a cathedral of redwood trees? Often among them, you will find an opening with trees ringing the circle of what was at one time a grandparent tree, now no longer visible. If you look up, you see the high branches touching one another, reaching toward the sky. The roots are also intertwined underground, woven together, sharing nutrients. Today we too circle the crown root crown, call it Channing. For from that root crown grew a circle of reformers that envisioned and inspired the progressive movement we today inherit. We can trace a shift of consciousness that begins among those inspired by Channing’s ministry. Among the Transcendentalists and their “fellow travelers” new modes of thought and action took form. Emboldened feminism, experiments in communal living, solidarity with poor people and a radical democratization of the church all grew from that root crown. We are particularly inspired by the ministry of James Freeman Clarke, often referred to as Channing’s successor as “Bishop of the Boston Unitarians.” His long and fruitful ministry was marked by focused effort in each of these new modes.1 Just as we have tried to build on his example we bow to those of you who also seek to further like ends even and especially as we retire from full time ministry.

We have given the larger portion of our life to the church. We still believe that vital religious communities grounded in the experience of the holy, sustained by personal practice and by rituals of confession, lamentation and covenant, provide a framework for love and justice to take hold in the world.

ROB Direct Experience of the Holy:

The ministry Janne and I share stands squarely in the lineage of Clarke and is in large part inspired by the Church of the Disciples, which he founded in light of the Transcendentalist corrective. As transcendentalists ourselves we have always understood our ministry to arise from our own experiences of the Holy. Effective ministry takes form in structured, sustained practices, personal, interpersonal and social that emerged and are still emerging from that new consciousness. In Nature, his first published essay, Emerson, another new tree sprung from the Channing root crown, asks, “Why should not we also enjoy an original relation with the universe? Why should not we have a poetry and philosophy of insight and not of tradition, and a religion by revelation to us, and not a history of theirs?”2 The year was 1836. In September of that same year, a small group, including the young James Freeman Clarke, met together at the home of George and Sophia Ripley to discuss their strong sense that the Unitarian Church, not twenty years past its founding was already stifling, class-bound and in dire need of reform. Two years later Emerson was admonishing each of the seven graduating seniors at Harvard Divinity School and through them each of us to, “be yourself a new-born bard of the Holy Ghost, cast behind you all conformity, and acquaint (us all) first hand with Deity.” 3

Building on the early work of Schleiermacher and the German Idealists, the Transcendentalists attempted to reform liberal Christianity by insisting that the personal experience of the Holy is and should be at the center of the spiritual life. They loved the church but found it both performative and deadly dull. Some held out no hope. Emerson himself was already considering options other than the parish ministry. Others, in particular for the purposes of this Essay, James Freeman Clarke, held that the church, though out of touch with its true purposes, might yet be the seat of both personal and social transformation.4 This might happen if and only if, it could become what church historian, Diana Butler Bass, has called, “a practicing congregation.”5 As opposed to being adoring fans of some heroic preacher, participants in a practicing congregation embody the teachings and values of the church at the very core of their lives. Its disciplines become their practice. Centered in the experience of the Holy, they learn to testify to that experience and encourage others to like encounters of their own. At the heart of the Transcendentalist corrective is the notion that the church is in the world to encourage the experience of the Holy and to frame that experience in ways that lead us to live lives of integrity, service and joy.

We will return to Dr. Clarke and to his Church of the Disciples later in the Essay. For now, it is enough to know that among the tall trees grown from Channing’s root crown is one that bears the name James Freeman Clarke. Our ministry has been informed by and we hope, renews his vision. From the start we too have met with colleagues both ordained and lay in hope of reform. We too have devoted our lives to equip and empower the laity to take up their ministry. We too have endeavored to breathe new life into the places and the people we have served not in order to perpetuate the institution but to realign its purposes and bring them more fully to life. To know we are not the first to gather in this interest helps assure us that we will not be the last.
In order to speak about the experience of the Holy I think it necessary to share moments early in my life when I first felt that sense of merger, that trajectory of surrender into something far larger than myself, that moment of moving beyond my own ego, the feeling that everywhere, across cultures and traditions, is understood as evidence of the experience of the Holy. Our dear, departed colleague, Max Kapp, was surely recalling the humility and surrender of the experience when he wrote:

I brought my spirit to the sea,
I stood upon the shore.
I gazed upon infinity,
I heard the waters roar.
And then I felt an inner flame
That fiercely burned my tears.
Upright I rose from bended knee
To meet the asking years.6

For me, it all began with singing. In 1956, the First Unitarian Society on Chicago’s Southside established a children’s choir. The Choir’s core commitment to crossing lines of race and class in order to model both literal and figurative harmony soon was taken up by the larger community and we became the Chicago Children’s Choir, now the largest choral organization in the world with more than six thousand singers organized into sixteen neighborhood choirs. By 1958, I had turned seven and was old enough to join the choir. We learned to listen. We learned to blend. We learned that when we were together our sound was more important than ourselves. Then and now, the experience of the Holy came, when by discipline and practice we were pitched beyond ourselves as soul took hold and we many became one. I had no language for it but even then, I knew I wanted my life to center in that harmony.

JANNE Practice is Essential

A disciplined spiritual practice brings one closer to the experience of the holy. The distant God of conventional religion no longer holds relevance in people’s spiritual lives. In Grounded: Finding God in the World,7 Diana Butler Bass asserts that we are in the midst of a collective spiritual transformation. She argues that the majority of people understand that the holy is found in their lived experience and is not external to them.

In the late 1970s, a group of California ministers gathered in the Santa Cruz Mountains for their annual retreat. Harry Scholefield, Minister Emeritus in San Francisco, was asked to share an odyssey focusing on the development of his devotional practice. He talked about how activism devoid of devotional practice had come close to killing him and that finding practice had saved his life. His reflections inspired significant debate. At that time very few of our colleagues had a spiritual practice. Many felt it was unnecessary and a distraction. Some even considered it a new form of pietism that would inevitably diminish and undermine our activism.
Ten years later, when I entered the ministry, there was more acceptance of the importance of spiritual practice but often, its importance was acknowledged but not practiced. We all had our excuses; generally we claimed, it was busyness or the grueling demands of ministry. These excuses were true then and continue to be true now. We are busy and the demands can be grueling but we have learned that spiritual practice makes us more capable of being present to the people we serve and to the realities of our lives. The work begins within.

Among those who knew best that effective ministry is grounded in spiritual practice was, Christian mystic, theologian and minister Howard Thurman. Thurman’s work is focused on the centrality of the individual’s religious experience. He understood those experiences as confirmation of God’s presence and believed that in encountering the Holy we become aware of and responsive to something larger than ourselves. He believed that such encounters enhance our ability to be present to ourselves, each other, the world.

“Thurman suggests that the person who seeks a sense of identity and purpose must find a way, a spiritual practice, that allows the inner voices that are often in conflict to come together for the sake of wholeness, integration and harmony within the self,” writes Walter Earl Fluker, the Martin Luther King Jr. Professor of Religion at Boston University in Anchored in the Current, a book of essays on Thurman as an educator. “Thurman felt it essential for leaders who are concerned with social justice to begin within.”8

The neurobiologists have proven that no matter what the practice, whatever the cultural or religious context, practitioners experience much the same thing. That said, each person tells the story of their encounter with the Holy in their own way, language and context. You can share your experiences with others and find rich intimate connections as you do. There is no hierarchy that ranks the quality of spiritual experience. Spiritual practice strengthens us all and helps us to be more vulnerable, authentic and open human beings. As religious leaders, it is an obligation we take seriously to teach the efficacy of practice and to find ways to testify to our own experiences of the holy.

In the introduction to the pastoral prayer each Sunday at Unity, we say these words: “We stand at the side of parents, teachers and all those whose primary spiritual practice is caring for children.” We say these words, because a parent who was also a teacher came to us and said that it was almost impossible to find time for practice in the midst of raising young children. She helped us to recognize, and in time to teach, that parenting can and should be framed as spiritual practice. Parenting certainly came to be spiritual practice for me and for Rob.

Parenting is holy work day in and day out. We include the words on caring for children as spiritual practice in the pastoral prayer to recognize that spiritual practice comes in many forms and to affirm parenting as a spiritual practice, to support our parents and teachers in their efforts to bring their best selves to their most important work.

Experiences in early adulthood awakened me to the need to create a consistent practice in my life. I began to chant regularly with a Buddhist community in Berkeley. There I was transported, as our voices merged into something awe inspiring, something deeply moving that carried me beyond myself. My voice, all of our voices ebbed and flowed, connected and harmonized. Time lost its meaning. All there was was now.

Since that time, I have always maintained a serious spiritual practice. The practices have changed over time, but they have become essential to sustaining my life. They align me with life, connecting me with the Holy. At its best, practice fills my life with wonder, encourages me to honor my embodied experience, to touch the depths of sorrow and joy, to take risks, to learn from my mistakes and to open myself up to be held and accompanied by a larger love.

I have had direct experiences of the holy in nature, in standing in solidarity with others, in chanting and singing, in loving so fiercely my heart aches, in being present and unafraid in moments of birth and death. I have witnessed to a power not of my making and yet been a part of it. I believe our people ache for this sense of connection. We can witness to the efficacy of spiritual practice not only for personal wellbeing but also as an antidote to the anonymity and atomization which result from the damage done by white supremacy and patriarchy. We liberals can actually live religious lives. In his 2019 address to the graduating seniors at that same Harvard Divinity School, Dr. Cornell West, dared the graduates to live overtly religious lives. He called them to a “subversive pietism.”9

When our congregants take their own spiritual lives seriously, a new kind of vitality invigorates our time together. Our job is to focus that vitality at the intersection of spiritual development and positive social change.

When James Freeman Clarke founded the Church of the Disciples, he established that a worshipping community could have a shared experience of the holy. He had confidence that personal practice, small group gathering, communal worship and acts of social betterment all provided opportunities for the Holy to take hold.

He purposefully named his new start up, “Church of the Disciples” because he wanted to be part of a group of people discipled to an evolving set of teachings that helped them to live out their shared beliefs and values. He envisioned an enlivened and spirited congregation that gathered across lines of caste and class. He called for a church of the open door, where all were welcome.10 For a time, his vision was largely made real.

In the narthex of the First Unitarian Church of Oakland are six stained glass windows depicting leaders of 19th century Unitarianism. One of the portraits is of James Freeman Clarke. Rob went to Oakland to see if a new ministry could revitalize and save a dying urban church. It soon became clear that the effort would require a group of committed disciples who would devote long hours to rebuilding every aspect of congregational life. Slowly, a congregation emerged. Many of them were born and bred Unitarian Universalists, looking for an enlivened worship experience and a place to find meaning, purpose and a sense of their own ministry in the world. Although I had intended to look for work as a therapist, the work of rebuilding the Oakland congregation was calling and after a year of living and breathing this compelling work as a volunteer and spouse, I applied to Starr King.

It soon became clear that I wanted to be part of the ministry at Oakland and I asked to join Rob. He was afraid that sharing the same ecological niche would threaten both our marriage and his ministry. I insisted. Despite his ambivalence, Rob agreed. The first years were difficult. For the reality of our shared ministry to truly take hold required years of struggle, of negotiations, of give and take. The lay leaders learned to breathe through our disagreements. We both learned and benefitted from our partnership. We learned that co-ministry actually gave us the freedom to pursue those aspects of the work in which we were most interested and for which we were best suited. Forged from our struggles, came a vision of shared ministry. It began between us and then took hold among the laity.

Decision-making took new more inclusive forms. The shape and style of leadership began to change. At that time, we did not realize how much we were echoing what Clarke had created more than a century earlier.

James Freeman Clarke imagined lay people involved at every level of church life. Every other New England church was funded through pew subscription. He wanted everyone, regardless of their economic resources, to be able invest in the church according to their means. He introduced congregational singing into worship which was a radical departure in his day. He envisioned joyous, lively worship. He wanted very much to cultivate lay involvement in planning and offering worship. He wanted lay people to preach. He wanted joy at the heart of the their ministry. We envisioned the same thing. Clarke’s vision was not completely fulfilled. To his disappointment, most lay leaders were reticent to preach. He was also well aware that their admiration for him remained a barrier preventing many of them from fully embracing their own ministry.

Clarke provided inspiration and encouragement for the public ministry of his members. It was Clarke who suggested his parishioner, Julia Ward Howe write what became “The Battle Hymn of the Republic”, the best-known work of a woman who, in all of her years, sought to live out her faith in the world. In each key area of church life, Clarke cultivated opportunities for the laity to engage fully in their ministry.11

In his book Deeply Woven Roots, the Rev. Gary Gunderson former Director of Interfaith Health at the Carter Center, reminds us that a forest’s resilience reflects and is dependent on species diversity, the exchange of nutrients and other biological processes by which the trees support each other. Shared ministry is much like a healthy forest where a sustained exchange of essential nutrients occurs.12

Gunderson continually lifts up the power of collaboration. He draws a direct link between connections among people and their physical and spiritual health. He writes: “Many innovations rest on collaboration between people and institutions….The future flows from the alchemy of flesh and spirit that is manifested in the lives of the people who commit to do the next right thing within their grasp.”13

ROB Aligning Congregational Life

Beginning at Oakland and continuing over the course of our ministry in St. Paul, with support, inspiration and encouragement from congregants, we created what we call the associates programs. Inspired by a workshop led by our beloved colleague, Mark Belletini, we and the worship committee of the Oakland Church established the original worship associates program. We then extended the invitation to the laity to become more formally involved in pastoral care. Eventually we added like opportunities in justice making and in teaching. In collaboration with lay leaders, we created clear pathways for existential involvement in the ministry of the church. The relationships that grew out of the depth of that collaboration enriched the soil in which our ministry was planted. Time and again, people who were shy and reticent, people who thought they had little to offer, rose to the opportunity in ways that served the community and changed their lives for the better. It turned out that “the next right thing within our grasp” was to work together to create new forms of ministry that empowered lay people, significantly strengthened congregational life, and furthered the impact of the church in the world.

Many conversations undergird this effort. Our daughter Jessie, an engaged activist educator asked, “Looking back, do you recall moments early in your career that helped to shape the likelihood that your work would come to focus primarily on cultivating lay ministry?” I do recall such moments. For instance, at the end of our second year in Oakland we went away for a few weeks leaving intern minister, Lindi Ramsden responsible for summer worship. We returned in late August to find the congregation, which had doubled over the summer, singing acapella. As we sang along that first Sunday back, I knew something important had changed. They were learning to listen. They were learning to blend. They were starting to see how discipline and practice could pitch them beyond themselves as soul took hold and together, they experienced the Holy.

The purpose of religious community is to foster the experience of the Holy in the sure hope that such experiences will help adherents live more loving, joyful and effective lives. At Unity Church in Saint Paul, we teach that there are three basic practices we expect of our people. We expect each person to learn and practice a personal spiritual discipline. Personal practice helps us find and keep our balance as we become more aware of and more sensitive to the presence of God in our lives. The second expectation is that our people will find ways to deepen their capacity for intimacy. Just as we offer yoga, meditation, martial arts and a variety of other personal practices, we also offer communal practices that expand and reinforce that same receptivity. The list of small group offerings is long and rich, including, Chalice Circles, Justice Outreach Teams, support groups, music making, pilgrimage opportunities and more. They are all intended to equip us to go deep quickly with strangers.

The third expectation grows out of the first two. When personal practice and shared intimacy become central to our lives, our hearts break open and compassion rises. Working for justice is a natural outgrowth of personal and communal spiritual practice. “Organize your compassion,” we tell them, “bless the world.”

It is not that we entirely reject the old ideas of responsible membership. We also ask for regular attendance at worship, generous financial support and service to the church itself. However, we want those commitments to be inspired by the three core expectations of our shared ministry. Obligations agreed to out of duty are far less sustainable than those arising out of gratitude as people change and grow in response to their involvement in the church.

Some years ago, I helped facilitate a Board retreat at one of our prominent congregations. “In what ways,” I asked them, “does church involvement foster transformation in your lives?” After a discomforting period of silence one of the trustees said, “I’ve never thought of our church as a place where people change their lives. It has always been a liberal refuge for community connections, cultural enrichment, making friends and opportunities for learning.” I was taken aback. Shared ministry offers a very different understanding of the church. It posits that the primary purpose of religious community is the transformation of individuals, groups and society as a whole. The Church is not primarily about building community, though community is built. The Church is not primarily about making friends, though friends are made. The Church is not even primarily about alleviating suffering, though suffering may well be relieved. We are meant to be communities of accountability in which both the world and we ourselves are changed for the better.

I too have been changed by what we have started. When Janne decided to enroll at Starr King, she insisted she had no interest in parish ministry. I admit I was relieved. My early ministry was shaped by a small circle of successful men who saw themselves in me and experienced my work as an expression of their legacy. I was an old-boy born and bred. The last thing I wanted was to share the spotlight. When Janne was called to parish ministry and asked to join me in Oakland I reacted very badly. I only acquiesced after being confronted by a dear friend who simply said, “When someone you love makes a demand bid you really have only one choice.” So I said yes but between character and training, forging an effective, mutually respectful team ministry has been a slow and sometimes excruciating process. I want you to know that a commitment that began out of duty, has over years of change and growth, been sustained by an ever-deepening sense of gratitude for the many blessings we have found.

We can’t really know how Clarke dealt with the loneliness and unencumbered independence of doing ministry on his own. However, after graduating from the Divinity School at Harvard in 1829 and serving for seven lonely years at Louisville out on the Kentucky frontier, he knew he had to make a change. Far from his Boston friends, who were at the heart of the Transcendentalist circle, he kept in touch by correspondence and by editing the first Transcendentalist journal, the Western Messenger. Nevertheless, by 1840 he had had enough of frontier life. Together, he and his young wife, Anna moved to Boston where Clarke and a circle of friends established the Church of the Disciples. Though there were a number of existing churches that would have welcomed him, he had a vision for a very different way of doing church. At the Church of the Disciples, he would remain the primary preacher while insisting that ultimately, the ministry was less his than it was theirs to share.

JANNE To Bless the World

Clarke was clear. Their shared ministry needed to extend beyond the walls of the church. He understood that small groups are central to effective spiritual development. From that depth of engagement with one another, the Church of the Disciples became renowned as a congregation that practiced generosity as they took their values out into the world. Among their many memorable contributions, was raising the funds to equip the Massachusetts 54th, the first black regiment in the Civil War.14 For most of its existence, the congregation gave away 1/3 of its budget to causes outside the walls of the church.15 Too often, spiritual development and social justice the two are separated in congregational life, though it is clear that they are linked and intertwined. They are interdependent. It is where the two meet that prophetic imagination best takes hold.

All too often activists, who are not anchored in practice, tend to move through the world with a distinct lack of humility. Even those of us committed to regular practice fall easily into arrogance and unbecoming certainty. To be effective partners, we have to learn to engage those with whom we work with deep respect and a cultivated humility.

Lone Ranger leadership, the model most of us were raised in, trained in and will perpetuate without intentional effort, is patriarchal, outdated and ineffective.16 What we need now is the creativity and vision new and more inclusive forms of leadership can bring. Faith is relational and we express it relationally. It is important to note that collaborative leadership is only viable when those involved have come to trust each other deeply enough to listen carefully, speak truthfully, and when necessary, “speak with one voice.” Collaborative leadership is inherently covenantal. Those attempt it without devoting the time to establish the bonds that only trust can build risk undermining the very communities they hope to serve. Making structural changes while avoiding essential conversations is not a viable approach to resolving interpersonal challenges. New forms of governance that clarify authority and invite more inclusive decision making can bring our organizational structure into better alignment with our values. Don’t try it if you and your team are unwilling to do whatever is necessary to build the trust and honest dialog such changes require.

The world continues to get smaller. Proximity teaches us that we are profoundly connected one to another. Rooted in this understanding, at our best, we move toward one another with respectful curiosity and humility. We have to let go of the assumption that we have all the answers. In fact, we know we don’t. The strength to connect is built on the willingness to reach out to others with partial knowledge at best, knowing that we have so much more to learn, that we need to listen first and not assume that we already know. We need collaborative leadership structures that help to quiet those who take up too much space, encourage those reticent to speak and invite new creative possibilities.

White supremacy wounds us all but it wounds each of us differently. Those of us who are white-skinned people need to understand that our privilege undermines our capacity to be useful partners in positive change.. We have to learn to strip away the privilege, day after day, learning as we go, making mistakes, always falling short of our aspirations. And after we have failed we get up and try again. This is what ministry asks of us. In the words of Cornel West, we all need to learn to “fail better.”17
Complacency is not acceptable. It never has been. Ministry asks that we pledge ourselves to engage in accountable and transforming relationships that are based in a growing mutual respect and trust. We earn these things over time as we practice becoming truly accountable partners.

We can’t speak honestly about the call to shared ministry without acknowledging the present reality that we live in a deeply divided nation. On January 6th of this year, there was an insurrection at our nation’s capital. This excerpt is from a prophetic poem written by activist organizer, adrienne maree brown, in 2017 and shared again on her blog the day after the assault:

things are not getting worse
they are getting uncovered
we must hold each other tight
and continue to pull back the veil
see: we, the body, we are the wounded place

we live on a resilient earth
where change is the only constant
in bodies whose only true whiteness
is the blood cell that fights infection
and the bone that holds the marrow

a body is always a body
wounded, festering, healing, healed
we choose each day what body we will shape
with the miraculous material we are gifted
let us, finally, attend to the wound
let us, finally name the violence
let us, finally, break the cycle of supremacy
let us, finally, choose ourselves whole
let us, finally, love ourselves
whole.18

Is this not the work of the church, to love ourselves whole-to organize our compassion and learn to love our neighbors as ourselves?

ROB Summing Up

The Ministerial Conference at Berry Street was first convened on May 31th, 1820 in the vestry of the Federal Street Church. Dr. Channing invited ministers of liberal leaning to come together to create “a Bond of Union within which they might meet to exchange practical ideas for strengthening their ministries.” Channing himself offered the first essay under the title “How Far is Reason to be used in Explaining Revelation.” His key point is that in the struggle for primacy between liberalism and orthodoxy respect for reason gave liberalism the upper hand. By choosing to address the place of reason in matters of religion, Channing was speaking to what he perceived to be among the pivotal concerns his colleagues should consider. He also charged those invited to deliver future essays to speak to what they saw as essential concerns.

Though the Berry Street Committee assigns no specific topic to the essayist, Janne and I had a strong sense that the Committee hoped we might address the shift from single-point patriarchal leadership to a more inclusive, far more collaborative approach informed by what Sharon Welch calls “a feminist ethic of risk.”19 That long, slow change of both consciousness and behavior is grounded in the joy and struggle of working toward mutual respect. We have tried to trace this welcome if challenging change in the life of the church and in the development of both our ministry and of our marriage. In recent years, the Berry Street Scribe has suggested that essayists try to move beyond the dryly academic, disembodied style of liberal discourse by bringing our whole selves into the equation. We have tried our best to live into that charge.

We share Clarke’s strong sense that single-point heroic leadership no longer serves us well. In fact, it undermines our efforts. We are called to become humble, credible, and accountable partners in helping to bring in what Norbert Capek called “the reign of mutual respect.”20 If we are actually to help to break the hammerlock of white supremacy and end what Baldwin called “the racial nightmare”21 we will need to come to understand ourselves as disciples and charge our people to disciple themselves not to any teacher but to the teachings themselves. We need to develop and practice rituals of confession, lamentation and covenant that move us toward humility, spiritual strength and true solidarity. Then we may yet learn to take as gospel what philosopher and social critic, Judith Butler calls “the radical equality of lives.”22
We need to learn to testify, dear colleagues. We need to learn to speak of our own experiences of the Holy and help our people to do likewise. Then, grounded in the joy and power of surrender, strengthened and sustained by the intimacy of spiritual friendship and fully engaged with the world, our practicing congregations will rise again in Max Kapp’s words, “from bended knee to meet the asking years.”

Acknowledgments

As we have tried to demonstrate in this essay, much of what is attributed to individual effort arises, in fact, from what Lewis Hyde calls, “the cultural commons.” Our work is embedded in the continuing discourse of a community of colleagues. The essay was written with the help of four reader/editors with whom we shared a series of early drafts. We are grateful to Wayne Arnason, Arif Mamdani, Meg Riley and Kate Tucker each of whom offered insightful suggestions that helped to clarify and strengthen the work. John Buehrens and Paul Johnson shared their scholarly enthusiasm for James Freeman Clarke and his larger circle. We are grateful as well to Mark Morrison-Reed for his enduring friendship and for introducing us and to our respondents, Jen Crow and Mykal Slack, each of whom brings their unique perspective and deep insight to the conversation.

We are indebted to the staff and congregation of Unity Church-Unitarian in Saint Paul, Minnesota who have always understood collegiality and continuing education as central to our ministry and have encouraged us to take whatever time we needed in pursuit of this and of many previous assignments.

Notes
1) January 28th, 2021 Conversation with John Buehrens
2) Nature Essential Writings of Ralph Waldo Emerson,
Modern Library Classics 2000
3) An Address ibid.
4) Minns Lectures 2010 Paul Johnson
5) The Practicing Congregation: Imagining a New Old Church Diana Butller Bass
Alban Institute 2004
6) “I Brought My Spirit to the Sea” Max Kapp #4 Singing the Living Tradition
Unitarian Universalist Association, Beacon Press 1993
7) Grounded: Finding God in the World Diana Butler Bass Harper One 2015
8) Anchored in the Current: Discovering Howard Thurman as Educator, Activist, Guide and Prophet Gregory Ellison, Editor
Westminster John Knox Press 2020
9) “There is Joy in the Struggle” Cornel West Harvard Divinity School
Commencement Address 2019
10) Minns Lectures 2010 Paul Johnson
11) January 28th, 2021 Conversation with John Buehrens
12) Deeply Woven Roots: Improving the Quality of Life in Your Community
Gary Gunderson, Fortress Press 1997
13) Ibid
14) January 28th, 2021 Conversation with John Buehrens
15) MInns Lectures 2010 Paul Johnson
16) March 11th, 2021 Correspondence with Aril Mamdani
17) “There is Joy in Struggle” Cornel West Harvard Divinity School
Commencement Address 2019
18) adrienne maree brown’s Blog February 3rd, 2017
19) A Feminist Ethic of Risk Sharon Welch, Augsburg Fortress Press 2000
20) “Blessing of the Flowers” Norbert Capek
21) The Fire Next Time James Baldwin pp105 Vintage International 1993
22) The Force of Nonviolence: An Ethico-Political Bind Judith Butler
Verso 2020

Responses to Berry Street Essay

Response 1 of 2 by The Reverend Jennifer Crow

Response 2 of 2 by The Reverend Mykal O. Slack