2021 Response to Berry Street Essay: The Reverend Mykal Slack

I am settling into the gift that is today and this moment. I was curious about what I could add to this Berry Street experience. After some meaningful conversation with Janne and Rob, I discovered my own excitement about this work, this OPENING, having a life of its own beyond today. And so I am deeply grateful – for their invitation to respond and for what might come out of our shared time today. I’m glad to be here 🙂

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What comes to mind when we hear a word like “holy” or consider experiences of the Holy? Something sacred, or sacrilegious? Something healing or harmful, perhaps. Powerful or painful? How does it make you feel? Whatever words, moments, past lives, or very present regrets that may come to people as we lift up experiences of the Holy, my guess is that it does SOMETHING to us to talk about this, whether we like it or not, whether we’re interested in understanding it or not.

Janne’s movement beyond herself in the chanting of her Buddhist community in Berkeley, and Rob’s early days of singing with the Chicago Children’s Choir, are experiences that catapulted them beyond language and into spaces that were simultaneously full-bodied and incomprehensible to their available senses. Something that is hard to grasp, and yet so deeply felt, can be as scary and unsettling as it can be beautiful and right on time.

When there have been too many tidal waves of painful moments around that which may be considered Holy, the inclination to feel anything around it can easily and understandably get washed away. And if any of us as religious professionals have hard and complicated feelings about articulations of the Holy, then some of our congregants and community partners likely do, too. If we truly intend to connect more deeply in the world we have and do the work to build the world we want, it matters that we interrogate what comes up for us relative to experiences of the Holy.

If you know anything at all about me, you know that I am just as invested, perhaps more invested, in the journey to the thing, as I am in the thing itself. It’s why my call has been focused for the better part of thirteen years on helping faith communities and organizations, across a broad spectrum, understand HOW to be spaces of hope, healing, and promise for queer and trans people. Not talking about it over and over again and putting pretty words on websites, but growing into being NEW SPACES, with NEW or RE-IMAGINED OPPORTUNITIES for care and accountability.

Even in the context of my current ministry to Black UUs, there is much needed work to be done because we’ve all been taught to believe Unitarian Universalism has to center whiteness in order to be holy, wholly legitimate, and worthy of our attention, energy, and time. In BLUU’s explicitly Black worship, online panel discussions and community conversations, pastoral and spiritual support, organizing, children and youth programming, and daily affirmations, an engagement with the Holy is at the core of our work. Whether we specifically name it as such or not, we recognize the Holy as that thing that can’t totally be explained in words or contained in any singular tradition, but that offers an energy that draws us to one another and binds us together. There is something about the connectedness of our lives as Black people, whether it’s some measure of commonality of lived experiences, or a cultural synchronicity, something in the air literally shifts when we’re together, online or in person.

I appreciated Janne and Rob’s storytelling, particularly around the long work of getting to the point when all the people around them were having their own experiences of the Holy that not only drew them inward to a deeper understanding of self, but that also opened folks up to what was possible beyond their current situation. But here’s the thing. We cannot get to that gut-stirring, other-worldly, full-bodiedness of the Holy without an honest encounter with truth.

We have to dig into what is hardest about an engagement with the Holy in order to engage more fully. A deeper connection to and care for self is only part of this story and part of this work. Encountering truths held in other people’s experiences is one of the hardest parts of engaging the Holy. What happens, for example, when a deeper connection to a congregant’s own heart and soul, as expressed and fulfilled in their own spiritual practice as a UU, enlivens their Blackness and a clear desire to feel held by, or more connected to, Black ancestry, Black love, Black thought, Black artistry, and Black faith as part of their UU faith, and white congregants they’re in community with take serious and loud offense? How clear are we about both where the harm lies and what our Unitarian Universalism calls us to do in moments like these? Because these moments DO happen, often with far less support and care than is needed. How is a shared experience of the Holy even possible in moments like those?

There are countless more examples we could all give. But let’s look at one more that is hitting close to home right now. Let’s ask ourselves where does the work to manifest experiences of the Holy live in our calls for and planning around reopening our church buildings? Is that work in logistics around sanitizing restrooms after every use? Or in figuring out how many people can be in the building at one time based on its square footage? OR? Does that work live in a deeper understanding of trauma and human responses to it? There is a lesson here in recognizing the unhealthy and harmful practices that ALREADY EXIST in our congregations and other institutions and how they can be amplified when people have spent more than a year being terrified of losing family, resources, work, and connections to a world that, suddenly, nobody recognizes. Are experiences of the Holy expressed more powerfully and in deeper alignment with Unitarian Universalism when our focus is on our property or when our focus is on our people?

I raise these questions to help clarify the responsibility we hold and the nature and significance of what is possible as we fully engage the Holy.

Earlier, Janne lifted up words from a poem and directive by adrienne maree brown that has resonated with me for a long time. In “what is unveiled? The founding wound”, brown makes our work clear:

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.

I want to believe that it’s possible for us to encounter and experience the Holy with grace and honesty, and with commitment and care. I believe the Holy can offer a clarity of vision that will save us from the stagnation of our insistence on striving, rather than arriving, and truly equip each of us for this next phase of the work that was known and named nearly 185 years ago. If we are to heed this call extended to us by our esteemed colleagues today, then our experience, our practice, our alignment, and our blessing are vital – to our lives, to our faith, and to the world.

May it be so.