21st August 2021 – Opening Worship for Hucklow Summer School Online
So my job tonight is just to introduce our theme – we’ve got five fantastic speakers lined up – and I’ve only got fifteen minutes – but I’m going to offer a few preliminary thoughts on this topic of ‘Why are we here? Discerning our Unitarian mission in an upturned world’.
I think it’s important to start with an unflinching acknowledgement that to say we’re living in an ‘upturned world’ is a bit of an understatement. Many of us feel overwhelmed, right now, both with grief at the sufferings of the world and all her people, and our own daily struggles. Many are traumatised and exhausted, navigating loss, uncertainty, conflict, and hardship. Covid is not over. Climate catastrophe is beyond denial. Intersecting injustices are being unveiled every way we turn, and it’s becoming clear how baked-in to the fabric of our society they are, how comprehensively things need to change if we’re to right these wrongs. The modern media landscape renders knowledge of all the world’s suffering inescapable.
I read a piece by Lutheran minister Nadia Bolz-Weber just this week which speaks of this:
‘I used to live in a very old apartment building with super sketchy electrical wiring. Were I to audaciously assume my hair drier could run while my stereo was on, I would once again find myself opening the grey metal fuse box next to the refrigerator and flipping the breaker. My apartment had been built at a time when there were no electric hair driers, and the system shut down when modernity asked too much of it. I think of that fuse box often these days, because friends, I just do not think our psyches were developed to hold, feel and respond to everything coming at them right now; every tragedy, injustice, sorrow and natural disaster happening to every human across the entire planet, in real time every minute of every day. The human heart and spirit were developed to be able to hold, feel and respond to any tragedy, injustice, sorrow or natural disaster that was happening IN OUR VILLAGE. So my emotional circuit breaker keeps overloading because the hardware was built for an older time. I’m not saying we should put our heads in the sand; I’m saying that if your circuits are overwhelmed there’s a reason and the reason isn’t because you are heartless, it’s because there is not a human heart on this planet that can bear all of what is happening right now.’ Words by Nadia Bolz-Weber.
So often when I’m confronted with the ills of the world, or much closer to home, the struggles of my own life, or the life of the communities and institutions I’m part of, there’s a simple phrase which comes to mind: ‘It doesn’t have to be like this.’ It doesn’t have to be like this. It’s a simple phrase but a powerful one because so often the temptation is to be fatalistic. To assume that the way things are is the way things have to be. But it doesn’t have to be like this. We could – collectively – organise our lives, our institutions, our societies, in a way that better serves the common good. In a way which serves human flourishing and the health of the planet. I often think about this in terms of a ‘God’s-eye-view’ – because God-language, God-imagery works for me – I wonder about what a world shaped by God’s vision of love and justice would look like. And how we might yet get there from here, from where we are now. What might it require of us? (If God-language doesn’t work for you it’s an easy enough switch to think of the ‘Highest Good’: What would a world that was organised for the Highest Good look like, what does it require of us?)
That’s the context, that’s the upturned world – both in the sense of being disrupted from what we were used to, through Covid and climate and an increasing awareness of systemic injustices – and in the sense of it being, in many ways, an inversion of how we might intuit the world ought to be.
Given that context we can turn to the other bit of our title for the week – Why are we here? What is the particular mission of our Unitarian community in the world as it is today? What’s our deep sense of purpose, our higher calling? What contribution can we make? What mission can we collectively get behind, feel a sense of ownership of, get fired up by?
I realise, again, that language may be a barrier here, and that there’ll be hesitancy among some about embracing the idea of mission. Let’s not get tripped up by language, as we so often do, let’s not get distracted from what really matters. Call it our purpose, or our ‘why’, if you like. But let’s own it as a sacred purpose – a holy ‘why’ – because we are a religious community. Our mission, our purpose, our why will be rooted in our spiritual and moral vision. So let’s own that. It isn’t – and shouldn’t be – just like the dry mission statement of an NGO. Let’s articulate a vision which spells out what it is that we’re ultimately here for. If nothing else it’s a useful lens through which to view, and evaluate, our choices about what we’re doing and how. If we have a clearer sense of our ‘why’, our purpose, our mission, and if we hold this ideal before us, keep it front-and-centre in all our decision making – whether that’s personal, congregational, denominational – it will shape everything we do. It is important to periodically ask ourselves: Why are we doing this? Does this particular course of action, or way of doing things, really serve the mission? Even if it’s ‘what we’ve always done’? This sort of mission-centred reflection may, in changing times, lead us to see that some of our forms and practices need to adapt in order to truly fulfil our purpose as a religious community.
In a way, this is all preamble, prior to putting my own cards on the table, mission-wise. My sense of why we are here, what we’re meant to be doing, as a religious community, is one that was laid out in our readings earlier (particularly the one by Tom Owen-Towle).
For me, the heart of our mission is building Beloved Community. For the first umpteen years of my Unitarian life, I heard this phrase bandied about such a lot, out of context, and it took me ages to realise that I hadn’t fully understood what it meant. I thought, when people were talking about ‘beloved community’, they meant something like: striving to make our congregations nice, inclusive, welcoming places, where we played nicely and got along (not that we always manage to achieve even that). But of course now I realise those words carry a lot more weight. To speak of the ‘Beloved Community’ (with a big B and big C) in the way that Martin Luther King famously did is to hold up a vision of a world transfigured by love and justice. The world as God would see it.
And as we heard in the reading earlier there are many other names that gesture towards much the same vision – take your pick – the Kingdom (or Kin-dom) of God, Shalom, Paradise (if you’ve read Stephen Lingwood’s great book on Unitarian mission – maybe more on that this Thursday). Perhaps you’d prefer to characterise it more simply as ‘a Better World’. Each of these images has its own resonances and some may appeal to you more than others but again – let’s not make the mistake of getting hung up on the language or have the vanity of small differences get in the way of discerning a coherent vision here – they all point towards a world where love and justice reign. A transformed world where all are liberated – set free from oppression in all its insidious forms – all of us enabled to live as our whole, authentic selves, and flourish in our fullness. What a dream!
If this vision of the Beloved Community (or the Kingdom of God, Shalom, or Paradise) is one that speaks to your heart’s longing – as it does to mine – that deep longing for love and justice and liberation – if you too have a sense, like I do, that this should be the vision that shapes our Unitarian mission – then we have to ask ourselves: What would this mean in practice? What would it look like for our communities to be ‘Building Beloved Community’ (as I’m sure many of us already are)?
There’s a quote from Rebecca Parker on this, she’s a prominent UU / United Methodist minister, which I find particularly compelling and it’s one that I’ve really taken to heart. She shares a vision of how our ‘congregations can be “communities of resistance” – counter-cultural habitations in which people learn ways to survive and thrive that can resist and sometimes even transform an unjust dominant culture… an embodied experience of covenant and commitment… which ground life in shared rituals that nourish and strengthen people spiritually, emotionally, psychologically and intellectually, providing a deep foundation for courageous and meaningful living.’
I love that so much I’m going to read it again: ‘congregations can be “communities of resistance” – counter-cultural habitations in which people learn ways to survive and thrive that can resist and sometimes even transform an unjust dominant culture… an embodied experience of covenant and commitment… which ground life in shared rituals that nourish and strengthen people spiritually, emotionally, psychologically and intellectually, providing a deep foundation for courageous and meaningful living.’ For me, this ties it all together – the sense that we’re living in an unjust culture – but that ‘it doesn’t have to be like this’. That in small ‘communities of resistance’ we can practice a different way of living, in alignment with our values, and with that vision of ‘Beloved Community’.
Even if we’re just a small, flawed, microcosm of ‘Beloved Community’, or an ‘Outpost of Paradise’
– in such communities we can tell the truth about the grief and overwhelm we experience – and as our opening words said we can gain insight and courage from the journey we make as companions.
We can practice grounding our vision of love and justice and liberation in the messy but meaningful reality of living alongside other mixed-up human beings in all of their – our – glorious complexity.
Showing solidarity and offering practical support as we each attempt to live wisely and well.
This sort of community doesn’t arise by accident. It takes intention, care, and sustained work. That phrase Parker uses – ‘counter-cultural’ – is important. There are so many magnetic forces in the prevailing culture which pull us back towards unjust and unloving ways of being. And these forces are often really subtle; ingrained habits of being, ways of thinking that are hard to unlearn (also material realities that constrain our life choices /drain much of the energy we need to resist). We know, don’t we, that often, in our communities the most privileged still hold most of the power; the loudest voices dominate the conversation and drown out the tentative offerings of the quiet; institutional inertia means we often ‘do what we’ve always done’ so we ‘get what we’ve always got’ (we’re often blithely unaware of all the barriers to participation for those who don’t fit the mould). We talk a good game in terms of diversity but without examining our practice the words are empty.
It’s an aspiration. It is hard to live out this vision in practice. To create a culture that goes against the grain. But if we’re to live out this vision, build ‘Beloved Community’, make our congregations ‘Outposts of Paradise’, then we need to consciously, doggedly, break away from prevailing norms.
And it’s a bit of a hobby-horse of mine, this: key to our mission, as I see it, is the sacred practice of intentionally creating ‘safer, softer, kinder’ spaces. And spaces that are more just, more equal, more truthful – spaces where every voice is heard – where we resist privilege, redistribute power, practice consent, and give up on pretence, so that all can be authentically present as we truly are.
I’ve experienced flashes of this reality, from time to time, in our Unitarian communities. Most often at summer school, in fact – possibly because it’s a bit easier to live up to such high ideals if you know you’ve only got to hold it together for a week in August, let’s be honest – but also in engagement groups and groups like ‘Heart and Soul’. And now’s probably not the moment for me to evangelise at length about the transforming power of engagement groups (but I will just say that, for me, these small groups are the key spiritual practice by which we Unitarians might make this vision a reality). The key intention of such groups is to cultivate right relationship with self, others, and God (or however you prefer to characterise that larger reality which grounds and holds us all). At their best, these groups are carefully structured to be such counter-cultural ‘communities of resistance’ which break the habits of behaviour we’ve learned from the wider culture and model a better way of being. They involve group covenants, which shape how we relate and make space for each other, and simple rituals and structures which ground us in a bigger reality and remind us of the overarching spiritual purpose that we share. In these groups we are called back to our highest intentions and supported to realise our mission.
And – if you’re not used to this sort of practice – they often feel clumsy and awkward! At first. You might feel terribly self-conscious once all your default conversational habits are interrupted. But in time you will notice that quiet voices start to get heard, invisible struggles get seen, people start trusting each other with the deeper truths of their lives. These are places where we can be our whole selves: bringing our grief and sorrow, our hopes and joys, our messiness and confusion, and feel safe in the sharing as we know they will be held in compassion and loving-kindness. We can bring concerns about the suffering and injustice in the world, and our sense of overwhelm, and find the strength and solidarity – and sometimes practical help and support – to go on. And in my experience – the quality of relationship we develop in these sort of groups – and the habits of thought, and behaviour, and care – they slowly ripple out and have a wider influence. The conscious effort towards right relationship starts to come naturally and the culture shifts. First the culture of the congregation but then – in small, humble ways – ripples will spread beyond.
This is just one vision – one that’s especially close to my heart – of how we might characterise our mission and how we might begin to build the ‘Beloved Community’ through small group practice. And you’ll hear five more visions, at greater length, from our team of speakers in the week ahead.
To close, though, I want to offer some words – borrowed / slightly adapted from Starhawk – words that perhaps speak to this vision. May they inspire us as we journey onward together. She writes:
We are all longing to go home to some place we have never been—
a place half-remembered and half-envisioned
we can only catch glimpses of from time to time.
Beloved Community.
Somewhere, there are people to whom we can speak with passion
without having the words catch in our throats.
Somewhere a circle of hands
will open to receive us, eyes will light up as we enter,
voices will celebrate with us whenever we come into our own power.
Community means strength
that joins our strength to do the work that needs to be done.
Arms to hold us when we falter.
A circle of healing. A circle of friends.
Someplace where we can be free.
Amen.
Talk by Jane Blackall
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