This weekend, I have been given a taste of spiritual renewal. I have been reminded of the power of human connection as we work to build a better world. I want to offer you some of the vignettes that I am sitting with this morning.
On Saturday and Sunday, I attended Compass 2021, a conference hosted by the UUA. I didn’t know much of what I was getting myself into before the fact, except for this description: “With so much uncertainty in the wider world, sometimes it can be hard to find one’s bearings. Join us to find our collective “compass” as we explore interdependence as a path to wholeness.”
The conference offered workshops and worships, and a “Keynote in Four Voices.” A writer/poet/activist/educator, an epidemiologist, and two musicians* shared their insights on interdependence, as a basic and humbling fact of life that guides their life’s work. UU leaders responded, speaking about the way that interdependence calls us to accountability with one another, about covenant as a tool for doing this.
The conference presented a vision of how we are leaning into the Beloved Community, celebrating the transformation done by the grassroots 8th Principle movement, and tapping into the complementary processes of the UUA Article II Study Commission. These two streams are converging, taking on a faith-filled reassessment of the covenant expressed in Article II of the UUA Bylaws, reworking them, adding to them, so that our covenant as Unitarian Universalists may better reflect how we want to be in relationship with one another. Our own Reverend Bill offered a homily for the Sunday morning worship, challenging us to be ready for this work, and to make peace with the truth that we will encounter resistance. This is how we move into being a community worthy of the name “Beloved.”
Yesterday, I finished reading a book that has captivated me in recent weeks: Work Won’t Love You Back by Sarah Jaffe. This is a book about how 21st Century Capitalism’s mythos of the labor of love is keeping workers underpaid, isolated, and burnt out. Jaffe, a labor journalist by trade, makes her argument by weaving tales of workers in different industries (like teachers, retail workers, tech workers, and artists, among others), as well as diving into the histories and labor organizing efforts of that industry. Her thesis is straightforward: it is a lie that our greatest love in life is work, because love is something that happens between humans, and love between humans is what will set us free.
This book is simultaneously damning and uplifting. Her conclusion, I think, is about Beloved Community. She writes:
“All of the labors of love, stripped of the capitalist impulse to make money, fame, and power, are really at bottom attempts to connect to other people. They are attempts to be bigger and better than our lonely little selves–even the most solitary artist’s creations are in a way a request to be seen, to be known. Stripped of the need to fight to survive, how much more connection could we create? How much more could we try to know each other?… If there is one thing worth doing with our brief, flickering lives on this dying planet, it is loving other people.”
If I was writing this later in the week, later in the day even, it might come out a bit more cohesively. But the truth is, I am still processing and integrating all that I’ve been learning over these past few days, and I want to share with you anyway.
In the cohousing community where my partner and I live, we have community dinners on Sunday nights. I am sleepy this morning because we stayed up late eating homemade lasagna, playing card games, dancing a little, and laughing a lot. It is an ineffable gift that nights like these have become part of the rhythm of my life, especially in pandemic times. Because of nights like this, community is not just an idea or something we are “working towards,” but it is real and I know it in my body.
For all that Beloved Community theology offers, or scholarly presentations on interdependence, or books on social and political theory, we’ve got to be able to know it in our bodies, too. This Advent season, I am wishing us all well. May we be invigorated by all that we are learning and taking in these days. And may we find truth and freedom, and know ourselves to be beloved, in a life shared with others.
*The conference included a virtual performance by a band I’ve loved for a long time: Rising Appalachia. If you want to take a deep dive into the magic they offer, I recommend this livestream concert of theirs.