Where does your story begin? That was the question Ruby Sales, civil rights activist, social critic, and public theologian, asked those of us who were present at a gathering centered around faith, arts, and justice. She called on different people in the audience. People responded with re-telling their birth narrative or another “birthing” story or a story of transformation in the middle of their lives.
“No,” she said, “Your story doesn’t begin with you.” And, she went on to model what she meant telling the story of her great-great grandmother and the elders in her village, followed by her great grandmother, and so on. “Your story begins with your ancestors.” Ruby Sales spoke about this act of remembering and reconnection as decolonizing our personal narrative.[1]
We did not spring from nothing. From day one, we arrived to a place connected to stories of oppression, or of domination, of harming or being harmed, of healing, of liberation, and more. The activities of those who came before give us life and present the opportunities and the obstacles we have to overcome.
Our story also doesn’t end with us. It continues through our descendants – sometimes our own children, grandchildren and so on, and always the people who come after us in the villages we are a part of – the communities in which we live and move. Our Unitarian Universalist communities are one of those village spaces.
Where does your religious story begin? is another potent question. As a minister, I have heard many of these spiritual journeys, and as with our personal narratives, some people begin with themselves. This is more and more likely these days as more and more people find religion having had none or very light exposure as a child.
And, yet, for as long as humans have roamed the Earth, we have had need of meaning making and rituals to mark the milestones of our lives. Even if our parents and grandparents or the mentors throughout our growing up were no longer religious, the moral values that they passed on to us were often rooted and shaped by connection with or disconnection from a particular religious community that buoyed up their ancestors, or exiled them, or a bit of both. My mother is a good example of the latter. She was shunned by the orthodox Jewish community of her childhood for both her sexuality and her openness to date people across the religious divide, yet she was shaped by making space for Shabbas (the sabbath), for ritual, and for retelling stories of survival until they made it into your bones. When she ultimately married a Christian man, they found a community that would welcome the fullness of who they were here in our midst. My religious story begins with my ancestors and a road that ultimately winds into Unitarian Universalism. It’s not simply that I was born here.
a transformational community grounded in faith-inspired social justice.
And, besides, none of us in this room is old enough to have started the story of Unitarianism, or Universalism, or this church for that matter. We are all spiritual heirs to those who have come before us and set the altar tables for us, and how we re-form and re-shape our faith community will impact who can find a place at here at our table in the future.
Our personal story and our religious story do not begin or end with us. It is not simply a question of Who am I? But, rather Whose am I? and To whom do I belong? We are rooted in relationships in the past, the present, and the future.
Our faith is founded on a principle of being rooted in relationship. We call the particular relationship one of covenant, which comes from the Latin root com + venire or “to come together.” It is the practice of coming together around a set of spiritual agreements that unites us across history. The covenants created in our churches beginning in the 1600s and every centennial since have been both recognizable and radically different from what came before. Yet, this practice of re-covenanting every year with every new member and throughout all time has never ceased. It may be the one constant in Unitarian Universalism. It is the faithful, faith-filled way we do religion.
It is baked into our practice that you cannot really do Unitarian Universalism completely by yourself. Yes, you can be a free thinker by yourself. You can believe in religious freedom and the value of religious pluralism by yourself. You can hold the common ideals of Unitarian Universalists of the day on your own. But, being a free thinker without a community you may not go that deep. Believing in religious freedom without practicing making space for others can be quite shallow. And, ideals are meaningless if they are not expressed through action. Again, many of the ideals shared in our current covenant of eight principles and six sources can only be realized in a collective community. (By the way, mark your calendars for February 26th following the service, for when our board will be hosting a dialogue on the renewal of covenant happening throughout our denomination as we speak. This is in anticipation of a vote happening at this summer’s General Assembly.)
This weekend, we have spent time with the Rev. John Buehrens, our scholar in residence for Seminary for a Day yesterday.[2] He spoke to us about one group of ancestors that continues to heavily influence us to this day. They are known as transcendentalists, a movement that was born in our midst in the 1800s. You may be familiar with some of the names, such as the Rev. Ralph Waldo Emerson, Margaret Fuller, Julia Ward Howe, and the Rev. Thomas Starr King, whose words are often credited as the inspiration for the founding of our congregation.
At a time when Unitarianism was centered on reason and logic and a historical critical approach to the bible, the transcendentalists were the young rebels in our midst. They implored their community to listen to the stirrings of their spirit, to their deepest intuition, to their direct experience of wonder and awe and mystery, and to the revelation of nature beyond the walls of any sanctuary. The transcendentalists are often misunderstood, as John shared, because most people read about them in English class. The transcendentalist Henry David Thoreau’s book on nature, Walden, may give the impression that they spent the bulk of their time feeling a connection with the natural world in retreat by themselves. But, No. The transcendentalists were shaped by the practice of covenant. Although, they may have spent time in reflection, they also spent significant time in community crossing the divides of class, race, and gender, and organizing collective power to bend the moral arc of the universe towards justice. For example, Gandhi was inspired by Thoreau’s writings about non-violent resistance.
How do we realize our covenants? It takes more than just thinking ideas into being. It takes practice – a practice of personal reflection on meaning and values, followed by a practice of what John calls “spiritual friendships,” which is something we offer here. We have need of conversations which deepen and broaden our perspectives, and organized communities, which can bring our values and our ethical promises to life both here and in the world.
We are such a community of covenantal practice. We encourage and make spaces for personal reflection and spiritual friendships in our worship, our practice groups – like the loving kindness meditation on Mondays at 8pm on Zoom, and in our classes, and so on.[3] We also do not let those ideas languish, but rather aim to organize through our social justice efforts to build the beloved community, dismantle oppression, and repair the persistent harm to people on the margins and to mother earth.
Today, our hearts are heavy with the persistence of harm that comes from policing black and brown bodies in the name of safety and peace. Just this weekend we bore witness in word and images to both the violent nature of these policing efforts and the beauty of the young man whose life was taken, Tyre Nichols, a skateboarder, a photographer, a father, a son. The police unit was aptly named SCORPION – a deadly, venomous creature – with a false overlay of an acronym, Street Crimes Operation to Restore Peace in Our Neighborhoods. Peace for whom? If there is no justice, there can be no peace.
We are called by the 8th principle of our covenant to dismantle racist systems and to respond with love, creativity, and courage in the presence of such brutality. As a newcomer to this community, not here even six months yet, I have been moved by the testimonies I have heard as to the experience of the police response to protests in the streets here in Portland during the pandemic, and I have been moved by the testimonies of people of color about the over policing of certain neighborhoods. It is clear that we have the work of dismantling and repair and re-constructing to be done.
What is our collective work to fulfill the covenants of our people and the mission of our congregation, which currently reads:
- to create a welcoming community of diverse individuals;
- to promote love, reason and freedom in religion;
- to foster lifelong spiritual growth;
- and to act for social justice.
I want to invite everyone into a period of personal reflection in the month ahead, and then to gather this spring with me and others in a series of community conversations that I will be hosting. We will reflect on what we hope for the future of our emerging shared ministry. These conversations will be happening in-person and online.
I also want to invite you to my installation service on Sunday, April 16th at 4pm – the formal celebration of your calling me into shared ministry with you. I am excited for the installation where we will covenant together in worship and hear an inspiring message from the Rev. Rosemary Bray McNatt a mentor of mine, who is also the President of Starr King School for the Ministry.[4]
It is my hope that we can use this fertile time in the first year of a new ministry and of the emergence post pandemic to plant seeds of change, as well as to water the seeds that have nourished us thus far in faith. It is a time of shared possibilities and creativity as we imagine and learn together what traditions continue to serve us well, what we may wish to let go of, and what we’d like to begin for the first time or begin again. The community conversations will surround the installation and take place in March, April, and May. So stay tuned and sign up.
It’s ironic, when you called me through a vote in May to join you this fall as your minister – that the word we use in our tradition is a ‘settled’ minister. However, we are not merely settling for our congregation as it is, we are both called to a shared ministry where we can adapt and grow and experi-learn with and from one another how to continuously co-create and re-create ministries which are spiritually alive, justice centered, and radically inclusive.
We are preparing tables for those who are here beside us now and those who are yet to come. While the first year of a new ministry is a fertile time for such work, and we don’t want this precious time to pass without making space for community conversations, it won’t be the only time we do this.
It is our work overtime as we re-covenant and reflect on our mission with our members and friends, the fullness of our spiritual village of children, youth, and adults both now and at times again in the future. As I begin to know more of your history, one thing is very clear. While love is the ground of being at this church, you are not the same community as you were in the late 1800s. You are not even the same community you were twenty years ago, and maybe not even the same community that you were last year.
While some aspects are constant, you continue to grow and change, so let us do the work of wise planting now. May we grow in our capacity to offer hospitality, healing, and hope in a time of isolation, suffering, and resignation to the world as it is. For we have covenanted for such a time as this.
We are the spiritual heirs of a faith that reveres the past but trusts the dawning future more. We are not here merely to preserve what was, or is, but to practice love in ways that builds towards the church and world that ought to be. May it be so. And Amen!
[1] I attended the annual Wild Goose Festival, a transformational community in faith-inspired social justice. Ruby Sales was one of the featured speakers: https://wildgoosefestival.org/ruby-sales18/
[2] Rev. John Buehrens is a former president of the Unitarian Universalist Association, a retired parish minister, and a prominent scholar and author in our movement. His Seminary for a Day remarks were based partly on his book, Conflagration: How the Transcendentalists Sparked the American Struggle for Racial, Gender, and Social Justice.
[3] https://www.firstunitarianportland.org/events/lovingkindnessmeditation/
[4] https://www.sksm.edu/faculty/rev-rosemary-bray-mcnatt/
Topics: Creation