Today, we continue on our exploration of our Unitarian Universalist principles, focusing on number six:
“We covenant to affirm and promote the goal of world community with peace, liberty, and justice for all”
The goal of world community with peace, liberty and justice for all. There’s a lot in there, right? And yet it feels so broad, lifting up this ideal, but without many hints of what to do about it.
I need to admit that this has been a hard service to prepare for. This principle is not presented to us in an easy way.
First and foremost, it’s strange for one of our principles to be a “goal.” It implies that we might try actively working toward that goal, but what role are we supposed to play? We are a people of faith, not an intergovernmental body, or policy thinktank, or any other such delegation of people tasked with solving the world’s most vexing issues. Yet it is our goal nonetheless.
And, “peace, liberty, and justice for all,” yes. These three values must be practiced and woven throughout the world we dream of, but they don’t land easily for me. They sound so much like the Pledge of Allegiance, right? That strange tool of indoctrination we ask our schoolchildren to recite daily, with its false proclamations of what this nation and its flag stand for.
With the vast majority of Unitarian Universalist people and institutions being rooted in the United States, I think we should be wary of ways that we try to translate our national norms into universal truths. We are just as susceptible as anyone to acting from a place of American exceptionalism and believing ourselves to be guardians of “good values” in far flung locations.
So I encounter this principle unsteadily, and with appreciation for the chance to think about it more seriously, as it can feel so easy to gloss over. I hope that in this time we have this morning, I can share some of my thoughts and questions, and inspire you to do some of your own grappling with this principle. My hope is that I can at least offer a fruitful starting point.
It’s worth taking a step back to marvel at the ways we feel our global interconnectedness in our 21st century lives. Think, in contrast, of our ancestors, many thousands of years ago, who were evolutionarily basically the same as us. They would have spent their whole lives within the same small community, while we have opportunities to encounter numberless strangers on a daily basis.
Our modern connected world also means that our actions ripple out to people we will likely never meet. We frequently eat food and wear clothes prepared by strangers. We will never come to know the vast majority of people we share languages and laws with. Our governments act on our behalf in places we will never visit.
This truth of our interconnectedness was never made more clear than in the outbreak of the coronavirus pandemic. In early 2020, we could watch known cases spread from China to Europe to North America and so on. We could hear testimonies from people in any country about what it was like for them to live under lockdown, witnessing the way this disease strained hospitals and whole communities.
Of course, this is all still just as true now, but the shock seems to have worn off, and the stories of lives changed and lost have piled up so high they feel unfathomable. Yet the truth of our connection through it all remains the same.
In some ways, it is a real gift to be able to know and act on this knowledge of our interconnectedness. Many of you are hard at work writing letters to voters in North Carolina because we know that their right to vote is important for all of us. Living in a state with a real but tenuous grip on reproductive healthcare access, our siblings in North Carolina have a big responsibility to people all over the South. And we have a responsibility to work in partnership and solidarity with them.
But also, how difficult, how heavy of a responsibility it is to know that the motions of our daily lives ripple out and impact countless lives in ways that are hard to see. How difficult it is that we live within systems so much bigger than our individual selves that cause harm to others, that make it so challenging to do right by our fellow humans.
Think of this food system we find ourselves a part of because we need to eat to stay alive and well. People tell us that we are consumers with the power to “vote with our dollar” and buy food grown and prepared by people in good working conditions with good pay, using methods that are good for our shared environment. Yet, these “choices” remain inaccessible to so many because of issues of cost and availability. The freedom of choice here is often just a fantasy.
What a conundrum! We have more power than ever in human history to know strangers and witness our impact on them, yet the world feels so vast, and those impacts too many to even count. How do we act on our moral responsibility to our siblings around the world, while caught up in harmful systems we have limited control of?
Corporations continue pumping out carbon to fuel our lives, contributing to climate change around the world. Our government kills people overseas on our behalf. Diseases spread as a result of our travel and interactions with one another.
What are the ways that you ache for our interconnectedness?
And what about the ways you rejoice in this world community?
It is a gift that so many of us will get opportunities in our lives to travel to new lands, to find home in places other than those we were born into. Even better, our communities are filled with people of many cultures, with many ways of being in the world.
Though it does take work to learn how to engage across cultures respectfully and avoiding misappropriation, it can feel so easy and natural to celebrate a diversity of foodways, music, language, and art.
To live as a global citizen, to engage wholeheartedly with this world community can feel so gratifying, and yet it is so clearly full of pitfalls as well.
For guidance, I turn to Kwame Anthony Appiah, a contemporary Ghanaian and English philosopher whose work seeks to name the ethical responsibilities we have to one another as a global family. In his book, Cosmopolitanism, he begins with many of the same questions I’ve posed here today.
He argues that these questions may be broad, but they are not abstract in how they play out in our lives. Indeed, the reality of world community is far from abstract and “impartial” as Appiah calls it. It is one thing to proclaim our affection for the general mass of humankind, but it is another to be actively in relationship with people different from ourselves, and to develop fierce, specific affection through that relationship.
Appiah writes that we should, “[exchange] that bird’s-eye reasonableness which soars to avoid preference and loses all sense of quality, for the generous reasonableness of drawing shoulder to shoulder with [those] of like inheritance” In short, we should be striving to make our sympathy for humankind specific, and therefore practical.
One way I have known this truth on a personal level has been in getting to know and build a home with a lovely man from France, Baptiste. Before we met, I had known some general facts about France, and generally wished for the wellbeing of its people.
But it has been through our marriage that I have gotten to know and love many of those people as family. I have been learning their language and history, sharing in holidays and other rites of passage. There has been so much richness–and yes, a good deal of frustration too–in this growing partiality, this cross-cultural dialogue.
I share this example because it is one everday way I get to live into this goal of world community. It is important to get clear about how we each can strengthen our sense of interconnectedness, how we can reach beyond false borders to try to know and love one another.
Of course, there are many ways our Unitarian Universalist institutions are doing this work that we can support. The UU United Nations Office, which we shared our offering with last week, works to connect Unitarian Universalists to the work of the UN, to be engaged in global issues like gender justice and climate justice. The UU service community works to advance human rights causes through building grassroots partnerships with people working to strengthen and aid their particular communities. The UU Partner Church Network helps congregations around the world build relationships of care and cross-cultural sharing with one another.
These and more are organizations that help us, as a faith community, live as global citizens, beginning with relationship, rather than bringing our own agendas.
Now, I don’t know if these small ways of living into world community are enough. Remember, this principle leaves it up to us to figure out how to relate to that goal.
When I think about all the ways that humans live with violence and injustice, all the ways that we are not yet free, our small reaching toward relationship doesn’t feel like enough.
Even on the smallest scale, community is hard. I’ve learned this in my time in community housing, and many of us have learned it here in church. We’ve all chosen of our own free will to show up, care for one another, and be a community, but that doesn’t make it easy.
We have to acknowledge that our dominant culture has not equipped us with the skills to live in this way. Expressing our vulnerability, moving through conflict with intention, and putting the greater good over our individual pettiness are all hard things to learn, and it feels like we are learning from scratch.
Of course, there are so many ways that we mess up, and hurt one another. Sometimes perfect peace, liberty, and justice, feel impossible to attain with just seventeen of us, who are trying, and who actively care about one another in all our particularities. How are we supposed to be one whole world community, when even the small community of our daily living together is so hard?
I am reminded here of adrienne maree brown’s fractal principle. It is the idea that, as we can witness in nature, forms display self-similarity at varying scales. Like the leaves of a fern, which look themselves like the whole fern. Like the way blood travels in our veins in the same branching patterns as rivers flowing on the face of the earth.
In brown’s movement work, she emphasizes the importance of communities embodying the values they are trying to enact in the world. Not only is that a way to avoid being a hypocrite, but it is also a tool for helping that world we dream of emerge. It is the big embodied in the small, and it magnifies out from there.
So no, our individual actions, our reaching across difference, working for peace and justice in our homes and neighborhoods, is not enough to get us to one whole Beloved Community just like that. But it is a crucial part of a larger whole. We can at least try our best, knowing that our particular relationships and communities are fractals, an image of that great community that we are living into being.
I want to invite you to reflect more on how this 6th principle is already showing up in the way you go about your life.
Are there ways you can be more attentive to your impact on humans near and far?
What about leaning in, allowing yourself to feel the frustration and heartbreak that comes from knowing the pain of violence and injustice that our siblings around the world are experiencing?
What about leaning in, allowing yourself to feel the gratitude that we are different, and we get to share and learn from one another, and love one another?
And there’s no roadmap here, just a goal. Just the guiding lights of peace, liberty and justice. And the knowledge that we have to go through the infuriating and rewarding work of getting to know our siblings on this planet earth in all their particularity. And learning from that relationship how to act in solidarity with them.
The path is not laid out for us, yet we can travel it together all the same.
Let us close with a time of prayer.
I want to share this prayer for peace, written by Reverend Marta Valentín.
Loving Spirit
Of this and every sacred moment,
Be with us in times of self-doubt
When we forget that dreams are not born in an instant
But must be nurtured,
Must be chosen over and over and over.
When the world is telling us that we are dreaming too large,
Too wild, too unrealistic, or even
To small…
Remind us, gentle, patient Spirit
That any dream worth waiting for
Is worth working toward.
Precious and Loving God,
Today more than ever
We dream of peace–
Peace in our hearts, which have been
Clouded over with promises
Of a free world
That will never come to pass
If bought with the blood of war.
Dear God, today we dream of peace…
Today we dream of peace.
Amen.
Topics: Our UU Principles