Thank you, Darrell Grant, for letting us use this music and the mural it’s been paired with, for our voluntary this morning. And thank you to our musicians here on the chancel for the art you’ve brought to us this morning. It has all demonstrated so beautifully the importance of dreaming, and building spaces in our communities that encourage dreaming.
Today, we’re going to be talking about this important spiritual work: setting aside time and space in our lives for imagination, for getting clear on our vision of what the world can be, so that what is possible might emerge. It’s about witnessing to possibility, to our wildest dreams, with earnestness.
Let’s keep going with our time travel today, because the reading we shared today transported me back in time as well as forward. It took me back to 2015, to my first training with my undergraduate university’s Fossil Fuel Divestment campaign. We were organizing to urge our small North Carolina public school’s administration to take its endowment out of the non-transparent and unethical management company it worked with, and instead to seek a socially responsible investment strategy. The idea is that if large institutions everywhere are actively removing their financial investments in the fossil fuel industry, we can all move closer to a just energy transition.
So, come with me to 2015. I’m ready to be an activist college student and fight climate change, though I know very little about the stock market in general and the way endowments work in particular. I still have a lot to learn about the science behind climate change, and how our efforts might help to create a more sustainable world for future generations. I sign up for the training, intimidated, and ready to learn as much as I can and catch up with everyone else.
The training ends up being quite different than I expect. That technical learning will come, eventually, and over time, but it is not where we start. We start with dreaming.
After introductions and housekeeping we open with this one exercise, very similar to our meditation today. We are asked a series of prompts about the world we want to live in, and are asked to draw our responses on big sheets of poster paper. What kind of housing is the norm in this world? How do young people get an education? What are the headlines in the news? What about our public infrastructure? Our justice system? And so on.
And I am still intimidated. This is a surprisingly difficult exercise for me, especially as someone who isn’t great at drawing. It turns out my imagination is quite limited by the constraints I see in the world.
When it is time to share our responses, I talk about my straightforward dream of a world where housing, powered by clean energy, is a human right. And then, I feel a mix of awe and embarrassment when my peers start speaking with passion about redesigning neighborhoods to prioritize community. They talk about housing stock that fits diverse family structures, and about taking power away from our current landlord systems. They talk about houses being unique, colorful, and made of all kinds of interesting building materials. Inside I’m saying “yes, yes, yes” and also “why didn’t I think of that?” And it was a similar story with the other prompts. This feeling of “wow, we’re allowed to dream like that?”
It was a day, honestly, that changed me. Writing a vision, together, of this world that we dreamed of was a way for us to stay motivated and keep our eyes on the prize when faced with financial jargon and complex administrative bureaucracy. It kept us inspired, and, bonded as a community, when we were tempted by climate despair.
And in this exercise, we learned to communicate this vision, in creative ways with people who would become our allies and accomplices. Such as the Valentine’s Day event where we sent our chancellor cards encouraging her to “break up” with the toxic management company.
This initial visioning exercise is one of my most vivid memories from my time in the Divestment Movement, because it was a moment when I learned what a different world might look like, and started to be able to glimpse it. It held our community together through long strategy meetings, through diplomacy with university trustees, and through bold and creative direct actions.
And, it is a deep joy to let y’all know that we won! Thanks to the sustained efforts of younger students that my peers and I mentored and of administrators we built relationships with, our university divested in 2019. I firmly believe it would not have been possible without those early exercises in collective dreaming.
It also feels worth mentioning that the Sunrise Movement, the youth organization that dreamed up the bold vision of the Green New Deal was born from the collective dreaming of folks who had been part the nationwide student Divestment movement. All of this has taught me that groups of people who prioritize dreaming are powerful, and can change not only the way we see the world but also the world itself.
Are there examples of this in your own life? Of being offered a vision of a way things can be that are different than they are now? Of being captivated by that vision? Of watching it become possible? Become reality? This happens in our world through movements like I’ve described to you. But it also happens on a more personal level when we reach toward dreams for our lives, for our communities, for our children.
I don’t want to diminish how much work needs to be done between dreaming and making dreams real. This is not merely a manifestation exercise. But, I do want to assert that we must start with a dream, with articulating it clearly and with passion.
Research shows time and again that imagination is a powerful tool for making change. In his book From What Is to What If: Unleashing the Power of Imagination to Create the Future We Want, author Rob Hopkins highlights some of these studies.
He quotes a 1995 study by a Harvard medical researcher who followed two groups of new piano players, learning to play a specific sequence of notes. Both groups were asked to practice for two hours a day for five days, one playing the piano, and the other sitting at the piano and imagining playing it. At the end of the study, both groups demonstrated the same ability to play the notes, and showed similar changes in their brains.
A similar and possibly more mind-boggling study showed that a group of people imagining exercising a particular finger muscle showed similar increases in strength of that muscle as the control group who actually exercised it. Wow!
I don’t know about you, but I have found it so hard to dream in these past couple of years. Imagining a better tomorrow seems like more of a luxury than everyday practice. I am sharing this today precisely because we live in a time when our dreams can feel fanciful and out of touch with reality. When we are quick to remind each other that rest itself, the pre-requisite for imagination, has become a privilege.
Sadly, this idea is backed up by science too. The parts of our brains responsible for imagination literally shrink in the face of sustained stress and trauma. Given our culture’s widening economic gaps, the pressures of modern life under oppressive systems puts on our bodies and psyches, and add climate change and a global pandemic on top, it’s no wonder that imagination is in sharp decline. And precisely when we most need creative solutions to difficult problems.
It is when we feel safe and when our material needs are provided for, that we have the emotional energy to play, to experiment and try new things.
It is a real tragedy of these times that imagination has become a privilege, rather than a basic human right. If even rest is becoming inaccessible, how are we supposed to dream?
So today, we are not just talking about “If you can dream it you can be it” but also I want to make it clear that in our efforts to make the world a more just place for all, we also need to be actively making space for all people to dream.
I believe that our Unitarian Universalist living tradition urges us to fight back. To reclaim imagination as necessary, as a right.
I think that my elevator speech on Unitarian Universalism gets at this idea. It usually goes something like this:
In Unitarian Universalism, we believe that there are many paths to truth, so we gather together in religious community to explore these paths, to connect with Spirit. We hold a diversity of beliefs about God, what happens when we die, and so on, but we agree on a set of values about how we want to be in the world, and actively work towards a world of wholeness where all are loved as the blessings that they are.
There it is: the dream. Call it liberation, Beloved Community, even the Kingdom of Heaven on Earth, if you will. Our UU heritage holds this vision of a world, where, as we say, all souls are welcome as a blessing, and the human family lives whole and reconciled. And to get there, we must create religious communities that allow us to live into this dream.
Here at First Unitarian, we wrote it down and made it explicit last year by adopting the eighth principle into our common covenant. Finally, we have a principle to speak directly about Beloved Community and our accountability to one another on the journey there.
But can we get there? Does the moral arc of the universe really bend toward justice? And what about now? How are we to live in this world that feels so broken?
In my last year of divinity school, I had the immense privilege of accompanying my friend and colleague Rev. Alex Jensen through his masters’ thesis writing process as a peer reviewer. His thesis was a work of UU theology addressing this question exactly, and has helped me further articulate my understanding of Beloved Community.
In his paper, Alex argues that Beloved Community is something that is always emerging, in a process of becoming, something we are building and moving toward, but that we can also begin to taste, to know in the here and now. There are moments in a person’s life, in our relationship with others, that Alex calls “glimpse moments”. These can be tender moments with loved ones, swells of power and solidarity in justice movements. They are all the ways we take time out of our lives to care for one another, to build relationships of mutual aid and accountability.
Have you experienced these “glimpse” moments? I know I have. It’s those times when we feel loved and appreciated, and that we get to offer love and appreciation to others. Those times when we think “why can’t life be like this all of the time?” I encourage you to seek out those moments, lean in, and let them inspire you.
I also hope that you’ll bring this energy into our congregational life here. This work is for all of us, not just staff or board members, or people who are “really into social justice”.
No, to build the community we dream of, we need all of us to craft a vivid, inspiring, shared vision. In the words of Toni Cade Bambara, it is our job “to make revolution irresistible.”
I want to close with a modified version of our meditation today. I’m going to guide you through some questions, and there is only one rule. You aren’t allowed to constrain yourself with current or projected realities. Budget, facilities, and existing social norms are not relevant in this exercise. This is not a time to say “Yes, but” rather, for all my folks out there who are familiar with improv, this is time for “Yes, and”
Are you with me?
Let’s take our time machine for a spin, for a relatively short journey this time. We all hop in together and before we know it, we slow to a halt. We have arrived in 2030, only 8 years from where we started. First Unitarian Portland is years into a successful new senior ministry. Our staff and lay leaders are thriving on collaborative, innovative, and spiritually deep shared ministry. While we continue to grow and get better at practicing accountability, our congregation feels it has more fully and holistically integrated the anti-oppression work of the 8th principle. We offer a robust hybrid ministry that is both deeply rooted in the Portland community, and widens our circle to include members around the world.
You’re attending social hour on a Sunday morning.
How do you know we’ve accomplished all this?
What do you see?
Who is in the room with you?
What do you hear?
How do you feel?
What does our worship look like?
Our congregational meetings?
What are your relationships like with other members of this community?
How does your participation in this community flow into the rest of your life?
How is your spirit?
How is your heart?
I wish we could be together in person to share our visions. I hope you take the time to dream about becoming Beloved Community with anyone in the room with you. Or maybe you want call a friend from church to exchange your visions. This is collective work, after all.
In the coming days and weeks, especially as we get deeper into our ministerial transition, I hope you will keep taking time to imagine. And, please, keep taking time to share your wildest dreams with others. It is through this collective spiritual work that we will journey into tomorrow, together.
Let us pray.
Great, creative, dreaming Spirit. We are grateful for your visions that made all that we know and all that we are, possible.
Please help us to remember to dream.
Please help us fight for our dreaming.
Imagination cannot be a luxury.
Instead let it be the breath that fills our lungs. And let us use our out breaths to speak boldly our visions, without shame or fear.
May we be comforted and inspired by the dreams of our ancestors. May we live so that our children and all future generations can dream, too.
And, may we glimpse, may we taste, may we feel that vision of beloved community, here and now. And may we revel in those glimpse moments. May they fill us up and move us forward.
And, Spirit of Life, we ask that in all of our dreaming, may we dream together.
May all of this come to be.
Amen.
Topics: Witness