The best …is yet… to come.
I love the positive energy of that music. Such confidence. Such faith.
Today is the first day of the best days of your life.
Much of the summer has had the feel of a return to better days.
The in-person service at Pioneer Square felt so good. The CDC and the state eased restrictions.
Many of us have been getting together with family and small groups of friends. Long delayed travel for some of us. Even the extraordinary high temperatures did not set our spirits back…most of us…
It felt like some version of normal was coming soon.
The first day of the best days of our lives.
We need to get there. And we will get there. To that forward looking place.
But it has gotten more complicated than it was… not too long ago.
We were so ready to put Covid behind us…despite all of the losses and the suffering…ready to give thanks that we made it through…
Of course the news was never all good.
There were the unvaccinated folks… especially the vaccine resisters and the pandemic deniers, the folks who insisted that masking should be a personal choice rather than a collective responsibility.
But it seemed like we had stumbled through…that enough of us were vaccinated…that enough of us had taken enough care…
And then the infections started to increase again…not just in Missouri and Texas and Florida…but here in Oregon and Washington and California….
And the news about the Delta variant kept getting more and more troubling… much more transmissible…with even vaccinated folks able to carry high levels of the virus and pass it along…
This week has seen the CDC change its tune, seen mask mandates beginning to be reimposed…seen more and more organizations with vaccination requirements and more bonuses…well, they are bribes… to the unvaccinated to get the jab…
We are going to get to that forward looking place…we are…
And it will be our dreams and our commitment to a hopeful vision that will get us there. We need to remember that.
But it is not going to be quite as direct or easy a path to hopefulness as we thought it might be…as we allowed ourselves to believe it would be. It is going to be more complicated…but we will get there.
Some folks are still talking about this current surge as a pandemic of the unvaccinated…
And I understand the impulse to focus on vaccination status.
But the Universalist in me fears that that is just another version of the same old story…some of us saved and some of us damned…
I just don’t believe that the vaccination divide is the central spiritual issue that needs our attention.
I am finding a different message in the persistence of this virus…a message that doesn’t lead us back to “us” vs “them.”
The message that I am taking away is that we are all in this together…whether we like it or not.
That there is only one destiny on this small blue planet.
And that we had better find a way to claim a hopeful, collective future…
And begin living into a religious imagination that points toward a world in which we all belong and are welcomed as blessings..
A world not of “zero-sum” games, not of winners and losers…
This is a world in which Beloved Community is a possible future…
We have tried just about every way imaginable to keep us divided…
What we haven’t been willing to try…really try…is bringing us together…into a community worthy of being called Beloved.
We need this to be the first day of the best days of our lives.
But we have some spiritual work to do to make that so.
Where do we start?
Do we begin…don’t we have to begin with the brokenness.
Perhaps we find hope so hard to sustain…and we do….because we focus so much on the brokenness…
I’m inclined to see this as the Unitarian in our religious DNA…that impulse to see our shortcomings first…
It is the flip-side of the belief in our agency…our ability to change the world and change our lives…
We need human agency…the power to change…because our shortcomings are so real personally, despite the image we may present to the world… and we need human agency because the brokenness in the world presses down on so many of us….
The Unitarian side of our tradition, speaking through its privilege…is called to fix things…called to repair that brokenness. Our justice commitments flow directly out of that truth.
We need this to be the first day of the best days of our lives…
The Universalist in us speaks more directly to community and broad connection.
I found such wisdom in the story of Eisha (E-sha) and her Mama that Cassandra shared.
First, her attachment to the clay shape that she made…and the grief she felt when that shape broke into many pieces.
We all know grief and loss…
I was so relieved when the story did not have Eisha’s Mama try to paper over that feeling of loss or deny that yearning for wholeness that young Eisha experienced.
We need to be just as present to the yearning for repair as we are to the grief itself.
As De Noche, the hymn we sang, says…we are all in search of the living water…it is our thrist that leads us on…
Our yearning moves and motivates us…
But then, in the story, Eisha’s Mama had the wisdom to bring out the box of twine and string…the tools of connection…so that Eisha could string the broken pieces together…and discover a new path to connection…
Discover a new sense of hope.
We. too, know the brokenness… in the world…the racism, the inequality, the privilege made possible by oppression, the great wealth of the few made possible by keeping us divided and impoverishing so many…the devastation done to our planet home…
I heard a report over the weekend that the money distributed by the Federal Government in the Covid Rescue Plan…especially the payments to families with young children, the Child Tax Credits….
Those payments will cut the rate of child poverty dramatically in this country and leave fewer families living below the poverty level than ever before.
I heard that report and found myself applauding that positive progress…
But also so angry that we have been willing to leave so many families with so many children behind…for so long…
We know the brokenness in this nation….
And we feel that yearning for repair…for reconciliation…in our personal lives as well.
Facing such brokenness and feeling such yearning, deep in our religious DNA, we feel the urge to make it better.
We know that we have to find a way to live in greater wholeness…closer to promptings of the spirit…however we might name it.
Where do we start?
Where do we look for the lenses that lead to liberation…not for some of us…but for all of us.
Dr. King, writing shortly before his death, after the victories that dismantled legal apartheid in America…
“Where do we go from here?” was the title of the book…”Chaos or Community.”.
“First,” … first… “ we must massively assert our dignity and worth.
We must stand up amidst a system
That still oppresses
And develop an unassailable and
Majestic sense of values…”
An unassailable and majestic sense of values…
I think his was a call to be clearer and clearer about what is important…what is spiritually important to us
It was a call to remember what we care enough about to risk our lives for… and why.
He called on us, first, to remember…
“Can we develop the skill of remembering the future?” wrote Theresa Soto.
“Can we commit to build the community that will extend into a time that we only know by memory…?”
Dr. King called us first to memory.
Even before he talked about love and about power.
We need to talk about how to deal with the divides in this nation…how we talk across, and walk across and work across the aisle…how we find ways to make common cause.
We need to have those conversations.
But I belief we need first to get clearer about our vision…we need to remember where we are going…we need to bring a kind of certainty to the table…an unassailable sense of our values to use Dr. King’s language…for us to be able to find a hopeful way forward for all of us…not just for some.
I have been back to my office at the church a few times recently. And spent some time with the painting that hangs above the conference table where so many meetings take place.
It shows people streaming toward the church. Adults and many kids. Different colors and combinations. Queer couples and straight. One person in a wheelchair. A lot of hand holding. The artist was not trying for accuracy but his point about the diversity of identity was clear.
It is a reminder that even if our church reflects the variety of diversities of human experience imperfectly…and it does….our vision of Beloved Community calls us to include more and more of us each time we imagine what those words mean.
(Back to Bill)
The Beloved Community is for the Sum of US…not just for some of us.
The Sum of Us is the title of Heather McGhee’s new book and I recommend it. She offers a powerful critique of the zero-sum games we have insisted on playing. Games that have kept us apart, made us poorer in wealth and stunted our collective spirit.
Zero sum games. Think of the public swimming pools in the American south…and Midwest…in the 1950’s and 60’s. Many were filled with concrete rather than allow Black kids to join white kids in the water. Equality meant that no one could use those public pools. Equality meant that the white community lost something. Equality meant that everybody lost.
From that time to this, every call for equality for Black, Indigenous and other persons of color (that’s BIPOC…a term that may be new to some of you)…
Every call for equality has been framed as requiring a loss for the white community. Think of the way affirmative action is discussed in the public square today…and the way some white folks believe they are the ones now being discriminated against.
The result is that we have ended up making too much that should be in “the Commons”…private… so that it could avoid the demands for justice.
The zero sum games have privatized too much of our collective life.
McGhee believes that racist structures and rhetoric drive most of the zero-sum thinking in this country and help explain why our social safety net is so much more porous than any other industrialized nation.
Every demand for equality from the community of color is heard as a demand for relinquishment by the white community.
The language is no longer racialized.
We hear of the “makers” vs the “takers” and “tax payers vs welfare queens” but these are racial dog whistles and everyone knows it.
One of the ironies is that the majority of those who are deprived in this system are white.
McGhee argues that we need to begin focusing not on the relinquishment, but on what she calls “solidarity dividends.” Focusing not on the cost to the community of color by the structures of privilege as they exist, but on the possibilities that open when we let go of race-based mean-spiritedness and fear.
McGhee writes, “I’ll never forget Bridget, a white woman I met in Kansas City who had worked in fast food for over a decade. When a co-worker at Wendy’s first approached her about joining a local Fight for $15 group pushing for a livable minimum wage, she was skeptical. “I didn’t think that things in my life would ever change,” she told [McGhee]. “They weren’t going to give $15 to a fast-food worker.”
But Bridget attended the first… meeting anyway. And when a Latina woman rose and described her life — three children in a two-bedroom apartment with bad plumbing, the feeling of being “trapped in a life where she didn’t have any opportunity to do anything better” — Bridget, also a mother of three, said she was struck by how “I was really able to see myself in her.”
“I had been fed this whole line of, ‘These immigrant workers are coming over here and stealing our jobs…’” Bridget admitted. “You know, us against them.”
“In order for all of us to come up, it’s not a matter of me coming up and them staying down,” she said. “It’s the matter of: In order for me to come up, they have to come up too. Because honestly, as long as we’re divided, we’re conquered.”
We need to be in a conversation about how we can be together…about the possibility of being together…celebrating our differences rather than fearing them.
The point I would leave you with is that there are resources available…new lenses that offer greater clarity…and new leadership from thinkers and activists of color.
There is support now for remembering our vision, remembering that liberation will benefit all of us. That we can all get free.
Where do we start?
We are already started. We are in process. Whether it is here in Portland or in Ann Arbor. Or Washington, DC, or Austin Texas or Minneapolis, MN… Whether it is adoption of the 8thPrinciple or reflection on the work of the Commission on Institutional Change. Whether it is prioritizing hires of folks with marginalized identities or paying attention to all the dimensions of accessibility as we plan to re-gather.
We are already started.
A better question is whether we will stay the course. Through whatever the pandemic will require of us moving forward…
Through whatever changes we will encounter as we regather…
The real question is whether we will be faithful…to our memory and to our dreams.
The brokenness is real. The question is how we will respond.
“Beneath the ash we find the ember,” writes Theresa Soto. “Remember the day toward which we gather; the tomorrow toward which we advance. It is with your actions today that you engage that muscle memory, that sense of smell, the ragged feel of a day that you have never lived. [That] is also your day. Remember it well.”
Amen
Prayer
Will you pray with me now?
Spirit of Life, Spirit of Love.
God of our hearts and of our hopes..
We come ready to turn toward the future
Only to confront our past and find
the challenges of the present still
Pressing upon us.
Help us be faithful to our memories
And to our dreams and to the communities
That ground our lives.
We are people of memory and of hope
And of accountability.
Help us remember that we are held
in love and by love…
and that we have it in our power to share love.
Most, may we remember to begin with gratitude
For all the blessings we have received
And as we search for our way forward
May thankfulness leaven our sense of privilege
And open us to the love that…it is our faith…
Will never let us go,.
Amen
Topics: Possibility