The Wednesday Brown Bag Sept 5

Bring your brown bag lunch to the Common Room at noon, Wednesday Sep 5.
It's a chance to disuss, really, anything that's on your mind.
Our "default" topic for Sep 5 is the the article:
Thandeka, "Obama's Relious Roots," UUWorld, Fall 2012, pp. 20-25.

Read the article online here, and the sidebar here.

The author is Rev. Thandeka: an African American woman, Unitarian Universalist theologian and congregational consultant. Formerly on the faculty at the UU seminary, Meadville Lombard, in Chicago, she leads the "We Love Beyond Belief" project.

"The project We Love Beyond Belief is designed to increase financial income and worship service attendance in your congregation through the enhanced use of music and words as a liturgical practice." Read more.

In "Obama's Religious Roots," Thandeka uses the case of the Barack Obama to discuss what happens to so many UU youth. Obama attended -- sporadically, apparently -- UU RE while he was growing up. What he got was "sampling":

"The story of Back Obama's childhood Unitarian Universalism appears to be a tale about religious sampling, little more."

Thus, in adulthood, Obama went the way that so many UU youth go:

"Nine out of ten of our young people leave us,...We're much better at attracting converts than we are at providing a lifelong home: Only 12 percent of th 161,500 members of our congregations say they were raised as Unitarian Universalists. In mainline Protestant denominations, by contrast, half the current members grew up within the tradition."

Why? "Emotional distance," says Thandeka, citing our Honolulu minister, Rev. Mike Young, who speaks of the

"uneasiness of really getting people involved across the age lines -- the demographic lines. The middle-aged folks are uneasy when dealing with the young adults and the young adults are uneasy when dealing with the kids....UU adults tend to be reserved, emotionally cautious, wary of 'spirituality.' Young people, however, are seeking emotional connections and a strong sense of identity with a group."

Solving the problem, says Thandeka, will require that UU adults:

• "feel this missing part of our life together"

and

• "be transformed by the experience."

Obama's path took him to congregation-based organizing work in Chicago. He was working with people of faith, yet as a religious "sampler" himself, he seemd aloof and removed. Obama became a Christian and a member of a UCC church because he saw/felt a need for "an unequivocal commitment to a particular community of faith." (Note: NOT a need for a specific BELIEF.)
With a commitment to a particular community of faith came:

"feelings of loyalty, family, love, embrace, care, nurture, endurance, and also heightened experiences of salvation while still on earth....Religious communities, he [Obama] now realized, are not just sources of wisdom for moral ideas; they are also healing vessels for the regeneration of broken emotional souls. 'The gospel songs, the happy feet, and the tears and shouts all spoke of a release, an acknowledgment and finally a channeling of those emotions.' Obama became a Christian because his emotional life was not only touched, but also transformed."

Unitarian Universalists, on the other hand,

"keep our individual spiritual needs at arms length from the collective needs of our congregational life."

We UUs are proud of our critical thinking and our engagement with social justice. These virtues, however, do not require emotional distance. Indeed, Obama found that the emotional transformation of his UCC religious experience -- in Obama's own words:

"did not require me to suspend critical thinking, disengage from the battle for economic and social justice, or otherwise retreat from the world that I knew and loved."

We don't need to dampen our mind to open our heart.
Thandeka tells the story of being at a Youth Con:

"One by one the teens stood up and talked about their feelings. They disclosed stories of abuse, of being racially profiled at school, about being the unwanted child, stories about not feeling loved, appreciated, or adored by the people who were supposed to love them. Some of the teens cried as they spoke. The teens held and comforted one another. And at the end of each story, we said together, 'We hear you and hold you in our hearts.'"

Does UUFG provide enough opportunity for emotional connection and transformation?