For the UUWorld article, "Partners in Justice" (2012 Spring) -- click here.
For the UUWorld article, "Report Catalogs Abuse of Immigrants at Mexican Border" (2012 Spring), click here.
These two articles are the topic of our discussion at the Wednesday "Around the UUWorld" Brown Bag Lunch Discussion on April 4.
Before and during General Assembly 2012 in Phoenix, AZ, Unitarian Universalists are partnering with a number of organizations for immigrant justice in Arizona, including:
- "Somos America" includes several groups with varying foci: organizers of marches; organizers of citizenship fairs and voter-registration drives; business community members decrying the effect of Arizona's law on the economy; advocates for the DREAM act; watchdogs looking at Sheriff Arpaio and the Arizona prisons.
- "Puente Arizona" is a grassroots migrant-rights organization. Puente works "to document police and detention abuses, and empowering migrants in their communities with health classes, community gardens, computer trainings, know-your-rights classes, and workshops on creating defense plans."
- "The Florence Project" "provides free legal services to people detained by ICE in Arizona and works alongside Puente and the ACLU."
- "Stand for Children" does grassroots children's advocacy.
- "Mi Familia Vota" aims "at promoting citizenship, registering eligible voters, and then getting them out to vote."
- "Arizona Immigration Ministry," headed by UU minister, Rev. Susan Frederick-Gray, does immigration justice work with a faith perspective.
- "No More Deaths" is a ministry of the UU Church of Tucson, AZ. "Many members of the Tucson congregation volunteer with it, as do many other UUs and other people of faith across the country."
Questions:
1. What stands out for you about these articles?
2. What can we learn about the immigration situation in Arizona and along the Mexican border that will help us address the migrant labor situation in Florida?
3. What do you think UUs in Phoenix will be able to accomplish?
This Wednesday (March 14), at the Wednesday Brown Bag Lunch we're discussing the article in the latest UUWorld (2012 Spring): "For Love and Justice" by Kimberly French. To read the article,click here.
Judy and Raul Cardenas
What did you feel as you read the story of Raul Cardenas' deportation?
How does the Cardenas' story matter to you?
Does it matter to you that Judy and Raul Cardenas and their three kids were active UUs?
If the Cardenas had been as active and as long-time members of UUFG as they were of 1st Universalist, Denver, when Raul was deported, how do you think our congregation would have responded?
A 1996 law made it much harder -- essentially impossible -- for foreign-born spouses to obtain legal status. Did you know about that law?
Linked Issues?
Priscilla Ledbury (member of First Universalist Church of Denver) is quoted:
Injustice against immigrants and gay people are "linked oppressions, no doubt about it,” she says: The struggles for immigrant rights and LGBT rights both come out of laws that deal unfairly with people who are different, forcing them to live in secrecy and fear. Both require creating an understanding that these people, too, are part of our community, often people we already know, work with, and love.
Do you see immigrant and LGBT issues as linked? These are the two issues at the center of our "Standing on the Side of Love" campaign (see here). Do they seem to you to belong together?
Other Voices
Not all UUs are agreed on this issue. Rocilla Dilger (member of 1st Universalist, Denver) is quoted:
“I don’t understand why we’re supporting people who have broken the law. We can’t let everyone come across to our country. To me, it’s clear. They’ve broken the law. They should go back.”
How would you respond? (It might be worth recalling that the Unitarian Service Committee (now the Unitarian Universalist Service Committee -- see here) had its beginnings in the creation -- in some cases, "forging" might have been the word -- of documents to help people get out of Nazi-occupied territories.)
Language
The UUA, along with immigrant organizations, advocates the term “undocumented” over “illegal” immigrant.
Does language matter?
Why This Issue Now?
The article asks:
Why this issue? Why now? What about the economy, our hollow democracy, Wall Street greed—and the very connected problems of joblessness, homelessness, and hunger? What about environmental justice and the climate crisis? Is immigration justice the best place to invest our energy at this moment?
How would you answer?
UUA President Peter Morales is quoted:
How this country treats immigrants is an urgent moral issue of our day. It’s an appalling violation of our First Principle — respect for the inherent worth and dignity of each person — on a massive scale that is largely hidden from most Americans.
Is he right?
Know the numbers
Estimated number of undocumented people now in the US: about 11 million
Proportion of all undocumented people who entered the country legally: About half.
Percentage increase in the number of undocumented immigrants since NAFTA was signed in 1994: 300.
Percent of the undocumented immigrants since 1994 who are from Mexico: 57
Decline in corn prices in Mexico as a result of subsidized US corn flooding the Mexican market: 70 percent.
Number of Mexican farmers driven off their land as a result: 2 million
The U.S. Brought This On Itself?
The stats above suggest the US role -- in pushing through NAFTA, and in our corn subsidies -- in creating the current immigration situation. Miguel De La Torre, professor of social ethics at the Iliff School of Theology in Denver, is quoted:
When a nation enters into another nation to build roads to access their natural resources and their cheap labor, we should not be surprised when those same people take those same roads following everything that’s been stolen from them. We have an immigration problem because for over 100 years we have had a foreign policy that has stolen from these countries.
Is this a true? Is it important?
What Is Ours To Do?
Hundreds of immigrants die each year—by drowning, heat exhaustion, injuries, and excessive force by border patrol—trying to cross the Sonoran Desert and Rio Grande.
What is ours to do?
Poor working families who have lived in the United States for years and committed no crime are separated when wage earners who can’t provide on-the-spot documentation are whisked off to ICE detention, moved from place to place, and denied outside contact. About half those detained are deported. In the first six months of 2011, the U.S. government deported moWhre than 46,000 parents, like Raúl, of U.S.-citizen children, many of whom then entered foster care.
What is ours to do?
Fearful parents refuse basic services like free lunch programs, choosing that their children go hungry rather than providing information that might risk separation.
What is ours to do?
The current system forces families into some horrible choices: What laws will they ignore, what risks will they take, in order to stay together? Is it better to live in fear, in a foreign and often hostile culture, in order to feed their families, keep them safe from worse violence, and give them hope for the future?
What is ours to do?
Further reading: See UUA President Peter Morales' essay, "We Are One." Click here.
Can't make the lunch? Leave a comment here. (In the comment box, or click the word "comment" in the next line.
Rev. Ken Belden's Minns Lecture is the topic of our "Around the UUWorld Brown Bag Lunch" at noon on Wednesday March 7, in the Common Room. Read the lecture: click here.
Rev. Ken Belden is the minister of the Wellsprings Congregation in Chester Springs, Pennsylvania (about 35 miles west-by-northwest from the center of Philadelphia). They have 185 members and rent worship space in a school auditorium (so they don't have building up-keep to worry about).
Wellsprings is a new congregation. They had their first worship service in 2007 January, nearly two years after Rev. Belden, hired by the Joseph Priestly District to lead this start-up effort, began working with focus groups of interested people. To fund this start-up almost $700,000 was given by the UUA, the Joseph Priestly District, and Main Line UU Congregation in Devon, PA. From these focus groups, a "Planting Team" of 12 committed people emerged which met weekly for seven months. The Planting Team meetings focused on their personal spiritual development and building community with each other. Out of these meetings -- and information gathered from interviews with people in the area, the Planting Team articulated the "Core Values and Beliefs" for the congregation-to-come.
With the "Core Values and Beliefs" identified and clarified, they then formed a number of small groups which met covenant-group-style for 10 sessions. These sessions aimed at providing people a chance to share fellowship, grow in their understanding of faith life, offer service to the community, and share in the vision of Wellsprings.
They were then able to hire a Director of Leadership and Spiritual Development and an Office Administrator (still several months before their first worship service!)
The Wellsprings slogan is "A Community Charged Full with the Charge of the Soul" (language swiped from Walt Whitman) -- and they emphasize and repeatedly invoke this slogan. Everything they do is oriented being charged with "the charge of the soul."
You might also be interested to take a look at the Wellsprings Congregation's web site: click here.
And you might want to see Rev. Belden's blog: click here.
Ken Belden was one of the speakers in the "Powerful Pathways to Growth" workshop at General Assembly 2011 in Charlotte. You can see the video of that workship on Youtube: click here or watch part 1:
From Rev. Belden's Minns lecture:
"UU’s often lack explicit modeling about how we live every day for, and in, our faith."
QUESTIONS
How are UUFG's members doing at living our faith -- living for, and in, our faith -- day by day?
What would help?
Belden's Wellsprings worship includes a rock band, and an informally dressed preacher. That's one of the branches of our UU future, but not the only one. Actually, taking up the idea of "ancient faith for a postmodern world," we can draw on our 19th-century ancestors for some key themes to emphasize.
Our Unitarian and Universalist forebears in the 19th-century understood "that each day is a chance to grow, shape and form our spiritual character through practices both inner and outer directed." This should still be our emphasis today.
The specific form of the spiritual practice doesn't matter so much -- as long as it truly is a spiritual practice. Belden says:
Dr. Newberg takes MRI’s, images of people’s brains who have well-developed spiritual practices. In one of his experiments, he compares the brain scans of Carmelite nuns in their theistic Centering Prayer practice with Buddhist monks and their non-theistic mindfulness meditation. Different traditions, different names for the experience of the Holy. But the brains of these Buddhist and Catholic practitioners appeared the same in the imaging. The parts of the mind that were associated with empathy, compassion, peace and self-transcendence all showed greater engagement. Activity in the parts of the brain associated with fear, anxiety, aggression, the “reptile brain,” diminished.
QUESTIONS
Is spiritual development -- that is, the work that rewires our brains toward empathy, compassion, equanimity, and self-transcendence -- what UU congregations should be all about?
How is UUFG when it comes to encouraging and facilitating this sort of development?
"Intellectual Knowledge" and "Spiritual Wisdom"
Belden refers to an incident at a Florida UU congregation (it was the Clearwater UU congregation: In 2007 December, a man shot dead his ex-wife, the couple's two small children, the ex-wife's female partner, and then himself. All five were members of Clearwater UU). One member of the Clearwater congregation was quoted in the press as saying he didn't understand how someone so well-educated could do such a thing. This remark is testament to the UU proclivity to subsume all virtues under "well-educated" and "intellectual knowledge." (In this particular case, it seems the issue has to do with mental/emotional health more than with either cognitive fitness or spiritual fitness. See my blog series on this subject over on Lake Chalice: click here for the first entry, then follow the "Next" links at the bottom of each post.)
QUESTIONS
Does UUFG (in the shared understandings of its members or in its overall "institutional personality") make the mistake of confusing intellectual knowledge and spiritual wisdom with each other?
Or, if UUFG doesn't regard them as exactly identical, does UUFG regard spiritual wisdom as a subset of, or subsidiary to, intellectual knowledge?
How do you understand the difference between intellectual knowledge and spiritual wisdom?
How widespread would you guess your understanding of that difference is among UUFG members?
Not Static
Belden says,
Rejecting both the doctrine of original sin and the notion that our inherent worth and dignity are some static entity, instead we affirm that we are inherently invested by the Universe with the capacity to develop our lives.
QUESTIONS
How is it that worth and dignity can be inherent yet not static?
In what ways have we sometimes seemed to assume that inherent worth and dignity are static?
"Of" and "About"
To distinguish themselves from more mainstream or conservative Christian faiths, Unitarians have sometimes characterized themselves as adhering to "the religion of Jesus, not the religion about Jesus."
QUESTIONS
Have we become the religion about Ralph Waldo Emerson, Clara Barton, Susan B Anthony, and Bronson and Louisa May Alcott rather than the religion of these figures?
They were serious about the practices to cultivate the spiritual virtues in themselves. Are we?
Praying Together
Beldon says:
We don't all share a common understanding or experience of God, but what comes from praying aloud with and for each other is the unearthing of what we do hold in common: our aspirations for our community, our individual and collective losses, sorrows, hopes and gratitude. It is time together that we treasure. It’s like that old Ragu commercial, we find “it’s all in there” in each of us: the need for contemplation, restoration, lamentation, thanksgiving.
QUESTIONS
Do you resonate with this approach to prayer?
What is the appropriate place for prayer in the life of UUFG and its members?
More Important Than Ever?
Unitarians and Universalists are drawn to fill a need in society. We tend to put relatively less emphasis on the areas that our culture is pretty much taking care of. We focus on the areas that wider culture neglects. For example. we teach sex ed -- our "Our Whole Lives" curriculum -- and we probably wouldn't if the schools were doing an adequate job of it.
Our culture appears to be reaching a point where it is neglecting the spiritual more than it has ever done before in the last 300 hundred years of North American history. Belden writes:
There’s a recent study by the University of Michigan about the levels of empathy exhibited by incoming college students. It finds that current students are the least empathetic, most narcissistic cohort in the more than two decades since they’ve been conducting the study. The study paints a picture of a generational slice of young people who have been raised to be overstimulated, overexcited, overexposed and over-competitive. These are the exact opposite attributes from what daily spiritual practice can help us aspire to be.
We might also note that 93 percent of US drivers identify themselves as above-average drivers. Ninety-four percent of college professors believe they have above-average teaching skills.
"In the 1950s, 12 percent of high school seniors said they were a 'very important person.' By the '90s, 80 percent said they believed that they were" (David Brooks, citing Jean M. Twenge, New York Times, 2011 Mar 11. Click here.)
And it's no wonder, the New York Times columnist continues: our young people, more than any previous generation, have been "bathed in messages telling them how special they are."
Belddn cites sociologist Avner Offer:
“Affluence breeds impatience and impatience undermines well-being.”
QUESTIONS
Has the sustained and growing wealth of the US over the last 50 years made us feel less wealthy and less happy?
Has it undermined our well-being?
Has it functioned to undermine our spirituality?
Is the US now at the most arrogant and narcissistic point of its history?
Is spiritual discipline -- the serious discipline of adopting and maintaining daily spiritual practice to cultivate patience, equanimity, humility, awareness, and deep satisfaction in just being alive -- now more neglected than ever in US culture?
Is it, then, the calling of UU congregations to compensate for this lack?
Sounding the Retreat
Belden says:
At WellSprings we have a Spiritual Retreat team. Although we’re still young we’ve had seven spiritual retreats in the last few years. The joy is that we get to do this work together, in community. We get to follow up with each other, grow small groups from our retreats, and hold each other accountable for our aspirations.
QUESTIONS
How does this sound to you?
Is this what UUFG needs?
I look forward to your thoughts! See you Wednesday, March 7.
Can't make it? Post your reflection as a "Comment" (if you don't see a Comment Box below, click on the word "comments" in the next line down).
Robert Hardies' Minns Lecture of 2011 (click here), begins with a "postcard from the future of Unitarian Universalism." He describes a worship service:
...the minister—arms outstretched—stands before the faithful. The keyboardist sounds a contemplative chord and the minister begins his prayer of invocation, asking that God’s spirit be upon this place, these people. As he prays, his congregants—some with eyes lifted to heaven, others with heads bent—echo his prayer with whispered “Amens.” “Yes, God.” When the prayer is over, the minister says: “Greet your neighbor. Show them a sign of God’s love.” And what follows is a “passing of the peace” that is anything but peaceful. The room is filled with loud greetings and big bear hugs and laughter.....From amidst this holy cacophony, the band begins. First just some noodling on the electric organ, then a plaintive human voice, then a driving beat on the bass and drum set....Some sit and sing, with their hands in the air. Others stand and sway. Still others clap in rhythmic accompaniment.
Then we get to the preaching. The minister:
delivers a 40-minute sermon that feels like it’s over in five. He begins slowly, in a learned and philosophical mode, examining passages from Scripture that speak of the worth and dignity of every person. Which, the preacher reminds his congregation, “means each and every one of you gathered here today.” Hungry for that reassurance, the congregation responds with grateful calls of “and “Thank you, God!” And the preacher rides this wave of energy, taking the sermon—and his—to a new level. Now his words are stirring and powerful. Now his stories have folks laughing and crying as he builds to the Good News. The Good News that God, despite everything that they’ve been told, God loves all souls, not some. “So go from this place,” he says, “and share that message, share that love with a world that so deeply needs it.” And with that, the congregation propels itself out into the world on another wave of song.
Hardies acknowledges that some UUs would find this vision appalling, some would find it appealing, some would find it intriguing.
What's your reaction to the picture Hardies paints? Would that sort of worship work for UUFG?
In 1992, our denomination began its "Journey Toward Wholeness" initiative to make our congregations ARAOMC (Anti-Racist, Anti-Oppression, Multi-Cultural). UUFG, like most UU congregations, has a fairly high level of theological diversity (we have Christians, Pagans, Buddhists, Humanists, Etc., All of the Above, and None of the Above). We do not have much diversity of class, ethnicity, or race. UUFG, like many UU congregations, has participated in various "Journey Toward Wholeness" anti-racism workshops over the years. There are three questions here:
1. Resisting race-based oppression in the world: What is ours to do? I.e., what role is UUFG called to play in moving toward a world with reduced race-based oppression? Are we doing it?
2. Eliminating race-based oppression from our congregation: Have we?
3. Becoming a more racially, ethnically diverse congregation: Does this matter? How much? How could it happen?
And running through all these questions is: How do we -- how can we -- change ourselves to become a congregation with better answers to #1, #2, and #3? Robert Hardies says that the "Journey Toward Wholeness" initiative got us started. Are we, in the words of our beloved hymn, Bring Many Names, "willing to be changed by what we've started"?
Hardies suggests:
1. Put the vision [of multicultural diversity] at the center and measure your progress. Use a detailed demographic survey of your members to keep track of diversity progress.
2. Require that all congregational social justice initiatives draw us into relationship with communities of color.
3. Build a multiracial staff.
4. Include nonwhite speakers at every Sunday worship service.
5. Include stories and readings in every worship service that represent nonwhite cultures and wisdom traditions.
(Hardies also seems to be suggesting that a successfully multi-cultural means moving toward the sort of worship style described at the beginning of this post.)
Carlton Pearson was once "the most famous black televangelist in the country." He became convinced that God's love meant Universal salvation. He was rejected by his church, and taken in by the UU church of Tulsa, OK, where he leads services. (Review the Wikipedia entry on Carlton Pearson: click here). Pearson believes that Universalism will be to the 21st century what evangelical Christianity was to the 20th. Pearson says: “You’ve got the theology. It’s the vision you don’t have. You can’t imagine Unitarian Universalism as anything but a movement of white New Englanders.”
Is Carlton Pearson right? If he is, what should we be doing? (And if he isn't, what should we be doing?)
Please post your comments -- and join us for discussion of this at the "Around the UUWorld Brown Bag Lunch" on Wed Feb 29 (Common Room, Noon).
