And when the time comes, to let it go

Mary Oliver's poetry has been on my mind (just completed a final paper focussing on her poetry.) So it a poem came to mind on this Memorial day weekend.
This is a weekend of letting go, and a weekend of celebrating what was, and a weekend of new beginnings. Friday was my last day at work at Cornell University. Over 15 years of calling this institution my professional home has come to an end. I'm feeling dislocation, sadness, and joy. This new space in my life creates possibilities that did not exist before. It is also a great wrench to let go of the identity given to me by my profession. I've been grieving the losses for a while. Loss of co-worker relationships. Loss of dreams. Loss of income. This grief, grief that is hard to express in the face of other's congratulations, sometimes makes me irritable.
This is a weekend of letting go, and a weekend of new beginnings. Thousands of students graduated this weekend and last. The town was full of strangers driving the wrong way on our confusing Ithaca streets, drunken students stumbling home after celebrations, and be-robed, proud graduates strutting their accomplishments. This is another grief that is hard to express in the face of other's congratulations. I hope that they do make the time to pause and feel the losses. Loss of classmates, loss of studying as a life's focus, loss of freedom from facing the necessity of earning a wage.
Living in a college town gives us an opportunity to face the lesson of Mary Oliver's poem, over and over. Wonderful and dear friends come, spend 2, 4, (or more if they are on the famous "Cornell PHD plan") years with us, and then move on. We must open our hearts to these gifts knowing that they will leave us.
This is a weekend of celebrating what once was, the courage of men and women fighting to protect the country they loved, and a weekend of letting go, remembering their losses, and grieving the cost of war. These many loves and losses, small and large, deserve our mindfulness.
May we all have the courage to be fully with the impermanent loves and endeavors of the now. And may we have the courage to grieve and let go when the time comes. And may we remember, that every loss invites us to a new beginning.

“In Blackwater Woods,” by Mary Oliver

Look, the trees
are turning
their own bodies
into pillars

of light,
are giving off the rich
fragrance of cinnamon
and fulfillment,

the long tapers
of cattails
are bursting and floating away over
the blue shoulders

of the ponds,
and every pond,
no matter what its
name is, is
nameless now.

Every year
everything
I have ever learned

in my lifetime
leads back to this: the fires
and the black river of loss
whose other side
is salvation,
whose meaning
none of us will ever know.
To live in this world

you must be able
to do three things:
to love what is mortal;
to hold it

against your bones knowing
your own life depends on it;
and, when the time comes to let it go,
to let it go.

Belief-O-Matic

I just completed the course "Our Theological House" offered by Starr King School for the Ministry. The course explored Unitarian Universalism's theological roots and attempted to name some theological centers to the dynamic, diverse, contemporary movement that is Unitarian Universalism.

So, for entertainment, I took the Beliefnet.com Belief-o-matic test again. Not only was it fun to see the questions, and to be able to recognize which theological category they were attempting to assess, it was also interesting to see the results.

The top three haven't changed. Secular Humanism has risen as I've begun to listen more carefully to the reasoning behind it. That most liberal of Christian faiths (Quaker) continues to hit my top three.

I don't know if that means I'm boring and changing very little, or if it means "Phew! I picked the right religion in which to become a minister!"

1. Unitarian Universalism (100%)
2. Liberal Quakers (89%)
3. Neo-Pagan (83%)
4. Secular Humanism (80%)

An Ethic for Religious Sharing

First, a Definition of Terms:

• Appropriation - The act of participating in a ritual or meaning making event, or the use of an artifact (or replica of an artifact) that originates, or seems to originate, in a cultural/religious context other than one's own.
• Misappropriation - Appropriation without respect for, acknowledgement of, nor deep understanding of the culture/religion being appropriated. Appropriation without permission.
• Cultural Borrowing - Appropriation. Often used in place of "appropriation" due to the emotional overtones of the word appropriation.
• Religious Sharing - the gift of giving permission to use, or offering access to, cultural/religious rituals, symbols, etc. of ones own tradition, and the respectful acceptance of that gift on the part of members of other cultures.

Between people/cultures of equivalent power, sharing is easily possible. All that is required is a basic understanding of the other culture, mutually respectful communication, and some clarity about permission.
However, in the case of Unitarian Universalists as a group, sharing is almost never between equals. Unitarian Universalists as a group are middle and upper class, north american, white. We are historically colonizers, oppressors, beneficiaries of racist systems. This requires additional ethical obligations when considering enjoying the spiritual gifts of others.

• First: Know where you stand. You cannot know when you are sharing and when you are not, you cannot know who you are and what you have to offer, until you know your own history and place. You also cannot know why you need what you think you need to borrow unless you know your self. What is your personal, congregational, and movement-wide history? Your heritage? Geneology? What resources do you bring to the table? How do you define yourself and your movement? What is your theology...
• Second: Know what you are borrowing. Do you know where the sage smudge stick comes from? If you don't, perhaps incense, or some other smoke ritual that you DO know the source for will need to take its place until you can do your research. As a Jun player, I need to know what the name of the song I am playing is, what rituals and vocals it is played with, and what is the dance. What is the cultural context? What do I know about the ritual/symbol itself? Is it public domain?
• Third: What is the provenance of what you are borrowing? How did this come to you. Can you name the teacher/book/source? Do you trust the teacher/book/source? Did you get permission? Do you trust the source of the permission? I try to know the teacher, the teacher's teacher, and the ethnicity of the people from whom I learned a drumsong. For instance, it matters that the lineage is fairly direct since that means to me that the people who teach me have the authority to do so.
• Fourth: Know from whom you are borrowing. What do you know about the history of the people? The culture? the current situation of these people?
• Fifth: Are you in right relations with the people you are benefiting from? If you are benefiting from Luisah Tish's insights from Yoruba tradition, are you in a mutually respectful relationship with the African American and Caribbean community? As a drummer who has benefited from expat. African teachers, am I active in supporting the interests of West African or African-American people?
• Sixth: Give credit. Put it in the order of service. State the names of the sources of this tradition when you use it, especially in public.
• Seventh: When you mess up. Forgive yourself, and begin again in love. Do your best...

Here's how this works for me in the context of music... I try to use my traditional djembe and juns for playing traditional West African music. I play West African drumsongs that I know the context of, and songs I learned from a person of that culture, or from a respectable student of someone from that culture. I always acknowledge the tradition and people who originated the song. I try to honor the context of the playing: at least acknowledge that I'm playing a harvest song out of season if I opt to do so. When I'm just noodling around and playing African-inspired drumming I try to clarify that this is what I'm doing. In return for the gift of drum and dance in my life I spent several years promoting teachers and helping them make a living after arriving in the US of A and have taught classes to kids of color as a way of lifting up and passing along the genius of that heritage. I always acknowledge teachers and sources. When an African American person confronts me about "ripping off her culture" I am prepared to speak to that accusation without defensiveness. I truly believe it is more important to keep the traditions alive than to respond to the criticism by stopping playing. But in exchange for that gift I have responsibilities.

This approach is more complex for Unitarian Universalists because the first step is less defined for us. With music I have a pretty good idea of the musical traditions that belong to the American culture and where they came from (Ken Burn's "History of Jazz" is one great source of knowledge.) The history of Unitarian Universalist religious elements is just as complex, but less well documented and accessible. That doesn't let us off the hook, but it does mean the work will not be done easily or done quickly. It is still worth doing.

UU Pedagogy of the Oppressed

Or, on what theological basis rests our commitment to Educating to Counter Oppression

One core Unitarian, and Universalist, value is a value of education. This is to be expected from a religious tradition that focusses on development of individual character and freedom of thought, but it is also to be expected of a tradition that (and I'm speaking of Universalists here) was a part of the lives of the poor and working class, struggling to make it in the early years of America. In many times and places we see a commitment to education as a way of creating freedom and opportunity when there is none. I just read Rosemary Brae McNatt's auto-biography "Not Afraid of the Dark" and this commitment to education as a way to counter oppression is explicitly illustrated in her story.

Our commitment to personal, educational growth, and growth toward justice, is how we express our historical theological, our most deeply held, values. First, our belief that every person is a child of God, loved by God, and love-able, as expressed in the Universalist statement of faith: "...God as eternal and all-conquering love... the supreme worth of every human personality..." and by Channing and Emerson. Channing, in his "Likeness to God" sermon and Emerson, for instance, in this quote: "God enters in through a private door into every person" and both of them in their work for abolition.) Second, the connectedness of all. I believe Martin Luther King found inspiration from first corinthians, 12:26 “if one part suffers, all the parts suffer with it, and if one part is honored, all the part are glad” when he penned "Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere." in his letter from Birmingham jail. This is a part of our Christian heritage and of the gift from our Process theologians, and even the scientists among us (those who are able to continue to be open to the findings of quantum physics) who, in philosophy, and in science, showed us that we are truly interconnected in far more than a spiritual or psychological way.

It is not a surprise that those two values are the alpha and omega of our association's principles: "Inherent worth and dignity of every being" and "Interconnected web of all existence." These two values require that we recognize the ways in which (as Rev. Rebecca Parker puts it) we are "in the midst of the flood" of oppression and harm. These understandings of god and man require us to stand with those who are most harmed, and to remember to both afflict the comfortable and comfort the afflicted. (A phrase first coined in reference to newspapers, but used often in reference to religion.)

Two paragraphs of Rev. David Bumbaugh's statement of UU faith make the connection between historic and current Unitarian Universalist theologies and a commitment to countering oppression: "We believe that the moral impulse that weaves its way through our lives, luring us to practices of justice and mercy and compassion, is threaded through the universe itself and it is this universal longing that finds outlet in our best moments."

"We believe that our location within the community of living things places upon us inescapable responsibilities. Life is more than our understanding of it, but the level of our comprehension demands that we act out of conscious concern for the broadest vision of community we can command and that we seek not our welfare alone, but the welfare of the whole. We are commanded to serve life and serve it to the seven times seventieth generation." The piece that is more current is the work that is being done by the religious naturalists, who I see as the successors of the religious humanists.

Another theme that is discernible in Bumbaugh's statement and which flows through our history, is this sense of creating heaven on earth, the idea of building the "city on the hill" that our Puritan forebears came to this country to do. We have inherited a conviction that paradise is both achievable, and that it is our responsibility to bring it into being. This requires that we turn our hands and hearts to fighting injustice, ending violence, and celebrating the diverse complexity that is life's yearning toward life. I believe that the Pagan theologies, and some aspects of feminist theology, which are also rivers feeding Unitarian Universalist theologies, are a part of this idea that we are all a part of a community, and that our role in this community is to celebrate one another in all our diversity.

(Rev. Bumbaugh presented these ideas, and others, at the Meadville Lombard January Convocation, 2009)