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)
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