Creation

by WUUC | Mar 30, 2016 | Minister Blog

“Any foolish boy can stamp on a beetle, but all the professors in the world cannot make a beetle.”
? Arthur Schopenhauer

This quote from Schopenhauer sums up where we are now in the human species vs. the rest of Life. We human beings have spent centuries using up finite resources that, once gone, cannot be replaced or recreated. We take and take and take and cannot create what we have wiped out.

100 or so acres were cleared behind a friend’s property in Carnation to make way for 5-acre parcels. Walking the trails that used to wind through forest, one now makes one’s way through slash piles and carcasses of trees and upended root systems that supported the tree in its life. The land lies unprotected and desiccated. The dried wood lies gray. I am not sure what the piles are waiting for: lightning, a torch of fire, metal jaws attached to machines which rip life from the earth to load them into dump trucks to clear them away to make way for…

It always upsets me when I see crews out, cutting limbs and disfiguring branches to protect the precious power lines that we have forgotten how to live without. I always see the stumps of branches as phantom limbs that now give the remaining tree pain. Or when the sap runs from the severed attachments, I see blood. It takes decades for such trees to grow and mere seconds for us to fell them. Can’t replace that one. Or that one. Plant new ones, wait years ? you still can’t replace any one of them.

Process Theology was beginning to become popular in Western liberal seminaries in the 1980s. It was developed from Alfred Whitehead’s process philosophy by Charles Hartshorne and John Cobb. Process theology essentially says that God is not static, removed from “temporal processes.” This refutes the notion of God as unchangeable or unaffected by the universe and our world. Here is the part that I latched on to from this theology: Creation is not done being created or coming into being. Humans, in partnership with God or the Divine, are “co-creators” of creation. Creation is not done yet; it is still unfolding and we are part of that unfolding.

I have since translated all of that thought into an acknowledgment that all that is possible has not been brought into being yet.  We are pure potential and possibility. Humans, by partnering with imagination and creativity, bring forth what is still to be born or created. Yes, we can clone, we can hybridize, we can genetically modify. But recreate or create any extinct species from nothing? The foods I eat, the animals and birds I have seen ? none of them may exist when my great nieces and nephews are my age now. If I let that reality sink in then my only action must be to protect these beings’ futures.

Our 7^th principle, which was adopted in 1985, tells us to “affirm and promote…respect for the interdependent web of all existence of which we are a part.” Each species lost means that a part of our lives are also lost or diminished as well. We have to stop stomping out beetles…

Peace, Shalom, Salaam,

Rev.Lo

Process is Everything

by WUUC | Mar 30, 2016 | Minister Blog

I relearned an important lesson recently: Process is everything.  There are some things that must endure a process and cannot be rushed. The most obvious example was announcing to the congregation, without consulting any of the stakeholders, that there would be no more Time for All Ages and that children would not be in worship. The idea had been one of many proposed as a way to accommodate growth. But rather than running it by the REALL Committee or the Worship Team, and families, it was presented as a fait accompli.

It was also announced that we were going to two services in September. We kind of skipped over a key recommendation from a document the UUA created for congregations considering this change: take a year to consider what this might mean and look like, and solicit input from as many folks as possible.

Sometimes a sense of urgency unintentionally overrides process. I participated in all the meetings where all of these decisions were considered and made. And I can assure you that the very best interests of the congregation were at the forefront of those decisions. Yet we have had to slow down and circle round and revisit both of these issues. As Gary Tomlinson wrote in his article for this newsletter, there is a Two Services Team consisting of stakeholders in this process. They are a recommending team, not a decision-making team.

Many of you have strong feelings about children no longer being in our worship services. What started out merely as a way to address growth has now become a values issue: Are we welcoming to all as a community? When the church is one of the last places in our culture that is intergenerational, what does it mean to separate out not just adult and children’s worship but adult and children’s religious education?

What is the purpose of worship? How do we include our children in worship without putting them on display? How does the presence of children in worship affect the content of worship? What do want worship at WUUC to look like?  These are questions that the Worship Team and REALL and a DLL will need to delve into. Congregational feedback will need to be given.

As I said to you from the pulpit, we are simply out of room at WUUC.  Our growth is being constrained by a lack of space in our sanctuary, overcrowding in our RE spaces and not enough space to accommodate all ages, and a shortage of parking places. Inevitably there will be missteps as we make our way  through trial and error to address these issues. But the message that process rather than a particular decision or outcome needs to take priority has been heard.

Peace, Shalom, Salaam,

Rev. Lo

Liberation

by WUUC | Mar 1, 2016 | Minister Blog

Liberation. It is a word I most associate with the liberation of the concentration camps in WWII. Or the Earth Liberation Front that uses “economic sabotage and guerrilla warfare to stop the exploitation and destruction of the environment.” Or the Animal Liberation Front that liberates animals from research labs. Or Gay Liberation or the Black Panther Party or the Women’s Liberation Movement. What they all obviously have in common is the freeing of persons or beings that were in essence, held captive by societal norms and systems.

But the word “liberation” took on new meaning for me in 1979, the year I entered Divinity school. I entered the school as unconscious as a person can be about the realities of the world. In six months I went from unconsciousness to a radicalized consciousness of myself and the world. I owe it all to Liberation Theology. This was a theology from below- from the hearts and minds of the poorest of the poor and the oppressed of the world. This was a theology that embraced the Exodus story as the story of liberation, a liberation that needed to happen right here and right now. In his classic book, A Theology of Liberation, Gustavo Gutierrez writes that liberation “is the struggle to construct a just and fraternal society, where people can live with dignity and be the agents of their own destiny.”

Liberation is more than freedom. Freedom is a state of being. Liberation, as Gutierrez infers, is action. It is not a solitary act. It is big picture thinking and acting. Some of the liberation movements I referenced above may have sought freedom but they have not granted actual liberation. That liberation is still being constructed by women in developing countries, by blacks in this country and elsewhere, by folk who are queer, and certainly by those who work for the liberation of the planet and all life.

We can’t stop at freedom. We need to work for liberation.

Rev. Lo

#nativelivesmatter

by WUUC | Feb 18, 2016 | Minister Blog

Many of you have probably seen the “Powerful SuperBowl Ad that Redskins’ Owner Dan Synder Needs to See.” If not, simply go to Facebook or YouTube and type in the search box, “redskins commercial.” The commercial lists the names of many Native American tribes and lists many descriptions of who Native Americans are. It ends with by saying, “Native Americans call themselves many things. The one thing they don’t is…” and you are left with the visual of a Washington Redskins helmet with a football in the background.

While the focus for many of us in terms of white privilege has been on Black people recently, there are just as many ways in which it is constantly being exerted over Native peoples. After watching the commercial, I remembered my experience of attending a YMCA day camp as a young child. We would have Coup Councils once a week. All of us would gather in a special area carrying our “coup sticks.” The heads of all the different activity areas wore full feather headdresses of certain colors that were identified with their area: Pool was blue; Field was green, etc. Those of us who had excelled at an area during the week were given colored feathers representing the area to put in our coup sticks. My father made mine out of an old shovel handle, drilling holes in that could hold the feathers. I was inordinately proud of my coup stick.

I had no idea that this ritual was a complete cultural misappropriation of a Native American tradition. A site about the Plains Indians explained the true meaning of “counting coup and coup sticks:”

Counting coup was a relatively harmless act of bravery and war honor of the highest grade. Any blow struck against the enemy counted as a coup, but the most prestigious acts included touching an enemy warrior, with the hand or with a coup stick. The expression can be seen as referring to ‘counting strikes’”. Coups were recorded by notches in the coup stick, or by feathers in the headdress of a warrior who was rewarded with them for an act of bravery.”

The mascot of the college I attended was the “Redmen, “with a silhouette of an Indian face with a headdress. I thought nothing of it. As someone who had grown up in a suburb outside of New York City, I had had no exposure to Native Americans other than what was presented in films or TV shows like “The Lone Ranger.” College would be the first time I interacted with Native Americans and got a faint glimmer of the challenges so many of them faced in the dominant culture. To its credit, the college changed the name of the mascot to the “Redhawks” in response to requests by Native Americans. Which is more than the owners of many ball teams can say. Greed breeds privilege and trumps knowledge about the importance of cultural respect or disparagement. Why is it still acceptable to name ball teams by misusing names that are so important to Native Americans or by using names that perpetuate harmful stereotypes about them?

As Lindsay Rogers and I were discussing this, she stated what I believe is absolutely true when it comes to determining what is or is not offensive to a marginalized people: if they say it is offensive, it is. It is not up to me as an upper middle class white woman to defend my use of a term, try to talk someone out of their position, or to question why they find a term offensive. My job is to listen for understanding. And then to educate myself further and other white people about why the use or abuse of a word or term is offensive.

May our learning about white privilege and identity expand and continue.

Peace, Shalom, Salaam,

Rev. Lo