By David Stewart
Good Morning. David Morgen shared with you this morning our Mission and Vision for Northwest. I wanted to add to that and talk about how we can continue to evolve Northwest and ourselves with that larger Mission and Vision as our grounding statement.
I am taking on the role of president of our Board of Trustees this year. My wife was asking me the other night if I was excited about this job for the next year. I am actually not – I didn’t take this job for personal glory or to cap off a happy story of service to the congregation or denomination. I have a lot going on – and taking on this role was not an easy choice. I run a business, I chase my 3 boys around and I try to keep up with my wife (though she usually runs circles around me as some of you may know). Needless to say, I am not hurting for things to spend time on. I took this on because I feel like I can help make a difference and help build up our congregation as a spiritual home for my children, for all of our children and their parents, for young adults searching for something meaningful, for empty nesters seeking out some new place of truth, for retirees who have time to give to a great cause, and for all the people who need each other right here in our community. I took the job because I feel like our country and our congregation is at a crossroads and I am very passionate about setting us on the best road for a bright future. It really matters to me — but I know it isn’t just me — it really matters to all of us.
In thinking about the past year, we have been through an intense amount of change with a lot of stresses and strains that come with change. I think we all owe Hannah Cowart a deep debt of gratitude for the spiritual wisdom she brought to bear this last year.
In the coming year, I am hopeful that the pace of change will slow a bit. We will still have change going on all around us in the world – new policies, laws and tariffs, new social norms, and an ascendant white supremacy.
We also have a lot of change in rebuilding the foundation of our congregation after a time of transition – a new minister, a new director of religious education, a building expansion project, and new administrative processes for how we operate. As is more normal, we have a new budget, new board members and ministry team leaders, the potential for a new day care and if we are able to be fully welcoming, new members. Through all of this, it is really important that we stick together to harness the wonderful and positive side of this change and together turn ourselves to the right road for Northwest. In thinking about this reflection – I wanted to share this quote about our country which also really applies to our uniquely democratic religion –
“Democracy in America is an act of faith. Not faith in the divine, but in the people with whom we hold the fate of this fragile experiment. That’s always been true: we Americans have little to hold us together, really, but some words on parchment and a collective uncoordinated habit of investing those words with meaning.” –author Eric Liu, from his book Become America.
When I really stop and think about it – what holds us together at Northwest is also pretty fragile. We aren’t held by guilt or fear as with some religions. We aren’t held by law or by monetary payment. We aren’t held by faith in the divine. We are held by faith in each other, our shared covenants, by faith in the people who are part of this beloved community. With every positive action, every kind word, every changed heart for the better, and every role taken on in service to the greater – we are held together.
As we think about how to grow – and make no mistake, we must grow to continue as a community. We move, change, ebb and flow, and we must think about how to allow in voices and thoughts and opinions that are not always like our own to continue our community into the future. To hold together this fragile union, we have to listen and try to internalize our new voices and new members, allowing them to lead in our community.
This next quote grounds me in the spiritual growth that we UUs are so capable of:
“I know that people can be better than they are. We are capable of bearing a great burden, once we discover that the burden is reality and arrive where reality is.”
― James Baldwin, The Fire Next Time
This is my challenge to all of us – both new and longtime community members – we all have to come to this place and think about how to be better than we are to have the beautiful and positive impact we know we can in this city, this country, this world. Our burdens might include new skills learned, new coalitions built, relationships we can improve, and what goals we can achieve to improve our reality.
One thing that has been very difficult for us at this congregation is to figure out how to truly be welcoming to those who are not like us culturally. We need to build our multicultural competencies if we are to welcome in a new generation to continue the next chapter of Northwest. I have been increasingly aware over the course of the past year of wounds we have inflicted on our own Beloved Community – wounds that are unnecessary, and are hurtful to our efforts to keep ourselves functioning well.
We have been here before in our movement; the UUA has had an opportunity to be a united diverse movement before. I want to take a few minutes and talk about what I mean by this.
In 1961 the Unitarians and Universalists merged – merging largely affluent white congregations (Unitarians) with white working class congregations (Universalists) together into one movement. This combined denomination of headish Unitarians and heartish Universalists went on to be a very positive force for change during the Civil Rights movement in the mid 1960s, arguably giving Civil Rights legislation its final push with the martyrdom of UU Rev. James Reeb.
Subsequently, a Black Empowerment movement blossomed within the denomination, challenging the way things had been done for many years. Unfortunately for us all, the Black Empowerment movement splintered and fell apart in part because they were not armed with the tools we have today. Specifically, we have a covenant of right relation that keeps us properly engaged and focused on our shared goals while properly maintaining our interpersonal relationships. By keeping us at the shared table of Beloved Community, this covenant doesn’t allow us to take our ball and go home, or question the motivation or integrity of our fellow congregants, all of which plagued the Black Empowerment movement. If we had been able to share our covenant with them, they may have been able to stay united and might have remained in the UUA.
Our religion today stands much as we were after the Black Empowerment Controversies ended 1971. The UUA wasn’t able to take advantage of the appeal of our democratic strengths because we had no tools to integrate a different culture within our denomination back then. And we still struggle to this day, though we now have a multi-cultural toolset that can allow us to integrate other cultures and people into the melting pot of our denomination. Our movement calls to us to try again to build our Beloved and diverse Community, closing the gap between what we say we want and how we act in order to accomplish our desire. I will take the liberty of paraphrasing our Statue of Liberty: Give me your spiritually hungry and impoverished, your huddled masses yearning to worship freely, the wretched refuse thrown out of and unwelcomed in their tired, rigid religious communities. Send these, the religiously homeless, tempest-tossed to me, I lift my lamp beside the seven principles and our multi-cultural practices!
Our denomination can contain multitudes. Just as the United States is a land that aspires to the rule of law, so should we aspire to using our principles and covenants to bring in seekers of truth to our congregation.
I believe our path for Northwest and Unitarian Universalism overall is to have a second chance at this path to truly build a diverse religious family in our community. To do this, we will have to embrace the fact that our lives, class and wealth have been improved because of the mere color our skin. Those of us who are white have more in every study I have ever seen than those of who are people of color. We need to use our privilege to remove the persistent problems and gaps in our beloved community and beyond. Just as America is an experiment that we are still improving, Northwest and the UUA are experiments that are still growing and improving. We aren’t in the same UUA as we were in the 60s and 70s, with their sky high achievements and rock bottom failures. We have a new chance to do our part in today’s tribal and increasingly violent America – hopefully to pass the tests internal to our congregation and denomination so we can proceed to improve our America by word and deed.
However, as long as there is white privilege, nascent racism, subconscious discrimination, ethnic profiling, gilded zip codes, persistent hiring, wage, and wealth gaps, and huge differences in the justice system, we can’t rest and we must work hard for change. This work is emotionally and spiritually challenging – most of all because of how difficult it is to listen and be still with the discomfort that often comes with hearing our privilege illuminated. We must do more than we think we should have to in order to make sure that new members and different voices really do have an equal opportunity in the UU and Northwest families.
I must do this work to build our congregation and I look forward to working closely with all of you whom I love so much in this room and this congregation to make that happen. I am here to help build the path to our best-beloved community.
Amen