Spiritual wisdom suggests we find equanimity when we practice living in the moment neither clinging to past hurts or fretting about the future. But achieving goals requires imagining a future different from this one and plotting a path to achieve it.
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We’ve been talking this year about the three elements of a complete faith: Beliefs, Values, and Actions.
The final aspect of a complete faith is what you do with your faith.
What kind of person do your beliefs and values actually make of you?
How does your faith transform your living? How do you translate your beliefs and faith values into actions that shape your life and shape the world around you?
We could think about the action aspect of a complete faith as spiritual practice. That’s one way to live your faith.
We talked a little about spiritual practice last fall. I offered an expansive definition of spiritual practice. Spiritual practice to me isn’t only prayer and meditation, and yoga. Spiritual practice is also gardening, and making music, and reading with a book club, and hiking in the forest. Or at least it could be. Nearly any action could be a spiritual practice if it meets a few criteria.
It needs to be done regularly. Like any practice, spiritual practice has to be an activity you return to regularly.
Spiritual practice needs to be done intentionally, with the intention of deepening your spiritual life. Gardening can be just for the sake of gardening, or hiking can be just for exercise, but mundane activities can also be spiritual practices if you approach them with the intention of using them to grow your spirit.
And spiritual practice needs to be holistic, in the sense that your practice involves the whole of your person while you’re doing it: mind, body, and spirit. Holistic means mindfulness: bringing your complete awareness to what you’re doing. But holistic also in the sense that we aren’t just aware of where our thoughts are when we do our practice, but we’re also in touch with our bodies. How are we sitting? How are we moving? What is our body saying to us, as we do our practice? And what are we feeling emotionally?
So spiritual practice is one way to express our faith in action.
Another way to live our faith is through social justice work.
Social justice work can be for some Unitarian Universalists a kind of spiritual practice in itself. If it’s done regularly, if it’s done with a spiritual intention (not merely expressing your politics), and if it’s holistic, done with mind, body, and spirit.
But as with the term spiritual practice, I want to give an expansive understanding of what could constitute work for social justice.
I’m going to talk more about this in my sermon for June 5, but let me just say for now, that change work can include marching in the street and other kinds of public activism, but that’s not for everyone, and change work can take other, less demonstrative forms. But every action we take, done publicly or privately, should be an expression of our beliefs and faith values: from the intimate, like justice, equity and compassion in human relations, all the way to the global, like the goal of world community with peace, liberty and justice for all.
One way to talk about the action part of a complete faith, would be to talk about some of the current social issues that I know are important to folks in our Fellowship. For instance, the topic of abortion that pre-empted my sermon from two weeks ago.
But, rather than talking about specific issues, I thought it might be helpful to talk about some of the basic strategies useful to making social change. How do we actually make change happen in the world? For whatever issues we identify where change needs to happen, how do we actually do we make change? From the civil rights era, through the ongoing work for women’s rights, through the work for marriage equality, through the continuing work for racial justice, economic justice, addressing climate change, and so on. What have we learned? What worked? And what lessons can we apply to the change work we wish to do today?
Let me go back to those two justice principles from our Seven Principles that I named before: the two times that the word justice appears in our Seven Principles.
We affirm and promote:
“Justice, equity, and compassion in human relations,” and
“The goal of world community with peace, liberty, and justice for all.”
Justice is encountered in human relations in the second principle. Justice emerges in the context of world community in the sixth. The key to both those principles is relationships. The key to making any kind of effective social change is first through building community.
Before I care what you know, about your political theory, or the history of racism in the U.S. or what the science says about global warming. And certainly before I care to hear what you know about your proposed legislative solution, I have to know that you care, about me, as a person. I need to know that you care about my struggles and challenges and my human needs.
That’s why I started this series on faith action a couple of weeks ago talking about making community. That’s the foundation for effective, lasting, change.
The other insights I want to share today and in the next few weeks, come from my experience as something of an activist over the last 40 years, starting with my work at AIDS Project Los Angeles. We advocated for attention from a Federal Government that was happy to ignore people suffering with AIDS. We advocated for money toward drug research, and once drugs were available, we advocated for money to get expensive drugs to the people who needed them. We advocated as part of a broad coalition for the landmark Americans with Disabilities Act. Later, as a Unitarian Universalist, I worked for marriage equality for same-sex couples, for the repeal of Don’t Ask Don’t Tell. I worked with union organizers in Los Angeles advocating for a living wage and other kinds of employment protections for mostly immigrant hotel workers and carwash workers.
I learned, first of all, that change never happens until build community. The insight that I wanted to share two works ago has to do with how communities are made.
I had titled my sermon, “To Go Big, Stay Small.” And what I meant by that phrase is that the way to build a large and politically powerful coalition is to stay very focused on the particular issue at hand, and then to invite anybody who agrees with you about that one issue to join your movement, even if you disagree with them about practically everything else.
I think about the coalition that we built to pass the Americans with Disabilities Act, signed by George W. Bush in 1990.
In the 1980s persons with HIV were routinely discriminated against in housing and employment. HIV positive persons were denied medical care, hospital beds, dental services. Emergency workers would refuse to touch HIV-positive persons. Families of persons who died from AIDS often struggled to find a mortuary that would attend to the body. All of this not from any rational fear of infection, but from simple discrimination.
Folks I worked with at the AIDS Project Los Angeles, worked to convince the Federal Government to recognize that persons with a chronic illness, such as HIV/AIDS, were disabled in a way, and just as deserving of protection against disability-based discrimination as were persons with physical and mental and other forms of disability.
Prior to the 1970s, the obstacles to full participation in society faced by disabled persons were considered to be inherent in the disability itself. In the early 1970s, following the examples of the Black civil rights and women’s and gay rights movements, persons with disabilities argued that the obstacles faced by disabled persons were not due to the disabled person’s condition, but due to society’s biases.
In other words, it’s not my being in a wheelchair that prevents me from leaving the house, it’s the fact that public spaces can only be accessed by stairs and that every street corner has a curb, and that busses have no room for my chair, and that if I was out all day I wouldn’t be able to find a bathroom I could use, that prevent me from living fully in our society.
Prior to the 1970s, our culture dealt with persons with disabilities by removing them from society. Special institutions. Abandoning folks to limited lives. Starting in the 1970s we switched the conversation to ask, “How can public spaces be altered to accommodate people with disabilities?” In other words, we recognized that this was a discrimination problem, not a disability problem. And the 1990 Americans with Disabilities Act put that new thinking into Federal law.
But to get that law passed required bringing together all of those people with all of those various disabilities and building a coalition around our single struggle. It meant the HIV/AIDS advocates had to convince other folks that chronic illness was also a disability that should be included. It meant we had to avoid prioritizing some disabilities as more deserving of protection than others. It meant that when gays and lesbians showed up to the table that folks who thought it was perfectly acceptable to discriminate on the basis of sexual orientation would be willing to look past that issue and welcome us as allies in working against disability discrimination. And it meant that gays and and lesbians had to be able to keep our focus on the common goal of disability protection and not lose allies in that fight because they disagreed with us elsewhere.
In other words, we were able to go big, because we stayed small. We stayed focused on the narrow issue of disability discrimination, and then welcomed in everyone who had a stake in that issue, regardless of what we all felt about other issues.
This is a good lesson to remember when we’re trying to make change today. Too often I see activist organizations operating under extensive purity tests where every potential partner must be screened on a host of important but unrelated issues before they are allowed to work on the issue at hand. What’s your position on Palestine? What’s your position on policing? What’s your position on Tran-inclusion?
I read an opinion piece in the Washington Post on Thursday by Lis Smith, a Democratic communications strategist who was at the helm of Pete Buttigieg’s 2020 presidential campaign In the context of abortion rights, she talks about the problem of alienating allies by policing our language rather than keeping our eyes on the shared prize. She wrote:
“Last week, the House Pro-Choice Caucus released a memo denouncing common-sense terminology such as “choice” and “safe, legal, and rare” as “harmful,” and urging members of Congress to instead swap in language such as “decision” and “safe, legal, and accessible.” At this moment, with fundamental rights under attack, changing commonly understood labels that tens of millions of Americans identify with, such as “pro-choice,” would be like trying to rename the Titanic — as it sinks.
Most Americans don’t walk around every day calling themselves “pro-decision,” nor do they lament that abortions are too rare. Anyone who supports a woman’s right to choose should be welcomed with open arms into the movement to protect it — regardless of what terminology they use. But when we engage in unintelligible activist-speak, we not only confuse people who share our views, but we also have the potential to alienate them.”
Let’s not make that mistake. To go big, stay small.
The other insight I want to share today, is a bit of contrarian spiritual wisdom, that I think applies both to spirituality and to activism, and to the rest of our lives as well.
We’re often told, in spiritual teachings, to live in the moment.
That’s good advice. Stay in the here and now. Don’t carry your past hurts and pains and shame and regrets into your present experience. Let it go.
And don’t worry about the future, either. Don’t fill yourself with anxiety for what might happen. Don’t postpone the life you have today because you’re focused on a fantasy life you might have in the future.
The spiritual question is, “What’s alive in you right now? That should fill your mind and heart.
It’s good advice.
But it’s not enough. Because effective change works requires holding on to a picture of the world we want to see when our work is successful. Yes, we must do our work in the present, but we have to have a vision to guide us. We have to have a goal in mind, and we have to order our work along a path that step by step points toward that goal. If we’re only ever looking at the spot beneath our feet, we’ll never get anywhere else.
To be agents of change, we can’t live only in the present, our hearts and minds must live in the future, too. We need to embrace that future place of equity, peace, liberty, and justice for all. We have to not lay buried under the oppression, despair and anger of the present world, but let our spirits live in the hope and the dream of the future world to come.
As James Baldwin writes:
For nothing is fixed,
Forever, forever, forever,
It is not fixed;
The earth is always shifting,
The light is always changing,
The sea does not cease to grind down rock.
Generations do not cease to be born,
And we are responsible to them
Because we are the only witnesses they have.
Our faith responsibility is not only to ourselves, but to the future generations. We must witness to them, see the future as alive and as valuable as today. If we can’t imagine the future generations, and feel them, and know them, then we cannot live for them.
Yes, we do our living in the present, so I’m being a little snarky when I contradict that good spiritual advice to live in the moment, but we must be able to live in a present world that is in community with the future world. So it comes back to community, again.
We must recognize a broad community that includes the people who will come after us, who are depending on our wise present action. And we must recognize a broad community that includes the people who came before us, who are hoping that we will realize their dreams, and who have lessons to teach us that will make our present work more effective.
As Albert Thelander says in our chalice lighting, bringing past and present together: “We hallow this time together by kindling the lamp of our heritage.”
And in the old Quaker Hymn, “How Can I Keep from Singing!” there’s a fourth verse, that wasn’t in the video we listened to earlier, but was included in a different version that Rich found. A fourth verse I’d never heard before. This verse brings the present and the future together beautifully, and marries activism to music:
I lift my eyes the clouds grow thin, I see the blue above it.
And day by day this pathway smooths, since first I learned to love it
The hope of peace makes fresh my heart, a fountain ever springing
For those I love and all we are, how can I keep from singing?