Too much of our activism is “re-activism”. We’re responding with sorrow or outrage to the latest incident. That sort of public emotional catharsis has its place, but we should be working pro-actively, too. We need to set our own vision, map out our strategy, and recognize that big goals require sustained effort.
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We’ve been talking this year about the three spiritual questions of Identity, Meaning, and Purpose: Who am I, Why does it matter, and What should I do?
As we focus now on the third of those question, “What should I do?” we address the question of purpose.
What should I do? What should we all do?
If I know who I am (the question of identity) and I know why my life matters (the question of meaning) then how should I live? If my goal is wisdom, or joy, or beauty, or order, or whatever you have identified as the ultimate for you (and there is more than one ultimate, as we know), how should I live my life? If my life’s meaning comes from being related to a larger goal of creation, how should I respond to the far-off call of the divine voice urging me in a particular direction? What should I do?
And if we know who we are as a community (our community identity), and we know the values that gather and shape our community (the meaning of this community), then how should we work together toward the goals we seek? How should we align our congregation with the cosmic flow toward the ultimates? If we are here to help the divine spirit of creation achieve its purpose, then how should we respond? What should we do?
As I said last week, a church is gathered to do many things. That’s the way of churches. People join a church to do many things: education for their children, hoping to make some new friends, to learn something, to connect with the transcendent. Maybe they’re going through a tough time and are looking for some spiritual care, or just some kindness. Maybe they’re here because they have love to give and are looking for a place to share it. Some are here just because being a Unitarian Universalist is part of who they are and they couldn’t imagine not belonging to the local UU church.
For some people, a UU church is a place to gather with like-minded people to harness our collective power in the service of some social justice goal: to care for persons beyond our church community, to relieve human suffering, to make the world more just. As we say in our sixth principle, we share “the goal of world community with peace, liberty, and justice for all.”
The church needs to be all those things and more for the varied people and the varied reasons they choose to join us. That’s our purpose, multiple, not singular.
What I have been doing for the last few weeks, and will for a few more weeks to come, is to offer, whatever purpose you’re pursuing, some suggestions about how to achieve it successfully.
Because our purposes are so varied, I can’t answer for you, what you should do. So instead, I switched the question to, “Whatever you think you should be doing, how best to do it?”
These strategies come from my own experience with some of the big social change work that I’ve been involved with: care and treatment for people with HIV/AIDS, passing the Americans with Disability Act, marriage equality, a living wage. But, I think these strategies are helpful whatever your goal. Whether it’s social change on a global, or national scale, or a local issue, or even if the change you seek is your own personal growth, or spiritual growth, I think these steps are good advice.
First, the foundation, I think, for any kind of healthy, positive change toward the good, the true, and the beautiful, whether in our own persons, or in the larger world, is building community.
That’s why I started with a sermon about the importance of building community, a lesson I learned from watching my mother and father meet in our livingroom with the neighborhood property owner’s association, and with their involvement at their church.
By the way, you know my mother died a year and a half ago, but my father is still alive, and still very connected to his community. And now that he’s living alone, those connections that he made and nurtured to his neighbors, and his church are more valuable than ever.
And then, earlier this week, my dad, who turned 91 last month, told us that he has agreed to serve on the board of his local Kiwanis club: a two-year term.
God bless him.
He’s still a powerful example to me of the importance of connection to community, for the support we all need, and for the life of purpose we all need.
So whether you’re trying to change the world, or merely change yourself, build your community.
As Neibuhr says, “Nothing we do, however virtuous, can be accomplished alone; therefore, we are saved by love.”
Then, last week I advised that our communities can be quite broad if we allow ourself to work with anyone who wants to work with us on a narrowly defined, shared goal, and not turn away helpers who disagree with us about something else.
Certainly my father’s Kiwanis club in rural, western, North Carolina, is going to include a lot of people who disagree with my father’s liberal politics. This is the district that elected Mark Meadows and Madison Cawthorn, after all. But he’s willing to serve on the board, and they elected him, because the Kiwanis club works on service projects in the local community they all care about. When they’re building a playground that includes equipment specifically designed to accommodate children of all abilities, or collecting used eyeglasses to send to a Doctors Without Borders group in Honduras, what does it matter who you voted for?
As Neibuhr says, “No virtuous act is quite as virtuous from the standpoint of our friend or foe as from our own; therefore, we are saved by the final form of love which is forgiveness.”
This week, I want to offer the strategy that, whatever change work you want to do, begin at the end.
Begin at the end means, begin your work with the end in mind.
Begin, because you have a goal, and work toward that goal.
Begin because there’s something you want to achieve. Work on your agenda, rather than blocking some one else’s agenda. Play offense, not defense. Be an activist, not a re-activist.
Too often, I fear, today’s activists are attracted to the spectacle of social justice protest, not the goal of social change. We like the anger. We like the shouting. We like the outrage, the shaking fist, and the marching shoulder to shoulder with people who completely agree with us. But the longer, quieter work of achieving a social goal isn’t so attractive.
Sure, the protest has a goal. We know why we’re marching. We can write it on a sign. But once the march is over, what have we done? Are we closer to achieving our purpose? Once we’ve brought the sign home, or dropped it in the trash as soon as we left the march, what’s next?
It’s activism for the Twitter age. Activism that’s about shouting our outrage into the void, but not about the actual work of social change, which requires meeting with people who aren’t already convinced, persuading them, and passing legislation.
Because I live in downtown Los Angeles, just two blocks from the LAPD headquarters and three blocks from City Hall, I see a lot of protests, for a lot of causes. It’s not that I doubt anyone’s commitment to the goals. But sometimes it seems as though having the march is the goal because that’s as far as we get. And the steps beyond the march, to actually imagining a solution to the problem, creating the policy, convincing the law-makers, finding the funding, passing the legislation, implementing the new law and holding people accountable to it, so that the purpose of actually relieving the suffering of human persons can be reached, those further steps are never traveled.
That goal is too far away. Our outrage can’t sustain our work beyond the protest march. We’re responding rather than follow our vision. We haven’t begun with the end in mind. Instead, we see only the first, closest step. We’re so angry, let’s grab a megaphone and shout on the steps of city hall. But once we take that step, our resolve flags and we call it quits, while continuing to lament that the world doesn’t ever seem to change.
Social change is hard.
As Ghandhi said:
“A principle is a principle, and in no case can it be watered down because of our incapacity to live it in practice. We have to strive to achieve it, and the striving should be conscious, deliberate and hard.”
Social change is hard. It requires tenacity, not merely a spurt of anger. It requires patience, and strategy. It may even require more work than can be done in a single lifetime. As Niehbuhr says, “Nothing worth doing is completed in our lifetime; therefore, we are saved by hope.”
I was dismayed, as many of you were, I’m sure, by the revelations that came out last fall when a tape-recording was leaked of three of our Los Angeles City Council persons discussing how to preserve their own power in the city redistricting.
Now there’s something inherently corrupt in sitting city council persons having that much influence over drawing the districts that will get them re-elected. But that’s the process we have, so they weren’t doing anything illegal by having that strategy session.
But the scandal was the way the three city council persons talked disparagingly about other city leaders and the citizens of Los Angeles. They laughed while making racist comments and crude jokes. They insulted blacks, and people from central America, and accused a gay city council member of using his adopted son as some kind of a prop to increase his credibility. It was disgusting.
One of the city council persons, Nury Martinez, resigned following the scandal. A second council member, Gil Cedillo, had already lost his seat in an election a few months earlier, so he chose to keep his head down and serve out the last weeks of his term.
But the third council person, Kevin de Leon, who serves the district that includes downtown Los Angeles where I live, refused to resign. He kept his seat and decided to see if he could ride out the controversy. For the next several weeks he avoided any public appearances. He was entirely absent from city council meetings. Other council members stated they would refuse to work with him. Downtown developers also said they would refuse to work with him, another reason that he, a public servant, should have resigned.
But he didn’t.
When he did begin appearing at City Council meetings, he was met, appropriately, with outrage from an organized group of activists who made sure he heard their anger. They disrupted the meetings. De Leon usually was forced to leave the room after only a few minutes.
This continued for weeks. Every City Council meeting began in chaos. Activists were warned and then removed by police officers. Little city work was accomplished. De Leon was effectively silenced.
What didn’t happen, though, was de Leon resigning. Shouting at him, and shutting down the city council meetings wasn’t enough. But that’s all the activist’s had.
Meanwhile, a recall effort was started. A recall is a very difficult project to pull off. It requires gathering an enormous number of signatures in a limited amount of time. It requires great organization, great promotion, great funding, great leadership.
Unfortunately, this recall effort had none of those things. It was started by a woman with no organization, who had already tried to recall de Leon two times previously. And even for this recall she wasn’t motivated by the racist comments on the tape recording, she just didn’t like de Leon’s liberal politics.
So she was manifestly the wrong person to be mounting a recall campaign.
But imagine for a moment, if those committed activists who spent weeks and weeks diligently showing up at every city council meeting ready to show their anger at someone in our community who would speak those kinds of hateful comments and yet claim a seat representing the public on our city council, had taken the passion, and organization, and the commitment of time, they showed in those city council meetings, out in to the street and gathered signatures for the recall campaign?
Was the goal to make sure Kevin de Leon knows we’re angry? Mission accomplished. Or was the goal to get Kevin de Leon out of office?
What if we had begun with the end in mind, rather than simply voicing our present anger?
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’s the question 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 vision of the world we want to see when our work is successful. Not just protest the way things are, but see the way things could be. Yes, we must do our work in the present, but we have to have a goal to guide us. We have to follow a purpose, and we have to order our work along a path that step by step achieves that far purpose. 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.
Though days be dark with storms
And burdens weigh my heart
Though troubles wait at every turn,
I know I can go on.
And though the journey is long.
The destination is near,
So brothers take my hand
And sisters sing my song,
When hope awaits at every turn,
I know we will go on.
When our social justice work is an angry response to the way things are that’s not activism, that’s re-activism. To be activists, whether in social change movements or in our own personal lives, we must be inspired by a vision of our own, a hope that comes from within, a panting desire of our own that sustains us, and sustains our work, “Though days be dark with storms.” And when those storms come, not to be swayed by the wind and the rain of what other people are doing, but stay stuck steadfastly to the street beneath our feet, that takes us to our goal.
Begin with the end in mind, and let that vision carry you there.