Good News Is Not No News
Rev. Sarah Person

“Where have you been all my life?” How many of us have said that, or heard that from other newcomers to Unitarian Universalism? For a faith that has been around for centuries, we have become a well-kept secret. This church was established in 1821. My home church in Dedham Massachusetts celebrated its 300th a few years ago. Of course, in Massachusetts you won’t find a street sign for the major thoroughfare you are on; the unspoken reason being that if you don’t know where you are you shouldn’t be here.

Are we sending the same message to others? Are we sending the message that if people don’t know about us, they probably wouldn’t fit here? Nowadays, many of our newcomers have to find us on the internet. We have become a small but mighty influential force for truth and justice in the world. Today, I want to talk about being small. If we do not grow, we will lose the power of our voices to offer truth, compassion and justice in a world that sorely needs us.

Rev. Jan and I have been exploring what it means to live out our faith, and why it can be difficult at times, and yet why it is so important in these difficult times.  Newcomers comprise most of our denomination around the world today. Why, then, is it so difficult for us to reach out to them? If they come to church with us, will they find something that relates to their lives? This is a hard question with hard answers.

I am a UU American Princess. Like most of our number since before the ‘70s; I am white European American, liberal, middle class, as educated as I’ll ever want to be, with a tendency toward humanism. I wasn’t really aware that I was a UU American Princess for a long, long time. I now know I am, and I’ve become uncomfortably aware:

I can if I wish attend a worship service with people of my own race and ethnicity most of the time.

At church and in most walks of my life, I can avoid spending time with people whom I was trained to mistrust and who have learned to mistrust my kind or me.

I can be pretty sure the people I sit next to or live next to will be neutral or pleasant to me.

When I am told about our history, I am shown that people of my color made it what it is.

When I am told about our history, I am not told that people of my color or gender or sexuality were victims of oppression – only about martyrs of my faith.

I can be sure that my children’s RE program will show pictures that testify to the existence of their race.

I can go into any UU church and count on finding the familiar music of my race represented, authors of my race quoted, and the same cookies, crackers, juice and coffee of my cultural traditions during coffee hour.

I can be pretty sure my children’s teachers will tolerate them if they fit school norms; my chief worries about them do not concern matters of race.

I can swear, dress in second hand clothes, or not cooperate in meetings without having people attribute these choices to the bad morals, the poverty, or the illiteracy of my race.

I can speak to a powerful group without putting my race or gender on trial.

I can do well in a challenging situation without being called a credit to my race.

I can remain oblivious of the language and customs of persons of color who constitute the world’s majority without feeling in my culture any penalty for such oblivion.

I can criticize our policy governance and talk about how much I fear its policies and behavior without being seen as a cultural outsider.

I can go home from most meetings feeling somewhat tied in, rather than isolated, out-of-place, outnumbered, unheard, held at a distance or feared.

My culture gives me little fear about ignoring the perspectives and powers of people of other races.

I can expect figurative language and imagery in all parts of worship and church life to testify to experiences of my race.

I have no difficulty finding neighbors in the pews where people approve of my household.

My children are given texts and classes which implicitly support our kind of family unit and do not turn them against my choice of domestic partnership.

I will feel welcomed and normal in the usual walks of worship, social and public life.

Some of you will recognize that I have borrowed from Peggy McIntosh’s “White Privilege: Unpacking the Invisible Knapsack”  to make my point. Her unsettling 1988 paper calls for the privileged to hold themselves accountable for their unintended violations of others. Make no mistake; privilege is a huge, unspoken and invisible violation. In the best of all possible worlds, the days of the UU American Princesses and Princes will be numbered – and I can’t wait.

We have said we want to grow in diversity. We have said we want to reach out to others.  We have said we want to embrace the new. To do this, we have to learn what we take for granted, what we need to give away and what we need to hold on to, what we need to compensate for, and what will make it all worthwhile.

We have seen a surge of interest in our congregation in growing our membership in diversity.  Sharlene and Julio and others have extended an eloquent invitation to join in that effort. This effort is exciting, rewarding and very, very demanding. It may also be the richest, the most sound and satisfying spiritual task before us; because we have good news to share.  We have good news to share with others. “What we give heals and transforms our world,” says Naomi King.  And somehow our songs, or readings, or faith language or cookies and coffee are less important than that one unassailable fact.  And yet, we have not offered our good news – in fact, the idea of proselytizing makes us itch.  Instead, we offer no news.  Others have to work hard to find us. And we are suffering for it.

We have good news to share, good comfort to offer and good values to celebrate. There are people who need the chance to embrace them with us; and we need the chance to be transformed and brought to greater comforts and deeper values. Think of it as company on the journey; company with their own songs, and stories and language and food that will enrich our journey.  But first, we have to unstop our ears, open our eyes, and unclench our grasp of the familiar.

Last week, Rev. Jan told us how to begin the deep reflective soul work of orienting ourselves to the “other.”  She said:

Looking beyond difference
can be harder than most of us want to admit.
We might accept difference intellectually,
as the “right thing to do”
but we remain stuck in “us versus them” thinking
until we have done the soul work
of looking beyond our differences
to see another human in need of heat, touch, breath,
to see someone who, like us,
needs understanding, kindness and love.

The “roots of justice” she said, “are in the practice of kindness.”      

The privileged are carefully taught not to recognize privilege. Insiders are unconscious, oblivious, ignorant and arrogant of the life circumstances of those on the margins of their own circle. This woeful state is invisible to the insiders. The burden of privilege is to repeatedly hurt another all unaware. The burden of privilege is to make a scourge out of kindness. When we assume we are the norm, we are not kind. When we assume that others want to be like us, to worship like us, we are not kind. When we assume that different cultures and values are somehow less attractive and meaningful than ours, we are not kind. And, my friends, we miss out on so much when we lose that kinship with difference.  If you are willing, we can help one another do this soul work. It takes time, great understanding and patience. We can do this together, with friends among us to lead us. 

How do you feel? Satisfied? Curious? How will you feel if and when you begin to learn you have been unkind? Guilty? Irritated? How will you feel if we begin the conversations around changing what we experience on a Sunday morning and a weekday evening? You might feel afraid that you will lose your sense that this is your church, your home, your comfort. You might feel afraid that we are promising that the music and the message will change and will not relate to you. I ask not that you not be afraid, but to set aside your fear and open up your heart. Whatever we do, we will take time and we will do it together; with all of our voices and hearts to the task.

The message we carry as a people of faith can be told with different music, with different words of reverence and with different scriptures of the spirit and still be the same message.  As long as we do so with honor and respect, these differences can only enrich us. The message we carry offers comfort and meaning to those of us who are not UU American Princes and Princesses: to those of us who are gay, lesbian, bisexual, or transgender; to those of us who are people of color; to those of us who are physically or mentally challenged; to those of us who are working class and those who are not college educated; to our young adults and our youth. We want to do everything in our power to carry that message in the clearest and most passionate way we can.

Author and teacher Parker Palmer frames teaching in the same language of love and honesty that I frame ministry. “To teach” he says, “is to create a space in which the community of truth is practiced.” The community of truth. What will it take for us to create a community of truth in which all of us may live and flourish? A community of truth in which the center expands to embrace the margins. What keeps us from doing so? Palmer asks us to boldly name our fear: “The sequence of fears begins in the fear of diversity, leads to the fear of conflict, then the fear of losing identity, and the final fear of the challenge to change our lives. Knowing is always communal. Knowing is a human way to seek relationship, to have encounters and exchanges that will alter us.” Take heart, Palmer says; it is possible to come to great understandings as a beloved community when we have overcome our fear of diversity and difference. “Truth,” he says, “is the eternal conversation about things that matter, conducted with passion and discipline. The community of truth includes a transcendent dimension of truth-knowing and truth-telling…” When we open ourselves to diversity, we open ourselves to an eternal conversation of truth knowing and truth telling. And isn’t that what church is all about?

When the members of Fox Valley Unitarian Universalist church in Appleton Wisconsin looked into the heart of their congregation and decided to grow, the first demand they made of each other was “Don’t we have an obligation to the people who haven’t yet found us?” In fourteen years they quadrupled in size. When we asked you what brought you to the Universalist Church, you answered “I finally found a home.” Our home is big and we can build it bigger yet.

The UU American Princess is dead, long live the rainbow people.

The Universalist Church
West Hartford CT
January 17, 2010

[1] Peggy McIntosh, excerpted from Working Paper 189. "White Privilege and Male Privilege: A Personal Account of Coming To See Correspondences through Work in Women's Studies" (1988), by Peggy McIntosh; available for $4.00 from the Wellesley  College Center for Research on Women
[1] Ibid, page 1.
[1] The Courage to Teach: Exploring the Inner Landscape of a Teacher's Life, by Parker Palmer, San Francisco, Jossey-Bass, 1998.