hUUman

Peter Bowden at UU Growth Lab asks “How are we as Unitarian Universalists and as UU congregations called to show up in response to Ferguson?”

my response: stop the ‘Privileged Brightly Colored White Religious Leaders Go Slumming aka Visit a Black Hotspot’ meme. give up the White Christian Clergy Privilege.
copy black & brown resistance.
Resist.
get stopped by the police in your car, roll the window down an inch, tell the cop you fear for your life, deny them search, then fear for your life & do only what’s required by law. get arrested in a real way on your own real unplanned worst time.
live it. don’t fake it.

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resistance is the secret of joy
– Alice Walker

from Tom Schade’s blog ‘The Lively Tradition’, “writing about Unitarian Universalism’s Public Ministry and Public Theology. Standing at the intersection of UUism and the history of the present. Also, by necessity, UU growth.”, www.tomschade.com/2014/10/why-no-national-uu-call-to-ferguson.html

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ps. what else you can do:
use your own funds to send a black or brown member of your
congregation, or a neighboring congregation, to go to Ferguson.
give hir your own clerical collar & stole to wear there to promote
‘the priesthood of all believers’ & class equity.

at 58 i have experienced the crest of life’s hill and am feeling the pull, the increased gravity, of the downward slope. my body’s metabolism has kicked over into lower gear, and i wish my dad&mom, and all my ancestors & relatives, had written down more things for us kids to mull over as we got older. so i write here, hoping the internet will be a better, easier library for my kids & nieces&nephews to access these little radical ideas when their writer is gone in twenty years or so.  … knowing that if i don’t say it now, it will forever remain unsaid. at least by me, here, now.

this is also both a more accessible outlet than facebook, especially for UUs who don’t go that way, and more private & less offensive than engaging friends & family at ‘church’ & ‘back home’ every time we meet. this way i can play nice in meat space, and verbalize here in virtual reality, where the two forms rarely meet. (inadvertent pun noted;)

i’d say it differently, but the end is the same.
so if we humanists, freethinkers, atheists & agnostics are faith-less,
rejecting (or logically barred from) any place in the larger “faith community”, and reject any patronistic language like ‘redemption’,
– where can we find that “culture of encounter” that Francis promotes?
and if it’s there, – what would be different from the current exchange of taunts that would make a faithless+faith encounter worth hanging around for?

and especially being UU & faithless, – when do we start acting up & challenging UUAism’s untruthful inclusion of UUism in ‘the community of faith’?  or do we not get a say in how our paid leaders represent the payers?

attribution:  don’t know who drew the stick characters (and i slightly modified the cartoon by decreasing the horizontal space between characters & the vertical space between the characters & text), but found the line on twitter:
NoDogma13 ‏@DDiamond13: I didn’t “lose my faith”. I threw it the fuck away. #atheism · 22 Apr 2013
& Jen & Juice @Cheeto_Breath I didn’t “lose” my faith, I threw it the fuck away! · 25 May 2013

The irony: a pic of sexists&classists (clergy) against racists.
There can be no real religious egalitarian movement as long as clergy/laity classism is defended as natural, with clergy as the natural upper ruling/leading class of religion. Sheep: why do you praise your shepherds?