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?

Am tired of hearing ‘the language of reverence’ — it was the foreign language of my youth and is a foreign language in english translation now. While foreign languages are valuable for thinking in different ways and introducing new concepts, ‘the language of reverence’ feels so false to me, so deceitful as a thinking person who tries to say what he means and mean what he says, that i avoid it — ‘the language of reverence’ — when i can. Like knowing traffic is stopped on the freeway and taking the other very functioning city roads, i get to where i’m going without using the christomystic words that current pop UUism is pushing to the silent, listening bodies on sunday mornings, trying to be Nearer your Childhood Christianity to thee.

The pop UU lexicon starts with the word ‘church’, progresses through ‘faith’ ‘reverend’, ‘sanctuary’, and various other word leftovers. Nieuwejaar‘s 2012 “Vocabulary of Reverence” for UUs includes God, Faith, Hope, Love, Covenant, Doctrine, Sacrament, Prayer, Sanctuary, Sin, Atonement, Blessing, Grace, Mercy, Salvation, Holy & Soul. She and others who promote this Extra Light Christianity for UUs apparently miss the object of theistic affection, love the mysticism of euro-american religion, and support the classism inherent in all UU god-talk in which clergy define the terms of engagement with laity.

The problem with ‘the language of reverence’ is that it’s not a shared language among UUs. It’s promoted by the clergy class, tolerated by the laity, and rejected by humanists. This christomystic lexicon validates Christianity as the privileged language in a denomination that is currently paying lip-service to multiculturalism and cultural relativism, and losing religion’s cultural relevance war to the Nones.