An Orientation of the Heart

Reverend Janet Parsons

Gloucester UU Church

February 14, 2021

 

“We will rebuild, reconcile, and recover.

And every known nook of our nation and every corner called our country,

our people diverse and beautiful, will emerge battered and beautiful.”   (Amanda Gorman, “The Hill We Climb”)

 

It’s been another hard week for our country.  This week, we watched and listened to testimony in the Senate impeachment trial, to determine whether the former president incited a violent attack on the U.S. Capitol on January 6 in order to disrupt the vote to certify the presidential election results.  The stark images of violence and the hate-filled language have been difficult for us to bear.  It was worse than we knew. We are feeling battered, but not beautiful.

And of course, yesterday, the former president was acquitted of wrongdoing.  We will have to own that failure of ethics and courage for the rest of our history.

“We will rebuild, reconcile, and recover,” said the young poet, Amanda Gorman.

May it be so. But how?

It has proven to be a difficult month to talk about Beloved Community, the aspiration of creating heaven here on earth.  It feels elusive, unrealistic, in this moment. But it is our work, and we are not excused because the forces who would tear down our country have made it feel more distant. Rather, it is even more imperative that we learn all we can; learn how to turn ourselves, to orient ourselves, toward the spiritual discipline that Beloved Community represents. And certainly, we have learned much about what the opposite of Beloved Community looks like: the selfishness; the need to grasp and hold onto personal privileges and perceived rights; the need to silence others, to prevent them from flourishing, to keep them from assuming their rightful place in our society; the white supremacy. The hatred. We saw the opposite of Beloved Community in the story of the Tulsa race massacre, where the fabric of a thriving community was ripped to shreds by hatred.

To fight that hatred is a lifelong act of spiritual discipline.  As we heard in our second reading, Beloved Community is nothing less than a way of looking at the world, and our own place in it.  It is ultimately the hope that if all people could orient themselves toward the highest form of love, which is called agape – toward unconditional love, toward compassion – then we would find ourselves able to create heaven here on earth, during our human lifetimes.

Since the 1960’s Civil Rights Movement, we have associated the vision of Beloved Community very strongly with Dr. Martin Luther King.  He, in turn, absorbed the concept from philosopher Josiah Royce and Mohandas Gandhi.  Their writings honed his philosophy of agape as well as non-violent protest and resistance. This orientation, these philosophies were then carried forward and articulated by the late Representative John Lewis throughout his life.

In looking more closely at the concept of Beloved Community in recent weeks, I have been struck by the role of the Black church in fostering this transformative way of looking at the world. King was able to root Beloved Community in philosophy and give it a vocabulary, but the love, the agape, has been a long-standing hallmark of the Black church.

Theologian and civil rights activist Ruby Sales talks about the legacy of what she calls the black folk church.  She said, “ I’m talking about a religion that came out of ordinary folk. And I’m also talking about a religion that began during enslavement, in the fields of America. It was a religion that offered an alternative view of God from the view of God that empire gave us. It was that kind of Beloved Community vision; it was a vision of justice. And it was also a vision that predicated itself on a very strong sense of agape, that even was able — as Martin Luther King would say — was able to find the humanity in people who were slave owners. And it was also a theology of resistance, a theology of reaffirmation. ‘I might be a slave, but I’m somebody.’ It was a theology of hope.”  (On Being, interview with Krista Tippett, https://onbeing.org/programs/ruby-sales-where-does-it-hurt/)

Ruby Sales went on to talk about how deeply ingrained this religious discipline was: how even at a young age she knew all the songs and spirituals by heart.  “I’m gonna lay down my sword and shield, down by the riverside…and study war no more.”  There was always the message of non-violence, and an abiding message that all were loved and worthy of love. The word ‘hate’ simply was not in their vocabulary.  She went on to explain, “I grew up in the heart of Southern apartheid. And I’m not saying that I didn’t realize that it existed, but our parents were spiritual geniuses who created a world and a language where the notion that I was inadequate or inferior or less-than never touched my consciousness.”  (Ibid.)

This is a description of extraordinary spiritual discipline; the creation of Beloved Community within themselves, absorbed through song and faith, and parental love.  They absorbed the idea of agape in their everyday lives.

Those of us who were not raised in such a tradition must ask: how do we create this spiritual discipline for ourselves? 

Orienting our hearts toward Beloved Community will take a very different form for Unitarian Universalists than for southern African Americans.  And often the discipline will not be based solely in religious belief or practice.  But certainly we can achieve the necessary spiritual discipline to help create heaven here on earth if we put our minds and hearts into a few practices.

First, let’s work to keep our Unitarian Universalist principles close to our hearts.  Learn them.  Learn to ask yourself what the principles are calling you to do.  This is hard work.  How does our belief in the inherent worth and dignity of every person call us to respond to the immigration crisis?  When we acknowledge the interdependent web of all existence, what actions do we take to address the climate crisis? How, in the wake of the disaster that has engulfed our national government, do we work to strengthen and uphold democracy, as our fifth principle asks of us?

Taken all together, our Principles remind us of our Universalist theology that no one is to be left out, and every human endeavor, in fact, every life-sustaining endeavor, is worthy of our care and effort.  Measure your daily thoughts and actions against our principles. That is a tall order. 

Unitarian Universalists are considering adding an eighth principle.  It reads like this:  “We…covenant to affirm and promote: journeying toward spiritual wholeness by working to build a diverse multicultural Beloved Community by our actions that accountably dismantle racism and other oppressions in ourselves and our institutions.”

 

How do we more actively fight white supremacy?  We can no longer deny its presence, after the events of the past few years, from the rally in Charlottesville to the violence in the Capitol building.

 

If the lesson today is that we are not trying to build a physical community, but a spiritual one, then we must begin by orienting our hearts, as Victoria Safford put it. Beloved Community, she wrote, “is a disciplined understanding of your own relationship to other people, to everyone else on the planet, to every living thing.”   (Victoria Safford, “Walking with the Wind,” sermon, January 9, 2020.)

 

To understand our relationships with one another, we have to learn about each other.  We must commit to first, becoming curious about the lives of others; their hopes, dreams, and challenges.  We must commit to recognizing their humanity; not so that we can say, ‘oh, they are just like us,’ but so that we can say that we are approaching being able to see them with empathy and compassion.

 

We are living in a time of unprecedented access to the stories and thoughts of people who we might struggle to ever meet in person.  Let your curiosity guide you to books, lectures on line, movies, plays, music.  Find your way in to the learning and the conversation. Allow yourself and your thinking to be changed.

 

To stay curious requires spiritual discipline.  Inevitably we will encounter ideas that will make us uncomfortable, as we search our own hearts for traces of white supremacist thinking.

How well can you stay with your discomfort?  Will you turn away, or will you sit still and keep learning?  To be willing to be uncomfortable so that others can be heard requires discipline, and courage.

 

Curiosity requires that we practice listening more than we speak.  Are you ready to allow other voices to be heard?  To take a back seat, to allow others room at the center of the dialogue?

 

Remember to keep before you the big picture.  What we are called to do, to create the Beloved Community, is to hold on to a vision of justice and inclusiveness for all.  Along the way, we will all make mistakes. The question becomes, will we let go of the mistakes in order to hold on to the vision, or will we allow errors and discomforts to deter us from achieving Beloved Community?  Keeping the vision before us will call for spiritual discipline.

 

My friends, in the last four years, and especially in the last few weeks, we have been shown what can happen if we do not actively rise to this moment and develop the discipline – religious, or spiritual, or intellectual – to work for a vision of a world where all are equally enabled to flourish, where we can live in peace.  We have been shown a potential future ravaged by hatred and violence. We are at a crossroads.  What will we do?  Do we have the courage to question, to confront, to resist, to be guided by agape – unconditional, compassionate love?  As Unitarian Universalists, do we have any other way to be?

 

Our poem, The Hill We Climb, ends with these words:

 

“For there is always light, if only we’re brave enough to see it.

If only we’re brave enough to be it.”

 

Have courage. Be the light.

 

Blessed Be,

Amen.

 

Reading                           Rev. Victoria Safford

 

The Beloved Community [is] not a goal or destination, and it was not any kind of idealistic, Christian utopian dream, but instead a way of being – spiritually, politically, economically, emotionally, intellectually. Beloved Community is an attitude, an orientation of the heart; it’s a disciplined understanding of your own relationship to other people, to everyone else on the planet, to every living thing. If you are religious, this is a religious discipline, and it goes by many names. If you are seeking spiritual wholeness, spiritual balance, it is a spiritual discipline. If you are an ethical humanist, it is a deliberate moral stance. It is a daily practice, a spiritual politics, that requires inclusivity, nonviolence, and the hard discipline of radical hospitality. It requires love, agape.  Of all the legacies that Dr. King bequeathed to us, including legislation, including the Voting Rights Act, including the dismantling of legal segregation, including so many tangible advances, I think the construct of Beloved Community may prove in time, over the long arc of time, to be the most radical, durable and transformative.”  (from her sermon “Walking with the Wind,” 1/19/20.)