Filed under: in between time
Dear readers,
As I am plowing through a final finals, I invite you to watch and reflect upon this video from Tim Wise, a well-known white anti-racist writer, teacher, and activist:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J3Xe1kX7Wsc
I shall return to my research about white liberation theology. Believe me, you will hear plenty about it in our future together.
Have a great week! I am particularly thinking of the UUCFM youth Alison and Josh who are getting ready to bridge into young adulthood!
Cheers, Allison
Filed under: in between time
If we are not teaching our children, who will? If you have not yet seen this film, rent the DVD Jesus Camp. It will light a fire in you to stay focused on being present with our church’s children. This would be another great film to watch and talk about. The trailer for the movie is on Youtube, so check it out:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y_EKHK1C2IE
This past Sunday I preached about children’s faith development and how serving our children is a spiritual practice. Trusting in their own developments and articulations of god/divine/ultimacy is a way of reinvigorating that process in ourselves anew. If you feel a hint of apathy about children or children’s religious education, I highly recommend watching the film Jesus Camp. Some Evangelicals are touching the hearts and minds of small children and, at a very young age, cultivating a socio-political-spiritual identity that, for some, is fulfilling the will of god. For others, this indoctrination is just plain scary. In the meantime, the documentary’s frank and open-minded presentation of these adults and children of faith has me wondering what these folks are doing right that we could also do. Meaning, can we develop within our children a Unitarian Universalist identity while still maintaining openness to the flowering of their own spiritual lives? Can we teach without indoctrinating? Explore without cutting off other paths?
I just saw that in the Fall 2006/winter 2007 issue of Religious Humanism (by the HUUmanists) there is a reflection on this film by Lynn Hunt that is also very insightful.
Filed under: Uncategorized
Félicitations to California for making a move to support same-sex marriage. This ruling, however, still does not provide equal rights that hetero-marrieds enjoy. Though legal marriage is not the be-all, end-all for everyone, imagine what it means to know that when your partner is in the hospital, it is you, not your mother-in-law, who is the next-of-kin. Or that you can file jointly with the Feds. Or that marriage means not having to pay a lawyer to designate power of attorney and all of the things I do not even have to think about as someone in a hetero-marriage.
Opponents call this move an act of judicial activism. Ah, yes, those wild and woolly activist judges. Just what they act upon next? Banning heterosexuality? (ha!)
I am soaring for California! But my heart is heavy for Florida that we should have to waste our collective energy and resources fighting about who loves who. Might it be that it would distract us from addressing the larger economic reality of recession and unprecedented rates of foreclosures and unemployment? Or that the economic stimulus plan is only a band-aid on the gaping and deep wound of America? I am so tired of the divide and conquer game.
But in the mean time, love is love and marriage is a right. Want to do some work together for November?
Filed under: Uncategorized
Welcome to my web log! (blog) I hope that these entries will give you a glimpse into my world and the spirit I bring to my ministry. I write new entries every week, so check out the archives and check in again soon. Looking forward to beginning ministry with UUCFM in the fall!
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My thoughts are traveling across the globe to the natural disasters that have occurred in Myanmar (Burma) and now in China. I was speaking to my maternal grandmother, who was very upset to hear about those presently suffering in China.
How can the Lord let such things happen? she asked.
My grandmother has been Episcopalian for roughly thirty years. Before, she was a Methodist. The reason for the switch is never directly answered, but it seems to have had less to do with theology and more about family politics. At any rate, she has been a practicing Christian all of her life. She says prayers at her bedside every night. No longer able to kneel, she says them in her little twin bed as she lays herself down to sleep.
In her devotion, she still questions her god. Why would her god do or even allow such awful things to happen? I told her that some people don’t believe that god is all-powerful and all-knowing but some believe that god suffers with us in these times of shock and difficulty. The Buddhists simply acknowledge that life is suffering- not in that martyred kind of way, but in a pragmatic way. Yep, life is hard… as well as offering us moments of the sublime.
In mujerista theology, one of the main tenets of this liberation-based thought is that la vida es la lucha. Life is the struggle. But acknowledging the struggle of life does not mean that life is awful. We can celebrate life and take charge of our own lives as much as we can.
In my grandmother’s theology, heaven is where there is no more suffering. For me, the end of suffering is when I will no longer have the sense of being an “I.” I am uncertain as to when this could happen. Perhaps upon death, or perhaps after some moments of reconciliation with a greater reality I would lose my I-consciousness. As it stands as pure speculation, I might only extend my heart to those who are suffering in this world here and now, asking that we all be free from suffering and at peace. I might do even better to go beyond contemplation, get off my zafu pillowed duff, and embody these sentiments in the world. Life may be suffering, but it can also be an active prayer.
And on a completely unrelated note, I have another couple pictures to share of the most recent renegade punk knitting installations I have seen. It seems some love and appreciation has been extended to the bike racks at the Logan Square Blue Line stop. Enjoy!
Filed under: with great rejoicing
Welcome to my web log! (blog) I hope that these entries will give you a glimpse into my world and the spirit I bring to my ministry. I write new entries every week, so check out the archives and check in again soon. Looking forward to beginning ministry with UUCFM in the fall!
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Last night I had the great pleasure of hosting a screening of the film Traces of the Trade. The film is about a white American woman, Katrina Browne, who traces her ancestor’s instrumental roles in the triangle trade. With other close and extended family, she journeys from Bristol, Rhode Island to Ghana then to Cuba to trace the trade.
It is a powerful film which is being supported by our Unitarian Universalist Allies for Racial Equity, an affiliated organization in the UUA that is accountable to DRUUMM (Diverse Revolutionary Unitarian Universalist Ministries), the organization for UU people of color and those who identify as Latina/o or Hispanic.
The family is interviewed during the journey, and one of the women comments about how seeing the reality of what her ancestors did, well…she touches her heart and then cannot speak. I am so appreciative of this film becasue it is thoughtful. Hannah Arendt, in her reflections on Nazi Germany after WWII, laments the thoughlessness of the people. Tirelessly following a skewed logic, the people of Germany participated in genocide. Arendt, in her own processing, begins by calling what the Nazis did a radical evil. But as she understood more and wrote more over the years, she then more aptly called this brand of evil banal.
Over the Atlantic ocean, 11 million Africans were stolen away in ships and 1 million did not survive the journey. Their lives were for the sake of someone’s profit, a profit that still benefits whites today. And we as Unitarian Universalists have a history here. Universalists and Unitarians have a proud history of abolitionists like Theodore Parker and Samuel May. However, we also know that Unitarians, the wealthy elite of Boston, were profiting from the slave trade.
What are the things we are wrapped up in these days that could be a form of banal evil? Back in the times of Katrina Browne’s ancestors, the common working family was a part of this slave trade enterprise by buying coffee and sugar, some scraping together enough cash to buy a share and invest in the trade itself. Take time this week to be thoughtful about the larger systems of which you are part. You can check out more information on the film at www.tracesof thetrade.org
I will get a copy of this film to share when I come in the fall.
Cheers,
Allison
Filed under: Uncategorized
Dear folks,
I changed the title of the blog from “We Make the Road By Walking” to “With Great Rejoicing!” in order to be more inclusive. I was thinking to myself, “Hey now wait a second! Not everybody walks in this world- some of us wheel about!” So, my thanks to all the liberation theology I am reading, which stresses that the language we use shapes what is normative in our culture (who really likes normative anyway?).
The previous blog title used walking as a metaphor, from Antonio Machado’s ”Proverbios y cantares XXIX” in Campos de Castilla.
Wanderer, your footsteps are
the road, and nothing more;
wanderer, there is no road,
the road is made by walking.
By walking one makes the road,
and upon glancing behind
one sees the path
that never will be trod again.
Wanderer, there is no road–
Only wakes upon the sea.
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Caminante, son tus huellas
el camino, y nada más;
caminante, no hay camino,
se hace camino al andar.
Al andar se hace camino,
y al volver la vista atrás
se ve la senda que nunca
se ha de volver a pisar.
Caminante, no hay camino,
sino estelas en la mar.
The idea is that we are in a process that is utterly mysterious- so mysterious that the road is not even a road, it is the unfathomable sea tracked by our wake. Postmodern liberation theologians tell me that, even though this is a beautiful metaphor, I do better by my brothers and sisters by being more accessible with my language. So, change it is!
