The Spiritual Journey

As a seminary student, I felt inadequate reading theology books so dense I could barely complete my assigned reading. I felt like the only student who couldn't sit still in meditation class. How could I get anywhere on my spiritual journey if I couldn’t sit quietly in meditation? If I couldn’t get through Tillich’s Systematic Theology? I got the impression that the spiritual journey was like the New York Marathon- thousands of people training and racing, and a few elite winners.

But something about this paradigm fundamentally does not harmonize with the most basic Universalist teaching- that all people will eventually be reunited with God. Or as I like to say - if there is a God, she loves everyone. Think of how diverse humanity is: folks who have been to school and haven’t. Folks who run marathons and folks who can’t walk. Eventually it dawned on me- whatever the spiritual journey might be, at its core it must be so simple that even I could do it. What kind of cruel God would require obstacles and hurdles that excluded even a single person from participating in the journey? I began to look at the spiritual journey in a different way. Instead of wondering how I could win the spirituality Super Bowl, I began to ask “what is the spiritual journey we are already all on?”

If you are part of an exclusively theist community, the question has an easy answer; the journey is the spirit’s desire to be closer to god, to return to god. But Unitarian Universalists are very diverse theologically. We are Atheists, Agnostics and Theists, We are Humanists, Christians, Jews, Buddhists and Pagans. What kind of spiritual journey could include all of us?

Recently I went to visit a friend and noticed that her beautiful oriental rug was gone. It turns out, hidden under the bookcases moths had been gradually eating away at it for years. Professional rug cleaners told her the wool rug was irreparably damaged, and that she should look now to saving the smaller wool rugs she had around the house. This shook her. These beautiful rugs she had loved were being silently eaten away, were un-salvageable. She said “have you ever noticed how often moths are mentioned in scripture?” I looked it up myself when I got home. For example, the book of Matthew says: "Do not store up for yourselves treasures on earth, where moth and rust destroy, and where thieves break in and steal.” One way of looking at the spiritual journey is this simple- is there anything that neither rust nor moths can destroy, that thieves cannot steal? [Matthew 6:19]

And so we look inside ourselves, inside our lives, to see past our small, separate self, to see if there is something larger there. Many religious traditions talk about this journey from the individual to something larger of which we are only a part. In the Western psychological tradition, Jung talked about moving from the ego to the Self. The separate self, the ego is the part of us that believes that we are doing this on our own. Life is a problem to be fixed, a race to be run, and our ego is going to fix it all by itself. The spiritual traditions hint that when we are able to let go of our ego’s grasping, we realize that we are not separate at all, that we are inexorably connected to something larger than ourselves.

All the paths in the classical traditions begin with observing ethical precepts. An early meditation teacher of mine said this is particularly critical if we are trying to grow spiritually, not just it helps us create a better world, and live a meaningful life, but because meditation can be very painful when your conscience is troubled, when your life is out of alignment. So living an ethical, compassionate life is recommended for everyone on the journey, and if that’s your only spiritual practice, that is plenty to work on and learn from.

For folks who want more, there are many paths that have been described (Useful resources include Teresa of Avila's Interior Castle, or Caroline Myss's modern interpretation thereof, Entering the Castle, Fowler's Stages of Faith, and Huston Smith's section of World Religions under Hinduism "Four Paths tot he Goal". ) But the two most common paths are work and love.

Our society values work very highly, and specifically our culture values material success- a large salary, a prestigious job title. The Buddhist precept of “right livelihood” encourages us “ to engage in compassionate activity, and to make [our] living in a way that does not cause harm and that is ethically positive.’[i] At the most elemental level, this involves choosing an ethical type of work- Assassin, for example, that’s an easy one to rule out. But even if we have chosen work in an ethical field, whether paid or unpaid, we must continue to ask -- do we do our work each day in an ethical, honest, compassionate way?

But the we apply the moth test. Nothing we build will last forever. Even the great pyramids, the great Empires crumble. The gardens we plant will be reclaimed by nature if we leave them be. No matter how many times we help with the backpack program, there will still be hungry kids. According to Huston Smith, the Hindu practice of Karma yoga is not, as we often say in the west, about doing kind and generous acts, but in fact is about doing any kind of work with a detachment from the outcomes. Can we build the new building with equanimity knowing that it will one day crumble? Can we fill the backpacks knowing we have not cured hunger? Can we write that report our boss asked for knowing that no one is ever actually going to read it? The Hindu scripture the Bhagavad-Gita (IV:1) says: “he who does the task dictated by duty caring nothing for the fruit of action, he is a yogi”

Whenever we experience a setback in our work, it is a huge blow to the ego. We feel like we played the game of life and we lost. At the moment when we lose a job, or don’t get into the college we most wanted, our simply have a low turnout at the event we planned, this is a turning point on our journey inviting us to ask “what is the meaning of my life when my plan is shredded and torn, when I have not achieved in my work what I hoped to achieve? Am I more than my work and my accomplishments?”

So the path of karma yoga is not to finally end hunger, but to loosen the grasp of the ego, and find the Self that is unchanging whether or not they are ever completed. What feels like a failure to the ego, is an opening for the soul, a separation between what we achieve and the larger nature of ourselves. Even in profound disappointment, in the discomfort of uncertainty and not being in control, it can be such a relief to see that I am not my work, I am not my job or my bank account, I am something much more expansive. And each time we put our hands to a task, we are all on that journey.

Love is another path all of us take just by being humans. Every tradition I have studied acknowledges that love is also one of the best and most direct paths on the spiritual journey. Love is a very direct way of opening to something larger than ourselves. But once again, the question is: how do we loosen the grip of the ego which gets attached to individuals and to outcomes? I’m reminded of the tears and drama of the dances I attended in High school- who had asked who to dance, which couples had broken up, which friendships were true. I feel like now in midlife I’m not as overwhelmed by this drama, but I still want to be loved, and the ego wants to be loved by a specific person in a specific way, so the spiritual journey invites us to ask, can we give love away without predetermining what we want in return?

That’s easy compared to the hardest challenge in this human life; everything we love we will lose. Losing someone we love can be excruciating. Some of us have been hurt so badly that we have reinforced the walls of the ego, of the separate self, looking for a safety from that pain by breaking or numbing ourselves to our connection to the web of life. But the spiritual path of the heart invites us to stay open and awake. Sometimes even in the deepest grief, especially in our deep grief, we touch a deeper love- The Buddhists call this Bodhicitta the “kinship of the suffering of others”[ii]. Even when our hearts are broken, we learn on this journey that even without that dear one, we still are, and we are not alone. This is enough practice for a lifetime.

But some folks really want to their spiritual journey to be at the center of their lives, they want to be more conscious and intentional about their spiritual growth. We can study meditation, prayer, we can study the subtle currents of energy that move in our bodies and in the world, there is a huge richness of diverse practices. Many folks start on this conscious path of spiritual practice and awakening because they are in pain, and they want the pain to be taken away. They want to rise up and out of the discomfort of ordinary life. We meditate to find peace. We pray to find comfort. And I will tell you from my own meditation practice, that sometimes there is peace. And sometimes there is comfort. But not always. So if spiritual practices don’t always make you feel good, what is the point?

Even on this intentionally spiritual path, the end is the same- to relax the grasping of ego. A Buddhist teacher I studied with in seminary shared with us a text that included a list of powers that could be gained with certain meditations, powers we might raise our eyebrows at in the skeptical rational tradition- for example in the Theravadan school of Buddhism adepts are taught that through the practice of the akasa-kasina one “is able to discover objects that are concealed, … see into the midst of rocks and of the earth, penetrate into them and create space therein and pass through walls and other solid masses.” [Buddhist meditation p. 164] When we gathered in class after that assigned reading we UU students asked our teacher with some skepticism what he thought of that- he said the development of such powers was a distraction from the true goal of enlightenment, or dissolving the separate self into the larger consciousness. It’s just as easy for the ego to be hooked by the idea of passing through walls as it is to be hooked by more ordinary goals.

Let’s take something more familiar to UUs. For folks who have had a numinous glimpse of something beyond ourselves, of peace, of love, the ego immediately clings to the experience, doesn’t want to let it go, and asks “how can I get it back” when it is gone. The Christian mystics call these moments of beauty and peace and grace “consolations” and the tradition is clear that these are not the goal of the journey. They can be welcomed, and cherished, but held loosely, because they, like all human experiences must end. The same traditions[iii], also talk of “aridity” the times when the soul feels dry like a desert, where there are no consolations to be found. These arid times are part of the journey too. Like the stumbling blocks in the paths of work and love, these arid places, some teachers say, help us relax the grasp of the ego. So if you are not finding such consolidations in your spiritual practice, it doesn’t mean you’re doing it wrong, it is yet another moment for the separate self to soften its attachments to its own plans and expectations, so that we can glimpse the real nature of what lies underneath.

Fortunately, no matter which path we take, life is teaching us. Our work will teach us, our relationships will teach us, our aging body will teach us, our spiritual practice will teach us. All of us are always on this journey. As Buddhist teacher Pema Chodron says “the path is the goal” So if our spiritual journey is not a mountain to climb or a state to accomplish or a problem to solve, can we do anything to help it along? The monk I studied with said the 2 core pieces of the journey were equanimity and love. We bring, as we are willing and able, a non-judgmental compassionate awareness to whatever life brings us.

And, in keeping with our Universalist tradition, whenever we are lost and not sure where the journey is leading, we return to love. As the Christian Mystic Teresa of Avila wrote “…we should really be loving our neighbor; for we cannot be sure if we are loving god, although we may have good reasons for believe that we are, but we can know quite well if we are loving our neighbor. And be certain that, the farther advances you find you are in this, the greater the love you will have for God” [Interior Castle p. 78]

So if there is a desire for the spiritual journey in you, just begin by following that desire wherever it leads you. And if you don’t feel like meditating or praying or ritual, that’s okay too, you are still on the journey as you work and love. The journey is unfolding now and in every moment. Don’t worry if your friend can walk through walls and you cannot, just open your heart to love and you are on your way.

Endnotes
[i] https://thebuddhistcentre.com/text/right-livelihood
[ii] When Things fall apart p. 87

Finding Our Way

The Way It Is by William Stafford

 There’s a thread you follow. It goes among
things that change. But it doesn’t change.
People wonder about what you are pursuing.
You have to explain about the thread.
But it is hard for others to see.
While you hold it you can’t get lost.
Tragedies happen; people get hurt
or die; and you suffer and get old.
Nothing you do can stop time’s unfolding.
You don’t ever let go of the thread.

I’m really honored to be joining you today for my first Sunday as your new Consulting Minister. I grew up UU, and was a student for the UU ministry back in my 20s, so over the decades, I’ve been to a lot of General Assemblies, and District Assemblies, and Ministerial Conference’s. And one thing you can count on when you go to big gatherings of Unitarian Universalists, there is always buzz about the future of our movement. Together we try to cast a vision of who we are becoming, of who we are called to be. One of my favorite presenters at such events is Galen Guengerich who serves the Unitarian Church of All Souls in New York City. They have over 1000 members and three full time ministers. Whenever Galen gives a workshop at GA it is going to be cutting edge. There might be a full jazz ensemble providing meditative interludes. There is certainly a high tech AV system, so that when he wants to references something from popular culture, he pushes some magic button and there is perfect cinema quality music and sound, seamlessly integrated into his presentation.

Sometimes at these national events where large abundantly-staffed congregations take the lead, it’s easy to feel left behind. We are told that if we are not skillful about our presence on twitter and Facebook, we won’t appeal to a younger populous, that if we don’t use sophisticated technology, and current popular music in our worship, the millennial generation won’t feel at home. We begin to wonder if our low-tech churches are relics of a time past.

When I was a very little girl participating in the town Easter egg hunt for the first time I found the whole experience kind of overwhelming and confusing. After 5 minutes of chaos the hunt was over and I returned to my mom, probably crying, holding my basket with only one egg, Mom told me this story, which has been almost archetypal for me ever since. She said “When that crowd of children headed left, you headed right. There you were alone with dozens of eggs, but when you looked up and saw where the other kids were, you left the eggs and followed the crowd. Of course by the time you got there, all the eggs were gone, and when you came back to where you started, all those eggs were gone too. If you had just stayed where you were, you would have a basket full of eggs right now.”

I have been mulling over that story ever since. When I realize that I have been separated from the crowd, I try to ask not “how can I get back into the crowd?” but “where are the eggs around me, right now, that only I can reach?”

For the past 11 years I’ve been serving congregations that have a lot in common with the UU Church of Cortland; family size congregations who can’t afford a full time minister …or any full time staff at all really. For the past 10 years I’ve been the settled minister for the UU Church of Athens and Sheshequin which is, like Cortland, a historic Universalist church in a beloved historic building, although UUCAS was not founded until 1808, so you are a full 5 years older. I want to reassure you that this morning’s sermon is not a challenge to keep up with the crowd, to have high resolution visuals in your sanctuary or to design an App for the congregation that works with the latest smartphones. You already receive plenty of encouragement from our culture to move in that direction. Instead, let’s look at the eggs hiding around us right now.

First, let’s start with what it means to be a family sized church. I don’t have to tell you the challenges of being a small church- we live those each week. But I want to remind us of the special gift of the small church, which is relational-ity. Anyone who has ever gone to a large church knows that sometimes it can be a lonely experience. But I can’t remember a time when I’ve felt lonely at a family sized church. The very first time I went to UUCAS as a guest preacher their friendliness shone and I felt welcome. I hope that is how it was for you when you first came here. There is no chance of getting lost in the crowd in a family sized church, we know each other and we know each other’s lives. We open our hearts to newcomers and visitors. Younger generations have a lot to teach us about the rapidly evolving web of social media, but people of every age will always want a place in the physical world where they can be with people they know and trust, and where they can meet new people in a web of community.

There are other hidden gifts of being small. I hear story after story from colleagues at larger institutions about how hard it is to maintain a large salaried staff. At General Assembly a speaker referenced with a nervous laugh the emerging trend that more and more ministers will be piecing together part time and multi-site ministries. I thought to myself- well on this one at least we are ahead of the curve! When the Alban institution closed after decades of being leaders in church life, a journalist theorized that we are headed into a time when many such institutions will be closing because they have an infrastructure that is unsustainable. One thing I suspect Cortland and UUCAS have in common is that we have always used our money carefully, staying lean. We don’t confuse the success of our shared ministry with the trappings of monetary success. It’s easy to look longingly at churches with full time youth ministers and a state of the art AV system for seamless video content in worship. But when the crash happened, UUCAS had a lean infra-structure, and no debit, and a board that understood the importance of stewarding its resources carefully to keep our institution sustainable.

Our small size also makes us nimble. Before I served in Athens, I served a church of about 400 in Palo Alto, California where even after 2 years of meetings we could not begin to imagine how we could make our vision of composting church food scraps into a reality. So when I first preached at Athens, I was amazed to see a composting center, and had to find out how that had come to pass. Turns out, the children were painting compost buckets for a Sunday School lesson, and one of our members bought an extra one for the church. Now members take the scraps home whenever the bucket is used, and so composting happens.

Here’s another example: My first year as the minister in Athens a parent asked me if I could create a coming of age program for his daughter. I had been running Coming of Age programs every year or two for a decade at the various congregations I had served, and I told I’d be happy to design a program for his daughter to do by herself. Bur miraculously when we created the program, all those teenagers who’d stopped coming to church when they aged out of RE came back for Coming of Age, and teens at the Fellowship in Big Flats wanted to participate too. Both congregations jumped in to support it. It was important to the young UUs who came of age, and it was powerful to me.

Now that doesn’t mean anything we want will just happen. The following year we had no teens at all most Sundays. There was no force of will that would have made a Coming of Age program happen. It would have been like a Fish trying to go adventuring on land. Neither Athens nor Big Flats are congregations where we can promise families that every week there will be a Sunday school class for each grade level, but whenever we have a critical mass of teens, we offer coming of Age to the folks who are ready …it’s starting to look like next year may be one of those magical Coming of Age years again.

Because we are nimble we are able to respond as the moment unfolds to the needs and gifts of our community. In 2011 a flood immobilized the Penn York Valley, where the Athens congregation is located. The rains came down hard on Thursday, and by the time the streets were clear on Saturday we had to pass through a National Guard checkpoint on the way to the church to assess and repair the damage. Volunteers filled the parking lot sanitizing and drying the contents of our basement. Sunday we worshiped without power, without potable water. At coffee hour, two members wondered how we could be of more help to our neighbors. We held an emergency board meeting, and decided to open our building to folks who just needed to use a restroom, or a clean place to rest. The next day we began serving a hot lunch and all were welcome to join us in the social hall. Other volunteers delivered sandwiches to people who didn’t want to leave their work salvaging their homes or businesses. For weeks we fed and cared for our neighbors until the crowds died down, and our work helping repair the damage of the flood continued in other ways.

Another gift of this church is our location. Both Cortland and Athens are situated in the historic downtown of rural cities which have significant economic struggles. And while there are many challenges that come with that, there are abundant opportunities for ministry. I don’t yet know what that might mean here in Cortland, so in the coming months I’m counting on you to teach me. Each community is unique, with particular needs and gifts. When I ask my colleagues for advice about working in the community where UUCAS is located, I often I get advice like “you should connect with the local GLBT community center” and I think, well, I guess that’s us. “Why don’t you work with the local interfaith group?” I guess that’s us too. “What about a local humanist group.” That’s DEFINITELY us. The Penn-York Valley is what you might call an “underserved community.” The Valley NEEDS us. Folks from the valley reach out to me to marry them when they don’t know where else to go. Can I marry GLBT folks? Of course. Atheists? Naturally. Whether or not our small congregations could ever grow large enough for a full time staff, we have an important ministry in our communities. We are needed here.

That, already, is a field of eggs wider than we can ever gather in –even with all 16 members of UUCC working diligently together. So which eggs will we gather? The Anglo Saxon tradition says that each of us has a Wyrd, formed in our unique intersection of nature and nurture, of time and place. Our Wyrd, like that thread in the poem by William Stafford, is hard for others to see. Sometimes it’s hard even for us to see in the chaotic web of culture and life. So how do we discern our Wyrd, our own unique path? One strand has to be our unique Universalist history and theology. That’s what makes us different from the Food bank of the Southern Tier, or the United Way. Karl Rahner, the famous catholic theologian who influenced Vatican 2 said “Christians in the coming age must all become mystics or be nothing at all.” One of the teachers in my Spiritual Direction Training, Don Bisson, interpreted Rahner’s statement this way: “the future of the church-- if the church is going to have a future-- is how do we initiate men and women into the universal call to holiness and union with God because that’s where the world would change. Not on what denomination you belong to, or whether you are Christian or not Christian, the transformation of the world is dependent on our call to holiness.”

Rahner is saying a very Universalist thing here. He is saying that spirituality must either be at the core of who we are as a church, or we may as well close our doors. For all the folks who check off “none” on surveys about religion it is not obvious why they would want to support the Unitarian Universalist tradition or any other tradition. But the soul hunger for the depth of life, that is universal. And the capacity to seek and find that depth-- Universalists believe that this is the right and potential of each and every person. The first source of our UU tradition is: “Direct experience of that transcending mystery and wonder, affirmed in all cultures, which moves us to a renewal of the spirit and an openness to the forces which create and uphold life.” In other words, mysticism. This is the single most important thing we can offer the world direct experience of the forces which create and uphold life. Which renew our spirit.

Rahner calls this “union with God.” But we know that not all UUs, nor all those in the wider community who are spiritually hungry are comfortable with the word “God”, so let’s switch gears a bit and look at this from the psychological perspective. Don continued “We get lost if we don’t experience something deeper in us than just our superficial ego needs. We get lost. This is what Jung called soul murder.”

There is no App to feed our spiritual hunger. It is not Facebook that brings us back to the deeper self when we are lost. The reason I like, for example, to sit and hear Galen’s talks is not because of how his beautiful technology (okay, maybe a little. It is pretty cool) but it is because he has a message worth hearing. And you, you left your home this morning not because you knew everyone would be tweeting about today’s service, not because we have so many followers on YouTube, but because you wanted to experience something directly- you wanted to connect with other people, face to face, you wanted to connect with something deeper inside yourself. You wanted to connect something bigger, larger, wider --the interconnected web of life of which we are all a part. And from that place of holiness, from there we can transform the world.

I believe that far from living in a time when these old Universalist churches are a historic remnant, these crossroads where our churches were planted over a century ago are filled with ministry that is calling out to us- filled with Easter eggs, if you will. The need for our Universalist tradition and for our beloved communities is so great, that an equally great discernment is needed. We have to be willing let go of everything we “should be doing” --all those ideas we hear at conferences, the ministries we witness at other churches, in order to hear our own destiny. Sometimes we need the courage to take our eyes off the crowd, to follow the thread of ministry right here where we are. This is at the core of why we gather in our UU tradition, to listen for and know our own thread, to see and know the thread we hold together as a community. When you feel lost remember, there is a thread you follow. There is a thread we follow, together.

Getting out of Our Bubbles

A bit of context: this sermon was originally delivered in a 97% white and culturally-Christian county (The broader UU movement is more diverse in both race and religious background.)  under the presumption that it is helpful for  white people to talk to other white people about whiteness and white privilege. It was first preached as part of a “get out of your bubble” summer challenge -- a lighthearted moment in our ongoing anti-oppression and anti-racism work. 

I need to check- does everyone here know who Wonder Woman is? Remember how Wonder woman grows up on an island of warrior women? Whether you’ve seen the movie, or read the comic books, you probably remember that the island, called Themyscira is surrounded by a bubble of protection that shields them not only from harm, but also from all knowledge of the outside world. When army pilot Steve Trevor crashes through the bubble, the community has to decide- do they ignore the new information he brings from the wider world? Or do they act? It’s our hero, Diana, who decides to leave the only world she has ever known to fight the God of War. Only when she leaves the protection of her sheltered island does she begin to understand the true scope of her power, and the true nature of the world she wants to help. Only when she gets out of her bubble can she become Wonder Woman.

Like the warrior women who live on Themyscira, we all live in a bubble, though ours is rarely as obvious or literal as the one in which Wonder Woman grew up. Each morning on my walk to yoga I see the same trees, the same construction projects, and I see many of the same faces in my 7:30 yoga class. When I sit down at my computer, Facebook and Google reflect back to me the small slice of the world I already know, and when I walk my dog at lunch, I see only that one other dog owner who walks their dog at lunchtime. You would think, in fact, that there were no other dogs living in the neighborhood, but the smallest change can stretch my bubble- if I walk the dog a couple hours later, I encounter dogs and people I had no idea lived in my neighborhood.

Why does it matter whether or not we get out of our bubbles? First of all it can be fun. It’s fun to meet a new dog, to make a new friend. It’s fun to find a new author, or new cuisine. When life feels stuck and stuffy, chances are we’ve spent too much time in our bubble. There’s a huge wide world out there of new things to try and learn.

Second, getting out of our own bubble teaches us something about ourselves. In my own bubble I am like the fish who doesn’t know what it means to be wet, because wet is only a normal, inevitable state-- the only state he has experienced. I grew up culturally Christian, so I’ve been listening to a podcast called “See something, Say something” about being Muslim in America. It’s written by Muslims for Muslims, not for me and my bubble. The podcasts I listened to during Ramadan gave me a peek into a different bubble -- what is it like to be the only kid in your junior high school fasting during Ramadan? What is it like in a high school with a larger Muslim contingent who have their own space in the gym during lunch when they are fasting? What are the logistics of a working person getting up before dawn to eat, and trying to work a full day alongside co-workers who are not fasting? As I peer outside my own bubble I am invited to notice that I am part of a religious tradition that has no required fasting; in fact our tradition does not really ask us to face any physical hardship, and does not emphasize restraint. What’s up with that? What are the lessons Muslims are embodying during Ramadan that I am missing?[i]

As I peer outside my own bubble I notice that not all UUs celebrate Christmas, but most of us get the day off regardless. No one in Bradford County would think to schedule your biology final on Christmas Day, but most wouldn’t think twice about scheduling an exam during Ramadan or back to school meetings on the Jewish High holidays. Getting out of your bubble from time to time is probably good for everyone, but I would argue that it is particularly important for those of us who occupy a place of privilege. In this case, the privilege of having a school calendar that syncs up with your cultural holidays.

Last year the Athens congregation read a book called “Waking up White” by Debbie Irving which really helped me see the shape of the bubble I live in called “white culture.” For example, in the white culture in which I was raised, I was taught that it’s not polite to talk about race. In one of the author’s college classes she was asked to fill out a survey asking “how often do you talk about race with your family and friends?” She chose “a couple of times a year.” She was amazed when a young black woman in her class responded “I couldn’t believe it when I found out white people don’t talk about race very day. I thought everybody talked about race very day. Not talk about it? How can you not talk about it?” [p. 101]. If Debbie had not intentionally tried to go outside her bubble, she could have spent her whole life thinking everyone agreed that talking about race was rude. She might never have realized that actually this rule was one of the forces holding her bubble in place, the bubble of white culture, and that outside her bubble other rules applied. Because white culture is the central, privileged culture in our society, the culture of a majority of law makers, judges, teachers, doctors, and UU ministers, if we don’t take time to get out of our bubble, we might never know that things that seem “normal” to us are just one bubble in a sky full of bubbles, and we might never know the effect our culture, our actions are having on folks who don’t live in our bubble.

This is one of the reasons I’ve been listening to a podcast called “Code Switch.” The term “code switch” describes the requirement that to survive outside your own bubble, you need to quickly and fluidly switch from, for example, the norms of your own home to the norms of your workplace or school. Because white culture is dominant in America, the culture in my home, in my yoga studio, in my grocery store, is pretty similar to the culture at my workplace and at my son’s school. When I interact with people from another bubble while inside my bubble, most likely they will be code-switching-- adapting to my culture. To get a true glimpse outside my bubble, I need to visit theirs: listening, reading, visiting a space where I am in the minority, where I don’t have any authority or power, where people from other bubbles feel at home, allows me to glimpse the limits of my own bubble, and peer into other cultural worlds.

As people of privilege, we face a similar choice as the heroes in this year’s blockbuster film Black Panther. Did folks see that movie? Black Panther is a hero-king from Wakanda, a wealthy and highly advanced nation in North East Africa, that hides behind a bubble of
cloaking technology[i].

Our invisible bubble is called white supremacy culture. And even when our hearts are in the right place, if we don’t understand our own bubble, and the bubbles of folks we want to support, our efforts may backfire. For centuries, white supremacy culture has assumed that its ways would work just the same outside their bubble as they did inside. Our ignorance about the values and wisdom of local cultures and ecosystems has often produced disastrous effects from invasive plants, to desertification, to the cultural genocide of native peoples[ii].

So how do we respectfully get out of our bubbles? When we boldly leave the confines of our own bubble, we enter someone else’s space like a house guest in a new home. We follow the local rules and conventions. For example, Wiccan teacher and activist Star Hawk writes in her blog:

“In our own communities, we have a lifetime to absorb the norms and adapt to them. But when we move into a different culture, we may not even recognize what the norms are nor be aware that we are violating them. I once attended an Ohlone ceremony and was blithely singing along with the chants in my high soprano. Had not another white woman tipped me off, I would never have guessed that in that culture, singing an octave above everyone else is considered rude and insulting.”[iii]

At some level it comes down to remembering it’s not all about us. In our own bubble we are at the center, but just as I am not the center of my cousin’s wedding, we are called to de-center ourselves when we witness or participate in someone else’s culture.

When the movie Black Panther premiered, it was an important event for my family, as we always go to see new Marvel movies opening week, but it was an even more important event for the Black community. It would have been easy to experience the movie with my own identity as a Marvel fan at the center, but I also wanted to know how folks outside my white bubble were experiencing and creating meaning around the event. My son and I listened to the full 2 hours a podcast called “Black Men Can’t Jump [in Hollywood]” in which 4 black men explained in great detail their experience of and response to the movie. It was not a very bold endeavor on our part, but it gave us a chance to de-center our experience and peer into a different bubble. Although we had all seen the same movie, the commentators used slang I didn’t know, used references I didn’t know, discussed cultural norms I didn’t know. If I had seen the premier in one of the theaters these guys went to, instead of in my home theater in Ithaca, I imagine I would have felt like a fish out of water. But if you are trying to get out of your bubble, that’s the point -- catching a glimpse of a world where you are not at the center. One of the characteristics of white privilege is that we swim in a culture that assumes that it is right and good for white people to be at the center, for white values and cultural norms to be dominant and that white culture is “normal”. So each time we allow ourselves to be a fish out of water, we are challenging that aspect of white supremacy culture.

When we venture outside our bubble, we learn that our bubble is not what everyone’s bubble looks like, that our bubble is not normative. This is hugely important, because difference exists, and difference matters. It matters especially in situations where some folks are making decisions that affect other folks. If we think our experience is universal, we are going to participate in co-creating a reality that is a bad fit for many. As we visit other bubbles we begin to learn how to be better bubble-guests; I have learned not to assume I know what pronouns people prefer, I have learned not to hold a lunch meeting with my friend who’s observing Ramadan, and I have learned that dressing up is a sign of respect when going to a Black Panther premier. We also learn to be curious about our own culture -- how we usually use pronouns, what we usually wear to a movie premier. We learn that we are making choices. And eventually we gain confidence being a fish out of water; we learn how to notice local etiquette and cultural norms, how to be a good guest.

We live at a time when we are encouraged to put a lot of energy into strengthening the walls of our bubbles, but now more than ever there must be some who are called to make their own bubble permeable enough to allow in new information, new experiences and new ideas. Like Wonder Woman and the people of Wakanda, I think the Unitarian Universalists are being called to leave the shelter of our own bubbles, to explore bravely outside their membranes, and to learn anew how we are called to serve.


Endnotes:

[i] My colleague Rev. Kelly Weisman Asprooth-Jackson helpfully explains: “some sort of super-advanced holographic system, probably with a force field component - plus the 24/7 facade of the Border Tribe living outside of the hologram and maintaining the low-tech illusion”

Their central dilemma is whether to keep their gifts to themselves, or to share them in service to the world.

[i] It’s important to note that my own story of growing up UU is not universal. We are a faith community of folks with diverse religious roots and beliefs: https://www.uua.org/beliefs/what-we-believe/beliefs. To learn more about UU Muslims check out: https://www.uua.org/beliefs/what-we-believe/beliefs/islam and Jewish UUs visit: https://www.uua.org/beliefs/what-we-believe/beliefs/judaism

[ii] https://www.facinghistory.org/stolen-lives-indigenous-peoples-canada-and-indian-residential-schools/chapter-7/cultural-genocide

[iii] http://starhawk.org/blog/page/5/