This is the text of the report delivered by Leia Durland-Jone, Director of Faith Development, to the congregation of Thomas Jefferson Memorial Church Unitarian Universalist on June 2, 2019
As this is our annual meeting, it is a time for me to reflect with you specifically about this year in our congregation’s lifespan faith development program. You may be familiar with the Masai people of Kenya who greet one another by asking, “Kasserian Ingera?” which means “how are the children?” Those of you who attended worship this morning and witnessed our high school seniors bridging to young adulthood can attest that the children of our church are beautiful, complex, unique, talented, brave and loving. And our children and youth’s faith development program, from infant through high school graduation, strives to support the full development of our children and their families. Our work is to nurture the next generation of Unitarian Universalists so that they are equipped with the skills, tools, and resources they need to live their values every day and to help heal our hurting world.
Our religious education experiences for children and youth this year have some highlights that need a special shout-out including our meal packet initiative led by Margaret Gorman, our year-long Our Whole Lives comprehensive sexuality education program for our 7th & 8th graders, our church-wide celebrations of the Jewish holidays of Purim and Passover led by the Gill Family, our anti-racism focused family covenant group co-led by Camille Thompson and Stephanie Davis, our senior high weeklong trip to Appalachia to help make peoples’ homes warmer, safer and drier and our inclusive Sunday morning multi-age RE class designed to welcome children who do best in active learning environments led by Nick Laiacona and Michelle Benedict.
To all the volunteers in our children and youth’s religious education programming, I offer my heartfelt appreciation for your time, your dedication and your willingness to engage with the very important work of helping our children understand what it means to embody our faith.
Every time we worship together whether it be in children’s worship, in small groups, or in multigenerational community, we are all learning or reminding ourselves of how to live our faith and values in the wider world. As our children can tell you, from their internalization of our UU principles using the Rainbow Chalice, it is incumbent upon us… it is our work as Unitarian Universalists to keep learning throughout our lives. The children know this through the yellow candle which reminds us to “Yearn to Learn” and the green candle which tells us to keep “growing in our ongoing search for truth and meaning.” Our adult faith development program is one way to do this. We had a variety of AFD offerings this year including Transylvania Stories and Unitarian Theology and Building Your Own Theology with Rev. Alex, Faithful Practices with RevWik, our tenth annual Women’s Dream Quest, the short story reading group, Wednesday Wonderings, Tai Chi and several offerings related to our work for racial justice and dismantling white supremacy including RevWik’s Seeing with New Eyes as well as a class focusing on the plays of August Wilson, and one called Exploring White Privilege led by Donna Baker and Ann Forno.
I want to lift up the work of our Racial Justice Committee, particularly Kate Fraleigh, for their commitment to creating opportunities for us to regularly engage with racial justice as faith development. Committing to and going deep on a personal level to learn about racial justice is truly one of our most profound opportunities for faith development. (Slide: Critiques of White Supremacy Culture.)
I urge us all to engage or re-engage or stay engaged with the important and life-changing work of understanding and dismantling white supremacy. As Unitarian Universalists, we are called to this work and it is truly about our mutual liberation.
Which brings me to where we are today. I stand before you with a heavy heart. Like many of you, I am sad that Chris and Wik are leaving. And while I know that something had to shift, something had to change, this is not the change I prayed for. I have learned so many things from both Chris and Wik in the time that we worked together and I will remain forever grateful to them both for their many gifts of collegiality, friendship, courage and for seeing in me things I could not yet see myself. I will miss them both every day. Thankfully, what I have learned from and with them will live on in me. For instance, I will continue to remind myself, and I hope you will too, to see the world, due to Wik’s urging, as “both/and” instead of “either/or” –realizing that dualistic thinking is usually unhelpful.
I will carry with me Wik’s sense of humor, deep humility and his commitment to radically shared leadership. As you know, he is an amazing writer and creative thinker. I feel incredibly lucky to have co-led worship and adult faith development classes with him and to have co-authored a curriculum on family ministry for the Unitarian Universalist Association together.
And Chris, fierce warrior goddess for racial justice that she is, has allowed me to earn the privilege of being a white ally—a privilege that requires daily vigilance. And I make mistakes regularly and mess up and then work to find ways to repair our relationship. I have been very grateful to have Chris as my accountability partner. Many of you know that Chris’ primary orientation as a religious professional is as a religious educator. Her antidotes to white supremacy culture or Multicultural Centering (Slide: Multicultural Centering by C. Rivera) is a powerful resource that gives me guidance, direction and a path forward. I hope you will take some time to reflect on this tool she created to see how you might incorporate its message into your own life.
There will be a time in the coming weeks to formally and informally say our good-byes to Wik and Chris. Let’s honor them and their gifts and their work and time with us by saying good-bye well and with love.
So what do we do now? The late Maria Harris, a prominent Christian religious educator, and someone I admire taught that the entire congregation is the curriculum. Think about that for a minute. Maria Harris said everything we do—from the words we use when we talk with each other to how we treat one another to how we use our time and resources teaches us and our children about our values and beliefs more than any curriculum we could ever use. The entire congregation is the curriculum. Our children and youth are watching and learning who to be and how to be from us. So what I ask of you today and as we move forward together is to be aware of your own actions and behaviors and how they impact others. How are your values manifesting in your behaviors? I heard a quote the other day, unfortunately, I can’t remember where about how our actions matter more than our opinions. That can be hard to remember, particularly as UUs. Our actions matter more than our opinions. Most of the time, our opinions really matter only to ourselves and our attachment to our preferences can get in our way. So I ask you, in this challenging time in the life of our congregation, and maybe forever, to really pay attention to when you might be expecting someone else or everyone else to defer to your preferences. I am asking you to be aware of your preferences, not necessarily to ignore or negate them, but to know when that’s simply what they are, preferences. I am asking you to make room for the needs, wants, desires, and preference of others in our large and ever-changing faith family. If you are used to having your way, getting your needs heard and expecting they’ll be met, or having your voice be centered, I invite you to step back, to make space, to be generous, to consider the whole and let our congregation be a place where many voices and many preferences can be honored as we work together to clarify who we are and to carry our multifaceted vision forward together.
There is much work ahead of us. We need time to reflect and discern together about where we have been. There are questions that need to be asked and wrestled with. There are answers that may be hard to sit with. There are many stories and experiences to be shared and heard. We must make and take the time to do this important work together. If we do not, I fear we will never be able to be whole.
I shared earlier that the Masai people greet one another by asking, “Kasserian Ingera?” “how are the children?” It is also important to know that the hoped-for reply is “all the children are well.” Not just my children. Not some of the children. All the children are well. For the Masai, society cannot be well unless all the children are well. In the coming weeks, months and years, may we too embrace our call as a people of faith to care lovingly for the children and youth of our congregation, and to care lovingly for each other as well. And then, we must, we must, do the work that only we can do, for and with our siblings in the wider community and world. This work will be messy work. It will likely have times of great discomfort. We will disagree. We will make mistakes. We will need to practice naming when we have fallen out of covenant with each another and then find ways to make things right between us and be in covenant again. And, we will also find joy and purpose and healing, and if we’re lucky, we just might be transformed. Our work is waiting for us–will you join me?
Amen and blessed be.