Congregational Meeting, June 3rd, 2018
During our Congregational Meeting I made reference to the written report I’d submitted, and I heard from some folks that they hadn’t found it easily accessible. Following up on publishing Adam’s President’s Report yesterday, I thought it’d make sense to post mine here as well.
It has been quite a year! In thinking about writing this report I imagined beginning by noting that I could hardly remember the first part of the year because the events of this summer so overshadowed it. And then I realized — the church year began with the events of this summer (which many here have taken to calling, “The Summer of Hate,” while in other parts of the country it’s being called, “The Summer of Charlottesville”). The descent on our city of the Klu Klux Klan took place only one week after the start of the 2017-2018 church year.
And then, of course, there was August 12th, from which many of us are still recovering. One of our members was among those struck by James Fields’ car, and is still dealing with the physical — and emotional — trauma. One of our members was providing CPR to Heather Heyer before she died. Many others were in the crowd on 4th Street, only narrowly missing being struck. Our own Director of Administration and Finance, Christina Rivera, was one of the clergy team immediately on-site after the car struck (even before 1st responders). She and other members of our congregation were among those who ministered to people who’d been injured and traumatized, evacuated the injured, and provided crowd control assistance to get ambulances to the injured. Chris was also instrumental in organizing the clergy non-violent non-passive resistance which, without hyperbole, can be said to have saved lives that day.
Other members were in the park, and on the side streets, directly in the middle of it all, while still others were more on the periphery, working to attend to the needs of those in the “red zone.” Our sanctuary was kept open as a sacred space for those who were in need of respite. Even those who stayed at home, or were away from Charlottesville that day, have expressed the continuing impact it has had on their minds and hearts. Many people have told me that they flinch every time a late night talk show host, or political pundit uses the name of Charlottesville as short-hand for the kind of explicit and overt racist violence that we see escalating throughout our country.
We were only 8 weeks into this church year when the Rev. Jesse Jackson stood in our pulpit and said that our city had entered the lineage of Selma, Birmingham, and Montgomery.
As we look back over this year I think it’s important for us to remember the chaos and pain with which it began. I also think it’s important, though, for us to remember some of the things we learned about ourselves. Two years after our Racial Justice Committee guided us through the process which led to our overwhelmingly adopting a Public Witness Statement supporting Black Lives Matter, our local Black Lives Matter chapter has told us that we have shown them that they can count on us to show up when needed. It speaks volumes that so many members of our congregation were downtown, on the front lines, on August 12th. And let’s not forget that when the Rev Jackson decided to come to Charlottesville, he was looking to speak in a predominantly white congregation so as to demonstrate that the work of racial justice was not the work of the African American community alone, but the work of all people. He has said that he was directed to our congregation because he’d been advised that ours is a faith community that doesn’t just talk about racial justice, but is actively involved in seeking it.
We would do well to remember these things about ourselves, because they are as true as the feelings of distress and division that for some people are our current reality. In fact, I would say that they are more true. It is my understanding that Islam teaches that a person will be judged by the best of their actions, and not the worst. Shouldn’t we do the same for ourselves?
It cannot be denied, though, that this year began with internal challenges in addition to those beyond our walls. Among some of us there have continued to be frustrations and dissatisfaction with staff performances — particularly senior staff — and there are those who feel that the Board lacks transparency and accountability. Some still don’t know what to make of, and some actively disapprove of, the radically shared leadership model I pointed toward throughout candidating week, and which has come to be known by the unfortunate name, “the triune.” (Admittedly, Trish, Leia, and I used the term ourselves when first trying to explain it. To our regret, it stuck.)
Not everyone agrees with the stance our Racial Justice Committee, I, and Leia (and our Religious Education program) have been taking in recent years, particularly in saying that those of us who identify as white are all complicit in the survival of the dominant culture of white supremacy, because each of us, and all of us together, participate in and perpetuate (even if unwittingly) the culture we all live within in which all things “white” are elevated to a “supreme” position. The use of the term “white supremacy” has been quite distressing to some of us. We are, after all, good liberal people who are working hard to make a difference in the world, and we’re nothing like the white supremacists who came to town this summer carrying their torches, signs, guns, and hatred. Some of us feel like we’ve been being yelled at and insulted, and there are those of us who feel like the tone has been too hard and harsh too much of the time.
These feelings really came to a head when, on Monday, February 26th, our Director of Administration and Finance, Christina Rivera, discovered a hateful, anonymous racist note in her office mail box. Congregational leadership was decisive in their response, deciding to postpone the celebratory party and worship service that had been scheduled for two days later (to coincide with the actual date of our 75th anniversary), and to declare in no uncertain terms that such an act was both unacceptable and intolerable. I went further, saying that whoever sent the note was not welcome in our congregation, and naming a shared responsibility for allowing a congregational culture to exist in which something like this could happen. Some of us found these declarations to be upsetting and inappropriate, and when Christina wrote her own response, that also was taken by some as one more sign that leadership was out of touch. (It needs to be noted, though, that there are also many members who have applauded the positions congregational leaders have taken, and who received Christina’s note as, to quote a member, “a gift.”)
All of these things, and no doubt some more besides, have been swirling around together, simmering, and many of us feel that we have become a congregation divided, between:
- Those who believe that a balanced budget is vital to a healthy congregation, and those who believe that we need to invest in our future (even if we don’t currently have all the funds we need to pay for it);
- Those who think we’re heading in a good and exciting direction, and those who think we’ve already extended ourselves too far and have forgotten what a congregation is supposed to be about;
- Those who think that Unitarian Universalisms’ inclusive welcome means that no one should be “excluded,” and those who think that our commitment to being a safe and welcoming place for people who have been historically (and are still being) marginalized means that we need to re-think how “open” our welcome can be;
- Those who want to see the church once again as strong, healthy, and vibrant as it once was, and those who want to see the church grow into its still unseeable future.
No doubt some people see other divides besides these.
On Sunday April 28th, the day we began our year-long celebration of our 75th Anniversary, my reflections on our history led to what seemed to me to be an important truth — we have lived through times of disquiet and distress before, and just as we weathered those storms I have faith that we will come out on the other side of this one. In my Report to the Board for its May meeting (which is part of the minutes of that meeting, available online) I lifted up our our financial history as a way of putting our current fiscal situation into a larger context. In the rest of this Annual Report I want to do the same thing regarding our feelings of community, something many of us, no matter where we place ourselves in any of those dichotomies, believe we are losing (or have already lost).
That sense of community, of being “family” to one another, is something that our history shows we have always valued. Carrie Baker put that now famous 14-word ad in The Daily Progress because she was looking to meet like-minded, like-hearted people. She did, and in that meeting what we know today as our congregation was born. The desire that drove Mrs. Baker also drove so many of us to this place and to these people. So many of us came here, and have stayed here, because we’ve felt this to be “home.”
Yet while that desire for a loving community has been a constant throughout our 75 years, we haven’t always been able to achieve or maintain it. There have been other times when divisions ran deep, hearts were broken, and some of us feared the loss of our church, much as some of us do today.
In telling our history to prospective clergy during the 1976 search for a new settled minister, the Search Committee felt compelled to note, “Today the people of TJMCUU are sensitive to the fact that both previous ministers [Roy Jones and Curtis Crawford] were actively opposed. … The wounds have not fully healed.” [Italics added for emphasis.] In writing specifically about the ministry of Roy Jones they said that because of the strong — and to some, radical — focus of his ministry on racial justice, “In 1967 and 1968 some of these began a move to have Roy dismissed, others resigned.” They continued,
“The congregation remained split roughly down the middle for several years, while Roy rode out the storm and advisers from the UUA helped forestall a dismissal. Roy left only four years later, of his own accord, to accept another call. The wounds from that time remained deep, and the pervasive effect on the church from these several quiet yet seething years — Roy still here, the trouble mainly unresolved — was one of demoralization, almost psychic depression, in the spirits of many members.” [Again, italics added for emphasis.]
Since you called me to our mutual ministry 7 years ago, I’ve heard stories about when the congregation was similarly divided: when a teen was involved in the committing of a serious crime, for instance, or when a respected adult was arrested for solicitation a minor, and when it happened again with a different person a few years later. In each of these instances the congregation split, with no objectively “right” side. People on all sides of the issue were upholding a value that in their understanding is central to who we are as Unitarian Universalists. The problem is, not all values are compatible; sometimes our values conflict with one another. At such times there really is no way to reconcile all of the varying positions. At such times there is no way to reach a consensus, because the “competing” values actual contradict one another and are mutually exclusive. Sometimes the only way to resolve such a conflict is to make a choice — go one way or the other, you simply can’t go both ways at the same time.
Actually, there is a way out of the conundrum, and from all that I’ve read and heard it is one this congregation has used — allow the conflict to fade away; focus on something else; turn our attention away from what’s contentious to what we hold in common. Unfortunately, such an approach gives more importance to the appearance of peace than to the real health of the community. And when this happens, we are later forced to say, “The wounds have not fully healed,” “the wounds from that time remain deep,” “the trouble [remained] mainly unresolved.” I cannot tell you how many times I’ve heard people say just such things about these more recent times of discord and division — “we didn’t really handle it all that well,” “people are still hurting,” “we never resolved that.”
The sense of seismic fracturing which some of us are experiencing right now simply could not happen if there were not already fault lines in place. Elizabeth Kübler-Ross — who, I discovered, spoke here on a Sunday in 1986 — taught that when grief, when pain, when trauma is not allowed the time it needs to truly heal, when a person takes a shortcut through her “five stages of grief,” unprocessed pain is left behind in what she aptly, though graphically, called, “pus pockets.” She said that we add to these residual pockets of pain each time we experience a new trauma or loss, and eventually they take on something of a life of their own. They are no longer tied to the situation that gave birth to them, and they can erupt without warning or explanation because they now exist untethered. The only way to avoid this fate is to stay with the pain, and the grief, and the heartache, and the fear, and the uncertainly, and all those other things we’d rather avoid … to stay with them until they really are resolved, no matter how long it takes, how discomforting that is, and how much easier it would be to go back to “normal.”
I believe that the conflict(s) we are experiencing this year are not just about the issues we’re naming. I believe that they are also manifestations of past pain that we’ve never really dealt with. I do not think that this is all (just) about whether or not to live with a deficit budget, whether there are too many (or too few) sermons about racial justice, or how quickly someone receives a response to an email. Now, as then, I think that beneath all of that, what is really happening, is that we are being asked to look at who we are as a community, who we want to be, who we believe our faith calls on us to be, and who we think our world needs us to be. The truth is, no matter how much we might wish it, we simply cannot be all the things every one of us might want us to be. We cannot be “all things to all people.”
I cannot tell you how much I wish I could bring us all back to that comfortable place where it appears that these conflicts are behind us. Like a great many of you, no doubt, I wish we could find our way to that place where everyone feels welcomed and valued, where we have no serious disagreements, and where those who have been a part of the congregation for a long time, and those who are new to it, can equally feel that their needs are being met. Yet I have to say that I no longer believe such a place actually exists, or has ever actually existed. In our yearly Rite of Spring celebration, we quote Douglas John Hall’s reminder that, “It is the propensity of religion to avoid, precisely, suffering: to have light without darkness, vision without trust and risk, hope without an ongoing dialog with despair—in short, Easter without Good Friday.” We want to “get to the other side,” without having to go through what we have to go through to get there.
Time for deep discernment is needed to know what to do when our visions of who we are conflict, and when mutually contradicting values bump into each other. Staying with such questions means staying with the discomfort, even pain, that necessarily goes along with them. To be true to the call you extended to me, I have to do my best to “keep our feet to the fire,” and not let us slip out of our current discomfort too easily and then convince ourselves that we’ve made it.
There is a story in the Hebrew Scriptures, in the book of Genesis, in which Jacob wrestles with an angel on the banks of the Jabbok river. When the angel begs to be released, Jacob says, “I will not let you go until you bless me.” The ministry you called me to requires me to do all that I can to help you stay at it, to continue to wrestle with these deep issues until we find their blessing, so that in future years people won’t look back at this time and find themselves having to say, “the trouble [remained] mainly unresolved … the wounds of that time still run deep.”
I believe in this community, and I believe in our Unitarian Universalist faith. Let us believe in one another.
Pax tecum,
Rev. Wik