Dreams and Visions: The Holy Mountain Ahead
In mid-March, as news of the pandemic began sweeping our country, our congregation closed the doors of our building and began meeting online. Each week, I recorded three short videos to encourage our relatively aged congregation to shelter themselves as much as possible. In one of the first videos, I talked of the importance of supporting our small businesses. For Unitarian Universalists, affirming and sustaining the interconnected web of life takes many forms—one of which is economic. To walk my talk, I looked at the needs of my household and thought of how those needs could continue to be filled by the businesses around us. Instead of ordering a journal online, I contacted my favorite art supply shop, paid for a couple of sketchbooks, and picked them up curbside. These would be my “pandemic journals.” A vision came to me for a cover: a pilgrim climbing a path up a mountain topped with a crown. The tiny pilgrim looked a lot like me.
After only a couple of weeks into the quarantine, COVID-19 revealed great disparities between those who were most vulnerable to the virus and those who were able to shelter in place. Since climate justice had been at the forefront of our congregation’s work in the past year, our eyes also opened to how stopping business as usual was best for the Earth. I imagined God sending us to our rooms to think over our actions until we were ready to come out and be a productive member of the household. This feels like a time for us to go inward and consider how we need to transform. A glimmer of hope in my congregation is that everyone indicates that they don’t want to go back to business as usual. As a faith leader, how can I provide a vision of how business needs to change?
In the past months of this pandemic, the pastoral needs of the congregation have amplified. I have been using my life energy to encourage my people to keep safe. That has seemed like enough: to keep them safe. And yet, we know that we can’t keep our people safe. In our community, three people have died, two suddenly, and of causes other than COVID-19. I wake up at night thinking of the people who are sheltering alone, knowing that some are suffering from depression. I have gathered with them at a distance in the shady space to the side of our building to pray for their safety.
In the midst of caring for my flock, George Floyd was publicly killed at the hands of law enforcement—the world as witnesses. His death raised larger concerns at the heart of a different kind of public safety and about the salvation of this world. Along with this deadly virus, our country seemed to be dying from the long-term effects of racism as we pass the four hundredth year since the first Africans arrived in Jamestown to be sold as slaves. Suddenly, taking care of my people did not feel that it was enough. How could the scope of the pilgrimage up the mountain be large enough to encompass this moment in history?
It is hard for me not to become discouraged. Since I began pastoral ministry eight years ago, I have been giving sermons, offering classes, talking with people one-on-one, reading books with people, trying to open people’s eyes to the racism that is at the heart of this country’s history and present. Mostly, my people have known that there was a problem, but in my mostly-European American congregations, I find myself being caught in the “we” and “they” even as I try to raise their understanding of systemic racism. When I have talked and called for change, I hear exhaustion and weariness in my voice as I push up against what now seems impossible. Thousands of people before me worked for justice only to find racism shifting shape rather than disappearing. For example Jim Crow laws shifted into a school-to-prison pipeline and a “War on Drugs.” What happens in my congregation is subtler: a “we” that sees people of color as “them.” “They” are people we would like to have in our congregation and around our tables. “We” ask “why aren’t ‘they’ feeling welcome?”
George Floyd’s voice as he was dying at the hands of law enforcement struck me as it struck the world. In this moment of pause, of more time to reflect, it is obvious that what I, and we collectively, have been trying to do hasn’t been working. In workshops on multi-cultural competence, I learned what I already knew, that shaming people doesn’t help them improve. Shame actually pushes people into less understanding and further from transformation. During the past months of the pandemic, I have sat with people at a distance, listened on the phone, mourned with them, and conducted a memorial service on Zoom. As pastors, we learn to know our people well and to love them. I have come to wonder, though, if knowing them and being with them in their most difficult moments makes it more challenging for me to believe in transformation. What will it take for all of us to deeply understand racism, make reparations, prepare for the way for healing? Do I need to wrestle with my imagination?
I marvel at Martin Luther King, Jr.’s ability to dream. He went beyond his lived experience to “still have a dream, a dream deeply rooted in the American dream – one day this nation will rise up and live up to its creed, ‘We hold these truths to be self evident: that all men are created equal.’”[1]
Could the work of my pilgrimage during this time be to imagine beyond my lived experience as a pastoral minister and dream up a new world? How do I look at the new church photo directory and consider each person in a new light? Perhaps I am stuck in a limited “we.” If I cannot expand my sense of “we,” how can they? Is this the work God does for me? Even though I make the same mistakes over and over again, a gentle Presence returns each morning that believes that on this day I might surprise myself and the world with a new response, a new way of loving.
After I had recorded three or four weeks of messages to my congregation, our congregation’s social justice coordinator, asked me, “Who are the ‘we’ of your messages?” She challenged me to consider expanding my “we” beyond the congregation I serve to include the many people who did not have the privilege of sheltering or the means to pick up curbside takeout. How can I change my own perception of “we” so that I can lead my congregation in this change? All of a sudden, I am that rich young man asking Jesus how I could become part of this new community. If George Floyd and his family became a part of the “we” that I express, what will change in myself? Could those changes help the congregation begin the post-COVID-19 era with a new perception of “we?”
In the middle of March, when I began the pilgrimage up the mountain, I found around me a tenderness, a new sense of vulnerability, a shared realization of the transitory quality of life, of the fragility of this moment. Could part of the alchemy of change happen when our deep presence meets an expanded “we?” Alone, in this moment, could we walk with our fellow humans, and learn how to become a family through mourning, singing, dancing and praying? The vision will unfold.
[1] From Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.’s speech at the March on Washington in June, 1963
