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This week at church the senior minister talked about racism and community. He quoted Mark Morrison-Reed, who will be giving the sermon next weekend, about the different sorts of freedom that tend to come up in black churches (spiritual freedom) and UU ones (intellectual freedom), and the intersectional space between them.
He mentioned Rev. Morrison-Reed's belief that UU focus on connection tends to be ... honestly, I would almost call it stock pagan, a sort of immanent awareness of presence in the world, and black churches focus on connecting to God and connecting to a community.
(And I added a handful of Rev. Morrison-Reed's books to my wishlist when I got home, because Relevant To My Interests.)
He talked about the 1969 walkout - and how he joined it. He talked about racial guilt and the incoherence of action and the fact that a full fifth of UU ministers joined Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. in Selma when he called for support there. He talked about a lot of things, in ways that I don't know how to speak about, because I'm still processing.
I listened, and thought, and studied the quilt that was hanging in the sanctuary. Where the church of my childhood would have had a glinting cross, there was a quilt done in gorgeous autumn colours, the central medallion a representation of the UU chalice, the squares surrounding it in particolour brown and cream, gold and ... red, I think, and framed in a maple-leaf mottled red and gold band.
The minister talked about the racial history of the community the church nestles into, and I think of any of a number of things as he explains precisely why the local dentist is a the fourth and how once upon a time the then-police chief had a map posted on the wall with the homes of every black inhabitant of the town circled.
The quilt is a beautiful thing, pieced together out of such glorious cloth. The squares are broken by curls of cloth, dividing them diagonally, making for a change in colors, the way quilts will do. There is something fundamentally familiar, almost ancestral, about the idea of the quilt, and there is something profound to listen to the seamy underside of racial politics in the denomination and the community while studying beautiful seams between brown and cream.
I don't know if I'm a UU-in-general yet, but this church, this church I love.
(Still need UU/church icon.)
He mentioned Rev. Morrison-Reed's belief that UU focus on connection tends to be ... honestly, I would almost call it stock pagan, a sort of immanent awareness of presence in the world, and black churches focus on connecting to God and connecting to a community.
(And I added a handful of Rev. Morrison-Reed's books to my wishlist when I got home, because Relevant To My Interests.)
He talked about the 1969 walkout - and how he joined it. He talked about racial guilt and the incoherence of action and the fact that a full fifth of UU ministers joined Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. in Selma when he called for support there. He talked about a lot of things, in ways that I don't know how to speak about, because I'm still processing.
I listened, and thought, and studied the quilt that was hanging in the sanctuary. Where the church of my childhood would have had a glinting cross, there was a quilt done in gorgeous autumn colours, the central medallion a representation of the UU chalice, the squares surrounding it in particolour brown and cream, gold and ... red, I think, and framed in a maple-leaf mottled red and gold band.
The minister talked about the racial history of the community the church nestles into, and I think of any of a number of things as he explains precisely why the local dentist is a the fourth and how once upon a time the then-police chief had a map posted on the wall with the homes of every black inhabitant of the town circled.
The quilt is a beautiful thing, pieced together out of such glorious cloth. The squares are broken by curls of cloth, dividing them diagonally, making for a change in colors, the way quilts will do. There is something fundamentally familiar, almost ancestral, about the idea of the quilt, and there is something profound to listen to the seamy underside of racial politics in the denomination and the community while studying beautiful seams between brown and cream.
I don't know if I'm a UU-in-general yet, but this church, this church I love.
(Still need UU/church icon.)
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