Vessel

Over the past two weeks I have been gone. My activities have ranged from doing self-care to overwhelming myself with “I have to order *how many* books in a week?”

At orientation for graduate school, at the women’s retreat and even my kayaking trip I have had too many experiences to relate well here. Waiting a few days to write about them has caused two things to keep nagging at me.

One is the idea of our UU identity, or specifically, at how we can’t stop talking about it. At orientation, Mike Hogue brought up a good point: the more we focus on our identity, the more we have an identity crisis. It made me think about why we have these constant questions. Many would say because of a lack of a central dogma. I don’t agree. It seems fairly straight forward: we are religiously inspired to democratically elect what we, as a movement, believe. We hold onto that quite tightly. Currently those beliefs are rather neatly arranged into seven principles, but that could change and we’re open to that. I suppose where people get lost in explaining us to others is that we have to figure out who we are in relation to deities. However, deities are important to us as individuals, not as a whole. We, and I’m using the we of everyone/everything on the planet, are more important than those deities or philosophies, and what we (back to the UU we) find in these wisdom (religious or philosophical) books is reasoning to this fact. I wonder if an identity crisis serves another purpose, a purpose of inaction. We cant stand up for anything if we don’t know what we stand up for. We don’t have to reach out to anyone to tell them about ourselves if we aren’t quite sure of ourselves anyway.

The other thing that stuck out at me was a Catholic Father at an inner city church in Chicago. For our first year at seminary, we’re required to serve a non-profit for 8 hours, and took a tour of good sites for these non-profits. The Father at this site was talking about how his neighborhood was full of Hispanic children with no high school, and the constant struggle against gangs. He said that there is a park with church property, and there is graffiti scrawled all over it except for the wall of the church. The kids there will not deface it, believing that if they do, the devil will get them. And the Father said: “What do I tell them? I say that’s absolutely true.”

And as I filter this through my UU lens, I first laugh. Because the Father laughed. He didn’t appear as though he believed the devil was really going to get the kids for graffiti. Then I longed for a UU equivalent: do the right thing or NPR will fold under. Unitar, in all her peaceful glory, will get you. Then I kind of got a little angry - he was lying! This is the same type of hypocrisy that made me turn UU! Then I thought about it a bit deeper. What is the devil? To me, it’s supernatural evil, as understanding it in the Christian tradition. If these kids continued graffiti, continued to be in gangs, would evil, from almost unknowable sources, befall them? Probably. That made me think that perhaps literally he was lying, but in a real sense, he was not. I contemplated all this as he recanted how he was awakened at 4 am that morning to perform last rites over a teenager shot in the head, and how he was on his way to a school to talk to a teen about the boy he will be burying that Thursday, and a mother who can not stop sobbing. That is his daily reality, and quibbling over lying about the devil (in one sense) won’t change it. In that place, the devil is more real than any I’ve ever known.