First Unitarian Universalist Church of New Orleans
Rev. Melanie Morel-Ensminger
Sunday, May 22, 2011
My colleague Tom Owen-Towle was not a Freedom Rider, but 4 years later as a young seminarian he came down South to Selma, Alabama, following Martin Luther King’s invitation to interfaith clergy. He worked with other students to help set up the mass meetings in a field outside the town. His exact assignment, as he recounts in his essay “Ten Hallmarks of the Beloved Community,” was to remove cow patties from the ground so the big tents could be erected where civil rights movement leaders would speak to the crowds. It may not have been fun or glamorous, but it was important. It was his contribution to the Beloved Community.
“Beloved Community” is a phrase that was often used by Dr. King and other Movement orators. It referred not just to the people active in the civil rights movement, but to an ideal reality that, in Owen-Towle’s words, “includes yet always transcends our own skins, clans, congregations, collectives.” The idea of the Beloved Community is always open to those who not yet inside its embrace; it is always reaching to include more and more people from the margins. Like Jesus’ phrase “kingdom of God,” it refers to a time that is both here and not-yet.
It was inspired by the work of 19th century philosopher Josiah Royce, who urged,
Judge every social device, every proposed reform, every national and every local enterprise, by the one test: does this help towards the coming of the universal community?
It is a mistake to use the term Beloved Community to refer to a smaller subset, for example, one single congregation. Beloved Community is much larger than that. It is a reminder that no matter how much we feel affection for our individual church or denomination, we must always widen our embrace; we must always be ready to welcome the stranger, the outcast, the marginalized, the oppressed.
Owen-Towle asks, “What would be necessary to incarnate a version of the Beloved Community wherever Unitarian Universalist congregation is located?” and answers his own question with 10 points:
1. Beloved Community means holding to the difficult. In this point, “difficult” refers both to issues and to personalities. The point of building the Beloved Community is NOT for people to feel all comfy and cozy, and not to be challenged – the goal is to be, in Owen-Towle’s words, “to be adventurous in service of the prize.” Sometimes that will mean staying the course when the going gets rough.
2. Beloved Community produces where it’s planted. While it can be a good thing to spread compassion in areas far from where we live, our main responsibility is to bloom where we are planted. I once served a UU congregation that raised thousands and thousands of dollars to help people in a country over 5,000 miles away – and yet they gave virtually nothing to the impoverished city that was their county seat, a mere 6 miles away. Whatever we might do to help those who are faraway, we must be dedicated to the recovery and renewal of our own city and area.
3. Beloved Community requires vigilance. The Beloved Community is always in the process of being builded, it is never completely built. We must always ask ourselves, How can we be more welcoming? How can we hold ourselves accountable to this vision we hold in common? We can never drop our guard or stop being watchful.
4. Beloved Community honors the law of respect. How much stronger would we be if pervasive respect was manifested in our church and in our lives? We must treat everyone and everything respectfully, for it is the only virtue large enough to caringly include the “other.”
5. Beloved Community is open. The door never shuts in the Beloved Community – there are always more people and more ideas to be included. This is especially true for this congregation, for we remember and honor our historic name “Church of the Stranger.” Who’s not in the picture we have of our congregation, and how can we include them? That is always the question.
6. Beloved Community supports its members. Being of service to others also means being of service to each other. This is an area where this congregation excels – whenever an individual or a family in the church is known to be in need, the folks of this church spring forward to help, to be there for each other in concrete ways. We celebrate together, we mourn together, we are together in thick and thin. As long as we remember to widen the circle of our caring, we are building the Beloved Community.
7. Beloved Community members fight fairly. Striving together to build the Beloved Community does not mean we will not have disagreements and conflicts – in fact, these are practically guaranteed! What matters is how we treat each other in the midst of and through times of turmoil. We prove who we really are and what we really believe in by how we act when times are tough.
8. Beloved Community balances justice with joy. I don’t know about you (but maybe in fact I do), but I won’t be part of a group that is always deadly serious, that is always focused on a problem not solved, that is always grim in its pursuit of its goals, however noble those goals may be. The Beloved Community must have joyful celebrations together or there will not be enough energy and heart for the hard work. As revolutionary Emma Goldman once said, “If I can’t dance, I don’t want to be part of your revolution.”
9. Beloved Community is always changing. Our Transylvanian ancestor Francis David’s Latin motto “Semper reforma,” which can be translated as “always changing.” It is related to the idea that the Be-loved Community is never finished, never completed, that there is always more to be done. We can never allow ourselves to think that we already know what has to be done and what is needed – there is always more to learn.
10. Beloved Community is held in an eternal embrace. In the Beloved Community, there is a constant awareness of the past, the present, and the future. We honor the past, our ancestors, their work, their struggle, their hopes; we look to and plan for the future as best we can, while working as hard as we can in the present. We know we are connected to something larger than ourselves, however we define that Ultimate Reality. We rely on that, we lean back upon it, we are ever assured, as our Universalist ancestors used to say, “Rest assured!”
On this Flower Communion, as we have rededicated ourselves in our Flower Meditation, let us be renewed in our efforts to build the Beloved Community, not just within these sheltering walls, but ever outward, among all three UU churches in our Greater New Orleans cluster, to all the people and the land and air and water of this city and its surrounding area, and on and on to include eventually all people and all the earth. May our efforts be to the building of the Beloved Community, even though we may never see all the fruits of our labor. So might this be! AMEN – ASHE – SHALOM – SALAAM – NAMASTE – BLESSED BE!
