The Difficult Task of “Being”
Dr. Allan Georgia, Director of Religious Education
Hello UUCC Members & Friends!
The events of this month –– a national pandemic response, a guilty verdict in the Derek Chauvin case –– have been the latest in many consequential months upon months of things happening in the world. And with each shift under our feet and change in the atmosphere of things happening above our heads, there is the instinct to act. And act we do: we watch, we comment online, we share, sometimes we attend, sometimes we march, we vote, we advocate, we organize––we do all of these or we do some of these, and in everything we do what we can.
Social justice, and by extension, social activism, is a central part of the UU ethos, and so many of our programs and activities are oriented around acting on behalf of our principles. Rooted in the optimism of early Americans to make a new kind of society, there is a core of optimism in the social justice work that UUs do, because we refuse to accept that the world CAN’T be made better.
Even so, I think there is another dimension to how we think about HOW we do social justice work that we and other UU congregations can be thinking about. And it has everything to do with the kind of community we are and how being is a kind of work––a task that is accomplished in the world. We don’t usually think of “being” as a kind of activism, a kind of action. But if you look in any dictionary, you’ll find that “to be” is a verb. And so “being” in a certain way around a certain set of ideals––that is a kind of activism too, and an important one because of how we get to let our ideals guide our way.
Taking on the difficult task of being––and being in a certain way, like the way in which UUs seek to embody a “beloved community”–– is worth the while though, because doing so can allow us to do things that working on the front lines of social justice can’t. (That goes vice versa too –– justice in action and justice in being are two sides of the same coin, and both are crucial.) But consider that even if you are as successful as you could ever hope to be around a particular issue or policy having to do with social justice, you can never do more than to redress the world that is. You can make our society better. You can make our justice system more just. And those are absolute wins. But, on the other hand, you can’t, by doing that work, imagine a new society altogether or describe justice except as an alternative to the unjust system you are working against.
Activism and community life are both crucial. But it is important that we not lose sight of the fact that, even when the world feels like it is teetering on the edge, bringing a beloved community into being that can spin out hope and imagine justice and live out beloved-ness is an act of social revolution. It is the deeper resources of the struggle to make a world that is better than the one we have, because it reminds us that we can make a world that is premised on more than power and wealth and the perverse incentives of hierarchies. The difficult task of being UUCC––and a UUCC that lives up to its ideals, and struggles to make them central in all we do––is also an important task. And as we all, I hope, act out and work toward doing better, I hope we also recognize how important it is that we also be people who seek to do better.