Marriage v. Everyone Else

It is interesting watching my Facebook news feed the past few days to see the spectrum of reactions to the recent SCOTUS hearings on Prop 8 and DOMA. Ending the laws that make love between consenting adults illegal or illegitimate is an important and necessary step on the road to promoting human rights. Moreover, marriage equality is an issue that intersects with so many others, including health care, immigration, poverty, childcare, housing...just to name a few. Again, issues dealing with the denial of basic human rights. Some of the reactions I have seen to the intense energy around these hearings have been extraordinarily critical of the attention that they have been getting, operating under the premise that other (equally important) human rights denials are occurring. Prison privatization. Monsanto. HIV/AIDS quarantines. Drone warfare. Gun violence. People are being accused of jumping on the marriage equality bandwagon, and ignoring all of the other issues that need to be addressed if we are to build a world where all are respected and able to thrive.

Breathe, people. Just breathe.

We are all, in some way or another, oppressed by our current social structures. Whether the impact is physical, social, financial, or psychological, something prevents us from being our fullest and freest selves. That sounds terrifying and dark, but it doesn't have to be. In fact, it should be empowering; we're all in this broken system and most of us want to change it. Yes, let's make sure that the efforts to take apart one piece of the oppression puzzle don't end up replacing it with something new, or cement another piece even further so that others' humanity is further denied. Yes, let's recognize the complexity of each of these allegedly individual issues, so that we can properly point out its relationship to other manifestations of oppression. Taking this puzzle analogy to an uncomfortable stretch, when we remove one piece, we make it easier to remove another. Because these pieces are interlocking; they are intentionally designed to fit one another and keep each other in place. So rather than say that the focus on one issue, for example, marriage equality, is detracting from the energy needed on others, let's try something different. Let's use that focus to dive deeper into the issue at hand, see its many nuances and its interlocking nature. It sounds paradoxical, but it makes a lot of sense. The closer we look at something, the greater our vision becomes. Our awareness increases our intentionality, which in turn increases our effectiveness, which in turn empowers us to new levels. The energy surrounding the movement to end oppression should not be seen as being finite and divided among different issues, but rather, ever-expanding and conscious of their connections to each other and to the same root. Our energy grows when our "individual" movements do not vie for attention, but give it to one another. So Let's lift up each other and the ways in which we are working together to take apart this puzzle. Let's celebrate when our movement successfully removes a piece from its place. We're working for the same goal. Let's help each other get there.

The Freedom of Humility*

Most Unitarian Universalists are probably familiar with the seven principles of the tradition. I personally love it when we get to sing the children out on Sundays to the “Principles Song,” because it removes the complicated language and identifies the simple spirit behind each principle. Maybe lesser known are the six sources of our faith, which help us to understand more deeply the call behind each of our principles, and inspire us to engage the potential for diversity inherent in our tradition. Of these six sources, perhaps the most commonly celebrated in UU communities today is the humanist teachings which counsel us to heed the guidance of reason and the results of science, and warn us against idolatries of the mind and spirit. With this source, our tradition lifts up the fact that we are enlightened beings, with a capacity to understand some of the most intricate complexities of our existence. We are able to engage in thoughtful dialogue over controversial issues, and critically respond to harmful ideologies that disregard what we as informed citizens know to be reasonable and empirically sound. With this source, we not only celebrate the fact that we can think, but we also recognize this ability as a responsibility. It comes as no surprise that our Unitarian predecessors thoroughly engaged the power of reason and intellect, knowing that our ability to understand our experience has the power to help us appreciate it even more. They believed that our capacity for reason helps us to critically examine the accepted norms of society, and their tradition of challenging practices that violated human rights and dignity is one that we continue today. That’s pretty awesome.

Yet, with all of the gifts and potential that arise out of our ability to use reason, it does have its limits. Intellectualism carries risks, in particular, the risk of getting stuck in our own minds. When we place so much importance on the power of the mind and our capacity for intellectual discourse, we risk forgetting the limitations inherent in our thinking. When we focus so much of our energy on being critical consumers, on relying on what we [can] know, we risk assuming that we are capable of understanding and explaining everything. In effect, we brainwash ourselves with our own rational thinking. The reality of our “freedom of the mind” is that it comes with a responsibility to recognize its conditionality. Our minds are free, but they are bound to a certain context. Thus, when we exercise our gift of reason, we are better served in doing so humbly and responsibly, by first acknowledging that our thinking is in fact limited to our context.

But there is a happy twist. By recognizing the limits to our reason, we open ourselves up to new forms of freedom, forms that are based in trust. We become free in our ability to hear challenges and learn from another’s point of view. We become free in our ability to detect and eliminate the dominant and oppressive paradigms that may permeate the foundation of our thinking. We become free by sitting with the contradictions that our mind tries so hard to resolve, perhaps even welcoming them as evidence of something greater than us that we may not know. We are freed of the desire to explain everything so that it fits our view of the world. This idea may be objectionable for some – when I first came across it in the fall, I dismissed it as a “lazy theology.” But if we think about it, resisting the urge to neatly rationalize everything is actually harder than we might realize. It is a significant intellectual challenge to stay in the messiness of contradiction, and to be willing to say that we cannot know all that we need to explain our experience. A lazy mind cannot accomplish that task. But a mind that is engaged in a responsible search for truth and meaning can – a mind that is humble can be freed by recognizing its limitations.

*Due to word count constraints, this post is limited in its exploration of the potential for humility to be exploited or taken to an unquestioning extreme.

"My Body Is Not Your Battleground"

My Body Is Not Your Battleground
By Mohja Kahf

My body is not your battleground
My breasts are neither wells nor mountians,
neither Badr nor Uhud
My breasts do not want to lead revolutions
nor to become prisoners of war
My breasts seek amnesty; release them
so I can glory in their milktipped fullness,
so I can offer them to my sweet love
without your flags and banners on them

My body is not your battleground
My hair is neither sacred nor cheap,
neither the cause of your disarray
nor the path to your liberation
My hair will not bring progress and clean water
if it flies unbraided in the breeze
It will not save us from our attackers
if it is wrapped and shielded from the sun
Untangle your hands from my hair
so I can comb and delight in it,
so I can honor and annoint it,
so I can spill it over the chest of my sweet love

My body is not your battleground
My private garden is not your tillage
My thighs are not highway lanes to your Golden City
My belly is not the store of your bushels of wheat
My womb is not the cradle of your soldiers,
not the ship of your journey to the homeland
Leave me to discover the lakes
that glisten in my green forests
and to understand the power of their waters
Leave me to fill or not fill my chalice
with the wine or honey of my sweet love
Is it your skin that will tear when the head of the new world emerges?

My body is not your battleground
How dare you put your hand
where I have not given permission
Has God, then, given you permission
to put your hand there?
My body is not your battle ground
Withdraw from the eastern fronts and the western
Withdraw these armaments and this siege
so that I may prepare the earth
for the new age of lilac and clover,
so that I may celebrate this spring
the pageant of beauty with my sweet love.