Beauty Is Before Me
Rev. Peter Morales, President of the Unitarian Universalist Association, has a dilemma. Next Thursday, July 29th, when he leads a delegation of Unitarian Universalists in Phoenix, to protest Arizona SB1070, will he carry identification papers, or not? SB1070, if it is not declared unconstitutional, will require Arizona police officers to stop anyone they are suspicious of committing a crime, and asking them for identification papers. The intent of the law is to identify people who are in the country illegally, and to deport them to their country of origin. In Arizona most people who do not have legal papers have come from Mexico or further south. The law allows police officers to stop anyone they are suspicious of being in the country illegally. In reality, that is anyone who looks like they have come from Mexico or further south. In reality, it asks us all to judge a person by the color of their skin.
Protesters are deciding whether or not to participate in non-violent civil disobedience, and if they do, whether or not to carry identification papers.
If arrested with papers, protesters most likely will be released in a few hours. If they don’t have papers with them, but cooperate in giving information about who they are, they will be kept in jail for, perhaps, several days. If they refuse to give any information they may be in jail for several weeks, or longer.
Peter Morales, a citizen of this country, is a man of Latino descent. How will he be treated?
* * * * *
On March 7, 1965, watching her television, she saw peaceful marchers in Selma attacked by Alabama State Troopers. She heard Dr. Martin Luther King’s call for people to come to Selma to protest this action, and she decided to go. Before she left Detroit, more than 100 Unitarian Universalist ministers joined in the Selma demonstration, and one, the Rev. James Reeb, was beaten and killed by a group of white men. It was March 11th. Viola attended a memorial service for James Reeb at her church in Detroit, then, within a matter of days, she drove her car, with Michigan license plates, to Alabama. In Selma, she volunteered to work with the Southern Christian Leadership Conference and registered marchers and volunteers. She shuttled people to and from the airport.
On Sunday March 21st she joined 3000 others as they marched across the Edmund Pettus Bridge headed to Montgomery. Three days later she was in Montgomery to greet the, now, 25,000 marchers who arrived there. That night, following the rally at the capital she drove a carful of demonstrators back to Selma, to the airport. After she dropped them off, on her return, with a young black man in her car, four white men pulled alongside and shot her twice in the head.
They didn’t ask to see any papers. They saw an out-of-state license plate, and a northerner causing trouble, upsetting “the way we do things down here.” Later it was learned that an FBI informant was in the car from which the shots that killed Viola Liuzzo were fired.
Though suspects were tried in both cases, for the deaths of James Reeb and Viola Liuzzo no one was ever convicted.
What price must we pay to claim compassion as the common blood we pump through all our bodies?
* * * * *
Our Unitarian Universalist principles affirm the worth and dignity of everyone. We affirm justice and equity. Because we have no creedal requirements for membership, our congregations always include a variety of religious perspectives. We engage constantly in living with others who hold different beliefs than ours.
Like all human communities, we have not always lived up to our ideals. Even though we have marched on streets to protest injustice, sometimes we find we are not as tolerant as we thought we were. It is challenging to hold my own beliefs dearly, and to make room within them for people who see things differently.
It’s not always easy, but at our best,
we visualize the beauty of our unity-in-diversity
as a bouquet of multi-colored flowers.
We see the beauty in our variety.
Though our skin may be of different colors, we know we are one.
We know the color of our blood is the same,
and we pray its name will become “compassion.”
* * * * *
There is so much going on in the world around us. This week we expect to hear the decision of United States District Judge Vaughn Walker ruling whether or not California voters violated the U.S. Constitution’s guarantees of due process and equal protection when they passed Proposition 8 in November 2008, limiting civil marriage to heterosexuals.
Will we embrace the beauty in our variety?
Will we, as Martin Luther King called us to do, extend the long arc that bends toward justice to include more and more people?
Will we affirm our common blood of compassion?
* * * * *
And there is so much going on in your lives, in our lives.
We live with illness and pain, with aging, and life transitions.
Babies are born.
Our young adults graduate high school, and seek to find themselves in work, or further education.
We lose jobs and seek to find new ones.
Loved ones die and our lives are never the same.
Through it all we seek the support of one another.
We look to others to give us images of beauty that can sustains us,
and call us forward to new life, to new possibilities.
Through all the turmoil we seek to celebrate this adventure we call life.
We want to be reminded to see ourselves as One,
a community of humanity.
We seek to remember the beauty that embraces us,
if only we will open ourselves to it.
I know it is not easy. My mind can be snared, or seduced into focusing on minutia, what seems important in this moment and then what seems important in the next. And, so, the spiritual discipline is to ground the “what seems important in this moment” in the deepest, most significant values I cherish.
It is to pay attention, to answer the call of Hafiz through the centuries, across lands and oceans:
“Listen,” he says, “Listen more carefully to what is around you
Right now.”
In my world
there is the sound of piano, [with four hands dancing]
(notes from a flute…)
the voices of children.
There is a chorus of voices singing
Hafiz says,
“There is an astonishing vastness
Of movement and Life
Emanating sound and light
From my folded hands
And my even quieter simple being and heart.
O listen -
Listen more carefully
To what is inside of you right now.
In my world
All that remains is the wondrous call to
Dance and prayer
Rising up like a thousand suns
Out of the mouth of a
Single bird.”
The discipline of breathing out mindfully, intentionally, letting go of what I’m holding, makes room, in those centered moments, for a relaxed going deeper. From that deep place, the essential questions emerge:
What do I love?
For what am I grateful?
What needs to be forgiven?
What connections need to be made?
* * * * *
Sitting on a mountain top it is so easy to feel the Infinite, to know the mystic sense of interconnection beyond time and space, to lose the need for a consciousness of Unity because I rest in it. How wonderful that Hafiz names this experience “Love.”
We humans have an instinctual way of defending ourselves when something challenges our usual patterns of being, whether religious, social, or political. When something new presents an alternative to what we have known we can easily say “No Way!” and pick up our guns and bombs to defend our God.
And so we pray,
Come Love, from beyond our limited knowing.
Help us to evolve the knowledge of our interconnection and our interdependence, not just with one another,
but with all the amazing gift of creation.
Help us to see in the eyes of another,
not a different race, or gender, or orientation, or ethnic heritage,
but the reflection of our own eyes, and the realization that we are One.
In the Beauty of this gift of existence,
in spite of grief, pain, and alienation,
help us to speak and to act reminding ourselves, and others,
of this Infinite Love that embraces us all
and which we are all destined to become.
As our UUA President Peter Morales,
and those who walk in Phoenix with him,
discern their call to conscience,
may we be moved by the common blood of compassion
running through their veins,
and the veins of people in this country without papers,
and the veins of Arizona police officers,
and the veins of all of us.
When we know we are One,
the border fences of privilege will dissolve
in the desire for freedom and fairness.
* * * * *
This Thursday evening, July 29th, if you would like to join with others in support of all those in Arizona and across the country protesting SB1070, Rev. Chris Holton Jablonski will lead a vigil here at the church at 7:30.
And on the day Judge Walker announces his decision, if you feel the need to be with others, please check with the church to see where and when there will be a gathering.
* * * * *
It was out of the desert lands of Arizona
that the people we call Navaho, first sang,
“Now I walk in beauty. Beauty is behind me.
Beauty is before me, above and below me.”
The world is meant to be beautiful for all.
May the sight of beauty stir in us the impulse to make beauty.
May the dream of justice call us to make justice.
Breathe deeply.
Beauty is before you.
Compassion is streaming through you.
What do I love?
For what am I grateful?
What needs to be forgiven?
What connections need to be made?
Beauty All Around Me from UU Church of Berkeley on Vimeo.
Copyright © 2010, Rev. Bill Hamilton-Holway, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED
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