Laura Park, Beloved Community Staff Team and Director of Membership and Hospitality In the fifth SoulWork video, Team Dynamics co-founder and President Alfonso Wenker and Minister of Faith Formation KP Hong further explore the necessity of having an among antiracist multiculturalism practice. Alfonso begins where KP left off in the fourth SoulWork video, responding to the paradox of among and to the temptation to move to structurelessness to accommodate individualism. As we focus on and critique structure and process, however, we distract ourselves from the conversation we need to have about whiteness, racism, and the ways in which we’re reinforcing or dismantling white dominant culture. The ability to recognize White Supremacy Culture Characteristics, as outlined by Tema Okun, is a helpful skill to support the conversations we need to have about whiteness and racism. Once we understand how perfectionism, defensiveness and the other characteristics reinforce white supremacy, then we can employ their antidotes so that these qualities develop a more right-sized place in congregation life and elsewhere. The antidotes particularly help us avoid weaponizing the characteristics of white supremacy culture and our naming of them against each other. ![]() As Tema writes, “I have come to understand that some people, when introduced to the ‘White Supremacy Culture’ article and its list of characteristics, respond with anger, thinking that my goal in listing the characteristics is to shame or blame. Sometimes people are angry about being connected to any of the characteristics, feeling that to admit we have perfectionist tendencies or a belief that our way is the right way makes us bad..." Instead of feeling bad, the antidotes invite us into work that can better build the Beloved Community. Practices among us support the work of recognizing the characteristics of White Supremacy Culture and employing antidotes to right-size those characteristics. In the next SoulWork video, KP and Alfonso explore the impact of these among practices further, in a faith context. SoulWork for you: On the paradox of among: Spend a week noticing the paradox of among that Alfonso and KP explore in this video.
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Laura Park, Beloved Community Staff Team and Director of Membership In their commitment to covenantal accountability, religious liberals often experience a paradox in doing SoulWork. In the fourth SoulWork video, Minister of Faith Formation KP Hong explores that paradox. On the one hand, we appreciate the invitation to wonder with one another, to notice and become more aware of our practices, to courageously engage with our values of justice and the inherent worth and dignity of all people. On the other hand, we can find discomfort in the accountability that work among us may ask of us, as people wonder more about us than we feel is appropriate or ask more from us than we’re willing to give. And we begin to look for places with more freedom and less structure. In confessing this struggle, KP sets up the next video in which Alfonso Wenker of Team Dynamics explores the tyranny of structurelessness. SoulWork for you: How have you experienced the paradox of among? How have you stayed at the table when wondering and noticing together leads to conflict and discomfort? Next: SoulWork#5 – The Conversation We Need to Have Among Us (Coming soon!)
Previous: SoulWork#3 – HeartWork SoulWork is the term we use at Unity Church for when we engage our Unitarian Universalist faith formation and antiracist multicultural work together. We use a Double Helix model to invite the congregation into this SoulWork and the SoulWork practices, models, tools, and an eight-part video series help us live into increasing complexity on this double helix. To learn more about SoulWork, please visit our Adult Faith Formation page. There you will find a link to the Double Helix Model of Faith Formation and Antiracist Multiculturalism worksheet to help you develop practices for Within, Among, and Beyond. Visit Unity’s YouTube Channel, SoulWork Playlist to view all eight videos in the series. Image credit: Graphic Recording by DrawingImpact.com by finn schneider In the spaces and communities that contextualize my being and doing, the proliferation of rainbow flags and symbols during the month of June has become a familiar ritual, the marking of a season of sorts. Pride month, in my experience, is a season of paradox; ripe with contradiction and characterized by tension if we are willing to dig just a bit below the shiny surface. Designating June in this regard invites the learning of LGBTQ+ history, a practice which is important not just for those of us who are queer and/or trans. Many of us associate Pride Month as commemorating the Stonewall riot, a collective uprising against police violence in New York that culminated from a series of protests led by BIPOC drag queens and transwomen. This courageous act of resistance is often understood as the start of the LGBTQ+ movement, and yet it is one of countless such efforts to interrupt state violence directed at queer and trans people. How does uplifting a singular (and often white-washed) story of resistance contribute to the consolidation of an extraordinarily diverse and diasporic grouping of people and histories? I was well into my 20s and exploring my identity as a trans person when I learned about Compton’s Cafeteria riot, an uprising led by trans women and sex workers in the Tenderloin district of San Francisco who were being targeted by police violence. Compton’s Cafeteria riot predated Stonewall by three years and yet remains largely unknown in mainstream understandings of LGBTQ+ history in the U.S. What happens when we become attached to a particular historical narrative as representing an entire grouping of people marginalized on the basis of gender and sexuality, and perhaps even feel proud of ourselves for being aware of that particular narrative? Whose histories are lost, or intentionally invisibilized? How does designating a particular month as the time within which we reflect on particular histories set us up to believe that such reflection and learning ought not be an ongoing practice? Pride month asks us to become educated about and commemorate stories of struggle and resistance and resilience; this is important work. At the same time, this call to gain knowledge paradoxically contributes both to the flattening of complex, varied histories, as well as to the belief that we can and ought to be able to know and understand “the Other” on our own terms and through our own frameworks. Pride month invites celebration of difference and designates time and space for joy, revelry, community, and solidarity among LGBTQ+ people and those who love and affirm us. To me, as a queer and trans UU, these are practices of faith and expressions of covenant rooted in our belief in the inherent worth and dignity of every person and the interconnected web of all existence of which we are a part. In other words, the season of Pride invites life-giving and community-building practice. Herein lies another paradox. While collectively enacted, Pride month is imagined through configurations of individual identity and individual rights frameworks. What opportunities and challenges come with imagining gender and sexuality primarily through the framework of personal identity? As an expression of our faith, we must and will continue fighting for the rights of self-expression, futures free from violence based on real or perceived identity, and equitable access to societal resources and institutions. At the same time, there is sacrifice inherent in centering and leveraging individual, identity-based, rights-focused approaches to working toward transformational justice. Visibility, for example, is often equated with progress in relation to LGBTQ+ people and issues. Undoubtedly, increased visibility has played a significant role in shifting hearts and minds toward greater societal acceptance in recent decades. Visibility, however, is not harmless; nor is it accessible to or desired by all LGBTQ+ people symmetrically. The focus on personal identity at the heart of Pride month and central to mainstream change-making efforts has resulted in meaningful societal progress for many LGBTQ+ people and groups; it has also come with a cost. As a practice of faith formation, how might we complicate our engagement with gender and sexuality by thinking critically, collectively, and generatively about the ways that our UU tradition both limits and expands our thinking, doing, and being? Pride month, and the abundance of rainbow flags that mark its arrival in my corner of St. Paul, is layered and complex for me. One of the many things I appreciate about queer frameworks and ways of being is their capacity for engaging paradox productively. Many moments of my life are characterized by navigating in-between spaces, never quite fitting in easefully. Even while such navigation brings with it exhaustion and sometimes hurt, I do not seek easy resolution. Engaging paradox has grown my capacity to see the world and other beings with complexity and expanded the ways in which I feel connected to holy mystery. It is my hope that we, as members of Unity Church, will deepen our covenantal commitment and collective faith formation practices through exploring and engaging contradiction and paradox.
Image: "Rainbow Bridge" by HelenHates Peas is licensed under CC BY-NC 2.0
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Beloved Community ResourcesUnity Justice Database
Team Dynamics House of Intersectionality Anti-Racism Resources in the Unity Libraries Collection Creative Writers of Color in Unity Libraries The History of Race Relations and Unity Church, 1850-2005 Archives
June 2024
Beloved Community Staff TeamThe Beloved Community Staff Team (BCST) strengthens and coordinates Unity’s antiracism and multicultural work, and provides opportunities for congregants and the church to grow into greater intercultural competency. We help the congregation ground itself in the understanding of antiracism and multiculturalism as a core part of faith formation. We support Unity’s efforts to expand our collective capacity to imagine and build the Beloved Community. Here, we share the stories of this journey — the struggles, the questions, and the collaborations — both at Unity and in the wider world.
The current members of the Beloved Community Staff Team include Rev. Kathleen Rolenz, Rev. KP Hong, Rev. Lara Cowtan, Drew Danielson, Laura Park, Lia Rivamonte and Angela Wilcox. |