Unitarian Universalism as a whole is entering into a period of profound change. Like a young adult who is finding the old answers are still good, yet not quite good enough, many Unitarian Universalists individuals and groups are asking profound questions about what it means to be a UU and by extension, what it means to be fully human.
These types of questions often result in change. The problem is in a collective, we don’t all change at the same time. Some of us are a little ahead of the curve. Some of us are a little behind the curve and a whole lot of us make up the curve itself.
What’s important is the process of change. How we move toward where we are pulled without untethering all the links to our past while still keeping communal care and a vision of a shared future that expands to include an ever growing number of spiritual and religious travelers on our collective journey.
It’s not easy. We will all leave things behind. But, I suspect that we will all also find new ways of being that had not previously occurred to us. In short, we will enter into a period like this one and we exit from that period, over and over again. At our exit, we will be different, but the same. At our exit, we will discover a new normal which will be different, but the same.
Entering into this period takes inventiveness of the spirit. It takes patience with each other. It takes a willingness to embrace ambiguity of that new, yet unknown normal toward which we’re all heading, despite not at all being sure what it looks like or when we’ve arrived.
This process I’m describing is at the core of what it means to be human. We like to think of this process as having that exit I talked about, but sometimes, I’m not so sure it does. Maybe change is so lifelong, so constant and so human that we need to insert beginnings and ends to keep our sanity and avoid the exhaustion that comes with it.
This living, breathing, liberating, redemptive and joyous faith we all share can be a lot of work. Knowing that change is coming makes many of us long for a humanity that can’t be: one that is fixed and stagnant….a never-changing normal that we all know is not really a real thing. We spend much of our time building systems, ideas, dreams and destinations around this imaginary fixed normal only to be jousted out of our spiritual slumber when profound change shows up yet again.
Thank you for all that you do for and with Emerson. We are a community that can and will enter into this period and emerge better off for it. Stronger, faster, and even more ready to live our mission in this world.
