The Promise of Unitarian Universalism, Part II

November 19, 2023
Rev. Rita Capezzi—Unitarian Congregation in Mississauga

Commemoration of the Transgender Day of Remembrance

I thank several people for their contributions to this part of our service this morning:
Wendy Shusterman, Leslie Webb, Devin Kreuger, and the Rev. Danielle Webber and other Staff of the CUC.

All across the world, people who identify as trans or queer or both are murdered, and they die specifically for who they are and who they love. They are vulnerable people, subject to the hatred of extremists who have somehow got that idea that their notions of right living, notions that dominate our cultural landscapes, authorize them to eliminate all that does not fit, all the exceeds the bounds. Trans and queer death by murder or neglect touches all our communities, including our larger UU community.

Last November, Maiken also known as Dani Cooper was shot by the RCMP, resulting in an investigation by the Independent Investigations Office (IIO) of British Columbia. The investigation concluded in August, and no wrongdoing by the RCMP officer was found. Maiken was a nonbinary poet and social justice activist and was 27 years old at the time of their death. They were active in Unitarian Universalist young adult communities across Canada and the United States and were connected to the North Shore Unitarians.

At the time of their death, Maiken was experiencing a mental health crisis. In the investigation and much of the media reporting, Maiken was constantly misgendered. We bear witness to the ongoing pain and sorrow of Maiken’s community, friends, and family. We join with the family in calling for “greater transparency in shootings by officers and better de-escalation training for officers, especially when dealing with mental-health crises.”

“We are with you in your grief and sorrow,” says Rev. Samaya Oakley, President of Unitarian Universalist Ministers of Canada. “We are with you in your anger and in your sadness. Maiken was someone who I watched grow up in our faith tradition and their presence and light is missed. We light a chalice as a sign that Maiken will neither be forgotten nor ignored. May our chalice be a symbol of the Universal Love that surrounds us even when our hearts are broken.”

Here and now, may we in this community feel with our sibling UUs their loss. May we feel with all the threatened and vulnerable trans and queer people in this country and across the world, and may we thus be filled with love and compassion. May we here make a place for safety and expression for, curiosity and delight in our trans and queer community.

Hear now these words from the Rev. Sunshine Jeremiah Wolfe, a trans and indigenous minister serving in the Eastern Region of the Unitarian Universalist Association:

“On this Transgender Day of Remembrance,
we remember those who have been murdered for being who they are,
those who face violence on a daily basis,
those who have lost loved ones, and those who worry for loved ones.

“May we come to a time when we cease to shame children around gender roles and expression,
where we allow for freedom and exploration of identity and expression,
and to a world that operates from love especially when things are difficult and confusing.

“May all of us who live with the threat of violence find support, strength, community, hope, and safety from violence.
May it be so. And Amen.”

The commemoration of the Transgender Day of Remembrance has a sad note to it. But Canada’s Drag Race, Season 4 dropped on Thursday, and that is one space of trans and queer thriving, persistent and beautiful, and so today we also celebrate. And we do so by remembering our own Alice Travis, whose death we marked and whose life we celebrated just a little over a year ago.

Alice came to UCM seeking a community of acceptance, and she found it here. Alice was assigned male at birth, but she was fully herself in a dress and pearls, proudly trans and living her best life as a woman. She taught the congregation line and Latin dancing. She contributed to congregational life in many ways. Alice helped this congregation learn what acceptance and radical hospitality looks like in action, when a single person is held whole and holy just exactly as she is and was. We thank Alice for the gift of her life. We are grateful for the perspectives and the experiences and the beautiful differences and the joy of life all trans and queer people bring to our community and to our world.

Let’s join our voices now, singing #1053 in the teal hymnal, “How Could Anyone.” Please rise in the way best for you.

Now these words adapted from writer Jess Reynolds, a queer Unitarian Universalist living outside San Francisco, CA. “A Prayer for My Queer and Trans Siblings”

Here you are.
Here in this holy space,
standing on this ground that is holy
because you are here.

You are here, in flesh and bone,
filling up this body that belongs to you alone.
Your pumping heart is a wonder
because it keeps you alive.
Your loving heart is a blessing
because it keeps all of us alive.

 The Spirit of Love has a home in us.
May all see that love in us
and let your hearts become mirrors
for the compassion at our core.

The Spirit of Justice has a home in us.
May we light our wicks from one another
until we are all aflame,
until we burn out every prejudice
we carry in our bones.

Here you are. Holy as you are.
Here we are. Holy as we are.
Here we are, holy as we are. Blessed be.

Let’s celebrate the joy of life, using our bodies in a way that Alice would have loved. She could do a lot more sophisticated dances than the hokey pokey, but that’s what we’re all about this morning. Let’s dance together. We’ll hokey pokey four times: Put your head in, put your heart in, put your hands in, put your whole self in. Just as in this religious community, the work of our heads, our hearts, and our hands move us together to make the world better. Stay seated or stand at your seat or move to the edges. Rise and dance in the way best for you. Ok, Abigail, give us a lead in and here we go.

Homily:

I took Geometry in American grade 10, I was 15. And I struggled with a very important concept in the course. I struggled with it as I had struggled with the Roman Catholic catechism that had made no sense to me. When working through a geometric proof, there is always a “given”: a set of parameters within which to logically proceed. “Given.” And I, resistant questioner that I was, had to ask, “Why is this given?” I am sure I was a frustrating student for many teachers. I didn’t like staying within the boundaries, coloring between the lines.

That might have been a foolish attitude, to question everything, even the most fundamental of principles. Yet I feel now that this attitude of curiosity and resistance led me to Unitarian Universalism and to the higher call I feel now to foster and to advance this religious tradition and our faith communities. And I perceive now that some “givens” are crucial, good boundaries that remind me again and again when I have slipped back into arrogance and “know-it-allness” and judgmental assertions.

Open-heartedness, curiosity, humility—these are the affective conditions, the givens that Unitarian Universalism calls forth from each of us. They are the DNA of the Six Sources and the Eight Principles, they are integral to the call of Unitarian Universalism in the contemporary world, the only world we inhabit—this world, today.

Thomas Lynch says “Religion, race, and nationality; gender, age, affiliations—these define and divide us. We are ennobled and estranged by them. Race, religion, tribe, caste, class, club, color, gender, sexual preference, denomination, sect, geography, and politics—everything we are separates us from everyone else.” I agree, in the sense that our various identities are meaningful, significant, defining. We are ennobled by the experiences afforded by our identities. Our identities matter, and they need not be divisive. We need not be estranged from each other because of them.

The larger world—our society, the cultures we inhabit, our politics—these will set us up, Us against Them, taking sides, pitting us against each other, ranking us. But our differences need not be the source of bias and hatred and oppression. Our differences will differentiate us, but they need not divide us against each other. This is a promise of Unitarian Universalism, embedded in the Six Sources and Eight Principles, embedded in your DNA mission here are UCM, embedded in your Covenant of Right Relations. When we meet each other with open-heartedness, curiosity, and humility, the “Givens” of our faith tradition are not restrictions that harm us but rather boundaries that shape our living. Our principles, our sources, our missions, and our covenants, these are our aspirations, our longings, our clarion calls to ourselves and each other. They underpin and guide and shape how we are together and how we hope to help the world become.

We live in this community, drawing our strength from being part of it—enjoying it and co-creating it. And we enjoy and co-create when we recognize the inherent worth and dignity of each of us, not only some of us but all of us. We enjoy and co-create when we hold ourselves to compassion, equity, and justice even when we disagree. We enjoy and co-create when we encourage each and all on a spiritual journey, even when we arrive at different understandings of the holy or the ultimate or the more. We enjoy and we co-create when we seek truth and meaning, even as we falter, even as our sense of things changes. We enjoy and we co-create when we listen to each other’s voices, seeking to learn and to understand if not agree. We enjoy and co-create when we recognize that the hatreds and inequities of the outside world are inside our community as well, and we work to dismantle those biases and oppressions. We enjoy and co-create when we turn the goodness of this community outward toward a world crying out for peace, liberation, and justice. We enjoy and co-create when we know ourselves to be, always, part of the interdependent web of existence, always a part of, never apart from the grown world and each other.

And we seek from many sources the wisdom that will enable us to truly live into and from such high aspirations, sources in other religious traditions, including our Christian and Jewish heritage, as well as in spiritual practices rooted in distant traditions and writings and those rooted here in the earth upon which we move. We turn to sources in the prophecy of justice makers. We turn to the practices of discovery and exploration—in the physical, biological, and social sciences, and in the humanities. And we turn to our own experience, where we have sensed with our minds and bodies a transcendent reality, part and parcel of the everyday and the ordinary.

Here, in our communal life symbolized by your Great Hall, we are called to practice what we proclaim, with and for each other, so that we might be in the world in the same way—steady in our open-heartedness, curious and humble in the face of what is unfamiliar, of what is painful and perplexing and just plain WRONG! Here we practice a way of living that we then model in our relations outside of our walls and our familiar, much-loved community. That is what this faith calls us to do, and it holds us in care as we do it. It calls us to be gentle with each other. To translate our differences, and to honor them. “When we unite in purpose, we are greater than the sum of our parts.”

Come and go with me with me to that land—together—together, we can build this new way— of love and justice, peace and compassion for us all and acted outward into a hurting world. Our journey home to each other, where we practice together equity, understanding, humility—where we practice right relations—with all of our differentiation and strangeness and wonderfulness, it is a journey of refuge and it is a journey of strength-building, where acceptance is given and we gain confidence and fortitude to face a world less sanguine and less loving. Today, we call for our home to be truly that for all who are here and all who might venture here, called by the way we answer the call of Unitarian Universalism, our spiritual home—our fortress, our learning ground, our refuge, our hope and faith in and as a community that cares.