Reflections on the District Annual General Meeting

I just returned from our annual district meeting. I was privileged to speak at a workshop entitled “Bullfrogs in Wheelbarrows: Planning Along the Chaordic Path.” The workshop addressed a number of the issues discussed in a series of entries in this blog last summer regarding church growth and development, with an added overlay of the Spiral Dynamics model. What surprised and delighted me was how many in the audience were clearly ready for something like this. They seemed a bit tired of one-dimensional models of church leadership and are truly interested in understanding church life as a system. I had expected a chillier reception because I was speaking some hard “truths” to people I had assumed were not systemic thinkers. I don’t know if the maps I was able to present are the best around – but they aren’t too bad and they seemed to make some sense. Many seemed to be happy just to hear someone speaking candidly about difficulties in church life and putting them into a broader context. Too often the “solutions” that are offered are mere techniques and do not address the complexity of the church as a living organism.

At the same time I had the opportunity to hear and get to know some other people. While the UU movement as a whole is still mired in fundamentally dead-end notions of political liberalism and a self-congratulatory notion of political righteousness, there are signs of progress. I do believe deeply in liberation theology, but that liberation must be rooted in personal spiritual transformation if it is to be authentic. Gandhi and MLK both understood this, as have others from our past. Political action without piety devolves into anger and bitterness and violence. If we are not working on our own liberation – and working at it assiduously – how can we have the moral or personal integrity to be prophetic voices in the world? ‘

A few weeks ago I had reason to ponder anew Gandhi’s notion of himsa (violence) - that simply by being alive, we contribute to the violence of the world. We are all complicit. That can paralyze us or it can motivate us to develop greater awareness and intentionality. Ahimsa (nonviolence) is an impossible ideal and Gandhi goes so far as to say that in a war there is no appreciable difference between the soldier who kills and the medic who binds up the wounds (he drove an ambulance for a brief time in the Boer War and his reflections are clearly based on that experience). What Gandhi seems to be saying is similar to one of the central messages of the Bhagavad Gita where Krisha tells Arjuna that he must remember the divine and do his duty, which in that case involved initiating a battle in which many of his kinsmen would die. We cannot truly make the world a better place unless we ourselves are seeking liberation form the egoic self that is the source of so much suffering. In the end it is about awareness of our actions (which will decrease our net contribution to himsa if we are paying attention) and taking responsibility for our complicity in the whole. Failure to recognize this complicity inevitably results in self-righteousness and arrogance which ultimately is a pretty sure path to outward and explicit violence towards others. If the ambulance driver thinks he is morally superior to the soldier, all is lost and the spiral of violence deepens.1

Back to AGM – I was also struck, and positively so, by an increased focus on spiritual practice. There were workshops on it, there was discussion about it. The workshop I attended was basic but quite good. Sparking and feeding interest in this is wonderful. All of this seems positive. So much of what we need to do in this church is transcend the notion of materialism. We, as UUs, are still fundamentally post-Enlightenment, post-modern materialists – we cannot bring ourselves to believe that our soul or even our mind reflects a dimension other than mere physicality. Until we admit to the authentic reality of Spirit, it seems we are likely to continue to wander in the wilderness. I am seeing a few UUs (mostly ministers) beginning to get this. For more on this notion, click here.

These discussions about UU spirituality remain in the realm of what Ken Wilber would call “translative practices” or spiritual practices that focus on adjustments to ordinary life and which don’t fundamentally challenge current structures of consciousness. (And that is true of the course on building a spiritual practice that I am co-leading in our church as well.) In contrast to the notion of translative practice, Wilber claims, and I think he is right, that all of the great wisdom traditions demand a form of "transformative practice" and by that Wilber means that egoic structures are systematically and wholly dismantled in the face of development towards divine consciousness. (Wilber affrirms the validity and importance of both of these types of practice - but suggests that we should not confuse the two.) While all sorts of goals of spiritual practice exist (reducing stress, connecting with the body, becoming more mindful, etc.), the whole point in virtually every tradition when you follow it out to where it is heading is the mystic experience of the destruction of egoic self-contraction in the presence of the Ultimate (the destruction of self in realizing Self). We have a very, very long ways to go – and our complacency at our level of structural development of consciousness continues to be our own worst enemy.

The only sour note for me was Dr. Rebecca Parker’s keynote address. I found it sadly disappointing and even troubling. She is undoubtedly a wonderful person and may have a deep and rich spiritual life, but it didn’t come through. Her talk was a rousing cry for caring for the world, but it was without depth or any genuine compassion – it was laced with latent anger and vitriol with a heavy handed overlay of the rhetoric of oppression, which in this day and age simply sounds shrill and unskilled The realities she points to are painfully real and beyond worthy of our compassion and zealous activism. The shame of it is that the ways she addressed it are alienating and singularly ineffective for this time. For me, it seemed the same message from the progressive left that I have heard since listening to Jerry Rubin and Angela Davis but wrapped in a veneer of postmodern religiosity. How often do we have to replay the rhetoric of the 1960s New Left. Flatland yet again. C’est domage.

More concerning to me was the dehumanization of the evangelical Christians and other “oppressors”. They were the enemy in Dr. Parker's talk. It smacked of cheap pandering - bash the Christians and bash the Republicans and you bring a group of UUs to their feet in applause. The problem with this type of self-righteousness is that eventually degrades into bitterness, nihilism and performative self-contradiction. Dr. Parker's speech left me wondering if she wouldn't just rather wipe the evangelical Christians from the face of the planet, or at least their leaders. I could take no joy in these "us v. them" characterizations of first tier thinking and the standing ovation for a talk with the level of animosity reflected towards those groups truly saddened me. It is liberal fundamentalism at its worst. Until we have the wisdom of Pogo (“We have met the enemy and he is us.”) we have no hope of bringing any real transformation either on a personal level or to our culture. In fairness, Dr. Parker may believe that as well, but it just did not come through in her talk.

The self-congratulatory new progressive rhetoric is so strong in our churches but the actions are so anemic and inconsistent (we play at engaging in a costless form of social justice often designed it seems to salve our liberal guilt) and it seems to me to stem from the fact that we have no stomach for genuine liberation. That type of liberation demands that we die to our self (our egoic sense of who we are) and that we find God (our true Self existing before we were born). Once that happens, life cannot be a tepid thing and if we then decide to engage, we engage wholeheartedly and because of calling that is rooted in the timeless now and the Ground of all Being. We show up, we don't flit through.

Perhaps I am being too hard on good folks who are doing the best they can, but, doggoneit, I am tired of pretense and lack of any real "there there" and I think my fellow UUs are feeling the same. We need better stuff from the president of our seminary which is turning out people to work with us in our congregations. We UUs are as trapped in our culture as any and the thing we long for is genuine liberation - we seek the meaning of our lives and much of that meaning can be found in service to others, but not without spiritual depth. Reductionist materialism (as a rock bottom philosophy of life) ain't going to get us there - it won't even get us out the door. A political agenda based on reductionist materialism is a dead end - why liberate the huddled masses if all they are is just a slab of meat with neuropetides? Until we recognize either that evolution is taking us collectively towards divinity and that glowing embers of that divinity are in us (a la Whitehead, Chardin, and the German Idealisists) or we believe that involution has brought divinity deep into our our material existence and into our humanness (a la Plotinus, Eckhardt, Sankara and Nagarjuna), or both (a la Aurobindo), we might as well go back to watching TV.

1. This is not to deny concepts of moral development - there are higher and lower stages of moral development. It is only to disparage the notion that morality can be used as another form of oppressive heirarchy. The moral high ground does not permit you to dehumanize those who are developing to your level.

© 2008. Matthew Wesley. All rights reserved.