Today, as our collection designates, is Association Sunday, a day the Unitarian
Universalist Association of Member Congregations asks us to remember we are part of something larger. That by dint of membership in the UUA, we are part of some thousand congregations across North America, that we number about 200,000 (children and adults) continentally; worldwide there are nearly half-million who claim identification with Unitarianism, Universalism, or what we know here as Unitarian Universalism. It’s easy to forget sitting here there are more of us “out there.”
And if you go to General Assembly, the national convention of the Unitarian Universalist Association, you might get the sense we are everywhere. That we are, but given that UUs and similarly minded liberal faiths make up less than seven-tenths of one percent of the American religious landscape, according to a recent Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life survey, we are not a force to be reckoned with just yet.
Our numbers the last few years have declined, but it is not the numbers I watch. As the name of the day suggests, who we are might be better gauged by noting our associations. More useful than crunching or decrying numbers, let us ask ourselves about the associations we make, the ones we keep, and ones that keep us.
Rev. Sean Parker Dennison writes in a recent blog reprinted in this month’s Open Door newsletter about the importance of presence and visibility in the larger community. His blog begs the question: how will they know us? Will citizens of Fitchburg associate First Parish with the big brick building at the top of the common, or by the steeple visible from Crocker Field, or will the townsfolk know us by our works? Or by the associations we form? Will we be partners in coalition for social justice, environmental action, community preservation?
Recently, we’ve begun to associate with a group of area teens known as the Main Street Coffeehouse by providing meeting space and welcoming them. The group, an offshoot of 15 West, a gathering for gay, lesbian, bisexual, transgender, questioning youth and their allies, associates us not just with a dozen youth, but with an understanding of and appreciation for the value of a safe space for teens who do not always feel safe or respected in the larger world, or the smaller planet of their families.
Nothing drives home the point more poignantly than Tyler Clementi’s suicide this week. Our association allows us to be present to fissures in our society that still exist, fissures we wish to heal. Our association reminds us of the vulnerability of adolescence and its unique potential. If we nurture this association, a roomful of teens might connect Unitarian Universalism with a space station nothing short of sustaining. And how might that keep us in an orbit of relevance, an atmosphere of meaning?
The question to ask this Association Sunday is what can be gleaned from our
associations? Will the people of Fitchburg associate us with our building or our ministries? Even if the building is one form a ministry takes, such as the meeting space we provide LGBTQ teens or Alcoholics Anonymous, how we associate ourselves makes a difference. Most churches in town open their doors to AA, but not all welcome queer youth. By making our association known, we say to the wider community, we have a religious principle that affirms the worth and dignity of every person, that recognizes the importance of finding and honoring one’s own truths.
In one of the classes I teach at Keene State College called “Religious Pluralism in a Global World,” we have been discussing identity lately. We began by naming the parts of our identities: religious, region, ethnic, gender, sport. I asked the students to bring to class an object that signifies an identity central to them. Students brought in swimsuits and ski goggles, vitamins and a pair of sweatpants emblazoned with USMC, the acronym for the U.S. One young man brought in a bullet casing to represent his conservative values, much beleaguered on a college campus; another brought in his hunting license. In short, a fascinating mix of identities and associations. Only one student brought in an item related to his religion, which is Wicca.
This is not altogether surprising given young adulthood is a time many people,
especially those in college, question elements of upbringing and identity, try out new ideas and explore different views. Still, in a country where only 16.1 percent of the population expresses no religious affiliation, the lack of religious association suggests for these college students anyway, a lack of relevance.
Religion doesn’t feel central to them, though as one student astutely observed: “As much as your choices affect who you are, you really can’t help who you evolve into.”
Despite the influence, even power of personal choice, we are shaped by our associations. By the parents who raise us with particular values, by the worldview they possess, by the privilege or lack of it that nuances the childhoods we have. We are formed by associations with literacy and numeracy, art, music, sports, product brands, notions of beauty, desirability, success, virtue. We are cast into being through a sexual association that may or may not result in a familial one. In a home, shelter, street, or even an orphanage, we develop associations with others. We learn to identify with our tribe, or tribes, whoever they may be.
By the time my students reach Keene State and encounter other tribes within the great mash of college life, their associations widen or deepen. Even in a class, and on a campus students recognize as fairly homogenous, they encounter different tribes. The politically conservative young man sees himself bobbing in a sea of liberals. The young atheist encounters the Wiccan, fascinated. The young man sporting the Red Sox cap sits next to the Yankees fan from Connecticut connected if only by the way they hallow a diamond-shaped patch of ground.
The conversation in class turns to the power of association. A young woman brings up the way she gets associated with certain female peers. “When I’m out with other girls who dress a certain way and some guys make sexual comments, I feel I have a responsibility to speak up, to call the guys out on their disrespect.” This prompts the question from a classmate:
“Why do you have to say anything? What they do doesn’t reflect on you.”
“But it does,” she counters. “Certain guys associate me with them. Look, I know I have assets, but I don’t flaunt them. I want to be respected for who I am, for what I think, not the size of my chest.”
The conversation roils with energy, though for a long time it is the women who volley and the men who listen. Finally a young man says, “Hey, I’m friends with one of those girls, who dresses like that and because I’m her friend, I asked her why she goes out looking that way.”
“Slutty?” someone offers across the room.
“Yes. She says she likes how she feels when she dresses that way. But here’s what I want to know,” he asks, “what’s wrong with being slutty? Why do we associate slut with bad?”
What a great question. Where does the association come from? The students offer possibilities. Fashion ads, Brittany Spears. I ask them to think further back. A woman posits rock and roll. I point to the religious origins of the virgin/whore dichotomy.
On a Monday afternoon in September twenty students simmer in the broth of how a mode of dress gets associated with a way of being and how a way of being gets associated with being bad. I listen a few minutes longer to the frustration of several young women who don’t like being associated with the image or identity of slut.
Eventually I get all teacherly and mention in a culture where women historically have not had access to power: political, economic, social, in the same ways as men, at least men of privilege, the ability to arouse desire sexually may be the only form of power some women experience. And by extension, members of religious groups who experience a lack of power may employ provocative behavior for the same ends. Look at the power of one previously unknown pastor to gain world recognition in an hour. Provocation works.
In the same way the female students in my class wish to disassociate themselves, not from the young women who dress provocatively, but from the results: the catcalls, the assumptions of what they might do, Christians of every stripe from Sarah Palin to President Obama were quick to tell the media being Christian—or American— doesn’t mean burning the Qu’ran.
Still, those incendiary associations led to demonstrations. According to France 24, a French news service: Thousands of rock-pelting Afghans assaulted a NATO military outpost on Friday [Sept. 9] as fury built across the Muslim world against a US pastor's threats to immolate the Koran on the anniversary of 9/11. In a turbulent start to the festival of Eid al-Fitr, when Muslims worldwide mark the end of Ramadan, leaders of countries including Afghanistan and Indonesia issued dire warnings against the provocative act.1
How is it that offended Muslims living in the ravages of retaliatory wars come to conflate Americans with flame-wielding infidels? By association, of course. Associations are how we become known. Our lives are shaped not just by the associations we make, but by the associations others keep toward us.
A thousand or so Unitarian Universalist congregations agree to form an association called the UUA. We covenant to affirm seven principles: to uphold individual dignity and inherent worth, we call for justice, equity and compassion; we accept one another and encourage spiritual growth; we search for truth and meaning freely, responsibly; we employ conscience and the democratic process; we seek liberty and justice for all; we respect the interdependent web.
And yet the demographers chart our disproportionate privilege. Thus we, not unlike Pastor Terry Jones, are called to reconcile our affirmation of justice, equity, compassion and the interdependent web with the conflict minerals that enable our cell phones, the 401ks and stock portfolios that yield profits from war-based defense industries and earth-ravaging mines. We who drink fairly traded coffee at church and perhaps unfairly traded coffee at home, we all have good intentions but ultimately we cannot source all our food to humane, environmentally-sound family farms, anymore than we can source all of our affordable consumer goods to just working conditions and sustainable manufacturing.
So here we are, looking to much of the world like provocative young women who sacrifice principles with a voluptuous display, pushing our ever expanding cleavage of rich and poor, empowered and not, into the face of others.
Some of us will associate the jeers and derision we receive as misplaced hostility, anti-Americanism, radical jihadism. Some of us cringe at our buxom hubris. And others cinch the bustier tighter and flash a smile. The associations that freeze us into a snapshot of immodest consumption and self absorption may feel to us unrepresentative of who we are. Or truth be reckoned with, they may reveal our less flattering side.
It is up to us to decide—- to make choices. What will we do, not simply as individuals blessed with personal agency, but as members of a collective that together weave the fabric of this society? We, with our choices, through our actions, within our ministries create an environment that shapes the choices available to others.
To the student in my class who astutely observes: “As much as your choices affect who you are, you really can’t help who you evolve into” -— for evolution depends on genetics and environment, not just personal choice -— I say this: our choices create environment. The associations we make, the associations we keep will surely shape the associations that keep us.
Will the people of Fitchburg, and non-Unitarian Universalists everywhere associate us with our privilege or our purpose? Our assets or our ministries? Our principles espoused or our principles embodied? Association Sunday is a time to answer.
Amen.
1 http://www.france24.com/en/20100910-man-killed-afghan-protest-over-koran-burning-pastor-james-nato-base-attack-afghanistan
© Rev. Leaf Seligman First Parish UU Fitchburg 3 October 2010
