SPIRIT IN PRACTICE
A Tapestry of Faith Program for Adults
WORKSHOP 9: JUSTICE PRACTICES
BY ERIK WALKER WIKSTROM
© Copyright 2008 Unitarian Universalist Association.
Published to the Web on 9/29/2014 8:54:26 PM PST.
This program and additional resources are available on the UUA.org web site at
www.uua.org/religiouseducation/curricula/tapestryfaith.
WORKSHOP OVERVIEW
INTRODUCTION
What we would like to do is change the world—make it a little simpler for people to feed, clothe, and shelter themselves as God intended for them to do. And, by fighting for better conditions, by crying out unceasingly for the rights of the workers, of the poor, of the destitute... we can, to a certain extent, change the world; we can work for the oasis, the little cell of joy and peace in a harried world. We can throw our pebble in the pond and be confident that its ever widening circle will reach around the world. We repeat, there is nothing that we can do but love, and, dear God, please enlarge our hearts to love each other, to love our neighbor, to love our enemy as well as our friend.
—Dorothy Day
The sixth workshop in this series—"Body Practices"—encouraged healing the split that is often thought to exist between the body and the spirit. The eighth—"Life Practices"—focused attention on the seeming dichotomy between spirituality and our everyday lives. These are really two examples of the same fundamental misunderstanding about spirituality—that spirituality is somehow apart from, or different than, regular life. Things "of the spirit" are seen as somehow more ethereal than our physical bodies and more miraculous than our mundane experiences.
There is another common example of this same essential error: the separation of religion and politics. You might hear individuals in our congregations complain that there is too much talk about politics on Sunday morning and not enough spirituality—or conversely, that there's too much spirituality and not enough politics. Either way, the two are often thought of as separate spheres.
Mohandas Gandhi—known by the Indian people as both "Great Spirit" (Mahatma) and "Papa" (Bapu)—is remembered as saying that those who say religion has nothing to do with politics understand neither religion nor politics. The Unitarian Universalist minister Mark Morrison-Reed has said, "The central task of the religious community is to unveil the bonds that bind each to all. There is a connectedness, a relationship discovered amid the particulars of our own lives and the lives of others. Once felt, it inspires us to act for justice." At its best—at its deepest, its most full—religion always decreases separation and increases connection. It is not narcissistic navel gazing. We discover that we all have Buddha nature, or are all members of the body of Christ, or that we are all—along with the animals, the trees, and the stars—children of "Mother Earth."
One way or another, all of the great religious and spiritual traditions we humans have ever developed point to a fundamental commonality that absolutely requires us to care for one another. As the well-known Vietnamese Buddhist monk and peace activist Thich Nhat Hanh puts it, we "inter-are"; we are not truly independent, but rather are interdependent. The Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., puts it this way in his sermon Remaining Awake Through a Great Revolution : "We are tied together in the single garment of destiny, caught in an inescapable network of mutuality ." Our own Unitarian Universalist Association's Statement of Principles and Purposes tells us that we UUs affirm the idea that all of existence is an interdependent web. And, as the Reverend Morrison-Reed says, once you fully embrace this interconnectedness you are compelled to act.
And we Unitarian Universalists have a proud history of action. In fact, for many adults who find our movement, our activism is the first level of engagement. As Unitarian Universalists, our personal faith is not necessarily connected with a belief in a supernatural deity. Faith is meant to convey our connection and commitment to whatever we hold most real and most true. We may have faith in God. We may have faith in the essential goodness of humanity. We may believe in the brokenness of humanity, yet have faith in our ability to grow beyond it. We may have faith that peace is worth fighting for, that one day people will see that it matters not so much whom you love as that you love, or that it is indeed possible for us all to learn to get along. Each of us has some kind of faith, and none of us ever acts without those actions being informed by our faith.
This workshop encourages us to realize that our religious/spiritual faith and our social engagement must not only co-exist, but must be fully integrated, because they are, in essence, one and the same thing. After all, what is social action but ministry to a hurting world? And as the minister and author Frederick Buechner notes, our ministries, our place of service, our action in the world will be found where our deep passion and the world's deep hunger meet. Finding such a place is a spiritual task; responding to it is as well.
GOALS
This workshop will:
LEARNING OBJECTIVES
Participants will:
WORKSHOP-AT-A-GLANCE
Activity | Minutes |
Welcoming and Entering | 0 |
Opening | 5 |
Activity 1: Sharing Names | 5 |
Activity 2: The Story of Siddhartha's Awakening | 10 |
Activity 3: Twenty-one Thoughts | 10 |
Activity 4: Justice Work as Spiritual Practice | 25 |
Closing | 5 |
Alternate Activity 1: The Congregation's Justice Work | 45 |
Alternate Activity 2: Social Justice Project | 30 |
SPIRITUAL PREPARATION
Leaders are encouraged to prepare for the workshop not only by gathering supplies and reviewing the workshop's activities, but also by engaging in a justice practice—something that puts your hopes for a better world into action. This could involve advocating, demonstrating, or serving the community. Reflect on the experience afterwards, thinking of how it expressed and/or informed your spirituality and beliefs. You may wish to consult one of the resources listed in Find Out More.
WORKSHOP PLAN
WELCOMING AND ENTERING
Materials for Activity
Preparation for Activity
Description of Activity
As participants enter, invite them to sign in, create name tags, and pick up a schedule for the workshop series if they have not already done so. Direct their attention to the agenda for this workshop.
OPENING (5 MINUTES)
Materials for Activity
Preparation for Activity
Description of Activity
Welcome participants to Spirit in Practice.
Ask the group to turn to "To Be of Use" by Marge Piercy, 567 in Singing the Living Tradition. You may wish to share with participants that Marge Piercy is a contemporary poet, novelist, and activist. Invite a participant to light the chalice as the group reads responsively.
After the reading, ask the group to turn to "This Little Light of Mine," 118 in Singing the Living Tradition. Invite the group to join in singing. If the group is largely unfamiliar with the song, you may need to teach them the tune.
Including All Participants
If your congregation has large-print and/or Braille versions of Singing the Living Tradition, make those copies available for participants who might need them. Using a microphone for this activity helps more people hear you.
ACTIVITY 1: SHARING NAMES (5 MINUTES)
Materials for Activity
Preparation for Activity
Description of Activity
Introduce yourself and your co-leader(s), and invite participants to take turns sharing their names. As participants introduce themselves, invite them to stand (if they are willing and able) and to speak loudly or use the microphone so they can be better seen and heard.
Including All Participants
Using a microphone for this activity helps more people hear one another.
ACTIVITY 2: THE STORY OF SIDDHARTHA'S AWAKENING (10 MINUTES)
Materials for Activity
Preparation for Activity
Description of Activity
Read the story "Siddhartha's Awakening" aloud. Provide copies of the story to people who prefer to read along.
After sharing the story, invite participants to take a moment to quietly center themselves, to let go of any tension or emotions that are not needed for the next hour, and to breathe deeply. You may ring a bell at the beginning and end of this silent time, or simply invite people into the silence and then gently bring them out.
After the silence, invite participants to discuss their responses to the story. Keep the discussion brief and focused, allowing time for your own concluding remarks. Ask:
Conclude by emphasizing that spirituality and justice are interrelated. You may wish to draw on the text from this workshop's Introduction to make your points.
Including All Participants
Be sure that all participants can hear the story, or have the story interpreted for them. Using a microphone for this activity helps more people hear the story. You may wish to print out a copy of the story in advance for participants who are hard of hearing or who prefer to read along.
ACTIVITY 3: TWENTY-ONE THOUGHTS (10 MINUTES)
Materials for Activity
Preparation for Activity
Description of Activity
Invite participants to sit in a circle. Explain that you will pass around a basket of quotations. Participants can pick a quotation to read aloud, or let the basket pass by them if they prefer to just listen.
Going around the circle, have participants read the quotations slowly and loudly. Take a moment or two of silence between each quotation. Continue around the circle until all of the quotations have been read.
Discuss the quotations with the group:
Including All Participants
You may wish to pass a cordless microphone during the reading and discussion so that participants can hear one another better.
ACTIVITY 4: JUSTICE WORK AS SPIRITUAL PRACTICE (25 MINUTES)
Materials for Activity
Description of Activity
Introduce the activity by telling the group that Felix Adler, a humanist who founded the Ethical Culture Movement, said that "spirituality is consciousness of infinite interrelatedness." In this sense, working for justice is a spiritual practice—it increases our awareness of the interrelatedness of all people and the interdependence of all life.
Ask participants to name some other ways in which working for justice can be a spiritual practice. Invite them to speak from their own experience and the experience of people they know well. This helps demonstrate that one need not be Gandhi or Mother Teresa for justice work to be spiritual. List the group's ideas on newsprint.
Introduce the ideas of "praxis" and "theological reflection" if they haven't already been introduced. Here's a description of each:
Ask participants if they have experience using tools like these for spiritual reflection or in other contexts. Invite participants to consider the ways that praxis and theological reflection can contribute to their spiritual growth as they work for justice in the world.
If there is time, ask participants to identify a time when work for justice affected their spiritual growth or changed their beliefs. Participants can share in pairs or as a whole group.
Including All Participants
You may wish to pass a cordless microphone during the whole-group discussion so that participants can hear one another better.
CLOSING (5 MINUTES)
Materials for Activity
Preparation for Activity
Description of Activity
Gather participants around the altar or centering table. Affirm the good work that participants have done in this workshop.
Offer an opportunity for the group to reflect back over the workshop, seeking what are sometimes called "likes and wishes." Ask participants, if they wish, to briefly share something they particularly liked about their experience and one thing they wish for in the future. If the group is small or there is extra time, allow participants to speak freely. If the group is large or time is tight, limit people's sharing so that all who wish to share will have the opportunity.
Distribute and explain your customized Taking It Home handout. Review the ideas for how to continue exploring the workshop's subject with friends and family.
If you have chosen to encourage journaling throughout the Spirit in Practice workshop series, remind participants to write in their journals. (See Workshop 1, Alternate Activity 2: Introduction to Journaling.)
Make any announcements concerning the next meeting, especially any changes to routine (such as a change in meeting time or place, a guest presenter, etc.).
Close the workshop with this ritual: The leader takes the hand of the person on his/her right while saying, "I put my hand in yours so that we might do together what we cannot do alone." That person, still holding the leader's hand, then takes the hand of the person on his/her right, saying the same thing. When this saying has gone completely around the circle and everyone is holding hands, the workshop has ended. Extinguish the chalice.
Including All Participants
Using a microphone for this activity helps more people hear you.
Be sure to be inclusive of people with a variety of living situations—living alone, with a significant other, in a family, with housemates, etc.—in the way you explain the Taking It Home activities.
You may wish to adapt the closing ritual to make it more comfortable for people who are averse to holding hands. You can change the words to "I reach out to you so that we might do together what we cannot do alone" and change the accompanying gesture to reaching rather than holding hands.
LEADER REFLECTION AND PLANNING
After the workshop, co-leaders should make a time to get together to evaluate this workshop and plan future workshops. Use these questions to guide your shared reflection and planning:
TAKING IT HOME
In the days and weeks to come, try these tips for using social justice work as part of your spiritual regimen.
Don't try to do it all. Remember the definition of ministry offered by the Protestant minister and novelist Frederick Buechner: "the place where your deep passion and the world's deep hunger meet." Another great reminder comes from theologian and civil rights leader Howard Thurman: "Don't ask what the world needs. Ask what makes you come alive,and go do it. Because what the world needs is people have come alive." Explore what causes and aspects of justice work give you the most passion, energy, and purpose, and get engaged with those. Go in the direction that your heart and the world call you to go.
Remind yourself, and those you work with, why you are doing what you are doing. Don't get so caught up in the task that you forget the task's deep meaning. Frequently ask yourself what inspires you about what you're doing; ask how it makes you "come alive."
Act. Reflect. Act. Reflect. Explore ways of intentionally deepening the spiritual experience of justice work. Take time to reflect after actions you take, whether they are as simple as signing an online petition or as challenging as building homes for a week on the Gulf Coast . Reflect on your own, and reflect with companions. If you're looking for specific tools, several books on theological reflection are available online and at religious-themed bookstores.
Remember to refresh yourself. As Thich Nhat Hanh says, "Life is full of suffering. But it also has sunshine, blue skies, and the eyes of a baby. It would be a shame if all we saw was the suffering."
Even small steps move the cause forward. You don't need to start a homeless shelter; simply taking the time to say "hello" and to look into the eyes of a homeless woman as you pass is something. Writing a letter to the editor or to a legislator, bringing something to your congregation's canned food drive—these are not as drastic as selling all that you have and giving it to the poor, but they are steps in the right direction. And every step counts.
ALTERNATE ACTIVITY 1: THE CONGREGATION'S JUSTICE WORK (45 MINUTES)
Materials for Activity
Preparation for Activity
Description of Activity
Introduce the panelists you have invited. Ask each one to introduce him/herself and to share a little bit about the UU-related social justice activities she/he is involved with. Ask panelists to speak about the ways their social justice work connects with their spirituality and their Unitarian Universalist identity.
After each panelist has spoken, invite participants to ask questions of the panelists. If participants don't immediately have questions, ask some of the questions you prepared in advance.
Including All Participants
You may wish to pass a cordless microphone between panelists so that participants can hear them better.
ALTERNATE ACTIVITY 2: SOCIAL JUSTICE PROJECT (30 MINUTES)
Materials for Activity
Preparation for Activity
Description of Activity
Invite participants to plan a social justice project together—one in which they can build time for spiritual reflection. You can approach this discussion from many angles. Suggested questions for discussion are:
If the group agrees on a project, ensure that someone (or a group of people) takes responsibility for making it happen.
Including All Participants
You may wish to pass a cordless microphone during the discussion so that participants can hear one another better.
SPIRIT IN PRACTICE: WORKSHOP 9:
STORY: SIDDHARTHA’S AWAKENING
Young prince Siddhartha had been raised in complete luxury. His life had been so arranged that he knew no suffering, no lack, no want. So when he first encountered suffering—in the form of a sick person, an old person, and a dying person—he was determined to find its cause and its solution. For six years he endured the most extreme self-denial the Hindu tradition of his day encouraged. Eventually he sat himself down beneath the Bodhi tree, determined to remain in deep meditation until he solved the problem of suffering.
For six days he sat, and then he had an awakening through which he saw the deep truth of reality. He entered a state of perfect oneness and bliss—nirvana. And he was tempted to remain in this state, for here there was no suffering, no struggle, no sorrow, no strife.
But what good would it do for him to have found the solution to merely his own life’s suffering? What would be the result of his determination if he alone attained nirvana while all other beings suffered on?
Siddhartha roused himself and stood. It was the beginning of a new day, and there was much work to be done.
SPIRIT IN PRACTICE: WORKSHOP 9:
HANDOUT: TWENTY-ONE THOUGHTS ON PEACE AND JUSTICE
Cut each statement into strips.
1. Nothing could be worse than the fear that one had given up too soon, and left one unexpended effort that might have saved the world. - Jane Addams
2. How can one not speak about war, poverty, and inequality when people who suffer from these afflictions don’t have a voice to speak? - Isabel Allende
3. No matter how big a nation is, it is no stronger that its weakest people, and as long as you keep a person down, some part of you has to be down there to hold him down, so it means you cannot soar as you might otherwise. - Marian Anderson
4. This country will not be a good place for any of us to live in unless we make it a good place for all of us to live in. - Theodore Roosevelt
5. The good we secure for ourselves is precarious and uncertain until it is secured for all of us and incorporated into our common life. - Jane Addams
6. Bullets cannot be recalled. They cannot be uninvented. But they can be taken out of the gun. - Martin Amis
7. Cautious, careful people, always casting about to preserve their reputation and social standing, never can bring about a reform. Those who are really in earnest must be willing to be anything or nothing in the world’s estimation, and publicly and privately, in season and out, avow their sympathy with despised and persecuted ideas and their advocates, and bear the consequences. - Susan B. Anthony
8. Action is the antidote to despair. - Joan Baez
9. Politics should be the part-time profession of every citizen who would protect the rights and privileges of free people and who would preserve what is good and fruitful in our national heritage. - Lucille Ball
10. When someone steals another’s clothes, we call them a thief. Should we not give the same name to one who could clothe the naked and does not? The bread in your cupboard belongs to the hungry; the coat unused in your closet belongs to the one who needs it; the shoes rotting in your closet belong to the one who has no shoes; the money which you hoard up belongs to the poor. - Basil the Great
11. Faith is taking the first step even when you don’t see the whole staircase. - Martin Luther King, Jr.
12. We will not learn how to live together in peace by killing each other’s children. - Jimmy Carter
13. Sometime in your life, hope that you might see one starved man, the look on his face when the bread finally arrives. Hope that you might have baked it or bought or even kneaded it yourself. For that look on his face, for your meeting his eyes across a piece of bread, you might be willing to lose a lot, or suffer a lot, or die a little, even. - Daniel Berrigan, SJ
14. This will be our reply to violence: to make music more intensely, more beautifully, more devotedly than ever before. - Leonard Bernstein
15. If you want peace, work for justice. - H. L. Mencken
16. Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful citizens can change the world. Indeed, it is the only thing that ever has. - Margaret Mead
17. Once social change begins, it cannot be reversed. You cannot uneducate the person who has learned to read. You cannot humiliate the person who feels pride. You cannot oppress the people who are not afraid anymore. We have seen the future, and the future is ours. - César Chávez
18. I swore never to be silent whenever human beings endure suffering and humiliation. We must always take sides. Neutrality helps the oppressor, never the victim. Silence encourages the tormentor, never the tormented. - Elie Weisel
19. The challenge of social justice is to evoke a sense of community that we need to make our nation a better place, just as we make it a safer place. - Marian Wright Edelman
20. Thou shalt not be a victim. Thou shalt not be a perpetrator. Above all, thou shalt not be a bystander. - From the Holocaust Museum, Washington, D.C.
21. Past the seeker as he prayed came the crippled and the beggar and the beaten. And seeing them, he cried, “Great God, how is it that a loving creator can see such things and yet do nothing about them?” God said, “I did do something. I made you.” - Sufi saying
FIND OUT MORE
Bowens-Wheatley, Marjorie, and Nancy Palmer Jones, eds. Soul Work: Anti-racist Theologies in Dialogue (at www.uuabookstore.org/productdetails.cfm?PC=14) . Skinner House, 2002.
Kivel, Paul. (at www.uuabookstore.org/productdetails.cfm?PC=67) Uprooting Racism: How White People Can Work for Racial Justice (at www.uuabookstore.org/productdetails.cfm?PC=67). New Society, 2002.
Leonard, Richard D. Call to Selma: Eighteen Days of Witness (at www.uuabookstore.org/productdetails.cfm?PC=557). Skinner House, 2001.
Parker, Rebecca Ann. Blessing the World: What Can Save Us Now (at www.uuabookstore.org/productdetails.cfm?PC=547). Skinner House, 2006.
Reckford, Jonathan. (at www.uuabookstore.org/productdetails.cfm?PC=52) Creating a Habitat for Humanity: No Hands But Yours (at www.uuabookstore.org/productdetails.cfm?PC=52). Augsburg Fortress, 2000.
Stout, Linda. (at www.uuabookstore.org/productdetails.cfm?PC=339) Bridging the Class Divide and Other Lessons for Grassroots Organizing (at www.uuabookstore.org/productdetails.cfm?PC=339). Beacon Press, 1997.