…In order to travel the Great Way together, we have to cultivate a sense of belonging that isn’t conditional upon conformity.
I don’t want a smoothed-out, disproportionately aggrandized faith that attempts to draw all comers to its one self-righteous place at the top of the map of humanity, leaving the messiness of their upbringings and lived realities behind them. Instead, I want an imaginative and wandering faith of holy cartographers, eager encounterers who pay exquisite attention to the terrain and the systemic forces that shape it. Leaders who meet people where they are, approach them with curiosity, hold lightly to their own individual stories, and are willing to be surprised and delighted and moved by what they discover in the treasure trove of another.
This cannot happen with assimilation; it has to be transformation. We all have to be aiming for transformation, and to be willing to be guided not by positions and placeholders but by principles held in covenant, and to which anyone of loving intention can guide us back. The old, top-heavy map simply cannot get us there.…
Could we teach one another how to do this? Could we make the foundation of our faith development learning how to inhabit an open and curious presence, by rooting firmly in our own mutual belovedness as it is so beautifully articulated in the Universalist half of our heritage? I want us to heal one another through our fiercely compassionate presence so that we can chart a different path as a matter of lived theology. So that we can caringly release the old one-directional paths that aren’t broad enough for all of us to accompany one another.
I think this degree of spiritual security and resiliency could be what gets us there, what frees our souls to encounter the sacred terrain of one another’s experiences. What we discover and share could be our new map, more complete and truer than the one we were handed and that we didn’t know we could leave behind. This could be how we grow our new way together.
excerpted from “Class Passing into UU Leadership” by Teresa Youngblood, pp. 51–61 in Seeds of a New Way: Nurturing Authentic and Diverse Religious Leadership (Manish Mishra-Marzetti and Nancy McDonald Ladd, eds.) This excerpt: pp. 59–61.