A Letter to A Young Activist

Dear Young Friend, 

No doubt one day you will lead in justice work. But I can see you now confuse it with partisan work and you easily get caught up in roles handed you by the system as rewards for your good labors.  These roles may not be formal ones, they could be informal ones, like being the cute young white upcoming activist we should all support.  I know you've been to the marches, the frontlines, and to jail. You deserve rewards and respect, dear friend, but don't be an asshole.

The work of justice is not a place for righteous glamorous one-liners or words of wisdom you can put in your placards. It is not about a moral position you cannot change. Egos will ruin everything. When you are only demanding from afar, you are respecting the present dynamics that created the problem, you should be on a poster inspiring people who will grow many but never change a thing.

Justice doesn't start with a demand. It starts, with a confrontation in a conversation that changes the oppressor and yourself. If you still look good, you haven't been broken. If you haven't been broken, you haven't been vulnerable. If you haven't been vulnerable you have resisted change. If you have resisted change, you haven't done the good work.

So care for your friends in the work of good whose names are riddled with doubt, whose faces are tainted with realities, whose minds are heavily burdened. Be kind if you're a true ally. Stand with them in ugly work. Always take the side of the oppressed.

The powerful will confuse you saying they are shamed when injustice has been exposed. And your good heart can sympathize and should, but be not silenced. Telling the truth is the first work of justice. Truth-telling is ugly, it tells people you have seen the muck that everyone thinks is too tacky to talk about or dirt that only cleaners need mind. This is what it takes to  start the work. It is the work of bringing people into a conversation of breaking together.  

The work of justice is not for the high-minded.  It is not for the person who can grab the mic or stand on a platform to say what the topic is about tonight or who can summarize for us things that we have been blind to all along.  That work does not belong to anyone. Those facilitators have been telling us they know the right road in the mindmap where we all can be found. As if they can punctuate to end history. And what shall we do with the rest of of the mindmap? Throw it out? Bury it for now? This is the reason why there is always an again and again in ritual.  The map never ceases to expand and nothing gets obliterated. Just look at the faiths that used to be heresies in the last centuries. They persist.  And the only thing we can do is keep conversing around these conundrums.

The deep work is in conversation dear friend. And perhaps this letter is not even for you but for myself. Perhaps when you read this letter and we have a conversation, I will be found to be the asshole. See, that's alright, my dear. That is my partly my point. I've grown fond of watching your growth in spirit in the hope that our quality of conversation grows in wisdom.  The other part of my point is: I don't want to see your ass in the middle of the road on my way to the office of the latest oppressor.  Stand aside. We will not hesistate to run you down.  

Remember the day we all thought we could listen to your shit. Perhaps you will not be shamed if I expose your ugly ass because you've tainted me enough in your microaggresive conversations that pass for concern among your gossiping fragile friends.  Just know that when it all boils down to power, we are more than you and all it needs is consciousness of how few and puny you are behind your guns, goons, and gold. 

I hope that day never comes, dear friend.

With fondness,

Tet 

This is for no one in particular and was meant to be a piece of literature. 

Truth-telling Is The First Act of Justice

Sermon delivered at the First Unitarian Society of San Francisco, April 2, 2017.

What happens when people can no longer find truth in their churches? What happens when the UU principles become more of a myth than reality?   Today our churches are filled by a surge in attendance of mostly white people seeking solace from an impending implosion of American society.  But how much are we welcoming for people referred to as the minorities, in fact they are the global majorities – those we call people of color?

I’m honored to be on an American UU pulpit at a very interesting time in UU history and American history.  When I said the president should resign, I meant the US president.  I’m not as “international” as you might think. I have a stake in Peter Moraleses’s term of service.
In 1988, the UUA by-laws changed to make the UU Church of the Philippines part of the UUA. We have 29 congregations and have been there for the last 60 years. Our founder Toribio Quimada was assasinated in 1987 because he had run for office under the platform of land rights for farmers and made a few enemies.

I come from a country called the Philippines, it’s not the name of a restaurant. It’s a paradise on earth with 7,641 islands.  Have you ever tried being depressed on a sunny beach? That’s pretty hard to do.  So when people ask me if I am going to overstay here in the US.  I go hmmm…(balance left and right hand). Paradise or morose country? Why don’t you ask the half a million Americans overstaying in my country?   Why don’t you ask the more than a thousand Jews who escaped from the Holocaust whom we took as refugees or the half a million Vietnamese who escaped your war and we gave them their own island and they are now thriving. Why don’t you ask the other refugees we’ve been taking in, Russians, Chinese, and recently, 6,000 muslims who fled Burma because of “Buddhist” persecution instigated by the British who want to rid the lands they want to mine for jewels.
If there were three cathedrals, one was a UU church, the other was the United States, and the third was The World, where would you go if you were a truth-seeker? The UU Church, the United States, or the World?

How are we welcoming to the global majorities in UU churches? Rev. Craig Moro said evils in society are sometimes so strutured we call them Empire, Corporation, Party, State, and sometimes including Church.  Do you see a pattern where the organized can be the more efficient evil than the unorganized?  The understated part of Jesus’s ministry was this message: we organize for the unorganized, Christians for the Gentiles, we become efficient servants for what’s out there. And this has been one of the foundations of our faith early on.

The Cathedral of the Unitarian Universalists have principles, purposes, and sources, which mention Jewish and Christian teachings but not Muslims who form a very large part of the world.  Also, our UU system seems eager to accept people from the global majorities into volunteer positions but not in paid positions of leadership.  What made you think white people can run the world better than we can? “Come Build a Land” is a really good song to make me feel I’m in the right church, especially that part of the song that goes, “Where justice shall roll down like waters and peace like an ever-flowing stream.”

On the other hand, the Cathedral of the United States featured Lady Gaga when she led a heart-wrenching soul-soaring rendition of all the beliefs that is America during the Superbowl halftime, singing land of the free, home of the brave with William Guthrie’s lyrics, “This land was made for you and me”.  The Cathedral of the United States has its Declaration of Independence, penned by the Unitarian Thomas Jefferson, that states: “We hold these truth to be self-evident: That all [men] are created equal.”  Is it the truth that this is self-evident? How self-evident is it?

Meanwhile, we have the Cathedral of the World, where corporations make the laws.  So there must be a wisdom in why Trump was elected.  Well, yes, almost as much wisdom as there is in the Bible that says kill other nationalities, but yeah wisdom is not always right or complete.  Wisdom comes from well-grounded reasoning working with limited information.   This lack of information you may call ignorance.  Most of America has been kept in the dark by these corporations who know armies of workers are more efficient when information is given on what they call a “per-need basis”, that is you only get as much information as would be necessary for you to accomplish an assignment.   And the assignment right now is to serve corporations.

This country is colonized by corporations with no national preference, well possibly, Ireland where there’s tax holidays for corporations or Panama, perhaps.  Even white people who think they are privileged in the race contest are probably the most lied to. We are all oppressed in this same boat.
Trump was elected on a platform of America First because people were beginning to see the colonization of America by corporations who would rather give jobs away to non-Americans.  I know this because I was part of the team that would go to the US and tell Americans, Filipinos were taking their jobs.  Accenture is one of those large international corporations. Accenture is in 120 or so countries catering to at least 90 of the Top Global 100 companies. And the one in Manila where I used to work until 3 years ago is the biggest Accenture in the world with now about 30,000 employees.  Jimmy Kimmel, a TV comedian, had a whole sketch about how Accenture repaired Obamacare and I was one of the thousands who contributed to the repair of Obamacare.

“The truth is out there” goes the famous tagline of the TV series The X Files.  

Ours is not a faith for followers.  We don’t say, “Come in, find the truth. Follow us.”  Because the truth is out there, we say, “Come in, speak your truth. Convert us.”

How do we invite the truth in our churches these days so that we can catch a glimpse of it here?  What is stopping us from giving half the pulpit schedule to people who are not UUs, especially if they were from the global majorities, especially if they will teach us their wisdom in counter-oppression instead of white privilege theology?  What is stopping us from putting Martin Luther King on our walls? Didn’t he honor us when he spoke at our GA in 1966 and changed the face of America? What is stopping us from giving our space for free to activities focused on diversity, even if they were not members of our faith?

The truth needs to come alive in our conversations.   Right now, our church is engaged is probably the most important conversation of our faith : Inclusion.  Peter’s resignation is a sign that we are starting to be truthful in our conversations.  UUs are no longer just “being visible” on street rallies demanding justice from leaders who can’t hear them, but are finally having the spine to engage in confrontation of truths.

Conversations are the best places to wage conflict and yet we often come to it thinking we will be the same afterwards, holding on to our positions so that we don’t change our minds. People these days talk about “shutting down” the opposition or dropping the mic to win an argument or deliver the “word”.  

A study published by Harvard Business Review in 2011 showed that teams are better at problem solving when there’s women in the team.  And that teams with more women can outthink teams with higher IQs.  And the theory of some social scientists on why that is, is because women think with others better.  Women may have less obsession with who thought what first, taking credit, copyrighting, labeling, boxing something as theirs, when they are thinking things through by talking and not being the last word.

We need to welcome different ways to talking about how to arrive at the complete wisdom of, for instance, surviving as a human race, outwitting oil interests and climate change.

Today, companies like Accenture are growing and thriving competitively by leveraging on what they call “diversity intelligence”. They are organizing better by deriving more wisdom from ideas that are connected non-linearly, often tangentially or off-tangent, and sometimes adversarially.  It gives organizations a better systems-level view of variables that form an interconnected web, and see how the whole web shifts and moves.  If corporations make more sense with diversity intelligence than churches, we are in danger.

May we learn to invite the truth in here.  May we continue to be pilgrims in constant movement in this church.

 
BENEDICTION PRAYER AT END OF WORSHIP

PRAYER TO THE HIGHER SELF (pause at every line)
Let us confirm that we are worthy of  healing.
Let us confirm what we are worthy of knowing.
Let us confrm what we are worthy of being.
Let us think of what we need to allow to happen.
Let us think of things we are grateful for.
Let us confirm things we are worthy of having.
Let us sense the nascent answers in our inquiries.
Let us accept the quests launched by our questions as paths to seeing our selves.
Now let us pray the same for others.