I was ordained in this religion with no dogma to offer a world desperate for answers; by tradition to be called the Reverend in a world irreverent about moral ascendancy; to stand for a people of my sexual orientation met with intolerance and violence in the world; to be present as a person of color in a majority-white denomination; to represent a liberal faith in a country so Catholic that one can be jailed for “offending religious feelings". So help me God.
Sunday, March 4, 2018
In Solidarity With Christina Rivera
I have been thinking intermittently since 2014, since I came up-close to the UUA culture, that perhaps this isn't my faith calling. It was only 1 year after my ordination, after 7 years of serving the UU Church of the Philippines mostly on zeal. And tonight, I cry soulful tears for these truths shared by Christina Rivera. And for the first time, I daydreamed in my ride home of how a world would be if I wasn't Unitarian, as it was before.
Because beyond these mostly posturings we call ritual, there is an emptiness. When watching Youtube, when eating with farmers, when getting lost on the German rail, when relying on the mercy of strangers in Nepal has brought me higher hopes in normalizing non-partisan, transcendent, and enlightened moments of human connections while getting more and more wounded in my encounters in the UUA, I flood myself with hurtful questions whose possible answers point to the fact that there is a culture of complicity, an affirmation of systems of oppression in all their intersectionalities, and a smokescreen of reducing the gargantuan white supremacy to black oppression. We cannot live one-issue lives, so let's get real here. This will be my last post about this religion. I offer my 30-day silence as protest while I dedicate those days to powerful prayer, fasting, healing and discernment.
Her blog is here:
https://uuchristinarivera.wordpress.com/2018/03/04/a-culture-of-complicity/
I have started a 30-day blog of reflections of how I had contributed to this culture of complicity.
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