Close to Home, Close to Tears

I performed a Memorial Service last night in Byron, Michigan followed by a reception at the Eagles Aerie in Durand. On the drive home to Flint, I burst into tears and realized that I have been living into what I asked for when I moved to Flint. It feels so hard.

Unitarian Universalism, in my experience, is clearly localized in upper middle class and suburban culture. We joke sometime about an "M.A." as the price of admission to membership in our churches. We say we expect a learned ministry (although we really don't have much of one, anymore, but rather a professionally prepared clergy), and yet are satisfied that our members are often smarter than our ministers.

When it was clear to me that it was time for me to leave Community Church of Boston, I met with a leading colleague in Boston who looked with me at the list of congregations that were in search. He read a list of eight wealthy suburban congregations in eastern Massachusetts, and said he thought I could use my public position as President of the Greater Boston Interfaith Organization and frequent supportive spokesperson of the janitors union in their struggles as a way to become minister of one of these powerful pulpits. I rejected that notion outright. Not that I don't want to have a meaningful ministry among people with resources; but there are plenty of well-prepared ministers who can serve in those locations.

I come from a working-class family, my Dad a maintenance man in a vinyl factory and later a sheet-metal rolling mill, my mom working in the home until all the kids were in school, and then working restaurant and clerical jobs often on a part-time basis. I was the first person in my family among all my cousins to go to college, and even now I am in a minority among my cousins.

Still, this upper middle class liberal religion has been lifesaving for me. In Unitarian Universalism I have found a place to be the free-thinker that I am; to live openly my homosexuality and radical politics; to find friends who care deeply for the earth and for the people who live closest to the earth, those who, because of their economic resources, have fewer options than the wealthy to move to other places, to avoid the poisoning of the earth and the commodification of our food and our lives.

I came to Flint to pursue a multi-class and multi-cultural Unitarian Universalism. I came to be in a place where there might be the possibility of leading a racially-diverse community. I came here to be able to sit with working-class families in their joy and grief, to accompany them in their experience of injustice, to offer them a broad and liberal way out of circumstances and thinking that might have been straitened by the relentless attacks of our economic system on working people, families and communities.

Here I was, after sitting in the simple home of a grieving man who had lost his partner of 25 years and who wanted, in his grief, not to be bombarded with anti-gay messages; here I was with his sister who had watched her brother struggle for many years and finally to die only weeks after his 50th birthday; here I was trying to speak a truth about the tremendous value of worthy lives that might be considered less significant than those lives of the wealthy, educated, powerful.

I asked for this ministry, and here it is. And yet the truth that I don't experience in my everyday life is that a working class life is a familied life, a communal life; to find myself without a family here, without much of a community beyond my employment here, is difficult, lonely.

And so a drive last night with many tears.

The morning is bright, snow is steady and beautiful, just at freezing and pretty "even." I'm leaving later this morning to see the first showing of "Semi Pro" in Flint at noon. Looking forward to THAT! (And yet, I'll be doing this alone. Hmm.)

Good morning.