Complicated Love

I have long wondered how Unitarian Universalists minister to "my people." Now "my people" is a complicated subset of humanity. Some most readily identify the "my people" among us as middle-aged gay men (yep, I'm one of those!), and gay men have long had a pretty public place among UUs. Especially since the AIDS crisis of the 80s and 90s, many gay men (and those of us who lived through the challenging first decades of AIDS are pretty middle aged now!) have found a place at UU churches where they have been fully integrated.
If "my people" are men, well, of course, men have been running this movement since its inception. Men have also relied heavily on women's participation to raise money for our projects, write our Sunday school curriculums, build all our institutional forms,etc.; but men (as "my people") have been ever present.
But it is working people who have been rather marginalized in our movement. Interestingly, we have long been aware of the challenge of integrating working people into a religious tradition that has long ben part of the ruling class of this country. Friend Street Chapel (1827) was founded in Boston specifically to reach out to the poor and working people who were coming newly into Boston. Similar working-class chapels were established in many cities with large "establishment" churches.
Still, since the suburbanization of our country following World War II, the power of many UU institutions has moved out of the central city (so that the Cleveland OH church is in Shaker Heights, the Lynn MA church is in Swampscott, the Bridgeport CT church is in Fairfield, etc.). I want to find a way to do ministry that was intentionally directed toward serving working class people. In Flint, I have found that some of my most painful and rewarding work has been tending to the grieving of working class families after the loss of mother, father, lover, friend.
Last weekend included two rites of passage for two families. On Saturday afternoon (with a rehearsal on Friday afternoon), I was privileged to officiate at a wedding that was overflowing with joy (and relief!) that this couple had found each other and were ready to go forward in trust and mutual dependence. It was a celebratory afternoon with a delightful evening reception at the Sloan Museum.

On Friday evening, friends of Freda Counelis remembered a mother who recently died in her late 50s. Sitting in Freda's home on Civic Park, looking at piles of photographs and seeing the presence of children's toys and proud clutter, I felt so very much at home. This was as close as I've found in my professional life to the home of my upbringing. And to share with a daughter her feelings for her mom--celebrating the best that her mom was, and her deepest conviction that her mom loved her, loved her, as well as her sense of disappointment at times her mom let her down, and she let her mom down--this was the stuff of a class conscious ministry I to which I aspire.

As the memorial service proceeded, with mom's favorite music, including the karaoke which helped to tie her to a community and to her own son, I was overwhelmed with a notion: that the universalism I preach is about a complicated Love. This complicated Love is, as I might say, eternal and all-conquering; a Love which calls us all into reconciliation and harmony. But it is also a Love which recognizes the aspirations evident in our love. I, personally, always loved my Dad, always wanted to love my Dad, even when the haze of his alcoholism made it hard for him to see me, or for me to see him truly. So often my vision was skewed by my inadequate lenses of resentment, and even my earnest desire to save him, to redeem our relationship, to reform him so that I might be formed as a good son with a good father.

It was a complicated relationship, as our relationships are complicated, and the Love discovered in our lives is a complicated Love. But the universal Love, the eternal and all-conquering Love of our faith, is Love that tolerates the complexity of complicated Love, and gives us a means by which t make things less complicated. In faith, I understand that my Dad is, after death and now in Love's presence, able to live his best Love; and I, too, am able to remember him at his best, to Love him with my best. Eternal and All-Conquering Love leads me to experience a complicated Love not as inferior but as a part of the greater Love.

Likewise, complicated Love lets me see working class people not as inferior (nor superior!) to the middle-class folk who so populate my ministry and around whom so much of Unitarian Universalism is organized. A complicated Love lets me embrace where I am and fully to enter the possibility about which I dream--a multi-class Unitarian Universalism which expresses more completely the fullness of human living and being.

Mornings are dark, again, after the sunrise time was "sprung ahead." Yet here I sit, overwhelmed by this calling, held by a complicated Love which brings me to Flint and sustains me day by day.

Good morning, friends!