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Freedom and Obligation
The homily I preached before the Ministerial Fellowship Committee - September 2016
This spring I watched baby Robins struggle toward freedom in the flower box under my front window. I witnessed with wonder four blue eggs laid and hatched, then with fascination, saw these strange, alien looking creatures emerge – tiny sacks of bones and skin. With impossibly thin necks they lifted their oversized heads with bulbous blue, lidded-over eyes and opened their beaks begging the wide world for food. I watched them snuggle close to one another, almost merging, sometimes pinning each other down and fighting for the food their parents brought.
One morning I looked out and saw that two of the baby birds had been moved, presumably by their parents, out of the nest. They lay, pale yellow and lifeless, still in the flower box but separated from their living siblings. After what I hoped was an appropriate amount of mourning, I removed them and lay them gently in the garden under a shrub.
As I watched the two remaining chicks get pounded with rain and looking almost as lifeless as the two departed, I was certain they wouldn’t make it. But days past and miraculously, they continued to develop into viable beings. I watched them, nurtured and growing into their hard won independence, preening and finally stretching their wings. I hoped to watch them as they first took flight and checked on them almost obsessively through the window. And I was there when they first fell, with a decided lack of majesty, from their nests, unable yet to fly, but hopping toward freedom. I was sure I saw them in the following days still hopping around the neighbors yard but I never saw them take flight.
It wasn’t what I expected. I pictured them gracefully taking wing and flying off into the air, but they hung around, pathetically grounded. Birds are the symbol of freedom. We say, “free as a bird.” But they are not born free. They struggle for their freedom and it’s not perfect or absolute. There are losses and limits in their striving but strive they do.
We humans are born no less tethered, weak and dependent. When we leave our nests, we learn that freedom comes with frightening responsibility. We have to learn to feed and defend ourselves. And we also learn that our survival depends on each other. We idealize and glorify freedom, but individual freedom is a myth. Liberation is born in relationship.
Our nation is built on the idea of liberty but it’s never been a pure, unencumbered moral value. The notion of freedom has been shaped by colonialism and slavery in this country and around the world. Our understanding of who is free has always been linked to who is not free.
Freedom is not only our most cherished American ideal, but also within our Unitarian Universalist movement. We deeply value our ability to think and believe freely. And building beloved community means we must balance individual freedom with our mutual obligation. Our interdependence obligates us to demand and fight for greater freedom for all. We are called to hold a more nuanced, complex understanding of liberty – one that doesn’t declare each person’s right to do and say what they want when they want to, above the demand to truly cherish all lives.
Buying into a simple notion of freedom that says, “don’t tread on me, don’t try to tell me how to act, or how to think,” as we neglect the obligation of covenantal community, clips the generative, life-giving wings of freedom. If we are more concerned with our individual liberty from constraints, while we ignore the fact that still, in 2016, black children are drinking poisoned water, attending overcrowded classrooms in buildings that are crumbling or closing, that Black Americans are almost six times more likely to be incarcerated than White Americans, and when Black men and women are murdered by police almost daily with impunity we are peddling in a cheap, perverse and fantastical version of freedom. It is the kind of false freedom that enables us to tolerate the destruction of precious lives, allows us to ignore those on the margins and accept the comfort of what is and always has been. While we cherish our freedom, we must remember to ask who is not free and why.
This year’s General Assembly breathed life into the Black Lives Matter resolution of 2015. There were workshops, worship services and speakers that put the voices of the many black Unitarian Universalists who were present at the center. There was space for black UUs to tell their stories of why they came to a UU church, why they stay, why it is difficult for them to stay and why their voices are oh, so needed. However, in spite of the strong presence of Black UU’s and our spoken commitment to support the Black Lives Matter Movement, several racial justice initiatives were not passed this year and many felt our words were empty. It was a painful reminder of our historic inconsistent commitment to racial justice.
Hearing the stories of many UU’s of color shattered the myth that ours is not a religion African Americans want. I heard over and over the voices of those who have felt marginalized, othered, and offended in our churches but who remain because this IS THEIR religious home. Together, as a movement, we can renew our commitment to building inclusive communities of justice and freedom by listening more deeply and acting more courageously. Together we can find a way to make space in the center for those who have not had a voice, those who have been tokenized, those who have withered in the glare of a wish that their presence would absolve us of our racism. We must balance our cherished value of freedom with the obligation to remember who is not free as we build a more multicultural religious movement and world.
Our fourth principle, the Keystone of our seven, lifting up the free and responsible search for truth and meaning, holds together in redemptive tension individualism and interconnection. Our ideal of freedom must be kept in check through our relationship to one another. Our agency and our ability to choose are always in relation to the agency and choice of every other being.
I was a scared little kid, not at all a risk taker, and I surprised myself when I agreed to go skydiving when I was twenty. I remember standing at the open door of a gutted two-seater plane at 10,000 feet, an experienced diver strapped to my back. Knowing that I was literally bound to this person, I understood that I was obligated to leave that plane. I had no choice. In that transformative moment, waiting to jump, I felt the fear drain out of me, from the top of my head and down out of my toes. We leaped and I experienced the exhilarating and overpowering rush of air as we fell. It was a very good thing that I wasn’t jumping alone because I did not have the wherewithal to pull the ripcord in time, which is, in fact, why they don’t allow rookies to jump alone. When the parachute opened up I felt myself yanked up as we slowed to a gentle drift and the silence, like I’ve never heard before, was magnificent. I felt utterly emancipated in one moment and, then as we landed, I remembered I was bound to this other person – still strapped to them - and grounded through connection with the other and the earth.
Freedom doesn’t just fall from the sky. We have to work hard for it, continuously creating and recreating it so that all people, including ourselves, can be free. We are unique and valuable individuals profoundly connected and obligated to one another. This fundamental truth is the basis of our covenantal faith. We come into community freely and we promise to love and serve one another justly.
At times, freedom can seem a lifeless dream beyond hope. But freedom is still possible if we nurture it, work for it together and demand it for one another. Freedom is impossible without knowing our obligation to uphold and advance the freedom of all. The journey is not a narrow path but fills the wide sky. We will suffer losses as we ascend and descend, swoop, dive and sometimes come crashing to the ground. But knowing we fly or fall together, we will rise again. May we lift one another up toward freedom with ever more justice and love.