Tuesday, June 30, 2009

wrestling with multiculturalism

I met with my spiritual director yesterday and realized that I was still carrying a lot of feelings around the challenges of multiculturalism, challenges for me personally and for our faith.

I blogged last week about my disappointment in the presenter chosen for the minister's continuing education program. I mentioned in my blog her really appalling use of psuedo-science to support what was in any case a pretty basic point. As I spoke about the incident again yesterday with my spiritual director I became clear that I was offended by that anti-intellectualism as I would be offended if a presenter had made blatantly bigoted remarks. It was insulting to me as an educated person, and as part of a faith which historically is associated with high intelligence and the best science and still requires an advanced degree from our clergy, to listen to those remarks unchallenged. Both of my congregation's book clubs are reading presently, The Invention of Air, a biography of Joseph Priestly by Stephen Johnson. I wonder what the Unitarian discoverer of Oxygen would have thought of that day's example of his faith.

My Spiritual Director encouraged me to consider other forms of intelligence, bodily and emotional and so on. And I'm there. What I'm hoping for is multi-culturalism not only a "thinking" faith. But a truly multi-cultural faith requires that reason and logic be lifted up equally with mysticism and activism and ritual and expressions of pastoral care, not abused.

I then was able to contrast that day's presentation with the Conference at Berry Street. Rev. Paul Rasor's essay was the essence of head-space Unitarianism, and also unfulfilling to me. It came across as unfinished, as though he had gotten wrapped up in the interesting work he was doing on statistics but wasn't able to connect that to the real work of our congregations. In fact he announced at the outset of his talk that we should attend the GA workshops if we wanted practical solutions; he was going to focus on theology. And then Rev. McNatt offered a response which was both respectful and appreciative of the work Rev. Rasor had done, but also was able to connect the numbers to the heart-space of how our churches' lack of racial diversity affects people in the pews. Rev. McNatt also offered the very helpful insight that what we're dealing with is a cultural problem rather than a racial problem per se.

Of the two I found Rev. McNatt's talk more satisfying, but having them both together really made the point. We need good thinking and good feeling. And we can speak from either side without doing dis-service to the other.

3 comments:

Robin Edgar said...

:It was insulting to me as an educated person, and as part of a faith which historically is associated with high intelligence and the best science

The key word here being *historically*. . . :-)

:I wonder what the Unitarian discoverer of Oxygen would have thought of that day's example of his faith.

Good question. Who knows what Joseph Priestly would have thought, or indeed would think if he was alive today. I expect however that famous Unitarian, and *now* famous U*U. . . Sir Isaac Newton, who is considered to be something of a "whack job" by *some* people, might have been more open to the supposed ability of water crystals responding to positive and negative thought. ;-)

Anthony David said...

Thanks Ricky--I appreciate your words here. I've also been reflecting on multiculturalism as it was brought up at GA. See my "Thousand Voices" blog at anthonyuu.wordpress.com

Best wishes,

Anthony
(Rev. Anthony David)

kim said...

How do you solve the cultural dilemma? If we aren't comfortable with each other, we aren't going to stick around. Well, some of us hang on anyway, but most don't.
I think most of the cultural stuff is unconscious. What do we do with it? How can you satisfy everyone?