Harmony from Accountability

A Cup of Joe, June 3, 2022

Along with some members of the Board and others from the congregation, I am taking a course that introduces something called “restorative process” or “restorative justice.” Restorative Justice efforts are efforts in the legal system to shift from a practice that focuses on punishment to a practice that focuses on restoring broken relationship.

Bringing those ideas to congregational life, I like to refer to them as “restorative process” to emphasize that there are different systems and practices and procedures that we can use to make sure that in our relationships we stay focused on relationship.

There are lots of things that make this difficult. One of them is that staying in relationship means being willing to be accountable to one another. I can’t just do whatever I want to do without checking in with whomever I’m in relationship with. When you’re in a relationship with someone, you don’t ignore their feelings.

It is impossible to be in a relationship without conflict or tension. That’s just true. And being a Unitarian Universalist means honoring some values that will conflict with one another. We honor individuality, so we say we treat every individual with inherent worth and dignity, we believe that every individual has a right of conscience and one of the ways to respect that is through the democratic process. Every individual has their own spiritual path that they are on, and so we honor a free and responsible search for truth and meaning.

Did you notice the tension, though, that enters in with that principle? Our search for truth and meaning should be both free and responsible. What we do has effects, and we need to be responsible for those effects, the way our actions impact others. For we also honor the interdependent web of all existence of which we are part. We are part of an interdependent whole. Or, as Martin Luther King, Jr., would say, we are caught up in an inescapable network of mutuality.

As UU’s we define ourselves not by a creed of beliefs but by a practice of covenantal relationship. The difficult part of that is holding ourselves accountable to that practice, to our covenant with one another.

The reason I’m bringing this up now is because there is a candidate forum this Wednesday evening, June 8, 2022, at 8 o’clock our time. There are four people running for two spots on the UUA Board of Trustees. Two of them were vetted by the UUA Nominating Committee and two of them got on the ballot by petition. (You might remember that last year Rev. Sam Trumbore—who was nominated by the Nominating Committee—was in a contested election for a spot on the Board, which he won.)

The thing that really seems to differentiate the candidates from one another is their willingness to be in accountable relationship. There are two who lean into interdependence and and two who lean quite strongly into independence. (One candidate even “wholeheartedly” believes that “younger and/or marginalized-identifying” Unitarian Universalists should leave our denomination. This candidate thinks these “younger and/or marginalized-identifying” people could start something separate from the UUA, “maybe named 21st Century UUs.”) There are two candidates who lean into being “free,” mostly in the sense of free from, and two who lean into being “responsible.”

You can probably sense which way I lean myself! Three delegates from our congregation, who will be approved by the UU Saratoga Board of Trustees that you elected, will have the responsibility of voting in this election for the UUA Board of Trustees. (As a fellowshipped minister serving a congregation, I get a vote, too.) If you’d like to learn more about the election and the candidates and what’s at stake, please get in touch with me <revjoeuucss@uusaratoga.org> or 518-290-0284, and we can talk some more. And you can read about all of the candidates at Nominations for Election at General Assembly and register for the June 8 candidates forum by clicking General Assembly 2022 Contested Election.

We need one another! As Robin Wall Kimmerer says in Braiding Sweetgrass, the only thriving is mutual thriving. The song of life that we make and sing together will always have some dissonance in it. That dissonance is the sound of our yearning for harmony. And harmony in covenantal relationship can only emerge from accountability.

Together! That’s how we make it.

Blessings,

Rev. Joe