We Are
We affirm our newest members in their wholeness. We want you to find belonging here, to trust our congregation with your real self. To jump in, to join in our traditions, to share your ideas, to bring your passions.
And that means that all of us need to open to our new members. This is Amherst, and this is a Unitarian Universalist congregation, and we expect everyone to have opinions, to participate in our governance, to swell our ranks but also to shake us up.
Though we value our individual and collective histories, we’re not here to stay the same. As we grow with our new members, as all of us grow from encountering the complexity of one another, it is impossible that we could stay the same.
Or to put it another way, a congregation of freethinkers that’s older than everyone in it will not be the same as when it began. It won’t even be the same as when our current longest member joined. It’s not even the same as it was six years ago, when I first entered this sanctuary. Beloved members and friends have moved, have died. New people come in and don’t take the places of those who came before. They find or make their own places. Each member no longer with us was unique. Each member here is unique. Those who join in the future will be unique too. There’s no replacing those people who did that thing you liked so well. And the people who come after are doing a new thing, or doing the old thing a new way. This is how it’s supposed to be.
Each of us is unique. This congregation needs the unique perspectives of all of us to be its most vibrant version. We don’t welcome those who are different in spite of those differences; we welcome everyone in their uniqueness. We’re not looking for common ground here–we’re rejoicing in a wild and varied terrain.
I have something to tell you, though maybe the octopus sermon tipped you off. I can be a little weird. And I don’t need people to love me in spite of it. In the wisdom of my 40s, I have come to realize that I don’t need to be tolerated. I need to be loved, in my specificity. I need people to know me for who I really am, to celebrate with me in my joy, to accompany me in my struggles, to sit kindly with me in my sadness, to laugh with me in the absurdity of it all, to challenge me and hold me accountable, and to trespass into strangers’ lawns to sniff their lilacs. Those are the relationships I curate in my life, not the ones where people look at their phones when I start getting excited about how beautiful and strange life can be.
And everyone deserves to be loved specifically. Not because they’re part of a group or even a congregation, not because they fit in, but because they are absolutely unique in the world and loved for it.
Our world would love to classify us, to bundle us all into packages of data, to sell and consume. But here, we’re doing something different.
The policies of the current federal administration have placed great value on sameness, on some sort of default if not ideal human, who is white and cisgender and straight and able-bodied and wealthy and US-born and English-speaking and Christian and male. And that’s garbage. I know several guys who hit all of those categories, and they’re not garbage at all, but enacting policy that sets them up as the default while the rest of us can’t measure up is garbage.
I’m particularly troubled by secretary of health and human services Robert F Kennedy Jr’s obsession with autism. The way he speaks about the worth of autistic people, as people who are burdens, that’s some hot eugenicist garbage. And we’re definitely here to do something different.
I want to give some love right now to all of our neurodivergent members, friends, kids, and neighbors. You matter. And you belong here. If you want to talk with me about what might make our congregation friendlier to you, I welcome it. We don’t all need the same things, and that’s actually a good thing. That means we can help one another. We all have different strengths and passions and gifts as well as access needs. So, friends who have autism, ADHD, dyslexia, Down syndrome, Tourette’s, PTSD, traumatic brain injury, dementia, epilepsy, chronic mental illness, and all the other forms of neurodiversity, any brain that isn’t typical, yes, you belong, if you want to. You don’t need to fit in to belong with us.
Every now and then we come back to that question of how do we do a better job with diversity in our congregation, and one of the most important things to remember is that we actually value uniqueness, not welcome in spite of differences. When we value diversity, of every kind, we remember that everyone who wants to join our covenant belongs, not just to fill our numbers but to share their whole unique selves.
How wonderful, how beautiful you all are. How full of inspiration. What a blessing to be here.
Photo by Jeremy Thomas on Unsplash
