I have to say that I feel like I am writing this to you from another country. Our Quest publication schedule is such that I am writing in March for publication in September. Which is generally not too much of an issue, except that March 2020 feels like a date that will go down in history, like the War of 1812, or 9/11. At the moment I am writing this, all of California, where I live, has been told to stay home to avoid spreading COVID19. I imagine the rest of the country will follow. I imagine that we are just at the beginning of enormous loss of life. I imagine hospitals in the US will soon be overwhelmed the way they already are in Italy. We are all, right now, pretty much in shock, but I imagine grief is on its way.

I imagine, but I don’t know. This is a message in a bottle, sent out to the future. I imagine (but don’t know) that by the time you read this in September, the worst of this crisis is past. I imagine being able to dance with my friends, to sing together, to go out to dinner or to a play. When you read this, you will either think “Of course!” or “How could she be so naïve!” I don’t know what September will bring, but I can imagine.

And perhaps that need to imagine is the real blessing in this time of crisis. Usually we go about our lives assuming that one day will be very much like the next. Some lousy days, some special treats, but generally all of a piece. Then a novel virus comes along and it’s all, well, novel. New. Unpredictable. We have some models based on the experiences of other countries, and the reasonable predictions don’t look good. But maybe we will have a medical breakthrough. Maybe people will be so careful for one another’s sake that we will stop this thing in its tracks. You know the answer, although I don’t.

But what I do know is that in this time of crisis an enormous amount of imagination is being required from us. Churches are re-imagining worship in a world of enforced social isolation. Musicians are re-imagining what a concert is as they continue to try to share their music with the world. Parents whose children are home from school are re-imagining education and family time and work and leisure and what a day might look like.

At this moment I am furious at the US government for what I would consider a criminal lack of preparation. But the rest of us have no choice but to be unprepared. We couldn’t imagine the place where we are now. But we’re working on it. I have to say that I am wildly impressed with the creativity and generosity of spirit that I am witnessing. So far this week I have done Zumba with a man who was live-streaming from some unknown country, attended a couple of virtual house concerts and watched live on Facebook as a friend drew a Venn diagram for her dogs to illustrate appropriate and inappropriate barking. The dogs watched studiously.

When everything is different, we have no choice but to live imaginatively, to create things that have never existed before. Radical disruption invites radical imagination. So now I am wondering just how radical our imagination might become. I wrote this poem today:

Imagine

Imagine with me for a moment—

don’t worry, I’m not saying it’s real.

Imagine, if you can, that there has been

not a calamity, but a great awakening.

Pretend, just for a moment,

that we all so loved our threatened earth

that we stopped going on cruises,

limited international flights,

worked on cherishing the places

where we already are.

In this pretty fantasy, everyone who possibly can

stops commuting. Spends the extra time

with their kids or pets or garden.

We have the revelation that everyone

needs health care, sick leave, steady work.

It occurs to us that health care
workers

are heroes. Also teachers.

Not to mention the artists of all kinds

who teach us resilience and joy.

Imagine, if you will,

that we turned to our neighbors

in mutual aid, trading eggs for milk,

checking in on those who are elderly

or alone. Imagine each of us

felt suddenly called to wonder

In this moment, what does the world

need from me? What are my gifts?

Yes, I know it’s just a fantasy.

The world could never change

so radically overnight.

But imagine.

Whatever life looks like in the world of September, I’m sure that we will still be imagining a better world.

Attached media: https://web.archive.org/web/20211110172652/https://www.questformeaning.org/podcasts/20_09/05.mp3

I had a proud parenting moment the other day. My young adult daughter texted me “I have officially become the kind of annoying adult that won’t shut up about politics.” I replied “This makes me so happy.” Yes, I do feel that it says something good about my parenting that my kid is paying attention to politics. When she was little I made a point of taking her along with me to the polls to vote, so that we could talk about how important the process of informed voting is. And yes, when she turned 18 I badgered her into actually filling out her ballot and getting it in on time. My daughter is a young Black woman, and I feel like the world needs her vote, and she needs to feel that she can have an effect, however small, in shaping our country toward the way she wants it to be.

When I was her age, I did vote—I haven’t missed a presidential or congressional election since I turned 18. But I was hardly the kind of adult that wouldn’t shut up about politics. Politics seemed to me something like flossing—an annoying chore that you attended to because apparently it was important. Understanding issues was complicated and the information tedious. Politicians were better or worse, but not inspiring.

Then, in women’s studies classes in college, I learned the phrase “The personal is political.” That began to capture my imagination. How we live our lives, the choices we make, the way we treat the people around us, the words we speak or write, the songs we sing—it’s all political. Who we are as individuals shapes who we are as communities and who we are as a nation. That made sense to me. It also gave me an out. If I wasn’t going to protests or writing letters or campaigning, well, I was doing other things. Personal things.

Beyond voting and the very occasional protest my politics stayed pretty personal for some time. I just couldn’t bring myself to get invested in any activist way. I moved to Idaho in 1991 to serve my first congregation as an out lesbian. Surely, that was a personally political act! Well, in 1992 Kelly Walton, a local minister far into the right wing of Christianity started collecting signatures for an initiative that would stop gay people from having “special rights” like employment non-discrim-ination. And the personal got a whole lot more political. Somehow, two years later, when they had gathered enough signatures to get Initiative 1 on the ballot, I ended up as the chair of a faith-based organization opposing the initiative, and got out on the streets canvassing people to talk about why Prop 1 was wrong. In the end the initiative was defeated 50.38% to 49.62%, and we couldn’t help but feel our efforts made a difference.

I’d like to claim that my experiences of turning the personal political turned me into a life-long activist, but that would be a considerable exaggeration. I hate calling people with a nearly phobic passion, and standing in a group of people yelling just makes me feel squirmy. I make the occasional phone call, write the occasional letter, attend the occasional march. But I read about politics, and as the political situation gets more extreme and more bizarre my reading takes on an almost frantic quality. As if by knowing more I would have more control over the political tidal waves crashing through my country. Politics has gone from being tedious, to horror movie levels of jaw-dropping terror.

And I find that I have become the kind of annoying adult who won’t shut up about politics. To my friends. To strangers on Facebook, to anyone who will read what I write or engage in a conversation. Because it has become clear to me that not only is the personal political, the religious is political. Who I am as a minister is not more separable from who I am as a political person than it is from who I am as a mother.

And while it is not anywhere explicit in our UU principles and purposes, I believe that it is a central tenet of our faith that we are called to be in conversation. We are called to have convictions about how human beings are treated—with inherent worth and dignity. We are called to have convictions about how the earth is treated—as inseparable from our own lives. And we are called to talk with passion about what matters to us. We are also called to listen intently to what matters to others. We don’t have to agree, but we are called to be in the conversation. And we are called to move that conversation beyond the bounds of comfort into the wider world, boldly bringing all of our personhood into the realm of the political, working for a world in which everyone’s full personhood can flourish.

It isn’t easy. We will never do it “right” and we will never be done. But’s that’s how it is in any relationship. We talk. We listen. We choose. And then we do it all some more, trying to nudge ourselves, each other and the wider world toward something that looks more like wholeness.

Attached media: https://web.archive.org/web/20211110121732/https://www.questformeaning.org/podcasts/20_03/06.mp3

The call comes on a stunningly
ordinary telephone: the doctor
telling you the test is positive,
the agency saying that you have a child,
the lover who left so long ago
wanting to make amends.
Suddenly the earth tilts.
The path you thought to follow to the lake
heads sharply up the mountains.

The trail through the dense woods
comes around the bend into an open meadow.
Of course you weren’t prepared.
Who knows how to dress
for such a journey? Listen.
Inside your ear there is a high,
insistent ringing. What do you
suppose might happen
if you should answer?

Lynn’s book of poetry, Bread and Other Miracles, is available at lynnungar.com.

Attached media: https://web.archive.org/web/20211110085045/https://www.questformeaning.org/podcasts/19_12/10.mp3

I confess I’ve never been a big fan of the concept of sacrifice. It’s always struck me as kind of punitive, like it’s morally superior to suffer than to enjoy life’s abundance. And the religious tradition of sacrifice, which is deeply engrained in a wide variety of religions around the world, strikes me as even more suspect. Why would God or gods want you to offer up something that surely a god has no use for? Why give up something so precious as a life, or even as trivial as a basket of fruit, for a god whose divine nature surely doesn’t run to eating or drinking? What kind of relationship is it when you are expected to give up something valuable for no reason other than to prove your love and devotion?

The quintessential religious story of sacrifice is that of Abraham and Isaac, from the Hebrew Scriptures. God tells Abraham that he must make a sacrifice of his beloved son Isaac—that he must take a knife and slaughter his own child as a way of proving his love for God. Now, when the time rolls around and Abraham raises the knife, he finds a ram caught in nearby bushes, and that ram becomes an acceptable sacrifice instead of his child. Yay.

Needless to say, this is a deeply disturbing story. Sometimes it is described as depicting human moral progress from sacrificing people to sacrificing animals, which is, you know, good. But isn’t this kind of a horrible way of God asking for proof of love and devotion? Where was Isaac’s choice in the whole thing? Where was Sarah, Isaac’s mother? Shouldn’t they both have gotten some say in whether taking Isaac’s life was an appropriate demonstration of Abraham’s love for God? For that matter, who gets to say whether God’s demand for Isaac’s life was a reasonable ask to begin with? What kind of a dreadful story is this?

Maybe it is a story that is both dreadful and true. The fact of the matter is that life continually demands sacrifices of us, some insignificant and some heartbreaking. Parenting, for starters, always involves sacrifices. Of course, there are the sacrifices that parents make for their children: the sleepless nights, the severe limitations on your freedom, the financial and emotional cost of being responsible for keeping another person safe and growing. Those are hard enough.

But there are also the sacrifices we make of our children. We walk away from a crying child to catch an airplane for a business trip. We shut down the endless barrage of questions and demands to get the ten minutes of quiet that we need to maintain our sanity. We send a child to school when another day to recover from illness might be better, because we simply can’t miss another day of work. We inevitably fail at the daily balancing act between what our kids want and what they need, or the ongoing push and pull between what we know society expects of them and the perfect freedom of expression that they deserve. And if all that
weren’t enough, we live with the knowledge that the choices of our generation deeply and inevitably affect the world that our children will inherit.

And there is just no way to do it right, let alone do it perfectly. The fact of the matter is that the world is continually making utterly outrageous demands. It isn’t nice or fair or right, but it is true. And the concept of sacrifice is one way of making sense of that painful reality. Sacrifice declares that in the face of all the impossible challenges that the world presents to us, we choose. Rather than just stumbling through whatever happens to be on our path, we try to remember what matters most.

Of course, what matters most changes from moment to moment. But the idea of sacrifice is that, at least some of the time, we are able to choose to give ourselves to what we most care about. We can give up what is lesser for the sake of what is greater. Maybe that looks like a choice to give up eating meat for the sake of the health of the planet. Maybe it looks like sitting through the raucous honking of a middle school band concert so that your child can see your loving witness. Maybe it looks like listening with soft eyes while someone berates you for a mistake you didn’t know you made.

Of course, not every loss is a sacrifice. Sometimes we really just get no choice. But the idea of sacrifice reminds us to consider when we do choose: Who or what is lost because of my decision? Who gains? What price will I pay and what will be the cost to others? What do I have the capacity to give so that someone else can thrive?

The choices, of course, are never entirely right and never entirely wrong. But the idea of sacrifice invites us to meet the challenges of the world with the crucial, ongoing question How do I serve love? and with its partner question Is there a larger love that I might serve? Maybe living in the rich and beautiful complexity of those questions is all that anyone, divine or human, has a right to ask.

Attached media: https://web.archive.org/web/20211110063339/https://www.questformeaning.org/podcasts/19_10/05.mp3

“Who are you?” the caterpillar asks Alice in Alice in Wonderland. It turns out that is a surprisingly difficult question to answer. Maybe the caterpillar would like to know who Alice is in relationship to him. After all, she’s a stranger in Wonderland. The caterpillar is likely wondering where this stranger came from and what to make of her.

It turns out that this side of our identity is something that we run into a lot. We humans are relational creatures, and we want to understand how other people’s lives connect with ours. When you meet a new person they might want to know where you work or where you go to church or where your kids go to school.

Unfortunately, we humans are also quite territorial, and all too ready to decide that someone “doesn’t belong.” After her encounter with the caterpillar, Alice ends up growing so tall that her neck becomes long and snake-like, and a pigeon, in great disgust, accuses her of being a serpent. It doesn’t do Alice any good to protest that she is a little girl—the pigeon has already concluded that Alice is a serpent after her eggs.

This is rather silly in Wonderland—after all, no one ever really eats a mushroom and turns into a giant with a long neck—but it happens all the time that people decide who we are, and then conclude that what they have invented about us makes us a threat. And the less people know—the more they categorize someone as a stranger—the more likely they are to see them as potentially dangerous. For instance, people in locations with very few immigrants tend to be much more negative about immigration than people who live in places with large populations of people from outside the country. People who believe that they don’t know any LGBT folks are more likely to be homophobic than people who have LGBT friends or family.

Our brains want to affirm our identity by identifying who we are not. Evolution has shaped our brains to distrust those we think of as being not like us. But the world changes faster than evolution does, and in the modern world our chances of being neighbors with people who are, in one way or another, not like us are just about 100%.

So how do we re-tune our brains to this world where we constantly encounter people who are outside our “tribe,” who differ from us in ethnicity or race or language or politics or gender or sexual orientation or ability or any of the 1001 ways that people are different from one another?

Maybe some part of the answer lies in our ability to answer the question Who are you? There are so many answers to that question. We are our relationships: parents, children, siblings, partners, friends, colleagues, teachers and students. We are our heritage: race, ethnicity, language, stories. We are our sexual and gender identities. We are our bodies: age, ability, height, appetites. We are our theologies and our philosophies, the things we’ve learned and the things we want to explore. We are our hopes and fears and dreams and disappointments.

And not one of those things is normal. Or abnormal. When we invest the time and attention into deeply and specifically answering the question Who are you? we come up with a long list of precious details that we hold in common with others—and at least as many that differ from people who we know. The tendency to identify people as “strange” or “other” rests in the assumption—often unconscious—that our identity and experience is “normal.” But the more we look at all the facets of who we are, the more obvious it becomes that our intricate set of facets couldn’t possibly be the same for everyone.

But there’s another piece of the puzzle. Alice, in the confusion of falling down the rabbit hole and changing size and meeting beings as surprising as a hookah-smoking caterpillar, loses track of who she is. Or at least loses the ability to define herself in the ways she is used to. But in moving through a place where so much is unknown to her she is challenged to understand herself in new ways. Which is another part of the answer to how we change our brains.

When we dare to enter unfamiliar places, talk with unfamiliar people, taste unfamiliar things (even if they don’t change our size), then who we are expands to meet our expanded world. As Alice experiences, we may run into folks who challenge our sense of who we are—who lead us to the awkward realization that we aren’t sure, that our identity is shifting with each surprising encounter. It isn’t necessarily comfortable, this interview with a caterpillar, or with any stranger. But it is what leads us into a Wonderland of discovery, where we move beyond imagined walls into new possibilities for who we might turn out to be.

Attached media: https://web.archive.org/web/20211110015823/https://www.questformeaning.org/podcasts/19_06/05.mp3

If, like me, you are fortunate enough to have a refrigerator and the means to fill it, it is possible that you have a tendency to stand in front of the open fridge, staring at the contents and wondering what there is to eat. It is even possible that some of us do this multiple times a day, staring at the shelves as if something would have magically appeared while the door was closed.

The thing is, when I stare at my open refrigerator—or at my open snack cupboard—it’s not just that I’m hungry. I’m hungry for something in particular, but I don’t know what. And so I stand there, wondering if what would satisfy me at this moment is avocado or cheese—or maybe both together on toast. What exactly is it that I want?

You could quite reasonably argue that my refrigerator-gazing habit is silly—I pretty much know what’s in there with the door closed, since I did the shopping and the cooking myself. And it is certainly not energy efficient to stand there letting the cold air out and the warm air in. But I would contend that the question that goes along with staring at the food is absolutely crucial.

What do I want? What exactly do I want? I imagine that pretty much all of us spend a lot of time dissatisfied with our own personal lives and with the world in general. We hunger for work that is meaningful and restorative rest and caring relationships and fun times and a world that is more just. And many of us have gotten pretty good at recognizing and sharing the many things we see that are wrong with the world—racism and homophobia and sexism and ableism and environmental degradation and corruption in government and the whole long list of very real, and often devastating, problems.

And it matters to identify those problems, whether personal or social. We need a clear analysis of what has gone wrong and why. But it seems to me that we often assume that identifying the problem is the same as finding a solution. Somehow we seem to think that if we tell our partner or our child how their looking at their phone during dinner makes us nuts, it should fix the relationship. Or maybe we figure that by sharing news of the latest police atrocity against a person of color on Facebook we are dismantling white supremacy.

And those are both perfectly good things to do. But they aren’t solutions. Solutions don’t start with what is wrong. Solutions start with the question What do I want? And the more precise we can be about what we want, the more specific we can be about how we might be able to get there.

What do I want from my family at dinner time? I want to hear about each person’s day, their successes and frustrations. I want to look in the eyes of the people I love. I want to share a story about something that happened to me today. I want to make plans for what we will do on the weekend. I want to hear about an idea you had or a book you read or something you learned.

When I know what I want, I can ask for it. I can make a plan for how I might get it. I shift the focus from how the other person is wrong to concrete steps that would move in the direction of something that is better. Of course, getting to those solutions is not necessarily easy. What I want may be in conflict with what someone else wants. Powerful forces may stand in the way of what I want. But creating change is only possible when you move step by step down the path of what exactly do I want?

To be clear, I’m not saying that there is some magic power that will manifest what you want if you just imagine it. I’m not a fan of the power of positive thinking, or of the prosperity gospel which seems to generate so much more prosperity for its preachers than for its followers.

The question What exactly do I want? is pragmatic, useful. What do I want? Justice. What exactly do I want? Well, it’s a long list, and I’m going to have to choose where I will focus my attention at any given point in time. I want an end to racist policing. OK, but that’s really what I don’t want. I don’t want racist policing. What do I want? I want police who understand their job as protecting and serving the entirety of the community where they work. I want police to choose de-escalation over force whenever possible. I want the police department to listen to the community about what would make people feel safer. I want police officers to be accountable for their behavior.

That list could go on and on, and each piece could be broken down into smaller pieces. But when I know what I want I can find other people who want the same thing, and we can find points in the system where we can exert pressure to accomplish those goals.

Maybe my standing in front of the refrigerator pondering what exactly I might be hungry for is a waste of time and energy. And it is possible to get what you wanted purely as a delightful surprise, without even knowing the hunger was there. But if you intend to actively pursue positive change, then the more exactly you know what you want, the better position you are in to make it happen.

Attached media: https://web.archive.org/web/20211110004621/https://www.questformeaning.org/podcasts/19_05/06.mp3

Our UU faith encourages us to be agents of change in the world.

Rather than leaving it up to God to reward or punish people after they die, we think that folks should spend their lives not only trying to be ever-better human beings, but also trying to make the world an ever more just and compassionate place.

This is, of course, a tall order. Being an agent of change isn’t easy. Mostly individuals and social systems alike want to stay the same. “Homeostasis” is a high-priced word for exactly that phenomenon. In the same way that our bodies fight to stay at an internal temperature somewhere around 98.6     degrees regardless of what the weather is like outside, relationships between people—including complex social relationships—tend to actively preserve things as they are.

So how do we serve as agents of change? If our mission is to make the world a better place, what exactly is our job?

It seems to me that there are all kinds of jobs, all kinds of agents, and that some people naturally gravitate toward some roles more than others.

Most obviously, there are activists. Activists agitate. They lead protests and other symbolic actions, drawing the attention of both politicians and the general public to wrongs that need to be righted. They get arrested. They take to the streets with songs and banners. They sit in. They write letters, and ask their friends and neighbors to write letters. In whatever way they can, they pressure those with power to attend to the needs of the people.

Blessed are the activists, for they claim power for those who seem powerless.

Less obviously, behind the activists there are strategists. They plan. They identify not only what exactly they hope to change, but also where there are points in the system that might yield to pressure. They organize, build coalitions, foster conversations to help discern what the next move will be.

Blessed are the strategists, for they carry a map for the journey.

Somewhere in the mix of activists and strategists there are communicators, who cast a wide net to draw people toward the work of change. They articulate the message of existing wrongs and new possibilities in ways that change hearts and minds.

Blessed are the communicators, for they widen both the conversation and the community.

Significant social change only happens with the sustained efforts of large groups of people, but not all movement toward change happens in groups. Some agents of change are explorers, bold thinkers who are able to share both a clear picture of the world as it is and also a vision of the world as it might be. Explorers are people who offer possibilities. They are often historians, people who have a clear enough understanding of how we got to where we are to enable them to imagine where we might go from here.

Blessed are the explorers, who know the path we have traveled, and can imagine the road ahead.

Finally, there are artists, the creatives, people who, in music or paint or words or dance or sculpture or any number of other forms, create new worlds for us to inhabit. Artists give us the ability to not only see things as they are and to see other worlds that don’t yet exist, they also enable us to live in the gap between those two. Artists both create visions of what is possible, and invite us to live in the longing for something better than what we know.

Blessed are the artists, for they invite us into worlds of possibility.

Of course, many people operate in more than one of these categories, and a lot of us have a hard time finding our way into any of them. All the roles I’ve described are for different kinds of leaders, and the reality is that in many situations a whole lot of us not only aren’t called to be leaders, we shouldn’t consider ourselves leaders. If we are trying to be supportive of a community we are not members of, being a follower is probably a better choice.

But one way of being an effective agent for change is to look for the activists, the strategists, the communicators, explorers and artists who inspire us, and throw our weight behind their efforts. Rather than feeling inadequate and overwhelmed in the face of injustice, we can look for places where we might lean in, places where our own lives can shift toward something just a bit new, just a bit brave, just a bit outside our familiar comfort zone where we know what will happen because it has always happened that way before.

It might be scary. We might say the wrong thing or do the wrong thing or feel like we’re not up to the task. Remember, it is as natural to long for the safety of the familiar as it is for your heart to return to its customary beat.

But what feels natural and what feels possible are two different things. You can, through diligent exercise, actually change your natural resting blood pressure. And you can, through diligent exercise, move down new paths, re-envisioning your journey as one of creating change.

Attached media: https://web.archive.org/web/20211109013236/https://www.questformeaning.org/podcasts/18_09/05.mp3

Attached media: https://web.archive.org/web/20211108201007/https://www.questformeaning.org/podcasts/18_03/05.mp3

Attached media: https://web.archive.org/web/20211108093544/https://www.questformeaning.org/podcasts/17_06/05.mp3