Synchronicity

Yesterday, Ms. P and I were all set to go to the Quaker meeting downtown. We'd spent Saturday afternoon at a required transracial adoption seminar, and one of the things we talked about on the drive home was how, well, WHITE our spiritual communities are. The pagan community we mostly participate in is pretty much all white, and the small Quaker meeting we've gone to sporadically has had, at most, two people of color attending. So we had decided to check out the downtown meeting, which has a monthly meeting just for people of color. That seemed like a good sign to us.

But, us being us, we were running late. More to the point, getting out of bed was cold, and breakfast was  not fast, and so we headed downtown to the farmer's market, knowing we would be much too late to go to meeting, but figuring we'd drive by so we knew where it was for next time.

And then we were driving down 16th Street, the strip of downtown that has representatives from all the world's great religions on it, and we saw that the big UU church, which we had talked about, had services starting in just ten minutes. And so we whipped into an only-legal-on-Sunday-morning parking spot and went in, baggy jeans and all.

Now, a commenter recently asked if we'd considered a UU chuch, and we mostly hadn't. We'd both separately attended the UU chuch in GradSchoolTown, and neither of us had found it all that fulfilling. It's membership was largely well-off, white, and University-affiliated, I couldn't stand that the service was wildy different week to week, and it tended to the secular humanist end of things. (The last straw for me was during Joys and Sorrows, when a classic 50's-era-scientist-looking man stood up and said he couldn't believe no one had yet shared the joy that we'd found life on Mars.) As Ms. P said of that congregation, we need a little more passion with our reason, and that one was more lecture series than spiritual community.

But we stopped. This is the church, after all, that brought Sweet Honey in the Rock together. So we went in and we took our seats and we started to cry when the processional was a joyful, rollicking sound that took much of its inspiration from African-American spirituals. Then during the greeting portion of things, we turned around to realize we were sharing our pew with our neighbors from across the street. The reading was a beautiful poem about learning to say yes to our lives, and the sermon was about how we can be grateful for our whole lives -- even the parts we don't like -- and about how we can make a gift of our whole selves to the world. And so we sat there feeling blessed.

It's not perfect -- what is? Parking is annoying, it's not that close to home, our weekends (like our weeks) are more chaotic than not, and there's still too much talking and not enough praying or singing for my tastes. But we looked around the sanctuary and saw diversity made real -- diversity in all different directions. We got excited about the choirs, the attempts at Evensong, the social justice activities, the seminar on white privilege. We could see ourselves in the community.

We thought about this specifically because, should we adopt a child of color, we want to make sure that he or she sees themselves in our communities. But diversity isn't just important to a kid we don't have yet -- it's important to and for us, to and for any child we have, whatever their heritage might be. And so it felt like a step, an important step, towards articulating and manifesting the kind of life we want to be living.

I doubt that a UU church will ever be our only spiritual community, but as one among others, it may well do just fine.

Comments

[Thorn]

This is my first time on your blog, visiting thanks to Dawn of This Woman's Work. Finding a diverse, lesbian-friendly, spiritually accommodating church is something my partner and I have struggled with a lot lately now that we're getting closer to adoption. I hope you can find a good balance. I'm starting to lose hope that we can.