It Begins With Us

Flexible Body. photo by darkday (cc) 2014.

I’m writing this blog post in a very odd space — It’s the afternoon of the U.S. presidential election on November 8th, but this won’t go up tomorrow morning, when if all goes well a winner will have been declared. Right now, the future is at a crossroads, and yet when you all see this, a direction will have been chosen.

So, not knowing what will have come to pass by tomorrow morning, I find myself only able to write about my hopes for the future: of healing, of commitments to love, of building sustainable, welcoming communities that foster healthy boundaries and a culture of consent.

My paganism is essential to this work for me, because my paganism is where my religion loves my body, the physical existence in which I experience the world around me. Almost every way that we humans find to exclude people is based on separating ourselves from our bodies while at the same time excluding other whose bodies don’t look like what the dominant culture finds “acceptable”.

Racism is about skin colour. Sexism is about value given to birth bodies and their assigned sexes. Transphobia is about cultured gender constructions of how we look in public. Fat phobia, ageism… even classism can be argued to be about the space in which one lives, and the access one has to food, health care, shelter, etc., to keep one’s body alive and well.

Paganism has been central to how I live into and manifest my Unitarian Universalist faith and our shared values. It teaches me that I am part of the Earth and its cycles — that my inherent worth and dignity is in part because of my bodily existence, not in spite of it. That the web of the Earth’s ecosystems, and therefore the Earth’s divinity, of which I am a part also includes everyone else, even the people whom I want to hate and dismiss.

I Have A Question. Art by Bill Strain (cc) 2011.

I wrote this for a sermon this past spring: “It is thousands of years of genetic memories that teach us to demonize, de-humanize those with whom we find ourselves in conflict, because when they are not-us, we can safely categorize them as a threat. That is how humans survived the millennia — with categories. This plant is safe, that plant is not. This tribe is an ally; that tribe is a threat. And yet humans are also hard-wired for compassion — we can see this in our babies and young children. It’s the most profound act of love, of our Universalist tradition, to witness something beyond that instinctual categorical thinking. When all of our human history works to convince us that putting people into boxes keeps us safe, it’s dangerously radical to live into the idea that love wins.”

When you read this, it will be the first day of the future the citizens of the U.S.A. have chosen — even if that future happens to be too close to call Wednesday morning. And because we are all interconnected, the U.S. election inevitably affects those of you around the world. No matter the outcome, the work to change the world in accordance with our values and our covenants does not end today. No matter who “wins,” we must continue to share our lives and our resources with our neighbors.

Today, the future begins. And it begins with us.