Last Sunday we stood inside our Seventh Principle: respect for the interdependent web of all existence of which we are a part. Every strand holds every other strand. But a web can be torn. And the web does not tear evenly.
The gap between who we are as a nation and who we pretend to be has fundamentally ruptured our interconnected web. The damage of that tear is everywhere. It is the immigrant family taken from a courthouse hallway. It is the Muslim neighbor treated as a suspect because of her name. It is our trans siblings being stripped of care, documents, and safety. They are told that their becoming is a lie when we know it is holy. It is the marginalization of every family that fails to match a warped 1950s photograph of permitted love. And, as it has for four hundred years, it is the targeting of Black lives. Black Lives Matter remains a plain fact that the powerful keep trying to silence because those words force this nation to confront its history. But history, faced honestly, becomes a light guiding us to a future free from the mistakes of our past.
This congregation declared all of this together on the first Sunday of our series. This week I want to trace what happened when our own faith tried to move from declaring to repairing.
In 2013, two Black Unitarian Universalist leaders, Paula Cole Jones and Bruce Pollack-Johnson, named a hard truth: a faith can affirm all seven principles and still be a place where people of color cannot thrive. So they drafted an Eighth Principle, and starting in 2017, hundreds of congregations adopted it, from the grassroots up: journeying toward spiritual wholeness by working to build a diverse, multicultural Beloved Community by our actions that accountably dismantle racism and other oppressions in ourselves and our institutions.
The Seventh Principle names the fact: we are woven together. The Eighth assigns the task: mend the tears, starting with the ones our own hands made. The word that caused all the trouble was accountability.
Here is the honest record. Our movement remains one of the least racially diverse religious traditions in America. Roughly nine in ten of us are white; our Black membership sits near one percent. A gap that wide between what we claim and what our structures produce has a name: the distance between espoused theology and operant theology. And the causes are documented. Worship whose pacing and music default to white Protestant norms. Welcome that quietly requires assimilation. Anti-racism routed outward into charity and advocacy while our own power arrangements go unexamined. A reflex, whenever race is raised, to restore the comfort of the majority first. Our association audited itself in Widening the Circle of Concern, and in 2024 the General Assembly wrote the Eighth Principle’s heart into our new Shared Values, love at the center, with the commitment to dismantle racism named in the covenant itself. The document changed. The sanctuary still has distance to walk.
Family systems theory explains the stumbling better than blame does. A congregation is an emotional system, and every emotional system defends its own equilibrium. Structural change spikes anxiety, and the system works to discharge it. The fights over the word accountability were the system defending its temperature. Our tradition’s favorite defense is intellectualization: turn a lived reality into a research topic, form a committee, debate wording, and let the study of the thing replace the doing of it.
The same theory names the way through: self-differentiation. A differentiated person holds their convictions clearly and stays warmly connected to people who disagree. Fusion trades conviction for comfort. Cutoff trades relationship for purity. Differentiation keeps both conviction and relationship, and it is the capacity that makes holy conflict possible: on-purpose, in-covenant disagreement about the gap between our aspirations and our actual life together, held by people who stay at the table when the temperature rises. Beloved Community will be built by people who can disagree and still hold on to each other.
That is the invitation under this Sunday, as we gather the Seventh and Eighth Principles into one morning. The mending of the world and the mending of ourselves are one motion.
Come Sunday. And one joyful instruction: next Sunday, August 30, is our Water Communion. Bring a small amount of water from somewhere your summer took you, in body or in spirit. A faucet counts. A memory counts. We will pour our many streams into one vessel.
Peace,
Rev. Dr. Harold Marrero