Rev. Joseph Boyd I think before we talk about abolition of any kind, we should talk about what we are seeking. It seems over the last four years we have been hyper focused on what we don’t want, made manifest in various ways by being presented with the opposite or counterpoint of our deepest values and desires. It is easier to say what we don’t want: hatred, bigotry, racism, injustice, predatory economic practices. Interesting enough, the one area where it seems to be easier to articulate what we want is with our environment. We want clean air, a place that will support and nourish our children, an earth free of plagues or prevalent disease, a place that will last and endure in its beautiful vulnerability. Like a mother looking after her child, we want that child to know the taste of freedom walking in a meadow, hearing birdsong, and the belief that love is more than just an idea. We want our children to feel the presence of their heart, and know this place, this very place, is the place where that presence is welcomed and nourished. It is much easier in many ways to imagine what we want for our children. It is much easier to articulate our vision and sense of right when we imagine a next generation, much easier than articulating our own visions or desires.
Our own desires and visions are quite changeable, unpredictable, and open to constant change and reevaluation. Especially over the last four months, there has been an opportunity to reevaluate how we’ve been living our lives, and reevaluate if we are putting our energy toward our best life. It has been a time to reevaluate our values, and seek guidance in ways that we might be able to adapt, and even thrive in the next months, and years ahead. For many now, the sense of thriving seems a bit too ambitious, and some are just seeking ways they can at least coast without falling into depression or rage in the coming weeks or months. It would be enough for some, just to maintain whatever is getting them through each day now. We are in a special moment that when we are asked to imagine six months from now, it is understandable to see blankness, a literal blank slate, where it seems like anything could happen. It could be disaster or a renaissance, a military state or a revolution, a sense of status quo as we’ve always known it, or a complete reevaluation of every single one of our values.
Nietzche referred to the transvaluation of values, which is the deliberate choice to decide whether the values of a culture are in fact true or false. One has the power to trans valuate, meaning to choose to disinvest from a value that no longer serves, and reinvest in a value that has been forgotten, obscured, or ignored by the culture we live in. When I talk with people now, there is a sense of disequilibrium and destabilization. There is a sense of not knowing where one is completely, and how to adequately plan for things that seemed perfectly reasonable a few months ago: seeing family, vacations, planning for the next school year, knowing if you should move or stay, and for how long should you stay, and how long should you move away for. A constant sense of stress and immobility. A feeling of being held in place, when the spirit is accustomed to much more movement. It is in this destabilization that I think the reevaluation of our values is not only necessary but unavoidable. We are being forced to not just look at what we’ve focused on perhaps our entire life, but to also see what we’ve missed, long ignored, or never had a clue of the import of: values that were beyond our current world we inhabited.
I think this destabilization is the effect of each of our inner worlds expanding to take up space in the actual world we live in – a global, diverse and racialized world with great opportunities for reevaluation, great opportunities for justice and the righting of wrongs. It is the perfect time to have our living, our felt sense of living, catch up with the great interconnected reality of our lives.
Even our current debate about masks in this country seems to be forcing us out of outmoded ways of seeing ourselves in relation to others, and it may seem this a slow and painful process, but this is not very slow.
In the course of months, many millions across the world and within our own country are adapting their life to a reality that was real before this pandemic, is true now, and will continue to be true for the rest of our days: whatever we choose to do or not do will affect human lives across the globe. This has always been true albeit mostly theoretical and philosophical for many. Now it is unavoidable, a practical truth that has the opportunity to reorient ourselves as a single person in the interconnected web. The web is far more vast and intricate than we imagined. Through the worldwide web, we are accessing this interconnected web, through simple acts of clicking a screen. But it doesn’t have to end there. It is my hope that this is just the beginning of a complete reorientation of our understanding of our life. It is an opportunity to orient ourselves away from values that have held sway for our entire lifetime that have cut us off from the great reality that we live in. It is an opportunity to rediscover values that have been too long neglected and ignored, and turn these values into the centers of our living, breathing, and thinking.
It is understandable to just want to get through this time. It is reasonable to find just enough comfort and inspiration to get through this time, so that we can find our footing once we’re on the other side of this, whatever it will be. The sense that I think is destabilizing so many is that we are having a hard time imagining that other side. We know it will not be exactly what our life was like six months ago, but we hold values from that time that won’t go away, and seem thwarted during this time. I would like to imagine a day when I can give my mom a hug again. In similar ways, I’m sure there are everyday things that you hope to continue at some point in the future, ways of being that gave meaning and sense of where you were in the world. I think that will happen. I think we will find ways to reclaim that which has endured as a lasting value during this time, and we will find ways to express that in a way that makes us feel content. I also think we are given a whole new lens and worldview that I hope will have a lasting impact on us for the rest of our days.
That might not happen. Realistically, many people find a sense of courage, vision, and purpose during a crisis. Once the crisis is over in the way that is collectively understood, there is a return to normalcy. What I think this time is teaching us though, is that one crisis seems to be uncovering more crises. A global pandemic is uncovering crises that will probably not be going away in two years: the crises of racism, the crises of health care, the crises of disunity about the role of the individual in a globalized world. All of these won’t be going away, even if we have a successful vaccine, even if this pandemic is resolved.
Which is why I see this time as more than just a time to get through. It is that, and it is also something more. It’s an opportunity for us to reset. It’s an opportunity for us in this enforced time of pause and physical isolation, to reset our expectations of business as normal, life as normal, the way we should treat each other as normal.
Frances Ellen Watkins Harper was the only daughter of free African American parents in Philadelphia. She was an abolitionist, a suffragette, a poet. She was a dual member of the African Methodist Episcopal and Unitarian churches. She became acquainted with a famous white abolitionist, Lydia Marie Child, who was also Unitarian, and wrote a famous pamphlet enitltled “Appeal to End Slavery.” In the pamphlet, Harper was struck by something Child said: “Christianity expressly teaches us to love our neighbor as ourselves. This shows how dangerous it is, for even the best of us, to become accustomed to what is wrong.” This framework helped her gain greater insight into the plight of white people in her community. She realized that white people were not inherently evil, even though their actions seem to be pointing toward that judgement. She saw that white people had become accustomed to what is wrong. This realization influenced her poetry where she began to write more about the personal particular relationships of slave mothers and their children. She sought to find ways to do justice mightily in her lifetime, while also trying to break the spell of a culture that accustomed whole groups of people to actively or passively participate in wrong.
I think that realization still holds power today. Why are we in a system that exploits and harms people based on the hue of their skin or the size of their bank account? We’ve simply grown accustomed to it. We’ve grown accustomed to what is wrong. Even if we ourselves were not directly involved, we’ve grown complacent for far too long, because we live in a culture which accumstoms us to accept what is wrong. It is very tricky how this happens. Most of us don’t go around saying that racism or exploitation of the poor is right. Over the decades many of us have found rationales that perpetuate being accustomed to wrong. We may say well that is one issue of many, and I have other issues that are in need of my attention right now.
We may say well it seems that the evolution of our species has always been built around tribalism, warfare, and the abuse of those with access to resources, so what can we do to thwart nature’s way? We have grown far too adept at avoiding that which is now unavoidable.
I’m deeply inspired by our Unitarian ancestor Frances Ellen Watkins Harper. She was an incredibly popular writer during the abolition movement leading up to the Civil War, and after the war, the suffragette movement. After her death in the early 20th century her work was largely forgotten, and has now seen a resurgence of attention in the last 20 years due to Unitarians, activists, and poets, who have resurrected her work and shown her influence on their thinking. I wonder what Frances Harper would think as we face a new abolition movement. A movement that seeks to abolish racism, a justice and penal system as we know it. I don’t know what she’d think, but I do have a clear sense of what she’d do. She would engage. She would do justice, by protecting those who need protection. She would write, and she would share her perspective widely, especially with those who have become accustomed to wrong.
As we enter this new abolition, let us keep alive the memory of our fellow Unitarians like Frances Harper who were abolitionists. Let us learn from their insight that people are not inherently evil, they are just accustomed by a culture that supports the perpetuation of wrong. People are not inherently evil, but they go along with values that go unquestioned, and the values that could save us as a people are often made marginal and invisible. This is a time of reevaluating these values. This is a time when for a moment the spell is broken, and we are given insight into all the ways we have become accustomed to wrong, the ways that wrongdoing has been normalized and defended and dissuaded from challenge. But we have discovered more than accustomed wrongs. We’ve discovered rights, human rights, and though long buried in our history books and in our soil are seeking a resurgence and a new life, a new abolition that seeks to abolish all the ways we’ve become accustomed to wrong, and avoided what is right.
