by Jeff Lambkin, community minister, Richmond, California
My experience with prisons goes back almost as far as I can remember. I grew up about 20 miles north of New York City on the banks of the Hudson River. About three miles north was the notorious Sing Sing Prison, an imposing concrete behemoth with a yard that sloped down toward the river, and massive ashen walls and barbed wire fences around its perimeter.
Growing up on the polluted Hudson, we “river rats”, as we were called, often had access to boats—owned, borrowed or otherwise. My friends and I used to ride up to Sing Sing regularly, moor our boats, and sit and watch the men out in the prison yard. In our naïve and youthful sense of adventure, we would imagine ourselves, Hollywood-style, in a prison break, maneuvering our boats at full throttle and dodging a hail of bullets from the guards on the towers. Nothing nearly that dramatic ever occurred. But what did happen as I watched the men in the prison yard was that I came to sense that there was something really wrong with that whole place—not just the supposedly bad men who were locked up there. And I’d wonder about them and especially their children and I’d ask, “Isn’t there some other way?”
And so, as an adult, I’ve worked with a number of organizations, on both the East and West Coasts, that provide temporary housing, education, job training and referrals for newly released inmates who are trying to put their lives back together.
February 15th of the year 2000 marked an unfortunate milestone for the United States. On that date, the number of people incar-cerated in our prisons reached two million. The “trail ’em, nail ’em, and jail ’em” mentality so prevalent in the United States since the 1970s has led to both the highest incarceration rate and the largest total imprisoned population on the planet, more than even Russia or China. A quarter of the entire world’s prisoners are in U.S. prisons.
As a culture, we seem to be obsessed with street crime and its effects—especially assaults and murders. Yet why is it, even with the scandals involving Enron, WorldCom, and others, that corporate crime and governmental crime advance virtually unhindered, while news about local violent crimes has become so central in our lives? The answer, I think, lies somewhere in the mixed realm of our own hidden fears, in our sense of powerlessness in the face of crime, and in the immense power of corporate vested interests who gain so much from the current situation, and who control so much of what we view and read.
And, although studies currently show that somewhere between 85 and 95% of all adult Americans break the law—which would include most people reading this—who are the people who fill our prisons? Overwhelmingly, those we imprison are the poor and people of color, primarily Latino and African American young men. Today, one out of every three Black men in their 20s has been convicted of a felony.
Ninety-two percent of all felons are high school dropouts, with 70% functionally illiterate. Eighty-five percent are addicted to drugs. And, contrary to popular mythology, 65% of all prisoners have been convicted of nonviolent offenses. Activist Angela Davis observes that homelessness, unemployment, drug addiction, mental illness, and illiteracy are only a few of the problems that fade from public view when the human beings contending with them are imprisoned. And yet, instead of focusing on education, job training, and addiction as one three-pronged approach to crime prevention, our single-minded strategy has been to build more prisons and impose longer sentences, even at a time when the non-corporate crime rate in the United States has been consistently decreasing. In fact, as the homicide rate in the United States dropped 50% during the 1990s, the three major television networks’ coverage of homicide stories rose 400%. Joe Hallinan, a Wall Street Journal reporter, likens the scare tactics that have created this prison boom phenomenon to Joe McCarthy’s communist scare in the 1950s. Filmmaker Michael Moore sees it this way:
It's much easier to get elected playing off people's fears. Run a law-and-order campaign. Promise you’re going to lock everybody up. Play on the racism of the White voters, and let them know you’re going to lock up the Black community, or as many of them as you can. The hard way to go is to say, “You know what? If we work toward full employment and if we had a safety net to catch anybody who wasn’t employed, where we made sure everybody had the means to get through the day and the week and the month, we would have an enormous decrease in crime.”
Disturbingly, over the last twenty years, largely because of mandatory minimum sentencing, women now comprise the fastest growing segment of the prison population, with the vast majority of these women involved in nonviolent crimes. But many of these women are also mothers and, in imprisoning them, we are leaving future generations of children to grow up in foster homes or on the streets to perpetuate the dead-end cycle of crime and prison. Although prisons are not reducing crime, they are fracturing already vulnerable families and communities. As Gandhi said, “An eye for an eye makes the whole world blind.” And in our blindness we throw ever more of our money and precious resources into a system that continues to weaken our moral authority and that fails over and over again.
Isn’t there some other way?
Howard Zehr, in his book Changing Lenses, explores the notion of the Hebrew word “shalom,” which means much more than just peace. Shalom refers to a condition of “all rightness.” In Hebrew law, justice involves making things right, coming back into relationship. And it applies to both criminal justice and social justice. The acts of the one who oppresses are as serious as those of the one who assaults or robs. Both are contrary to shalom.
When societies evolve, they change their means of social control.
Confinement as a form of punish-ment was a humane step in its day, but now it is time to move on to more evolved methods of dealing with social problems. What I am suggesting involves a radical shift from the current system of punishing offenders toward one of greater community involvement, what is generally being called a restorative justice model. This is a powerful way to break the destructive cycle we’ve been caught up in for so many years. The cycle is familiar—crime leads to fear, then to withdrawal and isolation that weakens community bonds and then leads to more crime. All of us—victims, offenders, and community members—are caught in this downward spiral.
Conversely, the principles of restorative justice help us to increase connections among community members. The more connections between community members, the more likely a potential offender will be to restrain impulses that place that person at odds with the community. Most criminal offenses can only occur within the context of social disconnection. The success of a restorative approach is dependent both upon community support and involvement and upon the social and economic uplifting of our most damaged communities.
Restorative justice is actually a perspective or a point of view out of which some new programs are emerging. Restorative justice stresses that crime harms individuals and communities. Those affected by crime—victims, the community and offenders—are encouraged to play a role in the justice process. Instead of asking, “Who is guilty and how should he or she be punished?” restorative justice asks, "Who has been harmed, what losses did they suffer and, to whatever extent possible, how can the harm be repaired?” Restorative justice sees both victims and offenders as human beings oppressed by a system of vengeance.
In addition to its focus on helping to heal and to restore the losses of the individual victims of crime, restorative justice recognizes the need to restore offenders, when possible, into right relationship with their victims and with their communities. Punishment alone will never restore an offender to right relationship and will not allow the victim to heal. Offenders need the opportunity to be accountable to their victims and must become responsible for repairing the harm they have caused, changing themselves in their own eyes and in the eyes of the community.
I recently heard a wonderful definition of “justice” as “a dynamic process that allows us all to live together in peace.” How different that is from the current perspective that assumes that bringing someone to justice means administering punishment, usually imprisonment.
Where they have been tried, programs using a restorative justice model, such as diversionary programs, sentencing circles, family group conferencing, victim/offender mediation, and other restitution and reconciliation services, have proven to be dramatically successful, especially with juveniles. The satisfaction rate for both victims and offenders is overwhelmingly high—in the 80 to 90% range. And the reduction in recidivism has been significant where these programs have been tried.
What would it take to transform our present punitive criminal system into a collaborative system that encourages truth-telling, dialogue, accountability, forgiveness and healing? And what will it take for us to seriously address the root causes of crime? Methodist activist Harmon Wray suggests that what is needed is a growing movement, rooted in faith communities, low income and working class neighborhoods, and informal groups of justice professionals—people who can build a political consciousness sufficient to have a real impact on the present system.
There are unquestionably a dangerous few who do need to be kept out of circulation for the safety of both themselves and the community. But these offenders would be only a small portion of those currently incarcerated. They could be kept in safe, humane containment and encouraged to make constructive use of their time. With most people, non-violent constructive alternatives which do not involve full-time deprivation of liberty would be possible.
Very practically, then, an enormous step forward would be to call for an immediate moratorium on prison construction. The money saved could then be used in a variety of ways far more likely to reduce both recidivism and crime—creative programs of public education, drug and alcohol treatment, the creation of affordable housing, early intervention with struggling families and at-risk children, and the development of jobs that pay a living wage. Our Unitarian Universalist principles lead us directly to this work.
Restorative justice is not only applicable to criminal situations. Every time a conflict between two people or within a group is acknowledged as normal and healthy, engaged with compassion, deep listening and a willingness to forgive and to reconcile, justice is being served. Remember, justice is that process that allows us to live together peacefully.
As we enter the Jewish High Holy Days, this season of repentance and forgiveness, there is still far too much violence, too much poverty, racism, ignorance and hopelessness, and there are far too many prisons. But there is also an extraordinary movement on behalf of true justice in communities of faith here and around the world. We each have an opportunity to choose to be on either side of this balance. The world truly needs us to put our weight on the side of justice.
by Lucinda Duncan, minister, Follen Community Church, Unitarian Universalist, Lexington, Massachusetts
At sunset on the 24th of this month the holiest of Judaism’s Days of Awe will begin. Yom Kippur—observed with day-long religious services by Jewish people around the world—concludes the ten “Days of Turning” which begins with Rosh Hashanah. As the most solemn and serious of these holy days, Yom Kippur is often experienced as the dramatic moment of self-surrender. With prayerful vows and symbolic actions, it becomes the time to let go of those stubbornly pleasurable grudges, acid resentments, and reactive behaviors that keep personal relationships so angry and estranged. It becomes time to participate personally in the renewal of the world by repairing ruptured relationships.
As a Unitarian Universalist, I have always admired the Jewish insistence on facing, and relinquishing, resentments. While we speak of holding ourselves accountable, we have no equivalent requirement for honoring the process liturgically. What I appreciate about Judaism’s wisdom is how well the tradition invites self-reflection, how clearly it offers a release from self-centered-ness that allows people to turn toward a fresh consciousness of universal redemption. For underlying the theology of the Days of Awe is the assumption that spiritually, politically and morally, Jews are interdependent with all people, and that they are thereby responsible for the poor, the exploited, and the oppressed. Judaism teaches that what we each do either upholds the world in justice and peace or throws it into disarray.
That’s impressive to me. Imagine where the world would be today without the great gift, thousands of years ago, of Judaism’s acute moral conscience about the lives and fortunes of the poor and vulnerable! Social activists from every religious and secular tradition have benefited from the strength of that exemplary religious conscience.
Of course, all the world’s great religions hold forth the value of healing ruptured relationships and of finding ways to live together in peace. Yet for all this talk, analysis, and religious encouragement to forgive, the actual practice of forgiveness is the hardest single thing we will ever try to do. Why? You know as well as I. Because we’ve been hurt. Sometimes we’ve been hurt casually or randomly; sometimes the damage is delivered maliciously, or with evil intent. Yet it happens to us all.
Take a moment now and revisit some scab, scar, or tear in your heart. Allow yourself to remember how it got there. Remember the causal faces, words, situations. Remember the miscalculations, the sadness, the lies. Remember the destruction of trust, the betrayals, the rage.
Measure the heat of the anger that still lies there, beneath your pain. Feel the resistance you have toward offering the reconciling word; acknowledge the well-banked rage that still glows in the absence of justice. Are you remembering, now, the ways you devised, reactively, to protect yourself? The hard shell you presented to the world? The ways you reworked your whole understanding of what it means to stay safe?
No wonder so many people say, “Forgiveness? You’ve got to be kidding!” For the center of how we deal with forgiveness is not just the beliefs we hold or the vocabularies we use, it’s the pain. It’s the way our sorrow and rage and pain keep us chained to our past, to what happened to us before. Hannah Arendt spoke directly to that problem when she observed, in The Human Condition, that we are created with the power to remember the past but left powerless to change it, and that we are created with the power to imagine the future, but left powerless to control it. It’s such an exquisite anguish. It keeps us from giving an opening even as big as the eye of a needle to the group or the person who has wronged us. Yet it’s the utter reality that without such effort—and it is an effort—our neighbor will never respond by opening a “gate to heaven” for us: the proverbial gate through which forgiveness—and the possibility of reconciliation—may flow.
With all of that left unreleased, we can become prisoners of our past. Not consciously. Not willingly. We see our therapists, talk with our ministers, and cry copiously when we’re alone. But we are tied to what has been. We believe ourselves irrevocably changed and cannot conceive of ever re-imagining the future.
People who teach troubled, defiant or incarcerated kids know how this resistance works. One such teacher described it this way:
Many of the students in my classes had come from situations of violence and trauma across the globe. They were often locked in patterns of behavior shaped by their pasts, so I encouraged them to begin to listen to their selves, to become more aware of their verbal maps of the future. These maps often included scenarios where the cost of forgiveness appeared too great a sacrifice to make.…. There was often a sense that their past was gone [but] their future was on hold.
Some groups or nations have also been experimenting fairly successfully with new ways to confront painful pasts. Interracial groups traveling to Ghana have reported visiting the site of the pan-African slave trade departures and processing together their sorrow at how both white and African ancestors had sold the ancestors of African Americans into slavery.
Others look to South Africa for stories of healing and forgiveness, citing the decision by that nation’s political and religious leaders to call for the practice of public forgiveness as the only way to a constructive future.
Archbishop Desmond Tutu gave this example in 1999 at the John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard when he spoke to a Symposium on Forgiveness and Healing about that process. Explaining that he had been through the crucible of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, having heard endless chilling tales of humanity’s inhumanity to one another, he said:
I [know] I have looked into the abyss of human evil and seen the depth to which we can in fact plumb. But, paradoxically, one comes away exhilarated by the revelation of the goodness of [ordinary] people. You encounter people who, having suffered grievously, should by right be riddled with bitterness and a lust for revenge and retribution. But they are different.
He told the gathered audience that day of a woman whose body was so filled with shrapnel fragments that she couldn’t walk through the security checkpoint at the airport, but who wished to thank the perpetrator for throwing that grenade because, miraculously enough, everything that had happened to her in the aftermath had enriched her life.
He told the story of a man, an officer, who with his four other fellow officers admitted giving the order to ambush some innocent villagers. “Yes,” the man admitted to an angry roomful of survivors, ‘”we gave the orders for the soldiers to open fire.” Said Tutu: “The tension was combustible!” But then the officer said, “Please forgive us. Please accept my colleagues back into the community.” And almost miraculously, according to the Archbishop, that roomful of angry, seething people broke out into deafening applause. “And afterwards I told them,” he recalled, “Please let us keep quiet because we are in the presence of something holy.”
Forgiveness remains a hollow word until we decide, to use Archbishop Tutu’s words, “to come full circle.” Suddenly, after so much resistance, so much fear, so much anguish, so much pain, it occurs to us: there is no future without forgiveness.
This is as true in South Africa and the Middle East as it is for the pains you and I have suffered in our own lives. Without forgiveness, there is no progress, no linear history; there is only a return to conflict and to unending cycles of conflict. This is a very old lesson.
May each of us, during this season of Yom Kippur, consider anew the religious call to relinquish our resentments, angers, and fears. May we chop the chains that bind us to our pain-filled pasts. May we offer just enough space that our resentments slip away and the new energy of forgiveness can slip in through the eye of a needle. May a small gate to heaven, designed just for us, swing open, very soon.
A story for Yom Kippur, from the rabbinic teaching tradition:
In his dream, Jacob beheld a ladder set on the earth whose top reached into Heaven, and angels of God were ascending and descending on it.
Some rabbis believe there are angels ascending and descending everywhere, could we but see them, but most insist there are only a few such junctures between heaven and earth. Rabbi Simeon speaks of only nine such Gates, while Rabbi Tanhuma estimates seventy. But for Rabbi Abraham Ibn Ezra, each person has their own gate, whose door is open only on the Day of Judgment.
The sages tell us that this is our work in life: Make for me an opening as wide as the eye of a needle, and I shall make an opening for you as wide as a gate to heaven.
by Kathy Reis, CLF Prison Ministry Director
I am writing you this letter expressing my humble gratitude for your pen pal services and for matching me with my pen pal. I do thank you and your staff for putting happiness and friendship into my life…. CLF is always in my nightly prayers. — Larry in Utah
I am writing you this letter expressing my humble gratitude for your pen pal services and for matching me with my pen pal. I do thank you and your staff for putting happiness and friendship into my life…. CLF is always in my nightly prayers.
— Larry in Utah
The staff at the Church of the Larger Fellowship always appreciates hearing from members of our far-flung congregation. At any other church we’d get to know our members in the usual way, by hearing about graduations and vacation trips and glasses that were left behind on Sunday. At CLF, we thrive on letters or, at best, the occasional visit to our Boston office.
There’s a group of CLF members, though, who can’t even visit us, because they are behind bars in jails and prisons all over the country. The CLF currently has about 130 imprisoned members—a number that has doubled over the last couple of years—and the only way we get to know them is through their letters. Since I became the CLF’s director of prison ministry I’ve been privileged to share, through their letters, the ups and downs of these members’ lives—their joy at receiving a letter, their frustration that comes from trying to be a good Unitarian Universalist in a religiously hostile setting, their loneliness, and their gratitude for their pen pal. An imprisoned member in Utah named Larry wrote the words that inspired this reflection, and I hope that Larry’s CLF pen pal is as gratified as we were by his heartfelt expression.
Another imprisoned CLF member, Tommy, in California, told me this story: The prison chaplain had proven himself intolerant of any religion outside his narrow denominational views. Tommy wrote:
It is this religious intolerance that is spread among the inmate population. A few months ago I was asked by an inmate Bible study leader if I was born again. I indicated that I was a Unitarian Universalist and a religious liberal. At that point I was called ‘heathen’ and ‘pagan’. I really doubt he understands the meanings of these terms. Two weeks later he again approached me and asked why I would associate myself with gays and child molesters. I asked, ‘What do you mean?’ He indicated the UU church honors such people as Channing, Emerson, and Thoreau, and they are noted gays and child molesters. I then said, ‘Who are you to judge?’ I also brought to his attention that he was an admitted murderer. Not as an insult, but a reality check. How do I deal with such situations?
It is this religious intolerance that is spread among the inmate population. A few months ago I was asked by an inmate Bible study leader if I was born again. I indicated that I was a Unitarian Universalist and a religious liberal. At that point I was called ‘heathen’ and ‘pagan’. I really doubt he understands the meanings of these terms.
Two weeks later he again approached me and asked why I would associate myself with gays and child molesters. I asked, ‘What do you mean?’ He indicated the UU church honors such people as Channing, Emerson, and Thoreau, and they are noted gays and child molesters. I then said, ‘Who are you to judge?’ I also brought to his attention that he was an admitted murderer. Not as an insult, but a reality check.
How do I deal with such situations?
I don’t know if my response to Tommy, counseling patience and understanding, was very helpful.
Charles, a prisoner in Florida, told me that his chaplain was giving him special attention, hoping to convert him from Judaism. One day soon after Charles joined the CLF, he told the chaplain that he was now a UU. “Oh, no!” said the chaplain. “That’s an evil religion. Better you stay where you are, stay a Jew.”
I hardly know how to respond to these stories. The fact is that I’ve never been behind bars, never heard that locked-from-the-outside door clang shut behind me. I have only spent an afternoon inside a prison as part of a touring clergy group. Almost everything I know of prison life I have learned from Larry, Tommy, and Charles, and from other imprisoned CLF members who have written to us, and I am deeply grateful to all of you who have added to my growing awareness by sharing your stories.
I’m also grateful to the almost-70 of you—a number that has tripled in the last year—who have become pen pals for our imprisoned members. You are the face of Unitarian Universalism for these members, many of whom are learning of our hopeful message of inherent worth and dignity primarily though you. This is a wonderful, even life-saving, service that you are giving.
According to journalist Eric Schlosser, the movement to imprison more and more of our citizens has created something like a “prison industrial complex,” meaning the developing system of government and prison employees, for-profit private corrections companies, and politicians who work together to expand the criminal justice system. These entities, working hand-in-hand, have been described as “a confluence of special interests that has given prison construction seemingly unstoppable momentum.”
Unitarian Universalists as a group are learning more about prison conditions in the United States as part of the UUA’s Study Action Issue on criminal justice and prison reform. Here at the Church of the Larger Fellowship, we see something of the human face behind the statistics. What we are told, over and over again, is that through Quest and the UUWorld, through our pen pal program, through our ministry to prisoners, we are delivering that most precious and rare of prison commodities: hope and the anticipation of a better future. Our free-world pen pals are putting a human face on our Principles, our imprisoned members are educating the rest of us about prison conditions, and our CLF congregation is moving ahead, each in our own way.
Margaret Mead once said, “Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world; indeed, it’s the only thing that ever has.” CLFers, on both sides of the prison doors, are changing the world, one small piece at a time.
It’s an honor to get to know you.
We have incarcerated CLF members waiting for pen pals. If you would like more information, contact Kathy Reis at kreis@clfuu.org or call 617-948-6166.
For more information on the UUA Study Action Issue on Prison Reform, go to www.uua.org/csw.
by Brad Greeley, member of the board, Church of the Larger Fellowship
We have been having some serious and awakening discussions on the CLF Board about the fact that we are an international congregation. Over against that reality is the parallel reality that feelings and experiences root us in a single geography and culture. We know we need to grow and expand our ability to recognize our multicultural base. But we aren't finding it easy.
I confronted this reality in thinking about these words to you. It is September—that is universal, at least amongst the majority who use the Gregorian calendar. In the culture in which I write, the culture of congregations in the northeastern part of the North American continent, it is fall. The summer vacation season is drawing to a close and we are beginning a new cycle of work and school and church. That is the immediate context of my life and experience and would be the logical jumping off place for these comments.
But, I hesitantly recall, the season of autumn inhabits less than half the globe as September begins. The members of our congregations in South America and Africa and Indonesia and Australia are experiencing an entirely different part of our earth cycle. Not the harvest and cooling temperatures, but the warming rains and glorious buds of spring. I can't use the analogy of fall if I wish to speak to our whole congregation.
Our lives and cultures have powerful cycles, which are defined and shaped by the angle of the sun and the amount of precipitation. These seasons reverberate in our religious practices, from Sabbath to Sabbath, from holy day to holy day. The local and regional rhythms of our religious practices—whether religious, family or personal—derive a great deal from the context in which we live. They are obvious reference points for musing on life and faith. This makes it very challenging to find metaphors which resonate, in a timely way, with all of us scattered around this globe.
One of the things that a common culture does for us is create the raw materials out of which examples and metaphors can spring. The common experience of farmers is the cycle of clearing, tilling, planting, tending, and harvesting. Metaphors based in that experience can be shared in the most remote corners of our planet. Fewer of us are farmers any more, but most of us are enough in sync with the natural cycles that they provide a universal base for spiritual and philosophical orientation. Timing, of course, is the problem. We can recognize common stories, truths and lessons from the agricultural cycle, but we can't share the timely celebrations that go with them.
Through the religious principles and spiritual values of our faith, we share many religious rituals and celebrations. But the elements which dramatize our commit-ment and concern tend to grow out of the land and culture we inhabit, giving uniqueness, but also strangeness, when offered to others as illustration. Thanksgiving and Christmas are obvious and easy examples. Cranberry sauce and snow are delightful elements of my rituals of those celebrations, but are totally limited to specific environments. Chances are the ways we celebrate marriage, child-birth and death are influenced by our culture as well as our faith.
But since we share a common faith, we share stories of its development and spread. The drama of Francis David in Transylvania converting a king and a kingdom to the Unitarian heresy. The drama of Michael Servetus of Spain refusing, in Switzerland, to recant his intelligent understanding of the scriptures and their lack of support for the notion of the Trinity. The drama of John Murray coming from England to the United States, shipwrecked and hungry, being pressed into preaching his message of universal salvation in order to get supplies for his shipmates. The drama of free religion and an open society taking root among the women and men of the Khasi Hills of India. The drama of English Unitarian Florence Nightingale caring for those injured by war in Europe and Universalist Clara Barton doing the same in the United States—women whose extraordinary bravery and caring led to the Red Cross, which now serves a world at risk. The drama of Norbert Capek of Czechoslovakia, arrested and killed by the Nazis for practicing and preaching his Unitarian faith when the law forbade it.
The timeless universal metaphors are those of life. The life in the world around us. The life of those who have gone before us. The life within us, which we experience and share each day.
The lesson is a gigantic one and a simple one. As board and staff of the CLF struggle to learn how to be a truly world-wide organization, as we struggle as citizens of particular ethnic groups and as members of individual nations, as we work to comprehend the meaning of being passengers on the whirling spaceship Earth, the answer is simplicity itself. The timeless universal metaphors are those of life. Our faith and our ride on Planet Earth depend upon learning that simple lesson.
by Helen Zidowecki, acting minister of religious education, Church of the Larger Fellowship
September marks the beginning of the church year for many of us in the northern hemisphere. Religious education programming here at CLF certainly has much to look forward to this year.
A year ago, I was doing the final editing on the curriculum plan that Dan Harper, my predecessor, had developed and put onto the CLF Web site. This gives an excellent background for religious education throughout the year.
Then I started really looking at the many religious education resources that had been developed for CLF, and was amazed. Many of the items developed in the last five years are on the Web site, and many excellent items are on file, but you may not know that, because we haven’t given you an index for items. Resources don’t do any of us any good it we don’t know how to get to them!
I have become aware of the variety of people who use the CLF materials, everything from Between Sundays to Religious Education Connections to this page in Quest. You are parents and families who are isolated by geography or circumstance, religious educators, leaders of small groups, and children and youth yourselves. Materials may be used by an individual, by a pair of people or a family, or with a group. And there is still a need for material for youth and young adults!
And while I have been looking at religious education within CLF, things are happening in religious education circles of Unitarian Universalism itself. The Religious Education Department of the Association, now called Lifespan Faith Development, focuses on educating or preparing for a lifelong spiritual journey. A new curriculum being developed by the UUA over the next few years will focus on ethical development, spiritual development, Unitarian Universalist identity, and faith development. I discussed this curriculum plan in Religious Education Connections, Spring 2004, and would like to present their vision statement here, as a vision that CLF can also embrace.
We envision children, youth, and adults who:
Now, here comes the puzzle! So much to cover, so much to make accessible! Building on the idea of the curriculum plan from last year, a new CLF curriculum will be:
This can’t be done all at once. So there will be a plan to introduce new material gradually. The focus for:
October to December will be Unitarian Universalist Identity; January to March will be Jewish and Christian Heritage and World Religions; April to June will be Ethics and Social Justice, and July to September will be Religious Questions.
October to December will be Unitarian Universalist Identity;
January to March will be Jewish and Christian Heritage and World Religions;
April to June will be Ethics and Social Justice, and
July to September will be Religious Questions.
Keep in mind, however, that the order in which the material can be used will be flexible. Material will be available for preschool, elementary, middle school/junior youth, youth and young adults in each topic. In addition, material that is found in various places will be combined into sections on Life Issues, and Celebrations and Holy Days. Each month in Quest there will be a “New in Religious Education” box that will have links to new material on the CLF website.
To see the overall plan for introducing material, go to “Organizing Religious Education Resources” in Religious Education Connections, Fall 2004 on the CLF website. Go to www.clfuu.org, click on Religious Education, then RE Connections, then Spring 2004.
Take a look at the center of your September/October UUWorld magazine to see uu&me! in its first issue as an insert.
I’d have better things to do than hang out with my crew — The pink skinned swans and golden colored doves, the little sphinx moths, Hummingbirds, and swift falcons. On darker days, I’ll slice through rain clouds and make a bright clear day. Flutter through eons of old folk’s agony and pain. I’ll take luxurious baths in lush blue streams and quench My thirst with sugar water. I’ll wing way way out on solo missions of honor. Soar high along the California coast And fly back across the shores of Maine. Glide slowly over poor towns. Pause mid flight Swoop down low and drop food into the mouths of starving babies. I’ll beat my beak into the ground one thousand times so broken hearted Girls could bury their sorrow. I’ll wheel through the prisons and release all my comrades Locked down in cages. Yeah. Hang up side down. Take in the injustices around the entire world through these small, beady eyes. I’ll be a witness for truth. And you’d never even know I was there.
by R.S. Lewis From the Maine Commons, Spring 2004
Reginald S. Lewis is an imprisoned member of CLF. You may write to him c/o the CLF prison ministry director.
that we will be offering new online courses this fall? Go to www.clfuu.org and click on Religious Education for more info.
Last updated June 12, 2005
Church of the Larger Fellowship (CLF), 25 Beacon Street, Boston, MA 02108-2823 Phone: (617) 948-6166 · Fax: (617) 523-4123 · E-mail: clf@clfuu.org
