It's a pretty amazing story, the account that I heard recently of a bunch of kids in Washington State who set out in the brief span of two weeks to learn about the plight of local farm workers-most of them migrants from Mexico and Central America-and to work with them as advocates for change.* For me, it's a model of what so many of our volunteer efforts here at All Souls can be and, in many cases, are. It inspires me and drives me.
Two summers ago, these kids-ten of them, ranging in age from 15 to 18-applied through the Just Works program of the Unitarian Universalist Service Committee to participate in a work camp near the Columbia River community of Yakima, Washington. In the company of their adult advisors, they went not knowing much at all about the working conditions of women and men and, yes, children, who spend long hot days all summer long in the fields and orchards of this produce-rich state.
They went with open hearts and open minds, and they heard the stories of folks like Maria, a young woman of 30 with two small children. For five years, Maria has shared half a mobile home with two other adults and her two young children. The plumbing hasn't worked right for ages, but she's one of the lucky ones. She takes her children to a neighbor's home to bathe. The sewer system she and her neighbors rely on isn't reliable, but it's better than it was. She remembers when her kids would play among puddles of raw sewage in what passed for a front yard. Her complaints to the landlord got her a rent increase. When she turned to the State Department of Health, she was told they were too busy for such matters. Many of Maria's friends who work the fields of this lush region of Washington State wouldn't dare go to the authorities. They're undocumented laborers hanging on the edge of survival, and the prospect of policy change is no match for the threat of being sent home empty handed.
So our ten youngsters heard Maria's story and the stories of Mrs. Placido, whose children work ten-hour days picking cherries, and of 50-year-old Francisco, who begs for water from the residents of the town or uses the spigot in the city park. Farm workers all, they're subject to conditions of working and living that none of us would tolerate for a day--unless we had to because there were no other job options and our families depended on us.
The work campers also met with folks who wielded power and influence over the lives of the farm workers. Questions that drove their actions included: Who is responsible for these conditions? Who is responsible for changing these conditions? We all are, they concluded! And this response fueled their perseverance.
They listened hard and they pitched in at the Migrant Head Start Program, the Mattawa Food Bank, and the Esperanza Housing Project. They got their feet wet and their hands dirty. All this gave credibility to what they had to say when they went knocking on the doors of power at the offices and homes of the growers, of the community dignitaries, of government officials. They spoke with hope and passion and offered concrete recommendations for policy changes in housing, healthcare, education, grower-worker relations, and immigration law. And they enjoyed some victories, like the construction of a system that made safe water accessible to the farm workers living on the bare fringes of this community that benefits so amply from their labor.
Now why did they do it? Why did they reach into their depths to discern realities that most of us can so easily ignore? In their own words, here's why:
"The inherent worth and dignity of every person; justice, equity, and compassion in human relationsthe interdependent web of all existence
Our religious tradition and beliefs demand that we do not remain apathetic and complacent while others suffer. Our faith commands us to question relationships that create our comfort at the cost of other people's dignity. Through this project, we reached an understanding that the only way to truly call ourselves Unitarian Universalists is to not only affirm [these] values.but to actively promote them through just actions."
So what do we call this voluntary tour de force? Outreach? Service? Charity? Advocacy? Well how about a melding of these? I believe that giving of ourselves is giving to ourselves. I believe that inreach and outreach dissolve into one another when we consider our connections with one another-not just the one anothers sitting here this morning, or those of us and those well known to us who join in the rich cluster of activities that comprise the rest of our congregational life, but the souls out there who give meaning to All Souls, the folks out there and the folks in here who have known profound oppression, the kind of oppression that is everyday life for Maria and Francisco and Mrs. Placido.
Inreach and outreach are yin-yang. Inreach that goes deep enough generates outreach. And outreach that extends beyond the boundaries of our comfort zones becomes inreach. Faith-based justice calls us to reach in and out. Faith-based volunteering bids us to go far beneath the conventions of service to a spirituality that penetrates any barricade of quietude.
Now there are many of us at All Souls who say "If I'm going to volunteer, I'd rather do the hands-on stuff only, the stuff where I can see the difference I make." And there are some of us who snub our noses at that and say, "No, I'd rather take on the system that drives the oppression. I'd rather go after the causes." So what is it service or advocacy? Charity or justice? Making dents or making waves? Where lies the common ground in this matter of faith-based volunteering? Hey, if the Mets and the Yankees are competing on the common ground of this city, there's probably a way out of this other dilemma.
David Hilfiker is a physician and founder of Joseph's House, a small hospital community in Washington, DC for men living with AIDS. He's definitely a guy who knows about service. Yet he makes a powerful case for "The Limits of Charity." (The Other Side, September/October 2000) Well-intentioned acts of individual service or charity cannot begin to do what a more just, tax-fare society could accomplish, he contends. If communities of faith, for example, were asked to take on financial responsibility for "only three government programs-welfare for families, disability payments for the poor, and food stamps-every single church, synagogue, mosque, and other religious congregation would have to come up with $300,000 a year." It won't happen. "The fundamental problem for the poor in our country," he argues, "is not homelessness or AIDS or hunger or the like.The problem is injustice," and "injusticeis the inevitable result of the structures of our society-economic, governmental, social, and religious that undergird inequality. .poverty is built into these systems."
Ed Loring has a different take on the matter. As a partner/worker at Atlanta's Open Door community, which ministers to that city's homeless, Loring is well acquainted with life at its harshest. He speaks of feeling sometimes torn between the apparent dichotomies of "prayer and action"charity and justice." "The solution," he claims, "is not either/or but both/andespecially regarding charity vs. justice-or the band-aids-vs.-systemic-change approach. Neither can stand by itself."
Let's bring it closer to home. If we are to act meaningfully on the common ground of service and advocacy, charitable hearts and just actions, we might take heart from some of the work that continues to be open to this congregation's willing volunteers. I think of our partnership-and I emphasize partnership-with Rev. Leroy Ricksy's Church of the Resurrection on East 101st Street and the community-based organization that he directs-the Booker T. Washington Learning Center. And I recall Mary-Ella's words read earlier by Peronne:
As I walk down 101st Street toward the Center I will see the church where we meet in the basement and across the street a ball field and a narrow strip of land that is our annex set amidst a community garden. But I will also see the block as it was eight years ago, just another abandoned lot filled with scrapped automobiles and junkies doing business on shredded car seats. I will know what it took to transform the block-the community effort, the leadership, the negotiation, the maze of bureaucracy.
And as I hear Mary-Ella's words I think of the times that I have walked down that street-sometimes sweltering under an August sun and praying (yes, a prayer of complete self-interest) that the man selling that mango ice would have lingered a bit longer in front of Booker T. And my memory's eye takes me through the colors and fragrances of the community garden, where I wonder at the flowers growing with the same promise as the youngsters at the Center, munchkins who will sit so willingly in my lap and snuggle and cuddle and hope for a story. And I think of Leroy and of Kim and her children-the eloquent ten-year-old Travis, the erudite five-year-old Naomi, and the irresistible one-year-old Maya. And I know that they are full partners in this enterprise that has now produced a pre-school program, an after school program, a full array of summer activities, adult education, and a series of educational forums that represents a full partnership of grass-roots advocacy on behalf of our public schools, so that children's minds can blossom with the same promise as those flowers across the street.
Rev. Ricksy reports that what he has so enjoyed about this partnership is that it's not a model whose core of integrity is undermined by one party patronizing the other but rather a relationship of equals-all of whom respect the reality that folks in the immediate neighborhood of the Center know what their needs are and how best to use whatever resources, fiscal or otherwise, flow into this enterprise. The partnership of stakeholders and volunteers and advocates and workers at the Booker T. Washington Learning Center mirrors that partnership realized by our youngsters and farm worker neighbors in the Pacific Northwest. Again, Mary-Ella's words ring true:
I do what I believe needs to be done to bring social justice and human rights to the children, women, and men in this complex partnership we have named life. I do it because I can't resist the call of the spirit toward justice.
Engaging in service without partnership can all too easily intensify the dehumanizing experience that we otherwise seek to de-intensify. We lose sight of our interdependent web and consider the great and grand good that we are doing for "those people." And without a clue, we behave unjustly.
Rev. William Sloane Coffin, in his new book, The Heart Is a Little to the Left: Essays on Public Morality, speaks to this in the ripeness of his own decades of justice ministry, and he minces not a word:
"Said prophet Amos 'Let justice'-not charity-'roll down like mighty waters,' and for good reason: whereas charity alleviates the effects of poverty, justice seeks to eliminate the causes of it."
Then he speaks to those of us in the professional ministry:
"many pastors deliberately perpetuate a childish version of the faith, particularly if they are ministers of mainline middle-class churches, for, not surprisingly, they [or we] find it easier to talk to [our] congregations of charity rather than of justice. Charity, after all, threatens not at all the status quo that may be profitable to a goodly number of [our] parishioners. Justice, on the other hand, leads directly to political controversy."
And he doesn't let up.
"there is a real temptation to think that the sanctuary is too sacred a place for the grit and grime of political battle. But if you believe religion is above politics, you are, in actuality, for the status quo-a very political position. And were God the god of the status quo, then the church would have no prophetic role, serving the state mainly as a kind of ambulance service."
Gulp! So how do we "let justice roll down like waters?" How do we do justice in this congregation? How do we adopt the policy and politics of justice in our volunteering at All Souls?
The scales of justice suggest to me both the balance that is at the heart of partnership and a balance of service and advocacy.
With service, we wade in the water with our fellow humans who know the oppression of poverty, ill health, aborted education, and the plagues of racism, sexism, classism, and economic disparity-and many of us in this sanctuary have known such oppression. But when we wade in that water, a deeper notion of justice bids us to do so in consultation with folks-ourselves or others-who have been there for a long long time.
With advocacy, we speak truth to power. To use a common expression of faith, we witness to what we see and hear and experience. And we open our mouths and write our letters and e-mails and sometimes take to the streets in protest to gain the attention and elicit the response of folks in positions to make a difference-legislators, judges, presidents, mayors, employers, movers and shakers altogether.
Without service, our advocacy rings hollow. Without advocacy, our service lapses so comfortably into self-congratulatory errands or guilt-ridden tokenism-the Ladies and Gentlemen Bountiful syndrome.
The model of doing justice offered through the 60-year practice of our Unitarian Universalist Service Committee weds service and advocacy in the framework of partnership. It affirms the dynamism of faith-based justice by immersion into the fray of real lives. It affirms the distinction between church and state while acknowledging that political power resides in the pews of every sanctuary. It is a model well worth looking to as we reflect upon the endeavors that draw forth our volunteering selves and seek to put meat and bones on the shared principles and purposes of our larger community of faith.
We seek, for example, to "use the democratic process within our congregations and in society at large." The democratic process in society at large is upon us. A mere 16 days remains until we elect our 43rd President. Critical seats in the US Senate and House, district judgeships, and seats in this State's Senate and Assembly are also at stake. The most basic act in a democracy-even an aspiring democracy such as ours-is to vote. However inaccessible government might seem or might be positioned to us, in a democracy, the government is us.
This is no less so in the democracy of our congregation. The democratic process in this congregation is a participative process. What does this mean? It means that we hear and heed the same call that our ten young friends did, the same call that Mary-Ella and Kim and Leroy and all of us who seek to make a positive difference in this partnership we call life just can't resist. It means that we heed the prophetic role of this community of faith and worship "with our eyes and ears and fingertipswith the opening of all the windows of our beings, with the full outstretching of our spirits."
When the prophet Amos spoke of "justice rolling down like waters," (Amos 5:24) he was in good company. At about the same time, the prophet Micah was giving voice to his own soul: "What does the Lord require of you, but to do justice, and to love mercy, and to walk humbly with thy God." Through Micah's words, I hear a call that urges me on:
What does the miracle of life ask of us, but to practice justice, to behave with compassion, and to walk through the span of our days in reverence for all Creation. We are all called. We are all chosen. Amen.
* Exploitation, Human Rights & Responsibility, The plight of the farm worker in Washington State, A Report from Participants of the 1999 UUSC Just Works Workcamp in Washington State, with comments also drawn from Rev. Jose Ballester's account at a forum held at The Unitarian Church of All Souls, October 15, 2000. Copyright AllSouls 2000.