Unitarian Universalists of Sterling

A few years ago, our nation collapsed in an economic quagmire. Presently the Occupy Wall Street movement stands to challenge not only the forces that led our markets to ruin, but the government that failed to hold the guilty to account. I can’t help but see this movement in relation to the struggles that bled through the nations of Egypt and Lybia, and throughout the Middle East; the ones that still haunt the lives of the Syrian and Egyptian people. I see a relationship in the way all these movements are born of the common desire to right wrongs and the hope that a collective power will have the capacity to overcome one that is despotic or over-indulgent.

As a child, I was fascinated by mummies. When Natural History Museum of the Smithsonian hosted a traveling Egyptian exhibit, my mother and I took a train from Connecticut to Washington, DC. I stood for hours peering into the glass cases. I was awestruck.

Kate Braestrup, a Unitarian Universalist minister to the game wardens of Maine, wrote a memoir titled, “Here if You Need Me.” The work traces her husband’s early death and the years just before and after the loss. In one chapter, she gives a detailed account of the way she dressed her husband’s body for burial. Rev. Braestrup, well acquainted with death through her profession, did not want a stranger to tend her husband’s body; she wanted to serve every inch of his frame with her own attention and love.

I am still haunted by the book Things Fall Apart by Chinua Achebe, which I read in my early teen years. Among many other themes, the book wrestles with the way White missionaries destroyed the heart of African communities by importing and imposing “proper” ways of life and worship. I am revisited by horrors from the text each time I hear tales from a mission trip.

Some tales come from dear interfaith colleagues. I’ll ask them the nature of their mission. I listen to hear one truth—do they go seeking to impose their ideals, or do they go as sojourners, hoping that their presence will help others achieve the goals they have set for their own communities?