Spiritual Practices
By Rev. Michelle Walsh, September 29, 2023
We have very high aspirations as Unitarian Universalists, and these are reflected in our values and principles. It’s what makes our faith tradition so powerful and draws so many of us to it out of disappointing experiences with other traditions or keeps us connected to it if we were lucky enough to grow up within Unitarian Universalism. Yet sometimes our focus on Unitarian Universalist prophetic social justice practices – our focus on the need to change the external structures of injustice in our larger world – can contribute to imbalance in our practices and in forgetting the equal importance of pastoral communal care for one another. In truth, the prophetic and the pastoral are intertwined and interdependent. I’m reminded of the time I heard Thich Nhat Hanh, a famous Vietnamese Buddhist practitioner, say: “So often the peace activists are the least peaceful people.”
The same can be true of pastoral care and human service providers who spend their entire lives taking care of others without equal attention to their care for themselves OR attention to the larger political institutional structures that create gaps in our larger society for pastoral and human care. These gaps contribute to how much harder it is to provide adequate care and the tendency to feel individual responsibility to fill in these gaps, with burnout resulting. A classic parable in social work is: “Social workers are spending a lot of time pulling drowning people out of rivers until the day a couple of them go upstream to try to figure out and stop who’s throwing the people into the river in the first place. Even so, after stopping people being thrown in, there are still people who need to be cared for after being pulled out.” We speak in social work of the need for a balance of both a micro clinical practice and a macro social practice – both are intertwined and necessary.
My questions for each of you are: Do you have adequate spiritual practices of boundaries and balance and broader perspectives in your personal life? Are you able to think and practice on both the spiritual level of individual and communal care AND on the spiritual level of systemic political change and advocacy? Both are necessary as we live into our shared ministry here at the First Parish Unitarian Universalist in Canton – and this parallels a type of work your Parish Committee is engaged in as well, using metaphors involving the “train” of day-to-day practices and the “airplane” of the larger vision. As each of you spiritually discerns “what makes your heart sing” for your personal ministry in relationship to the congregation this year, I hope your discernment will engage these questions of balance and boundaries and broader perspectives in your spiritual practices. Your lead ministerial team stands ready to help you with this discernment process!
Rev. Michelle