Sunday, March 1, 2015

Spiritually Speaking: What in the World Is Good?

Many good things are happening in our congregation!

I want to extend my deep gratitude to the members of the ADORE (A Dialogue On Race and Ethnicity) Team for their creativity, passion, and vision that helped to make this year’s Black History Month celebration a success.  For the first time in our congregation’s history, we took the entire month of February and set aside business as usual.  We moved beyond the annual sermon on Dr. Martin Luther King Sunday into a deeper commitment to cherish diversity. 

This past month, we heard from members of our congregation about their vision for multiculturalism alongside the struggle within our community to sustain multiculturalism.  We listened to the words of Rev. Anthony Smith and the insistence to know subaltern histories.  We bore witness to Dot Counts Scoggins in her walk of faith and honored her as a living legacy. And just this past Sunday we listened to the brilliance of Angela RenĂ©e Simpson and Dr. Carl DuPont as they shared the poetry, philosophy and pain which created African American spirituals.  If you missed these Sundays, I encourage you to visit our past sermons section of our website, www.puuc.org, to hear some of the services.  Thank you to Michelle Boesch, Eva Dew Danner, Anne Laukaitis, Ilene McFarland, Lauren Neal, Arvind Patil, and Christine Robinson for making this incredible month possible.  And thank you to Lisa Dickinson for putting the finishing touches on our congregational mosaic.  Look for it in the sanctuary this coming Sunday! 

When we dream together amazing worlds can be born into being.

In this time of appreciation, I also want to lift up my gratitude for the incredible music ministry of Dr. Carl DuPont and the soul-nourishing music being offered by the members of our Piedmont UU Choir.  In just six weeks of rehearsals, our choir has sung on three Sundays and helped to participate in last week’s music Sunday.  Their voices fill the sanctuary with robust, responsive and refulgent sound.  I do believe our choir may soon sing Spring into our midst from this extended North Carolina winter.

Good things are happening. I am so grateful to the many in our community who give of what they can to nurture the spirit and heal our world.

This coming month, we are focusing our time on the monthly theme of gratitude. 
When I was in seminary, one of my advisors implored me to share my spiritual practices.  She instructed us all that spiritual practices were central to one’s ministry. She quoted Harry Scholefield, minister emeritus of San Francisco’s First Unitarian Church. “If you do not maintain a spiritual practice you shall dry up and blow away.”  For a long time I searched for a practice that I could maintain daily.  I have many, many spiritual practices from yoga to prayer and textual studies, but I tend to jump from one practice to the next.  I wanted to feel that sense of depth born from commitment.  It took me years to realize that I did have an intuitive spiritual practice.   I had a spiritual practice I engaged every day.

This practice is so simple and yet powerful, I’ve maintained it without even realizing it.  This spiritual discipline companions me in marches, protests and rallies for justice.  It is what has helped me through some of the most desperate and despairing times in my life.

Gratitude.

Seeking meaningful ways to give thanks and appreciate the world around me has sustained me and called me to give back to this earth and her people.  From journaling to notes of appreciation and even to taking the time to pause and see the world around me, I offer thanks at least a dozen times a day.  The writer Anne Lamott reminds us that there are really only three central prayers, “help, thanks, wow.”  I’d been praying “thanks” my whole life.

This is not to say that my life is perfect.  Nor is it to say that my gratitude becomes a numbing medicine from the world’s pain and my own pain. Indeed it is a balance of saving and savoring the world.  But in that balance, I believe we discover the spark at the core of our mission statement and ultimately the light within Unitarian Universalism.
I hope you will join us this month as we explore the spiritual practices of gratitude and the ways in which gratitude are essential to our faith as Unitarian Universalists and our commitment to heal the world.

With appreciation for the ministry and vision we share,

Rev. Robin

From Your Community Minister: An Invitation to participate in small group Spiritual Direction.

The term “spiritual direction” is a bit of a misnomer.  Spiritual Direction, at its best, is not really directive at all.  It is not about one person guiding another towards anything other than their own deepest truths, in the most gentle of ways, in what is often referred to as “holy listening.”  The Unitarian Universalist Spiritual Director’s Network describes the relationship of director and directee this way:  “…We work with others, companioning and witnessing to their sacred stories and grace-filled moments.”

I was first introduced to the practice of Spiritual Direction as a seminarian in Cambridge where I experienced both individual and small group direction.   There, in the basement of a hundred year old chapel, we honored one another’s journeys and helped each other along the path to a deepening sense of spiritual growth.   The direction relationship is not about offering advice or counsel (for that is not a part of the practice); rather, it is about offering a safe space where deep listening can occur.  We offer the presence of open minds and open hearts and respond with reflective questions that encourage the processes of self-awareness, contemplation, and exploration of that which you might name as sacred.

My training as a spiritual director began with a semester in seminary from a monk who was part of the community of The Society of Saint John the Evangelist, a monastery located on the beautiful Charles River in Cambridge, Massachusetts.  I then completed a two-year training at the Charlotte Spirituality Center where I now serve, offering direction and contemplative mini-retreats.

If you’d like to experience the practice of spiritual direction in an individual or a small group setting (a maximum of four per group), please contact Rev. Mary Frances at maryfrances@puuc.org.  We’ll set up a time to meet once per month.

Wishing you peace for the journey,
Rev. Mary Frances

Piedmont UU hosts Latino Immigration Forum on Tuesday, March 24

All of us are immigrants unless we are Native Americans. Our ancestors came to this country from across the globe, from many dozens of countries and all of the continents. Many came under extremely trying circumstances, although very, very few under the circumstances endured by the millions brought here illegally for many generations from Africa. Immigrants have come during the 17th, 18th, 19th, 20th and 21st centuries, hoping for freedom and better lives for themselves and their families. The plight of immigrants from Mexico and Central American countries, who have come to this country in recent years escaping violence, poverty and war, is a very important current issue. 

We are members of a religious denomination, Unitarian Universalism, that has advocated since its inception for civil rights and human rights, activism we can be proud of and be part of. The plight of Latino immigrants is an important UU issue. An entire General Assembly in 2011 was held in Phoenix, Arizona, close to the border with Mexico, to focus denominational attention on these issues.

Piedmont UU has been active in this area, with several members, Darla Davis and Anne Laukaitis, serving for some years on the Immigration Solidarity Council that meets monthly at the Friends Meeting House close to UNCC. Rev. Robin Tanner has engaged in rallies and vigils and been a speaker. Several dozen of our members have supported these activities at times.

The Piedmont UU Social Justice Council, in conjunction with the Immigration Solidarity Council, will hold a Latino Immigration Forum on Tuesday, March 24, 2015, from 7 to 8:30 p.m. in the sanctuary of our church. We offer this forum to raise the awareness of the issues and provide accurate, current information for our members and our guests.

Ben Snyder, an immigration lawyer, will provide an overview of the current status of President Obama’s recent administrative actions regarding Latino immigration. Hector Vaca, Director of ACTION NC, will talk about immigrant rights, the issue of in-state tuition in North Carolina for young students who accompanied their parents to their country as children and the municipal ID card for undocumented immigrants. A young Latino student, affected by the in-state tuition issue, will be present as well. There will be time for questions and the evening will conclude with member Mark Sanders leading us in a discussion of what Piedmont UU’s role might be in these important issues.

The Social Justice Council hopes many members will be interested to learn more about these issues, and the council has extended the invitation to other nearby churches and the community as well. There is no admission fee and refreshments will be served.

Latino Immigration Forum       
Tuesday, March 24, 2015, 7 to 8:30p.m.
Piedmont Unitarian Universalist Church      
9704 Mallard Creek Road
For more information contact Anne: laukaitis@windstream.net

Why We Must Fight For Medcaid Expansion

North Carolina’s continued rejection of Medicaid Expansion perpetuates systemic racism1. Even as we may work passionately to rid our own souls of every vestige of racism or classism, our failure to address systemic discrimination still sits on our shoulders. To that end, it is important that we call upon NC’s leaders to get off their duffs and pass Medicaid Expansion.

Medicaid Expansion is a critical component of the Affordable Care Act (ACA) and is intended to provide health insurance and improve health care access to millions of Americans who can neither afford to buy private insurance nor access coverage through their employer. Those millions of people make too much money to qualify for traditional Medicaid coverage but not enough to qualify for subsidized insurance. They fall into the insurance gap. That gap includes 357,000 North Carolinians: a number equivalent to filling every seat at the Charlotte gathering every Sunday for more than 33 years. That many people are being denied health insurance coverage in North Carolina. And, those people are disproportionately people of color.

One needs only to quickly peruse the 2010 report card on North Carolina’s racial and ethnic health disparities produced by the Department of Health and Human Services (Yes: the very government denying Medicaid Expansion has an office that studies and advocates overcoming major differences in health between whites and people of color!) to find statistical evidence that people of color have significantly poorer health outcomes than whites in North Carolina.2 Rejecting Medicaid Expansion results in preventing 357,000 people who are mostly people of color from accessing health coverage. That’s the same population of people who already experience worse health outcomes than most. See where this is going?

But it gets worse! Failure to expand Medicaid, has already cost North Carolina billions of dollars and thousands of jobs. A recent study examined the potential impact of this failure county by county in North Carolina on tax revenue, job creation, business activity and health insurance coverage. According to this study, if NC expands Medicaid in 2016, it will help create 43,000 new jobs and save the state budget $300 million by 2020.3

North Carolina has one of the largest wealth gaps in the nation, with only 17% of whites, compared to nearly ½ of all people of color, experiencing asset poverty (including things like home equity and pensions). Wealth of this kind can be used to generate more income and passes from generation to generation. So, this disparity is self-perpetuating. And, yet, as one of the poorest states in the nation and with almost ½ of our people of color living in asset poverty, we reject 43,000 new jobs and $300 million in state budget savings?

The ACA was passed by the U.S. Senate in December 2009 and the U.S. House of Representatives in March 2010, signed into law by President Obama March 23, 2010, and upheld by the U.S. Supreme Court June 28, 2012. In its ruling, the Supreme Court allowed states to individually choose to participate or reject Medicaid Expansion, the part of the ACA critical to providing health insurance to millions of low-income Americans. North Carolina, like many other Republican led Southern states, rejected it.

As of January 27, 2015, 28 states and the District of Columbia are expanding their Medicaid programs and embracing millions of people. Three states are considering expansion and 19 – including North Carolina – are still on record as neither expanding nor considering expansion. Earlier this month, NC Governor McCrory emerged from a White House meeting “breathlessly declaring”4 his surprise that the White House is willing to work with states on compromise plans to help these millions of people.  And yet, several states that originally rejected Medicaid Expansion have already negotiated waivers with the White House allowing those states to charge premiums or include co-pays to people newly covered by the expansion. Our Governor apparently didn’t know that.

As I said earlier, our failure to address systemic discrimination still sits on our shoulders. Join Reverend Robin and fellow PUUC congregants at the NAACP’s Mass Moral March on Raleigh February 14, 2015. Write your legislators. Do something. We cannot sit this one out.


January 31, 2015
A. Elaine Slaton

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1 (government, institution, or system policies and practices that disadvantage people of color)

2  Office of Minority Health and Health Disparities and State Center for Health Statistics, NC DHHS. Racial and Ethnic Health Disparities in North Carolina: Report Card 2010. Retrieved from www.schs.state.nc.us

3  Linker, Adam. New study shows that state lost billions of dollars and thousands of jobs by refusing Medicaid expansion; Legislators can still change the course. December 19, 2014. Retrieved from http://pulse.ncpolicywatch.org.

4 http://www.ccharlotteobserver.com/2015/01/06/5429467/mccrory-obama-open-to-medicaid.html#.VK1MzSvF9qV