The Ongoing Evolution of the ‘Beloved Community’: Hype or Real Change – Each spring break for over thirty years Rev Bush was privileged to lead UIUC and Parkland students into the US deep south for a weeklong immersive experience with racially and economically marginalized communities in our country. These communities included: the Houma Indians (this community’s preferred name of reference) in the most southern tip of Louisiana, Gullah communities of the South Carolina Sea Islands, Central Americans on the Texas Mexican border (in sanctuary, in the INS prison and family camps) and predominantly African American communities in Jackson, Mississippi, New Orleans, Louisiana (multiple trips both before and after Katrina) and Tuscaloosa, Alabama.
Her goal of each trip was the same each year: to seek to break the hearts and radically open the minds of young people as they witnessed with their own eyes and ears to both the violence of systemic racism and the impact of poverty in America And the profound courage, compassion and integrity of individuals working for survival and for change in each of these communities.
Over the years she observed a powerful and important common denominator that ran through the stories of so many of the individuals they met in each community— over and over… a denominator unfortunately found seemingly comparably scarce in predominately white, relatively affluent communities in our country.
On Sunday September 18 Reverend Karen Bush will offer a message of challenge and hope about the Unitarian Universalist Eighth Principle and how this principle plays an essential role in our own integrity and future welfare as a congregation who dares to claim it seeks to strive to live into our faith’s sacred vision of “Beloved Community”.
The Eighth Principle of UUism:
“We, the member congregations of the Unitarian Universalist Association, covenant to affirm and promote: journeying toward spiritual wholeness by working to build a diverse multicultural Beloved Community by our actions that accountably dismantle racism and other oppressions in ourselves and our institutions.”
We hope you will join us!
This message is Part II in Rev Bush’s Fall sermon series on the theme of “ Waking Up!”.