Answering the Call: Unity Church and ISAIAH

Brian Newhouse, Beloved Community Communications Team

​Mary Oliver crafted a beautiful poem years ago that, especially for UU’s, has become a kind of secular scripture. Her “Wild Geese” begins: 

“You do not have to be good. / You do not have to walk on your knees / for a hundred miles through the desert, repenting. / You only have to let the soft animal of your body / love what it loves.”

Such a startling message, isn’t it? A bit later in the poem she introduces the wild geese, “high in the clean, blue air.” But the final lines of that same poem have been speaking more powerfully to me recently. As we emerge from the wreckage of Metro Surge, I find these helpful:

“Whoever you are, no matter how lonely, / the world offers itself to your imagination, / calls to you like the wild geese, harsh and exciting— / over and over announcing your place / in the family of things.”

Two words in particular stand out here: calls and family.

Calls. The harshest sounds of this besieged winter were those of Minnesota’s little orange whistles sounding an alarm to our neighbors as they sprinted for their homes and prayed that ICE agents wouldn’t batter the door in. Those whistles were a terrifying call. But far more than terror, I hope that same shrill sound made real what The Atlantic writer Adam Serwer found here as he coined the term “neighborism.” These whistles were the harsh call of Minnesotans “who don’t care whether their neighbors were born in Minneapolis or Mogadishu.”

And Family. Thanks to the organizing of Unity’s Martha Tilton and many volunteers, I joined Obama Observers this winter, walking back and forth on Laurel Street, whistle in my pocket, eyes on the school’s playground. Some days we jumped over the sidewalk ice (oh, the metaphor!) and the next day it was pond-sized puddles. Regardless of the weather, we were incensed that any of us needed to be out there in the first place. Here’s a sentence I never thought I’d write: we volunteered to keep our government from abducting a child. But this was and is neighborism. This was a wider definition of family. This is the point of Oliver’s poem. As our late ministers said, “There are no other people's children.” 

Unity’s Ends: We the people of Unity Church-Unitarian, grounded in a joyous vision of beloved community…cultivate a multigenerational community of joy, care, and belonging…

As we sift through the damage that our government created, how can we, Unity Church, turn and cultivate more belonging? 
Twice this church year Reverend Oscar has cited from the pulpit the eye-opening research of sociologist Erica Chenoweth. Across a century’s worth of data, Chenoweth found that when 3.5% of a population protest nonviolently against their authoritarian government, that government is likely to fall. If UUs want to affect new outcomes in our politics, healthcare systems, housing, climate policies and a host of other needs — create beloved community at scale — we’ve got a math problem. There are about 5,000 UUs in Minnesota, and that’s roughly 0.1% of our state’s population. We can’t do this alone. We have to partner. 

We partner with those whose work, if not their theology, aligns with our own. One example: ISAIAH is a multiracial organization representing half a million Minnesotans, including 100 churches and 40 mosques. Its roots are unapologetically Christian, yet its leaders emphatically differentiate ISAIAH with white Christian nationalism. They organized the massive December rally at the Minneapolis Convention Center in which 5,000 gathered to train in nonviolent resistance; ISAIAH estimates one third of those attendees did not identify as Christian. On April 15, Tax Day, their political arm, Faith in Minnesota, organized a lobbying effort at the state Capitol in support of healthcare — one of the pillars of what they call their “People’s Agenda” which includes housing, public education, and food security. Vivian Ihekoronye is Faith in Minnesota’s Lead Community Organizer and told me she’s seeing more and more Unitarians joining Isaiah’s actions, many from Unity Church. Quakers and Buddhists are also showing up in large, new numbers.

As Unity seeks to walk the talk of our End's Statements, church member Clover Earl, convener of the Racial Justice Ministry Team, saw potential. Unity’s ISAIAH Partnership Team was born. Its charge is to keep “the congregation connected to and actively engaged in increasing awareness of Faith in Minnesota’s People’s Agenda.” One tangible outcome is that the congregation now has dozens of members serving as Faith in Minnesota delegates at Senate District Conventions, committed to ensuring that candidates support the People’s Agenda. With the midterms coming, Clover sees ISAIAH “committed to bringing together people of all faiths, ages, classes, and orientations to help ensure that our democracy and Beloved Community prevail in November.”

Is there any conflict between ISAIAH’s explicitly Christian mission and Unity’s faith tradition? “The short answer is no,” says Clover. “As an organization, ISAIAH has been masterful at creating simultaneous opportunities for actions across different faith traditions.” 

This is just one of the many partners that Unity needs and seeks so we can meet this moment. When our values align and our voices join, we do the work of Oliver’s beautiful wild geese, calling more and more people into the family where they have always belonged. 

Both Vivian and Clover welcome your direct inquiries to learn more.