One of the blessings of our Unity Church community is the number of people that call it a spiritual home. With so many individuals that make up our community, it can also make it hard to get to know everyone at the depth we crave here in our work at Unity. As a way to create a tapestry of Unity voices, the Beloved Community Staff Team, aided by the Beloved Community Communications Team, is starting a new project within the congregation called, “All Our Fullness.”
The goal of the project is to provide a way for congregants to introduce themselves in a personal way. Here’s how to participate: 

• Fill out the form that includes a prompt or question for your consideration.
• Respond to a prompt in any way that is meaningful to you: write a story, poem, reflection, or play; offer a watercolor painting, photo, or sculpture; create a video with a song, a dance, or a recorded response or conversation; or a knitted item. 
• Upload images and/or videos via the online form.

The limit of your response is only your imagination. These contributions, as well as a photo and brief biography, will be posted on the Beloved Community News blog.

The idea for the project and its name is pulled from the fourth of the Unity Church ends statements, which guide our work, “Know each other in all our fullness and create an ever-widening circle of belonging for all people.”

We hope this project can serve as a starting point for deeper relationships among us. We also hope to create a tapestry, a sampling, a “Unity community quilt” of sorts, of the folks that make up the Beloved Community here.

For this introduction of All Our Fullness, here is the inaugural question and prompt: What illuminates your commitment to creating an antiracist multicultural community? Share a story, image, and/or video. 

This is just the very beginning of this project. We’re exploring many ideas, avenues, and directions for how this project may evolve over time, so we’re leaving the future of it open-ended to make space for its growth. Look for more information in upcoming newsletters and a future table in Parish Hall, as this project grows. The evolution is also going to depend on the level of participation, meaning you, yes, you dear reader, are the perfect person to submit a response. Submit to All Our Fullness!

​I think it’s safe to make the generalization that for many of us who find ourselves in a liberal theological community, one of the most difficult tasks asked of us is to develop a spiritual practice. And don’t even get me started on my (and probably others’) struggle with developing a prayer practice; that’s for another newsletter. Thankfully, we find ourselves here at Unity Church with a plethora of circles, sources, events, and publications to support that task. But even with all those resources, the learning never stops, so I joined the late-February follow-up to the fall 2023 series Spiritual Practice: Discovery and Transformation, with Rev. KP Hong to continue my dive into spiritual practice.

​If you are contemplating these questions, you are not alone: 

It can be overwhelming to know what a practice can look like that fulfills within, among, and beyond needs. 

During the February event, KP reminded us of the core definition of spiritual practice: it’s how we connect to the whole, the holy, that which is greater than the self and greater than the ego. He also reminded us of the unbreakable bond between spiritual practice and antiracist practice. We cannot think to dismantle racism without the transformation a spiritual practice provides to us to connect to that which is greater. This intertwining is seen in the Double Helix Model in which spirituality and antiracist work at the within, among, and beyond levels to break down white supremacy.
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We were asked to consider these questions as we shared what our practice looks like: 

Of all my spiritual uncertainties, I’ve always known that nature has been, and always will be, my connection to that which is greater because it is the realm in which I’ve experienced the most awe: the pulsating of an aurora borealis, waves lapping against rocks, and a Cooper’s Hawk raising its young in our backyard silver maple. A spiritual practice for me is anything that brings me outside.

We were then asked to name our antiracism practice and to look at how it and our spiritual practice come together to support each other. And if it was hard to name how the two support each other, are there adjustments to be made to increase that support?

That’s where I find myself: ruminating on the adjustments. I feel a connection between my roots in nature and an antiracist practice of acknowledging how environmental destruction is a white dominate act. However, I don’t yet know how to clearly define that thread to someone else. 

This idea of spiritual and antiracism practices supporting one another follows a theme. The disconnections we often experience in our capitalist society that does not value spirituality, rest, community, art, face-to-face communication, or humanity as a part of nature, lead to other-ing and barriers. We put up barriers thinking that we need protection between the “other” and the “self.” 

Within the “self,” even more barriers go up to create separations of the body, the mind, the persona, and the ego. When all these barriers become impermeable, it easy is for us to see ourselves as separate from the “other.” That’s how we find ourselves in these problems: racism, environmental destruction, individualism, and burnout. If we are unable to move through these boundaries to see ourselves as connected to the “other,” the disconnection leads us to see a race different and as less-than. It leads us to see humans as having dominium over nature rather than as a part of it. Disconnection ends in destruction. 

But spiritual practice is the key to rebuilding those connections.

Maybe you’re thinking that seems a bit overblown: “My spiritual practice can’t really hold that much weight; all I’m doing is going for a walk or sitting on a meditation cushion.”

That’s where the February event culminated: not only should your spiritual practice be about the space to transform the self, the within, it should serve to transform the other, the beyond. The final question hints at that: Does your spiritual practice bring you comfort, or does it bring you to connections you’re uncomfortable with?

The call to action is the answer you and I are trying to find: If your spiritual practice pushes you to connect with something you’d rather avoid, to discomfort, that is your spiritual practice.

No Question That Reparations Are Owed
After coming into the Parish Hall for Wellspring Wednesday on January 31, 2024, and saying hey to a few people, I took a spot at the front in one of the only seats left for the panel discussion, “The Process of Politics and Reparations in Saint Paul,” sponsored by the Unity Racial and Restorative Justice Team. Unity member Russel Balenger spoke about being a descendent of enslaved people, and about growing up in Rondo before being displaced. In a brief film, we heard Bridgett Floyd, sister of George Floyd, speak about the enslaved ancestors who managed to acquire several hundred acres of farmland in the South after emancipation only to have it stolen from them.
 
Our country and our state of Minnesota were built on stolen land and free labor. Reparations are not an abstract idea relating to people over 100 years ago. The action is personal to Russel and Bridgett and every descendent of an enslaved family member. And it is about the continuing legacy of slavery: trauma, lost generational wealth, health care issues, housing discrimination, disproportional imprisonment, the destruction of the Rondo neighborhood, and more. We learned that Minnesota has the third-largest racial wealth gap in the country. It should be personal to all of us.
 
Jane Prince has worked on reparations for years and is now fresh off the City Council and a Unity Church member. She said, “Reparations [are] a federal debt.” The work in St. Paul is a start, as are the 116 other proposals to do with reparations that have passed around the country.

Reparative Work by the St. Paul City Council
To bring us up to date, Trahern Crews, a Black Lives Matter Minnesota leader and one of the conveners of St Paul’s Reparations Advisory Committee, walked us through the years of study and work completed by himself, Balenger, Prince, and many others that led to successful reparations work in St. Paul.

Highlights include:

• An apology and first action: Resolution 21-77, passed January 13, 2021, included an apology for “the City’s role in the instructional and structural racism experienced by its residents.” It also called for a Legislative Advisory Committee (LAC) to plan for a permanent commission; keyword, “permanent.”
• Work gets underway: Resolution 21-866, passed in June 2021, established the Saint Paul City Council Legislative Advisory Committee on Reparations to advise on a permanent commission to address reparations long-term.
• Established: A permanent commission under the St. Paul City Council, the Saint Paul Recovery Act Community Reparations Commission, passed on January 4, 2023, and took effect on February 13, 2023. But the eleven-member commission has not been seated yet; other than some controversy last summer over a staff hire, the panel did not know why.

​Independent of the City Council, Mayor Melvin Carter established the Rondo Inheritance Fund to help displaced Rondo families purchase housing. And while information on the Inheritance Fund is on the city website under “City Council Reparations Efforts,” it is not related to the commission. Due to a large number of applicants, the city is no longer taking applications for this fund.
 
What You Can Do Right Now
The history so far is important, but to hear direct-experience testimony is to witness the pain and hopefully, to become allies in the work of reparations. Thus, the call to immediate action. Here’s what you can do:

• Call your St. Paul City Council representative and ask, “When is the Saint Paul Recovery Act Community Reparations Commission going to be seated?” Ask to be contacted with follow-up information. Find your City Council rep and their contact information on the city website.
• Support the Minnesota Migration Act, introduced in the Senate–SF 3950 and in the House– HF 3850. If it gets out of committee and passes, it would establish a state-level commission to study how to provide reparations in MN. Find your Senate and House elected officials on the Legislative Coordinating Commission site.
• At Unity Church, follow the use of the Currier Fund for Racial Justice, an endowment left to us by Helener Currier in 2021, some of which will be used for reparations. Board of Trustees Chair Louise Livesay-Al said that the Board is starting a conversation on the use of and a process for distributing the funds this spring.
• Register for and attend the National Reparations Convention Midwest Focus, organized by Black Lives Matter Minnesota; Thursday, February 22, 2024, through Saturday, February 24, at the Hilton Minneapolis-St. Paul Airport. Register for the FREE convention.
• Learn more about reparations from these sources recommended by the panel:
  • African-American Redress Network
  • Saint Paul Recovery Act Community Reparations Commission, sign up to receive news.
  • “Reparations Now,” by Jane Prince, Beloved Community News, 4/1/2021.
  • United Nations resolution on the right to remedy and reparation.
  • The Debt: What America Owes to Blacks by Randall Robinson (on order for the Anderson Library).
  • Anti-Racism Institutional Audit, Unity Church

​Questions for Further Thought

• What do you think of reparations for chattel slavery? For Indigenous genocide and land theft?
• How should Unity determine the use of reparations funds from the Currier Fund?
• What actions are you inspired to take regarding reparations?