As we begin the new church year, we are reminded that Unity is rich in numerous opportunities to be together as a congregation in all the ways that matter — joy, pain, grief, celebration, worship, social justice — and in learning about ourselves and one another. The arrival of Rev. Oscar brings our congregation an especially charged atmosphere of promise and renewal. The Beloved Community Staff Team (BCST) is already at work exploring opportunities for deeper connection for this new year.

What is the BCST?
The BCST was initiated in 2016 by senior co-ministers Rob and Janne Eller-Isaacs to coordinate and sustain efforts across the congregation that explore and deepen learning explicitly through the lens of antiracist multiculturalism. Aspiring to achieve the Beloved Community, prophetic practice — developing meaningful ways to integrate our values into our day-to-day lives to make qualitative changes in our souls—is a constant. The BCST serves to expand and strengthen our collective capacity for antiracist multicultural understanding, and ensures that this remains foundational across the congregation from how we operate to our programs and activities, embedding our antiracist multicultural Ends throughout congregational life. 

It was the BCST, for example, that:

• Implemented congregation-wide learning opportunities with Team Dynamics that sharpened our awareness and understanding of intersectionality and dominant culture.
• Created the Double Helix Model interlacing faith formation and spiritual practice with antiracist multiculturalism. 
• Worked closely with the Ministerial Search Team to engage the congregation in examining biases surrounding identity and expectations for a senior minister. 

Under Rev. KP’s steadfast, inspired leadership, the BCST is committed to 1) critical discernment — keeping in mind the larger historical implications of this work, 2) connection — sustaining our humanity and empathy towards one another, 3) tracking hypocrisy — aligning what we say with what we do and noticing when we have failed, and 4) hope — empowering our creativity to reimagine the future in building the Beloved Community. 

The Unity Ends Statements that ignite the BCST work are:

• Know each other in all our fullness.
• Create an ever-widening circle of belonging for all people.
• Create brave space for racial healing and dismantling the dominant culture.

“Beloved community is formed not by the eradication of difference but by its affirmation, by each of us claiming the identities and cultural legacies that shape who we are and how we live in the world.” — bell hooks, Killing Rage: Ending Racism

Who is in the BCST?
The Executive Team (ET), staff members, and lay leaders make up the BCST. The ET: Rev. KP Hong, Minister of Faith Formation; Laura Park, Executive Director; and now senior minister Rev. Dr. Oscar Sinclair. Staff members are Rev. Lara Cowtan, Minister of Congregational Care; and Drew Danielson, Coordinator of Youth and Campus Ministries. Lay member Angela Wilcox serves as project manager and scribe.

To better inform the congregation about this work, former BCST members Erika Sanders and Pauline Eichten created the Beloved Community Communications Team (BCCT). The team has been at work for over seven years and is charged with the task of sharing stories of the struggles, questions, and collaborations coming out of the multicultural work at Unity and in the wider world of our faith and city. The current team includes Shelley Butler, Becky Gonzalez-Campoy, Marjorie Otto, Suki Sun, Ray Wiedmeyer, and me, team leader and BCST liaison. Guided by the work of the BCST, the BCCT is responsible for collecting and writing Beloved Community News articles and blog posts that focus on the issues, ideas, and challenges of the antiracist multiculturalism work, and for positing questions and engaging in reflection that offers deeper understanding and multiple perspectives.

Complexity is our only safety and love is the only key to our maturity. —James Baldwin

Antiracist multiculturalism work is inherently complex. As much as we wish it were simple — “love is love,” “we are one,” and numerous other aphoristic phrases we employ that invite complacency, to build the Beloved Community is to embrace the many layers of identity and experience that each of us represents. To dig down into our own human existence and examine ways to “know one another in all our fullness” is often difficult and sometimes painful, revealing uncomfortable truths about ourselves and how we influence others to the good or ill, but ultimately redemptive. 

The BCCT would like to hear your story! What illuminates your commitment to creating an antiracist multicultural community? Share a story, image, and/or video in the All Our Fullness program, or just get in touch to let us know you are interested in working with us: [email protected].

In this new church year, may we be guided by our faith and connected in love as we aspire to build the Beloved Community. 

Ray Wiedmeyer, Beloved Community Communications Team

I’ve been thinking a lot about land ownership the past couple years. Just a bit into the pandemic, I attended the Sacred Sites Tour in the Twin Cities led by Rev. Jim Bear Jacobs, a member of the Stockbridge-Munsee Mohican Nation. Jim Bear spoke clearly about the broken promises, the broken treaties that would remove the vast majority of Indigenous Peoples from the land that is now the Twin Cities, and efforts in the 19th century to banish them completely from Minnesota. All that after having been told, in fact promised, that the white colonizers would share the land.

Indigenous Peoples understood that land could not be owned, that no one could claim ownership. If anything, they were of the mindset that the land owned them; that humans were no more important than the land on which they lived and that gave them sustenance. 

After Rev. Jim Bear’s presentation, I realized that I was now part of the story. I own land in St Paul. And I own land in Wisconsin a mile or two from the scattered bits of the St Croix Chippewa reservation where 3.8 square miles is all the tribe has left of original homelands that once covered thousands of square miles. I am not someone disconnected from the past; I am part of the historical timeline. 

To be perfectly honest, it totally changed how I see the land we own. Given the choice to see the land as a commodity or to see myself as the caretaker of that land was a choice I could make. I choose now to think of myself as caretaker. But I am caretaker of land that was taken from folks who lived here long before my white ancestors arrived. 

With that in mind, how do I live with the principles of Unitarian Universalism, the Unity Ends Statements that I was so excited about in 2018, and the ritualized land acknowledgment we espouse every Sunday? What was my next right action? What kind of discomfort, what kind of pain did I need to be willing to work through to see the change I wanted to see in the world?

I have been living with that discomfort for some time now. It was scary but I asked my partner if we could give the Wisconsin land we own back to the local St Croix Chippewa Tribe. It was scary because I feared she would say, “No.” You see, it is our happy place. The place we go to disconnect, and we love it dearly. She said, “Of course we should give it back.”

The next hurdle for me was fearing what our neighbors might think. Was there really a fear in me that the tribe would not be good neighbors? Surprisingly, I needed to move past those racist attitudes that bubbled up in me. I needed to give up on the idea that only I could be the perfect caretaker of that land.

Time passed. The inertia of white privilege can and will make one forget one’s best intentions. But eventually we contacted Jessica Intermill of Minnesota Interfaith Power and Light. Jessica centers much of her legal work representing Native tribes and I am acquainted with her workshops on reparations. She let us talk through our questions and concerns about giving the land back. She introduced us to the concept of “rematriation,” or restoring the matriarchal relationship between Indigenous Peoples and ancestral land. 

Upon her recommendation, we contacted the St. Croix Tribal Historic Preservation Officer of the Chippewa Tribe of Wisconsin, who then consulted their lawyer, who then approached their tribal council, who considered our request, and told us they would love to have the land back.

We then needed to find a Wisconsin real estate lawyer, preferably native, who would do the necessary legal work. Months passed. It is so easy to just move along in one’s privilege and not to keep on task.

Needing to finish this story, literally, for this August newsletter was the additional push I needed. We met with Richard Lau, one of my recent associates on the Ministerial Search Team at Unity Church who practices real estate law in Wisconsin. We talked through various ways of giving the land back, and he has begun the work to transfer the land.

Recently I heard the phrase, “It is one thing to begin to be woke but eventually one needs to get out of bed.” We moved from a place of awareness to the place of discomfort, and finally found the price we are willing to pay to be in right relationship with the world we wish to see. It has been a long journey but worth every step taken. 

Fourteen inmates of the Minnesota Correctional Facility–Shakopee, the only women’s prison in Minnesota, enter the group room for a Restorative Justice Healing Circle. This will be their routine for the next ten Thursdays. The women, though dressed alike in gray sweatpants and sweatshirts, represent different ages, backgrounds, races, crimes and sentences. Each takes a chair in the circle, uncertain what this experience, for which they signed up, will require of them. I take roll and send the attendance sheet to the control desk. 

We talk about Restorative Justice (RJ) and the Circle process; about providing a respectful place to center on accountability and healing. And how, in contrast to the punitive consequences assigned by our criminal justice system, RJ seeks to restore wholeness to all impacted by a crime: victims and perpetrators and the broader community. 

My co-facilitator and I lay out expectations. This entire series will be conversation, we say. We then discuss as a group what values we wish to honor and uphold during our time together. Words like courage, honesty, respect, compassion are offered. 
There is coherence between the physical setup of the Circle, the quality of conversation that ensues, and building trust: 

• The talking piece designates the speaker and gets passed left from the speaker’s heart to the woman on her left. We ask people to speak from the heart in their sharing, and that emotional honesty evokes sympathy. 
• Echoing the shape of a circle, there is no hierarchy, no “boss” or intended outcomes so the conversation flows with emphasis on understanding. Everyone is equal in Circle. 
• What someone says in Circle does not get shared outside Circle. Confidentiality is the highest priority, especially in this place. 

I think of Circle as a non-white-centered way for people, both known and strangers, to engage in a slower, more attentive way to be together, in which we focus on who someone is rather than what they do. We remind the women that they are not their crimes, and then we ask them to tell their stories. All in the group feel respected and safe and, over time, the group becomes non-judgmental in their listening. 

When I think of my own experience of meetings, I am reminded of how dominant culture seems to be driven by productivity:

• Meetings are confined by time and agenda, focusing on moving the group’s business forward. 
• A few empowered individuals typically monopolize the conversation; all perspectives in the room are not usually solicited. 
• Data-supported objectivity often overrides personal insights; it is presumed that there is one right answer within an either/or approach to problem solving. 

Some have felt that the Circle process has at times been misappropriated when adapted to meet white cultural patterns. This happens when getting the work done supersedes relational values. See “White Supremacy Culture Characteristics” by Tema Okun for more on this.

I learned the Peacemaking Circle process from members of the Inland Tlingit Nation of Yukon Territory, Canada, who have been sharing “community-based justice” for years. Circle Keeper training confounded me at first. I had expected to be instructed on facilitation techniques, but training consisted of days of sitting in Circle, listening to people respond to questions about life experiences, personal challenges and aspirations, or just what was on their hearts. We were being trained to listen. 

Circles are used in a variety of situations from school to organizational settings, providing a respectful space to resolve conflict, determine appropriate amends, talk about wrongdoing, and to deepen relationships among people of differing backgrounds and experience. For example, I recently served as a Circle Keeper for Museums Advancing Racial Justice hosted at the Science Museum of Minnesota, with the Smithsonian. Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) professionals from around the country attended, and I learned this can be lonely work. At the beginning and end of each of the three days, participants attended circles to deepen their experience and new relationships, that will support their important work. 

I used to think that ending racism requires us all to interact more with people that don’t look like us, in order to dispel the knee-jerk racist perception of those people as “other.” This still seems true, but it is how we interact with people, no matter their race, that is critical. Recognizing that there is something to learn from other cultures about how to be together can catalyze the shift we yearn for towards Beloved Community.

Our Healing Circles at MCF-Shakopee are consistently comprised of mostly white inmates, and is demographically more in line with the state population, unlike men’s prisons. Written evaluations at the end of the series include statements like:
I feel better about myself; like I am willing to move on, and let go of what landed me here in prison. I owned my part even though I didn’t want to.

I am compassionate with peers because I recognize that it isn’t what’s wrong with her but more what has happened to her to get such action.

We never know if there are happy endings for the women we get to know. Though they speak of change and creating better futures for their kids, some return to the same neighborhoods, relationships, and lifestyles where old expectations do not support fresh beginnings. But most are resilient and resourceful survivors, empowered by the unique bond of Circle. They have laughed and cried together. They have seen themselves in each other’s stories and have been there for each other. 

I hope that this experience will help each woman pursue the long process of healing and forgiving herself; that she will hold in her heart the group of exceptional women who listened to her story attentively and respectfully, and that she will continue to source in herself the strength to speak her truth bravely. ​