Our UU Society, not “church”, is a member of an inter-religious-based social justice organizing project, not going so well. Failure to swell.
Our U.S. Religious Right neighbors are not interested, perhaps also actively disinterested, in taking beloved community with Us.
Our U.S. Religious Left to Moderate constituency is not interested, perhaps also actively disinterested, in taking beloved community with Them.
That becomes problematic when missioned to reduce irreligious trauma for all inter-religious community members, and potential members.
So, our organizer staff thought about this, using their systemic thinking skills, and decided to offer free NonViolent Communication Certification training on a corporate zoom platform. While teaching skills, our democratic health case study and role play scenarios focus on bicameral dissonance in economic and political governance AND bipartisan dissociation in EarthMother’s inter-religious health and wellness community organizing projects.
To this end, when a staff member ran across an ordained gay white guy certified in Multicultural Community Mediation, Integral Permaculture Design, and Music and Movement Therapy who, with their help, invited every non-professional, non-clergy congregant of all religious communities to a zoom discussion.
How Do NonViolent Communications Help Us, and Them?
Our first compassionate community project was to define integrity. That went fairly well for finding a CommonGround root sentience.
Then we moved on to critical questions.
Most of us believe in life after death. What do you believe about life after birth?
If life after birth is different than how you imagine life after death, why?
Have you ever felt an organic sense of belonging within sacred MotherEarth, at this time and place?
If so, how might you describe sentient awareness? If not, why do you believe in life after death, or love after birth?
We found these questions challenging.
Then we realized, we all,
right and left,
male and female,
parent and child,
monotheistic and polytheistic,
monogamous and polyamorous,
yang and yin,
crown and root,
spirit and nature,
mind and body,
1 and 0 cobinary prime relationship,
find these questions
sacredly challenging and organically curious
Going deeper toward analyzing feelings, body needs, and mind wants, than a popular House Meeting question “What keeps you up at night?”
This generated diverse responses:
need to pee,
horny,
need to clean up after taking care of horny,
need to pee again,
arthritis,
recovering from surgery,
traffic noise,
late night news,
late night TV,
late night lights,
late night…
We shared this with our nonviolent community mediator. S/he strongly supports open questions, and yet, for our critical climate health risk situation, perhaps a more focused question would be more useful. How about?
Which is more likely to keep you up at night?
a. sex life
b spiritual life
c. lack of a sexy spiritual life.
Then came some more quickly processed consensus agreements.
Why do we usually associate health with love and disease with hate, and not the other way around?
What would consciousness of “God the Monotheistic Father” lose by restoring sentient awareness of “Gaia Earth’s PolyAmorous Mother”?
Do all relationships work out for the Win+Win systemic best for those who love inter-religious community organizing?
Then, our final “what would you lose?” question: What would you lose, and what would you love, if our dialogue resulted in a covenant including
We religiously associate health, well-being, and therapeutic values
with healthy democratic minds and bodies.
AND
We irreligiously dissociate disease, chronic anxiety, and traumatic disvalues
challenging anthropocentric minds and unhealthy capitalist bodies.
We find that two opinions are better than one, especially when one of the two is less anthropocentrically toxic.
We are healthier Right and Left together
than falling Right v Left apart.
