Unitarian Universalist Church of Palo Alto

Weaving the Web

March 29, 2009
Rev. Amy Zucker Morgenstern

How can I help? Part I: Moving Upstream

Several installments of this column will address the questions: What can I do — and what can we do as a congregation — that will really make a difference in the world?

A modern fable seeks to answer this question this way: People sitting by a river one sunny afternoon realize to their horror that babies, living babies, are floating by. They wade in and start pulling the babies out as fast as they can. More and more babies keep on coming and someone finally pauses long enough to ask, “Who is throwing all these babies into the water?” And goes upriver to stop them.

(If the analogy appalls you, remember that it’s no more horrific than what is actually happening now around the world. In the week that has elapsed between my writing this column and your reading it, malnutrition will have killed 60,000 children ages birth to four.)

The downstream and upstream approaches can be characterized as service and justice. Our Action Council breaks the possibilities down further into five categories, and asks UUCPA Task Forces to use multiple approaches.

Service is meeting immediate needs: pulling the babies out of the river. Donating clothing, helping in a homeless shelter, serving food in a soup kitchen, helping in a free clinic are all in this category. Service is important. It doesn’t address the causes of poverty, hunger, and the lack of health care — it doesn’t stem the flood of babies — but even if those causes are being addressed, people are hurting in the meantime, right now. Service is for them.

In Education, we inform ourselves and others about an issue. Sermons and workshops, films and lectures are in this category. Alone, they are insufficient. Their strength is in the way they can inspire us to act, and help us to make good choices about the actions we take.

The other three approaches are Witness/Direct Action, Advocacy, and Community Organizing. They take us upstream to the sources of problems and the place where long-term solutions become possible, and I’ll spend more time on them in future installments.

If you are dissatisfied with your social action, I encourage you to look at the approaches you (and organizations you support) take; if they are mostly service and education, try stretching to include more direct action, advocacy, and organizing.

You may encounter resistance from yourself or other people. As Dom Hélder Câmara said, “When I give food to the poor, they call me a saint. When I ask why the poor have no food, they call me a Communist.” Churches often come in for the same criticism (Câmara himself was a Brazilian bishop); people are happy to have us house the homeless, but when we advocate for a restructuring of the housing market so that fewer people will be homeless, they chide us for stepping out of religion into the political realm. If so, we’re in impressive company. Was Jesus only a religious leader, or a political one too?

— Blessings,
Amy