Ask the Big Questions and Fail More

On Saturday I participated in William and Mary's annual Service of Celebration.  It is a multi-faith service that offers a time of worship during the busy commencement weekend. The speaker this year was Varun Soni, the Dean of Religious Life at University of Southern California and he is Hindu.  It was the first time in William and Mary's history that the speaker was not either Christian or Jewish.

Dean Soni talked about the Millennial generation, the generational cohort that the college graduates are a part of as the most multicultural and most multi-faith.  He talked about the opportunity provided by the fact that so many Millennials are among the "nones" - those not affiliated with any particular religious faith.  This attitude of opportunity, rather than fear or despair, resonates with me.  After many years and three different religious affiliations I understand why so many young people are choosing not to affiliate 

Dean Soni's talk focused on Living an Authentic Life.  It is a question deeply related to the question of discernment and vocation which I have been wrestling with and contemplating for most of my life since college.  What is it I am called to do?  How can I best serve the world along with taking care of myself and my family?  What are my gifts and where will they be best used?  I am going to focus on only two of Dean Soni's points - the asking the big questions and failing more.

Asking the big questions - who am I?  What is my purpose?  How am I to live? These are central spiritual questions.  They are questions we wrestle with our whole lives since the answer changes as our life unfolds.  They also cannot be simply answered by means of our faith traditions and by that I mean that our faith traditions can give us tools, examples of how others have answered these questions and this can be helpful but each generation and each person is called to wrestle with these questions and find our own answers.  The answers to these questions will hopefully be translated into the ways we live our lives for these are not solely intellectual questions but questions of heart, questions of authenticity.  If who you say you are is a person of integrity but then you do not act that way in your career then your life is not authentic.  They are also not solely individual questions but communal ones as well.  How are we as Americans in the year 2013 called to live?  What sort of nation will we be?  They are questions faith communities must ask as well.  What does it mean to be Unitarian Universalist?

Many of our faith communities including UU ones are asking these questions. As membership stagnates or declines, as young people seek and create their own communities, change is called for.  We can see the tensions of this throughout American religion.  Some are saying that what is needed is a new orthodoxy  a return of a certain strictness much like what Pope Benedict practiced.  He was willing to accept fewer people in church for a strict orthodoxy and adherence to church teachings particularly teachings around sexuality.  Others see a return to orthodoxy as a way to keep or draw back in members - that people left because of the lack of orthodoxy  However this seems to fly in the face of evidence such as from the Barna Group and You Lost Me by David Kinnaman that it was a rigid adherence to certain doctrines or beliefs, particularly around questions of sexuality, that made young people leave in the first place.  On the other hand there are more hopeful people like Diane Butler Bass who see this time as presenting new opportunity.  That it is a time of renewal and revitalization but that in order to get there the old needs to die.  I am in the more hopeful branch. I am inspired by the multi-faith possibilities.  I want to be part of this movement to explore spirituality and spiritual questions authentically.  The Millennials are leading the way on this by getting involved with Interfaith Youth Corp and the President's Interfaith Service Challenge.  They are putting their faith into action and they are sharing what they are discovering with one another.

This is part of why I love campus ministry - there is so much possibility to explore faith, service and the big questions.  It is because it was as a young adult that I began to seriously reflect and wrestle with my faith and these big questions.  I was so blessed to have my questions welcomed and to find support within the campus ministry at Georgetown.  My experience was that I was given not just permission but an invitation to question, to struggle, to wrestle.  I am so grateful for that.  I experienced it in a similar way at the Jesuit School of Theology at Berkeley where I was welcomed and supported. I had a spiritual director, I went on two silent retreats and attended community Mass as often as I could.  It was a time of revisiting many of the questions I asked at Georgetown and a deepening of my own faith and self-understanding.  Now I want to serve by using my gifts to support others in their spiritual journey.

One of the other points Dean Soni made was challenging. He called upon the graduates to fail more. Using sports as a metaphor he talked about the most successful athletes were also the ones that the highest number of missed shots or failed attempts. Their success was about persevering in the effort, about taking risks about doing something rather than nothing.  I imagine I was not the only one in that room challenged by this statement.  As one who was raised with a fair amount of privilege and expectation of success, the message of my childhood was that failure was not OK, not even average was OK - I was expected to be above average.  The message of my upbringing was to be successful in high school to get into a good college and then onto a successful career.  When I brought home grades that were only average, I would be lectured about how I could do so much better.  That I was so gifted and smart and that I needed to just do better.  It was all about having the right answer, getting the right grades. Now I know that my family had the very best of intentions. They only wanted the best, they saw my potential and wanted me to live into it.  I know I as a parent have done this as well.  Yet one of the unintended after affects is that I am often paralyzed by a fear of failing.  What if it doesn't work?  What if I get it wrong?  Or maybe the middle of life question - did I just make a whole mistake of my life?  Where did I go wrong that I find myself here at this time?

I struggle with risking failure, with risking period.  I want a sure thing, I want a guarantee that it will all turn out OK   Yet I know that in order for it to work out, I need to try.  I need to risk.  I often reflect on the Marianne Williamson quote that it is not failure we fear but our own greatness.  Maybe that is true. Maybe what feels like a fear of failure is really about what would happen if I really just put me, all of me, not hidden under a basket or fearing that someone will be offended, out there? What if I was really successful and really claimed my gifts?  Now I have to say that this has gone somewhat easier as I have gotten older.  I am more fed up with deferring to others. I am more willing to claim my own place and my own knowledge.  I am more willing to accept with grace the thanks and praise I receive for my work.  Since I know more about who I am and what my gifts are, it is somewhat easier now to understand what will work and won't for me.  There is a freedom in knowing that I can't just do anything or be anything.  I am someone particular, with particular gifts and particular limitations.  My life circumstances do limit what I can and cannot do and there is a gift with those limits.  Unlimited choices are too much, too overwhelming.

Yet I wonder is there a way to not get so lost in the journey to the authentic self.  I wonder is there a way to inspire and mentor our young people in ways that help them figure out who they are sooner, rather than waiting until the middle of their lives to find out?  Is there something in this generation that is growing up in a more diverse - in all ways diverse, world that will allow them to not take ten or twenty years to figure out who they truly are?  If not this generation than what about the ones right behind them, ones like my daughter who is just on the cusp of the Millennial generation - will her cohorts figure this out sooner?  Can we as adults, mentor and nurture the journey? One of my favorite antidotes from Parker Palmer is how he started a letter to his granddaughter about what he saw in her from the very beginning of her life.  He was keeping a record to give to her when she was older, that she might sooner discover her authentic self then he himself did. I see in my own daughter, a greater capacity for risk hopefully because we have tried to instill in her the knowledge and feeling that she will be loved no matter how well she does; that it is more important that she explores what calls to her, that she tries to follow her passions even if it does not work out; and that ultimately struggling with the big questions remembering that how she answers them should be congruent with how she lives. Perhaps in watching and engaging with my own child and her journey, I myself am returning to my own soul, my own authentic life.

So let's ask the big questions, fail more and live a truly authentic life!

When I Gave Up the Church for Lent

Each year when Lent rolls around, I watch my Facebook news feed fill with articles and posts about Lent and the discussion about what and whether to give something up for Lent.  It always brings me back to my senior at college when at the advice of one of the Jesuits I gave up the Church for Lent.

I was raised in a strong Roman Catholic household.  I attended Catholic school from first grade through college (and you will notice that my MTS is from the Jesuit School of Theology).  While my family was quite devout - grace before meals, bedtime prayers, Mass every Sunday unless you were sick, they were not rigid. I knew that my parents disagreed with church teaching on birth control and made it clear that my sister and I were quite planned.  I was raised on their personal stories of dissent and the use of conscience.

I was also blessed to be raised in the Roman Catholic church as the implementation of Vatican II was happening.  I have no memory of the Latin Mass, nuns did not wear full habits at my elementary school, Communion began to be served with both the bread and the wine, my parents were among the first to be trained as lectors and Eucharistic Ministers, and the confessional boxes were converted from dark boxes to lighted ones that gave options for both face to face and behind the screen confessions.  The music was the Songs of the St. Louis Jesuits - thank you Dan Schutte and all of you for providing the amazing hymns that to this day move me.  Even as a child, I could feel the excitement of a church opening to the world ... a church changing.

I loved going to church - I remember my First Communion vividly and my sense of what an important and sacred moment this was in my life.  I took my Confirmation very seriously and was proud to take my place as a full member of the community.  I prayed constantly. In the eighth grade I decided instead of giving something up for Lent, I would commit to going to 8 am Mass every day (the advantage of parochial school).  I became a lector and Eucharistic Minister while in high school and I was active in my church's youth group.

Yet by the time I got to Georgetown, the church was changing and trying to reverse the changes that Vatican II had brought.  There were reinforcements of traditional teachings on birth control, women's ordination and abortion.  You could feel the hierarchy of the Church clamping down.  I was very active in campus ministry at Georgetown.  The Jesuits at Georgetown were part of my amazing support system as I struggled with depression.  I discovered my love of theology at Georgetown.  I took my first theology class - Introduction to Catholic Theology with Monika Hellwigg. I had no idea that I was taking theology from a prominent and well respected feminist theologian.  I loved everything about that class. I was hungry to know the "why" of what I had been raised to believe.  Yet why can be the most dangerous question there is.  With why came the realization that much of what is the practice of the church came not because of thoughtful discernment of God's will and what was best for humanity but rather petty politics, greed and a lust for power and control.

Throughout my college years, my faith underwent a transformation.  It was no longer the faith of a child.  I had doubts, I didn't know if I could remain Roman Catholic.  At the heart of my struggle was that I could not accept that a small group of men in Rome could dictate faith to the entire world.  My struggle was not over specifics of women's ordination, birth control or the myriad of other issues - rather it was with the whole hierarchy itself.  As a child my father would say to me repeatedly  as if it were a given fact like the world was round, the sky is blue, "Margaret, the Church is not a democracy" and inside I was quietly thinking..well maybe it should be.

So during my senior year of College I was struggling with all of this.  I had been talking about whether or not I needed to leave the Church.  So finally the Jesuit I had been confiding in suggested that I take a break from the Church and it was right around the start of Lent.  So that Lent, I did not go to Church.  Now please understand that I was not just a Sunday only Mass attender. I often attended weekday Mass - 11:15 pm in St. Mary's chapel along with Sunday Mass.  So for me to suddenly say I was giving up the Church was no small feat.

So I gave up the Church for Lent and it was hard. I missed the liturgy, I missed singing, I missed receiving Communion.  So I went back to Church on Easter Vigil, still one of my favorite services (whether Roman Catholic or Episcopal).  It was wonderful to be back.  I still had doubts but for now I was not leaving.

Of course the story does not end there.  I did finally leave the Roman Catholic Church, I became an Episcopalian and then eventually a Unitarian Universalist.  Yet I will always be grateful to that wise Jesuit who encouraged me to take the break I needed, to try out leaving.  For not condemning me or saying I had no other options.  I would hope more people would find religious leaders as supportive of their spiritual journeys as I did among the Jesuits.

However you celebrate, or not, Lent this year, I hope it is a meaningful and true spiritual practice.  May it help you wrestle with your faith.  May the holy break through in new and profound ways.

Blessed Be.

Transgender Day of Remembrance 2011

Here are my closing words to last Sunday's Transgender Day of Remembrance service at the College of William and Mary.

It would be easy now to be overwhelmed and helpless; so many lives and so many young lives taken far too soon, taken because of misunderstanding and hate. Lives taken because they were different, viewed as outside the mainstream, challenging binary notions of gender and challenging heterosexist assumptions. Not all who were killed necessarily identified themselves as transgender, some were killed because assumptions were made based on appearance.

Yet this is not the time to be helpless or hopeless. It does not honor these lives that were lost for us to get lost in our own hopelessness. In the words of Dorothy Day, “No one has a right to sit down and feel hopeless. There’s too much work to do.”

Yes too much work to do. Work to break down stereotypes and rigid assumptions about gender. We need to work toward a time when everyone is free to be who they are, to express their gender identity without fear of violence, losing their jobs or being treated less than. Each of us can do this work by first living our own lives with as much authenticity as possible. Each of us can do this work by challenging rigid notions of gender and expression.

Each of us can work for the day when we will gather together for one final Transgender Day of Remembrance Service and there will be no new names to read. The day when we will gather one final time to say “We remember, we never forgot;” a day to celebrate a time when no one need live in fear of violence, a day when we can all be just who we are.

May it be so.

99% Rally at William and Mary

Today I spoke at a 99% Rally at the College of William and Mary.

Here is what I said.


Good afternoon I am Margaret Sequeira and I am grateful that I was asked to speak here today.  While I hold many roles and relationships within Williamsburg and the College, I want to be clear that I speak today only for myself and not for any organization or group. I begin there because so much of the Occupy movement has been about individuals coming together in community to speak up.  If you read the mainstream press about the Occupy movement it is driving them crazy that there is no single leader, there is no spokesperson – no one who speaks for the whole.

This is not comfortable for us – we who long for clear leadership and clear lines of authority are confused by this.

Yet I stand before you not just a person by herself, I stand before you intimately and intrinsically intertwined in a complex web of relationships.  I think the Occupy movement calls each of us to live into the paradox that we are both individuals, with individual needs and abilities and that we are not just individuals – that our lives are tied up with others.

I am a Unitarian Universalist and in my faith tradition we are bound in covenant by 7 principles (don’t worry I am not going into all 7 – just 2).  The first is to affirm the inherent worth and dignity of the individual and the 7th is to affirm the interdependent web of creation of which we are all a part. This captures well this paradox – the paradox of being an individual and that we are part of complex web of relationship and creation.  One of my favorite signs from the Occupy Movement is one that read “My wellbeing is tied up with yours.”

The Occupy Movement has been critiqued for not being focused enough, clear enough with concrete demands and policy changes.  It is critiqued because it is out of step with our usual political organizing with leaders and talking points.  It is trying to capture a diversity – that yes it is about the economy and how the greed of a very few controls both our economy and our government and it is also about racism, sexism, and heterosexism.  It is about how if one is not wealthy, not white, not male, not straight, not able bodied, not able to pull oneself up by one’s boot straps – then one deserves whatever less than status one may find oneself in.

You see the Occupy movement is so threatening because it seeks to tell the truth to expose one big lie – the lie is that here in America anyone can be anything they chose to be – with enough hard work, if you play by the rules, if you do what is expected than you can succeed – you might even be president one day.  We love our stories of quote unquote self-made individuals who pulled themselves up and made an immensely successful life for themselves.  This myth of America – that anyone can be anything is very powerful and for that story/that myth to be challenged in anyway is a profound threat to way we see ourselves as a nation.

Yet many know for a fact that this story of America is a false one.  That too often people are too dark skinned, have too much of an accent, are too poor, are the wrong gender, are too queer – and no there will not be success there.  Part of the lie is that those who are successful do it on their own – they don’t need a handout or help for anyone.  “They are self-made.”  Yet none of us is self-made.  Human beings are communal beings – we thrive only in the midst of our relationships.  And if you listen closely enough to our quote unquote self made people – there are numerous people who helped them along the way, gave them a chance, opened a door.

The Occupy movement is speaking the truth loudly – the truth that a very few control most of the wealth and income, that playing by rules does not mean that one will thrive, that one can do it on ones own, that the 1% earned their wealth on their own and not through inheritance, government programs that have benefited certain people and not others, economic policies and programs are set up for the benefit of the few and not the many.  Speaking the truth is a risky business – one only need look to many of our religious and spiritual leaders to see that rarely do people want to hear the truth – Ghandi, Martin Luther King Jr., Jesus, Oscar Romero to name a very few.  Speaking the truth means to risk violence, to risk outcast, to risk death.  Speaking the truth, whether it is our own personal truth or speaking a social truth is to be daring.  Occupy invites each of us to speak our own truth, to speak truth to power.

“If you have come here to help me, you are wasting your time. But if you have come because your liberation is bound up with mine, then let us work together” was spoken by Lilla Watson an Indigenous Australian or Murri visual artist, activist and academic working in the field of Women’s issues and Aboriginal epistemology.  Occupy is not asking anyone to help them..they are speaking the truth that our individual liberation, our well-being is bound up together.  We are not just individuals who thrive or fail on our own … we are connected individuals whose wellbeing, whose liberation is woven together.

May this movement encourage us all to re-engage as public citizens.  Citizens that speak our own truth and risk speaking truth to power and thus transforming our country to be a more just, more thriving place for all.  

Living Gratefully

So yesterday I led worship at the College of William and Mary and I titled the service "Living Gratefully."  I have been thinking about what it might mean to live gratefully, not in a pollyanna, prosperity gospel way, but in a way that takes seriously the deep paradoxes of life.  What does it mean to live in gratitude even in the midst of suffering?  Can we be authentically grateful even in the midst of grief and loss?

One story that always comes to mind when I think about this in The Hiding Place by Corrie ten Boom.  Corrie and her sister were imprisoned in a Nazi camp for hiding Jews in their home.  One of the stories in the book is that Corrie's sister reads a Scripture passage that says to be thankful for all things and so they give thanks for the fleas in the barracks.  Corrie is a bit skeptical, to say the least, as I think most of us would be.  Yet it was because of the fleas that the guards would not venture into the barracks which allowed them to hide the Bible they possessed, to talk together and share their meager rations.  This seems to me, to be an authentic way of living in gratitude while not downplaying the reality of suffering.  It also strikes me that Living Gratefully is a discipline..that we must practice living in gratitude.  It also may not be as easy a discipline as it might seem at first, for to be authentically gratefully, would mean to be grateful even those when we are angry, sad, frustrated, afraid. It means being grateful for the fleas even when we are skeptical! Gratitude might spill forth when things are going well but I think only a practice of gratitude allows us to be grateful in the midst of suffering.

I was also thinking about how the word grateful is very close to grace-filled.  Unitarian Universalists don't often talk about grace and I think we need to do so.  I just finished reading William Schulz for my theology study group.  Schulz defines grace as:  "grace in fact refers to whatever blessings of Creation come to us unbidden, unheralded, and unearned. In this sense, the gracious—whether manifest in the rising of the sun, the sparkle of a fish, the chuckle of a child, or the deliverance of death—is the gateway to gratitude and the wellspring of faith."(What Moves Us, Workshop 9). Grace cannot earned and it cannot be demanded yet it is freely available to all of us.This is a core message of Unitarian Universalism!

Might it be that in accepting and welcoming grace, those gifts of Creation that come into our lives often unexpectedly and always unearned that we can then Live Gratefully?