Our youth group travelers are heading to GA this week! 

Fresh faced and mostly excited, ten of our high schoolers piled into vans with their four chaperone/sponsors Wednesday morning, headed to Baltimore, MD to attend UUA’s annual General Assembly (GA). We expect they’ll have a good time exploring the wider world of our active, liberal religion with other youth and UUs of all ages. Over the course of this 5-day immersive event, there are engaging workshops & speakers; inspirational worship services; UU business & voting; connection-building within identity groups and with UUs of all backgrounds; spiritual nourishment; justice learning & action; music; games and fun; and more! Additionally, our youth group has signed on to help lead the youth-focused Synergy Worship Service happening at GA on Friday. We hope all Asheville attendees will come to support our and all UU youth!

General Assembly is a time for connection, growth, and reflection and can be a rich, profound experience. GA is a space to explore personal and shared UU values and to go deeper in community. What does it mean to be a Unitarian Universalist? How do we live out our values? What does democracy look like in action? This is the first time since 2018 that our youth group is participating. 

The youth group and their parents (and others!) have been working together all year to bring this trip experience to fruition. THANK YOU to all of our Soup Sunday and pancake breakfast “customers,” Parents’ Night Out attendees, Faithify and other donors, to congregation groups and committees for shared work and revenue, and to the UUA/GA for several scholarships to help reduce the family cost. 

GA attracts more than 3,000 folx from over 1,000 UU congregations, and we are proudly in that number! In addition to our youth group of 14, UU Asheville has more attendees: Rev. Audette, Kim Collins, Mary Alm, Susan Foster, Rob Fulson, and Jody Malloy are attending in Baltimore while Rev. Claudia, Matt Farris, Bernise Lynch, and Mara Sprain are participating in GA business and more virtually. (Note: this may be an incomplete list.) Ask them all about it next week! 

Jen Johnson, Religious Educator

Opportunities to practice activism abound these days. In fact, we probably wish there weren’t such a need for our activism in service to collective liberation. Couldn’t we just get a little break from the injustices, the wrongs, the hurt? Sadly, the call for our activism is deadly serious, and we simply can’t ignore it. As we continue to promote collective liberation locally and nationally, I’d like to draw your attention to an often-overlooked form of liberative practice: mystic activism.

There is no substitute for Horizontal change for the Good; i.e., transformation that makes life better for Our Relations (humans and non-humans alike) in concrete ways. Then again, there’s also no substitute for Vertical change for the Good; i.e., transformation that makes life better for Our Relations (humans and non-humans alike) in spiritual, mystic, or esoteric ways. If the Horizontal were all that matters, we could be exclusively concerned with material life. But what about wellness for Our Relations that pertains to the soul, psyche, and so on? What about spiritual health and wellness for All Our Relations?

In her short and accessible book, Practical Mysticism: A Little Book for Normal People, Evelyn Underhill aims to promote a brass tacks, mystic way of life. Her book was originally published in 1914, and it bears a romanticism common in late 19th and early 20th century English spiritual thought. But maybe these days we need a bit more romanticism to inspire our struggle against “the banality of evil” (à la Hannah Arendt). Maybe we need more practical mysticism to counteract the soul-deadening effects of capitalism and the idolatry of exclusivist privilege.
Underhill lays out our collective calling as follows:

So here is your vocation set out: a vocation so various in its opportunities, that you can hardly fail to find something to do. It is your business to actualise within the world of time and space—perhaps by great endeavors in the field of heroic action, perhaps only by small ones in field and market, tram and tube, office and drawing-room, in the perpetual give-and-take of the common life—that more real life, that holy creative energy, which this world manifests as a whole but indifferently. You shall work for mercy, order, beauty, significance: shall mend where you find things broken. 1

Underhill urges us to recognize that the material world may be our field of play, but manifesting “that more real life, that holy creative energy” is the vocation for a well-integrated Vertical and Horizontal human life. Our Transcendentalist forebears—like Ralph Waldo Emerson, Margaret Fuller, and Elizabeth Peabody—understood that our holistic health requires us to live as beings who participate in Being (the sacred Whole, the Holy, the transcendent). To put it simply, our mystic activism is to be co-creators of a Good reality. Yes, advocate for Goodness on the Horizontal level, but don’t forget that the Vertical dimension of life also warrants our mystic activism: at the grocery store, in your neighborhood, “in field and market, tram and tube, office and drawing-room, in the perpetual give-and-take of the common life.”

The motto of Mount Tamalpais College—the two-year liberal arts college program for inmates of San Quentin State Prison—is Discamus Ut Mundum Reparemus: “Let Us Learn So That We May Repair the World.” That, Beloveds, is mystic activism in a nutshell! I taught philosophy at Mount Tamalpais College, and my students “on the inside” deeply understood the practicality of mystic activism. They grasped the vitality and power of spiritual wellness in service to collective liberation. We read Octavia Butler, Dostoevsky, Foucault, Vine Deloria Jr., and Paolo Freire. For them, studying Freire’s Pedagogy of the Oppressed or Foucault’s Discipline and Punish wasn’t “just an academic exercise”—it was the sublime practice of spiritual resistance and the mystical praxis of wellness for the Whole.

Friends, mystic activism is an invaluable complement to the genuine transformation of our material world. Typically I would now provide you with a list of “spiritual things” you could do to practice mystic activism. You don’t need a list. Try something you think might be mystic activism. Or use your intuition. Or ask a kindred spirit what mystic activism might mean to them. Experiment. If you do this, you will be practicing mystic activism. It’s that easy…and sublime.

Matt Farris, Ministerial Intern 

My birthday is in May, and I am a Taurus. Horoscopes are complete nonsense, except for all the ways they seem to be true (this is humor). Regardless of the stars, I do tend to go at work and justice-side things long and hard and with a certain amount of push, but to keep that up – especially as the years do pass – I need real rest, times of just lollygagging (dilly-dallying!) or daydreaming, unpeople-y down time and sleep. 

As the weather and the world get so lovely, and summer adventures beckon, there’s a new challenge. We all know that the world is struggling, and our country is in a dangerous place – and not just at risk, but extremely hard to predict, given that we are affected by the pure whims of unserious people. To attend graduations, celebrate birthdays, or go to the beach or paddling down rivers at such a time can be a surreal kind of experience, but it’s one that has an actual name: hypernormalization. A term born in Russia, it was brought Westward by the work of Adam Curtis, who wrote:

““HyperNormalisation” is a word that was coined by a brilliant Russian historian who was writing about what it was like to live in the last years of the Soviet Union. What he said, which I thought was absolutely fascinating, was that in the 80s everyone from the top to the bottom of Soviet society knew that it wasn’t working, knew that it was corrupt, knew that the bosses were looting the system, and knew that the politicians had no alternative vision. And they knew that the bosses knew that they knew that. Everyone knew it was fake, but because no one had any alternative vision for a different kind of society, they just accepted this sense of total fakeness as normal. …Everyone in my country and in America and throughout Europe knows that the system that they are living under isn’t working as it is supposed to; that there is a lot of corruption at the top. But whenever the journalists point it out, everyone goes “Wow that’s terrible!” and then nothing happens and the system remains the same.”

So that doubling & tripling sense of “It’s bad/but I’m ok and things seem much the same/I want to check out/but I should do something” is both real and you are not alone.

So… what, then? As people of faith, we have faith in something, right? And for me, that “something” is two-fold: first, that humans can be wonderful and we have a lot of power when we work together and put our efforts into dreaming up better things. (We are also darn good at erecting roadblocks when we want to slow or stop something!)  And second, that we don’t know the future, and as Gandalf reminded Frodo, “There are forces at work in this world beyond the will of evil.” Greed and hubris and the hunger for power are deeply corrupting – but they have a limited shelf-life, and by staying present, working hard, and building up communities of strength and love, we can make a difference. We can turn the tide.

Perhaps, like me, you were born to dilly-dally, and need your rest time and times of laughter, good food, and beauty. But we have to fight fascism. So please: don’t make looking away and avoiding news your default. Rest and return to those things that are important to you. Find the institution you love and protect it. Find the people you love and protect them. Find the hope you have and nurture it. But it’s ok to dilly dally a bit, from time to time. 

Rev. Audette Fulbright Fulson, Lead Minister