January 15, 2025

“I know that we can be better than we are.” 
~ James Baldwin

Beloveds,

Heading toward Martin Luther King, Jr. weekend, thinking ahead to the upcoming presidential inauguration, and looking forward to connecting this weekend with UUs across Tennessee organizing to support each other in social justice work, I was reminded of this passage from The Gospel according to James Baldwin, by Greg Garrett, which I’ve been reading with a group of progressive clergy colleagues in town: 

“What Baldwin believes about faith, I would argue, is that belief and action badly applied make us more dangerous, more limited, more blinkered in our vision. A bad religious understanding may breed jealousy, greed, and hatred. ... But rightly applied, faith and hope make us bigger, better human beings, capable of seeing and loving the world and all those in it, capable of living in hope rather than in fear.” 

Baldwin’s assurance that we can be better strikes me less as a judgment about our failings than as a stubborn application of faith and hope to the human condition and its infinite variations. At the same time that I hold a certain (healthy?) skepticism about the idea that we will be better, I do want to be part of the club (which might be labeled “the faithful”) that believes we always, in every situation and permutation of humanness, carry within us the possibility of being better. 

The brief sentence of encouragement from Baldwin quoted at the top also opens some interesting questions, which I will leave for you to ponder:  

-Who is “we”? 
-What kinds of “better” might we cultivate right now?

There are no right/wrong answers, just yours–or ours! And I would suggest these are good questions to entertain in preparation for our next meeting of GNUUC’s Shared Ministries Council (which, you may remember, is a meeting of the congregation) at the end of our service on Sunday, January 26. 

Yours in faith, and the hope of applying it well,
Rev. Denise
RevDenise@gnuuc.org