"An Equal-Access Faith "

READING

From "Radical Hospitality: Benedict's Way of Love'" by Father Daniel Homan and Lonni Collins Pratt

When we speak of hospitality we are always addressing issues of inclusion and exclusion. Each of us makes choices about who will and who will not be included in our lives. . . . Issues of inclusion and exclusion, while personal, are not just personal. Our entire culture excludes many people. If you are in a wheelchair, for example, you are excluded because there are places you can't go. If you are very young, if you are very old, you are excluded. . . . Hospitality has an inescapable moral dimension to it. . . . It is an issue involving what it means to be human. All of our talk about hospitable openness doesn't mean anything as long as some people continue to be tossed aside...

But calling hospitality a moral issue does not tell us the whole truth about hospitality either. A moral issue can become bogged down in legalisms, and hospitality is no legalistic ethical issue. It is instead a spiritual practice, a way of becoming more human, a way of understanding yourself. Hospitality is both the answer to modern alienation and injustice and a path to a deeper spirituality.

SERMON

Any Sunday you will find congregations like ours coming together to declare that against all the odds, inclusive community can change the world. It's a bold statement and an inspiring vision. Our faith is an affirmation of the values of acceptance, dignity, justice, and equity - words we spoke together at the beginning of the service. And we succeed in living these values in many ways, small and great.

Any Sunday you also will find congregations like ours failing at our task, proving ourselves to be inhospitable in more ways than we can count. Despite our vigorous declaration that we are a "welcoming congregation," our efforts are often incomplete, the needs of others callously overlooked. Every now and then, not nearly often enough, we know it. It hurts all of us not to be as inclusive as we would like to be. Our intention may be good, but our learning travels a very steep curve. Perhaps it has to, in these times.

Today our service takes place just as we have observed another World AIDS Day, with its witness to the millions of people who have died, and those who suffer here and now. We hear the call to reach halfway around the world, to places like Zimbabwe, and to places down the street, such as Common Ground Westside. The AIDS pandemic is changing the world.

At the same time, soldiers are returning home from war with their lives permanently altered. A new population of disabled citizens will live among us for many years to come. Meanwhile, baby boomers are beginning to know first-hand what it means to grow old. It won't be long before a huge segment of the population faces chronic illness and disability and joins the many others who are already there. Disability is part of life. Every one of us is affected by it - or will be.

This is the reality against which our faith declares our intention to be inclusive. It's time to find out what it really takes. We may learn more than we think we need to know.

This past Veterans Day Sunday, our choir teamed up with the choir from Emerson Church in Canoga Park, and together with their minister Anne Hines, and members of Veterans for Peace, we held a Unitarian Universalist memorial at Arlington West. Arlington West is on Santa Monica beach, just north of the pier. Volunteers have created an installation of crosses and caskets in memory of those who have died in Iraq and Afghanistan.

We planned the service carefully. Months of preparation and attention, however, did not help us to consider one critical aspect. The beach location was not accessible to people who use wheelchairs or scooters. The problem came up for our choir first, but it was already too late to change the location. That meant at least two members of our church would not be able to participate.

The service went off exactly as planned. Timed to coincide with sunset and taking in the crosses, it seemed to fill a need for many of us. Later that evening, however, I listened to a scathing voicemail message from someone who had driven to Santa Monica from the Valley in order to attend the service. She was a wheelchair user. When she arrived, she quickly sized up the situation, angrily turned around and went home. I would have too.

I called her back, listened to her grievance, apologized, and promised to make the event accessible if it happens against next year. She graciously accepted my apology. And now I am rightfully stuck with my shame and complicity in making the world less hospitable than it should have to be. Or is. The Winter edition of "SeaScape,"[1] a publication from the City of Santa Monica, just announced that beach-worthy all-terrain wheelchairs are now available just north of the pier. I am told they even go in the water.

Having had this recent experience that sensitized me to my ignorance, I decided we should devote a Sunday service to the topic. With Devorah Greenstein, UUA accessibility consultant with us today, it seemed like a good time to reflect on the challenge of being a truly welcoming congregation. Interweave and our YRUU youth called World AIDS Day to my attention, both intensifying the focus and raising it to a global level. The issues are all interrelated.

My job should have been easy, with all this help. But I spent a staggering amount of time - several hours - just trying to find the hymns. It was even more difficult than finding winter holiday songs without snow in them for us southern Californians to sing.

As it turns out, many, many of the hymns in our hymnbook reflect able- bodied privilege. I found myself reading through the words of one hymn after another, seeking to avoid references to walking, stepping, wandering, or climbing. "One More Step" and "Guide My Feet" are two that were quickly discarded. Same with "to bow and to bend." And then just when I thought I had a good one, I realized that "I was blind but now I see" is a cruel fiction for many people.

This effort became a small education in itself. I called Devorah to share my frustration and my lesson. "The hymns reflect our culture," she said, calmly. They sure do. And the culture is not terribly hospitable to anyone with a disability. That includes our Unitarian Universalist culture, as reflected in our hymnbook, our buildings, and our attitudes. We have work to do before we can live up to our own aspirations.

According to "Radical Hospitality: Benedict's Way of Love," the reading we heard earlier, practicing inclusiveness is spiritual work. This is a powerful truth, which resonates well with our own tradition. It's not enough to talk about what it means to be inclusive. To practice inclusiveness - providing hospitality to everyone, no exceptions - is to go through a transforming process and then to act.

First there is the wake-up call that we are not doing all we can. Then there is all the feeling - shame, anger, guilt - that motivates us to look at what we can do. There we learn that the status quo is maintained by able-bodied privilege, or power. So we must challenge the status quo, look at our own assumptions, our apathy, our lack of imagination, and break through. This takes energy. So we take energy that might be spent on something else and use it to change the status quo.

Once we realized that two members of our own choir could not participate in the memorial service at Arlington West, we could have stopped what we were doing and solved the problem. At the time, it seemed insurmountable. But it wasn't. We could have relocated the service, or used the all-terrain wheelchairs, as it turns out. Next time we will. Insight leads to action - if you believe it should.

"Hospitality," the Benedictines wrote, "is a spiritual practice, a way of becoming more human, a way of understanding yourself. Hospitality is both the answer to modern alienation and injustice and a path to a deeper spirituality."[2] It's about seeing the injustice in the status quo and giving ourselves the assignment of changing it. It's about shifting our energy: a spiritual discipline, if there ever was one. And it's about reaffirming our conviction that this work is what our faith really means. Here we practice what it means to be human. The work of including everyone, no exceptions, which is a work of the imagination as well as the heart, is our equal-access faith in action.

[1] "SeaScape," Volume 14 No. 2, Winter 2006/7, p.2.

[2] Father Daniel Homan and Lonni Collins Pratt, "Radical Hospitality: Benedict?s Way of Love" (MA: Paraclete Press, 2002).