This I Believe.
Pause with these three words. Repeat them to yourself; each time changing the words you emphasize. Feel the differences of meaning and the possibilities for uncovering one of your foundational guiding personal insights.
Remember when NPR had a program where people shared their 3-500-word responses to this prompt. Over the years we have used their format and have shared our own responses in worship services a few times. (Shout out to Becky Poplin who I think organized this at UUFH originally.)
A personal insight I discovered one of the first times I did the exercise took the form of a question that became a cardinal point on my moral compass: is this good for children, all children.
This guiding question informed our creation of the DREAM scholarships after the DREAM act failed to pass. We knew we couldn’t fix our country’s immigration system. But we could help take care of our children.
What could we do to help Hendersonville take better, loving care of its children? We asked. How might we be more loving and help our town be a more loving community? What could we do, as Wendell Berry says, at the scale of our competence?
In late August, Rev. Judith Long who organized and lead the scholarship program presided at a wedding at Camp Pinnacle. When Judy sat down to sign the wedding license she recognized the name of the Assistant Registrar of Deeds. There was the signature of the first recipient of one of our DREAM scholarships. Tears welled up in Judy’s eyes.
This last week, the President, announced the end of the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals, or DACA, program: “The five-year-old-policy that allows [young undocumented immigrants who were brought to the U.S. as children] to remain without fear of immediate removal from the country and gives them the right to work legally.”
Before DACA, the DREAMERS in Hendersonville lived with the anxiety of not knowing what might happen to them next. It is not too dramatic to say that they lived under the psychic burden of the chronic question: Was their life as they knew it about to end? Every day they had to figure their routes to school and work in order to avoid ICE check- points.
Then DACA eased some of those fears, it provided a few simple foundational securities that all children should grow up with. And now those securities have been taken away. The anxiety and fear have returned.
Whatever your political understandings, we should not be playing politics with children’s security and lives. This is not only, not good for children, our children, it hurts them. The corollary of the guiding question of my moral compass could be: we should not hurt children. But I never felt the need to word it that way and that obviously until this moment.
Pause with that phrase: We should not hurt children. Repeat it to yourself.
Feel it become a call to action: we should help our children, all our children.
I’m not sure what forms that will take, but I trust that if we focus our creative energies on the need for action we will step up in support of our children, our country, our world.
This month’s Soul Matters theme is Courage. I strongly encourage you to look at the materials even if you have never done so before. Courage is a word of the heart. How are we to live boldly, fully and with and from an inclusive love? The uncertainty that has been created around DACA has been called cold hearted. So, it’s up to us to step up and step in. We have the courage. We must call it up and somehow help all our children feel warm and safe again.
This I Believe.
—Rev. Jim McKinley, Minister