Submission 211
Amanda Patt
Capital UU Congregation of Victoria (Victoria, BC) 8616
What is your suggestion or idea?
- Remove the ““transformation of the world through liberating Love”” in the purpose section. Please rethink what we think our purpose is here together.
- Vague, undefined ““Love”” at the center of UU, at the center of the Values…is not useful. It at minimum needs more definition of what love means.
- The ““inseparable”” six UU Values are not useful, nor is the idea of rotating them helpful. Make Interdependence the primary value please!
- Only allowing tweaks to the wording of the proposed Article 2 pre-supposes support for this document that I do not feel.
- Where are the sources? It talks about heritages in the Purpose section and histories in the Inspirations section, but the lack of a list is disconcerting. Maybe the sources should be a separate document?6. Where is the soaring, spiritual language to uplift us?7. What defines what is a ““qualifying”” suggestion to be approved for subsequent posting on the online discussion platform?
What is the reason for your amendment idea?
- A colonial-based, Christian-roots, large-percentage-white, UU community shouldn’t be trying to liberate anyone, and not with love…we should be listening to the truths of the historical harms and how to mitigate our privilege within those systems.
- It needs parameters for how we know if we are reaching our goal of being ““loving”” i.e. do the marginalized among us feel valued and safe. I’m not sure love really is at the center of UU at all, so that could use more discussion.
- Given climatological and ecological crises that may cause a mass extinction event, it seems self-evident to me that interdependence with the natural world needs to be the primary UU value!
- This whole process has felt negative and top-down! Creating this Article 2 proposal to re-write UU proposes to not just change your bylaws, but re-write what the faith is about!!
- We do have a history, we do have members with a diverse plurality of Faith backgrounds, we should give more substance to our sources.
- UU is a sort of a faith, in sort of a distributed faith community, yes? So, while I understand that Article 2 is part of the UUA bylaws and is therefore part of a legal document, this is part of how UU faith is defined. It should feel like it is spiritually uplifting and theologically masterful. This proposal doesn’t fit either of those criteria.
- Knowing more about how this proposal is being created on the back-end, and how it has come this far, and how people can give feedback now, would be helpful. While I appreciate the ways a process has been created to allow feedback, it still feels limited, stilted, and contained, rather than allowing genuine discussion of what UU is or could be.
Have you discussed this idea with your congregation or other UUs?
A. I am not a paid member of Capital, but I have attended the congregation, on and off, for years.
B. I have discussed my concerns with my congregation. A few people had some resonance with what I said, but largely, there seemed to be little feedback.
C. I will copy and send my responses here, via email, out to be posted in case any CUUC folks are interested in my responses to this form.
D. I am Not a designated delegate for this congregation. It will be up to the Beacon UU congregation to discuss Article 2, to decide on (a) delegate(s), and to decide if they wanted to propose any sort of congregation-wide changes, or to simply allow individuals to post their thoughts on this form/online forum separately.
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