I was talking with a UU friend about our elevator speeches recently. These are the 15-second sound bites that you could spout off if you wanted to explain our religion to someone in an elevator. Part of our coming of age process as UUs is reading multiple elevator speeches from other people and then coming up with one for our selves. I feel like especially in my tradition where we often spend too much time deciding what we are not, having a practice of intentional identity writing is really powerful. So my friend asked me what mine was, and I responded with roughly this statement:
Unitarian Universalism is a liberal religious tradition that came out of Christianity but now focuses more on the covenant we make with one another and the world than on a specific creed about God. We value highest honoring the worth of all people and working together to build a more just and loving world.
Obviously Unitarian Universalism is so much more than those two sentences, but that is the Spark Notes version I use. After hearing a UU minister friend use the word covenant in their elevator speech I have started consistently including it in mine. Making covenants are a sacred and spiritually grounding practice and it is the underpinning of my faith. We teach our children at a young age how to lead a covenant making process by modeling that in our religious education classes, and covenanting is a sacred ritual in youth and young adult spaces. I had been missing this spiritual act until we made one in choir this last week.
We sat together in a circle with flip chart paper and markers while one person led the covenanting. We offered up practices and ways of being that would help our group be more loving and more affective. When we covenant, we set expectations and aspirations for how we will be as a community together. We will respect each other’s time. We will help each other learn and improve. We will contribute to the community. We set goals for our communities knowing that in our humanity we won’t always meet those goals. And so we covenant as well to hold each other accountable and hold each other lovingly when expectations aren’t met. As Unitarian Universalists even when we know that sometimes we will fall short our practice, our spiritual action, is to make promises to each other and to the world. Let us hold others and ourselves with love and forgiveness as we work to live deeper into our covenants.