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“Trust your buoyancy,” I shouted out over the water. The words were tinged with desperation and directed toward my 12-year-old son as he crashed into the waves on the Delaware shore. He did not hear me. He was too busy proving that those very waves, the last remnants of an early-season storm, were not too big to thwart him. I was terrified. Confused, even. Something had changed.
There before me was a tweenager within a whisper of my own height, a kid with man-sized feet and shoes that no longer fit into a carry-on suitcase. Where my little guy had been just one summer before, here was a broad-backed swimmer wading out into the overwhelming tumult without fear. And yet, in my imagination, he was still so small. In my emotional landscape, my own body was still the single bulwark against the waves and the world that would jostle his little bones around.
What is and what had once been smashed up against each other in the clear morning air as he motioned me forward with encouragement. “Don’t worry mom. You only have to crash out twice before you get past the breakers.” And so, I followed him. Crashing out along the way, losing one earring and a fair amount of my dignity as I went about it. Eventually our whole small family waded in. The only ones foolish enough or brave enough to make it past the breakers on that chilly morning, the lifeguards on the shore kept a wary watch over us. We laid on our backs and let the ocean roll beneath us, trusting our buoyancy and learning from each other, though so very much around us and within us had clearly changed.
The physicists say that a wave is a dynamic disturbance in a medium. It moves through whatever substance it is composed of. By its nature, a wave propels. It has momentum. Perhaps it is momentum. A wave is the opposite of stasis. The dynamism of a wave means that it will try to expel the force of change it carries by any means necessary, either by traveling onward and altering the future, or by violently pushing backward, swamping the space it left behind.
On nearly every level, as Unitarian Universalists, people of faith and communities, we are overcome with dynamically crashing waves of change. The storms come up and wash over us, one after the other, leaving little room for anything more than the duck and cover of self-protective reactivity.
The litany of dynamic disturbances in the medium of our lives is too long to name. Naming them is too paltry a tool to capture what it is to live through them. We know what it feels like to live in a time of consolidating nationalistic authoritarianism, the medium of the body politic itself swept by a weaponizing power that feels beyond our control. The wave crashes and we fear we may crumple beneath it.
We know what it feels like to lead in a time when patterns of religious practice are changing all around us, rendering former models for congregational life increasingly irrelevant or unsustainable while the ocean depths of our yearning remain unchanged. As congregational leaders, we may track the endowment holdings and wonder how many more years we can make it as-is in our programming and our staffing without some significant change. Sometimes the wave crashes and we put all of our competence into pretending it isn’t there.
We know how frightening it can be when we watch the institutions we care about—in our world and in our faith—shaking with uncertainty as change crashes over them, moored to ways of doing and being the church that may not serve us well in the future. We even know how much we have to lose when the only institutions and progressive networks that could effectively oppose the mounting tsunami of injustice find themselves scattered by internal fractiousness and court intrigue, their people spending precious capacity on the wrong things.
And here we are, on the shore. Like a mother watching her child swim away with sure strokes into an unknown world, here we are, both astonished and afraid. We know that nothing we can do will get away from the coming change. We are afraid of what it may mean to trust our own buoyancy, face the risk of failure, and make our way out past the breakers to a field of shared practice, a way of being, that will allow us to move with the waves instead of crashing fearfully beneath them. Perhaps we cannot yet imagine what it would be like for us to not just meet the wave of change but be the wave—to become a force moving in the medium of our days so powerfully that we bring transformation in our own wake.
That, then, is what we are talking about when we say that Unitarian Universalism must Meet the Moment. We need to acknowledge the waves that are crashing before us and how change moving around and between us is showing up in real life. We need to know the range of possible responses still available to us within the framework of that honest assessment. And then we need to act.
We can’t take on every change. We can’t tackle every problem. We can’t surf them all. But neither can we wait or wish that none of it was happening or nothing at all has changed. Not if we want to survive, let alone thrive, in the dynamic days that are given to us. This is why Meet the Moment is important.
Meet the Moment is a Unitarian Universalist framework of shared practices that helps us ground in our values, discern together, and take hopeful, courageous action in rapidly changing times. Rooted in centuries of UU collaborative decision-making, Meet the Moment equips us to face today’s challenges with clarity, courage, and a posture of hope, drawing on the wisdom of leaders, laypeople, and communities alike. Everyone has something to contribute; everyone has something to learn. Like a fractal wave, these practices might ripple out, building our own momentum that carries us toward justice, liberation, and Love at the center.
Building from this, a Wave Cohort is a small group of people who are willing to move off the safely withdrawn beachhead of plausible deniability and into the dynamism of this moment, taking risks and discerning together along the way. Our Wave Cohorts are invitations to trust our buoyancy together. They are a chance to beckon to one another as we venture out into the depths. “It’s ok, beloved,” we might say, “You only have to crash once or twice before you get past the breakers.” And out we go—not alone, but together—to face the dynamism of a transformed world.