Skip to main content

Responsibility For, Responsibility To

One of the chief values in being part of a community whether it be a church, a town, or a country, is a sense of responsibility as a member of that community.

But we are also individuals, not just cogs in a machine. We make our own decisions, determine for ourselves what we believe, and shape our own lives.

Like many things in life, there needs to be a dynamic tension between individuality and community. In our faith of Unitarian Universalism, this tension is seen by the "bookends" of our Seven Principles. The Seven Principles are a set of promises, a sacred "to-do list," that every UU congregation promises to the other UU congregations that they will work toward.

The First Principle is that we affirm and promote "The inherent worth and dignity of every person." The Seventh Principle is that we affirm and promote "Respect for the interdependent web of all existence of which we are a part." To be a Unitarian Universalist community means to hold those in tension, honoring the divine value of each person, while understanding that our lives are blended together and we must take the overarching wellbeing of all into our decision-making.

My systems mentor, Ken Shuman, refers to these questions about individuality and community in a framework of "Responsibility For" and "Responsibility To."

I am responsible for myself. It is my responsibility to manage my own anxieties, self-regulate, and work on increasing my emotional maturity.

I am responsible to others. Because I am a member of a covenanted religious community, I am responsible to them, to share my time, talents, and treasure. As their minister, I have an additional set of responsibilities to them, chiefly, to care about their lives. To love them. I am not responsible for Live Oak, I am responsible to Live Oak.

I am responsible to the larger community I'm a part of. There are medical professionals, grocery workers, first responders, sanitation workers, and others who have taken on jobs that make them responsible to our larger community, which includes me. And so I am responsible to them, to limit the spread of coronavirus. I am responsible to them in other ways, too, to advocate for fair working conditions and wages.

I am responsible to humankind and that intersects with my responsibility for myself. Being responsible for myself means it is my responsibility to seek out the best scientific knowledge available and to keep up with what is happening in the world. Being responsible to humankind means not re-posting information that I haven't scrutinized for accuracy.

Because I am responsible to humankind, I am limiting my physical interactions with those outside my household, while increasing my social interactions online. Because I am responsible to humankind, I wear a mask if there's any chance I will be within 20 feet of someone outside my household. Because I am prioritizing decreasing the spread of coronavirus over my privacy concerns, I have downloaded the Novid App and will use it when I leave my house.

I am responsible for myself.
I am responsible to you.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Me and My Collar

You may run into me on a Friday, in my neighborhood, so it's time I let you know what you might see. When I was doing my required unit of Clinical Pastoral Education (CPE), my supervisor suggested that any of us who came from traditions where a clerical collar was an option, take one "collar week," to see how we were treated, as opposed to wearing regular professional clothes. After a couple of days, I joked to the Catholic priest, "How do you manage the power?" In regular clothes, I would walk into a patient's room, and it would take about 5 or so minutes of introductions and pleasantries before we could really get down to talking about their feelings, their fears, the deep stuff. With most people, as soon as that clerical collar walked in the room, with me attached, they began pouring out all the heavy stuff they were carrying. I was riding the bus back and forth every day, and though not quite so dramatic, the collar effect was alive there, to
10 comments
Read more

We've Reached the "Tom Hanks Eating Raw Fish" Phase of the Pandemic

Last May, as it became apparent the covid-19 pandemic was not going to be a temporary affair, I wrote about the benefits of imagining you were shipwrecked on a deserted island.  Now, a year after we began hearing about the "novel coronovirus," I suspect that many of us have now entered the "Tom Hanks Eating Raw Fish" stage of the pandemic.  We've made the best of things. Rearranged home offices and homeschool desks. Got through the holidays, mustering as much joy as we could. There's a permanent hook or basket at the front door for our masks.  Most of us by now either know someone who died of covid, or are, at most, 2 degrees away. Our co-worker's husband's mother. Our friend's aunt. Or closer. We've grieved.  And now...we're just numb. We keep putting one foot in front of the other, because that's what we have to do. We eat, we drink, we sleep. We get our work done. We nag our kids to do school work.  But our affect is flat. Like Ha
1 comment
Read more

Beloved Community: The Now and Not Yet

Rev. Christine Robinson has a great little post up about the phrase "beloved community" and why it's problematic to use that to describe a church. Like her mom, I can get cranky about the whole thing, but my crankiness lies in the misuse of what is, to me, such a breathtaking and profound concept. Martin Luther King, Jr., someone whose words I study in great detail, is the one we often think of as originating the term, but he learned about it through the writings of Josiah Royce. Josiah Royce (right) with close friend William James.  Royce was a philosopher, studying Kant, Hegel. I imagine he would have enjoyed Koestler's theory of the holon , because he saw humanity as being both individuals and part of a greater "organism" that was community. As King's belief about Beloved Community would be rooted in agape , Royce's philosophy stemmed from what he called loyalty, and by that he meant, "the practically devoted love of an individual f
6 comments
Read more