What do you think life will look like if you should live to turn 94 years old?

Yesterday was John Foord’s 94th birthday. With a growing number of Beacon members celebrating birthdays into their nineties and even past 100, they are paving the way. John is a shaman and leads a weekly Zoom meeting for participants in shamanic practices. Participants attend from their homes across the country, after the introductory workshop. John has often shared with me (Rev Emilie) that his practice is teaching him how to live, how to age, and how to move into what’s next. 

On my phone call with John and his wife, Janet (92 years old herself, she told me that she had married an “older man”), they were asking about a longtime member, Barbara, who had moved to Vermont. They hadn’t heard from her in the last year, and they were worried. So I called her; she’s great! It turns out that she raised her four children in the town where I am raising mine and had served on the Board of Education. I asked her what Beacon and our town were like while she was raising her kids. 

One year, she told me, Beacon invited a high school student from Madison to share his story from our pulpit. Barbara ~ a white woman ~ learned from this student that black folks knew to drive with the utmost care through our town because the police so often targeted them, demanding to know why they were there. She was so outraged she drove immediately to the police station and demanded that they stop. Later, Barbara was sharing her story with her white neighbor, a conservative Republican, who said, “Barbara, I have been going to the police station once a week for years and telling them to cut that out!”

It’s been almost a year since Beacon passed our 8th Principle and six months since we passed our covenant: Love guides our congregation [and] calls us daily to acts of liberation grounded in antiracism. In order to begin living into our promises, twenty-six Beacon leaders - 21 white leaders; 5 BIPOC leaders - participated in a 16-hour (virtual) Racial Equity training over Easter weekend with the Racial Equity Institute, an organization with whom Rev Robin connected us. She was able to secure the training before her sabbatical! Our leaders were seeking a shared language for understanding social & institutional power, prejudice, advantage and oppression, white supremacy, and yes, race and racism. Now, we have a framework so that we may begin dismantling racism within our system specifically. It is a commitment that our Board of Trustees and leaders have made. It’s not going to be easy; racism is pernicious. 

Dr. Tuli and I have been to A LOT of anti-racism, anti-oppression, multicultural trainings in our years; this was by far the most transformative experience yet. Honestly, I believe every white American should be required to take this training, just so that we can begin to understand our true history and how it has harmed us as a nation. We encourage you to sign up for the Phase I Racial Equity Training, even if you think you’ve “done that.” 

It’s easy to condemn the racial bigot, but we are all learning that it’s not the one bad apple that perpetuates racism. It’s all of us who perpetuate - often unknowingly - oppression in order to have white advantage. It’s how our system was built. Barbara hadn’t lived in my town for at least twenty years, but I can tell you from the Black Lives Matter teach-in last summer that my town is still not hospitable to BIPOC folks: not on the streets, not in our housing, not in our schools. But it’s one of the best neighborhoods, schools and towns for us white folx. We make sure people know that last bit. 

What will life look like in my town when I am 94 years old? 

I learned this weekend, if I hadn’t before, it’s up to us to pave a new way of being.