​Transgender Day of Visibility
Prayer
with RevMrBarb

 Empower Women for a Better World
I have spent much of my life learning that, as a man, I have a privilege, a position and a power that women do not automatically share. It has taken so long because I have had to learn this lesson over and over again. As a citizen of the United States, I live in a culture that has recognized and celebrated the equality of women in its laws for a hundred years.

Our Unitarian Universalist faith community has worked to make women’s empowerment the norm for decades. And still, it requires intention and vigilance. Witness the current struggle in the US to protect a woman’s right to control her own body. Much of the rest of the world has not changed the legal second-class status of women, the constraints in education and opportunity or the barriers to leadership. The resistance to these changes is widespread and intense. Worse, abuse, disfigurement and rape are all too common, with religion often used as justification.

Van Jones, progressive advocate, preaches that we do not have any “surplus people,” that in these challenging times we need all the energy and the talent we can find. We cannot afford to limit or shut down the contributions that women make and can make. The Beloved Community needs us all.

More important even than that calculation of benefit, however, is the toll on the spirit that the disempowerment of women takes. It requires energy to “keep women in their place.” When we stand against a group, out of perceived self-interest or righteousness or fear, we diminish ourselves. It can be easy for those of us in the “developed world” to criticize cultures that disempower and abuse women. Our outrage is justified, but our arrogance is not.

We do well to remember our struggle to change the laws that held women back, the long effort to extend voting rights and the on-going effort to even approach equality in pay. Within Unitarian Universalism, full recognition of women’s leadership took decades, nor is that process complete. It is spiritually critical, however, to hold fast to our vision of a world made fair, with all her people one. All her people, women and men, empowered to build the Beloved Community, blessing the world with our gifts and our creativity.

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