Cleaning the Lens

A service titled ‘Cleaning the Lens’, led by Roy Clark, with readings given by Chloe Harewood and Brian Ellis, and music from Holly Redshaw and Jack Campbell.

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SPEAKER_01 2:40

We have come into this room of hope where our hearts and minds are open to the future. We have come into this room of justice where we set aside our fear to name freely every oppression. We have come into this room of love where we know that no lives are insignificant. We have come into this room of song where we unite our voices in the sombre and beautiful melodies of life. Those words from Libby B. Stoddard welcome all who have gathered this morning for our Sunday service. Welcome to those who have gathered in person here in Essex Church, and to all those joining online via Zoom. A very special welcome to our friends from Godwin Unitarians. Glad that you can join us. And anyone turning up on YouTube at a later date. This morning, our service is called Cleaning the Lens. We'll be reflecting on the theme of unconscious bias, considering how we might become more aware of our biases and what we might do to overcome them and correct for them. In the words of Brian McLaren, which are on the front of your order of service today, we all have a whole set of assumptions and limitations, prejudices and preferences, likes, dislikes and triggers, fears and conflicts of interest, blind spots and obsessions that keep us from seeing what we could and would see if we didn't have them. So let's light our chalice flame now as we do every week. It's a moment for us to stop and take a breath, settle ourselves down, and put aside any preoccupations that we came in carrying. This simple ritual connects us in solidarity with Unitarians and Unitarian Universalists the world over and reminds us of the proud and historic progressive religious tradition of which this gathering is part. We light this flame to ignite the sacred power of justice. We light this flame so that it may be a beacon of hope in moments of uncertainty, fear, anxiety, and the unknown. We light this flame and are emboldened by its blaze. Knowing our strength as a prophetic and powerful people is rooted in the diverse ways we answer the call to love. So we've got a hymn now. Our first hymn is number 21 in your purple hymn books. Come and find the quiet center. For those joining on Zoom, the words will be up on screen and feel free to stand and sit as you prefer. This prayer is based on words by Lynn Cox. You might want to adjust your position for comfort, close your eyes, or soften your gaze. There might be a posture that helps you feel more prayerful. Whatever helps you get into the right state of body and mind for us to pray together, to be fully present with ourselves and with each other, and that which is both with us, within us, and beyond us. We turn our full attention to you, the light within and without, as we tune into the depths of this life, and the greater wisdom, to which and through which we are all intimately connected. Be with us now as we allow ourselves to drop into the silence and stillness at the very center of our being. Spirit of life, God of all love, who draws us together in a web of holy relationships. Make your presence known with us and in us and among us. Remind us that we are not alone in history. Ignite with us the courage of the living tradition. Remind us that we are not alone in entering the future. Anchor us with patience and perseverance. Remind us that we are not alone in our times of grief and pain. Comfort us with your spirit manifest in human hands and voices. Remind us that we are not alone in joy and wonder. Inspire us to honor and extend the beauty we find in this world. May we move with the rhythms of peace. May we move with the rhythms of compassion. May we move with the rhythms of justice. Source of stars and planets and water and land, open our hearts to all of our neighbors. Open our souls to a renewal of faith. Open our hands to join together in the work ahead. And in a few minutes of quietness now, let us seek a higher perspective, a longer view. Starting right where we are, let us shift our awareness ever outward in circles of concern. Let us bring to mind those we know to be struggling this day, perhaps including ourselves. Those friends and family that we hold dearest. Our neighbors in community, others around the globe that we may only have heard about on the news. And let us take time to send prayers of loving kindness to all who suffer this day. Taking time to notice what was good, to count our blessings, all the ways in which others helped or encouraged us, inspired us, and delighted us. All the goodness and beauty we have known, even in the midst of pain and struggle. And let us take time to give prayers of thanks for all that we have been given. God of all love, as this time of prayer comes to a close, we offer up our joys and concerns, our hopes and fears, our beauty and brokenness, and we call on you for insight, healing, and renewal. As we look forward to the coming week, help us to live well each day and to be our best selves. Using our unique gifts in the service of love, justice, and peace. Amen. Let's sing together now. Another hymn. Um Who is My Neighbour? We've sang it quite a few times lately, and I really like it. I think the words are just so beautiful, so um, let's enjoy it together. Who is my neighbour?

SPEAKER_00 19:12

Unraveling unconscious bias by Pragya Agawal. The following is an excerpt from Sway. Unraveling Unconscious Bias by Pragua Pragya Agawal. And here's the book here. Have you ever been told to smile more? Been teased about your accent or had your name pronounced incorrectly? If so, you've probably already faced bias in your everyday life. We like to think that we are all fair-minded and egalitarian, but we all carry biases that we're not even aware of. We might believe that we live in a post-racial society, but racial tension and inequality is pernicious and pervasive. We might believe that gender inequality is a thing of the past, but it is still ubiquitous. The phrase unconscious bias has entered common parlance, but there are still so many myths around it. Our implicit or unintentional biases affect the way we communicate and perceive the world and affect our decision-making even in life and death situations. We often think that unconscious bias only covers race and gender, but it is far more pervasive than that. Disability, sexuality, body size, profession, and so on all influence the assessments we make of people and form the basis of our relationship with others and the world at large. Each of us form and carry unconscious biases of some sort. It's not only the behavior of overtly bigoted, racist or sexist people, but of everyone, including you and me. So the answer is to go to the roots, to understand the processes that shape us, to be aware, to acknowledge that we are all biased to a certain degree, and that we are all discriminated. We judge, we exclude people, we stereotype to a certain sometimes that is a little tough to comprehend. Our unconscious biases can be balanced by bias control mechanisms that turn instinctive responses into socially acceptable reactions. However, what is socially acceptable varies, and our bias control mechanisms are not independent moral guides. There has been an upsurge in diversity training with the aim of freeing ourselves from our unconscious biases, but we cannot erase our biases completely. Awareness and action are possible. Obliteration is not. The consequences of stigma and of unconscious bias and prejudice are enormous. Physically, mentally, and socially, and talking about discrimination and prejudice isn't easy. The truth can be uncomfortable. But at a time when partisan political ideologies are taking centre stage and we struggle to make sense of who we are, who we want to be, and who we will become, it is crucial that we understand why we act the way we do. This book attempts to view our contemporary society through a lens that enables us to reflect and consider the forces that shape us. It's about understanding the way we put up walls between us and them before we even realize we are doing so. It might seem we are bound to our biases and unable to escape them. However, as Raymond Williams, a Welsh Marxist theorist, said, to be truly radical is to make hope possible rather than despair convincing. I believe that by addressing the biases at the individualistic level, we can begin to understand the societal and structural inequities and injustices. This is my hope and many aspirations anyway.

SPEAKER_01 24:02

Thank you, Kay. We're moving in to a time of meditation now. To take us into stillness, I'm going to share a poem called Bones by Unitarian Universalist Minister and Poet Lynn Unger. It resonates very much with the the reading we've just heard and hints at some of the biases that are baked into our brains through our evolutionary history and social conditioning. It is perhaps quite a challenging poem to be taken into meditation. So hold yourself gently. Following the poem, we will hold a few minutes of shared silence, which will end with the sound of the bell. And then we'll hear music for meditation from Holly and Jack. So let's do what we need to do to get comfortable. Adjust your position. Put your feet flat on the floor to ground yourself. Close your eyes. As ever, these words of music are just an offering. So feel free to use the time to meditate in your own way. You tell me I don't have a racist bone in my body. And I believe you. The long pillars of your tibia the delicate wings of your clavicles. The intricate jewelry of your feet. All are innocent in their creamy whiteness. Your brain is a different story. Your brain, like mine, is tribal from its prehistoric roots. Your brain, like mine, was grown in a laboratory of lies. Your brain, like mine, tells stories that are thrilling but unreliable. Your brain, like mine, is doing the best it can to make its way in a broken world. It is your muscle that scares me.

SPEAKER_02 32:45

This short reflection by Unitarian Universalist Science Ambassador J. D. Stillwater opens with a quote from the popular scientist Neil de Grasse Tyson. What history has shown is that when you are granted a perspective bigger than the one you had been harbouring, you end up thinking differently about the world for the better. Still Walter continues with his own story. He writes, all I said was, science requires all five senses. This gentleman of mine smiled indulgently, paused, then replied, only five. After establishing that he was not referring to psychic abilities, within minutes I was amazed to discover two additional human senses. By the next day I had three more. They were obvious. We re-routinely refer to them as my sense of, without ever connecting them to the five. I'll let you experience the aha on your own. There are many. In that moment I felt three very different emotions all at once. I felt stupid for not seeing the obvious, wonder at what else I might be missing, and determination to find other mental blocks I might carry. The five senses were described by Aristotle some 2,350 years ago. Since then, textbooks and teachers alike have simply repeated the phrase without question. Kindergarten teachers pass it on to children as self-evident, its conventional wisdom and its wrong. I became obsessed with uncovering other examples of cultural inertia, especially in science. Critical thinking and self-questioning are the essence of science, more essential than any concept in the curriculum. I encouraged my students to question authority, especially my authority, because only rarely can we recognise our biases without help. Those biases get installed early in our lives. Studies of implicit bias show us that racism, sexism, and all kinds of binary thinking are deeply ingrained habits of thought, like the five senses. When I'm lost and I don't know it, I need someone to point out that I'm on the wrong road. When someone does this or gently asks, only five, it can be tempting to lash out at them for exposing my ignorance or bias. But if I take a pause to self-question, it can reveal new vistas to me. Then it takes humility to admit my error and effort to get back on track. Experiencing the world clearly and openly with all our many senses requires vulnerability and authentic self-questioning. I think it's a spiritual practice. Stillwater closes with a few brief words of prayer. Source of all truth and clarity, bless us with companions who disrupt our inertias, curiosity to hear them out, and courage to seek the truth.

SPEAKER_01 37:12

Thank you, Brian. Before I retired, I was a teacher. Well, a university and college lecturer specializing in design, primarily filmmaking and photography. As I would tell my first year students, choosing the right lens for a photo shoot is critically important. For example, a wide angle lens is great for landscapes, but ill suited for portraiture. Likewise, a telephoto lens is a great choice, a great tool for photojournalism, or nature photography, would it be another one, but not so useful for a wedding chute. Other factors such as choice of lens hood and lens filter also figure. And of course, the importance of keeping the lens clean and free of marks and smudges makes a big difference in terms of outcome. In short, the lens selected might look fine, but can produce a distorted or false image. Brian McLaren, in that quote that I read a little earlier, offers us a necessary, if humbling, reality check about assumptions, limitations, prejudices, and preferences. Think of it this way. We all walk into everyday situations wearing a pair of glasses we didn't know we had on. The lenses of these glasses were ground by our upbringing, our culture, our fears, and the stories that we've been told about other people. These aren't just abstract thoughts. They are the filters that tell us who to trust, who to avoid, and who to ignore. The trouble with these blind spots isn't that they exist, it's that they act like a smudge on the glass, just like on my student's camera lens. They keep us from seeing the person standing right in front of us as they truly are. When we live behind that wall of suspicion, it feels safe, but it's incredibly lonely. We lose the ability to trust anything that we didn't build ourselves. Suspicion doesn't look at people, it looks for evidence. It builds a wall. On one side of the wall is me, the one who is right. On the other side is them, the object out there, category, problem. Once that wall is up, we stop knowing people by their likeness to us. We stop seeing a human being with a story, and start seeing a subject to be analyzed and doubted. There is a terrible cost to this us and them architecture. The 20th century stands as a grim testament to what happens when unconscious bias is allowed to harden into state policy. History's darkest chapters began not with violence, but with the quiet othering of our neighbours. In the tumultuous times we are living through today, as populist rhetoric again finds a foothold in social media and increasingly in mainstream political discourse, we risk repeating those same tragedies by trading human complexity for convenient stereotypes. Dr. Martin Luther King knew this well. He saw it in the form of physical racial segregation and felt it in the heat of the Montgomery bombings. During the civil rights campaign in 1957, four black churches and two pastors' homes were bombed in Montgomery, Alabama. Dr. King knew that you can't tear down a wall with suspicion, of suspicion, with more suspicion. He lived in what he called an already and not yet space. Already and not yet. In other words, he knew the world was broken and split, but he acted as if it was already whole. His answer to our blind spots wasn't a complex theory. It was a way of living he called the inescapable network of mutuality. Or what's that? Well, imagine a spider's web. You tap gently on the thread, on one thread, and the whole thing vibrates. Dr. King insisted that we aren't just individuals bumping into each other. We are links in an unbroken web, or to use another metaphor, a chain of shared humanity. For him, this wasn't abstract spirituality. He understood that when we allow our biases to turn someone into an object, we are actually cutting a thread to our own safety. As he famously said, the agony of the poor impoverishes the rich. We are inevitably our brother's keeper. Because we are our brother's brother. Dr King was very familiar with, in fact, lived by a theological concept known as Imajo Dei. This holds that every human being, regardless of race, class, gender, or belief, is created equal. Imajo Dei, or in the image of God, not literally as in physical appearance, but in concept, in essence, is a Christian concept. Although there are similar ideas, i.e., the brief the belief that a human being is created in the image of the divine, within the Islamic and Jewish traditions too. But you don't have to be a theist, or indeed belong to any faith, to recognize the profound truth hidden in this concept. Whether we call it the divine spark, the inner life. Light or simply a person's inherent worth and dignity we are talking about the same radical reality. That there is something in every person that is original, precious, and irreducible. It is the original goodness that exists before the fog of bias ever settles in. To see through the lens of affinity is to look apart the labels and the object we created and instead to recognize that that same spark of life, that same lightness reflecting back at us from every pair of eyes we meet. It demands that a person see the inherent value in every individual, forcing the mind to look past superficial group categorizations and actively resist the biases that lead to prejudice or unjust judgment. It transforms the outgroup into a member of the universal human family. But how do we actually do this in practical terms in our own community? I was speaking for myself. I see it as a simple gift a unitarian charity for social action where I'm privileged to be a trustee. But there the goal isn't just to provide a service, but to dismantle the subject-object split. When we observe, it's easy to see ourselves as the helper of the subject, and the other as the needy of the object. But the true work of simple gifts is about finding the affinity. It's about realizing that we are all part of the same web, and that the flourishing of our neighbour is the only way we can flourish ourselves. I see it too in my work with mental health support here in West London, which is often a topic where the fog of suspicion is thickest. Our biases tell us to keep a distance, to categorize, to analyze someone's struggle from afar. But when we sit down over a simple cup of coffee, the wall of suspicion begins to cry. We stop building a case about someone's diagnosis and start seeing a person. We move from being strangers standing over and against one another to being companions or companions and sharing a table. In these moments, we aren't just being polite, we are cleaning the lens. We are restoring the web that allows each of us to be who we were truly meant to be. One of the things that community work has taught me is how our unconscious biases can get in the way. And we are. But with a growth mindset, you can always get better at no matter where you started. When we are in a growth mindset, when a mistake is pointed out to us, we will be more open to learning when our biases come up. However, that is also easier said than done. And I'm standing here speaking to you today very much as a work in progress. Our goal isn't to be perfect. Our goal is to be connected. This I have found begins by admitting we are looking through or wearing those smudged or distorting lenses. Maybe when we find ourselves fitting the pieces together to judge someone, we can stop and ask ourselves, am I seeing a person or am I building a case? Instead of looking at what makes them other, look for the affinity. It might be as simple as acknowledging they love their children like I love mine. The Unitarian tradition affirms the inherent worth and dignity of every person. That is a call to heal the split. It is a call to stop looking at people as objects of our suspicion and start looking at people as partners in a shared destiny. When we dismantle the walls of suspicion, whether at a meeting or at a community center or sitting on the bus, we are cleaning the lens. We are coming home to each other. As we go forth, may we move from the suspicion that divides to the love that restores. May it be so. So another hymn, and our final one today. It's number thirty-six in our books. For everyone born, a place at the table. Thanks to Holly and Jack for the really lovely music. Thanks to Liz for greeting. And David for making coffee. If you're in person, do stay for cake. Apparently it's biscoff cake and apple pear cake. Today it says here, maybe both, who knows? I know someone's brought some biscuits in over there, Jasmine. So um there's lots to go around. Um if you're online, uh stay uh stay with a chat with Aisha if you can. If you can stay around after today's service, we have our craft a noon. You can do your own craft project or rummage in the many boxes of art materials that we have and just hang out and be sociable. Tonight and Friday at 7 p.m., we've got our online heart and soul. You'll be glad to do I'm not I'm not doing the the uh the technical stuff for that. Um so uh yes, that's this evening uh tonight and Friday at seven. Um this week it's on the theme of self-compassion. Email Jane if you want to join that. And in fact, this week marks six whole years of Heart and Soul online. So it's it's a landmark week. We also have an in-person heart and soul this Wednesday here at 7 pm. So again, let Jane know if you're coming along. Sonia will be here with her Nea Dance class on Friday lunchtime. So have a word with Sonia if you'd like to join that. Um this week I told you there was a lot, didn't I? This week, the Better World Book Club is reading Afropean Notes from Black Europe by Johnny Pitts. And you've just about got time to read it. Um if you'd like to join online next Sunday evening. Next Sunday we'll be back here at 11am when Jane and Azita will be leading the service on Wonder. Um we've got a special treat as our musical offerings will include a full-size concert park. And after the service, we're going to have another labyrinth mini retreat that's co-led by Jane and uh Sarah Tinker to mark the spring spring equinox after the service. Please do sign up for this as soon as possible. Oh my goodness, I'm away next week. I tell you what, I feel like cancelling my trip now. Um details of all our various activities are printed on the order of service, and it's also in the Friday email. So sign up to our mailing list if you haven't done so already to find out about all the wonderful things that are happening. And the spring newsletter is out. Some of you may have got it in the post, but we've got lots of copies, so please do take one. Uh the congregation very much has a life beyond Sunday mornings. We encourage you to keep in touch, uh, look out for each other, and do what you can to nurture supportive connections. So just time for our closing words and some closing music now. We have come to the end of our service, but not our calling in the world. We close our time together with a humble reminder that justice and equality are our spiritual practices to embrace. Each day, every day we are blessed to be the embodiment of the word when justice and equity around us in all that we do.