The education of progressive Unitarian and Unitarian Universalist ministers is literally embedded in Harvard Divinity School’s DNA.
The legendary Rev. William Ellery Channing actually penned the 1815 appeal that went out in Harvard President Kirkland’s name. The list of graduates from the School’s first half century reads like a “who’s who” of UU—and early American— history: the writer and social critic Ralph Waldo Emerson, HDS ’25; the abolitionist Rev. Theodore Parker, HDS ’34; the “Saint of the West,” Rev. William Greenleaf Eliot, HDS ’34.
The Rev. Erik Martinez Resly, MDiv ’12, represents a new generation of HDS alumni carrying on the progressive UU tradition. As founder of The Sanctuaries, an interfaith arts community in Washington, DC, Martinez Resly ministers to devout Muslims, Hasidic Jews, Evangelical Christians, Humanists, and many others. All come together to experience art as spiritual practice and to place their creative and theological imaginations in service to social justice.
“For the people in our community—particularly folks who didn’t grow up with any particular tradition— making art is an incredibly meaningful, transcendent, spiritual practice,” he explains. “We try to empower people to claim their soulful voice, to express themselves and their stories creatively, and then to collaborate on projects that have a direct impact on the lives of people in our city.”
At The Sanctuaries, Martinez Resly not only brings people together from different traditions, but also connects the devout with the “nones,” the burgeoning group of Americans who identify with no organized religion. The community’s glue is the process of creating art, which Martinez Resly says enables all members to be authentic individuals and, at the same time, have an experience together of something greater than themselves.
“We can never fully grasp the fullness of each other’s differences,” he says. “But when two people compose a song together, there are those moments of being in sync. It’s more than just working side by side. There’s a sense of connection there that, for me, is a moment of divine touch. We really need each other and we feel it in a visceral way. Literally, the harmony sounds good together.”
Martinez Resly’s community puts the power of this experience into practice through social justice work, as it did recently when it partnered with community organizers Empower DC on a public housing campaign. Members of The Sanctuaries visited the Barry Farms project in Washington’s Anacostia neighborhood amid pressure to tear the development down and replace it with condominiums. In response to the complaints of residents who said that they felt shut out of the conversation about the future of their community, a singer and a spoken word artist from The Sanctuaries created a poetic history of Barry Farms. Residents were so touched that they urged the composers to record the work. Now The Sanctuaries is partnering with local radio stations to get the work on the air and to offer any proceeds from sales of the recording to Empower DC’s campaign.
“It was incredibly meaningful for the residents to have people who were spiritually grounded take the time to listen and amplify their voice,” Martinez Resly says. “What we do is about personal empowerment, but personal empowerment in service of a higher cause.”
Martinez Resly hopes that The Sanctuaries will continue to grow in the years ahead. The challenge is to make the group financially sustainable. Washington is an expensive base of operations, and the artist/members of the community often have few financial resources of their own. Still, Martinez Resly is hopeful that the group’s combination of diversity, creativity, and activism will prosper. There is always the need for sanctuary.
“There is a certain secret sauce to the soulfulness that people experience and embody in our community that is magnetic,” he says. “It’s one of the reasons that we’ve been able to grow the way we have while spending almost no money on any advertising. Just giving people an opportunity to tap into, to discover, and to embody that sanctuary within themselves, within one another, and to live that in their daily lives—I think that can have a tremendous impact.”
—by Paul Massari