As Unitarian Universalists we greatly value learning and growth. Rev. John W. Brigham, quoted in our hymnal “Singing the Living Tradition” captured this value well: “Go your ways, knowing not the answers to all things, yet seeking always the answer to one more thing than you know.” Our Transcendentalist ancestors called this process of learning and growth “self-cultivation” and they saw it as an essential part of the religious life. So the question “What do you know?” has significance for us.
Using it as a frame, or a prompt, for Black History Month, the questions could include these: What do you know about “The War Before the War?” What do you know about the Harlem Renaissance? The Combahee River Collective? The women of the civil rights movement? The work of Octavia Butler, or Audre Lourde, or Bayard Rustin? What do you know about Ta-Nehisi Coates’ “Case for Reparations”? What do you know about the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters, or the St. Luke Penny Savings Banks, or Black Wall Street? How many massacres of African Americans in American cities in the 1900’s can you name? The list goes on and on.
The larger question – the more important for our religious lives, is this: what difference does knowing or not knowing make? Especially now?