By Nikki J Hunt
The First Principle
Project is more than a bylaw change. It is a deepening of faith and
relationships through conversations with each other when we ask heart and mind
challenging questions:
What does it mean to be
human in a multispecies world? And what is our compassionate response to that
understanding? How can we live more deeply connected to all of life? How can we
love both human nature and all of nature? Exploring these and other questions
together will help us grow stronger, flourishing communities.
The FPP challenges us to ask to go beyond this, to look
deeper. There is so much suffering in the world. How do we fix this? It is easy to fall into ranking suffering
and say we need to fix this oppression first before this other oppression. This
way of thinking is both symptomatic and prescriptive of a worldview rooted in
domination. When we rank suffering as part of our strategy of change, we will
create solutions that have within them the seeds of domination.
Instead of using the tools of domination, the
FPP asks us to use the tools of love--cooperation, compassion, individual and
collective responsibility, and justice. We can help each other widen our caring
and accountability so we can see, more and more, how everyone and everything is
interconnected. When we each do the work of undoing oppression from this place
of our interconnections, then we find solutions to suffering that do not rest
upon or perpetuate the suffering of others. Instead we find solutions that heal
deeply and transformatively. We find solutions that create flourishing for
everyone and everything.
This is why the FPP’s goal is to foster, grow
and deepen conversation around the idea of shifting from “every person” to “every
being.” There are no simple answers and no simple fixes, and such conversations
can be hard and even painful. Yet we are called to rise to engage these
questions together, for this is how we create Beloved Community.
We hope you will vote yes at General Assembly
to continue the conversation.
