Confronting the Crises
MAGA racists were screaming at us. They were dual-wielding cameras, hurling racist obscenities, and blowing a shrieking whistle; a man in a kippah waved a Trump flag while another provocateur screamed “Christ is King!” (Not all interfaith action is equally beautiful.) I hadn’t planned to speak at this press conference — which was held to defend an Imam against racist attacks from the NY Post — but Mousa nudged me. I stepped forward and tried to meet the force of our antagonists’ hatred with love and solidarity in equal intensity, representing Community Church, a tapestry of faiths, rooted in the diversity that has made this city great, offering a moral witness in the face of necrotic hatred.
The next day, another press conference. Joining with Palestinian mothers, one from Gaza who has lost 60 of her family members in the genocide — their faces on pasteboard behind us. Another pregnant with twins, still vulnerable to Islamophobia and state violence here, but nothing like her family back in Palestine. Mass miscarriages. C-sections with no anesthetic. 20,000 children dead, another 20,000 completely orphaned. A generation — an entire people — scarred by irreparable physical and psychological traumas. A Jewish grandmother spoke, a child of Holocaust survivors. She was quiet, but with perfect clarity said that the genocide in Gaza is a holocaust. She said her heart was broken. I joined them to call on Vice President Vance, who was visiting Jerusalem that day, and Ambassador Huckabee, to interrupt the violence. We have no hope in them, but our words linger in the moral record, and will haunt the memory of these killers for generations.
At the public Yizkor service in front of Borough Hall on Yom Kippur, we ripped garments and screamed in grief for Gaza. It was, I think, the most powerful liturgy I've ever been a part of.
It’s hard to understand how people get like they do. Masked ICE officers — the children of someone — stand in the corridors at Federal Plaza to intimidate immigrant families and the volunteers that accompany them (though sometimes it’s just one person, completely alone, no one to encourage, support, or protect them). I trained and went in with the New Sanctuary Coalition and watched the rehearsal of state violence against the most vulnerable among us. A mother and her two kids, all dressed up, leave their hearing and a swarm of brutish officers chase them down and arrest the mother and God knows what happens to the children. I’m there to witness, to try to deescalate, to be with these folks in a harrowing moment and let them know someone cares about them. We care, as a community.
Rev. Peggy penned a letter to Governor Hochul and Mayor Adams, asking that they mobilize every local resource to prevent the racist violence on our streets, carried out by an occupying federal force. Clergy around the city are signing on, and Senator Julia Salazar has raised the same call. We are reaching into the halls of political power, while also pounding the pavement with protestors, gathering for No Kings, and marching with ICE Out of NYC. We’re organizing a faith response to the federal siege with Hands Off NYC. We’ve brought in organizers from D.C. to train city clergy with the lessons they’ve learned from the clashes there. Community Church is in the middle of it all.
We hosted two Palestinian theologians from Jerusalem. Students from Union came for bagels and coffee, and clergy from all over came for lunch. Sam and John Munayer are young, late 20s. They represent a new generation that is taking up the banner of their elders. Their theology, they are careful to tell us, comes from their grandmothers. Not solely, but she has shaped them so deeply that her spirit is present to everything they do. And so with Community Church, spanning the generations, do we hold the breadth of our elders and our newcomers. All of us are needed, all of us intertwined. As we continue into this work together, we need everyone.
We need you. I need you. If we haven’t had the chance to connect yet, I want to get to know you and hear your story. Whether or not this is the kind of work that moves you, there is a place for you. There is world-changing work happening here. This is only what I’ve been up to, all of it only possible because of the support of the congregation and the staff — all of whom have showed up for me in absolutely crucial ways. I’m only one small slice of the work and witness of Community Church, intertwined and interdependent with everyone else, and I want to invite you deeper into the beauty and power of being held in your purpose by the whole. Let’s talk. Let’s think about what that might look like for you, and how I can support you.
With revolutionary love,
Conor
