Passover and the Path to Liberation

The ancient Israelites were enslaved in the land of Egypt. They’d arrived there after being a nomadic people for centuries. They lived in freedom and partnership along the Nile River for a few generations, but then one particular Pharoah, not knowing the history or context of this co-habitation, decided to enslave the people. The line in the Book of Exodus is something like: There arose a king who knew not Joseph. In other words, he didn’t remember the friendship which was the foundation of these new people living on this fertile land. His primary concern was that there were too many of them. The Egyptians were outnumbered. He was afraid they could be overtaken if the Israelites wanted a fight, or became willing to join an invading army. There was no reason to think they would, but it seems to be part of human nature to think in terms of Us and Them, and to exercise power over whomever you see as the outsider. So, thousands of people were enslaved.

Their lives were intentionally made difficult. Pharoah wanted them to have fewer children so their numbers would stay small, but their numbers grew anyway. He wanted to work them so hard they couldn’t possibly rise up against him, but they seemed more determined to resist with each new cruelty. To break their spirit, he ordered the first born son of every family to be killed, which was a horrific and violent response, but the midwives resisted, lying about the births.

There was still a massacre, but some of the children were saved, including Moses, who was sent down the Nile and retrieved by the Pharoah’s own daughter who raised him in wealth as part of the king’s court. It was Moses, after witnessing his family’s cruelty, who took a stand, killed a soldier, and ran into the desert. It was there that he started a new family and then heard the call to free his people.

In this story, there is a good-guy, Moses, backed by G*d, and a bad-guy, Pharoah, whose behavior is sponsored by greed and fear. Moses wants to get the Israelites out of there, to lead them to a place they can live without persecution or oppression. Pharoah wants free labor. He has plans for development and he needs slaves to do it, and he wants a large population to back him in case of invasion. He wants the Israelites to stay, but on his terms. Moses doesn’t see any way forward if his people remain on this land; they need to find somewhere else to settle.

In order to get the people out safely, Moses and G*d team up. Moses tells Pharoah to let the people go, and G*d sends plagues to make Pharoah’s life difficult as long as he keeps these people enslaved. The final plague is the killing of the first born Egyptian sons.

To ensure none of the Jewish children are killed, they are told to put lamb’s blood on their doors so the angel of death will know and pass over them.

This is an important moment. This is the first time the people participate in their own liberation. This is the moment they make the decision to be counted, to join the group, to declare their intentions. This is when they take an action aligning themselves with others, putting their own lives on the line for the good of their people and future generations.

Pharoah relents and lets the people go. Once they flee and are on the way out of town, he changes his mind and sends his soldiers after them. They are unarmed, carrying whatever food, blankets and water they manage, holding their kids’ hands, helping their elders keep up, and an army is fast on their trail aimed at killing enough of them to convince the rest to return to their enslavement. They go as far as they can, but are stopped by a sea. They don’t have boats. It’s much too far to swim. They are caught between death in front of them and death behind them.

Then, as the story tells us, Moses steps into the Red Sea, raises his staff and the sea parts, letting the people go through. When the soldiers arrive, the sea closes up and drowns them.

They were saved.

And the journey begins.

I wonder what this looks like today. We feel the pressure of change, we see a tidal wave of incompetence, of carelessness, even of cruelty, and if it’s coming for any of us, it’s coming for all of us.

There’s a human psychological process that happens in moments of political crisis. First, we don’t believe these things can happen here. Then we think they can happen here, but only to people who deserve it. Then we think it can happen here to people who deserve it and it’s sad because some good people get caught up. Then we see that it can happen to good people, but it won’t happen to us. Then it happens to us.

The it can be a long list of things. Deportation. Unexpected poverty after benefits are cut. Avoidable sickness after medications are no longer accessible. Hunger after food costs skyrocket. Kids who can’t go to schools because funding was cut from necessary programs or schools shut down or universities shrank incoming classes.

And when we see these things coming, one of our instincts is to shift into survival mode. How can I save myself and my family? People begin to hoard, to lie to protect themselves, to stop speaking out, to comply even when they haven’t been told they have to do that.

And in our computer driven world where so much of our lives happen on a screen, isolation is easy. It’s one of the ways we comply in advance. We stay away from each other. We send messages. We watch things from a distance. And the more distant we are, the more detached we are, and the more likely we aren’t going to identify with people who are different. It’s part of survival mode. We pull back from people who are not like us. We are safe because whatever happened to them isn’t going to happen to me – they are different. They are poorer, sicker, browner, gay-er, they are trans, they were born somewhere else, they live in a red state – they are different so I am safe. We create a disembodied artificiality that has isolated us from each other.

So we turn our attention to the wisdom of our ancestors, to the ancient stories that tell us how we have survived in the past and how we will get through whatever we’re facing now. And when we look at the Exodus story, the foundational story for both the Jewish and Christian traditions, we see that we survive when we work together.

G*d didn’t save Moses. Or Moses and his family. Moses was chosen to be a leader of all the people. All the people who declared themselves ready. All the people who wanted freedom over slavery. All the people who were willing to take a huge risk, to place themselves in the group who were going to run, in the group who had no idea what was before them, but were willing to leave everything behind in the hopes that it was better than what was behind them.

They had a choice. You can put the lamb’s blood on your door or not. You can mark yourself, publicly, visibly. Yes, this means the angel of death will pass over you, but will it? What does that mean? Who says? It’s a risk. It’s a declaration. I’m joining my people.

They weren’t even a people yet the way we think of them. We think they were all Jewish, but that comes later. There’s no such thing as Judaism. We might think of them as the 12 Tribes descended from Abraham, but that story was written later. What they all were was enslaved. They were not of the free-class, they were of the slave-class. That’s what they had. Shared desperation. So, they put the blood on their doors, and the next day, after death caused unbearable grief for the Egyptians, they fled. They followed Moses who led them right to the sea and then, miraculously, through it to the other side.

We can get into the science and history of this, but we’re not going to. There were other bodies of water they might have run into, bodies that decrease dramatically and then fill up quickly. It doesn’t matter. The story is that they made a radical, way outside the box, seriously courageous decision to leave, and off they went, into and through a giant, foreboding sea. And their enemies didn’t make it. They were safe.

And they were together.

This isn’t a story of one person’s salvation. It’s the story of an entire people.

And ours isn’t the story of one person’s salvation. It’s the story of our entire people.

I had a conversation a few weeks ago with a member here who is concerned that, in this hyper-individualistic world, if she gets sick and is unable to make decisions for herself, that there isn’t anyone who can do it for her.

I had a conversation a few days ago with a woman who works full time but who is afraid the church she works for can’t give her a raise and she won’t be able to pay her rent. She’s afraid that she will become one of the working homeless.

I had a conversation recently with a man who has been paying into social security for 50 years, but whose check didn’t arrive on the 1st. Without it, he can’t afford to pay any of his bills.

I had a conversation with a mom recently who has stopped feeding her children breakfast to save the money on groceries.

Our artificially divided lives are becoming deadly.

They are also optional.

We are saved, together.

I want to start a Mutual Aid Society. Instead of just preaching every week about how we’re saved together, I want to create the infrastructure in which this can work. We are not saved alone.

Br. Zachary and I will host a series of meetings. The first one will be online, although I’m hoping most of these will happen in person. Tuesday, April 29th at 3pm, we’re going to gather together to talk broadly about mutual aid, but more specifically about the question of health proxies. What happens if you don’t have someone who can represent you in a hospital? Let’s see if we can do this with and for each other. And, let’s think about what other safety nets we need to create together.

If we’re going to figure out how to get across the Red Sea, we’ll need to do it together. The sea will open if we lock ourselves arm in arm, committed to our shared salvation, unconcerned with who has what, who owes what. Then we’ll go, children and elders, musicians, artists, teachers, the poor, the rich, people of all nations and religions and colors, refugees and profits, bound together, each to the other, ensuring no one is left behind.

The land of milk and honey is somewhere before us, currently unseen, but we know it’s there. We know because we are the ones who are going to create it.

I’m closing with an excerpt from Aurora Morales’s poem The Red Sea.

This time we're tied at the ankles.

We cannot cross until we carry each other,

all of us refugees, all of us prophets.

No more taking turns on history's wheel,

trying to collect old debts no-one can pay.

The sea will not open that way.

This time that country

is what we promise each other,

our rage pressed cheek to cheek

until tears flood the space between,

until there are no enemies left,

because this time no one will be left to drown

and all of us must be chosen.

This time it's all of us or none.

Girls Just Wanna Have Fun (What WomEn Want Series)

I’m a Gen Xer which means that the song Girls Just Wanna Have Fun, was something of an anthem for my friends and me when we were kids. Sung by Cindi Lauper, the video made for the new MTV network, features a young woman in Brooklyn explaining to her Baby Boom or maybe Silent Generation parents that times have changed. While her father seeks chastity and her mother is sewing and baking in the kitchen, Cindi is frolicking in the streets, talking on the phone, and packing her bedroom with so many people dancing, they come spilling out. It’s joyful and long after the song was released, girls and young women repeated that line over and over to each other. Girls Just Wanna Have Fun.

A few years ago, in honor of International Women’s Day, I started this annual series, What Women Want. Fun may not be the only thing we want, but it’s definitely part of it. But, if we’re going to have fun, we’re going to need some changes in our cultural, political and economic systems.

Young women are both discounted and dismissed, maybe seen as frivolous rather than ferocious. Frankly, old women suffer a similar fate, being not only discounted and dismissed but also made entire invisible.

Have you seen the new Matlock? Kathy Bates, 76 years old, plays a ruthless lawyer hiding in plain sight, someone no one sees coming because of her gray hair. The assumptions made about middle aged women allow her to fade into the walls, to be consistently under-estimated, even by her closest colleagues.

I know I’m talking about young women today, but I have to tell you this story. The UUA Moderator, meaning, the person leading the UUA board and running our business meetings at General Assembly – a power position without question – was doing a little internal growth work. She wanted to set herself up to be rejected, to become practiced in the art of being turned away. She was preparing, actually, for some major fundraising work. So she started knocking on people’s doors, and without explanation, asked them if she could come in, walk through their houses and see their backyards. Obviously, no one would let a stranger do that, so she was sure to get plenty of experience in rejection and would push through and knock on another door. But, that’s not what happened. Also a gray haired woman in her 70s, Rev. Meg was invited in over and over again. Making an unreasonable request to strangers in their homes, she found that at her age, she was deemed irrelevant. Society didn’t see her as a threat. She concluded that they didn’t see her at all, and she could easily walk right into their homes and to their backyards often unaccompanied.

Here's something most women can attest to. The age of invisibility comes almost immediately after the age of immaturity. Society deems women too young to be competent to be taken seriously, too young to be successful, too young to be professional until we’re about 40 years old. At that point we’re seen and heard, but that has a shelf life of about 5 years, because by 45, we have become too old. While men are in their prime in their 30s, 40s, 50s, and often even 60s, women can’t get hired, can’t get published, can’t be heard in the public square, because we’re no longer relevant after peak child-bearing years.

And since we’re dismissed as silly little girls during peak child-bearing years, those of us who identify as female are culturally marginalized most of our lives by all genders. And yet, women, and girls, are ferocious. Dismiss us as your peril.

At the age of 16, Greta Thunberg had already launched a global climate movement powered by teenagers. Furious that the adults were distracted by profit and convenience, or paralyzed by political expediency and dreams of personal wealth, Greta harnessed the anger of young people who took to the streets in the hundreds of thousands in multiple nations repeatedly. Impossible to ignore, she was invited to address the United Nations. Her speech, written and delivered entirely by her, standing not quite 5 feet in the halls of power, Greta admonished the leaders of the international order saying:

“I don’t want your hope. I don’t want you to be hopeful. I want you to panic. I want you to feel the fear I feel every day. And then I want you to act. I want you to act like your house is on fire because it is.”

Time Magazine’s 2019 Person of the Year, winner of the prestigious Right Livelihood Award, and named Amnesty International’s Ambassador of Conscience, at 16 Greta was also listed by Forbes Magazine as one of the most powerful women in the world.

Girls just wanna have fun.

That part is true. We want to relax on the beach or go on a hike or read a good book by a fire and maybe talk with our girlfriends about it over dinner. We don’t want to learn that we’re too young or too old or that what we want or need is dismissed because of our gender.

We can imagine a new world, a better world, an equitable world, and given the right set of circumstances, regardless of how seriously modern society takes us, we are going to do our best to realize our vision, a place where girls and women have what they need, and have time for fun to boot.

We can all imagine a better world, visions that propel us forward, but there’s also a drawback to indulging those daydreams. When humans imagine something better, we can become discontented with what we actually have. It’s the risk of a sermon like this one. If I want you all to feel great, I shouldn’t really talk about what’s not right, because you might start feeling unsatisfied, uncomfortable, or unhappy with the current situation. If I want you to be delighted this afternoon, it’s safer for me to not even talk about the dream of what’s possible. But, we’ll never get to where we want to go if we don’t name the things that aren’t working.

Nietzsche tells us that the primary way humans manage our discontent is to feel guilty about wanting things to be better. We judge ourselves and each other for not loving our current situations or for wanting more. It’s one of the reasons we dismiss young women as being frivolous. We are judging them both for enjoying their lives and for expecting the world to help them create something better.

Possibly as a result of our response to discontent, we judge and attempt control over key parts of the human experience, villainizing sex, our will for power, and our capacity for joy, allowing only a limited number of socially acceptable ways for us to indulge these human experiences. From that judgmental stance, we have created a culture of hall monitors, people watching and determining whether or not we’re playing within bounds. There is a push for conformity in every human culture and how we play, how we enjoy ourselves, how we find fun, is often at the center what we want to control.

Throughout history we see people pushing the boundaries – whatever they are. Speakeasys were very popular when drinking was illegal. Teenagers have been sneaking cigarettes since an age limit was put on them. Every generation finds a way to dance closer to each other than our parents did while sex clubs and prostitution have been with us from the beginning of civilization. We want fun, we want more, we push to see what we can get away with, and we judge and patrol each other in every country in every generation.

Historically, girls have been the most policed. We keep our girls in very small boxes, doing our best to control them, to keep them in line. The consequences of this can be dire, but I actually think this sexist system, reaching across cultures and through time, originated with the consent of women. We understood our power and agreed to what would have started as legitimate protection. This social construct has reached its limits, but some feminist philosophers and sociologists have suggested that women were full partners in the creation of our patriarchal systems, limiting options for girls to ensure the perpetuation of the race. We have always understood the value of the uterus for human survival. Dr. Michael Karson wrote in Psychology Today (December 22, 2022) that “the sensible evolutionary basis for this focus on girls is that sperm is cheap, and uterus access is scarce, so much of what passes for politics involves an argument about who controls the uterus.” The ability to propagate the species is powerful, and politics is often about gaining, managing or limiting power.

I want to say this clearly: While many of us suffer from social limitations, we are also the ones creating them. We are both the prisoners and the guards.

So girls might want to have fun, but society has other priorities. Even over time as population has exploded, we’ve kept girls in small boxes, and now, as population declines, we are again raising alarms about girls and the freedoms they seem to be demanding because if girls are free, we lose control.

When Malala was a child in the mountains of Pakistan, she wanted to dream her future the way her brothers could. Boys could become what they wanted, but girls had far fewer opportunities, and those opportunities all came at the end of a solid education, so she committed herself to going to school. When the Taliban moved into Pakistan and tried to close the schools for girls, locals defiantly kept them open. At 15, Malala was interviewed as a local girl who was still going to school, now 4 years after the ban on education for girls. In this seemingly irrelevant blog, she talked about her hopes for herself as a result of her schooling.

The Taliban, not able to kill this dream of an education and not populous enough to close every school, they decided to make an example of a few girls, creating terror for all the families in the region. Malala was targeted as an activist because of that blog, and was shot in the head while riding home on a school bus.

She survived after massive interventions and has become the voice for girls’ education the world over. Instead of silencing her, they gave her an amplifier and a global stage on which she earned a Nobel Peace Prize at the age of 17.

Police our bodies, judge our behavior, gun us down if you can’t control us. In this country, reproductive rights are under attack, a nearly national attempt at removing the right to self-determination from women and girls. And with that outsized value placed on people of child-bearing age, the Vice President of the United States declared post-menopausal women entirely unnecessary as a group, with one saving grace- they can help care for grandchildren.

It's no wonder Cindi Lauper is skipping in the streets, staying out ‘til dawn, assuring her father she loves him, but she and all her friends really just need to have some fun.

We all do. Because we are the victims and the perpetrators. We have built this system and we are the ones who can break it down – starting by having some fun, and letting others have their fun. We can do it by seeing each other, by respecting people regardless of gender or age. People are snippy right now. I’ve seen it, you’ve seen it. Short tempered, demanding, unreasonable, self-righteous. Maybe for Lent, we let it go. We stop monitoring other people, stop requiring others to serve us, stop speaking when we should be listening. For Lent this year, maybe we bring kindness and a generosity of spirit to our encounters as part of our spiritual practice.

And when we see girls dancing in the streets or skipping through the neighborhood, we can just let them, and ourselves, have a little fun.

Au Chocolate A Celebration of the Delicious

When I was a kid, there was an ad on TV with a woman facing all kinds of life stresses and it ended with her in a bathtub filled with bubbles, her head back, eyes closed, looking blissful, while the narrator said, “Calgon, take me away!” I didn’t know then – nor am I entirely sure now – what Calgon was, and the idea of a bath being something indulgent made no sense to me at all, but the line has been embedded in my head my entire life.

I’d like to think of this service as our Calgon moment. Inside a life of profound stress, maybe even grief, this is our hour of bliss, our moment for indulgence, or at least of rest.

Things are looking bleak. Our city mayor manipulated his way out of accountability by agreeing to support politicized cruelty. The executive branch of the government is dismantling the structure of the nation as laid out in the constitution. The Department of Education is being slashed within an inch of its life endangering millions of children as well as our collective future. Food and medicine created to serve the poorest of the poor has been diverted and left to rot by the richest man in the world while millions of our fellow Americans cheer. Every regulatory agency has been hollowed out to ensure the end of oversight or consequence for the billionaire class. Our phones beep and howl constantly bringing us the latest in bad news, the next step in the dismantling of our democracy, the new face of incompetence being put in charge of some massive agency that does critical work this person knows nothing about. And the mid-February cold doesn’t help. Those with kids at home are also stuck without school this week adding to the stress. People are getting viruses, major and minor, all over the place, coughing and sneezing and adding to the “under the weather” “not up to the task” “I can’t do any more than sit on my couch” feeling that seems to have taken hold.

I don’t know about you, but I’m not willing to just put my head down and hope my loved ones and I survive, watching rom-coms and reading mystery novels. But, with that said, I’m also not willing to devote my life to doing nothing but fight, to resist, to live like a punching bag getting slammed from every angle over and over until I’m bruised and broken.

If these are our only two options, the future we’re building will either be defined by profound disengagement or broken bodies and spirits. But, the future we want to build is bigger than that, more dynamic, more beautiful, more fulfilling. And that future is built on joy.

The method is the message. How we respond to the current crisis will frame how we design the world we’re fighting for. So, we need to bring everything we have – our bravery, our restfulness, our playfulness, our balance and ability to engage all of it. We can’t allow our ongoing state of shock to ossify, turning us into screaming banshees permanently fixed in a state of alarm.

The new world requires moments of soft, of pleasure, of entertaining, of delicious. It requires us to live lives filled with joy, not only because that’s how we recharge, but also because we are dreaming a world that is magnificent and that world is filled with wonderful.

We pray. We dance. We mourn. We protest. We eat chocolate. It is a full life. Complete. Balanced.

I’ve told you the story of Emma Goldman before; she’s been a guide for me for many years, so here it is again, this time with a caveat and a warning.

Emma Goldman was an anarchist, which for her and the left-wing activists of the early part of the 20th century, was about liberation. There were rules, especially for women, that bound them into very small lives. They were fighting for the vote, but also for an end to the conventions that dictated who they were allowed to be. One day, Emma received a letter from a man after her attendance at a party had been noted by some others in the women’s rights movement. The letter told her that in a time of such distress, it was unseemly for her to be seen dancing. He went on to note that her frivolity would hurt the cause and that her behavior was undignified. There were, after all, very serious matters at stake, and if they were going to be successful, they needed to reflect the urgency, especially in public. In her response she said, (I’m quoting from her memoir) “I did not believe that a cause which stood for such a beautiful ideal…for release and freedom from convention and prejudice, should demand the denial of life and joy.” She then went on with a version of the now famous line, “If I can’t dance, I don’t want to be part of your revolution.”

The revolution isn’t separate from the joy. The revolution – the dramatic upheaval of the conventions that have brought us to the brink of destruction – the revolution has to include dancing.

But, I have an addendum which has become critical in my understanding of the work of the activist.

Rev. John Haynes Holmes wrote about Emma Goldman in his autobiography. He admired her work and was very excited to meet this larger than life character. She was known to be a bold and charismatic speaker, so he invited her to Community Church. The morning before she was to speak, Rev. Holmes and a friend of his went to Grand Central Station to meet her train. Expecting to be captivated, he described her like this: “Such storms had swept over that face, so weather-beaten was it in every line and feature, so unutterably sad and stern, so weary and forlorn, that one wondered if this countenance had ever been softened by a smile or graced by love... Emma had fought in so many battles, faced such dangers and endured such ills, been so unfairly and cruelly treated…known such suffering in body and mind, that she had no time to give to those gentler and serener aspects of the soul.”

He goes on to say she was exceedingly nervous, timid, and suspicious. She apparently blew the roof off the place anyway, but he was taken aback by her disposition, one that had been permanently altered by the abuse she had taken in the fight she so willingly entered.

I want to go back to the other Emma Goldman! The one who didn’t want to be part of a revolution that didn’t include dancing. And, I think we can. I think the older woman is telling us the same story. If we forget to dance, if we forget indulgence and sparkle, we become nothing more than exhausted soldiers at the end of a battle whose lives are limited to the fight, never again to live with unfettered joy, regardless of whether we win or lose.

That’s not for us. We are going to dance. And sing. And sleep. And eat. Because, without the joy, what’s the point? What are we trying to save if all we have is empty, desolate, gloomy shells of a life? We need delight.

Our lives are full. We pray. We cry. We protest. We organize. And we indulge ourselves in the things our bodies and our minds love.

I want to make sure I’m being clear. This isn’t about doing one thing so we have energy for the other. Our activism and our restfulness, our fight for justice and our drinking hot chocolate, our chanting in the streets and our singing in the shower, are connected. It’s not about needing one to continue the other. What I’m saying is that these things are the same. We are building a new world while engaging all of it. Eating chocolate, taking baths, calling senators, it’s all part of one full life, one engaged and awake life, one balanced, beautiful life. We aren’t betraying one with the other. It’s interconnected, interwoven, one whole cloth that is us in our fullness.

There is no “here” and “there” or “this” and “that”. It’s all one thing, one place, one life - Ours -and we’re living it as whole beings. The method is the message. So, if we want to build a world of radical inclusion, we have to live into that vision now. If we want systems of accountability, and communities that prioritize care for the whole, if we want everyone to be included, and justice to be the law of the land, we have to normalize that with our words and actions. If we want love at the center of everything, we have to put it there now.

Joy is the point. It’s not a by-product. It’s not an aside, a way to rest to go back to fight. The pleasure, the fun, the love that makes our days possible – that’s the point. That’s what we’re doing here. We’re creating a world of THAT. A place everyone has that. A place everyone can safely play and dance and read romance novels.

And that’s why I brought chocolate. And strawberries. Things of indulgence. Life is sweet. It’s smooth and soft and yummy. And, it’s shared.

Chocolate communion may not be considered a holy act in some religious traditions, but it is here. Communion literally means “with together”. Our shared faith is grounded in the idea of community, of god being known within and between us. The sharing of food, of flowers, of water, is how we express in concrete terms the sacred nature of our relationships. We don’t have to know each other to share the objects of joy.

Unlike cornbread communion, you don’t have to wait. Come up. Take chocolate or strawberries or chocolate covered strawberries. There are also dates and the scattered hearts are nut free, the X ones are vegan, as is the chocolate on the strawberries. Come, take. Eat. Indulge. Enjoy. Life is sweet and yummy and altogether delightful. Dig in.

We Can Still Dream

It might seem like a cruel irony that a racist, fascist administration be instituted on the same day we celebrate the life and work of one of our nation’s greatest redeemers, the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. It might feel like, out of respect for this proud history of liberation that the inauguration should be moved to another day. But, I think it’s exactly as it should be. We are today confronted with the depth and breadth of who we were, who we are, and have before us two distinct visions for who we could be.

When Hitler’s administration set out to design laws excluding Jews from German society, out-casting them, stripping them of the rights of citizens, and later laying out the justification for mass deportation and ultimately genocide, they used the American Jim Crow laws as their blueprint. In fact, there were ways the American laws were even harsher than those of the Third Reich. Here’s an example- Until 1967, white and Black people in the US weren’t allowed to marry. To determine race, we adopted the “Not One Drop” rule, stating that if you had any Black ancestry at all, you were legally Black and could not marry a white person. Germany, on the other hand, had a “3 of 4 grandparent” rule, allowing someone to avoid being classified as Jewish if two of their grandparents were not. The Nazi Party was, it turns out, more inclusive in some ways than the American South.

When Rev. King started his public fight for American liberation, he was facing a profoundly entrenched country of racial politics and violence that started the moment Europeans landed on this continent and persisted over centuries, even in the face of other sweeping and radical social, political and economic changes. His primary constituency was poor, Black, and often uneducated. Segregation ensured they had little access to university, to well-paying jobs, or to people with influence in the nation’s political or social systems. He was trying to organize people who were tired, who had little disposable income, even less time, and were often devoid of hope.

It is to those people who fought and won, those who followed a leader whose love for this nation, his people, and his opponents was unwavering, that we look for our inspiration at the precise moment we truly need it. As this reactionary political party takes their seat on the American throne, filling American halls of power with lawlessness, racism, sexism, and arrogance, we can cower and hide, or we can do as those before us have done and fight with all the love in our hearts.

The MAGA movement betrays it’s own racist fantasies when it claims the slogan Make America Great Again, clearly waxing nostalgic for those days when white power was dominant and ensconced in a calcified patriarchy. Longing for our Leave It To Beaver past when everyone knew their place and a quiet Christian conservatism was a mist that rested over all the land, the people moving into the circles of American social and political power this weekend are hoping to unravel so much of our progress. Rather than buying into the liberal vision of equality and a move toward social and economic equity, they are solidifying an underclass designed to support and serve the wealthy or disappear entirely.

I don’t know about you, but it can make me feel sick. Completely ill, like if I pay too much attention to what’s happening to our beloved nation, I might vomit. One response is to hide. Listen to James Patterson audiobooks. Read Vogue. Eat chocolate. Climb into bed and wait for it to end.

Another response is to be furious. Justifiably angry. To rage at the machine. To take to social media and rant for anyone who’ll listen. To hate that face, that voice, to hate everyone who loves what’s happening, who’s supporting it, who voted for it, or even to hate anyone who didn’t vote against it. We can spew our self-righteous rage for the next 4 years, at the end of which we’ll be right, but alone, and no better for any of it.

We can also play mediator. Consider all sides. Find the middle ground. Learn to make room. Be moderate, temperate, even-handed. Adult? Except that serves to normalize things to which we should not become adjusted, things we should find abhorrent. And letting go of our moral center for the sake of peace doesn’t preserve either our nation or our souls.

In 1966, Rev. King was the Ware Lecturer at our own General Assembly where he told us:

…There are some things in our nation and in our world to which I'm proud to be maladjusted. And I call upon you to be maladjusted and all people of good will to be maladjusted to these things until the good society is realized. I never intend to adjust myself to segregation and discrimination. I never intend to become adjusted to religious bigotry. I never intend to adjust myself to economic conditions that will take necessities from the many to give luxuries to the few, and leave millions of people perishing on a lonely island of poverty in the midst of a vast ocean of prosperity.”

Hide, rage, adjust.

Or, we can choose the path of Love.

Love is our Fourth Way. Love is the call of the ancestors, the call from the generations who started this fight, who sustained this fight, who are charging us to continue this fight, firmly on their shoulders, standing steady on the Path of Love.

Having fallen deeply in love and having stayed in love for more than 30 years, I can tell you without doubt that real love isn’t blind. Love sees everything. It sees the quirks and imperfections. It’s not that lovers can’t see, but that they see beauty in it all, they see the flaws and love them. They see the weak spots and love them into strength.

The lesson from the past that we can learn if we are willing, is the lesson of radical, powerful, profoundly awake, and fiercely committed Love. The Love required, the Love that breaks down concrete walls to let justice flow like a river, is not soft or gentle or yielding or in any way in denial about what’s real.

Rev. King told us over and over again that Love is the only path to authentic, societal transformation. He said:

“Now, I’m not talking about a sentimental, shallow kind of love. (Go ahead) I’m not talking about eros, which is a sort of aesthetic, romantic love. I’m not even talking about philia, which is a sort of intimate affection between personal friends. But I'm talking about agape. (Yes sir) I'm talking about the love of God in the hearts of men. (Yes) I’m talking about a type of love which will cause you to love the person who does the evil deed while hating the deed that the person does. (Go ahead) We've got to love. (Oh yes)”

We’ve got to Love.

And I can’t think of a more difficult charge. I can’t imagine, in the face of the hate, in the face of the ignorance, in the face of the intentional dismantling of the domestic and international liberal order we’ve fought and died for, that I can enter this next stage with Love in my heart.

But Love is the only legitimate path. Love is the only path of our faith. Love is the only path of our history. Love is the only path that leads to a joyful future.

And if I think this is hard, I need to get my history straight because Americans have been fighting for this vision that all people are created equal, and should have equal access to Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness, since our inception. Slavery. Christian Nationalism. Irish Need Not Apply. Red Lining. Anti-Semitism. No Right to Vote. No Voice in Court. Rape. Imprisonment. Homelessness. Child Labor. Police Violence. It’s been centuries of oppression and centuries of Love Fighting Back.

And now it’s our turn.

Yes, we can hide. We can rage. We can adjust.

But not if we want to win. Not if we are committed to inclusion. To equity. To justice.

We can get by. We can be self-righteous. We can be gentle and yielding.

Or we can play our part. Resisting. Speaking Truth. Loving in spite of them and in spite of ourselves.

The Path of Love is calling us to speak Truth. To call out bigotry. To call out racism. To defend ourselves and our nation against the autocracy this new administration is trying to install. To protect the marginalized. To take seriously the power of our pocketbooks in claiming our dissatisfaction. To avoid throwing up our hands at the enormity of it all and instead to be careful, intentional, mindful of all the places we have power.

To join and reengage communities of good will, without purity tests, but in the spirit of communion, of shared resistance, of joyful friendship and companionship on what would otherwise be a lonely road. To befriend people and institutions that are also centered in Love, also willing to defend all we can be, in partnership. This is the path of Love that leads us to our Becoming.

Let’s give the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King the last word as our wise guide on this journey:

“Go out with that faith today-that the universe is on our side in the struggle. (Sure is, Yes) Stand up for justice. (Yes) Sometimes it gets hard, but it is always difficult to get out of Egypt, for the Red Sea always stands before you with discouraging dimensions. (Yes) And even after you've crossed the Red Sea, you have to move through a wilderness with prodigious hilltops of evil (Yes) and gigantic mountains of opposition. (Yes) But I say to you this afternoon: Keep moving. (Go on ahead) Let nothing slow you up. (Go on ahead) Move on with dignity and honor and respectability. (Yes) I realize that it will cause restless nights sometimes. It might cause losing a job; it will cause suffering and sacrifice. (That's right) It might even cause physical death for some. But if physical death is the price that some must pay (Yes sir) to free their children from a permanent life of psychological death (Yes, sir), then nothing can be more Christian. (Yes sir) Keep going today. (Yes sir) Keep moving amid every obstacle. (Yes sir) Keep moving amid every mountain of opposition. (Yes, sir, Yeah) If you will do that with dignity (Say it), when the history books are written in the future, the historians will have to look back and say, "There lived a great people. (Yes sir, Yes) … a people which stood up with dignity and honor and saved Western civilization in her darkest hour (Yes); a people that gave new integrity and a new dimension of love to our civilization." (Yeah, Look out) When that happens, "the morning stars will sing together, (Yes, sir) and the [people] will shout for joy."

Hush: A Study of Silence

Today is my first day back from a short vacation. I took this last week off to give myself a break after the holiday. I love the Christmas season from Thanksgiving through New Year’s. The lights, the music, the parties. There’s A Lot, and I’m partial to all of it. Afterwards, my introvert self needs a little time to hibernate.

In the world of spirituality studies, there are two distinct practices that always come to mind when we make this transition from December to January. The Katophatic path, also called the Via Positiva and the Apophatic path, also called the Via Negativa.

The Katophatic path, the path of the Positive, is the one that has much. It begins with descriptions of God, defining and explaining the Divine, talking about all the ways God is good and powerful and present. The Katophatic path might have music and elaborate ritual, incense and readings. There are always a lot of words both sung and spoken often with explanations and exposition and symbols and metaphors packed into sermons that say interesting things, offering insight and ideas and food for brains to chew on. The Via Positiva. It’s what I call the spiritual path of The Stuff.

Apophatic spirituality or the Via Negativa, is the opposite. It’s the spiritual path of emptiness. Nothing. Silence. God is in the void. Indescribable. A whisper. The Quakers share an apophatic spiritual practice when they join together in silence on Sundays. Those who Sit as a Zen practice are also on an apophatic path. Sitting. Being. Listening. It’s a spirituality of desolation, calling us into the barren wilderness where we can rest un-assaulted.

Christmas feels like the ultimate time for kataphatic spirituality. There is So. Much. I don’t even mean Christmas as a day, but as a season, within which we also celebrate Hannukah, Kwanza, Winter Solstice, and which gets kicked off by Thanksgiving. Our shared national story and spiritual culture includes the constant playing of music, gathering of people, the added decorating found in every public and most private spaces. There are concerts and weekend trips and family. It’s a time to see people we haven’t seen, send and receive cards and year-end letters, to bake and visit neighbors. There are often special clothes to wear, traditions to abide, and gifts to dream and purchase and give. It’s a lot of stuff.

Then comes January, the time we shift into an apophatic pattern of quiet. Ice and cold conspire to keep us still, to move us indoors. The world gets smaller as outside space is less welcoming. Our loftiest goals are met with heavy sweaters, hot tea, and a good book.

The apophatic path feels natural in winter. It’s a gift of Earth. It’s the breath we take between the frolic of the holiday season and the new growth of the springtime. It’s an opportunity to renew our spirits through an emptying. The trees lose their leaves, the animals burrow in and go to sleep, and we, too, set ourselves for a time of semi-hibernation.

The silence feels right. It feels like the appropriate response to the world, the natural consequence of the holiday season.

Silence isn’t an absence. It’s not just that there are fewer words. Silence is healing, curative, restorative. It’s the starting point for us to recover our power.

Silence is the tool that brings us back from fragmentation into wholeness. So many of us live lives of division, running from one thing to the next, waiting for moments just to sit down and when we do, it’s often in front of a screen or while waiting for whatever’s next, possibly someone who’s late who’s also living a life of fragmentation. There’s an accepted state of constant semi-attention to the sound of voices, music, traffic, the generalized noise of what goes on all the time around us or the tidal wave of words that crash on our computer screens with their attachments and links to more words and posts and updates. This keeps us immersed in a flood of racket and words, a diffuse medium in which our consciousness is half-diluted: we are not quite “thinking,” not entirely responding. We are not fully present and not entirely absent; not fully withdrawn yet not completely available, leading us all into a state of semi-consciousness as we make our way through busy days. Silence is the healing balm that brings us back to ourselves and into right relationship with the world around us.

Silence is the beginning of a conversation, the place from which truth can be formed. Silence is not an absence, not a hole to be filled; it is the necessary medium for clarity. And the truth silence brings is not intellectual; it’s a truth we know in our bodies, one that rests away from our brains wordlessly and ethereally. It’s a truth that comes from a deep place, one that can only be accessed after sinking into the quiet where the boundaries of self soften.

One of the places there are too many words is social media, a venue driven almost entirely by language. Because the national conversation is happening on Facebook, Bluesky, Instagram, and Threads, they can be agenda of social change, terrifically effective places for community organizing and shifting moral norms, so, I try to be an active and visible presence. Most of the year, I engage a potential audience of more than two thousand people who follow me in a variety of conversations and strategies to shape the world in our vision of love. And, every January and July, I sign off. For two months each year, I silence the voices. I shut out those thousands of people to give silence more space in my life. I disconnect, disengage, disentangle myself for a little while from the world so that I can reconnect less with the masses and more with myself.

For those of you very connected on social media, I recommend this pattern. It is restorative. A full month living my life focused only on what’s in front of me and not on an imaginary Greek Chorus who might or might not like the pictures I post or my random thoughts for the day. Quieting the many voices around me gives room to the few voices. My voice. The voice of the trees. The divine voice. The voice of the wind. I need the quiet so I can hear.

My first real step into pastoral ministry happened when I knew, and accepted without judgement, that I had nothing to say. My training took place largely with runaway or what we called throwaway teens here in the city. That training was a lot about what to say, how to help move someone from crisis to a place where they can think clearly. How to help them process trauma enough to make a good next step. My real training happened, though, when I was first confronted by a woman howling in her pain, in her grief, a woman so overcome with loss that all she could do was kneel and beg god to make this nightmare go away. I knew then that words were meaningless. There is nothing to say. Real pastoral care begins with knowing there are no words.

Yet, it’s the reason so many people don’t show up when someone else is in pain. I hear it all the time. Someone didn’t call, didn’t visit, didn’t attend a funeral because they didn’t know what to say.

Speaking isn’t always the way we heal. Words are limiting and can trivialize those experiences that are too deep for language. Being present to someone else’s suffering without having to speak is true companionship. Tolerating the not curing, not knowing, not healing requires some humility, an acceptance that we are small in the face of anguish. But the failure of language is not all we have to offer.

Jewish scripture tells us the story of Job, a man who lost everything, whose grief was unbearable. Chapter 2, verses 11-13 read: When Job’s three friends heard about all the troubles that had come upon him, they set out from their homes and met together by agreement to go and sympathize with him and comfort him. When they saw him from a distance, they could hardly recognize him; they began to weep aloud and they tore their robes and sprinkled their heads. Then they sat on the ground with him for 7 days and 7 nights. No one said a word to him because they saw how great his suffering was.

They sat on the ground for 7 days and no one spoke a word.

Silence itself is the healing balm.

I’m talking about silence as a powerful spiritual tool. I’m also aware that silence can be a powerful tool of oppression. Silencing is not a gift nor is it healing. When you are silenced by political or social moors, when your voice can’t be heard, when your experience isn’t recognized, when you’ve been erased by dominant culture, you’ve been silenced. When our government removes mention of LGBTQ protections from anti-discrimination guidelines, millions of people are silenced. When the talking heads on TV giving their opinions about the day’s events are all white, millions of people are erased. When subways are designed so only people with working legs can use them, millions of people are disappeared. When previously incarcerated people aren’t given a vote, millions of people are muted. When bathrooms are labeled for men or women, millions of people are forgotten. When I list ways people are marginalized in my sermons, but I forget the way you live differently in the world, you are also silenced.

Silence can be a wrench closing the opening where the steam can get out, used by people in power to keep the hissing noise down. It can become a weapon of dominance, wielded to ensure submission and irrelevance. Language is used in courtrooms and welfare offices and at child protection hearings to ensure the silence and continued existence of an underclass.

And silence can become the resistance, a non-participation in the language of oppression. A response to subjugation. A liberation rather than an accommodation. Sometimes we use silence because it’s the only response to a world of too many words, of violent words, of threatening and destructive words. Silence can be self-determination. When systems use language to oppress, our non-participation can utilize silence as an expression of sovereignty.

But, mostly, I’m talking about silence as a spiritual tool, the silence that brings us back to ourselves, back to the Source of our being, the single place where we are most authentically who we are. There’s a voice that has to be heard without language. It’s the healing silence we experience when we first walk in our doors after a busy day, when we take that first deep breath; or that magical silence after a hymn of shared faith is over, when the last word was sung, the final note played; or the meditative silence of standing in a field while it snows.

Wisdom is born in silence, in our ability to be present without ego-consciousness.

Faith is fostered in silence, by the willingness not to explain it all.

Relationships are developed in silence, on our ability to be present without a cure.

Community is encouraged by silence, by sharing the common experience of allowing the boundaries of self to soften.

Learning happens in silence when we accept that there might not be an answer.

Clarity is found in silence, as a gift given in gratitude.

We’ll close as we opened, with the words of the Irish poet: “We can make our minds so like still water that beings gather about us that they may see, it may be, their own images, and so live for a moment with a clearer, perhaps even with a fiercer life because of our quiet.”

The Fantastical Life of the Child

It’s a cozy Christmas Eve at the Stahlbaum’s house which is decorated with Christmas ornaments, wreaths, stockings, mistletoe and in the center of it all, a majestic Christmas tree. As the family prepares for their annual Christmas party, their children, Fritz and Clara, wait anxiously. When the guests appear, the party picks up with dancing and celebration. The toymaker arrives with an air of mystery and gives presents to the children.

Fritz is given a beautiful drum, but Clara is given the best gift of all, the Nutcracker. Fritz grows jealous, snatches the Nutcracker from Clara and plays a game of toss with the other boys. It isn't long until the Nutcracker breaks. Clara is upset, but the toy is fixed and a guest makes a small bed under the Christmas tree for her injured Nutcracker.

The party ends. As Clara’s family retires to bed, she checks on her toy one last time and falls asleep under the Christmas tree with the Nutcracker in her arms.

At the stroke of midnight Clara wakes up to a frightening scene. The house, the tree and the toys seem to be getting larger. Out of nowhere large mice dressed in army uniforms, led by the Mouse King, begin to circle the room while the toys and Christmas tree come to life. Clara’s Nutcracker groups the soldier toys into battle formation and fights the mouse army. The Mouse King traps the Nutcracker in the corner, and the Nutcracker can’t overcome the Mouse King’s strength. Clara makes a desperate move to save her Nutcracker by hitting the Mouse King in the head with her shoe. The Nutcracker takes advantage of the stunned Mouse King and claims victory. The mice army carries away their King.

Clara and the Nutcracker fall back into the bed as angels hover over their heads. The bed turns into a magical floating sleigh. The Nutcracker is transformed into a human prince. He gets on and he and Clara sleigh through a snowy forest where the snowflakes turn into dancing maidens.

After their magical journey through the snow forest, they come to the Land of Sweets. Clara can’t believe her eyes; ladyfinger mountains topped with whipped cream, sweetly glazed flowers and buttercream frosting everywhere she looks. Upon their arrival, they are greeted by the Sugar Plum Fairy. As they reenact the night’s events, the Sugar Plum Fairy becomes impressed with Clara’s bravery and the Nutcracker’s heroism. In their honor, the Sugar Plum Fairy takes them inside the Candy Castle and throws a lavish festival. They are treated like royalty and presented with every imaginable dessert. And then, the dancing begins.

Hot coco dances to trumpets and castanets. A giant gingerbread house, opens her skirt and eight little gingerbread children circle around her. Flowers enter to the tune of the harp dancing in mesmerizing patterns as a single Dewdrop floats above them. The Sugar Plum Fairy then enters the room, lighter than air to complete the evening. Everyone bids Clara and the Nutcracker Prince farewell as she wishes the adventure would never end. He tells her it won’t, as long as she has eyes to see it. Clara wakes up the next morning under the Christmas tree with her Nutcracker still in her arms.

The Nutcracker Suite is a fantasy. A famous fantasy. A fantasy depicted as if from the mind of a child, but written by an adult and every year at this time, thousands of us revisit it. Large dance companies report as much as 40% of their income each year is generated from this story alone. Interpreted in hundreds of ways in countless venues, it’s a perfect window into the charm of the Christmas season. It’s about children who enter a fantastical world with dancing and gifts and magic, accompanied by music that removes us from the ordinary and re-places us in the extraordinary, a world people around the globe can and do return to year after year.

Fantasy is why Christmas is so popular as a holiday. The Christmas season has many iconic stories, each pointing to something magical, something outside the ordinary. In It’s a Wonderful Life, a man is allowed to experience an alternative time line in which he was never born, and discovers that he is necessary in the world, that his work has been transformative for an entire town. We’re entranced in A Miracle on 34th Street when a single mother, her utilitarian daughter and a lawyer take in a man who claims to be Santa. The relationship turns into a visitation worthy of Scripture as this stranger enchants them, opening them to the possibility of a truth greater than what we can see. In Dickens’ A Christmas Carol, Ebenezer Scrooge is visited by a ghost and three spirits who fly him through time and space giving him a chance to reflect on who he was, who he has become and the direction his life is headed, all of which inspire him to recommit to his earlier values becoming the best version of himself.

And, of course, at the center of the Christmas season is the story of Santa Claus, that jolly old man who delivers gifts to every child on the planet over the course of one night with the aid of flying reindeer, a story told famously in the early 19th century classic ‘Twas the Night Before Christmas and retold again and again in millions of households each December. ‘Tis the season for a little magic.

Even the Birth of Jesus story has a fantastical element to it. A single woman impregnated by god delivers a baby in a barn and three wise men follow the north star to bring gifts for this light brought into the world. An event that happened in the spring is celebrated in the dark of winter because that’s the setting for a dream. I’d like to suggest it’s the magic of this story that has sparked so many other fantastical stories, each one equally delightful and enchanting.

I grew up in an inter-faith home. My Jewish mother got cranky every year when we’d put up the Christmas tree and she stayed in the kitchen or would get in our way with a broom or vacuum trying to keep the living room neat while we’d tear through boxes of ornaments or toss tinsel on the tree and the each other. As a very little kid, I didn’t notice her bad mood because my father’s joy was too bright to be dimmed by her anxiety. As a teenager, though, I really tuned into her dissatisfaction on what was otherwise a joyous family tradition of tree trimming. (I’m sure I greeted her with a few “Come on mom, you’re ruining everything” statements.) But as an adult, I discovered something deeper. My mother loved Christmas. She was annoyed at herself for enjoying it so much, for humming those carols to herself while hiding away in the kitchen. And then I noticed, she wasn’t hiding as much as she was making us snacks to share while we worked and dinner for the family afterwards. In fact, once my sister and I started our own families, my father suggested they don’t need to do a big tree every year and it was my mother who insisted it wasn’t Christmas without it. And after he was too sick to help, she got out that old tree and decorated it herself.

My Jewish mother taught me that Christmas isn’t about being Christian. It’s about embracing a life of fantasy for just a few weeks. Those folks who are imploring us to put Christ back in Christmas might be onto something when it comes to commercialism and the increased materialism being encouraged, but I think they’ve missed what’s really going on here. They’ve missed the magic this season inspires. Rather than focusing on one story, this season is about embracing great hope, about living as if anything is possible. Every year we wish each other a happy season, we sing Joy to the World and we tell stories of a jolly man who will deliver gifts and good cheer the world over. Our generosity buttons are pushed and we buy toys for tots and food for banks and cover trees in mittens. We live as if the world could be a marvelous, safe, magical place where peace on earth is a real possibility just a step or two away. And we revisit this fantasy every year.

I have a son at home. As a younger child, like other children, he didn’t know the difference between fantasy and reality at Christmas or any other time. At 3 or 4, my son told me stories every morning on the way to school, shifting between things that happened and things he’s imagining. He’d begin with the mundane and move into something other-worldly. We have a lot of birthdays in my family in December and I distinctly remember him at about that age talking about the birthday dinner we had for grandma the night before. He described it in detail, but he added a friendly dragon who came to visit. A dragon who, as it happens, could breathe fire, making hot tea an easy choice with our birthday cake. He also loved when he found bugs in the house. Millepedes he named Mille, recounting how they’d become great friends, playing together every evening after bedtime. Ants were Anty, and we talked often of a frog we called Florence. For a time, I was afraid he was becoming a liar, that he’d tell story after story of things that didn’t happen. I insisted he started stories that weren’t true with the disclaimer” Once Upon a Time” until he started annoyingly interrupting my story-telling with the question “Is this a Once Upon a Time story?” But, children that young don’t make those same distinctions between truth and fantasy. Real, they understand fully, is a matter of opinion. Buckingham Palace was no more real to my 3 year old than Santa’s home in the North Pole. My adult desire to classify is an unnecessary intrusion in his creative process and we’re all best off if I leave my left brain out it.

Adults rely on children to bring us into the fantasy world. We can’t help but remember that a toy for a poor or orphaned child doesn’t fix the economic disparities of human life. So we look to the children who stare wide-eyed at Christmas trees and sing carols at the top of their lungs and put cookies and milk out for Santa. We know that if we are going to revisit the Sugar Plum Fairy, we’re going to need them to tell us how to find her, how to get to the Land of Sweets where evil Mouse Kings are defeated by Toy Soldiers and Snow Queens and Nutcracker Princes dance with snowflakes.

This season presents us with the opportunity to live in a fantasy, which we need most years, but this one for sure. On our own streets, with the execution of a wealthy CEO, violence became a source of hope, which isn’t a good sign for what’s to come.

But for now, also here on our own city streets, sidewalks and store windows are dressed up and reminding us of joy and good cheer. Lights twinkle all around us every evening creating a sense of something outside ordinary time, outside the mundane, reminding us of mystery, of the miraculous. And the stories and holiday parties and Christmas music conspire to remove us from the ordinary and re-place us in the extraordinary, a time of magic and fantasy we return to year after year.

There’s Something About Mary

There is likely an inverse relationship between my interest in Mary, Mother of Jesus, and that of the Roman Catholic Church. As a Catholic convert, other people’s interest in Mary was always confounding to me. In my own history as Catholic congregant, chaplain, student, or teacher, I was hard pressed to find a subject I found less interesting. This was a tripping point in my life as professional Catholic, which I was for some time.

Mary, Mother of God, faithful servant. Quiet, somehow continuously in prayer. Oddly always young, also a white, blue-eyed Middle Eastern woman, wearing the colors of royalty – sapphire - over her head, looking up, hands clasped or stretched outward in gentle welcome. Painfully boring on top of being impossible. Adding to my disinterest there’s this doctrine people absolutely love that I always approached with such a theologically critical eye as to not be able to see it at all. Mary was conceived and therefore born without sin, making her ridiculously irrelevant at least in my life.

The doctrine of Mary’s sinlessness is often confused, so let me clarify.

The Catholic Doctrine of the Immaculate Conception, celebrated world-wide on December 8th, states that Mary was conceived without sin.

People often confuse this doctrine as having something to do with the conception of Jesus, which it does not. This is all Mary. Or, it doesn’t have to do with Jesus insofar as the Doctrine of the Immaculate Conception does not speak to Jesus as born, or have anything to say about him and his life. It speaks to the flawlessness of Mary as a vessel for his birth. She had to be perfect for him to be perfect, so the theory goes. This is her day all the way.

To take a step back, many Christians believe in what’s called Original Sin, the idea that everyone is born in some way broken or guilty, a sin which is washed away at baptism. Some Christians believe baptism has to be done shortly after birth, while others think you have to have at least hit the age of reason. The miracle is that Mary was not victim to Original Sin. She was born pure, sinless. Wholly good. Unlike the rest of us.

The Catholics in particular are serious about this doctrine. It was officially declared in 1854, although for about 400 years before that, it had been discussed and debated. To be clear, though, that’s still only about 25% of the life of the church. I note that because sometimes we get so used to something we forget there was a lot of time before when that thing didn’t exist.

There is another doctrine that says that under certain circumstances the pope is infallible. The doctrine itself is actually quite limited, but declaring the possibility that a human being is absolutely right is quite a leap. It set a whole mood. A vibe, if you will. But, in reality, the doctrine has only been used twice in its 150 years in existence. There are only two doctrines upon which any pope has said they are absolutely sure, without a doubt, that this is true. Twice when they’ve declared themselves Infallible. One is that Mary is in Heaven- the Assumption. The other is that Mary was conceived without sin, the Immaculate Conception.

On the one hand, I don’t care. Doctrines related to Mary have been damaging to women for centuries and I’d prefer to just pretend they don’t exist. They are confusing, misleading, and hold up an image of women as sexless, ageless, limited, suffering servants that most American women are either oppressed by or they dismiss them altogether.

On the other hand, as a UU, I’m very interested in the corners of Truth that the world’s religions offer, and Roman Catholics are telling us there are only two things about which they are absolutely certain, and this is one of them. That makes this worth exploring.

And this is the time. Today is the Feast of the Immaculate Conception, which always happens early in Advent as we talk often about birth and Mary’s role in bringing about the new world.

This is the season of Mary. You can tell us to put Christ back in Christmas all you want; Christmas isn’t Jesus’s holiday. It’s all about Mary. Birth is sort of about the baby, but mostly, it’s about the mother. There’s a woman at the center of this story, a story that is fundamentally about a family.

Mary was a teenager, betrothed to a man. For her time, she was not young, even though many of us balk at the idea of a high school sophomore getting engaged. She was from a good, Jewish family. Sometimes people like to say she was poor, but she wasn’t by local standards. She was likely illiterate, as most women were, but since very little was written down, it didn’t matter much.

The story is that before Mary married Joseph, an angel appeared to her to tell her she’d been chosen by God to bear his son, that he would be born in 9 months. When it was discovered she was pregnant, Joseph was going to quietly leave her, but an angel asked him not to. He stayed, they married, and the child was born that spring, as it happens.

According to ancient doctrine and contemporary lore, Mary and Joseph never had sex, she remained a virgin, and Jesus was an only child, but even a cursory reading of the story refutes that version. Scripture talks often of Jesus’s siblings, and the word we translate today to mean, “never had sex” more accurately translates to “young woman”.

As a student of theology, I’ve gone down plenty of rabbit holes to find the story beneath the story, but that no longer seems interesting to me. I mean, I like facts, but once I have them, I put them aside so I can dive into the myth. Mythology is more powerful than facts, for better or for worse. We are people of the story. We need narratives to give our lives meaning. And Mary, Joseph and Jesus are endlessly fascinating as the primary characters of some critical global, historical myths.

So the doctrine a billion people are celebrating today declares Mary to have been born without sin. No mark of Eve on her. No reason to be baptized. Born perfect. Sinless. Immaculate.

She never snapped at her mother. Never lied to her father. Never coveted her neighbor’s husband. Never pretended she wasn’t home when the local gossip came calling. She never got angry at her two year old for hitting her or bored when her 4 year old wanted, again to know why the sky was blue. Mary never had sex, never had even a lustful thought. She never walked by a beggar and pretended she didn’t see her, never told a leper on the dirt path that she didn’t have any bread to offer. Never.

Mary was conceived without sin, born without sin, lived without sin and died a magnificent death, never having had so much as an impure thought.

Or, maybe we need to rethink what Immaculate means. What does it mean to be Pure? What does it mean to be perfect? What does it meant to be Holy?

Is sex unholy? While the doctrine of Mary’s perpetual virginity goes back to the 6th century, meaning that Mary never had sex, even after the birth of Jesus, Scripture actually talks candidly about Jesus’s 4 brothers and at least 2 sisters. Biblical literacy wasn’t a shared value in the 6th century, so doctrine filled in as the primary teacher for the world’s Christians. It was easy to contradict Scripture. Declaring Mary a Perpetual Virgin was a way of setting her apart and holding her up as better than regular women. But, were they saying something of value about Mary, or about how they felt about women?

The only time I ever got in trouble teaching theology in a Catholic college was when I asked my students what the value of this doctrine is. What do we gain from suggesting that Mary was a sexless mother? What do we lose if we say Mary was not a virgin? What we gain is the ability to find all other women through history, and around the world, inferior. What we lose is the concept that sex can be holy.

With my rational, feminist, sex-positive, 21st century brain, it’s easy to dismiss and ignore the Doctrine of the Immaculate Conception as anti-woman, anti-reason, anti-historical, and maybe even the foundation for the hyper control of women’s bodies popular throughout history and again gaining ground at mind-boggling speeds. This doctrine is either entirely irrelevant, or it provides the DNA for so many of our contemporary troubles. This is why I actively ignored it for so long, and maybe why you do too.

But.

What if it’s true? What if Mary was conceived and born without sin. Whole and Holy?

And what if she’s not alone?

The Roman Church might be onto something, but maybe they’re just thinking a little too small.

Mary is an icon of human perfection, flawless and magnificent. She was a wife. A mother. She cooked and cleaned. She wiped dirty faces and butts. She washed filthy clothes in the river, gossiping with her friends. She had secrets and told secrets. She felt angry and sad and frightened. She felt love and hope and joy, too. She was human. And she was perfect. They are right. The fullness of her life, of her character, of her humanness, was gorgeous.

And so are you. And so am I. Conceived and born in beauty. You and I and everyone we’ve ever known, everyone who’s ever lived. Stunning. Impeccable. Immaculate. Mary was born to partner with god, to be the mother of god, to become the embodiment of what is possible. And so were we.

She loved her husband and had sex with him. She loved and laughed and made mistakes. She had at least 7 children who made her nuts, whose diapers she changed, whose questions she answered or didn’t answer because it’s been a long day and she still has laundry and has to make dinner and get wood for a fire even though we live in a damn desert. She was sometimes short tempered, sometimes hormonal, sometimes unimaginative, sometimes neglectful. Mary was human.

And she was complete. Born not covered in Original Sin, but enveloped in Original Blessing. Surrounded by Love. An icon of grace. Deeply human, messy, flawed, and, like us all, she was magnificent.

We Are the Storm

Le Chambon-sur-Lignon is a small village in the mountains of Southern France. Located in this Roman Catholic nation, the people of Chambon-sur-Lingon were Protestant and had a long history of resistance to maintain their religious identity. When France fell to the Nazis in 1940, Jews from around the country were rounded up mostly for deportation to death camps, but some for medical experimentation or slavery. Nazis made their way through French villages to capture Jews, but when they arrived in this village, the people didn’t comply, mostly feigning ignorance.

The effort was led by the pastor in the town, André Trocmé (trog-ma) and his wife Magda. Magda explained how it began.

“Those of us who received the first Jews did what we thought had to be done—nothing more complicated. It was not decided from one day to the next what we would have to do. There were many people in the village who needed help. How could we refuse them? A person doesn’t sit down and say I’m going to do this and this and that. We had no time to think. When a problem came, we had to solve it immediately. Sometimes people ask me, “How did you make a decision?” There was no decision to make. The issue was: Do you think we are all brothers or not? Do you think it is unjust to turn in the Jews or not?”

When there was a raid, Jews were often hidden, but most of the time, the strategy was to incorporate these refugees into the village seamlessly so that when Nazis marched through unexpectedly, they couldn’t discern one person from the next. Children went to school, people worked in shops and in the fields. The remarkable thing, the thing that worked, was that everyone participated, no one thought these people should be sent to their deaths.

Pastor Andre had been in that parish a long time and had been preaching a message of Christian love and action long before the Nazis arrived. His standard benediction was, “You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your mind and with all your strength, and love your neighbor as yourself. Go practice it.” This message had been- even without him but explicitly with him- part of the culture of the village.

The remarkable thing about the actions of this village is that no one dissented. Everyone did what they thought they had to do given the situation in front of them. Some didn’t actively participate in hiding people at risk, but they didn’t turn the others in either. It was this unity, this unbroken refusal to participate in evil, that kept the people safe.

Historian Marianne Ruel Robins notes:

“The fact that an entire community participated (or watched and said nothing) is remarkable... The silence observed by the people of the Plateau was an important condition for its success, not simply because it sheltered Jews from external threats, but also because it minimized internal dissent. To refrain from talking meant that one would not shame one’s neighbor for his lack of participation; it also meant that different rationales for behavior would not conflict with another, be they commitment to pacifism, nationalism, or Christian charity... Silence did not necessarily imply that everyone implicitly agreed on the reasons for hiding Jews, but rather that most people came to agree that something ought to be done.”

When Magda, the minister’s wife, reflected on her choices years after the war, she said, “When people read this story, I want them to know that I tried to open my door. I tried to tell people, ‘Come in, come in.’ In the end I would like to say to people, ‘Remember that in your life there will be lots of circumstances where you will need a kind of courage, a kind of decision on your own, not about other people but about yourself.’”

Over the course of four years, this tiny village in the mountains of southern France saved 5,000 people.

Last week, the Sunday after the election, we spent our time together acknowledging our anger, worry, and grief. It was cathartic, and I told you it was only the beginning. We need to feel what we feel, and find others to commiserate with, but that’s not all we need. We also need to understand what’s at risk, and commit to protecting ourselves, each other, and our country. That’s what we’re up to today. We are taking our cue from a tiny village in France who demonstrated for us the power of Resistance.

We may not agree on the level of risk we’re facing. It’s always difficult from a place of safety or near normalcy to look into the future and declare with certainty what’s coming. Acknowledging a wide range of opinions on this – and many other subjects – I have decided to spend these four years speaking Truth as I know it without being afraid of losing congregants or even making people uncomfortable. I don’t know what’s before us, but I know what’s behind us. I know history. And while it’s possible we won’t be repeating it, we have, as a nation, taken a clear step toward a fascist future, and if the worst repercussions are to be avoided, we will need to make some courageous choices. Speaking Truth is one of them, even with the understanding that there could be consequences. (The pastor of that small village was arrested by the Gestapo.) Timothy Snyder, the acclaimed Historian at Yale with a specialty in 20th century fascism wrote this week that the United States is not in a post-electoral moment, but in a post-catastrophic one. He, along with other historians, political scientists, and Constitutional lawyers, is sounding every alarm telling us to do what we can to stop the avalanche barreling toward us- or at least to get out of its way so not everyone is buried in the wake.

Democracies can become autocracies in less time than one might think. This is because democratic systems survive on what’s called legitimacy. The idea is that the government is ruled by a set of laws, that those laws provide the guardrails for ethical behavior, that there is a free press who have access to ensure those laws are being followed, that the people are free to disagree with government and can assemble in a variety of ways to hold them accountable, and that the people elect the government freely. The legitimacy of the government is held up by the many trusted systems in place, but when those systems are no longer trusted or are no longer in place, legitimacy is challenged.

We started to see the beginning of the end of American legitimacy when the result of the 2020 election was challenged. We witnessed an attempted coup, designed to stop the levers of government running. When that failed in the courts, they physically attacked Congress, which also failed. Not being successful with an outside attack, they have now staged an internal one, which is how these things often happen. They came to power with the consent of the majority, and are now getting to the work of dismantling the government. Installing incompetent people in positions of power, removing people with experience, putting the Justice Department in the hands of a criminal, shutting down entire systems like the Department of Education, are all part of history’s autocracy playbook.

The march of tyranny is getting louder, closer, gaining more soldiers jumping into lock-step both thoughtlessly and too often with tremendous pride. We can feel the thumping in the ground beneath us, a ground we aren’t sure will hold when that army of angry, lost, people- our neighbors, family, co-workers- marches by us drunk on hate and the power of being one of many. As tyranny assumes more of our country, as it infiltrates our neighborhoods or even our own minds, it is up to us to be the front line of defense.

I’m not going to outline all the ways we can do that today; we’ll have time to talk over the course of the next few months. But there are a few things for us to keep in mind as this situation unfolds.

Trust your own senses. We’ve seen this strategy at work, in fact, the GOP just swept the nation with a full campaign of gaslighting, telling people that what they are experiencing isn’t real. How many times did we hear that immigrants have taken over entire cities which have fallen into lawlessness? That they are eating pets, or that they are living in luxury at our expense? Trust what you see, not what you are told.

Be careful about your media consumption. Determine now what sources are attempting to bring you facts verses those married to an agenda they will alter the stories to serve. The New York Times, and the Guardian. Have been safe for me. Others trust the BBC, ProPublica, Mother Jones and the Atlantic. The Atlantic, as it happens, was founded by Unitarians and continues with it’s mission of being the organ of no party.

Social Media is not a news source, but it will give you a feeling of the national conversation. Follow people you trust. Twitter has become state media. BlueSky is more trust-worthy at the moment. Facebook is a highly manipulated platform.

But, Facebook has something no one else has created yet. Groups. And at the moment, groups are a very good way to stay connected. Fascist systems need people to be isolated. We are more easily convinced, more easily controlled, when we are alone. One of the most effective things we can do is build and sustain strong communities.

Timothy Snyder tells us that one of the 20 things we need to do is pick an institution and defend it. As I’ve said to you before, I’ve picked this one. This particular church with it’s long, very proud and effective liberal history, but also the idea of Church itself. All the liberal churches which, to be honest, we’re dismantling without anyone’s help. I’m defending Church, places people gather to pray, to care for each other, to get some window into Truth, and where we practice being our best selves. Strong religious communities, grounded in shared values, committed to taking care of each other, are a critical part of the social infrastructure we will need.

In the Guardian last week, Rebecca Solnit wrote: We do not know what will happen. But, we can know who we can commit to be in the face of what happens. That’s a strong beginning. The fact that we cannot save everything does not mean we cannot save anything and everything we can save is worth saving.” She closes by quoting Julian Aguon, “No offering is too small, no stone unneeded…All of us, without exception, are qualified to participate in the rescue of the world.”

The needs right now are great, and we might feel small or insufficient. And we are. Alone, we are less than what’s needed. A single voice speaking of love won’t be heard over the cacophony of hate coming at us from every direction. A firestorm of anger was unleashed and is being celebrated, supported, funded, institutionalized.

So we change our aloneness. We partner with each other, with other congregants, with the person you’re sitting next to or in front of. We partner with other churches, with religious people called by their faith to embody and bring forth love. We don’t have to be single raindrops trying to put out this fire, we can build alliances, join arm in arm with like-minded people.

And they may not be people with whom we agree on everything. Our motivations might be different. Our theology, philosophy, our politics might even be different, but we aren’t getting picky, aren’t looking for purity. We are looking for allies who, like us, refuse to let hate win.

Like the people in Chambord who leaned into their collective power and unspoken decision to fight a terrifying foe, we can build our own coalition of Love to combat the hate getting hotter around us.

(*SLOW) We are not enough alone, but we are Not Alone.

The devil might whisper in our ears, “You are not strong enough to withstand the storm.” But we, together, will whisper back, “We are the storm.”

Dancing With History

You want me to say something that’s going to make you feel better, that’s going to bring clarity, something you’ll be able to remember all week long to keep you grounded, something clever and honest and useful. I want me to say that thing too. I would like to hand you a pile of magic words that fit neatly into a sparkly gift box, ribbon on top, for each of you to take home.

I’d like to start that sermon with a story. My story would be ancient, filtered through millennia and the breath of our ancestors. It would be about a people who called a leader who was cruel or incompetent, and the people rose up against him in some glorious, bloodless way, to take back their nation. It might include a wise woman who loves her people into knowing they deserve more, that they can be more, maybe a woman who inspires them to build a new society of mutual aid centered on love and a commitment to companionship.

That’s a sermon I’d like to preach. It’s a sermon I’d like to hear.

But, I don’t know a story like that and I don’t have any gift boxes.

There are plenty of stories of bad leaders, but no bloodless uprisings ending in utopia.

There’s the story of Saul, the first king of Israel, chosen by god through Samuel. He was an awful king, selfish and arbitrary, and as soon as they realized he wasn’t up to the task, god and Samuel got rid of him.

I thought I might tell you more about Saul, maybe by way of saying, “See, leaders can be damaging and dangerous,” but you already knew that. We’ve been here before.

I could also outline for you all the stages of resistance, all the things the experts tell us about how to recognize the fall of democracy, how to live in a fascist society, how to prevent civilization from collapsing. And, I will, many times, I’m sure. But, not today. 

I’m a student of history. My doctoral work was in American Religious History. My Masters is in Medieval Theology. My Bachelors, if you’re interested, is in Liberation Theology. In other words, I spent a lot of time studying so I could be ready for – or at least understand – a moment like this one. Power imbalances, profound sexism, intractable racism, in-fighting, rage, systemic economic injustice, these things have been part of the human story from the beginning. We are, in some way, who we’ve always been. If we’re stunned that a charlatan promising everything to everyone with a message soaked in hate was elected in what might be called a landslide, if we’re stunned and we keep asking ourselves Why or How Could This Happen or Who Are These People, we haven’t been paying attention.

These are Americans, they are humans, demonstrating for us, again, who we are at our most broken. These are the people they have always been -  for 400 years, and long before that. These are the people who filled Roman coliseums to see slaves and Jews and Christians torn apart by hungry lions while they cheered. These are the people who showed up to watch the heretics march through the streets naked, the people who taunted them and threw rotten food on their children. These are the people who tortured women behind prison doors for trying to get the right to vote. These are the children in the schoolyard who circle around two people arguing and chant “Fight Fight Fight”. These are the people who covered themselves in white sheets, tore their neighbors from their homes, and hung them on the tree outside. 

Cruelty is and has always been part of the human condition. So has apathy. When Jews were rounded up and put into ghettos, Germans would walk by without glancing in the direction of their neighbor, now starving and desperate. The most common acknowledgement was a request to move the ghettos further from town centers because of the smell.

It’s not difficult to get people to behave badly. When I was teaching undergraduate theology, I had a lecture I called “10 Easy Steps to Genocide”. It starts with naming the out-group. Create an “us” and “them”. Who can we hate? Fear? Who can we blame? Turning from our own problems to a concrete cause, a people we can target, is an easy first step. Call them animals. Different. Not really human. Vermon. Need to be eliminated so we can all be happy again.

This has already started, and some of us are the new “Them”. Trans people, trans families, queer people and queer families, immigrants, people of color, women, especially those without children, even more childless women of color, and anyone who speaks out for any of them. We are Them. And our neighbors voted for a society where we don’t exist.

Or, some did. Some weren’t paying enough attention to know what they were voting for. The most Googled question on election day was, “Did Biden Drop Out?” That day was the first they’d heard that Harris was the candidate.

That’s part of the end of democracy too. Without an engaged electorate, without civics taught in schools, without a body politic tuned in to and actively participating in the national conversation, democracy has no one to hold it up. We work too much, we have too many devices barking at us, the news cycle literally doesn’t stop, and in the end, it’s all we can do to get through a day and have dinner on the table when over. This cycle of exhaustion serves anyone who needs us to look away.

So, here we are. After all that has happened, all our get out the vote efforts, sending post cards, making phone calls, knocking on doors, sending money, after months of doing whatever we can to stop the rising tide of hate, we lost. More than half the country – for many, many reasons – voted for project 2025 and the elimination of the EPA and the Department of Education and climate ambitions, and diversity equity and inclusion initiatives, and social security, and health care, and reproductive rights. 

It stings. It’s infuriating. Maybe terrifying.

It also isn’t the end of the story.

I’m absolutely not going to pretend everything will be OK, but I also know that none of the examples I gave of our inherent violence end with those acts.

Women did get the right to vote, the Civil Rights and Voting Rights Acts were passed, the Inquisition ended, seven states codified reproductive rights in their constitutions on Tuesday, and believe it or not, even the lions got tired of tearing apart those defenseless Christians.

This story is not over.

That it started is depressing. It’s mind-boggling. It’s also, in too many ways, expected. We should sit with that. Sit with the sadness of it. Sit with the disconnect we feel from people in other parts of the country, or maybe in other parts of our own families. Sit with a mirror up to our own culture, our own people, our own history. Sit with the feeling of being baffled, and of sort of understanding the ways hate can feel good. Sit with our anger, our fury, our rage. We’ll need it later. Sit in the feelings of being alone, of being afraid, of not knowing what’s next. It’s all real.

But, this story is not over. 

For now – for this afternoon and each of the afternoons through this week – I’m hoping you can take care of yourself. Next week, we’ll get ready to fight fascism, but for now, let’s all sit with what we know and what it means. Let’s hold fast to each other, share meals with each other, send texts with love to each other. Hold someone’s arm as you walk together. Take time in the morning for meditation. Go to sleep early. 

For this week, consider eating really well. Consider full, well-balanced meals. Consider cooking. Consider sharing that meal with a neighbor. It doesn’t have to be a sick neighbor or a single mom or someone in need. Just cook and share with anyone in your sight. Offer kindness to someone. Offer care. Drink water.

Allow this week to be a little slower, a little quieter. Make room for introspection. For dancing. For howling at the moon. 

I love the Jewish death ritual of sitting shiva. The family sit in their homes and the community takes care of them. The door is unlocked, the mirrors are covered, people bring food. For one week, let’s take care of one another. Maybe before you leave here today, make a date with someone for window shopping on Tuesday or morning coffee on Thursday. 

There is a lot to do in the years ahead. 

For now, rest in knowing you are Loved. Beloved. You – and I -  have been claimed by Love. We are part of this mysterious universe, this world too big to understand, this galaxy spinning, this planet sustaining. We are no less than the trees and the stars. It’s so easy to forget our place, here at the Center, with Love, who has wrapped herself around us each, who delights in our wondering and in our searching, who accompanies us in our rage and witnesses our despair. Rest in knowing that you belong here. You are part of whatever happens next, part of the march of time, even this time. You. Belong. Here. With the rest of us, all beloved, all called by Love.

I started by telling you I don’t know what to say, that I don’t have wisdom, that I don’t have a story that will illustrate and guide our next steps. I don’t. But, I will. And you will too. It will all become clear to us as time unfolds. For today, we’ll stick with what we already know.

We are Loved. We are Love. We have been claimed by Love, and we will claim others for the path of Love. 

For today, that’s all we have, and it’s enough. 

From Consumer to Citizen

For most of human history, we lived in what Jon Alexander calls The Subject Story. Human civilization was structured hierarchically, with most people being ruled by one or a small group of other people. And for most of history, the people believed that was by divine order or other kind of providence. The elite were simply better than the masses. They were smarter and otherwise more worthy. They had more because they deserved more. The people accepted their place in the order of things, often without pushback. They were there to serve.

The trade-off, the thing the people got from not pushing back on the vast economic disparities they witnessed, was safety. They were being taken care of. They had enough to eat, a warm place to sleep, freedom to marry (within a specific framework) and have children who could be raised without violence, relatively speaking.

Part of this Subject Story is a tacit acceptance from the people that they are incapable of taking care of themselves. They need a strongman or an elite group of royals who can manage all the pieces on the chessboard. There need to be people in charge, a political class, or a caste that the people can trust to manage the big picture. Kings, Brahmin, Emperors, even Presidents. People with power, often surrounded by other important, wealthy classes living bigger lives than the average person who agrees to the system so long as they can feed their families and not get hassled too much.

The Subject story was the human story for a long time, but something shifted between the 18th and 20th centuries with the rise of democracy and introduction of commercialism.

The Consumer story turns the subject story upside down. (SLOW) Instead of the ruler being served by the people, the people take on the role of being served. Beginning with the dawn of democracy, average people started seeing themselves as powerful. In the beginning, there was still a ruling class. Presidents were chosen from a small group of elite men. Only a small portion of the population had the vote, and there was put into place an electoral college in case the people got it wrong. But, the idea of democracy, of the people voting for their own leadership, of leadership changing, shifting power from one person to another, from one group to another, was a very new way of considering how we structure human societies.

That was the backdrop to becoming full-on consumers. With American democracy in particular, the idea that people are not born into power or status, but that they can earn it took hold. Those concepts were easier here where there wasn’t an established elite and where we’d dramatically, even violently, gotten rid of the monarchy. Now the people are left to themselves, touting independence, self-rule, self-reliance, and most importantly, choice.

These concepts were becoming popular globally, even though they hadn’t quite taken hold, by the 1920s. This is when advertising and marketing saw its chance. A man by the name of Edward Bernays was hired by the American Tobacco Company to increase their sales. Rather than follow traditional routes, Bernays created a different kind of campaign. Tobacco was used by men almost exclusively. Women never smoked in public and in some cases it was illegal even if they wanted to. At the very least, it was considered crass. Bernays hired a group of fashionable women in NYC, the influencers of their time, to smoke cigarettes during the 1929 Easter Parade. He told them it was about claiming their power. Newly able to vote, women’s identities were changing; smoking in public was touted as the next step toward freedom.

So, beautiful women in their Easter bonnets, parading down 5th Avenue, were smoking. They looked modern. Self-reliant. Chic. Sexy. Independent. Every woman wanted a cigarette.

And consumer culture took root.

By the 1940s, consumerism was America’s greatest export. Wanting. Having. Even in places where income levels were very low, the desire for bigger, better, faster, stronger, transformed global cultures. We can buy our way to happiness. Commerce became our biggest investment in peace with multinational treaties and trade organizations supported by the planet’s greatest political powers.

There are a lot of implications for this, but one of them is a new global culture that flipped the subject story upside down. No longer here to serve, the people are the ones being waited on. We have the power of the purse. We get to decide what we want. We are here to be satisfied. The customer is always right.

Consumer culture has saturated all of our institutions. I can’t help but see it in the current election with each party promising things to the people they want voting for them. What can we offer to buy your vote? Student loan forgiveness. No tax on tips. $20,000 for every person buying their first home. Child tax credits.

I’m not knocking any of those programs. In fact, I think things like capping the price of insulin at $35 is a great way to demonstrate how government can work and make our lives better. I’m using these as examples of ways the consumer model is the lens we use for everything, that everyone, no matter who they are or what they want, is trying to sell us something.

And we agree to this model because we’re buying. We like the power we think it gives us. We like feeling like what we want is what drives the conversation from adding plus sizes to mass markets to normalizing hybrid cars, to cancelling Aunt Jemima. Our money is the sword we use to carve out the world we think we want.

But now, we are in a moment of turning. The consumer story isn’t working for us anymore. Our consumption has brought our planet to the edge of being able to sustain human life. Our need for more money has us working 80 hour weeks, supported by all the things we bought like fully stocked home offices. It’s easy to feel left behind when your neighbor has a new car and you can’t afford one or other people are going on expensive vacations and you’re worried about the price of eggs. Personal computing, deigned and purchased for our convenience, has created a culture of exhaustion and over-exposure. We can’t go on this way.

The need for change has inspired a new rise of authoritarianism. The subject model. Maybe we should just go back to letting someone else make all the decisions. We see this shift in Italy, France, Hungary, India, Venezuela, and now here in the US where 50% of our nation would prefer what they perceive to be a strong leader who will single-handedly make things right.

Understanding the implications of that shift, I would like to suggest we don’t go back, and instead we go forward. The new model is the Citizen story. This is the story I think most of us imagine when we talk about democracy and articulate our fantasies about the founding fathers. This is the story the Occupy movement tried to embody. It’s a story not of the dependence of the subject or the independence of the consumer, but of interdependence. It’s not about duty, or of rights, but of purpose. We don’t obey, we don’t demand, we participate. This is the story that allows us all to be part of something new, not led by, not requiring of others, but forming groups of mutuality and connection.

I’ve become attuned to the ways the citizen story could transform our culture, leaning into collectives with shared ownership and models not based on profit at all like free-stores. And while I could give more examples of how hive-thinking could work here in the city or other political systems, I’m even more interested in how it could work in the church.

While churches historically functioned using the subject model with ministers and priests in charge, the consumer model is now in full form. Members act like – and are treated like – consumers. Customers. We have something to sell and hope they’ll buy. Sometimes we brand ourselves, sometimes we’re not so slick. We ask ourselves at staff meetings about what people want. Should we offer a bible study? Or a group for singles? A brunch for young adults? How do we attract more members? We invest in our future by paying a lot for great music or exciting children’s programs.

And in plenty of churches, those investments are weighed by the return. We hired a membership director who cost us $100,000, but we only increased our membership by 5%. We added hours to our religious education staff, but our youth group hasn’t grown. I hear these complaints from religious professionals all over the country in every denomination. Boards want results and with the decline in religious activity, they aren’t seeing them, and are therefore calling their staff poor hires, ultimately firing them and looking for people who can meet the expected numbers.

I’m not going to lie and say there’s none of that here. I don’t see it in the numbers; that’s not how it plays out. But, there’s a consumerism deep in our bones too. It looks different in part because we don’t rely on pledge money, so members can’t threaten to withhold donations if they don’t like something. Here, it looks a little more like a divide between staff and members, where staff serve members who sometimes get angry if they don’t like the way they’re being served.

But, of all the places I’ve been, this seems like one of the best to think about shifting to the Citizen story. Citizen organizations are powered by the mission. They value mutuality, inter-connectedness, relationship. Everyone has a role to play, everyone is valued. Events aren’t put on by one group to serve another, but are imagined, and designed by the whole. We all have partners, we collaborate, we support each other.

And we care deeply for each other. In the Citizen story, people are seen. They are loved. They feel held by a community of people. They know where to go when they are frightened or need comfort. They know who their partners are when there’s been a grave injustice they want to fight.

The precondition of the Citizen story is belief in ourselves as creative, capable, caring people, not lazy, self-interested, and competitive like the consumer model assumes. This is an opportunity to step into our shared power, to trust ourselves and each other, to expand empathy rather than sink into apathy. It means risking making mistakes, being judged naïve, or unrealistic. It’s in the citizen story that we can commit to a shared vision of the world, and to each other as co-creators, letting go of complaining, of ordering, of thinking we are here to be served. Instead, we are here to create, to build, to acknowledge our inherent worth and potential power, always warmer, kinder and smarter, together.

I know that for us to live into this citizen story, we probably need to have a home of our own. But, I think we can start today, if we want to.

Here are some things we can all do.

We can treat each other with kindness. Reach out to someone you know is in need. Join the Wednesday Worthy Now group. Show up for community events. Ask Jil if she needs help with the kids on Sunday. Or, here’s something harder, reimagine this as a multigenerational congregation. This room on Sundays is for everyone. People with a variety of needs, including your own. Some people need space and will sit apart. Some need community and will sit together. Some people listen best sitting down. Others need to stand. I’ve seen people lie on the floor or run down the aisle. Some people make noise and some are quiet. Some sing loudly and some just bob their heads. Consider an embrace of it all.

Next time you want to complain, ask yourself if you can imagine a way to become part of a solution. How can you help? If you want something to happen, can you be the engine for that?

This mindset will serve us well if we can get there. We are this church in the same way we are this city. We are this planet, part of the natural rhythms of Earth. We are this community, not a consumer of it, but a living breathing part interdependent with everyone else.

The time for this change is now. Frankly, change is happening like it or not. There is a turning. We can shift backwards or push forwards. Let us, together, become citizens of this church, living in a hive of justice making, putting Love, always at the center of Everything.

Space to Dream

I love to dream. But I didn’t always like to dream. There were times in my life that I found it almost impossible. There were times in my life that I couldn’t take a break, or even rest for a moment, and in those times, it was almost impossible for me to dream. Do you know what I’m talking about? Those times were scary because dreaming is a very important part of who we are.

Do you love to dream? What are your favorite things to dream about? Night dreaming or day dreaming. Do you like to dream about happy things you like to do? Or things you like to eat? What are your favorite things to dream about?

Don’t be afraid to share your dreams with people. A dream can always be shared, but it can never be stolen. It can be broken, but never erased. And I don’t think we will actually ever have the same dreams. Because my dreams will always look special to me. And even though you shared your dreams with me, the ones in your mind, in your heart, will always look special to you.

At this point, while I was practicing and rehearsing my sermon, one child interrupted me. Wait, a minute, she said to me. Are you talking about the dreams you have at night? Or do you mean, like, what do you want to be when you grow up, kind of thing?

Well, I suppose I mean both. We use the word to mean both the thing that happens to us at night, and the thing we do during the day to help us look forward to the future. And anyway, as far as our brains are concerned, there really is not much of a difference. Both our subconscious hallucinations and our innermost wishes and hopes are connected to our selfhood, our humanity. Both are windows into what I will call our inner world.

Part of what makes dreams so difficult is that they have a frustrating quality that makes them hard to study. They are subjective. That means, they are based on the individual, and they are influenced by the person that is dreaming. I can’t look in your mind and see dreams like you see them, and you can’t look in my mind to see mine. Your dreams will always be yours, in some fundamental way.

And believe it or not that’s where it starts to get complicated. See, some people say that they don’t really have dreams. Some people think maybe they do dream but never remember it. Some people have a hard time dreaming in the daytime - imagination can be tricky for some folks. Depression and anxiety both affect the brain in ways that make it hard to conceptualize the future, to believe in any future at all. I’ve heard people describe this dreamless existence like being trapped inside your own body, with the windows closed.

Furthermore, there is a word called aphantasia, that the word for it’s hard for someone to imagine things, or see what things look like in your mind. It’s not common, but people with Aphantasia have a hard time with thinking about pictures at all, let alone dreaming when they are not asleep.

But aside from these rare situations, whether we think we do or not, dreaming is a basic human activity that can be thwarted and undermined by various factors, something we do without thinking about it, and it is essential for full happy productive lives. Aside from these rare situations, we should be dreaming all the time. I don’t know about you but it feels to me like dreaming these days has gotten harder and harder.

I don’t know what’s gotten into us that makes it so hard to dream. I’m afraid we are losing our ability to dream. I’m afraid that we just aren’t that good at dreaming anymore.

“Now hold on, Br. Zachary,” you might say, “I had a nice little dream just last night, and I like thinking about the future. Br, Zachary you’re starting to make wild accusations, and I’m not like that. You must not be talking about me.” Well, maybe. But I suspect your dreams are not as good as they could be. You could dream bigger. To learn how to dream, and get better at dreaming, I think it’s best if we describe what we’re talking about. If most of us have dreams, then, what is a dream, anyway? Why do we dream?

Doctors and researches don’t agree with themselves all the way, about what is a dream and what isnt. Some doctors noticed that when people have a certain part of the forebrain damaged or injured, this part right here, people stopped reporting dreaming at night, but had no trouble imagining things. Likewise, damage to the nerve centers in the spinal cortex, back here, affect REM sleep states, which seems to directly limit our capacity for dreams.

There is a tight connection between the deep part of sleep where our eyes are moving fast, called REM sleep or Rapid eye movement sleep, (which I will call REM sleep), and dreaming at night. Medically, during Rem sleep, we know that two naturally produced chemicals interact in a way that explains some of the experience of dreaming, just not how much, or in what way. Acetylcholine (which maintains brain activation) is more prominent, as is dopamine (which some researchers link to hallucinations). Dopamine may help give dreams their surreal quality. This can create a surreal, hallucinatory experience of waking brain activity, without actual sensory data or experiential input from the body.

And here’s why dreams are so hard to pin down. The thing is, each of you sitting here listening to me also have a fair amount of Acetylcholine and Dopamine going on up there already. It’s part of the chemical interaction that allows me to say to you, picture a purple unicorn - and then you almost have no choice but to do it. We are all dreaming all day. It’s hard to put a finger on what exactly a dream is. That’s as close as we can get to knowing scientifically what is happening in our inner life.

It might be more productive for us to consider what dreams aren't. Dreams are not reality - this thing we are all a part of right now, here in this church breathing air and sitting with each other, is not a dream, but a reality. This is real. In case you need a reminder, yes, You are really here, and this is really happening. I’m pretty sure… Yes. This is not a dream.

Reality is objective. We can talk about the real world and agree about the things in it because of this objective quality. The world is not simply based on what we think about, but on what we all collectively experience and interpret through our senses. I can talk about the real world just fine. It’s not so easy to talk about my inner world. The subjective quality of our interior life gets in the way, and the tools that help us ascribe meaning, boundaries, rules, to the real world, they don’t work very well in our inner worlds.

But is it so hard to see your inner world as an actual ‘world’? It might not be the real world here, that we are all a part of, but our dreams do have a sort of internal coherence, don’t they? Our dreams, whether we remember them or not, whether we honor them or not, wether we share them or not, say something important about who we are, and what is important to us. Whether we know it or not, whether we cultivate it or not, the capacity to dream belongs to nearly each and every one of us, and with it our own, personal, subjective world that belongs to us, and only us.

Understanding this interior life is very important - it is where we find meaning and belonging. The interior life was important to a man named Saint Augustine in the 3rd century as well. In his written works, Augustine thought and wrote about what a person is, deeply concerned with this subjective, inner world that belonged only to the individual. Augustine once mused, “[people] go abroad to wonder at the heights of mountains, at the huge waves of the sea, at the long courses of the rivers, at the vast compass of the ocean, at the circular motions of the stars, and they pass by themselves without wondering.”

Elsewhere, Saint Augustine asks, “Don't you believe that there is in [people] a deep so profound as to be hidden even to [the person] in whom it [exists]?” (repeat). This is a rhetorical question, and in trying to answer it, Saint Augustine seems to draw the conclusion that yes, this depth does truly exist, if not in everyone, then in a great many of us. To come to this conclusion, Augustine probed his inner reality with selfless abandon, and the riches he found filled books. He probed his own internal reality with a depth and conviction that I greatly admire.

By the way, what color was he? Yes, Saint Augustine. What did he look like? Do you know where he was from? With a name like Saint Augustine, I imagine that what comes up in your mind is a lot like what comes up in my mind. But let’s seriously think - if he were around today, with the racialized language of our time, what would we call Saint Augustine? White? Black?

Saint Augustine was black. Tia Noel Pratt says it best in her piece from US Catholic, published April 28 2023:

“…[Augustine’s] African identity was usually muted in favor of describing him as a North African citizen of the Roman Empire with a distinct emphasis on “North” and “Empire.” Currently, the United States Census classifies individuals of Middle East and North African (MENA) descent as white. Consequently, emphasizing that St. Augustine was North African allows him, especially in the United States, to be racially coded as white. At the very least, it allows for deemphasizing his Amazigh origins—the endonymic term for the people of North Africa.”

Pratt’s contextualization for me lays bare what’s at stake in this recoloring of Augustine when she writes, “For generations, Africa was continually robbed of its greatest treasures—its people—through the horrors of the transatlantic slave trade while the continent’s natural resources were confiscated or decimated by colonial powers. Yet, throughout all of that time and into the present-day, the church and scholars of theology, philosophy, and literature alike have considered the works of St. Augustine—an African man—as some of the greatest writings ever produced.” Hows that for robbing Africa of it’s greatest treasures?

We know more about race than we’d like to admit about these ancient church fathers, like the time Saint Augustine described a row of processing bishops as “Cyprian the African, Ilarius the Gaul, Ambrose the Italian, and Gregory the Greek.” Those terms were not so much about place - they were racialized words, conveying ethnicity, or phenotype, in the ancient world.

That first name on the list, Cyprian, of course, is the Black African Catholic Bishop who led the African churches in the 3rd century through intense persecution and slaughter at the hands of Rome. But you all knew about that right? No? You never heard of Cyprian’s African resistance?

Maybe that’s because Cyprian is described as ‘North African’ in history books, as well as his reputation as a great scholar of latin emphasized. In this way, a leader of black Christianity is casually coded white. Investigating not african-ness, that is North African versus Berber or Amazigh, etc., but looking for evidence of blackness, that is the modern racialized category that denigrates those who are darker, a category that still functioned in the ancient world, we turn up a number of saints that we (and by we I mean the dominant cultural narrative) have labelled white incorrectly.

I’m talking about people like Tertulian, who gave Christian tradition the language of trinity, and founded trinitarian theology, himself Berber and dark skinned; and Athanasius, the 4th century bishop that popularized a new testament canon of the 27 books now recognized by the catholic church, and whose writing we often cited in the reformation. Athanasius had his coptic lineage and bilingual and lower-class history conveniently ignored by most of his biographies, in favor of being a, you guessed it, “North-African” and scholar of Alexandria. Funny how our racist assumption that scholars in history were white, then helps us ignore the existence of black scholars throughout history.

There are figures in the Bible like the Ethiopian Eunuch, whose blackness cannot be read away, But characters like Simon of Cyrene (which is actually in modern day Libya), or Apollos, who with a greek name and Alexandrian origins, the folks get read as white. But for these two in particular, there are subtle reasons to think they were actually dark skinned.

But this brings me back to my point. Because we live in the real world. This world is shared, we have inherited it, and it is ours to shape. It is our only world, and it has been warped and twisted into a scary violent place. White supremacy was a dream that caught fire, and that dream created entire disciplines of racist science called phrenology and eugenics, the dream created the slave trade and still forms the basis of our global capitalist economy. Your dreams are circumscribed and coded by those evil dreams.

This world is broken. The brutality of capitalism and racism and militarism, these three above all, have stolen liberty and hope from our world. To say nothing of the epidemic of loneliness, worthlessness, and emptiness that is driving statistics of suicide higher and higher. 2018 had the most suicides on record, and the numbers have barely fallen. Mental illness has reached epidemic proportions as well, fueling crises in our healthcare establishments and exacerbating the complexity of homelessness. Our imaginations are held captive by our broken world.

If you look around at this world and listen the the stories we tell about it, I think you’d have good reason to lose hope. If you are living through intense physical and emotional struggle, I see you, and I understand why you may want to give up. If you are a young person trying to make a way, and all you see are headwinds and difficulties, problems and obstacles, with no end in sight or promise of prosperity of comfort, I can understand why you may not even want to try. If you are watching the news and find yourself increasingly on edge, tense, consumed by a non-specific feeling of doom or dread, then that is anxiety, and you are not alone in your fear or hopelessness. You are not wrong to feel scared or alone, to suffer without the words to describe the intense alienation and despondency this life seems to demand of us.

The pain is real. The fear is real. The isolation is real. This world is real - and this is the only one we have. And yet, it is not the only world we have. Inside of us, each and every one of us, is a whole world. An interior world that contains these fears and pains, that contains this suffering, and yet is more and deeper than it. We have in ourselves the capacity to remake the world around us, to dream a new world into existence. We owe it to our friends to share our dreams, to tell them out loud, and in so doing remake the landscape of ideas in our image, for the sake of our futures!

I stand on the shoulder’s of a true giant of homiletics, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., when I say that I have a dream now, of a beloved community, where our children and elders dance and paint and sing and bang drums and talk about our deepest fears, our greatest dreams, and where we know we all are welcome and we all belong. We owe it to future generations to speak these dreams out loud, to share them so that they might grow into reality.

After all, they dreamed this world into existence! You know, They, that they who built the transatlantic slave trade - they crafted a world that dehumanizes not only the non-white bodies that serve and are destroyed, but also dehumanizes white bodies, severing white legacies of resistance and creativity, and crafting false stories and narratives of acquiescence and conformity to justify continued brutalization. Here in the real world, real people’s bodies are the cost of that white dream.

It is for this reason church that we must dream new dreams, and we must share those dreams with one another. You can’t teach a person to dream, you need only get out of the way, and we will do it without thinking. Dreaming is natural. It’s a reflex. Dreaming can not be taught, only experienced. The only prerequisite is rest.

This world will have you believing that you have no space to rest. There is no escape, there is no other world. I weep for the people who have no place to rest - nowhere to go to escape the machine. I weep because I know from my own experience, what it feels like to have nowhere to rest, no place to go to escape the machine. I know what it’s like to feel hopeless in the world, to wonder at the audacity of life despite our suffering. This is real, church. We have to look directly at it.

The way forward isn’t to force yourself to dream, but instead, learn to rest. It is a lesson I’m still learning. Rest is not filling your calendar with social engagements instead of work functions. Rest is not sitting at home spiraling through anxiety patterns until you pass out, exhausted from just thinking all day. Rest is not forcing yourself to have fun or to “relax” so you can check it off your self-care to-do list. Rest is listening to yourself, your body, your needs. Rest, and the dreams will come.

It’s not wrong to be broken, to need help and healing. This world does not make it easy to dream. Dreaming isn’t easy in poverty. Dreaming isn’t easy when you are caring for young children. Dreaming isn’t easy with a cancer diagnosis, or a sick partner, or chronic pain. Dreaming isn’t easy no matter your color, no matter your struggle. Dreaming isn’t easy.

Rest is the first step. Rest, and the dreams will come.

It is through rest that we find dreams, and through dreams that we find our story, our selves, our purpose, our meaning, our destiny, our selves. Afrofuturists are dreaming ourselves into the future because the future others dreamed up didn’t include us. So we had to dream for ourselves, and share those dreams with the world.

If you choose to share your dreams with the world, you can change it, both the real world, and the inner worlds of other people. You can light the light, and pass it on. But dream either way, because your inner world is yours and it is there. Friends, if you see yourself in these images, if you hear yourself in these words, then I forgive you for forgetting how to dream. For losing track in the pain or suffering that they told you you could never fix, so you never tried. I forgive you for believing the stories that they made up. I believed them too.

But church know this - I’m still learning things I thought I already knew. It’s never to late to turn back. Get your dreams back, church. The first step is rest.

I’ll end today by coming back to our opening quote, fom Ytasha L. Womack:

“It’s one thing when black people aren’t discussed in world history. Fortunately, teams of dedicated historians and culture advocates have chipped away at the propaganda often functioning as history for the world’s students to eradicate that glaring error. But when, even in the imaginary future—a space where the mind can stretch beyond the Milky Way to envision routine space travel, cuddly space animals, talking apes, and time machines—people can’t fathom a person of non-Euro descent a hundred years into the future, a cosmic foot has to be put down.”

Rest is that cosmic foot. Education is that cosmic foot. Dream sharing is that cosmic foot. Rest, church, and dream yourself into the future. It is through actual rest that we find space to be ourself, to imagine ourself, our future, into existence. It is here that we find our true dreams. Amen.

The Veil

Good afternoon. And it is a good afternoon, isn’t it? I noticed that our services have been growing, and while I haven’t been checking the numbers online, I have seen more and more people filling out the space. It’s a good sign. Thank you all for being here. I know there are other places to be.

My topic today is the veil. If you leave here today and remember one thing, I hope that it is this - there are a thousand ways to lift the veil - it’s hard to help anyone, including yourself, until you do. I cannot discuss this topic authentically without describing myself, and without discussing the context of race and racism in America. Please let this serve as a trigger warning for those in our space sensitive to racialized violence and trauma.

I am going to discuss some of my family history. I will touch on the themes of generational and racial trauma. I am not talking not about a literal veil, but using a metaphor to describe ordinary reality. Stay with me now.

At the general assembly of our Unitarian universal denomination it is the custom for those who address the wider community in any capacity to describe themselves physically before they share their message. Well, I have heard criticism of the experience, and I certainly recognize that every bit of changes colors with the colors of the speaker, I want to invoke this tradition now because the way that I look deeply informs my message.

I am a tall, thick and stocky brownish male human with a few thick curls on my chin, the thick dark curls on top of my head are pulled up into a bun. I am occasionally almond colored, and occasionally copper. My range, however, goes from the deep walnut of my freckles and birthmarks to the cashew tones of my palms. In the colors of my skin I see blue, not only in my tattoos, but also in the blood that pumps us to the surface of my skin. I am veritable rainbow of color, wearing a dark blue and green plaid shirt with salmon pink pants. It is difficult to tell by looking what my background or heritage might be.

Keep me and this body in mind when I tell you, I had a strange feeling a couple of days ago when I woke up. It felt like a feeling somewhere in my throat, but it would move down to my shoulders, a warmth in my chest that settled slowly into my belly. It was a strange feeling you know.

That morning I also, I had a little headache, I suffer from chonic migraines, and my neck was sore from sleeping funny. I have a little pain in my right foot, it happens sometimes when I overuse it, some of you may remember the cane I walked with last year. I felt sore in my foot.

I felt these things, but, this other strange feeling in my throat and shoulders, and my belly felt stronger - it was almost as if those little aches and pains didn’t matter. I had this warmness I couldn’t really Identify, I had a hard time even trusting myself that I felt it. But I knew it because it felt good, really good. I felt clear. Present. What was it? You all have to believe me that I took a long time trying to figure it out, what was this warm calm I felt?

Eventually it came to me and some of you may not be so surprised to hear what it was. It was joy. Simple, pure, grounded, joy. It wasn’t an explosion of laughter, or a shout (where I’m from it’s called a grito - aoow!!) It wasn’t like that - it was slow and gentle. It wasn’t fuzzy, it was sharp and clear, but soft. I felt as if I could answer any question about me, and I would enjoy the sharing. I was transparent, unbothered. I was safe and present to what was going on around me.

I didn’t know it at first but when I knew it was joy, I could no longer not know that it was joy - like when you see a lump on an unmade bed, and it’s pillow shaped, and though you don’t see the pillow you know there’s a pillow under there - in the same way, I knew this feeling was a deeper kind of joy.

It’s not that I didn’t have anything on my mind - I’m sure you all can understand I have my worries too. Three kids a spouse and a dog, you know I’m always worried about something - I had plenty of worries of my mind, I was aware of that too. it’s not that. But again, it was like those worries didn’t so much matter. The feeling of warm calm, that sat right here (puts hand to chest), it was what I wished I had been feeling the whole time. It was like background joy.

What is that joy, church? Do you know the feeling? Not a big splash of dopamine, but like a warm pillow that you can swallow, and it just cradles your insides. It was a strange feeling.

That joy is totally alien to the anxiety that normally pushes me through my day - ok, gotta get rolling, gotta get my coffee, gotta get breakfast, gotta walk the dog, gotta get my stuff together, gotta get to work, gotta get this done, gotta send this out, gotta get uptown, downtown, across town, on and on…

No, this was more like a list of ‘don’t gotta’s’ - I don’t gotta think about that, I don’t gotta deal with you, I don’t gotta respond to that comment, I don’t gotta show them what I can do… It was the sort of happiness that feels solid and unchanging. I felt free. The feeling made me light on my toes, I almost wanted to dance. It was a buoyant, levitating joy.

Of course, that feeling didn’t last forever. Eventually, I noticed my worries took their place back at the front of my mind, and I felt no particular warmth in my body. I noticed in my foot and in my shoulders all my little quirks and pains took on their usual dull urgency. I noticed the heel of my feet returned to the ground. I was back to Earth. But even though the feeling came and went, I was hooked. I wanted that kind of joy again. I wanted to rest in it forever. I had to figure out what happened, and how to get it back. Have you ever felt like that?

WEB Dubois teaches us that that feeling is what it is like to be liberated - and that the reason I found that feeling so strange is that for most of my life, as a legacy of my african american heritage, I have lived with something called “double-consciousness.” This means I can’t simply be, or know myself simply as a person, but because of my social location as the descendant of slaves, I must always experience life through a lens that distorts not only what I see, but also who I think is doing the seeing. In his own words, from The Souls of Black Folk, DuBois writes, “... the Negro is a sort of seventh son, born with a veil, and gifted with second-sight in this American world,—a world which yields him no true self-consciousness, but only lets him see himself through the revelation of the other world. It is a peculiar sensation, this double-consciousness, this sense of always looking at one’s self through the eyes of others, of measuring one by the tape of a world that looks on in amused contempt and pity. One ever feels his two-ness,—an American, a Negro... two thoughts, two unreconciled strivings; two warring ideals in one dark body, whose dogged strength alone keeps it from being torn asunder. The history of the American Negro is the history of this strife, — this longing to attain self-conscious manhood, to merge his double self into a better and truer self.”

Part of why that feeling of warm joy was so strange is because usually when I wake up in the morning, it’s about 4:30am. And my body tells me urgently, it’s time to get up and handle business. It’s time to move, respond, consider. Is everything handled? What day is it today? It doesn’t matter whether I slept seven hours or two, my body it seems cannot tolerate a calm, cool, slow, gentle morning. This is what made that moment so strange to me - because years of generational trauma has taught me not to trust my sleep, but to be always prepared to wake and run at a moment’s notice.

We have a story in my family of origin, of my grandfathers home in Waterloo, Iowa, a small two-room shack with dirt floors. Five children, and the grownups took the only bedroom, so all of the children had to find pieces of furniture to sleep on, to keep them up off the ground. They couldn’t sleep on the ground because the mice and rats had no trouble comin and going through those dirt floors. My grandfather I think, never had a good full nights sleep in his life. The trauma of those dirt floors stayed with him, in his body, and he passed it on to his children, none of whom get a good nights sleep, who in turn passed it to the grandchildren. I don’t know how many of my twelve first cousins sleep in, but I know more than a few who don’t.

In my body, this racial trauma lives in me, and it finds me in my sleep. When I wake up in the morning, around 4:30, I’m not tired, or ready to curl back up. I can. But my body is on edge, alert, and prepared for anything. For me, that morning, the veil was lifted. I wasn’t looking at myself through the lens of my blackness, where the only person to protect me was myself. I could live as an integrated human, not led or guided or pushed by past events, not guided by intangible fear.

Church do you know about that feeling? I called it a deeper joy - it made even the little pains in my body feel, not even like bad things, but like part of the fabric of my beautiful life. Even my little foot pain, my little worries about walking the dog, felt suddenly, temporarily, extra-ordinary. They were ordinary things, but they felt extra - like the volume on life got turned up, not the distracting parts of life, but the part that are more, maybe, real.

Have you ever felt that way? Do you know that feeling, a deeper joy that makes even the most uncomfortable problems in life, the real difficulties seem less like difficulties and more like little puzzles in a game room? I’m told to come to my problems with joy and creativity, but sometimes I don’t know how to do that, and it seems too hard, but then there are other times, like this that I’m describing, this moment of extraordinary time, extraordinary experience, when I feel helped along by this deeper joy - in those moments, I wonder how else I ever expect to solve problems unless I see them for how small they are. Do you know what I’m talking about?

WEB Dubois uses the veil as a metaphor, but our conversation today is not a purely theoretical exercise. Make no mistake, The veil is very real, and it affects our lives whether we want it to or not. Don’t lose me now, if I were I better preacher I could say this part so that everyone understood me, but I’m doing my best. Forgive me, but I have to say the quiet part out loud. The veil doesn’t want to be seen or discussed, but it is a matter of life that you deal with in your life friends, that we deal with it in church, because even if you don’t catch every word, try to catch my message. Even if we don’t know how, we have to say the quiet parts out loud.

I am a black man, and Dubois is talking about black people, not only to white people, but to other black people, to offer language for their situation. You all who sit before me, or who join in online now or at a later time, some of you are black and might resonate with my words, and others are white and you might resonate, or feel discomfort. And others might be disconnected from American racialized trauma and have to translate my words into your cultural context.

Every person must contend with their veil, and every culture must contend with it’s veils. We lose sight of ourselves, we lost sight of what’s really important, and then we struggle to course-correct. It hard for us as people, to walk a straight path, and when we go astray, it can be easy to stay distracted. We begin to see ourselves as ordinary, and we recognize our part in the ordinary story of ordinary life. Ordinary, like normal, is an operative word in our culture. Ordinary is a tool of white supremacy. “Ordinary” and “normal” become euphamisms for the thing we’re not supposed to say out loud. The veil is itself ordinary, and calls everything we see through it’s distortion ordinary too.

The veil covers our whole faces, our eyes and ears and mouth and nose. The veil is convincing, and it is attractive. It divides us and separates us into units of loneliness, and distorts our vision so that we might never truly embrace each other, but instead just keep bumping into each other as we move through life. The veil can be lifted, in brief exhilarating moments of extraordinary life, moments that take our breath away and burn into our memories as the times we truly lived.

Church, I know you don’t need me to tell you about the times in life that the veil gets lifted. Art lifts the veil sometimes, a puppy on the street can lift the veil - a good song can lift the veil, or a surprise hug. Sometimes making animal noises in church can lift the veil for you, remind you what’s really important in life - and then boom, life is extra-ordinary, and you just can’t keep from smiling, or remember why you were so grumpy a moment ago.

And sometimes, the veil lets up. Fun and joy and connection break in uninvited sometimes, and it can teach us what we’re missing. It’s not wrong to just enjoy these moments, and it’s not wrong that sometimes we have to just feel it briefly and move on. Life is like that, we can’t expect to be always in a place of receptivity and transformation. We can’t live extraordinary life every moment of every day, can we?

Can we?

To be honest, I’m not so sure we can’t.

There is wisdom in accepting the waves of life, all our comings and goings and good fortune and bad fortune, dispassionately and calmly. This is not wrong. But a lifelong Unitarian Universalist who offered me some advice on preaching to this community told me, “a good UU sermon engages both the head and the heart.” I need both from you now, because the compassion we extend to each other cannot be in judgement of our shortcomings. But any thinking person can see, in this community and in our communities across this country, we simply cannot continue as we are. We cannot simply weather this coming storm as if it were someone elses problem. The veil tells us to mind our own business, when in fact the crumbling of our world right now is as much our business as anyone elses. This is not about accepting the good with the bad in a sort of spiritual self-imposed quarantine. It is about the messiness of trying to live life while protecting liberty.

Friends, as we name that which refuses to be named, and put our fingers on the veil, as we say the quiet parts out loud, and lift this veil from our eyes, that distorts us into normal ordinary thinking, let us see with clarity this moment in our different cultures and communities around the world. Nobody is winning. We are all losing, losing our selves, losing each other, losing all we have. Even those among us with wealth and security, power and influence are losing these things.

Around the world, violence and social unrest are spilling us out onto the ground. We are all over the world victims of populist movements and too-advanced weaponry. All over the world our planet is shrugging off the yoke of human development, buckling beneath our hubris. We are all over the world looking for our agency, our power, to stop what feels like an inevitable march toward death and destruction.

In this global moment, Who are we called to be in the church? What are we called to do, church? What is the difference between us and everybody else? Rev. Peggy has been talking a lot about the difference between a citizen and a consumer. I wonder how well we have been listening. Citizenship brings with responsibilities. I know how easy it is, how easy it has been for years, for me to shirk those responsibilities. But I cannot deny that I experience their compulsion. I am called, and if you don’t believe in the Holy Spirit, you might understand the feeling of being cold, drawn, either through feelings, or through the observation of circumstances in the world that cannot be unseen, yet so frequently remain unspoken.

If you leave here today and remember one thing, I hope that it is this - there are a thousand ways to lift the veil - it’s hard to help anyone, including yourself, until you do.

The veil is not a social theory, and though we are focusing on African American life and experience, the veil is not culturally specific. It is difficult to talk about because it is the thing we’re not supposed to talk about. We don’t talk about race, we don’t talk about poverty, we don’t talk about intimate partner violence, we don’t talk about the way those with mental difficulties or neurological differences are systematically culled from the population, we don’t talk about the mortality rates of prisoners or the death systems that eliminate unhoused people. We don’t talk about the slow quiet isolated deaths our elders endure because we have bad systems of care for them.

We don’t even talk about the people who care for us and our children and our sick and our elders on a daily basis, clean our toilets, and take out our trash and sort through our lazy unsorted recycling. David Letterman, on his television show entitled, My Next Guest Needs No Introduction, was interviewing Jay-Z, and in an attempt to build camaraderie around the task of fatherhood in the midst of a demanding career, invited Jay to share his thoughts. Jay’s words drifted to discussing the hired help that cleans up after the family and cooks for his children. “What’s the matter Dave,” he says, noticing Letterman’s visible discomfort. “Not supposed to talk about the staff?”

We churches like to call our spaces safe, and yet how easily we forget the labor required to create them. We can value accessibility, and yet we must step out from behind the veil if we are also to acknowledge the labor required to create it.

Do you see thei veil now? Our training has been intense and consistent, at least for those who grow up in this country. The two ways of seeing. Don’t talk about the veil.

I know that here at the Community Church of New York,we might know a thing or two about the veil. The more I learn about you church, the more I see that the community church of New York has a legacy of poking the bubble. We say the quiet parts out loud. Usually it seems to pop right here on 35th St. We uncover the root cause of illness in our society, and sometimes that illness is so deeply infected us that we have exised our own flesh and blood, trying to seek health and wellness, wholeness. It is our legacy to say the quiet part out loud. This is the place where we look for the bits and pieces that are hard to say other places, and we try to say them right here. Language is built upon and within the communities that speak it.

People building beloved community can lift the veil, but only if we do the hard part, and lift our own veils together. Just like you, I am just a person, and I have a body. This body is the same as yours, but different. My body colors my place. What I want to talk about today lives inside my body. I know this is not all there is. There is something more. You have all you need - our body can heal itself, our thoughts can heal themselves - we can change ourselves, change our communities, change the world.

And let me tell you, there has never been a time like this. When Rev. Jude speaks about history, and the present moment, I wonder if you were aware of the reverence that he brings. When he tells you from the pulpit about, where he has been, whom else he has served, whom else he knows in the work and what is happening around the country through his eyes, I wonder how deeply we are listening.

Deep listening is a specific technical term, and listening deeply is not passive or receptive. In order to recognize the felt experience of another, one is not emptying them. Self of their invited experience but fully embodying it. How do I feel, what is happening in my body? What am I doing here, what is that smell? No, I’m serious, because, we have to get here and be here fully. I’ll tell you why at the end.

To engage the practice of deep listening, it is almost better if the conversation partner is speaking a foreign language. There’s no veil that way. You connect to what it is they are saying, not the words, but how they are telling their story. It’s about how your body moves, and sympathizes. It’s about the breathing. Even just a deep breath can lift the veil.

If you leave here today and remember one thing, I hope that it is this - there are a thousand ways to lift the veil - it’s hard to help anyone, including yourself, until you do.

Two weeks ago, we cancelled church. It was a difficult decision, the ministers were in conversation the whole week about it.

Do we cancel church? Do we hold services even if we know most people are not going to be able to come? It was the day of the annual pride march, a day in which the entire island of Manhattan shuts down. Reason for not gathering many, and the opportunities to be together on that day seemed Fleeting.

On the Thursday before hand, the city shut down for an impromptu protest on the west side. On the east side, all I saw were block after block of gridlock traffic, drivers laying on their horns and shouting at each other, angry, pedestrians, sharing, gossip about what the protest was about. The next day, there was the impromptu Dyke March, and annual ritual in pride festivities that is unscheduled and therefore not mitigated by police. This time, I decided I wanted to see what all the fuss was about. I wanted to see if we really should hold church or not in the midst of this protest.

I was not prepared for what I found. They continued along fifth Avenue when I joined, and there were thousands of women and girls, and several men and boys, yelling, chanting, holding signs, beating drums, playing, music, laughing, shouting, dancing, kissing, playing hand games. There were children and adults of all ages. Together, the people shut down the city. Traffic stopped, and though I don’t know how many people were walking down Fifth Avenue, at one point near 28th Street I saw only bodies, people before me as far as the eye could see, people behind me as far as the eye could see, and more gathering, pouring onto the avenue from every side street.

In that moment, church, it happened to me again. The veil was lifted. I saw all people around me not for who they were in our culture, not for their demographic or for their power, but for their humanity. I felt a warm peace in my chest, a knowledge that who I was was not so important, and that the type of person I was mattered less than the fact that I’m just a person. I was filled with hope at the human condition, amazed at what social action can do to a city, but even more, at what social action can do to a soul - I was lifted in love. For me, I suddenly saw myself and the world with clear eyes, and I knew what it meant to love without limits and without understanding.

There are a thousand reasons for us not to have fun, not to live fully, not to be ourselves, not to say the quiet parts out loud. There are a thousand reasons for us to live under a veil, and to go through life bumping into others instead of living. But today, let’s try something else. Let’s have fun, and be full together. Say the quiet parts out loud. Let’s lift our veil, join in the dance, and make messy beloved community. Right now.

Friends, I am just a person, and I have a body. This body is the same as yours, but different. My body colors my place. I see things through my lens. In this body, through this body, I know this is not all there is. There is something more. Here in us, here between us, we have all we need - our body can heal itself, our thoughts can heal themselves - we can change ourselves, change our communities, change the world.

If you leave here today and remember one thing, I hope that it is this - there are a thousand ways to lift the veil - it’s hard to help anyone, including yourself, until you do.

Flower Communion

Flower Communion was founded by Norbert Capek who was born June 3rd, 1870. Capek was born in Bohemia into the Roman Catholic Church but he had trouble with some of the dogma he was taught, so he left to become a Baptist. In that role, as a young man, he went door to door to convert people from Catholicism. After so many conversations with people, he realized that there were many paths to truth, and that no one church really had a corner on it. He was looking for a faith that was more expansive, more inclusive, a faith that could celebrate a diversity of thought.

In the early part of the 20th century, Capek and his family, having moved to the United States, found a Unitarian Church which fit their faith perfectly. Capek loved its optimism, which reflected his own disposition. He loved this new faith so much, in 1921, Capek went back to his homeland where he started a Unitarian Church. Free, liberal religion was unusual and refreshing. The Unitarian Church in Prague, with 3,200 members, was the largest Unitarian congregation in the world. Some 8,000 Czechs considered themselves Unitarian as a result of Capek’s evangelical spirit and message of universal hope. (If you’re interested, Community Church of New York holds the record for being the 3rd largest ever, and the 1st largest in the Community Church movement clocking in at 1800 people.)

As much as his people loved this freedom of thought and the use of reason, they were craving something more spiritual. On June 4, 1923, 100 years ago last Sunday, Rev. Norbert Capek created Flower Communion. The idea was that each person would bring a flower to church and would place it in a vase. The minister would bless the flowers and then every person would pick a flower different from the one they brought. In this way, every person knows they are necessary to form a bouquet. That our individual selves, when held together in community, create something gorgeous. That the whole is not the same when the individuals aren’t there. And then, after bringing ourselves, we take with us a gift from the community that leaves the church with us, just as we carry our faith wherever we go.

Rev. Capek’s church celebrated Flower Communion every year in June as we do here. When the Nazi’s took Czechoslovakia, they started attending his church, suspecting that he was preaching values that opposed fascism. In 1940, they arrested him and sent him to Dachau.

When he was there, Rev. Capek took to ministering to other prisoners. In fact, he brought Flower Communion into the Nazi Concentration Camp. He sent people to the fields to look for flowers. Sometimes they could find a dandelion, but more often they brought sticks and rocks and blades of grass. It was, he told them, enough. The survivors of Dachau remember him and his spirit of inclusion. When the world was contracting, Rev. Capek’s spirit was expansive.

In 1942, Rev. Capek was killed for his faith. His witness to truth, his faith in the power of the human spirit and his willingness to become a martyr in service of our shared ideals lives on in all of us.

Flower Communion also lives on, celebrated every year all over the world. Unitarians in the Philippines, in Scotland, in India, Transylvania, Latvia, Sri Lanka, Uganda, and in Pakistan

are all celebrating the 100th anniversary of Flower Communion, this celebration of the wide range of human expression.

In the spirit of unity in diversity, of optimism and hope for our collective liberation, and in the spirit of bearing witness to a world of both pain and terrific beauty, we bring flowers to our final service in June to share with each other. And then, we leave with flowers, bringing our faith and the spirit of love everywhere we go.

The Art of Failure

Good afternoon church. Happy Mother’s Day. Generally speaking, I don’t like to telegraph my main point by stating it out front, but there are so many topics today and Dr. Cone already gave it away, so I want to make sure we are all the same mind and don’t confuse my message today. 

What we are here to talk about is failure. 

And my argument to you is that failure is scary, but failure is also good for us. It is not only good for us, but it is necessary that we experience it in our life, because it moves us to grow. And finally, failure is not only good for us and not only necessary in our lives, but it is beautiful, and should be celebrated for its beauty.

If you don’t mind me saying so I have a very real experience of failure this morning. I checked my email to discover that nobody else on staff today knew what was happening today, nobody got my order of service. 

Now I can tell you all my good reasons for failing, and why I should be forgiven, but that’s not what we’re talking about. This message today isn’t about how can I explain away my mistakes, or how can I avoid accountability. It’s not about how can I come off looking good, or how can I avoid blame. No, it’s about the art of failure. 

And I don’t mind telling you today that I feel these words in particular because it is Mother’s Day I have deep wounds and memories from failing at mothers day. And what child, daughter or son, husband or partner or wife or father, hasn’t felt the experience of failure on Mother’s Day?

 I speak for myself when I say I second-guess myself all the way up until the day, and then no matter how I celebrate the wonderful motherers in my life, because anyone can mother, this day is often flattened into a celebration of females and female parenting, but we do well to remember today that we all can mother and that we have been mothered by people of all genders and persuasions - I try to celebrate the motherers in my life and I determine my efforts to be unworthy all by myself. I see my gestures as small and meaningless compared to the depth and breadth of meaning my mother and the mother of my children bring to my life. All around me I see missed opportunities to honor motherers who do not get enough recognition or appreciation.

For those who celebrate Mother’s Day today, I wish you a happy Mother’s Day, and if you didn’t do enough, I forgive you for not doing enough.. For those who do not celebrate or who today go uncelebrated, may you find peace in affirmation. Because not everyone celebrates Mother’s Day. 

For some, becoming a mother is neither a choice nor joyful. For others this day is a sad reminder of what will never come to pass. Some long to be mothers and can’t, while others mourn the children taken away too soon. Mother’s Day more than any other celebration, even Father’s Day, holds a great tension in our world. We all come from a mother, whether we know her or not, like her or not. For some, Mother’s Day is a chance to acknowledge a woman rarely present, when the ever-present often female caretaker, perhaps with children of her own at home, is often neglected and overlooked.

We can find this tension also in the discrepancy between the definition of a mother and the role that she is expected to play in the family, and society. A mother simply bears children, this is what it means to be a mother in definition alone - the role of mother, however, is deep and broad in our culture. The mother role is, frankly, perfection. She must be, in the words of St. Paul, all things to all people. 

I encourage all of us to consider this definition of mothering, and without laying accusation or blame on the women in our life overburdened with these responsibilities, I argue that a good many people still long to the maternal care we either received when we were young, or that we didn’t receive. The attention and compassion that we give to children, regardless of our gender or theirs, is an expression of maternal love. We cannot all be mothers, but we can all mother. And we all need maternal loving care. 

I have in my mind today:

• A mother who recently lost her mother

• A woman who recently learned she will never be a mother

• A mother who will not be getting her own life back, and a daughter who mourns this loss with her

• A daughter who cares for a mother who offers little support or recognition or gratitude in response.

• A mother who longs to speak to her two sons

• A child who never knew her mother, and a mother child who wished she didn’t know her mother.

• I have on my mind a mother who is trying desperately to raise children as she was raised, as if the world hadn’t changed in 30 years. And another who is trying desperately not to become her own mother, breaking generational patterns of emotional neglect. 

We need each other church, mothers or not. In my tradition, the church is our spiritual mother - maternal care is owed to each member of a church, given by the community. We need each other now more than ever. 

I can only speak for myself when I say that I try so hard to be perfect. To get it right. I don’t want to miss an opportunity, I don’t want to be ineffective. It’s not for recognition from others, it feels like my biological imperative to make the best of every moment, to do what is needed of me. 

Mothers are expected to be heroes, and a great many women live up to that expectation and perform incredible work. The hero finds herself receiving higher and higher expectations as time goes on. The burden can be so much to bear. 

In the Disney movie Encanto set in a fictional Colombia, South America, Luisa is a woman gifted with superhuman strength. She uses this incredible physical power to help the whole town with various tasks, matching her strength with incredible poise and great virtuosity. In one scene she restores a church wall to proper alignment with the shake of her hip; in another, she is tossing grown donkeys over her shoulders. Although she sings about her feelings to her little sister and not a daughter, I can’t help but hear the voice of a mother expected by the world to be superhuman. The lyrics are as follows:

I'm the strong one, I'm not nervous, I'm as tough as the crust of the Earth is

I move mountains, I move churches

And I glow, 'cause I know what my worth is

I don't ask how hard the work is

But under the surface, I feel berserk as a tightrope walker in a three-ring circus

Under the surface, I'm pretty sure I'm worthless if I can't be of service

Who am I if I can't carry it all?

Under the surface, I hide my nerves and it worsens, I worry something is gonna hurt us.

Under the surface, I think about my purpose, can I somehow preserve this?

But wait, if I could shake the crushing weight of expectations

Would that free some room up for joy or relaxation, or simple pleasure?

Instead, we measure this growing pressure

Watch as she buckles and bends but never breaks, no mistakes

Just pressure.”

Luisa describes the experience of being overwhelmed by expectations. 

Church tell me you have never felt that way. Tell me if you honestly can that you have never felt overburdened by the expectations put upon you, like you were just gonna pop. If the weight of what other people thought you needed to do was a crushing weight, tell me, church, because I know you have. Tell me, have you ever felt pushed so hard that you bent and buckled but didn’t break, church?

Mothers, I  know you have. Because I know the expectations upon you as a mother are impossible. They cannot be accomplished by a single human being, in fact, even with the help of a community it seems mothering is still really really hard.

Tell me you have never felt that the world required a hero, but you were just a person, and how are you supposed to succeed when the only option available to you seems to be failure? 

Well, the problem is not us, or those who seem to be asking too much from us. The problem is that our world gives us such a small definition of success, and such a vivid shame response to failure. Why is that? What is the reason we seem to lust so hard after success?

That’s a legitimate question, I’m not going to offer up a pretend answer. Because time and time again, I find ultimate success in my failures. I get proven wrong time and time again, when i try not so hard to be perfect, and try instead to be myself, to be honest, to be real. When I say I’m sorry, I hear people tell me, “That’s ok.” Don’t worry about it.” or my favorite, “say less.” When I miss the mark and have to walk back my efforts, I often find that I didn’t understand the first time anyway. When I slip and fall and get muddy, haha I’d be lying if I didn’t admit that it is pretty funny to see. When I lash out in strong feelings at those closest to me, and cause harm I don’t intend, yes, that is a failure, and it’s not meant to be explained away. But only when we see failure, admit its presence in our lives, and allow it to shape us, can we reap the benefit of its fruit. 

Failure means making choices, and not being afraid to be “not perfect.” This morning church, this very morning in front of me while I was waiting in line to get coffee was a woman wearing a handbag that said, “I am giving up the need to be perfect today” - whew that got me! Church what if we gave up the need to be perfect? What if we admit to each other and ourselves that it is really difficult and unsettling to live alone? What if we stopped holding those around us accountable for an invisible perfection? What if we stopped wishing things we go back to the way they were, and admitted that things weren’t that great then either, we are just scared to be here, now? What if we simply admit we are afraid to admit we failed?

Ultimate Sucess doesn’t look like never tripping and falling. It looks like laughing at yourself for it. Ultimate success doesn’t look like happy confidence - it looks like the wiping of tears, the sharing of bread, and stooping down low to touch someone. Success doesn’t look like winning, defeating losers, or being safe while others are vulnerable. It looks like Joy. 

And now I am speaking directly to you church, whether you have enough to get by or not, whether you are scraping by and don’t want to tell us, that’s ok, we’re here for you either way, whether you are here in this space or out there in the world, whether you are bedridden and trapped by your failing health, or your fears of change, which are valid, or whether you are struggling with the daily activities of healthy living because it’s just that hard right now, Spirit sees you and knows that's true, whether you are angry at the past for leaving you, or sad because all you loved is now gone, whether you are lifted by the presence of friends or strangers, or whether you are truly exhausted and overwhelmed by how bad it is in the world - it doesn’t matter who you are and where you're from, whether the talk of Jesus is for you or not, either way, ultimate success is gonna require some talk of failure. 

And failure is beautiful - this truth can only be seen when you give up on perfection. Realness is gorgeous - people glow when they are true. You may remember me talking about Joy and saying Joy isn’t a reflex - it’s divine intervention. Joy shows up by accident, and it is often not perfect. Joy overflows, Joy overreacts, Joy explodes - and yet is not destroyed. Joy is contagious - but not always obvious. Sometimes, we feel joy we can’t say, or sometimes Joy looks like anger or sadness. But we miss the mark when we say that the Joy is ours, that earned it, and that we are joyful because we deserve it. 

No, ultimate success is not obvious. The parable of the starfish thrower comes immediately to mind, as the story goes, a passerby notices thousands of beached starfish, and a single individual throwing them back. When pressed, the starfish thrower said, “Of course, I know I cannot save them all. But I can save these,” and the thrower bent down and picked up another starfish. 

I’m sure you can conjure similar images of hope in times of despair. Joy in times of pain and grief. Ultimate success in times of obvious failure. But if we miss the beauty in realness and connection, if we miss the loveliness that comes from mistakes, then we are still sleeping, and we are not awake to the art of failure. The art of failure is beautiful all by itself. And if we must fail, let us fail joyfully. For this Joy we have, the world didn’t give it, the world can’t take it away. 

The Way of the Pilgrim

Good afternoon. Friends, I need you to listen to me. Lean in closely. Because I am not here, sharing, empty musings with useless intellectual jargon. I am a human, just like you, talking to you about the most important thing in our lives. Put down your cell phone, at least for a minute, put down whatever you are holding. Whatever is on your mind, I’m sure it’s important, but just let those problems sit for a second.

Take a minute to be with me, do your best to forget about whatever is troubling you. It will still be there when we are done here. The future will come, but worrying about it in this moment will not help. You might get distracted, and miss what I have to say.

I am speaking to you with the urgency of a person that cares for you, and expects your attention. What will it take for me to have your undivided attention? Are you comfortable? Do you need to shift around in your seat? Are you someone who thinks best while standing, or pacing? Do you need to stand and stretch?

Don’t let the empty rituals of decorum interrupt your listening. Because this is important. This moment is important. I am a person standing here with my own flaws, with my own difficulties, and with a sincere love for you. I am speaking to you to share what I have heard, what I have read, what I have lived, what I have learned. Please do me the honor of listening. You might just learn something. Or worse, you might just feel something.

You see, it is no small thing to stand before a community and offer guidance and support. And those of you who have known me and who have walked with me, and who have asked me for your attention, you can attest to the reality in my words when I say, I see you and hear you. It is with these tools, the looking and listening, that I do my best to show that I love you. I love you now, not for any strength on my part, but for the effort placed in my spirit by forces outside of my control. I am not any more loving than you, I am certainly no smarter than any of you sitting before me, or in the Internet, I am not stronger, and I am not chosen. I am just like you, a person, trying my best with the information presented to me. And, I would be heartbroken if I discovered that you weren’t listening to me. So I ask you with all of my heart right now. Pay attention. Lean in close. This is no small message I bring.

Because Friends, the time is now. It is here. This is our chance. there is no time to waste. As we speak, the dark clouds of violence build in the skies above us. All around the world forces of war gather and consolidate. Here, in our very city, the fragile peace that binds us together and keeps us New Yorkers going is fragile and tenuous, stretched thin by our present moment . Here and everywhere fear holds power over our communities, over our cities, over our nations, over our very hearts. There is no time to waste.

I am not sure if you have seen the news lately, but our world has become a scary place. And in scary places, when scary things happen, it is good and right to be afraid. But it can’t end there.

Every moment we spend motivated by fear, guided away from trust and courage, is another moment spent wasting our time alone. For there is no camaraderie in fear, no trust in cowardice, and no truth in anxiety and worry. Anxiety and worry are fantasies, born of an over-eager imagination, attempting to know the future. And the future is not ours to know. All we have is now, and all we have is each other. And friends look around you. Even if you are joining from home, alone in your living room or apartment, or even if you are alone in a big empty house, I am here with you by the miracle of technology. If you are lucky to be here in this space, in this moment, you are not alone, you have not been forgotten, or ignored, and you Have friends.

Maybe trust for you is not easy to come by. Maybe you have been hurt in the past, or maybe even recently, by someone, you trusted, and now loneliness feels safe. Maybe you are still suffering under the experience of rejection or humiliation, certain that there is no love in this world for you that you deserve. Maybe you Are here now, remembering only the love that you yourself have lost, the happiness and connection that was once yours, but you cannot find it anymore. And I honor the grief we all must endure simply to live and lose. Loss is part of how we live, and it is a powerful motivator for fear. Fear is good common sense. There is plenty for us to fear in the world. But fear is not true. Right now, all we have is this moment, and all we have is each other.

Friends, do not waste another moment, thinking thoughts of sadness, or emptiness, until you hear my words. This is the most important thing we will do today, is to speak honestly with each other about what it means to be a person. What it means to be afraid. What it means to lose. What it means to hurt. What it means to feel alone. We have all felt those things. And we may feel them now just to speak about it.

And yet it is also true that a person cannot be truly alone. If you are sitting down, it is likely in a chair or a pew, or a couch, or a piece of furniture built by someone else. If you stand, you likely stand upon the soles of shoes that you did not construct yourself. If you are listening to me through the miracle of technology, there is not one of you among us capable of producing the device that brings you my face and my voice without help. Maybe you remember a time when an imaginary friend helped you too, or the thought of a comforting presence was truly comforting.

What I am saying to your friends is that all around us are forces that try to keep us apart. And in this moment, by our collective strength and intention, we can be together. And even if we are not truly together, we can come together. We can see each other, and feel seen in return. We can be present to all that we are, and all we have been. No one is trying to hurt you right now. So breathe. The world is a scary, lonely place and we need to take and hold every opportunity we have to be together.

Perhaps this is not news to you. Perhaps you already take every chance you can to feel seen and connected. Maybe it feels like you have heard all this before. Maybe you’re listening to me thinking,

there is nothing new in his words, no great insight in his musings, no help in his effort, no foundation to his outbursts of emotion.

And friends you may very well, be correct. I don’t stand here, pretending to be an original, I am one person having learned and still learning from those who came before me, sharing the best that my mind has to offer, and none of it is new. these are very old ideas. And you have likely heard all of this before. Many others who are stronger and smarter and better with words have spoken wisdom with clarity I can only admire and emulate. But do not think for one moment, friends, that the reason you have heard all of this before, is because you have seen at all. Do not think for a moment that you have experienced all that this world has to share, that you have collected all of the knowledge and wisdom there is to be found.

And I imagine in your heart, if you are feeling this way, you must know that it is wrong, and that there is more to see and feel in this world than you have exhausted in your years. None of us has experienced all this world has to offer. None of us can know with true knowledge all that has transpired in this world. None of us knows everything, none of us can be everything, because we are all just people. We are all living this Life one moment at a time, all we have is now, and all we have is each other.

To leave behind our petty worries and fears is not folly or ignorance. To accept our interconnectedness, and to reach out to one another in trust is not naïve or foolhardy. It is a recognition of our true place in the world, here, now, surrounded by one another. It is not foolishness to admit we cannot know the future, it is wisdom. It is not foolishness to admit we can’t do this alone, that is wisdom.

Today is an auspicious day to be talking of wisdom. It is the feast day of Saint Patrick, a guide and sage from catholic tradition whose life continues to inspire lives of urgency and presence across the world. And what a strange life it was. The most reliable account of the life of Saint Patrick is his own autobiography, and in it we hear incredible stories of miracles. Saint Patrick is believed by many to have raised more than 30 from the dead, including horses and children.

I don’t have time to recount all of these miraculous events in his life here and now, and it is likely you would not believe me anyway. These fantastic stories of miracles do not land well with a modern audience. The boundaries of what is possible are smaller for us than they were for the ancients.

We believe in What we can see, we believe in the tradition of empirical evidence we call science. We mistrust, with good reason, strange fantasies and stories that defy what we believe about the world. Doubt and skepticism are themselves forms of wisdom, that teach us to discern the truth rather than accepting everything we hear at face value.

But they can also be misleading, intoxicating assurances of our own self-sufficiency and strength of mind. Our doubt and skepticism can make us believe that we alone know the truth, that we understand all there is to understand in this world, and then by the strength of our good sense, we alone know what is true. We can’t leave behind our down and skepticism, but neither can we trust it with our whole hearts.

And if he were with us today, Saint Patrick would insist on all that we do not know in the world. He would talk about his own inadequacies, his own lack of education and his own illiteracy he would talk about his stumbling and feelings, about his mistakes and missed opportunities. He would talk about the things he saw that he didn’t understand, the things he felt that were beyond his knowledge, And the times that his God spoke to him from another world.

He would talk to us about the love he felt by talking to his imaginary friend, Jesus, and the strength that this imaginary conversation brought him through his time in captivity. He would say to us, “do not think for a moment that you have experienced all that this world has to share, that you have collected all of the knowledge and wisdom there is to be found.”

We can imagine this man saying these things, but that is just our imagination. St. Patrick is not actually here today. I am not Saint Patrick, and I have not lived a life like his. But I do know something about loss, and I know something about wandering. I know something about leaving and returning, and I know something about stepping out onto a new path with nothing. It is only in the losing that we can be reminded of what we have. It is only in our memories of times past that we can recognize the beauty in our present community. It is only through knowledge of love that we feel the pain of loneliness.

My grandmother’s house was a big house, enclosed by a concrete wall with a big iron gate. It was surrounded by shrubs and trees, and in my childhood imagination, it was, in a magical way, eternal. It had always been there, and I assumed it would always be there. I was an adult, and I had been living here in New York for more than 10 years when my grandmother sold her house.

It was not my house, I had never lived there, but my grandmother had lived there since before I was born. It was the house we gathered in for holidays. It was the house I met my cousins in. It was where my mother‘s childhood bedroom Still held her bed and sheets and dolls. And when my grandmother sold that house, nobody asked me. Why should they? It was not my house. I had never lived there. I had been living in New York for over a decade.

But I felt the sting and pain of loss, as if a family member had died. The house lived in me, and though I never called that house my home, I had a life there, with stories. Only I and those four walls and possibly my imaginary friend Tristan knew.

It wasn’t my home. But I felt I had lost a home. I felt like I was suddenly stranded, wandering, without a tether. I felt like I had lost my center, and I felt my steps wobbled without direction. I was not wrong to be sad, or to feel loss, but the intensity of the feeling told me I was, in some way, wrong to have relied upon my grandmother’s old house for some sense of balance and direction. Because that house like everything else in this world, eventually moves on. Eventually, all of us, and everyone we know, will move from this world, and this place, to the next. Our memories and our imagination are all we have to keep us connected to the things in the world that pass on. This feeling of wandering without a tether is disorienting to us. But to the pilgrim, it is the beginning of freedom. The pilgrim lives in the moment, filled with these memories and imaginings.

And these memories, real or created, live in us in every moment. Those memories, these imaginings, do not move on - they linger. They can be for us a comfort, or a burden.

When I began this message, friends, I asked you to put aside your worries and listen to me. I asked for your attention. Now, I invite you to consider what in your life is heavy or tiresome. What are your worries, what are your fears? What have you lost? What pains do you carry with you? Who has gone on before you, that lives only in your memories and imagination?

Friends, we are all in this together, as the song goes. Walking the line between faith and fear. This life won’t last forever. But here and now, in this moment, it is the truest thing ever said when we assert that we have each other. This is the way of the pilgrim - we do not sit in one place, and we do not linger in the places and people that eventually leave or die or fall. We do not linger in our fears or worries, looking for an escape into the future we cannot understand or predict.

The pilgrim is tossed and turned by the weather - the pilgrim wanders sometimes without direction, or moves swiftly with conviction and certainly. But The pilgrim moves on. The pilgrim keeps going. The pilgrim is motivated by an understanding not that the future holds any particular promise, but that the moment, this very moment, miracles are happening, both outside and inside us.

The pilgrim talks to imaginary friends, not to escape the pain of the world because the truth of loss is so heavy that it must be shared at every turn! The pilgrim knows that in our loneliness, though it seems that we walk alone, we are always, constantly, guided and supported by the spirit and memories of those who have gone before us.

The pilgrim knows that though we are each of us only one person, we each contain multitudes of stories and memories and imaginings to carry us through. And, most of all, the pilgrim knows that not every friend is imaginary. Not every person whom we have loved or who has loved us is gone. The pilgrim knows that the past and future live in us but friends live outside of us, and outside of us, in that special place of connection and sharing, when we experience a moment filled with wonder and beauty, or even in the midst of sadness and suffering, not all of our friends are imaginary. Sometimes, there are very real people around us, sharing the same moment, thinking the same thought. Look at them. See them as the pilgrims we all are, as the travellers that we try not to be, but become eventually anyway.

Friends, this is the way of the pilgrim - to be guided by our past, not consumed by it. This is the way of the pilgrim: to be curious about the future, not obsessed with it. Because if we spend too much time in the past or the future there, we miss the miracles passing us by in each and every moment. The miracle could be the fantastic, the imaginary, the transcendent - or the miracle could be the regular everyday person, sitting next to us, who loves us and we didn’t even know it. The miracle could be somebody trying to get your attention, saying good afternoon, who sees you and hears you and calls you beautiful.

The way of the pilgrim is to stop for a moment, put down your stuff, and look at the people around you. Truly look at them. Listen with your whole heart. Share the weird parts of your heart with recklessness. Because we are all in this together. Amen.

The Path of Non-Violence

Church, I have a problem. Once again, I have far too much to say, and just not quite enough time to say it. It is a saying often misattributed to Mark Twain, “If I had more time I would have written a shorter letter.” Well, church, If I had more time, I would have written a shorter sermon.

The path of Non-violence is a well-worn subject in this pulpit, and I do not hope to add to the legacy of the man we honor today by repeating what need not be explained. We are here, grateful, and hopeful, already engaged in the work of loving, and already engaged in the building of Beloved Community.

“The Beloved Community” is described by the King Center as a term that was first coined in the early days of the 20th Century by the philosopher-theologian Josiah Royce, who founded the Fellowship of Reconciliation. However, it was Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., also a member of the Fellowship of Reconciliation, who popularized the term and invested it with a deeper meaning which has captured the imagination of people of goodwill all over the world.

As early as 1956, Dr. King spoke of The Beloved Community as the end goal of nonviolent boycotts. As he said in a speech at a victory rally following the announcement of a favorable U.S. Supreme Court Decision desegregating the seats on Montgomery’s busses, “The end is reconciliation; the end is redemption; the end is the creation of the Beloved Community. It is this type of spirit and this type of love that can transform opponents into friends. It is this type of understanding goodwill that will transform the deep gloom of the old age into the exuberant gladness of the new age. It is this love which will bring about miracles in the hearts of men.”

I had the distinguished pleasure of visiting the King Center for the first time last year in 2023. I visited Atlanta for the Finding Our Way Home conference, the gathering of Unitarian Universalist ministers of color. I took public transportation from the hotel to the King Center, which was only about 15 minutes away. I had breakfast at the hotel. I spoke with distinguished colleagues about erudite and lofty matters. We lost track of time and missed the group going to the King Center. We got separated. I ended up making my solemn pilgrimage to the King Center alone.

On public transportation, through Atlanta, I noticed a great deal of poverty. People sleeping on sidewalks, and in tents. Some people stood around, while others passed cigarettes and coffee cups between each other. Bodies of men and women lay against walls and on sidewalks, motionless.

It felt Ironic to be gathered in Atlanta to celebrate the work and understand the meaning and life of Dr. King around so much evidence that his work was not completed in his lifetime, or since. We do not yet live as he hoped we eventually would. Poverty is a plague. Few can endure it for long. Either the disease is cured, or it is fatal.

Poverty is not the absence of wealth. It is not the lack of riches. It is not even the lack of stability that affluence and comfort provide. No, poverty is an intricate network of systems that withhold or remove resources from communities, most easily performed through forced migration and forced relocation. Poverty is a today problem, and it has been a today problem since long before the time of Jesus.

Dr. King’s Beloved Community rests in justice, not for any one oppressed group, but for all people. As Dr. King often said, “Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere.” He felt that justice could not be parceled out to individuals or groups, but was the birthright of every human being in the Beloved Community. I have fought too long hard against segregated public accommodations to end up segregating my moral concerns,” he said. “Justice is indivisible.”

War is everywhere, and it would be a waste of time, and a waste of energy to tell you all about the evils of war. And anyway, we do not have time to waste on war or the ones who condone it or perpetuate it. I don't have time here to talk about or explain why violence is bad and wrong, why collective civic non-violent action struggles to capture the imagination like war.

Nonviolence is a way of life for courageous people.

Nonviolence seeks to win friendship and understanding.

Nonviolence seeks to defeat injustice, not people.

Nonviolence holds that suffering can educate and transform.

Nonviolence chooses love instead of hate.

Nonviolence believes that the universe is on the side of justice.

I want to share a brief story as an example. I was on 6th Avenue. I'm off in Greenwich Village because it's where my children go to school, and I have gotten to know some of the folks along this avenue in the morning, of all socioeconomic levels. It is hard. My nervous system does not want to trust poor men, especially those who gather in groups. I would be lying to you if I told you all human beings were safe. And yet I want to share with you a moment of holy transcendence and connected reality with you.

I had just dropped off the children at school, I was walking quickly with my long brown coat, and I was talking on the phone, as I often am. A man Stood in my way And asked me if I had any money to give him. In truth, all I had were my children's have eaten bagels in my bag, and no cash. Cash. I shook my head at him and I said good luck. He took my refusal as proud. As I passed, I felt him place his hand on my shoulder. He hesitated for a moment and shoved me forward. I felt the pressure of his body and heard the stumble in his steps. Still holding my phone. I turned with my shoulder and faced him. I looked him square in the eye, and we looked at each other.

I felt fear, that he was willing to try to hurt me, but through the stumble of his footsteps, I knew he felt weak. Turning and looking at him. He saw that I was larger than he, and he felt My size when he shoved me. But when I turned to him, I walked closer and I held up a fist, not with malice or threat, but sideways, and slowly, rising from below with no speed or intention. I lifted it as I slowly and carefully approached him and I stopped outside his comfort zone. His gaze softened. He raised his fist to me.

There is a great deal bell hooks writes to help me offer context for this moment of shared love and humanity, but I want to begin with her analysis that violence is not an inherently male characteristic. Now I know what you may be thinking. I look around the world and I recognize that even if violence is not an inherently male characteristic, it is very much a gendered in our world. Male violence has a different characteristic, a different impact on human society, and a different role in our neurological and embodied fear of men.

But the softening of maleness is a practice. And we get it so wrong to expect men to soften for us first before we make space for it. Principles of non-violence are not spirituality 101. This is the next level. This is how we become not simply practitioners of the religion, but teachers, guides, and elders. It is not enough simply to possess a belief or a stance. We must also cultivate the resilience that allows us to do the work of non-violence.

I have been invited to connect folks to resources and communities around the city, and I'll admit I've had limited success. We are disorganized, I am disorganized, and the city in my opinion has never been this disorganized or felt this disorganized. Do you know what I'm talking about?

Unfortunately, this doesn’t absolve us of our responsibilities. This is the task that we have signed ourselves up for. Whether we are up to the task or not, we have decided to put love at the center of what we do here at this church. What that means, what that looks like, is the beloved community. Last year, I already shared descriptions of my beloved community with you all, and my understanding of what it looks like to put love at the center of everything.

It looks like a relationship. In relationships are hard, especially if you have deeply entrenched and embodied experiences and expectations of conflict. That comes with the terrain of the patriarchy. Dr. King reminds us that the three evils non-violence seeks to eradicate are poverty, racism, and militarism. Patriarchy cannot be left off this list. Because with it comes the aspects of our sociopolitical reality upon which our racism is built.

It would not be fair of me to leave you there.

What does a beloved community look like?

In a 1957 speech, Birth of A New Nation, Dr. King said, “The aftermath of nonviolence is the creation of the beloved community. The aftermath of nonviolence is redemption. The aftermath of nonviolence is reconciliation. The aftermath of violence is emptiness and bitterness.” A year later, in his first book Stride Toward Freedom, Dr. King reiterated the importance of nonviolence in attaining The Beloved Community. In other words, our ultimate goal is integration, which is genuine inter-group and inter-personal living. Only through nonviolence can this goal be attained, for the aftermath of nonviolence is reconciliation and the creation of the Beloved Community.

The way of non-violence is what we talk about when we say we are putting love at the center of everything. The way of non-violence is what we're talking about when we speak of beloved community and the work of caregiving. The way of non-violence is what we talk about when we discuss the meaning of pastoral care and how we provide it for each other.

Here at the community church, we are not beginners. The many years of ministry and activism on our team proclaim our mission through action. Any time spent in the life and work of John Haynes Holmes quickly finds erudite and comprehensive work on the nature of non-violent action, the necessity of demilitarization and disarmament, and the urgent claim to peace in the lives of all human beings. This pulpit is not new to the idea that war is bad. So we can't stop there.

The core value of the quest for Dr. King’s Beloved Community was agape love. Dr. King distinguished between three kinds of love: eros, “a sort of aesthetic or romantic love”; philia, “affection between friends” and agape, which he described as “understanding, redeeming goodwill for all,” an “overflowing love which is purely spontaneous, unmotivated, groundless and creative”…” the love of God operating in the human heart.” He said that “Agape does not begin by discriminating between worthy and unworthy people…It begins by loving others for their sakes” and “makes no distinction between a friend and enemy; it is directed toward both…Agape is love seeking to preserve and create community.”

The task for us, church, is not simply to describe the world as it was, but to build the world to come. We are building a church here. And the foundation is love. Amen.

Fire and Ice: Winter Solstice

Frigga, the Earth Mother, the Norse Goddess of love and marriage, weaves the clouds with her spinning wheel. She’s responsible for the wind and the rain and the snow and therefore the crops and the food and Frigga could see the fates. Frigga was worshipped by all the ancient peoples of the North and was the beloved wife of Odin, The All-Father. She was known as a 'seer', one who knew the future though she could never change it.

As a seer, Frigga saw her son’s fate. She saw that her son, Baldur, whose name means Shining One, was going to die. Baldur is the God of the sun, the light, the one who brings life and warmth to Earth. Frigga could see the future but she had no power to affect it. Baldur’s death came to pass. The malevolent trickster Loki fashioned a dart made of the poisonous plant mistletoe and, in a cruel trick, placed it in the hand of Baldur's brother Hodor who was the God of Darkness, and offered to guide his hand while teaching him to shoot darts.

And so he did, guiding the arrow directly into Baldur's heart. Baldur was shot with a spear made of mistletoe and the Light died. His body was burned in a huge fire. Frigga couldn’t bear the loss of her son, so she impregnated herself by eating berries from the mistletoe and gave birth to him once again. The sun was reborn. Frigga is so grateful that she made the plant a symbol of peace and love, promising a kiss to all who passed under it.

Theirs is the story of the Winter Solstice. The light dies and Mother Earth brings him back again. Of all the holidays celebrated by humans, the solstice is likely the oldest. It’s a magical season marking the journey from dark to light, the turning of the year from the end to the beginning. The year is reborn accompanied by festivals of light to mark the rebirth of the Sun. In ancient Europe, this turning of the darkness was credited to Frigga who sat at her spinning wheel weaving the clouds, watching the fates and birthing the light.

We are entering the Winter Solstice. Daylight has given way to dark. Sunbathing and outdoor dining and open-air theatre are things of the past and the future. These are the days of hurrying from place to place wrapped in heavy coats and faces covered in scarves, of dutch-oven stews, and the feeling of nighttime settling in each afternoon. We have moved just about as far from the sun as we can get, plunging ourselves into days of cold and dark as our planet revolves and rotates in her magical, mysterious orbit.

Long before people were tracking our own history, we were celebrating, or at least acknowledging, the winter solstice. People, wherever they were, noted the turning of the season. The daylight is at its briefest and the nights are not only long, they are very dark. For some, there is no light at all these days, with the sun barely breaking the horizon even at the peak of daytime. The northern pole is leaning away from the sun so that everyone north of the equator, which means 90% of the human population, is living with these long nights and shortened days. For us, there are about 9 hours of light this week, 16 hours of dark.

Solstice is the time of turning. We are about to experience the darkest, longest night of the year, and although we will then begin to add seconds of light back, our experience for some time will be that of darkest winter. Then, in a month or so, we’ll notice that it’s no longer dark at 4:30, and in February it might even feel like spring is on its way as evening is pushed even later. Our planet turns and we along with it. Spinning faster than we can imagine, and obviously faster than any of us experience. In the day to day-ness of life, it all feels very slow, as dark descends and takes hold.

We are here, on the cusp of what’s next. Our year is ending as light reaches its lowest point. Each day we lose another minute of light as we get closer to December 21st at 10:27pm when the shift begins. That will be the darkest point and the next day, the light will return, at first just a few seconds at a time. The darkness is ending. Frigga’s mourning is soon over. We see the return of the shining star. Later this week, the hours of sunlight begin to lengthen and the fates are woven and new possibilities are imagined. Mother Earth is laboring to give birth to her son, the Shining One.

I have hope for the turning. I am of the belief that we are in a Great Turning, an epic moment in human history. We can see the last vestiges of a culture dying, an industrial growth society that’s reached the end of its effectiveness. This happens in human culture. We evolve. We change. There is a turning.

Twelve thousand years ago, there was an agrarian revolution in which people domesticated animals and plants. They learned that hunting and gathering could be shifted if they planted their own food and raised animals near their homes. This shift led to a massive alteration of human culture, allowing us to let go of nomadism and settle into homes and communities, thereby increasing life expectancy and expanding human culture.

It’s happened again and again through history with the solidification of world religions, the introduction of math, great scientific discoveries, important inventions, and new ways of thinking, each bringing an evolution, a conversion from what used to be into what happened next.

The Industrial Revolution of the 19th century created one of these definitive transformations. Things formally made by hand in the home were now made by machine in a factory. Human lives were never the same again. There was a dramatic increase in population, tremendous growth of towns and cities, in education, transportation and massive immigration and exchange of cultures altering the course of human evolution.

And we are, again, at a moment of turning. Earth can no longer sustain our appetite for consumption. The industrial growth economy that requires demonstrable growth in every calendar quarter, demands an incessant and unceasing stripping of natural resources from Earth. The transition we’re seeing is from an unsustainable economy to a life-sustaining society committed to the recovery of our world.

In the early stages of major transitions, the initial activity might seem to exist only at the fringes. Yet when their time comes, ideas and behaviors become contagious: the more people bear witness to their inspiring perspectives, the more these perspectives catch on. At a certain point,

the balance tips and we reach critical mass. Viewpoints and practices that were once on the margins become the new mainstream. We begin to see people organizing to move society toward a shared vision. Language that was used only by a select few is heard in everyday conversation. Average people begin to push for a new vision as norms shift and expectations for ideas that seemed far-fetched become realized.

We just saw this happen at the United Nations Climate Conference in Dubai. I won’t go into the details, but the whole thing was feeling doomed. Then it changed. For the first time ever, the world’s leaders agreed to phase down - or maybe out - fossil fuels. This is momentous. In 2015, the fight was to recognize that increased temperatures over 1.5 degrees was catastrophic. Each year, we move closer to the possibility of being able to address climate change meaningfully, but never have we said out loud that the cause of the problem is the burning of fossil fuels. Never. And in a million years I didn’t think that was going to change in Dubai, nestled in the heart of oil-land, during a conference whose president is a climate denier and the chair of a Middle Eastern oil company. But, it did. There is a turning.

The culture we’ve grown used to is ending. We can no longer consume resources the way we’ve become accustomed. We can’t deplete Earth of all her resources for our consumption or travel tens of thousands of miles a year. And as these concepts move from the fringes into mainstream awareness, many people, millions of people, are grasping at whatever they can reach to keep it alive. Slogans like Make America Great Again, reach backwards to a fictional past as a last gasp of a dying culture.

This is the path we follow. When the Industrial Revolution was taking hold in this nation, elections were rampant with anti-immigrant, racist rhetoric. In 1856, 75% of the House of Representatives was made up of what were called Nativists, people who today we’d call White Nationalists. And in 1860, the Civil War broke out and culture was transformed. There was massive change in the Industrial Revolution. Culture was altered permanently. People were terrified. They tried to hold on to a world they knew they were losing. And then, there was a Great Turning.

We’re watching again as fascism rises and democracy shows signs of strain. This is fear trying to ossify in our political and social systems. It’s how we respond to change. When culture turns, when one world dies and another is born, people afraid of change wield all their power to stop the turning.

In the current, charged atmosphere, I hesitate to even nod to the metaphor of light as good and dark as bad. There are dangerous implications in the ways we’ve embedded that language in our culture, and the increase in racism we’re witnessing makes me even more sensitive to it. But in this particular turning, this winter solstice moment, I’m making an exception and I hope you can make room this time for the metaphor.

Earth is turning again. We are in the last days of the old age, the days when Loki is aiming his poison at the light, hoping to burn out the sun. Frigga can see what’s coming, and in her grief, she will birth the light once again.

I suspect, in this moment of Turning, we all have the potential to be Frigga and Loki and Baldur and Hodor. Identifying with Baldur is easy. He’s the bright light who falls victim to someone else’s misdeeds. Loki wants trouble. He doesn’t like the way things are going and wants them to stop. He wants the world to stop turning, for things to stop changing, so he lies and manipulates to get what he wants. There might be people in the public arena who remind us of Loki.

Hodor isn’t paying enough attention to know what’s happening. He thinks Loki is teaching him something about spears and doesn’t realize the mistletoe is poison or that hitting his brother will have fatal consequences. He goes along with the plan, mindlessly. There are lots of Hodor’s around.

And then, there’s Frigga. She can see it all. She knows her son, the Sun, will be killed. She grieves his passing as any mother would. And then she uses all her power to transform that loss into a new birth. She creates life where there was death.

This is our call; this is our task. We are Frigga. We can see what’s next, and we are making ourselves ready. We are living in the dark, in the cold, in the waning days of the year. But the solstice is coming. Earth is turning. This is a time of Great Turning, a time of transformation, the end of the old and the beginning of the new.

This is the Winter Solstice. We count down the minutes. Night extends. Cold descends. And then it turns and the new world is born anew.

Advent: Waiting in the Dark

Today is the first Sunday of Advent. Advent is the Christian season that builds toward Christmas. Using the story of Mary’s pregnancy, Christians relive those last few weeks, expectant. The world gets dark and often cold, and we move inside, get cozy, light fires, and wait for the birth of hope.

This is the cycle. This is the story, the myth, the metaphor. Every year a billion Christians, and a whole lot of other people who can’t resist, lean into this story. It begins today. A season of waiting. The church of my young adulthood moved services to the evening in Advent so that it was dark. Advent is about the dark. That’s part of the metaphor and it’s a reflection of the actual reduction of light 90% of the world’s population is experiencing. It’s dark. Mary is pregnant and she waits. We wait with her. We wait all month in a whole lot of cultural/communal ways. We have Christmas countdowns, we open daily advent calendars, we recount all the stories about Mary, we talk about the suspense of pregnancy in our story telling, we even make a huge deal out of Christmas Eve, so popular because it’s the closest we can get to Christmas morning, the final moments of anticipation. And then there’s Christmas, the birth. It’s the birth of Jesus, of hope, of light if you’re willing to use a dark/light metaphor which generally, I’m not but often pervades this time of year. The star song, the end of waiting, the meeting of the newborn, the shift into the new world. The end of what was and the beginning of what will be. The liturgical year ends and begins, over and over again, as we wait, once again, in the dark.

That’s it every year. We wait. We count. We expect. We anticipate. We celebrate the birth, until the next year when we wait again.

I’ll be honest. I love it. It’s a favorite season for me. I like Advent more than Christmas, maybe because I think it reflects our real lives more. Also, because nothing can live up to the hype of that much waiting. The waiting really is the best part. Even with a child in the house, even with a ton of gifts Christmas morning, even if we plan a perfect day, it’ll never quite justify an entire month of build-up. But we’ll do it again next year anyway.

In reality, the final weeks of pregnancy are alive with expectation, but the birth isn’t one day. It’s not even 12 days, as Christmas might be. It’s forever. It’s a lifetime. But, that’s not how we celebrate this. We wake Christmas morning, celebrate the day, the birth of hope in the world, and then we sleep for a week, pack up and go on with our lives. This is how you know the birth was a metaphor. No crying babies, no life-altering situation. Nothing has changed. The season ends and we move on to what’s next.

In this case, the season isn’t so much about Christmas, but about the weeks leading up to it. It’s about Advent, about the season of anticipation, of preparation. The pot of gold at the end

of the rainbow in our real lives won’t have much consequence, but we dedicate an entire month building up to the great reveal.

I suggest we turn our attention to how we spend this Advent season since this is, as far as I can tell, where hope really lives. In fact, while the last few weeks of a pregnancy are about waiting, it’s about a lot more than that, as anyone with 4 weeks left to birth can tell you. It’s about gestation, about creation.

This is what brings me to the Visitation. Christmas is about the birth of Jesus. It’s about the baby and moves from there. If you’re Christian and going to live your life according to the teachings of Jesus, Christmas kicks things off. After the birth, the story is really about his life, his work, his death, the transformation of the world in response to his message. Those things are beautiful and worthy of our consideration and even our dedication, but in our very real lives, in our shared spiritual practice, we don’t spend too much time after Christmas focusing on those things.

But for us, the time spent during Advent is more relevant, more alive. What we do in the month of December year after year is more reflective than what we do on Christmas Day. The story of the Visitation is a reflection of so much of the socializing we do this month, and this story recasts the star of the show. The Visitation, happening in this pregnant moment, is about two women more than two male children. It’s about family and friendship and solidarity. It’s about all the relationships that happen before, about all the people who make one life – Jesus’s life in this case – possible and important. It’s a moment in history when two women share their joy and their concerns and they partner to move through the waiting, to move through the trepidation, to prioritize their bodies and their love for each other.

A few years ago, a good friend’s daughter-in-law was killed. She was shot by her own father in her home. He then shot and killed himself. My friend’s son was grieving, the whole family was grieving. My friend was holding all of them along with so much of her own sadness. Because the death was violent and stunning, people kept their distance from the family. Their minister didn’t even call. I went to their house for a visit and told my friend I was coming to sit. I told her we didn’t need to talk, she shouldn’t cook, certainly don’t clean anything. I’m coming to sit.

And we did. We sat on the couch for a long time. She told stories. She cried. Mostly, though, she didn’t speak at all. She just sat. I made tea. She held the warm cup to her face and breathed deeply. I touched her hands. I kissed her head. And I sat too. We sat and we waited as grief and fury moved through.

It was a Visitation. It was a holy time. In birth and in death, we Visit. We meet each other in our joy and grief.

It is who we are. It is what we need. Now, as much as or maybe more than ever.

The Adent season is an invitation to Visit. I’m spelling that with a capital V. Visit. Be with each other. There is an end, a new beginning later, like all stories, a place we’re heading where

this story will turn, but for now, we’re waiting, and the waiting is holy. It’s the in between space where we create the world we’re waiting for.

It feels like the whole world is waiting. Everywhere I go people are talking about fascism, authoritarianism, climate disaster, the end of democracy, the rise of the right, the disintegration of the world as we’ve known it. We don’t seem to be preparing for something, though, as much as we’re just waiting for it. We’re waiting to see what this election cycle will bring. We’re waiting to see if there will be any accountability for trying to overthrow our government. We’re waiting to see if our fellow countrymen care about the implications of the rhetoric or if they – or we – even understand it.

There’s a pall that is setting over the land. A sense of foreboding. I’m watching what’s happening at the climate conference in Dubai as world leaders – at least those who showed up – are making compromises that prioritize profit over planet and concede to concessions that are leading to our own destruction. Almost 30 years of United Nations climate conferences and emissions are still rising, making 2023 the hottest year in human history. Fish in the Irish Sea are lifting their heads above the water to get a break from the boiling sea. And we are watching them, doing the equivalent of nothing. Most of us are just waiting.

This is Advent. The time of waiting.

But, this is a time of gestation, not of passivity. Mary is creating a baby. Life happens in the dark. Worlds are conceived. There is no Christmas without Advent, there is no baby without pregnancy. It’s now that the world is created, now that we are designing and building and producing hope.

If this historical moment is fraught, if the world is hanging by a thread that seems ready to tear, then this isn’t our time for doing nothing. It’s our time to Visit. When people are feeling worried, when grief seems to be just over the horizon, we can use Mary and Elizabeth as our model.

December is often a very social month, but I’m hearing reports that it doesn’t feel that way to everyone this year. I’m not sure how universal that is, or why it might be happening. It could be a backlash from last year’s feeling of liberation after two very tempered Christmas seasons, or if the pandemic broke so many of our social bonds that we are finding ourselves without all the invitations we used to have, or maybe saying “no” is more the new normal, creating greater isolation, but there seems to be a little less celebration in the holiday season this year.

Given all of that, it’s time to Visit.

This is the hour of incubation, of construction, of creation. We do that together. If we are going to birth a new world, if we are giving life to hope, we are going to do it in community, in partnership, and please tell me we’re going to do it in Love.

Mary brought nothing to Elizabeth but her self. She brought her love, her care and concern. She offered her time, a sharing of her life. Elizabeth was in transition, pregnant, facing some level of danger, and Mary brought her Self.

That’s what we all have to offer. We bring our Selves to each other.

Next week, Leslie McKenzie had the lovely idea of having a birthday celebration for folks over the age of 90. We offer ourselves in celebration of life.

Janice has started a new gathering some Sundays for caring and exploring in community. We offer ourselves in shared spirituality.

When I hired Br. Zachary, I told him I was looking for an anam cara ministry, a ministry of spiritual presence which he has so deftly embodied. We offer ourselves in spiritual companionship.

When people are sick, Esther often brings them bone broth. We offer ourselves in healing.

When Lisa had her surgery last summer, a team accompanied her to appointments, ensuring she wasn’t alone in all the medical things she had to navigate We offer ourselves in care.

Br. Zachary and Rev. Jude have started a monthly brunch for people in their 30s and 40s. We offer ourselves in friendship.

Our choir has been opened once a month to all the people who love to sing together, who then share in bringing us beautiful music. We offer ourselves in joy.

Our Council will gather after this service for some lunch and strategic planning. We offer ourselves to our shared mission.

And we Visit. We visit each other in times of crisis, in times of celebration. We Visit each other for fun and friendship, to aid in grief, in loneliness, and always we Visit in love. Over and over again, we become the bodies of the Visitation, the people of presence who are not just waiting, but who are gestating, who are creating a new world the one that will be born of our love and companionship.

This isn’t about waiting passively for a single day of celebration, but about embodying the new world in all the days leading up to it. It’s the designing and weaving, the sitting by warm fires, embraced by the comfort of darkness. It’s incubation. It’s gestation. And it’s happening between and among us as we, here together today, are again part of the making the ground holy and ready with our Visitation.

Legacies of War & Peace

This is the sermon I’ve been actively avoiding since I started here. Before I started here. I was candidating and one question that came up repeatedly was where I stood on Israel/Palestine. I’d been in ministry a good long time and no one had ever asked me that question but it came up several times that week. I could tell there was a lot of energy around the topic, so I had a plan. Here’s my plan. Avoid the question as long as I can.

But, here I am, entirely unable to avoid it, having been told too many times by both sides that my silence is complicity.

I’m starting with my own story because who I am has everything to do with what I think about this and every issue. We cannot separate our personal narratives from our belief systems since much of what we believe has to do with the cultural worlds we were born into.

I was born into a Jewish family. As you might remember, my mother is Jewish, although my father came from an Italian Catholic background. Both had long ago rejected religion, which means that my experience of religion was entirely cultural.

Part of that experience was Passover. That holiday was central to my upbringing. Every spring my mother, father, sister and I went to my Uncle Joe’s house. Uncle Joe was my grandmother’s brother. At Uncle Joe’s house were people from three or four generations, mine being the youngest, with as many as 30 people packed into his little Long Island home. My father would bring some Italian Kosher-for-Passover wine which everyone loved and made him indispensable, even as he found this tradition a little mind-numbing.

I, on the other hand, did not. Aside from Christmas, this was my favorite holiday. It was the only time I would see our cousin Gilda who was mesmerizing in her brash, bleach-blonde wig and loud, shrill voice that seemed to fill every tiny room, and Chaim, her husband, who sat nearly still the whole night making small talk so dull I couldn’t help but stare. There were endless what-we-did-on-our-vacation slide shows and the joyful moment of opening the door for Elijiah when some fresh air could finally be let in the overcrowded living room where we’d gather around a single table snaked through the room, cobbled together with bridge tables and folding chairs.

The seating plan was prearranged so people could spend time with those they saw less often. A few times, I was placed next to the cousins with numbers tattooed to the inside of their arms. They showed me the tattoos, told me about concentration camps, talked about the trauma of starving, of being taken from the people you love, of being entirely powerless and victimized by strangers who think the world is better without you or your parents or spouse or children.

Regardless of how young we were, we heard the stories of rape. Of being dragged from our homes. Of watching our babies killed, randomly, by state-sponsored thugs. Of losing everything until the only thing left is the decision to keep breathing, a choice made only to ensure that evil didn’t win. We stayed alive in defiance.

I switched to “we” there. I always do when I tell these stories. Most Jews do. “When they came for us.” “What they did to us.” It’s how the stories were told. I sat every year to hear my family, my people, tell the stories of what happened “to us”. It happened when we were slaves in Egypt, it happened over and over again around the world in ghettos and pogroms in ancient and

medieval and then modern times, and it happened again when we didn’t expect it, in 20th century Europe. It happened in Egypt, and we’re here to tell the story- that’s what Passover is. The telling of the story of our people from slavery to liberation. And it happened again. It started in Germany, it spread through Europe. Nazis had power in the US, too. 30,000 of them gathered in Madison Square Garden with a huge picture of George Washington flanked by swastikas.

We told the story. We told the story of our suffering, enslavement, victimization, the story of genocide. And when every Seder anywhere in the world ends, we all call out, “Next year in Jerusalem!”

Every year. Millions of Jews enact this same ritual. We tell the story, reminding ourselves and passing it to the next generation. We tell of our people, and we talk about resistance. We won’t let them do it to us again. We won’t take our eye off the ball again. We won’t be lulled into complacency again. We will protect ourselves, and take care of each other, at all costs. Never Again. Never Again.

This is generational trauma and it’s intentional. It’s what we do to stay safe. Most Jews I know have some basic information almost unconsciously in their minds at all times. I know I do, and mine wasn’t anything close to a religious household. But, I know where to run when they come for me. I know to have both cash and jewelry ready, in case. And, when I hear my Jewish friends right now saying, “I know who will hide me,” I’m sure that sounds hyperbolic to some people, but that’s exactly the kind of information we were all raised to track, even when it wasn’t ever said explicitly. How will you get out? Who will hide you if you can’t leave? Next year in Jerusalem.

Israel is where we will be safe. It’s where we went when we escaped from Egypt and where we ran when we couldn’t stay in Europe any more. It’s the one place on this otherwise inhospitable planet where Jewish people can gather together, protect each other, the one place from which we won’t have to run. Every citizen a soldier. Every Jew a citizen. Ours, then and now.

I know this story deep in my bones, and I know this story was triggered for every Jew all over the world when Hamas, swearing the end of Israel, massacred people, tore into their homes, separated people from their children, kidnapped and continues to hold people very young and very old, threatening not to stop until Israel is eradicated. I could feel all those stories come alive in me, and I knew what to do because they are coming for us, again. Gather with my people. Fight Fight Fight. Never Again. Next year in Jerusalem.

But Hamas isn’t the Nazi party. And we aren’t replaying stories from ancient or Medieval or even modern history. And this story isn’t nearly as simple as those of the past.

When Israel was gifted to the Jews in response to the trauma of the Nazi genocide, there were people there. Palestinians lived there. In our trauma, we couldn’t see that we were taking on the role of the oppressor. Because we were so frightened, because we were so desperate, because we wanted to claim our power in whatever way we could, we dismissed the possibility that anyone else might claim rights to the land we so frantically needed.

Jews were pushed to the outskirts of European society, made into 2nd class citizens, and ultimately denied basic human rights, including the right to life. Israelis then did the same thing to the Palestinians. Both native and European Israelis moved in and occupied Palestine, even though there was already an ancient people on that land.

Amnesty International has declared Israel’s treatment of the Palestinians to be an oppressive and discriminatory system of government, committing the crime of apartheid. There are arbitrary restrictions on freedom of movement including 175 permanent checkpoints in the West Bank designed to disrupt everyday life, checkpoints that have been the direct cause of human death when people can’t get through in time to seek medical care. Israelis also engage deliberate acts of collective punishment, administrative detentions, random acts of violence, denial of the right to work, and if that isn’t bad enough, they also withhold water, force evictions of entire neighborhoods, and according to the UN, there are many meaningful accusations of torture of Palestinian citizens. Last October, Israel started denying married couples in the West Bank with passports from different countries the right to live together, an act meant to destabilize families. Israeli forces have demolished entire villages, creating a constant sense of impermanence, ensuring no one ever feels safe, guaranteeing intentionally that people are not secure and will not thrive. For instance, a year ago August, Israel launched an offensive on the Gaza Strip that destroyed 1,700 Palestinian homes, displacing all those people. 49 were killed including 8 children.

And this kind of thing has been going on since 1948. Yet, what we’re seeing now is even worse. As I wrote this sermon, an alert came in that Israeli solders had surrounded a hospital, not the first to collapse under the weight of Israeli violence. This morning, that hospital has been abandoned, as have all the people inside who will not survive without care.

There are two sides to this conflict, and each side sees themselves as victims in a fight for their survival. In some way, I was raised to know who my people are, and to protect them with everything I have.

But it’s because of how I was raised, it’s because of the stories of Kristallnacht, of occupied Austria, of concentration camps, that I know the pain of being Palestinian. Never Again means Never Again. Not to us. Not to them.

The Jewish stand can’t just be one of self-protection, but of universal protection of the human right to life for all people. Freedom of movement, of housing, to marry, to raise children, to health care, to food and water for All.

I’m finally answering the question posed to me almost five years ago. Where do I stand? I stand with the people. I stand with the suffering, with the powerless. I stand on the side of distraught children whose parents were killed and grief-stricken parents who watched their children die. I stand on the side of the sick, the hungry, the elderly trying to find safe harbor when tanks are rolling down their streets.

I know it’s not that simple. Hamas has vowed the end of Israel and antisemitism is skyrocketing around the globe. Hundreds of people are still captive. Victims abound. Everybody’s right. And everybody’s wrong.

We need a third way. We need to step out of the binary us vs. them and instead think about what new can be created, what can we birth, what alternative idea, amalgam of solutions can we design? How can we put love at the center? Is there room even to ask that question?

Part of that love is the listening. Acknowledge the deep wells of pain, the anger, the fear of being erased from both sides. Too many of us can hear only our own, so that the response to this sermon is likely to be about “them”. What “they” did. Yes, what you are saying, what you are going to say to me, is true.

And none of that makes the continuation of violence, the leveling of city streets, the bombing of neighborhoods, the kidnapping of children, or massacres of anyone anywhere any more justified.

The only way forward is for Israeli troops to cease fire and for Hamas to return those they are holding captive. Israel has to withdraw and let people back to their homes. They have to allow humanitarian aid in and the US has to fund it. There is no peace without justice, but there is no justice without peace.

What happens next in the Middle East is for other people, but what happens next here is for us. Let’s learn to hold each other’s stories. Rather than responding with “what about” let’s respond in love. When a story is told in anger, we respond in love. When a story is told in fear, we respond in love. When a story is told in self-righteous indignation, in direct confrontation and accusation, let’s respond in love.

There is so much pain, histories of pain, generations of pain, ongoing, constant, regularly triggered pain, wounds open never allowed to heal. Let’s become the balm of peace, the soothing, comforting people who can hold that pain for each other. Rather than feeding into the divisions, let’s hold people together. See them and understand their fear and anger to be real.

It won’t be enough, but it’s what we have. Where spirits have been torn and shredded, where hope is struggling to stay alive, we can share our vision of freedom for all centered in love, holding the generations of trauma but not perpetuating them, ending the pain with our commitment to love, doing all we can in every one of our relationships to say Never Again. Not to you, not to anyone. Not ever.

Thinning the Veil: Memorial Sunday

This is a story I very rarely tell. I don’t tell it because most people I know won’t believe me or won’t believe that this story means anything. Those who do believe me might get some thrill from the spookiness which isn’t really the point of the story either, so, I don’t usually tell it. I am, after all, a rational person, a person who loves science, who doesn’t generally bother with things that can’t be investigated and proven. But, I’m telling the story anyway, because what happened was real, even if I don’t know or can’t prove anything about what it meant if it meant anything at all.

In February of 2004, my grandmother, with whom I was quite close, collapsed. She was 87 and had a leaky valve in her heart. After a few days at the hospital, she went home where she entered hospice. For the next 6 weeks we all spent time with her. At first it was with the force of a crisis with everyone flying down at once, filling her living room with four generations of us. When it seemed clear death wasn’t actually immanent, my mother and her brother took turns living in my grandmother’s Floridian apartment with her as she moved slowly toward the end. They slept in the bed next to her, held her shrinking body, reminded her of the long life she lived and, as was normal for my grandmother, they – and we – laughed quite a lot. It was a very sad, but also sweet and beautiful time for our family.

One night, when I was asleep in my bed in New York, I awoke because I couldn’t breathe. I sat straight up, desperately gasping for air. There was none. Absolutely none. I couldn’t open my throat enough for even a wisp of air. I was terrified. I wasn’t making a sound- no air was going in or out. My head was spinning, trying to figure out what to do, knowing I didn’t have long before I’d pass out. More and more desperately, I kept trying to get some air into my lungs. Finally, something released and I could get a thin breath in. And another. And my body relaxed and opened and more air could move in. Now I was breathing. In and out. Oxygen was again available. My heart began to slow. The panic subsiding. I looked at the clock. 2:36. I went back to sleep.

At 4am the phone rang. It was my mother, sobbing. My grandmother had died. She apologized for calling so early, but said she’d waited a while and didn’t want to wait any more. I asked her how long she waited to call, when did grandma die. My mother said, “It was about 2:30 when she drew her last breath.”

I can’t explain what happened to me that night, nor am I going to try. Nothing like that has happened to me since or had it ever happened before. Were these things- my grandmother’s death and my inability to breath – were they related, or am I drawing conclusions from an odd coincidence? Was my grandmother’s final breath somehow felt by me, was I connecting to her or she to me as we were both seeking air? Was I experiencing her last breath? Was my breathing, was my life, tethered to hers? I don’t know, but I find my own rationalism to be a little limiting

sometimes. I can dismiss real experiences because I don’t think they are logical or because I can’t explain them scientifically. Were I listening to someone else tell that story, I might let my skepticism get the better of me, but I’m the one who lived it and it was very real. I try not to explain. I don’t have anything to say that would ease my rational brain.

Interestingly, though, the few times I’ve told that story, someone has replied with a parallel story. Others have had that or a similar experience when a beloved has died. I’m not the only one who may have touched the veil between life and death.

At this time of year, we start to feel the layers between worlds thinning. Samhain (sow-in) is the Celtic, pagan holiday we’re marking this week. Samhain literally means the end of summer. It is the time we shift from warmth to the cold of winter. It is the time of year the leaves fall and decompose into Earth which opens the space between dimensions. The presence of death, of so much plant matter moving between the worlds, the sudden loss of leaves that filled the space around us, conspire to thin the veil, bringing the two worlds of life and death closer. This is the pagan pre-curser to Halloween when the spirits could move more freely in and out. This is the time a breath breathed here might be felt in the next world.

Halloween is fun, but the theme is supposed to invoke fear. Horror films, blood and gore, scream-fests, chokie-rooms, haunted houses- they’re all designed with the idea that this thinning of the veil is frightening. I’m not critiquing any of that. It’s fun to be scared in that way, sort of cathartic. And dressing up in a come-as-you’re-not costume, walking through dry-ice-fog with sounds of a crazed clown laughing or a ghoul howling while you knock on strangers doors seeking candy is a great way to spend an evening.

Outside the holiday trappings, though, the presupposition is that this time of year, this thinning of the veil, this closeness of the other world is frightening. Or, maybe that it should be. I don’t experience it that way, though. The other world, the world of the dead, is home to my grandmother. My father is there, too, both people who loved me infinity. The other world feels friendly to me. There’s love there too. My people are there. People I miss terribly, people I wish I could talk with, or sit with, whose voices I want in my ears, whose hands I want to hold, whose advice I want to seek, whose food I want to eat. For me, the thinning of the veil is akin to feeling closer to someone I can’t see, because I know they are right there, on the other side, feeling my breath each time I exhale.

The walls will get thicker again. We’ll move back, away, the worlds will separate and we’ll be left here without our beloveds. Our grief will return, as it always does. We will again forget and remember we forgot and feel guilty and relieved and sad all over again. Even in this liminal space of feeling closer to those we’ve lost, we’ve still lost them. They are not here, even if we catch a whiff of their perfume or hear a laugh that brings us right back to some delightful moment. They are not here. They can’t see how we’ve grown or be proud of some accomplishment or accept our apology, or simply accompany us in our lives the way they once did.

Mourning is supposed to be temporary, but there’s a way in which it is constant or that it comes and goes in waves, washing over us and then away, even as time passes with the turning

of months to years to decades. It is no matter in the world of grief and longing. Time moves differently making the past feel very present and then so distant again.

Late October, early November offer us a gift of liminal space where the distance of death, the distance of love lost diminishes. People around the world are gathering in circles, are calling to their loved ones, are ritualizing their longing and the sharing of this space before the veil becomes a wall again.

Br. Zachary and I would like to welcome you to our own ritual of fire. During this time of the thinning of the veil, we are writing the names of the people we’ve loved and lost and we are casting those names into a flash as a way of calling them forth while also letting them go. We are bringing them into our space, remembering them, calling to them. And we are using the element of fire to send our love and our longing and our memory into this liminal time so they can hear and see us. We are remembering. The cleansing power of fire, the element of passion, of connection, will be our catalyst, bridging the space between here and there.