Going Viral

“Attention is the rarest and purest form of generosity.” ― Simone Weil

It’s one of those unspoken rules in preaching that you don’t spend time in the sermon talking about how you wrote the sermon… but… it’s Community Church, and we’re a little known for being rule-breakers.

So I’ll tell you about how I picked the title for today’s service.

“Going Viral.” It’s a slightly strange title for a sermon. The phrase has changed a lot over the past six years.

In the spring of 2020, “viral” meant at least two very different things. One was a virus that upended all of our lives. The other was an app that suddenly seemed to be everywhere.

Like so many college students, I was sent home almost overnight. I moved back in with my parents in Oregon, attended Zoom classes from my childhood bedroom, and suddenly found myself with a lot more time online than I had ever expected.

That’s when I started a TikTok account called @unitarianuniversalist.

At the time, there weren’t many people making videos about Unitarian Universalism, so I started experimenting. Some videos were dances or trends. Others were just me talking about business resolutions, the Principles, my favorite hymns, and whatever else I thought people might find interesting. Some of them got a few hundred views, some got a few thousand. A few went viral, and with that also attracted the comments of some people decidedly not looking for what I was offering.

Looking back, I don’t know exactly what I expected when I started making those videos. I wasn’t trying to become internet famous. I also wasn’t imagining that a sixty-second video explaining the Seven Principles would somehow transform the future of Unitarian Universalism.

Mostly, I was curious. I wondered what would happen if someone scrolling through dance videos and cooking tutorials suddenly stumbled across a nineteen-year-old talking about covenant, singing a hymn, or explaining why we light a chalice every Sunday.

I think I was asking a question that we have always asked:

How do people discover us?

Fortunately, I wasn’t the only one making UU TikToks. Around the time I got too busy with school and work and everything else and tapered off posting videos, a UU minister named Rev. Joanna Fontaine Crawford came on the scene. She even turned her hateful comments into a running series of cocktail videos with names like “Filthy Heretic” and “Agent of Darkness.” Today she has over 75,000 followers and has done more UU evangelism through TikTok than anyone else I know.

In preparation for this service, and because our theme for the month of July is “fun,” I made my return to TikTok a few weeks ago with the help of our fabulous media editor AJ, and Br. Zachary. You might have seen us recording the video before the service, or maybe reposted on Facebook or Instagram. It took me longer than I’d like to admit to get the dance down, but Br. Zachary and I turned it up to “Lush Life” by Zara Larsson and had a pretty fun time while we were doing it.

If that sentence made absolutely no sense to you, you’re not alone.

And here’s the good news: this sermon isn’t actually about TikTok. Or dances. Or trying to convince any of you to download another social media app.

Even though my official job title here is now basically “cool youth pastor”—or at least, that's what I’m choosing to call it—it’s not actually TikTok that piques my interest.

It’s people.

Because, even though it doesn’t always feel that way from behind our screens, every view is a person. Every comment is a person. Every account that follows Community Church is a person. Well...most of them are people. The bots are another sermon.

It’s surprisingly easy to forget that online. Numbers have a way of flattening people. Seven hundred views sounds like a statistic until you imagine seven hundred actual people. Seven hundred people with jobs and families and worries. Seven hundred people who are grieving someone, or celebrating something, or trying to figure out what they believe.

Somewhere in that crowd might be someone who has never met a Unitarian Universalist before. Somewhere might be someone who hasn't been inside a church in years. Somewhere might be someone who didn't know communities like this one existed.

Once you start thinking about people instead of numbers, the question changes. It stops being, “How do you go viral?” and becomes, “What is worth spreading?”

One more story about TikTok, and then I promise I’m done.

If you're on social media, you've probably seen clips of our choir—posted by Community Church or by choir members themselves. They get shared around a lot, and every time I see the comments, I’m reminded how extraordinary both our music ministry and our social media ministry are.

A few months ago, someone commented on one of those videos asking, “Do you do this every Sunday?”

Yasmine replied with the time and place.

Sam showed up.

And then they kept showing up.

That story has stayed with me because it reminds me what social media can do—and what it can't.

A video can spark curiosity. It can answer the question, “Could this place be for someone like me?” It can introduce someone to Community Church. But everything that happened after that first visit had nothing to do with an algorithm. It had everything to do with this community: the people who welcomed them, remembered their name, invited them to community events, and made room for them here.

That’s why I don’t think of our online presence as separate from what we’re doing here. It’s an extension of it.

For some people, the first Community Church they experience is the one on a screen. They hear the choir before they ever hear us sing in this room. They watch a sermon before they ever sit in these pews. They attend online because they live across the country–or the world, are disabled, immunocompromised, caring for children, working on Sundays, or simply gathering the courage to visit for the first time.

That’s real ministry too. And none of it happens by accident. We have a dedicated staff who think carefully about what we share, what platforms we use, and how to tell the story of Community Church with integrity. They spend hours editing videos, writing captions, taking photographs, updating the website, and making sure someone who’s never heard of us can figure out who we are before they ever walk through the door.

In the 1960s, UU congregations across the country placed newspaper ads that asked, “Are you a Unitarian without knowing it?” Many congregations, including Community Church, would broadcast services on the radio and distribute pamphlets of sermon manuscripts. The impulse to share what we are doing has always been there. The mediums have just shifted. Because an algorithm can recommend a video, but it can’t build a relationship.

And maybe that's the thing that’s been sticking with me as I’ve thought about this sermon. We talk about things “going viral” as though they spread all by themselves. A video suddenly takes off. A movement suddenly catches on. A church suddenly starts growing. But “suddenly” is usually just the moment everyone else notices.

Long before something becomes visible, someone has been doing the work. Someone has been building relationships. Someone has been asking hard questions, making coffee, sending emails, rehearsing music, welcoming newcomers, showing up week after week.

By the time the rest of us notice something spreading, there’s usually a whole foundation underneath it.

That’s the part Conor was talking about earlier.

Ella Baker called it spadework—the work beneath the work.

I keep thinking about that because it’s true in organizing, but it’s also true in almost everything else.

It’s true on TikTok. Every video that “goes viral” sits on top of dozens that don’t. It sits on top of years of learning what to say, how to say it, and who you're trying to reach.

And it’s true here.

There is so much spadework around Community Church that most of us never see.

Someone has to decide which choir clip to post. Someone has to write the caption. Someone has to make sure the livestream actually works. That is ministry too.

Someone remembers that another member was having surgery this week and asks how they're doing. Someone stays in a conversation after the service because another person needed to be heard. Someone invites a newcomer to the diner because they remember what it felt like to walk through these doors for the first time. Someone suggests nametags, or shares their pronouns, or notices when a familiar face hasn’t been here in a while.

None of those moments are likely to end up on Instagram.

They’re also the reason people come back.

So maybe the question isn’t whether Community Church can—or should—go viral.

Maybe the question is:

What do we want to spread?

I hope it’s not just our name. I hope it’s not just our reputation. I hope it’s not even this sermon.

I hope what spreads from this place is the feeling that someone belongs.

I hope what spreads is the courage to stand up for a neighbor.

I hope what spreads is curiosity instead of certainty.

I hope what spreads is the conviction that another world really is possible.

Because that’s how faith has always moved through the world.

Through ordinary people who keep showing up for one another. Through the quiet work that rarely gets noticed. Through communities that choose, week after week, to welcome one more person, sing one more song, have one more conversation, and keep dreaming another world into being.

During the congregational year, after we sing the children out to Learning in the Loft, they gather upstairs in a circle, sing together—sometimes you can hear them from down here—and light a chalice. These are the words they say every time they meet, words they have said for as long as anyone in the Religious Education program can remember:

“Flame that starts with one tiny spark that can so quickly spread, reminds us that good ideas, loving acts and peaceful thoughts can spread quickly too.”

I think that's the perfect call to action.

May we spread good ideas.

May we spread loving acts.

May we spread peaceful thoughts.

May we be one tiny spark...

...that can so quickly spread.

Amen.

It’s Okay to Change Your Mind

“Not everything that is faced can be changed, but nothing can be changed until it is faced.” – James Baldwin

In the days after Renée Goode was murdered in Minneapolis and thousands took to the streets to protest the fascist brutality of ICE and the United States government, the organization Singing Resistance was born. Some of the songs they sang were passed down from generations of justice movements, and others were written for the moment they found themselves in. Even the new songs were inspired by old movements.

Annie Schlaefer, who wrote “It’s Okay to Change Your Mind,” says that she was inspired by the Serbian resistance movement Otpor!, which opposed the dictatorship in Serbia in the late 1990s (Link). Otpor is the Serbian word for “resistance.” The movement was rooted in nonviolent organizing, and their story is one example among many of how people have resisted oppression throughout history.

Even as members of Otpor! were arrested, beaten, and harassed by police, they continued reaching out to police officers and soldiers. They visited homes and workplaces with a simple message: “You might not join us today, but you can join us tomorrow.” Two years later, when the military was ordered to use lethal force against protestors, many refused their orders, some even turning on other officers who had not yet defected (Link).

“You might not join us today, but you can join us tomorrow.”

What a message.

Imagine saying that to someone who arrested you. Imagine saying that to someone who had beaten your friends. Imagine believing, day after day, that the person standing across from you was not the finished version of themselves.

I’ll be honest – I’m not entirely sure I could do it…

But it makes me ask a question at the heart of every justice movement: how do we get people to change their minds?

I think we tell ourselves a story about how people change.

We imagine someone hears the perfect argument. They read the perfect article. Someone presents the perfect statistic, and suddenly everything clicks into place. We imagine that if we could just find the right words, the right evidence, the right headline, the right study, the right way of explaining ourselves, another person's worldview would shift.

If that were true, social media would have solved politics by now.

But that isn't how most of us have changed. Think about the moments when your own worldview shifted. Maybe it was because you met someone whose life didn't fit the stereotypes you'd been taught. Maybe someone trusted you enough to tell you their story. Maybe you found yourself in a community that asked different questions than the one that raised you.

For most of us, the deepest changes don't happen all at once. They happen slowly, almost imperceptibly. A relationship complicates a certainty we once held. We begin to notice a contradiction we can no longer ignore. What once felt obvious begins to feel incomplete. We don't wake up one morning as entirely different people. We become different through hundreds of small moments that slowly reshape the way we understand ourselves and the world around us.

Social psychologists have spent decades studying why people hold onto deeply rooted beliefs, and one of their recurring observations is that our opinions are often connected to something much larger than the opinions themselves. They become part of our identities—bound up with our families, our communities, our histories, and our sense of belonging. Changing your mind can begin to feel less like reconsidering a position and more like risking the loss of the people who taught you to hold it in the first place.

That helps explain why relationships matter so much.

Take marriage equality, for example. One of the strongest predictors of changing attitudes toward same-sex marriage wasn't simply age or education. It was whether someone personally knew someone who was gay (Link). For many people, a relationship accomplished what arguments alone never could. It is much harder to reduce someone to an abstraction once they have become your neighbor, your coworker, your child, your friend.

None of this means facts don't matter. They do. Justice requires truth. Good organizing requires good analysis. We need people who can articulate why another world is possible.

But facts are rarely enough on their own. People are most open to transformation when they believe they won't lose their belonging in the process. They need to be able to imagine themselves walking into a different future.

If you don’t believe me, just take a look around at our own city.

Many of us are also watching these questions unfold in real time as our communities respond to the actions of ICE and the expansion of immigration enforcement across the country.

Earlier this week, an interfaith group of clergy – including myself and Conor, and the UUA president and vice president – gathered outside of the Delaney Hall detention center in Newark to witness, protest, and stand in solidarity with those who are being detained. We did not know whether anyone inside would hear us. We did not know if our presence would change anything. And at the end of the day, we went home to our families, to food on the table and another day of work ahead of us.

It was a hard day, although not for the reasons we thought it would be.

Moments like that can leave us with complicated feelings. We want our actions to matter. We want to know that our voices are making a difference. Sometimes the work of justice feels powerful. Sometimes it feels painfully small.

But movements are built from those moments too. They are built by people showing up before they know exactly what will happen next. They are built by people refusing to accept that suffering is normal.

Ten years ago, even a couple of years ago, conversations about universal childcare, fare-free buses, municipal ownership, democratic socialism, or guaranteed housing lived mostly on the margins of public discourse. Today, whether people agree with those ideas or not, they are part of mainstream political conversation. That didn't happen because everyone woke up one morning convinced. It happened because organizers spent years talking to neighbors, knocking on doors, building relationships, and helping people imagine a future that had once seemed impossible. It also happened because people organized, built power, disrupted systems, and made it impossible for those ideas to remain at the margins forever. Movements do not change the world through persuasion alone. They change the conditions that shape what people believe is possible.

None of that happened overnight. It happened because people were willing to have thousands of conversations whose results they would never fully see. It happened because someone believed that a neighbor who disagreed today might think differently tomorrow. It happened because movements grew, not by waiting for perfect allies, but by welcoming people as they continued becoming.

Many of us in the room know what it feels like to be the people trying to move the conversation. We know what it is like to feel discouraged, to wonder whether anyone is listening, to ask ourselves whether anything is actually changing.

History has a way of reminding every generation that our imaginations are always unfinished.

There were people who believed ending segregation was asking too much. People who believed same-sex marriage was politically impossible. There are conversations happening today that will seem equally obvious to future generations, and there are injustices we have not yet learned to recognize.

Part of our spiritual discipline is remaining open to that possibility—not because every new idea is good, but because none of us has reached the end of our own becoming.

And for those of us who already find ourselves further radicalized, there is another temptation waiting for us.

Movements can become so accustomed to disappointment that we begin to assume anyone who hasn't caught up simply doesn't care. We forget that our own political imaginations were shaped by teachers, organizers, books, communities, friendships, and countless conversations. We forget that someone, somewhere, made room for us to grow.

Organizing isn't the art of finding people who already agree with you. It's the art of helping people become who they are capable of becoming. It is also the work of building enough power that those who refuse to change can no longer maintain unjust systems unchallenged.

To be clear: that doesn't mean sacrificing your safety. It doesn't mean asking marginalized people to educate those who are harming them. It doesn't mean abandoning accountability or pretending that every disagreement deserves endless patience. Every one of us has to discern where those boundaries belong.

But if we stop believing people can change, we stop building movements capable of changing the world.

I think this is one of the gifts our faith has to offer.

As Unitarian Universalists, our shared values of justice, transformation, and equity, centered in love, call us to this work. Transformation reminds us that people and communities can become something they have never been before. Justice tells us where we are headed. Equity reminds us that the goal is not simply changing hearts but changing the conditions that allow every person to flourish. We are called not only to imagine another world, but to help build it, one conversation, one relationship, one act of courage at a time.

We declare that every person has inherent worth and dignity. Sometimes we hear those words as a statement about who people already are. I also hear them as a statement about possibility. Every person possesses the capacity for growth. Every person is more than the sum of their worst choices, their worst fears, and their worst moments. Every person is capable of becoming more fully human. That conviction does not ask us to ignore harm or abandon accountability. Rather, it asks us to refuse the temptation to believe that any human being is beyond the possibility of transformation.

Our Universalist ancestors made a breathtaking claim. At a time when much of Christianity was preoccupied with dividing humanity into the saved and the damned, they insisted that no one stood outside the reach of God's love. They did not believe that love erased justice. They believed that love made justice meaningful, because its purpose was never simply punishment. Its purpose was restoration.

Universal salvation has often been misunderstood as though it means that nothing matters, that harm has no consequences, or that repentance is unnecessary. But that has never been the heart of the tradition. Universalism takes transformation seriously enough to believe that no one is beyond it. It refuses to believe that anyone is permanently frozen in the worst chapter of their story. Salvation is not a reward for having always been right. It is the promise that love never ceases to call us toward becoming more fully who we are capable of being.

"You might not join us today, but you can join us tomorrow."

I keep returning to that sentence because it embodies that same theology. Imagine saying those words for two years. Imagine believing them enough to keep knocking on doors, even after arrests and beatings. Imagine trusting that people are capable of surprising you, capable of disappointing the systems that taught them who to fear and what to obey, capable of discovering a courage they did not know they possessed when the moment finally came to choose.

Our world desperately needs people willing to resist injustice. It also desperately needs people who have not given up on the possibility that hearts can change. Every justice movement in history has depended on ordinary people becoming capable of something they were not capable of before. Our faith asks us to believe that this work of transformation is never finished—not in our neighbors, not in our institutions, and certainly not in ourselves.

That doesn't mean every conversation will change someone's mind. Most won't. It doesn't mean every invitation will be accepted. Many will be ignored. It doesn't mean every movement will succeed as quickly as we hope, or that justice will arrive without sacrifice. The people of Otpor knew that. The people marching against ICE know that. Every generation that has struggled for freedom has known that.

And still, they keep extending the invitation.

Because movements are built not only on the courage to resist what is, but on the hope that people can become part of what might yet be.

That hope is not naïve. It is disciplined. It is practiced. It is renewed every time we choose to have one more conversation, knock on one more door, welcome one more person into the work, or remain open to being changed ourselves.

Because none of us has arrived. None of us has finished learning what justice requires, or what love makes possible. We are still growing into the people our values call us to become. We are still building the Beloved Community our ancestors imagined. We are still discovering new ways to embody justice, equity, and transformation in a changing world.

So may we have the courage to change our minds when truth asks it of us. May we have the patience to accompany others as they grow into deeper understanding. May we have the wisdom to know when to keep inviting and when to protect ourselves. And may we never lose faith that another human being—and another world—is capable of becoming something more than it is today.

It's okay to change your mind.

And you can join us here anytime.

May it be so.

Lollipop Moments

“I've learned that people will forget what you said, people will forget what you did, but people will never forget how you made them feel.” – Maya Angelou

There’s a TED Talk by this motivational speaker Drew Dudley called “Everyday Leadership” that I’ve probably watched at least half a dozen times—in classrooms, at conferences, in those years in my teens and early twenties when you’re just trying to figure out what kind of person you’re becoming.

In the talk, Dudley tells a story about his last day of college. A girl comes up to him and tells him, “I remember the first time that I met you.”

And then she tells him a story that happened four years earlier.

She had just arrived on campus, and she was sitting outside with her parents, absolutely convinced she was going to quit before she even started. She remembers feeling this wave of panic—like she had made a mistake, like she wasn’t ready, like she didn’t belong there.

She was so sure of it that she actually turned to her parents and told them she needed to go home.

And right at that moment, Dudley walks by.

He looks at the situation, sees this nervous student, and instead of ignoring her or just moving on, he does what can only be described as fully committing to the bit.

He’s got this ridiculous hat on, he’s running this campus charity table, and he just leans all the way into it.

He pulls a lollipop from his bucket, hands it to someone nearby, and suddenly turns this quiet, anxious moment into something loud and slightly chaotic and very embarrassing in the way only campus orientation events can be. Everyone bursts into laughter.

And in the middle of that laughter—this unexpected, ordinary moment of being included, being noticed, being part of something instead of alone—something shifts for this girl.

Not everything. Not magically. Not perfectly.

But enough that she doesn’t leave.

She stays.

And she tells him, years later, that that moment became the reason she made it through her first day, and year, then her degree, and eventually built a whole life she almost walked away from before it began.

It’s a really sweet moment. This “lollipop” moment. But my favorite part of this story is when Dudley admits… he doesn’t remember the moment at all. For him, it was just an ordinary day. He was being silly, handing out lollipops, cracking jokes left and right. That interaction was just one small moment in a long, busy day. But clearly, for her, it was enough to change the direction of her life.

And I think about this story a lot because I’ve had my own version of it—both sides of it. Moments I barely remember that someone else has told me they still carry. And moments where I was the one holding onto something someone else probably forgot as soon as it was over.

I'm guessing that's true for many of you, too.

If I asked you to think about the people who changed your life, you would probably come up with parents, teachers, partners, friends. But if I asked you to think about the moment they changed your life, if you can remember the moment at all, I suspect a lot of those memories would be surprisingly ordinary.

My long-term childhood friend and I became friends because one day we realized we were wearing the exact same Old Navy skort. At the time it felt almost laughably insignificant. We were just two kids excited to have something in common. But that tiny moment grew into a friendship that lasted years.

When I was a freshman in high school, I interviewed our student body president for the school newspaper. Somewhere in the conversation she mentioned, almost in passing, that she was planning to attend Mount Holyoke College. Until that moment, I didn't really know women’s colleges were still a thing. I went home and started looking them up, and before long I had fallen in love with the idea. Years later, I ended up attending Wellesley. I doubt she remembers that conversation, or even knows my name.

A few months ago, I walked away from a sermon feeling like I hadn’t done a very good job. As people were leaving, someone stopped to tell me it was exactly what they needed to hear that day. They probably don’t remember saying it. I remember it because it reminded me that we are often the worst judges of whether what we have to offer has any value.

The moments that stay with us are often so small that they don’t even feel like moments while we’re living them.

I think that’s part of what I love about Drew Dudley’s story. It reminds me that we almost never get to know which moments will matter. They remind me that our lives are woven together in ways we rarely get to see while they’re happening.

And yet we live in an economy that teaches us to value what can be measured, bought, sold, or produced. We are taught to count productivity, efficiency, growth, and profit. Even our worth can begin to feel tied to how much we accomplish or how useful we are to someone else.

But love has never obeyed those rules.

No spreadsheet could tell you the value of someone believing in you before you believed in yourself.

No annual report can quantify the feeling of walking into a room and realizing that someone is genuinely glad you’re there.

There isn’t a graph for the moment someone looks at you and, without saying it outright, communicates, “You exist to me. I see you.”

Most of what has ever changed our lives cannot be measured.

That's also why communities survive hard times the way they do. Not because one heroic person swoops in to save everyone else, but because ordinary people keep showing up for one another. Someone brings dinner. Someone watches the kids. Someone makes the phone call. Someone slips twenty dollars into a friend’s pocket without making a fuss about it.

We call that mutual aid now. But communities have always known that our lives are sustained by gifts we can never fully repay.

And maybe that’s part of why we miss it so often.

The truth is, you don't get to see most of the impact you have.

You will probably never know when you were the reason someone didn’t quit. Or didn’t disappear. Or decided to come back next Sunday. Or found the courage to apply for the job, have the conversation, make the phone call, or simply get through another difficult week.

Most of our impact remains invisible to us, and yet it matters – so much.

I felt this same way when I first watched the movie It’s a Wonderful Life. At its heart, it’s a story about a question none of us can really answer, even though we keep trying to: What difference has one ordinary life made?

George Bailey is shown what the world would have looked like if he had never been born, and what he discovers is that so much of the good he brought into the world came through moments that never seemed particularly extraordinary while he was living them. They were simply the accumulated effect of showing up, caring for people, and paying attention over the course of an ordinary life.

I think that’s what stays with me about stories like that. They remind me that our lives are woven together in ways we rarely get to see. Most of the time, we don't get the bird’s-eye view. We simply move through our days – having conversations, running errands, coming to church, checking in on a friend – without realizing how those ordinary moments may become part of someone else's story.

And if that's true, if any ordinary moment might become someone else's lollipop moment, then I think our faith asks us to take that possibility seriously.

Our core values as Unitarian Universalists call us to generosity and interdependence, centered in Love, and that’s just what I see present in these moments.

They remind me that generosity isn’t only what we put in a collection plate, and interdependence isn’t simply a comforting idea. It’s the way human beings survive. Every movement for justice has depended on ordinary people sharing food, opening their homes, watching one another’s children, offering rides, making introductions, showing up for court dates, writing letters, refusing to let another person carry the burden alone.

They also remind me that this kind of generosity isn't reserved for people who think of themselves as leaders.

One of the things Drew Dudley says is that we’ve made leadership into something bigger than most of us believe we can be. I think we’ve done something similar with justice. We imagine that changing the world belongs to elected officials, popular activists, or charismatic organizers.

But every movement I’ve ever admired has been built by ordinary people making ordinary decisions over and over again. Someone sets up the chairs. Someone cooks the meal. Someone remembers who hasn’t been here in a while. Someone knocks on the neighbor's door. Someone keeps showing up.

Justice, like community, is mostly built that way.

The beautiful thing is that none of those people usually think they’re doing anything remarkable.

They are simply living into the covenant we make with one another. They are putting Love into practice, one small interaction at a time.

And because of that, someone else may decide to come back next Sunday.

Someone else may discover that church can become home.

Someone else may begin to imagine a future they couldn’t quite picture before.

We’ll probably never know which conversations become someone’s lollipop moment. We'll never know which smile interrupted someone’s loneliness, which invitation quieted someone’s fear, or which simple act of welcome became the thread that kept another person connected to hope.

But perhaps we don't need to know.

Our calling isn’t to calculate our impact. Our calling is simply to keep offering what we have – to trust that every act of love enters a web of relationships far larger than we can see. We don’t get to watch where that love travels. We don’t know whose courage it strengthens, whose loneliness it eases, or whose life quietly changes because of something we almost forgot doing.

We simply offer what we have.

And somehow, in ways both mysterious and beautifully ordinary, what we have to give becomes part of someone else's journey, just as countless others have become part of ours.

So in that spirit, and in the spirit of this month’s theme of fun, it’s time for us to have our own lollipop moment – literally.

I have this bucket of lollipops.

And I’m going to give you a lollipop– actually, two lollipops. One of them is for you – a small reminder that someone, today, wanted you to know that you belong here. Eat it right now, save it for later, whatever you want. Trade your flavor with a neighbor after the service.

But the second one – the second one is for you to give away. You might tuck it into a lunchbox, slip it into a care package, leave it on a colleague’s desk with a note, or hand it to someone as you tell them you’re glad they’re here.

Because of course, it isn’t really about the lollipops. It’s about noticing that we always have something to offer. It’s about trusting that even small acts of generosity can become part of a much larger story.

We rarely know what our gifts will mean to someone else. We rarely know which moments they will remember, which kindness will stay with them, or which small offering will remind them that they are not alone.

But we can choose to keep offering what we have.

Salvation by Community

There’s an old joke that says Universalists (of the Unitarian Universalists) believe we are all saved because  God is so good. Unitarians believe we are all saved because we are so good.  

These two traditions merged and while not incompatible – both groups believe we are all saved – they are  not the same.  

Universalism was founded in the late 18th century entirely around the idea that there is no hell, that  everyone is saved, that God is Love and Love can only Love. The early Universalist theologian Hosea Ballou said  that Jesus didn’t atone for our sins with his death, but that he released Love into the world so that atonement was  no longer necessary. In other words, Love was released for the sake and in service to everyone, everywhere. What  we have when Jesus was killed isn’t an appeasement for an angry god who needs a blood sacrifice; what we have  is a moment when god refuses to retaliate, refuses to abandon humanity and in that moment sets loose in the world  a power stronger than death. 

Unitarianism stepped back from the question altogether, leaning into reason instead. Rather than creating  a fulsome theology of salvation, the Unitarians shifted the focus to what we can know and what really matters in  the life we are living. While orthodox Christianity debated the nuances of the next life, Unitarians dismissed it all  as distraction imploring people to make this life as good as we can for as many as we can without losing plot  through speculation on the unknowable. 

So, the Unitarians said, “this isn’t something to worry about” and the Universalists said, “and it’s all good  anyway”.  

Martin Luther, the man credited with sparking the Protestant Reformation, was obsessed with the question  of salvation. A whole lot of theological and political energy at the time was spent on who was in and who was out  and what we had to do to be invited to the party. The Roman Catholic Church was convinced that what we DO  will be the determining factor which led to a whole lot of prescriptive behavioral ethics and the first step out was  confession. There were different categories of sins and a variety of responses a person can engage to cut down  the time they’ll have to suffer in hell. Because the process started with confession, Luther would jump from  confessional to confessional constantly naming every unkind thought or worry. As a monk who lived in a  monastery with other Catholic priests, there were jokes about avoiding him in the hall lest he try to confess  something to you.  

But, Luther was just living into the logical conclusion of the theology. It’s almost impossible not to be in  a state of sinfulness, that is until he realized the presupposition for this mania was wrong. We aren’t saved because  of what we do, he decided, but because of what we believe. Jesus said over and over, “Your faith has healed you.”  Salvation by Faith. Not action. Not even redemptive action like saying the 10 Hail Mary’s the priest told you  would be required. It is your faith alone that will get you into Heaven.  

John Calvin took it all one step further. You were saved before you were even born. God has chosen you.  You will live a good, faithful life, and you will be rewarded. It is predetermined. Or, at least it’s true for most of  us, you know, us and our friends. We’re fine.  

So we’re saved by faith and/or many of us are saved in advance and we demonstrate that through faith.  Then the Universalists come forward and say, actually, it’s not just some Christians who are saved. Not just all  Christians who are saved. It’s EveryOne. Every person has been chosen, every person is Loved, is redeemed,  every person will spend an eternity in Heaven. There is nothing we can do to alter that trajectory. Our task is one  of acceptance. Knowing you are loved, living in that Truth. Letting go of the idea that you have to do more, be  more, to win the approval of a distant god, seeking your restoration.  

*The god of the question of who is saved has always been too small for me, too stingy, and not the god I  know through the trees, the oceans or the extravagance of the night sky. That god is not judging our sinfulness,  not presenting a prescription for redemption. And yet, so much of popular American religion teaches us that our  individual behavior is the key to our eternal punishment or reward.

As Universalists, we reject that entire concept. There is no pedestal of perfect purity to stand on and  striving for it is an ego game anyway. That isn’t our spiritual task. That isn’t our work. Our work is that of letting  go of the ego boundaries that allow us to think we’re better or worse than anyone or everyone else. 

Paul Tillich who taught here at Union Theological after being expelled by the Nazis – side note, Nazis  can’t bear the concept of universal love – says this beautifully: 

You are accepted… by that which is greater than you, and the name of which you do not know. Do  not ask for the name now; perhaps you will find it later. Do not try to do anything now; perhaps  later you will do much. Do not seek for anything; do not perform anything; do not intend anything;  simply accept the fact that you are accepted.” 

This is where UUs have landed on the question of salvation. Essentially, we have no real idea about life  after death, but it’s all going to be fine. There is nothing you have to do or confess or repent to be brought into  the circles of Love, and it’s not even that you have to believe the right thing because we know revelation continues  to unfold. We are born into a world where Love has been let loose and there is no power greater. It’s Love in the  beginning, Love in the end, and it’s Love all the way through. The human task is knowing and living into the  reality that we have been claimed by this Love. 

And while that’s no easy task, acceptance isn’t the end of the story. We aren’t worried about life after life,  but life during life still has some tripping points. We might not be at the mercy of an angry god, but we are very  clearly at the mercy of an angry humanity.  

So, what does all this talk of salvation, of Love all the way through, mean for people imprisoned at Delaney  Hall? What does this mean for the woman whose little sister starved to death in Palestine? To the teenager hiding  under his desk as an active shooter looks for people to kill? To the man sitting on the corner of 34th street waiting  for the shelter to open. We might be certain there is no hell after death, but what about the hell we created before  it?  

The real threat is not from a vengeful god, but from us. And the real salvation does not arrive after death  but in the ways we embody the Love always available to us now, here, for each other.  Theologians of the past weren’t wrong when asking questions of salvation; they were wrong in thinking  it was a distant or future necessity. Redemption, Liberation, these are immediate needs with real life consequences  and the God who let Love loose in the world is begging our attention, calling us to save each other from the hell  we ourselves have created.  

Luther feared his personal sinfulness would lead to his damnation, but it is our collective sinfulness, our  shared rupturing of right relationship that is creating the chaos, the hellscape too commonly known in this life.  Redemption is the shared work of embodying that Love that spoke our names before we were born, of making  that Love manifest in the systems that are damning us, setting it free to roam familiar, human-made halls of chaos  and grief. 

The racism that fragments and others, the colonialism that erases history and culture, the economic  systems that destroy mutual dependence, the tech that commodifies attention, the myth of independence that  isolates all of us, forcing us into cocoons of fear telling us lies of loneliness. This is the hell to which we’ve  condemned ourselves and each other.  

Church is the laboratory for our collective restoration. Authentic communities become the body of the  Holy. We are fully human only in relationship and it’s only in relationship that we can untangle the systems that  set this planet on fire with hate and fear.  

The people at Delaney Hall standing in solidarity with the victims inside, witnessing the deplorable  conditions that have sparked a hunger strike, are active participants in our collective salvation.  The people running what has become something of an underground railroad helping trans families escape  southern states where they are under direct threat are active participants in our collective salvation. When you, when we, enter this space and tell each other how beautiful or missed someone is or how happy  we are to see you or donate a little cash to help someone else eat tonight, we are all participating in our collective  salvation. 

God has no hands but ours. And our salvation is found in our cooperation in the healing of the world. We  are obligated to participate because this is the only road leading to mutual liberation. Reconciling the difference  between what is and what should be is the healing work that can only be done together. We are redeemed when 

we are flourishing. All of us. It’s not my work, but our work, not my sin but our sin, and the confessional is ours  to bear together.  

Because Love has been let loose in the world, and we have to accept it for ourselves and for each other,  living into the promise that liberation will be ours if we open ourselves to the unconfined Love running free in  and through us. What we do in response is entirely on us. 

We will either save each other or we will be damned alone.

Mother Nature

“I am sorry, Boy,” said the Tree, “But I have nothing left to give you.” – The Giving Tree by Shel Silverstein

It’s May, it’s Mother’s Day, we had our concert last weekend and my ordination this coming weekend. It’s an exciting time for the Community Church!

If this is a day you celebrate, or a day you feel complicated about, or a day you’re simply aware of because the world around you keeps reminding you of it, you are not alone in that.

And I also want to say, especially today, that whatever your relationship to the word “mother” is—whether it feels close, distant, painful, joyful, complicated, or something in between—you belong here.

We are a community that tries, imperfectly but earnestly, to hold the fullness of human experience. And that includes today.

Around this time of the year, each kindergarten class at my elementary school would put on a production of The Giving Tree. Since there aren’t actually many characters in the book, about ten students would get the illustrious roles of “Boy” and “Tree” at different stages in the story, and every other student in the class would sit on the stage and pass down a microphone, each reading a line of the narration.

I was thrilled to be one of the five little girls selected to read the line of “Tree.” I stood off stage and read my line into a microphone while a cardboard tree with removable branches and a trunk stood in my place on stage, being dismantled by a rotation of five year old boys “growing up” in real time.

It was exciting to be in a play as a kindergartener and it was even more fun, year after year, watching the next class of students retell the story. I grew older, but the story stayed the same.

But as I grew older, I also began to think a little more critically about this story. Wait a minute… Why does the Boy demand everything from the Tree while offering nothing in return? Why does the Tree keep saying yes to the Boy’s requests even when it costs her herself? And hey–why is the Tree a girl and the Boy, well, a Boy? That doesn’t seem fair.

I don’t know if Shel Silverstein sat down intending to write a story about the undervalued labor of women, especially mothers, and the extractive ways that we treat both women and nature in society. I don’t think that’s what’s happening. But…stories absorb the values of the worlds that produce them… and they also shape the worlds that come after.

And the older I got, the harder it became not to notice the ways this story echoed other things too. The expectations placed on mothers. On women more broadly. This idea that love means giving until there’s nothing left of yourself. That being needed is the same thing as being valued. That exhaustion is proof of goodness.

I think that’s part of why the story feels so emotional to people. Most of us recognize something in it. Maybe we recognize ourselves in the Tree. Maybe we recognize someone who loved us that way. Maybe we recognize the Boy.

Because the Boy learns to see the Tree primarily in terms of usefulness. What can she provide? What part of her can be turned into something else? Apples into money. Branches into a house. Trunk into a boat.

This is a children’s book, which means that it’s one of the first stories we learn. I think of my school, with class after class of kindergarteners retelling this story, and the little girls – now women – who have grown up to find themselves in the role of the Tree.

That’s what we learn in this society: How can we make things more efficient? How can we be more productive? How can we do more, make more, earn more?

Under the system of late-stage capitalism we have found ourselves in, it can be very difficult to imagine what is meaningful about a relationship outside of its usefulness. We are taught, over and over again, that our value is tied to what we produce. That rest must be earned. That care is valuable only if it is efficient. That even love can become transactional.

I think that’s part of why the image of the Tree stays with us. Because somewhere deep down, we know this way of relating is unsustainable.

So I’ve been thinking about all of this, sitting with the story of The Giving Tree and wondering what to say to you all on this Mother’s Day.

We tend to have very particular stories about mothers in this culture. Sometimes they’re idealized almost beyond humanity—endless patience, endless sacrifice, endless capacity. And sometimes they’re taken for granted in a way that is much closer to what The Giving Tree is actually showing us: care that is expected, assumed, and often unreciprocated. Gratitude that’s only shown on a day Woodrow Wilson had to sign into law for us to observe and has become an excuse for Hallmark and flower shops and brunch places to make more money on yet another holiday that has, like so many things, been absorbed into consumerism.

Mother’s Day can be a complicated day to preach about. I’m not a mother myself, and I don’t know if I’ll ever be. I have a mother, and a soon-to-be mother-in-law, both of whom I admire and adore. I know that is not something everyone gets to say. I feel lucky in that.

And I also know that in this room, there are a whole range of experiences and feelings about today. Pride, sorrow, anger, excitement, regret, numbness, fear, grief, gratitude… sometimes all at once, sometimes none of those things at all.

And I think it matters, too, to say that motherhood is a beautiful and expansive thing. For me, it’s not primarily about biology. People of all genders mother. People of all genders are mothered. There are ways we are held, and ways we hold others, that don’t fit neatly inside the boundaries of gender at all.

And at the same time, it is also true that in this culture, the labor of mothering has been deeply gendered. It has been expected, extracted, and often made invisible in ways that fall disproportionately on women. So when we talk about mothers, we’re talking about something that is both expansive and shared—and also something very specific, shaped by history, expectation, and inequality.

It’s not a coincidence that Shel Silverstein’s “Tree” is described with she & her pronouns.

In cultures all around the world, for thousands of years, nature and the earth have been described in maternal terms: Mother Earth, Mother Nature, Gaia. Images of the earth as something generative, something that brings life forth, something that nourishes and sustains.

And I find myself wondering why that metaphor stuck so strongly.

Because if we are going to use that language at all, then it has to mean more than sentiment. It has to include care in both directions. It has to include limits. It has to include respect. It has to include the possibility that what we call “mother” is not an infinite resource, but a living relationship.

And that’s part of why I keep coming back to trees.

I’m graduating from seminary this Friday, and I’ve been thinking a lot about my time at Union over the past three years. I remember back to my first year, in class on Unitarian Universalism, where we were exploring what spiritual development meant for ourselves and others. One of our assignments was to adopt a new daily spiritual practice.

I decided that mine would be to touch a tree.

When I tell people back home in Oregon that I live in New York City now, they ask me, “Don’t you miss the trees?”

And true, Oregon is verdant and beautiful and full of trees.

But there are a lot of trees in New York, too – we just don’t always notice them.

If you don’t believe me, the New York Parks department has done the math: as of yesterday’s count on the interactive “NYC Tree Map”, there are 887,439 trees managed by the Parks department. That doesn’t even count all of the ones that are privately planted and cared for.

Nearly nine hundred thousand trees.

Once I started looking for them, I saw them everywhere. Outside the doctor’s office. Outside the grocery store. Outside cafes and apartment buildings and subway entrances. I started noticing the ways they adapted to the city – and how the city adapted to them. Roots erupting through concrete, leaving cracked sidewalks behind. Scaffolding built around trunks, little cutouts in the boards so branches could keep stretching toward the sun.

Next to the skyscrapers and tourists and commuters, the trees were right there. Quietly accompanying all of us.

And I realized how rarely I actually looked up. I’m usually moving quickly from one thing to the next, listening to a podcast while answering texts while mentally organizing the rest of my day. When I have down time, I somehow manage to be watching Netflix and scrolling on my phone at the same time, which I don’t think is good for my brain, probably.

But until I started intentionally looking for trees, I didn’t realize how much of the world I was moving past without really seeing.

That summer after my first year of seminary, while I was interning as a chaplain at New York Presbyterian, there was one day in particular when I felt completely overwhelmed. I had spent the day holding grief and conflict and pain, and by the end of it, I felt like I couldn’t carry any more.

I called my friend Martha, (now the Reverend Martha) and told her I didn’t know what to do with all of it anymore. And in typical Martha fashion, she asked me, “Is there a tree nearby?”

There was. A Japanese pagoda tree just a few feet away, though I didn’t know that was the species at the time. I only figured that out later by finding it on the Tree Map.

Martha told me to put my hands on the trunk and release everything I was carrying.

At first I resisted. It felt strange. Unfair, even. Who was I to place all of my sadness onto another living being? The tree didn’t deserve that.

But Martha just said, very calmly, “The tree can hold it. It’s big. It’s strong. It can handle your pain.”

So I stood there on a New York sidewalk with my hands against the bark, and I cried.

And surprisingly, I felt better.

Now, I don’t think the lesson here is that trees exist solely to absorb human suffering. That would just be The Giving Tree all over again.

But I do think we underestimate how much relationship with the natural world can sustain us. Not because nature is an object for our spiritual consumption, but because we are already part of it. Whether we act like it or not.

And maybe that’s part of the spiritual task right now. Learning how to relate differently.

To other people. To the earth. To ourselves.

To practice forms of love that are rooted in reciprocity rather than extraction. To stop assuming that care means depletion. To remember that rest is holy. That living things are not valuable simply because they are useful to us.

And I think it’s important to say that none of this is about disappearing into some kind of endless self-giving. That’s part of what makes The Giving Tree so controversial. The Tree doesn’t seem to have any boundaries at all. There’s no sense that she could say no, or pause, or rest, or even ask for something in return.

And I don’t think that’s what love is.

I think we tend to swing between two extremes. Either we imagine love as total self-sacrifice—where you give until there’s nothing left—or we imagine protection of the self as complete independence, where you don’t need anyone and no one can ask anything of you.

But neither of those really feels like life.

That’s why, as Unitarian Universalists, one of our core values is interdependence. This slightly messier middle place where we actually do need each other, and also have limits. Where care is real, and so is exhaustion. Where generosity matters, and so do boundaries. Where it turns out you cannot actually pour from an empty cup, even if you want to.

I’ve been traveling a lot this spring, and I keep hearing flight attendants remind me that I need to put on my own oxygen mask before helping someone else. It’s a cliche line used to talk about self-care, and also, on an airplane, it’s a very real directive. Not because we are isolated individuals who should only care about ourselves and always put ourselves first, but because to actually be supportive to others we need to be able to survive.

“I am sorry, Boy,” said the Tree, “But I have nothing left to give you.”

In the story, it ends up working out. All the Boy – now an old man – needs is somewhere to sit, and thank goodness, that is all the Tree has left to offer. Even at the end of her life, as her fruits have been taken from her and her limbs stripped, she is the resting place for this Boy – this Man.

But what about the bees who used to buzz around her blossoms? What about the birds who sought shelter in her branches? What about the other, smaller plants, who grew strong beneath her dappled sunlight? What about the other trees around her, who relied on her to send water and messages through their interconnected root systems?

“I am sorry,” said the Tree, “But I have nothing left to give.”

And I know these are big ideas. Climate change and capitalism and societal collapse can all feel so massive that it becomes difficult to imagine what meaningful relationship even looks like anymore. It’s easy to feel disconnected from it all, especially in midtown Manhattan. Easy to assume that “nature” is somewhere else. Somewhere upstate, maybe. Or even just sectioned off in Central Park. Not here between the scaffolding and the subway grates and the corner stores.

But there are nine hundred thousand trees in New York City quietly insisting otherwise.

And I think paying attention can actually change us. Maybe not all at once. Maybe not dramatically. But slowly.

Once I started noticing trees, I started caring about them. I wanted to know what kinds they were. I wanted to remember where they were rooted. Apparently I cared enough that while writing this sermon, I somehow ended up signing up to volunteer for the city’s decennial Tree Census next week.

Which is, to be fair, a little on the nose.

But maybe that’s how relationship works. Once something stops being an abstraction, once it becomes familiar, once you begin to recognize it as part of your community, it becomes harder not to care what happens to it.

So after the service today, we’re going to have the Tree Map open on the computers in the back at the Love in Action table. And I want to invite you to spend a few minutes with it. Find a tree near your apartment, or your work, or this church.

Find one tree near you. Not the most impressive one. Not the “important” one. Just one you pass by. Maybe one you’ve never really noticed before.

And if it helps, you can think of it less as “choosing a tree” and more like… noticing a relationship you are already in.

Take a moment to look at it on the map. What kind is it? How big is it? When was it last pruned?

And the next time you stop by it, take a moment to notice it. You say hi, or give it a pat, but you don’t have to. Just acknowledge its existence in this world, in this moment, that you also exist in.

And maybe that sounds small. It is small.

But I don’t think small things are insignificant.

What I’m learning is that paying attention is a spiritual practice, that noticing is a form of love, one that goes right to the center of all that Love is and can be. Whether it’s the pigeons fluttering and squawking, or the trees standing silent and tall… we are all in this together. And if we are to build a world built on reciprocity and interdependence instead of consumerism and extraction, I think it begins with something very ordinary: learning to see one another clearly again.

Who Do We Need to Become?

King Charles came to the US this week. In DC, ground zero for the sitting fascist-leaning regime, he was  greeted with pomp and circumstance, as well as billionaires in the double digits. First in the gilded oval office  and then in a state dinner in white tie formality, the proverbial and literal red carpet was rolled out, offering the  royal treatment to the rich and powerful.  

Next stop was NYC where a different story unfolded. Our Democratic Socialist Mayor, born in Uganda,  a British colony, the child of parents born in post-colonial India, met briefly with the King and Queen in a friendly,  casual exchange in Lower Manhattan. He then went on to other work and left the King to be escorted by former  mayor Michael Bloomberg to visit the 9-11 Memorial. NYC did not, as it happens, roll out a red – or any other  color – carpet.  

Mamdani is resisting the expectation that some people should be treated differently than other people. It’s  an awkward, maybe uncomfortable, but honest reflection of the reality that, king or not, Charles is a human being  just like everyone else. The crowns, the stolen diamonds, the red carpets, the titles, the castles, the books, the  celebrity are all social constructs the entire planet has agreed to abide. The visual of Mamdani greeting the King  and Queen warmly, joyfully, and briefly, felt like a surprising window into a world not yet.  

There’s a line James Baldwin wrote more than 60 years ago that feels both defiant and compelling. He  wrote: “The world is before you and you need not take it or leave it as it was when you came in.” This exchange  between the mayor and the king felt like a watercolor painting suggesting both the world as it is and the world as  it could be if we don’t “leave it as it was when we came in”. We neither have to accept this world, nor do we have  to leave it unchanged. In fact, I might suggest leaving it unchanged would be a sign of generational failure.  Mamdani demonstrated great courage and an elasticity of thinking in not accepting the parameters given to him  for this visit. He did not fall into the pattern of bowing to this ancient monarchy or believing the social construct  of royalty. One of the most alluring human temptations is to settle for too little. We were offered a master class in  graceful, confident resistance. 

In January, we started on a trajectory here on Sundays that has been attempting to prepare us for this  historical moment. I started by asking what we need so we can resist the oncoming fascist shift of our government,  which I believe has triggered the fall of the American Empire. I started with the question, “What’s happening”,  which opened up the reality that Truth has become difficult to discern. So, first I said we need to say what we  know without capitulating to the gaslighting, the propaganda, the false narrative being offered by the government  and media outlets, parroted by millions of people in every arena. And, I noted that emotional isolation makes that  Truth-telling difficult to do. 

The second question I posed was “What do we need to risk?” After that, we talked about revolution, and  by Earth Day we got specific about the world we dream about, the world we’re suggesting is worth the risk. The  final question, theoretically addressed today is, “Who do we need to become?” Last week we took a step back  and asked if this is really our work, if religious people should be active in the public and political realm. (Spoiler  alert: the answer is yes.) 

The work before us is multi-dimensional. Speaking truth, taking risks, building community – these all  have to be done and often simultaneously. One more thing we have to do, though, is the internal work, the spiritual  work, the deep rooting out of the ways this corrupted world has already taken over our psyches.  

If we are going to find our way to liberation, we have to decolonize our minds. Even more, we have to  make ourselves unavailable to colonization. When I watch Mamdani refuse the King, and turn down the invitation  to the Met Gala, I see a mind that has done or is doing this work, that is making himself unavailable. 

Colonialization is a system, a network of behaviors, habits, fears, accommodations we make all the time, often  without anyone knowing. We limit our imaginations; we settle for too little.  

And societal collapse comes when enough of us have done this, have limited ourselves and our hopes for  what’s possible, that we the people begin to activate and sustain the very systems that are harming us.  Over time, a colonized mind will say what is expected rather than what’s true.  

A colonized mind will avoid questions that might be dangerous.  

A colonized mind will narrow what could be possible.  

A colonized mind will confuse acquiescence with survival.  

A colonized mind will perform roles instead of being a whole or true self.  

A colonized mind will choose denial over reality. 

Eventually, it doesn’t feel like oppression. It feels like the way things are.  

So, how do we decolonize our minds? 

Compassion. Attention. Community. 

The ability to be attentive to suffering is one important pathway toward the reclamation of our True and  Best and Freest Selves, the rewiring of our hearts and minds. Seeing people and feeling their pain. Knowing their  pain is like our pain. Knowing that the way they have responded is the way we would have responded. Knowing  we are connected and dependent on one another.  

Let me see if I can get specific. I was reading a story about a person on her way to work after dropping  her kids at school, who was then captured by ICE and sent into detention. She is here without papers, officially,  but she’s been attending court dates and working toward legalization. The story noted the lack of food or showers  or medicine or beds in the detention center. It noted that no one told her kids who waited at school for hours not  knowing what was happening. The story offered many entry points for compassion, but lots of the people  commenting were unable to find it within themselves to do anything but blame, and even enjoy the suffering of  this woman and her family.  

The ability to remain attentive to suffering is what keeps the mind, the soul, from collapse.  Retaining or reclaiming our compassion is our connection to our deepest selves, is our lifeline toward  decolonization. It is our way to ensure we are not hardened by the suffering, that cultural cruelty doesn’t deny  people the ability to tell their stories, or deny us the ability to feel them. When so much is awful, when the chaos  is constant and the pain is global, turning it off can feel like a kindness. It’s not. It’s a capitulation. It’s the  acquiescence we think we need to survive. It is surrender.  

Compassion is liberation.  

Mamdani was avoiding headlines related to the king, focusing attention on his livability agenda, but when  pushed, he noted that the king should return a diamond stolen many generations ago. This is an example of  interconnected suffering and the accountability compassion leads us toward. He was aware of the ongoing hurt  that theft has created and that was the one thing he brought to the conversation.  

Life in this world can be painful. I’m not going to pretend it’s not. Facing reality, when reality is what we  have now, is heartbreaking.  

But that’s not all there is. In addition to compassion and attention on this path of decolonization, on this  path of liberation, there’s community. And in community, there’s joy. 

Isolation, leading to loneliness, is one of the ways the virus of fascism takes hold in our bodies.  Community is the cure. I’m talking about authentic, covenantal relationships. I’m talking about communities of  care. Communities devoted to truth-telling. Communities where Love is at the center, not in a performative way  but in a messy, committed, loyal, affectionate, honest way.  

This kind of community requires something from us. There’s an obligation. Warmth without commitment  is comfort not covenant. Mutual aid requires mutual demand. This kind of authentic relationship can become a  source of joy which isn’t used as escape, but as fuel. Joy provides a sustained aliveness. It gives us what we need  to endure, to retain compassion, to be in this fight for as long as it takes. Joy is what frees us up to imagine. And  without imagination we’re not going to build the new world. We’re not going to become free of this one.  

Are you in relationships that make bravery possible?  

Are you in relationships that allow you to be your whole and true self?  

Are you in relationships where you can tell stories of your pain?  

Where you can move from your pain into joy? 

Because without that, the calls to resistance are unfair. There is no way we can Resist, there is no way we  can decolonize our minds, there is no way we can sustain compassion, there is no way we can experience authentic  joy, there is no way we can become who we need to be in this moment. Without these things, the call to resistance  is asking something from us that conditions cannot support.  

I’m not sure I have this, but I can imagine it. I am sure we, together, can create this. We’re closer to it than  any community I’ve ever seen. 

And I’m not willing to give in to the temptation to settle for too little.  

I hope you’re not either. I hope you’re feeling as ambitious as I am.  

If we’re going to build something new, we’ll have to be sure not to lose the ability to trust what we know,  to risk what we must, to hold fast to one another in the spirit of love and compassion, to decolonize our minds, and to imagine a life that is not defined by what is already breaking.  

There is no way out of this spiritual work, every one of us is implicated. We are warriors in a revolution  that has begun quietly and without our consent. We are in it, making or not making the world. Let’s live  unambiguously declaring that we have no intention of leaving this world as we found it.

A Pope A Politician and a Fight for the Ages

It’s rare in the 21st century for the words of a religious leader to make headlines, and even less common for a national political leader to argue with them publicly, but that’s exactly what we’ve been seeing. The war of words, both subtle and explicit, between the President and Vice President of the United States and the Pope, leader of the Roman Catholic Church, has triggered an international conversation both on the issues, but also on the bigger question of who gets to talk about what.

Our government waged war on Iran without provocation and without an apparent or accessible goal articulated. It was in clear violation of the Just War Theory, a framework written by St. Augustine in the early 5th century and theoretically followed by the Christian world since.

One of the first acts of this war was to bomb a school killing more than 160 girls, a war crime by both modern and ancient, both legal and moral standards. From there the attacks got worse and the rhetoric threatened mass annihilation. In response, the pope chastised our theoretically Christian leaders and defended the Iranians with lines like, (these are all quotes from the pope over the last few weeks) “whoever is a disciple of Christ, the Prince of Peace, never stands on the side of those who yesterday wielded the sword and today drop bombs.” “…our God is Jesus…who rejects war...” “No cause can justify the spilling of innocent blood.” “Enough of idolatry of self and money! Enough of the display of power!” “The delusion of omnipotence…is becoming increasingly unpredictable and aggressive.” “God does not listen to the prayers of those who wage war…your hands are full of blood.”

In response JD Vance, himself a Roman Catholic, said the Pope should be careful when speaking on matters of theology, which has to be the most bizarre statement in this ongoing public quarrel. He said it with a staggering level of arrogance. And, folded into that arrogance was a hint or even just a whisper of a threat. He said exactly, “I think it’s very, very important for the pope to be careful when he talks about matters of theology.” I think what he meant was he should be careful when speaking on matters of theology that aren’t in alignment with US policy. In other words, don’t get in our way. Know your place.

Lucky for the whole world, this pope does, in fact, know his place.

But sometimes in this country, we get confused about who belongs where and who should be saying what. Part of the liberation people experienced in the founding of this nation was the implied and later codified declaration of the separation of church and state. And while we often assume that choice was a response to centuries of church corruption, it was actually a way of protecting the new church from the stink of politics. As the Puritans were imagining their home in the new world, they wanted to ensure that purity wasn’t tainted by either the Roman Catholic Church they were trying to purify themselves of or the mess that government too often creates.

In the beginning, what was declared in our Constitution was an assurance that no church would ever be Established. This is in contrast to the Establishment of the Church of England which, even today, is enmeshed in governmental systems. While they couldn’t have imagined the pluralism we have, they did want to guarantee that no one in government ever had a say in how religion was to be run or what people were to believe. Remember that they were fleeing England where there was a doctrine of uniformity that legally required conformity of liturgy, government and theology by every citizen.

But separation of church and state is not the same as separation of religion and politics. Separation of church and state, meaning no religion will be established, thereby giving people freedom of belief, - no conformity required - is a legal reality. It means that none of our federal systems will benefit or harm any one group over another. No favorites. No uniformity required. That’s what the 1st Amendment protects. Religion and Politics are different.

Religion is how communities ask big questions together. How we face Mystery, together. How we live deeply, together. How we organize our questions and how we respond to the answers, together. I keep saying “together” because religion is a communal reality. Spirituality is individual. How any particular person asks big questions, faces and responds to mystery, or seeks deeper life is our own spirituality. How we do that with others is religious. We are religious together.

Politics is how we organize ourselves in groups, how we make collective decisions, distribute shared resources, and solve common problems. Each person brings to those public conversations our own individual value systems which are informed by many things including culture, history, and religion. No single person can separate their religious beliefs – the things they discover in community when facing the great mysteries of life – from their politics – how they think we should solve our problems, distribute our resources or make collective decisions.

If we are religious – and if you’re here most Sundays it’s fair to call you religious like it or not – we are going to bring the values we espouse here into the public conversation. Authenticity requires it of us. To be ourselves, we have to ask what it means to Live the Truth as we understand it.

And that Truth is what we discern here, together. That Truth includes supporting each person in their fullness, includes gratitude as a spiritual practice, includes rest as a form of resistance, includes joy as witness to liberation, includes a belief in the beauty of every being with all our varieties, includes a sense of our profound planetary interconnectedness, includes wild equality of being, includes the value of discovery through science, includes truth-telling itself, includes living with Love at the Center of Everything.

And we carry those beliefs into public spaces. We embody them. They are who we are in the world. We want our civic organizing systems to reflect those values. Which means there is no way for religion to be separated from politics. Our politics is incarnational. It is embodied. It is our values taking flesh. Living and breathing in the world.

We don’t really expect our selves or our neighbors not to bring those value systems into the public conversation. And when it comes to clergy we require them to speak out on major ethical issues. We need it as witness. We may not agree with them, but as long as they are respecting our right to disagree, we have collectively determined that we need these voices. People like Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., Rev. William Barber, the Dali Lama, the Archbishop of Canterbury who’s been turning my head lately, Thich Nhat Hahn, Rev. Mariann Budde (Buddy) who spoke truth to power at the inauguration, even our own Rev. John Haynes Holmes. Each of these people has at some time been the critical voice countering cultural norms. They are calling us to be our best selves. They’re holding up the vision of the new world, the world possible, the world not yet.

As is the pope when drawing attention to abuses of power leading to violence. And, he knows he has a particular responsibility in this scenario because this government has declared Christianity as core to its value system and the Vice President is himself Catholic.

The power struggle between secular and religious leaders is as old as humans. Since we could form language, we’ve been jockeying for position and recognition. Some of these power struggles have been epic leading to massive disruptions like the Inquisition and the Crusades to name only two. The Avignon Papacy, the Great Schism, the Protestant Reformation are a few others.

I actually think we’re in a similar fight right now, and one that, like the others, might also lead to a restructuring of the platforms and frameworks for our living.

I know there are people in our country – even in our government – who are trying to bring about the apocalypse. I’m not talking about that, but I’m also not not talking about it. What I mean is that I think there’s a little bit of a feeling both in the country and around the globe, that something big is happening. Maybe it’s AI. Maybe it’s the increase of violence. Maybe it’s the mind-boggling wealth disparity. Maybe it’s the fall of the American Empire. Maybe it’s the climate crisis. Maybe it’s all of these seeming to happen simultaneously and, in important ways, relatedly.

Do you know the entire tech world has a scale they call P(Doom)? It refers to the likelihood that AI will cause a disastrous outcome for humanity like extinction. There are some tech leaders who have a P(Doom) of 95%.

Even without that alarming number, there’s just a feeling so many people – on every side of the political and religious spectrum – have that something is coming or shifting or something. Something is something. Which is why we can’t cede ground to hopelessness. It’s just too easy give up. To look around and say, “We’re doomed. It’s done. Why bother?”

It’s why we need our incarnational politics.

It’s why we need our embodied integrity.

It’s why we need our voices of reason.

It’s why we need our experience of interconnectedness.

It’s why we need our willingness to be curious about difference.

It’s why we need our holy impatience.

It’s why we need our commitment to collective liberation.

It’s why we need our truth-telling in civic discourse.

It’s why we need to be visible as witness to the world we know is possible.

It’s why we need to embody hope in every public square.

It’s why we need our insistence that Love be at the Center in every decision, in every choice, in every vote, and policy, and law.

It might not be common in the 21st century to hear religious voices in public discourse, but that doesn’t mean we’re going to surrender common ground. Not now when our voices are profoundly necessary. So, as we started with words from Pope Leo, let us end with them.

“You are the salt of the Earth. You are the Light of the world. You are the message of hope, and it is on you, on us, to give hope to everyone else… Be not afraid.”

The Revolution At Our Curb

“Cities have the capability of providing something for everybody, only because, and only when, they are created by everybody.” – Jane Jacobs

I’ve been thinking a lot about pigeons, lately. 

That’s not really something I ever expected to say in a sermon… but once I read the Pigeon Manifesto a few years ago, I knew that eventually I was going to have to preach on it. 

If you don’t already know, in Unitarian Universalist communities, we believe in a “living tradition” of wisdom and spirituality, that includes sources as diverse as poetry, nature, scripture, science, and personal experience. We believe that a NASA report (and have you seen the pictures from the Artemis II mission?) is just as sacred as a Bible verse. In some UU congregations, it might even be easier to talk about NASA than Nazareth (for those of you who weren’t paying attention to Rev. Peggy’s Easter sermon last week, that’s where Jesus grew up). 

Here at Community Church, I think we’re pretty comfortable talking about it all – from scripture to science, poetry to protest. So today, our holy text of the day is The Pigeon Manifesto by Michelle Tea. 

And by the way, if you want to check it out yourself, or spread the Pigeon Gospel, I’ve folded up a bunch of zines with the manifesto printed on it – please take one for yourself, one for a friend, one to leave somewhere for someone to find… 

Because once I first heard it, I couldn’t stop thinking about it. 

What Michelle Tea states in the Pigeon Manifesto is true. The pigeons with which we are all too familiar, that we flinch from when they come too close, that we look past on our daily commutes, are a result of our own doing. 

The species Columba livia is divided into a few categories: the rock doves, which are the wild type, and what we call domesticated and feral pigeons. Again, these are all the exact same bird–it’s just their circumstances which are different. 

Feral pigeons, or city pigeons, are descendents of rock doves that were domesticated by humans and who escaped, or were released, into the wild. 

They are animals who have lived alongside humans for thousands of years, who were once cared for, relied on, sent out as messengers, and who now live in the environments we have built, surviving on what we leave behind, adapting to the systems we have created.

Because of their domestic ancestry, feral pigeons have learned to recognize human-made structures as their homes. They will feel more at home in the eaves of a building than the side of a cliff. 

“The pigeon was once a dove, and then we built our filthy empire up around it, came to hate it for simply thriving in the midst of our decay, came to hate it for not dying. “ 

I couldn’t shake this idea that the pigeon was once a dove, that nothing about the bird itself really changed, that it has always been exactly what it is, and that the shift happened somewhere in us, in how we learned to see it–or maybe in how we learned not to. 

The pigeons are birds, they are doves. They are the nature of the city and the ones who no one loves. 

And maybe part of why that catches in me is because I do love this city. 

I love the way New York holds beauty in places that aren’t polished or planned, in the stubborn life that pushes up through concrete, in the layers of people and stories and survival that exist right on top of each other… 

And it makes me wonder what it means that we can love a city for exactly that kind of resilience and texture, and yet struggle to extend that same recognition to the creatures, and sometimes even the people, who embody it most visibly. 

Somehow we have told ourselves a story where they are the problem, rather than a reflection of the world we have shaped. 

I’m not sure if our reaction to pigeons is really about pigeons. 

I think it’s about what it feels like to see something thriving in a landscape that we know, on some level, is marked by our own excess and our own neglect, to see life continuing in ways that don’t fit our sense of what belongs or what is worthy.

When I was telling my fiancé’s grandmother about this sermon a few days ago, she gave me a look. I knew what it was for: 

“Pigeons? What does that have to do with the sacred?” 

Isn’t that what church is for? For us to come together in worship, in acknowledgement and appreciation for the ways in which the divine has shown up in our lives, and to call us forth to better and more intentional living in the spirit of Love? 

I shrugged back at her. 

Where is God in this story? Where is the sacred? 

I think it’s everywhere. 

Because this entire time, over these past several hundred years, nothing about this bird has changed – but everything about how we relate to it has. 

Sometimes transformation isn’t out there (gesture outward)... it’s in here (hand on heart). 

A few weeks ago, at an event our clergy team attended with other progressive faith leaders in the city, one person shared a hadith, a saying from the prophet Muhammed: If you see an evil, change it with your hand. If you aren’t able to do that, change it with your tongue. And if you aren’t able to do that, change it with your heart – and that is the least you can do. 

We must change the world with our actions, and our words, but the very least we can do is begin the work of transformation by changing our hearts. 

We’ve changed our hearts before when we began to reject and resent the birds who learned how to exist around and between us, as we stripped them of their ability to survive in the wild but banished them from our homes. We made them reliant on us and then we abandoned them. 

And it’s not just pigeons–I hope you realize this by now. 

And it’s not fair. 

We are entangled in systems we did not create–although we have certainly shaped them and benefited from them. We are living in environments that might not reflect our individual values but do reflect our collective ones, and our habits, and our ignorance, and we are sharing those environments with other forms of life that are constantly adapting in response. 

And all of this has started to become very real for me in these past few weeks, because I don’t know if you’ve heard… but we bought a building. 

It’s exciting–it opens up a new era for Community Church as we look back on the last two hundred years of our existence and look forward to the next two hundred years. It’s something we’ve been waiting for, for a long time now. 

And you know what? 

It means we have a curb. 

A real one. 

And I didn’t expect that to feel as significant as it does, but there is something about having an actual edge, an actual place where our sense of “this is ours” meets the rest of the city, that changes the way you pay attention. 

It also means other people are paying attention to us.  

In the days after closing on the building, one of the front windows was smashed. It might have been targeted at us, but probably was just someone causing a bit of good old fashioned property destruction. 

Within a few hours, the window was boarded up and the situation was handled. 

Reverend Peggy wants to put up a sign on the boarded up window that says “Next time, smash the patriarchy.” 

And it’s not a huge deal, but also, it is. Owning a building means a lot more than just getting to host events whenever we want and design a sanctuary that feels more like home. 

It means dealing with condo boards and smashed windows and litter and disorderly conduct. It means having safety policies and backup plans and a team of people to keep the space clean and safe. 

It means building relationships with our neighbors, both unhoused and housed, human and other-than-human. 

Because a curb isn’t just a boundary—it’s a meeting place. It’s where everything we’ve been talking about shows up. 

It’s where the pigeons are. 

It’s where people pass by who may never come inside. It’s where things get left behind—sometimes intentionally, sometimes not. It’s where the life of the city presses right up against whatever sense of control or intention we thought we had. 

It’s exciting. It’s scary. It’s an opportunity. 

Because the question is not whether we are part of this shared world.

The question is how we are going to live within it.

What we are going to notice.

What we are going to care for.

What we are going to ignore.

And whether we are willing, even a little bit, to change our hearts, to change our words, and to change our actions. 

Because the revolution, if it hasn’t begun already, is not going to arrive all at once. It’s not going to be loud or dramatic or easy to point to. It begins in these small shifts—in the decision to pay attention to what we have been trained to overlook, in the willingness to question our first reactions, in the recognition that the lines we draw between ourselves and everything else are often thinner than we think.

It might begin right there at the curb.

In the moment where we realize that nothing we encounter is outside the web of existence we are already part of. 

I’ll end with a confession: I still don’t entirely like pigeons. Not because they’re dirty or disgusting, just because I’m not a fan of the sudden movement of a flock of birds flying towards me and maybe pooping in my hair. 

But even if I don’t like pigeons, I do respect them. 

And so maybe the invitation is not to suddenly love everything in some overwhelming, abstract way, but to begin more simply—to notice, to pause, to let ourselves be unsettled by what we see, to consider that even the lives we resist or dismiss are part of the same shared world that we depend on. 

Because our curb is already full of life.

Our city is already full of life.

And we are not separate from it—we are participants in it, shaped by it even as we shape it in return.

And if that’s true, then the question is not who belongs here.

The question is how we are going to live together.

Passover: A Story of Risk Taking

We all know the story. We tell it every year, but we know it.  

• Abraham, Isaac, Jacob 

• Joseph sold/exiled to Egypt 

• His brothers followed 

• Generations passed and they remained refugees/outsiders 

• Forced into slavery 

• Harsh conditions 

• They call to god. God hears them and takes their side. 

• Moses is called by God to liberate them 

• 10 plagues, Red Sea, Desert 

My interest today is in the tiny space between when Pharoah said, “Fine, go.” And when  they actually left. Before the 10th plague, Moses told the Israelites to put lamb blood on the  doorframe so the plague – the killing of the first born son – would pass over them. Until this  point, nothing had been asked of the slaves. And even in this act, there wasn’t great risk. Have  lamb for dinner tonight, share with your neighbors – which scripture actually says – and mark  your door.  

It’s after that when all the Nile River Valley is mourning and the Pharoah relents that the  people have to step up. That’s the moment. 

I can imagine that moment well. Eldest son, super happy he survived the night, says, “Let’s  get out of here.” Teenagers in the household are all for it. Pack up some bread and water and  we’re out. But mom isn’t so sure. I mean, life here sucks and Pharoah is god-awful, but what do  we know about this Moses guy? Isn’t he Pharoah’s grandson? Who are his people? Wasn’t there  a rumor he killed someone? And dad doesn’t want to get up in the morning to hunt for straw and 

labor all day in the dry hot sun, but he has a house with a doorframe and food and they just planted  those fig trees. Maybe we should wait and see what happens.  

It’s human nature to assume the best, even in the face of impossible odds, to want to stick  with what you know, to live within the familiar narrative, even if it’s one of slavery and  oppression. 

Years ago I heard a story from a Polish woman. She was a child and Germany had taken  over. It was the 1940s and her Jewish family had gotten a letter. They were to be on a train heading  for Auschwitz in 2 weeks. She talked about counting the days and waiting up the night before  wishing she could stop the sun from rising. On the train, she and her brother were bickering about  shoes. When they arrived, she and her mother were sent in one direction, her father and brother  in another. She never saw her brother or father again. Her mother was killed shortly after. She  was the sole survivor in her family. 

In hindsight, waiting at home for 2 weeks to catch that train taking you to your own murder  seems deranged, but, it’s what most families did. Leaving, escaping, seeking an alternative meant  confronting the truth about what was happening, and accepting that life isn’t what it used to be,  no matter how normal each day appeared. It was the same for the Israelites. The first and most  difficult step is breaking through the denial to understand this isn’t like anything we’ve  experienced. Everything is different and we have to respond in unusual ways.  

For the last few months – or maybe for 200 years – this pulpit has been a counterforce, a  visible alternative, to the normalcy of American culture, the everydayness of accepting the slow  burn of social, economic, and political oppression. We’ve been providing a counter-narrative,  offering wide-eyed truth telling. I’ve noted the danger in that, the potential for dismissal, that  your desire for comfort – and my desire to provide it – could mean fewer people show up, leaving  our pews literally and figuratively empty. But, that hasn’t happened. You’re still here and more  have been coming. We are willing to speak and hear the Truth, willing to accept the consequences  of knowing, and willing to participate in the resistance we are mounting. 

John Haynes Holmes once said from this pulpit, “When the church identifies itself with the  state, it becomes a chaplain to empire, blessing guns and sanctifying slaughter. In that hour it  ceases to be the church of Christ.” 

The problem for most of us, even as we acknowledge the need to oppose tyranny, is that  we want to be safe. We want to live simple, quiet lives. We want the question of what we’re eating  for dinner or whether it’s warm enough to skip a coat to be all that fills our minds.  

But as we stand on a precipice of history, no one is innocent, no one is irrelevant, and  neutrality is fantasy. Doing nothing is a choice with a consequence.  

Some of the Israelites stayed in Egypt. They decided it was too much to risk and they’d  prefer the devil they knew. There are no stories about them. They have no history. They melted  into irrelevance having sacrificed their lives to the gods of autocracy. 

Because there are no innocent actions. There are no innocent people. When the dragon of  empire breaths fire as ours has been doing, we all get burned. We are complicit either in our  collective destruction or in the building of the new world. Either way, we are all accused and we  are all guilty. 

There is no safety, there is no neutrality, there is no passive democracy. The price of truth  is risk. It could be the risk of inaction like the family that obediently brought themselves to the  train heading to their own deaths. Or it could be the risk of action, of occupying federal space, of  blocking the expulsion of people born on the other side of the border, of speaking unpopular truths  to break through denial and claim your place even in the face of loss.  

To be faithful is not to be safe. The Israelites who stayed behind, faithful to the Egyptian  empire, were no more safe than the ones who left. The family that got on the train, faithful to  governmental orders, was not safe. Safety is as much an illusion as innocence. The implication  of every action and inaction is guilt. The world is broken and we are incriminated by our very  presence in it. We are all participants, one way or another.  

We commit our lives to collective liberation, pushing back on the power of empire, and we  will be found guilty.  

We provide no resistance, obeying the law and accepting the stories we are told, and make  no mistake - we will be found guilty.  

The question before us isn’t how we stay safe, or how we avoid risk. Those are not options.  The question before us is “What does Love require of me? What does Love require of us?” I’m reminded of when John Haynes Holmes stood at this pulpit while patriotism was the  air everyone breathed on the eve of war, and declared, “So long as I’m your minister, this church 

will answer no military summons.” He was risking his job, his career, his livelihood, his  reputation, his standing. He was called disloyal, dangerous, treasonous.  

But the church - our spiritual ancestors – applauded him. He did not stand alone. Because  risk is made possible by our membership, our participation, in community. When we stand alone,  it’s more likely we’ll get crushed. Alone, we are dissenters, non-conformists, trouble-makers.  Together we are a force. A church. A movement.  

What we have here is costly solidarity grounded in an unflinching truth. We are making no  moral surrender to power. To autocracy. To empire. We are linking ourselves each to the other,  knowing Love is the bond, Love is the Truth, Love is the ground on which we stand, together.  

Communities that avoid risk not only become irrelevant, they become soulless. We are here  to save our souls. Salvation isn’t the byproduct of following the rules, the law, living within the  structure of the totalitarian fantasy of a mad king. Salvation is the byproduct of living in Love  with one another, saving each other again and again. Helping each other gather the food and the  water we need for the journey. 

Because we need each other to walk out of the pain that is known into the pain and  possibility that is unknown, that has yet to be imagined, map-less but not without direction,  protecting each other from the dragon’s fire the way they walked out of Egypt, away from  European concentration camps, far from Southern plantations. As Marge Piercy has said, “We are  born of wanderers, with shoes under our pillows and a memory of blood that is ours raining  down.” We will be counted among those who chose the desert over bondage, who revolted, who  fought, who ran. We will one day be the ancestors who let go of everything but freedom (This is a paraphrasing from a piece of Marge Piecy’s poem “Maggid”).

What Women Want (2026)

Every year I dedicate the service closest to March 8th, International Women’s Day, to the question of What  Women Want. Women, of course, aren’t monolithic and what we want isn’t an easy thing to capture.  Women are a lot of things. We’re the people who apply mascara without a mirror on the subway, who  wipe snot from a toddler’s nose, even if the toddler isn’t ours, who wear high heels and short skirts, who drink  pumpkin spiced lattes and text our friends when we get home so they know we’re safe. We’re the people who don’t wear make-up or scarves in our hair, who keep our distance from children,  especially the ones with runny noses, who look fabulous in combat boots and cargo pants, who like Gatorade and  ham sandwiches, whose friends are elderly neighbors or aren’t known much outside of Reddit. Some women are hot all the time, wearing layers they can shed through the day, opening windows to sleep  even in January, and some women are cold, no matter the season. We joke that my sister-in-law could be burning  in hell and she’d still reach for a sweater. 

For a century, public opinion has tried to capture What Women Want, tried to figure out where they’ll  spend money, who they’ll support in an election, how they’ll respond to a news story or policy or if they’ll adapt  to new technologies.  

But women want different things. 

The women in Afghanistan, the women who were born into freedom but were forced into burkas, not  allowed to leave their homes, to see doctors, to go to school, those women want their lives back. The women in Iran whose daughters were killed last week in their school as part of an aggressive show of  force by an insecure American president and incompetent Defense Secretary, want to roll back time so they can  change everything that happened that morning, keeping their daughters home and safe.  The women in Russia whose husbands were forced into the army occupying Ukraine, who have not heard  from their spouses, who do not know if their lovers are alive, want their families intact, want to hold the men they  love in their arms to whisper in their ears, “You’re safe.” 

The women in Ukraine want to stop being so strong, want to collapse into their fear and anger, want to  scream from the bottom of their powerlessness, howling into the black hole of injustice where their neighbors  have died, where their homes were destroyed, where their strength has been sucked from their bodies and  disappeared.  

The women of Congo want an end to sexual violence perpetrated on them as a weapon of war, a war they  did not start and cannot stop, a war that makes their pain a sign of victory, a war that is designed to humiliate and  traumatize girls whose mothers watch powerless, horrified, filled with rage and unsure if survival is worth the  price extracted. 

The immigrant women of Minneapolis want to go to the supermarket without the threat of being captured,  kidnapped, abducted, sent to an American detention center where they will live in a cell so crowded they can’t  even lie down to sleep, where they won’t be able to call home, where they will live hungry and afraid until they  are sent to countries on distant continents surrounded by unfamiliar languages and people with no way back. 

Young women want to walk to their apartments without worrying that the only thing keeping them safe is  the key they slid between two fingers and the performative smile they use to hide their vigilance and fear. Old women want to be seen by society, just to be seen, to know that their opinions, concerns, joys, wisdom,  experience is not ignored, not dismissed as irrelevant because their hands are covered in sun spots, and their  eyelids have fallen over their thinning lashes. 

Black women want to stop having to work twice as hard to get half as far, to stop having to prove  themselves even when they’ve reached the peak of their careers, have accomplished more, achieved more,  succeeded more than the men in their industries.  

And they’d like to stop having to be so resilient, stop having to go high even though the rest of the world  has gone so low, stop having to suck it up, turn the other cheek, be the bigger person, and to, every once in a  while, have the temper tantrum they so fully deserve. 

Women aren’t one thing. 

Some women are proud of their military sons, and some join up themselves, donning uniforms and  machine guns, itching to get to the front lines, and some want their husbands called to war, taking their violence  out of the house, maybe even with a secret hope that they never return. 

Some want to show their bellies, flat or round, and some conceal their whole bodies, neck to ankles. Some cover their heads and others dye their hair to match the rainbow. 

Some write their phone numbers on bar napkins, kissed in red lips, and slipped to the woman drinking a  beer with friends who seem to bore her. 

Some women carry lies on every breath. 

Some speak truth oblivious to consequence. 

Some make music.  

Some run long distances. 

Some own closets filled with shoes. 

Some are wondering how much longer they can go on. 

What do women want?  

We want to be able to balance five cups of coffee in a four cup tray.  

Or hold the phone, and a stack of mail, and a handbag, and the dog’s leash in one hand while trying to get  the keys into the lock with the other. 

We want not to be so weighed down by that tote bag heavy with a wallet, umbrella, a pair of heels for  when we get to the office, half eaten bags of smoked almonds, crumpled receipts that should have been turned in  three weeks ago, and the sadness of each unhoused person we walked by, even as we tried to distract ourselves  with thoughts of anything and everything else. 

White women are not one thing. There are white women enlarging their lips, breasts, butts and whatever  else they think will attract the male gaze, wearing red hats and t-shirts with arrows pointing to their crotches  letting Donald Trump know he can grab them any time, hoping to get onto a billionaire’s government subsidized space-ship while complaining that immigrants shouldn’t have access to services like emergency doctors when  their child is having an asthma attack. 

There are also white women blocking the exits to parking garages preventing ICE from leaving with their  nefarious motives, putting themselves between danger and the vulnerable, filling city streets with bodies and  signs, making visible the resistance of the majority to the degradation of our democracy, of our morality, of the  core of who we have claimed or maybe pretended we were, white women who risk their own lives for the sake  of others, who take the heat, redirect the attention, white women getting pepper-sprayed, getting murdered in front  of their wives in their own cars.  

Women want what people of every gender want. We want love and affection, we want softness, and  security, we want to know those we love are safe, we are safe, we will be safe even as we age, even as our bodies  become less capable, even if we disagree, even if we don’t have a lot of money or no money or no way of getting  money. We all want to live in a world without violence, without fury, without reckless politicians or greedy  billionaires or power hungry tech bros who feel disconnected from responsibility or planetary relationship. 

Women want what everybody wants, we want clean air and fresh water and the freedom to explore our  own humanness without interference.  

We want food that nourishes us and access to healthcare we can afford without worry. We want opportunity and relevance. 

All of us. Every one. Every one in this room, everyone on Madison Avenue, in New York City, and state,  everyone in this country, in every country. Everyone regardless of how they voted or who they think is stopping them from getting what they want or what they think they need to do to get it. 

Women want what men want, what non-binary people want, what trans people want. We want to live our  lives fully, feely, openly. 

We want joy.  

We want rest. 

We want music and dancing and reading and thinking and laughing. We all want laughing. We want survival without required resilience. 

We want recognition without a fight.

We want safety without compromise.  

We want to wear what we want, live like we want, do what we want without threat or fear or complaint or  excuse or criticism. 

We want to belong.  

And we want Love. Unapologetic, unmoored, unbound Love. Love that has been released from its  shackles, love that’s been liberated, love that is liberating, love that sets us free. 

That’s what women – and everyone else – wants. 

There Are Four Lights: Truth Power and the Courage to See

There’s an episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation where the captain is abducted held by an enemy  force. He’s in a dark room with one man who turns on 4 overhead spotlights and asks Captain Picard how many  lights he sees. Picard says there are 4 lights. The captor says, “There are 5 lights.” Picard, again says, “There are  4 lights.” He’s then stripped and hung up by his wrists. He’s denied food and sleep. The captor returns periodically  to ask Picard how many lights there are. They aren’t looking for information about the fleet or anything else. They  just want him to see 5 lights.  

There’s a similar story in Orwell’s 1984, holding up 4 fingers, requiring the protagonist, Winston, to say  there are 5. In that story, after torturing him, Winston says there are 5 fingers to make the pain stop. It doesn’t  stop. Saying there are 5 isn’t the point. He has to actually see 5 fingers when only 4 are shown. 

The captain in the Star Trek story suffers much pain, but he keeps yelling that there are 4 lights. He’s  promised a good life, a gentle life, if only he can acknowledge that there are 5 lights, but in his suffering, he keeps  repeating, “There. Are. Four. Lights.” He’s rescued, and in the final scene he’s with a therapist, who is also a  good friend. To her he says: 

“At the end, he gave me a choice – between a life of comfort or more torture. All I had to do was say that  I could see five lights, when in fact there were only four.”  

The friend says, “You didn’t say it?” 

He responds, “No, but I was going to. I would have said anything at all, but more than that- I believed I  could see five lights.” 

It’s not that he was willing to speak the lie. It’s that he believed it.  

When the same test is administered in the book 1984, Orwell tells us: 

“The Party told you to reject the evidence of your eyes and ears. It was their final, most essential  command.” 

The danger is not that the subjects would lie. The danger is that they would believe it. Power is not in the  facts. Power lies with the people who define reality. 

We are living in a moment when reality is beginning to fracture under the weight of so many lies. We are  in danger of losing the truth. 

That statement is so bold, it might sound hyperbolic. After all, my life looks much like it did a year ago.  I’m guessing your lives do too. School is still in session. Movies are playing in theatres. Contracts are still binding.  Things appear to be pretty normal.  

I think Renee Good’s life looked and felt pretty normal too. She was in her neighborhood, doing what she  and her neighbors do. When ICE comes around, they blow whistles as a warning sign. They yell and witness, and  when she had to leave to…I don’t know what – run errands? Get her kids? She got in her car to do that. She didn’t  know that she had crossed into a different world where neither law nor human decency exist. She was shot by an  officer of the state right there in her Honda Pilot.  

No one could come to her aid. She was an enemy of the state, a terrorist, as the Party has confirmed, and  the laws of our Constitutional Republic didn’t apply. 

And when that happened, many people thought the chaos in Minneapolis would stop. Obviously, things  are out of control and the rule of law will kick in. 

It didn’t. 17 days later Alex Pretti, after trying to help a woman to her feet who’d been pushed to the  ground, was tackled and then shot at least 10 times.  

Ernst Fraenkel, the German political sociologist, described his experience in Nazi Germany as a tale of  two nations. It’s what he called The Dual State. In the Normative State, things operate as expected with a  governmental system that abides established laws and norms. In the Prerogative State, which runs parallel to the  Normative State, often on the same streets, there’s a system of arbitrary power that is dictated by the executive  who has unchecked authority to target enemies of the state.

The existence of the Normative State lulls most people into passivity. Everything Is Fine. They don’t have  to care about whatever chaos might be happening elsewhere. In fact, it’s not happening. There are reasons for it  that fit into our shared understanding of the world. There’s nothing to see here, just move it along. 

This concept of two worlds isn’t entirely new here in the US, or in most nations. There are often two sets  of laws – one for the majority, and one for an oppressed minority. Or, one set of laws that stands for most but is  applied randomly for others. 

Every mother of a Black child knows this too well. There have been, from our founding, two nations under  God, quite divisible. 

I’m not going to suggest, though, that something hasn’t changed. Instead of seeing this through the lens  of common experience, we need to be willing to state out loud that we see the fractured nation, we see the work  of The Party. Things are not normal and we know it. There are Four Lights. 

Part of what makes this moment more dangerous is the scale and the institutionalization of the rewriting  of the facts. The President of the United States, the American Cabinet, most of the Executive Branch, and the  majority of both the Congress and the Supreme Court are collaborators in perpetrating the Lie.  

And the Lie is simple. There are enemies in our nation trying to bring us down. We have to do everything  we can to get rid of them so we can be safe and happy again.  

What we have is a massive othering that includes everyone in this country who wasn’t born here, every  transgender person, every non-binary person, every gay, lesbian or bisexual person, every doctor who offers  reproductive health care or vaccines, every lawyer who defends any of these people, every protestor or resistor or  worker for human or civil rights, and now, one year in, every Democrat. Each group has been named an Enemy  of the State, a danger to the nation, people who have to be eliminated. 

You’d think this would be more alarming, but isn’t because even those of labelled “enemies” are living  in the Normative State. We can see the Prerogative State from where we sit, but we haven’t crossed the line yet. While some people are being sent to detention centers where there is very little food and no bathrooms,  where children are existing in a state of heightened trauma, where people are being carted off to countries they’ve  never been to and where they cannot be found, most of us are living in a Normative State where our lives are still  governed by rules, where permits and licenses are processed, where elections occur on schedule and markets and  trains and storms are all still relatively predictable.  

This experience is necessary. It keeps us relatively passive. It creates an experience of continuity and  stabilizes the country, dampening our resistance. The last words Renee Good said were. “Dude, I’m not even mad  at you.”  

She wasn’t. She was living in a Normative State where ICE agents behave badly and good people blow  whistles. It is not unusual or somehow outside the frame of traditional American life. The dual state doesn’t announce itself. It’s a reality that is denied by what Orwell calls – and I will call – The Party. Most people start out in the Normative State and get shifted into the Prerogative State without knowing  it. In both states, the law doesn’t stand on its own. It is coopted by the Party. It’s not that the nation is lawless, but  that the law becomes executive property, applied haphazardly, irresponsibly, and to the benefit of those in power. Truth is also coopted. Federal officials offer different accounts, alter or deny eyewitness testimony, retell  the story to their benefit. They alter images, create AI video, flood the zone with entirely false “proof” designed  for maximum emotional impact. And the people believe them. That was a gun. She was running him over. They  are terrorists. There are 5 lights. 

Some of you have been asking me if we can get out of this without a war? This seems to be an ongoing  wonder. The answer is Yes. It has been done. Spain did it after Franco. Chile did it after Pinochet. South Africa  did it. So did South Korea. Frankly, the US did it too after McCarthy, and each time a country pushes through  authoritarianism, they find themselves more deeply committed to democratic systems than when they started.  

It hasn’t ever happened, though, when the people waited for norms to snap back on their own, or because  some election fixed everything, or because the courts stepped in and saved democracy. It ended because the people  engaged both mass protest, and deep organizing; spoke truth to each other, partnered with each other, refusing the  Big Lie, and avoiding collective amnesia in the quiet times, which I might suggest is what happened between the  two Trump terms. 

So, back we go to Picard and Winston, both tortured and convinced that what they could see and hear was  not true, that the Party, alone, is the arbiter of Truth. How did they recover?

Here I turn to Hannah Arendt who tells us that authoritarianism doesn’t begin by terrorizing the people; it  begins with their loneliness. Before our systems break, before we are willing to believe The Lie, we are isolated  and alone.  

We know this. The epidemic of loneliness we’ve been talking about since the pandemic is real and even  just claiming ourselves victims of it can feel shaming. But, loneliness isn’t just a private sorrow. It’s a political  condition. Media – both mass media and social media – replaces lived experience. We sit alone in our homes,  celebrating nothing, sharing nothing, feeling like there’s something happening somewhere and we aren’t part of  it. 

We turn to online spaces where outrage replaces judgement, where we get lost in torrents of images that  fill our brains and our bodies, leaving us feeling worse – lonelier, angrier, sadder. 

And we connect with others – read their comments, agree with snippets of thought, add our own fury to  the whirlwind. And others agree. And we give in to the rising tornado, letting it blow us into whatever groups  might help us feel connected, less alone, more wanted and seen and safe.  

Belonging replaces truth. We don’t care how many lights there are. If you say there are 5, that’s good with  me. 

When we are isolated, we feel disempowered and unmoored. Propaganda works not because people are  stupid. It works because people are lonely.  

Winston, once he’s released and goes back into the world, continues to suffer. He is profoundly alone.  Memory is no longer shared. He cannot test his perceptions against others. Language doesn’t stabilize meaning.  The common world has dissolved for him, making his reality only what others say it is.  

Picard, on the other hand, recovers. He returns to his friends. He is seen and heard and trusted. He  remembers that there were only 4 lights.  

The greatest acts of resistance are found in the restoration of communities where truth can be spoken and  believed.  

My dear friends, my people, my community, this is what we do. This is who we are. We gather each other  up. I believe your Truth and you believe mine. When you tell me of your experience in the world, I listen, I see  and hear and I remember. Andrea Gibson tells us, “Even when truth isn’t hopeful, the telling of it is.”  

In a time defined by the Big Lie, a time saturated in deceit, when bearing public witness is done at the risk  of death, telling the truth is a revolutionary act. 

Together, fending off the rising waters of loneliness, the pull of social and mass media, and the fear of  crossing into the prerogative state, holding fast to one another, we will howl with our final breath… There. Are. Four. Lights.

Made You Look

In an ideal world, we’d all spend the month of January sleeping. Christmas, Hanukkah, Kwanzaa, the New  Year – they’d all be behind us with their music and parties and food and drink and shopping and ritual and social  visits and we’d collapse into our beds for a month of quiet. Here in the Northern Hemisphere, Earth provides the  cold and ice, pushing us indoors, attempting to make our worlds smaller, simpler, maybe a little less frantic. Our  bodies enter a state of semi-hibernation naturally it seems, so all we need do is turn everything off, and give in to  rest.  

Our culture, though, this civilization we’re so proud of with its booming economy and free market, really  doesn’t care if our bodies need to slow down. There’s money to be made, and we need to get to it.  If we want time to rest, time to get quiet, we’re on our own. The creation of noise is a necessary part of  21st century capitalism. We are all commodities in the Attention Economy. Pulling the shades or shutting down  our phones are not viable options if this fast paced world is going to keep going around. Because today, nothing can happen without attention. It used to be that if you wanted to build something,  you needed infrastructure, labor, capital. Today, you need those things, and you need attention. You need people  to know what you’re doing, to support it, to love it, publicly. Everything is public. Everything is up for discussion.  And without attention, there is no support, there is no capital, nothing is built or designed or created.  It's true large and small scale. We’re trying to build beloved community right here. We have labor,  infrastructure, and capital. But if we can’t get attention, we can’t get people, we can’t build anything. Last week  I was asked by a visitor who loved the service why this place isn’t filled to the rafters. What’s happening here is  so wonderful; why isn’t it standing room only?  

Because in today’s culture, it’s very hard to get people’s attention.  

~Drop Something on the Floor ~ 

You were listening to me. I had what’s called voluntary attention. You were hearing my words. You had – and have again - chosen, at least if you’re in the room, to give me your nearly undivided attention. You might  have also be tweeting or posting or texting, but for much of the 20 minutes I preach on Sundays, I usually have  the attention of the people in the room.  

But then something fell to the ground and that thing got your attention. That’s involuntary attention. You  had chosen to listen to me. You did not choose to listen to the crash. You just did it. It happens with or without a  choice. 

The people in the attention business want your voluntary attention. Politicians want you to notice their  votes and comments and speeches. Newscasters want you to tune in to their channels and hear their messages and  opinions. Writers want you to sit undisturbed to read their words. Clergy want you to be attentive to their sermons.  Musicians and singers want you to lean in and hear their music. Teachers want you to absorb their lectures. We  are all in the attention business and none of us knows exactly how to get you to pick us over the millions of other  choices you have in a given moment. We don’t know how to get your voluntary attention. This is not a nut any of  us have cracked. 

But we have learned how to get your involuntary attention. We do know how to slam a pile of books on  the floor or how to send a tray of champagne glasses crashing to the ground. We know how to get you to turn  without thinking toward a screaming crisis of our own making.  

I mean, every child knows how to do this. You’re standing with some friends in the middle-school hallway  and one friend widens her eyes and says, “Here comes the principal!” and every kid turns their heads. The kid  then laughs and says, “Made you look.”  

We can all make you look. We can make you shift your attention from where it is to something else for a  moment. 

In the absence of knowing how to get anyone to sink into a juicy idea undisturbed, in other words, to offer  their voluntary attention, we’ve crafted a culture that thrives on the incessant slamming of books on the floor.  I’m guessing that in the time I’ve been talking, which is about 6 minutes, all of our phones have tried to  get our attention at least once. If we haven’t turned off notifications, there has likely been a ding with a text, 

possibly from a friend, but maybe from a politician asking for money or a company telling you that scarf you  were looking at three weeks ago is now on sale. I don’t watch television news, but if you do, you know the  newscaster is competing against their own scroll screaming from beneath their faces telling you there’s breaking  news that requires your attention right now. 

In January, we should all go to sleep. The human body, the human mind, needs time to rest. Planet Earth  provides just that. But we don’t allow it to happen.  

We don’t give each other a break. Society doesn’t give us a break. 

And when we get used to an onslaught of crises, it gets even harder to get our attention, requiring louder  and louder crashes, moving us further from the possibility of silence and stillness and healing. The other response to the constant screaming from every direction is that everything starts to feel the same.  The sale at H&M has the same urgency as the state sponsored shooting of an innocent mother in her car which  has the same urgency as the oncoming winter storm which has the same urgency as the death of an actor which  has the same urgency as a famine in the Sudan. Everything feels flat. Everything feels normal. And our response  time to each crash gets briefer and briefer requiring an increased volume and number of crashes.  We even, at this point, choose the crash over other things. The psychology of scrolling is based on this  phenomenon. You have one thing to pay attention to and in the time in takes for your thumb to scroll down, you  have another thing to pay attention to. One vertical video after another giving you hundreds of different crashes  creating, essentially, a white noise of emergencies.  

With an inability to lean in, to focus on one thing, to offer our full attention, our spirits begin to fragment.  We feel the internal frenzy, the disconnection, the many pieces of our minds rattling around, unable to click  together to form one long, deep thought. 

Silence is the tool that brings us back from fragmentation into wholeness. Silence is the healing balm  soothing the broken edges, bandaging the myriad pieces of ourselves and healing us, so we can live in right  relationship with the world around us, so we can live deeply, attentively, as our most authentic selves, the selves  we can’t usually even hear over all the noise. 

Silence is the place clarity is formed. It is where we are most honest, where we can be sure of what’s real.  It is in the silence we can listen to the wind and the trees and the winter birds call and it’s in the silence we can  listen to our deepest selves.  

Silence is also an act of resistance. In an economy that requires our constant willingness to commodify, to  pay attention, we have the freedom to shut it all down. Non-participation is a choice.  And it’s a choice I’m making with some frequency. I’m not making it so much because I want to but  because I need to. Maybe you need to also. 

Maybe you’re feeling the fraying of your mind the way I am. 

Maybe you’re living a shallow life that can’t penetrate the distractions, the noise, the crashing, the real  and virtual sirens screaming for attention as I do. 

Maybe you’re yearning for long thoughts that lead down unpaved roads with unexpected conclusions. Maybe you’re hoping for a life of depth, of meaning, of rich silences from which emerges beauty.  I know I am.  

I’m not on social media for the month of January, which is a semi-annual fasting for me. It means the  outside voices are silent. There are no crashes to force my attention. No one can make me look. That time is spent sitting with people – sometimes with you – over coffee to talk about everything or  nothing. Or it’s spent writing or reading or, cooking or engaging other activities that need both my body and my  mind.  

Because what I want of my one life is to live out of passion, out of profound commitment to Love. I want  to live boldly. I want to live deeply. I want to connect with people and with the creatures of this planet openly and  authentically. And that only happens when I shut out the noise and enter my life silence.  

Rejecting the all the crashing around me, sitting still and breathing, is the beginning of the Life Well Lived.  So I turn my attention, my voluntary attention, inward. I can’t sleep for a month, but I can get very quiet.  I can heal my mind and my spirit with open spaces and slow movements. We all can. As an act of resistance we  can all take naps and attend 5 hour operas and read epic novels that get lost in language and wind their way into  meaning. 

This sermon wasn’t meant to get you going. Wasn’t even designed to inspire you. This is a sermon of  invitation into a bigger, deeper, maybe even a fiercer life that is born of the quiet. It will only be memorable if  you accept the invitation. If not, it’s just more noise, quickly forgotten when something else comes crashing  down… 

We’ll close with this poem by the Chilean poet Pablo Neruda called Keeping Quiet 

Now we will count to twelve 

and we will all keep still. 

This one time upon the earth, 

let’s not speak any language, 

let’s stop for one second, 

and not move our arms so much. 

It would be a delicious moment, 

without hurry, without locomotives, 

all of us would be together 

in a sudden uneasiness. 

The fishermen in the cold sea 

would do no harm to the whales 

and the peasant gathering salt 

would look at his torn hands. 

Those who prepare green wars, 

wars of gas, wars of fire, 

victories without survivors, 

would put on clean clothing 

and would walk alongside their siblings 

in the shade, without doing a thing. 

What I want shouldn’t be confused 

with final inactivity: 

life alone is what matters, 

I want nothing to do with death. 

If we weren’t unanimous 

about keeping our lives so much in motion, 

if we could do nothing for once, 

perhaps a great silence would 

interrupt this sadness, 

this never understanding ourselves 

and threatening ourselves with death, 

perhaps the earth is teaching us 

when everything seems to be dead 

and then everything is alive. 

Now I will count to twelve 

and you keep quiet and I’ll go.

Time After Time

After the service two weeks ago – the Winter Solstice – a small group of you came to me with a question  or conversation. Not a complaint. I wasn’t being mistaken for customer service. It was an observation  accompanied by a disappointment by at least one person. That conversation became a source of joy for me these  past two weeks. I have realized that I’ve been feeling very hopeful about 2026, largely because of that interaction. 

The gist of the concern was that the service was intended to lean into pagan wisdom and the ancient  solstice stories, but the closing song was decidedly Christian in the theme of Christmas.  One person noted that that this church tends to be a little more Christian in general than other UU churches,  which is true. Historically, this has been a Christian church with more people who identify as Christian even now  than any other specific non-UU tradition. There are also more Jews here than most other UU churches, and more  Muslims. While other UU congregations made sharp turns into atheism in the mid to late 20th century, a turn  which many are now reversing, this church didn’t follow that path quite so far. So, the general observation that  we lean Christian is fair, as is the recognition that closing with a song about Jesus might have been misplaced. I  have taken the note. 

But that wasn’t the whole conversation. Along with the observation, was a discussion about pluralism.  How do we make room for pagans at Christmas? How do we make room for Muslims during Rosh Hashanna?  How do we celebrate a wide variety of religious holidays without appropriating practices that are not our own?  These are living questions of our faith and we aren’t going to solve them in a single conversation, or maybe ever.  But, those congregants stood before me wrestling with these big ideas. 

And that’s where my joy came from. They were with me.  

This might sound small to some of you. It wasn’t. 

In so many communities, especially ones that are religious, especially ones where people have rejected  one historical religious path because of abuses or even just a lack of proof of life, people don’t talk directly to the  minister. Instead, they’re suspicious of her, assuming some unkind things about her intentions, maybe based on  past experience of others with similar authority. Here’s how that would have gone elsewhere. 

The closing song is over and one person turns to another and rolls her eyes. The friend smiles sarcastically  and says, “I know.” They then head to the diner with a group of other congregants where they start their  complaining about me or the music director or the board chair or all of us. There are all kinds of assumptions, and  even the people who don’t agree are joining in. No one is diving into the complex balance of a pluralistic faith  tradition; they are just bitching and accusing. And, next week, they do it again.  

Instead, 2 weeks ago today, we embodied my greatest hope. Someone disagreed or disliked something,  and engaged me and others in a conversation to tease out the issues. Nothing fancy. Just honest, respectful, mature  conversation. No unnecessary drama. Genuine communal behavior, building and embodying the world we dream  about. I am telling the truth when I say that it has since been a source of tremendous joy. 

Some of you might be aware of something I’ve written about and brought to a few workshops. It’s my list  of Shit We Don’t Have Time For. We are, objectively speaking, in a very dangerous moment. Both our nation and  our planet are on the cusp of treacherous transformations and we will need to be focused if we are going to put  up any kind of effective defense. Because the moment is so charged, people are behaving badly, acting out of fear  and anxiety, but we don’t have time for that. Which is why that conversation brought to me 2 weeks ago was such  a relief. We don’t have time for gossip or finger-pointing. But we do have time for working together to find a road  we want to travel as partners. We do have time for co-creating community. We do have time for wondering how  to embody big ideas in very specific situations.  

I’m not one for resolutions, but the new year is a good time to consider who we want to be, and maybe  who we need to be in the upcoming year. 

It’s easy to look at the new year and hope things change. I know I do. I hope Congress finds a spine, I  hope the Supreme Court confirms the boundaries outlined in the Constitution, I hope the military refuses illegal  orders. But those are all things we have no direct control over.  

In this complicated and fragile moment, our job is to put up a fierce resistance, to set up a safety net for  all the people being neglected and forgotten, and to care for our spirits, personally and collectively. Our job, our work, our task, is to use our time well. 

Time is elusive and unpredictable. We plan for lives we never live. We are taken by surprise, sending us  in unexpected directions. We meet people, learn things, are victims of crimes or accidents or illness, inheritors of  fortunes or beneficiaries of social generosities or any one of an infinite number of things happens to alter the  course we thought we were on.  

I asked my 15 year old son what he expected in 2026. He said, and I quote, “I’ll hit a 1080 before spring.”  Baffled, I asked what that meant and the rest of the words sounded like every adult in Peanuts: whom whom  whom whom whom. I did catch that it has something to do with snowboarding. When I clarified that I was  thinking bigger, he told me he expects the country will go to war. This was on Friday and I told him I didn’t think  so. I woke up Saturday morning to see that we’d launched a large scale attack to illegally capture the Venezuelan  president, and that now we’re saying we’re going to “take over the country”. It happens that fast. For his sake, I  hope he’s also right about the 1080. 

But, time itself is neutral. I mean, if Zack is going to land the 1080, which I now know is three full rotations  in midair (god help me), he’s going to need to practice. He has done two with a clean landing, and he has 2 months  to keep working on it. And that’s the point. We keep working on it. 

Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. pointed out that time isn’t itself going to solve any problems. Injustice  isn’t resolved in time, broken systems aren’t fixed, in fact wounds don’t even heal in time. You have to clean  them, dress them, partner with the process, take action. Dr. King wrote: 

“And somewhere along the way it is necessary to see that human progress never rolls in on the wheels of  inevitability. It comes through the tireless efforts and the persistent work of dedicated individuals who are willing  to be co-workers with God. And without this hard work, time itself becomes an ally of the primitive forces of  social stagnation. And so we must help time, and we must realize that the time is always ripe to do right.” 

“The time is always ripe to do right.” Doing right comes in the form of a thousand tiny choices, but each  one is grounded in the idea that time is not neutral and what we do and how we act, as tiny as we think we are in  this massive structure of planetary existence, matters. There is no formula for “doing the right thing”. Some days  the right thing is to rest. Some days it’s to protest. Some days it’s to take a friend out for coffee to listen. Some  days it’s to let someone take you.  

What isn’t the right thing is waiting for the arc of the universe to bend toward justice if we aren’t going to  help. What isn’t the right thing is waiting for what we hope is an inevitable justice to happen spontaneously or at  least eventually. We don’t have time for passive shoulder-shrugging and empty hope. We, small as we might feel,  are all we have. And we are enough. We have what we need to bend the arc of this complicated universe.  

Because the right thing is sourced by Love, and we have plenty of that. Plenty of compassion, and empathy.  Plenty of interest in the idea of integrity, the concept of affordability, the movement for equity. We are a people  of faith rooted in Love. Love is, to repeat myself, at the Center. If it’s not, time will not, can not save us. But, it  is. We are doing the work to ensure that it is. I can see it, feel it, I know it to be true about every one of us. 

Toward the end of 1939, WH Auden wrote a poem reflecting on his historical moment, one that looked  sadly like our own. The nations were, again, at war, having learned, it seemed, nothing the first time around. Hate  was on the rise. There had been a Nazi rally that same year a few blocks from where we’re standing at Madison  Square Garden. Antisemitism was common and anti-Black racism was entrenched even in places it wasn’t actually  the law. Immigrants were marginalized, women had very few rights, and a small group of people were hoarding  money, protecting themselves at the cost of everyone else.  

On the eve of a new decade, he starts his poem saying: 

I sit in one of the dives 

On Fifty-second Street 

Uncertain and afraid 

As the clever hopes expire 

Of a low dishonest decade:

He goes on, though, and finds himself at exactly the same conclusion I am drawing. There on 52nd street,  on the eve of a new year, a new decade, disappointed in how things were going, he wrote: All I have is a voice 

To undo the folded lie 

The romantic lie in the brain 

Of the sensual man-in-the-street 

And the lie of Authority 

Whose buildings grope the sky; 

There is no such thing as The State 

And no one exists alone; 

Hunger allows no choice 

To the citizen or the police; 

We must love one another or die 

Time is neutral. We make choices over and over again which create our reality, create the next moment,  create the world in which we exist. We decide to bring our thoughts directly to the minister for an honest  conversation, even if that’s not the most enticing or delicious way to address the issue. We commit to the practice,  the risk taking, to reach a goal even if it’s just spinning around 3 times in the air. We aid in the healing, we chose  the empathetic response, we engage honestly and maturity, even when we are afraid or uncomfortable. We bend  the arc toward justice because it’s not going to bend itself. 

Because no one exists alone; hunger allows no choice…We must love one another or die.

Reflection on the Moment

There’s a Chinese story you’re all likely to have heard. There was a Chinese farmer whose horse ran away.  His neighbors expressed sympathy, saying how sorry they were for him. He responded with, “We don’t know  what’s good or bad.” The next day the horse came back with 7 more horses and his neighbors said, “What fortune  for you!” and he responded, “We don’t know what’s good or bad.” The next day his son was riding one of the  new horses, fell and broke his leg to which the neighbors – who seem hang around this guy’s house a lot – expressed their sympathy and he again reminded them that we don’t know what’s good or bad. That’s when the  army showed up looking to take young men from their homes to fight in foreign wars, but the son had a broken  leg, so they left him home. Again the farmer reminded the ever-present neighbors that we don’t know what’s good  or bad. 

Every Sunday we gather for an hour to lean into…something. We feed our souls with music and prayer.  We look into each other’s faces, greet each other, shake hands, call each other by name. And we sink into an idea.  The great American writer Ralph Waldo Emerson said the true preacher (who he assumed was male) deals out to  the people his life – life passed through the fire of thought.  

There’s a reason I’m telling you this.  

I had a plan for today, but when the worship team got together on Wednesday, the mood was hot off the  election, and feeling like it’s hard to focus on much else with everything happening in the country. Fair. And, yes,  we can pivot. It’s why we’re here.  

We’re in a moment and what are we doing here if not reflecting on all the implications of NOW. Passing  life through the fire of thought. But unlike a year ago when we gathered in this same place, also in response to a  consequential election, our experience, our attention, might not be as unified today.  

One year ago, we gathered in grief and fury. It was so intense, we reworked the Sunday after to continue  the conversation, because it felt like the nation as we knew it was collapsing. We weren’t wrong. One year later, and the experience is different. There’s a collective sense of relief from the Left that the  system hasn’t been impossibly rigged, that the protests weren’t for nothing, that there’s still a sign of Progressive  life. 

One year later, and we know, all is not lost. 

Hope seems to have found her way back to New York City. 

What we saw, not just here but around the country, was a clear rebuke of the establishment, of corruption  culture, and certainly here in the city, of the power of money. A younger generation was heard. Mamdani also  showed us a new model for campaigns, one defined by vertical video and on the street accessibility.  

And he named for us what we’ve been needing someone to say. Living here is wonderful, but also horrible,  and it’s become so difficult, so expensive, people are moving further and further out, putting us at risk of losing  the texture created by so many different kinds of people who are being pushed out by the unaffordability of it all.  He mirrored for us what we’ve been saying, and he said he was going to take some risks, push some boundaries,  and throw himself into trying to make life here possible. It felt refreshing and affirming and it brought hope to  city life.  

It feels a little to me like the night Obama was elected insofar as it feels like a vote for new, both in what  he says, but also in who he is. Both men of color, both young when elected to their positions, their very being  feels like the gateway to the pluralistic future we can feel right at the tips of our outstretched fingers.  

Which is why I’m also a little trepidatious, a little like the Chinese farmer who gets the celebration, but  also knows that we don’t know what’s good or bad. Obama’s election was, in some real ways, the culmination of  the American progressive agenda going back 150 years. The ceiling was finally cracked. Generations of  Americans fought in almost countless ways in every arena to make that possible, and after shifting and expanding  and challenging and breaking and repairing American society an infinite number of times, we reached the apex  of all that effort. A Black man was moving into the White House. 

Obama did a lot while there. He created a soft landing to the financial crisis, got nearly every country on  board for an ambitious climate agreement, and he delivered on the age-old promise of creating a more accessible  and affordable health insurance system.  

But the racism we thought was ending only got worse. And our economic system continued to support the  movement of money from the poor to the rich. And we continued to occupy land in the Middle East. And our  immigration system was left to crumble, so that when those 8 years were over, we saw a national dramatic-over reaction in the election of Trump. Progressives were given a chance to show them what we’ve got, and in the end,  even we were a little disappointed.  

I’m not looking to try Obama’s case. I’m simply offering a note of caution. We can’t just celebrate a  progressive win and walk away. We don’t know what’s good or bad.  

Today, there’s hope. 

And hope is an action word. 

We don’t just feel hope or have hope. We plan, we organize, we push through, we live out of Hope.  The blue wave is a sign of Life. But there’s a balance in American society, and certainly in this giant,  multi-racial, multi-cultural, multi-national, multi-generational, multi-religious city of 8.3 million residents. That  balance has been carefully honed over 400 years, but sometimes we see cracks in the surface. And, this city is just  a city in the state of NY, but it’s also an international city with eyes on us from all over the planet. And some of  those eyes want to see those cracks deepen and broaden.  

Even without the outside pressure, we have to be vigilant. There are accusations of antisemitism for which  there is no evidence or actual cause for worry, but facts don’t always matter. Accusations can be equally or even  more dangerous. The ADL came right out of the gate with fingers pointing and swords ready to fight. While the  rest of us are hopeful and open, they decided they are the neighbors who know what’s bad. 

Nonetheless, there is reason to celebrate. And, there is work to be done. Rebecca Solnit tells us: “Causes  and effects assume history marches forward, but history is not an army. It is a crab scuttling sideways, a drip of  soft water wearing away stone, an earthquake breaking centuries of tension. Sometimes one person inspires a  movement, or her words do decades later; sometimes a few passionate people change the world; sometimes they  start a mass movement and millions do; sometimes those millions are stirred by the same outrage or the same  ideal and change comes upon us like a change of weather. All that these transformations have in common is that  they begin in the imagination, in hope. To hope is to gamble. It’s to bet on the future, on your desires, on the  possibility that an open heart and uncertainty are better than gloom and safety. To hope is dangerous, and yet it  is the opposite of fear, for to live is to risk. 

“I say all this to you because hope is not like a lottery ticket you can sit on the sofa and clutch, feeling  lucky. I say this because hope is an ax you break down doors with in an emergency; because hope should show  you out the door, because it will take everything [we] have to steer the future .... Hope just means another world  might be possible, not promised, not guaranteed. Hope [is a call for action...]”  

What we have right now is the joy, and the luxury, and the instruction of hope.  

We don’t know what will happen, but there is suddenly a spaciousness, suddenly room for us to imagine  a way forward. Resistance was not futile. We organized, we protested, we influenced, we took to social media  and to the streets, and we found a way through.  

I don’t want to be a downer. Celebration is appropriate. There are things we value that a million other  people said they value too. 

I also don’t want us to rest on this win, to see a blue wave and decide to take the year off. I suspect the  ride is going to get bumpier.  

American individualism sometimes conspires with messianic culture to set us up to see a person, a leader,  as the End, the Rescuer, the One Who Will Make All Things Right. We don’t have a savior; we have a mayor.  Hopefully a bold, out of the box thinker who will address the fragile economics of city life in new and effective  ways and who can help the party to welcome a broader coalition, a younger generation, and a more genuinely  progressive platform. 

The task before us, our task as a community of faith, is to gather up all that hope and put it to work. To  use it as an ax to break down doors. To let it propel us into unforged land where we dig out a new path. We aren’t  going to rely on any political leader. We will support, we will cheer, and we will stay true to our values.

Because the song that’s fighting to be sung, the new world that’s pushing to be born, is moving through  us. There is no savior, there is not clarity about good or bad, and time doesn’t stand still long enough for those  judgements to matter anyway. We have a little room to breathe, we have more partners in Resistance, but the  beauty of this world needs us to protect it, even, maybe especially now. There is no apex in history; this story  keeps moving, scuttling, dripping, shifting side to side, forward and back around again. Take a breath. Take a  beat. Then pick up your ax; we’ve got doors to break through.

The Thin Space Between Worlds

Donn, as the ancient Celtic stories go, was a military leader, the oldest of seven sons. He lead his brothers and a fleet of 65 ships to Ireland prepared for invasion and occupation, propelled by revenge for their kinsmen who were killed on site. When they landed, they started heading for Tara, but met three queens along the way. One of the queens – also a goddess in Celtic lore – foretold great success for their invasion, which, apparently, annoyed Donn no end. I suppose he didn’t want a woman taking credit for his victory, so he responded something like, “We owe our success not to her, but to our own power.”

Let’s say that the Queen/Goddess was none too happy with that response, and let him know that, thanks to his arrogance, victory was no longer on the table for him. He would not be celebrating a win any time soon. When they arrived in Tara the forces realized they weren’t actually ready to fight and decided to head back out to sea to regroup. Legend has it they went as far as nine waves breadth from Irish shores. I suppose so as not to look ridiculous, they told the people they were giving them time to mount a defense, and that if they could prevent them from landing again, they’d turn tail and return home.

The people, delighted by this turn of events, sought the help of their goddesses, particularly the one who was already done with Donn, and they raised a great storm, demolishing most of the enemy ships. Four of the brothers died and were buried on the ragged islands known as the Skelligs. The others did return to the mainland, but Donn, the leader and instigator of the massive loss, died at sea, never setting foot on Ireland again.

After his death, Donn used his power in the Otherworld to rise to the position of Lord of the Dead. He made his home in a place now called Tech Duinn on one of those islands, completely visible from the Irish coast. On stormy nights, it was believed he rode on a white horse across the sky and the people would say. “Donn is galloping in the clouds tonight.”

The legend grew. Donn’s story mirrored that of Hades, the Greek god of the underworld. The story of this invasion is mythological and is sort of dated about 3000 years ago, and could have, over time, blended with some of the Greek stories. Like Hades ferrying people across the River Styx, Donn ferries people over the sea to the Otherworld.

Unlike Hades, Donn is said to have a home – or several homes – in Ireland. This is because the Celts didn’t separate worlds the way we do today. There was one world, one eternal soul, that lived here and moved on to another existence once life in this world ended. Donn, the god of death, is present, as seen riding across the sky, and has homes where there are doorways into the Otherworld where souls move through or sometimes hover, as do a host of creatures we rarely see like the fairies and the little people who were sometimes around to offer help and blessings, and sometimes to cause mischief or even great pain.

The boundary between these worlds usually holds firm, but there is a time of year when it gets thin and beings move back and forth between them.

Samhain (SOW-in), the Celtic festival celebrated at this time of year, marks the mid-point between the autumnal equinox and the winter solstice. It is the most important festival in Celtic tradition, and while Westerners like to say it marks the new year, I haven’t found evidence that the Celts actually understood time in quite that way.

Samhain (SOW-in) is the juncture between two halves of the year, marking a suspension of time. It’s in these hours that the veil between worlds thins and the world of the living becomes entangled with the world of the dead, or more accurately, the Otherworld, where we’ll find those who have passed between worlds, and a host of creatures otherwise unseen here.

To mark these critical hours, all the fires of the land were put out, bringing deep darkness. They could only be relit from the Great Flames of a single ritual fire. In reality this relighting from one fire was more symbolic, but the extinguishing of all flames was real, giving people a lived experience of the dark, and the feeling of the power of that dark, ascending. When the fire was lit, there was a public celebration and feast, and it was understood that the spirits of the dead could be welcomed into your homes safely, posing no threat. The spirits of the ancestors were thought to gather around the fire, bringing health and hope to the family who in turn offered them light and warmth.

The spirits of the ancestors were friendly, but not everyone who made their way through the gates was benign, so it was good to head to bed early to stay out of their way. Food was left out to appease them, even those considered friendly, because, frankly, you don’t want to piss off a ghost, even one who theoretically loves you.

As time stands still, as the land goes dark, people went to bed for another reason. Boundaries everywhere became soft. The line between your land and your neighbor’s was a place to encounter the shenanigans of the little people. Ghosts hovered in the doorways. Bridges were sites of dangerous encounters with entities felt but not seen. Burial places were popular hangouts for the spirits of the dead.

During this time of the thin veil when the dead and other creatures slip between worlds, it’s also possible for humans to slide across the line, or to be tricked into entering a space from which it is not easy to return. And if you do return, you’ll find that time moves differently, so three days there becomes 300 years here, and everyone you know is gone. Leaving out treats and going to bed or finding way to hide on this night, is the safest acknowledgment of the time, and a critical part of Samhain.

When Christianity came to Ireland, some of these traditions lived on in one way or another, and when the Irish arrived in the US, they brought the lore and practices to us in the form of Halloween. This coming Friday night, people will dress in costume to hide themselves from roaming ghosts. Standing in border spaces of front doors and porches, strangers will offer treats to ward away the tricks they are otherwise promised. Teenagers will hover outside cemeteries daring each other to enter, telling haunting stories, and everywhere people will light up pumpkins with fire to bring light back, and frighten off wandering spirits looking to make mischief. Three thousand years later, we continue to talk about the doorway between worlds, as many countries and cultures around the globe also note what they experience as a thinning veil. We talk about all of this as fun, as ancient, as legend, as entertainment. But, last year I told a story of my grandmother’s death and more than half of you later relayed similar experiences.

For those who weren’t here, the abbreviated version is that one night, I woke unable to breath. It was terrifying. No air in or out for maybe 45 seconds. I panicked, but then air came back. I learned a few hours later that my grandmother died, apparently at that same moment.

I wasn’t sure I wanted to tell that story. I thought many of you would dismiss me as being foolish or dramatic or silly. You didn’t. Or, maybe some of you did, but you didn’t tell me that. Instead, what I heard was how often people have had supernatural experiences at the moment of a loved one’s death or have seen, heard, or smelled someone in undeniable ways. You also told me you don’t talk about those things because you have the same fear I did of dismissal.

In the 16th century, human evolution shifted and reason was introduced in a very different way to our toolbox. The superstitions of the Medieval period were melting away and in their place was a new rational framework for how we understand the world. In the 18th century we experience such a universal change in how we understand everything, we call it the Enlightenment and founded a country – this country – on the principles of reason and human rights. Valuing the human experience above religious law, imagining new ways to organize ourselves starting with what we know to be true, this country was formed outside of the religious structure of past societies.

Unitarianism was birthed very specifically in that context, and so mirrored Enlightenment principles that founding father Thomas Jefferson predicted every American would soon be Unitarian. Reason was the precursor to religious belief, and the filter for every theology. The Universalists weren’t quite so strict in their approach to the world, but that Unitarian spirit of rationalism continues to inform much of who we are.

Which is why I didn’t want to tell you that story. It was not rational.

And we don’t live in a world where we see the god of death riding across the sky during a storm or expect leprechauns to create havoc in October. Or, if you do, you probably don’t tell too many people that. We think our way out of acknowledging things that don’t seem reasonable. We might acknowledge mystery of some kind, but it’s more likely to be things we think we will one day understand like if there’s life on other planets. Experiences we define as supernatural are more likely to break into our lives, but less likely to find their way into polite conversation.

I’m not going to change that, certainly for our culture, and likely not for you. What I can do is tell you that for millennia humans have had these experiences, and even in our hyper rational world, we can sometimes hear the voice of someone who is not there or feel the spirit of the ancestors in the ground beneath us when we lay prostrate on the grass. Feeling spooked in a graveyard is common and seeing a ghost is not uncommon.

So, as October 31 approaches, as the veil between worlds becomes thin, we can put on costumes and hand out candy and light up our jack-o-lanterns all in good fun. But, we can also stand still and feel the spirit world pass through us, listen for the voices of those who have gone before, and allow the mystery of this wild and complicated world to inspire and awe us, setting our minds, on these dark and cold nights, ablaze.

Are You There God, It’s Me Peggy

There’s a coming of age book you may know written by Judy Blume called Are You There God, It’s Me,  Margaret. Margaret, a 12 or 13 year old girl talks to god like you might a good friend, always starting with the  title line, “Are you there, God, it’s me Margaret?”  

“Are you there,” I suspect, is the beginning of many prayers. Maybe not spoken, just thought or hoped  for, almost like pre-game prep. People get on their knees, or stand and bow, or light candles, hoping someone is  there, hoping someone can see and hear us in our need. It’s an articulation, with or without words, of our desire  to be taken care of, to be safe, protected, to feel like there is order in the chaos we experience. Are you there? Is  anyone there? Can anyone hear me? Whether the petition is to heal a sick loved one or to find a parking spot,  people often call into the darkness in some fashion hoping someone is listening. 

I was a college chaplain interviewing student ministers to work in our campus department when we asked  a young man who god was to him. He looked a little confused by the question, although why a person looking to  be a student minister at a Catholic college hadn’t anticipated that question is unclear, but the way he expressed  his confusion was in a baffled facial expression and a finger pointed at the sky. I laughed, which might have been  rude, but I was struck by the clarity of his desire for us to explain which he asked without a word spoken. Pointing  up is somehow a universal symbol for god.  

That moment has stuck in my head because god has never seemed to me to be above, although his gesture  was completely legible. You mean…(point up)?  

So many of us begin the spiritual journey thinking god is elsewhere – up, above, transcendent – and think  the spiritual response is to also transcend this world to find him/her/them. So much of worship, of spiritual seeking  or direction focuses on how to go up. Often in history we declare the most extreme examples as the most spiritual.  Those who transcend physicality, who deny the body and Earth, are closer to god. This leads people to give up  sex in some traditions, to deny themselves food, to limit clothing to one uniform or robe, to accept poverty not as  a way to confront the burdens and inequity of capitalism but as a way to separate from materiality to prioritize  the spiritual, having accepted a divide or incompatibility between them. There have always been contemplatives  in every tradition, people who leave their lives and, ostensibly the world, behind to find or to be worthy of god.  The Jain monks who wander the streets naked. The Hindu ascetics who cover their bodies in human ashes. There  were desert fathers in the ancient church who lived their whole lives in trees hoping the sacrifice and self-denial  would get them ever closer to that god above. Beneath these acts, well-motivated as they might be, is a theology  of the spirit that devalues the body, and sees god as elsewhere. 

And while most of us don’t go to those extremes, it’s still not uncommon to pray with our attention above  or away from us. Are you there? If I pray hard, or right, if I call out loudly, will god hear me? I speak my prayer  and I wait. I hope it’s my turn to be heard. I listen for an answer. One doesn’t come, maybe no one is listening.  Some pray with more gusto or maybe some promises in negotiation; some stop altogether, never to return.  

This process has always struck me as the makings of a dysfunctional relationship. Hello? I’m talking!  Why can’t I hear you? Feel you? Why is nothing happening?  

Most often when people come to me to talk about prayer, it’s in response to this experience. God, as they  understand god, is a many-eyed, many-brained, many-armed parental figure who often seems absent, leaving us  to feel abandoned, or possibly alone by virtue of the non-existence of such an entity.  

Are you there? Hello? 

People often pray with eyes directed upwards, and in the process, we miss the god located directly before  us. It’s the genius of the Christian tradition where god’s big leap in Jesus is to come “down here”, to share in the  human experience, to walk with us. God in the Christian story is forever overcoming the gap, making spiritual  growth less about climbing, denying or performing and more about descending, letting go, grounding. The  invitation the Jesus tradition offers is that of shifting the spiritual life toward authentic humanness, wounds and  all.  

The idea of ascending, of leaving behind our humanity, of not embracing our brokenness, but of self denial as spiritual practice is not mirrored in the story of Jesus, a man who was very much of this world, who 

suffered, and loved, and drank wine and shared meals with friends. The rejection of that world in an attempt to  be closer to god, to be more spiritual, more worthy, is misguided or out of sync with the story, and too often  sponsored by ego. It is, many times, a practice seeking perceived perfection, coddled in arrogance, even as  humility is touted by both practitioner and onlooker.  

Earth-centered pagan traditions are brilliant in their rootedness. The Celtic, Wiccan and Druidic gods are  embedded in the trees, the birds, the wolves, and in each other. God isn’t above, but within and around. Praying  up or otherwise trying to transcend is to bypass the spiritual richness of the world we inhabit.  

When we do that, we miss the god located here, in sight, to be touched and heard. GK Chesterton once  wrote: “Your religion is not the church you belong to, but the cosmos you live inside of. Once we know that the  entire physical world around us, all of creation, is both the hiding place and the revelation …of God, this world  becomes home, safe, enchanted, offering grace to any who look…” 

We keep trying to talk to god, sitting quietly, waiting for a reply, not realizing that we didn’t start this  conversation, and our sitting still or getting small, is limiting our ability to participate in it. This whole world is  Revelation, and our prayer is the response. If it is, in fact, a dysfunctional relationship with communication issues,  we’re the perpetrators. We’re the ones keeping silent while the world, while the god or gods of this world, are  begging for our attention in the extravagance of all that surrounds us. 

Richard Rohr once said: “Our small, scarcity-based worldview is the real aberration here, and I believe it  has largely contributed to… the “practical atheism” that is the actual operative religion of most Western countries  today. The God we’ve been presenting people with is just too small and too stingy for a big-hearted person to  trust or to love back.” 

This is the invitation of Universalism. Maybe even more than an invitation – maybe it’s a charge. A  directive. A demand. The demand of Universalism is to know god to be so big, so generous, so wildly inclusive  as to have saved every single one of us. To love us all so well, so excessively, so generously, as to have brought  us at birth to the Center where Love Lives, to have embraced us from our first breath, never once to let us go.  That is the Love that claims us, the Love to which we belong.  

And that is the Love that surrounds us, enchanting the wind blowing past us, the rain soaking us, the leaves  on the trees captivating us with their reds, yellows and oranges.  

Maybe the question isn’t “are you there”, but “are we here”? Are we here, paying attention, leaning into  the beauty we were born into? And that’s not limited to the natural world in it’s first form, but to what Salle  McFague calls Second Nature. Second Nature like stone houses, like wooden pews, like stained glass. The life of  the spirit isn’t limited. It is all embracing. 

And it’s invitational. It’s a provocation, enticing us to notice. Yes, god is here. No, you don’t have to sit  still or look up or deny your body or your reason or your personhood in any way. You have to lean into those  things, accept your humanness, your earthliness, your body as stardust, sacred and holy.  

This living god comes to us in the form of our lives, in the form of all life. We have only to notice, only  to respond to the gift of this life. We can fall to our knees in gratitude, raise our arms in praise, sing the joy of this  Love, pray with our hands preparing food for someone who is truly hungry, march for justice on any city street,  breathe deeply the air that gives us life, and we can call out, knowing we are heard, knowing the conversation  started long before we arrived and will continue through the end of time. Call out like you just arrived home,  swung open the door, can smell dinner all ready for you, in this world that welcomes you home again and again,  and howl in delight: Are you there god, it’s me!

Religion, Politics, and the Seduction of Empire

Jesus was executed as a criminal after a public trial, nailed to a cross on top of a very visible hill. He was convicted of the crime of sedition. He was a traitor to the Empire.

All Jews were in danger of this crime because the Emperor was considered part-god, a god the Jewish people wouldn’t recognize. To deny the divinity of the Emperor was treason. Jesus was a traitor to his king.

For the next three centuries, Christians joined the Jews as suspicious actors. Pagans held the seats of power. Civic activities started with prayers or rituals in honor of the Emperor-God. Jews and Christians refused to participate in those rituals making them ineligible for positions of authority, government jobs, military service, or any political leadership. The State and their system of belief were inseparable, and those with a different belief had no access.

Worse, they were traitors. They were criminals. They were a danger to the people, the king, the empire. And so, in waves through those centuries, they were arrested, charged, and executed. They were brought to the arenas where they were attacked by lions and tigers to the cheers of the crowds. There are reports of children, and pregnant women being mauled with the sounds of applause surrounding them.

In the year 311, there was an internal power struggle, and Constantine needed an army. Most people were pledged to his rivals, so he made a deal. If the Christians would fight on his behalf and if he won, he’d make Rome a Christian empire. They did. He did. And we entered a new age.

Before that, Christianity was practiced in people’s homes, in catacombs beneath the city, in small, private chapels. It was centered on communal love, on the sharing of resources, on community care. It was literally underground, a secret religion, a subversive, counter-cultural movement committed to egalitarian social structures and radical love. And participation was an act of treason punishable by death.

So, hell yes, Mr. Constantine. Legality sounds really good. You want to institutionalize Love, bring it to the mainstream? God is answering our prayers. We’re in.

They won, and the rest is history. Christianity became the way of the empire.

Those relationships merged so profoundly, there was no way at all to tell the difference between church and state. They were one and the same. Belief was dictated by people in power. Emperors, Royals, political leaders decided what the people believed, and they appointed clergy, theologians, ministers, and other practitioners to be the point people on the ground. Disagreeing even in the smallest ways was a crime with varying degrees of punishment from public humiliation to imprisonment to death.

When the Protestant Reformation broke out, 1200 years after Constantine’s victory, the radical changes sweeping Europe weren’t entirely about personal belief but about national power. There were significant theological underpinnings to everything that happened, but the massive cultural transformation was the result of a new national consciousness. Individual leaders were convinced of a new way and shifted their own nations from the Catholicism of their ancestors to a new Christianity made manifest in their own cultural and political contexts.

Church and State were still one and the same thing. Taxes were levied to support churches. Coronations were religious affairs. There was still very little daylight between the two.

As part of the Reformation, there were a few fits and starts around Europe, attempts to disentangle church and state or to widen the lens through which we understood that relationship, but it’s not until the founding of this nation did this concept get enough room to live into its potential.

When the original colonies were founded, each had a sponsor and reason for being, and each established the religion of the land, in relationship to the land owners in Europe. Roman Catholics started in Florida. Anglicans owned Virginia. Congregationalists took Massachusetts. Rhode Island and Connecticut were founded after theological disputes. Aside from New York, every colony had their theology, and their established church. Taxes were collected to serve owners, the crown, and the clergy. Fun fact - one of the most common means of paying clergy was a tax on tobacco. The more you smoke, the richer we are.

The relationship between church and state was controversial in a land that was trying to promote freedom of thought. With so much space, with the Enlightenment taking hold, surely we can disestablish the church, letting each one stand alone without the support of the government.

And, the Puritans thought, the state is messy. The work of the government is fraught and potentially corrupt. It always involves compromise, a stepping back from its values, and often sucks people in with the allure of power, carrying them further and further from the purity of the church. We don’t want their yuk on our yum.

Thus, the clause in the First Amendment to the Constitution, “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof.”

Establishment in this case doesn’t simply refer to founding a church, but of allowing any church to become Established, to become intertwined in the State, to be the State Church like, for instance, the Church of England or the Roman Catholic Church, both implicated in their names. These new United States will be free of any Established Church, at least as far as the federal government goes. It was actually another four decades before individual states disestablished churches with the Congregationalists in Massachusetts being the last to go in 1833.

In 1954, then Senator Lyndon B. Johnson proposed a soon adopted provision in the tax code that prohibits tax-exempt organizations, like churches, from directly or indirectly participating in, or intervening in, any political campaign on behalf of or in opposition to any candidate for public office. It doesn’t affect speech regarding social issues, voter information campaigns, or public statements about laws either in effect or debated. But, if John Haynes Holmes had endorsed Roosevelt from the pulpit today as he did way back then, we’d be in trouble. Johnson proposed this change because two non-profits in Texas were collecting tax deductible donations from their members and using that money to actively campaign against him.

Churches were not the target of this provision and were rarely mentioned in any enforcement of it. In fact, until the rise of the religious right in the 80s, it was barely noticed. But in the 80s, Evangelical preachers wanted to tell their congregations which candidate did or didn’t live by what they called “biblical values”, and argued that the Johnson Amendment curtailed their freedom of speech. The IRS would, occasionally, issue warnings, leading to the Right claiming government overreach.

By 2008, the Religious Right was so frustrated by the limitation, they declared Pulpit Freedom Sunday during which they endorsed candidates (remember who was on the ballot?), daring the IRS to challenge them. They were ready for a fight.

I’ll tell you, I wasn’t entirely sure they were wrong. Isn’t it fair for a church to want to know who their minister is voting for and why? And, isn’t it fair for someone like me to tell people about racist dog-whistles like “show us your birth certificate” and why I won’t support it and even how it stands in opposition to our core beliefs? I want to name names! And when we have a candidate who is clearly going to round people up because of their browner than tan skin and deport them to torture prisons or into war zones, can’t I tell people not to vote for that? You have free will. You don’t have to – and almost never – do what I tell you to do. I’m not buying a vote, which, it turns out, is suddenly also acceptable.

But here’s where this gets sticky. How closely associated with the state should the church be? Should we partner with a political campaign to get our person in office? Is that different from the Christian bishops in 325 climbing into Constantine’s cushy carriages, heading to a Council to make religious/state policy?

What’s the benefit of the separation?

Empire is seductive. So much power. So much money. I can hear her whisper in my ear, promising me fame and fortune. My values become everyone’s values, enshrined into law, enforced by the state. Delicious.

And so helpful to our nation. We’re in a massive moral crisis and can use some ethical clarity, some clerical voices, to break through and lead us away from the corruption that has penetrated the entire Executive branch, and much of the Judicial and Legislative as well. We need our clergy to tell us how to untangle this deadly knot; we are desperate for authentic leadership.

And the IRS told us it’s fine. This summer, they changed their rules! No more Johnson Amenment. I can endorse a candidate and it won’t put our non-profit status in jeopardy.

So why not?

In 1917, Former President of the United States Howard Taft was serving as President of the American Unitarian Association. My predecessor, Rev. John Haynes Holmes, an avowed pacifist, had been charged with the creation of a statement that was supposed to articulate our denomination’s support of the war we now call World War I which the nation had just entered. Holmes and Taft had clashed over this issue publicly several times, as did Holmes and President Woodrow Wilson. Holmes’s proposal for our national statement included a resolution affirming both “conscientious support and conscientious objection” to the war, establishing the right of Unitarians to either support or refuse. Taft declared Holmes “unpatriotic” and said the proposal was “treasonable”. The conference upheld Taft’s resolution to support the war whole-heartedly. Homes, and later our beloved church, left the Unitarian Association entirely.

Church vs State. Church And State. Church With State.

Are we instruments of State? Partners with State?

Or are we distinct from State?

Taft went on to become the only person in our history to hold the offices of both the Presidency and the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court. Power was his, as was wealth.

Holmes remained Senior Minister of Community Church of New York leaving him with very little money and a voice that has been largely forgotten.

In a contest for the most toys, Taft won.

In a contest of morality, Holmes beat Taft hands down.

Taft was standing in for the State. Holmes for the Church.

Taft was calling the Church to serve the State.

Holmes was calling his colleague and the entire denomination not to serve the state, but to be its conscience.

The proper role of church in relationship to state, is not partner, but prophet.

We don’t endorse candidates not because it’s manipulative or in violation of some tax code. We don’t endorse candidates because we are called to stand apart, to critique, to become outside voices of justice, to entice the state toward morality.

And if ever the outside voices of conscience were needed, it’s now.

Our nation is fractured, vulnerable, weak with anger and suspicion.

And our government has aligned with one brand of Christianity, creating a dragon born of power and performative piety breathing enough fire to set us all ablaze.

So, I stand before you not in support of the current Republican administration or ethos and not in support of Democrats, but in support of our shared faith. A faith that tells me pluralism, equity, and empathy are worthy of my devotion, of my whole-hearted, full-bodied endorsement. A faith that tells me that any policy, any government action that chooses the rich over the poor, the healthy over the sick, the privileged over the marginalized, or that intentionally withholds life-giving support or encourages or even just allows violence in our streets or in our schools, is immoral and in opposition to all I hold true.

We are not instruments of State, but of Love. We are the voices of a Love that will not be enticed into silence; we are the bodies of a Love that will not cease to act even with promises of power. We will not climb into the carriages of Empire, comfortable as they may be. We are prophets of a new world, a world not yet, but one we will never stop calling into existence.

There are no threats, and there are no promises, that will make this church or our beloved faith, a chaplain to Empire.

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.