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.