The Black Lives of Unitarian Universalism Organizing Collective is excited to confirm our participation in the upcoming #ReviveLove Tour hitting the road this Fall. We join Standing on the Side of Love and Rev Sekou & the Holy Ghost in planning this exciting tour focused on movement fortification and healing.

Key pieces to the tour which centers local organizers in its goal to create spaces for artists & activists to be sustained include:

1. ‘Fortify the Movement’ workshop/discussion with Standing on the Side of Love

2. An explicitly Pro-Black and Pro-Trans/GNC show by Rev. Sekou and the Holy Ghost in every site in relationship with local and national artists.

3. Training and 1:1 support ‘clinics’ for lead organizers in local communities

4. Strong local partnering in every site to build networked relationships

Currently planned tour stops include the following cities in the South & UpSouth:
• Knoxville, TN
• Nashville, TN
• Atlanta, GA
• St. Louis, MO
• New Orleans, LA

We ask that our faith — at the individual, congregational & institutional level — support the #ReviveLove Tour along with all of the amazing organizers involved. Donate & support the #ReviveLove Tour Faithify campaign: http://www.faithify.org/projects/revive-love-tour/

For more ways that you can help support the tour & get involved visit: http://www.blacklivesuu.com/revivelove

See you on the road!

Attached media: https://web.archive.org/web/20211108071908/https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/57222bd14d088e9d91f8e4fe/1472485532749-L109QWTC4M4K21ZQ1ETA/ke17ZwdGBToddI8pDm48kFQQgP34qnCpeHaeAOzTt7pZw-zPPgdn4jUwVcJE1ZvWQUxwkmyExglNqGp0IvTJZamWLI2zvYWH8K3-s_4yszcp2ryTI0HqTOaaUohrI8PIedjZT6_OBzi2ofH1EqNdNeCRxNMlbxs9807lIebBlcA/Revive%20Love%20Tour_4.png?format=1500w

At some point in the mid-20th century, it came to the attention of demographers that the average American family had something like 2.something children. Now, most people understand that people don’t have fractions of a child. Most people get that this meant that some families had fewer than two children, and some had more. And yet. And yet, the statistics said this was the average American family, so as builders raced to build houses in suburbs following the example of Levittown, they built all these three- and four-bedroom houses. To accommodate all of those 2.something children families.  Which was great, if you had a family with two or three children.  But not really so much if you had seven children. Or five, even. Which wasn’t all that unusual in the neighborhood that I lived in as a kid.

But hey, it’s a formula. There are other things that we’ve learned from demographic statistics.  Demographics have told us for a long time (although this is changing rapidly), that about 12% of the U.S. population was black. And it would seem that people in Hollywood must have gotten hold of this. That is the most charitable assumption I can make for how Hollywood has represented minorities on screen (I can think of nothing nice to say about how women have been represented).

Once upon a time, everyone on screen was white, unless there was a specific reason for someone to be a person of color (black slave, evil Indian, stereotyped Chinese guy with buck teeth who was probably played by a white guy anyway (see Part 1)). But eventually, more enlightened producers and directors caught on, and started including people of color. For example, in “The Mod Squad” – one default guy (you know, the “regular” white guy), one woman (i.e. a white woman, because we can only handle one variable at a time), and one black guy. So, boxes ticked.  And there was “Star Trek”, which really was ahead of its time. But again, “Star Trek” had a predominantly white cast. The captain, of course, was a white human man. There was a black woman in a prominent role, which was truly fantastic. And there was a Japanese-American guy, and a Russian character (also a white man, but it was the 1960’s, so this was big – the two communist nations sitting there together). And there was a Scottish white guy, and an alien white guy. Boxes ticked.

But in the late 1980’s, when “Star Trek Next Generation” came around, things hadn’t changed all that much in terms of total diversity. This is supposed to be taking place centuries in the future. The captain is still a white guy. Of all the main characters on the series, two were black: LeVar Burton, who played a human, and Michael Dorn, who played a Klingon in heavy prosthetic make-up.  Centuries in the future, and we were still envisioning people of color in token representation.

It’s no wonder that last week Tim Burton shoved both his feet down his throat when he allowed as how he’s bought into the whole idea that white people are the default for movies unless a character is specifically called to be a person of color (read more here). His exact words were, “things either call for things or they don’t.”  Ew.

Here’s the thing — regardless of what the statistics say about the current population of the United States, we know from our lives that families don’t have 2.3 children, and we know that each school doesn’t have one black student, each office doesn’t have a single black employee, each neighborhood doesn’t have one black family.  So why do we still represent the world this way on screen?

We can imagine better. When “Doctor Who” chose to represent the British Monarch in the 29th century, they gave us Liz X, a black woman.  That’s a good start. I think we need to keep it going. And maybe Tim Burton ought to sit down and watch a few episodes.

That’s my mite. It’s all I’ve got.

Back in 2010, the New Humanism online magazine asked me if I’d write an article introducing Unitarian Universalism to Humanists. I sent them a text titled “Unitarian Universalism: A Church for Humanists?”, which they posted under the title “A Church that Would Have You as a Member”. 

So far so good. But recently it has been pointed out to me that the New Humanism web site no longer exists, and so links that used to point to my article now go to some page that’s trying to sell you something unrelated. I’ve googled lines out of my draft and haven’t gotten any hits, so I don’t think the article has moved somewhere else.

So I’m going to repost it here. I didn’t keep track of my agreement with New Humanism, so it’s possible I’m violating copyright by doing so. If so, and if that bothers whoever has a right to be bothered, they should just leave a comment. I’ll happily take this post down if you can point to somewhere else on the internet where the article can be found.

Bear in mind: What I have in my records is the article as I sent it to them, so it’s missing whatever edits they might have made, for better or worse. I fixed a mistake. (James Barrett died in 1994, not 2003.) Also, I’ve had to fix the links, which may not go to the original places anymore, but should go somewhere relevant. Anyway, here it is:

A Church That Would Have You as a Member

Unitarian Universalism has long had a unique relationship with Humanism. What other religious group would showcase an outspoken atheist at its national convention, as the UUs did when they invited Kurt Vonnegut to give prestigious annual Ware Lecture at the General Assembly of 1984? UU Humanists have their own national organization (HUUmanists) with their own journal (Religious Humanism). In a 1998 survey, nearly half of UUs identified themselves as Humanists. New Humanism's publisher Greg Epstein spoke at the 2008 General Assembly, and has been invited to speak again in 2010.

Unitarians were largely responsible for the first Humanist Manifesto, and in his 2002 book Making the Manifesto, former Unitarian Universalist Association President (and the AHA's Humanist of the Year for 2000) William Schulz claimed that there were more Humanists in UU churches than in the American Humanist Association. 

Few other religious organizations have so consistently stood with Humanists in those battles where traditional morality and human rights take opposite sides. The lead plaintiffs in the Massachusetts same-sex marriage case took their vows at the Boston headquarters of the Unitarian Universalist Association, with then-UUA President William Sinkford officiating. About a hundred UU ministers -- a significant fraction of the entire UU clergy -- marched with Martin Luther King in Selma in 1965, and the murder of one of them (James Reeb) provided the white martyr that President Johnson needed when he urged Congress to pass the Voting Rights Act. Another UU (James Barrett) was murdered in 1994 while trying to protect an abortionist from religious-right violence. Linus Pauling, the two-time Nobel laureate who led an international groundswell of scientists pushing for a nuclear test-ban treaty (and co-founded the International League of Humanists) was a UU.

UU General Assemblies have passed more than a dozen resolutions supporting the separation of church and state. People for the American Way founder Norman Lear was another Ware lecturer in 1994, and a Unitarian Universalist (Pete Stark) was the first congressman to announce in public that he did not believe in God. 

Small wonder, then, that when Humanists go looking for a like-minded community -- a place to raise a child in humanistic values, look for social-action allies, solemnize a wedding or funeral, or perhaps just be reminded once a week that American consumer culture is not the only alternative to God -- the local Unitarian Universalist church is a prime option. There are about a thousand UU churches around the country (far more than Ethical Culture societies or other Humanist-friendly groups), and you can find at least one in every state of the union.

But is the humanist-community problem really that simple? Should we all just go join UU churches? As a Unitarian Universalist myself -- I am, in fact, more comfortable identifying myself as a UU than as a Humanist -- I wish I could make that sweeping recommendation in good conscience. But while many Humanists are happy as UUs, many others are not, and every year some number of UU-Humanists stomp out the door in disgust. 

So would you be a contented parishioner or a stomper-out-the-door?

*

Probably the best way to get a handle on UUism is to understand where it comes from. Believe it or not, the story (or at least the Unitarian branch of the UU family tree) starts with the Puritans. When they came to the New World in the 1600s, the Puritans weren't any kind of Humanists or even particularly liberal Christians. But Puritan churches lacked two features that anchor religious institutions against the progressive forces of evolution: They didn't have a creed and they didn't have a hierarchy. 

Each local congregation was supposed to read the Bible for itself, and no external authority could force a congregation to read it any particular way. Puritans believed that an external authority was unnecessary, because the Holy Spirit would keep pulling congregations back to Christian truth. What happened instead was that many of those congregations drifted towards liberalism. 

The drift was gradual, but over the centuries the small changes added up. In the late 18th and early 19th centuries, people like William Ellery Channing started interpreting the Bible according to reason rather than tradition, and noticed that some of the more unreasonable Christian doctrines, like the Trinity, were also un-Biblical. So they affirmed the unity rather than the trinity of God and became known as Unitarians.

By the middle of the 19th century, Ralph Waldo Emerson was challenging the uniqueness of the Bible itself, which he saw as the record of one people's inspiration. People in other times and places (like us here and now) might hope for their own divine inspiration. And if that was the goal, why not look to Nature or Art rather than to scripture?

From there, each generation of Unitarians became a little more humanistic than the last, until by 1920 Unitarian minister Curtis Reese could announce to his colleagues (in public, no less) that God was "philosophically possible, scientifically unproved, and religiously unnecessary."

The fact that Cotton Mather was not rolling over in his grave was, in itself, powerful evidence against the Afterlife.

Reese-style Unitarian Humanism was controversial for about a generation, but by the time of the merger with the Universalists in 1961, it was the majority point of view in most UU churches. Since then things have drifted in a different direction, which we'll get to in a few paragraphs.

*

This unique history explains the otherwise bizarre combination of features you will find in a typical UU church. If you walk into a UU Sunday-morning service wearing earplugs, you might imagine you are in a Christian church. Families arrive together and children go to their classes. Adults stand up or sit down in unison. Sometimes they sing together or read something out of the hymnal together. There might be a choir and an organ. Candles might be lit. More often than not, a minister will stand up and give something that might be called a "talk" or an "address," but looks an awful lot like a sermon.

UUs might appear to be imitating the more popular Christian denominations, but they're not. Like the evolutionary product it is, UUism comes by all that stuff honestly through a common ancestor -- the same way that dolphins get their lungs.

No matter how naturally those Christian trappings arise, though, they provide the first test of whether you'll be happy as a UU: If they drive you crazy, independent of the the service's intellectual content, then your life as a UU will be difficult. Don't torture yourself.

But if you can tolerate the appearances -- I've grown to like them myself -- then take out your earplugs and listen. You'll hear a message that is not always capital-H Humanist, but is decidedly humanistic: People of goodwill need to look past their disagreements about metaphysics and start fixing the world -- where fixing means creating the conditions for human happiness and fulfillment here and now, not preparing our invisible souls for some higher happiness after death. The world's many scriptures are read for inspiration, not for authoritative pronouncements, so a UU discussion doesn't end when someone quotes the Bible. Prayer is a community meditation on human needs and desires, not a request for supernatural favors. Science's description of the physical world is accepted, and while UUs may at times be skeptical about whether technology is creating a Heaven or a Hell for us, they completely understand and sympathize with the scientist's desire to solve whatever earthly mysteries might be solvable. Unlike Bluebeard's castle, a UU universe has no locked rooms.

*

Before you say "sign me up," though, you need to consider the continuing drift of recent decades. There was a moment in the 1960s or 70s when Unitarian Universalism might have become an unofficial Church of Humanism. Humanism was clearly the dominant philosophy and all forms of traditional religion were in retreat. Many UUs felt that their centuries-long evolutionary journey was done now: They had shaken off the barnacles of orthodox Christianity and had arrived at Humanism.

Many still feel that way, but the community as a whole has gone in a different direction. Particularly among the ministry, there is a trend to view traditional religion not as an encrustation to be shaken off, but as a resource to be mined. The solid shore of Humanism is largely taken for granted, but from that shore many 21st-century UUs dive back into religion, to see what can be salvaged: community-building rituals, teaching stories, techniques of personal transformation, invocations of awe and wonder, and so on.

And so, religious words that once seemed to be on their way out -- worship, prayer, God, holy, sacred, salvation, divine, and many others -- are on the upswing again. If you tap on those words, if you ask what UUs are trying to get at by using them, chances are you'll hear an explanation largely compatible with an underlying Humanism. But if you view the words themselves as the carriers of a dangerous infection, you'll find today's UU churches to be unhygienic environments.  

Finally, UU congregations are tolerant to a fault. Literally anyone can show up at a UU church, believing any kind of craziness, and will not be told to go away. (In fact, if you take it on yourself to tell someone he or she doesn't belong, you are the one who is likely to be reprimanded.) If you mingle at the coffee hour after the Sunday service, you may run into astrologers, crystal gazers, faith healers, and new-agers of all varieties. They won't be anywhere close to the majority and most of them don't stay more than a few months. But if one such encounter ruins your whole week, you won't be a happy camper.

In short, if you are allergic to the appearances and words of traditional religion, Unitarian Universalism is not for you. If you are looking for a community of pure and unadulterated Humanism, you won't find it at a UU church.

But if you want to be accepted for the Humanist you are, without any fudging or hypocrisy, you can have that. If you want allies in the struggle to make the world a better place, you can find them. If you are stimulated by diverse points of view and enjoy engaging people who frame the world differently (but not too differently),  a UU church is a good place to meet them.

If you came to my church, you'd be welcome. You might be happy there, or you might not. Only you can judge.

If I believed that we were born in total depravity, then I would have to believe that I am more mature than God. That is a horrific thought. No — I believe — I must believe that God is greater than I am, that God is more mature, wiser, kinder, gentler, more patient, and better in every way than I am. After all, I do believe that I am made, that we are all made, in God’s image. No, I don’t believe in a literal interpretation of the Genesis creation stories, but I do believe that we are made in God’s image, that we carry God’s Divine spark, the ruach – the Divine wind, within us.

But being made in God’s image does not make us God. We are not the original. We are the copies. We are not as good. We are striving to be.

So I do not believe that we are born in total depravity. I am a Universalist. A capital U Universalist and a lower-case U universalist.  I believe that God never gives up on us. Never. Not ever. Which already makes God better than me.

Because right now – and a lot lately, I find that I am just this close to giving up on humanity.  It’s not just this election, or any election. It’s the general level of nastiness that we are showing one another.  The rape culture that is being condoned and excused. Rush Limbaugh, the poster boy for the total depravity argument, on 12 October, 2016, allowed as how those on the left would call any sexual contact that didn’t include consent as rape. Um…yes. By definition! That’s exactly what rape is! You can read his statement here if you haven’t just eaten.

A man thought it would be appropriate to dress his son in blackface as a Black Lives Matter activist for Halloween. Because his son wanted to go as something stupid. And then he posted the photo proudly on Facebook. I weep for this child – for the way he is being brought up.

A seven-year-old was beaten up by other children on his school bus in North Carolina. Because he is Muslim. On his school bus. Where an adult is present, driving the bus. The family is now moving back to Pakistan, because they don’t feel safe in the U.S. Let that sink in for a moment. They are moving back to Pakistan, where they feel safer.

And today, on the 287th day of the year, as I write this, 843 people have been killed by police so far in the U.S. this year.  That’s just about three people every single day. Every. Single. Day. And yes, police do get killed in the line of duty. They aren’t all killed by people, but police do die in the line of duty. So far, in 2016, 99 police officers have died in the line of duty.  And there were 130 police deaths in 2015, and 146 in 2014, so fortunately, that number is trending down. (The average daily death toll for civilians killed by police in 2015 was about the same as it appears to be trending now).

So I see all these things, and many more things, and I get discouraged. I say “Black Lives Matter,” and someone says, “well, I think all lives matter!” And I get tired of explaining that all lives can’t matter if we’re erasing the black lives.

I take a stand against rape culture, and someone says, “can’t you take a joke?” I can take a joke. Having agency over my body isn’t a joke. And I get tired of explaining to men, and sometimes even to other women that my body isn’t here for your amusement.

I say that I want to learn about other faiths, that my way isn’t the only way it is one way, and someone says, “but they can’t be trusted, they could be terrorists.” And I get tired of pointing out that terrorists abound in every flavor, and that while we sit and cower in the corner about terrorists, the poor are still poor, the hungry are still  hungry, many people still don’t have adequate healthcare or education, and so much more.

We spend so much time looking for ways to hate each other. We spend so much time looking for the things that divide us.  If you don’t love the way I do, you must be broken. If you don’t eat, worship, think, look the way I do, you must be broken/wrong/inferior.

So I think that God must have infinite patience. I think there must be so much more that we are capable of. Because I cannot bear to believe that we are totally depraved. This is my prayer. That God grant me the strength to continue the work. That we will come to know how to be better humans. That we will continue to build the kingdom. To repair the world. It is the only way. God must be greater than all of us. Let us find our way to God.

That’s my mite. It’s all I’ve got.

Today, the UUA Board affirmed support for Black Lives of UU with a motion allocating $300K to address our short term organizing needs, AND a commitment to meeting our long term request for financial support in the amount of $5 million. This moving act of solidarity followed a stirring presentation to the Board by Black Lives of UU Organizing Collective members Leslie Mac and Rev. Carlton E Smith.

We acknowledge those that came before us in the struggle for self determination as Black UUs, and we are overcome with emotion at this historic moment for our faith.

To read the full statement visit:
http://bit.ly/HistoricUUABoardSupportBLUU

You can also read more in coverage from UU World here: http://www.uuworld.org/articles/board-commits-5-million-bluu?utm_source=newsletter&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=oct17

Dear President-Elect Trump,

The election is over, and, because the founders of our nation were fearful of direct democratic power in the hands of the populace, despite a majority of voters having voted for Secretary Clinton, you will be the next President of the United States. A job you never even wanted.  Ironic.

But Mr. President-elect, this is a job. A real job. With real responsibilities. And now you will have real work to do.

Most of the people in this nation didn’t want you to be our President. So you area already starting out in a nation deeply divided. People are scared. You could, as fascists before you have done, play on that fear, and continue to divide and cower the nation for the next four years. You could destroy the economy, entangle us in wars, and make this country, and the world a more dangerous place.  But I don’t think that would be of any benefit to you. You would go down in history as the worst President ever, if not the last President ever, in the history of the United States.

Alternatively, you could rise to the occasion and the office. You could recognize that you now have responsibility to everyone in this country. We do not serve you — you now will serve us. All of us. Not just the rich, but the poor. Not just whites, but blacks, latinos, Asians, and everyone else.  Not just Christians, but Muslims, Jews, Hindus, Sikhs, atheists, and those of every other faith.  Not just straight married people, but lesbian, gay, and bisexual people, married or single. Not just cis-gendered people, but transgendered people.  All of us. Everyone.

Your wife has said she wants to campaign against cyber-bullying.  You have been the biggest cyber-bully of them all.  You will have to lead by example.  The name-calling will have to stop.

Mr. President-elect, people are scared.  If that’s what you wanted, well, you’ve got it.  But how much more would we be able to accomplish if we weren’t frightened of each other and instead worked together?  The ball is in your court.

That’s my mite.  It’s all I’ve got.

Sincerely,

The Mite-y Widow

This post is the text of the talk I gave on the Sunday after the presidential election.

A few weeks ago, I had the chance to sneak out of town with my partner for a getaway weekend. Ready to relax and just read a magazine for a change, I sat down with the one copy of the New Yorker that I had managed to grab while rushing out the door. Then I opened the magazine. The Politics Issue.

The whole magazine was about the election. I briefly considered a ritual burning. The presidential race was wearing me out even then, before any of us knew what we know now.

I did not set the magazine on fire, nor, to my surprise, did I set it aside.Instead, I found myself drawn into a photo essay. It was about first-time voters from around the country. Each voter, ranging in age from 18 to 72, was pictured next to a quote about the presidential candidate they had decided on.

And I found myself most interested in the stories of three young voters, two 20-year-olds and an 18-year-old. They lived in Kentucky, Colorado, and Missouri, and they were all planning to vote for the candidate who, as it turned out, won the election.

I have a lot of hard-right relatives in my extended family. So while I didn’t know these Trump voters personally, they were not totally unfamiliar. I found the minister part of me wanting to reach out to them with care, and the former journalist part of me wanting to share some information with them. And so I started writing imaginary letters to the three of them.

The 20-year-old guy in Kentucky was a coal miner. He was voting for the pro-carbon candidate to try to save his job and his town. In my letter to him, I explained that my uncles had worked in iron mines and paper mills, and that whenever I go back to where my mom grew up, there’s always another empty storefront; it’s so different from the community I used to visit as a kid. But I also wrote that coal was never going to be great again, and praised his decision to take college courses, because the global market has collapsed. I mentioned that one of the other candidates actually had a plan to help Coal Country make a transition, and I asked him to give it some thought.

The 20-year-old in Colorado was a welder who was working on a bridge. He was voting for the pro-gun candidate because he and people he knew hunted elk and deer for food; they were able to get enough meat in their freezer to skip buying beef at the store for a year. In my letter, I told him about the many hunters in my family, how it was not unusual to find a deer hanging in my grandpa’s garage in November, and how none of the meat went to waste. And I told him that no one running for president had any interest in taking away guns for hunting wildlife; that those of us who are concerned about urban violence and mass shootings had other kinds of guns in mind, to keep people from hunting each other. I also pointed out that, if his future employment as a welder was a concern, some political parties tended to be more open to public-works spending than others, and I hoped he would give it some thought.

The 18-year-old in Missouri voted as she did because 1) she was opposed to abortion and 2) she felt lied to by Hillary Clinton, and, she said, “I hate being lied to.” In my letter, I  explained, with kindness, that, if reducing the number of abortions was important to her, health care and family planning access work very well toward that goal, and that she should research which candidate would do best in that area. And I directed her to a couple of websites that kept close track of the number of lies each candidate had told during the campaign. I hoped she would take a look and give it some thought.

I really did type out these letters on my laptop, to these young adults who probably got most of their information from political ads on TV, who didn’t have conversations with liberals in their daily lives, whose main reasons for voting the way they did had nothing to do with building a wall or excluding Muslims. These three should not in any way be given a pass for their disregard for the lives of so many other people. But their reasoning does help explain how we got to where are.

We cannot blame the outcome of this election solely on blue-collar white people who voted for Trump any more than we can blame it solely on the white-collar white people who voted for him, or on the millions of left-leaning people who stayed home. This national tragedy was complex and multifaceted, with voter suppression, voter apathy, and the complacency of the comfortable playing major roles.

I must count myself among the comfortable and complacent. These letters I wrote before the election, I was thinking that I might post them on my blog, just to see what would happen – maybe they’d go viral and change a mind or two. But they didn’t seem essential, so they stayed in my computer. Just like I stayed in my house instead of door-knocking. The polling was looking pretty good. How many people would really vote for someone like that?

Well, now we know. And I can hardly look back at the pictures from Tuesday afternoon, photos of smiling friends with their “I voted” stickers, photos of 100-year-old women in pantsuits casting their vote for the first woman president. Photos that are now somewhat heartbreaking. Photos that now feel so distant that they may as well be black and white.

That’s one of the things that  grief does to our minds. Grief warps time, and it fuels our regrets; it makes us furious and steals our sleep. The grieving people I minister to usually have experienced the death of a loved one, but the symptoms of grief are similar regardless of the source of the sense of loss. The strong feeling of there being a “before” and an “after” is the same. I have been recognizing my own deep grief this week, and I see it in many of the people I know here in my deep blue city and in the deep blue congregation I serve.

The things being grieved are real. They go beyond feelings of safety or a sense of having lost the country we thought we knew, and losing the world we hoped to see. I like to be reassuring and positive whenever I can – hope is part of my job. But I cannot stand up here today and assure you that everything is going to be OK, that everyone will be fine, that love always wins. We are evidence-based around here, and the evidence is not looking good right now.

There’s been a spike in hate crimes and hate speech in just these past five days. People of color and immigrants and our LGBTQ neighbors are living with new levels of fear, fear of citizens and government alike. Women and girls, never truly safe to begin with, are on heightened alert, with an unrepentant sexual predator on his way to the highest office in the land. The very functioning of our democracy and the functioning of our press are at risk. And I can barely talk about what’s going to happen to the earth. Most of the coastal counties from Corpus Christi all the way around Florida to the Virginia state line voted to put a climate denier in the White House. They voted to let their own communities drown.

We as a country, as a whole, have never been here before, nothing even close in modern times. But other nations, many other nations, have been where we are right now. And there are groups within our own country that are less shocked than others. Groups that have had justifiably low expectations from white-dominated America for a very long time.

I want to share with you a series of posts by an African-American writer who goes by 5’7 Black Male on Twitter. Here’s what he has to say:

This feeling you have right now. Amazement that the country could be so short-sighted, that it could embrace hate so tightly?  Welcome. This despair and dread you feel. The indignation,  the bewilderment, the hurt, powerlessness, the fear for family and livelihood?  Welcome. That knot in your stomach, that feeling of heartache? That uncertainty about your safety? The deep sense of fundamental injustice?  Welcome. I do not say this to diminish what you feel today.  What you feel is real and valid.  I’m giving you an opportunity to truly empathize. For it is the lack of that empathy that allowed America to shrug as the marginalized shouted warnings.

I’ve read similar thoughts from Native Americans. And Alice Walker, the African-American novelist and humanist, wrote this the other day: “How to survive dictatorship: That is what much of the rest of the world has had to learn. Our country has imposed this condition on so many places and peoples around the globe it is naive to imagine we would avoid it. Besides, do Native Americans and African American descendants of enslaved people not realize they have never lived in anything but a dictatorship?”

So there are plenty of people in America who have felt powerlessness, who have had to learn resilience and survival, who have planted a beautiful garden in the backyard when it wasn’t safe to sit on the front porch. What has just happened in America has never happened here before, except since the beginning, it has always been happening to some of our people. American authoritarianism was not invented on Nov. 8; it was revealed anew.

So there are people to learn from and things to learn, be they strategies for bringing about change, or tactics for preserving one’s dignity and human spirit. A blog post with the title “I Know What to Do” was written in response to the election by the Rev. Dr. E. Scott Jones, a United Church of Christ minister. “I know what to do…” he writes. “I know, because I’ve done it before. I lived as a very public gay man in the state of Oklahoma during a time when a state legislator said we were worse than terrorists, and the Aryan Brotherhood murdered a gay man in a horrific hate crime.” Rev. Jones says he and his partner received death threats and were denounced by name in the state Republican Platform, yet they still chose to get married in a public park with 200 guests for all to see. “Every day I lived with hope, courage, and integrity, refusing to let others define me or rob me of my power and my voice,” he writes. “I insisted upon my right to be equal and free and worked tirelessly on behalf of my community, in the face of overwhelming opposition and a climate of terror and violence.”

So, there are some strong people out there. And there are strong people in here. Some know it; some don’t realize that they have always been strong; some have not had much chance to prove it. We are now going to have plenty of chances, opportunities we didn’t want but opportunities that are arriving. Opportunities to show up and support people we know and people we don’t; to stand up for ourselves; to speak up for institutions that have never been perfect or fair for everyone, but that are so much better than some of the options we are facing.

From afar Americans had witnessed the Prague Spring and the Arab Spring, and now we here at home are looking at something that’s going in the opposite direction, something of an American Winter. A freezing or reversing of freedoms, a chilling of free speech, a time when new things do not grow, a time when our reserves of energy and hope may become depleted. A hard frost that few saw coming has suddenly plunged us into a different season.

But here’s the thing about winter. We here in Minnesota know how to survive a winter. We know that winter is not a season of growth, but we know how to keep living things safe until the warmth returns. We know to keep an eye on our neighbors, to make sure they have what they need, to offer them a jump-start or a push when they get stuck, and to accept their help when we ourselves are digging out. We know the importance of not letting the harsh reality outside dim our inner light. And we know that beauty and joy can always be found and celebrated, even on the coldest days.

So we know winter, and we know what to do. But there are some things we can’t afford to do as this American winter settles in. We simply can’t hunker down and stay home and wait this out. Yes, we need to grieve and heal and take care of ourselves, but those of us with the option to retreat cannot do so for the next two or four years. The stakes are too high.

If we choose passivity, we will contribute to the normalizing of this situation, to the idea that this is just another president, another transition. The Nigerian-American writer and photographer Teju Cole, writing in this weekend’s New York Times, pointed out that People magazine is already running photo spreads of the Trumps in the White House, with headlines describing the pictures as “way too cute.” We are already being asked to cuddle up to the family of a demagogue. Cole writes:

Evil settles into everyday life when people are unable or unwilling to recognize it. It makes its home among us when we are keen to minimize it or describe it as something else. This is not a process that began a week or month or year ago. It did not begin with drone assassinations, or with the war on Iraq. Evil has always been here. But now it has taken on a totalitarian tone.

America does have a long history of normalizing evil. It’s normal to restrict black people to one part of town and to fill our prisons with them. It’s normal for misery to prevail on native reservations, normal for Americans to fill their closets with clothes made by modern-day slaves on other shores, normal to pump untold tons of carbon into the air. We must resist this latest attempt to normalize evil.

And while I know we need to grieve and take care of ourselves, we can only resist and bring about change by getting out of the house. The safety pin telling others that you are a safe person for immigrants to interact with won’t work in your living room. The Kentucky coal miner and the Colorado bridge welder, as well as the Wisconsin factory worker and the Minnesota farmer, felt seen and heard by Donald Trump because so many other Americans stopped coming by or looked away. The kinds of one-on-one conversations across political divides that helped stop Minnesota’s marriage amendment four years ago did not happen on any kind of scale this time. They were replaced, with great futility, by angry Facebook exchanges and family members blocking each other’s pages.

We have to find new ways, or go back to old ways, of acknowledging and understanding one another’s realities, rather than reinforcing the limited realities we each live in. Relationships need to happen. And we somehow have to get across the idea that it’s a small group of people at the top who are responsible for the false scarcity and destructive infighting among all the rest of us.

So we need to show up. Not just virtually by pushing the “like” button, but really show up in our physical bodies – at a fund-raiser for Syrian refugees, at a rally to preserve reproductive freedom, at a gathering to celebrate trans lives, at a protest to stop private prisons. Showing up has been the work of the few. In an America where the ways of governing have been upended, showing up needs to be the work of the many. As we continue to grieve, it would be best if we grieved in motion.

Before I close, I want to talk a bit about hope. It’s a hard feeling to come by right now, for reasons that are very  real. But I was reminded in recent days of the work of Joanna Macy, who wrote a book that some of you have read, called Active Hope. She defines hope not as something you feel, but as something you do.

“Active Hope is a practice,” she writes. “Like tai chi or gardening, it is something we do rather than have. It is a process we can apply to any situation, and it involves three key steps.

“First, we take a clear view of reality; second, we identify what we hope for in terms of the direction we’d like things to move in or the values we’d like to see expressed; and third, we take steps to move ourselves or our situation in that direction.

“Since Active Hope doesn’t require our optimism, we can apply it even in areas where we feel hopeless. The guiding impetus is intention; we choose what we aim to bring about, act for, or express. Rather than weighing our chances and proceeding only when we feel hopeful, we focus on our intention and let it be our guide.”

As we head forward into this uncharted new reality, may our intentions be our guide. May love be our guide. May we stay at each other’s sides, and be with those in greatest need. May we grieve in motion and in solidarity. Together, courageously, is the only way.

This text was originally delivered at First Unitarian Society of Minneapolis on November 13, 2016. Audio and PDF versions available here.

1. Grant a pardon to all undocumented children and youth living in the United States and issue them irrevocable papers placing them on the path to citizenship.
2. Grant citizenship to as many immigrants as possible over the next 60 days.
3. Appoint Merrick Garland to the Supreme Court and immediately sue the Senate for failing to perform its constitutional duty. This probably won’t work, but it is better than doing nothing.
4. Release the last two decades of Donald Trump’s tax returns to the media. The public has a right to know the extent of his investments in and indebtedness to foreign nations.
5. Use the powers of Presidential pardon to depopulate our nation’s prisons, especially by freeing non-violent drug offenders and others impacted by the injustice of mass incarceration.
6. Use executive orders to dismantle pieces of the federal government that a Trump administration could use to inflict harm on American citizens. This might mean, for example, destroying domestic surveillance capabilities.

Out of the deep
Have I called unto Thee, O Lord —
Lord, hear my voice!

Psalm 130:1-2a
tr. from Requiem, John Rutter

The first snow fell this week. So did the second snow, and that has stuck, and the pool has frozen over firmly enough to support the neighbor’s rotund clumsy cat, which lost its balance trying to drink the other day and landed, perplexed, on the surface while I watched out the window. The third snow is coming, tomorrow night into the next, and that will require shoveling the walks and borrowing Spouse’s car when I go down to Portland overnight.

It is a month out from the election, give or take a couple of days. In that time I have crafted and delivered three worship services (two Sundays and one weeknight) and worked three overnights and a day shift on-call at the hospital, and done the other things with (mostly) calm efficiency, and also finished this morning the last sequence of blocks for what will become a small bright quilt in the next week or two.

I am functional. I am so very functional. I take pleasure – pride, perhaps – in my capacity to be highly functional under stressful conditions. I get satisfaction from being able to show up and deliver even when things are falling apart.

But my heart is not in it.

My heart – small wild thing that it is, with flashing eyes – has gone to ground, disappeared into a tangled thicket of branches and old roots, wary and invisible, silently observing a world that has once again demonstrated its pervasive untrustworthiness and inherent danger.

Whatever other image you may have in your head, this is also what PTSD looks like, or feels like: for me, it’s an emotional flashback to my Reagan-era childhood of being bullied and social manipulation and parental disengagement, all under the sociopolitical cloud of imminent thermonuclear armageddon and/or the Holy Rapture, whichever came first.

When all experience feels pervasively, inescapably dangerous; when continued survival depends on being favored, or at least overlooked, by those with slightly more power in a rigged system; when authority is ineffectual or malevolent or just plain not there: the heart learns wildness to survive. It grows claws and teeth, learns to bite hard and writhe free and escape certain destruction. Stay back, it hisses, fangs bared and eyes glittering. When the world is unwelcoming, the heart learns how to survive — and nothing more.

When one doesn’t know anything else, one learns to function without it.

What is different, this time around, is that I miss my heart, that small wild tender thing. It was starting to become tame, a little bit anyway, and beginning to learn trust; that now seems much harder.

And also, when I pretend not to notice its glittering eyes watching me from the shadows, I imagine that my heart would also rather not hide and fight always, but has forgotten how to do that other thing for which it knows no name, newly learned and sweet.

Chalice Lighting

At times our light goes out and is rekindled by a spark from another person. Each of us has cause to think with deep gratitude of those who have lighted the flame within us. -- Albert Schweitzer

Centering Words

You may not always have a comfortable life, and you will not always be able to solve all of the world's problems at once. But don't ever underestimate the importance you can have, because history has shown us that courage can be contagious, and hope can take on a life of its own. -- Michelle Obama

Sermon

Most of the time, some ceiling or roof blocks my view of the sky: in my apartment, my car, in stores, offices, churches, and just about anywhere else I go. Even when I’m outside, I don’t always remember to look up. Occasionally I check what the weather is doing or how much daylight is left. I might admire a beautiful sunset, or the Moon, or the stars on a particularly clear night. But I look at them the way I look at paintings in a museum. I contemplate them for a while and then I move on.

So while I am well acquainted with the sky, I don’t live with it the way my father did when he was farming, and certainly not the way ancient peoples did. Not many of us do anymore. And so it can be hard for us to grasp what the Winter Solstice must have meant centuries or millennia ago, when our culture’s mythic intuition was forming.

Our calendars tell us that the Solstice is about a week away, and of course we notice that days are shorter this time of year. But ancient peoples who lived with the sky as a constant companion would have seen much more than that. Even children must have noticed that the path the Sun takes across the sky was dropping ominously towards the horizon. And every child, at some time or another, must have asked the obvious question: "Is it going to keep dropping, until someday the Sun won’t bother to come up at all? What will happen to us if the Sun never comes back?"

Today, that question sounds even more childish, because are educated: We know about the solar system and the Earth’s tilted axis. We understand that the Sun’s shorter path across the sky does not mean that it is getting weaker or lazier. In the Southern Hemisphere, we know, days are bright and long now, and the tropics are as hot as ever. In short, the Sun is doing fine, however it might look from our angle. The Earth is in its usual orbit, and everything is right on schedule. The fear that the Winter Solstice might fail this year never really crosses our minds.

Millennia ago, it probably did. If you were that questioning child, no doubt your elders would reassure you: “The Sun always turns around about now. Wait a week or two, and you’ll see for yourself.”

But I wonder just how reassuring that was. I doubt it communicated the clockwork certainty we feel today. Probably it sounded like those somewhat less convincing reassurances we all get from time to time, like: “That fault line is stable.” or “People with your credentials always get good jobs.” or “America would never elect someone like that.” — reassurances that may have been true in living memory, but which come with no guarantees. “Maybe it has always been that way,” you think, “but is it going to be that way this time?”

So I imagine that ancient peoples of all ages watched the sky this time of year with a certain anxiety, believing, but not completely certain, that the age-old pattern would hold, and a cosmic catastrophe would be averted once again.

But of course, the pattern did always hold. Every year, the Sun’s arc across the sky stopped sinking and began to rise, the days got longer, and Spring eventually came. But no matter how many times you lived through it, I imagine that the Solstice never really lost its miraculous quality, because the mechanism behind it remained invisible.

And so it became that rarest of events: a predictable, regularly occurring miracle. In time, the Solstice came to represent something a little more abstract than just the promise of Spring: It was evidence that miracles were still happening. It symbolized the lesson that you should never lose hope, because situations that just seem to get worse and worse every day can turn around, even if you don’t see exactly what is going to turn them.

Over time, symbols and stories and holidays of hope clustered around this time of year: The Temple lights that should burn out, don’t. The Golden Child who will change all of our lives — whether it is the hero Mithras or the savior Jesus — is born. Even our secular Christmas mythology reflects this hope that things can turn around: Scrooge gets back his humanity. The Grinch’s heart grows three sizes. George Bailey discovers he actually is living a wonderful life.

And every year, we are encouraged to bring that hope into our own lives: Maybe an old friendship can be rekindled. Maybe that ancient family quarrel can be patched up. Whatever part of your life seems stuck or broken, you should give it one more try, because this is a time when things might turn around, even if you don’t necessarily see how. This season of darkness is also a magical season, a season of hope.

But what can Unitarian Universalists do with all that?

Hope is fine, I guess, but we don’t put much stock in magic, or in things that are supposed to turn around for no particular reason. We want to see the mechanisms.

We are also skeptical of saviors. When I was growing up Lutheran, we called this season Advent, and we sang:

O come, O come, Emanuel.
And rescue captive Israel
That mourns in lonely exile here
Until the Son of God appear.
Rejoice! Rejoice! Emanuel
Shall come to thee, O Israel.

That tune is still in our UU hymnal, but we changed the words. Because we are a proud people, a people of action, and we don’t plead helplessly for someone to come save us, not even God.

A lot of us don’t believe in God, and even those of us who do probably don’t believe in the kind of God who steps into history and fixes things that humans have screwed up. At most, we might believe in the upward tilt of Progress, or in the Theodore Parker line that Martin Luther King liked to quote: “The arc of the moral Universe is long, but it bends toward justice.”

Many of us don’t even believe that much. The universe simply does what it does, and whether it ultimately bends towards Heaven or Hell is beyond our knowing. Our so-called “progress” may lead to annihilation rather than paradise. Rather than grant us freedom, it may enable a tyranny more all-encompassing than even George Orwell could have imagined. Rather than evolve into an interconnected global village, the world may fragment into echo chambers that are increasingly suspicious of one another.

Instead of adventure and innocent fun, the literature of our young people is full of dystopian wastelands and zombie apocalypses and heroes who hope for little more than to survive with a few of their friends. And who can blame the young for dwelling on such dark scenarios? Aren’t they just bringing into popular culture the private fears their elders are reluctant to discuss?

So we can see the darkness, but where is this hope we are supposed to celebrate?

In order to present that hope to Unitarian Universalists well trained in doubt and skepticism, I’m going to need to take advantage of something else we do well: appreciate subtle distinctions. UUs can split hairs like nobody else, and I’m going to split a really important one right now.

So far I’ve been using the word hope interchangeably with the belief that things will get better. But those two notions aren’t the same at all. Believing that things will improve isn’t hope, it’s optimism. The opposite of optimism is pessimism, the belief that things will get worse. But the opposite of hope is something far more devastating than pessimism, it’s despair. To be in despair is to believe that it’s useless to try, because your actions don’t matter. Nothing can be done.

So here’s the hair splitting: Optimism and pessimism are beliefs about the future. Hope and despair are attitudes towards the present.

Pessimism is going to the plate in the ninth inning when your team is behind, assessing the situation, and concluding that you’re probably going to lose. Despair, on the other hand, would tell you not to bother taking your turn at bat, or if you do step into the batter’s box, to let the pitches go by without swinging, because what’s the point? What difference could it possibly make?

Hope is the opposite of that. Hope is that feeling deep within you that you are alive, and that in this particular time and place, the only thing you need to concern yourself with is what you do next. Hope means refusing to prejudge the situation, it means doing whatever you can think to do and then whatever happens will happen.

Optimism and pessimism both claim to know something, but hope thrives on the unknown. It focuses on those parts of the future that remain undetermined, and it says, “Let me see what I can do.”

Once you appreciate that distinction, I think you’ll agree that while some UUs are optimists and some are pessimists, we are, at our core, a hopeful people. We don’t claim to know the future. We throw ourselves into the unknown and we act, because we have a deep, abiding faith that actions matter.

People sometimes ask me, as they probably ask you, why Unitarian Universalists bother to form congregations at all. Why do we set our alarms on Sunday mornings, make ourselves presentable, and show up? After all, if you’re going to make up your own mind about the Big Questions and follow your own conscience, can’t you do that just as well at home? No UU Hell is waiting for the unchurched. No authority is going to condemn you if you sleep in. So why bother?

I suspect that these last few weeks, you’ve known exactly why you bother. We are now in a season of darkness in more ways than one. The values Unitarian Universalists cherish are challenged today in a way they have not been in my lifetime. We are told from the highest levels to fear the stranger, and blame our misfortunes on those least able to defend themselves: on immigrants and refugees and the poor. Those who are different are presented to us as threats to our well-being and our very way of life. Science, we are told, is just another bias, and compassion is weakness. Those we might previously have seen as victims are in fact just losers, people unworthy of our concern.

In the middle of this immense darkness, if all you can see is the small candle of goodwill that you carry yourself, then you may well fall into despair. Because no matter what you do or how hard you try, you cannot light the world. If you worry that your candle might really be the only one left, then you might do well to hide it, for fear of those who would snuff it out.

Or you could bring it here.

On the Sunday after the election, I was speaking in the place where I grew up, a small Midwestern town in a rural county that voted three to one for Trump. The Unitarian church there is small, but we drew a good crowd that day.

I don’t think people came to church that morning because they wanted to be jollied back into optimism. We gathered together for reassurance, but not the kind that says everything is going to be OK. (A lot of things are not going to be OK in the coming years. I think we all know that.) No, the reassurance we were looking for that morning, that I think many of us are still looking for, is to be in the presence of people who are not surrendering to despair.

I led the congregation in a responsive reading of the UU Principles, just so we could hear each other and hear ourselves say out loud what we stand for: the worth of all people; justice, equity, and compassion; acceptance of one another; the search for truth; democracy; world community; the interdependent web.

We’re not ready to give those things up, or to hibernate for a few years and let them take care of themselves. We don’t all have a plan yet. We don’t know exactly what we’re going to do. Most of us are still casting about, trying to figure out what we can do, what roles we can play, where we might make some kind of difference. But UUs across the country are determined to do something, because we are a people who believe that our actions matter. We are a religion of hope.

We are also a religion of faith. Not necessarily faith in some perfect world after death. Not necessarily faith in an all-powerful God who makes our stories come out right. Not even faith that some great leader will ride in with the cavalry to save us in our hour of need. But we do have faith that the potential for human goodness is far more widespread than it often appears. That flame you feel inside yourself, that desire to live in a more just and compassionate world, that willingness to make an effort and take some chances to help bring that world about — it also burns inside other people, including many you would never suspect. An old-time Universalist like Hosea Ballou would tell you that if you could look deeply enough, you would see that flame burning somewhere inside everyone.

You can never predict when or how it will shine through. Several years ago, I was worried about my wife, who was facing a life-threatening cancer she eventually recovered from, and so I did not notice that I had picked up a virus myself. It hit me suddenly one afternoon in our local mall, and I dragged myself to Food Court to sit down and try to recover enough energy to drive home. But instead I just felt worse and worse. Looking around, I saw only strangers, no one I could ask for help. So I decided to make a run for the bathroom, hoping to be sick there rather than in front of everyone.

But when I stood up, I keeled over, and woke up a minute or two later on the floor with people all around me. The man at the next table had caught me as I fell, and an impromptu emergency response team had formed around me. Mall security had been notified, 911 had already been called, and an ambulance was on its way.

When I had looked around at all those strangers, I had not seen that level of caring, that willingness to get involved and help. But it was there.

That is a story of personal caring, but history is also full of moments when caring for the public good has burst forth, seemingly from nowhere: when crowds have faced down armies, when workers have stood together in unions, when citizens have marched together in support of civil rights or against war, and very recently when Native Americans and their allies from across the country — including a sizable contingent of UU ministers — came together at Standing Rock.

Hope thrives on the unknown, and we do not know what depths of goodness and courage might be hidden inside the American people. During this past year, it has been hidden pretty well sometimes. Sometimes I have felt that I didn’t know this country at all. But it is the faith of a Universalist that human goodness does not die just because it is hidden, any more than the Sun dies when it sinks behind the horizon.

If we are honest with ourselves, we have to admit that our own goodness is hidden sometimes. We haven’t always done what we could have done. We haven’t always spoken up when we should have. In hindsight, I suspect, most of us can look back at times when we were on the wrong side of some important issue. (I know I can.) But the goodness inside us didn’t die in those moments, it was just obscured by ignorance, or by fear, or maybe just by exhaustion.

It is the faith of Universalist to give others the same benefit of the doubt that we need for ourselves. And it is the faith of a Universalist to believe, as Michelle Obama said, that actions of courage, of generosity, and of inspiration are contagious.

The challenge of a season of darkness is to start such contagions and to spread them. If you step forward, you do not know who will follow you. Maybe it will be people you never would have expected.

In terms of optimism, I can offer you only the vaguest reassurance. Human history shows that things do not go on getting worse forever. Eventually they turn, and the moments when they turn are hardly ever obvious at the time. Even decades later, historians are usually still arguing about them. Right now, we could be closer to a turning point than anyone suspects, or it could still be a long way off. I don’t know.

One thing I can guarantee you: In a season of darkness, whatever you can think to do will seem totally inadequate to the immensity of the situation. What does it matter if I wear a safety pin? Or correct that fake news story my friend posted to Facebook? Or put a Black Lives Matter sticker on my car? Or sit next to that kid who’s being bullied? Or call that congressman? Or go to that demonstration? Or work for that candidate? Or run for that local office? How is that going to turn the world around?

And the answer is: We don’t know. By itself, nothing you do will turn things around. You cannot light the world.

But we also do not know how much hidden goodness is out there, and how it might reveal itself. If you do that thing that it occurs to you to do, you do not know who will see it and be inspired by it, or what you yourself might learn from it, or what either of you might go on to do next.

Here, in a time of darkness, we choose to act, but we do not know what will come from that action. We cannot know. And so, we hope.

Last week Transforming Hearts Collective co-leader Teo Drake served as one of four leaders of a powerful four-day training on mindfulness, compassion, and social justice, organized by the organization Off the Mat, Into the World.

The training was intended for yoga practitioners who wanted an intensive exploration of effective social justice activism grounded in compassionate practice. Each day of the training featured a mix of practice, teaching, exercises, small group work, individual reflection, and integration of all of these elements. Mindfulness meditation and daily yoga practice created a foundation for participants to open their hearts to the pain of injustice, heal themselves and their communities from the trauma of oppression, and foster the resilience they need to stay in the struggle over a lifetime.

Over fifty participants dug into the impacts of injustice and inequity and grew their skills in being agents of social change, supported by embodied practice. Those who were new to social justice work gained an understanding of systems and historical context for our current political moment, as well as learning how yoga and meditation practices can support their ongoing engagement. Participants with marginalized identities and/or those who have been in the struggle a long time were able to have space to be together, share wisdom across identities, build solidarity, care for their bodies and spirits, and gain hope from being in community.

In the current political moment, it is more important than ever to help each other stay present, be able to sit with discomfort, and meet this moment of increasing awareness of oppression—particularly racism—without becoming too overwhelmed, shying away from culpability, or shutting down. Embodied spiritual practice is one key way to meet these goals.

Attached media: https://web.archive.org/web/20211108072812/https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/589767cae58c62ed8ac20bc5/1522598410188-UPOHKCDGLZO1WFP56SVU/off-the-mat-still.png?content-type=image%2Fpng

Never Again. This is carved in stone in seven languages on the monument at the Treblinka death camp. I wonder if we ever meant this. It says never again, but we do this again and again. We annihilate each other time and time again, and God weeps.

Aleppo has been devastated (view before and after photos here).  Misinformation from Russia has interfered with the evacuation of civilians from the city.

But this is just the most recent atrocity we have committed against each other.  Cambodia. Bosnia. Rwanda. Darfur.  All of these genocides occurred since the words were carved on this stone in Treblinka. And what for?

Bashir al-Assad wants to remain in power in Syria even if there are no people left to rule over. Russia and Iran are happy to back Assad at any cost. Human life is cheap. It’s about maintaining power for them, too.

Until we begin to see each other as God’s creation, as equals each carrying the face of God, we will continue to treat each other as commodities. We will continue to do this. Again and again.  We can carve whatever we like into stone.  God already tried that with us, giving Moses the tablets containing the big 10.  We aren’t doing to well.  Just to recap here:

From Exodus 20:1-17

Then God spoke all these words:

 I am the Lord your God, who brought you out of the land of Egypt, out of the house of slavery;  you shall have no other gods before me.

You shall not make for yourself an idol, whether in the form of anything that is in heaven above, or that is on the earth beneath, or that is in the water under the earth.  You shall not bow down to them or worship them; for I the Lord your God am a jealous God, punishing children for the iniquity of parents, to the third and the fourth generation of those who reject me, 6 but showing steadfast love to the thousandth generation of those who love me and keep my commandments.

You shall not make wrongful use of the name of the Lord your God, for the Lord will not acquit anyone who misuses his name.

Remember the sabbath day, and keep it holy. Six days you shall labor and do all your work. But the seventh day is a sabbath to the Lord your God; you shall not do any work—you, your son or your daughter, your male or female slave, your livestock, or the alien resident in your towns. For in six days the Lord made heaven and earth, the sea, and all that is in them, but rested the seventh day; therefore the Lord blessed the sabbath day and consecrated it.

Honor your father and your mother, so that your days may be long in the land that the Lord your God is giving you.

You shall not murder.

You shall not commit adultery.

You shall not steal.

You shall not bear false witness against your neighbor.

You shall not covet your neighbor’s house; you shall not covet your neighbor’s wife, or male or female slave, or ox, or donkey, or anything that belongs to your neighbor.

We’re screwing it all up. It’s time to pay attention to the words on the stones.

That’s my mite. It’s all I’ve got.

There’s a well-worn story that circulates in the spring time, often around Mothers’ Day:

A woman is doing some minor household repair, assembling flat-pack furniture or something – maybe she’s at a friend’s house, helping the friend move – and finds she lacks the right tool for the job.

She calls out to a small child nearby, “Can you go get me a screwdriver?”

The child replies, “Do you want a mommy screwdriver or a daddy screwdriver?”

Perplexed, the woman responds, “I don’t know. Bring me a mommy screwdriver.”

The child promptly returns with a butterknife.

I’ve been thinking about this one today, on my Monday-after-the-holiday off, performing my domestic duties as cat furniture and catching up on light housekeeping and half-abandoned projects. The calendar is shaped differently for people who work in churches and hospitals, and I have been doing just enough of each that I seldom remember what day of the week it is, if it isn’t Sunday, and sometimes I am not sure about that.

Ministry is odd work. Sometimes frustrating, sometimes heartbreaking, sometimes exciting, sometimes satisfying, but always odd. Sometimes it involves fixing an old toilet chain with a paper clip, or making a checklist that includes cookies, kitty litter buckets, a manuscript, and an overnight bag. It involves changing gears from the sublime to the absurd and back again, always expecting that something unexpected will come up.

For all the things I know how to do, or am learning, I keep finding there are more things I do not even know where to start with. So I hope that, like the butterknife, my showing up and being of service in the moment is enough.

A butterknife, after all, is great for spreading butter, or cutting pancakes; but it also makes a serviceable standard screwdriver in a pinch, and can be pressed into service as an ice scraper, or used to jimmy open a stuck cocoa can or a recalcitrant bathroom door. It can be a straight edge, or a thumbtack-pusher, or used to stir the spaghetti sauce when the spoon has escaped somewhere. There are better tools for most of these things, but then in the moment there is the butterknife.

After a period of discernment and consideration, Rev. Carlton Smith has resigned from the Organizing Collective of Black Lives of UU.

For full information visit: https://medium.com/@BlackLivesUU/rev-carlton-smith-exits-black-lives-of-uu-organizing-collective-b3d0a6369c0f#.z2m2o9saq

After a period of discernment and consideration, Rev. Carlton Smith has resigned from the Organizing Collective of Black Lives of UU.

For full information visit: https://medium.com/@BlackLivesUU/rev-carlton-smith-exits-black-lives-of-uu-organizing-collective-b3d0a6369c0f#.z2m2o9saq

We are pleased & excited to announce registration for the 2017 Black Lives of UU National Convening is now OPEN. The very FIRST Black Lives of UU Convening will take place in New Orleans, LA on March 9–12, 2017.

Being held at The Double Tree by Hilton, this historic event will bring together Black Unitarian Universalists from across generations. Over the course of four days together we will co-create spiritual nourishment and healing through ritual, worship and pastoral care.

As a community we will help design what we want for ourselves and our faith now and for the future. Black Lives of UU rose out of the Movement for Black Lives and we need YOU to join us in justice making and liberation through our faith.

All Black Unitarian Universalists are encouraged to attend. Financial assistance is available for registration fees, transportation & housing. Please visit http://www.blacklivesuu.com/convening2017 for full event information & registration.

We are pleased & excited to announce registration for the 2017 Black Lives of UU National Convening is now OPEN. The very FIRST Black Lives of UU Convening will take place in New Orleans, LA on March 9–12, 2017.

Being held at The Double Tree by Hilton, this historic event will bring together Black Unitarian Universalists from across generations. Over the course of four days together we will co-create spiritual nourishment and healing through ritual, worship and pastoral care.

As a community we will help design what we want for ourselves and our faith now and for the future. Black Lives of UU rose out of the Movement for Black Lives and we need YOU to join us in justice making and liberation through our faith.

All Black Unitarian Universalists are encouraged to attend. Financial assistance is available for registration fees, transportation & housing. Please visit http://www.blacklivesuu.com/convening2017 for full event information & registration.

It is the day when I sit down and write that I am not sure whether I want to write a year in review post, and then I do it anyway.

It has been, and will be, always and already, the beginning of the rest of my life.

I didn’t blog much this year – skipped posting in April and July entirely, in fact. Things happened off camera. Probably the most significant step for me was completing my required unit of Clinical Pastoral Education (CPE) in the spring, and taking on some very occasional, very part-time work as one of the many overnight on-call chaplains at my CPE site. I am planning to do a second CPE unit in the coming year, something I would not have imagined a year ago.

Six months out I can say that CPE was… formative? transformative? Those are the words people tend to use but I never found them helpful. Surely it is a subjective experience, and one that takes different shapes depending on the student and the supervisor and the cohort and the context. What my first unit did for me was help to clarify my call to pastoral caregiving – an area where I’ve had some internal (and external) resistance. I still marvel that I get to do this holy work of being present with people in their most vulnerable situations – and that even though I feel wholly unqualified and inadequate to the task, it is somehow, mostly, good enough. I’m still processing that. It leaves me with a sense of awe and wonder.

One of the deeper layers of that, a layer I’m still exploring, is the relationship between my own vulnerability and the holy work I do in the world. For all that I have done the hard work of healing from various traumas and setbacks I am still very much susceptible to shame and thinking I should hide those scars away, avoid those vulnerabilities, be swift and solid and secure. But during CPE it became clear – as it does, from time to time – that my tender and fragile heart is where my deepest listening and spiritual connection comes from. The mind is good at a lot of things but connection is not its strength. Intellect is fabulous but not the only useful thing; this soul-self is more mercurial and wild and needs to be treated gently – and is worth working with, because its gifts are also great, if harder to quantify.

A regret for this year is not making more art. I did make a quilt this fall, a small one, or mostly made it – but I still need to put the thing together. Stalled in the construction phase.

A major event that did not make it into the blog was the death of Spouse’s mother back in June; she left this world following complications of an extended illness that has been part of our lives for the last few years. It happened to be during my last month of CPE, and I was very grateful for that supportive environment. She was very much opposed to anyone outside the immediate family knowing what was going on with her health – in retrospect, I strongly suspect that things had been deteriorating far longer than Spouse and I were aware of – and so the end came as something of a shock to the extended family, even as it was both grief and release for those of us carrying the burden of silence.

People, don’t do that to your folks. Talk about that shit. Yes, it’s awkward. Do it anyway.

Anyway, when the time came to make arrangements, Spouse and his brother overruled my father-in-law, who had not wanted to have a memorial service, but acquiesced to them organizing something so long as he didn’t have to do anything but show up. Brother-in-law said he’d get the VFW hall and put together a gathering and someone suggested we do a short service and they all looked at me.

“Well,” I said, “I’d be honored to do it, but y’all do know I haven’t done a memorial service yet, right?”

My father-in-law grinned and patted me on the arm. “Well then, you do this one for practice.”

So that’s how I ended up doing my mother-in-law’s memorial service. It was fitting, somehow. We had knocked skulls often over the years, two very stubborn people with an array of bad habits in common, but we were starting to finally sort things out before the end.

Besides, officiating the memorial service meant that I was wearing my preaching shoes. It’s much easier to be on my good behavior when I’m dressed for the part.

This September I started my student ministry (two years, half-time) and am starting to slowly integrate there. I’ve led worship a couple of times and been to a lot of committee meetings and still not quite sure exactly what my role is. Half time feels like not quite enough time, but I am trying to keep to it: partly to set good precedent should they ever get another intern, and partly because I want to leave space in my life for other things like this coming CPE unit, and MFC preparation next year. I still have one more class to take, but it isn’t offered this spring, so I will be taking that next year. I hope.

It is a little hard making the mental shift from “graduation and credentialing are forever away” to “OMG this is COMING and PANIC and DO ALL THE THINGS.” There are some workshops and such I need to pick up next time they are offered. And paperwork. Holy mother of recycling, the paperwork. I despair of paperwork. There’s got to be a better way to do this. No, really.

The election this fall threw me for an emotional loop, as was true for a lot of people. Not that I was especially invested in any particular candidate, just that the level of vitriol that emerged late in the campaign – especially given the electoral upset in the presidential race – triggered an emotional flashback to my Reagan-era childhood: the sure knowledge that nothing is safe or certain and the world could come to an end at any uncontrollable moment. Flashbacks are a pain in the ass. Now that I understand why my soul does that, and am getting better at recognizing them when they show up, I seem to be learning how to get out of them instead of getting tangled in them and stuck there. But it is an occupational hazard of caring about the ills of the world that I occasionally get poked in my tenderest unhealed places.

Family holidays have been interesting. My mother-in-law was always the ringleader for everybody doing all the things for the holidays, and so this year has been the year of renegotiation of traditions and sometimes doing everything but. I worked at the hospital for Thanksgiving and the guys didn’t do a big dinner and nobody made the mysterious hamburger-based side dish that had been a staple of the turkey-day dinner table and nobody minded. I worked at the hospital for Christmas too, and Spouse and I went out for Chinese food when I got home and opened presents, many of which had been culled, I mean, curated by my brother-in-law from their mom’s estate. There’s probably a sermon in all this, or several: the value of tradition, the willingness to step away from the way we’ve always done it when the way we’ve always done it isn’t serving the needs of who we are now, and the willingness to hang onto old things in our back pockets just in case some day later they might be exactly what we need.

Other parts of my life include lots of petting the elderly black cat, who is firmly convinced that my job is to be her furniture. She objects to my nights away and complains mightily to Spouse. I am grateful for this small warm beanbag of highly conditional and demanding affection; not entirely sure she will be here next New Year’s Eve. They do not stay forever, and so, we may appreciate them all the more.

And so, onward. To life and love and defiance in the face of overwhelming uncertainty.

We are so excited to announce the addition of Adam Dyer to the Black Lives of UU Organizing Collective. Adam joins BLUU to focus specifically on pastoral care needs and other theologically based projects.

We are particularly overjoyed that Adam is joining the collective in advance of the March 9-12 BLUU Convening.

Full information about both Adam can be found below:

Adam is a Unitarian Universalist Candidate for the Ministry and this spring he will complete his M.Div. at the Pacific School of Religion in Berkeley, California.  His life's work focuses on disrupting the lingering effects of colonialism on modern culture.  Specifically, he is committed to: liberating faith and spirituality from biases that stem from exclusively privileged world views; exploring healthy concepts of how people experience their bodies as expressions of their lived experience; and working to counter the social oppression that is entrenched in traditional Western economic models.  Upon graduation, he will also receive a Certificate in Sexuality and Religion for which he has studied and worked closely with leaders in LGBTQ communities and youth in sexuality education.   

Adam sees his ministry developing out of his long held belief in the shared beauty and power of human bodies and his belief that the ability to make healthy, informed choices and decisions about our bodies is at the heart of the divine gift of human life.
 
Born in New York City and raised in Framingham, Massachusetts, Adam attended college at Princeton University where he majored in English Literature and Creative Writing. Early on, he pursued a performing arts career which allowed me to travel around the globe working as a cruise director.  Ultimately, Adam had the great fortune to appear in the original Broadway company of Ragtime the Musical. Prior to pursuing the ministry, he became a well known personal trainer, fitness instructor and massage therapist.  Learn more about his journey on the Life Beyond Ministry page.

We are so excited to announce the addition of Adam Dyer to the Black Lives of UU Organizing Collective. Adam joins BLUU to focus specifically on pastoral care needs and other theologically based projects.

We are particularly overjoyed that Adam is joining the collective in advance of the March 9-12 BLUU Convening.

Full information about both Adam can be found below:

Adam is a Unitarian Universalist Candidate for the Ministry and this spring he will complete his M.Div. at the Pacific School of Religion in Berkeley, California.  His life's work focuses on disrupting the lingering effects of colonialism on modern culture.  Specifically, he is committed to: liberating faith and spirituality from biases that stem from exclusively privileged world views; exploring healthy concepts of how people experience their bodies as expressions of their lived experience; and working to counter the social oppression that is entrenched in traditional Western economic models.  Upon graduation, he will also receive a Certificate in Sexuality and Religion for which he has studied and worked closely with leaders in LGBTQ communities and youth in sexuality education.   

Adam sees his ministry developing out of his long held belief in the shared beauty and power of human bodies and his belief that the ability to make healthy, informed choices and decisions about our bodies is at the heart of the divine gift of human life.
 
Born in New York City and raised in Framingham, Massachusetts, Adam attended college at Princeton University where he majored in English Literature and Creative Writing. Early on, he pursued a performing arts career which allowed me to travel around the globe working as a cruise director.  Ultimately, Adam had the great fortune to appear in the original Broadway company of Ragtime the Musical. Prior to pursuing the ministry, he became a well known personal trainer, fitness instructor and massage therapist.  Learn more about his journey on the Life Beyond Ministry page.

I’m back! I haven’t written in ages. I haven’t written in ages because, pretty much since November 9, I’ve been, well, despondent.  I really haven’t had the energy to write much.  But I’m writing now. I’m writing now because there was the Women’s March on Saturday. And it was important.

A dear friend and colleague has been telling me lately that marches aren’t what get things accomplished anymore.  I understand what he means. This isn’t 1964, and we aren’t going to bend the will of politicians these days by marching. No, these days, politicians are putting party politics well above their actual jobs and what’s best for the nation, and they aren’t going to be moved by millions of marchers. But that’s not why we marched.

This is what the march did.  It energized us for the work. Official estimates for Washington DC were 500,000. I’ve seen marches of half a million people before. This was more. WAY more.  There were so many people that the official march never actually got started. The march was the non-stop walking to and from the rally points, and walking to the metro to leave.  Swarms and swarms of people filling the streets all around downtown.

Now, I’ve been attending marches since 1968, when I picketed Gracie Mansion in New York City with my parents and their colleagues during the New York City teachers’ strike.  I’ve had non-violence training, and I’ve been a marshall at a few marches, too.  This march was remarkable.

This was the most respectful march I’ve ever been to. Sure, there were outside agitators who were attempting to make trouble. But the folks who came to the march just refused to engage them. At all. They were left to their bizarre ranting on the sidelines while people from all over engaged with each other.

This was the first time that I really noticed the intersectionality at a march. It was intentional and it was important.  There were signs in multiple languages.  Marchers engaged with one another – and not just the people they came with.  People were talking to people they didn’t know and helping each other out. And people were listening to one another.

Chants of “Black Lives Matter” and “We want a leader/Not a creepy tweeter,” and many others didn’t so much compete with one another as they did flow into one another.

I ran into people who said they felt ashamed at how much they’d taken for granted before the election.  People who said that they’d felt despondent but now were feeling energized and ready to get to work.  People who were committing to calling their elected officials regularly.  People who were ready to dig in.

And this was just the march in Washington, D.C. There were marches all across the U.S. and on all seven continents (yes, there was even a march on Antarctica).  People are mobilized.  It would have been good to have this energy before November 8, but we do have it now.

The point of this was not that it’s one and done.  The point is that the beast has awakened.  This was just our grand entrance.  We’re coming. And we who believe in freedom will not rest.

That’s my mite. That’s all I’ve got.

At the annual Creating Change conference hosted by the National LGBTQ Task Force this January, attendees were able to access care and spiritual practice in two brand new ways. Along with other LGBTQ faith leaders, co-leaders of the Transforming Hearts Collective spearheaded the creation of a Spiritual Care Team and a dedicated spirituality room, the Many Paths Gathering Space.

The Spiritual Care Team is a thirty-person multi-faith, multi-racial, multi-gender, multi-generational volunteer team of lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, two spirit, and queer faith leaders who were "on call" throughout the conference to provide care and support to attendees in many different ways. The team also led a variety of spiritual practices in the Many Paths Gathering Space that were open to all: offerings ranged from Muslim prayer to meditation to queer-inclusive Christian prayer to Earth-centering ritual to Catholic Mass.

A highlight of the conference was an interfaith ritual held during the inauguration on January 21, where more than forty people from more than fifteen different spiritual paths had space to grieve, heal, hope, and sing together in community.

Attached media: https://web.archive.org/web/20211108073258/https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/589767cae58c62ed8ac20bc5/1509119968945-8NY7QQ7Q9NOU3L9QILLQ/IMG_3002.jpg?content-type=image%2Fjpeg

Pictured: current candidates for UUA President, Rev Susan Frederick-Gray, Rev Allison Miller & Rev. Jeanne Pupke

With it’s first ever National Convening just a month away, the Black Lives of Unitarian Universalism Organizing Collective is excited to make an exciting programming announcement. All three candidates for UUA President, Rev. Susan Frederick-Gray, Rev. Alison Miller & Rev. Jeanne Pupke, will join the convening on Saturday March 11 for a historic Presidential Forum moderated by lead organizers Takiyah Nur Amin, PhD & Royce James PhD. 

Dr. Amin shares, "I'm excited about the upcoming BLUU convening and understand its historical importance, growing out of the intersection of engaged faith practice and the long struggle for Black Liberation more broadly. The forum we'll be hosting with candidates for UUA President is especially significant in that it creates a space for candidates to respond specifically and directly to questions from Black Unitarian Universalists."

“We as Black people have been integral to the faith since its inception. Living this legacy, we look forward to the opportunity to renew Black voices in the democratic principles of our faith tradition.” added Dr. James.

With close to 100 Black Unitarian Universalists set to gather in New Orleans from March 9-12, this Presidential Forum is just one of many program elements the collective has planned for attendees. “For us, this convening is an opportunity to learn from our past, be clear about our present & plan together for our future as Black UUs, said Convening Coordinator Leslie Mac. 

Black Unitarian Universalists can submit questions for the forum in advance via an online form. Registrants will receive access to the form next week via email with form access also available via the Explicitly Black UU Facebook group run by the BLUU Organizing Collective. The forum will also be broadcast via Livestream for those will not be in attendance at the Convening.

Stay tuned for more exciting announcements in the coming days from the Convening team.

With it’s first ever National Convening just a month away, the Black Lives of Unitarian Universalism Organizing Collective is excited to make an exciting programming announcement. All three candidates for UUA President, Rev. Susan Frederick-Gray, Rev. Alison Miller & Rev. Jeanne Pupke, will join the convening on Saturday March 11 for a historic Presidential Forum moderated by lead organizers Takiyah Nur Amin, PhD & Royce James PhD. 

Dr. Amin shares, "I'm excited about the upcoming BLUU convening and understand its historical importance, growing out of the intersection of engaged faith practice and the long struggle for Black Liberation more broadly. The forum we'll be hosting with candidates for UUA President is especially significant in that it creates a space for candidates to respond specifically and directly to questions from Black Unitarian Universalists."

“We as Black people have been integral to the faith since its inception. Living this legacy, we look forward to the opportunity to renew Black voices in the democratic principles of our faith tradition.” added Dr. James.

With close to 100 Black Unitarian Universalists set to gather in New Orleans from March 9-12, this Presidential Forum is just one of many program elements the collective has planned for attendees. “For us, this convening is an opportunity to learn from our past, be clear about our present & plan together for our future as Black UUs, said Convening Coordinator Leslie Mac. 

Black Unitarian Universalists can submit questions for the forum in advance via an online form. Registrants will receive access to the form next week via email with form access also available via the Explicitly Black UU Facebook group run by the BLUU Organizing Collective. The forum will also be broadcast via Livestream for those will not be in attendance at the Convening.

Stay tuned for more exciting announcements in the coming days from the Convening team.

Art speaks. Art loud and quiet, in your face and under the radar, beautiful and ugly, obvious and enigmatic, and art is subversive.  Art is powerful. Art can support, art can bring down, art can evoke and provoke, and it is dangerous.  And if our So-Called President doesn’t understand art and its power, their are people in his administration who do.

The Administration is proposing cutting the funding for the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) in the 2018 budget.  They are proposing this as a cost-saving measure, but at $148M, this represents a mere 0.003% of the federal budget.  To put that in perspective, the cost to U.S. taxpayers for the S0-Called President to travel to his personal Florida retreat for nearly every weekend since his inauguration has been $10M so far. For one month (CBS News).  It’s not about money.  It’s about an attempt to silence artists.

Just last week, I visited the Women Now exhibit at the Lorton Workhouse in Lorton, VA.  Lorton was a workhouse and a prison, and is now an arts center.  This exhibit highlights the struggle of women one hundred years on from the suffragists who were imprisoned at the workhouse.  This exhibit is political.  It speaks to the workhouse that exhibits it. It speaks to the struggle of women. It speaks to persistence.  It speaks.

There are interactive elements of the exhibit that invite us to be participants, not only in the moment, but in the creation of the art from a deep place. Interaction invites us to consider our own struggle, our own commitment, our own persistence, or perhaps our own  complicity.

Art is like water. It can seep in where more direct communication often cannot.  And we can understand.  When Sen. Joseph McCarthy was engaging in metaphorical communist witch hunts through the Senate Permanent Sub-Committee on Investigations, the playwrite Arthur Miller wrote the play “The Crucible,” which appeared to be about a literal witch-hunt, based on the transcripts of the Salem witch trials of 1692-93.  The play was produced in 1953, at the height of McCarthyism, and Miller’s statement was clear.  Except that it was about something that happened in Massachusetts in the 17th century.  So Sen. McCarthy couldn’t come out and say that it was about him, without acknowledging that he was, indeed, conducting a witch hunt.  Art is ingenious.

Artist Shephard Fairey created a series of posters called “We The People” in response to the inauguration and dramatic increase in hate crimes since the election.  The posters depict all sorts of Americans who are diverse in all sorts of ways.  They are powerful statements.  Recently, the Carroll County Schools in Maryland insisted that teachers remove these posters from classrooms, because some people perceive the posters as “anti-Trump.” (read more here).  The posters say things such as “We the people protect each other” or “We the people are greater than fear” or “We the people defend dignity.”  Think about that for a moment.  This is what is perceived as being “anti-Trump.”  Art is provocative.  This means that the So-Called President and his supporters are claiming that it is against him to be greater than fear, or to defend dignity.  Art is important.  You can see  the posters and download them for free here, by the way.

Since the time that the prophet Nathan told King David a story about a rich man who stole a sheep from a poor man to provoke David to do the right thing, people have been using art as tool for justice.  Use art. Go and see art. Support it. Make art.

Art is dangerous. It’s subversive. And it’s important.  What will you subvert today?

That’s my mite. It’s all I’ve got.

The Black Lives of UU Organizing Collective is pleased to make the full 2017 BLUU Convening Program available. With over 100 Black UUs scheduled to attend the historic gathering in New Orleans, LA, the event program is focused on connection, collaboration and creating a shared vision for Black Lives of UU. 

Program Highlights include:

• Spiritual Practices that drawn on from the strength of our ancestors
• Daily worship service centered on the Black experience
• UUA Presidential Forum
• Bringing the Past Present: An Intimate Conversation with former Black Unitarian Universalist Caucus President Dr. Mtangulizi Sanyika

The Black Lives of UU Organizing Collective is pleased to make the full 2017 BLUU Convening Program available. With over 100 Black UUs scheduled to attend the historic gathering in New Orleans, LA, the event program is focused on connection, collaboration and creating a shared vision for Black Lives of UU. 

Program Highlights include:

• Spiritual Practices that drawn on from the strength of our ancestors
• Daily worship service centered on the Black experience
• UUA Presidential Forum
• Bringing the Past Present: An Intimate Conversation with former Black Unitarian Universalist Caucus President Dr. Mtangulizi Sanyika

Thanks to Richard Hurst for noting that encoding rot made the “Ordo de Diservo” — Order of Worship — unreadable, even for those who do read Esperanto.

Should be all fixed, here and at RevScottWells.com, where I write slighly more frequently.

Join Black Lives of UU for a LIVE Multi-Faith Panel Discussion: Whose Faith Is It Anyway?: Confronting White Supremacy in Faith Institutions Sunday April 23, 7:00 PM ET.

The Black Lives of Unitarian Universalism (BLUU) Organizing Collective is excited to host this much needed, online panel discussion. Together, we will discuss the many issues that people of faith doing liberation work confront within religious institutions. Our conversation will focus on strategies for challenging and dismantling institutional racism within faith communities and what resources might be useful in confronting oppressive structures meant to hold us back.

PANELISTS INCLUDE:

• Dr. Takiyah Amin - Assistant Professor, UNC Charlotte & BLUU Lead
• Candace Benbow, M Div - Writer, Educator & doctoral student at Princeton Theological Seminary
• Vicar Lenny Duncan - St. Mark's Lutheran Church & organizer #decolonizelutheranism
• Vahisha Hasan - Founder, Movement in Faith
• Kenny Wiley - UU World Senior Editor & BLUU Lead

Moderator: Leslie Mac - CoFounder Safety Pin Box & BLUU Lead

RSVP: http://bit.ly/RSVPBLUUWhoseFaith

Join the conversation: #BLUUWhoseFaith

Join Black Lives of UU for a LIVE Multi-Faith Panel Discussion: Whose Faith Is It Anyway?: Confronting White Supremacy in Faith Institutions Sunday April 23, 7:00 PM ET.

The Black Lives of Unitarian Universalism (BLUU) Organizing Collective is excited to host this much needed, online panel discussion. Together, we will discuss the many issues that people of faith doing liberation work confront within religious institutions. Our conversation will focus on strategies for challenging and dismantling institutional racism within faith communities and what resources might be useful in confronting oppressive structures meant to hold us back.

PANELISTS INCLUDE:

• Dr. Takiyah Amin - Assistant Professor, UNC Charlotte & BLUU Lead
• Candace Benbow, M Div - Writer, Educator & doctoral student at Princeton Theological Seminary
• Vicar Lenny Duncan - St. Mark's Lutheran Church & organizer #decolonizelutheranism
• Vahisha Hasan - Founder, Movement in Faith
• Kenny Wiley - UU World Senior Editor & BLUU Lead

Moderator: Leslie Mac - CoFounder Safety Pin Box & BLUU Lead

RSVP: http://bit.ly/RSVPBLUUWhoseFaith

Join the conversation: #BLUUWhoseFaith

Dear President Morales,

I too, am deeply saddened.  This is the season of Lent, a time when we are called to look inward and examine ourselves, to prepare for Easter, a time of rebirth. So let us turn inward and examine ourselves individually and in the UUA, shall we?

I think it’s important in this work to be open and honest.  I am a cis-gendered, straight white woman. I am a fellowshipped minister serving a parish, and I serve on a District board, so I am quite familiar with governance and regionalization. The opinions here are my own.  Our current system privileges me over ministers of color, and often over LGBTQ ministers.  If I don’t recognize that and face it, I will never be in a place to change it.

My womb is not wandering, and my response to this crisis (and I do believe it is a crisis) regarding UUA hiring practices is not related in any way to the condition of my uterus. I therefore resent your characterization of peoples’ responses as “hysterical.”  Those of us who identify as women are far too familiar with this type of dismissive language.

According to your own biography on the Unitarian Universalist Association (UUA) website, you served on the Unitarian Universalist Ministers Association (UUMA) Executive Committee “as the first person to carry its anti-racism, anti-oppression, multiculturalism portfolio.”  Given this credential, I would expect a more culturally sensitive response.

In fact, when looking outward, you have often given thoughtful and sensitive responses.  In February of 2010 you wrote a moving letter to the Unitarian Universalists of Uganda, praising them for their, “…courageous stand on behalf of gay and lesbian citizens…”.  In November of 2015, you urged us as Unitarian Universalists to learn to follow rather than insisting on taking the lead,  and to learn to respond, as we worked as allies with Black Lives matter (read here). In December, 2014, following the horrible decision in the Eric Garner case, you said, “…Eric Garner is dead. Michael Brown is dead. And we must raise our voices, again and again, to proclaim that black lives matter.” (read the whole statement here). You made a similar statement in August of 2014 following the Michael Brown decision.

Even when talking about the UUA, at least in general terms, and when talking about the state of ministry in congregations, you have been aware of the numbers for some time.  In the summer 2010 issue of the UU World, you wrote in “The New America“:

Yet during this time the number of minority ministers has changed hardly at all. What is even more troubling, ministers from historic minorities have had great difficulty finding and keeping positions. Why is it that in a generation the situation of women and lesbians and gays in our ministry has changed dramatically while the situation of ethnic and racial minorities has changed hardly at all?

I know that the hardest work is the work we have to do in ourselves.  The time is overdue for the UUA to do this work.  It is not enough to rest on the laurels of the 2016 Ends Monitoring Report.  It is a monitoring report.  It doesn’t say “mission accomplished.”  It will not do to “whitesplain” or “mansplain” anymore.  When those among us who have been historically marginalized are telling us that they are once again being marginalized, we cannot simply tell them they are being “hysterical.”  We must pay attention.  A good starting place will be the statement from Black Lives of UUs here and The Reflection on White Supremacy in Our UUA from the staff of Youth and Young Adult Ministries here.

The UUA, and in particular, the American Unitarian Association, has a long and ugly history of racism.  We must face it, own it, and repair it.  In 1903, the AUA published The Blood of The Nation, a horrid treatise promoting eugenics and warning against the dangers of defiling the pure white blood of Americans with inferior races.  One hundred and fourteen years on, it’s time that we stop assuming that white is default or superior.  It’s time to examine our excuses.  It’s time to do the real work.

That’s my mite. It’s all I’ve got.

Update:  30 March, 2017

Dear President Morales,

I have just read your letter to the UUA Board of Trustees in which you announced your intention to step down as President effective 1 April.  I commend you for this difficult decision. Your letter is eloquent and thoughtful, and an example of the best of ministry.  In doing this difficult thing you are setting an example for all of us in that you are putting the needs of the UUA before your own.  I share your prayer that we will come together, listen deeply to one another, and reaffirm our commitment to one another.  After all, we are a covenantal faith — what have we got if we don’t have our covenant?

Yours in faith,

The Mite-y Widow

The Transforming Hearts Collective is proud to have collaborated with the Religious Institute in creating and resourcing the National Weekend of Prayer for Transgender Justice, March 24-26, 2017. The weekend of prayer was originally envisioned as a way for people of faith to lend support to Gavin Grimm and his court case against a Virginia county school board for not allowing him to use the boy's bathroom in his high school, which the Supreme Court was planning to hear in late March.

When the Court decided it would no longer hear the case—in response to the executive branch's decision to remove Title IX guidance clarifying protection for transgender students—it became clear that a weekend of prayer was needed even more than before. Day in and day out, the suffering of transgender people, particularly those who are women and femmes, people of color, youth, elders, disabled, and undocumented, goes unnoticed by the mainstream.

So we broadened the focus of the weekend and helped create resources for faith communities to understand the moral imperative of transgender justice, practice guiding principles around working for transgender justice, engage in religious education related to transgender justice, and commit to next steps as faith communities to foster transgender justice both within and outside their congregational walls. Close to thirty different LGBTQ and religious organizations signed on as co-sponsors.

Attached media: https://web.archive.org/web/20211108075612/https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/589767cae58c62ed8ac20bc5/1509131323307-BITO91ZVZDN9JUQIQTL3/static1.squarespace.png?content-type=image%2Fpng

Notes for a Lecture on Climate Change

Striding across campus
to an afternoon lecture, thinking
that I can change the world —

no, not the world, but maybe
adjust the lens so students will see
a little more clearly

the inner workings
of capitalism, colonialism,
power and climate –

then pausing beneath
cedars hundreds of years old
I begin to worry:

If only I were more prepared, more
patient, more compassionate, more
like someone I once believed

I would grow into.
When I arrive at class
I am afraid –

being stranded with nothing
in front of students who expect
answers to a wicked problem.

“But it can’t be solved!”
I want to scream.
“Let me tell you how

we have already lost
so many days not seeing
the weather change.”

Yet their faces do not say
Give us answers, or
Tell us the way.

They say, We are scared.
We are sad. See us
for who we are, here,

here on this day, in this
room, in this place.
Listen to us –

We will wait.

The reality is that the climate has already begun to change noticeably and that we are going to be dealing with the storms, the refugees, and agricultural issues that come with those changes over the next few decades no matter what. That can be immensely frightening, or it can be a chance to really ponder what matters to us and what is most important.

Do I need all the personal items that make my footprint so big on this planet, or could I use networks of personal connection and mutual support that would mean material goods needn’t be as relevant in my life? What does it mean to substitute trust in human communities for personally having everything that I need to be comfortable independently? What would interdependence really look like?

No single day or single action is going to win this movement and nobody is going to be perfect. I know that I be can’t be inspiring all the time, but if each of us can be an inspiration sometimes, it might be enough to change everything. Because, as it turns out, in that time on the bridge, we did help change everything.

Shell pulled out of the Arctic Circle entirely by September. (Spiritual Lessons from St. John's Bridge)

On the Final Day
When the room emptied of your voices
I sat in the back row to read again
what you’d left behind -- visions, futures
scrawled across the blackboard:

Less consumption, less disease.
Trains of light connecting everywhere
to everywhere else. Justice and good food
for all creatures, a tiny house for each

to make its home. Lives of peace.
No war, no cages, no razor wire, no prisons
no corporate money, no student debt.
Instead more forgiveness, more love

more conversation, more compassion
more things powered by the sun.
Better education, interplanetary government,
spaces for wildness, for wonderment.

I wanted to leave your words
to instruct passerbys that what they think
can’t be, you choose to see, and offered free
unknowing the value of your gift.

Yet for some easy routine,
and thought that if not me
someone else surely would
I erased the board and walked out

into the long shadows of the late afternoon.
But your words stayed with me
in the gathering darkness, stayed then
and still do, and all this is just to say
thank you.

(Finding Hope and Gratitude in the Climate Change Classroom)

Our ask is a simple one: For each congregation participating in the #UUWhiteSupremacyTeachIn to join us in donating $5,000 to the National Mamas Bail Out Day.

We ask you to put your faith into action with this gift and to imagine the impact of this challenge — imagine hundreds of Black & Brown Mother’s reunited with their children & loved ones this Mothers Day.

How to participate:

• Visit https://brooklynbailfund.org/national-bail-out-day-donate and make a direct donation of $5,000 in your congregations name.
• In the “How did you hear about the National Bail Out Day?” field enter: Black Lives of UU

We hope that you will take the lessons learned during your #UUWhiteSupremacyTeachIn and put them into ACTION right now and support the National Mamas Bail Out Day

“the world’s religions are packed with good ideas on how we might live and arrange our societies.”

“We do not know what God is. God himself doesn’t know what he is because he is not anything. Literally, God is not, because he transcends being.”

We are pleased to offer this short update and follow up from the Black Lives of UU 2017 Convening - UUA Presidential Forum. Candidates Rev Susan Frederick-Gray & Rev. Alison Miller kindly provided written responses to several Black UU submitted questions that we were not able to cover in New Orleans in March.

**NOTE: Rev Jeanne Pupke provided her responses to the Black Lives of UU Team on May 26. We post and share them here as a courtesy.

Watch the full recording of the initial forum at the bottom of this page and click below to access the written responses to the additional questions.

We are pleased to offer this short update and follow up from the Black Lives of UU 2017 Convening - UUA Presidential Forum. Candidates Rev Susan Frederick-Gray & Rev. Alison Miller kindly provided written responses to several Black UU submitted questions that we were not able to cover in New Orleans in March.

**NOTE: Rev Jeanne Pupke provided her responses to the Black Lives of UU Team on May 26. We post and share them here as a courtesy.

Watch the full recording of the initial forum at the bottom of this page and click below to access the written responses to the additional questions.

The Clearing is growing! In the past year, this emerging spiritual community centering the voices, experiences, and liberation of queer and trans people of color and open to all, has been deepening its work in Durham, NC.

Transforming Hearts Collective co-leaders LeLaina Romero and Rev. Mykal Slack, along with a group of close friends and chosen family in Durham, connected around a common vision for spiritual community that none of them had found in the area, but were longing for. We co-created spaces for rest, renewal, and uplift in the midst of HB2 repeal efforts, facilitated honest and pain-filled dialogue in the aftermath of the 2016 presidential election, and held visioning sessions to lay the groundwork for a series of community conversations to help identify leaders and continue to cultivate and curate what this new spiritual adventure can and should be.

The first two community conversations took place this spring—the first at the LGBTQ Resource Center at North Carolina Central University and the second at the LGBTQ Center of Durham—to explore people’s hopes for spiritual community. More than thirty people participated—people of color, queer folks, and trans/non-binary folks, ranging in age from 9 months old to 60+. Our time together was filled with the sounds and feels of babies playing and elders sharing; bread being cut, salads getting dressed, soup heating up; gratitude for the openness and the willingness to share what’s real, what’s hard, and what’s good, among new friends.

We learned that, for folks to show up fully, they wanted a multigenerational, nonjudgmental space to share meals and music, be outdoors together, hear cool sermons, learn from sacred texts, and make art. We also learned that, because of past pain in spiritual spaces, understanding how to show up as an anti-oppressive, multi-faith, multi-vocal space will take time and intention.

We visioned and dreamed together, and made a plan for sharing monthly dinners, finding the joy and release of dance and moving our bodies, embracing the power of ritual, and reclaiming public space out in the world, as well as building an evolving team of visionaries and organizers that will continue to breathe life and love and meaning into this community. And we continue to dream about engaging trans/non-binary communities in altar-building in places where we gather and connecting with local artists and musicians about creating art spaces and dance parties as places for healing. Ashe!

Attached media: https://web.archive.org/web/20211108093914/https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/589767cae58c62ed8ac20bc5/1530829063244-04L506AEJ78EOQP50OC8/Clearing+doodle+cropped.jpg?content-type=image%2Fjpeg

When was the last time you got an actual letter in the mail? A hand-written, personal letter?  When I was younger, and there was no such thing as e-mail, I used to be very good at writing to people, and as a result, I got a fair number of letters in return.  There were the summer camp letters.  I know from personal experience that children still eagerly await mail call at summer camp — but now it’s possible to send e-mails to your children at summer camp (these are still generally delivered at mail call). But I used to write to people even when I wasn’t away at summer camp.  And I kept this up through college.  But at some point, this art seemed to give way to modern technology.

So I decided to reclaim it.  For Lent this year, I took up the spiritual practice of letter writing.  I wrote a letter every day — forty-six letters (and then two more) to all sorts of people, and it was a wonderful gift — to myself.

I wrote to family. I wrote a letter to my mother. And to my brother.  I wrote to friends.  Close friends whom I talk to all the time, but who are far away.  Friends whom I haven’t talked to in a while. I wrote a fan letter or two.  And then I got bolder.

I started searching out people I hadn’t seen or heard from in years.  Like, 40 years.  In the Bible, 40 is code for “a really long time.” I know I wrote to at least two people I hadn’t seen in 40 years or more.  I wrote to a girl I remembered from the second grade.  We met in the second grade, but to be fair, I knew her through elementary school. I’ve wondered about her since then.  And I found her.  And she wrote back!

I wrote to a cousin I haven’t seen since my teens.  Not only did she write back, but when I was in New York in May, we got together.  Catching up on 40 years is hard to do over brunch, but now we’re connected on social media, and connected in real life.

I wrote to someone I know who’s in jail.  This was a hard letter to write, because I’m angry at this person.  But sometimes it’s important to say that.  They wrote back.  It was a difficult letter to get, too.  But if I’m to be true to my faith, true to the idea of God’s universal love, then I can’t shy away from the difficult spiritual work.

I found that, as I continued to write, it became easier to write, even to people who seemed more distant to me.  I started with the closer people, but I got braver.  I wrote with no expectations.  But I did get letters in return, and that was wonderful.  What a gift to catch up with people, to go the slow path, and dig in a bit.

One letter was returned as undeliverable.  Many went out with no word back at all.  But I said what I need to or wanted to say.

Since Lent, I have continued to write letters, albeit not daily.  But once awakened, it’s been easier to keep the practice fresh.  And I’ve found that it’s enriched the way I write to people in more formal e-mails, as well.

I like technology. I do.  I feel almost lost without my cell phone.  But I also think it’s important to unplug from time to time.  Nothing can be a replacement for face-to-face interactions,  and there is still something special about the slow route of hand-written snail mail.

That’s my mite.  It’s all I’ve got.

The Black Lives of Unitarian Universalism Organizing Collective is proud to publish our full schedule for this year's General Assembly. In addition to programming inside the Explicitly Black Healing Space run by the BLUU Ministerial Network, the schedule includes a joint worship service with DRUUMM, several workshops, a plenary session in the main hall and an opening reception on Wednesday evening opening the Healing Space.

For all information related to #BLUUGA2017 visit http://www.blacklivesuu.com/ga2017 where you can:

• Download BLUU GA 2017 Event & Healing Space Schedules
• Access the official #BLUUGA2017 Playlist (on Spotify AND Tidal!)
• Watch the Pre-GA Webinar Recording
• Sign Up to receive Text Messages from BLUU

We wish everyone a safe journey to New Orleans and look forward to being together next week in faith & fellowship.

The Black Lives of Unitarian Universalism Organizing Collective

Lena K Gardner, Executive Director
Takiyah Nur Amin, PhD
CDR Royce W. James, Ph.D.
Leslie Mac
Rev. Mykal O'Neal Slack
Kenny Wiley

The Black Lives of Unitarian Universalism Organizing Collective is proud to publish our full schedule for this year's General Assembly. In addition to programming inside the Explicitly Black Healing Space run by the BLUU Ministerial Network, the schedule includes a joint worship service with DRUUMM, several workshops, a plenary session in the main hall and an opening reception on Wednesday evening opening the Healing Space.

For all information related to #BLUUGA2017 visit http://www.blacklivesuu.com/ga2017 where you can:

• Download BLUU GA 2017 Event & Healing Space Schedules
• Access the official #BLUUGA2017 Playlist (on Spotify AND Tidal!)
• Watch the Pre-GA Webinar Recording
• Sign Up to receive Text Messages from BLUU

We wish everyone a safe journey to New Orleans and look forward to being together next week in faith & fellowship.

The Black Lives of Unitarian Universalism Organizing Collective

Lena K Gardner, Executive Director
Takiyah Nur Amin, PhD
CDR Royce W. James, Ph.D.
Leslie Mac
Rev. Mykal O'Neal Slack
Kenny Wiley

• Fri, 09:59: The gay agenda for Friday. @ Ozdachs Consulting https://t.co/s9BRPhleyl

For those who were able to make it to General Assembly this year, the energy was different this time around. Something is changing in our denomination -- and BLUU has been a part of creating that change. You have been a part of creating that change. If you’re receiving this email, it’s because you’re a Black UU yourself or a supporter. Without y’all, BLUU would be just a group of folks getting together, arguing, laughing and supporting each other -- which wouldn’t be the worst. But with you, we are building and dreaming something into being that is already changing lives. Thank you, thank you, thank you for supporting BLUU, for being a Black UU if you are and sticking it out in a denomination that makes it all too easy to leave.

Last week I had the privilege speaking during plenary and more than once the collective and the work that BLUU has done (and is doing) received standing ovations from a crowd of thousands. Thousands. And that doesn’t include the thousands of others who were with us in spirit, watching the live streaming or just cheering from afar as they tended to work, children, and other responsibilities. This GA was so very different from the feeling of General Assembly even just a year ago.

And yet it is so clear that we still have so much work toward justice to do because even as I write this to you, I am working as part of a team of UU leaders who are advocating for the human rights of the four young Black men who allegedly burglarized UUA staff members Tim Byrne and James Curran. The incident was caught on tape. The BLUU team sends our love and wishes for healing to Tim and James and to their families as they recover from what was a violent encounter. We encourage folks to support them by giving to the UUA Staff Assistance fund here.

And we are called in this moment, along with other UU leaders to encourage a process of restorative justice. We know that the four young men, Dejuan, Joshua, Nicholas, and Rashaad, are young, Black men and face a criminal justice system that does NOT recognize their worth or dignity. In communication and agreement with the James and family of Tim and other UU leaders, we have begun to advocate for a restorative justice process in New Orleans. So the work continues. This wasn’t the note we hoped to end General Assembly on, but if we are to live out our principle that all Black Lives Matter then it is the work we are called to do in this moment.   

WELCOME DIDI DELGADO TO THE BLUU TEAM

In the service of that work, we are also very proud to announce the first Black Lives of UU Collaborative Organizer, Didi Delgado, who officially begins work with us on July 13, 2017. Many of you may recognize her from the BLUU Convening in March. We are thrilled to have her on staff. She will be helping build out and support the work of our BLUUMicro30 teams and continuing to deepen our connection with the Black Lives Matter Network and the Movement for Black Lives. Welcome to the BLUU team Didi!

DiDi Delgado - Black Lives of UU Collaborative Organizer

As part of Didi’s work, BLUUMicro30 launched its next step at the convening. The next step is: an in-person local meet up with other Black UUs. You can read about the creation of the #BLUUMicro30 groups and what the projects are on our website. And please look for more details about support for the upcoming meet ups - some are big and some are small, but we are excited to keep building. If you aren’t a on a BLUUMicro30 team yet and are a Black UU, please click here join us!

INTRODUCING 360 COUNCIL

Other big announcements from GA include the establishment of our BLUU 360 Elders Council. We are honored to have Paula Cole Jones, Rev. Susan Newman Moore, Dr. Mtangulizi Sanyika and Rev. Mel Hoover serving on that council. You can watch the address in plenary from Rev. Mel and Miss Paula, Baba’s stirring plenary speech as well as the Organizing Collective receiving the President’s Volunteer Service Award on the BLUU website here.

Dr. Michael Dumas and Dr. Takiyah Amin right after their Introduction to Anti Blackness workshop, you can see the recap here!

They also head a discussion in the BLUU Healing Space on Black Fugitivity, Joy and Futures. It was a lively discussion and in depth conversation with audience participation.

Drs Michael Dumas & Takiyah Amin (BLUU Organizing Collective Lead)

BLUU PARTICIPATES IN UUA GA 2017 MURAL PROJECT

Natalie Jeffers with Lena K. Gardner and Dr. Mtangulizi Sanyika, completing the BLUU portion of the mural, with inspiration from Dr. King’s 1967 Ware Lecture, entitled Don’t Sleep Through the Revolution.

The three purple figurines represent BLUU in the mural and continuation of BAC and BUUC from which you can see with raised fists behind those figurines in the mural.

NEW ROLE!

Last but certainly not least, at General Assembly 2017 we announced Rev. Mykal Slack as our BLUU Community Minister of Worship and Spiritual Care.

We are beyond grateful for his service and ministry and blessed to have him on this team.  

It’s the Friday after General Assembly and I’m heading back down to New Orleans to support local organizers in our efforts to live more deeply into our faith values as Black UUs, a few of us from the OC, myself included will be taking some time off in the coming weeks but rest assured we’ll be back into the full swing of things by late July and early August! Love to you all!

Lena K. Gardner
Executive Director, BLUU Organizing Collective

For those who were able to make it to General Assembly this year, the energy was different this time around. Something is changing in our denomination -- and BLUU has been a part of creating that change. You have been a part of creating that change. If you’re receiving this email, it’s because you’re a Black UU yourself or a supporter. Without y’all, BLUU would be just a group of folks getting together, arguing, laughing and supporting each other -- which wouldn’t be the worst. But with you, we are building and dreaming something into being that is already changing lives. Thank you, thank you, thank you for supporting BLUU, for being a Black UU if you are and sticking it out in a denomination that makes it all too easy to leave.

Last week I had the privilege speaking during plenary and more than once the collective and the work that BLUU has done (and is doing) received standing ovations from a crowd of thousands. Thousands. And that doesn’t include the thousands of others who were with us in spirit, watching the live streaming or just cheering from afar as they tended to work, children, and other responsibilities. This GA was so very different from the feeling of General Assembly even just a year ago.

And yet it is so clear that we still have so much work toward justice to do because even as I write this to you, I am working as part of a team of UU leaders who are advocating for the human rights of the four young Black men who allegedly burglarized UUA staff members Tim Byrne and James Curran. The incident was caught on tape. The BLUU team sends our love and wishes for healing to Tim and James and to their families as they recover from what was a violent encounter. We encourage folks to support them by giving to the UUA Staff Assistance fund here.

And we are called in this moment, along with other UU leaders to encourage a process of restorative justice. We know that the four young men, Dejuan, Joshua, Nicholas, and Rashaad, are young, Black men and face a criminal justice system that does NOT recognize their worth or dignity. In communication and agreement with the James and family of Tim and other UU leaders, we have begun to advocate for a restorative justice process in New Orleans. So the work continues. This wasn’t the note we hoped to end General Assembly on, but if we are to live out our principle that all Black Lives Matter then it is the work we are called to do in this moment.   

WELCOME DIDI DELGADO TO THE BLUU TEAM

In the service of that work, we are also very proud to announce the first Black Lives of UU Collaborative Organizer, Didi Delgado, who officially begins work with us on July 13, 2017. Many of you may recognize her from the BLUU Convening in March. We are thrilled to have her on staff. She will be helping build out and support the work of our BLUUMicro30 teams and continuing to deepen our connection with the Black Lives Matter Network and the Movement for Black Lives. Welcome to the BLUU team Didi!

As part of Didi’s work, BLUUMicro30 launched its next step at the convening. The next step is: an in-person local meet up with other Black UUs. You can read about the creation of the #BLUUMicro30 groups and what the projects are on our website. And please look for more details about support for the upcoming meet ups - some are big and some are small, but we are excited to keep building. If you aren’t a on a BLUUMicro30 team yet and are a Black UU, please click here join us!

INTRODUCING 360 COUNCIL

Other big announcements from GA include the establishment of our BLUU 360 Elders Council. We are honored to have Paula Cole Jones, Rev. Susan Newman Moore, Dr. Mtangulizi Sanyika and Rev. Mel Hoover serving on that council. You can watch the address in plenary from Rev. Mel and Miss Paula, Baba’s stirring plenary speech as well as the Organizing Collective receiving the President’s Volunteer Service Award on the BLUU website here.

Dr. Michael Dumas and Dr. Takiyah Amin right after their Introduction to Anti Blackness workshop, you can see the recap here!

They also head a discussion in the BLUU Healing Space on Black Fugitivity, Joy and Futures. It was a lively discussion and in depth conversation with audience participation.

BLUU PARTICIPATES IN UUA GA 2017 MURAL PROJECT

Natalie Jeffers with Lena K. Gardner and Dr. Mtangulizi Sanyika, completing the BLUU portion of the mural, with inspiration from Dr. King’s 1967 Ware Lecture, entitled Don’t Sleep Through the Revolution.

The three purple figurines represent BLUU in the mural and continuation of BAC and BUUC from which you can see with raised fists behind those figurines in the mural.

NEW ROLE!

Last but certainly not least, at General Assembly 2017 we announced Rev. Mykal Slack as our BLUU Community Minister of Worship and Spiritual Care.

We are beyond grateful for his service and ministry and blessed to have him on this team.  

It’s the Friday after General Assembly and I’m heading back down to New Orleans to support local organizers in our efforts to live more deeply into our faith values as Black UUs, a few of us from the OC, myself included will be taking some time off in the coming weeks but rest assured we’ll be back into the full swing of things by late July and early August! Love to you all!

Lena K. Gardner
Executive Director, BLUU Organizing Collective

• Tue, 11:52: Happy Independence Day! Make America Stronger. Support a LGBT refugee/asylum seeker. Click and give.… https://t.co/aalLxiCEiN

• Sat, 11:23: Cooking class at Roy's with Geoff. @ Roy's Restaurant https://t.co/X6Ll4UdEOa