Our Moral Compass

Our Moral Compass: A Social Justice Model for Operating in the World

Based on the work of Dr. Paul Farmer

Something that is so cool about this church is that our Sunday Service topics often relate to each other and layer upon one another to provide for a richer and deeper exploration of important issues. A few weeks ago, Thom Botsford spoke with us here about the works of Paul Tillich, the influential theologian, existentialist philosopher, and Christian socialist. As a reminder, Tillich’s sermon “You Are Accepted” explored the concepts of Sin and Grace. These concepts of Sin and Grace and the way that Tillich explained them have relevance to today’s consideration of Our Moral Compass.

Tillich identifies Sin as a state of Separation – our separation from others, our separation from ourselves, and our separation from God or our Higher Power, which Tillich referred to as the Ground of Being.

About separation, Tillich observes that “life is estranged from life.” He writes, “The most irrevocable expression of the separation of life from life today is the attitude of social groups within nations towards each other, and the attitude of nations themselves towards other nations. The walls of distance, in time and space, have been removed by technical progress; but the walls of estrangement between heart and heart have been incredibly strengthened.”

Keep in mind that Tillich is delivering this sermon 1948, in the wake of World War II, the circumstances of which led so many people around the world to deeply question humanity and the meaning of life. Yet about 75 years later, here we are, and these words seem even more true today.

Tillich continues: “Let us just consider ourselves and what we feel, when we read, this morning and tonight, that in some sections of Europe all children under the age of three are sick and dying, or that in some sections of Asia millions without homes are freezing and starving to death. The strangeness of life to life is evident in the strange fact that we can know all this, and yet can live today, this morning, tonight, as though we were completely ignorant. … In both mankind and nature, life is separated from life. Estrangement prevails among all things that live.”

On the other hand, Tillich identified Grace as a process of Reunion, which is something we can experience only when we have truly felt “the separation of life.” Speaking of the disciple Paul in the Christian Bible, Tillich writes: “The moment in which grace struck him and overwhelmed him, he was reunited with that to which he belonged, and from which he was estranged in utter strangeness.”

You may recall that the Bible depicts the disciple Paul, originally called Saul, as a hateful man who “intensely persecuted the followers of Jesus.” Saul had a life-altering experience, underwent a conversion, ceased his hateful persecution, and then spent his life building up the Christian church and doing lots of writing.

When we, like Paul, experience the light of Grace, Tillich says, “We perceive the power of grace in our relation to others and to ourselves. We experience the grace of being able to look frankly into the eyes of another, the miraculous grace of reunion of life with life. Sometimes grace appears in all these separations to reunite us with those to whom we belong. For life belongs to life.”

Tillich continues: “And in the light of this grace we perceive the power of grace in our relation to ourselves. We experience moments in which we accept ourselves, because we feel that we have been accepted by that which is greater than we.”

‘Blessed and Made Whole’

Tillich describes Grace – Reunion – as a process of being reconciled with others, with ourselves, and with the Ground of Being. We sang the UU anthem “Answering the Call of Love” for our Opening Hymn today. The lyrics tell us that the promise of the Spirit is that faith, hope, and love abide — that faith, hope, and love endure without yielding. If this happens, “every soul is blessed and made whole.”

We are whole, able to live holistically, united with the Ground of Being, with others, and with ourselves. We are not estranged from ourselves. We are in a position to listen to and follow our deepest values. Jason Shelton, the composer of “Answering the Call of Love,” asserts that “the truth in our hearts is our guide” when we answer the call of love. But how do we find the truth in our hearts?

‘The Truth in Our Hearts’

One might say that we follow our truth when our behavior is in alignment with our values, when we live with integrity. Integrity requires that we know what our values and beliefs are and that we use them to make decisions and take action. Our values and beliefs then become like a compass, a moral compass.

The Rev. Mary Deal, minister of the UU church in Olympia, puts it this way: “Integrity [means] that we have a moral compass, and we use it. A compass is a tool that helps us find our direction when we are on a journey. A moral compass is an internalized set of values that guide us with regard to ethical behavior and decision-making. A moral compass helps us find our direction on the journey of life.”

“Knowing our moral compass requires reflection and contemplation; thinking and observing, listening to our heart and spirit.” In terms of becoming acquainted with our personal moral compass, Deal suggests that we tune in to the values that are reflected in our actions, such as the issues that we pay attention to, the way that we spend our money and our time, and how we feel about these choices. The way that we budget our time and money says a lot about what we value. Those of us here today or watching later, those of us who are drawn to UUCP and who invest our time, talent, and treasures here most likely value love, diversity, and justice, the mission of this church.

Deal goes on to discuss “spiritually grounded justice work,” which means working for justice based on our core values. Deal stresses that justice work that is grounded in our core values is more sustainable. “It is those values that we return to when the work is hard and when we are tired,” Deal says. “Without those core values to remind us of the ‘why,’ we burnout and have no energy for the ‘what.’ A moral compass is a touchstone we return to when we need it for the long haul.”

Dr. Paul Farmer

Dr. Paul Farmer is a figure with an extremely refined moral compass, someone in touch with his own values, and someone who had the strength to continue justice work over the long haul. Farmer was a physician, anthropologist, and a humanitarian who became internationally renowned for his work providing health care to some of the world’s poorest residents, mostly in Haiti. He came from humble beginnings – living part of his childhood in a bus his father had converted for the family – and went on to attend Duke University and Harvard Medical School. Living and working in Haiti, he was appalled to see that poor patients could not get the healthcare they needed if they could not pay for it up front. In 1987, he founded Partners in Health, which operates a network of community health centers, run and led by the local people. Dr. Farmer died in Rwanda in 2022 at the age of 62 following a cardiac event while he was asleep. The director of the CDC remarked that there are untold numbers of people alive today because of the work of Paul Farmer.

It should come as no surprise that Dr. Farmer witnessed immense injustice in his years assessing and treating the medical needs of the global poor. In his book “Pathologies of Power,” published in 2003, Farmer articulated the injustices that arise from economic inequality. He writes, “By almost every measure, social inequalities – both within affluent societies and across borders – have risen sharply over the past two or three decades. The social pathologies associated with rising inequality give pause to even the cheerleaders of neoliberal economics.” These social pathologies include inequalities in the control of land and systems of production and inequalities baked into our political and legal structures. Wealth and control have become increasingly concentrated in the hands of a few.

Farmer quotes an economics scholar as saying that “the social consequences of economic inequality are sometimes negative, sometimes neutral, but seldom – as far as I can discover – positive.” A leader of the liberation theology movement, Leonardo Boff of Brazil, notes that the poor “are those who suffer injustice. Their poverty is produced by mechanisms of impoverishment and exploitation. Their poverty is therefore an evil and an injustice.” Likewise, Abby Maxman, President and CEO of Oxfam America, asserts, “We must stop normalizing extreme inequality. This is not by accident, but by design.”

Remember: “life is estranged from life,” “heart estranged from heart.”

In terms of working for social justice, Farmer believed that the poor are the ones most deserving of our efforts. In Haiti, the poor are the descendants of a people enslaved in order to provide our ancestors with cheap sugar, coffee, and cotton – or, in the U.S., tobacco and cotton.

Dr. Farmer saw that the poor were the most likely to fall sick and be denied access to care. The most likely to be victims of human rights abuses. The most likely to “suffer the insults of structural violence.” The poor are the ones whose children die of measles, gastroenteritis, and malnutrition. In Pensacola, the poor are the people who sleep on the streets, or in a car or tent, the people who go hungry or without access to proper nutrition, even the people who serve us in restaurants or teach our kids. The poor are the people who die in childbirth or whose babies die before their second birthday due to inadequate health care and living conditions, or the ones who die at an early age from homicide or heart disease.

Preferential Option for the Poor

Paul Farmer was a practitioner of liberation theology, which is a religious movement concerned with political liberation for oppressed people, with social justice and social responsibility. You are probably familiar with liberation theology at least to the extent that it is discussed periodically here in the UUCP pulpit.

Farmer writes: “For decades now, proponents of liberation theology have argued that people of faith must make a ‘preferential option for the poor’ [against their poverty].” A preferential option for the poor means that we put the needs of the most vulnerable first. You might say this option reunites us with the poor.

Farmer says: “It is my belief that the liberation theologians, in advocating preferential treatment for the poor, offer those concerned with human rights a moral compass for future action.” That moral compass, in Farmer’s view, points toward social justice for the poor. He writes: “Making an option for the poor inevitably implies working for social justice, working with poor people as they struggle to change their situations.”

Farmer continues: “In my experience, people who work for social justice, regardless of their own station in life, tend to see the world as deeply flawed. They see the conditions of the poor not only as unacceptable but as the result of structural violence that is human-made. … Unless we agree that the world should not be the way it is … there is no point of contact, because the world that is satisfying to us is the same world that is utterly devastating to them.”

The See-Judge-Act Model

The social justice model that Farmer proposes for addressing these conditions is one with deep roots in Catholic social teaching. It is known as the See-Judge-Act model, created by Cardinal Joseph Cardijn, who was born in 1862 in Belgium and focused his ministry on the working class, whom he believed were being neglected.

The organization Catholic Charities outlines the methodical practice of See-Judge-Act in this way:

• Review (“see”) the best available information, including scientific research;
• Consider (“judge”) the information in light of a chosen value system;
• Advance proposals for dialogue and action (“act”) at an individual and a global level.

This three-step process is described as “a praxis-oriented methodology that prioritizes a critical assessment of reality (See) in order to change reality (Act) through critical reflection as a mediatory step (Judge).”

By way of example, let us apply the See-Judge-Act model to an issue that is directly tied to poverty: food insecurity.

What do we See when we study food insecurity? The USDA reports that about 13% of U.S. households were food insecure at least some time during 2022, meaning they had difficulty providing enough food for all their members because of a lack of resources. More households experienced food insecurity in 2022 than in 2021 or 2020. In fact, after declining pretty consistently over the last decade, food insecurity shot up in 2022.

So while a rising number of households in the U.S. are going hungry, “The world’s five richest men have more than doubled their fortunes from $405 billion to $869 billion since 2020 —at a rate of $14 million per hour— while nearly five billion people have been made poorer.”

In terms of the first step in the See-Judge-Act model, then, Farmer says it clearly: “We look at the lives of the poor and are sure, just as they are, that something is terribly wrong.”

Given these terrible conditions, how do we Judge the situation related to food insecurity? The Global Solidarity Alliance for Food, Health and Social Justice declares: “People are hungry because they are poor. They are poor because they have been systematically and chronically marginalized.”

Under the slogan Rights Not Charity, the Global Solidarity Alliance advocates for adequate food and nutrition as a basic human right, guaranteed in the UN Declaration of Human Rights. The group points to the destruction wrought by the proliferation of institutionalized corporate food banking, private philanthropy, and other “emergency measures.” These approaches allow us to estrange ourselves from one another, from the hungry. Global Solidarity Alliance says that these institutionalized, emergency-based, shallow approaches allow governments to consider the problems of hunger and poverty solved, to ignore the actual causes of food insecurity, and to evade their responsibility for setting economic policies. In terms of food insecurity, we have resorted to a charity model to address the problem rather than a social justice model.

Janet Poppendieck is a U.S. scholar and activist in poverty, hunger, and food assistance. Paul Farmer quotes Poppendieck in his book “Pathologies of Power”: “The resurgence of charity is at once a symptom and a cause of our society’s failure to face up to and deal with the erosion of equality. It is a symptom in that it stems, in part at least, from an abandonment of our hopes for the elimination of poverty. … It is symptomatic of a pervasive despair about actually solving problems that have turned us toward ways of managing them: damage control, rather than prevention. More significantly, and more controversially, the proliferation of charity contributes to our society’s failure to grapple in meaningful ways with poverty.”

In terms of the second step in the See-Judge-Act model, we might recall the words of theologian, philosopher, and writer St. Augustine from more than 1,500 years ago: “Charity is no substitute for justice withheld.”

Having observed and judged the food insecurity situation, how do we Act in this matter? Dr. Farmer urged proponents of social justice to engage in “pragmatic interventions.” He chose to provide medical care to the poor, which is not an option for all of us. But we could support the work of Farmer’s organization, Partners in Health, which carries on his vision — or we could support the work of similar organizations like the Global Solidarity Alliance that I discussed earlier. Or The Bail Project, which raises funds and pays bail for people in need in order to limit the inequitable impact of cash bail that falls disproportionately on people without cash. Or our own JUST Pensacola, working to increase access to affordable housing in this community and increase the use of civil citations for young people and adults who are caught engaging in misdemeanor offenses. JUST Pensacola is planning a major summit on affordable housing, set for Tues, May 14, at 6pm, at First United Methodist Church downtown.

Closing

The Brazilian educator and philosopher Paulo Freire was a role model for Dr. Farmer. Freire spent his life educating working people and helping them to develop the awareness and skills they needed to fight their own oppression. Freire is considered one of the most significant educators of the 20^th Century, influencing the fields of education, community development, and community health, among others.

In terms of the third step in the See-Judge-Act model, Freire urges us to show true generosity. He proclaims: “True generosity consists precisely in fighting to destroy the causes which nourish false charity.” False charity is about having power over another person. Freire continues: “True generosity lies in striving so that these hands — whether of individuals or entire peoples — need be extended less and less in supplication, so that more and more they become human hands which work and, working, transform the world.”

May it be so.

Text of a talk originally presented 04/28/24 at the Unitarian Universalist Church of Pensacola

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Our Solemn Promise

A covenant is a solemn promise that we make to one another. One of the interesting things about ‘covenant’ is that the word is both a noun and a verb. As a noun, a covenant is a written agreement. As a verb, to covenant means to make those mutual agreements. When we enter into a covenant, we covenant together.

Today’s message deals with the meaning of covenants and their importance. Covenants appear within many religious traditions, including the Judeo-Christian tradition from which Unitarian Universalism arose.

Noah’s Ark

One of the most well-known stories in the Judeo-Christian tradition is a story of covenant, the story of Noah’s Ark. Noah and the ark are found in the Old Testament book of Genesis. God decided to destroy the world, which had grown wicked in God’s eyes. But Noah and his family were righteous, and Noah was obedient, so God promised to save them. God gave Noah the instructions, and Noah built an ark for him and his family members and gathered pairs of animals to take on the ark. After they had boarded the ark, it rained for 40 days and 40 nights, and the waters rose. The flood lasted for 150 days. Every living creature on the earth died except for the ones on the ark.

Mark Woods writes the following in the publication Christian Today: “In Genesis 9:12-17, after the floods have gone down, God says he will make a covenant with human beings and that the rainbow will be a sign of it: ‘I have set my rainbow in the clouds, and it will be the sign of the covenant between man and the earth… Never again will the waters become a flood to destroy all life.’”

Woods continues: “But why should it be a rainbow? One reason is that there’s a sort of poetic appropriateness about it. Rainbows appear after storms as the light from the sun hits the water droplets in the air and breaks into the different colors we don’t normally see. A light rain may still be falling, but generally speaking you know when you see the rainbow that, no matter how fierce the storm may have been, it’s over.”

The rainbow remains for many a symbol of aliteral promise that God made to Noah and the survivors of that destructive flood: that God would not again annihilate the people of earth by flood waters.

The Covenant with Abraham

The other major covenant discussed in the Old Testament is God’s promise to Abraham that he would be a father of nations. You may recall that Abraham was the man who held such an unwavering belief in God that he obeyed God’s command to kill his only son, Isaac, as a sacrifice. When God saw that Abraham was willing to follow through on this command, God spared Isaac and blessed Abraham, and he had many, many offspring, even though he was a very old man at the time. Abraham is now known as the father of three major religions – Judaism, Christianity, and Islam – which are considered the Abrahamic faiths after Abraham.

In the article “God’s Own Covenant,” Daniel Casni writes: “The theme of the covenant in the Old Testament is at the starting point of all religious thought, distinguishing Judaism from all the surrounding religions that were aimed at the worship of idols and gods of nature.” Casni says, “Yahweh is the Lord who fulfils his promises given to Israel.”

Covenant is a defining concept of the monotheistic Judaic religion. Covenant is what marks the Jewish people as “God’s Chosen People.” As the religion of the Old Testament gives way to the New Testament, the original covenant between God and God’s followers has been fulfilled through Abraham’s descendants. God issues a New Covenant of grace through the sacrifice of Jesus, which creates a special relationship between God and God’s people, at least for those who believe in this New Covenant, generally known as Christians.

To continue in Casni’s words: “In the Bible, the theme of the Covenant is interwoven with the fundamental idea of God’s salvation of man through the establishment of intimate communion with him. … Such a relationship between »master« and »servant«is characteristic of the relationship between God and Yahweh and Israel.” In the Judeo-Christian tradition, the covenant is characterized by a master-servant relationship, a relationship of obedience.

Covenant for UUs

Covenant is regarded differently within UU congregations. Our covenants are between individuals who enter freely into agreements. UUs covenant with one another as equals, as peers. As UUs, our congregational covenant binds us together in relationship as we promise to try to be our best selves and to uphold our values within our church and outside its walls.

You may have heard it said that Unitarian Universalism is a covenantal faith, not a creedal faith. A creed is a set of fundamental beliefs. In creedal traditions, a creed is usually confessed or recited together formally. For instance, some of you may be familiar with the Apostles’ Creed, which starts: “I believe in God, the Father Almighty…”

Creedal religious communities usually recite their creeds, their fundamental beliefs, together during worship services. But UUs do not subscribe to a shared set of beliefs. We may all believe different things about the nature of our existence, the reason we are here, and where we’re going. There are many differences between us. Like described in the video “We Are Unitarian Universalists,” we “have different beliefs but shared values.” Our covenant, then, is what unites us. When we join this congregation and when we say our liturgical covenant together during each Sunday Service, we affirm the way we treat one another and the kind of people we strive to be.

Here is where our UU covenantal faith shares a practice with other religious traditions. The author Casni writing about covenant makes this assertion: “A covenant is a contract between all who are bound by common interests and responsibilities … which is concluded by a certain ceremonial act.” Signing a pledge is one such common ceremonial act. When a person joins our congregation and becomes a member of UUCP, they sign our Membership Book. Signing the book is a gesture of their agreement to be in covenant with us.

After signing the book, incoming members also participate in a New Member Ceremony where we all recite our congregational covenant together and commit to right relations and engagement in this community. For the new members, they are entering into covenant with us while we existing members are renewing our covenant. It is a meaningful ceremony. If you haven’t been part of a New Member Welcome Ceremony before, we have one scheduled on April 7 and will be welcoming into membership at least two new members.

The Meaning of Covenant

What is it that we agree to when we covenant together here at UUCP?

As we did earlier this morning, we recite each week:

Love is the spirit of this church

And service its law

This is our covenant:

To dwell together in peace,

To seek the truth in love,

And to help one another

Love and Service

To begin with, we affirm love and service. Service flows from a loving heart. We want to help the folks we love, and we also listen to and respect the needs that they express. We hold realistic expectations and understand that we are all human, and we all have limitations.

The Rev. Renee Ruchotzke, a consultant with the UUA, shares an allegory that illustrates the values of love and service. She describes the excitement of a backyard berry patch bursting with juicy, flavorful berries during the summer season. The promise of delicious berries all year long tempts her to buy berries at the grocery store during the off-season when the backyard berry patch isn’t producing anything, but those store-bought berries don’t taste as good as the fresh backyard berries.

Ruchotzke (ruh-HUT-skee) writes: “Our modern, international food supply web has created expectations of fresh fruit all year long. The reality is that growing seasons need to be balanced with fallow seasons. … Consumers have a seemingly endless supply of fresh berries, but they may not notice that the berries come from different parts of the western hemisphere, depending on the month.” Ruchotzke continues: “Sometimes we see consumer expectations show up in our faith communities when it comes to Sunday services, religious exploration, and so on. The work of the staff and other leadership can also be out of sight and out of mind.”

We can take people for granted and not recognize and appreciate the hard work that they are doing, the emotional and intellectual energy that this work often takes, which can sometimes look so easy from a distance.

UUCP is not a spectator sport, to borrow a phrase. We are not here as observers, as consumers. We are participants. Especially given that we are a lay-led congregation, without a minister, and with minimal staff members, it is imperative that we recognize that *we* do the work of this congregation. Our general upkeep, our Sunday Services, our children’s programming – we as the congregants of UUCP are responsible for those functions. Our love for this community and for one another spur us to service.

Dwell Together in Peace

The first element of our covenant speaks to dwelling in peace. Dwell is a word that means to live in a particular way. In this case, to live together in peace, peacefully. Dwelling in peace suggests experiencing a level of comfort with one another, that we feel at peace with one another, regardless of differences that we may have.

A few months ago, I read a book by Krista Tippett called Becoming Wise: Inquiry into the Mystery and Art of Living. This book is actually what inspired me to propose the topic of this service I am giving today. Many of you are probably familiar with Krista Tippett, a journalist and host of the long-running radio program “On Being.” In the book Becoming Wise, Tippett presents interviews and conversations with various thinkers, philosophers, writers, and religious persons that she has spoken with in her work.

In the book, Richard Rodriguez, an essayist and a Catholic, ruminated on the power of ritual in our religious communities. Rodriguez observes that the consistency of our religious communities embraces us through many seasons of life and provides us with strength to go on and even to draw meaning from our suffering. Rodriguez remarks: “The seasons of grief and triumph, the seasons of renewal and sorrow. The power of religion to make us reflective of the lives we are leading seems to me to encourage an inwardness, which I would call intellectual. Consolation of the inner life — that’s no small gift.”

We covenant to dwell together in peace, to foster a space where we can be comfortable and accepted, embraced and supported, and safe to explore our inner life and to go deeper — that is no small gift.

Seek the Truth in Love

​The second element of our covenant deals with seeking the truth in love. UUs are known for being seekers and skeptics, which generally means that we are not satisfied with just one answer, so we spend a lot of time seeking truth. Our seeking can bump up against the seeking of others with viewpoints that clash. It is a good thing we can temper our seeking with love, or else we’d get pretty prickly and tough to be around.

To return to Tippett’s book Becoming Wise, one section of the book presents some observations by Vincent Harding, a historian, a devout Christian, civil rights activist, and speech writer for Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King. Harding refers to “democratic conversations.” He observes that democratic conversations open up the question of what it means to be truly human, and here he sounds very much like a UU. He asks, “What is our purpose in this world, and is that purpose related to our responsibilities to each other and to the world itself?”

Harding observes: “We are absolutely amateurs at this matter of building a democratic nation made up of many, many peoples, of many kinds, from many connections and convictions and from many experiences. After all the pain that we have caused each other, [it is a challenge to know] how to carry on democratic conversations that in a sense invite us to hear each other’s best arguments and best contributions, so that we can then figure out how do we put these things together to create a more perfect union.”

Within these democratic conversations, seeking the truth first starts from a place of love and respect, inviting others’ voices, and listening to hear and to understand where others are coming from. The publication Behavioral Covenants in Congregations: A Handbook for Honoring Differences notes that “the vitality and the life source of our faith depends upon our differences as we seek new ways to be authentic and faithful in a time of changing assumptions.”

The handbook presents an example of “seeking the truth in love” as it describes two religious communities in a small Dakota town. Both communities were divided by deep disagreements. Both communities held meetings that began and ended with prayer. In the first community, each participant in the meeting spoke, “everyone heard and gave counsel. The result was an agreement that allowed all of the participants to remain in the community without feeling compromised or defeated.” In the other community, members attended the meeting but then talked and criticized one another behind their backs, and “no one had a say, no one was heard, and community was diminished.”

Here was the distinction between the two communities: The second community received occasional sermons or admonishments to “love one another” but did not voluntarily and formally commit to this behavioral principle. Meanwhile, the first community had a written behavioral agreement in place that was read aloud often and constantly enacted.The community lived in covenant with one another and chose to act accordingly.

Help One Another

Our UUCP covenant concludes with a commitment to help one another. We all need help at times, and helping takes many forms, from assistance setting up for an event to staffing a table or leading a class to lending a listening ear and shoulder to cry on. As I said earlier, *we* do the work of this congregation.

Back in the book Becoming Wise, a Unitarian Universalist chaplain named Kate Braestrup shares her view of God. For Braestrup, “the idea that God is love has everything to do with beliefs or transcendence andeverything to do with actions and people.”

Tippett asked Chaplain Braestrup how she maintains her belief in God in a world full of pain and violence and suffering, including harm done by human beings against other human beings. Braestrup responds that death and suffering are a given for all of us, but people showing up for one another and offering care and love is not a given, so when it happens, those people who show up are embodying a higher power. Braestrup says: “If someone asks, ‘Where was God in this?’ I’ll say, ‘God was in all the people that came to try to help.’”

Braestrup concludes: “The question isn’t whether we’re going to have to do hard, awful things, because we are. We all are. The question is whether we have to do them alone.”

In this covenantal community, we do not have to bear the difficult times alone. We are here to help one another.

Covenant as a Model

But I would argue that we cannot stop there, within our own congregation. The “We Are Unitarian Universalists” video described our UU movement as one that “calls you to put more faith in yourself, your community, and your beliefs.” As we lean into our beliefs, our values, and our covenant, we draw our circles wide and wider still. To harken to the civil rights activist Vincent Harding that I shared earlier, we consider our place in the world, “our responsibilities to each other and to the world itself.”

Our covenant induces us to build a beloved community that expands beyond our walls. The term beloved community was coined by the philosopher and theologian Josiah Royce and was popularized by Dr. King. King used to term to refer to a society where “caring and compassion drive political policies that support the worldwide elimination of poverty and hunger and all forms of bigotry and violence. At its core, the ‘Beloved Community’ is an engine of reconciliation.”

A position of openness, curiosity, and understanding is essential in a diverse and evolving society such as ours, but these types of spaces seem less likely and less common in recent times. It is becoming increasingly apparent that, as a nation, we are divided even on our understanding of this country and what it’s all about. A recent article in The Guardian asserts that there are two mutually incompatible views of the U.S. The first view is that this is a pluralistic society where everyone has equal protection under the law. The second view is that this is a promised land for European Christians.

The second view is held by believers in or supporters of something known as Christian nationalism. The Guardian article observes that the Alabama Supreme Court’s recent IVF ruling belies the court’s commitment to Christian nationalism, “the belief that the U.S. should be an explicitly Christian country and its laws should reflect that.”

I have previously shared about the dangerous rise of Christian nationalism in the U.S. Recent polling indicates that about 30% of Americans support tenets of Christian nationalism, agreeing with statements such as “The U.S. government should declare America a Christian nation.” Christian nationalism is observed in the form of certain recent legal and political conquests such as the overturning of Roe v Wade, the proliferation of efforts targeting sex education and LGBTQ+ rights, and the erosion of separation of church and state protections in schools.

The Guardian article continues: “The post-Roe skirmish over abortion rights illustrates … the Christian nationalist … tendency to not only cast issues in binary terms, but to believe that the opposing side is a force of literal evil.” The article quotes Matthew Taylor, Protestant scholar at the Institute for Islamic, Christian, and Jewish Studies and author of an upcoming book about Christian extremism, The Violent Take It By Force. Taylor says: “There is no dialogue with the other side – in their mind, you never compromise with demons. You exorcise demons.”

At a time when some folks are seeing not fellow people but demons among us, we UUs offer an important, vital perspective, a non-dogmatic religious community that celebrates diversity, encourages seeking, and acknowledges the fallibility of all of us, while maintaining hope and the opportunity for change and growth throughout life.

I cannot say enough about the dangers of Christian nationalism, White Christian nationalism. I cannot stress enough how detrimental this worldview is to freedom, democracy, human rights, equity, diversity, security, and so many of the other values that we treasure and that we need to survive. But to keep this focused on covenant – our covenant serves as a model for how we live here in this building and out in the greater world. Recognizing the humanity in each of us, seeking truth, focusing on service and helpfulness but, above all, love and not hate.

We are not spectators. We draw on our 8 Principles and our history of social witness to center us and to fortify us in the work. We UUs recognize that we are interconnected and that what affects one of us affects all of us. The UUA says it this way: “Covenant is the silk that joins Unitarian Universalist congregations, communities, and individuals together in a web of interconnection. The practice of promising to walk together is the precious core of our creedless faith.”

Text of a talk originally presented 03/17/24 at the Unitarian Universalist Church of Pensacola

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The death sentences wrought by authoritarian governments

The death of Russian anti-corruption activist and political prisoner Alexei Navalny should (again) wake us all up to the death sentences wrought by authoritarian governments — attacking, even killing critics or anyone in their way; consolidating state power at the barrel of a gun (literal or figurative); undermining and destroying democracy, free speech, the free press, and pluralism; interfering in and restricting our private lives, our health decisions, even what we read; criminalizing our relationships and our families; and mocking, circumventing, and outlawing principles of diversity and equity that have brought progress. Horrifying to see it elsewhere, and terrifying to watch it happening here in the U.S. For all the talk of “liberty,” some folks are all-too-comfortable with ceding their rights and livelihoods to wannabe dictators. It’s all good for those proponents of authoritarianism, I guess, as long as the dictator and the restrictions and interferences that they support seem to align with their views of what they want to force other people to do or not do with their lives. But trying to control others and supporting leaders who want to amass unchecked power is not liberty, and it’s not freedom. I like my free speech, my privacy, my personal dignity. I value liberty, and I understand what it means and what it takes to preserve it. I will defend my right and ability to manage my own body and decisions, and I stand with all those fighting for the same.

What is our Eternal Truth?

Full disclosure: I am not a theologian nor a historian nor a philosopher nor a scholar of religious belief systems. I know that we have some very accomplished and knowledgeable individuals among us, and I admire them that. I just got here because I ask a lot of questions, more often to myself than out loud. And I came to be giving this talk entitled, “What is our Eternal Truth?” – see, a question – because I got to thinking about a few lines that I heard right here at church. Those services provided me with what any good UU service should offer: They spurred me to thoughtful consideration, research, and reflection. My talk this morning will cover some of what I learned and am learning.

First of all, each week, we recite together our church covenant. As you all likely know, Unitarian Universalism is not a creedal organization but a covenantal organization. This means that instead of espousing a creed or set of beliefs, we affirm a covenant or promise. One of the things that we promise to one another in this congregation is to “seek the truth in love.” This line of our covenant, of course, mirrors the statement in our 7 Principles asserting that we promote “a free and responsible search for truth and meaning.” I noticed in our congregation’s covenant, though, that we’re talking not just about some imprecise concept of truth but the truth. The addition of the article “the” changes the meaning and implies a singular truth. So here I go thinking: What is this truth? We believe in the pursuit of truth, but how do we know if we’ve obtained this truth? And how do we discriminate one person’s or group’s truth from another?

Some of these questions were already floating around in the back of mind when I heard something else about truth here one morning. On Easter Sunday, Rev. Julie spoke about the work and teachings of Jesus, whose radical acts of love and hospitality inspire us today. Rev. Julie observed that Christians view Jesus as a savior who died to bring eternal life to all who believe in him and accept him as their Messiah. Unitarian Universalists, meanwhile, regard Jesus as a great inspiration and model for an authentic life. Rev. Julie closed her Easter talk with meditation words from Vietnamese Buddhist monk Thich Nat Hanh reminding us that we are a part of a larger cycle of birth, life, and death and of the world around us. This life cycle was called an “everlasting truth.” This phrase – everlasting truth – influenced the title of my talk this morning.

Further piquing my interest in the truth about … the truth was a talk given by Rev. Julie one Sunday in which she told a story about The Mystery. She related that, about the great questions of life, “The Mystery was silent about these things.” Instead of speaking to these age-old questions, “The Mystery kept quiet, hoping they would figure it out themselves.” The Mystery advised, “Don’t’ listen with your ears; listen with your heart.” She concluded, “When we act on our feelings of thankfulness and joy, The Mystery will play with us and through us.”

Remember, we have a promise to one another in this church that we will “seek the truth in love.” Then we hear about one “everlasting truth,” which is that we humans are a part of an ongoing and interdependent cycle of life. This cycle can be summed up with the old joke: There are only two things you can be sure of in life: Death and taxes.

But then, on the other hand, we are told that there is a lot of ambiguity and uncertainty and doubt that we have to work our way through in our lives without much guidance. As they say, kids don’t come with instruction manuals. Well, there aren’t instruction manuals for heartbreaks or frustrations or overwhelming joys either. It would seem that there are some Knowns or commonly accepted realities and a lot of Unknowns that we might be making up as we go along.

There are a series of conferences called TED conferences featuring world-renowned speakers and thinkers in the sciences, technology, arts, and humanities. Talks from these conferences are called TED Talks and can be found online at ted.com. As an aside, I highly recommend TED talks as enthralling resources in your own pursuit of knowledge. Brene Brown – a doctor of clinical social work who studies shame, vulnerability and resiliency – remarked in her TED talk that “religion has gone from a belief in faith and mystery to certainty. ‘I’m right; you’re wrong. Shut up.’” We UUs can relate to what Brene Brown means by that; many of us are probably here because we have rejected the certainty and stepped out into the uncertain. We are seeking truth, but we still recognize that not all things can be proven. We value scientific knowledge, but we retain some of the mystery and wonder that makes life exciting.

Brene Brown’s remark is a humorous reminder that the pendulum has been swinging from absolute faith in religious doctrine to rejection of all things supernatural for a long time.

Michael Werner recounts in “Humanism and Beyond the Truth” how humanism emerged in the 19^th Century in response to both the Enlightenment and the Romantic Movement. Werner writes: “A basic tension arose when the Enlightenment replaced religion with critical reason and science as the bridge to a better life. The Romantic Movement countered with the view that our emotional, intuitional, prescientific awareness was more important. These dialectical polar views seemed to be synthesizing at the beginning of this century when many humanists seemed to integrate heart and mind, reason and compassion.”

Werner argues that humanism today places too great an emphasis on truth reached through the use of science and reason. Werner writes, “There are limits to reason and science in all areas, but much more so in the area that talks about how to live our lives.” Werner observes that “much of the universe is chaotic, unexplainable, or without clear-cut choice.” He advocates a pluralistic approach to avoiding deep and hurtful conflicts when faced with these complex situations. He offers a successful marriage or long-term relationship as an example of how, as people, we learn to allow some overlap or blurring of the lines of truth in order to get along, live with, and enjoy the company of others. As an alternative to rigid adherence to science and reason, Werner proposes a mix of those methods coupled with environmental and biological considerations and our own intrinsic motivation and inspiration that spur us to decision making.

Werner cites research such as that published in the books Descartes’ Error and Emotional Intelligence to support his argument that it is our emotionality more than our rationality that governs many of our choices and actions. This is especially true of ethical choices. There may be a very strong rational argument for why something is the right thing to do, but we won’t act unless something about the situation moves us. The driving emotional forces of fear, love, hate, envy, grief, empathy, and happiness are very powerful.

This I know to be true, both empirically and intuitively. As a Licensed Clinical Social Worker and Certified Addictions Professional, I help people who are incarcerated or who have been involved in the criminal justice system overcome a pervasive pattern of drug and alcohol use, criminal activity and self-destructive behavior that threatens to destroy their lives and the lives of those close to them. I am talking about people who have stolen from their own parents or grandparents to get money for drugs; people who have plowed their vehicles into guardrails or telephone poles while driving drunk not just once or twice but three, four, or five times, incurring extensive injuries and expense to themselves and others; people who detest where their lives are going but who continue to do the same things again and again that keep them in a bad place.

I assure you that reasoning with someone in this sort of state is virtually useless. There is an idea that criminals or addicts or alcoholics make rational choices and weigh out their options before acting: “But if I get caught carrying these drugs or selling this stolen property, I’ll get a five-year prison term.” That idea has been disproven. Instead, research shows that people with these sorts of behaviors tend to discount the negative consequences that might happen to them and overvalue the payoffs they get from their behavior.

Change begins with the establishment of a relationship, a feeling of trust and acceptance. It’s the idea of “You’ve done some bad things, but you’re not a bad person.” There has to be hope that things can get better. Sometimes this hope or inspiration comes in the form of religious faith. At times, religion provides an inroad or a starting point. There is a sense of community right off the bat and a network of supportive people to lean on. We have seen this in our prisons and jails, where faith- and character-based rehab programs are very popular with inmates and show promising results for future success. The way I look at it, religion provides a foundational set of moral or ethical standards to anchor people and provide structure in our society.

I was not raised in a church. My family by history is Catholic, but my dad was agnostic, and we didn’t practice or attend Mass when I was growing up. As a teenager, I started attending a Lutheran church with a friend and became something of a zealot. I really admired Martin Luther and appreciated that he opposed the Catholic hierarchy and worked to bring the scriptures to the common people. I was, by choice, baptized and confirmed at the age of 15. Then I entered a four-year relationship with a Jehovah’s Witness and studied that religion for a while.

Trying to figure out my own belief system, I used to think that religion would be so much simpler if each person just read the Bible and came to their own understanding of what God wanted them to know. I used to say that there should be a rule that no one could talk about or debate religion or try to convert or proselytize to others. Doing so, I saw, only led to arguments and wars, splintering and the creation of so many separate religions and denominations that it makes your head spin.

I must have been a budding UU even then because, as it turns out, the UU Rev. John Brigham, whose Closing Words we’ll hear later in this service, espoused roughly the same philosophy. Brigham reported that UUs don’t talk much about God because our knowledge of God and the universe is limited. As a result, we don’t want to make any claims that are untrue. “It’s fine to make guesses and spin metaphors about God,” Brigham said, “but we certainly shouldn’t make claims that these are infallible truths! It’s wise just to speculate tentatively or stay thoughtfully silent.”

The flaw in this line of reasoning, however, is in the fact that many people are like me. Our minds get going, and, as we ponder God and faith and eternity and tragedy and on and on and on and – All of that uncertainty starts to get a little uncomfortable. We have to check our ideas against the ideas of others and get some reassurance about what we fear. As the Lebanese-American poet Khalil Gibran wrote, “You talk when you cease to be at peace with your thoughts.” When we are not at peace, we may look for resolution of our inner turmoil within a faith community.

Gibran was born into a Maronite Catholic family but evolved into a mystic Christian influenced by Christianity, Islam, Sufism, Hinduism, and theosophy. Theosophy, which literally means “divine wisdom,” is a philosophy concerned with direct knowledge of the divine, mysteries of humanity, and nature. These influences are reflected in Gibran’s writings, notably his famous book The Prophet. In that book, Gibran writes about how the wisest teachers allow their students to come into their own knowledge rather than force feeding them facts. “If [a teacher] is indeed wise, he does not bid you enter the house of his wisdom but rather leads you to the threshold of your own mind.”

The concept of a teacher leading a student “to the threshold of [her] own mind” brings us back to what Rev. Julie told us about The Mystery. The Mystery encourages us to figure things out ourselves and “listen with our hearts.” We listen with our hearts when we put our faith into action, when we demonstrate our compassion and our reverence for the divine within us all.

In the liberal Christian magazine Sojourners, a review of a new book caught my eye. The book, Faitheism by atheist and humanist Chris Stedman, illustrates the sort of faith in action I’m talking about. Stedman writes about the growing chasm and animosity between believers and non-believers. Stedman’s tagline seems to be, “I don’t hate God. I love people.” He argues that hate is not just wasteful, it’s toxic. Stedman promotes a vision of a world where all people can be proud of who they are and work together to promote the common good.

The common good was a cause also championed by the well-known black sociologist and scholar W.E.B. DuBois. DuBois was raised as a Congregationalist but disavowed organized religion as an adult. However, he recognized the important role of the church, especially in African American social and moral life. Some of DuBois’s writings reflected a spirituality that he didn’t express publicly. In his 1904 poem Credo, DuBois wrote: “I believe in the training of children, black even as white; the leading out of little souls into the green pastures and beside the still waters, not for self, or peace, but for Life lit by some large vision of beauty and goodness and truth.”

DuBois alludes to “some large vision of … truth.” There is no article “the” like in our covenant and no “a” either. Recall that DuBois was an early civil rights activist at a time when many whites used threats and terrorism to maintain their version of truth in the form of white supremacy. Surely, DuBois would have been skeptical of the assertion that there could be a singular truth. As Rev. Brigham said, we must remain cautious of advocating infallible truths. Truth is an ever-unfolding ideal, and the process of discovering truth is as important, if not more important, than what we ultimately discover.

So what is our Eternal Truth? You really want to know? Well, based on what I have learned so far … it’s still an enigma. Life is a journey, not a destination. But while you’re out there looking for that truth, remain open to the world and the beauty it offers, and don’t forget to love each other.

Our Closing Words today come from the UU minister John Brigham:

“Go your ways

Knowing not the answers to all things

Yet seeking always the answer

To one more thing than you know.”

Text of a talk originally presented 06/10/12 at the Unitarian Universalist Church of Pensacola

Sheroes & Heroes

We have so many sheroes and heroes to look to for inspiration, and they are way cooler than the oppressors, tyrants, and jerks that some fools are following these days. Racism, fascism, and oppression shouldn’t fill us with guilt and paralysis but should put a fire in our belly. We have lots of examples of resistance, solidarity, and allyship to follow. Primo Levi is just one of these examples. Arrested for his antifascist work and deported to Auschwitz in 1944, Levi was a prolific writer who tried to make sense of the inhumanity he had endured, to warn us that it could happen again, and to try to envision a better way.

Photo credit: Gianni Giansanti/Corbis

Practices for a Meaningful Life

Several years ago, in my work as a social worker serving individuals, couples, and families, I developed a series of workshops about happiness: the Habits of Happy People, Happy Couples, and Happy Families. Using the framework of positive psychology, these presentations laid out common practices to increase happiness, connectivity, and resilience. I was even scheduled to share my Habits of Happy People presentation here as a Sunday Service way back in the spring of 2020, but we all can understand how that plan got derailed.

In the intervening years — COVID, losses of many friends and family members including beloved members of our congregation, continued racial violence, attacks on our democracy, and an increasingly aggressive hard Right religious push in government, now the Russian invasion of Ukraine — I seem to have gone a little deeper, a little more soulful. Inequality, devastation, and injustice are difficult to bear. Our guest speaker two weeks ago, Dr Harold Beu, discussed these issues in his Sunday sermon and spoke about the hard times we are currently going through as a nation. These issues are heavy, and they arouse strong emotions. Sometimes all we can do is stand together for support. In the lyrics of one of our cornerstone UU songs, “We are a gentle, angry people, and we are singing, singing for our lives.”

Talking about “happy people” just doesn’t feel right in this moment. That is not to say that there isn’t deep happiness and profound joy to experience in the here and now. However, these emotions may be more nuanced and attenuated as we cope with stress and conflict all around. We may question what is the meaning of it all. That said, this may be just the time when we need to renew our faith, to refer to our Spul Matters theme for the month of March, Renewing Our Faith.

Faith is all about finding our way forward through uncertainty. I cannot pinpoint the meaning of life, but I have compiled some suggestions for cultivating a meaning-FULL life, hence the title I settled on for my talk today, Practices for a Meaningful Life. These practices include nurturing relationships, serving others, and experiencing wonder.

Nurturing Relationships

“Even before the pandemic, scientists were warning of a global pandemic of loneliness.” I heard this stated on one of my favorite programs on NPR, The Hidden Brain with Shankar Vedantam, on the episode entitled A Social Prescription: Why Human Connection is Crucial to Our Health. The program reported that a 2018 survey by the Kaiser Family Foundation indicated that 22 percent of U.S. adults struggle with chronic loneliness, more than the number of adults who smoke or who have diabetes. People who struggle with such loneliness seem to have a greater risk of cardiovascular disease, dementia, fragmented sleep and depression and to have shorter life expectancies.

Once a person feels lonely, they may begin to act in ways that promote more loneliness. Keeping to oneself may feel comfortable and may seem like a good way to avoid getting hurt, but isolating also limits our opportunity for the benefits that come from social interaction. The magazine Psychology Today reported that lonely people may attempt to minimize the risk of rejection by engaging in self-defeating behaviors and sabotaging opportunities to make new connections or to deepen existing ones. That is why we may need reminders like the one today during our Time for All Ages — reminders to reach out and connect with someone. If you are struggling with loneliness, set a firm but reasonable personal goal such as making two contacts in the next few days. Call or text a friend or family member, send a card or a letter, even be explicit that you’ve been feeling lonely and want to connect.

Doing this can boost your mental health and create a positive feedback loop. Making these connections and nurturing relationships also may improve your physical health. On the flip side of our loneliness and poor health coin is friendships and good health. Friends can make us healthier and more resilient. Claire Yang, a sociologist at the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill, found that people with close social ties had lower blood pressure, lower body mass index, lower waist circumference, and lower levels of an inflammation marker protein than those who were socially isolated.

There is an Irish blessing: “May your home always be too small to hold all your friends.” Although Scott and I had this blessing read for us at our commitment ceremony, introvert that I am, I thought to myself when I heard this line, “Goah, that’s a lot of friends. I’m not sure I really want that many friends filling up my house and my personal space.” (Ha, ha) But it is not really about the quantity of friendships that we have. It is about the quality of those friendships.

Nurturing relationships is not easy. The writer and philosopher Khalil Gibran is quoted as saying, “Friendship is always a sweet responsibility, never an opportunity.” He meant that friendship takes work and is not to be taken advantage of.

Resentment can destroy relationships. A colleague of mine would describe living in resentment and anger and all of those murky, negative emotions as continually drinking poison and waiting for the other person to die. We can break out of this pattern by forgiving. Recognizing the humanity in the other person can help us to arrive at a place of forgiveness, a place that we may have to keep arriving at again and again once we have decided to forgive. That state of forgiveness may not stick, and we may have to fogive more than once even for the same thing. Recognize that we are all human and make mistakes, and we each deserve to be defined by more than our actions on our worst day.

Apathy is also a relationship killer. People don’t like to be taken for granted, and they may shut down or withdraw from the relationship. The psychologists Drs. Julie and John Gottman, world-renowned relationship researchers, advise us to build a culture of appreciation. Regularly expressing appreciation, gratitude, affection, and respect for the other person serves to remind both you and that person what you like about them and generates a positive perspective on the relationship that can act as a buffer for negative feelings. Voltaire tells us that “Appreciation is a wonderful thing. It makes what is excellent in others belong to us as well.” A culture of appreciation involves expression of genuine thankfulness for what the person brings to the relationship, the small thoughtful things that they do and the person that they are in your life.

Serving Others

There is a Buddhist saying: “When you light a lantern for another, it will also brighten your own way.” This is more than just a nice motivational quote. Service to others is a powerful force for good in the world and in our lives. The author of a Psychology Today article about finding hope in the face of hopelessness wrote, “Devote some time to helping others … and learn to value yourself more. When you give others hope, you receive it as well.”

As a therapist, I have routinely encouraged clients experiencing a depressed mood to engage in community service to focus on something else and someone else for a time. Service can be an antidote to loneliness as well since service enables us to connect with others and have a purpose — a sense of being useful and needed.

Altruism and a drive to help others is a distinctive aspect of being human. The moral fabric of our society also is constructed largely from altruistic behaviors, the goodwill toward others that Rev. Beu referred to in the Longfellow poem that he spoke about two weeks ago. You might say that altruism makes the world go ‘round, from donating to an emergency relief fund, to bringing donations here for our Manna Food Bank Sunday’s, to contributing to our church budget, to letting the tired parent in the grocery store get ahead of you in the checkout line. Altruism is about recognizing the need, empathizing with the person or animal or ecosystem in need, and acknowledging that we have some power to alleviate the need.

There is evidence that altruism develops very early in our lives. In what may be one of the cutest ever pieces of scientific research, the University of Washington’s Institute for Learning & Brain Sciences worked with 19-month-olds and found that altruism may begin in infancy. Here are a few sentences from an article about the study: “Human adults often respond to hungry people, whether through food banks or fundraisers, or by simply handing over their lunch. … In a study of nearly 100 19-month-olds, researchers found that children, even when hungry, gave a tasty snack to a stranger in need. The findings not only show that infants engage in altruistic behavior, but also suggest that early social experiences can shape altruism.” I imagine all these little ones handing over their Cheerios and fruit slices to a hungry stranger.

Being altruistic or being compassionate toward others may actually be correlated with reduced physical pain as well. So friendship AND service to others can improve our health while adding meaning to our lives.

A 2005 article in the International Journal of Behavioral Medicine reported a strong correlation between the well-being, happiness, health, and longevity of people who are emotionally and behaviorally compassionate, so long as they are not overwhelmed by helping tasks. The message there is to strike a balance. Serve but do not overtax and stress yourself by giving until it hurts. Set proper boundaries, and practice self-care.

The great spiritual leader Mahatma Ghandi said, “The best way to find yourself is to lose yourself in service to others.”

Experiencing Wonder

Now, it strikes me as interesting that the church covenant that we recite together each week, just like we did this morning, deals with the first two practices I have just laid out but does not address the third practice I am about to discuss. We avow that “love is the spirit of this church and service its law. This is our covenant: to dwell together in peace, to seek the truth in love, and to help one another.” Nurturing relationships and serving others are covered in that statement, but experiencing wonder — I do not hear that in our covenant. Regardless, there is cause for wonder all around us. There is so much that can strike us, give us pause, and affect us deeply, if we permit the space.

As we saw earlier in the music video for the “Here Comes the Sun” song that is the official music video and song of our budget drive, there is a sunrise and a sunset every day, and they are free for us to enjoy. I know that many of us here have admired the beauty of the colors of the sky and the play of lights at sunrise or sunset. I remember our own Dolly Berthelot’s photo series of clouds that she shared with us at a Sunday Service a few years back. And I know we have lots of gardeners out there — Laurie and Carol and Margaret and others — as well as artists like Laura, Kate, and Maddy who see the beauty in colors and shapes and textures and the living beings of nature. The world is full of beauty.

The scientist Rachel Carson, best known for her book “Silent Spring,” which awoke so many people to the environmental degradation that had gone unchecked in the 20th Century, made this declaration: “Those who contemplate the beauty of the earth find reserves of strength that will endure as long as life lasts.” Having a sense of wonder means recognizing that there is something greater than our Self, this body, and there is strength in that knowing. That Carson quote appears in her book “The Sense of Wonder” about her adventures outdoors, walking along rocky shores and in open fields, looking at strange plants and listening to the “living music” of insects and contemplating the cosmos.

Some of us have been attending the 6-part book group considering “A Religion of One’s Own” by Thomas Moore. Moore writes about aspects of a deep, soulful, personal religion that incorporates mysticism. Moore describes mysticism as including an appreciation of art and nature, entering an alternate state of awareness and mindfulness. This might include something like engaging in walking meditation or sitting quietly outside and tuning in to the physical senses — the sounds, smells, textures, temperatures — the dappling of light and shadow, insect noises and animal noises, blooming flowers.

Can you believe that some folks walk right on by all of that and don’t event notice it? Of course, we all get busy and distracted with other issues, and we may not slow down and really absorb the amazing creatures and natural things or lose ourselves in wonder, but take this as a reminder to do just that once in a while. Schedule wonder into your week.

There is a saying that life is not about how many breaths you take but how many moments that take your breath away. On first thought, that seems like one of those inspirational messages on a poster — and it is — we had that poster hanging on the wall at my work — but to consider the meaning of the words, there is something there. How many moments have you had that took your breath away, where you just caught your breath and had to pause in wonder?

Conclusion

Make no mistake, there is plenty out there to frustrate us, sadden us, anger us, and cut us to the quick. The world is a tough place, and life ain’t no crystal stair, to borrow from the great poet Langston Hughes. I have no keys to the meaning of life, but I have found an outline for building a meaningful life.

A meaningful life includes deep, rich relationships that are complicated, but we work at them and they bring us joy.

A meaningful life includes service to others that enables us to invest in our community, focus outward, and have a purpose for living.

A meaningful life includes a sense of wonder, marveling over the beautify of our earth, the miracle of friendship and love, that shows us the vastness of all that is possible and fhat sustains us through difficulties.

May you find and foster these practices in your life.

Text of a talk originally presented 02/27/22 at the Unitarian Universalist Church of Pensacola

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Inspire Love (UUCP Mission, Part 3 of 3)

An Overused Word

My sixth-grade teacher was not a fan of LOVE. He urged us to be more specific and clearer in our language. “Love is an overused word,” he said. “We can love ice cream, love our favorite song, love a certain color — and this is the same word we use to describe our feelings about the people nearest and dearest to us. So what does love really mean?”

A guest columnist in a Chicago newspaper shared a similar view. He wrote, “Love probably suffers from overuse. For example, the classical Greek in which the New Testament of the Bible was written has literally dozens of words which we translate as simply ‘love.’ When one word is used in so many situations, it loses much of its distinctive meaning. Yet love is the word we’ve got, and I doubt we’ll change [it].” So LOVE is the word we’ve got and is the topic of my talk today.

Our UUCP mission is to Celebrate Diversity, Strive for Justice, and Inspire Love. Today’s talk is the third in a three-part series. Over this summer, I have explored threats and opportunities for us as UUs to Celebrate Diversity and Strive for Justice. Now we come to Inspire Love, the third line in our church mission statement. With all of the strains and heartaches that we have collectively and individually endured lately, it is worthwhile to consider the topic of inspiring and nurturing more love in our congregation and beyond. Today, I:

• Will identify different conceptions of love,
• Will consider what is involved in promoting and fostering love,
• and will discuss love as an essential moral and spiritual value for UUs.

Conceptions of Love

As I mentioned earlier, the Greeks had multiple words for love. Ancient Greeks studied love and denoted each type with a distinctive Greek name. In the Greek tradition, the eight types of love are:

1. Philia – affectionate love
2. Pragma – enduring love
3. Storge (store-gay)– familiar love
4. Eros – romantic love
5. Ludus (loo-dus) – playful love
6. Mania – obsessive love
7. Philautia (fee-low-sha) – self love
8. Agape – selfless love

For the purposes of this talk, I will spend just a little time on four of these types of love: philia, storge, agape, and philautia and their applications to our community. We’re all probably familiar with the saying that love is the only thing that you get more of by giving it away. While love and care can arise spontaneously, love can be deepened and nurtured through investment in the various types of relationships that I will be addressing.

Philia is non-romantic affectionate love that is epitomized by true friendship. According to one definition, “[Philia] occurs when both people share the same values and respect each other.” We demonstrate philia love when we engage in deep conversation, demonstrate trustworthiness and openness, express thanks, and help each other through difficult times. Here at UUCP, we see philia on display during our coffee hour socializing, when we lend a hand and follow through on what we commit to, and when we call and check in with each other, send a card, visit, or share a ride.

Storge (store-gay) is familiar love such as that between family members or lifelong friends. As a church, we count family groups among our congregants as well as chosen family members and people who have known each other for decades. Storge is defined as “an infinite love built upon acceptance and deep emotional connection.” Memories are the catalyst for storge love. Shared memories and experiences foster long-lasting bonds and increase the value of relationships. We build storge love when we practice forgiveness and acceptance, give our time, revisit our shared memories, and create new memories together. Storge is embodied when we tell stories about our treasured items like this podium made by Flo Fulwiler’s husband, the quilt of congregants’ hands behind me, and the mirrored mosaic bearing our mission statement which hangs in the lobby. Storge is also embodied in communal activities like workdays and potlucks or marching together in the MLK Parade.

Agape is selfless love and is considered the highest form of love. Agape can also be identified as an empathic attitude and unconditional love. According to one definition, “[Agape is] given without any expectations of receiving anything in return. Offering agape is a decision to spread love in any circumstances.” We demonstrate agape when we focus on the good of humanity and the earth and when we give our time, talents, or treasure to charitable causes. At UUCP, this includes mutual aid and volunteering with the church or in the community. Agape looks like our Manna food collections and other seasonal collections of coats, blankets, and personal items. And I imagine that we’d reach into the thousands if we added up all the hours that members and friends of UUCP spend regularly in support of an array of organizations, such as children’s issues, education and literacy, arts and culture, civic organizations, environmental causes, animals, and more.

Philautia (fee-low-sha) is self-love or self-compassion. To elaborate: “Philautia is a healthy form of love where you recognize your self-worth and don’t ignore your personal needs. Self-love begins with acknowledging your responsibility for your well-being.” Without good self-love, it becomes challenging to exemplify the outbound types of love; a person can’t offer what they don’t have. The influential feminist and cultural critic bell hooks, phrased it this way: “One of the best guides to how to be self-loving is to give ourselves the love we are often dreaming about receiving from others.”

Philautia involves recognizing our worth. As UUs, our legacy of philautia is exemplified in the summation of our faith by the renowned theologian Thomas Starr King. When asked the difference between the two denominations, Starr King reportedly quipped, “The Universalists think God is too good to damn them forever; the Unitarians think they are too good to be damned forever.” Philautia is embodied in our drive to create and reside in an environment that nurtures and sustains us, to spend time among people who support us, and to practice good self-care with attention to our health and appropriate boundaries.

Our lives may contain all of these types of love. For a balanced and fulfilling life and for a healthy, thriving UU congregation, we would expect to have friendships (philia), familial-type relationships (storge), selfless acts of love and commitment to a higher purpose (agape), and self-compassion (philautia) to balance our love for others with our love, care, and attention to ourselves and our needs.

Fostering Love

So how do we foster these types of love as we aspire to live out our UUCP mission? Having given it some thought as I’ve been developing this series, I see now that it would have made more sense for me to discuss love 2nd in this lineup rather than 3rd. In other words, I would have started the series with Diversity then moved to Love and finished up with Justice. I say that because diversity and love are contributing factors for justice, so the concepts flow more naturally when we consider Diversity first, Love second, and Justice third.

Love – or its close relative empathy – provides the conditions for justice. Love and empathy are similar but different. Love is an emotion represented as attachment, connection, and attraction. Empathy, meanwhile, “focuses on the tactical ways we connect with others. It incorporates three elements: honoring another’s perspective, sitting with the person and their feelings, and, finally, taking supportive action,” according to educator Cherilyn Leet. Love and empathy both require the courage to be open and vulnerable.

Composer Joyce Poley expressed this idea in her song “When Our Heart Is in a Holy Place,” one of our well-known UU hymns. Poley writes, “[When] we see our faces in each other’s eyes, then our heart is in a holy place.” When we see our own humanity reflected back to us in others – when we see ourselves and other species as a part of us, part of the interconnected web of life – we create and allow sacred space for their existence to flourish. Recall that agape love focuses on doing what is good for all.

The presence of all of these types of love along with empathy increases the likelihood that justice and equity will exist within our relationships. Former UUA President Rev. Dr. Susan Frederick-Gray put it like this: “If our justice work does not emerge from the moral and spiritual value of love, in the end [the work] will reinforce practices of domination and violence, just in new forms.” True justice and equity cannot exist where love and empathy are lacking. I’m a visual person, so, as I considered this possibility, I pictured it in my mind, and I ended up illustrating this concept.

I was going for relatability, so this here is a photo of a common Southeastern habitat, a longleaf pine forest, which is one of the most biodiverse habitats in North America. Diversity is present at all levels of the ecosystem and is integral to the health and sustainability of the habitat. Diversity and inclusion are depicted here by the double-sided purple arrows going in each direction. Love and empathy are the sustenance, the soil, nutrients, and the water, depicted here by rust-colored hearts. Justice and equity are nurtured and grow from this foundation like the tall pines and longleaf species and other flora in the photo, depicted by green circles.

Granted, this is an oversimplification of the elements necessary to foster a well-balanced society, but I am not the first person to draw a connection between love and justice. The philosopher and political activist Dr. Cornel West is known for the statement: “Justice is what love looks like in public.” Love is embodied as justice near and justice far. In 2017, in the early days of the Trump administration, the Pride Foundation published a column that drew on Dr. Cornel West’s quote. The author wrote, “We must stand firm in our belief that every person deserves the opportunity to live openly and safely … Ultimately, all of the actions we take in moments like this to lift up our shared humanity will move us along the path toward justice. Because they are, fundamentally, acts of unconditional love.”

Love as a Moral Value

The song we sang today as our meditation hymn is called “There is More Love Somewhere.” The song is an African American slavery-era hymn that, in the words of the UUA, “reminds us that no matter what our personal circumstances, focusing on the healing potential of love helps us to go on.” The song was later given the alternate title of “Biko,” in honor of South African activist Stephen Bantubiko, known as Biko, a medical student who founded the South African Student Organization in 1968 in response to the racist practices of the existing student association of apartheid South Africa at the time. Biko was beaten to death in 1977 while being interrogated after being arrested. In the words of the UUA: “His courage to work for freedom continues to inspire us in the ongoing fight against injustice in all its forms.” Biko showed great love for himself and for others even when love was in short supply in the world around him.

The hymn “There is More Love Somewhere” expresses hope and determination, like that exemplified by Biko. Kimberley Debus, who blogs about UU hymns, calls this hymn “a song of lament and aspiration.” Debus goes on to say, “Even in a loving community, there is ALWAYS more love, peace, hope, and joy to be found, as long as there is hate, oppression, war, and injustice in the world.”

The influential thinker and writer bell hooks, who I referenced earlier, described love as the will to nurture our own and another’s spiritual growth, free from domination, coercion, or abuse. Former UUA president Frederick-Gray invoked hooks in a 2019 column that Frederick-Gray wrote about love. In the column, Frederick-Gray recognized love as “the core teaching and practice of what it means to be a Unitarian Universalist.” As we recite together here each week, “Love is the spirit of this church.”

In our current moment with increasing polarization and isolation, self-retreat into defined bubbles, loneliness has become a concern. More than half of Americans report feeling lonely, including older people and younger people. Data indicates that loneliness may be as detrimental as smoking in terms of the impacts on health, physical health as well as mental health. Groups espousing racist, misogynistic, homophobic, and transphobic messages are targeting people who are lonely – especially teenage boys and men – to offer them an antidote to loneliness in the form of joining movements for hate. Love and empathy are also antidotes for loneliness. In fact, love and empathy are the best antidotes for loneliness. We see and feel that in our church.

In these days, we face a seemingly endless litany of injustices – from threats against democracy to political and religious ideologies that dehumanize whole swaths of people, from verbal insults and lies to physical violence, rape, and murder. Frederick-Gray writes, “On a fundamental level, [these injustices] are spiritual challenges, and they reflect the way we have come as a society to denigrate the value of love and compassion as an essential spiritual and moral value.”

As UUs, we must continue to enshrine the value of love and compassion in our personal, public, civic, political, and spiritual lives, in all facets of who we are, individually and collectively. We do this here at church and in the community in many of the ways that I discussed earlier. We do this on a larger scale through collective efforts such as the UU Side with Love campaign. Side with Love can be captured this way: “With the goal of creating beloved community, the campaign pursues social change through advocacy, public witness, and speaking out in solidarity with those whose lives are publicly demeaned.”

Currently, the Side with Love campaign is working on a project that you may have seen in the media under the title of Stop Cop City. Cop City refers to an effort by the city of Atlanta to greatly increase militarization of the police force while building a mammoth corporate-backed $90 million training complex on currently forested land. The Side with Love campaign is working alongside coalitions in Atlanta, actively collecting petitions for a citizen’s referendum that would allow Atlanta voters to decide on the future of this project. An email message I recently received from the Stop Cop City campaign described it this way: “[Our power is in] neighbors showing photos of their children, talking about their hopes for their schools. It is walking in to be greeted with a warm and familiar welcome and leaving hearing ‘Thank you, sis.’ … The reason this city has erupted with activity to collect 70,000 signatures is simply a love that is rooted and cultivated in the legacy of struggles for justice won and lost on southern soil.”

We know very well about struggles for justice won and lost on southern soil. Many of us have been intimately involved in these various struggles. Here in this part of Florida, we are a small but mighty congregation. We have an incredible capacity to see our faces in each other’s eyes and to show up in love and empathy. I have been moved time and again by the impact of this congregation as we go out into the world and live our values, creating ripples of love and justice that far exceed our numbers. It makes sense for a congregation that vows to Celebrate Diversity, Strive for Justice, and Inspire Love.

I will close with more words from Rev. Dr. Susan Frederick-Gray: “To be a faith of action with love as our doctrine doesn’t mean we live it perfectly, but it does mean we are called again and again to learn, to make amends, to restore relationship, to choose love.”

Text of a talk originally presented 08/13/23 at the Unitarian Universalist Church of Pensacola

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Strive for Justice (UUCP Mission, Part 2 of 3)

Our UUCP mission is to Celebrate Diversity, Strive for Justice, and Inspire Love. With so many social justice issues affecting our world right now, this is an appropriate time to consider what it means for us as UUs to Strive for Justice. Today’s talk is the second in a three-part series of services exploring our UUCP mission statement. Today, I:

• Will discuss our religious traditions of working for justice,
• Will identify injustices present in our current moment,
• and will share ideas and examples of striving for justice even when justice seems elusive.

Our Religious Traditions

“Do justice, love mercy, and walk humbly with God.” This verse from the Old Testament, Micah 6:8, is commonly cited in Jewish and Christian communities to compel people to act in times of injustice. The well-known line is said to have been a message delivered by God to the prophet Micah. Micah was active in a small agricultural town southwest of Jerusalem in the 8^th Century BCE. Micah is notable for having ministered to common people and for prophesying judgement against corrupt leaders of the time.

In the words of one text interpretation: “The leaders practiced and tolerated false doctrine that led to a false understanding of the character of God, and, as a result, injustice towards the lowly, mistreatment of women and children, unjust business practices, and exploitation of the poor, many of whom were rural dwellers, like Micah. The rich were living in luxury while the marginalized suffered to pay for extravagances for those in power.”

Micah warned these leaders and the people that – in the face of injustice, exploitation, racism, and mistreatment of certain populations – they were not doing what they needed to do. They were not acting with righteousness, equity, and morality. They were not being just. Micah’s text is a call to action to people of the book to not be silent or complacent when others – especially people who are vulnerable – are abused, mistreated, in need, scorned, or exploited.

Those of us in this congregation who have participated in JUST Pensacola events likely have heard this text there. Micah 6:8 is used as a motto for the work of JUST Pensacola, an interfaith coalition whose acronym stands for Justice United Seeking Transformation in our area. The purpose of the organization, in their own words, is to “actively uncover injustice and mobilize [people of faith] … to create and win just, fair, and effective solutions” from decisionmakers.

Considering that there are hundreds of Christian churches alone in Pensacola and the surrounding area, one might think that there’d be dozens of congregations involved with JUST Pensacola to live out the religious mandate of Micah 6:8. There are 17 committed member congregations, which includes both Jewish temples in town, numerous Christian denominations, and, of course, UUCP. One of the local mosques also has been involved with the effort but is not an official member of the group at this time. JUST Pensacola is intentionally multiracial and utilizes a shared leadership model.

In the handful of years of its existence, the organization has made a significant contribution to this community merely by pushing the conversation about these justice issues among people of faith. The congregations involved have mobilized hundreds of folks who otherwise likely would not have gotten involved in political activism of this kind. The work of JUST Pensacola and its member congregations keeps with the legacy of religiously liberal faith traditions, including Unitarianism and Universalism, striving for justice.

According to an article on the history of progressivism published by the Center for American Progress, “Many of the most prominent social movements in American progressive history would not have been possible without the inspirational values and moral authority of socially conscious Christianity and Judaism. … The social gospel movement and Catholic social teaching played influential roles in the progressive search for economic fairness and justice in the 20th century.” Proponents of the social gospel whose names you may recognize are settlement founders Jane Addams and Ellen Gates Starr, Catholic Worker Dorothy Day, and, later, the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. UUs recognize these folks and many more among the “prophetic people [who] challenge us to confront powers and structures of evil with justice, compassion, and the transforming power of love,” in the words of our Six Sources of wisdom and spirituality.

Related to the social gospel movement is liberation theology, which arose in late 20th-century Roman Catholicism and was centered in Latin America. To quote from Brittanica: “Liberation theology sought to apply religious faith by aiding the poor and oppressed through involvement in political and civic affairs. It stressed both heightened awareness of the ‘sinful’ socioeconomic structures that caused social inequities and active participation in changing those structures.”

Meanwhile, black liberation theology emerged out of 1960s civil-rights activism to address the black experience in the United States of America, in particular. Rev. James Cone is the founder of black liberation theology, which is inspired by both Dr. King and Malcolm X. Rev. Cone comes from the African Methodist Episcopal faith tradition. Cone explains the black liberation theology movement as “mainly a theology that sees God as concerned with the poor and the weak.” Terry Gross of the NPR show Fresh Air conducted an interview with Rev. Cone in 2008. In the interview, Cone explained that “at the core of black liberation theology is an effort — in a white-dominated society, in which black has been defined as evil — to make the gospel relevant to the life and struggles of American blacks, and to help black people learn to love themselves.”

In Jewish teachings, the concept of tikkun olam, translated from Hebrew into English as “repairing of the world,” refers to various forms of action intended to repair and improve our society. Bear with me as I quote from Wikipedia here: “In classical rabbinic literature, the phrase tikkun olam referred to legal enactments intended to preserve the social order. … In Lurianic Kabbalah, the ‘repair’ is mystical: to return the sparks of Divine light to their source by means of ritual performance. In the modern era, particularly among the post-Haskalah movements, tikkun olam has come to refer to the pursuit of social justice or ‘the establishment of Godly qualities throughout the world’ based on the idea that ‘Jews bear responsibility not only for their own moral, spiritual, and material welfare, but also for the welfare of society at large.’”

I would be remiss not to acknowledge that the social gospel movements, the liberation movements, and the Jewish social justice proponents were and are seeking to repair and restore disorder and to heal pain, trauma, and injustice that was originally wrought at the hands of people, states, and institutions that also espoused strongly held religious beliefs and who claimed that they also were acting out religious mandates, which involved dispossession, death, and destruction. Religious texts have been used to justify many viewpoints and actions, often competing ones. Some would say that the texts were being corrupted and misused when they were held up as imperatives for campaigns of dispossession, death, and destruction and that the teachings, in fact, speak more to humanity, justice, and equity. There is not just one model for spiritual life, and the authoritarian religious model that we often see today has not always been and does not have to always be. It is empowering to learn and become familiar with these religious leaders for justice of earlier days. It is affirming to recognize that our religious traditions of working for justice run deep.

Faith movements have been involved in activism to free folks from bondage of many types, including slavery, prison, poverty, intimate partner violence, and labor exploitation. Abortion rights and reproductive freedom also have been causes taken up by religious organizations, and not just UUs.

If you had a chance to watch the 2022 HBO documentary “The Janes,” which I highly recommend, you may have been surprised like I was to learn about the Clergy Consultation Service, a network of religious leaders who helped thousands of women find safe, comfortable ways of having an abortion.

Most shocking of all to me was the revelation that Southern Baptists of the 1960s and ‘70s favored at least some abortion access. From a 2015 article by the Baptist Press: “When the Supreme Court legalized abortion on demand in 1973 with its Roe v. Wade decision, some Southern Baptists criticized the ruling while maintaining their support of abortion rights as defined in the 1971 resolution. Others embraced the Supreme Court’s decision. A Baptist Press analysis article written by then-Washington bureau chief Barry Garrett declared that the court had ‘advanced the cause of religious liberty, human equality, and justice.’”

Today, the organization the Religious Coalition for Reproductive Choice continues to advocate for reproductive freedom on the grounds of religious values. RCRC, as the group is known, describes itself as “a multifaith, intersectional, and antiracist movement for reproductive freedom and dignity leading in spiritual companionship, curating frameworks for faith leaders, and training the next generation of activists.” Some of you will remember that a beloved friend of this congregation, Tom Brown, who was a retired Methodist minister, was an avid supporter of RCRC and a regular escort at the women’s clinic to help folks safely seek care at that facility when it was still open.

There was a concerted effort within the Southern Baptist denomination starting in the 1980s to move the denomination in a more conservative direction regarding abortion rights. A Southern Baptist minister named Larry Lewis reported picking up a copy of the St. Louis Post-Dispatch newspaper in 1979 and seeing a full-page ad listing the Southern Baptist Convention among denominations that affirmed the right to abortion. Lewis said, “Right there beside the Unitarians and Universalists was the Southern Baptist Convention. … That bothered me a lot.” The Southern Baptists went on to adopt multiple antiabortion statements, to lobby for antiabortion legislation, and to become the key player that it is today.

As the Southern Baptists shifted, the dominant religious messages on important political and social issues also have come increasingly from the religious right and from rightwing evangelicals, rather than from the social gospel proponents or liberation theologists who were so active in the late 1800s and throughout the 1900s. In his book Reclaiming Prophetic Witness, Paul Rasor writes, “Religious liberals … seem to have moved into the background of public life or disappeared altogether.” Rasor, a UU minister and author of numerous books, goes on to write, “[R]eligiously grounded social justice work has declined among religious liberals. … Religious liberals have been far less likely than members of other religious groups to support any form of activism or speaking out on public issues by their clergy or denominational leaders, and they have been less likely to engage in most forms of political participation.”

There are relevant explanations for this decline in faith-based justice work among religious liberals. Rasor notes, “Mistrust of religious dogma and openness to diverse theological traditions, while generally a positive trait, can leave religious liberals uncertain about how to relate their faith commitments to their social and political commitments.” When you’re not a religious evangelical who views everything through a particular religious lens, it can be tough to speak about beliefs and values using religious language. The religious right has no such qualms, however, and they have made causes such as attacking reproductive rights, women’s rights, LGBTQIA+ rights, and the rights of people of color central to their religious crusade.

Religious discourse on social issues over the last several decades not only has come increasingly from the religious right rather than the religious left. Religious discourse on social issues has become increasingly, unceasingly authoritarian and nationalistic.

Current Injustices

The headline of this article from a publication called U.S. Catholic warrants serious consideration: “Any religion allied with nationalism is dangerous.” Religious nationalism is not merely a Christian issue. Religious nationalism is present in the form of Hindu nationalism in India, Turkish-Islamic nationalism in Turkey, and Buddhist nationalism in Burma, among others. In these cases, nationalism at the hands of the religious group involves acts such as imprisonment of dissenters, destruction of religious sites, marginalization of minorities, even rape and murder. For this talk, I am focusing on the U.S. and Christian nationalism.

The U.S. Catholic article describes a U.S. study conducted in February of this year by Public Religion Research Institute (PRRI). The study is titled “Understanding the Threat of Christian Nationalism to American Democracy and Culture.” The poll found that 29 percent of Americans are sympathetic to Christian nationalism, which involves these tenets: 1) that the U.S. should declare itself a Christian nation, 2) that God has called Christians to exercise dominion over all areas of American society, and 3) that the U.S. should not be a nation made up of people belonging to a variety of religions.

Sympathizers and adherents of Christian nationalism support the notion of an authoritarian leader, which means “a leader who is willing to break some rules if that’s what it takes to set things right.” More than eight in 10 Christian nationalist adherents agreed with the following statement: “God intended America to be a new promised land where European Christians could create a society that could be an example to the rest of the world.” It is appropriate to clarify that we are talking not just about some general Christian nationalism but White Christian Nationalism.

This statement about God’s intentions for European Christians should sound familiar. In so many words, this is the 19^th-century doctrine of Manifest Destiny, which is the assertion that the white supremacist colonial expansion of the U.S. throughout the American continents was both justified and inevitable thanks to Divine Providence.

We can easily discern that White Christian Nationalism is antithetical to justice work in the spirit of the social gospel, liberation theology, tikkum olam and our UU principles. Our humanistic traditions embrace the full worth and humanity of all people, and our pluralistic values oppose extremism in favor of engagement, openness, and inclusion of diverse groups, as I discussed in my previous talk on Celebrating Diversity.

Likewise, the international nature of many faith traditions encourages us to think beyond national boundaries and to embrace our global siblings and their experiences as bound up with ours in our interdependent web of life. This message of internationalist solidarity is epitomized in the hymn “This Is My Song,” one of my favorite songs from our UU hymnal. The lyrics refer to the God of all the nations as we sing “a song of peace for lands afar and mine.” The writer recognizes that “other hearts in other lands are beating / With hopes and dreams as true and high as mine.”

The authoritarian White Christian Nationalist movement has erupted in the last 15 years or so in direct opposition to many decades of justice work to secure rights and representation for historically marginalized groups. UU minister Rev. Cecilia Kingman contextualizes the rise of authoritarianism in her exemplary essay, “‘My Little Pony Was Right’: Reflections of Fascisms Without and Within.” In the essay, Kingman invokes the work of Jason Stanley, a professor and scholar who is the author of How Fascism Works: The Politics of Us and Them.

Kingman in her essay writes: “Fascists tell people that equality is victimizing them by making them lose their rightful place or power. Stanley says: ‘The goal is to make [people] feel like victims, to make them feel like they’ve lost something and that the thing they’ve lost has been taken from them by a specific enemy, usually some minority out-group or some opposing nation.’ According to Ejeris Dixon, writing in Truthout, ‘Fascists believe that democracy has failed them and allowed the majority […] to be tyrannized by communities that have no right to power. Therefore, fascists seek to eliminate both democratic processes and marginalized communities to return to an often fictitious and glorified past where their power reigned unchecked.’”

Ideas and Examples of Justice Work

So let me be honest: things have gotten pretty bad. As a nation, our commitment to pluralistic democracy and equity seems to have peaked some years ago and been on a downturn since. Like climate change, the danger is multiplying at an exponential rate. But there is really no sense in bemoaning the current state of affairs and being inactive. We are still here, we are still alive, and we stand on the shoulders of many giants who have resisted similar turns and far worse. That said, I want to share some examples and ideas of justice work that we UUs can engage with even when justice seems elusive.

In the words of activist-scholar Angela Davis, “We’re never assured of justice without a fight.” As UUs, we know what it means to fight for justice. Social justice work is important to us. Hence, we here at UUCP included Striving for Justice in our congregational mission statement, and what I like about the phrase is that it is aspirational. We are striving for justice, and this is an ongoing process.

UUs – and Unitarians and Universalists before the merger – have been religious movements that have wedded social justice work to theology. Our 2^nd and our 6^th principles underscore the importance of justice in our relations and broader communities. The Unitarian Universalist Association, or UUA, notes on its social justice page that many people have come to UU congregations first and foremost because of our liberal voice in the community on important issues. I know that was true for me and for Scott.

Let’s turn back to Paul Rasor and his book Reclaiming Prophetic Witness. Rasor writes that, even while many religious liberals were less likely to engage in the public sphere over the last several decades, “Unitarian Universalist clergy have remained a highly activist ‘dynamo of the left in contemporary American politics’ by translating their theology into social and political activism.”

Rasor cites the Side with Love campaign as one example of this activism. Thousands of UUs have shown up over the years in bright yellow T-shirts to participate in a variety of activities, such as protests against unjust immigration policies in Arizona and demonstrations against the white supremacists who converged on Charlottesville, Virginia, in 2017 for the Unite the Right rally, which resulted in the death of Charlottesville local 32-year-old Heather Heyer and the injury of 19 other people when a white supremacist intentionally drove into the crowd.

You can see in this photo that our then-UUA President Rev. Dr. Susan Frederick-Gray was present and in solidarity with other faith leaders during the march in Charlottesville. Her yellow Side with Love stole is clearly visible. Frederick-Gray has been notable for her persistent presence in justice work, even before she was elected to the presidency of the UUA.

Frederick-Gray followed in the footsteps of other justice-minded UUs before her, including the civil rights martyr Rev. James Reeb, shown here walking in the pivotal Selma to Montgomery march with Dr. Ralph Abernathy and his children and Dr. King and Coretta Scott King in 1965 not long before he was beaten to death by white supremacists. Reeb’s legacy continues in the form of a UU congregation that bears his name as well as voting rights campaigns and education projects.

Frederick-Gray just concluded her 6-year term with the UUA and was succeeded by Rev. Dr. Sofia Betancourt, who ran unopposed and was elected at the UU General Assembly last month. Betancourt serves as Resident Scholar and Special Advisor on Justice and Equity at the Unitarian Universalist Service Committee and is expected to follow through with the UUA’s justice initiatives.

One such initiative on the national scale has been the Poor People’s Campaign begun in 2018 by Rev. William Barber. You might recall that, in 2013, Barber had helped to organize Moral Mondays, weekly protests at the North Carolina legislature led by religious progressives demanding gun-safety measures and an end to discriminatory laws. UUs were a part of that work as well.

The current Poor People’s Campaign has carried forward the economic justice work begun by Dr. King in 1968 before his assassination. According to their website, the campaign “is uniting people across the country to challenge the evils of systemic racism, poverty, the war economy, ecological devastation, and the nation’s distorted moral narrative of religious nationalism.” While there is not a physical chapter here in our area, the organization has held online rallies, teach-ins, and events to educate and mobilize folks like ourselves and to advocate for legislation and civil action.

Locally, there are several organizations that are addressing the recent book bannings in Escambia County and other school zones that have targeted materials portraying characters of color, LGBTQ characters, and storylines that depict a diversity of lived experiences. Many of you have probably heard that a lawsuit has been filed against the school district on First Amendment grounds. The plaintiffs in the suit include PEN America, a writers’ group; Penguin Random House, a publishing company; and local parents and students, including Scott and Desmond. Another plaintiff in the lawsuit is the organization Protect Democracy, whose website declares: “Our democracy is in danger. The 250-year American experiment in self-government is threatened by a global rise in authoritarianism. Together, we can preserve democracy for future generations.”

Another group working on this issue is Florida Freedom to Read Project, which works to defend students’ rights to access library materials. The group gave away copies of banned books during the recent PensaPride festival. Another non-profit that many of us are familiar with and support, Open Books, also gave away free banned books at the festival and regularly distributes books of all kinds to other non-profit groups, fills area Little Free Libraries, and sends books for free to Florida prisoners, which has been the organization’s mission for more than 20 years.

Another local group is the Pensacola Abortion Rights Taskforce or PART. The group formed just a few months ago in response to the Supreme Court’s overturning of Roe v Wade with the Dobbs decision. PART has held several educational events, including a screening of the film “The Janes” that I mentioned earlier, has organized rallies to demonstrate local support for choice, gives away reproductive items such as pregnancy tests and Plan B pills, and is currently working with multiple other entities to collect signatures for the Abortion on the Ballot initiative to place the issue on the 2024 ballot so that Florida voters have the option to decide about abortion access rather than leaving these decisions to legislators. We have petitions here in our lobby, and I invite any Florida voter who has not already signed to complete a petition to put abortion on the ballot in 2024.

Finally, I want to circle back to the essay that I discussed earlier by Rev. Kingman. Kingman delivered the essay “My Little Pony Was Right” at this year’s UU Minister Association’s annual Berry Street Conference in June, and the essay is the springboard for two upcoming online workshops about understanding and combatting fascism in our lifetime. The word fascism is thrown around a lot these days and not always in a reasoned way. Kingman takes great pains in her essay to explain her reasoning for using the word. These webinars will provide us with an opportunity to more fully understand how we got to the point that we are currently at so that we can fight authoritarianism in a strategic, effective way.

In the words of the philosopher and political activist Dr. Cornel West, a Christian and a religious progressive: “Justice is what love looks like in public.”

May we as UUs show up in the public sphere with our love, our faith, and our work for justice constantly on display. May we be visible and persistent in our strive for justice.

Text of a talk originally presented 07/09/23 at the Unitarian Universalist Church of Pensacola

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Celebrate Diversity (UUCP Mission, Part 1 of 3)

Our UUCP mission is to Celebrate Diversity, Strive for Justice, and Inspire Love. Pride month and the month of Juneteenth is an appropriate time to consider what it means for us as UUs to Celebrate Diversity. Today’s talk is the first in a three-part series of services exploring our UUCP mission statement. Today, I am going to establish some groundwork related to our understanding of diversity in our society, identify recent attacks on the concept and practice of diversity, equity, and inclusion, and share ideas and examples of celebrating diversity.

Understanding Our Reactions to Diversity

Let’s face it. We live in a world full of diversity. From the existence of 8.7 million species of plants and animals on our planet – including about 10,000 species of just birds alone – to the 10,000 types of minerals that exist on earth to the variations in climates across this planet. In the words of Woody Guthrie, “from the golden valley … to the diamond deserts … from the redwood forests to the Gulf Stream waters,” the non-human elements in our world are extremely diverse.

Likewise, when we focus on the humans on this planet, we can easily identify mundane differences among people like food preferences and favorite music and partiality to cats over dogs. Then there are the more serious and impactful variances like skin color, native language, disability, and religious beliefs, to name a few. Among and between us, we are very different people. There is just no escaping diversity.

However, the existence of diverse people with diverse appearances and practices and opinions is not the same thing as respect for and inclusion of those people … and their appearances and practices and opinions. The existence of diverse people among us – in our neighborhoods, schools, our grocery stores, health clinics or at the voting booth – does not even necessarily lead to mere tolerance of these folks. In fact, the opposite may be true.

A Harvard political scientist conducted a test of what seeing more diversity in our everyday surroundings does to our political opinions. The study was reported in the book Why We’re Polarized by Ezra Klein. Before starting the study, the researcher surveyed passengers at train stations in white suburbs around Boston. The researcher than recruited Spanish-speaking people to catch trains at these stations. This went on for three days with the intent to send a message to the other passengers that the Spanish-speaking population in that area was increasing. Then the researcher again surveyed the train passengers and found that their political views had “moved sharply rightward.” According to the researcher, “The mostly liberal Democratic passengers had come to endorse policies such as deportation of children of undocumented immigrants,” a policy being advocated by Trump during his presidential campaign at the time.

We are probably all familiar with the phenomenon of White Flight. White Flight refers to the tendency of white residents to leave a neighborhood as black residents move into that neighborhood. Research indicates that white residents hold preconceived notions about racially mixed neighborhoods and predominantly black neighborhoods and that these notions of neighborhood instability and disintegration lead them to not want to live in these neighborhoods. The percentage of black residents in the neighborhood may be as low as 10%. Residents who have the means to live elsewhere may choose to do so and, as a result, their departure may contribute to the instability of those neighborhoods, which may reinforce the preconceptions about those neighborhoods that drove the residents to leave in the first place. You can see how this can become a vicious cycle.

White Flight can also occur within schools. In this scenario, parents who perceive that the population of a school is shifting and who have the means to put their children in school elsewhere may choose to do so. A historic example of White Flight from schools occurred in 1958 in Little Rock, Arkansas, the year after the Little Rock Nine integrated Central High School in that city. We often hear about and see depictions of the brave efforts of the nine black students who faced mobs of angry white residents and students and who ultimately had to be escorted by members of the National Guard just to be able to, somewhat safely, receive an education in the 1957-58 school year.

The piece of the story that we don’t often get is that Arkansas Gov. Orval Faubus closed all Little Rock public high schools the following school year rather than allow integration to continue. And the city of Little Rock wasn’t alone in this. Virginia also closed schools to avoid having to integrate. Across the South, many white families had organized “White Citizens Councils” in the 1950s to fight integration. In the 1950s and ‘60s, these same families and others formed private schools in order to continue educating their children in a segregated setting, including right here in Pensacola.

Attacking Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion

The situation in Little Rock in 1958 and the extreme measures that some groups will go to in order to avoid interacting with people different than themselves bears similarity to our current situation. Recently, various tactics have been taken to remove certain elements of history and literature from public schools – K-12 as well as, now, higher education – in order to prevent some folks from having to be exposed to other people and ideas. Those calling themselves parents’ rights proponents argue that the representation of diverse people and experiences within our schools is immoral, does not reflect American values, and is hurting students. In true Orwellian fashion, they are supposedly the champions of liberty. In their view, the equity and inclusion that has been fought for over many decades – from the Brown v Board decision to the legalization of same-sex marriage – is a conspiratorial takeover by a so-called Woke Mob.

In an effort to block this supposed takeover, Gov. Ron DeSantis recently signed a bill banning public colleges and universities from spending money on diversity, equity and inclusion programs, known as DEI programs. The governor refers to DEI instead as “discrimination, exclusion, and indoctrination.” Let me be clear: When we are talking about Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion programs at colleges and universities, we are talking about offices that managed programs to diversify staff and promoted inclusivity for faculty and students. Here in Pensacola, the DEI office a few years ago hosted a speaking event featuring the sculptor of the “Four Spirits” statue in Birmingham. The statue is a memorial to the four girls who were killed in the bombing of the 16^th Street Baptist Church in Birmingham in 1963. During the event, the sculptor, a white woman, described the process she went through to decide what to sculpt to represent the tragic loss of these girls due to hatred and white supremacy in Birmingham at that time. These are the sorts of programs that these offices would run. The DEI office at UWF no longer exists, and staff with decades of experience are looking for work elsewhere because they can no longer do the work that they have trained for and to which they have dedicated their careers.

Building Empathy and Support for Diversity

I can see where opponents of diversity and inclusion have a point. Building empathy toward diverse groups of people does contribute to more favorable opinions toward those groups. One study of teenagers in 38 countries that had experienced large waves of immigration found a correlation between the views held toward immigrants by youth native to those countries and the composition of the classrooms in the schools those youth attended. The researcher noted, “Ethnically mixed classrooms do contribute to more favorable attitudes toward immigrants. Native youngsters in mixed classrooms had significantly higher levels of inclusive views than native youngsters in all-native classrooms,” that is, classrooms without immigrant students.

Exposure to messages of diversity increases tolerance and acceptance of diversity and may even help to close gaps between diverse groups, according to another study, this one at the University of Wisconsin at Madison. In the study, a public messaging campaign was launched on campus to normalize discussions about diversity. The project included a poster campaign featuring student testimonials about embracing diversity and a four-minute video describing pro-diversity opinions among students. Follow-up 10 to 12 weeks later indicated that students who were exposed to the public messaging campaign reported more positive attitudes toward members of other groups and stronger endorsement of diversity. Students who were identified as marginalized – meaning non-White students or those who were Hispanic or who identified as a religion other than Christianity – were particularly impacted by this campaign. The researcher reported, “The students belonging to marginalized groups tell us that they have an enhanced sense of belonging. They are less anxious in interactions with students from other ethnic groups. They tell us that they’re less and less the target of discrimination. They evaluate the classroom climate more positively and feel that they are treated more respectfully by their classmates.” The campaign promoting diversity messages had tangible impacts on the lives of marginalized students at the university.

Leaders in the Civil Rights Movement knew about public messaging. They actively engaged in campaigns to humanize black Americans. In many cases, these efforts – such as Freedom Summer and the Freedom Riders campaign – were focused on white young people who were more open and progressive in their views.

Leaders in the Gay Rights Movement used similar tactics and often urged their peers to come out of the closet in order to normalize gay and lesbian people in the eyes of their friends, family, co-workers, and neighbors and to build support for their rights and safety in the broader society.

Leaders in the Disability Rights Movement also understood the importance of building support from the general population when they organized the Capitol Crawl in 1990. After a march to the U.S. Capitol building to protest the efforts within the U.S. Senate to stall and stop the Americans with Disabilities Act from passing, protestors with physical disabilities began throwing themselves out of their mobility devices and crawled up the 365 steps to the capitol doors. The image of this demonstration was extremely moving and ultimately led to the passage of the ADA.

Celebrating Diversity

So we can look at it this way. The presence of diversity in our society and the tolerance, support, acceptance, and inclusion that have grown over the last 50 to 70 years here in this country are a threat to some people – people for whom liberty and freedom are anathema, despite what they claim. Celebrating diversity is powerful. Celebrating diversity builds empathy and solidarity among people.

When we recognize the humanity in each of us, we approach people who are different from us with curiosity, openness, and respect. We draw our circles wider. We favor pluralism in our diversity. In the words of Rev. Dr. Jane Page of the UU Fellowship of Statesboro, Georgia, “Pluralism tries to encourage members of a society to accommodate their differences by avoiding extremism … and engaging in good-faith dialogue.” Continuing in her talk on diversity and pluralism, Rev. Dr. Page described pluralism as looking through a series of windows. “It’s the same light, but the various windows seem to provide a very different understanding and meaning for people,”  she said. Many of us as UUs prefer to explore many windows and see the world through different perspectives.

We may encounter diverse perspectives just in the course of our everyday lives, through interactions with neighbors, co-workers, and friends. But, let’s be honest, many of us do not spend a whole lot of time around people who don’t look and think a lot like we do. In that case, we have to be more intentional about exposing ourselves to diverse people and experiences. There are myriad opportunities to do so. Some simple ideas include reading books or watching movies by or about people of color, people who are LGBTQ+, people who are living with disabilities, people who are immigrants or refugees, or people from a religious background different than our own, just to get started.

Here in Pensacola, there are festivals, plays, art exhibitions, and events that celebrate diversity. Just in the last few weeks, I have attended several events of this type. I went to events celebrating the Juneteenth holiday, also known as Emancipation Day or Freedom Day. The Juneteenth holiday marks the anniversary of the day on June 19, 1865, when the last group of enslaved people, located in Galveston, Texas, were informed that they had been freed from slavery under President Abraham Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation, which had been issued one and a half years earlier.

On Friday evening, I attended the 23^rd annual Freedom is Not Free banquet hosted by the civil rights organization Movement for Change, which Scott and I have been involved with for about 18 years. During that banquet, I witnessed my first African Libations ceremony. Practiced in the Yoruba and Igbo cultures of the African continent, the libation ceremony involves making an offering of water or other liquid to pay homage to the ancestors. According to an African Libations officiant, “During the libation, we honor the wisdom, love, and legacy of our ancestors and esteemed living elders.” Some of us may be familiar with this type of ceremony by its colloquial phrase: “pouring one out for the homies,” when we pour a little beer or wine on the ground to memorialize someone who has passed.

Yesterday, I attended the annual PensaPride festival and ran into several of our church members there as well. There were musical and poetry performances, a puppet show, vendors, creators, a photo booth – and so many young people and families and elders out in the park yesterday. It was such a festive atmosphere and so beautiful to see a huge segment of our local community out celebrating pride and just enjoying themselves and being who they are despite the threats of hellfire and damnation from the protestors.

I am looking forward to several other events that will also allow me to celebrate diversity. I share them because I also encourage you to attend, if you’re able.

1. “My Ancestors’ Wildest Dreams,” an exhibit featuring the artwork of local African American artists up now through Friday, July 14, at Artel Gallery downtown Pensacola.
2. SOIL, an exhibit open until July 15 at the Alabama Contemporary Arts Center in downtown Mobile. The exhibit is subtitled “Radical Empathy in the Act of Remembrance” and is the work of the Mobile County Community Remembrance Project, a local grassroots program affiliated with the Equal Justice Initiative.
3. Bias Inside Us, an interactive community engagement project that will be at the Pensacola MESS Hall for one month starting July 15. This Smithsonian traveling exhibition raises awareness about the science and history of bias and what people can do about it.
4. Stamped, an annual free film festival that, according to the website, “is dedicated to providing a vibrant cultural experience to Pensacola by using the unique expression of films with a specific focus on the lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer community to foster awareness, inclusion, and diversity.” The festival this year runs from September 28 to October 1.

 These opportunities check several boxes. I enjoy them. I learn from them. My exposure to people who look different than me, who see the world differently, fosters deeper empathy and care in me for them as fellow human beings. I build relationships across differences. And I show my support for these folks and the moments that are important to them by putting my body where my mouth is, by walking the talk.

These actions are within the reach of all of us.

Text of a talk originally presented 06/25/23 at the Unitarian Universalist Church of Pensacola

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Hope When Hope is Hard to Find

I recently attended a summit on mental health in the Black community. One of the speakers addressed us about the importance of hopefulness as an element of mental wellbeing. He told a story about a research study on hope, and the story has been on my mind since then.

Psychologist and community behavioral health director Dr. Casey Wolfington described this study on hope in an article that Wolfington wrote in March 2020, as we all were learning about and being impacted by a virus called COVID-19.

Wolfington writes: “Hope is an incredibly powerful and often overlooked psychological force. During the 1950s, Curt Richter, a Denver native, Harvard graduate and scientist with John Hopkins University, conducted a profound (and by today’s standards incredibly cruel) experiment on rats.

“Dr. Richter placed rats into buckets of water and timed their ability to swim. Rats, who are apparently known for their strong swimming skills, lasted an average of 15 minutes before drowning. In a second experiment, Richter rescued the rats when he saw them begin to stop swimming and sink. When he took them out, he dried them off and gave them a short period of rest. … And then, just as they were dry and rested, Richter put them back into the water. However, this time Richter identified a substantial behavioral change. The rescued rats swam longer than 15 minutes. In fact, they swam for nearly 60 hours.

Wolfington continues: “Psychologists often cite this article as evidence of the power of hope. Our perspective can be incredibly powerful. When we are hopeful that our circumstances are temporary and change is possible, we can achieve extraordinary feats. Hope can be the factor that changes an outcome.”

This rat study is both cruel and morbid, but it does convey a universal truth: While we all will reach our inevitable end, having hope along the way enables us to push on in the face of adversity.

I have spoken to you before about just a few of the adverse circumstances that are weighing on me and on us right about now. If I am painfully honest, I will admit that I really struggle to remain hopeful. Something that does give me pause and resets my spirit when I am feeling down is reflection on the struggles of folks who came before me who have endured so much. I think about my genetic ancestors, my spiritual ancestors, and my heroes and sheroes, my ancestors by inspiration.

I imagine that my talk today is something of a continuation on the Sunday Service that fellow UUCP Member Barbara Wright presented last week on Courage. As do many of us, Barbara and I both find encouragement among the giants on whose shoulders we now stand. This morning, I will share just a few stories that might help us to put our own troubles and current circumstances into perspective.

The theologian, mystic, and social activist Thomas Merton, a Trappist monk, understood that periods of intense difficulty and devastation might generate in a person a deep appreciation for life and a sense of connectedness to something greater than ourself. With language updated to be more inclusive, Merton wrote, “Only the [person] who has had to face despair is really convinced that [they need] mercy. Those who do not want mercy never seek it. It is better to find God on the threshold of despair than to risk our lives in a complacency that has never felt the need of forgiveness. A life that is without problems may literally be more hopeless than one that always verges on despair.”

So let us hear some stories of despair, that we might be awakened out of complacency and convinced of the need for mercy and the power of hope.

Few situations were more desperate than American slavery. William Still was an African American abolitionist who frequently risked his life to help freedom-seekers escape slavery. Still became known as the father of the Underground Railroad. In the book The Underground Railroad: A Record, Still shares some letters he received from abolitionists and formerly enslaved persons. The passages shed light on family separation, the financial costs of the journey to freedom, and the logistics of the Underground Railroad.

Here is a letter from James Loguen from Syracuse, written October 5, 1856.

DEAR FRIEND STILL: I write to you for Mrs. Susan Bell, who was at your city some time in September last. She is from Washington City. She left her dear little children behind (two children). She is stopping in our city, and wants to hear from her children very much indeed. She wishes to know if you have heard from Mr. Biglow, of Washington City. She will remain here until she can hear from you. She feels very anxious about her children, I will assure you. I should have written before this, but I have been from home much of the time since she came to our city. She wants to know if Mr. Biglow has heard anything about her husband. If you have not written to Mr. Biglow, she wishes you would. She sends her love to you and your dear family. She says that you were all kind to her, and she does not forget it. You will direct your letter to me, dear brother, and I will see she gets it.

Miss F.E. Watkins left our house yesterday for Ithaca, and other places in that part of the State. Frederick Douglass, William J. Watkins, and others were with us last week; Gerritt Smith with others. Miss Watkins is doing great good in our part of the State. We think much indeed of her. She is such a good and glorious speaker, that we are all charmed with her.

We have had 31 fugitives in the last 27 days; but you, no doubt, have had many more than that. I hope the good Lord may bless you and spare you long to do good to the hunted and outraged among our brethren.

Yours truly,

J.W. Loguen

Agent of the Underground Railroad

In very simple and straightforward language, not overly sentimental, Mr. Loguen conveys the heartbreaking anxiety of a formerly enslaved mother separated from her children and husband, longing to be reunited with them and carrying an abiding hope that she soon will be.

Mr. Loguen concludes the letter sharing about a visit with some of the leading abolitionists of the time, themselves symbols of hope to others still held in slavery and fighting for its end. One of the leaders mentioned in the letter is F.E. Watkins, or Frances Ellen Watkins Harper, the first African American woman in the United States to publish a short story.

Watkins Harper was also an influential abolitionist, suffragist, and reformer who co-founded the National Association of Colored Women’s Clubs. As an adult, Watkins Harper attended the First Unitarian Church of Philadelphia and would be classified as a Unitarian Christian.

If William Still and the aggrieved mother Susan Bell and Frederick Douglass and Frances Ellen Watkins Harper could muster the courage and hope to continue challenging that peculiar institution – slavery – how could I not also find the hope to carry on?

Storytelling is an extremely powerful method of communication. Our culture is shaped by the stories that we tell. Telling the stories of trailblazers in the LGBTQ+ struggle is particularly vital and relevant, especially as October is LGBTQ+ History Month. Sometimes these stories are larger than life and describe sweeping changes, such as the stories of the Stonewall Uprising, which sparked a major revolution, and the 2015 Supreme Court decision mandating the right of same-sex couples to marry. Sometimes stories are profoundly personal and involve people whose names we do not know. For persons struggling to carry on, the story of someone who has been there and gotten through can be life-changing.

In 2018, a cast of 10 LGBTQIA+ storytellers from around the country presented an Off-Broadway production called “Lifelines: Queer Stories of Survival,” which featured inspiring true stories of triumph in the face of suicide. A documentary followed. The production team writes, “[O]ur goal for the documentary is to amplify the voices of members of the LBGTQIA+ community, and to provide audiences the opportunity to listen, be inspired, expand their awareness, and identify with the storytellers. Most importantly, we hope these radically true stories will inspire a cultural shift and the world will become a safe and welcoming place for the next generation to live fully and fearlessly as their authentic selves.”

Here is the story shared by Racine Grayson of Forked River, NJ: “I am thankful every day that I reached out in the myriad of little ways I did – that I didn’t end up a story between some train tracks and instead I’m a story of survival and perseverance. I’m not the depressed kid with the cut up thighs who drives in circles for hours convincing himself not to wrap his car around a tree on the mountaintops. Now, I’m the out and proud trans man who devotes every day to making life better for everyone and absolutely takes no shit and demands respect not just from everyone around him, but from himself as well.”

If Racine Grayson can face depression and suicidal thoughts and a pattern of self-harm prompted by the pain of social stigma and rejection, how could I not also find the hope to carry on?

And here is a story that is ripped from the current headlines, a story of hope that is still being written. The Supreme Court’s Dobbs decision turned back the clock to a pre-Roe v Wade era, made us a post-Roe nation where health care for more than half of our population is no longer protected but is subject to the interference and rulings of increasingly far Right state lawmakers. For me, frankly this is one of the most distressing developments in recent times. So where to find hope in this mess?

For one, advocates in states where trigger laws closed abortion clinics after the Dobbs decision say that the ruling may mobilize voters to take a more explicit stand in support of abortion rights. As we have frequently heard, a sizable majority of Americans favors at least some access to abortion and does not support an outright ban on the procedure, but many were not motivated to vote on the issue while Roe was on the books. Of course, we know that UUs – including people in this room – have advocated for abortion access and have placed our bodies and our lives on the line in defense of this issue for many decades.

Meanwhile, in other communities where clinics have not been closed, groups quickly mobilized to provide transportation, funds, and other tangible support to those in need of abortions and reproductive health care. These acts of mutual aid are acts of necessity but also acts of hope, the will to persevere despite the consequences and circumstances. Here in Pensacola, a group has formed – the Pensacola Abortion Rights Taskforce, or PART for short – to provide logistical support and to change the conversation about abortion rights. The group is also organizing to try to get our city’s only abortion provider re-opened after the state closed it down. They will be in attendance at the upcoming Fem Fest event at Artel gallery on Friday, October 28, as well as other events.

I am thankful that friends and allies have joined to address this problem right here in the Deep South, in the belly of the beast, where we are surrounded by states like Alabama and Mississippi that (surprisingly) have even less access to abortion services than we do here in Pensacola – and I am holding on to a shred of hope that we can improve upon that situation.

If a pregnant person, terrified and unsure, having perhaps endured a sexual assault or unsafe relationship, can find the strength to act, how could I not also find the hope to carry on?

And let me share one more story of hope that has just recently touched me. Some of you who follow local news may have read or heard that HCA Florida West, our local private for-profit hospital, formerly known as West Florida Hospital, decided in August to surrender its state license to accept patients brought in for evaluation under the Baker Act. The Baker Act is Florida’s mental health law regarding voluntary and involuntary examination and treatment for people experiencing a mental health crisis that makes them a risk to themselves and others. In a community of about 400,000 people from Escambia to Walton county, we once had a total of four psychiatric receiving facilities that could evaluate people experiencing such crises, but HCA Florida West’s decision to surrender their license would have brought us down to just one facility – Baptist Hospital – with such capability. This would mean that some of the most vulnerable people among us would be negatively impacted – possibly lose their very lives – due to an inability to access needed care during an emergent situation.

However, in a scenario possibly similar to that prompted by the Dobbs decision, this impending catastrophe led stakeholders – hospitals, behavioral health providers, state agencies, and local government – to come together to try to quickly devise a solution. I learned just a few weeks ago that they are working on opening a centralized receiving facility where folks in mental health crisis would be triaged by a team of behavioral health professionals. Some patients would be linked with services and scheduled rapid turnaround behavioral health appointments and discharged while others who needed more intensive oversight and stabilization would be hospitalized for a few days at one of the local inpatient facilities, whether at Baptist or HCA West Florida or at a new detox facility being launched by Lakeview Center. So from a terrible situation might come a system that is actually better than what we had before.

Some of you who are familiar with our behavioral health systems of care will know that we recently launched 988 nationally, a three-digit suicide prevention and mental health lifeline that makes accessing 24/7 confidential and anonymous crisis assistance so much easier. Here in Pensacola, our local 211 United Way call center has just been certified as a crisis response center and can begin answering local crisis calls incoming from 988, which means our neighbors in crisis will be assisted by people right here in our community who are experts in community resources and able to get callers linked with services in Northwest Florida. In addition to this, the VA has awarded a multi-year $750,000 suicide prevention grant to one of our local non-profit service agencies. This grant program funnels targeted case management services and dollars into our area. Again, I am hopeful about these initiatives.

Let me try to tie together these stories of hope. The title of my talk today – Hope When Hope is Hard to Find – is drawn from the line of one of our familiar UU hymns, “Come, Sing a Song with Me,” which we will sing shortly. The Rev. Amy DeBeck, former minister of the UU Fellowship of Elkhart, Indiana, wrote about this song in her newsletter column for that church.

DeBeck writes: “This line from the hymn ‘Come, Sing a Song with Me’ is a promise that we enjoy singing together. Recently I was thinking about how the song always feels different to me based on what has been happening in the week leading up to the service. It is no surprise, then, to find that its writer, Carolyn McDade, spoke about her own song as needing context. From the UU World magazine: ‘In the 1980s, the chaplain of the women’s state prison in Framingham, Massachusetts, asked [songwriter McDade] to come do a music program. She brought the song mainly because it was easy to learn. But the prisoners sang it in a way she’d never heard. She had to stop singing and listen. “That song needs context — “I’ll give you hope when hope is hard to find” — and these prisoners had context to bring to it,” she says. “It went from sweet to profound.”’

DeBeck continues: “That is how I see hope, all the time, its weight being reliant on its context. Sometimes hope is light and sweet. ‘Oh, I hope you have fun today!’ But other times, very profound. Given [a cancer diagnosis], our dearest hope is for comfort and freedom from pain. Hope is a prayer, a promise, a wish, and sometimes, the last feeling we have left or the first idea when we start to rebuild.

In the winter months, during holidays, in these days when some of our beloved … are struggling …, this hymn will not seem light to me. Hope IS hard to find, and when beloved community stokes its fire in your heart … that, friends, is profound. Reach out to each other, with walks, with roses, with singing.”

Text of a talk originally presented 10/16/22 at the Unitarian Universalist Church of Pensacola

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