This morning I invite you to join me as co-conspirators in a nonhostile takeover, a kindly insurgency, a veritable fusillade of gentle acts of aggression, all aimed at the forces of evil.
Join me as we climb those hills, proudly waving the rainbow flag, fanning out across this great but troubled land in defense of our oh-so-fragile and quickly fading democracy, we, soldiers who carry no guns, warriors who carry no swords, fighters who do battle by refusing to bend the knee to tyrants, we who protect those most vulnerable with the impenetrable shield of unconditional love.
In other words, I invite you to relentlessly commit unspeakable acts of kindness. Senseless acts of celebrating diversity. Unconscionable assaults on inequity. Graphic displays of truth-telling. Random acts … of inclusion.
Join me, my friends, in this noble cause, and surely victory will be ours.
Yes, for those of you who know me or have heard me speak from this pulpit on other occasions, the words I just shared are ample proof that I have surely and finally lost my mind. What kind of fool would stand up here and announce that the surefire antidotes to hate and evil … are goodness and love?
How naïve must you be to look at what is quickly unfolding – and unraveling – in our country, with churches, schools and hospitals no longer safe havens for law-abiding people who fear deportation, with the world’s richest man peering into our private data and who clearly has an agenda, with a dictatorship quickly forming – how naïve must you be to look at all this and think love will save us?
I’ll just pause here at this point to say that I was going to pause here at this point to apologize for getting too political this morning. But I decided not to. I understand not everyone is upset about how the November election turned out or what is going down in our country right now. But a significant number of us are, and given that diversity, equity and inclusion are key values of Unitarian Universalism, and those values are explicitly under attack by name by the new administration, and are being abandoned by the many corporations that were for DEI when it was good PR, I can’t not talk about the elephant in the room. Or the donkey.
And anyway, this isn’t about politics. This is about people’s lives – physical and spiritual. This is about safety – physical and spiritual.
And, I would submit, it is about something that shoots an arrow directly into the heart of our religious life: whether the Unitarian notion that we are all connected as one or the Universalist notion that everyone is worthy of love are, in and of themselves, strong enough to overwhelm the forces of tyranny.
We march. We call our senators and House representatives. We write angry letters. We attend rallies and hold signs. We support legal defense funds for those being persecuted. There is much we do, and much we can do, that is not passive, that is actively fighting the racism, xenophobia, misogyny, and corruption running rampant in our country right now.
The problem is that right now, it doesn’t feel like enough. And that can be dispiriting and demoralizing. But let’s look at the problem another way. Let’s talk about the difference between what is policy and what is permanent. Human-made versus spiritually ordained. Policy is a tool of policymakers, and while policies can have real consequences, for good or ill, they come and they go. The eternal and everlasting, which include our values and our principles, such as the interdependent nature of our very existence – well, they sail right on through good times and bad, unadulterated, unchanged. I don’t know about you, but if I have to choose sides, I’m going to go with the thing that remains in our hearts and in our minds, the soul-stuff of our spiritual existence. I’ll take the mountain in Alaska, The Great One, over what we’re ordered to call it. I’ll take the huge body of water south of Florida over what cartographers are being forced to label it. I’ll go with permanence over transience any day.
I mean, if a book is banned, does that book cease to exist? Thanks to librarians and free speech advocates all over the country, a lot of banned books tend to see renewed interest and increased sales. But even if all the copies of a book were destroyed, the book itself, the collection of thought, still exists. Its contents transcend human interference.
Here's a great example of that drawn from our own Unitarian Universalist ancestry. In 1553, Michael Servetus, a Catholic theologian from Spain, was burned at the stake by John Calvin, a leader of the Protestant Reformation, for heresy. Our first Unitarian martyr. Servetus’s crime? He wrote books claiming that nowhere in the Bible was there proof of a Holy Trinity, and that therefore there was only one God and that Jesus was of divine inspiration but not himself divine. Calvin, who insisted everyone believe in a Holy Trinity, Father, Son and Holy Ghost, was having none of that.
After Servetus was burned at the stake, both Catholics and Calvinists burned nearly every copy of his latest book. But Servetus’s ideas of religious freedom and questioning basic doctrines of Christianity lived on and helped lead to Unitarianism, the idea that God is one. And here we are today in a Unitarian church that has been around nearly 400 years.
Fast forward to today, and one of the most obvious assaults on inclusion is happening in real time right now, the full-court press to erase transgendered people from the human conversation – and now, even history. This past week, the administration directed the National Park Service to remove the letters and symbol "TQ+" from LGBTQ+ and all mention of transgender people from the Stonewall National Monument website page.
The monument, located in Greenwich Village in New York City honors the Stonewall riots, a series of spontaneous riots and demonstrations against a police raid that took place in the early morning hours of June 28, 1969, at the Stonewall Inn, in the Greenwich Village neighborhood. Although the demonstrations were not the first time gay Americans fought back against government-sponsored persecution of sexual minorities, the Stonewall riots marked a new beginning for the gay rights movement in the United States and around the world. President Barack Obama declared the site a national monument in 2016.
In addition to removing TQ+, the Stonewall National Monument web site has removed a page about pride flags associated with the movement, including the trans pride flag, all for the cause, according to the new administration, of "restoring biological truth to the federal government."
This is the modern-day equivalent or burning all the copies of Michael Servetus’s book. Trying to erase something you disagree with from history. You can’t have a Stonewall monument without mentioning trans people. As trans blogger Erin Reed noted this week, “Trans women and gender-nonconforming people were some of the most influential activists behind the Stonewall movement and what followed.”
What the National Park Service has done would be ludicrous if it weren’t so sinister, so hateful. But what do we do in response?
This is where I believe random acts of inclusion are one of the ways we can resist the overt dehumanization taking shape before our eyes. If we, at every opportunity, reach out to those on the margins, those being persecuted or targeted, if we simply let them know we see them, we are resisting. We are laying claim to the parts of us a policy or executive decree cannot invade or touch.
What do random acts of inclusion look like? It could be as simple as saying hello to the person behind you in the checkout line at the supermarket, or the person ringing you up. I learned last week that ICE has been going into Market Baskets, presumably because the vast offering of ethnic foods may attract immigrants. So smile. Say hello. You never know who’s standing next to you – until you ask.
It could be as simple as remembering to mention your personal pronouns when introducing yourself to a group. My friend Li, who uses they/them pronouns and who also has a transgender daughter, once told me that when someone argues that mentioning personal pronouns isn’t necessary, or worse, misgenders them, it is like being rendered invisible. There were tears in their eyes when they shared this with me. Mentioning your personal pronouns is a way of saying, to no one in particular but to everyone, I see you.
It could be as simple as trying to listen more than you speak. Sounds pretty passive, doesn’t it? But as anyone here who has come to Soul Matters on Monday nights can tell you, there is such a thing as active listening, and, perhaps oddly but then again perhaps not, listening can be a way of seeing. When you give someone space to talk, and as they gradually realize you’re not going to interrupt them or correct them or say, well, here’s what I think … a funny thing happens. A person gets to hear what they themselves think. In a sense, they get to discover themselves and what’s going on inside of them. Not only do they know you see them, they see themselves. That can be a gift.
Once, when I served as a chaplain at Boston Medical Center, I met with a man from Venezuela. He had been admitted for Covid. He had also just learned his mother back in his native country had taken ill and was possibly dying, and he was beside himself because he couldn’t travel to see her because he had Covid. This was two days before Christmas. He was distraught and had asked specifically to talk with “a man of God.” I was the man of God on rotation that day.
I listened to that gentlemen for an hour. He cried, sometimes laughed, often repeated himself, and I think during the course of that hour I said maybe three things. At the end of it, he said, “Well, I feel so much better now, Pastor. I knew all I needed was to talk with a man of God.”
When I told my supervisor of my experience and that I felt I hadn’t done anything, she assured me that I had done exactly what that man needed. She said, “You allowed him to talk himself whole.’”
Those are just some ways to include those who need to know they are seen and heard. I’m sure there are many more, including better ones. The point is that it just might be simpler than you think, and it also might not look particularly aggressive. But make no mistake: When we include another, when we see them, we’re saying, I include you in my reality. We’re not separate. We are bound up together, you and I. You are not alone. And neither am I. And that is putting a stake in the ground. That is saying, “We’re not going to let them shake us.”
There is a Unitarian Universalist reading titled “Love Is Hard” that gets at the crux of everyday inclusion. It goes like this:
Love is hard.
Love for people, especially those who are different from you.
Love that says “I see you as a person.”
Love that says “let your unique light shine in the world” because each of our souls touches the divine mystery.
Love that says “we’re on a journey together, and my fate is tied up with yours.”
Love that grabs you and won’t let go until your whole life is dedicated to siding with love.
Love that changes the world.
Love is hard. Do it anyway.
One of the authors of that piece is Tarasa Cooley, a minister and former director of congregational life for the UUA. In an essay she wrote titled, “The Global Challenge of Universalism,” Cooley went a little deeper about championing the divine inside each of us even in the midst of imperialism, such as we are in right now. Cooley recalled a Super Bowl commercial for Chrysler that aired in 2012 featuring Clint Eastwood; the commercial was called “It’s Halftime in America.” The commercial was about how we all have to come together as Americans to show the rest of the world how superior we are. Sound familiar?
In response to that commercial, Cooley writes, some UU ministers produced a video called, “Wholetime in America.” In it they said,
This isn’t about the superiority of our country. It’s about the strength of our souls… My faith is a faith for the whole. It tells the story of a shared human journey…. In a culture obsessed with domination, I as a UU will continue to share a different gospel, the story of cooperation, of people coming together to find that sacredness within each of us, and to live the salvation available to all.1
Those words appeared in 2012. Here we are, 13 years later, and the gospel of which those UU ministers spoke feels especially urgent right now. We need something more lasting than political campaigns, something whose source comes from outside our sociopolitical milieu, something that defies the maddening careening from one electoral cycle to another.
No, we need something that doesn’t depend on votes or politicians or PAC donations, something that overrides even veto overrides by not allowing our love to be legislated away. We need the ancient and sacred art of inclusion. Now more than ever, in public and private spaces, on the streets and in the supermarkets, we need to not turn our backs or turn away from the stranger. We need to, as one of our hymns says, circle round for freedom and envelop those most maligned in a loving embrace. We really need one another right now, and it’s going to take every last loving being to stand as one people in defense of love and in defiance of tyranny.
Because where there is inclusion, there is hope. In her essay, Cooley writes,
I am often asked whether I see a real future for Unitarian Universalism. I do. But it will look and feel different than it does today. It does not require us to abandon who we have been and what we do but to expand into a fuller expression of the values we have been given by our spiritual ancestors.
Our spiritual ancestors didn’t use the acronym DEI, nor did they necessarily use those terms, but they championed the reality of a multicultural world, of fighting for the rights of all human beings, of including the slave, the marginalized, the forgotten, the voiceless. Our ancestors fought for the abolition of slavery, women’s rights, civil rights, marriage equality, and more recently climate justice and LGBTQ+ justice.
They did it through good times and bad. They recognized that kings and dictators come and go but that love reigns eternal. They struggled, as do we, but nevertheless, they persisted. They understood, as do we, that even random acts of kindness, of inclusion, are not without risk. They certainly are not without risk now. But we can’t not see, we can’t not listen, we can’t not love.
Or, as Cooley wrote, “Love is hard. Do it anyway.”
May it be so, and blessed be.
Note: In the recording, I miss-title the video mentioned as “Wholeness in America.” The correct title is “Wholetime in America.” The link to the video is provided above.
Cooley, Tarasa G. The global challenge of Universalism. Turning Point: Essays on a New Unitarian Universalism. Muir, Fredric, ed. Boston: Skinner House Books (2016), 92.
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