Who Has Time for Collective Liberation?

/in , /by

When I preached the glossary service three weeks ago, I encountered a question that was too big to fit into the time we had for that service. It was about the term “liberal religion.” We have a tagline on our letterhead and now on our website that reads “A liberal religious light since 1893.”

Since we just had the November election, I want to be clear that liberal in the sense of liberal religion does not necessarily describe the electoral politics of our congregation or the Unitarian Universalist religious movement. We don’t endorse any candidates or parties. I do speak about how our values translate into public and collective power. Liberal religion is a term that describes not what a religion believes, or how its people vote, but how its beliefs work, though those things frequently do go hand in hand.

Liberal religion means, broadly, religion that is not limited by fixed doctrine but instead contains a framework for further evolution. Many religions have a liberal tradition–we’re not the only ones. In my seminary education alone, I read and studied with scholars from liberal Protestant Christian, Catholic, Jewish, Muslim, and Buddhist traditions. If this is new to you, just because you haven’t experienced it doesn’t mean it doesn’t exist. Let me know if you want a bibliography.

In the Unitarian Universalist context, we have made a tradition of outgrowing our own previously held doctrine. We don’t have a creed here. We do have shared values that guide our ethical decision-making. Those shared values are Justice, Equity, Transformation, Pluralism, Interdependence, and Generosity, grounded in a foundation of Love. Conscience, reason, and inspiration are our tools in making ethical decisions.

To go back to 19th century Unitarianism, older than our congregation, Theodore Parker preached about the Transient and Permanent aspects of Christianity. Doctrine on the nature of Christ, the miracles, the things Jesus did two thousand years ago, all of that was transient; the teachings of love are permanent, and that is what we carry with us. And you know what, a lot of what Theodore Parker wrote turned out to be transient too.

Liberal religion expects to grow and change. I really hope that one hundred years from now, all of my ethical commitments like:

  • All genders are sacred and trans people are free to live as their truest selves
  • Migration is a human right in an unstable world. People need the freedom to migrate and the safety to not migrate.
  • All people deserve freedom and a say in their government
  • All people have the right to food, housing, healthcare, education, and support throughout their lives

I hope all of those ethical statements sound ridiculously outdated someday, and the sooner the better, because then we will have built a world where those things are taken for granted.

But the real question here, from the person who submitted this term for the glossary service was, ‘Is there such a thing as radical religion?’ I don’t frequently hear those words together, though Unitarian Universalists and others do talk about radical meaning grasping something at the root, getting the whole metaphorical carrot, I guess, and not just the leaves.

I more frequently hear us talk about the difference between liberal theologies and liberation theologies. Liberal religion, with its liberal theologies, is concerned with the growth and freedom of the individuals who practice and believe them. Liberation theologies are concerned with generating freedom where it’s missing. In seminary, I studied Latin American liberation theology, Black liberation theology, Indigenous and Asian and African liberation theologies, women’s and queer liberation theologies. My friend Rebecca Stevens-Walter is a children’s liberation theologian. Liberation theologies ask what does salvation mean for someone who is oppressed?

I find this question fascinating when we hold it in the context of Universalism, which is to say that all people are loved without reservation and deserve what they need to thrive; liberation theology reminds us that those of us who face particular oppressions might need more than one-size-fits-all salvation. It’s why we have Black Lives Matter and a Pride flag on the outside of our building. Sometimes loving everybody means being on the side of people particularly. Love makes demands of our consciences, and loving everybody means dismantling oppression, for the freedom and healing of both the oppressed and the oppressor.

Liberation theology in a theistic frame says that God is on the side of the oppressed. God never stops loving everyone, but sometimes love means stopping harm, righting wrongs, making sure the people who don’t have enough get what they need. You can see this idea in the ministry of Bishop William Barber, Rev. Liz Theoharis, and the multi-faith coalition at the heart of the Poor People’s Campaign. It says in the Bible and the religious texts of many traditions that how we treat those who are poor, those who have less power, matters more than who can offer the best sacrifice.

The world has so many needs right now, and always, and none of them is more important, even if they seem to take turns as most dire and urgent. Food insecurity matters, and healthcare, and safety for immigrants and trans and queer people. And disaster response. And really everything. In the Beloved Community, it all matters, from ending genocide down to the tiniest animal shelter.

I often ask you to imagine the Beloved Community, where everyone has what they need to thrive, where we no longer experience racism, poverty, militarism, where we build positive peace and settle conflict constructively, without violence. I have never lived in the Beloved Community. It has not yet existed, at least in the sense of everyone in the whole world having what we need.

But I have experienced it in tiny glimmers. A holiday dinner where everyone, including diabetics and vegans and omnivores and food-allergics sat down hungry and got up satisfied. A meeting where people came together broken and in conflict and decided to meet the humanity in one another, not to compromise or even agree to disagree but simply to hear one another. Maybe even an election like this past Tuesday, in which voters all across the country repudiated the ongoing persecution of poor people, disabled people, immigrants, and trans and queer people by voting for change.

Like with most things, collective liberation, I don’t know how to get to the end goal from these tiny glimmers. I don’t have a plan. But like any kid who grew up with the Ghostbusters, the X-Men, and the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, I believe that having a plan is not nearly as important as having a team. Having a team means that we don’t all need to have the same gifts, and it’s better if we don’t.

Deepa Iyer’s children’s book We Are the Builders, as well as her helpful workbook Social Change Now: A Guide for Reflection and Connection propose ten roles for social change.

  • Frontline responders: These are the folks who mobilize quickly, who always seem ready to help and calm in the storm. The first example I can think of here is LUCE, responding to ICE detentions. LUCE was part of the ICE bystander training we hosted last month, and I am so grateful that they’re running the hotline for ICE sightings, verifying them, and helping those who have been detained and their families.
  • Visionaries: These are the people who know where we’re going, the ones who ask if the direction we are heading will get us to our ultimate goal. Sometimes these are the ones who wind up at the microphone at a protest, the ones who reconnect us to our hope.
  • Builders: These folks do details, solve the problems, and get it done. We have a lot of builders in this congregation, and I appreciate you all so much.
  • Disrupters: These are the people who take risks to call out injustice. Think of whistleblowers. Think of people in inflatable frog costumes pointing out the cruelty of our government.
  • Caregivers: These are the folks who make it safe for others to get what they need and feel their feelings. We don’t always name the caregivers as an important part of movements, but they are the ones who remind us to rest, make sure we eat, ask us how we’re taking care of ourselves. We would fall apart without them.
  • Experimenters: These are the out-of-the-box thinkers, the ones who are willing to try new things and see what works, what doesn’t, and what we learn along the way. They call us beyond our comfort zones and have faith that we can survive and learn from things that don’t go according to plan.
  • Weavers: These are coalition-builders, the ones who find what we have in common across perceived differences. They keep the larger ecosystem in mind and can look beyond self-interest. They build bridges between communities.
  • Storytellers: These are the poets, the documentary filmmakers, the photographers, the ones who make a narrative out of the moments and complex characters out of headlines. They connect the movement to its humanity.
  • Healers: These are the people who move our society and movements, as well as our congregation, into healthier ways of being and interacting. This looks like practicing moving through emotions together, repairing relationships, sitting with grief.
  • Guides: These are the wise elders, regardless of age, who translate their own experience for others to use, who know that some things may be different this time around, but their thoughtfulness can be a resource.

The disrupters and weavers, for example, don’t understand things the same way, or work the same way, but both roles, or really all ten, are necessary for creating a future that is actually for all of us. And infighting between people whose ultimate goals are aligned is a huge distraction from our collective liberation. Which is not to say that we need to play nice with those who dehumanize us and those we love, but the work we do to come together across difference is part of the work of building Beloved Community.

Nobody is all of these social change roles. I tell myself that, over and over, and sometimes it sinks in that I, or you, don’t have to be good at all of them. Because together, we have one another. Collective liberation needs all of us working in our different ways, not all doing the same thing. Once again, we’re called to connection not perfection.

If you feel guilty that protests make you anxious, if you don’t know the right thing to say when times are hard, if you hate phone-banking, that’s okay. It’s just not your role. Do you believe me when I say that there are people who feel the joy of their community at a protest, who actually enjoy knocking on strangers’ doors to canvass for an issue, who get a thrill from asking for donations? They really exist. I encourage you to find your role in making the world a better place, the place that makes you feel alive and connected to your purpose. If you have time or money to give, and you can do so with joy, then you’ve found your place just right.

And you know what, maybe what you can do right now is survive, and that is enough. The world is a better place with you in it. As Julian Jamaica Soto says, “All of us need all of us to make it.”

So maybe sometimes it feels like we don’t have time to get everybody free, but it won’t be Beloved Community until everyone belongs. We’re not piecemeal struggling people up into privilege. We’re called to build something so much better, joyfully interdependent, for a better world than we have ever known. So, it’s not so much who has time for collective liberation as who has time to wait?

None of us can do everything, and all of us can do something. All of us need all of us to make it. May we each find the gifts we can offer with delight. Amen.

To view the sermon, click the link below.

 

Featured photo by Kelly Cristine on Unsplash

The Glow of Generosity

/in , /by

A sermon by Rev. Rachael Hayes

Last June, our congregation adopted a mission statement in our annual meeting. What I appreciate about this mission statement is that it was crowdsourced from our congregation rather than proposed by a few individuals.

The mission statement process began with two questions: what is our purpose, and how does it guide us?

The Committee on Shared Ministries asked these questions, or versions of them, over the course of two years. Why do we exist? What do we want to mean in our community?

And it became clear to us, very early on, that there were three main reasons our congregation exists:  

  • To Support one another through a culture of connection.
  • To Nurture our spirits as we learn and grow together.
  • And to Build Beloved Community within and beyond our Congregation by putting our ideals and values into action.

That’s our mission statement. The longer version has more detail about how we want to do those things, but this is the story we heard over and over again from the members of our congregation.

I don’t think anyone in the congregation would have phrased these things exactly the way they sound in the formal statement, but it’s clear that the voices who contributed had a shared trajectory. Though some of us take side quests, we’re more or less on the same path.

The mission of the congregation has changed over the last nearly 140 years. Well, it has and hasn’t. The Universalist circuit-riding preachers came to Amherst in the late 19th century with their mission of hope not hell, of universal belovedness, and all of that sounds like what we’re up to right now. Their version had a lot more Jesus in it than ours, but the central message of Love, in our relations with one another, in our theology and our practice, in our relations with the larger world, that’s what we’ve always been here to do.

Communities guided by liberal theology have followed our values above all, and that’s why I am so encouraged by our mission statement. We do love, and this is how we do it.

I like to imagine how our congregation from any point in our past would respond to our congregation now.

The woman preacher part wouldn’t be especially scandalous. Universalists have had women preachers, going back to Olympia Brown. She wasn’t the first woman preacher, because women have preached forever, but she was the first woman ordained by her denomination in the US. She was ordained in 1863, before our congregation existed, and pastored congregations in Weymouth Landing, Massachusetts; Bridgeport, Connecticut; and Racine, Wisconsin. Our congregation has actually known women ministers since the 1890s. So, while my gender might be scandalous for those of us who grew up in or hearing about traditions without women clergy, it’s nothing new for our congregation.

Our congregation has celebrated queer relationships and families since at least the 1990s. Kids have been growing up in queer families here for decades. I don’t actually know the date of our first same-sex union. If you have more information on that, I’d love to hear it.

Some of our traditions might feel like they have always been there. The Water Ritual, which we celebrated last week, is about 40 years old; the Flower Ceremony is about 100 years old. Sharing Joys and Sorrows is maybe 50 years old. Though the iconography of the flaming chalice goes back to world war 2, lighting the chalice in worship only began in the 1980s. 

Traditions come and go, but the central value of love remains.

What are we here to do? We’re here to love.

During the 2024 and 2025 General Assemblies of the Unitarian Universalist Association, which is to say the big national meeting of Unitarian Universalists, delegates from congregations all over the country voted to affirm a change to Article II of the UUA’s bylaws. Stay with me–I know bylaws is a magic word that can put some people to sleep. This is the section of our bylaws that talks about why the Unitarian Universalist Association exists, including the Principles and Sources we affirm. How many of you are aware that the UUA bylaws no longer lists these Principles?

The details are slightly different, but it’s all still there, perhaps in a more expansive fashion.

Instead of listing principles, we have six values supported by the central value of love. Justice, Equity, Transformation, Pluralism, Interdependence, and Generosity.

And though I was absolutely in favor of this change, the word Generosity catches something in me. Maybe because one sense of the word implies that we should have a lot of money to give away, or that it implies money or class in general. And we don’t worship money, and we value each other’s character and actions, not parentage.

But generosity is so closely related to generate, and generate is a very exciting word. Generate as in put into motion. Generate as in give birth to. How do Unitarian Universalists put our love into motion? Because when we’re living our values, we do. We don’t just congratulate each other for being good and loving–we make things happen.

Across the national association, you can see those things when you flip through the pages of UU World magazine. But let’s talk closer to home. Love is making things happen here. 

  • Love is cooking up potatoes and eggs and sausage for over 100 people each week, during our Wednesday community breakfast.
  • Love is connecting with organizations making the world a better place, introducing them to our congregation, and sharing our offering plate with them.
  • Love is getting up early on a Sunday morning to sing in the choir, preparing anthems that open our hearts.
  • Love is calling our attention to issues that matter: indigenous awareness, climate justice, reproductive justice, democracy.
  • Love is carefully funding and enacting our mission so that we have a lasting impact for our members and our community.
  • Love is caring for a precious and peculiar wooden meetinghouse building so that we have a place to be together.
  • Love is putting that same building in the service of the wider community, offering it as a meeting place for justice, diversity, and collective memory.
  • Love is welcoming people to the service on Sunday, at the door, with social hour snacks, with tech, with careful planning and execution of the service.
  • Love is visiting someone going through a rough time, sometimes bringing a home-cooked meal or a bag of cider donuts.
  • Love is nurturing the ethical and spiritual selves of our children and youth, especially while we keep our program running without a director of religious education.
  • Love is pitching in for potlucks and suppers, is daring to be known and to know others in small groups, is playing charades and building connections. And building trust, with people who just happened to show up to this same congregation.

Each one of those small acts of love is wonderful, is a seed. But together, they grow and grow. This is what our congregation is made of. It’s not made of shingles or stained glass. It’s the organic and mystical network between people who have decided to put their love into action. It’s a whole micro-ecosystem of living in generosity, of love in active connection.

In 1893 or in 2025, our congregation has only ever been made of what a group of people decided to accomplish together. I joke sometimes that what is a congregation if not a group project through the centuries, but the institution matters, and it’s a thing that gives us hope on hard days. Because it’s a thing that gives us hope on hard days.

We have come through hard days together. The early covid pandemic, the first Trump administration, just to name a couple. Sometimes these feel like the hardest days. I don’t know. But these are the days we have now. It may feel frivolous to ask you to put your time and attention and energy into our congregation when so much is going wrong, but I don’t think that’s true. The touchstones of investing our attention into something we can feel making a difference can sustain us, not just the connections we nurture.

And it’s not only the giving side of that investment that builds our generosity. There is reciprocity to this flow. I know that we’d all love to give from the things that are perfect and finished in ourselves, but our congregation is made of connection, not perfection. Please don’t wait till you’re out of the hospital to let us know that you’ve been sick. Don’t wait for the crisis to be over and digestible to open your heart. These connections that make us stronger are forged in vulnerability, not in presentability or excellence.

When I found Unitarian Universalism as a young adult, I was in a rough place. I was grieving the end of my first career, realizing that it didn’t offer what I wanted after all. The centerpoint of my week was my therapy appointment, not exactly something I looked forward to. And then I walked through the doors of Fourth Universalist. I began to live my week Sunday to Sunday, not therapy to therapy. This is not a rejection of therapy–I didn’t quit going. But my therapy was full of things in my life that I had to figure out how to change. The congregation was something else altogether: that’s where I connected with the part of me that has always been worthy and whole. Being with a room full of people who saw my worthiness and wholeness week after week made it easier for me to see it in myself.

Being part of that kind of community made me want to share it. To receive it, but also to make it. It made me generous, in a way that didn’t have much to do with money at all. I came to the potluck. I helped replant the garden. I facilitated a small group. I co-led services. I started a racial justice initiative, which led to public witness events both at marches and in front of our doors. Or rather, we did, the members did, together. 

Getting involved in that congregation transformed my life. I had more capacity and more daring to take on hard things, including seminary, including surviving other life changes, because I had a network of generosity bolstering me. People who believed in me abundantly, people I wanted to be just as good to as they were to me. I don’t know if I would be your minister now without the gift of being so deeply connected to that congregation for that pivotal period of my life.

It is a gift to yourself, not just to the congregation, to participate in the life and labor of the congregation. Today following the service, we’re having an event in the social hall. It’s called Building Shared Community, and I encourage you to go and find a new way to get involved in the many committees, circles, and events that make our community strong, generous, and brilliant. This is our congregation, and it will be what we make it.

Photo by Diego PH on Unsplash

We Are

/in , /by

We affirm our newest members in their wholeness. We want you to find belonging here, to trust our congregation with your real self. To jump in, to join in our traditions, to share your ideas, to bring your passions.

And that means that all of us need to open to our new members. This is Amherst, and this is a Unitarian Universalist congregation, and we expect everyone to have opinions, to participate in our governance, to swell our ranks but also to shake us up.

Though we value our individual and collective histories, we’re not here to stay the same. As we grow with our new members, as all of us grow from encountering the complexity of one another, it is impossible that we could stay the same.

Or to put it another way, a congregation of freethinkers that’s older than everyone in it will not be the same as when it began. It won’t even be the same as when our current longest member joined. It’s not even the same as it was six years ago, when I first entered this sanctuary. Beloved members and friends have moved, have died. New people come in and don’t take the places of those who came before. They find or make their own places. Each member no longer with us was unique. Each member here is unique. Those who join in the future will be unique too. There’s no replacing those people who did that thing you liked so well. And the people who come after are doing a new thing, or doing the old thing a new way. This is how it’s supposed to be.

Each of us is unique. This congregation needs the unique perspectives of all of us to be its most vibrant version. We don’t welcome those who are different in spite of those differences; we welcome everyone in their uniqueness. We’re not looking for common ground here–we’re rejoicing in a wild and varied terrain.

I have something to tell you, though maybe the octopus sermon tipped you off. I can be a little weird. And I don’t need people to love me in spite of it. In the wisdom of my 40s, I have come to realize that I don’t need to be tolerated. I need to be loved, in my specificity. I need people to know me for who I really am, to celebrate with me in my joy, to accompany me in my struggles, to sit kindly with me in my sadness, to laugh with me in the absurdity of it all, to challenge me and hold me accountable, and to trespass into strangers’ lawns to sniff their lilacs. Those are the relationships I curate in my life, not the ones where people look at their phones when I start getting excited about how beautiful and strange life can be.

And everyone deserves to be loved specifically. Not because they’re part of a group or even a congregation, not because they fit in, but because they are absolutely unique in the world and loved for it.

Our world would love to classify us, to bundle us all into packages of data, to sell and consume. But here, we’re doing something different.

The policies of the current federal administration have placed great value on sameness, on some sort of default if not ideal human, who is white and cisgender and straight and able-bodied and wealthy and US-born and English-speaking and Christian and male. And that’s garbage. I know several guys who hit all of those categories, and they’re not garbage at all, but enacting policy that sets them up as the default while the rest of us can’t measure up is garbage.

I’m particularly troubled by secretary of health and human services Robert F Kennedy Jr’s obsession with autism. The way he speaks about the worth of autistic people, as people who are burdens, that’s some hot eugenicist garbage. And we’re definitely here to do something different.

I want to give some love right now to all of our neurodivergent members, friends, kids, and neighbors. You matter. And you belong here. If you want to talk with me about what might make our congregation friendlier to you, I welcome it. We don’t all need the same things, and that’s actually a good thing. That means we can help one another. We all have different strengths and passions and gifts as well as access needs. So, friends who have autism, ADHD, dyslexia, Down syndrome, Tourette’s, PTSD, traumatic brain injury, dementia, epilepsy, chronic mental illness, and all the other forms of neurodiversity, any brain that isn’t typical, yes, you belong, if you want to. You don’t need to fit in to belong with us.

Every now and then we come back to that question of how do we do a better job with diversity in our congregation, and one of the most important things to remember is that we actually value uniqueness, not welcome in spite of differences. When we value diversity, of every kind, we remember that everyone who wants to join our covenant belongs, not just to fill our numbers but to share their whole unique selves.

How wonderful, how beautiful you all are. How full of inspiration. What a blessing to be here.

Photo by Jeremy Thomas on Unsplash

Songs of Freedom

/in , /by

A Sermon by Rev. Rachael Hayes

Before I begin my thoughts on our texts today, I want to name that this holiday and the Exodus story would feel easier to approach if the ceasefire still held. What the Israeli government is doing in Gaza is heartbreaking. We have raised our lament and lament still for the hostages returned and unreturned, for the fifty thousand Gazans who have been killed, for all people in Israel and Palestine and Lebanon who live with fear for their safety and their children’s safety.

It feels more complicated this year, because I know that others will tell the ancient Exodus story to justify the actions of contemporary governments and the safety of one child over another. But when I turn to this story that people have told for thousands of years, this long, long journey of Moses and his mixed multitude, I hear something else. And I invite you to pause before closing your heart to this story OR thinking that it holds just one meaning OR thinking that this story is too old to have any truth in it.

This passage from Exodus comes later than we might usually go when telling the story. This is way after the plagues, after Pharaoh relents, after the mixed multitude, which Rabbi Danya Ruttenberg reminds us is the Israelites and all their friends and neighbors who came with them, after the mixed multitude walk through the sea, after God provides them with manna and water in the desert. Moses goes up onto the mountain and God gives him the ten commandments and a lot of laws and instructions.

Moses has been on top of the mountain for a long time, 40 days and 40 nights, and the crowd at the foot of the mountain is getting restless. Poor Aaron, who has been left in charge while Moses is gone, is trying to keep this whole thing from going sideways. Surely some of them have lost faith that Moses is coming back, fear that the God who brought them out of Egypt had abandoned them. And the Israelites and the rest of the multitude do a very human thing: they turn back to a thing they had tried in the past.

The worship of bulls has been a common thing across human history—and these folks have just left Egypt, where the bull-god Apis was worshiped as an intermediary between humans and other gods. So, Aaron takes their jewelry and makes a calf out of gold, perhaps to serve as an intermediary in Moses’ absence. Something tangible in the face of uncertainty. The story goes on to talk about how God overreacts, Moses talks God down, Moses overreacts, a lot of people die. It’s a mess.

And I find it incredibly relatable. We all want something to hold onto. Think of it this way: Aaron, who was Moses’ most trusted collaborator, and the very people God had delivered from Egypt and sustained in the desert, who witnessed miracles firsthand on a daily basis, even they in this time of uncertainty do something that they had specifically been commanded not to do. Yikes.

Rich Orloff’s poem, Resentment Is My Golden Calf, does something different. It asks us to consider what our own idols are. Not literal figures of worship, like Aaron’s golden calf, but maybe what shortcuts are we taking in our convictions?

Resentment is My Golden Calf

Resentment is my golden calf

See how it glistens

It’s always there to receive me

And oh, how good it makes me feel

Resentment is so much easier than love

Love is fragile

Resentment is sturdy

You can feel it without opening your heart

I can pray to it at any time

Openly or secretly

Resentment empowers me without asking that I give up victimhood

Can your god do that?

So, if your god isn’t satisfying your needs

Try resentment today

Resentment accepts everyone regardless of age, gender or race

All it asks is that you reject everyone else

Just look for the Golden Calf

It has more locations than you can imagine

Its glowing shine reflects all who have convinced themselves

That bitterness is the sweetest taste one can experience

 

What do we do that is more convenient than messy, complicated, abundant love? Orloff names resentment, specifically, but I can think of some more idols that I know: always needing to be right or to have the last word, having to see through to the bitter end, perfectionism, either/or thinking, constructing the world into heroes and villains, defensiveness, avoiding conflict, individualism–this list could get long. These are the idols I must remind myself to smash, to say nothing of the larger systems of oppression that con us into participating in them.

The old list of the sources of Unitarian Universalist faith includes a warning “against the idolatries of the mind and spirit.” And there’s a beautiful passage in our hymnal and Reform Judaism’s Gates of Prayer, possibly misattributed to Ralph Waldo Emerson, that goes like this:

 

A person will worship something—have no doubt about that.

We may think our tribute is paid in secret in the dark recesses of our hearts—but it will out.

That which dominates our imaginations, and our thoughts will determine our lives and character.

Therefore, it behooves us to be careful what we worship, for what we are worshipping we are becoming.

To put it another way, what’s subverting love in how you choose to be in the world. Or, since it’s Passover, and Passover is the celebration of the deep human yearning for freedom, where are you choosing a cheap imitation of freedom? Most of us have something that’s keeping us from fully embracing true freedom, but we don’t have to be stuck with it.

Jewish-American poet and activist Emma Lazarus wrote “Until we are all free, we are none of us free.” Freedom means everyone, everyone.

There is no real freedom that is for me but not you, for citizens but not immigrants, for one soul but not another. This message of the Exodus of the Israelites has inspired us, from generation to generation, throughout the long history of Judaism, from the self-emancipation of people enslaved in this country to the civil rights movement, throughout lands and times and people touched by Jewish and Christian and Muslim traditions, all of which tell this story. People everywhere pray, yearn, and work for freedom, all around the world, and we will continue to do so until freedom and peace come to the whole world.

Photo by Mohamed Fsili on Unsplash

The Silly Octopus

/in , /by

A sermon by Rev. Rachael Hayes

I would like to begin this time together with an embodied meditation. I invite you back to your breath and the feeling of your body. The breath inside you. The air around you. The bones and muscles holding you up.  The force of gravity hugging you into the earth and the structures upon it, the floor and the chair. Your own beautiful consciousness playing in this moment.

The year I lived in DC, I took a bunch of theatre classes. I worked at the theatre, so I could take classes in their conservatory for half price. I signed up for Principles of Realism and braced myself for doing scene work in the 20th century two-people-having-a-lifechanging-conversation style—not my favorite. I had my prejudices and did not connect with what I assumed I would be learning.

You see, I was all about the work of poetic theater playwrights like Mac Wellman and setting free the imagination to ask big questions on a tiny budget rather than trying to breathe life into a photograph. Or so I pre-judged.

The funny thing about this Realism and its Principles we were supposed to learn was that we had to set free our imaginations to get there, with no budget at all. One of the first assignments for that class was to do an animal improvisation. We had to observe an animal until we could portray it in the conservatory classroom. For some reason I decided I was going to be an octopus. I had only ever seen an octopus once, but it seemed like a thing I needed to do.

Luckily for me, there was an octopus in the national zoo. So that weekend I went to the zoo and stood in front of that big tank in the invertebrate house, stood there and watched the octopus all noodled up into the upper corner of the tank. It wasn’t doing much, so other people did not stop for long. They mostly paused for a moment before heading on to the crabs or other residents on exhibit.

It felt like being in a train station and not taking a train, just standing and watching as everyone moves around you. I laid my bag and coat on the floor and decided that I could try to copy the octopus not moving, if it wasn’t going to move while I was there. It swayed a little bit as it took in water through its gills and propelled it out through its funnel, so I started to play with the idea of being not so much air and bones but muscle and water, that the water I was in and the water that was in me were the same, that my body was sensing the water all over me and through me.

There I was, oh so subtly rocking in place trying to feel instead of my internal breeze of breath an internal tide, constantly waving in and out. The octopus began moving its tentacles in tiny subtle movements, tip over tip like shoelaces trying to untie themselves, so I copied that motion in my hands and my wrists, delicately spiraling, until the octopus’s motion became larger, moving the whole arm. I moved my whole arm, trying to embody that fluidity of motion.

I don’t know when the octopus saw me mirroring its motion—probably pretty early on, because they have excellent eyesight, you know—but it started copying me back. I had done mirroring exercises many times in theatre classes, where two people face each other and make the same movement at the same time, but this was the first time I had done such a thing with a non-human partner. The octopus made its movements larger and larger, until we were dancing back and forth across the front of its tank. I don’t know how long we kept this up, whether it was five minutes or thirty, long enough for me to get the feeling of the octopus in my body. My focus had narrowed to the tank in front of me. I could not tell you whether the invertebrate house was empty behind me or full of spectators.

It was a silly moment.

Silly, not meant disparagingly but way down in its root as being in the same word family as soul, which is a thing I learned from my poetic playwright Mac Wellman. Silly as opposed to proper or moralistic or respecting of an external order. Silly as coming from its own impulse. Silly in the way that this play meant everything and absorbed my whole being. My soul was invested in dancing with this octopus, and I think that it is because the octopus was teaching me how to move from my center out. You see, an octopus when it reaches does not reach with the ends of its arms. The movement spirals from its center until the whole arm—or sometimes the whole octopus—gets where it needs to go. The tips don’t operate separately from further up the arm. Everything comes from the center.

And we forget that, don’t we, while we’re so busy moving through the air with our skeletons inside us. We’ve even created a myth that the octopus can do eight different things at once since it has eight dexterous arms, rather than the unified grace I saw at the zoo. It’s almost as though the eight arms keep us from noticing the center.  Everything has a center. Even the octopus. Even us.

How do we connect to the center? How do we connect to the soul?

Ralph Waldo Emerson in his Divinity School Address called for, “first, soul, and second, soul, and evermore, soul” to fix what has become stale and rigid in our life together. I don’t know for sure that he would endorse pretending to be an octopus in public, but I do know that he was an advocate for the embodied and whole-hearted embrace of life. And the only way to come back to soul over and over again is to come back over and over again to risk appearing foolish for the demands of heart and soul.

It’s time to get silly, full of soul. The word has meant childish, pious, and foolish at various points in its history. The best translation I can find for the word silly as I mean it, as I feel it, is whole-hearted.  It’s time to be whole-hearted. It’s time to love something so much we let ourselves be beginners.

This formula has become my personal theory of everything. When in doubt, how do we lean deeper into the relationship? When called to something bigger, scale up from the center. When something goes wrong, where have we lost connection to the center? What’s the whole-hearted way to stay engaged?

It’s time to love people so much we screw up on Tuesday and keep trying on Wednesday, not for the sake of optics but for the sake of relationship. Daring to get it wrong in learning to get it right, learning in public, and for the love of God loving joy more than wit. It’s why we have covenants and not just rules. We make explicit how to create relationships not just how to break them.

It’s time to get silly, to love connection more than perception, to be fools together rather than cool to each other. It’s time to be all in. It’s time to ask the awkward question and listen to the answer. It’s time to love one another instead of loving things about one another. It’s time to be whole-hearted, to jump in rather than hang back.

What would happen if we tried to be whole-hearted instead of being right or good or smart? Who would we be to one another if we dared to be all the way there, without preconception? How could we be transformed by our own center? I think of how our life together might change, how we might reimagine our justice work, our idea of congregational right relations, if we dare to work from relationship rather than an imposed agenda.

Just to be clear, I’m not saying we can’t have agendas and procedures, but I am asking you to do something bigger. Agendas, procedures, bylaws, and institutions if they are to exist must serve our relationships rather than the other way around. How do they move from the center out, from that impulse to connect and be in a relationship that acknowledges that you are a whole and beautiful happening in the world just like I am, not simply my fellow committee member or my companion or my social hour friend? How do we create the pathways to relationships that acknowledge the heart in each other?

To be fair, we’re going to screw up. Eventually we will treat one another as objects instead of the wonders of the universe that we all are.  It happens. It happens every time there’s a relationship worth having. The way back in is to come back in, to lean into the relationship, the covenant, and say, “I didn’t take your perspective into account, and I am sorry.”

If any of you are taking notes, here’s the formula: “This is how I didn’t honor you. I am sorry.” Not “I’m sorry if you felt that way” or “I’m sorry if I offended you.” Nothing in the air, no if, just be sorry. And then do nothing. Honoring the relationship means not demanding a particular response, not imposing your project of how you will make amends. Return to treating them like a wonder of the universe who gets to make their own decisions and gets to decide how they show up to the relationship. You don’t protect your image. You open up. And learn how to not make the same mistake again.

And while you’re at it scale down and be this generous with yourself. Scale up and live boldly into the communities that are part of your life. Scale all the way up and get into beautiful relationship with earth and sky and ocean.

It’s time to look like fools, to try something new, to invite the new kid to play, to be the new kid, to forget everyone is or is not watching. It’s time to reach out in curiosity, because sometimes that which is curious reaches back. And the movement spirals from the center so beautifully, moving past what is probable and predictable to what is real beyond our imaginations. We are called to witness, and the only way to witness is from within, to get real in ourselves and our relationships, to get silly. It’s where the joy is, where the heart is, where the soul is, and that is how we come back to center ever more.

Please join me in a moment of prayer.

Breath of life, beat of our whole hearts,

We are called to this moment now.

Help us to be whole-hearted within it.

May our heartbeats remind us to live expansively in ourselves and with each other.

In the many names and many silences where we find our deepest connections.

Amen. Blessed be.

Full Service Below:

Photo by Alessandro Canepa on Unsplash

Resisting Reproductive Coercion in the Age of Trump

/in , , /by

 A sermon by Dr. Carrie Baker on January 26, 2025

Dr. Baker is the Sylvia Dlugasch Bauman Professor of American Studies and Chair of the Program for the Study of Women and Gender at Smith College. Dr. Baker’s new book, Abortion Pills, is available on open access and in print.

Thank you for inviting me back. Wonderful to be here with you today.

On January 22, 1973, 52 years ago last Wednesday, the U.S. Supreme Court decided Roe v. Wade, which recognized that the constitutional right to liberty included the right to make reproductive decisions without government interference. On June 22, 2022, the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade, opening the door to state abortion bans across the country. Today, 12 states prohibit abortion entirely; 4 states ban abortion at 6 weeks, 2 at 12 weeks, and 1 at 18 weeks. In the fall elections, 7 states passed constitutional amendments protecting abortion rights, including Missouri and Arizona, which had previously banned abortion. But in the last year other states have passed new bans, such as Florida, which now bans abortion at six weeks.

Despite these bans, the number of abortions in the U.S. has actually increased since Dobbs. In 2020—the year before Texas became the first state to ban abortion—the number of abortions in the U.S. was 930,160. In 2023, there were 1,026,700 abortions in the U.S.—an increase of close to 100,000. These numbers do not count the many people obtaining abortion pills outside of the medical system today.

How do we make sense of this? The number of abortions in the U.S. has increased for several reasons.

First, states banning abortion are also making access to contraception increasingly difficult, especially for young women, resulting in more unwanted pregnancies and more people needing abortions.

Second, anti-abortion policymakers do not support the kinds of policies that help people carry pregnancies to term and care for the children they have, such as paid parental leave, publicly funded childcare, living wage jobs, free school lunches and SNAP benefits. In fact, conservatives are now redirecting meager welfare dollars away from poor women trying to feed their children toward anti-abortion “crisis pregnancy centers” that use disinformation and coercion to pressure women to have children they cannot feed. If women can’t afford to care for their children, they will most often not want to carry unplanned pregnancies to term.

Third, conservative anti-abortion policymakers are passing laws that prevent health care professionals from providing life-saving medical care when women encounter complications during pregnancy, making giving birth in America much more dangerous. Maternal mortality and morbidity significantly increased in states that banned abortion after Dobbs. Anti-abortion prosecutors have also increased criminalization of pregnant women. I’ll say more about these two factors in a moment. But together, they discourage women from carrying pregnancies to term by making them medically and legally dangerous.

Finally, the increase in abortion is also due to the strengthening of abortion rights in states protecting them and the development of new avenues to access abortion pills, which are now used in over two-thirds of all abortions. Advocates have pioneered telehealth abortion, where health care providers consult with patients online and mail pills to them. They have also pioneered new avenues outside of the medical system, such as community networks sharing pills for free and websites selling pills very inexpensively.

These new avenues undermined the key anti-abortion strategy of limiting abortion to freestanding brick and mortar clinics, and then regulating these clinics out of existence—or terrorizing them. Since 1977, there have been 11 murders, 42 bombings, 200 arsons, 531 assaults, 492 clinic invasions, 375 burglaries, and thousands of other criminal activities directed at clinic patients, providers, and volunteers. Since Dobbs, there have been sharp increases in violent anti-abortion attacks on clinics, especially in states that protect abortion rights.

Last month, I published a book on the history and politics of abortion pills in the U.S., which thoroughly explores how these medications were developed, the fight to bring them to the U.S., the intense restrictions placed on them by the FDA and the medical system, and the campaign to increase access in recent years, including the development of telehealth abortion as well as the underground networks dispensing pills that are so critical to maintaining abortion access post-Dobbs. The book is available open access through Amherst College Press, and I have print copies here today available if you’d like one.

Abortion pills are more important than ever now that Donald Trump is in the White House again. But he and his people are coming after abortion pills because they know they are a critical path to accessing abortion. The Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025 policy agenda for Trump takes direct aim at abortion pills, with plans to roll back FDA approval of mifepristone and misuse a nineteenth century anti-obscenity law to criminally prosecute anyone who mails abortion pills, including distributors and doctors. While so far abortion bans have targeted medical providers and those helping people obtain abortion care, anti-abortion politicians are now proposing laws that target people who have abortions.

Legislation proposed in South Carolina, Oklahoma, North Dakota, and Indiana would reclassify abortion as homicide and prosecute patients. In South Carolina, Oklahoma and Indiana, that could mean giving women who have abortions the death penalty. In Texas, which also has the death penalty, twelve lawmakers recently pledged to bring forward similar legislation.

Health Consequences of Bans

The harms of abortion bans have fallen most heavily on people who are carrying wanted pregnancies to term, have health complications and are being denied care—and are dying.

In last summer’s Supreme Court case involving denial of emergency care to pregnant women, the National Women’s Law Center filed a brief documenting more than 70 cases of women almost dying, and one who did die—when they were denied emergency medical care because of abortion bans enacted across the country. “The true number of cases is likely significantly higher,” said the brief.

One involved a woman experiencing preterm premature rupture of membranes (PPROM), which is when the amniotic sac breaks prior to viability. Rather than treat her by terminating her pregnancy, the hospital sent her home. She returned to the emergency room two days later with severe sepsis. In another case, a doctor said to a nurse, “so much as offering a helping hand to a patient getting onto the gurney while in the throes of a miscarriage could be construed as ‘aiding and abetting an abortion.’ Best not to so much as touch the patient who is miscarrying…”

In another case, Mylissa Farmer was denied the emergency abortion care she needed, first by her local hospital in Missouri, and then by a hospital in Kansas. After diagnosing her with PPROM, doctors at both hospitals told Mylissa her fetus could not survive, and continuing her pregnancy would put her at risk of serious infection, hemorrhaging, the loss of her uterus, and even death.

Still, both hospitals refused to end the pregnancy. With her health deteriorating rapidly, Mylissa and her boyfriend drove more than four hours to an Illinois abortion clinic while she was in labor. 

She survived, but the medical and financial consequences of crisscrossing state lines to obtain life-saving abortion care linger to this day. Mylissa was docked pay for missing work and had to raise funds to pay for the Illinois care that her insurance refused to cover. Her boyfriend also lost his job because he was forced to miss work over the days he helped her travel. They could not regain steady employment for months.

Some women never get the care they need. A Texas woman, Yeniifer Alvarez-Estrada Glick, died from pregnancy complications on July 10, 2022, after a Catholic hospital in Texas failed to offer her an abortion. 

Other women who have died because of abortion bans include:

  • Josseli Barnica, Texas
  • Amber Nicole Thurman, Georgia
  • Candi Miller, Georgia
  • Porsha Ngumezi, Texas
  • Taysha Wilkinson-Sobieski, Indiana
  • Nevaeh Crain, Texas

… Say their names.

There are more, but we may never know because states with bans are disbanding their maternal mortality committees, so no one finds out about the deaths. Georgia fired everyone on their maternal mortality committee after Pro Publica publicized the deaths of Amber Nicole Thurman and Candi Miller. Texas has legally prohibited its committee from reviewing deaths that are considered abortion related. The NIH and the CDC do not require states to collect information about abortion-related deaths. And that was under Biden.

States with bans have higher maternal mortality and morbidity, and higher infant mortality. ProPublica has found, pregnant women have bled to death, succumbed to fatal infections and wound up in morgues with what medical examiners recorded were “products of conception” still in their bodies.

It’s hard to hear, but we must listen.

And remember, these same states are those with the weakest support systems for new mothers and poor children.

Criminalization of Pregnant Women

In addition to the harmful health consequences of bans, pregnant women are also facing increasing criminalization. Recent research from the organization Pregnancy Justice revealed that at least 210 women faced criminal charges because of their pregnancies or pregnancy outcomes in the year after Dobbs—the highest number of documented prosecutions ever in a single year. The real number is likely much higher. Most of the charges involved allegations of child abuse, neglect or endangerment, but they also included 9 cases of alleged homicide where there were pregnancy losses.

Many of these cases involved pregnant women who had positive drug tests, but most of these did not require any evidence that the drug use harmed the fetus or newborn. A significant number of the cases were based on prosecutors’ after-the-fact opinions on when and how pregnant women should have interacted with healthcare providers.

In 15 cases, the charging documents alleged women failed to obtain adequate prenatal care, and two alleged noncompliance with a medical provider’s recommended treatment.

Ten cases referred to failure to seek help during or after birth.

Three condemned mothers for breastfeeding their infants.

Pregnant women are in a special class of persons, under an exacting microscope and subject to arrest for otherwise non-existent crimes, such as “unlawful delays in obtaining health care.” 

Women’s reluctance to seek medical care is understandable, given the frequency with which medical providers share information about their pregnant patients with child welfare authorities and police. In over half of the cases, police relied on information obtained or disclosed in a medical setting. In 114 cases, the “child welfare” system was involved. 

“Out of fear of criminalization and family separation, many pregnant people avoid healthcare settings, even when they desire care,” said the report.

In a recent Georgia case, while experiencing a miscarriage, Candi Miller refused to go to a hospital because she feared criminal prosecution. She died in her bed, cradling her 3-year-old daughter.

Most of the people targeted for prosecution are poor or have low incomes.

Women are in a catch 22. If they go to the doctor, they may be denied care or criminalized. If they don’t go to the doctor, they may be criminalized. Rather than compassion and support, they receive judgment and punishment.

Meanwhile, prosecutors are not bringing criminal cases against companies and policymakers who release toxic agents into the environment that have clear causal connections to fetal harm, such as government officials in Flint, Mich., who knowingly switched the city’s drinking water supply to a source contaminated with lead, tripling the incidence of dangerously-high blood levels of lead in the city’s children.

Reproductive Coercion Is Violence Against Women

Laws that try to force women to continue pregnancies are a form of violence that subjects them to involuntary servitude and deprives them of bodily autonomy, dignity and equality. Abortion bans place pregnant women under state control and require them to endure the dangers of pregnancy, labor and childbirth against their will.

Pregnancy causes nausea, fatigue, tender and swollen breasts, constipation, body aches, dizziness, sleep problems, heartburn and indigestion, hemorrhoids, itching, leg cramps, numb or tingling hands, swelling, urinary frequency or leaking, varicose veins—and many more deeply invasive and painful experiences.

Pregnancy takes over the entire body, affecting the cardiovascular system, kidneys, respiratory system, gastrointestinal system, skin, hormones, liver and metabolism. It increases blood volume by about 50 percent and depletes calcium from the bones, decreasing bone density. Risks of pregnancy include high blood pressure, gestational diabetes, anemia, depression, infection and death.

These risks are particularly acute for women of color and low-income women in the United States, which has the worst rate of maternal deaths in the developed world. Labor and childbirth are extremely painful and bloody experiences, even with pain medications.

To force this labor on women is a violation of the 13th Amendment, which prohibits involuntary servitude.

Abortion bans also violate women’s equality rights. No human being is required to donate their organs, blood or body to another human being against their will, except for pregnant women. If someone forces another person to donate a kidney, they are committing a crime. No law requires a parent to give their organs or blood to their child, even if the child desperately needs it. Yet, abortion bans force pregnant women to donate their entire bodies to serve fetuses for nine months—a right that born children do not even have. These laws treat pregnant women differently than all other people in violation of the 14th Amendment equal protection clause.

Any attempt by the government—or anyone else, for that matter—to force another person to continue a pregnancy is a form of bodily assault with surprisingly similar dynamics to domestic violence and sexual assault. The essence of rape is taking control over another person’s body and forcing them to do something with their body that is against their will. Abortion bans do the same: They force pregnant people to do something with their bodies against their will, denying their bodily integrity and autonomy. When legislators pass abortion bans and restrictions, they are engaging in a form of violence against women and girls.

As Irene Weiser asks, “How can we ever begin to end violence against women if the laws of our society will not even guarantee the most fundamental of human rights to women—to say at all times, under all circumstances, what we allow to happen to our bodies?”

Resistance

With Trump and MAGA now in control of the executive branch of the federal government, it’s going to get worse before it gets better. But many people are fighting back hard.

States supporting reproductive rights, like Massachusetts, have expanded access to abortion and contraception since Dobbs. To support people in states banning abortion, grassroots activists have worked to pass telemedicine abortion provider shield laws in 8 states, including Massachusetts, so that U.S.-based health-care providers in these states can offer FDA-approved abortion pills to people in all 50 states, including those with bans. We have one such provider here in Massachusetts, a Cambridge-based organization called the Massachusetts Medication Abortion Access Project, or The MAP. Staffed by doctors, The MAP provides telemedicine abortion to people in ban states for a sliding scale fee.

In addition, grassroots activists have developed a robust alternative delivery system providing abortion pills to people in all 50 states, including those banning or restricting abortion. Operating outside of the medical system and extralegally, this system provides abortion pills to people in two ways: 1) through vetted online vendors who sell generic abortion pills for as little as $28 with 3 to 6-day shipping; and 2) through activist networks that mail free generic abortion pills to people in restricted states who can’t afford or access care otherwise. These networks include Red State Access and Las Libres.

Several organizations and resources exist to support people seeking and using abortion pills, including Plan C, which shares information on how to obtain abortion pills at plancpills.org; the Miscarriage and Abortion Hotline, which provides free and confidential medical support for using pills; Reprocare, which provides logistical and emotional support; and Repro Legal Helpline, which provides free, confidential legal services.

This robust alternative delivery system has served tens of thousands of people in the U.S. in the last two and a half years—people not counted in the official number of abortions in the U.S. Luckily, abortion pills are 90% effective and safer than Tylenol so they can be safely used without medical supervision.

In addition to these ongoing efforts, Democratic attorneys general and governors are fighting to protect reproductive rights. The Massachusetts attorney general Andrea Campbell is part of DAGA—the Democratic Attorney Generals Association, which is suing to block Trump administration rollbacks of reproductive rights. Maura Healey is part of the Democratic Governors Association, which is also pushing back against the Trump administrations violations of women’s reproductive rights. Finally, we must organize to take back Congress in 2026 and the White House in 2028.

We can do it because Americans want it. Currently, 63 percent of Americans say abortion should be legal in all or most cases. Of the 17 ballot measures on abortion since Dobbs, 14 of them were decided in favor of abortion rights, including in very conservative states such as Ohio, Missouri, and Kansas.

As UN Population Fund Executive Director Dr. Natalia Kanem said, “We need laws that will enable, rather than constrain, our human rights. We need human rights defenders who will advocate for policies that advance gender equality and reproductive rights. We must be those human rights defenders.”

I will close with a powerful call to arms from the Feminist Majority President Ellie Smeal:

“It’s tempting to feel overwhelmed. But I urge you to remember: the night is always darkest before dawn. Despair is a cunning thief, whispering that our efforts are futile. But history is a testament to the opposite—our resistance, our persistence, and our hope have always been the catalysts for change.”

Thank you.

Photo by Gayatri Malhotra on Unsplash