Ferdinand’s Refusal

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A sermon by Robin Livingston

For some of us, hearing the Story of Ferdinand this morning was the first time we heard it, but many of us have grown up with Ferdinand. A lot of us have a nostalgic sort of fondness for this bull. I think a lot of readers see themselves in Ferdinand, or aspire to be like him – someone who stays true to themself despite pressure from the outside world.

Ferdinand has been a mainstay of children’s literature for almost 90 years. The book was published in 1936 in the US, and had incredibly varied reception around the world. Despite the publisher’s predictions, it was a massive success in the United States. Munro Leaf, the author, says about Ferdinand that his intention was only to write a story that would encourage Lawson, the illustrator, to draw pictures that would make us laugh. Readers have interpreted Ferdinand as everything from a pacifist to a rugged individualist. It was burned in Nazi Germany and banned in Spain during the Spanish Civil War, but by 1938 it was so popular in the United States that Ferdinand was a balloon in the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade and Disney had made it into a short film.

Ferdinand is faced with a bullfight that he didn’t choose. The banderilleros and picadores try to rile him up and get him angry so that he will fight bravely against the matador. But instead, Ferdinand does what he always does, which is sit quietly and enjoy the smell of the flowers.

I think maybe the reason this story resonates with so many of us is because we also find ourselves stuck in places, systems, patterns, that we don’t want to be in. We didn’t choose to be in whatever our own bullring is, and yet we feel we have no other choice. Ferdinand gives us a possibility model. He shows us that even when we feel stuck, we have the option to refuse. Not only do we have the option to refuse the bullring we’re in, but we can find joy and calm among that bullring. It might also save us.

Reading The Story of Ferdinand reminded me of a story that Jenny Odell tells in her book How to Do Nothing: Resisting the Attention Economy. She tells the story of a tree called Old Survivor in the Oakland Hills. During and after the Gold Rush, as settler communities were rapidly growing and expanding, the old-growth redwood forest in the Oakland Hills was logged for timber. The entire old-growth forest, gone. Except, Old Survivor. Old Survivor was short compared to its neighbors, and kind of a funky shape.

It’s scraggly looking, and on a steep and rocky slope. Old Survivor didn’t live up to the standards for what it meant to be a “good tree”, for the purposes of timber, and so was left alone by the loggers. Not being a “good tree” was exactly what Old Survivor needed to be able to survive.

Ferdinand and Old Survivor both resist the systems happening around them, they are inconvenient. But both the bullfight and the logging would have been the end for Ferdinand and Old Survivor – the reason they are able to survive is because of what Jenny Odell calls their “resistance-in-place”. By resisting the systems that mean to destroy them, they are able to survive.

Our capitalist culture that requires more and more work for less and less pay is not designed for our survival – these systems are designed to maintain power in the hands of the few at the cost of the well-being of the many. But we also don’t have a way to completely disengage. Throughout history many groups and people have tried seceding from the confines of everyday life only to find that on a really basic level as humans we need each other.

So how do we, as Ferdinand and Old Survivor do, resist the system we exist in? Odell gives us some possibilities. One is to move away from a mindset of productivity and towards a philosophy of maintenance and ongoing care. To shift our ideas of success towards that which grounds us in survival and life and nurturing our basic needs. Odell’s book is called “how to do nothing”, but she suggests that we can’t simply “do nothing” – we have to replace it with “something”. We have to do “something” else.

She offers an option of finding ourselves grounded in place. To get to know the local natural world that we are a part of, and become connected to the natural world by knowing and experiencing it. She writes about her experience of birding. As she became familiar with more and more birds, her experience of time changed. She had a more intimate connection to the world around her, and the birds took on new meaning.

Ferdinand offers a similar answer – to simply stop and smell the flowers. There is not glory for Ferdinand in the flowers, no prize. But he gets to go back to his farm and his cork tree and keep on smelling the flowers. He gets to live.

I bet there are already ways you’re practicing your own refusal of whatever bullring you find yourself in, and finding others in that refusal. Maybe your refusal looks like growing your own food in your garden. Cooking for the Wednesday community breakfast. Buying second hand clothes. Starting a meal chain for someone having surgery. Setting strong boundaries between our “Eight hours for work” and “eight hours for what you will”. Cultivating relationships that don’t fit into typical boxes. Teaching your kids about the inherent worth and dignity of all beings including themselves.

Tricia Hersey, author of Rest is Resistance and founder of the Nap Ministry, might call Ferdinand’s refusal rest. Our grind culture that is always asking more of us, always holding the promise of “enough” and “rest” just out of reach beyond the next item on the to-do list, the next job, the next step.

The combination of grind culture and white supremacy have generated a world in which rest is not prioritized. Sleep, seemingly, is one of the few activities these days that cannot be monetized. Hersey’s refusal takes the shape of Communal Nap Experiences in which she sets up pillows and blankets and calming music to allow folks a space to rest.

Emily Nagoski and Amelia Nagoski write in their book Burnout: The Secret to Unlocking the Stress Cycle about how much rest we need. [quote]

So how much rest is “adequate”? Science says: 42 percent.

That’s the percentage of time your body and brain need you to spend resting. It’s about ten hours out of every twenty-four. It doesn’t have to be every day; it can average out over a week or a month or more. But yeah. That much.

“That’s ridiculous! I don’t have that kind of time!” you might protest….

We’re not saying you should take 42 percent of your time to rest; we’re saying if you don’t take the 42 percent, the 42 percent will take you. It will grab you by the face, shove you to the ground, put its foot on your chest, and declare itself the victor”. [end quote]

We cannot simply continue to run on the hamster wheel, chasing a carrot (or running from a stick), and saying that we will rest when we get there.

We have to rest. Not just in sleep (although sleep is important too), but in giving our brains a break and allowing ourselves to shift gears. So rest might look like sleep, exercise, connecting with friends or loved ones, or activities that let your mind wander. Hersey says “rest is anything that connects your mind and body.”

If we live our lives like we live each day, who is it that you’re answering to? What would it be like to resist, to refuse, to rest? To be a little bit more true to yourself? What would it be like to let yourself be a little bit more free?

To see a recording of the sermon, click below.

What To You Is Wealth?

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A Sermon by Polly Peterson

The King Midas tale has been told for nearly 3,000 years. The story seems to be a cautionary tale about the danger of being too greedy, a warning that loving money too much can harm you and your loved ones. But I doubt it has served that purpose. When people refer to the Midas touch today, it tends to be a positive thing—everything he touches turns to gold! It’s a metaphor for success. People who pin their hopes on striking it rich in lotteries or cryptocurrency investments or tech start-ups, like Midas, are undeterred by the possibility that there might be dire consequences if their wishes come true. We tend to have great faith in the American Dream.

In this election year, there are lots of directions I could go with that thought. But I chose the King Midas story because I see it as a kind of parable of European colonization. From Europeans’ earliest encounters with North America, they were awed by the continent’s abundance and eager to make their fortunes by taking its codfish, its timber, its beaver pelts, and ultimately, the continent itself. That story has been told as the progress of civilization, the birth of a nation. But there are other ways to see it.

Last August, my ecologist daughter and I spent a few days at a retreat lead by Robin Wall Kimmerer—who is both an academic scientist and an enrolled member of the Citizen Potawatomi Nation. We had read her book Braiding Sweetgrass, and we were eager to spend a few days immersed in ideas that lie at the intersection of modern science and indigenous wisdom.

It was a good way to joggle the mind out of some of the common assumptions, biases, and beliefs that come naturally to us in mainstream America.

Kimmerer points out that in North America, Europeans encountered an indigenous culture with values that differed fundamentally from their colonial dreams of striking it rich. From land grabs to literal gold rushes, European settlers have generally focused on taking whatever they believe to be valuable from the environment. Their Biblical beliefs taught them that they should have dominion over all of nature.

In contrast, indigenous people believed that they themselves were part of nature and that all living things were their kin. They believed in approaching all of nature with respect and gratitude. To them, the earth itself was sacred, as were all beings.

The European view of land as property and the earth’s gifts as resources was alien to the people who had been here for thousands of years. Colonizers admired most the men who turned their takings into great personal wealth. 

But to the indigenous people, taking more from the earth than you need was never admirable. Acquiring great personal wealth to keep for yourself was disgraceful.

The Potawatomi people have traditions that remind them not to be greedy. One is called the minidewak, which means “give from the heart” or simply The Giveaway. Wealth in Potawatomi culture, Kimmerer explains, is measured by the ability to share. The Giveaway is a cultural tradition that redistributes material goods so that everyone has enough. It represents a deep truth that all flourishing on earth is mutual.

The Potawatomi refer to the land with a word that means “that which has been given to us.” Their very language fosters gratitude and a trust in the reciprocity of their relationship to the world. The extractive mindset of western culture is at odds with indigenous ideas of reciprocity—yet the work of Kimmerer and other scientists has shown that the gifts of the natural world actually do “multiply by our care for them and dwindle from our neglect.” Recent studies have shown that the small percentage of lands managed by indigenous peoples throughout the world accounts for the largest share of the earth’s biodiversity. Reciprocity is not just an ethical issue. It is a matter of sustaining life on earth.

In the folklore of the Potawatomi people there is a terrible man-eating monster called the Windigo. The Windigo is voraciously hungry, but the more it eats, the more ravenous it becomes. Its hunger is never satisfied, no matter how many humans it devours. 

Kimmerer points out that our own Windigo nature tricks us into believing that money and belongings can fill our hunger—but of course we are left hungering for more, just as wealthy King Midas remained dissatisfied. Having great wealth just made him greedy for more. According to Kimmerer, corporations today are a new breed of Windigo, devouring the earth’s resources for greed, not for need. What Native peoples once sought to rein in, they unleash.

And Kimmerer believes we are all complicit.

“The consumption-driven mind-set masquerades as ‘quality of life’ but eats us from within. … We continue to embrace economic systems that prescribe infinite growth on a finite planet, as if somehow the universe had repealed the laws of thermodynamics on our behalf. We have unleashed a monster.”

Robin Wall Kimmerer, “Braiding Sweetgrass”

Karen Armstrong, in her book Sacred Nature, says that, while “we in the modern West tend to rely more on the left hemisphere of the brain, the home of rational and pragmatic thought, tribal people have a right-hemispheric worldview which identifies connections between things.” The right hemisphere is the source of poetry, music, art, and religion. Armstrong illuminates the peculiarity of the Bible’s God who exists elsewhere, in Heaven, not here on Earth, and points out that this belief has set the stage for nature’s exploitation.

Of our current climate crisis, she writes:

“While it is important to cut carbon emissions and heed the warnings of scientists, we need to learn not only how to act differently but also how to think differently about the natural world. We need to recover the veneration of nature that human beings carefully cultivated for millennia …  It is not a question of believing religious doctrines; it is about incorporating into our lives insights and practices that will not only help us to meet today’s serious challenges but change our hearts and minds.”

Karen Armstrong, “Sacred Nature”

The Jewish scholar Ben Zoma asserted 2,000 years ago that real wealth has little to do with material things. The wealthy person, he said, is the person who is happy and grateful for whatever they have, whether it be much or little.

The Buddhist monk Thich Nhat Hanh agrees. 

“Many of us think we need more money, more power, or more status before we can be happy. We lose ourselves in buying and consuming things we don’t really need, putting a strain on ourselves and on the planet.”

Thich Nhat Hanh

Like Kimmerer, he believes that science need not be at odds with a spiritual connection to the earth. “Every advance of our scientific understanding deepens our admiration and love for this wondrous planet,” he said. “When we truly see and understand the Earth, love is born in our hearts. We feel connected.”

As UUs, we covenant to affirm and promote respect for the interdependent web of all existence of which we are a part. But only when we’ve truly fallen in love with the Earth will our actions spring from the insight of our interconnectedness. Loving the earth, decentering ourselves, and listening for what the non-human beings have to teach us, may not seem like activism, but without this essential first step, we cannot hope for the change of heart, the altered mindset, the internal values that are essential to this work.

In an old nursery rhyme, “The king was in his counting house, counting out his money, the queen was in the parlor, eating bread and honey.”  In America, many of us enjoy material comforts far beyond what even the richest kings and queens could hope for long ago. Our homes are our castles. Our bank accounts and retirement funds are our counting houses. But sometimes our comfortable homes and concerns about money feel like Windigo thinking. Studies indicate that our way of life has led to an epidemic of loneliness. As Dr. Kimmerer suggests, we think that belongings can satisfy our hunger, when it is belonging that we truly crave.

The American Dream has long been predicated on taking, having, and keeping—but it is becoming clear that this way of life not only harms the planet, but fails to foster a healthy society. The centuries-long success of indigenous lifeways on this continent shows us that seeing life through a different lens is indeed possible.   

I am joining Karen Armstrong in suggesting that we learn not only how to act differently, but also how to think differently about the natural world.

I am joining Robin Wall Kimmerer in suggesting that learning from the wisdom of the land and the wisdom of the people who stewarded it for thousands of years gives us new tools to make the world better.

I am joining Thich Nhat Hanh in suggesting that the first step in helping our suffering planet is to love it. 

To heal the world, we’ll need science for sure. But even though science fiction might suggest otherwise, there is no Planet B. Our beautiful, shared world needs all the loving care we can give it.

Our little congregation can’t solve everything, but we each can contribute something. Let’s engage not just our left brain’s power of reason, but also our right brain’s sense of wonder and connection. Ritual and song, drama, poetry, art, and dance, all play a role in building the spirit of caring, mutuality, and generosity that we will need to solve the earth’s climate crisis.

If you believe your wealth lies less in things than in loving relationships, if you care deeply for the earth, if you agree that Windigo thinking leads to discontent, then you have probably been rethinking your relationship to consumption. You are probably looking for ways to help the earth heal. By good fortune, this is the day when our Green Sanctuary Committee has set up a table that you can visit during coffee hour to learn about some actions you can take right now to live in better harmony with our planet.

I’ll end with some lines from the poem “Beginnings” by Denise Levertov:

But we have only begun to love the earth.

We have only begun to imagine the fulness of life.

How could we tire of hope?

—so much is in bud.

—we have only begun

to imagine justice and mercy, only begun to envision

How it might be to live as siblings with beast and flower.

So much is unfolding.

So much is in bud.

Denise Levertov, “Beginnings”

Click above to watch the recording on this sermon.

Photo by Tevei Renvoyé on Unsplash

Transformation

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Sermon by Rev. Rachael Hayes, January 29, 2024

What a gift it is to change one’s mind. Somebody, usually a board member these days, says at the beginning of every Sunday service, “We are all growing, all learning, all loved.” You are not trapped by what you have been or thought before; you are free in every moment to grow from all you have experienced.

Or, as Ralph Waldo Emerson put it with his characteristic bravado:

“A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds, adored by little statesmen and philosophers and divines. With consistency a great soul has simply nothing to do. He may as well concern himself with his shadow on the wall.”

I can almost look back on the person I was five or ten years ago as a little sister. I have considered things that never occurred to her, experienced things she could not fathom. We may have some of the same values and talents, tell some of the same stories, but the years that have come in between have changed me.

Life experiences, interaction with people who made a mark, including this congregation, have changed me. You have changed my life – how could you not? The repetition of caring for you, listening to you, praying for you, being challenged by you. You have worn new grooves in my soul.

This is one of the things we come here for. We do not enter liberal religious community to stay the same, to be agreed with, to receive comfort without challenge. We are here for what I think of as the paradox of the third principle: we come here for acceptance and encouragement to spiritual growth. It’s a wild thing, learning how to receive the acceptance and the challenge, learning how to both accept people and encourage them too. We come here to be changed, in the course of an hour or the course of a life, to remember that we don’t have to stay stuck in whatever has us stuck, and to know that we are loved and worthy of love every step of the way, not just at some future destination.

Our congregation changes too. Of course it does. On the most basic level, new members join, old members move on, members die. The congregation is older than anyone here, and if we dare to grow the congregation will outlive everyone here too. But I’m not just talking about numerical growth. 

There was a time when our congregation was an everybody-knows-everybody place. But now, with about 140 or so official members, more friends and newcomers and kids enrolled in RE it might be more like 200. Very few, if any, of us could claim to know everybody. There are new faces, both upstairs and downstairs. We continue to change. Every time a new person greets or brings social hour or joins a small group ministry, we change. We open our ears, open our hearts. We consider things that we had never considered before. We are changed by the presence of each other.

Change is inevitable. At one extreme, you have the dwindling congregation that exists to keep everything the same, with no new people until the remaining group is too small to stay the same. Programs end, staffing shrinks, but you definitely know everyone in the room.

At the other extreme, you have the aggressive growth that incorporates every suggestion and accepts every person whether their actions respect the whole. That congregation will shrink before long, too, as the congregation loses focus and sacrifices the relationships of acceptance, encouragement, and accountability. 

Somewhere in the middle, though, we find a way where we open our hearts to one another, learn what matters to each other, and find a focused way forward together.

Our congregation is in the beginning stages of revisiting our mission and purpose. Why do we exist? Who are we called to be? How do we want to be known? You’ll be hearing from the Committee on Shared Ministries in the coming months. Please come to the chats, respond to the surveys, engage the process. 

It is this work that will keep us focused, that will help us find the balance between taking every suggestion and playing the losing game of trying to make our future congregation the same as our past. 

The larger Unitarian Universalist Association is engaged in a similar but more complicated process right now, conducting a periodic review of Article II of the UUA bylaws. A lot of things stayed mostly the same, but there is a new “values” section …

… that defines our values, held by a center of liberating love. One of these values is Transformation. We adapt to the changing world.

We covenant to collectively transform and grow spiritually and ethically. Openness to change is fundamental to our Unitarian and Universalist heritages, never complete and never perfect.

Some things change and some things stay the same. A hundred years ago, Lewis Fisher, a Universalist theologian, put it like this:

“Universalists are often asked to tell where they stand. The only true answer to give to this question is that we do not stand at all, we move…. We do not stand still, nor do we defend any immovable positions…. We grow… as all living things forever must do.

“The main questions with Universalists are not where we stand, but which way we are moving…. Our main interest is to perceive what is true progress, and to keep our movements in line with that, and not to allow ourselves to move round and round in circles simply… like a squirrel in its cage…. Old worn phrases are always losing their old meanings, and must forever be finding new meanings in the light of new experiences.”

We keep going forward, led by that central value of love, encouraged by the friends and neighbors who accompany us along the way, to become something new for the new moment. May it be so.

Transformation photo by Suzanne D. Williams on Unsplash

Unjust Laws, Civil Disobedience & Reproductive Freedom

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A guest sermon by Dr. Carrie N. Baker, J.D., Ph.D; lawyer, Smith College professor, and regular contributor to Ms. Magazine.

On January 22, 1973—51 years ago tomorrow—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 current Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade, opening the door to state abortion bans across the country. Today, 14 states fully ban abortion at fertilization—even before a pregnancy commences. In addition, two states ban abortion at 6 weeks, another two at 12 weeks, and three more at 15-18 weeks. Courts have blocked bans in another three states.

Over the last several years, in response to abortion bans and restrictions, advocates around the country have developed an alternative supply network for abortion pills outside of the law. In my writing for Ms. magazine, I have covered this movement closely, and even participated in it to some degree. As a lawyer and generally law-abiding citizen, my participation in this extra-legal work is not done lightly. Today I want to offer a moral justification for my decision to do this.

The reading for today is Martin Luther King Jr.‘s Letter From Birmingham Jail, written in August of 1963. King was imprisoned for participating in nonviolent demonstrations against segregation. The letter, written in longhand, was his response to a public statement issued by eight southern white religious leaders expressing concern and caution about King’s willingness to engage in civil disobedience by breaking the law. The letter was King’s explanation of why he felt compelled to do so.

In the letter, King distinguishes between just laws and unjust laws. Citing St. Augustine, King explained, “An unjust law is no law at all.” In answering the question of how to distinguish just and unjust laws, King appeals to “moral law” and “eternal and natural law,” citing St. Thomas Aquinas. He argues that just laws “uplift human personality” and unjust laws “degrade human personality.” He argued that an unjust law “distorts the soul and damages the personality.” Quoting Martin Buber, he argues that an unjust law “substitutes an ‘I – it’ relationship for the “I – thou” relationship and ends up relegating persons to the status of things.”

What does it mean to uplift the human personality? What does it mean to distort the soul and treat people like things?

King was of course talking about Jim Crow laws that segregated people based on race. He was explaining how he could on the one hand insist that southern states follow the law established in the Supreme Court’s Brown v. Board of Education decision, while at the same time himself defy southern states’ segregation laws. He argued that the violence of racial segregation distorted the soul, degraded the human personality and treated Black people like things. Segregation laws were therefore morally wrong and sinful, argued King.

Today, I will use King’s arguments to analyze current-day abortion bans and argue that these laws are also morally wrong and sinful for similar reasons.

Many might find this argument surprising, unnecessary or even offensive. People on the left, including many feminists, have ceded the religious language of morality and sin to religious conservatives. I believe this is a mistake. We need to translate our ideas into all languages to succeed in the movement for human rights.

So I ask you, do abortion bans uplift or degrade human personality? Do they “distort the soul and damage the human personality”? Do they give people supporting them “a false sense of superiority” and make people seeking abortion feel “a false sense of inferiority”? Do they “substitute an ‘I -it’ relationship for the ‘I -thou’ relationship, and relegate persons to the status of things”?

I would answer an emphatic YES to all of these questions. Let me explain. Headlines over the last year and a half since the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade gives us ample evidence of how abortion bans harm the dignity, rights and health of women and people who can become pregnant.

Shortly after Dobbs in June 2022, a 10-year-old pregnant rape victim had to flee the state of Ohio, where abortion had been banned, to obtain an abortion in Indiana.

At the end of last year, a 31-year-old Dallas mother of two, Kate Cox, received a lethal fetal diagnosis. Her doctor told her that she needed an abortion in order to preserve her health and future fertility, but that the Texas abortion ban only allowed abortions if death was imminent. Cox filed a lawsuit asking a Texas court for clarification on whether she qualified under the law. A trial court granted her request, but attorney general Ken Paxton appealed the case all the way to the Texas Supreme Court. Cox eventually fled the state of Texas to obtain an abortion. The Texas Supreme Court later ruled she did not qualify to receive an abortion under the law.

Another 22 women who had life-threatening pregnancies have sued the state of Texas for clarification on what the law allows—how close to death they have to be to have an abortion—because the state has refused to clearly define the parameters of the exceptions to the law, making doctors fear offering abortions at all.

Last month, a 33-year-old Ohio woman Brittany Watts sought treatment at a hospital before suffering a miscarriage. While in excruciating pain, she had to wait for eight hours while a hospital ethics committee considered her case. They denied her care and sent her home instead of treating her. She later delivered a nonviable fetus at home, alone, in her bathroom, and then returned to the hospital where she was treated with suspicion rather than compassion. The hospital reported her to the police and Ohio prosecutors charged her with abuse of a corpse because she miscarried into her toilet. A grand jury later dismissed the charge.

Prosecutors are increasingly bringing criminal charges against pregnant women who struggle with drug addiction or who engage in behaviors that otherwise would not be a crime, such as failing to go to a doctor, refusing to follow a doctor’s orders, or driving without a seatbelt. In a recent report, titled The Rise of Pregnancy Criminalization, the organization Pregnancy Justice documents how government officials are investigating, arresting, and prosecuting pregnant women at an accelerating pace in recent years, often under the pretext of protecting “unborn life.” Whereas a 2013 study found 413 cases of pregnancy-related criminalization across the United States between 1973 and 2005, the recent study found 1,396 cases of criminalization of pregnant women between 2006 and 2022 — over three times as many cases in half as many years. The vast majority of cases involved charges of criminal child neglect, abuse, and/or endangerment, and many relied on the cooperation of health care providers and family regulation systems, such as “child welfare” agencies.

Finally, these laws will lead to women’s deaths. The first woman to die because she was not offered a life-saving abortion due to an abortion ban was Yeniifer Alvarez-Estrada Glick. She died in July of 2022 in Luling, Texas.

Abortion bans have led to denial of medically necessary healthcare, putting people’s lives in danger, and they have led to threats of criminal prosecution. These laws enable healthcare providers, police and the public to bully and control women and pregnant people. These actions degrade and damage the human personality, and distort the soul, to use King’s words. I would argue these laws give some people “a false sense of superiority” and make people seeking abortion experience “a false sense of inferiority” that we call abortion stigma. I would argue these laws “substitute an ‘I -it’ relationship for the ‘I -thou’ relationship and relegate persons to the status of things,” whose lives are not valued, whose dignity is not respected, and whose rights are disregarded.

King was committed to the equal worth of each individual, which he defined as treating human beings as ends in themselves, and never instrumentalizing them as a means or objectifying them as things. Abortion bans treat pregnant people as a means to the end of producing more babies, and they objectify women as things, as incubators. King was committed to treat each person as a free agent—someone with the capacity and right to “deliberate, decide, and respond.” To do otherwise is to objectify and debase what it means to be fully human.

Laws banning abortion objectify women and pregnant people, denying them the right to make moral decisions for themselves. Therefore, these laws are unjust, immoral and sinful, to use King’s words. King described racial domination as a “particular form of evil or sin.” I argue that sexual domination is also a form of evil or sin. Abortion bans make women and pregnant people second class citizens, denying them the right to be free agents, moral decisionmakers and democratic subjects. King condemns “sinful racial hierarchies.” Abortion bans are part of sinful sexual hierarchies.

Finally, in the passage we read today, King argued that an unjust law is “a code inflicted upon a minority which that minority had no part in enacting or creating because it did not have the unhampered right to vote.” At the time, the southern legislatures that adopted laws segregating Black and white people were clearly not democratically elected. Black Americans did not have “the unhampered right to vote.” They were not equally or even proportionally represented in the legislative bodies of the southern states where racial segregation was enacted into law.

Today, how is it that over 60 percent of Americans support abortion rights, but Roe was overturned and 16 states now ban abortion in most circumstances? When Supreme Court justice Antonin Scalia died in February 2016 over six months before the next presidential election, Senate majority leader Mitch McConnell refused to hold a vote on President Obama’s nomination of Merritt Garland for a seat on the Supreme Court, saying it was too close to the election. When Ruth Bader Ginsberg died in October of 2020, McConnell rushed through the appointment of Amy Coney Barrett just weeks before the 2020 elections. A president whose vote count fell millions of votes short of his opponent appointed three Supreme Court justices, who joined the extreme right wing of the Court to overturn a half-century-old constitutional right supported by a large majority of Americans. Then politicians in states with high levels of gerrymandering and voter suppression banned abortion, contrary to the wishes of the majority of voters in those states.

In states banning abortion, women’s political representation is remarkably low.

  • Men make up 80 percent or more of the state legislatures in West Virginia, Mississippi, Tennessee, Alabama and Oklahoma—all states that ban abortion at fertilization without exceptions for rape or incest. In South Carolina, which has a 6 week ban, women are also less than 20 percent of the legislature.
  • In West Virginia, women are only 12.7 percent of legislators.
  • In all states banning abortion, men make up over two-thirds of legislators.

The U.S. lags behind 68 other countries in women’s political representation in national legislatures, with American women holding only 29 percent of seats in Congress. At the state level, women overall hold only 32.6 percent of state legislative seats. In the courts, women make up only one third of federal judges and state court judges.

Women’s lack of representation in the legislatures and courts making decisions about our bodies make these laws unjust.

For the reasons stated above and more, I believe that abortion bans are unjust. King distinguished between just and unjust laws in order to explain why he was morally obligated to break laws requiring segregation. I believe the fact that abortion bans are unjust provides a moral justification for breaking laws banning abortion.

Today, there is a robust alternative delivery system providing abortion pills to people in all 50 states, including those banning or restricting abortion. This system, which operates outside of the medical system, provides abortion pills from in two ways: 1) vetted online vendors who sell generic abortion pills for as little as $42 with 3-day shipping; and 2) activist networks that mail free generic abortion pills to people in restricted states who can’t afford other options. People in all fifty states can also get advance provision abortion pills from online vendor for $25 with three-week delivery. Several organizations and resources exist to support people seeking and using abortion pills. For information on providers who mail pills to all states, there is plancpills.org. For medical support, there is the M+A Hotline. For peer support, there is Reprocare.com. For free, confidential legal services, there is the Repro Legal Helpline. This robust alternative delivery system has served tens of thousands of people in the U.S. in the last year and a half.

I am morally compelled to support this work as a form civil disobedience in defiance of unjust laws imposed by undemocratically elected politicians and judges, and unrepresentative legislatures that degrade and endanger women and pregnant people.

I also support the work of advocates who have pushed the boundaries of the law with telemedicine abortion provider shield laws, passed in six states, so U.S.-based health-care providers can offer FDA-approved abortion pills to people in all 50 states, including those with bans.

I do these things because I believe that we cannot become habituated to the injustice of abortion bans. Martin Luther King described civil disobedience as a rejection of the habituated acquiescence to the injustice of segregation. Civil disobedience creatively enacted new habits and new relations required for a functioning multiracial democracy. According to King, nonviolence direct action enabled a recovery of agency by the oppressed. It buried the “psychology of servitude.” King said “we can make ourselves free” not only by fighting for freedom and dignity, but by enacting that freedom and dignity directly.

Fighting for better laws and challenging bad laws in the courts are critical parts of the fight for the freedom and dignity of women and pregnant people, but so is the underground abortion pill movement, which enacts that freedom and dignity directly, and resists the “psychology of servitude” and “habitual acquiescence” to unjust laws.

I hope you will join me in enacting that freedom and dignity by sharing information about these alternative abortion pill delivery networks in the United States. All you need to remember is www.plancpills.org.

Thank you.

To view this sermon on video, click below.

Photo by Tingey Injury Law Firm on Unsplash

UUA Statement on the Humanitarian Catastrophe in Gaza & Israel

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The Unitarian Universalist Association released a statement on the current crisis on October 17, 2023. During our congregation’s service celebrating the life of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., we handed out copies of the statement to our membership in attendance and member Naomi Yanis delivered a short message of introduction.

Our Social Justice Circle on Dismantling Racial, Religious and Ethnic Oppression felt that it was appropriate to return to this statement given Dr. King’s clarion calls for global peace during war, and the fact that the humanitarian crisis in the Middle East has not abated.

Click here to read the full UUA Statement on the Humanitarian Catastrophe in Gaza & Israel.

Peace be with us and all people whose lives are at risk in war-torn areas across the globe.

Chutes and Ladders for Universalists

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A sermon from the Reverend Rachael Hayes

Our opening hymn, We Are Climbing Jacob’s Ladder, is a spiritual, composed by enslaved Africans in the United States. It is a song of perseverance, of struggling toward a goal, the goal ultimately being liberation.

The spiritual references one particular scene from the book of Genesis, in which Jacob has a dream of a ladder set upon the earth and reaching up to heaven, with angels going up and down the ladder, and then God blesses Jacob, confirms his birthright, and promises to be with him every step of the way.

Jacob does not actually try to climb the ladder, but the image of the ladder connecting heaven and earth endures.

Inspired by the same Jacob story as the spiritual but in a different take, St. Benedict wrote about a ladder of humility, in which the more humble a monk becomes, the closer he gets to God. St. Benedict’s 6th century humility, in which one monk won’t look into another’s eyes is maybe not so useful to us as we affirm each other’s dignity and worthiness, but the idea of a humility that works for 21st century Unitarian Universalists is long overdue. 

How many of you have played Chutes and Ladders or Snakes and Ladders? I have to confess I mostly grew up with Candyland instead, which is a colors game instead of a numbers game, but it is also a game with a moving forward and being sent back mechanic, a game of pure chance and no strategy. 

Snakes and Ladders came from an Indian game called Gyan Chauper. Versions of Gyan Chauper have been played for thousands of years in India. Dice games like Gyan Chauper are even mentioned in the Rigveda, which make them over three thousand years old. Many of the religions and dharma traditions with an origin or strong presence in India, including Hindu, Jain, Buddhist, and Muslim traditions, have used the game as not only entertainment but as a game for teaching morals and virtues specific to their belief systems.

I’m going to focus on the Jain version today, not because it’s the oldest or because it’s somehow better than the others, but simply because it’s the most uniform. Hindu, Buddhist, and Muslim versions of Gyan Chauper vary significantly even within each tradition, but the Jain version has the same virtues and vices and ladders and snakes in the same places throughout 2500 years of game play.

Gyam Chauper on Wikipedia

It’s a meditation rather than a race, and it’s a game not of strategy but of karma. The player advances toward the final square, which represents moksha, liberation from the cycles of rebirth and all of the suffering involved in living. The soul (and here I’m talking about the larger belief system, not simply game play) progresses and sometimes regresses on this path to liberation, hence the ladders and snakes in the game.

The virtues in the Jain version of Gyan Chauper are Faith, Reliability, Generosity, Knowledge, and Asceticism. These are the ladders that will get you to a positive rebirth. There are only five of them, so you have to be pretty lucky to hit one out of those 84 squares.

The vices or evils that will slide you down a snake to a negative rebirth are Disobedience, Vanity, Vulgarity, Theft, Lying, Drunkenness, Debt, Murder, Rage, Greed, Pride, and Lust. There are more than twice as many evils ready to knock you back than ladders to get you ahead, but maybe that balances against the slower incremental progress of regular movement. 

Everything is moving all the time. Choosing not to play is actually choosing to stay where you are. We generate karma by trying to move forward, and it might get us a little bit further ahead or occasionally a lot, and sometimes in our trying to go forward we go backwards. Also, it may take millions of tries, but we will reach liberation. Maybe that’s why the first ladder is Faith.

So how did we get from this teaching tool of faith and morality to a mass-produced amusement for three- and four-year-olds? Colonialism, cultural appropriation, capitalism, the usual.

India was a British colony, and colonizers brought the game back to England, where it was altered to suit Victorian morals. The ladders stood on squares of penitence, kindness, pity, obedience, forgiveness, faith, truthfulness, and self-denial, which will bump you up 20 squares to finish the game immediately. The snakes’ heads rested on unpunctuality, covetousness, vanity, frivolity, dishonesty, quarrelsomeness, depravity, cruelty, slander, anger, selfishness, pride, and avarice. Did any of those chafe for anybody else? I feel like unpunctuality and quarrelsomeness alone would rule out a lot of us from ever reaching 100, to say nothing of how we rest with the virtues. These are the virtues and vices of the time, prioritizing souls that are industrious, agreeable, and selfless.

Eventually, the number of snakes and ladders became equal in the British version, reflecting that for every sin there is a chance at redemption. And then the virtues and vices were simply dropped as Victorian morality slid out of favor. In the twentieth century, after horrific wars and the end of the imperial age, the old morality no longer seemed to apply. So we get snakes and ladders that look like this one that we played today, simply snakes and ladders and counting.

What about Chutes and Ladders, the version I didn’t quite grow up with? Milton Bradley, and yes there really was a man named MIlton Bradley, produced a version that was explicitly for children. The illustrations on the board are of children, rather than adults, and you don’t have to read to understand what you’re playing. Instead of snakes, there are playground slides, because snakes are scary. And it actually looks like kid-sized karma rather than Victorian punishment and reward. The actions aren’t named but given cheerful pictures instead. Planting a garden leads up a ladder to a vase full of flowers. Rescuing a cat from a tree leads up a ladder to being friends with the cat. Climbing up high to sneak cookies that were put out of reach leads down a slide to both cookies and child falling to the kitchen floor. Writing on the wall with crayon slides you down to having to wash the crayon off the wall.

Chutes and Ladders never sat quite right with me, maybe because I was a stubborn kid (and still am deep inside) and thought that I was wiser than to eat a whole box of candy and make myself sick or to try to carry too many plates at once and wind up dropping them. I thought I should not face the consequences of these foolish actions that I only landed on by chance, not choice. 

I wish I could tell my preschool self that I still make these mistakes regardless of my intentions, really, although it looks more like having one more cup of coffee than makes me feel good or transporting pottery haphazardly because I’m in a rush. It looks like all the times I should have taken a little more care. That’s the moral system of Chutes and Ladders, the Milton Bradley version: we all need to be a little more careful, intentional, and forward-thinking. Sometimes the thing that didn’t seem like a big deal at the time winds up having a big benefit or resulting in a big crash. And it’s okay, because you can still get to 100 even after being sent back to the beginning. 

To deliver on my title, what would Chutes and Ladders for Universalists look like? And here I said Universalists, not Unitarians, because I think the old-school Unitarian version would look like having good character, maybe just an update of those Victorian morals we’ve already seen. Probably we would swap in “makes good coffee” and “thinks freely” and subtract a few of the morals that made us itch. My real question is what would Chutes and Ladders look like for Universalists? What does this game look like when heaven is not a goal, but a given? Does it happen on the board at all, or is this the board? Are we all walking it right now without knowing it?

I have one more ladder for you, a poem, this one by Kay Ryan.

Poem by Kay Ryan
by Kay Ryan

That poem says so much. It’s the lateral motion that’s hanging us up, not some game of up and down. It’s bumping into each other here, even with the best of intentions, not knowing where we went wrong, or at least not knowing until we’ve knocked our neighbor down. What if we could set the ladder down into the earth and aim it to heaven, to liberation, and work out some humility?

We’re not playing alone, of course, and it gets interesting when we put our ladders together. We can joust with them awkwardly, or we can prop our ladders against each other, even when we’re not sure where to aim. Two ladders can make a lean-to. Three ladders can make a scaffold. With enough of us and enough ingenuity, we can even figure out how to build ramps.

We can build more stable and inclusive structures of humility, where abundant welcome is the standard and collective liberation is the goal. I’m not talking about an afterlife heaven. As a 21st century Unitarian Universalist minister, afterlife heaven is not my concern. My concern is here and now.

Do all people have food, water, dignity, and love? As a Universalist, I’m saying that unless we’re all there together, it’s not actually heaven, or liberation, or beloved community.

So how are we going to build these scaffolds of humility, of freedom, of liberation? We take each other seriously. We listen to what our neighbors (and they are all neighbors) have to say, in their own words, in their truest emotions. We learn to see that we’re all in this thing together and until everyone’s free freedom doesn’t exist.

We build our scaffolds the best we can, trying to figure out the right place for each ladder, letting go of whose ladder is the longest, lightest, or most important. We will fall, we will disagree, and we’ll come back together in a new configuration. It’s a process. And when every need is met and every person is safe and loved, that is our heaven. The only real liberation is collective liberation. We only win together.

Banyan tree in Lahaina

Bringing Hell to Paradise

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150 years ago, on April 24, 1873, Sheriff William Owen Smith planted a banyan tree in the courthouse square of Lahaina, Maui. The tree was a gift from Protestant missionaries in India, and they sent it to celebrate the 50th anniversary of the first Protestant mission to Maui.

The tree was only eight feet tall when Smith planted it, but after 150 years of growth, it measures 60 feet in height and shades an area of a full city block, about two thirds of an acre. In addition to its original central trunk, it is supported by many additional trunks that have grown as aerial roots from its branches. It is the largest banyan tree in Hawai’i. It is the largest banyan tree in all of the United States of America.

During the Maui wildfires in August, the great banyan also burned along with so much else. Eighty percent of Lahaina burned in the fires. But the tree continued to stand as a symbol of hope for recovery. Arborists examined the tree and determined that there was still live tissue in the tree’s cambium, the layer beneath the bark. They began to care intensively for the tree, to water it, to compost and aerate the surrounding soil. Their efforts are paying off. New leaves have sprouted from the tree. All is not lost.

The banyan tree was sent to commemorate the 50th anniversary of the protestant missions to Maui. The Christianity that came to Hawaii in about 1820 comes from our family tree–specifically New England Congregationalism. The American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions sent twelve companies of Christian missionaries to Hawaii between 1820 and 1848. Queen Keōpūolani, the wife of the late King Kamehameha who had unified Hawaii with the help and gunpowder of British and American traders, invited the missionaries to come to Maui in 1823. Queen Keōpūolani converted and was baptized.

The missionaries stressed to their converts the importance of reading the bible, and to do so they translated it into Hawaiian language. The Hawaiian language had previously been unwritten, taught and transmitted orally. The missionaries taught the Hawaiian people their own language transliterated in the Latin alphabet so they could share the Bible with them. They formed schools for children, and school became compulsory, even for girls, something unheard of in the United States. Within a generation of the missionaries’ arrival, people who could not read were not allowed to get married.

The missionaries, whether from good intentions or not, reshaped Hawaiian culture. Hawaii went from a stop in the middle of the Pacific to a site of industrialization and globalization. Rev. Daniel Dole, son of a Congregationalist deacon, left New England in 1840 to serve as a missionary in Hawaii. His wife Emily Hoyt Ballard accompanied him. They founded a school for the children of the missionaries, where the instruction took place in English, not Hawaiian. Daniel Dole never learned Hawaiian in his lifetime.

In 1852, the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions stopped funding the Hawaiian missions, which meant that the missionaries had to self-fund or leave. King Kamehameha III didn’t want the missionaries to leave–they were part of this emerging new Hawaii–so he sold them land at incredibly low prices to get them to stay.

Daniel Dole’s son Sanford B. Dole was born in Oahu. After a short stint at Williams College and some legal work in Boston, he returned to Hawaii. He was twice elected to the legislature of the Hawaiian kingdom, took part in securing the 1887 Constitution that restricted voting rights to men of Hawaiian, European, or American descent and only permitted men of wealth to vote for elections to the House of Nobles, effectively concentrating power among the wealthy merchant class.

In 1889, a former Universalist minister, journalist, and politician from Maine, Rev. John L. Stevens was appointed by the US State Department to serve as minister to the Hawaiian kingdom. He arrived shortly after the 1887 Constitution had shifted the balance of power away from native Hawaiians to foreign businessmen. Even before he had arrived in Hawaii, he had written about the importance of the US securing ties with Hawaii, and then he was the one in place to make it happen. King Kalākaua died in 1891, which was a problem for the American businessmen and their political allies: his sister and heir, the ascendant Queen Liliʻuokalani was less inclined to go along with the Americans. She tried to reverse the damage inflicted to her people by the 1887 constitution, restore power to the monarchy, and restore the voting rights of Asians and lower income native Hawaiians. Stevens, as minister to Hawaii, could not support this and collaborated with those who overthrew Queen Liliʻuokalani in 1893.

And it’s into this Hawaii that James Dole arrives in 1899. James Dole, son of the minister of the Unitarian church in Jamaica Plain, Boston, arrived in Hawaii with a little over sixteen thousand dollars, which is roughly six hundred thousand dollars in today’s money. To begin with, he stayed with his cousin Sanford Dole, who had served as the president of Hawaii until the US annexed it and was serving in 1899 as the governor of Hawaii. James bought a 64-acre homestead in Oahu and experimented with a variety of crops before settling on pineapples.

James Dole began canning pineapple for export and grew and grew his empire. Dole now farms 109,000 acres on five continents. Farmers from tropical regions around the world lament the Dole corporation’s business practices–destroying ecosystems for exploitative and extractive agriculture, using dangerous pesticides, interrupting local foodways, leaving little in the way of crops for those who grew them, and maybe even supporting paramilitary forces.

The Maui wildfires were fed by two hundred years of colonialism, by the sugarcane and pineapple plantations and the loss of the native plants, by Europeans and US Americans deciding that we know better than the people who know a place intimately, by white supremacy hiding in religion paving the way for depriving people of their rights, by unsustainable tourism in an ecosystem on the edge, by real estate abuses. The settler colonialism that has harmed Hawaii is intimately connected, is the child and grandchild of the settler colonialism we still live with in Massachusetts.

What will it take for us to know the land as our source instead of a resource? What will we give up? Will we trust native Hawaiians when they ask us not to come to Hawaii as tourists? Will we begin to live from the relationships we build rather than the things (and places) we buy?

The great banyan, an Indian tree that took root in Maui, sent by one group of missionaries to honor another, simultaneously a symbol of enduring colonialism and enduring hope, might point the way. You see, the arborists caring for the banyan are not only caring for the banyan. The volunteer arborists who came together as the Lahaina Treescape Restoration Project met under the banyan about a week ago to survey the new growth. They also are caring for the native ulu, kukui nut, and Royal palm trees of Lahaina. Trees are essential for surviving the next fire. They hold water and moisture, and they slow the fire spread. The arborists are planting the next generations of native trees that will thrive in Lahaina’s hot sunshine and teaching others about the importance of restoring native plants after the fire.

After the fires, I will not romanticize the opportunity to plant drought-resistant native trees instead of invasive grasses, not after 98 people have died and more are still missing. But this is one more invitation to question the colonizer thinking that lives inside all of us, to say that manifest destiny must stop, to find the connections in our history and relationships and build forward with respect. We know too well that we cannot change the past, but we need not repeat it.

The following resources may help you find connections to change the future.

  • The National Native American Boarding School Healing Coalition is a nonprofit composed of more than 80 organizations that are dedicated to healing Native American communities affected by Indian Boarding Schools in the United States.
  • LANDBACK is a movement that has existed for generations with a long legacy of organizing and sacrifice to get Indigenous Lands back into Indigenous hands.
  • MA Indigenous Agenda is working to support legislation currently before the Massachusetts State Legislature that will benefit Indigenous Peoples.

To view the sermon, please visit the recording on our YouTube page:

Water Knows No Boundaries

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Sermon from the September 10, 2023 service

During the summer, I travel to Kentucky to spend time with my family. The drive is an old familiar friend by now. My GPS navigation welcomes me to New York, Pennsylvania, Ohio, and at last Kentucky. If I pay attention I see more revealing signs along the way, the ones that let me know that I have entered a new watershed. 

States are human business, colonial divisions to organize humans by laws, mere hundreds of years old, arbitrary in many cases, only sometimes related to a geologic reality. Watersheds are real. The water we pour to the earth in the Connecticut river valley flows to the interconnected ocean via the trough of that river, as it has for hundreds of millions of years, a rift valley gathering water from 148 tributaries. 

In comparison with the states and European colonies, the native people of the Connecticut River valley have lived and traveled by its waters for thousands of years, including the Norwottuck, Pocumtuck, and Nipmuck people who were and continue to be the stewards of the land I preach from today. 

Not all the waters stitching the land together are as old as the Connecticut. The lower Hudson River is somewhere between 13,000 and 26,000 years, a relative baby–but its power as a watershed is no less real. 

When we look at maps, borders divide us, but water connects us. Water creates communities, economies, families. And by us, I mean not just humans, but all beings. What is an ecosystem if not an economy of the natural world? The migrations and life cycles of fish and birds, guided by bodies of water, just as much as the humans who observe them.

Maps are full of lines, of course, but pay attention to which lines are designed to keep us apart and which trace eons of tangible reality. 

Understanding our place in the world only by the divisions we draw upon it, by these borders of towns and cities, counties, states, nations, we miss so much of the picture. We are not separate from nature, and going back to the paths of water, real beyond all human divisions, reminds us to look for what’s really happening beyond our anthropocentric assumptions.

It grows harder each year for this planet to sustain us in the ways we are accustomed. We break record numbers of weather-related records at an accelerating pace. We know the patterns of climate grief. To make it through the crisis of the coming years, we will need the strength of our interconnections more than we need our external classifications of your problem, not mine, of red states and blue states, of winners and losers.

Our Universalist ancestors knew that there was a single destiny for all people – that God loves everyone, and no one is damned. It’s our business to do what we can to heal this world now. 

To do that, we need one another. We flow together, we pool our strength, we catch one another’s tears, and we flow on, opening our hearts to the wider world, past shifting sands. We find reality in our interconnection, and whatever comes, we face it together. 

Our combined waters are like our covenant, each one of us bringing our whole selves to this community, affirming that this connection matters. There is power in our coming together. Power shared, held with intention and love, is a force for healing and sustaining life, and power out of balance can harm or even destroy.

At the beginning of our year, we come back to one another, come back to this covenant we have chosen together, to create together our stock of ritual water that will bless us this year. 

May we be part of the blessing and healing of this world.

The Water Ritual

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As drops of water come together.
From the sky.
Run across land.
Run together.
Form puddles, streams, rivers
Ponds, lakes, seas
Watersheds
Oceans
We come together.
Pay tribute as tributaries.
Map the rivers of our hearts.
For we are greater when together.
We come to connect to our power like a mighty flood.
We come to be refreshed like a cool drink.
We come to find comfort like a hot bath.
We come to be part of something bigger like the capillary hydration of the tallest trees.
We come to know our deepest nature.
To know and be known in this place
Coming together
Called by hope for the future.
Called by love for this life and our fellow travelers.
Called by our own worthiness and the worthiness of all people.

If we trace the water ritual that we celebrate today back to its original source, we go back to 1980, to the Women and Religion Continental Convocation of Unitarian Universalists. Carolyn McDade–the composer who wrote some of our congregation’s most beloved hymns–and Lucile Shuck Longview–a powerful feminist lay leader–devised a ritual where eight women from around this continent brought water from their distant places to the convocation in East Lansing, Michigan, called “Coming Home Like Rivers to the Sea.”

They write, “Water is more than simply a metaphor. It is elemental and primary, calling forth feelings of awe and reverence. Acknowledging that the ocean is considered by many to be the place from which all life on our planet came—it is the womb of life—and that amniotic waters surround each of us prenatally. We now realize that [this worship service] was for us a new story of creation. We choose water as our symbol of our empowerment.”

Congregations recognized the power in this ritual of the many waters and experiences poured into a common bowl. They began to use the convocation’s water ritual to celebrate their fall ingathering.

We celebrate the water ritual, almost 43 years after the convocation, to celebrate our own coming together. If you brought water from a place in your life, hold it in your hands. When you pour water into our common bowl, call to mind a time that water has touched your life in the last year. Imagine the place that the water comes from. What is meaningful to you about that place? Was anyone there with you? Do you remember sounds or smells or things someone said? Do any feelings come up in connection with this water? Take a breath, and when you’re ready, let it go.

If the water comes from a place of strength, share some of that strength with the congregation. If the water comes from hardship and struggle, allow the congregation to hold part of the burden. If the water comes from wellsprings of tradition, deepen our streams with this continuity. If the water comes from rains of change, share this fluidity with us. If the water comes from a clean start, share some of its freshness.

Many Unitarian Universalist congregations are celebrating this ritual today, across the continent and around the world. We know that all the planet’s waters are connected in the water cycle. Let us share our water.

Looking Back at 2024 with an All-Electric Car

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by Kay Flatten and Hilary Matheson

My family needed to buy a car when Kay emigrated back to the USA after 30 years in Britain.  One buys a car when they need a 2nd car, or their present car needs replacing, or maybe it is their first ever car. Those are needs, not just wants, and we were at that crossroads. If you find yourself there, then, like us, consider an all-electric car.  Here is how we did it, and what we learned.

Do your research first.  We talked to our friends and family who own all-electric cars. Our Son said he would never go back to a gasoline engine car. He lives two hours from his work and drives a Tesla there and charges. Once back home he rents a parking space with a charge station.  Kay said, “We are retired and live in a condo where there are no charging stations.  Will it work for us?” He said, “You will figure it out, go online and read blogs and YouTube. Posts by people who have all-electric cars and live in apartments.”  We did that, and those led us to apps, which we have listed in our references.   He added, “I’ve had my car for 7 years and only replaced the tires and wiper blades.” Our friends, on the other hand, were less enamored, but still positive. They had an all-electric car, but when taking journeys out of state experienced difficulty finding charge stations. Our friends owned a second gasoline car and when it died a gasket death, they bought a brand-new gasoline car. They said they couldn’t afford an all-electric second car, even though they had a home charger. We scored this as a “No” vote. Next, we visited car dealerships.

Our research led us to Hyundai, Volkswagen (we coveted an ID Buzz) and Nissan dealerships.  Salespeople were welcoming; however, it was obvious, most of them were not “up to speed” on all-electric vehicles. However, there was always one salesperson who could speak with authenticity.  They were into selling new vehicles, and we couldn’t afford that, so rather than leaving discouraged, we talked about leasing. Hyundai had a program called Evolve+.  New electric vehicle customers could lease a vehicle for 30 days to try it out.  The cost was about $900 and included 1,000-mile usage, insurance, repairs, and support.  We drove away with a 2024 Hyundai IONIQ 5 SEL. We decided to not drive it on long journeys but to learn how to live daily with public charging stations. Our all-electric journey began that day.

We used the ChargePlug app to locate public charging stations.  When we didn’t have a station’s app on our phones, we downloaded it. With each company, we registered the car’s make and model.  This took time. The station let us know if our car was not supported by their software.  That never happened, but we noticed that before a charge began, the station interacted with the car in a computerish way.  The car and the station tech talked. That reminded me of our Son’s comment, “You will be driving a computer.” Kay was glad he had faith in his 78-year-old Mom.

We talked tech to the car too.  There was a feature called assisted braking, when we took a foot off the accelerator the car braked and charged while slowing.  We started with level one and moved to level three.  The higher the level, the harder the car braked, and the more charge created.  We kept assisted braking low on the Interstate because cars behind wouldn’t have expected a sudden slow down. We used assisted braking when going down very steep hills, letting the car coast and brake while charging.  We also noticed feedback display features which showed when we were economical while driving.  We chose ECO mode with moderate, not sporty acceleration.  We stayed within the green features on the speedometer which illustrated when we were using momentum for coasting. We found times when we had to push the pedal and go into the red area on the speedometer.  Those times were when merging onto a highway or passing another car. Our car knew how to teach us, and when we needed to accelerate. It had plenty of get up and go. Electric bus and train drivers are trained in efficient acceleration and braking. This was our first lesson in driving differently with electric fuel. We were liking this experience and ready to find our own car, plus venture further afield.

That Hyundai IONIQ 5 SEL taught us a great deal. Not just how to drive differently, but wisdom in buying a high end (bells and whistles) model all-electric car.  If you are going to buy a computer, don’t buy a cheap one. That is the same with an electric car. We learned to love those software features.  It was off to car dealerships to find the car for us. Like our friends, we could not afford a new EV.  So, we started searching websites for used makes and models.  These makes and models included the Hyundai Kona, Chevrolet Volt, VW Golf ID3 and the Kia Niro.  We also wanted a car that qualified for MOR-EV grant funding and a tax rebate. This meant we were better off buying from a dealership than thru a private sale.

The MOR-EV grant process works with dealerships to verify the car is eligible for funding. We visited government websites and read up on applying for these supplemental funding opportunities.  Thus, we were able to speak with sales reps and ask them if they had any used cars of our preferred models eligible for MOR-EV funding and tax rebate. The response was always, “We will check that out and call you back”.  That separated the wheat from the chaff. One did! Country Hyundai, Northampton called to tell us they were expecting to receive a 2020 Kona SEL with 22,000 miles offered for $23,000. Within a week we completed the purchase, and the grant was sent off.  It was awarded and we received a $3,500 check some months later. In February we started with an Evolve+ lease, it was now April we were ready to learn long distance EV lessons.

Where did we want to go?  I’m from Kansas and had an ailing brother and 93 yr old farmer friend to visit. We wanted to spend time with our friends in Indiana, North Carolina and experience the Blue Ridge Parkway.  We would connect these with travel through Arkansas and Tennessee. These areas were considered EV deserts even if you had a Tesla.  The challenge was on!

We started by traveling west through NY and along the Great Lakes. We stopped at Niagara Falls and found a statue of Nikola Tesla. This route gave us good urban connections with charging stations.  Even so, we adopted a daily practice of using the ChargeHub app to plan a trip of about four to six hours of driving a day.  The app was set to filter for level 3 chargers that we would use at a lunch stop. We always looked up that lunch stop charge station in the PlugShare app to read the reviews, see what company owned the station and if we could walk to lunch.  We only considered stations with PlugShare scores of 8 or more out of 10 and with positive, recent reviews. Our lunch included checking ChargeHub trip planner for our night stop.  During this portion of our trip, we used motels because it was April, and we were in the North.  Camping was going to be an additional variable added once travelling South out of Kansas. Our lunch charge gave us time to trip plan the next two to three hours of driving.  We filtered Level 2 and 3 chargers because we would be staying all night and be able to give longer charging windows. We always started the day on a battery charged to 89-90%.  Eighty percent is the recommended top charge level to ensure the life of your car’s battery; however, to this day, we override that recommendation when traveling long distances and reset to 80% when home again. Here are a few lessons/observations made on this trip.

EV deserts don’t exist if you plan your trip in advance. This picture of our car was taken on the Blue Ridge Parkway, a so-called EV desert. The Golden Rule is Don’t Go that way if you can’t find a reliable charge station and a back-up within range.  Don’t generalize about urban versus rural.  The best charge station of our trip was in Arkansas after Joplin, MO, through open country at a gas station with several level 3 chargers, hot food and drinks. They allowed dogs inside and were very kind and helpful. The worst charge experience was in Memphis TN. We assumed there would be level 3 charging in a city of that size. We wasted a lot of time searching and the next morning we charged at a Mercedes dealership and walked to a great breakfast diner. Memphis TN is an EV desert!

Here is the most important observation we made. This way of traveling is perfect for us as retirees with no urgent needs to cross multiple states in a day. We took 28 days to cover 3,000-3,500 miles including visits with friends and family leaving only 9 full  days of driving. Where possible, ChargeHub routes were off Interstates.  This was because air resistance was just that, resistance.  Speeds above 65 mph cut into the range our battery could supply. The first part of our trip went West with a 12mph headwind.  On the Interstate, going 65mph meant near 80 mph headwinds. Other cars were going 70+mph.  In a guesstimate, that kind of driving would have cut our range from 230 down to 180. Our planned lunch stop might have become out of reach, or we would drive with the battery getting down to worry level. We liked ChargeHub’s choices.  The routes often paralleled Intersates, rivers or railroads.  This meant there were fewer crossroads and thus stop lights.  There were lots of historical sites and forests or rolling hills.  These trees blocked the wind, and hills gave us the regenerative power.  I’m not sure how that works, but I suspect a car’s momentum carries it partway up a hill and the power needed to crest that hill is more than made up in the subsequent downward recharge.

A final word about our life with an EV from May to the end of 2024.  We love our car and use it to go into town where we spend hours volunteering or in workshops or at church or playing Pickleball. For those, we charge at ChargePoint stations owned by Amherst Town.  It costs $0.35 per Kilowatt hr and no parking fee! If we need a fast level 3, we go to EVgo at Campus Plaza, but usually we plan and maybe leave the car to charge at the Marriott Hotel, Flo charge station, near our condo. It really is no problem, and we even found a few free charge stations in Amherst.

Now it is Winter, and we continue to learn.  Very cold weather, of the nature where we turn on the heat in our car and the outside temperature stays under 30 degrees for days, cuts into our battery’s range even more than wind resistance.  We planned a trip to Arlington VA using ChargeHub.  Knowing full charge would give us 190 miles instead of 230, our trip plan required two days.  An overnight in a motel and Winter driving conditions made us rethink our trip.  We will do it in warmer weather. We still drive to Boston and Connecticut, using the Interstate during these Winter months, but we usually plan a charge at our destination before returning home.

One other feature of an electric car: it can warm your seat and steering wheel without using battery power needed for driving; there is a 12V battery that takes care of this, as well as keeping the main battery warm when parked in very cold temperatures. Our car does not stay in a garage. When we drive, the12V battery is charged. Using the seat and steering wheel warmers means that we don’t often need to turn on the heat.  Passengers in the back seat might disagree, but as you see, the dog never complains!

That is all from us.  If you are still unsure, lease an all-electric Evolve+ car for a month and try it out.  Experience is the best teacher.

 

Applications we used. There were others only downloaded and used when needed:

  • Evolve+ – Hyundai’s month leasing program https://www.hyundaiusa.com/us/en/electrified/evolve 
  • ChargeHub – trip planning app
  • PlugShare – app which locates, scores and posts reviews of charging stations
  • ChargePoint – town of Amherst uses this app/company and allows 4hrs parking while charging without paying for parking.
  • MOR-EV – Massachusetts offers rebates for electric vehicles https://mor-ev.org/