On June 13, 2021, the UUSA members attending the 2021 Annual Meeting of the Congregation voted 50 in favor, 1 against, and 6 abstaining to accept and implement the UU 8th Principle, which reads as follows:
We, the member congregations of the Unitarian Universalist Association, covenant to affirm and promote journeying toward spiritual wholeness by working to build a diverse multicultural Beloved Community by our actions that accountably dismantle racism and other oppressions in ourselves and our institutions.
Recognizing that our congregation is unlikely to be satisfied by simply voting in favor of this bold statement, a logical step is to begin the hard work of journeying toward the Beloved Community by learning to dismantle racism and other oppressions in ourselves and our institutions. For those who are ready, you are invited to join other members of our congregation in studying and practicing the methods taught by therapist Resmaa Menakem, for healing the racialized trauma we all carry in our bodies. We will use his best-selling book, My Grandmothers Hands: Racialized Trauma and the Pathway to Mending our Hearts and Bodies, as our guide in this important work.
We welcome anyone who wants to do this work in a primarily white space, where most of the experiential learning will be oriented around those who identify as having white bodies. Sarah Puckett, John Gerber, and Reverend Rachael will facilitate a weekly series of experiential workshops based on this book on:
Wednesday evenings from October 16 to November 20, 2024
7:30pm – 9:00pm
at the UUSA meetinghouse
Because we will emphasize the examination of intergenerational systemic racism as it is experienced in our own individual bodies, rather than focus on analysis or discussion, our meetings will look and feel different from other book groups. This work is not like many workplace DEI trainings which do little to address the problem in a meaningful, enduring way. Neither is it about cultivating a sense of shame and guilt. It is about deep healing, which benefits all. This will not be a zoom event.
If you are ready to read the book and commit to the practice of examining our own embodied response to racism, please sign up here:
Menakem’s challenging approach to dismantling racism is offered as way of healing bodies that have been traumatized by 400 years of erasure of Native Americans, and enslavement and oppression of African Americans. White body supremacy is baked into our culture and will not be easily healed. But any approach that does not recognize that “racism and other oppressions” are embodied responses, not rational responses, will surely fail.
Menakem calls on white people, whom he refers to as “white bodies”, to work to build an anti-racist culture, but first to prepare themselves for this difficult work through a step-by-step healing process based on recent advances in neuroscience and somatic healing. He writes “Healing from white-body supremacy begins with the body – your body.” If you would like to begin to learn how, you are invited to join us.
For a short audio clip from the book, click on the link below….
https://uusocietyamherst.org/wp-content/uploads/2025/09/UUSALogoFinalVersion.png00John Gerberhttps://uusocietyamherst.org/wp-content/uploads/2025/09/UUSALogoFinalVersion.pngJohn Gerber2024-08-01 19:12:382024-09-13 06:46:57Please join us for a life-changing experience
I’ve been a Unitarian Universalist for thirty-four years now, ever since my parents joined a UU church outside Milwaukee, when I was six. My dad is the son and grandson of Presbyterian ministers, and my mom was raised a devout atheist in small-town Wisconsin. The family joke is that when they became UU, my dad’s family all said, “oh no, he’s lost religion,” and my mom’s family all said, “oh no, she’s found religion!”
I’m so grateful my parents joined my home church. It was a wonderful place to grow up. I was taught to honor my own truth. I came to believe that living our faith meant working to make the world a better place and fighting oppression. And as a queer and trans person, I was able to grow up without any sense that these deep truths about myself were at odds with my faith.
In fact, I credit being raised UU to a large degree with my ability to be the person I am today, my full, authentic, queer, genderqueer, gender fluid, flamboyantly masculine and feminine all at one time, neither here nor there, Mary-Martin-as-Peter-Pan, bowtie-flashing, motorcycle riding, roller derby playing, femme boy self.
And yet. Even though I was raised here, in Unitarian Universalism, even though this religion has given me so much—I have never found a church home. You see, not actively making it harder for me to be myself in the world was not enough for me to feel a sense of unconditional welcome and belonging in my church as I grew into adulthood. Nor have I felt that way in any of the dozens of UU churches I’ve been to since. I’ve never felt like any of them were places where I could be my whole self and fully get my spiritual needs met.
Why?
Well before I answer that question, I want to talk to you a little about welcome, and what it means to be a Welcoming Congregation.
For those of you who aren’t familiar with it, the Welcoming Congregation Program is a UU program for congregations to intentionally increase their welcome and inclusion of lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer people. This church was first recognized as a Welcoming Congregation exactly twenty-three years ago, in June 2001, which is awesome.
Now, I want to let you in on a little secret. When a lot of churches first went through this program, they often focused on “those people.” They talked about welcome as if it’s something “we” need to do for “them.” But here’s the secret: Being a Welcoming Congregation isn’t about “them.” It’s about “us.” It’s about what our definition of “us” is. And. It’s about what we are willing to do to expand that definition.
The program was started in 1990 because of a shocking recognition that our denomination’s values around welcome were not being practiced when it came to gay, lesbian, and bisexual people. Attitudes, assumptions, and beliefs that were ingrained in of our larger culture were unconsciously mirrored in our congregations. We didn’t think that LGB people were really a part of “us.” Non-straight people were “them.”
We learned that real welcome takes hard work. It takes actively fighting the messages we are taught by our larger culture about what—and who—is “normal” and “right” and most valuable, and it also takes transforming the idea that “we” are straight—that heterosexuality is the default for our community.
Back in the ’80s, we thought of ourselves as one of the good religions, one of the ones that didn’t condemn gay people. After all, we’d been ordaining LGB people for years and had even passed a resolution supporting same-sex services of union. Gay, lesbian, and bi people were welcome in our congregations. But as a collective whole, most UUs still had an expectation that their kids would grow up to be straight. That their minister would be straight. LGB people weren’t bad and wrong, but they were still “them,” not “us.”
You see, the transformation that we were invited into wasn’t from “gay people are bad” to “gay people are not bad”—it was from “gay people are them” to“gay people are us.” It was from “we welcome gay people” to “we are people of all sexual orientations.” Do you feel the difference?
At its best, being a Welcoming Congregation invites us to practice redefining our understanding of who “we” are—who we consider to be “one of us.” It offers us the chance to see this practice as part of our purpose as a community—growing our understanding of “us” wider and wider until eventually every living thing is “us” and there is no longer any “them.” Can you imagine that?
My friends, I can’t find a church because I have never found a UU congregation where I felt like I was fully part of the “us.” I’ve never found a UU church where I felt like all of who I am can shine, where my spirit can be fully fed, where my gifts can be truly received.
And I’m not alone. Despite more than three decades of the Welcoming Congregation Program, which was expanded in 1999 to explicitly include trans people, according to a recent denomination-wide survey, 72% of trans UUs don’t feel fully included in our congregations. 72%.
This is not because the average UU congregation is actively hateful or unfriendly to trans people. But there’s more to welcome than friendliness. The truth is, the entire three decades that I’ve been a UU, Unitarian Universalism has told the world, and has told me, that LGBTQ people are welcome here, but that entire time, I have experienced that welcome as conditional.
My whole life, I’ve known that I could attend any UU congregation and not be actively rejected, as long as I wore certain clothes and said certain things and acted in a certain way. I’ve known that I could be openly queer and trans, as long as I didn’t get too demanding about my basic needs around pronouns and bathrooms. I’ve known that because I’m white, and college-educated, and nondisabled, I can appear to fit in, in a way that many of my people can’t. I’ve known that because of this, people would be friendly to me. But that’s not the welcome I need. I need a welcome that isn’t conditional. I need a welcome that goes beyond friendliness, goes beyond tolerance or acceptance. I need a welcome that’s celebratory. A welcome that transforms hearts.
And my friends, my heart is heavy. Because I don’t just want to find a home myself. I want Unitarian Universalism to be the saving power in my people’s lives that I know it can be. I want to be able to tell Black trans women, and LGBTQ asylum seekers, and struggling nonbinary youth, that they can go to their local UU congregation and find healing, and strength, and resilience to keep up the fight for survival in a culture that is trying to annihilate them. But I can’t. Because I can’t trust that their local congregation will even be safe for them, much less a place of resilience.
The worst part is how much my people need this right now. We are living in a truly terrifying, life-threatening time for trans people. Conservative political actors have decided that trans people are their elections-winning wedge issue of the moment, led by a far-right fringe that speaks openly about their goal to eradicate transness. Five years ago, in 2019, there were twenty anti-trans bills proposed in state legislatures nationwide. Last year there were almost 600, in almost every U.S. state. This year there have been 600 more. Half the states in our country have now banned best practice medical care for trans youth and have banned trans youth from participating in sports, among scores of other new laws. Trans people now meet the UN’s criteria for internally displaced refugees.
I need to know that the religion that has told me and the rest of the world that LGBTQ people belong here—I need to know that my religion has our backs and will do the work that it takes to become places of belonging for us in this moment. And yet I constantly hear from trans and nonbinary UUs that they feel the opposite of belonging. That they have to steel themselves in UU spaces for invasive questions, or intolerant or ignorant comments, or resistance to the things they need in order to feel seen and whole.
Back in the ’80s, UUs believed that simply being friendly to gay people was enough. But it wasn’t. Straight UUs needed to do the work to unlearn all the things that made them think of gay UUs as the “other.” As abnormal. They needed to do the work to challenge, in themselves and in each other, the messages they had received about gay people from mainstream media—that gay people are a threat to children, that all gay people have AIDS, that being gay is a curse to be ashamed of and hide. That gay people shouldn’t “flaunt” their sexuality.
It’s been forty years, but the same messages are on the rise again—they are just primarily targeting trans people now. What do you believe about gender? Do you think there are only two sexes? Do you think that men are naturally more agressive and women are naturally more nurturing? How do you feel when you see someone whose gender is unclear to you? What were you taught about the “proper” ways for men and women to behave? What have you heard about trans women playing sports, and health care for trans children and youth? How do you feel about pronouns?
It makes sense that a lot of people have questions and assumptions about these things. How could we not? These are the pressing questions that we have to actively engage with if we are serious about welcome. Trans people challenge the social contracts we all inherited, the rules we were taught, the things that fall into the “that’s just the way things are” category—just like just like gay, lesbian, and bi people did forty years ago.
The truth is – queer people still challenge these things, too. Remember how I talked about the conditional welcome I’ve experienced in Unitarian Universalism? A welcome that feels dependent on things like how I dress, how I talk, how I act—a welcome that’s related to things like race, and class, and ability? The truth is, the Welcoming Congregation Program helped a lot of people widen the circle of belonging and their definition of “us” a tiny bit, to include “gay people like us”—that is, gay people who looked and dressed and acted a certain way. But the more ways people don’t line up with the assumptions and expectations about who “we” are, the harder it is for us to feel like we belong. If you’re gay and white and have a PhD and a house and a monogamous relationship, it’s a lot easier to feel welcome in most UU spaces than if you’re bisexual and Middle Eastern and have a GED and rent a room and practice consensual nonmonogamy, right?
This is why my best friend Rev. Mykal Slack and I created the program that this congregation is planning to engage with this coming fall. It’s called Trans Inclusion in Congregations, but it’s about so much more than trans inclusion. For years, as trans UU leaders, Mykal and I were asked to come teach UU churches about trans people. People wanted to understand all the vocabulary. They wanted to learn what the right things to say were. They wanted to feel a sense of mastery over this new, unfamiliar terrain.
And we got really tired, because although, as educators, we love helping people understand things, going around doing trans 101 trainings wasn’t changing the things that keep us from finding a UU home. It was helping a lot of people feel like they intellectually understood trans people. But they still joyously sang songs about brothers and sisters, and continued to misgender every single youth who came out as trans or non-binary within the congregation, and didn’t make any changes to their women’s group or their annual men’s retreat. Their welcome was still conditional on trans UUs looking a certain way, speaking a certain way, acting a certain way, and honestly being willing to betray parts of ourselves in order to fit in.
So we created a program that helps people really engage with the depth of what’s required if we are serious about welcome. It takes you on a journey, starting with the theological grounding for welcome, our denomination and this congregation’s gender history, and your own experience of gender. We offer expansive frameworks for how to understand gender and sexuality, talk about the lived experiences of trans people of many different races, abilities, ages, classes, and sexualities, and discuss trans spirituality. The program ends with a conversation about culture, about the difference between understanding welcome as a superficial “friendliness” and understanding welcome as a spiritual practice that transforms your heart, and about how to shift the culture of your congregation to be radically welcoming to all who are currently here and all who want to be here.
I want everyone who needs Unitarian Universalism to be able to feel a sense of home here. I want all of us—no matter who we are, no matter what experiences and identities we carry that the world has shamed us for or taught us are wrong or unwelcome—to be able to feel a sense of home here. I want all of us to be able to come to church without having to brace ourselves for the pain of people denying or resisting or ignoring or downplaying our needs.I want us to feel like we can bring all of who we are forward and be celebrated for doing so.
Do you want this too? I wouldn’t be here if I didn’t trust that you do. I wouldn’t be here if I didn’t know that I’m not the only one here who is yearning to experience radical welcome—a welcome that is not conditional. I know I’m not the only one here who has felt the need to leave certain parts of myself behind, who has felt pressured to look, or talk, or act in ways that make me appear to fit in, in order to feel a sense of belonging here.
I know I’m not the only one who knows that in order to survive this world, this dominant U.S. culture of division and intolerance and violence and environmental destruction, we need spaces like this one to be more than simply friendly. We need spaces like this one to be places where we can unlearn the judgments and assumptions and biases that have soaked into us from wider society, and practice healing the divisions that are tearing our communities — and our world — and our very souls — apart. We need spaces like this one to constantly redefine our definition of “us,” drawing an ever-widening circle across lines of gender, sexuality, race, class, disability, neurotype, age, language, nationality, substance use, mental health, family structure, belief, and more, so that none of us ever feel like we have to leave any parts of ourselves behind in order to feel like we belong.
What do you think? Are you in? I wouldn’t be here if I didn’t know that you are already on the path. That the good people of this congregation have drawn the circle wider again and again over the years, and are eager to draw it wider still. I know this is a space that has the potential to be radically welcoming.
If you’re eager and willing and want to gain some new tools and skills for being radically welcoming, I hope you’ll consider taking the Transforming Hearts Collective’s program this fall. I also hope that in the meanwhile you’ll ponder both the ways you are longing for greater welcome for yourself and your loved ones here, and also the ways you personally need help to widen the circle of who “we” are here, in your own mind and heart.
Being a Welcoming Congregation is not a static identity, any more than being an ally is. It’s not a sign you can put up or a box you can check or a statement you can make. Because being a Welcoming Congregation isn’t something you are, it’s something you do. Because welcome is a verb. It’s an action. It’s a spiritual practice. One that never ends.
So, I hope I can count on you to join me in the spiritual practice of radical welcome. Because it is truly one of the most holy, heart-transforming, and world-changing things that we can do together.
One of the first books I read when I joined the UUSA Board of Trustees nearly three years ago was Governance and Ministry by Dan Hotchkiss. This reference is a standard read for board leaders of many faiths and helped ground me in the work of the board. About the same time there was a minor kerfuffle within the congregation about the word “ministry.” Some of us seemed to want to reserve the word ministry for the designated minister, and others saw the work of our many committees as “ministering” to the congregation. Personally, I believe that everything we do is ministry.
I have come to understand ministry as service. In our case, it would be service consistent with UU Principles and Values. One of my problems with the Dan Hotchkiss book is that it seems to imply that “governance” and “ministry” are two separate functions. But this is changing as the feature article in the most recent issue of UU World titled “Shared Ministry Helps UU Communities Thrive” suggests.
The other book I read (yes, I’m a bit of a book nerd) early in my tenure on the board was adrienne maree brown’s modern classic, Emergent Strategy: Shaping Change, Changing Worlds. This is a deeply spiritual book that offers us hope for a better world. Brown guides us toward strategic and radical change in our institutions and our lives in ways that are consistent with our 8th Principle (to dismantle racism and other oppressions in ourselves and our institutions). One of her teachings is called intentional adaptation.
We all adapt to changing conditions, often as a knee-jerk reaction to an unexpected crisis (like a pandemic) or stress (like a budget shortfall). The key to “intentional adaptation” is to change in response to changing conditions while holding tightly to our mission, but not necessarily to specific pre-conceived outcomes. Rather than following a “five-year plan” we must “build the road while walking.” Strategies that result in success will emerge in non-linear, iterative, and perhaps unexpected ways. It requires faith. It requires hope. It requires love.
This sounds like “ministry” to me.
This past year, one of the adaptations that we have experimented with on the UUSA Board of Trustees is the practice of sociocracy, known in UUA circles as dynamic governance. Those of us familiar with the competitive, rough and tumble form of governance known as New England Town Meeting guided by Robert’s Rules, benefited from learning a different way to deliberate and make decisions. It has been an interesting and gratifying experiment. We are still learning.
I see sociocracy as a means of intentional adaptation for UU’s. Sociocracy is deeply embedded in a commitment to the worth and dignity of every person (First Principle), justice, equity, and compassion (Second Principle), the search for truth and meaning (Fourth Principle), and as mentioned, it allows us to practice our Eighth Principle. Sociocracy has helped us practice governance as a form of ministry.
If any UUSA committee, ministry, team, or circle wants to learn more about how the tools of sociocracy might help you in your own work, please contact me to arrange a consultation with members of the UUSA Sociocracy Support Circle. It’s another form of ministry.
In community,
John Gerber
https://uusocietyamherst.org/wp-content/uploads/2025/09/UUSALogoFinalVersion.png00John Gerberhttps://uusocietyamherst.org/wp-content/uploads/2025/09/UUSALogoFinalVersion.pngJohn Gerber2024-06-08 15:30:022024-06-08 15:30:03Ministry in Governance
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?
We don’t talk much about Jesus here. Christmas and Easter and maybe another service sometime during the year. This congregation sometimes operates as a refuge from dominant culture, where a lot of people who don’t seem very connected to Jesus’ message say his name a whole lot and speak for him in ways that contradict the Bible they’re trying to sell. But the Jesus stories, those collected by his earliest followers and transmitted by word of mouth until they were written down generations after his death, still speak for themselves in some wild and compelling ways. There’s a reason that people keep reading and telling these stories.
Stories of radical poverty, of sharing, of second chances, or of restoration to community. Stories of civil disobedience and moral obedience. Stories of love that are bigger than death and bigger than the Roman empire. So what if they were written to make sense to people who lived almost two thousand years ago, who did not have the same modern notions of empirical fact that we have today.
Historians agree that there was a man, a Jew in Roman Palestine, called Jesus of Nazareth. It is generally accepted that this Jesus was baptized by John the Baptist and was crucified by the Roman empire by the order of Pontius Pilate, who was prefect of Judea in years 26-36 of the common era. The rest of it, the biography, the teachings, the miracles, that’s impossible to prove or disprove by historical record. What we do know is that people have passed these stories down for almost two thousand years and used them to make meaning in their lives.
In a way, though, the Easter story as we heard it today is not really a story about Jesus. It’s a story about two of his followers, Mary Magdalene, and another Mary. They go to the tomb, and there’s an earthquake, and an angel or messenger rolls the stone away that is blocking the entrance to the tomb. But the angel talks to the women. It tells them that Jesus isn’t there. That he has been raised from the dead. That he will see them in Galilee, and that they should tell the disciples. They go to do that, and then they see Jesus himself, who tells them that the disciples will see him when they get to Galilee.
So, never forget that women were the first ones to proclaim the resurrection, in all the gospels.
But the thing I love about Matthew’s gospel is the feelings. First, we have these women in mourning, who have watched their friend and teacher suffer a gruesome public death. And they’re probably afraid too, given that they’ll need to confront guards to give their beloved and politically unsafe leader burial rites. But the earthquake and angel frighten the guards, essentially rendering them out of the scene. The angel tells them Fear not, which it wouldn’t do if they were not visibly afraid. By the time they finish talking to the angel, which is probably pretty confusing, to go looking for a dead body that’s not there, even when you are given a miraculous explanation, they have both fear and great joy. And then I can only imagine that it increases when they see Jesus himself, who tells them again, fear not.
The Marys are having an emotional day, and it’s still early morning.
The human experience of the resurrection is sad, and scary, and confusing, and joyful. And that sounds about right to me. Any given day, I might be mourning the news and afraid for what comes next, overwhelmed by the sheer volume of it all and the fact that I’m supposed to still be able to do my work and laundry and grocery shopping while the world feels like it’s ending all the time, and did you notice that the sun came out and the crocuses have too?
I find this Easter narrative so tender, so relatable, not for what it says about Jesus as much as for what it says about the rest of us. It’s okay if resurrection is a lot, if we must be told more than once to chill out. I also find it relatable that the Marys get told not to be afraid even though no one makes any promises that things are going to be okay or the same.
The Marys are up against the world’s most powerful military empire, that killed their friend and teacher, and nothing can change that it happened. But still, Empire doesn’t get the last word. Love doesn’t erase death, even though love is stronger than death. Resurrection can’t be easy on anyone involved.
This narrative is perennial. The Roman Empire, the Holy Roman Empire, the British Empire, and yes, the United States Empire. It keeps going, trickling through one era of history into the next.
This week brings us the news that the US didn’t veto a UN ceasefire resolution in Gaza, which some took as hopeful until the administration also agreed to send billions more dollars’ worth of bombs and warplanes to Israel.
For all my faith that peace in Palestine and Israel will come from Palestinians and Israelis and not from the opinions of a heartbroken minister in the Pioneer Valley, I can’t ignore this. I have something to say here, because it’s our government, our empire egging on the carnage in Gaza, our empire defunding the United Nations Relief and Works Agency but making a show of ineffective aid drops, our empire complicit in these more than thirty thousand deaths.
And it is how our empire works. How Gaza before October resembled our internment of Japanese Americans during the second world war, resembled our forced relocation of our native population into reservations. It’s how our empire works, after all. The way Israel encourages settlements on Palestinian land looks devastatingly like the way our own valley was settled by the English, by civilian pioneers holding land. This is how empire works.
For nearly two thousand years, people have told this story of resurrection to remember that Empire doesn’t triumph over love. That doesn’t mean everything’s going to be okay, just that Empire doesn’t win in the end.
In addition to Easter, today is also the International Transgender Day of Visibility. For the last fifteen years, Trans Day of Visibility has taken place on March 31st. It is a day to celebrate the life and work of trans people and raise awareness of the issues trans people face in our culture. Unlike Trans Day of Remembrance, which takes place in November, Trans Day of Visibility centers living trans people.
For Trans Day of Visibility, reflect that visible doesn’t necessarily mean safe. Empire is still Empire. The ACLU is currently tracking 479 anti-LGBTQ bills for this legislative year. Bills that make bathrooms inaccessible. Bills that outlaw gender-affirming medical care. Bills that prevent people from having accurate IDs, that censor curricula, that force schools to “out” children to parents. Just so you don’t think we’re talking about somewhere else, there are two in Massachusetts: one that would make sexual education an elective, and one that among other things would strike down any privacy a student might have from their parents at school.
We know in Amherst how important it is for students to know that their schools respect their gender identity. We know this, not because we’ve got it all worked out but because we were wrestling with transphobia and harassment of trans students in the middle school last year. And we know that not everyone can be visible, that it’s not safe for everyone to be visible.
But wow is visibility glorious. Everyone deserves to be known and loved as themselves. To be called by the name their heart answers to. Discussed with their accurate pronouns. To be themselves, as feels good and true, in appearance, expression, language. To be loved as themselves.
Really, all of us deserve to be known and loved as ourselves. This is not a thing that is new for trans people. It’s for all people, and it’s especially crucial to make sure trans people are not shut out of it.
This is the thing about collective liberation. It’s about all of us getting free together. I know that when a trans person is free to be fully themself, my identity as a cisgender woman is also more expansive and beautiful, wide open to possibility.
One doesn’t have to be a religious person to believe in collective liberation, of course, but it helps to have a collective to do some collective imagination. The religious imagination has sustained people and communities since prehistory. Jesus was steeped in the Judaism of his time and used that context to inspire those around him to imagine a better world, a beloved community, a reign of Heaven in their midst rather than the Roman occupation. People have used the Easter story to tell us that love is stronger than death and empire for almost two thousand years. What is resurrection but opening to the possibility that things, by our intention and care, might become radically better. Never erasing the pain that has come before but against all reason launching a new reality.
If we use them well, if we don’t surrender these stories to those who would use them for a conservative individualism, these stories can be seeds to pass the hope of a better world down through the generations, seeds of a world where all of us are free. It’s never happened. And yet I believe. What a resurrection that will be.
Please join us for a life-changing experience
/in News/by John GerberOn June 13, 2021, the UUSA members attending the 2021 Annual Meeting of the Congregation voted 50 in favor, 1 against, and 6 abstaining to accept and implement the UU 8th Principle, which reads as follows:
We, the member congregations of the Unitarian Universalist Association, covenant to affirm and promote journeying toward spiritual wholeness by working to build a diverse multicultural Beloved Community by our actions that accountably dismantle racism and other oppressions in ourselves and our institutions.
Recognizing that our congregation is unlikely to be satisfied by simply voting in favor of this bold statement, a logical step is to begin the hard work of journeying toward the Beloved Community by learning to dismantle racism and other oppressions in ourselves and our institutions. For those who are ready, you are invited to join other members of our congregation in studying and practicing the methods taught by therapist Resmaa Menakem, for healing the racialized trauma we all carry in our bodies. We will use his best-selling book, My Grandmothers Hands: Racialized Trauma and the Pathway to Mending our Hearts and Bodies, as our guide in this important work.
We welcome anyone who wants to do this work in a primarily white space, where most of the experiential learning will be oriented around those who identify as having white bodies. Sarah Puckett, John Gerber, and Reverend Rachael will facilitate a weekly series of experiential workshops based on this book on:
Wednesday evenings from October 16 to November 20, 2024
7:30pm – 9:00pm
at the UUSA meetinghouse
Because we will emphasize the examination of intergenerational systemic racism as it is experienced in our own individual bodies, rather than focus on analysis or discussion, our meetings will look and feel different from other book groups. This work is not like many workplace DEI trainings which do little to address the problem in a meaningful, enduring way. Neither is it about cultivating a sense of shame and guilt. It is about deep healing, which benefits all. This will not be a zoom event.
If you are ready to read the book and commit to the practice of examining our own embodied response to racism, please sign up here:
Embodied Anti-racist Practice Signup
Menakem’s challenging approach to dismantling racism is offered as way of healing bodies that have been traumatized by 400 years of erasure of Native Americans, and enslavement and oppression of African Americans. White body supremacy is baked into our culture and will not be easily healed. But any approach that does not recognize that “racism and other oppressions” are embodied responses, not rational responses, will surely fail.
Menakem calls on white people, whom he refers to as “white bodies”, to work to build an anti-racist culture, but first to prepare themselves for this difficult work through a step-by-step healing process based on recent advances in neuroscience and somatic healing. He writes “Healing from white-body supremacy begins with the body – your body.” If you would like to begin to learn how, you are invited to join us.
For a short audio clip from the book, click on the link below….
Radical Welcome
/in Blog Posts/by WebmasterA sermon by Zr. Alex Kapitan
I’ve been a Unitarian Universalist for thirty-four years now, ever since my parents joined a UU church outside Milwaukee, when I was six. My dad is the son and grandson of Presbyterian ministers, and my mom was raised a devout atheist in small-town Wisconsin. The family joke is that when they became UU, my dad’s family all said, “oh no, he’s lost religion,” and my mom’s family all said, “oh no, she’s found religion!”
I’m so grateful my parents joined my home church. It was a wonderful place to grow up. I was taught to honor my own truth. I came to believe that living our faith meant working to make the world a better place and fighting oppression. And as a queer and trans person, I was able to grow up without any sense that these deep truths about myself were at odds with my faith.
In fact, I credit being raised UU to a large degree with my ability to be the person I am today, my full, authentic, queer, genderqueer, gender fluid, flamboyantly masculine and feminine all at one time, neither here nor there, Mary-Martin-as-Peter-Pan, bowtie-flashing, motorcycle riding, roller derby playing, femme boy self.
And yet. Even though I was raised here, in Unitarian Universalism, even though this religion has given me so much—I have never found a church home. You see, not actively making it harder for me to be myself in the world was not enough for me to feel a sense of unconditional welcome and belonging in my church as I grew into adulthood. Nor have I felt that way in any of the dozens of UU churches I’ve been to since. I’ve never felt like any of them were places where I could be my whole self and fully get my spiritual needs met.
Why?
Well before I answer that question, I want to talk to you a little about welcome, and what it means to be a Welcoming Congregation.
For those of you who aren’t familiar with it, the Welcoming Congregation Program is a UU program for congregations to intentionally increase their welcome and inclusion of lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer people. This church was first recognized as a Welcoming Congregation exactly twenty-three years ago, in June 2001, which is awesome.
Now, I want to let you in on a little secret. When a lot of churches first went through this program, they often focused on “those people.” They talked about welcome as if it’s something “we” need to do for “them.” But here’s the secret: Being a Welcoming Congregation isn’t about “them.” It’s about “us.” It’s about what our definition of “us” is. And. It’s about what we are willing to do to expand that definition.
The program was started in 1990 because of a shocking recognition that our denomination’s values around welcome were not being practiced when it came to gay, lesbian, and bisexual people. Attitudes, assumptions, and beliefs that were ingrained in of our larger culture were unconsciously mirrored in our congregations. We didn’t think that LGB people were really a part of “us.” Non-straight people were “them.”
We learned that real welcome takes hard work. It takes actively fighting the messages we are taught by our larger culture about what—and who—is “normal” and “right” and most valuable, and it also takes transforming the idea that “we” are straight—that heterosexuality is the default for our community.
Back in the ’80s, we thought of ourselves as one of the good religions, one of the ones that didn’t condemn gay people. After all, we’d been ordaining LGB people for years and had even passed a resolution supporting same-sex services of union. Gay, lesbian, and bi people were welcome in our congregations. But as a collective whole, most UUs still had an expectation that their kids would grow up to be straight. That their minister would be straight. LGB people weren’t bad and wrong, but they were still “them,” not “us.”
You see, the transformation that we were invited into wasn’t from “gay people are bad” to “gay people are not bad”—it was from “gay people are them” to“gay people are us.” It was from “we welcome gay people” to “we are people of all sexual orientations.” Do you feel the difference?
At its best, being a Welcoming Congregation invites us to practice redefining our understanding of who “we” are—who we consider to be “one of us.” It offers us the chance to see this practice as part of our purpose as a community—growing our understanding of “us” wider and wider until eventually every living thing is “us” and there is no longer any “them.” Can you imagine that?
My friends, I can’t find a church because I have never found a UU congregation where I felt like I was fully part of the “us.” I’ve never found a UU church where I felt like all of who I am can shine, where my spirit can be fully fed, where my gifts can be truly received.
And I’m not alone. Despite more than three decades of the Welcoming Congregation Program, which was expanded in 1999 to explicitly include trans people, according to a recent denomination-wide survey, 72% of trans UUs don’t feel fully included in our congregations. 72%.
This is not because the average UU congregation is actively hateful or unfriendly to trans people. But there’s more to welcome than friendliness. The truth is, the entire three decades that I’ve been a UU, Unitarian Universalism has told the world, and has told me, that LGBTQ people are welcome here, but that entire time, I have experienced that welcome as conditional.
My whole life, I’ve known that I could attend any UU congregation and not be actively rejected, as long as I wore certain clothes and said certain things and acted in a certain way. I’ve known that I could be openly queer and trans, as long as I didn’t get too demanding about my basic needs around pronouns and bathrooms. I’ve known that because I’m white, and college-educated, and nondisabled, I can appear to fit in, in a way that many of my people can’t. I’ve known that because of this, people would be friendly to me. But that’s not the welcome I need. I need a welcome that isn’t conditional. I need a welcome that goes beyond friendliness, goes beyond tolerance or acceptance. I need a welcome that’s celebratory. A welcome that transforms hearts.
And my friends, my heart is heavy. Because I don’t just want to find a home myself. I want Unitarian Universalism to be the saving power in my people’s lives that I know it can be. I want to be able to tell Black trans women, and LGBTQ asylum seekers, and struggling nonbinary youth, that they can go to their local UU congregation and find healing, and strength, and resilience to keep up the fight for survival in a culture that is trying to annihilate them. But I can’t. Because I can’t trust that their local congregation will even be safe for them, much less a place of resilience.
The worst part is how much my people need this right now. We are living in a truly terrifying, life-threatening time for trans people. Conservative political actors have decided that trans people are their elections-winning wedge issue of the moment, led by a far-right fringe that speaks openly about their goal to eradicate transness. Five years ago, in 2019, there were twenty anti-trans bills proposed in state legislatures nationwide. Last year there were almost 600, in almost every U.S. state. This year there have been 600 more. Half the states in our country have now banned best practice medical care for trans youth and have banned trans youth from participating in sports, among scores of other new laws. Trans people now meet the UN’s criteria for internally displaced refugees.
I need to know that the religion that has told me and the rest of the world that LGBTQ people belong here—I need to know that my religion has our backs and will do the work that it takes to become places of belonging for us in this moment. And yet I constantly hear from trans and nonbinary UUs that they feel the opposite of belonging. That they have to steel themselves in UU spaces for invasive questions, or intolerant or ignorant comments, or resistance to the things they need in order to feel seen and whole.
Back in the ’80s, UUs believed that simply being friendly to gay people was enough. But it wasn’t. Straight UUs needed to do the work to unlearn all the things that made them think of gay UUs as the “other.” As abnormal. They needed to do the work to challenge, in themselves and in each other, the messages they had received about gay people from mainstream media—that gay people are a threat to children, that all gay people have AIDS, that being gay is a curse to be ashamed of and hide. That gay people shouldn’t “flaunt” their sexuality.
It’s been forty years, but the same messages are on the rise again—they are just primarily targeting trans people now. What do you believe about gender? Do you think there are only two sexes? Do you think that men are naturally more agressive and women are naturally more nurturing? How do you feel when you see someone whose gender is unclear to you? What were you taught about the “proper” ways for men and women to behave? What have you heard about trans women playing sports, and health care for trans children and youth? How do you feel about pronouns?
It makes sense that a lot of people have questions and assumptions about these things. How could we not? These are the pressing questions that we have to actively engage with if we are serious about welcome. Trans people challenge the social contracts we all inherited, the rules we were taught, the things that fall into the “that’s just the way things are” category—just like just like gay, lesbian, and bi people did forty years ago.
The truth is – queer people still challenge these things, too. Remember how I talked about the conditional welcome I’ve experienced in Unitarian Universalism? A welcome that feels dependent on things like how I dress, how I talk, how I act—a welcome that’s related to things like race, and class, and ability? The truth is, the Welcoming Congregation Program helped a lot of people widen the circle of belonging and their definition of “us” a tiny bit, to include “gay people like us”—that is, gay people who looked and dressed and acted a certain way. But the more ways people don’t line up with the assumptions and expectations about who “we” are, the harder it is for us to feel like we belong. If you’re gay and white and have a PhD and a house and a monogamous relationship, it’s a lot easier to feel welcome in most UU spaces than if you’re bisexual and Middle Eastern and have a GED and rent a room and practice consensual nonmonogamy, right?
This is why my best friend Rev. Mykal Slack and I created the program that this congregation is planning to engage with this coming fall. It’s called Trans Inclusion in Congregations, but it’s about so much more than trans inclusion. For years, as trans UU leaders, Mykal and I were asked to come teach UU churches about trans people. People wanted to understand all the vocabulary. They wanted to learn what the right things to say were. They wanted to feel a sense of mastery over this new, unfamiliar terrain.
And we got really tired, because although, as educators, we love helping people understand things, going around doing trans 101 trainings wasn’t changing the things that keep us from finding a UU home. It was helping a lot of people feel like they intellectually understood trans people. But they still joyously sang songs about brothers and sisters, and continued to misgender every single youth who came out as trans or non-binary within the congregation, and didn’t make any changes to their women’s group or their annual men’s retreat. Their welcome was still conditional on trans UUs looking a certain way, speaking a certain way, acting a certain way, and honestly being willing to betray parts of ourselves in order to fit in.
So we created a program that helps people really engage with the depth of what’s required if we are serious about welcome. It takes you on a journey, starting with the theological grounding for welcome, our denomination and this congregation’s gender history, and your own experience of gender. We offer expansive frameworks for how to understand gender and sexuality, talk about the lived experiences of trans people of many different races, abilities, ages, classes, and sexualities, and discuss trans spirituality. The program ends with a conversation about culture, about the difference between understanding welcome as a superficial “friendliness” and understanding welcome as a spiritual practice that transforms your heart, and about how to shift the culture of your congregation to be radically welcoming to all who are currently here and all who want to be here.
I want everyone who needs Unitarian Universalism to be able to feel a sense of home here. I want all of us—no matter who we are, no matter what experiences and identities we carry that the world has shamed us for or taught us are wrong or unwelcome—to be able to feel a sense of home here. I want all of us to be able to come to church without having to brace ourselves for the pain of people denying or resisting or ignoring or downplaying our needs.I want us to feel like we can bring all of who we are forward and be celebrated for doing so.
Do you want this too? I wouldn’t be here if I didn’t trust that you do. I wouldn’t be here if I didn’t know that I’m not the only one here who is yearning to experience radical welcome—a welcome that is not conditional. I know I’m not the only one here who has felt the need to leave certain parts of myself behind, who has felt pressured to look, or talk, or act in ways that make me appear to fit in, in order to feel a sense of belonging here.
I know I’m not the only one who knows that in order to survive this world, this dominant U.S. culture of division and intolerance and violence and environmental destruction, we need spaces like this one to be more than simply friendly. We need spaces like this one to be places where we can unlearn the judgments and assumptions and biases that have soaked into us from wider society, and practice healing the divisions that are tearing our communities — and our world — and our very souls — apart. We need spaces like this one to constantly redefine our definition of “us,” drawing an ever-widening circle across lines of gender, sexuality, race, class, disability, neurotype, age, language, nationality, substance use, mental health, family structure, belief, and more, so that none of us ever feel like we have to leave any parts of ourselves behind in order to feel like we belong.
What do you think? Are you in? I wouldn’t be here if I didn’t know that you are already on the path. That the good people of this congregation have drawn the circle wider again and again over the years, and are eager to draw it wider still. I know this is a space that has the potential to be radically welcoming.
If you’re eager and willing and want to gain some new tools and skills for being radically welcoming, I hope you’ll consider taking the Transforming Hearts Collective’s program this fall. I also hope that in the meanwhile you’ll ponder both the ways you are longing for greater welcome for yourself and your loved ones here, and also the ways you personally need help to widen the circle of who “we” are here, in your own mind and heart.
Being a Welcoming Congregation is not a static identity, any more than being an ally is. It’s not a sign you can put up or a box you can check or a statement you can make. Because being a Welcoming Congregation isn’t something you are, it’s something you do. Because welcome is a verb. It’s an action. It’s a spiritual practice. One that never ends.
So, I hope I can count on you to join me in the spiritual practice of radical welcome. Because it is truly one of the most holy, heart-transforming, and world-changing things that we can do together.
Amen. Ashe. Aho. and blessed be.
Additional Resources
Photo by Belinda Fewings on Unsplash
Final Budget Document – FY 25
/in Uncategorized/by John GerberMinistry in Governance
/in Uncategorized/by John GerberCo-presidents Letter for May 2024
One of the first books I read when I joined the UUSA Board of Trustees nearly three years ago was Governance and Ministry by Dan Hotchkiss. This reference is a standard read for board leaders of many faiths and helped ground me in the work of the board. About the same time there was a minor kerfuffle within the congregation about the word “ministry.” Some of us seemed to want to reserve the word ministry for the designated minister, and others saw the work of our many committees as “ministering” to the congregation. Personally, I believe that everything we do is ministry.
I have come to understand ministry as service. In our case, it would be service consistent with UU Principles and Values. One of my problems with the Dan Hotchkiss book is that it seems to imply that “governance” and “ministry” are two separate functions. But this is changing as the feature article in the most recent issue of UU World titled “Shared Ministry Helps UU Communities Thrive” suggests.
The other book I read (yes, I’m a bit of a book nerd) early in my tenure on the board was adrienne maree brown’s modern classic, Emergent Strategy: Shaping Change, Changing Worlds. This is a deeply spiritual book that offers us hope for a better world. Brown guides us toward strategic and radical change in our institutions and our lives in ways that are consistent with our 8th Principle (to dismantle racism and other oppressions in ourselves and our institutions). One of her teachings is called intentional adaptation.
We all adapt to changing conditions, often as a knee-jerk reaction to an unexpected crisis (like a pandemic) or stress (like a budget shortfall). The key to “intentional adaptation” is to change in response to changing conditions while holding tightly to our mission, but not necessarily to specific pre-conceived outcomes. Rather than following a “five-year plan” we must “build the road while walking.” Strategies that result in success will emerge in non-linear, iterative, and perhaps unexpected ways. It requires faith. It requires hope. It requires love.
This sounds like “ministry” to me.
This past year, one of the adaptations that we have experimented with on the UUSA Board of Trustees is the practice of sociocracy, known in UUA circles as dynamic governance. Those of us familiar with the competitive, rough and tumble form of governance known as New England Town Meeting guided by Robert’s Rules, benefited from learning a different way to deliberate and make decisions. It has been an interesting and gratifying experiment. We are still learning.
I see sociocracy as a means of intentional adaptation for UU’s. Sociocracy is deeply embedded in a commitment to the worth and dignity of every person (First Principle), justice, equity, and compassion (Second Principle), the search for truth and meaning (Fourth Principle), and as mentioned, it allows us to practice our Eighth Principle. Sociocracy has helped us practice governance as a form of ministry.
If any UUSA committee, ministry, team, or circle wants to learn more about how the tools of sociocracy might help you in your own work, please contact me to arrange a consultation with members of the UUSA Sociocracy Support Circle. It’s another form of ministry.
In community,
John Gerber
Ferdinand’s Refusal
/in Blog Posts/by WebmasterA 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 a Resurrection!
/in Blog Posts/by Rachael HayesA sermon by Rev. Rachael Hayes
We don’t talk much about Jesus here. Christmas and Easter and maybe another service sometime during the year. This congregation sometimes operates as a refuge from dominant culture, where a lot of people who don’t seem very connected to Jesus’ message say his name a whole lot and speak for him in ways that contradict the Bible they’re trying to sell. But the Jesus stories, those collected by his earliest followers and transmitted by word of mouth until they were written down generations after his death, still speak for themselves in some wild and compelling ways. There’s a reason that people keep reading and telling these stories.
Stories of radical poverty, of sharing, of second chances, or of restoration to community. Stories of civil disobedience and moral obedience. Stories of love that are bigger than death and bigger than the Roman empire. So what if they were written to make sense to people who lived almost two thousand years ago, who did not have the same modern notions of empirical fact that we have today.
Historians agree that there was a man, a Jew in Roman Palestine, called Jesus of Nazareth. It is generally accepted that this Jesus was baptized by John the Baptist and was crucified by the Roman empire by the order of Pontius Pilate, who was prefect of Judea in years 26-36 of the common era. The rest of it, the biography, the teachings, the miracles, that’s impossible to prove or disprove by historical record. What we do know is that people have passed these stories down for almost two thousand years and used them to make meaning in their lives.
In a way, though, the Easter story as we heard it today is not really a story about Jesus. It’s a story about two of his followers, Mary Magdalene, and another Mary. They go to the tomb, and there’s an earthquake, and an angel or messenger rolls the stone away that is blocking the entrance to the tomb. But the angel talks to the women. It tells them that Jesus isn’t there. That he has been raised from the dead. That he will see them in Galilee, and that they should tell the disciples. They go to do that, and then they see Jesus himself, who tells them that the disciples will see him when they get to Galilee.
So, never forget that women were the first ones to proclaim the resurrection, in all the gospels.
But the thing I love about Matthew’s gospel is the feelings. First, we have these women in mourning, who have watched their friend and teacher suffer a gruesome public death. And they’re probably afraid too, given that they’ll need to confront guards to give their beloved and politically unsafe leader burial rites. But the earthquake and angel frighten the guards, essentially rendering them out of the scene. The angel tells them Fear not, which it wouldn’t do if they were not visibly afraid. By the time they finish talking to the angel, which is probably pretty confusing, to go looking for a dead body that’s not there, even when you are given a miraculous explanation, they have both fear and great joy. And then I can only imagine that it increases when they see Jesus himself, who tells them again, fear not.
The Marys are having an emotional day, and it’s still early morning.
The human experience of the resurrection is sad, and scary, and confusing, and joyful. And that sounds about right to me. Any given day, I might be mourning the news and afraid for what comes next, overwhelmed by the sheer volume of it all and the fact that I’m supposed to still be able to do my work and laundry and grocery shopping while the world feels like it’s ending all the time, and did you notice that the sun came out and the crocuses have too?
I find this Easter narrative so tender, so relatable, not for what it says about Jesus as much as for what it says about the rest of us. It’s okay if resurrection is a lot, if we must be told more than once to chill out. I also find it relatable that the Marys get told not to be afraid even though no one makes any promises that things are going to be okay or the same.
The Marys are up against the world’s most powerful military empire, that killed their friend and teacher, and nothing can change that it happened. But still, Empire doesn’t get the last word. Love doesn’t erase death, even though love is stronger than death. Resurrection can’t be easy on anyone involved.
This narrative is perennial. The Roman Empire, the Holy Roman Empire, the British Empire, and yes, the United States Empire. It keeps going, trickling through one era of history into the next.
This week brings us the news that the US didn’t veto a UN ceasefire resolution in Gaza, which some took as hopeful until the administration also agreed to send billions more dollars’ worth of bombs and warplanes to Israel.
For all my faith that peace in Palestine and Israel will come from Palestinians and Israelis and not from the opinions of a heartbroken minister in the Pioneer Valley, I can’t ignore this. I have something to say here, because it’s our government, our empire egging on the carnage in Gaza, our empire defunding the United Nations Relief and Works Agency but making a show of ineffective aid drops, our empire complicit in these more than thirty thousand deaths.
And it is how our empire works. How Gaza before October resembled our internment of Japanese Americans during the second world war, resembled our forced relocation of our native population into reservations. It’s how our empire works, after all. The way Israel encourages settlements on Palestinian land looks devastatingly like the way our own valley was settled by the English, by civilian pioneers holding land. This is how empire works.
For nearly two thousand years, people have told this story of resurrection to remember that Empire doesn’t triumph over love. That doesn’t mean everything’s going to be okay, just that Empire doesn’t win in the end.
In addition to Easter, today is also the International Transgender Day of Visibility. For the last fifteen years, Trans Day of Visibility has taken place on March 31st. It is a day to celebrate the life and work of trans people and raise awareness of the issues trans people face in our culture. Unlike Trans Day of Remembrance, which takes place in November, Trans Day of Visibility centers living trans people.
For Trans Day of Visibility, reflect that visible doesn’t necessarily mean safe. Empire is still Empire. The ACLU is currently tracking 479 anti-LGBTQ bills for this legislative year. Bills that make bathrooms inaccessible. Bills that outlaw gender-affirming medical care. Bills that prevent people from having accurate IDs, that censor curricula, that force schools to “out” children to parents. Just so you don’t think we’re talking about somewhere else, there are two in Massachusetts: one that would make sexual education an elective, and one that among other things would strike down any privacy a student might have from their parents at school.
We know in Amherst how important it is for students to know that their schools respect their gender identity. We know this, not because we’ve got it all worked out but because we were wrestling with transphobia and harassment of trans students in the middle school last year. And we know that not everyone can be visible, that it’s not safe for everyone to be visible.
But wow is visibility glorious. Everyone deserves to be known and loved as themselves. To be called by the name their heart answers to. Discussed with their accurate pronouns. To be themselves, as feels good and true, in appearance, expression, language. To be loved as themselves.
Really, all of us deserve to be known and loved as ourselves. This is not a thing that is new for trans people. It’s for all people, and it’s especially crucial to make sure trans people are not shut out of it.
This is the thing about collective liberation. It’s about all of us getting free together. I know that when a trans person is free to be fully themself, my identity as a cisgender woman is also more expansive and beautiful, wide open to possibility.
One doesn’t have to be a religious person to believe in collective liberation, of course, but it helps to have a collective to do some collective imagination. The religious imagination has sustained people and communities since prehistory. Jesus was steeped in the Judaism of his time and used that context to inspire those around him to imagine a better world, a beloved community, a reign of Heaven in their midst rather than the Roman occupation. People have used the Easter story to tell us that love is stronger than death and empire for almost two thousand years. What is resurrection but opening to the possibility that things, by our intention and care, might become radically better. Never erasing the pain that has come before but against all reason launching a new reality.
If we use them well, if we don’t surrender these stories to those who would use them for a conservative individualism, these stories can be seeds to pass the hope of a better world down through the generations, seeds of a world where all of us are free. It’s never happened. And yet I believe. What a resurrection that will be.
Photo by Anuja Tilj on Unsplash