THE AUDACITY OF RECOLLECTION

 

A Sermon Delivered to 

High Street Unitarian Universalist Church

March 15, 2026

          I have few fond memories of the George W. Bush era, but I want to share another person’s memory. This is from then-Senator Barack Obama’s memoir The Audacity of Hope describing his 2004 swearing-in at the start of the second Bush administration.

A young Marine at the door politely indicated that the photograph session was over and that the President needed to get to his next appointment. But before I could turn around to go the President himself appeared in the doorway and waved me over.

’Obama!’ the President said, shaking my hand. “Come here and meet Laura. Laura, you remember Obama. We saw him on TV during election night. Beautiful family. And that wife of yours—that’s one impressive lady.’

’We both got better than we deserve, Mr. President,’ I said, shaking the First Lady’s hand and hoping I’d wiped the crumbs off my face. The President turned to an aide nearby, who squirted a bog dollop of hand sanitizer in the President’s hand.

’Want some?’ the President asked. ‘Good stuff. Keeps you from getting colds.’

Not wanting to seem unhygienic, I took a squirt.

’Come over here for a second,’ he said, leading me off to one side of the room. ‘You know,’ he said quietly, ‘I hope you don’t mind me giving you a piece of advice.’

’Not at all, Mr. President.’

He nodded. ‘You’ve got a bright future,’ he said. ‘Very bright. But I’ve been in this town a while and, let me tell you, it can be tough. When you get a lot of attention like you’ve been getting, people start gunnin’ for ya. And it won’t necessarily be coming from my side, you understand. From yours, too. Everybody’ll be waiting for you to slip, know what I mean? So watch yourself.’

…[As] we walked to the door I told him a few stories from the campaign. It wasn’t until he had left the room that I realized I had briefly put my arm over his shoulder as we talked—an unconscious habit of mine, but one that I suspected might have made many of …the Secret Service agents in the room, more than a little uneasy.

          Now that is audacity. I’ll leave it to you to decide whether it’s an example of disrespectful behavior, or the more common meaning of a bold move. You always chance, when you act audaciously, having your brashness be confused with rudeness. That sort of audacity, that willingness to boldly say or act because the stakes are too high not to, that we must present ourselves.

In this climate almost nothing is more audacious than remembering that it was June 16, 2015, 11 years ago, Donald Trump appeared at the top of an escalator with gold gilding in New York’s tower named for him. Who would have predicted at that time we would still be under his sway, let alone talking about him, all these years later?

          It should have been an indication what he was capable of when his first words on taking the stage were, “That is some group of people. Thousands!” According to contemporary news accounts there were, at best, a few dozen people in attendance, certainly no more than a hundred. Any others Trump imagined were on the other ends of cameras, of which there were also only a few, and except for Fox and CNN, those were all local. Any idea that the truth of the situation might temper his tendencies was smashed when, after his inauguration in January 2117, Trump’s factotum, Sean Spicer, reported Trump’s crowd size at “a million and a half” attendees while professional crowd counters came up between 3 and 600,000, well below the first inauguration of Barack Obama conservatively estimated at over 1,000,000 people. It is also instructive that this was the first time we heard the phrase “alternative facts.”

          It’s important to Trump that his White House continues, in the face of multiple facts, to trumpet his guesstimate. [It is also important because memory matters. John Gardner reminds us in Grendel, his novelization of the Beowulf legend, memory is supernal in the way that someone’s lies, deceitful, flattering untruths, as the monster puts it, “changed the world, had torn up the past by its thick, gnarled roots and had transmuted it…[They] who knew the truth remembered it his way—and so did I.”]

          Here’s one of my memories. January 2009 I was teaching a class at a suburban business that began at about the point Obama would be finishing up. I listened to his speech while I drove from another class. We thought it would never happen, and here it was, the first Black American president. And he was talking about things that were important to me. I recall his humble tone and willingness to reach out to others. Here’s an excerpt from his speech:

On this day, we gather because we have chosen hope over fear, unity of purpose over conflict and discord. On this day, we come to proclaim an end to the petty grievances and false promises, the recriminations and worn-out dogmas that for far too long have strangled our politics. We remain a young nation. But in the words of Scripture, the time has come to set aside childish things. The time has come to reaffirm our enduring spirit; to choose our better history; to carry forward that precious gift, that noble idea passed on from generation to generation: the God-given promise that all are equal, all are free, and all deserve a chance to pursue their full measure of happiness.

          Now, I will remind you that, among other things, this was still three years before Joe Biden would convince Obama his position on marriage equality was outdated and he publicly supported same sex couples marrying, eventually becoming law. So even with the positives in that speech, there was greater room for better to come.

          I was so enthralled listening to this I sat in my car in the parking lot an extra 15 minutes, soaking up as much of that feeling as possible. Class, of course, began later than usual, but most of the other students walked in when I did. One, a Muslim woman from Africa, had arrived early and sat in another student’s car, and they listened to the entire speech together.

          [It may be worth noting that where I got this excerpt, the Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History, promises a full transcript via a link to the White House. The White House has removed that transcript.]

          Am I remembering the lush sense of potential correctly? To test myself, I read an essay by one of my favorite New York Review writers, Darryl Pinckney, describing an appearance by then-Senator Obama in Indianapolis. “What Obama most projects is intellectual honesty, a sense that he has thought things through or is going to try to.”

          And a year later, writing about Obama’s inauguration: “President Obama’s speech was eloquent enough, starting with the fact that he used the word ‘I’ only three times throughout the course of his recollections on ‘the work of remaking America.’…[What] surprised many of us about Obama’s inaugural address was not the absence of rhetorical finery, but how basic and insistent was his reiteration of the premises on which he said we as a nation had always told ourselves we stood.”

          Further,

President Obama’s chastisement of the nation for the drift and low spirits of recent years exempted no one, including himself—everywhere he cautioned of the labor ahead…No slogans, no self-congratulation, but a definite end to the atmosphere of corruption. [He is pledged to transparency in governmental practice in order to ‘restore the vital trust between a people and their government…’]

In Harlem, they say that he is president of the world, [and the photographs of people watching the swearing-in ceremony from Kabul to Nairobi suggest that President Obama was at times so plainspoken in his speech in an effort to reach people who speak English in other countries, talking in a language the world could understand.] It was only after things were over that I remembered how much of the world had been watching…The dignity of the nation was gathered up into his assertion that ‘our security emanates from the justness of our cause, the force of our example, the tempering qualities of humility and restraint.’

The pride with which people came away from the Mall was owing in great measure to their profound respect for President Obama. As much as he tried to merge into his message, or to lower expectations of what he’ll be able to accomplish, I was moved by the thought that we hadn’t seen his like before.

         [I don’t have to tell you who looks pretty bad in contrast.]

Am I guilty of looking at the recent past with rose-colored glasses? I may be. But like looking at Washington, Lincoln, FDR, JFK, even Reagan and, now he’s safely dead, Jimmy Carter, it’s hard to take off those glasses when contrasting them with whatever era we might be reading from. A previous administration almost always looks better than the current one.

          But remember the things we’ve lost to a Trump administration. Perhaps calling these policies “lost” is incorrect. We haven’t mislaid them and however we might feel they haven’t been taken from us. The current administration has decided these are somehow out of reach, either because of finances or a strained morality, but we worked long and hard to achieve them, to convince enough people of their rightness that they understood with us that a sane, good society needs them. They are things we believe in.

          We believe in a person's sovereignty over their own body.  While the Dobbs v Jackson decision was reached after Trump was defeated the first time it was after he had appointed 4 conservative justices to the Supreme Court, including at least one who by rights should have been Obama's nominee. The right of a woman to make her own pregnancy decisions is, or should be, inviolate.  Likewise, the right of an individual to determine what body they’re comfortable in is sacrosanct.

We believe in the separation of church and state. As Obama said, Americans have the right to choose in a god or a discipline we believe, or choose not to believe, and the right not to be subordinate to someone else’s belief or nonbelief.  We believe in programs like USAID, that helped develop foreign policy and lessen poverty, enhance healthcare worldwide and make economies stronger. Prior to its dismantling, USAID was credited with preventing 75 million deaths, many of them in underdeveloped nations [in Africa and Asia.]

          We believe in an independent Center for Disease Control. In 2024 there were a total of 284 cases of measles; in 2025, a full year of the Directorship of Robert F. Kennedy Jr brought that number to a staggering 2283 cases. In these first 3 months of 2026 there are already 1281 cases.

          We believe in meaningful work. Just since Donald Trump assumed office again manufacturing lost 88,000 jobs, more than 10,000,000 people have been out of work for at least 6 months, over 4.7 million people are underemployed, unemployment among the young has jumped from 9.3% of job-seekers in 2023 to 13.9%.

What kind of quality can we put on our sense of safety or security in the actions of our government? How do we even measure that? After the disastrous rollout of Covid 19 prevention under Trump during which it was suggested by him we inject ourselves or swallow noxious chemicals, some intended for other species, or shining ultraviolet light up our system, 1,124,000 people have died. Since Trump’s reelection and expanded powers for ICE and the CBP 48 people have been reported dying in detention centers around the country, and another 8 people, famously including two who were videotaped, were also killed by ICE agents in public. For many of us this is shockingly new, but for just as many others it’s dismayingly familiar. A veneer has been pulled back to display the rot beneath.

          We’ve seen the sacrifice of DEI, Diversity, Equality and Inclusion, on the altar of the lies of wasteful government initiatives, preferential treatment, and hurt feelings. These programs helped correct past wrongs and contemporary setbacks. When we say we believe in DEI we echo our Unitarian Universalist values of an individual’s inherent worth and dignity, of justice, equity and compassion.

These are the ideas and policies we believe in. We fought long and hard and some of us died to achieve them, and just because Trump and his followers don’t share our8 belief doesn’t mean they are gone. It’ll take time but we’ll get them back.

          Because when you believe in an ideal like equality or feeding the hungry, sheltering the homeless or treating one another with respect and dignity, it’s not something you can cross out of a budget. We bought those things with muscle and blood. It’s not a pet rock or platform shoes. We can’t live up to our best without them.

          It’s a truism among political wonks that a leader is someone who watches which direction the people are going and runs out ahead shouting, “Follow me!” We don’t elect a leader to tell us what to do, we elect one to inspire us to do better.

          Can we do better than Donald Trump? Yes, we can. Can we do better than Barack Obama? Yes, we can. I don’t know what that looks like but they’re out there. We’ll know them when we hear them, the belief, the certainty in their voice and actions that we can and must be better. To quote the title of a James Carville book from the 90s that popped down the memory hole, We’re Right, They’re Wrong. There’s nothing wrong with certainty in helping others. We must hold to that belief if we’re going to return those values to their proper place.

         

“What is Happening to Me?”

 

A Sermon Delivered to 

High Street UU Church, 

February 15, 2026

I used to live about 45 minutes from Minneapolis. My wife says that when I start out with something like that, I should give fair warning that I’m about to tell you an amusing anecdote about myself. But this isn’t amusing and as you’ll see I’m peripheral to the story. Like today, a lot of protests and rallies were happening in the Twin Cities. Most I attended were uneventful, but in September 2008 the Republican National Convention came to town. Joining about 10,000 others on the streets of St Paul, I took with me a young member of my congregation. Keith had been to some protests in his sleepy Wisconsin town but not a large gathering or one with a sizable police presence. I suggested to him before we got out of the car he should leave his backpack of cigarettes and jacket, phone, instruments, and homemade signs in the car. But he was sure he’d need them.

We joined the anarchist contingent, a part of which was the so-called “black bloc,” the masked protesters dumping trash cans, breaking windows, setting small fires. One group eventually set a police cruiser on fire. I didn’t join them. I believe destruction gets you nothing except bad publicity, but I understand also publicity has its place.

Keith and I got separated soon after arrival and later I saw him do a brave thing. There was a large group of protestors at one end of a street and on the other end a large group of police. Now it’s a common sight today to watch videos from Minneapolis and Portland and Seattle and see all these militarized, armed cops in tactical gear and helmets, but in 2008 it was new. I stood with a part of the crowd at one end of the street, observing the standoff, when suddenly Keith emerged from the crowd. He walked to a point about midway between the two groups and sat down on the street. He sat in the lotus position, opening his arms to the cops, miming “Why?” Believe it or not, this had an ameliorating effect on the cops. They were ordered back a few blocks and the protestors marched further.

I saw a lot of things, places being vandalized, tear gas unleashed. Famously, a police car was burned. One protestor who’d thought to bring his own gas mask put it on and was surrounded and pummeled by the police about 20 feet away from where I stood. I stayed upwind avoiding the group collecting on the Wabasha Street bridge. There’s a police tactic called kettling, allowing a group to herd themselves into an area, then cutting off the means to and from that area, effectively boxing the group in. Most of those on the bridge were arrested.

There’s more to this day I’d relate but I’m talking about Keith, so I’ll skip to the end. After his action on the street, I didn’t see Keith again and when I returned to the car at our agreed-on time, he wasn’t there. I waited another hour before I called his cell phone, and it rolled into voicemail. I left a message and then drove the streets looking for him. Many streets were blocked off, however, so I knew there was a chance I wouldn’t find him. About 10 that night I called his mom and reported I hadn’t found him and needed to leave, as I had an 8 AM class next morning. She said she and her wife and her ex-husband, Keith’s father, would drive over and start looking.

Here’s the story as I heard it later. The three of them drove around the now-opened streets of Minneapolis until 3 when they found him wandering one of the streets with a small group of other teens. He’d been arrested a few blocks away from where I’d last seen him while getting a lighter out of his backpack. I knew that backpack was bad business. He’d been pressed down so hard by the cop he had a boot indentation on his back. Somewhere I still have a picture of it. He’d been taken to juvenile and kept in lockup for at least 8 hours. Juveniles don’t receive the fabled one phone call and his cell had long since died.

The cops remained on the streets of Minneapolis for about a week. The image of at least 2 officers armed with semi-automatics and bulletproof vests on every corner became a daily sight.

Here’s why I’m telling you this story. As nasty as the 2008 elections were—you remember the election? Sarah Palin was a Donald trump without either the charisma or the cash. John McCain referred to Barak Obama as “That one” in the second debate but made up for it by interrupting his own supporters’ allegations to describe him as “a decent family man with whom I have some disagreements.” Leading up to the election and after, Obama was described as anything from a secret Muslim, a Kenyan by birth, to the Antichrist. During the crackdown on the protestors that lasted a week, dozens were arrested. Some were hurt. But no one was killed. Other than gas masks when they deployed gas, I never saw a masked cop. Every one of them had his badge on the outside of his gear; Keith’s family eventually sued the officer who’d used excessive force in arresting him and we knew who she was because someone had taken a picture of her and her badge. My court appearance on Keith’s behalf was the first time I’d worn my brand-new clerical collar. People were hurt. No one died. As messy as things got, as adrenalized as everyone was.

Rush forward 18 years and things have changed. We look at one another and at ourselves differently. In under a year we have gone from, well, maybe not a Capraesque Bedford Falls, but it’s hard to deny we’re living in some version of Pottersville. You might remember in Bedford Falls there was a sizable community of hardworking immigrants, but there are no visible immigrants of any kind in Pottersville.

In my instance, I’ve come to see myself differently than before. I’m angry sometimes, at nothing in particular or at nothing I can identify. I avoid the news, and when I don’t I doomscroll. I brood. I don’t brood well. My brooding is less Heathcliff on the moors and more Charlie Brown reflecting on his team’s 156^th consecutive loss. “Rats.” I snipe at people whose only crime is being related to people who continue to support trump. I don’t think of myself as depressed, rather as echoing the poet of the Biblical Book of Lamentations who writes, “My eyes! My eyes! They stream with tears! How far from me is anyone to comfort, anyone to restore my life. My children are desolate; the enemy has prevailed.”

In his “autobiographical sketch” of his childhood, “The Ethics of Living Jim Crow,” Richard Wright’s there was a clear distinction between the Black and white children. Among other things, Black children threw clumps of railway cinders at one another in play, while white boys were allowed to throw broken bottles at them. Young Richard catches one of these projectiles in his neck, requiring three stitches.

When night fell, my mother came from the white folks’ kitchen. I raced down the street to meet her…I grabbed her hand and babbled out the whole story. She examined my wound, then slapped me.

“How come yuh didn’t hide?” she asked me. “How come yuh always fightin’?”

I was outraged, and bawled. Between sobs I told her I didn’t have any trees or hedges to hide behind. There wasn’t a thing I could have used as a trench. And you couldn’t throw very far when you were hiding behind the brick pillars of a house. She grabbed a barrel stave, dragged me home, stripped me naked, and beat me till I had a fever of one hundred and two. She would smack my rump with the stave, and, while the skin was still smarting, impart to me gems of Jim Crow wisdom. I was never to throw cinders any more. I was never to fight in any more wars. I was never, never, under any conditions, to fight white folks again, and they were absolutely right in clouting me with the broken milk bottle. Didn’t I know she was working hard every day in the hot kitchens of the white folks to make money to take care of me? When was I ever going to learn to be a good boy? She couldn’t be bothered with my fights. She finished by telling me that I ought to be thankful to God as long as I lived that they didn’t kill me.

What’s happening to me, at least partly, is my disheartening realization that this self-identification with the authorities like Richard’s mother is something we have already seen. Hispanics, Blacks, and women have all joined the Border Patrol and ICE and are, maybe not unilaterally, but sufficiently content with their orders and their targets. My fantasy solution is suggested by the line of a song by The Devil Said Jump. These MFers are gonna “Make Me Buy a Gun.” So far, it remains fantasy because I’m really too much the coward and pacifist to do that. But I will admit I’ve looked up the price of high-end long-distance slingshots. My rationale around that is to echo that of the pastoral character Shepherd Book of the TV series Firefly. When the ship is attacked by government agents and along with everyone else onboard he picks up a gun to fight back, he is asked, facetiously, whether there isn’t something specific in the Bible about killing, he answers, “Quite specific. It is, however, much fuzzier on the subject of kneecaps.”

My point is it can be done, it has been done, without people dying or being maimed. We can’t support a government that acts out of the barrel of a gun. We will not support such a government, we will not forgive such a government, we will remember the government that did this and the people who cheered it on or who, at best, ignored that it was happening. People point out, rightly, if we, by which I mean the predominantly white liberal community, had refused to allow the government to behave this way with Black citizens, Asian citizens, Native Americans, we would not be dealing with the government treating people this way now. Yes, 20-20 hindsight and all that, but there’s at least a salt lick’s worth of truth to that.

I quoted Lamentations earlier. Now I quote the Psalms: “The Lord is near to the brokenhearted and saves the crushed in spirit.” We can surely use some of that certainty, can’t we, the surety of UU minister Wayne Arneson who wrote “Take courage, friends. The way is often hard, the path is never clear, and the stakes are very high. Take courage. For deep down, there is another truth: you are not alone.

It may be time, may be past time, to cut loose MAGA from political thought. Remember the John Birch Society? There’s an argument to be made that Bircherism is echoed by contemporary Trumpism. Long thought dead, it declined in membership from a high in the 1960s of 100,000 to somewhere in the hundreds. It isn’t just numbers. More Americans profess belief in UFOs than voted for Trump—yes, I looked that up—and we don’t take them into political account. They have set themselves outside society. It’s time to metaphorically vote them off the island. I remember during the first trump administration coming across the comment that the only things that would separate most of his supporters from him would be finding a dead woman or a live child in his bed, and there was some question about the dead woman. With each day revealing more evidence, it is obvious the live child makes no difference either.

Am I suggesting we drop those people from our lives? In so many words, I am. It’s possible to love someone and hate his actions. I used to teach in the Minnesota prison system. I liked my students. They were personable. I didn’t ask anyone what his crime was because, a, that’s not something you ask a person, and b, I wasn’t so certain I’d like them after finding out. They looked forward to class days and did all the work because it was a way, as one inmate put it to me, “to remind me my life isn’t just punishment.”

One of my best students and a favorite of mine insisted one evening on telling me why, in his early 20s, he had a life sentence. Without putting too much of a spin on it, he told me he’d raped and killed a young girl in his mid-teens. I had to sort out for myself whether I wanted to keep him in class. I had that kind of power, to drop anyone from class if I felt their contributions ran counter to it. It was a week of some soul searching, and I decided that despite how I felt about his crime, he had earned an opportunity to better himself. It is the same kind of self-questioning anyone with a father, brother, mother, sister, cousin in prison must ask themselves.

I like to think he took some comfort in that, that as bad as he had made his life he could read and talk about good books. I would rewrite the benediction of Reverend Arneson from “Take courage, friends” to “Take comfort.” Where do I take comfort? I take comfort in the love of my family. I take comfort in my animals, the dogs and cats who make up my pack. I take comfort in my work, helping people. I take comfort in my daily walk around my neighborhood, greeting the dogs and cats, and yes, even my neighbors who wear red caps. I take comfort in my activism, in showing up to rallies and protests and marches. I rarely help to organize these and less often speak at them, taking my comfort instead by being a part of the crowd, a quiet body standing in solidarity with like-minded people. It reminds me I am not alone. I take comfort in the words of fellow Unitarian TheodoreParker, that “The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice.” But if we would see justice come in our lifetimes we must lean on one end.

Hope and the Courage to Act on It

 

I'm conflicted, I admit. Not a day has gone by since the ignobility of the November vote that there hasn't been an idea floated, an action taken, a decree made, an insult delivered, and thousands upon thousands of lies told, and I have felt the need to talk about it. I've been concerned that, in the wake of the complicity of most media in the pretense all this is normal, there won't be a note for future generations, if there are any, that there were people watching and writing it down and recognizing the wrongness of it all.

So I've felt it's fallen to me. But that's self-aggrandizing, almost worthy of trump himself, that anyone reads these missives, let alone they'll remember that there was someone commenting on it in a way that's worth holding onto. 

Besides, and maybe more importantly, I don't want to be that guy. I don't want what little attention I get to be for a list of lies and laments. That's all such notes would be because frankly just noticing this sort of stuff daily is exhausting. 

I want to be known, if at all, for keeping up a good word, for being the port in the storm, the one who keeps his head when all around them is chaos and dread. I do dread the chaos, of course, because not to do so is to give in to the lie that it's a kind of order, trump uber alles. 

I would be remembered like John Murray to whom is attributed this: 

You may possess only a small light, but uncover it, let it shine, use it in order to bring more light and understanding to hearts of men and women. Give them, not hell, but hope and courage. Do not push them deeper into their theological despair, but preach the kindness and everlasting love of God.

Quite some thought to be remembered by, isn't it? Of course, John Murray never said nor wrote this. It was attributed to a Time-Spirit counseling Murray in a 1951 pamphlet by Alfred Cole, and somehow made it into a Universalist Sunday text in 1962 and from there into The Larger Faith, the history of the Unitarian Universalists written by Charles Howe. 

But the point here is that, even if Murray didn't write it but Cole created it for his pamphlet, it is still a good distillation of what is important, that we leave people with hope and the courage to act on it. As Ken Davis writes in Don't Know Much About the Bible about the sayings of Jesus, "What's important is that someone said these things or wrote them down." Just as Jesus' words, whosever they may really be, remain a touchstone about how to behave with one another, so Cole's words are a prod to those who comment on the darkness and despair now. As Wayne Arneson reminds us, "The way is often hard, the path is never clear, and the stakes are very high." But "Take courage [because] you are not alone."

Let someone else keep the lists. I will uplift hope. 

Lionesses' Teeth

 

This 2nd round of the trumpanista government, while it often leaves me depressed, has also roused in me the sensation about how important my religious faith is to helping people remember they're worthy, they're strong, and they can help. Thus, I'm reposting a sermon from 2013 which is also a reworking of a message from 2 years before that that focuses on those attributes we uniquely have and why they are necessary. (This post is so old that the technology taking people to associated websites will ask if going there is really what you want to do. I have checked them, and yes, they are safe."

   

“Lionesses’ Teeth”

 

Homily presented to the

Dakota UU Church of

Burnsville, MN,

 

            Normally during my celebration of Flower Communion my contribution is a freshly-plucked dandelion.  Taraxacum officinale.  I use it because we all recognize it in its omnipresence, as indestructible as love. 

            We have yet to see them this year because of the incredibly late winter we’ve experienced—only a week ago my wife and I were stranded because our driveway had sixteen inches of snow unceremoniously dumped on it by whatever malevolent snow-god or whatever sleeping spring-god there might be —but I guarantee you they will be coming and they will be everywhere.  The dandelion is the cockroach of flora.  They existed long before our species rose up from the proverbial swamp and after we return to the dust they will continue to be here. 

The name “dandelion,” which I’d always assumed referred to the yellow mane of the flower and its seeming vanity, actually comes from the French dents de lion, “teeth of the lion,” and refers instead to the deeply serrated rosette of leaves that poke up from billions of lawns, in abandoned lots, between the cracks in concrete, in the clefts of mountain crags and skyscrapers, and sometimes tufting out of the useless chimneys of houses where no hearths have burned in decades.  They are perennial and rely on bees and flies to pollinate, and when they’re ready, the wind carries their seeds on tiny parachutes to new places.  Sometimes they fly as much as several hundred meters.  They do not need us at all.

            Dandelions are often used as a medicine, usually involved with blood, the liver, and gall bladder.  Its juices aids detoxification and bile flow, promotes lactation and the immune system, and helps reduce eczema and cough and asthma.  The root can be dried and ground up and added to coffee, like its close relative chicory, and the leaves are often delicious in salads (although I’ll admit I have to add a lot of butter to make them palatable).  And most of us are of an age when we have had dandelion wine.

            Had Jesus been born in, say, Kansas rather than in the Middle East, the Sermon on the Mount might have included the following: 

Consider the [dandelions,] how they grow; they neither toil nor spin; yet I tell you, even Solomon in all his glory was not arrayed like one of these. 

             Now don’t mistake all this information for anything like love for the dandelion.  I relish nothing more this time of year than to walk barefoot among my lawns, swiping the heads off these parasites with a few well-aimed kung fu kicks.  There is a deep, satisfying, bottom-of-the-gut joy that comes with yanking a 3 foot long dandelion root from my gardens.  Few things are as pleasurable as watching the beasts disappear under the deck of my lawnmower.  I do not love the dandelion.  I tolerate the dandelion.

            Because, try as I might to eradicate it, the dandelion remains as much a part of my life as a part of my landscape.  I cannot escape its existence.  I mow and weed and even spray the lawns, and still they come back up.  That is their unique power. 

A story now, a contemporary one, about motherhood that serves to relate how people are like dandelions.  Our relationships with our mothers, with either parent actually, can be pleasant and problematic at best.  I had what I think was a pretty good relationship with my late mother and with my dad, secure at all times in the knowledge that, no matter what, they loved me and wanted nothing but the best for me.  Those among us who are mothers or parents likely have that same assurance that they, too, love their children no matter what. 

            This week we saw the end of a news story that adds a different, more complex concept to this topic.  I refer of course to the story of the three girls, now three women, in Cleveland, the first of them abducted nearly eleven years ago, the last of them nearly nine years ago, all three found alive and relatively healthy in the home of their presumed kidnapper. 

            We can have only the barest inkling what Melissa Knight, Amanda Barry, and Gina DeJesus experienced over the past decade.  We should be thankful for that.  Worse perhaps, we are even less capable of imagining what the six year old daughter of Amanda Barry and her captor, whose name has yet to be released, has experienced.  If she is fortunate she herself will retain little memory of what her life to now has been. 

[Note:  In illustrating this post I purposely chose a photo in which her daughter's face is blurred.  There are many images available where it is not but I think she should be allowed as much privacy as possible.]

            There are so many things to be said about this situation, about the Castro Brothers’ activities and what they hoped to accomplish [update]; about the women’s years in captivity and in physical, emotional and sexual abuse; about how this situation happened in a neighborhood of a major American city and not in some Hills Have Eyes outback; about the unwillingness of police, despite what are supposed to have been multiple reports by neighbors, to investigate beyond the front door of Castro’s home; and most especially, there are things yet to say about Charles Ramsay and his willingness to expose his own past—because in this brave new networked world there are no past sins that can’t be found—in order to do the right thing. 

            But what I’d like to talk about is Amanda Berry and her daughter.  And how what little we know might suggest about motherhood and resilience.  The story as it’s come to us is that a week ago today Ariel Castro left his home to eat at a local McDonald’s.  If he did this on a regular basis we don’t know, and if he didn’t why he chose this day to do it, no one apparently knows, but when he did Amanda Berry took the opportunity to scream as near the door as she could until someone responded.  Charles Ramsay did, and it’s a testament to his heroism that this man, who partied with Castro, eaten BBQ with him, played music with him, didn’t say “It’s a domestic matter” and turn around, and after listening to her story that she was being held against her will kicked the bottom panel out of the door.  Berry, carrying her child, squeezed through the broken panel, hugged Ramsay, begged him to take her to his house to use his phone, and then called police.

            Some of us might routinely play a mental game with ourselves in which, if we were caught in a disaster and could save only one thing, what would it be.  To make it more interesting we often presume that there are no people or animals involved, to make it a specifically material question.  What thing would we save?  Amanda Berry did not have the luxury of pretending or of there being no person involved.  The material object she left with was her daughter.

             To put this decision in perspective, consider what myriad complications must have been involved over the past six years.  Berry was just under seventeen when she was abducted.  After years of sex with her abductor and probably his brothers—we presume the middle brother, Ariel, is the abductor because it’s his house the women were found in but the abductor could be any of the brothers[see update above] or, worse yet, someone we’re not even aware of—she is pregnant at twenty and delivers a daughter into the dark, airless, sunless existence she’s come to figure will be her future.  We don’t know if she wanted this girl or feared for her existence, born into the same situation she’d been held captive in, and it’s likely it was a combination of both sensations and any number of others.  She may have wanted to abort the fetus, although we have heard suggestions from one of the the other women that Castro beat her when she was pregnant to spontaneously miscarry.  So what we are left to guess at is that either Amanda fought vigorously to have this child or that Ariel, who DNA tests have proved to be the father, had a change of heart over this pregnancy and decided to allow it to be brought to term. 

            This girl, born into a situation her mother was abducted into, and raised only in the company of the other two abducted women and the Castro brothers—what can be going through her head?  She is six years old, she has known only these six people in her life.  Two of them are her parents.  One of them carried her out of her world into the unknown, into what she can’t possibly know.  So while we can’t know what Michelle, Gina or Amanda has gone through we can, with some certainty, know what Amanda’s daughter is experiencing now:  Absolute, unqualified, quaking fear.

              It seems to me, as an outsider looking in on parenthood, that this is one extreme part of what it means to be a mother:  To deliver your child into great uncertainty and, when the time comes, to help her escape into greater uncertainty.  But that is what you must do. 

            It’s well known that among lions it’s the female, the lioness, who hunts and who is really the fiercer of the species so it may be that the distinctive feature about dandelions—their serrated leaves, the dents de lion—may more accurately be termed the dents de lioness.  Perhaps the natural reaction as mothers, as parents, even as proponents of religious liberalism, is to emulate the dandelion—stubbornly resistive to any attempt to root us out, to burn us out, and even to the natural tendency of entropy to crumble us from within. 

            Our message, the message of religious liberalism, the message of people who see great complexity to parenthood—that it is better to be alive than to be dead, that to treat anyone as less than the glorious being that he or she is is itself an evil, that children and the people we’re responsible for need safe food and safe water and safe places to live, and that these are not starry-eyed ideals but necessities—must be heard.  We must endure for these messages to be heard.  We must become ubiquitous and obnoxious, unwilling to be pressed from our perch.  We must be willing to grow quietly beside the more beautiful and cozened strawberry and rose and lily so to suck up some of their excess nutrient and water until we can elbow those more popular petals aside to take the place we’ve earned.  To endure as a faith and as a people we need to be as tough, as resilient, and as uncompromising as the common dandelion. 

Black Lives are Sacred

I'd been asked to say a few words and do a public prayer at a rally for Black Lives in Mequon, near Milwaukee, over the weekend. I did so and enjoyed the company. 

These are my remarks. "As we were setting up today, someone drove by and shouted 'Get a life!' And what they fail to recognize is that we are here because so many lives have been taken. We come together because people have died. Died frightened, died pleading, died unheard. We mourn those deaths. But we come together too because of the living. Living in despair, in fear, in poverty of spirit. We come together to make this known, to point to it and swear that lives are no less sacred for that. We would be whole. When one of us cries, we all cry. When one bleeds, we all bleed. When one dies, we all die. Today, we all mourn. We ask to be brought together. Make us one. If we've forgotten, remind us it is good to be together. It is good to be beside one another in fortune and in pain. It is good to look into each other's eyes, to hear each other's voices. Remember the sacredness of our brothers and sister's lives as our own. We would be one. To make all lives safe and meaningful. To be as one and act as one, we would be one." 

The prayer is one I cribbed from John and Sarah Gibb Millspaugh, an adaptation from Pali canons. 

Opening: In the UU tradition, it's not just ministers and religious professionals who have the power to bless. Each of us has the power to bless one another, and therefore bless the world. The words are ordinary words, but we make our blessing real through our shared intent. 

Prayer: "As we have been blessed, so we bless one another to be a blessing. Breathe in, breathe out, this breath we share with all that breathes. Feel the love of the universe flowing through this joint community into you and out into the universe again. Let the love of all the universe--your love--flow outward, to its height, its depth, its broad extent. You are more than you know, more beloved than you know. Take up what power is yours to create safe haven, and make of earth a heaven. Give hope to those you encounter, that they may know safety from inner and outer harm, be happy and at peace, healthy and strong, caring and joyful. Be the blessing that you already are. That is enough. Amen." 

A new hymn

Yesterday I attended services at the congregation I frequent (I also do several services a year for them), and we had a couple discuss the "Life of a Peacemaker." It was an interesting message, although frankly not as deep or informational as I could have wished. Still, I can't fault it for what I expected it to be. 

But what I want to talk about is a song. The service's second hymn was John Lennon's "Imagine." The lyrics were printed out and passed around with our hymnals. I've discussed in the past my firm belief that, as churches and services grow and change, one of the likeliest changes will be the co-opting of seminal, probably secular songs into our hymnals to take the place of songs that either don't connect with our theology (we already see this with the dropping from many denominations of such aggressive, warlike songs as "Onward, Christian Soldiers") or that have greater resonance with our congregations (in my own UU faith, we see this in the inclusion of the song popularized by Cat Stevens, "Morning Has Broken"). I suspect "Imagine" could be the bridge between every faith by its inclusion as a hymn.

If this is the case, it'll be helped along by its simple tune and rhyme scheme, its ubiquity in mass culture, and the simple fact that, as I looked around, I noticed that nearly everyone my age was singing from beginning to end without looking at the lyrics. We have already taken it in as our own.

We Were Never Meant to Survive

This is the text of a sermon I gave yesterday at my congregation. The title is taken from a line in the poem "A Litany of Survival" by Audre Lorde. If you were there, the bracketed sections were ones I excised in the interest of time.  

We Were Never 

Meant to Survive

A Sermon Delivered to Unitarian Church North October 7, 2018

          [To be a good sermon writer you need to pay attention to what happens around you and bend it to make sense in a sermon. To be a great sermon writer you just need to pay attention and write it down, whether it makes sense or not.]

          Friday morning, just after my wife left for work and I was settling in with a book, she called me to say, One of the cats got outside and there are a couple people in front of our house trying to change a tire. I popped my head out and let the cat inside and saw a pair of young women.  I said Hi and they said, Please, do you know anything about changing a tire, because we don’t. They were practically crying. I said, Yes, I do know how to change a tire, because that’s something my mother taught me many years ago, saying If you’re going to drive, you need to know how to do this. [Now, in a good sermon I would tell you that] I changed their tire and they went happily on their way and I’d say something about how we all need to help strangers in need and that would be that.

          But [I’m going for a great sermon, which means I need to tell you,] try as we might, we could not get that flat tire off. We just didn’t have the right tools to take the lugs off the flat. They called friends and came back later to fix it.

          Kinda anticlimactic. But what makes this worth telling you about is why they stopped at my place with the flat tire. They weren’t sure what kind of reception two early-20s Hispanic single mothers with a flat tire, a trunkful of their kids’ clothes, and the wrong tools on the street of a mostly-retired white neighborhood would get at 8 in the morning. Then, they said they saw this sign [holds up “We’re glad you’re our neighbor” sign] on our front lawn.

          We live in a nation—and probably a lot of you knew this already, and for some of you this may have always been the case—where we have to advertise our willingness to help strangers. In the last two years we’ve developed other, sometimes subtler (shows safety on shirt) ways, sometimes not (pulls out pink pussy hat) of showing strangers we’re on their side, or at least willing to listen to them.

          Fred Rogers famously said in an interview, When I was a boy and I would see scary things in the news, my mother would say to me, “Look for the helpers. You will always find people who are helping.”

·        "Separations from their parents, especially in moments of extreme distress and displacement, has a very negative impact on a child’s wellbeing, mental health, and development…And I don't think that we want to be a society that does that to children." Dr. Lisa Fortuna, director of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry, Boston Medical Center

There are a lot of scary things in the news nowadays, and a lot of it scares adults. One thing is called Zero Tolerance and it refers to the program put into practice by the current president and his administration to prosecute everyone entering the United States illegally. Now, this type of program isn’t new itself—it’s long been a staple of Republican and Democratic administrations that, when families entered the country illegally and were caught, they were detained or returned to their origin country or paroled into this country. But the difference is that they remained together throughout the ordeal. The Trump administration’s Zero Tolerance policy of separating parents and children, something very costly in time and money and considered by previous administrations as “unnecessarily harsh”, was begun earlier this year. Its stated purpose was providing a greater deterrent against people trying to enter the country illegally.

This sort of news leaves adults looking for the helpers too. You realize one day that If you can’t find the helpers, then you have to be the helper.

·        [“Separating children from their parents contradicts everything we stand for as pediatricians…So many of these parents are fleeing for their lives…So many of these children know no other adult than the parent who brought them here.” Dr. Colleen Kraft, president, American Academy of Pediatrics]

As we’re here in a Unitarian Universalist church I think we can count on everyone’s beliefs in the first and second UU principles: That is, there is inherent dignity in everyone and a commitment to justice and compassion in human relations. The Trump administration’s Zero Tolerance policy promotes neither. If anything, it promotes the idea that some people are more worthwhile than others, with immigrant children at the bottom of whatever list someone might create.

     It is, at bottom, an evil policy that does evil to the people least able to defend themselves.

·        “The food was often expired, the milk was spoiled, and we weren’t provided with snacks for our children between meals. When we saved food for snacks, it was taken from us and thrown out because of concerns about rats in the dorms. Children went to bed hungry. And we could get water between meals only by asking the officers. Sometimes they wouldn’t bring any. The water we did have made us sick… When our children were sick, we waited days for medical attention. When one mother whose daughter had asthma informed the officers that her child needed medical care, she was told that she should have thought about that before she came to the United States. Another mother asked for medical assistance for her son, but it never came. She was deported, and her son died just a few months later.” Anonymous woman at a family immigration center, New Mexico

Shame on them. Evil is ubiquitous, it’s everywhere, so much that we sometimes are blind to it. You know it when you see it. Evil is hurting other people or animals when you don’t need to. Evil is treating other creatures as if they don’t exist, or if they do exist, they don’t matter. Evil is treating other people like they’re means to an end. Evil is pretending they don’t have people who love them.

·         “The expectation [of officials in the Trump administration] was that the kids would go to the Office of Refugee Resettlement, that the parents would get deported, and that no one would care.” Anonymous immigration official quoted by Jonathon Blitzer

As an example, those two girls I mentioned at the start, the one’s with the flat tire. Would it have been evil, given that I feel we all are connected whether we know it or not, not to have put out that sign that led them to believe they were safe if they stopped? I don’t know. But I can tell you it would have been evil for me to have that sign up and then to look out the window, see them struggling with their tire, and pretended they weren’t there. That would have been to pretend they weren’t us.

·        [“I was forced to flee my country because of violence and threats of violence against me and my family. When I was a teenager, my father and I witnessed a murder by local gang members. In 2005, my father was murdered for having testified. The gangs threatened me as well, but since the murder case got dropped, I was able to continue my life and found a job in law enforcement. However, several years later, they threatened to kill me too. That’s when I decided I had to leave and bring my son and my 16-year-old sister with me. If we had stayed, they could’ve killed us all.”  Anonymous woman at a family immigration center, New Mexico]

Evil is knowing this is happening to people, and when they tell us about it, to pretend maybe they’re not telling the truth, or worse, if they are telling the truth, that it doesn’t matter because they don’t look like us, they don’t sound like us, they don’t eat the same things we do, they don’t care about each other the way we do. It’s okay to separate them because, well, if they really loved their kids they never would have taken them on such a long, dangerous journey. They’re not like us.

Now you may think the “us” of Audre Lorde’s poem we read earlier includes us, and it does, but only if we use that second principle, justice and compassion. Compassion. Looking at situations or events as if we are living it too. For most of us, certainly for me, living on the shoreline is a good thing. I hear Lake Michigan in my dreams, see it even as I step out the front door for work. But this shoreline is metaphorical, it’s a line where on one side there is solid ground and on the other is deep, unfathomable unknown. To treat someone like he’s not us is evil. Because ultimately there is only us. Evil is pretending not to know it’s because immigrant parents love their children like we do that they were desperate enough to take them on such a long, dangerous journey.

·        [“There were people there who only spoke English, and they always said to us, ‘No touch, No touch’…You always had to be ‘an arm’s length’ from everyone. Un brazo de distancia. Un brazo de distancia.” Leidy Veliz, 9, from Guatemala. “No touch, no touch” is a phrase repeated by nearly every former child detainee]

·        "I couldn't hug my mom because the official didn't allow us to touch. Physical contact wasn't permitted…They took us to another cell, and we were talking there, whispering, because they didn't permit us to speak.to one another. They put ankle monitors on us and were going to drop us off at the bus stop. All I want is to live with my mom, go to school, get an education, and when tomorrow comes, be somebody…I know everything in life costs something. Nothing is easy. And whatever is easy isn't worth it." Alejandro, 13, on being reunited with his mother after 2 months separation

·         “Just take me back to jail. You’re not my mom anymore.” Jenri, 5, after being reunited with his mother Anita after a month’s separation

Evil is hearing these reactions from kids and pretending we don’t have anything to do with it. Or that there’s nothing we can do. Or that it just plain doesn’t matter.

     Evil, see, isn’t just doing something bad, it’s also not doing something when it’s possible for us to do. It’s dumping a kid’s lunch into the trash at school because he doesn’t have enough to pay for it. It’s delivering a pizza and seeing a woman with a black eye mouthing, Help me!, and not calling the police as soon as you’re able to. It’s seeing a guy on the street asking for your change, and even though you have some, not only pretending you don’t but pretending you don’t even see him. Evil is not doing anything when you could do anything.

“In spite of everything I still believe that people are really good at heart. I simply can’t build up my hopes on a foundation consisting of confusion, misery, and death. I see the world gradually being turned into a wilderness, I hear the ever approaching thunder, which will destroy us too, I can feel the sufferings of millions and yet, if I look up into the heavens, I think that it will all come right, that this cruelty too will end, and that peace and tranquility will return again.”

Every once in a while, we get a glimpse of that peace and tranquility. That Anne Frank, one of a swiftly vanishing handful of people who could legitimately tell God that She had messed up mightily, could still say this about Hitler, a man whose policies killed so many people including Anne that we refer to him only by one name, like Voldemort, as if that will keep him from returning.

Hitler’s policies and practices were evil. But there were still helpers. People like Miep Gies and Bep Voskuijl, who, after the family was arrested and sent to concentration camps in Germany and Poland where all but Anne’s father died, returned to the hidden rooms and retrieved, among other things, Anne’s diary. I will share a secret with you. In spite of everything, while they did evil, the Germans were not evil. The Nazis, even when they were sifting through the ashes that had once been people, looking for gold teeth, were not evil. What they did was evil and what they believed was evil. But if our first principle is to mean anything, it means Nazis had dignity too.

There are evil acts, evil ideas, evil practices, and I am convinced that the Trump administration’s Zero Tolerance policy is among them. But do I believe that anyone who takes a child away from his mother and father because of where they come from, from agents to supervisors to administrators to cabinet secretaries, is, in spite of everything, good at heart? Yes, I do. Does that mean I believe that Stephen Miller, who has argued most successfully for the implementation of Zero Tolerance and who has overseen its practice, is, in spite of everything, good at heart? Yes, I do. Do I believe that Donald Trump, in spite of everything, is good at heart? Yes, I do.

If our principles mean anything, they mean that we have compassion for the people we know are doing evil things, even if they don’t see it that way, and we afford them the dignity they deny others. Most of you know that I work with people who are dying, and you might be surprised at this, but in their last days or hours they don’t ask me where I think they’re going, either heaven or hell. I couldn’t answer that anyway. But the question they ask me is as hard to answer. They ask, in one way or another, if what they did in their lives was the right thing.

Boy, if that isn’t the hardest thing for anyone to answer. Here’s the thing I’ve come to understand about the end of life. At the end of it all, we must face our parents and our spouse and our children and our friends and ask them, Did I do the right thing? Now, if those are the only people we ask, maybe we can say, Sure, for them I did the right thing. But we also have to turn to other people’s parents, other people’s spouses, other people’s children and the friends of strangers, and ask of them, Did I do the right thing?

This is maybe the best test of whether we have done the right thing, because helpers can answer, even if it’s only tentative, humble, or a whisper, I did the right thing. In the absence of helpers, in the face of someone hurting, us are the helpers. (Touch chest) Us. (Indicate congregation) Us. (Indicate the world)