A Good Death

 

A Sermon Delivered to High Street UU Church

July 26, 2026

I don’t need to remind you we’ve had lots of deaths lately within our Beloved Community, members, friends, relatives, many of them in hospice. That word, death, can be frightening, I know. I was a hospice chaplain before I retired. I’ve been with a number of people as they’ve died and I want to tell you about it.

It stands to reason almost everyone must die in somewhat the same way. Wouldn’t you think? The Population Reference Bureau, whose unenviable task it is to calculate these sorts of things, has determined that nearly one hundred eight billion people have been born and died in the six million years science estimates people have been crawling and hobbling around on the Earth. They have also determined, through statistics, mathematics, algorithms, and observation, that there is a one hundred percent certainty that if you are born, you will die. That’s the trick about life: no one gets out alive.

Amazingly, there is still some variation. There are as many unique ways to die as there are to live. Some of us die alone. Some of us surrounded by loved ones. Some of us die by violence, some by our own hand, some by accident, and some by the slow accrual of time and entropy. Each of our deaths as unique as our fingerprints or our dreams.

Perhaps in these days of miracle and wonder pills, we need memento mori, the Latin admonition, “Remember, you must die.” Buddhists call this Maranasati the practice of keeping mindful of our impending deaths. We long, all of us, once we admit to ourselves we will die, for a good death.  What is that? Well, that’s up to you. I have a friend who once expressed the wish that a nuclear bomb would take him out, squarely to the top of his head. He wanted to die fast and easy, not wishing to live in a post-apocalyptic anything or to watch his loved ones and friends die agonizing deaths. Another friend once said, if he contracted cancer or AIDs or something incurable, he planned to take out a platinum credit card and use it to travel around the world, succumbing just as the mail was delivering the bill to his home. I’m pretty certain credit card companies anticipate this kind of thing.

I used to think I knew how I wanted to die. I was hiking the Appalachian Trail through New England and in New Hampshire I was on Mount Washington in the White Mountains. It’s a high, rugged mountain where erratic weather—snowstorms in August, winds in excess of a hundred miles an hour out of nowhere—is the norm. It collects at its alpine apex an annual average of nearly 100 inches of rain and snowmelt, so it is covered with magnificent waterfalls and ravines fed by runoff from the Lake of the Clouds.

I was at one such ravine on the Ammonoosuc River on the western slope, lying on a hump of dirt and grass that jutted out above the cataract and afforded an excellent view downward toward Vermont and lower Canada. I was taking a photo of my hiking partner who had straddled another, higher rock jutting out from that hump when I felt the rock I had planted my foot against suddenly give way and I slid. I went shooting off the hump and straight down the ravine. It was a long way down and I saw the trees and brush and birds in glorious detail. My feet struck slick boulders just before they accordioned to my chin. In reality I’d only slid about three feet, but it was enough. And in my mind, just as I’d hit those rocks I thought, “This is a fine death.”

Working with hospice patients I often talk about good ways to die. Some would have liked to die immediately and unknowingly, like from a bullet or getting hit by a bus. Others are glad to have had the opportunity to talk with relatives they hadn’t connected with sometimes for decades. Still others, of course, curse the length of time it can take a sick person to die. Many people lose their faith in a personal, loving God when they find their breathing and cognition outlasting, sometimes by months or years, their ability to move without pain or to communicate simple things like “eat,” “sleep,” “toilet.”

I suspect that my mother, who died ten years ago in June, had a good death. She had breast cancer the last fifteen years of her life, and those were hard years, but that isn’t what killed her. No, my dad woke up one morning to find she wasn’t in the bed next to him but face down on the floor in the living room. Mom had a habit of getting up in the night to sit in her recliner for a few hours’ respite after her back began aching. The coroner ruled that she had stood up from her chair, maybe a little too quickly, and had a heart attack. She was dead, he claimed, before she hit the floor.

In those final fifteen years our family and her friends had the opportunity to see her and speak with her, reminisce with her, and tell her what she meant to us. There was nothing left between us, no words unspoken, no undelivered messages. I had loved her, she had loved me, and we let one another know how deeply we felt, and then she died. There’s another sense too in which it was a good death and that’s the lengths to which I discovered, to my surprise and probably his too, how kind a caregiver my father could be to her. My favorite memory of him, during my visit the winter before she died, dressing her for an outing in the cold, adjusting the scarf around her neck just so and bundling the top button of her coat gently under the scarf so the wind wouldn’t whip under it.

We all want, whether we admit to it or maybe more importantly when we do not, a death that’s good, whether it’s “good” in terms of its painlessness, its ease, its meaningfulness, or its message. But the truth is no one can give us that. Especially not in the way most of us mean it. For most of us, a good death means we die painlessly, unknowingly, in our sleep. Without prolonged illness, without having felt pain, without even knowing we were ill.

That happens shockingly rarely, the percentage hovers around 4 or 5. This means out of every hundred people, four or five will die this way. If it’s any consolation, neither will most of us die in a violent manner, not from terrorist attacks or stabbings or violent accidents, shark attacks, lightning strikes, air crashes, radiation poisoning, falling through the ice, or someone intentionally dropping an electric fan into our bath. Most of us in America will die in the hospital or at home—in an interesting turn, after a century of not most people dying in hospitals, often separated from family and friends, there is a resurgence in the way most people used to die, at home in their bed—from the complications of disease, usually heart disease or cancer.

How will we die? Well, again, there are at least as many variations in the act of dying as there are in living, but there are characteristics that can be called constants in the same way I suppose that school education is a constant.

There’s a booklet I gave families when admitting someone into hospice called Gone from My Sight: The Dying Experience. It was published in 1986 by Barbara Karnes, a hospice nurse, and has gone through many revisions. It relates what most people experience during their final days in a non-sensationalistic, understandable manner, using plain language. Despite the way it’s necessarily presented, there is no timetable to death. The periods Karnes refers to are a general outline of when some things happen. They may not happen at that time. They may not happen in that order. They may not happen at all.

Karnes characterizes One to Three Months Prior to Death as a period of Withdrawal. It’s not unusual for those first glimmers of our actual mortality—“This is it”—to send us into a spiral of separation from everyone and everything else. We may become irritable or serene. We are slipping into a cocoon, and there’s no room for children, grandchildren, or other loved ones. We’ll peep out at them, even enjoy their presence for a while, but really we’re focused on ourselves.

We sleep more often and longer. Little naps here and there, several a day. It may seem as if we’re bored but our interior life has taken on great interest. We don’t feel the need to communicate with people. Karnes writes, “Words lose their importance; touch and wordlessness take on more meaning.”

We may stop eating. This is often very hard for families to understand or accept; in many cultures there’s still a certainty that so long as we’re eating, we’re alive. “If only she’d eat she’d feel better.” But nothing tastes good. Or only certain things—sourballs, ice cream, bacon, citruses—taste good. Meat is usually the first to go, and then other hard-to-digest food like vegetables. We’ll stick with soft foods longest, but eventually we’ll stop eating those too.

At One to Two Weeks, people begin to show signs of disorientation. We pick at imaginary threads or hairs, our arms or legs seem agitated and move without our volition. We sleep even more. Longer periods, deeper naps. It’s almost like hibernation, some patients say. We may talk to people who aren’t there and about events no one recognizes. Studies suggest that, as the body breaks down, the brain, helping to prepare us, will show us images, smells, sounds, of people who’ve died already. Relatives, friends, pets. Journalist Phoebe Zerwick writes, “As people near the end…the frequency of visions increases…[These] final visions provide patients…with profound meaning and solace.”

Our blood pressure goes down, our pulse goes up. Or it may seem to stop altogether. We sweat a lot more and when people hug us they remark afterward how clammy we feel. We want the windows open as we’re burning up or more blankets because we just can’t get warm. Our skin changes color, we seem pale and flushed, blue like we’re freezing. Our extremities are often blue because the heart is no longer pumping the way it used to and blood can’t reach there. It might be harder to breathe so we need oxygen. We might breathe faster, like we’re always racing. We’ll hack and cough but nothing comes up.

Finally, at One to Two Days and in the Final Hours Before Death, we may have a surge of energy, what hospice workers call a “spike.” We’ll sit up all night talking, drinking, and laughing with friends who’ve come by. We want a plate of fried potatoes and a rare steak and we eat every bite. Loved ones look at this and say, “He’s over the worst,” and we are, but not in the way they mean it.

We get more restless but take to our bed. We collapse. Breathing is slower, less regular, sometimes stopping altogether for nearly a minute. We sound congested, loudly congested, the way we did as kids with a croupy cough. Our eyes are open but we don’t see anything or recognize anyone. We might respond to sounds or voices or movements but we can’t identify them and we’ve stopped responding at all, except for an occasional grunt or moan. We aren’t in pain, usually, it’s just the air moving around our lungs and throat.

Our hands and feet turn purple; the heart can’t pump blood that far anymore. Joints become blotchy and because we’re lying down blood starts to pool on the underside of our arms and legs, our backs, our buttocks. We stop responding altogether.

In the Final Minutes Before Death, there is often the sort of gasping you see when fish are out of water—it’s called Chayne-Stokes Breathing—and we can’t be awakened or roused. This is often the hardest for family present because they can see the end and they want to be there but this experience can last for hours. Sometimes, when they can’t hold off going to the bathroom any longer, we take that opportunity we’re alone to finally just stop.

No matter how closely we watch on the outside, we may not see them die. I attended the death of a Vietnam veteran turned Buddhist, and while I glanced at my phone for an appropriate sutra, he died. It was that quiet. In the 1970s my dad tended to her while my grandmother died from leukemia. He told me how he was with her nearly every moment of her hospitalization, until his youngest brother visited. Dad said he stepped into the hallway to prepare him—“I swear, it was maybe 40 seconds”—and in that time she died.

We all die and we all in our own time. It may sound sad and it may seem sad but it isn’t to the person undergoing it. It’s just what they’re going through and they’re beyond any consideration of whether they want to do it.

Finally, after a certain number we stop counting the people we’ve seen die, but I remember one of my first. Her decline was dramatic after a period of relative energy. Inside a week she had gone from sitting in a wheelchair and actively participating in life to being bed-bound and sleeping nearly all the time. She was unconscious when I arrived so I took her hand while the RN who'd got there before I had went through her paces. She said, "I'll be surprised if she lasts the day."

The nurse left about 20 minutes later. We were waiting for one of her daughters to arrive and I said I'd stay with her until she came. But a half hour after the nurse left she became agitated, having difficulty breathing, and opening and closing her eyes without seeing. Her dyspnea was a series of quick, almost urgent, shallow breaths, as if she can't catch it. I talked to her, letting her know I was there with her and she wasn't alone. She could be scared, I said, but I was with her and wouldn't be leaving until she was finished. She lay on her back, swallowing great gulps of nothing. I held her hand more tightly and reminded her of my presence.

There was no great shudder. No death rattle. No final words of wisdom. One moment she was breathing, which I could see from the gentle rise and fall of her chest. Then she stopped. But then she started again. This went on a few times, the shallow intake, the rise, the wheeze out, the fall. Until finally, she stopped. From my seat I could see the flutter of her carotid artery. I watched that pulse slower, until it too stopped. I touched my fingers to it but couldn't be positive if I felt it still or if it was the throb of my own pulse. After about a minute I pressed her eyelids closed and they stayed that way—they don’t always—and I stepped out to ask a nurse to check her.

I held her hand and felt her life slow until I couldn't feel it at all. I don't know exactly what I felt. It wasn't fear or anxiety or even relief at its conclusion. What comes nearest I think is humility. I felt humble in the face of what happened, struggling to hold her one hand while she held a plush chipmunk in the other, and keeping the live flower her daughter had placed in her hair from tipping and rolling off her pillow. My entire role came to, "I'm here." Nothing else needed to be done.

 

GET UP!

A few weeks ago I joined the beginning of a local chapter of a larger group, Singing Resistance. Born from the movement of locals in Minneapolis during the ICE disturbances, it has become a larger, more broad-based movement that seeks to make nationwide the differences made in that instance. 

I am not a good singer, not even much of a mediocre singer. My wife often tells me she can't tell what I'm singing even if she listens. But I was told decades ago I had a voice for protest songs, that I make up in volume what I lack in talent, and I'm content with that. 

We learned several songs which we will use when deployed. The one that stuck most with me is called "Sola El Pueblo, Salva El Pueblo," meaning "Only the people will save the people." Per Francis Russell, it is a phrase grown out of Puerto Rico after the disasters of Hurricane Maria and privatization of electricity and distribution. Perhaps the greatest symbol of the US response to this was the infamous photo op of trump tossing rolls of paper towels into a crowd. 

A five man singing group called Peace Poets put it to an a capella tune and added another line; "And if one of us falls, we all rise up!" It's this image I want to focus on. 

One of my favorite punk songs is "Get Up" by Sleater-Kinney. Released at the very end of the millennium, it's come to mean more to me as the years wear on. That charge, "Get up!", strikes a chord in my soul time after time. The song's lyrics, credit for which is shared by the three members, cut through a miasma of despair with the refrain.

A large part of why it's remained so resonant with me is the video to it by Miranda July. Here is blogger Jovana Babovic running down the origin of the video. "The video for “Get Up” was a collaborative effort between the producer, the band, and their fans. The vision for the video, as guitarist Carrie Brownstein explained, “was Miranda July’s interpretation of our song.” The band invited friends and fans to star as extras and, on the day of the shoot, everyone assembled in a field outside Olympia. The band’s publicist Julie Butterfield remembered that filming stated early in the morning, around seven, while it was still cold and frosty outside. For drummer Janet Weiss, the experience was overwhelmingly positive. “It was fun,” she told the zine Rockrgrl. More than that, the band was pleased with the video because, as they described it, it was provocative rather than cliché."

The video, if you have never seen it, is simple in its execution, its effects, and its black and white coloring. Take a moment to watch it. See if you agree with Pitchfork's Julianne Escobido Shepherd who calls it Sleater-Kinney's best video. 

[It] is a black-and-white motif of women walking through a field, the evergreens of Oregon piercing the sky behind them. They are holding hands; as they walk through the grass, they pick Weiss, Tucker and Brownstein off the ground, as their warm notes and high-hat hits seem to cloak the specks of light in the lens. Shots of meteors flash in and out. The images are an evocative metaphor for Sleater-Kinney's career: leg-ups for downtrodden women; hope, promise, and humor through ingenuity and virtuosity; a coalition of ideas without bounds. The video ends with a hot pink cartoon supernova. Brownstein looks up in awe. Their impact fans out.

What would I add to that? That the image of women crossing a field holding hands and bodily lifting others off the ground, those others then joining the line, is a powerful and mesmerizing one. It's one of the best impulses of the Beloved Community, the act of lifting another and continuing forward. I would also add that the final shot reinforces that, in moving forward, we will always come across more fallen. There will always be people in the grass, and there will always be a need for helpers.

Lionesses' Teeth

 [This is an edit of a message I originally gave at DUUC in 2013. See that post for links to information.]

         A Message Delivered to High Street

Unitarian Universalist Church 

May 10, 2026

           My contribution to Flower Communion is a freshly-plucked dandelion.  Taraxacum officinale.  We all recognize it in its omnipresence, as indestructible as love. 

          The dandelion is the cockroach of flora.  It 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.  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 have even sprayed 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 I hope have that same assurance that they, too, love their children no matter what. 

          This is a newsstory from over a decade ago that adds a different, more complex concept to this topic.  This is a story of three girls, now three women, in Cleveland, the first of them abducted in 2001, the last of them in 2004, all three found alive and relatively healthy in the home of their kidnapper, Ariel Castro. 

          We can have only the barest inkling what Melissa Knight, Amanda Barry, and Gina DeJesus experienced in their decade of captivity.  We should be thankful for that.  Worse perhaps, we are even less capable of imagining what the now 19 year old daughter of Amanda Barry and Castro has experienced.  If she is fortunate she herself retains little memory of what her life to now has been. 

          There are so many things to be said about this situation, about Castro’s activities and what he hoped to accomplish; 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 multiple reports by neighbors, to investigate beyond the front door of Castro’s home; and most especially, there are things yet to say about his neighbor CharlesRamsay 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 suggests about motherhood and resilience.  The story as it’s come to us is that Ariel Castro, who worked as a bus driver for Cleveland Metro School District, left his home to eat at a local McDonald’s.  He did this regularly but this day was different. Castro had failed to lock the "big inside door", although the exterior storm door was bolted. Berry did not attempt to break through the outer door because. previously, he had tested the women by leaving the house partially unlocked and exits unsecured. If they attempted to escape, he beat them. But enough was different that 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 had partied with Castro, eaten BBQ with him, played music with him, didn’t say “It’s a domestic matter” and turn around. After listening to her story that she was being held against her will Ramsey 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 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 DeJesus and Knight that Castro beat them when they were pregnant to spontaneously abort their pregnancies.  So what we are left to guess at is that either Amanda fought vigorously to have this child or that Ariel had a change of heart over this pregnancy and allowed 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 Castro—what can be going through her head?  At the time of her rescue she is six years old, she has known only these 4 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 couldn’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 was experiencing: 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.  As a coda to this story, Jocelyn Berry, as near as I can find, is doing well for someone with this experience. Ariel Castro completed suicide a little over a month into his own captivity.

          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 by 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. 

 

 

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.

Speak Boldly

 

"Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;

Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,

The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere   

The ceremony of innocence is drowned;

The best lack all conviction, while the worst   

Are full of passionate intensity."

These lines from William Butler Yeats "The Second Coming", written over a century ago and describing a world on the brink after and before world wars, remain relevant to our situation. We aren't talking like we should. We should be howling from the rooftops that we are lost and our leaders are behaving the way we were taught were ways associated with the Soviet Union and its satellites. That is, what we have is not to be shared among a just and wise people but hoarded for the few and their favorites. 

There is a cautiousness to our speech today, as if we aren't sure what we believe is believable or that we want to put ourselves out that far to where we could be swatted down. Some individuals are making themselves heard--folks in Minneapolis angered at the death of Renee Nicole Good and people in other cities reacting to the kidnapping and spiriting away of citizens, documented and not, by a trump-anointed militia given the go-ahead to make things as untenable as possible to unloose that mere anarchy so to avoid justice and accountability--and these are good things. 

But what I'm talking about is individuals talking among themselves at the post office, the market, on the street. It is as if we've all agreed to avoid the discomfort of saying something that will somehow offend our listener. Unless of course we are MAGA, and then we can't shut up.

I am as guilty of this as anyone. I am passionate about the criminality of this administration but don't bring it up in regular conversation. There is a weirdness to my conversations. It's a day-to-day unwillingness to comment on the things happening directly in front of us unless we are already certain we're in a safe space, a church group, a protest, a meeting, where we are all basically agreed that this is a bad place to be. 

It isn't as if we're afraid to speak on these things because someone is listening. That's Orwellian enough. But we're self-censoring because we're not certain we're not imagining the illicitness of it all, that we're the ones who are crazy. 

We aren't crazy. We are awake and we see what's going on. For the sake of our future and our communities, we must say so.