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. 

Love this World, She Whispers

 

A Solstice Message 

Delivered to High Street UU Church

Sunday, December 21, 2025

          Starting out this morning with “A Winter Blessing” by Rebecca Ann Parker.

In the shadowed quiet of winter’s light

Earth speaks softly

Of her longing.

Because the wild places are in tears.

 

Come, she cries to us

Kneel down here

On the frosty grass,

And feel the prayer buried in the ground.

 

Bend your ear to my heart

And listen hard.

 

Love this world, she whispers.

Distill peace from the snow

And water the cities

With mercy.

 

Weave wonder from the forest

And clothe grief

With beauty.

 

Rest in the rhythm of the turning year,

Trace the bending arc

Rounding the curve toward justice.

And vow anew to do no harm.

 

The winter trees stand watch

Haloed in the last gleams of the slanting sun.

Glory sings here.

Heaven echoes the call:

Repeat the sounding joy.

 

Make your life an answer:

Bow.

Praise.

Rise.

When I was an undergraduate, I took a class in existential philosophy in which we read one half of the 589 page Macquarie and Robinson translation of Martin Heidegger’s Being and Time. The book is credited with opening up the examined life via Dasein, literally “being there,” much like Ram Dass’ “be here now” if Ram Dass had lived between the world wars and joined the Nazi Party. It is, in a word, a slog.

The class met two days a week starting in January at 10 in the morning. That first day, the professor walked in, turned out the overhead lights, and said, “If we were really going to study existence the way this book presents it every meeting would be at 5 o’clock in the morning on the winter solstice.” As that suggests, it is a very depressing book.

Winter solstice, part of the month-long holiday called Yule, has a somewhat deserved reputation as the start of a long depressing slog toward the joy and sunshine of Summer solstice, something to be gotten through. It is the longest night of the year followed by the shortest day. It is also my thirty-fifth wedding anniversary. Tomorrow is my wife’s birthday. I planned it this way. I’m no fool.

Winter Solstice is the day that marks when the earth is at its northernmost apogee from the sun. Our orbit around the sun is not a circle but an oval, with extremes at two ends. In the northern hemisphere are at our furthest away from the sun and so at our coldest. In summer we have been traveling to the north and then furthest in that direction, and so have arrived at the point where our section of earth begins to feel its warmest. If we still have the patience to observe it for the day, the sun seems to stand still on the horizon for about six days at this time of year, rising and setting at about the same places. This period of the sun remaining in place, which is what solstice means in Latin, “sun standing still”, marks the periods when we can be certain we’ve reached the end of the cold season and, because we are now facing the sun as we return in our orbit, the days will become warmer. Although no one seems to have explained that to January or February. This is the cycle by which we count the days until winter.

Cycles are important, not just for groups of people, deciding when it’s safest to plant or recognizing when the coldest months are coming, but for individuals too. We operate cyclically. Women’s bodies, of course, ovulate on a monthly schedule, and there is research suggesting that men also have a cycle of hormonal changes that happen every thirty days.

          Things, like people and animals and plants, are born, live, and then die. Then they rot and diffuse, or break apart, and mix with bacteria and enzymes, which themselves live and die cyclically, to be born again, perhaps as something else, and live, and die. Farmers know this. Keepers of suburban composts are acquainted with it. The whole process describes a huge circle that life as we understand it follows. We even breathe in and out cyclically, although it’s so subtle we’re usually not aware of it. Take a moment to recognize that you’re breathing now. Don’t concentrate on breathing or hold your breath, just notice that you breathe in, and then breathe back out. Consider too how many times you do this. The average person inhales and exhales about thirteen times each minute. That’s seven hundred eighty times per hour. That’s eighteen thousand, seven hundred twenty times per day. That’s nearly seven million times per year. Over the course of an average person’s lifetime, which is about sixty-eight years—that’s taking into account everyone in the world, in the richest places where people live longest and the poorer places where most people die youngest, you will breathe at least four hundred seventy-six million times.

          But that isn’t our only important cycle. Most of us wake up at morning, go on with our day, and go to sleep at night. We eat food and drink water, digest them for energy to move, and then expel them as liquid or as solid. Even our moods operate as a cycle. We will be up, happy, exuberant, experience that for a time, and then down, sad, depressed, experiencing that too for a time. Some of us experience extreme periods of that cycle and regulate it with medications; no one has a perfectly even, balanced experience of no joys and no sorrows. We aren’t built that way. We’re meant to suffer and enjoy, stress and relax. This is 8a part of what makes us alive, part of what helps us experience life in all its aspects.

          As those farmers and composters understand, nothing new is added to the universe. Physicists have determined that there is exactly the same amount of matter existent today as there was instants after the Big Bang. So nothing is created out of nothing; everything is made up of elements of something that already existed, usually in another form. Astronomer NeilDeGrasse Tyson—has he reached a point at which he can be called a public intellectual yet?—has said,

Recognize that the very molecules that make up your body, the atoms that construct the molecules, are traceable to the crucibles that were once the centers of high mass stars that exploded their chemically rich guts into the galaxy, enriching pristine gas clouds with the chemistry of life. So that we are all connected to each other biologically, to the earth chemically and to the rest of the universe atomically. That’s kinda cool! That makes me smile and I actually feel quite large at the end of that. It’s not that we are better than the universe, we are part of the universe. We are in the universe and the universe is in us.  

Here are some cosmological terms that Neil deGrasse Tyson would use to describe the process of winter solstice. I’m not going to explain them because I don’t understand them, but what I want you to hear is the music in their very words. Celestial navigation. Ouranioi. Heliostasis. Circumference. Parallel. Perpendicular. Obliquity of the Ecliptic. Heliacal circle. This comes about as close to the ancient music of the spheres as we can get.

A person dies and rots and becomes parts of grass and flowers, bees carry off the sweet stuff of flowers to make honey, and the honey is eaten by bears and wolverines as well as people. This is how the universe is transmitted from part to part to part. One huge, endless cycle. A movement from solstice to solstice.

          Where I’m from when we near this time of the year, this “shadowed quiet of winter’s light,” what we expect is snow and ice, the scrape of shovels on driveways and the roar of plows on the road, the warmth of parkas and mittens. As I remain here I’m becoming more acclimated to late-blooming camelias and magnolias, the hardy contingent wearing sweatshirts and socks with sandals. I’ll never reconcile myself to the sound of lawnmowers and leaf blowers. But in both places the axial tilt of the earth is the reason for the season.  

          When we celebrate Midwinter what we’re celebrating is the death of the former year, the former cycle, and the birth of a new one. It is, almost always, a time that brings excitement and hope. What will I do differently this new year? What will change around me? I say almost always because for many of us the new year holds no more hope than the dying one. Our conditions may not change, our lives may not get better, the circumstances we live in may not alter.

          What we do is hope. Hope can be a verb, a doing word, as much as a noun. I hope the new year changes things. Stereotypically, darkness is seen as bad, as depressing, as the thing we want out of. We hope for the sun. Midwinter celebration was seen as the summoning by the people of the sun. We’d preserve the light we had and use it to kindle the light and life we hoped would come.

          There’s no denying the sun feels good on our bodies. After all, it’s the warmth I chased down here, the opportunity in December to lie on my hammock in the backyard. Recently, during the cold snap at the beginning of the month, as I was doing laundry I realized with a start how many pairs of shorts I’d worn just in the two weeks around Thanksgiving. Six. Six pairs of shorts.

          Solstice is important to me too because, as Dr Robin Kimmerer of the Citizen Potowatomi Nation has said, "Winter is a teacher of vulnerability."  This year has not lacked for lessons in vulnerability and I have no doubt winter promises to bring more, probably harsher, lessons. As religious columnist Elizabeth Dias (behind a paywall) points out, for most of human history and even for many humans today, winter is a period when simple survival is the aim. "Winter is a primal time of death and loss, and a time for grief. It reminds us that darkness, not only light, is part of the recurring rhythm of what it means to be human...The great irony of winter is that the moment darkness is greatest is also the moment light is about to return. Each year the winter solstice comes with the promise that the next day will be brighter."  

          Yes, I love the sun and warmth. I love to stretch my limbs searching for that feeling of well-being in my body I get from the tingle on my bare skin. But the cold and dark has its place too. Parker reminds us “prayer [is] buried in the ground.” It might be cliché to refer to seeds right now, and I like to avoid cliché. But it’s true, seeds need the dark and the cold and moist, and we do too.

          “Love this world, she whispers,” as if we need to be reminded of our reliance on and our responsibility to it. Perhaps we do. It’s easy to get caught up in everyday life, just getting by, and ignore such a little thing as a turn of seasons, especially one so far off in terms of the cosmos. It’s not a crime, not even a moral one, to forget to pause a moment in the hurly-burly of this season with Hannukah, Christmas, Diwali, Kwanzaa coming fast and furious on each other and recognize that the cold nights are now shorter, the warm days are longer. There’s no reward to it other than the momentary noting that, at least in this, all is right in the world.

          Ultimately, today is not about light, it’s about noticing light. Not about change but recognizing change. But seize on it. Like a candle, allow it to warm you and even to guide you. Of such small things are greater things built.

           

Something Fun, For a Change

 

SOMETHING FUN, FOR A CHANGE

A Sermon Delivered to 

High Street UU Church, Macon, GA

11/16/2025

“The greatest enemy of authority…is contempt, and the surest way to undermine it is laughter…I’ll tell you this: I read the transcripts of [Eichmann’s] police investigation, thirty-six hundred pages, read it, and read it carefully, and I do not know how many times I laughed—laughed out loud!”  Hannah Arendt

“I used to be disgusted but now I try to stay amused.” Elvis Costello

 

          Let me tell you a little about an avatar of protest silliness, Wavy Gravy.  Unless you’re like me and spend much of your life in tie-dye, you’re likeliest to know him not by name but by his most famous line, uttered in the documentary Woodstock: “What we have in mind is breakfast in bed for 400,000.” This was the second morning of the festival, after the rains and the mud came, the New York State Thruway closed and the fences came down. Wavy and his companions from the Hog Farm, the commune in New Mexico they had been living at for some years, had agreed to act security for the weekend. When asked, “How do you plan to enforce security?” he responded with “Seltzer bottles and cream pies.” They didn’t actually use those, of course. What they did was to create the practice that’s still used at events like that, called the Hug Patrol. I’ve taken part in some of those and you may laugh at the idea but it’s really hard to fight when your arms are pinned to your sides by a dozen hippies crowding you until you chill out.

          Wavy, born in 1936, making him nearly 90 now, doesn’t appear in public as often as he used to. I’ve never met him, but I have seen him from a distance a couple times. He’s an overpowering presence even from yards away, decked in his traditional tie2-dye from head to oversized feet, his bright red clown nose and white face paint, and floppy hat. People treat him the way I think people who listened to them probably treated Jesus or Buddha: they swarm him, wanting just to be next to an incredible presence.

          Wavy, who describes himself as “clad in the crumbling remains of my original Prankster can’t-bust-me jumpsuit with the ‘kick me’-style sign on [his] back”, will try to appear serious by removing his giant clown nose in a confrontation. He is one in a long line of folks confronting wrongdoing by laughing at it.

          He’s the first to acknowledge he is a clown. Wes ScoopNisker, the author of Crazy Wisdom, states “We laugh because the clown is one of us, pathetic and lovable, trying hard but always flailing and falling…[He or she] shows us our awkward human condition and encourages us to laugh at ourselves…We climb the ladder only to realize it’s leaning against the wrong wall. We search for hats that are already on our heads. We plan our days only to find the days have other plans.”

And while Wavy would characterize himself in the noble clown tradition of Charlie Chaplin and Laurel and Hardy, he is really akin to the archetype of the jester, who are “the wits and critics. They expose the establishment’s lies and make light of the contemporary social scene.” However, as playwright Jane Wagner writes, “No matter how cynical you get, it is impossible to keep up.”          

          Nisker continues, “Because jesters are ‘nay-sayers,’ they often speak the truth, saying no to obvious lies, absurdities, and injustices. In the worldly realm of relative truths, jesters are the champions of crazy wisdom.”

          Interestingly, the only recorded historical pranks and jokes are those done by kings and emperors, often on guests and courtiers. In the parlance of jokes, this is known as punching down, the superior political figure taking shots at someone with no power. A prime example from the past few years is when Republican Governor Greg Abbott of Texas bussed migrants from the border with Mexico to New York City and Washington and then unloaded them literally on the street. In 2022, he even sent a busload to then Vice President Kamala Harris’ home to be unloaded in front of it, leaving them stranded and freezing. This is actually a time-honored Republican stunt, having originated in 1962 in what became known as the Reverse Freedom Ride, when southern Black families were bussed to Hyannisport, Massachusetts, a move calculated to embarrass JFK, and to commemorate the hundred-year anniversary of the Civil War.

          Pranksters Abbie Hoffman and Jerry Rubin, having first gotten publicity by throwing dollar bills from the balcony of the NY Stock Exchange onto the trading floor below where they were stuffed into trader’s pockets, memorably gathered thousands of Yippies together at the Pentagon with the intention of lifting it several feet off the ground by pure force of will, thereby signaling  the end of the Vietnam War. While they didn’t end the war that day, or budge the building, in a nod to today’s political climate they enthusiastically claimed to have succeeded. The next year Abbie helped draft a pig they called Pigasus to run for president. The campaign was guided by the statement, “They nominate a president and he eats the people. We nominate a president and the people eat him.”

          From the 76 to 88 elections Wavy helped nominate another candidate, Nobody. The Nobody for President campaign ran with the slogan, “Because Nobody is working right now in Washington for you.”

          I was of course too young to have known about some of these pranks when they happened, but I do recall the Pigasus and Nobody campaigns, as well as a few later ones. In the early 90s a group called the Barbie Liberation Organization managed to switch the recordings on the voice boxes of hundreds of Barbie and GI Joe dolls so that they said what the other was meant to say. Since the late 80s a group called Gorilla Girls, female artists wearing gorilla masks in their public appearances, bought billboards, electric marquees, and posters descrying the dearth of women artists in major museum collections. Their most famous line is “A woman has to be naked to get into the Met.”

          Author Andrew Boyd writes, “Humor is a great equalizer. It can puncture the aura of authority. It can pull the wealthy, powerful, and pretentious down into the mud where the rest of us live.” One of the best examples of this is the 1992 work of Nanjunda Swamy in India. Influenced by Gandhi’s concept of satyagraha, a Sanskrit term meaning “pressurizing for truth,” constitutional law professor Swamy gathered 50,000 farmers on the lawn of the Karnataka state secretariat to “laugh the government out”. This was in response to the flagrant abuses of multinational corporations and their ownership of certain politicians, specifically Karnataka Chief Minister S Bangarappa.

          “The farmers, surrounded by policemen, just sat on the lawn and told jokes against Mr. Banarappa…’They were puns, actually,’ Mr…Swamy said. After warming up the farmers with a little word-play, it was enough to simply say ‘Bangarappaj’ [in Sanskrit, “Bangarappa is inflexible”] over the megaphone and the farmers would shake with laughter.”

          This is punching up, holding the powerful for ridicule, and while it may not change anything in the here and now, it reminds people that their opponent is not impregnable and his policies are not to be taken seriously.

          This refusal is known as frivolous tactics and it has a long line in history, from Aristophanes’ Lysistrata, in which wives refuse to provide, um, physical comfort to their husbands until they give up warring, to Rabelais’ Gargantua and Pantagruel, ridiculing royalty and religion scatalogically, to the 17^th Century Levellers, who emphasized equality, popular sovreignity, and religious tolerance, to the Diggers, a San Francisco theatre troupe out of Haight-Ashbury, whose best-known alumus is Peter Coyote, often a voice one hears narrating PBS documentaries, and on whose antics the Yippies and Wavy Gravy cut their teeth. Today, punching up is located in the inflatable frogs and unicorns appearing at in No Kings and ICE protests in Los Angeles, New York, Atlanta and Chicago, and the aerobics classes and dance lines held at the South Waterfront ICE Detention Center in Portland. It continues despite the arrest of clarinet and cello players, the pepper-spraying of people in costumes, the attempts by the trump administration to equate day care teachers with M13 gang members.

          So what can we do? Well, here’s a suggestion, taken directly from the example of Mr. Swamy. Make fun of Donald trump’s policies, his administration, and him personally. We can do so in big and little ways. A retired farmer whose wife I used to visit during trump’s first term referred to him as The Canary, a jab I thought was on the mark. My own practice is to write out his name using lower-case t, because I don’t think he deserves being upper-case anything.

          Now, a caveat. There’s an argument to be made, and it’s a legitimate one, that to point out the physical or mental flaws of another person in a joke also points out those same flaws in people who aren’t the target. Disgraced comedian Louis CK, of all people, reminds us that “When a person tells you that you hurt them, you don’t get to decide that you didn’t.” But I also think it’s legitimate to note those flaws when they are projected on others by the target. For instance, a French joke of the 1930s noted the discrepancy in Nazi propaganda by saying that Aryan types were as blond as Hitler, slim as Goering, and tall as Goebbels.

                Thus, I feel no compunction with noting that trump supporters are as innovative as Ivanka, as independent as Eric and Donald Jr, and as trim as trump. I can go on: They are as scientific as RJK Jr, as athletic as Steve Bannon, as conscientious as Pete Hegseth, and as law-abiding as Tom Homan, Peter Navarro, Charles Kushner, Mark Meadows, Wilbur Ross, Tom Price, Ryan Zinke, James Flynn, Steve Bannon (again), Roger Stone, Linda McMahon, Matt Gaetz, Pete Hegseth (again), Elon Musk, RFK Jr (again), Rudy Guiliani, and of course Donald trump himself. When you tout yourself as being 6’3” and 224 lbs. people expect you to look similar to others of the same height and weight, say, Chris Hemsworth who plays Thor, or Tim Tebow who plays football.

          The rumors suggested by the release of emails this week are a perfect example. Being gay or performing a sexual act on another man is not funny. But striking at the very heart of trump supporters’ machismo, knowing that, whether it’s true or not, it’s experienced by them as a blow below the best? Now that’s funny.

          Here are several others. Feel free to utilize them as often as necessary.

• ·        There was a terrible fire the other day that destroyed the site of the trump library. It decimated the collection, burning both books, including one he hadn’t started coloring in yet.
• ·        Obama’s Affordable Care Act turns 15 this year. No wonder trump supporters are messing with it.
• ·        Trump walked into a bar. And then he lowered it.
• ·        Trump has suggested that when he finally leaves office he wants to go back to TV with a show about running the government. An interviewer asked, “You mean like The West Wing?” Trump said, “No, more like the Sopranos.”
• ·        I’ve heard a lot of people saying they like what trump says, but they prefer it in the original German.
• ·        Trump is being interviewed by Dan Rather who asks, “You’ve told so many lies, Mr. President, which is your favorite?” Trump says, “I don’t lie.” Rather says, “Yes, that’s one of mine too!”
• ·        Voting a progressive ticket in this day and age means you’re fighting truth decay.
• ·        How many trumps does it take to change a light bulb? Just one. He holds it in the air and waits for the world to revolve around him.
• ·        You might have heard about the bad reception trump received attending te Washington Commanders NFL game the other day. Someone even chucked a beer at him. It was a draft so he dodged it.
• ·        Trump was asked once, “Boxers or briefs?” He answered, “Depends.”

If the devil’s greatest trick is to convince us he doesn’t exist, trump’s great trick is to convince us to take him seriously. Now, is laughing at them likely to force the trump administration to run like rats from a sinking ship of state? Alas, no. Trump and others have proven rhino-skinned. If that alone was going to do the job, it would have by now.

What it is is a tool, a part of our arsenal that reminds his supporters that they are the only ones responding to his bleats, that the rest of us see through the gauze of their attempts to turn back the clock a century or more, and that they will be the only ones standing naked in the light of history,

This is not to say we should laugh at the things being done at his command. There’s nothing funny about people being grabbed off the street, their homes, or their work, or zip tying kids. But separated from their actions, these people deserve nothing but scorn, these Gravy Seals and members of Meal Team Six. The impetus behind their cruelty is itself a joke. They can’t strongarm their way into respectability and honor, and the mark they know is that they cover their faces, their badges and their names. They know they should be ashamed of what they do. As others have pointed out, if you have one Nazi holding forth at a podium and nine listening to what he has to say without contradiction, you have ten Nazis.

Give them what they deserve, what they’ve earned. A good, solid belly laugh. Underneath the silliness is something serious. We will not surrender. As Wavy Gravy himself says, “It only hurts when I don’t laugh.”