“Courage starts with showing up and letting ourselves be seen.”

—Brené Brown

In my world, courage takes a different form: I spend my days walking the halls of a Veteran’s Hospital and trying to start conversations. That probably sounds pretty easy to most, except I spend my days walking into patients’ hospital rooms; round after round of, “Hi, my name is Kali, I’m one of the chaplains.” I introduce myself to complete strangers and ask them if they would like to talk.

It’s funny the reactions I get. Sometimes people laugh. Sometimes people ask, “Am I dying?” Sometimes people cry; sometimes they ask “why?;” sometimes they tell me to get out.

One day after my awkward introduction, a Veteran responded, “I have to tell you about the last chaplain I met.” They began to tell me about a chaplain who embraced a “love the sinner hate the sin” theology. This chaplain (not me) proceeded to talk with them about how they could pray their homosexuality away.

As I stood in the doorway, I thought about all the things I could say to comfort this individual. I could tell them that I accept them. I could tell them I’m not like that. I could explain how chaplains follow a strict ethical code of conduct and that never should have happened.
Instead, I chose humor.

I said, “Well, if I did that my wife would be pissed.” In ten short words the air in the room changed and the Veteran invited me to sit down. Instead of feeling rejected, the Veteran felt welcome in the room, welcome in the conversation, and welcome to be their true self. We began to talk about their current situation and the struggle that weighed heavy on their heart.

Everyone deserves a chance to feel welcome and accepted. As a Veteran’s Affairs chaplain, my ministry is heavily focused on the most marginalized people in our military: LGBTQ+ Veterans and women Veterans. I cannot begin to tell you how hard it is for these individuals to enter a Veteran’s Hospital. How much courage it takes to show up as themselves and seek care. But when they do, I will be there. I will continue to walk into rooms and say “Hi, my name is Kali. I’m one of the chaplains.”

Prayer

God who is love, Help us to receive each and every person as part of the beautiful tapestry of your image. Each complicated, broken, vibrant, amazing, and wildly different person. Help us to show up with love in our hearts and a little bit of humor. Amen.

By Anonymous

“Return to the holy intimacy of being alive.”
—John Roedel

At the end of a church meeting, a handful of people lingered in our conference room when someone relatively new to our congregation took a deep breath and a big risk—because he didn’t know many of the people present. He began by expressing dismay about rising facism in our country, evidenced most troublingly by the current assault on trans people and immigrants.

What followed wasn’t an intellectual conversation; he didn’t recite news headlines. Rather, he opened his heart, looked around the circle, and said with emotion, “I really don’t know what to do. I’m very frightened for my trans child.” He described the pain of balancing his desire to be a public advocate with his child’s desire to maintain a low profile.

I was already touched by that act of vulnerability—but the people in the room responded with compassion and tenderness I could never have imagined or dictated. When the father said, “I know this isn’t about me,” someone else in the circle said, “Wait: it is about you. It’s definitely about your child, but it’s also about you and your feelings. It’s OK to bring that here.”

Another person offered, “My sister is trans and I’ve had times of really worrying about her. She led a service here this summer and it might offer you encouragement.” Another said, “Listen, I’m a teacher and I work with the queer and allies club at the high school in the next town over. I’d love to get together with you and listen to more of your story. Maybe I could help.”

It went on like that for quite some time. No one was trying to rescue or save anyone. They didn’t jump into problem solving. Rather, they responded to his open heart by opening their own, and that sacred gesture was resplendent with transformative potential. This is what shared ministry is all about: not finding a technical fix for every challenge, but creating the conditions for genuine and sacred connections to be made.

These days, it can be tempting to doubt whether congregational life makes a difference. Our showing up for one another in spiritual community—day in and day out, week in and week out—might feel mundane…but sometimes it’s the very thing that facilitates the breaking through of Spirit, Love, or meaning.

Prayer

Transforming Spirit, at work both through and in spite of us, kindle our courage to take risks for love and connection. In times of fear and overwhelm, remind us we are not on our own, but intricately woven together in community. Between us, Love’s power is most fierce. May we open ourselves more fully to its potential. Amen.

Editor’s note: The author of this reflection serves as minister of a UU congregation on the east coast. However, they’ve chosen to remain anonymous to provide privacy and safety to the people described above.

By Antoinette Hollamon

“Hold me accountable so I may bring honor to you, amplify love and compassion to those around me, and make the way easier for those yet to come.”
–Rev. Tandi Rogers, in “I Call Upon You”

“When will you start your ministry?” they always ask with excitement. This is usually after I’ve given a sermon, delivered a benediction, taught a class rooted in our shared spiritual values, or in some other way acknowledged them on their spiritual path.

“This is my ministry.”

My travels as a religious professional have allowed me to connect with all kinds of folks, and this question of ministry often comes from secular humanists, or at least folks who don’t want to leave out the secular humanists. It comes from the folks who identify as “not quite there yet” and searching. Or the folks who say, Never would I ever find myself in a church again, but I like it here since this isn’t really “church.”

Inside, I cringe. Not just because we’re usually talking in a shared sacred space, but because this is often said after we’ve shared a collective spiritual experience.

This is my ministry. Although I have not been ordained, we are in ministry together—because ministry, my friend, is the collective stewarding of our values in the face of the unknown. Church is where we do some of our greatest work, where we build some of the deepest community, and where we show those outside of our communities what collective liberation looks like. Church is where our ministries intersect: mine and theirs and yours.

On the outside, I do the rituals, bless the babies, and hold the hands of community members having a tough time. It’s never about me. Our shared ministry is making this life livable in the best and worst of times; we can only do that together.

I may never be an ordained minister, but I’ve learned that in some contexts, that label isn’t what matters. What matters is the way we live our lives together; the way we sing and hug and celebrate together. My ministry is with the folks who want to transform in this life together, hoping their ideas of mystery and wonder will be honored. 
Our Unitarian Universalist ministry embraces all of it. And together, we are home.

Prayer

Spirit of Life and Love, Guide us so we may share our gifts and trust our roles in this cycle of transformation.

By Joy Berry

My heart is moved by all I cannot save: / so much has been destroyed
I have to cast my lot with those / who age after age, perversely,
with no extraordinary power, / reconstitute the world.
—Adrienne Rich, from Dream of a Common Language (1978) and #463, Singing the Living Tradition

The first time I ever worshiped at a now-beloved UU church, the minister was speaking from the pulpit when a baby’s wail came from the nursery—the kind of interruption that most speakers would have perhaps skipped over; said a quick thing about church can’t be that bad, ha ha; or offered a word of thanks to their nursery care workers. All of which would carry an implied curriculum that such a cry was an interruption. Any of those reactions would have taught us that we could collectively ignore the crying and get on with the business of church.

Instead, he stopped. He didn’t talk over it or rush through. He cocked his head, listening.

His was a real response—one human hearing another human’s despair and pain, authentically compassionate. Then he said something like, “Let’s wait a moment. Let’s just make sure.” He let his presence to that cry subsume us all.

I was coming from a church experience where a baby’s cry would have never been heard in the sanctuary—and if it had, I think the minister would have been very unhappy at the interruption. But here, I felt in the embrace and invitation of the Holy Spirit, which I have not always felt as a UU (or a religious professional) in worship—though I have felt it many times working with children in RE.

I was moved, as Adrienne Rich said, by all we could not save; by the sacred responsibility to stay near, even in the face of that despair, and perhaps more importantly, in the face of our own helpless anguish. Even, perhaps especially, when it is not required of us.

That was the most powerful piece of ministry I have ever witnessed from the pulpit. The message I took was that the most important thing to do—for any of us—is to stay soft, whole-hearted, and open to the world, in all its beauty and its terror. And, gathered there: to let love lead us.

Prayer

Divine love, open our hearts to the solitary cry, and to understand it as a call. 
Ground us in compassion, to stay present, in sacred witness. 
Convict us with the courage to respond.

By Melissa Jeter

“From the body’s viewpoint, safety and danger are neither situational nor based on cognitive feelings. Rather, they are physical, visceral sensations. The body either has a sense of safety or it doesn’t.”
—Resmaa Menakem, in My Grandmother’s Hands: Racialized Trauma and the Pathway to Mending our Hearts and Bodies

The comforting, warm weight on my neck is my ten-week-old puppy. She is healing my heart. Love is transformational, never transactional. 
 
Six months ago I was doing my best to keep my head above water. All the boats—row boats, yachts, steamships—were, and are still, in troubled waters. Some were not even a boat: just rafts made of wood, pop bottles, and upcycled items that float. My dog died; my employer reduced staff; I experienced a re-wounding.

Real care—human or otherwise—takes time. Care is the soil we prepare so that the roots of authentic relationship can grow. 
 
When I was a child, My father was my authority on reading; science; and how to live, survive, and thrive in his Blackness authentically. It was during our cherished conversations that I would learn about who he was. These stories took time: long car rides and the time it takes to build a table from wood. I learned that he wanted to be cremated; I knew that he learned to fix cars by reading books; I knew that he loved his deceased mother and his dog.

Now, I have this wriggly puppy and—unlike the rescue dog who experienced neglect and abuse—this wriggly puppy is so excited to connect, love, and learn. My rescue dog who died did not play with toys or reach for closeness unless she was very ill. This puppy—Layla—reaches out in love. She licks every face who reaches for her. She is a joy.

Caring for her, and teaching her actions for mutual safety, takes time. Our relationship is transformational; we are learning to communicate beyond human and canine. As I teach her what I need and she communicates to me, I feel brave, calm, confident; she stands tall and looks at me directly. We are building safety. 
 
Love that heals and calls us, feels safe. It takes time. I will grow older and this puppy will become a dog, but hopefully both of us will have experienced real care, mutual trust, and an authentic relationship. These kinds of relationships are needed to transform our communities and world.

Prayer

Dear God, Power of all mercies and compassion, call us into relationships and communities that heal us from relational injuries and traumas. Let us take the time to create mutual trust. Let us find the courage to reach out for the strength and warmth of Love. Let us recount the stories of how Love has been our healer and transformer. Oh, Happy Day! Hallelujah! So be it! Amen! Asé!

By Karen G. Johnston

“This is the world I want to live in. The shared world….This can still happen anywhere. Not everything is lost.” 
—Naomi Shihab Nye, “Gate A4” from Honeybee

I have heard that the Buddhist teacher Sharon Salzburg has a spiritual practice when she flies. Waiting to board at the airport gate, she looks at the people sitting there and says to herself, These are my people.

A random, possibly ragtag, set of strangers are her people? Seriously? Yes, seriously.

I have begun doing this. At the gate. On board. For the next few hours, these are my people. With weather delays, even longer.

And I have begun doing it elsewhere. When riding the train. Attending a concert. In the grocery store. I even did it in January, when I was one of hundreds of clergy who traveled to Minneapolis to march with 50,000+ for the future of our nation. Every so often, in that frigid cold, I would feel the crowd around me and think: These people: they are mine and I am theirs.

They weren’t my besties nor my chosen family. Not even my immediate neighbors, but the ones that the universe cast as my temporary lot. Random. Not of my choosing.

Except I choose to choose them. As a spiritual practice, it stretches me. This embrace of others that I believe my faith asks of me (requires of me?) is not necessarily logical, as well as occasionally mystical and nearly always complicated.

Does this change anything? Bring about healing or justice? I’m not certain, but I can’t help wondering if this one way we get closer to Love at the Center.

Does this transform me? Hell, yes. It commits me to the very nature of reality: interdependence. It reminds me that I—that we—belong to each other, like it or not.

I’m thankful for the deep (so deep) and real (so real) and true (so true) ways in which we risk growing Beloved Community. In which we dare creating mutual aid networks beyond those besties. In which we risk creating and sustaining the necessary, complex, messy, sometimes prickly, sometimes joyful community coalitions to get us through this authoritarian nightmare.

These are my people.
You are my people.

Prayer

Spirit of Life and Love, Ever-Presence of Interdependence and Transformation, if we shall be known by the company we keep, may that company support us in daring and risking a greater wholeness than we have known thus far.

By Mary Shelden

“How easily my life becomes a list—
a long scroll of duties …”
—Gunilla Norris, “Planning the Day,” in Being Home

Long ago, when my beloved and I were newly dating, her housemate—social worker, blackbelt, and general wise woman, Cathy Corl—suggested to her a new daily practice: when you’re making out your to-do list, make two columns: one for you and one for The Universe. We were both already inveterate “to-do” listmakers with contrasting styles (my partner’s regular and tidy; mine random and as-needed) and the idea was compelling to us both.

So much in our lives felt beyond our control at that point, from my mother’s terminal lung cancer to when we might finally be able to live together. I can’t say I regularly wrote it out, but “making a second column for The Universe” became a regular part of my thinking. It served as a way both to name and honor a heartfelt yearning or prayer, and to release to the Great All what was not within our power.

After my mother’s passing, when we finally found our wee, adorable, perfect-for-us first home, it checked off an earnest second-column wish of many years.

I shared the idea with our daughter some years later, when she was struggling after a painful experience. I taught her the serenity prayer:

Grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change,
courage to change the things I can,
and wisdom to know the difference.

I suggested that making The Universe’s second column was a good tool for developing that wisdom: that often in contemplating what truly was beyond my control, I could surrender to The Universe that which I could not accomplish. Often in the process, I discerned the part that was mine to do—a smaller task for the first column—making my prayer more active.

Since then, I have come to appreciate the interplay between the first and second column: what’s mine to do, and what I leave to The Universe. In attending to them both, I affirm what Rabbi Tarfon knew: we are not required to complete the task, yet neither are we free to withdraw from it.

These days I often find myself overwhelmed by all that is beyond my control. But when I give over what is beyond me to the second column, I often find the first column part that I can do.

Prayer

Holy Interconnectedness, help us to be steadfast in what is ours to do. Help us to rest in the knowledge that the vast web of being will hold what we ourselves must release.

By Becca Morse

“We honor the interdependent web of all existence. With reverence for the great web of life and with humility, we acknowledge our place in it.” 
—Bylaws of the Unitarian Universalist Association, Article 2, section C2.2

We’re sitting at the kitchen table, where my niece is telling me about her day at work. One of her co-workers went through a break-up. In a collective effort to buoy her spirits, the team encouraged each other with a call-and-response chant: one would call, “I Am!” and everyone else would respond, “An Independent Woman!”

“I Am!”

“An Independent Woman!”

All day long, peppered between customers, cheering each other up and cheering each other on. Taking a sad moment in life, acknowledging it, and turning it around to proclaim and celebrate what we can be.

I’m enjoying the story, and then my niece says to me, “I was thinking of you all day.” I blink. Wait, what? I have no idea what she’s talking about.

My niece reminds me of a day six months earlier, when she was in a similar place and I gave her those words: when I asked her to loudly and repeatedly proclaim, “I Am! An Independent Woman!” I gave her the mantra to hold on to, to remind herself of a truth. (“I am!”) She took that truth and embodied it; passed it along when a friend needed it. I like to think that it will get passed along again (“An Independent Woman!”) to someone who needs help remembering that they’re powerful.

I believe it is both a blessing and a curse of humanity that we will never truly understand how we affect each other. We can’t know that the retail clerk we snipped at became grumpy and snipped at a chain of other customers, or their children, and eventually someone had a meltdown because we forgot breakfast and were hangry.

But we also can’t know that the person we smiled at—the random stranger whose clothes we complimented—was buoyed, and started a long chain of day-brightening smiles, compliments, and cheer.

We don’t know the negative impact we have on the world, and we don’t know the positive impact either. We simply move through the world doing our best and hoping that we did more good than bad, or at least balanced it out.

Prayer

Spirit of Life, help me be at peace with knowing only my small part of the story. Help me to do the small good things that I can and to give grace when it’s needed, both to myself and to others.

By Takiyah Nur Amin

“I find, in being Black, a thing of beauty: a joy; a strength; a secret cup of gladness.” 
—Ossie Davis

My family taught me that I come from a legacy of Black agency and excellence. They didn’t sugarcoat our history: I was well aware that, as a descendant of chattel slavery, my ancestors weren’t even thought of as people when trafficked into this hemisphere. Family taught that we were just ordinary people, but look at the collective greatness these ordinary Black people brought to the world. 

I’m grateful that I was taught deep respect for my forebears and our history. Still, it’s hard to live up to that when you’re eight years old. When my mother would say, “What do you mean you don’t want to do your fifteen minutes of reading today? You know our liberation came through our people fighting to be literate,” I’d say, “Oh, God, Mom. FINE: Hand me my book!”

I sensed that when your ancestors managed to craft freedom from dire, inhumane circumstances and set models of liberation for the world, my margin for error was remarkably small. What could I possibly have to complain about? What height was impossible to attain?

Alas, I am my mother’s child. Some twenty years later, at the end of the first year of my Ph.D. program, they sat us in a room with faculty to receive verbal feedback. My feedback was good; I was very happy. Then one of the faculty members said, “I know this is uncomfortable, but I have to say it.”

I’m like, Oh, God. Here we go!

She said, “In all of your classes this year, you managed”—that was the word she used: managed—“to write about Black people. I’m concerned. You write really well and I think you’re bent towards being a scholar, but I’m concerned about you pigeonholing yourself.”

“There are scholars in the Academy,” I asserted, “who’ve written about a single choreographer for thirty years. There are people who analyze a single piece of art for their entire career, or people who focus on a singular philosopher. I can’t see how writing about the Black diaspora is narrower than that. There’s enough diversity in the diaspora to keep me busy my whole life, if I want to. Thank you, but I don’t share your fear.”

What that faculty member didn’t know was that I was already rooted in my people’s history. Narrow margins be damned, I’d been given a mandate to explore and articulate the value and relevance of that history, no matter what.

Living as a Black person in this world is rigorous and beautiful, requiring the ability to navigate life challenging circumstances as a matter of course, while holding on to and shaping the continuum of our collective legacy. No matter the circumstance, I wouldn’t want to be anything else. I invite folks to look upon Black history with reverence and our personhood with awe.

Prayer

With gratitude and gladness, may we celebrate Black History month with the honor it deserves, embracing the chance for reflection and jubilation in equal measure. Amen!

By Lauren Smith

“We are our grandmothers’ prayers. We are our grandfathers’ dreaming.” 
—Ysaye M. Barnwell

I am the grateful beneficiary of my ancestors’ imagination. Their courage blesses my life and the lives of my children.

My great-great-grandparents lived in Wilmington, NC during the waning days of slavery, the pressure cooker years before the start of the Civil War. They were free Black people, but their freedom was limited by law and circumstance. Their relative freedom depended on the passes they carried and the whims of the White people among whom they lived. Free Black people could be re-enslaved for modest infractions, real or imagined. They lived on a knife’s edge.

This was the only reality they had ever known, the only place they had ever lived. The world beyond Wilmington must have felt like a great, unfathomable void, the edge of the earth on world maps drawn before people discovered the earth was round.

Despite this uncertainty and danger, they opened to the possibility of a different future. They packed up, picked up and moved on. They made the treacherous journey north to Oberlin, Ohio then continued east to New England. Moving north of the Mason-Dixon line didn’t mean full access to the rights of citizenship, but it did open new doors of opportunity and they chose to move through those doors.

William A. Hazel, the first Unitarian in my family, was a Black man born in the South before the abolition of slavery. As an adult, he attended the First Parish in Cambridge, MA. His life was a liberation journey, seeded by imagination and fed by courage, blessing the all of us who came after.

A century and a half later, I hope that my practice of Unitarian Universalism will also be a liberation journey, imaginative and brave. I pray that my journey will forge pathways of possibility for my three children—who are now eighteen, fifteen, and ten years old—and for the generations who follow.

Prayer

Spirit of love and freedom, teach me to imagine the impossible so that it may become possible. Help me to risk unfurling into something new, so that the lives of my children and their children may be blessed and expanded.