By Adam O’Dell

“My revolution is born out of love for my people, not hatred for others.” 
—rapper, songwriter, and activist Immortal Technique

Last September, I became one of many Chicago faith leaders—UUs, Mennonites, Baptists, Catholics, Presbyterians, Jews, and Muslims, among others—who gathered outside of a nearby ICE processing facility to protest, week after week.

Local police forced us to protest inside a fenced area called the “free speech zone.” From this spot, a few weeks in, we Unitarian Universalists led a Flower Communion ritual. Juxtaposing the murder of Norbert Čapek by the Nazis against the inhumane conditions inside the facility, we led a crowd of protestors in singing and the exchange of flowers.

When I showed up to demonstrate the following week, those flowers had been used to decorate the fence that restrained us. That tool of separation was now covered in a symbol of beauty, individuality, and love.

Shortly after I arrived, a number of us hopped the fence in protest of the “free speech zone” and peacefully approached the building. With a group of protestors holding the line, we led a singing circle and a dance party. We blew bubbles and drew chalk art on the street. Rev. David Black, a local Presbyterian minister, delivered a sermon to the Unified Command as they guarded the entrance to the facility. As his sermon invoked the Beatitudes (“blessed are the peacemakers”), Rev. David placed a flower at the feet of the police, who responded by brandishing their batons and forming an even tighter line.

We were shot with pepper balls; we sang through coughing. We danced on concrete stained by chemical agents. We were angry that day; we remain angry. But anger alone is not a sustaining emotion. It is our love that sustains us—and we demonstrated that love through our singing, our dancing, our drumming; through flowers on pepper ball stains.

The phrase “love wins” falls flat when you’re being called a terrorist for playing guitar and nursing people’s wounds. Lucky for me—lucky for us—love is more complex than that. Love doesn’t have to “win” every day. Some days, love is just the thing that drags us through the day. And some days, that’s enough.

Prayer

Spirit of Life, witness my tired spirit staying awake, waiting for the sun to rise on a just world. 
Spirit of Life, witness the tired spirit of my neighbor, and how it does the same. 
Spirit of Life, witness the tired spirit of the oppressor, how it holds onto hatred, lest it give way to pain.

Give us the persistence of love. Help us break the cycle. 
Give us the serenity of love. Free us from the exhaustion of hatred. 
Give us the courage of love; to use the broken pieces of our hearts to build a world we have yet to witness.

By Kim Mason

“Grief is the confusion caused by not knowing how to love someone who is gone. Grief is love’s frustration, bitterness, anger, and resentment at death’s destruction… Grief is love’s unwillingness to give up. It’s stretching bonds and redefining limits in order to create a space where you can love someone in their eternal absence.” 
—Eleanor Haley

I met Philip during my chaplain rotation in seminary. It was Philip’s wife, June, who was technically my patient. Progressing through the stages of a terminal illness, June was now unresponsive. Sitting at her bedside, Philip told me the story of falling in love, being married for sixty years, raising their family together, and their strong shared faith. He told me about her illness and how he was determined to exhaust all avenues of treatment. I looked at June in the bed and noticed the signs of her illness. Philip’s voice broke, “I just want more time with her.”

I looked at him and asked, “Would you like to pray?”

My job was not to remind Philip of the sixty good years together. It was not even my job to teach Philip to let June go. In that moment, not knowing if I would see Philip or June again, it was my job to hear his fear and loss; to let him speak his truth, his sadness. Together we held hands and prayed to the God that Philip understood, sharing how much Philip loved June and how much their life together meant. And we asked, humbly, for just a little more time.

As Unitarian Universalists, we make no promises about the afterlife. However, we make some pretty bold statements about the value of our living. As UUs, love calls us to create heaven in this life. So, it’s that in a season when the veil between life and death is thinnest that we honor the dead with love.

I don’t know if June got more time; she was moved to another part of the hospital. What I do know is that Philip’s love for June was the root of his deep grief.

Grief is love. We think of grief as sadness, emptiness, pain, sorrow but we would not grieve death without the presence of love. Grief is so often treated as a finite exercise, as though it ends.

But for grief to end, love would have to end. Your grief may be transformed. It may change. But love and grief, just like living and dying, exist in relationship. Grief does not end, but neither does love. All Souls invites us, the living, to reconcile with death by making meaning together. All Souls is a day to remember the dead, and by remembering, say: this life mattered. All Souls is a day to remember, and by remembering, we love.

Prayer

Spirit of Life and Love, as the veil between the living and the dead grows thin, may we remember our ancestors, forever connected by love in the eternal cycle of life. Amen and Blessed Be.

By Tucker Culbertson

“The past is never dead. It’s not even past. All of us labor in webs spun long before we were born, webs of heredity and environment, of desire and consequence, of history and eternity. Haunted by wrong turns and roads not taken, we pursue images perceived as new but whose providence dates to the dim dramas of childhood, which are themselves but ripples of consequence echoing down the generations.”
—William Faulkner, Requiem for a Nun

I come from Scots-Irish indentured servants and entrepreneurial settlers. Some crossed the Atlantic enthusiastically. Others were coerced. We’ve been living in the Blue Ridge Mountains since long before the US was a country.

I was raised understanding that these ancestors were to be known, claimed, and honored. Not idolized or imitated. Their lives were hard. It was never suggested that my glorious dead and I would have enjoyed one another’s company. Yet I was raised—and now choose—to honor and serve them daily because my life depends on them as much as it does on water, air, and the other elements.

Like gravity, my ancestors are ubiquitous and mysterious. Like history, they are not past but present. Like the past, they are not dead nor even past. Like all matter and energy, theirs changes and persists. Ancestry, for me, is a kind of reincarnation: my great-grandparents’ great-grandparents are like my past lives. I was right there, back then, in their DNA. The direction of flow is neither singular nor fixed. It’s all so much weirder than that.

I keep the bottle-green eyeglasses of my mother’s father, Furman Tucker, on an altar. When I see them I remember to take my eyes to my cousin’s house, so Papa can see her new baby. I find it easier to witness the beauty and horror of the world together in Mr. Tucker’s and my own eyes; I am one setting of a story, not its author or hero. And the villain isn’t a who or a what but a how. This opens possibilities for flow and wonder. The dead don’t have all the answers and the living aren’t the only ones with questions.

I believe that the wrongs and harms of my ancestors as well as my descendants can receive tending through me. I don’t know exactly how it works. But for me, harm and healing, suffering and peace, sin and redemption are not properties of individual biological lives.

It feels to me like being “good family” is about transmitting and receiving integrative love and regenerative care with awe and awareness. With curiosity and solemnity. I won’t know which way the flow is moving in any given moment. But I can hold myself open in both directions. Accepting that I emit, absorb, and reflect radiant life.

Prayer

Mercy. Mercify us: we who are, were, and will have been the distant past and future lives of our peoples, places, and traditions. All with which we do, and will, flow, flower, complete, decompose, and persist. Pride and shame are delusive. And they also just happen. Remember through us there is so much love to do and be.

By Melissa Jeter

“Our bodies are the texts that carry the memories and therefore remembering is no less than reincarnation.” 
—Rev. Dr. Katie Cannon, Womanist theologian

Wherever I go, I bring my ancestors with me. There was a time when I was disconnected from this sense of being. I’ve lost the memory of my grandmother’s face—though I know that her love in the first four years of my life sustains me still. She has always been with me in how I love. But she’s with me when I look into mirrors as well, because I look like I’m directly her child. I look nothing like my mother and her mother.

My father told me once that his mother admonished him to never go down South. Her words were protection, meant to protect future generations. However, just like salmon swim upstream to spawn, I had to return to visit friends and to learn and honor the pathways from which I have come.

Elizabeth was born in Brevard, North Carolina. Her high school was one of the Rosenwald schools that educated Black people after Reconstruction. Even today, our family values education; my father told me it’s the only thing that can not be taken away from a person once they have it.

I lack shame about my grandmother’s brown skin, her wide smile, or her education. The conditions from which Rosenwald Schools were formulated in the South bear no shame upon me either. Yet the knowledge is held by my body.

Salmon swimming upstream probably do not have this problem. They travel the paths of those who came before. The Way is encoded in their bodies. I experience this numinosity: I wander into Mystery of wholeness and oneness. I am the “we” of the narratives I still do not know about my ancestors.

I imagine that Elizabeth left North Carolina for a safer, more self-actualized life in Ohio. I went South for that too, but it was also for authenticity and inner felt worthiness of belonging. I needed to be in the waters that my grandmother swam in. I need it now. There is so much more to me. I know it when I read, when I write, speak, and especially when I sing. My ancestors take hold of me. It is no small thing. I need them and they are with me and we need to be free.

Prayer

Let the Mystery in becoming realigned with our ancestors, known and unknown, give vitality and purpose to our Being. Remind us of the scriptures written in our bodies and faces. Let the wisdom of honoring this Love tell stories of strength and endurance for the journey.
Amen Ase Blessed Be

By Stacy Duffy

“Blessings on all the life in this pile that will transform decay to fertility, death to life. May I always remember that the cycle of life is a miracle. May I continue to feel a sense of wonder and joy in the presence of death and life.”
—Starhawk’s Blessing for Compost, in The Earth Path

Every successful vegetable gardener knows the invisible key to a bountiful harvest: the sacred element of compost.

When I take my daily neighborhood walk, I notice clues about how Mother Earth deals with waste: the leaves browning and falling to the ground in autumn; earthworms emerging during a rain, ready to digest those fallen leaves; and my personal favorite: the never-ending varieties of mushrooms that pop up, quietly transforming what has fallen into something that can nourish new life.

Like most transformations in life, decay is messy. Most of the time it downright stinks. We humans know something about this kind of transformation. Grief is messy. Break-ups are messy. Losing a job, leaving a community, watching a chapter of life close… none of it is tidy. We resist it, we package it up, we try to move it somewhere out of sight. But the mystics and the poets and the gardeners all tell us the same thing: you cannot skip the decomposition. There is no shortcut from what was to what will be.

The compost pile does not mourn what it receives. The apple core, the coffee grounds, the wilted stems: they’re not failures. They’re not endings. They’re simply matter in the middle of becoming something else. Given time, given the right conditions—a little moisture, a little air, the patient work of ten thousand invisible organisms—what seemed like waste becomes the very substance that makes new life possible.

This is not a metaphor we invented. It is a truth the Earth has been demonstrating since long before we arrived to observe it.

Perhaps the invitation is not only to compost our kitchen scraps (though please do that, too). The deeper invitation is to practice what the compost pile knows: that transformation is not the same as loss. That what breaks down is not destroyed but redistributed. That the beauty of those flowers you passed this morning was fed, in part, by everything that fell and rotted and gave itself back to the ground before them.

The garden does not thrive in spite of decay. It thrives because of it.

Prayer

May we find the courage to trust our own seasons of falling apart. May we remember that we, too, are part of this great cycle of life. And may we tend—with care and with hope—both the soil beneath us and the fertile, unfinished ground within ourselves.

By Ann Stillwater

“I’m not broken. I’m different and that’s okay.”
—Ellen Hedger

“Hablo mejor que entiendo.” Years ago I memorized this phrase to explain my Spanish-speaking abilities: “I speak better than I understand.” My aunt was trilingual and I have her gift for learning proper pronunciation in other languages, but not her ability to understand them—so I feel lost and ashamed in pretty much every Spanish conversation.

This is also true in English, my native tongue: I do better at speaking than understanding. Like the time I went into too much detail on the phone about our upcoming motel reservation when all they needed was my last name to find the reservation. Each time I make this kind of mistake, it’s too easy to catapult myself back into the shame and guilt that was instilled in me as a child. I’ve been working on this for decades: learning that I often give too much information, and trying to remember that folks want to be heard—because I want to be a better listener!

A few years ago I found out the “why” behind my struggles: I’m on the autism spectrum. This helps explain my difficulty understanding! As a child, I was consistently over-corrected by my (probably also autistic) mom, who just wanted me to fit in. She taught me to focus on giving to others and sharing my knowledge. I loved to read and learn, and there was so much amazing and helpful info I could share! It was a way to mask my autism—though I didn’t have those words for it.

Learning about my neurodiversity has been a huge relief: I do not need to continue carrying the toxic shame that has haunted my entire life. It’s also a complicated journey: I haven’t been able to just flip the switch to rid myself of decades of conditioning. It’s a slow learning curve. I still often go into shame, but I am creating brave new patterns of compassion and patience for myself.

Hablo mejor… Yes, I do speak better than I understand, but coming to understand myself more deeply points me towards tools that are leading to a more relaxed and serene life.

Prayer

Spirit of Life and Learning, thank you for continuing insights about myself and my world. As I seek a healthy balance between giving and receiving, speaking and listening, let me deepen my appreciation for uniqueness, mine and others’.

By JeKaren Bell

“When great souls die, 
the air around us becomes light, rare, sterile. 
We breathe, briefly. 
Our eyes, briefly, 
see with
a hurtful clarity.” 
–Maya Angelou, in “When Great Trees Fall”

I became a death doula to companion people in their grief. That was the calling I trained for. I did not expect how many calls would come on behalf of a dog, a cat, a horse, an iguana.

The first time someone called about a dying cat, I almost said that wasn’t my work. I caught myself. She was not asking me to save the cat. She was asking me to help her hold what was coming, the same way I would help her hold the death of a parent.

So I said yes. And I kept saying yes.

Companion animal grief gets little room in our culture. People apologize before they finish describing their loss. They say “I know it’s just a dog” or “I feel silly grieving this much.” They believe that this love counts less; that this grief should stay small and be managed alone.

I’ve sat with a man who could not wash the blanket his dog died on, the smell his last thread to twelve years of companionship. I’ve held space for someone grieving an iguana, an animal most people would not think to grieve at all. That grief moved through her the way grief moves through anyone who has lost a being who relied on them completely and loved them without condition.

Grief does not measure itself by species. It measures itself by the bond that has been broken. A companion animal knows us unguarded and unwell, and chooses to stay with us through it all. When that attachment ends, the absence is not smaller because the body was smaller.

We’re rarely taught to anticipate losing an animal we love, even though most of us who share our lives with them will witness their death. There is no cultural script, no permission slip that says this loss deserves full mourning. People improvise alone, apologizing for tears at their desk.

This ministry allows me to hand people that permission slip: their grief is not too much, not silly, not something to minimize. I help them build a farewell ceremony, write a memorial blessing, or sit with a dying animal so neither faces that threshold alone. Every loss I have witnessed–fur, feathers, or scales–has been real, and worthy of honor and care.

Prayer

Spirit of all that lives and breathes, hold the ones who grieve a companion today. Let their love be counted whole, their tears be counted holy, and their heart be given room enough to break and mend in its own time. Amen.

By Christine Slocum

“We live by each other and for each other. Alone we can do so little. Together we can do so much.”
—Helen Keller

Moving slower lets you observe what’s around you. I’m a bicycle commuter for many reasons, but the ability to better notice the world—and its birds—is one of my favorite gifts of the practice. From my bike I can see them fly, build their nests, and raise their chicks throughout the summer. With that said, one species’ future is another species’ snack, and I am the witness to a lot of hunting.

I’ll be waiting at an intersection for the light to change, handlebars in hands, when a scene will unfold in front of me:

A large bird, usually a predator, swoops into an area filled with smaller birds. But instead of what one might expect when faced with a predator, the smaller birds collectively swoop and attack the larger one. They dive and scream. They make being around unpleasant, and the larger bird will usually fly away, chased until the smaller ones find the distance acceptable.

I’ve seen this collective effort from crows chasing ravens, hawks, and vultures. I’ve seen this with redwing blackbirds chasing crows. Their bravery impresses me. The size difference is big. Caught alone, the small bird would be a meal of the larger one. The small ones surely understand that. It’s easy to feel overwhelmed by large powerful forces of potential death and yet they challenge it directly and often are successful.

My mind wanders to all the ways that large, powerful forces in society threaten people I love or undermine my values. I witness them making rules or laws that challenge the self-defined personhood of people I love, starting unjust wars with deadly weapons, or showing up at my neighbors’ doors exacting life-disrupting consequences for not having the right paperwork.

By myself, I am an ineffective advocate. And I hear people around me describing powerlessness as the defining characteristic of their relationship to forces of harm. This is a perspective from a single person. Civil rights movements, labor movements, and other efforts of justice do advance. History shows that success is possible, and it is a collective effort.

It seems that every time I’m getting overwhelmed, I see another bird reminding me that you can be triumphant when challenging big things. The trick is doing it together.

Prayer

May we find our people and join together. May community inspire the bravery needed to fight for justice. May we use our collective power to create a life-affirming, equitable world.

By Carleigh Heckel

“Of course I wake up finally
thinking, how wonderful to be who I am,
made out of earth and water, 
my own thoughts, my own fingerprints—
all that glorious, temporary stuff.” 
—Mary Oliver, “On Meditating, Sort Of”

Tending to my houseplants has become a spiritual practice to me. I examine them daily, hoping to see new growth and their progress opening new leaves. I worry about brown spots and yellowing leaves, and hope that they’re getting the right amount of light and water and love to thrive. I feel the firmness and shape of their leaves to know when it’s time to water them, and I often poke my finger in the soil for another check.

Caring for my plants can be messy: the dirt I haven’t bothered to wipe from my windowsill, that always seems to show up in the sink, and that I never manage to entirely get out from under my nails attests to that. Yet it’s in the messiness where I’m reminded that my plants and I are alive, together, sharing a little studio apartment, breathing the same air. That dirt—which we kindly call soil when it’s contained—gives life to my plants and, through them, back to me. The row of plants in my windowsill ground me after hard therapy sessions, comfort me in my tears and my hurt, and ground me in time through their slow, continuous transformation.

I once took some of the water I had been growing plant cuttings in and used it in blessing to offer myself release from the shame I had around my pandemic trauma. I sought grace in that water that created and sustained life, knowing that only I could give myself forgiveness. That sacred, life-giving water gave me the space and the separation from myself to let me love myself, to make myself more whole, to find the Love inside me.

I cried many tears that night, but I found myself full of wonder knowing that those tears may one day be the water that blesses another; the water that now nurtures my plants may once have been another’s tears. The soil that now holds them may once have been a stone thrown in anger…yet here it is now: giving, nurturing, growing, and loving.

Prayer

Spirit of Love, May we be the dust, the dirt, the soil that creates and sustains life. Help us know that every time we testify at a city council meeting, write a poem, or tend to a child, we are givers and creators of life. Let us remember that we are blessed by those whose love created the life that surrounds us. Amen and blessed be.

By Kim Mason

“When it’s time to go onstage, 
know that you’re not ready but
this is not about being ready, 
it’s not even about being fierce, 
or fearless, it’s about being free.”
—Dean Atta, The Black Flamingo

Three religious professionals walk into a bar: a queer UU minister, a female priest from the Ecumenical Catholic Communion tradition, and a trans nonbinary Disciples of Christ minister. It’s amateur drag night and we’re all there to see our friend perform. In the tiny back room of the newest gay bar in town, we crowd in with strangers and friends to celebrate these drag newbies.

For some this is their first drag show—both performers and audience members—but everyone claps loudly, cheers enthusiastically, and generously offers wadded up cash to the brave kings and queens strutting their stuff on the stage.

The Catholic priest asks, “Should I have brought dollar bills?”

“Here,” I say, handing her mine. She hands the money into a drag king, who palms the money and kisses the back of her hand. “Oh!” she exclaims, fanning herself and blushing.

Our friend takes the stage, eliciting shouts of appreciative laughter as they sashay across the stage to the TLC song “No Scrubs” wearing a jacket covered in sponges and a skirt made of rubber gloves. There’s joy in the celebration of creativity, and we yell with pride: “We know them!”

Then it’s the final act. A tall, elegant drag queen strides on stage in massive, spiked platform heels and an ornate black cassock to the opening refrain of Depeche Mode’s “Personal Jesus”: Reach out, touch faith. Everyone screams in recognition.

With each stride and squat, the cassock splits to reveal black garter straps and a leather bustier. She is glorious. She looks at each one of us as though she can see beyond the bright lights of the stage and into our hearts.

Your own personal Jesus / Someone to hear your prayers / Someone who cares

She slides and grinds, genuflects and bows, praying with her body the prayer that all LGBTQ+ folks say at some point: See me as I am. Accept me for myself. Love all of me.

The song continues, Feeling unknown / And you’re all alone / Flesh and bone. This is why we gather, in the back rooms of bars and on the streets during Pride: to be known, to be free to be fully ourselves, to feel deep in our bodies the truth that we are not alone. When the world tells you your love is a sin, that your body is a transgression, to be seen is baptism; to be accepted is grace; to be loved is the Holy made real.

The song winds down—Reach out, touch faith—and our drag show priestess brings out a tray laden with wafers. My friends and I turn to each other in wonder: “We get to have communion?” So often in the position of giving, we religious professionals, on this night, get to receive. We line up at the stage, leaning forward, mouths open to receive the host. “Take. Eat. You are loved,” she says, over and over.

That night an Ecumenical Catholic, a Disciple of Christ, and a UU each received communion: the blessing of being seen, the blessing of being accepted, the blessing of being loved. That night, the blessing of belonging brought the holy into being. That night, reaching out for community, we touched faith.

Prayer

Spirit of Life and Love, Source of Pride and Well of Power, may we always find the places where we belong. In a world struggling to find hope, may each and every one of us be known. May we be free. May we be loved. In the name of all that is holy and life affirming, amen and blessed be.