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.

By Ali K.C. Bell

“We are pow­er­ful because we have sur­vived, and that is what it is all about—survival and growth.” 
—Audre Lorde

Thriving is deeply embedded in the DNA of my family. My great-great-great-grandma Melinda Benton, on my mother’s side, walked out of slavery in Arkansas and—with her husband and other Black people—bought hundreds of acres of land in Mississippi. My father’s side, the Bells, also came from a freed Black community. Each generation after them continued to rise.

My family taught me that we’re Black, not African-American, and that they had worked and struggled to get us all—not just our family but also our community—to a place of thriving. We uplift and we save ourselves. We can disagree on things that are substantial, but we agree that the community deserves not just surviving, but thriving.

In second grade, I had my first overt racist experience at the hands of my teacher, Mrs. Schumacher. My mom told me, “You’ll never go back to that school.” So what did they do? My family and another family said, “We can create a school.” They developed the Youth Development Workshop Day School. About forty children went to school in my house, where we learned from professors and activists and artists.

At school mealtime, the rule was: Nobody can eat until the children of different religions bless their food in a way that everyone can consume it. Since there were Christian and Muslim kids; Buddhist, Black Hebrew Israelite, and Black Muslim kids, saying grace took a long time; we weren’t happy about it. But now I understand how it shaped me for all sorts of people to be together, without any one group held above the others. The message was: We cannot thrive if we can’t figure out how to be together in this.

I now believe that in that school, as a nine-year-old, I was radicalized to understand our interconnection: if we’re a thriving community and someone hasn’t eaten, the community has failed. Community was, and is, everything.

Today, I have to be able and willing to do the work of creating community with people who may not understand how dangerous it is for me to allow them to be in community with me. As both a UU and the person who is often othered, my work is to protect myself first—to guard my heart—and also remain as open as I can to build a community with many bridges. If I can’t do the work of being in community with them, then how will they learn? I don’t believe we can survive unless we’re all surviving. I don’t believe that we can thrive unless we’re all thriving….and that means everyone; all of us; the whole of us.

Prayer

Spirit of Becoming and the Became, as generations move through the process of knowing themselves and learning the world, may they be deeply rooted in all of the work of the past that brings them to who they are today.

May we see ourselves as a people of thriving, and respect and honor the sources that got us to that place. May we know love and understanding; may we be willing to give it—and be willing to hold it for ourselves.

May we continue to build towards community in which we all can be free. And may we protect ourselves and others fiercely until that day comes. Amen.

By Antoinette Hollamon

“I’m rooting for everybody Black.” 
—Issa Rae, writer and actress, at the 2017 Emmys

I grew up in a historic, all-Black freedom town founded in the 1800s by, and for, free Black people. Every mayor in its history has been Black, and the town has had its own police and fire departments for as long as I can remember. My great-grandfather, Stenson Thomas, was sheriff in the 1940s and 50s. When Black neighborhoods around us were threatened by the Klan, Eatonville was never harmed. So I grew up witnessing Black people who were free to exercise our own self-determination.

My move to Los Angeles, at the age of twenty-four, popped this bubble! There’s a much different racial dynamic here, which came to head during the formation of Black Lives Matter after the 2012 killing of Trayvon Martin. I hadn’t ignored this part of Black life; I had just never lived it. That’s when I began to make the problems of all Black people my problems, and thus understood the deeper need to celebrate and honor all Black people, not just the ones from my hometown.

When Issa Rae was asked who she was excited to support at the ‘17 Emmys, I’m sure the interviewer expected a long-winded answer about the best performances in that year’s television season. But the response, blunt and to the point—“I’m rooting for everybody Black”—received a nervous and surprised laugh from the woman holding the microphone.

Every year since that night, I’ve used that phrase as a shorthand to celebrate other Black individuals. It’s the joy of complementing a young Black person on their stylish outfit, and watching them walk away a little taller. It’s the three Black women hyping me up as I sing at the karaoke bar, fast friends for just a moment as we share in this joy. It’s witnessing a long-lost friend accomplish something they’ve been working on for years, and time has brought you together right now, to celebrate each other.

Anti-Blackness is deeply rooted in our American culture. Celebrating Black people and affirming their accomplishments is a wonderful way to build unity within a disenfranchised group—and doesn’t take away from anyone else’s joy.

Prayer

Spirit of Life and Love, May we find ways to uplift our kin so they may see the light they reflect onto us. Amen.

By Takiyah Nur Amin

“We have a wonderful history behind us… If you are unable to demonstrate to the world that you have this record, the world will say to you, ‘You are not worthy to enjoy the blessings of democracy or anything else’.”
—Carter G. Woodson, Father of Black History Month

When I was growing up in Buffalo, NY, my family’s life was ordered around certain milestones: Kwanzaa in December; MLK Day in January; Black History Month in February; Women’s History Month in March; Malcolm X’s birthday in May; Juneteenth; and Marcus Garvey Day, and Black August. These holidays and commemorations were anchors that reminded us of the richness of Black history and Black people’s long struggle for freedom and liberation.

The oldest of these, Black History Month, has a beautiful, amazing history. It comes from a deep culture of resistance. For centuries, the prevailing attitude in the U.S. among many was not only that people of African descent had never contributed anything to world history, but that we couldn’t. Black folks knew that this wasn’t true, and we knew that no one was going to teach our children the fullness and richness of our history except us.

Historian, journalist, educator, and scholar Carter G. Woodson established Negro History Week in 1926. Woodson intentionally chose February for the first “Negro History Week” and subsequent celebrations because of the birthdays of Abraham Lincoln and Frederick Douglass, two people whose legacies he felt were critical to acknowledge due to their impact on Black life in the U. S. These celebrations started pre-segregation, in Black schools and churches, libraries and community spaces; Black educators and elders taught and shared our history through study groups, public programs, hosting speakers and giving educational presentations. We did it by and for ourselves, using our own resources to make an impact.

When (in 1976) Negro History Week became Black History Month, it was still something that Black folks did ourselves, for ourselves, on behalf of ourselves. We weren’t waiting on federal recognition or anyone else to tell the truth of who we are. For example, as a kid, no matter what project we got in school, I knew I’d cover something Black because my parents’ response always reinforced that Black people mattered and were always historically present and important.

“Mom, we’ve got to do a project on the War of 1812.” She’d say, Here’s a book on Black regiments.

“We’re covering the American Revolution.” Here’s a book on how Frederick Douglass helped conceptualize American notions of freedom, and here’s an essay about Crispus Attucks, the first person killed in the Boston Massacre in 1770.

As an adult, I now challenge myself to learn something new every Black History Month. For example, I don’t know much about sports, so a couple of years ago I learned about early Black hockey players and Nova Scotia’s Colored Hockey League, founded in 1895.

I do this because Black History Month was envisioned as something both backward-looking and forward-looking, prompting us to recognize that we’re all here today in the shadow of the greatness of Black people who came before. All of us benefit every day from their contributions, creativity, excellence, and sacrifice. Without acknowledging the impact and resonance of Black history, we cheat ourselves out of a robust vision for what our collective future can be.

Prayer

Let us learn Black history as a means to express our gratitude for the Black ancestors whose examples light our path during Black History Month and every day of the year. May it be so.

By Sue Oshiro-Zeier

“No act of kindness, no matter how small, is ever wasted.”
—Aesop

I grew up in Hawaii, in a town of eight hundred people, so I was excited to leave home for college—starting with flying alone to Montana.

My Baptist pastor and his wife wanted to ensure I had a positive transition to a town much larger than my own. Money was tight. I fretted because the most affordable flight would get me to Montana the day before the dorms were open. The pastor’s wife arranged for me to stay with church members in Bozeman—a kindness that made my adventure less scary.

When I landed in Bozeman in mid-September, exhausted, snowflakes were dancing in the air. I was dressed in a mini-skirt, sandals, and a light coat. Brrrrr! Steve and Barb from the Bozeman church picked me up and took me to their home. The next day, snow carpeted the ground. Surely I was in a Christmas card—my only experience with snow. I knew nothing about how to choose a winter coat and boots, but Barb and Steve helped, and kept easing my initiation into the bewildering “mainland” climate and culture.

I loved college, and I blossomed. At church, though, I felt invisible—except for Barb and Steve’s ongoing warmth. When they moved away, I became disenchanted and drifted away from church. Other people didn’t invite me to events or offer me a ride to church, which required walking more than a mile on icy sidewalks.

When a congregant told me they missed me at church, I did not experience love and kindness, but judgement: when I explained that I was exploring other faiths, she warned me that my inquiry would lead to confusion and possibly damnation. I was stunned. In my new adventure of being an adult in a different culture, I needed affirmation.

Sometimes in the stress of life, I leave compassion hanging in the closet. When I notice that, I remember my most vulnerable moments: how tenderness both helped me on my journey to adulthood, and taught me the importance of hospitality. At church I make an effort to sit with someone I don’t know or who may be new or notice who is standing alone by the wall hoping someone will welcome them.

Prayer

O Holy Ones, help me remember that compassion has the capacity for transformation for all involved if we chose to use this gift.

By Christine Slocum

“We must be willing to let go of the life we planned so as to have the life that is waiting for us.” 
—Joseph Campbell

Binoculars were in my hands; anticipation was in my heart. The sky was clear and the sun was bright as I waited for people to arrive. Our church does a service auction every year. I decided it was time to contribute something, so I offered to lead a birdwatching hike through a favorite nature preserve. It was my first time ever leading one.

It seemed like a good idea. Birding, for me, is one part treasure hunt and one part meditation. Many emotionally fraught moments of my life have been smoothed by immersing myself in the woods. Birds have brightened many banal moments of waiting, running errands, or being outside. I looked forward to the opportunity to share this practice.

On the morning of the walk, I noticed an uneasiness in my gut: stage fright. These nerves are familiar even though I often facilitate meetings and give presentations. I cope through preparation. I rehearse what I’m going to say, anticipate the questions I’m going to get asked, and run through each foreseeable moment.

Vulnerability crashes over me as we stand among trees, hearing birds but seeing none of them. I’ve chosen to lead something that I cannot control. I gaze at an osprey nest, realizing that I have planned this hike as if the birds were actors in a play. You can’t cue the cardinals to come down. Just because I often see tree swallows in a spot doesn’t mean they will be there. You cannot script nature.

I quickly pivot my goals from “see interesting birds” to “have a good time and enjoy each other’s company.” We wait in the woods, Merlin app running, hearing warblers but not seeing them. I put on a brave face. But then, slowly, we all start noticing: The yellow warblers. The red-headed woodpeckers. The tree swallows. Baltimore orioles. Thankfully, everyone seems to have a good time.

The irony is not lost on me: in showing everyone a practice of letting go and being in the moment, I had to let go of my need for control and be in the moment. I did not need everything to be just-so for it to be good.

Prayer

May we relax our need for certainty and control. May we trust in our ability to meet the moments exactly as they are, and trust—or discover—the beauty they hold.