Let me tell you about three of my heroes.

Hero #1- Buffy the Vampire Slayer. Heroic because as her epitaph reads (during the brief 2-episode arc during which she is dead), “she saved the world alot.” For those who aren’t familiar, teenage Buffy is part of an ancient line of Slayers who are destined to fight vampires and demons until their eventual death, thus ensuring balance between the forces of good and evil in the world. The position of Slayer is a full-time, mandatory gig for which one is “Chosen” and from which there is no escape. Even on the days Buffy is bruised or heartbroken or has no idea how to proceed, she shows up and does what needs to be done. At any given moment, she must accept that she may not survive the day- but still, she shows up. But perhaps the most compelling aspect of Buffy’s heroism is that, as the show makes clear again and again, she could not save the world without her friends by her side. Despite Buffy’s constant assertion that “the Slayer works alone,” her circle of friends takes her destiny on as their own, forever prepared to die by her side if it’s necessary to defeat evil. The Buffyverse tells us that when stakes are high and community is strong, the most ordinary among us can save the world.

Hero #2: Fred Rogers. By all accounts the gentle persona we’ve all seen on TV was indistinguishable from the real man. His commitment to the well-being and education of children was absolute. He shepherded children (and in many cases, their families) through growing pains and national tragedies with his kind words and gentle optimism. Even the set of his show Mr. Roger’s Neighborhood was inspirational- a modest but comfortable apartment with a secret passage into a sprawling world of imagination, an apartment which still sometimes feels like a metaphor for how I’ve lived my life.

Hero #3: Tenzin Gyatso, otherwise known as His Holiness the 13th Dalai Lama. He was just two years old when he was identified as the reincarnation of the 12th Dalai Lama, and officially inherited the title only 3 years later. He has been the supreme spiritual leader of the Tibetan people since he was 5. There aren’t many analogues in our Western experience for what it means to be destined for such a role at such a young age, but I feel like people being told practically from birth that they are Special-with-a-capital-S is rarely auspicious. This makes it all the more remarkable and beautiful that the Dalai Lama describes his life as that of a simple monk. He begins his day at 3 am with two hours of prayers and meditation. When I was briefly working in Dharamsala, India, the site of the Tibetan government-in-exile, many refugees told me that all that had sustained them on the long and dangerous journey across the Himalayas from China was the thought of an audience with the Dalai Lama. He in fact meets with all newly arrived refugees. His mere presence is enough to inspire hope, but he’s not merely present- he is a tireless activist for justice, speaking out on the subjects of immigration, capitalism, climate change, gender equality, democracy and more, at all times deeply rooted in his Buddhist faith.

To be honest I’m not exactly sure why I wanted to open by sharing these 3 heroes with you. I think mostly because I just like talking about them! The people we revere as heroes reveal our values, and maybe even help us to clarify those values when we reflect on their lives and their works. My heroes also help me feel a little safer in a broken world. I like knowing that the Dalai Lama has such a large public platform to champion ideas that I agree with. It makes me feel like maybe, and for lack of a better term, “our” side’s going to win.

Then there is Joseph Campbell, another hero of mine who broke things open in both my brain and my soul the first time I read Power of Myth. And in one of our readings today, Campbell reminds us that there is no such thing as a perfect hero in a stubbornly imperfect world. Reliance on heroes has all sorts of potential to go wrong.

Often, very often, the hero simply can’t stand the test of time. I’m looking at you, Christopher Columbus. And you, Andrew Jackson. Values change and we become more enlightened. Often what was admirable 200 years ago, even 20 years ago, simply isn’t today.

Sometimes, it turns out the hero was wearing a mask the whole time. In the case of people like Bill Cosby or JK Rowling, the fall from grace is sudden. We have to reassess what we thought we knew about a person, and ask how their stated values can be so out of step with who they’ve revealed themselves to be.

But most often, we lose our heroes in far less decisive and dramatic ways. Time and exposure have a way of chipping away at legacies. Often this process begins on the fringe, existing mostly in whispers, bubbling to the surface only after the person has passed. Mahatma Gandhi has his celibacy tests where he shared his bed, often naked, with young girls. The medical facilities run by Mother Theresa received millions in donations yet patients allegedly lacked basic medical care, even pain medication. Aung San Suu Kyi’s firm commitment to democracy in her native Burma landed her in jail as a political prisoner under the military junta, but she would later refuse to denounce her government’s genocide against the Rohingya Muslim minority.

The concept of a hero is an archetype, whereas all these folks I’ve mentioned are (ugh) human! Flawed, pathetic error-prone, stinky humans. And so instead of blind trust or worship, we have to recognize that every hero sits along a spectrum of utterly human morality. From there it’s for each of us to decide for ourselves who, at the end of it all, is able to transcend their human flaws and maintain their legacy as a “hero.”

Maybe in your own estimation, for example, someone like Mother Theresa stands the test of time and deserves her heroic status despite the controversies. That’s entirely fair. Then you have people like Fred Phelps. Before he was the founder of the hateful and rabidly homophobic Westboro Baptist Church, Fred was one of the most well-known civil rights attorneys in Kansas. By some accounts his law firm represented plaintiffs in a third of the state’s civil rights cases during the Jim Crow era, and one local activist said although there were cases that other lawyers “wouldn’t touch” on the chance that they wouldn’t get paid, Fred took them all.

I would argue that none of this is enough to save Fred Phelp’s legacy from who he later became, but it doesn’t mean that there aren’t still many people in Topeka today who remember and had their lives improved by Fred Phelps. Two things are true: He was a passionate defender of racial equality, and he was a virulently hateful homophobic person. Do with that what you will.

Do with all of them what you will.

But most of these people are dead. Arguing about their heroic status is largely a philosophical exercise. What about today? And what about, in particular, those heroes that are a little closer to us then some of the wider-known ones?

I want to tell you now about two heroes I’ve personally known who have each, in their own way, provided a lesson in how we should treat our heroes. They are both strong and principled people who came into prominence because of their strength and principles. They each became rallying points for a movement. It was their hearts that sustained those of us in their orbits. It was their conviction that we clung to when our own resolve faltered. And then, as is often the case, Things Happened.

In one case, the hero’s star burned so bright that it began to gain national attention. The accolades poured in, and so did the money. After a while it became far more likely to see this person posing for photos with celebrities or accepting an award in some exotic location than to see them at home among their community, doing the work that remained so very unfinished. This was someone we elevated so high that eventually they just got away from us. Meanwhile other, lesser-known heroes carried on with that work, but without the resources and recognition (or the 6-figure salary).

In the case of the other hero, their star also burned bright enough to gain attention. However, it didn’t come from those aligned with the cause. This hero was labeled a troublemaker -the key troublemaker- in the movement by authorities. Those authorities knew that if they could bring down this one key figure, the rest of the movement was likely to collapse altogether. Police paid them a visit and beat them in their own home. A bogus CPS report threatened to separate them from their family. Their closest associates were followed, harassed, even run off the road. And it worked. This hero was broken, disillusioned. Even worse from my own standpoint, I know they felt unsupported by the rest of us and I didn’t know how to help. We were all used to seeing this person be so strong. Without that strength to look to, we lacked direction. It didn’t help that this hero was angry (and they had every right to be!) but their anger made it so hard to move forward as one. And so we didn’t- and the movement broke apart, and fizzled out.

There are well-known examples of both of these cautionary tales, throughout history and today. If the Gospel accounts are to be believed, for example, near the end of his life Jesus was stressed and irritable and fed up with bearing the burden for everyone else. His disciples couldn’t even stay awake for a few hours to set a watch, and even though he knew a traitor was among them they all strenuously denied it would be them. Protecting their own egos, really, while their hero suffered.

There is a truism that many people in social justice spaces are fond of repeating: “check on your strongest folks, they’re probably not ok.” And in political spaces, far better scholars than me have warned against building an entire movement around a Donald Trump, or a Bernie Sanders, or a James Talarico. We can choose to be inspired by our heroes to greater actions ourselves, or we can be parasites- placing the totality of our hopes on their shoulders, trusting them to pick up the slack with their seemingly boundless time and energy while we rest, secure in the knowledge that someone has it handled.

I think, then, that we can help our heroes in a couple ways. First, we can recognize their humanity with compassion and allow them to shed the “hero” archetype and become simply humans with heroic deeds to their name. And second, we can ease their burden by swelling their ranks. Look around: isn’t there enough that needs doing in the world to occupy the time and attention of 8 billion heroes? In fact (and I’m going to spoil the ending of Buffy the Vampire Slayer right now, but in fairness it’s been off the air for over 20 years) the only way Buffy avoided the annihilation of the entire human race was by harnessing her unique Slayer strength and sharing it among every Potential slayer in the world, in essence creating an army of heroes on equal footing. But most of us don’t have a witch as a best friend who can perform a spell like that, so we need to find other ways to cultivate the potential for heroism in us all.

I’m not wise enough to compile all the wisdom of the ages on how to cultivate heroes, but few people have contemplated the personage of the Hero as deeply as Joseph Campbell. So I’m just going to tell you what Joseph Campbell says (best as I understand it!) and you can take it or leave it, as you wish.

For Campbell, the hero’s journey is some variation on this basic pathway: the hero identifies a need or hears a call to action; The hero goes on a series of adventures and trials to address this need or heed this call; The hero returns home, transformed, with a gift they give to the world.

Within this framework, it’s easy to identify heroes among the great figures in our mythologies, literature, and history. The specifics of their journeys change with the times and with the culture, but the path remains. There will always be monsters to slay, whether they be made of scales and fire, guns and authoritarian law, or simply the deep worries and doubts that disturb our sleep.

Campbell finds deep inspiration in mythologies (one could also say religions if they prefer). Over and over again, mythologies tell us that the hero can slay the monster. Buffy slayed vampires. Jesus slayed death itself.

And how do you know which manner of monster you should be slaying?

That, says Campbell, is an inward journey, and it is the real task of our time: to undergo what he calls the “adventure of the hero, the adventure of being alive.”

How do you get started on this inward journey? Again, this is just one man’s opinion, but Campbell says- “follow your bliss.”

In other words, think less on what is expected of you and more on how you can show up in this world as your most authentic self. If you’ve wandered so far from your authentic self that you don’t remember who you want to be in this world, Campbell says to read. Read poetry, read the great thinkers. Take inspiration from the great mythologies. Watch Star Wars (he really does say this). Look at art. The wisdom of the word is vast and deep, and there is something out there that will speak to you if your soul needs to wake up a little bit and remember what brings it bliss.

I have to admit, as much as I love Campbell, I’ve wrestled with this idea of finding my own heroism simply in what brings me bliss. It feels like there’s an inherent selfishness there, especially in a world where there’s so much to do. What kind of hero follows their own bliss? What would the Unitarian Universalists of generations past who wore themselves out fighting for justice have to say about that? Isn’t that, as Bill Moyers put it in his interview with Campbell, less a journey to save the world and more a journey to save ourselves?

To which Campbell responded:

“But in doing that you save the world. The influence of a vital person vitalizes, there’s no doubt about it. The world without spirit is a wasteland. People have the notion of saving the world by shifting things around, changing the rules, and who’s on top, and so forth. No, no! Any world is a valid world if it’s alive. The thing to do is to bring life to it, and the only way to do that is to find in your own case where the life is and become alive yourself.”

One man’s opinion. But if you want another, you might consider the theologian and a spiritual advisor to the civil rights movement, Howard Thurman- a name I know to be dear to many people in our faith. The Catholic scholar Gil Bailie wrote: Once, when I was seeking the advice of Howard Thurman and talking to him at some length about what needed to be done in the world, he interrupted me and said: “Don’t ask yourself what the world needs. Ask yourself what makes you come alive, and go do that, because what the world needs is people who have come alive.”

For what it’s worth, this does track with my own experience. The times I have fallen well short of heroic actions have been the times I was desperately chasing the things I thought were most important to do. Regardless of whether or not I was the best person to do them, or whether they brought me enough joy to sustain me for the time required.

There is both bad news and good news here. The bad news is that our world needs a LOT of help. It needs everything any of us can give it. Absolutely everything is important, and that has always been the case and will never change. But the wonderfully good news is that there is a place for your unique light, a corner of the world where only it can touch.

Your hero’s journey demands nothing of you but that you cultivate that light. Your true triumph is not that you have slayed the monster, but that you have been on a journey to become the type of person who can slay monsters. Imagine a world entirely populated by people who have really learned something about their soul, who possess what Campbell calls “the center of quietness within, which has to be known and held.” Imagine what sorts of heroic deeds can arise from people in that state of conviction.

Godspeed on your heroic journey into yourself, and into your bliss, and into a weary world that is calling for you to come to life. Blessed be.

Sermon given June 7th, 2026 at Community Church- Unitarian Universalist, New Orleans, LA. Photo: Ashraf Amra

Good morning, and Happy Sunday, and congratulations on waking up this morning and being part of the world of the living! Life is such a very precious gift, and it can be so tenuous, and it’s good to spend as much time as possible rejoicing in life- which you can do when you go home! Because this sermon is really more about death. That’s not the way I planned it, but of course you cannot appreciate one without contemplating the other.

And there are days when death seems to be everywhere, doesn’t it?

I want to tell you about some deaths now, or, depending on your perspective, some death-adjacent situations. And as I do, I want you to reflect a bit on how each one lands with you. I’m not going to suggest that you feel a particular way about any of them, just that you note how it makes you feel.

Let’s start with some large numbers. 1,200 Israelis were killed in just two days in 2023 in a massive act of terrorism. More than 73,000 Palestinians have been killed by Israeli forces since then. About 21,000 of them were children. The civil war in Sudan is so intense that the government is blocking access to data gathering, and we don’t know how many people have died- maybe 20,000, but maybe as many as 150,000. Last year 3,600 people died in Myanmar due to an earthquake, and US strikes in Yemen killed 224 civilians in a 2-month period last spring.

Such large numbers can be hard to wrap our minds around. So here are some smaller ones. The civil rights leader Reverend Jesse Jackson died in February at the age of 84. 3 people died from measles in the US last year (the first deaths from the disease in a decade). 5 people died instantly when the Oceangate Titan submersible imploded in the Atlantic in 2023. 4 of them were multimillionaires, one was a teenager. A nurse named Adriana Smith was declared brain dead in February of last year, but her body stayed tethered to the world via life support until her child was delivered on June 17th, 2025. Her child still lives. Luigi Mangione (allegedly) shot and killed Brian Thompson, the CEO of UnitedHealthcare on December 4th, 2024, and prosecutors are seeking the death penalty for Luigi in response.

How did each of those deaths hit you? Did each have the same impact? Of course not. Our relationship with death is complex. There are reasons, expressed or otherwise, why some deaths just pull harder at our hearts than others. Some deaths don’t hurt at all, and a few are welcomed- maybe with relief, maybe even with joy. In the depths of my own heart, for example, I have to admit- I have a couple people in mind who I believe that, by their death, could make this world a better place. That uncomfortable truth was in fact the inspiration behind this sermon.

With the internet providing us a front-row seat to nearly every disaster on the planet, it’s simply too much to take in, quite literally. It is utterly impossible for us to give each death the full gravity that it deserves. Instead, we have to come to an understanding with ourselves at some point- that despite how harsh it might feel to concede it, we cannot hold real space for every being that dies on this planet. Like with anything else in our overstimulating world, we choose which deaths we pay attention to, and which we don’t.

Almost 20 years ago, the researchers Thomas Eisensee and David Strömberg set out to discover how we assign value to different deaths based on their coverage in U.S. media. Using death toll data, they found that for every person killed by a volcano, almost 40,000 people would have to die from a food shortage in order to have the same probability of being seen on U.S. television. The researchers also estimated that an average of 91 Pacific Islanders or 45 Africans would need to die to achieve the same level of coverage as one European killed in a disaster. These results are possibly dated, but it’s no secret that the sudden and spectacular, such as an earthquake, capture our attention more than the drudgery of a long and drawn-out casualty event in a place few Americans have ever been to. And it’s no surprise that in a culture shaped by white supremacy, the white majority tends to reserve more sympathy for those who look like them than for the Other.

What all of this comes down to is a question: if we experience some deaths as being worth more than others, does it follow that some lives are worth more than others?

Put from another perspective, is life sacred, across the board, for all people?

Well….yes, right?

After all, nearly all major religions hold this to be a tenet in some form. In Hinduism, all creatures have a soul, which is in turn part of the Supreme Soul, which connects all living creatures even through the continuous cycle of death and rebirth. Islam likens personal life and death to universal life and death, as the Quran states, “whoever takes a life it will be as if they killed all of humanity; and whoever saves a life, it will be as if they saved all of humanity.” Judaism explicitly allows someone to break Jewish laws if it means saving a life. The Catholics, of course, believe life is a sacred gift from God that begins at conception. Both Buddhism and Jainism adhere to the principle of ahimsa, or nonviolence, of which the primary charge is to avoid killing and protect life. In fact, Jainism goes even further and extends this principle to all living things. In Jainsim, even the lowly and obnoxious mosquito is never slapped, but instead gently waved away.

And then there is the “consistent life ethic movement,” a primarily Catholic philosophy which holds that the sanctity of life is absolute. This movement unequivocally condemns abortion, capital punishment, assisted suicide and euthanasia. As the Catholic anti-war activist Eileen Egan put it, “The protection of life is a seamless garment. You can’t protect some life and not others.” Yes, this makes so much sense! On its face. It doesn’t hold immediate answers, though, for the perennial questions that arise from ideologically pure positions. Abortion to save a woman’s life (as is permitted in Judaism, for example), the taking out of a war criminal to prevent future deaths- these situations aren’t theoretical, they are ones we reckon with every day. Perhaps this is why the consistent life ethic movement is criticized even from within the Catholic Church. In 2004 the future Pope Benedict XVI, in writing on the subject of who was worthy to receive communion, maintained that while Catholics might ascribe to a number of positions on capital punishment and war and still stay true to their faith no good Catholic could ever support abortion or euthanasia. Curiously he didn’t go into any detail about what puts abortion and euthanasia in a different category than capital punishment and war; I imagine his justification is in the Bible somewhere, but that still seems like it would be quite open to many interpretations.

We see that nearly every faith carves out exceptions detailing (or at least leaving space for) instances when ending a life might be permissible. Even the gentle Jains have to eat, and so vegetables, grains and other non-sentient food sources are on the table for them, so to speak.

And so I don’t agree with the Consistent Life Ethic movement that the brave or supremely ethical position is to say that all ending of a life is immoral, full stop. It strips the nuance from a highly complex ethical question that people have been asking for thousands of years. To truly live by the tenets of any one of these faiths (and to do so in a way that accounts for the realities of this world and quells any nagging questions that might keep you up at night), it’s not enough to memorize a black-and-white list of who’s allowed to live and who’s allowed to die. Nor do I think that this is the most important way to approach the issue of the sanctity of life.

That being said- in the United States (and, perhaps, elsewhere) we are currently in need of a radical, come-to-Jesus level moral revival regarding the value of life. Because it is far, far too easy to end a life in 2026.

The Cameroonian political philosopher Achille Mbembe coined the term “necropolitics” in 2003 to describe how controlling who is allowed to live and who must die is the ultimate manifestation of political and social sovereignty. In necropolitics, sovereignty over life and death doesn’t just refer to warfare or any other literal killing of human beings (although that is certainly part of it). Mbembe also proposes the existence of what he calls deathworlds: “new and unique forms of social existence in which vast populations are subjected to living conditions that confer upon them the status of the living dead.” He cites slavery and colonial occupation as the primary examples of these deathworlds, places where people are caught in an existence that barely justifies itself. He points to South African apartheid, the Nazi regime, and occupied Palestine in particular.

And when I read that, I was reminded of the words I heard recently from a young medical student who was facing yet another displacement from her home in Gaza City: “I just want to die right now. I hate myself for being in Gaza. No one showed us any mercy. I just want to die right now. I think it’s the only way I will find relief.”

Her words epitomize the pain and cruelty of being relegated to an existence in these deathwords. And once you know about the idea of deathworlds, you begin to see them everywhere. You see them in homeless encampments and prisons and immigration detention centers. You are reminded of them when you hear about the soaring costs of rent and healthcare as wages stay stagnant, condemning people to work themselves to the bone just to survive. All the bread, none of the roses.

In deathworlds, the line between killing and allowing to die is blurred. Mbembe even postulates that the line between killing and suicide is blurred. He points to historical examples of people ending their own lives to escape slavery. The idea that no-life is better than a dehumanized one, and that creating the conditions for a dehumanized life is just as bad as ending one.

So, necropolitics involves these two grave sins- the imposition of death, and the imposition of suffering. Both of these things seem, to me, to be uniquely easy to do in 2026.

These globalized times, the ones that allow us to learn of all these deaths up close, are the same ones that are often described as “frictionless.” Traveling, communicating, doing business- technology has made all these things so much easier. And something else that has become frictionless- to kill.

To end certain lives is easy, oh so easy, way too easy. This happens in ways we barely think of on a daily basis. The factory farming industry is designed to take place far from you- you, who in all likelihood never have and never will have to wring a chicken’s neck to feed yourself, don’t need to think too hard about where your food comes from. An AI bot at a health insurance company could reject a patient’s treatment plan based on an algorithm, which for some might be a death sentence. At no time does another human have to look that person in the eye and reckon with that decision.

And then, of course, we have the power of drones and long-range missiles to literally kill unseen people at the push of a button, as exemplified by 170 people (almost all of them young girls) killed by an American tomahawk missile at the Shajareh Tayyebeh Elementary School in Minab, Iran.

These girls did not look their murderers in the eye at close range as they died. No one responsible will ever look their families in the eye to apologize, either. The U.S. had outdated satellite information, and I guess that happens sometimes, and the war moves on.

Several years ago I remember hearing someone say that the cause of gun control in America was lost after Sandy Hook. They said that if we didn’t take collective action for 20 murdered first-graders, nothing would ever make us act. I felt the same way after Minab. Nothing that happened in the war would matter more than that. We should talk about it every single day and demand accountability, but the war, and life, and everything else, moves on and on. We’re talking about gas prices now. Gas prices will matter far more to the midterms than those children we murdered, and that is so painful to know.

So again, I think we need a moral revival, a great reset, when it comes to how we think about the sanctity of life. And I don’t actually think this is too hard, or that we’ve gone down any path that we can’t back up from. The vast majority of us do not want to lose our humanity.

When a man named Brandon Bryant was honorably discharged from the air force in 2011, he was given an envelope. Inside the envelope was a number, referring to the number of kills that Bryant had contributed to in his time as a military drone operator: 1,626. Bryant is one of four former servicemen who went on to speak out publicly against drone warfare in 2015. “The hidden price,” said Bryant, “is we lose our humanity the more we excuse our ability to kill another human being.” Bryant and his colleagues spoke of PTSD and nightmares and drinking themselves to sleep every single night. The soul knows when something is amiss, and in speaking out to the public against this type of warfare, these four men fought for their own.

I can’t pretend to know what that journey back to humanity was like for them, but I encourage all of us to think about what our own journey back might be like. I think it begins with a recognition of our inherent humanity as universal and continues when we engage in life-saving actions. It happens when we hold a mirror up to the deathworlds and meet careless acts of dehumanization with deliberate acts of life.

Life-saving actions do not require physical strength or putting ourselves into the path of danger. On a segment of the My Unsung Hero feature of NPR, a man named Ken Wilcox once described contemplating stepping out into traffic during a low moment in his life when a woman walking by very deliberately met his eye to smile at him. He said that smile was just enough of a glimmer of hope to bring him back from the edge, both literally and figuratively.

I’m sure she had no idea that she saved a life that day. Which makes me wonder who among you today might have once saved a life without even knowing it. We are, at times, very, very powerful creatures. In fact, we have endless capacity and opportunity to save lives. A gift of time, a smile, food, money, attention- any one of these things, at the right moment, could shine a light into the deathworlds. In fact, if you study any successful social movement throughout history, you will see just how small the building blocks are. Great things happen through the smallest expressions of tenderness: someone cooks a meal, someone lends a listening ear and a word of encouragement, someone pays a light bill, someone shares a story with someone else.

These are acts of tenderness that add up, that ensure humanity recognizes humanity. I believe that the recognition of each other’s humanity is, at the end of the day, what most religious frameworks are really asking us to do when they ask us to consider the sanctity of life. To re-quote the Quran from earlier: “whoever takes a life it will be as if they killed all of humanity; and whoever saves a life, it will be as if they saved all of humanity.” The fate of us all contained in the actions of any given individual.

I am a Unitarian Universalist, and I don’t ascribe to any faith that tells me who lives and dies. I choose to begin with the recognition that my own life is a sacred thing and that how I choose to move through the world with that sacredness, with all the steps I take to minimize the suffering of all the other sacred beings around me- that is my own reckoning with the sanctity of life. As one of our own UU hymns puts it, life is the greatest gift of all the riches on the earth so treasure it, and measure it, with deeds of shining worth.

So go forth and cast your light into the deathworlds with your own deeds of shining worth. Amen.

On the day they told us the school was closing, we had just dismissed everyone for Christmas Break. By the time we started our afternoon staff meeting they would be cutting up on the bus, and by the time they got home the email would be waiting for them and they would know no one would be returning next year. One of my kids says she holed up in her room for 3 days when she read the news. There was a lot to process.

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COVID was a stupid time to switch jobs, much less switch careers. When I returned to teaching for the first time in more than a decade, my “classroom” was an awkward Zoom space of black boxes representing freshmen too scared to turn on their cameras or unmute themselves. But then we finally met in person for the last 3 months of that year (separated by six feet, masks, and those god-awful desk shields) and their warmth, penchant for asking questions, and clear enthusiasm about actually beginning their high school journey the “real” way made me feel like maybe leaving one career for another wasn’t such a disastrous move after all.

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My first year, I honestly didn’t know how to teach a World Geography class but I had been doing community organizing and non-violent direct action trainings for quite a while, so I did a unit on social change. The week after we discussed protest methods, my students staged a sit-in in the courtyard to demand we have class outside. When I told them I had a movie ready to watch but we had to go inside to do so, one student wrapped himself around a pole and would not let go. I was so proud.

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At the beginning of every year the kids always ask if I have my own kids and I reply that I have ninety of them and three cats and that that’s enough, and they all nod meaningfully like it’s the wisest thing they’ve ever heard.

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Maybe the most important thing I’ve learned about teaching is that if a kid needs a hug, it’s ok to give them a hug. Sometimes a hug is absolutely the correct prescription.

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I actually like sitting in on IEP meetings because you get to tell parents some things that make their kids wonderful that they might not even know about, and sometimes you can watch them literally swell with pride. Travis’s dad came in for his IEP meeting and when we after we had said nice things asked him at the end if he had any questions, he said no, he was happy with everything. “Travis chose this school,” he said. “A bunch of the high schools came to his middle school and were set up, and he was just off to the side, and someone from New Harmony started talking to him and said he belonged at New Harmony. I don’t think he had been told he belonged anywhere before like that.” It’s true that we can always spot a New Harmony student in the wild, even before they become a New Harmony student.

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And what is a New Harmony student? Whenever a new student would join my Advisory, I’d convene a Circle and have each kid introduce themselves and tell the newcomer one thing they should know about our school. “Everyone’s weird here,” Kayla would always say, and the others would nod sagely. “But that’s ok, it’s a good weird. People accept you here. So just be Weird, and you’ll be fine.”

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On the day they told us the school was closing, Janay had spent a free period in my room and we drank tea while she reflected on when she joined my Advisory last year. “I was scared to start over, because we had just come from Georgia, and we had had the fire and lost my brother and everything,” she said, “but then everyone said it was ok to be Weird here, and it didn’t feel like anything scary. I’m so glad I came here.” She smiled, and I swear she has the best smile in the whole school.

~~~~~

Teaching has the highest highs, and the lowest lows. Once after a particularly rough day, I was sitting in my classroom reflecting on how much more I could take when I heard a click-click-click headed toward me from the hallway. Then Doug appeared, our little school therapy dog that belonged to one of the English teachers. He looked up at me cheerfully from the doorway, as if to say, “I believe you were expecting me.” He had never visited me before, and as I squatted down to scratch him around the ears I marveled at how good he was at the intuitive part of his job.

~~~~~

Honestly, one of my favorite things about teenagers is how few vegetables they’ve heard of. On every field trip, I bring a small Tupperware of sliced bell pepper. One kid will ask if it’s like an onion, another will ask if it’s spicy, they all crowd around, and before you know it my snack is gone.

~~~~~

For some reason, one of my lesson plans that always goes perfectly is the one about the United Fruit Company’s dealings in Latin America. They generally find accounts of the US’s global sins fascinating. When I finished the lesson in 6th period, I asked them what they thought. “Well, Ms. Alicia,” said Jack, “That was bananas.”

~~~~~

If I’ve learned a second important thing about teaching, it’s that first impressions are often wrong. Headaches can look like boredom, self-consciousness like arrogance, and neurodivergence like defiance. Assume best intentions from everyone until you have very clear evidence to believe the contrary, and honestly you will never need to believe the contrary.

~~~~~

I had a quiet special needs student in my Advisory last year who spent the first week refusing to leave my room and go to her first class. One day I tried to make it a game and gave her a notecard, and told her that if she could write down one good thing that happened to her during the day, she could redeem the card with me at the end of the day for a piece of candy. At 3:30 she shuffled back in my room and handed me the card, where she had written “lunch.” Well, it was a start.

~~~~~

My students regularly say things so ridiculous that I laugh out loud. Some of my favorites have been, in no particular order:

• “You seem like you can beatbox. But like, you beatbox....for your cats.”

• “If I was in kindergarten, I would think you were a secret fairy. You have that vibe.”

• “Everyone be quiet. Ms. Alicia is thinking about her cats in the background, at the same time that she’s trying to tell us to stop disrespecting her room.”

• “I’m not racist, but I hate polar bears.”

~~~~~

I led the school Running Club for 3 years. Josh had joined as a sophomore and stuck with it through thick and thin, even the days when we only had one or two people come to practice. Finally we hit our groove this past year and suddenly, Josh was presiding over a large and rambunctious group of freshmen. On our last practice I planned a route that ended right at the door of the best local pizza place. After we had eaten I presented our one graduating senior with a gift certificate to a running gear store and a card signed by all of us. Josh came to me the next day and told me how much it had meant to him. “Well, I hope you can use it,” I replied, referring to the gift card. “That too,” responded Josh, and only then did I realize he didn’t mean the gift card at all but the other card, signed by his young friends who revered him as their favorite “grown-ass man.”

~~~~~

On the day they told us the school was closing, I had brought Shawn into my room and presented him with new running shoes. Someone from a nonprofit our Running Club works with had brought them over after watching Shawn run the Ole Man River 10k in Crocs the weekend before. Shawn grinned and bounced around in a wide circle, declaring, “I’m coming to practice on Tuesday just so I can wear these shoes!”

~~~~~

I remember my absolute favorite thing that any student has ever said to me. I spend a lot of time in my geography class trying to drive home the connection between fossil fuel consumption, climate change, and the loss of the beautiful biodiversity we have on this planet. “Well, in my opinion,” said Akilah after a class about the origin of fossil fuels, “I think it’s terrible that we killed all the dinosaurs just so we could get oil.”

~~~~~

If I’ve learned a third important thing teaching, it’s that the don’t-smile-til-Thanksgiving thing is bullshit. All students are looking and hoping for kind teachers. They might end up testing your limits a little more in the beginning, but you can hold limits with kindness. There’s really no reason why you can’t.

~~~~~

Once I was leading some review questions with my 5th period, which was my loudest and most chaotic and most frustrating class (and oftentimes also my favorite). They were doing surprisingly well, and when I remarked on that Darien replied, “see, Ms. Alicia, we talk a lot but we listen a lot too.”

~~~~~

Leigha sent me the sweetest email of gratitude a few weeks before her graduation which said, among other things, “you are one of many reasons why I now identify along the Communist spectrum.” I am that Indoctrinating Leftist Teacher that Louisiana politicians fear, apparently. I’m ok with that.

~~~~~

On the day they told us the school was closing, I was sitting in my classroom soaking in the silence after a loud and chaotic day of holiday festivities. My classroom is lit by two ambient lamps and decorated with art from my previous life in climate justice work– posters from protest marches, advertisements for rallies, photos of heroes of the movement, and a homemade banner that reads “Protect What You Love.” A wide array of plants adorn the windowsill which runs the length of the classroom. I have made every inch of this room just the way I want it, and I have loved it. I had hoped I could stay here longer. But on the positive side, at least this classroom has taught me that I’m not actually a horrible Plant Murderer; apparently, I just have bad light at home. In here, though, living things thrive.

~~~~~

The kids have been bullying each other lately, and it’s painful to watch. I want to put my hands on every single one of their shoulders and look them deeply in their eyes and tell them THEY MUST be nice to each other, that the world depends on their compassion, that once they start making excuses to be shitty to each other and telling themselves that the other person deserves it they open a path to dehumanization, and that in our class we’ve learned and seen and read that people dehumanize others all around the world, and that now it’s coming home to us in a big way, and that depending on who you are your government either wants to dehumanize you or have you dehumanize your neighbor, and they need to recognize this, and not fall for this.

~~~~~

My class has occasionally been criticized as being a bit of a downer, but I absolutely love sharing the stories I find with them. There’s something so beautiful and defiant about Stacey Ryan’s house in Mossville, LA, the last homestead surrounded by a sea of petrochemical plants who slowly poison the residents until they have no choice but to leave. Or The Guajajara who track down illegal loggers in their Amazonian territory in order to protect their home and their “little brothers,” by which they mean the neighboring Awa tribe which has never had any contact with the outside world. Or Baltazar Ushca in Ecuador who climbs Mt. Chimborazo every week to bring fresh glacial ice into town, long after most people have ceased to value it and moved onto cheap factory ice. There are billions of beautiful lives out there, and how lucky I am that I’ve been able to learn and teach about so many of them.

~~~~~

On the day our school closed, I woke up at 5. In the end, it turns out I couldn’t really anticipate how I would feel until the day came. All the emotions were jostling at the gate, ready to be let in. They all wanted to be felt, but none of them wanted to give their names.

~~~~~

On the day our school closed, I finally removed the “Protect What You Love” banner. I had tried to do so the day before but it had brought on an unexpected little wave of emotion that I wasn’t prepared to deal with at that moment. I folded it carefully and it will live in a closet for a while, alongside the 2 shopping bags I’ve managed to condense my school belongings into. Maybe it will grace another classroom wall one day, but its future (and mine) are by no means certain.

~~~~~

I’ve read that there are about 60,000 teachers in Louisiana, about 4.3 million in the US, and about 94 million in the world. Common as mud, we are, and yet it often feels like we’re being let in an exclusive secret. From just one little building we bear witness to the entire universe- its joys, its absurdities, its deepest despairs and hardest won victories. How can such a mundane profession feel so transcendent?

All student names have been changed.

Happy Earth Month! Sermon delivered 4/19/25 at Community Church-Unitarian Universalist, New Orleans.
Photo: The black gum pond at Crosby Arboretum in Picayune, MS (taken by me)

Had she not died late last year, my friend and our former member Dionne DeVille would have turned 51 3 days ago. When I got the call in November that she had entered home hospice, I happened to be hiking in the Woodlands Conservancy near Belle Chasse- a good spot to get lost in my thoughts. After I hung up the phone, the first thing I got to thinking about was how verdant my surroundings were, and how lucky I was to be in them on a beautiful day- that sort of hyperawareness of life and living that often accompanies reminders of our mortality. The second thing I got to thinking about was how much these woods had changed since I last visited, which was maybe 4 years ago. At that time the land was still recovering from Hurricane Isaac, which had taken down many of the trees and left the pathways unpassable. Quite frankly, it was ugly back then- and it’s remarkable to see how much it has recovered. And the third thing I got to thinking about was one of the last times I had seen Dionne in person. It was 2020 and we had been put in charge of planning the next GNOUU retreat. We went out for lunch after church and listed out everything we wanted, everything we would do, all our next steps. Trust me, it was about to be the best retreat ever. And then we went home, having no idea that less than 2 weeks later, the world would shut down. We would all be confined to our homes for the better part of a year and the retreat would never happen.

We all emerged different from the pandemic, including this church. We had been talking about expanding our space, and enjoying a growing RE program. Instead, throughout the pandemic we lost members, and a minister, and that wasn’t anyone’s fault, but it was an experience at times painful nonetheless.

I’m rambling a bit, so let me return to that moment in the woods. To sum up, there were 3 transitions on my mind: The land itself, which was finally coming back into beauty after a disaster, the memory of a time when our community began a season of change, and the upcoming transition out of this world of a dear friend.

I’m not great with change, but I’m trying to be better. The writer and activist adrienne maree brown says, Change is constant. Be like water. And I try to listen to everything adrienne maree brown says.

For example, I’m not great with the way our country is changing. I know you’re probably not, either. But I’ve been searching for frameworks to help me not only understand, but to greet the future with some measure of hope. That walk in the forest reminded me of the constancy of change. Not just for our country, of course, but for our own lives, and the lives of our communities like this church. It also got me looking into the research behind ecological transitions, especially the concept of succession.

Now, I should preface the rest of this by disclaiming that I am not a trained ecologist- but nor am I a trained minister, and yet you still graciously allow me to share my words with you on the occasional Sunday. So, Thank You, and here we go.

If you look at the cover of your Order of Service you’ll see a place that is very important to me- the Crosby Arboretum in Picayune, MS. It’s really one of my favorite places on earth (and it’s where much of this sermon was conceived of and written). Until 1978 it was a strawberry farm, but you would never guess this when you see the forest. Their website tells us that over the course of the next 200 years, “oak, hickory, beech, and other slower growing hardwoods will emerge and dominate the canopy. The forest will reach its final stage of natural succession, the climax stage, when it is dominated by hardwoods.”

The concept of ecological succession tells us that we are building toward a beautiful climax. In order to do so, however, we have to start with a disturbance. The disturbance can be large and biblical in scale, like a lava flow or a landslide that creates new soil for the first time. This is what’s known as primary succession, and in these instances, life must begin from scratch. In secondary succession, however, the conditions to create life are still there awaiting activation after a disturbance- after years of domestication as a strawberry farm, for example, or very commonly, a wildfire, where most of the land’s features disappear but life still hides in the soil. Ecologists tell us that most succession is secondary, arising in what is often termed, “a disturbed area.”

Small and basic forms of life come first, which in turn nourish new species. Over time, interlocking pieces of the land respond to each other. They are building toward a climax community- the ultimate raison d’etre of the land. A climax community is stable and balanced. Generally characterized by tall shade trees and high biodiversity, it brings to mind the sort of landscape we tend to be drawn to and consider the most beautiful. It might even evoke the sort of established neighborhoods considered the most desirable- old historic mansions set among majestic centuries-old oaks. Rich. Accomplished. Stable. A happy ever after for the land, and for ourselves.

Of course, there are also ecologists who argue that “climax community” is something of a misnomer. Especially in 2026, in the era of human-accelerated climate change. They tell us the so-called “climax” community is just as much a phase of succession as any other, because disturbance is an undeniable fact of nature. However timeless it may seem, they say, disturbance will always come for the “stable” community.

What does ecological succession tell us about what to expect after the inevitable disturbance? It turns out that succession is fairly predictable. The same type of species generally return to a disturbed area in similar manners over time. Different species have their prescribed roles, and their own moments. The spruce tree will never simply spring into existence before the colonizing lichen does. The deer will never return until there is something there to return to.

When we walk through a forest, how many of us notice the lichen before we notice the towering trees? I like this idea of the lowly lichen having its moment, along with fungi, grasses and herbs. These so-called “pioneer species,” the first to return after a disturbance, are tough as nails; used to harsh conditions, they are who the landscape owes its life to. They are the ones who add nutrients to the soil from which all future life will spring.

I think we’re living in a time where pioneer species are about to have a moment. Our institutions are falling like tall trees. Or burning, if you prefer. USAID or the Department of Education, longstanding legal precedent like a woman’s authority over her own body or maybe birthright citizenship- we thought many of these tall trees would last forever. Some of them have lasted our lifetimes, which makes it feel like they’ve lasted forever, like they’re supposed to last forever, even though nothing lasts forever. Change is constant.

Few of us here are naive enough to think that our current institutions have always served us, equally and adequately. But it’s hard, especially for those of us with relative privilege, to welcome a disturbance which threatens the system, especially when we don’t know where it will lead.

And look, let’s just say we lose it all. Democracy gone, 6th major extinction underway, everything. Ecological succession tells us what’s next. The pioneers are on their way. So who will they be? Who will add the nutrients to the soil?

In 1994, over the course of just 100 days in Rwanda, one million people were killed in a frenzy of ethnic violence- one out of every 8 Rwandans. I’d say this is about as total a “disturbance” as you could ever imagine. After the massacre, about 70% of the remaining population was female- and this was who then rebuilt Rwanda. They cast their nutrients into the soil, both literally and figuratively. They ran the farms, they rebuilt the businesses, they raised the orphans, they created support groups for widows. They proved their capability beyond the home and in 2003, a new constitution mandated that 30% of parliamentary seats be reserved for women. Today, they lead the world with 64% of those seats held by women, more than in any other country, a leap forward for gender equality born out of disturbance.

In 2023, a wildfire destroyed much of Lahaina in Maui. Natural disasters in certain areas, as those who survived Katrina already know, often usher in an era of profiteering- real estate companies descend on property that locals can no longer afford to rebuild or hang onto. The area becomes a windfall for corporations and ripe for gentrification. In Lahaina, however, indigenous organizers made sure a different story was told. When federal assistance was slow to arrive, they organized cleanups themselves. They successfully advocated for a law to phase out 7,000 short-term rental properties to be converted into housing for fire survivors. They established an encampment behind luxury resorts to draw attention to the way rebuilding had prioritized tourists over locals. They began working with officials to redevelop the main tourist centers to place greater emphasis on Hawaiian culture. They began planting acres of native plants after decades of water diversion had made the land vulnerable to wildfire. The disaster became a way to start cleansing the island of one invasive cultural story and replace it with something entirely more promising.

This is one way of looking at succession- the natural resilience and rebuilding in the face of disturbance. We didn’t choose the disturbance, just how we react to it.

But what if we did choose the disturbance? What if we owned it? Let’s go back to Crosby Arboretum.

Most people visit Crosby in order to sit by the edge of the 2-acre pond or walk amongst the tall trees. But the Arboretum also contains the wet pine savanna habitat. Not as many are drawn to the savanna, especially in the summer heat where bugs fly around you and there is no shade. In contrast to the deep greens and blues of the other areas, the savanna mixes pale greens with orange, brown and black- the evidence of the regular prescribed burns visible around the ankles of the trees. From the website, “The theme of the savannas is fire: an awesome, destructive force which can be a constructive, creative one as well. The highly diverse landscape includes wildflowers, grasses, and native shrubs and trees which are fire-adapted to the periodic prescribed burning.”

You might not look at the savanna and think, “that’s beautiful!” And yet- when your eyes adjust to the sun you will see the dots of color in the native wildflowers amongst the grasses. You will walk through the delicate carnivorous plants in the pitcher plant bog. Did you know that apart from tropical rainforests, the Gulf Coast wet pine savannas have richer biodiversity than any landscape in the world? And did you also know that less than 3% of those areas remain in their original state today, due to our own “disturbances” – namely, draining wetland areas, and discontinuing the periodic burning which these species have come to depend on?

Prescribed fire, practiced for generations by indigenous communities, controls the presence of invasive species. It clears away deadwood that might otherwise fuel an unintended, more catastrophic fire. It maintains delicate landscapes like the savanna that would otherwise transition over to forests and lose their biodiversity at ground level. It stimulates new growth on plants and shrubs that is particularly nutritious to grazing species.

What does it look like in our world to have a community that not only knows how to recover from disturbance, but actually depends on disturbance to grow? I think it means we need to start looking for what we ourselves can and should disturb. I have a student in my World Geography class who, anytime we mention a particularly low moment in US politics, will ask in exasperation “why can’t we just set fire to things like the French do?” And in moments of frustration many of us might be heard to say, “burn it all down!” I’m not literally saying we should go around setting fire to Walmarts and AI data centers (at least not yet), but there are things we can destroy in order to reset the landscape. In 2020 fans of the K-pop band BTS tanked a Trump rally in Tulsa by scooping up nearly all the available tickets and then not showing up, creating an embarrassingly empty arena for the administration. That’s just about as creative an example of destruction as I can think of! In 2008, the climate activist Tim DeChristopher sabotaged a public land auction by successfully bidding on 22,000 acres of Ohio wilderness that he had no intention of paying for. His actions brought scrutiny to the auction itself, and most of the land leases were eventually canceled when a judge found they had been rushed to auction in violation of environmental protection laws. These are small examples. The 1955 Montgomery bus boycott was a larger example. In protest of the indignity of segregation, Black residents supported the boycott of the city bus system by organizing carpools and even raising money in churches to purchase new shoes for those who wore them out walking to work. The community organized to break the system and deal a significant blow to the city’s finances, eventually forcing a decision in their favor. Disturbance is pain, but disturbance is change- and it often resets the path forward to something that ultimately serves us better.

None of this is easy. Although most of us would choose to be born in the time and place of the tall majestic trees in the climax community, so to speak, sometimes we are born in the time and place of the cleansing fire.

We must be willing to accept that this world may move completely beyond recognition in our lifetime.

I’m not saying that will happen, just that we have to consider that it might happen. We have to let ourselves be open to any range of scenarios, even the ones that contain nothing of the familiar. And if this sounds difficult, or if it hurts your heart, just bear in mind- there is no guarantee that these theoretical futures will be any worse than our current state of things- in fact, they might be far, far better. I’ve spent so much time worrying that my life and my country will mutate into something unrecognizable that I’ve so rarely remembered to also ask myself whether maybe that’s a good thing.

When I think about how our church community has changed since COVID, I mourn some of those who left. I mourn the GNOUU retreat that never happened and I mourn my friend who died. But then I think of those who have come to our church in the times since COVID, including some people I can’t imagine our community without. I think of the dozens of speakers who have filled the ecological niche of our pulpit, most of whom we wouldn’t have heard had we not lost our minister. There has been much to mourn, but as the hymn goes, “always, always something sings.”

Each stage of the landscape reveals its own beauty. Sometimes the beauty is evident on the face, like a towering redwood; sometimes, the beauty is in the story like the small singed grasses that sow their nutrients after a burn. As our own landscapes change– in our lives, in our communities, in our nation– we too can find beauty in the transition. Remember the little atom “X” in our readings from Aldo Leopold today, the one who circulated through our planet for millennia, participating in every possible change under the sun. It is literally in our bones to change, to die and be reborn constantly.

I do not know enough about succession, or about the mysteries of this world, to know whether the trees and the eagles and the rivers and the pebbles and the butterflies can read the history in the landscapes they inherit. But I do know that we CAN read, and listen to the ancients, and rebuild with intensity and clarity of purpose. We can think deeply about what nurtures the soil after a grand disturbance.

The fire will always come. But life still waits beneath the ashes.

What will you build out of the ashes?

Sermon given 3/1/26 at Community Church- Unitarian Universalist, New Orleans, LA. War is Hell.

Service readings here. Photo credit above: Hassan Khan, who once scanned 271 illustrations from the 1981 Children’s History of the World and combined them as one image.

There was a time, in each of our ancestral histories, where our lives did not extend much past the confines of the village. One day resembled another. Our tasks of waking, sleeping, hunting, gathering, farming, cooking, eating, caring hardly varied from one day to the next, or even from one generation to the next. Meanwhile in other corners of the world, full wars and revolutions and disasters and heroic stories would play out, reshaping societies and landscapes, all passing entirely unobserved by our ancestors in the village.

When I lived in a remote part of West Africa without electricity, there were still remnants of this. It wasn’t uncommon for my neighbors, especially women, to have never left the village in their lives. From neighboring villages people would even come to stare unabashedly at me, some having never before seen a white person (I actually made children cry!). The U.S. was more of a concept than a real place to them- I was regularly asked how long it would take to get there by car, and what it was like to hang out with George W. Bush. And although in 2005 we all heard a passing piece on the radio about a hurricane that had struck New Orleans, it hardly registered. It did not affect daily life in our little corner of the world.

The week I left that village was the same week that the first person there got a cell phone. The rest, we say, is history. Or if you prefer, globalization. Today, about 4.9 billion people own a smartphone. TikTok has 1.9 billion monthly active users worldwide. Instagram has 2 billion. Facebook, 3 billion. It’s harder to count traditional forms of media available to us but for global TV channels I’ve heard that there are anything from 4,000-25,000. Newspapers, almost impossible to say. Maybe 11,000? News websites- I don’t think anyone’s even tried to measure this. But, there are over a billion websites on the Internet. There’s about 44,000 global radio stations, and about 4 million podcasts. Not podcast listeners, actual podcasts.

All these connections forge an ever-tightening web including nearly every single person on this planet. Our little village has grown.

There is a classic dystopian young adult novel which is a staple of high school English classes everywhere. In Lois Lowry’s book The Giver, the people long ago made a choice to opt out of the dizzying ups and downs of life. They have carefully engineered a society in which they live in literal black and white, a flat sameness. By design, their climate is always temperate and their daily lives are predictable and unremarkable. Everyone has enough to eat. A well-managed, pragmatic system pairs husbands to wives and children to parents, avoiding any pitfalls that come with leaving those decisions up to chance- or worse, deep emotion. An effective pain medication exists and is immediately given for any injury or unpleasant feeling. There are no books allowed, as there is no need to think independently in a community where all life stages are pre-ordained. And after some years, at an appointed time, each person is honored for their life in the community and euphemistically “Released” into death.

Like the landscape that allows residents to pedal their bikes without effort, life is flat. Devoid of deep emotion, devoid of surprise, devoid of any uncomfortable sensation. There is only one person in the community who is exempt from this. In the event that they are some day needed for their context, all the memories of life in the world before the great flattening are archived, stored not in cabinets or on discs but in the mind of one person in the community called The Receiver. The Receiver alone remembers what war is, or heartbreak. He alone knows the sharp pain of hunger or a broken arm. Throughout the book, we the reader are meant to understand that his life is intensely difficult as he carries pain on behalf of the entire community.

Lois Lowry wrote that book in 1993. In those very early days of the internet, that fate that she assigned to her character was understood to be unusual; extraordinarily difficult. I wonder if she had any idea that we were all headed toward that same fate. Today, we are all The Receiver. In a globalized world with 24-hour news networks and constant access to the Internet, we see all. Everyone’s joy, everyone’s pain, not as a united or linear story but as a billion little dramas playing out at the same time. Absolutely everything, everywhere, all at once.

God help you if you idly check your notifications during a slow moment at work and accidentally witness a murder by the state’s secret police force. Try proceeding normally with your day after seeing that. But you have done that- you’re asked to do that sort of thing all the time. A famine here, an earthquake there. Waking up to see that your government bombed a school in Iran and killed dozens of small children. Appeals for help on social media in a hundred languages. All of this screaming at us from the small computers in our pockets. And every day, it is absolutely shattering.

In the same way that we were never designed to manage the information overload of the digital age, we were never meant to fully see and try to hold the suffering of the entire human race in our own hearts. We are all- seeing, all knowing. The tragedy is that we are not also, of course, all-powerful. Omniscient and omnipresent, without being omnipotent.

And yet, we are at this point in human history far too interconnected to ever opt out of this extraordinary global story. The information that we consume, the products we buy, the people we vote for, the retirement plans we invest in, the neighborhoods we settle in will always ensure that our lives are bound up with that of others on this planet; there is no going back.

There are some who try to insulate themselves from the sharper sensations of the world. The super-rich build underground bunkers or try to lay claim to Mars. The slightly-less rich have to settle for gated communities and NIMBYism. But I think the most common way that we fortify ourselves against the pain of our world is through the art of storytelling.

They wouldn’t be at that immigration facility if they hadn’t committed a crime.

If they had just come here legally.

MY ancestors came here legally.

And those citizens who were shot, well, that’s what happens when you interfere with law enforcement.

I heard she had been following them around.

I heard he kicked a tire.

I know the story.

Well, I know y’all, and I know that story probably doesn’t personally resonate with you. But we all tell ourselves stories out of self-preservation.

Other people are helping.

The other side will wake up soon, because no one can possibly deny the truth now.

The midterms will fix this.

It’s in God’s hands.

Years ago I read a book by Joanna Macy and Chris Johnstone whose subtitle speaks volumes. The full title of the book is “Active Hope: How to Face the Mess We’re in Without Going Crazy.” The book was written through the lens of the climate crisis (but unfortunately, we don’t talk about the climate crisis anymore). But really, their framework is applicable to any communal crisis we face. They are facets of the same crisis, after all. Macy and Johnstone identify three major stories that shape our time. The first story, which they term “Business as Usual,” is the head-in-the-sand one. It views the trajectory of the world as primarily positive, its resources infinite, and the quest for convenience as supreme. I’ve known people who have fully bought into this story, although I don’t understand how. It is a tempting story, but it is not a sustainable one.

The second story is “The Great Unraveling.” In this story, our eyes are open- wide open. Too open. This is the story that I suspect many of us carry with us too often- that everything is falling apart, that evidence of global collapse is everywhere we turn, and that we have no choice but watch it all happen as we sit by powerless.

I think most of us oscillate between these two stories. The pain of “The Great Unraveling” pushes us into the far-more-tempting “Business As Usual,” until we remember we don’t actually believe that story, and back to the “Great Unraveling” we go. How exhausting!

But then, maybe, we come to the third story- “The Great Turning,” which Johnstone and Macy also call, “the essential adventure of our time.” In the Great Turning, we reject both the status quo and our despair over it. We engage in life-saving actions and build new, sustainable practices that serve all the earth’s people. We build deep connections with each other that take hold like tree roots, and which pass on values that live beyond us.

I’d love to see these stories as a linear process over time where we start with Business as Usual, we become awake in the Great Unraveling, and we finally meet our happy ending with the Great Turning. But I think it’s more accurate to recognize that we may slide back and forth between these stories constantly over the course of a lifetime, or even over the course of an afternoon. For example, if I didn’t have at least a little Business-As-Usual in my story, how would I possibly get my grocery shopping or laundry done? And, the Great Unraveling keeps me close to the source of my humanity (and provides me with a good cry every once in a while).

In fact, at any given moment on this vast and varied earth, chapters from each of these three stories are playing out at the same time.

Let’s return, for example, to the treatment of migrants in our community. We could look away. We could count on our skin color or our citizenship status to keep us safe as long as possible. We could simply trust that our government will handle things professionally and by-the-book, and wash our hands of it. If the issue still nags at us in the news or in our conscience, we might console ourselves with the idea that others are helping, or that this all has to blow over at some point. This is our Business as Usual path forward.

In another version of this story, we can choose not to turn away. We can watch every video of an abduction on the street, watch every interview with a distraught relative, read the devastating statements from people who have been in the detention camps, read (and maybe even argue!) with every comment under an immigration story on nola.com (can you imagine?). We can get in the weeds researching what we are defunding in order to fund this, we can agonize over where in the world we are headed next. We can dwell within this story of Great Unraveling until we can no longer bear the pain.

There is yet another version of this story. Here in Louisiana it involves lawyers, and advocates, and some Congresspeople, and outraged Americans flooding their Representatives’ offices, and daily pop-up protests around the city. I know you know that part of the story. What you might not know is the part that even I know just a few bits of myself. It involves late-night planning over encrypted text threads. A network of people living in the deep-red communities of central Louisiana who travel to and from detention centers, who open their homes to migrants and cook them food and arrange their safe journeys home to their families. These are the people who dwell in their own version of the Great Turning. I got to know some of them over the summer. Someday, when the place where we live is different than it is now, I hope we can unmask those heroes. I hope we will know all their stories.

What’s your Great Turning?

In the moments when you feel the glimmer, like maybe things are going to be ok, who are the characters in your story and what are they doing? It’s different for everyone, so I think it’s worth really sitting with that question for yourself as opposed to me just telling you what that might look like. So I’ll ask again- in your Great Turning, who are the characters and what are they doing? Marching, meditating, praying, suing, cooking, painting, teaching, reading, funding, feeding, hugging, planning, laughing, building, resting, dancing, organizing, calling, writing, posting, singing? Which of these acts is bringing you closest to a story that you can read without looking away, that lightens your heart and prepares you to meet this moment?

Let’s return to the village. So much new pain came with opening up our village to 8 billion people. The village now contains immeasurable sorrow, yes, but it also contains immeasurable abundance and joy. More than there was before, in fact. Absolutely every single person who will ever make a difference on this planet lives or will be born into your global village right now. From thousands of miles away you can watch what they do to bring about the world they want to live in, the world we need to live in. And, of course, you can participate and be watched and encouraged by others from afar as well. The Great Turning is, after all, “the essential adventure of our time” and it’s not much of an adventure if we don’t take part.

We cannot shut out the pain of the world. We cannot unsee horrors across the globe, often inflicted in our name and with our tax dollars. We cannot pretend we don’t know what we know. Yet if we must see every single story, let us choose the ones we will give oxygen to. Until you discover the Great Turning, you will be caught in a loop of Business as Usual and the Great Unraveling for essentially your whole life. We can find stories that sustain us without lying to ourselves and without hiding from the pain.

How lucky we are to live in a time when we have access to so many beautiful stories. May your story sustain you, and bring you joy. May it sustain others and bring them joy! May your story weave with mine, and together, may they turn and turn and turn the world around.

Blessed be.

Sermon given 1/4/26 at Community Church- Unitarian Universalist in New Orleans, LA. Scroll to bottom for links to that Sunday’s readings.

Clarion River in Pennsylvania. Photo courtesy of Western Pennsylvania Conservancy.

I’m always curious to know what my fellow UUs think about prayer. When I was growing up in the Lutheran church, prayer was framed as a fairly straightforward one-directional communication. You told God what you wanted, and made sure to add Thank You, and that was that. Without wavering from the script for even a single week, we answered each “Lord in your mercy” with a droning “Hear our prayer.” The ritual was predictable, and that predictability smoothed away any pain, or passion, or anything else we might have felt in offering these petitions, rendering them flat, lifeless. At least to me.

Then there was that phrase, “I’m praying for you.” It always felt like a copout from people who could not or would not offer me any real solutions to my problems. Even the idea of putting people on a special prayer list seemed inherently ridiculous, as though an all-knowing and all-powerful god would choose to prioritize his mercy based on who got the most votes from the public. It felt weird to negotiate with God for what I wanted. This was the supreme and infinite deity of the universe, what could I possibly say during a few minutes of prayer that might sway their mind or convince them to see their own eternal plan from my point of view?

With time and a little more experience in the world I’ve been able to give my fellow churchgoers a little more credit, or nuance. For someone to tell you they are praying for you is a type of covenant, regardless of who is listening or whether you see any results. We little humans like to be seen, especially in suffering. “I’m praying for you” is a recognition of a fellow person’s humanity. Furthermore, maybe some people actually like those droning hear-our-prayers that bummed me out in church so much. Maybe they draw strength from a ritual shared with their community, the repetition of phrases helping them tap into something greater than themselves.

Still, the framework of prayer I learned in childhood is no longer for me. But, there are other frameworks. Which is why I am a little curious about how other UUs pray- how you define it, whether you see the value of it. For me, I am only just starting to pray again.

Like with many things I am seeking to understand better, I turn first to the poets.

Mary Oliver writes in her poem The Summer Day: I don’t know exactly what a prayer is. I do know how to pay attention, how to fall down into the grass, how to kneel in the grass, how to be idle and blessed, how to stroll through the fields which is what I’ve been doing all day.

There’s no god mentioned here, no wish list, none of the other trappings we would associate with a prayerful life. And Mary doesn’t claim to be defining prayer here, but at least indicates that she has something pretty close. If not prayer, maybe something serving the same function. I do know how to pay attention, she says. Just attention as prayer.

And this morning another great poet, Wendell Berry, tells us:

Sit and be still
until in the time
of no rain you hear
beneath the dry wind’s
commotion in the trees
the sound of flowing
water among the rocks,
a stream unheard before,
and you are where
breathing is prayer.

Again, there’s no reference to any explicit form of communication with a higher power, just an act, and again a very simple one- breath as prayer.

It’s odd that these things should be enough. When and how do these simple things that we do every day–paying attention, breathing–cross the threshold from mundane into sacred by becoming prayer?

I don’t think they do. I think they never stop being sacred; this life, after all, is a miracle. And how often do we truly pay attention to this miracle? Or recognize that we bear witness with our breath, which proves we are alive, and so part of the miracle?

Where I think this becomes a prayer is in the Thank You of it all. The unsaid in both of these poems is that amid passing rain and flowing water and falling into grass, Wendell and Mary are both clearly awash in wonder and gratitude.

And I suppose what they mean in these writings are that wonder and gratitude are also sacred things, perhaps even that words themselves are superfluous in any moment where wonder and gratitude are being practiced.

Does a good prayer need words? I suppose not, and that makes me realize prayer is way more ubiquitous in this world- and in my own life- than I ever thought.

So I, too, am learning how to use my breath, and how to pay attention. Mary Oliver also tells us this morning,

It doesn’t have to be
the blue iris, it could be
weeds in a vacant lot, or a few
small stones; just
pay attention, then patch
a few words together and don’t try
to make them elaborate, this isn’t
a contest but the doorway
into thanks, and a silence in which
another voice may speak.

A doorway into thanks and a silence in which another voice may speak. I wonder if Wendell Berry’s breath as prayer was also a vigil waiting for another voice to speak to him.

Wendell is a Christian who presumably communicates with a Christian god. Perhaps he listens for the “still small voice” of God that spoke to Elijah, the one that was found not in the wind, not in the fire, not in the earthquake but in the silence that followed all these things. But Mary, who said she did not know exactly what a prayer was, did not know exactly what God was, either. So I think it’s worth pointing out that a voice that speaks to us in the silence of a prayer doesn’t necessarily have to be the voice of God.

I don’t know who God is exactly.
But I’ll tell you this.
I was sitting in the river named Clarion, on a water splashed stone
and all afternoon I listened to the voices of the river talking.
Whenever the water struck a stone it had something to say,
and the water itself, and even the mosses trailing under the water.
And slowly, very slowly, it became clear to me what they were saying.
Said the river I am part of holiness.

One of the reasons I love this poem so much is because poets, visionaries, people of great passion and faith and conscience have a long history of hearing voices in rivers and trees and mountains. The Honduran activist Berta Caceres, who successfully fought the damming of the Rio Gualcarcque that was sacred to her people, said she always knew she was going to win because the river had told her she would win. Maybe that means the river itself speaks, maybe something speaks through the river. Or maybe the voice we hear comes from somewhere inside us, taking advantage of a quiet moment of our attention to speak. If you believe that there is a spark of the divine in all creatures on this earth, maybe the voice that comes from within you is simply that divine spark, seeking communion with other aspects of itself out in the world.

I don’t presume to know where voices come from. But any number of voices might speak to you in such a space, to borrow another verse of Mary’s, “announcing your place in the family of things.” Answering your prayer of attention and breath.

Here is what all this means: when you are silent and still, when you are open and you pay attention, you are spoken to. Call the voice that speaks to you God, or your unconscious, or the spark of the ineffable divine that connects you to all things- or call it nothing at all. If the message is nourishing, I don’t know if it matters what you call it.

This is my preferred type of prayer these days: the prayer of presence, where no words are offered, and no words are necessary. Mary Oliver and Wendell Berry are teaching me how to pray. I highly suggest them both as guides if you’re trying to learn the same. But if they don’t resonate with you, that’s fine- you might try St. Theresa of Avila, or Anne Lamott, or Rumi and the whirling Sufi dervishes who pray with their bodies. I just feel like you’ll need a prayer for 2026.

So let’s switch focus for a bit. I am speaking about this today because we are on the cusp of a new year. I actually love the change of the year. Maybe it’s the fact that I’ve been off work for two weeks so I’m primed to be peaceful and contemplative. I love reflecting on what has passed, and setting intentions for what’s to come. And what’s to come is, I am quite sure, a doozy of a year. Like 2025, and 2024, and 2023, and so on.

It is not enough to just know that work must be done and that you must be brave and kind in a world where it is hard to be brave and kind, where in fact your government might even punish you for being brave and kind. We all know this. Knowing is not the difficult part. What we need are the tools to do this. Material, and intellectual, and (the piece that’s often neglected) the spiritual.

26 years ago, the social justice activists Elizabeth Roberts and Elias Amidon sent letters to 3,000 people around the world, asking them to help usher in the new millennium by contributing to a book of prayers. Faith leaders, social justice organizers, poets, and others answered the call, and what emerged was “Prayers for a Thousand Years,” an anthology to accompany what the authors referred to as “a collective rite of passage” for the entire planet in the year 2000.

Like with any anthology, the prayers range from the beautiful to the forgettable. To be honest, most of them feel as hopelessly dated in the year 2000 as low-rise jeans. But low-rise jeans are inexplicably making a comeback, so let’s talk about this book. Even if many of its prayers fall flat today, some are wonderful. And, in terms of my search for diverse frameworks of prayer, the book is a fascinating way of collecting answers to the question, “what is a prayer?” More specifically, “What is the best prayer for a world on the cusp of something big?” It answers the question over 1,000 times, from over 1,000 people.

We can learn from the book, then, that sometimes prayer is manifestation, speaking words for the purpose of willing them into truth. Such as the Cambodian poet Chath Piersath who writes, “My homeland will be green again- she will sprout seeds of peace into spring blossoms of love and joy. The bigger and more wealthy countries will stop selling her arms to kill her own people.” We learn that sometimes prayer is pragmatic and to-the-point, closer, even to an op-ed than a prayer– such as when Marc Estrin writes, “The 21st century must feature kindness to the earth and all its species or there will be little hope for a 22nd.” And we learn that sometimes prayer recalls us back to the source of what truly matters in a way that I think would satisfy Wendell and Mary, such as when David Sluyter writes, “I think I will go down to the river and just watch it flow; it’s been a long time since I have done something really important.”

In this particular book, what unites most of the prayers is that they invoke a call to action to bring about peace in the new millenium. They are rooted in this idea of the year 2000 as a precipice. The end of one era, the beginning of another. To which I am tempted to say, oh, you visionaries of 26 years ago! If only you knew! And what I wouldn’t give to be staring down the challenges of 2000 instead of those of 2026. Y’all thought you were living on a precipice? Well, this is way more…precipicier. But honestly, I don’t know if I remember the last time it didn’t feel like we were on the edge of doom. So it’s good to remember that we, humanity, have nearly always felt this way. We’ve prayed and invoked and manifested our way through war, famine, fascism, and a neverending series of local apocalypses. For example, our attack on a sovereign nation this week in pursuit of oil- same old American stuff. This is nowhere we haven’t been before.

The writers and thinkers in Prayers for a Thousand Years paint visions invoking peace and justice, and that’s what they call a prayer. I think Mary and Wendell would approve. After all, if you truly pay attention in this world, you cannot help but be overwhelmed with wonder and heartbreak all at once. And faced with such wonder and heartbreak you cannot help but want to slip into your place in the family of things- whatever form that may take. It may have you out into the world doing the work of justice- building, or it may have you taking refuge in the inner recesses of your own heart as you gather your courage. Probably, it will have you doing both.

For me, then, that is the function of prayer. Whether it has words or not, whether it contains petitions or just presence, a prayer is how we make space for ourselves in a wondrous and broken world. A prayer is the process of affirming who we are and who we will be.

I hope in 2026 that you breathe, and pay attention, and find yourself a good prayer that gives you strength. If you don’t know where to begin, maybe try sitting beside a river. You never know- it has worked for some. I hope you find it, and that it sustains and guides you. Happy New Year.

Readings:

From “Sabbaths 2001” by Wendell Berry
“Praying” by Mary Oliver
“At the River Clarion” by Mary Oliver
From “Teaching a Stone to Talk” by Annie Dillard (Benediction)

Unitarian Universalism has always reminded me a bit of life in a tourist town. Yes, some of us are from here, but many or even most of us just kind of wandered in one day to check it out, fell in love, and didn’t leave. We grew up in other towns, maybe smaller or larger or less friendly. Maybe we didn’t have many people around who looked like us or thought like us. Maybe we thought we would live our whole lives in the place that we were from because it was something we were used to. We questioned whether there were other places to live and were told, yes, but not as good as here, so what’s the point? And then one day we took a chance, wandered off into something new and stimulating and very different, and were surprised to find that we could thrive there.

Such is my story. I wandered into this faith one day and didn’t leave. But (if, again, faith is like a town), I didn’t just buy a ticket into here from home. I wandered homeless for a while, visiting around, no particular plan. I existed in the place between where I was from and the unknown destination of where I was going; a long layover in liminal space.

I love a good conversion story. Finding a faith that fits you is a huge life shift. It can be exhilarating, scary, life-saving. My favorite is the knock-down-drag-out variety of conversion that the subject didn’t even ask for. The writer C.S. Lewis was famously “the most dejected and reluctant convert in all England” when he fell to his knees in 1929 and embraced Christianity. And the writer Anne Lamott said, “I did not mean to be a Christian. I have been very clear about that. My first words upon encountering the presence of Jesus for the first time 12 years ago, were, I swear to God, ‘I would rather die.’” Yet Anne, too, who envisioned the Holy Spirit as a small cat lingering outside her door, eventually gave in and opened the door to that little cat, saying, “Fuck it. Come in. I quit.”

Yes, I love a good conversion story, but there’s something I love even more- a narrative of lost faith, of deconversion. Depending on what metaphor you want to use, deconversion is where you are after the lights have turned off, or after you’ve landed from your fall, or after you’ve left home and face an indeterminate journey ahead. Sometimes the process is long, sometimes short. Sometimes it’s joyful, or sorrowful, or both, or neither. Sometimes it turns out to have been an interlude between two faiths, but it doesn’t need to be. The process may go on forever, or trap you in a loop. It can be so many complex and poignant and dynamic things. And it is worth talking about this process of deconversion, especially as separate from the process of conversion.

Conversion can happen in an instant (although how genuine that would be, it might be difficult to tell). I do not think deconversion happens in an instant, but I do think that the whole process can begin unfolding before we’ve even been made aware. Maybe you read a book, or take a class, or someone makes an off-handed remark that pricks your brain just the right way. A doubt surfaces, so unthinkable that it’s brushed aside immediately. And then, like Anne Lamott’s little cat, they keep popping up. One question paves the way for another, opening up the space for doubt just a bit more. And one day you realize that the unthinkable is now the unavoidable. It’s time to go.

I imagine many of you have been through this process, and maybe at the moment you’re remembering what that was for you.

For the former Saturday Night Live star Julia Sweeney, the process lasted years and underwent many iterations before she landed in a comfortable place. In her brilliant one-woman show “Letting Go of God,” Julia recounts her journey: how she started with a literal interpretation of the Catholicism of her youth which morphed into a more mythological and symbolic understanding. When that interpretation also raised too many questions within her, she abandoned Christianity in favor of Buddhism, hoping to preserve some fragment of her understanding of a God at work in the universe. When those tenets no longer seemed logical to her she switched to a view of Nature of God– but when the true harshness of nature caused her to abandon that framing, she spun her wheels around Deepak Chopra and quantum mechanics for a while until one day she was walking across her backyard and a thought came to her, unbidden. As she tells it, “I realized there was this little teeny-weenie voice whispering in my head. I’m not sure how long it had been there, but it suddenly got just one decibel louder. It whispered, “There is no God.” And I tried to ignore it. But it got a teeny bit louder. “There is no God. There is no God. Oh my God, there is no God!” “

This ultimate step on her faith journey was not looked for, and not hoped for, but it had found her all the same. As insight often does.

This morning, I shared a reading with you from one story of deconversion- and it is my absolute favorite. Megan Phelps-Roper was born into what the journalist Louis Theroux termed “the most hated family in America.” Her grandfather Fred Phelps was the pastor of Westboro Baptist Church in Topeka, Kansas and her large family constituted the majority of its members. From a very young age she joined her family’s public protests every day after school, holding aloft signs such as “God Hates You” and “Thank God for Dead Soldiers,” and dozens more filled with homophobic hate speech I won’t quote here. The church had its origins in her grandfather’s virulent homophobia, but over the years it added new enemies- trans people, Jews, Muslims, atheists, and even the military (as Fred Phelps believed that soldiers killed in action were being punished by God for the military’s tolerance of homosexuality). All these positions were ostensibly rooted in Old Testament verses, often taken out of context, but what really grounded Megan in her church was the unanimous hatred her family endured from the outside world. The more they were hated, her mother reminded her, the more it proved that God favored their family for rejecting the sins of the world.

But if Julia Sweeney’s deconversion was primarily an inner journey, Megan’s owed a lot to people outside her church. An avid Twitter user, Megan vigorously defended the family’s theology online and did not fear engaging with her critics. But as she shared in a later TED Talk (which you should absolutely watch), “[I]n the midst of that digital brawl, a strange pattern developed. Someone would arrive at my profile with the usual rage and scorn, I would respond with a custom mix of Bible verses, pop culture references and smiley faces. They would be understandably confused and caught off guard, but then a conversation would ensue. And it was civil — full of genuine curiosity on both sides. How had the other come to such outrageous conclusions about the world?

“People I’d sparred with on Twitter would come out to the picket line to see me when I protested in their city. A man named David…ran a blog called “Jewlicious,” and after several months of heated but friendly arguments online, he came out to see me at a picket in New Orleans. He brought me a Middle Eastern dessert from Jerusalem, where he lives, and I brought him kosher chocolate and held a “God hates Jews” sign. There was no confusion about our positions, but the line between friend and foe was becoming blurred.”

From there, a slow spiral began for Megan as her new friends started to plant seeds of doubt within her, gently pointing out inconsistencies between the words of Jesus and the words of her family. Megan says; “Once I saw that we were not the ultimate arbiters of divine truth but flawed human beings, I couldn’t pretend otherwise. These shifts in my perspective contributed to a larger erosion of trust in my church, and eventually it made it impossible for me to stay. In spite of overwhelming grief and terror, I left Westboro.”

So there she was at her lowest, just out of the church, asking herself what was the first step she should take in this time, the first step of the rest of her life? And she chose- to read. To lock herself away from a world she wasn’t quite ready for and consume all the wisdom and knowledge that her church had long rejected. Along with her younger sister Grace, who left the church with her, she rented a room in a faraway town where she knew no one, and traveled there with Hemingway, Dawkins and Nietzsche. Megan and Grace would read all morning, pause for lunch, and pick up reading again in the afternoon. It’s an excellent reminder of what fertile time deconversion can be– your mind open to new ideas, or to new perspectives on old ones. The sharp pain of having one worldview collapse in your mind is an opportunity for it to be replaced with– well, something! Maybe just a small shift to a different variation on what you believed before, or maybe something far more earth-shattering.

And not just for ourselves, either. We may conceive of deconversion as an inner, personal journey, and yet it has a way of pulling other people in our lives into its orbit. When the Christian musician Audrey Assad quietly revealed she had put aside her faith, I could tell from the comments under her videos that so many of her fans felt betrayed- Audrey had been on their team! And she sang so beautifully and soulfully about themes which drew them closer to God– how could she not feel this God herself?

And then there was the minister Joshua Harris, author of “I Kissed Dating Goodbye,” a tiresome relic of the Evangelical purity culture of the 90’s. The book criticized mainstream dating, and (like many books of the same era) placed the burden of maintaining abstinence on young women (and also the blame if that abstinence failed). The book harmed countless young women and men, including me- I lost my best friend who became radicalized into its sexist world view. And years later, Harris took accountability for this harm- first announcing that he was deeply sorry for the fear-based theology he had spouted, a little later announcing that he and his wife were divorcing due to “big changes” in both of their lives, and finally admitting that he had left his Christian faith. And so there he was, with no wife, no job, and legions of Millennials to apologize to.

And Megan, of course, was also one of those high-profile deconverts. Her decision to leave her faith was wrapped up not just in the grief of leaving her family but also the notoriety of her family’s noxious beliefs which had hurt so many people. Who would possibly embrace her now? And what could she possibly do with her life that would let her outrun the Phelps name?

For Megan, Joshua and Audrey their losses of faith had high stakes because of their public profiles, but in our own mundane lives we also have people who we may be disappointing or hurting as we navigate a faith transition. Faith can be so wrapped up in different aspects of our identity as to be utterly destabilizing to the rest of our lives when lost. Many familial and social relationships do not survive a deconversion. From that perspective, there are a lot of practical reasons to stand still in our faith lives. And really, there’s only one good reason to go through the process of reevaluation and deconversion at all: because working out what we believe about the world (and beyond the world) is a fundamental task of human existence. As Megan later wrote about her deconversion and her family, “It wasn’t the desire for an easy life that led me to leave. Losing them was the price of honesty. A shredded heart for a quiet conscience.”

So where does this journey end?

I have read many deconversion stories, and not a single one has ended with “I stopped believing. The end.” I don’t think anyone ever truly finishes a faith journey. If they do, maybe it wasn’t faith at all, it was just a list of beliefs. Learned once, not to be reexamined again. Joshua Harris listed out several phases of his post-Christian journey including “Skeptical Nuanced Evangelical Egalitarian,” “Melancholy Unsure Seeker,” and “Happy Unsure Seeker Who Still Prays to Jesus and Visits Church but is Less Triggered Toward Religion Because No One Has This Figured Out Human Being.” As for Audrey Assad, while her fans were mourning her departure from Christianity she tried to explain the beauty of the current point she was at in her faith life: “To be honest,” she wrote, “I can’t predict the future and don’t know where life will lead me, and I consider no doors to be closed ones. There are only curiosities…there is only presence…there is only gratitude. And those are the things I practice. Curiosity and presence and gratitude are my prayer life. In pain and bliss and everything in between. Whatever or whoever God is, I am still in love.”

Whether or not it makes sense to pray if you don’t know who you’re praying to, whether or not your faith requires a label or an endpoint, I will leave that up to you. That’s the point. Your journey is yours.

Take a moment now to reflect on something you’ve stopped believing in your life. Then take a moment to reflect on something you gained from that. Did it allow you to admit something you’d known to be true for some time, and in doing so feel a little more free? Did it allow you to really embrace a philosophy or worldview you’d always been drawn to? Did it help you to distance yourself from people who were causing you harm? Did it cause you to disappoint someone important to you, and in doing so maybe open up a much-needed conversation? Did it perhaps pave the way for you to come here?

No one is “saved” into Unitarian Universalism, at least in a theological sense. To depart from my initial analogy, our faith is actually not a destination so much as a living journey. Within the confines of our principles (and I use that word “confines” VERY loosely) one can cycle through conversions and deconversions of many sorts. In that sense, our church is a privilege. If we adhere to our principles, our church can provide the elusive “safe space” so many need in which to question their theology or doctrines or values. And like our faith itself, this “safe space” is also not a final destination– it’s an ever-shifting idea for our community to coalesce around, as we continually ask ourselves, are we giving seekers what they need? Is ours truly a safe space for people seeking to pull at the threads of their beliefs, even if those threads feel outrageous or threatening to us? Do we allow newcomers to question and wrestle with the values they find here, or do we demand (either through our words or behavior) that they arrive at our door with those values already in place?

Had Megan Phelps-Roper shown up at our door fresh from Westboro Baptist Church, what would she have found? Would we have been ready? Her spiritual and social views not yet fully re-formed, her values not quite yet what we might consider to be sufficiently liberal or “sufficiently UU.” Deconversion doesn’t mean you’ve suddenly been handed a package of new values. The initial time of a lost faith, or the building of a new one, can be awkward and full of missteps, even offensive to those around us. But to truly hold someone in community is to make space fully for who they are and who they are becoming. And as losing a faith so often means losing a community, the role we must play for these seekers is clear.

It’s logical to say that faith makes a community, like a church, but many anthropologists, historians and philosophers would disagree with that. Many say that the human need for community is the place from which faith springs. I’ll leave it to you to decide which you think comes first, community or faith. But, in this space we do know that we don’t need a shared cosmic theory of everything to build our community.

So Come, come, whoever you are. Wanderer, worshipper, lover of leaving. Ours is no caravan of despair. Come. On your own beautiful journey of unknown destination, come.

If you find yourself in Minneapolis, Minnesota you can stop by the Orfield Laboratories and visit a room which is widely billed as “the quietest place on earth.” The background noise of the room is measured in negative decibels, which I didn’t even know was a thing, but apparently it means below the threshold for human hearing. With the background noise gone you’d think you would hear nothing, but in fact, visitors to the room hear the blinking of their own eyes and the beating of their own hearts. The room has an eerie power over its visitors. People report disorientation, barely being able to stand. In fact, the longest anyone has ever been able to stay in the room is 45 minutes. There is probably no more intimate way to connect with yourself than being immersed in the beating of your own heart, and for some, to be left entirely to that sense of self with no hope of distraction is akin to torture.

I have been thinking a lot about silence lately. Both the literal, and the metaphorical. The literal is often in short supply, especially in a city as dynamic and alive as ours. The metaphorical, however, sometimes seems like it’s everywhere. In 2025 on Planet Earth in the United States of America, everything feels like it’s tinged with a sense of desperation, causing us to say again and again: We must speak up. We must make noise. We mustn’t keep silent.

I’ve been thinking, too, about whether literal silence (or, maybe, lack thereof) is connected to metaphorical silence. And also, wondering whether the urgency of metaphorical silence makes it ridiculous to spend any time talking about something so comparatively unimportant as literal silence. But as I’ve found myself craving literal silence lately, and as we are in a church and silence appears to have been a persistent feature of churches and temples throughout history, I feel like the literal silence deserves some attention, too.

All that to say, let’s start by talking about, spooky quiet laboratories aside, how absolutely beautiful a good silence can be.

One day, I hope to go to the Olympic National Park Visitor Center in Washington State, and from there hike approximately three miles up a certain trail into the Hoh Rainforest, and eventually come across a log on which there is (hopefully still) a small red stone. You can see the very same red stone on the cover of your Order of Service this morning. This stone was a gift from an elder of the Quileute tribe to a man named Gordon Hempton in order to mark Hempton’s One Square Inch Project. The project is the valiant attempt of Hempton, a self-described “acoustic ecologist,” to mark and make sacred a single spot on the planet where invasive noise does not penetrate. He chose Olympic National Park for its distance from roads and its relative lack of air traffic. Hempton dedicated the red stone on Earth Day 2005, and since then his foundation has successfully lobbied several commercial airlines to avoid the airspace over the rainforest. And so, he has created a sacred space. A temple in silence, dedicated to silence.

Of course this space is no Orfield Laboratory-level of silence. Hempton’s square inch in the rainforest teems with what he terms “native noise.” “Silence,” he says, “is not the absence of something but the presence of everything.” In saying so, I think he sheds light on what makes the Orfield Lab so unsettling- it is characterized by absence, not by presence. The most peaceful places on our planet are full, they are not empty. In the Hoh Rainforest, wiithout the drone of aircraft or the roar of a highway all the native sounds of the landscape have a chance to emerge and be experienced. It’s a bit like staring at the sky on a dark night; the longer you pay attention, the more stars emerge into your perception. They were always there, just unobserved.

I’m not sure most humans fully understand just how much our own noise smothers our world. Consider the Yangtze River Dolphin, not seen in over 20 years and most probably extinct. Nearly blind, he relied on sonar for navigation through crowded shipping channels until industrial noise pollution made it nearly impossible. We’re hurting the animal in ourselves, too. Consider the ceaseless, whirring fans of a bitcoin mine in Texas that caused one woman to report migraines “worse than childbirth” and a 5-year-old girl to describe “a red beam behind [her] eardrums.” The more we “improve” the world with our blinking, buzzing machines, the more other creatures around us have to adjust- often altering their wakeup times, the pitch of their mating calls, or the seasons of their migration just to get away from our interfering noise.

But humans too, says Hempton, can be part of the native noise of the world. We are indigenous to this planet, after all. And we’re capable of some truly beautiful sounds! We sing, and laugh, and play instruments. We can be part of the harmony of all things, when we care enough to consider how. But more on that later- because I love the idea of keeping human noise, no matter how beautiful, out of at least one square inch of space in a forest. Sometimes we really need to de-center ourselves. We don’t need to help fill the silence of a world that we’ve already changed so substantially with our presence. Sometimes we can just listen, and see what emerges.

And so on that note and before we move on with this message, then, let’s take some time (5 minutes, to be exact), to simply listen. With eyes open or shut but with mouths most decidedly shut, let’s listen to the absolute fullness of a silent day in the North American wetlands, courtesy of Gordon Hempton.

[We paused here in the service and listened to this beautiful recording]

Sometimes we can just listen, and see what emerges. And what is true for the temple in the rainforest, or in the wetlands, is true for other temples as well.

Temples and churches and other religious spaces serve many functions, but I think one of the key functions is as a place for silence. Here within these walls, too, there is native noise for us to key into. On a sidenote, I love some of the literal noises of our church- the gentle music Nicholas plays just before 11 to let us know it’s time to start. Esther would ask the speaker to “speak up, we can’t hear you!” And of course, we have our aging air conditioning unit which constantly begs for our attention. But this is not the native noise I have in mind. If churches and temples are spaces for meditation, and they should be, the native noise which a good silence exposes is found within us.

Our thoughts rush through us every day. It’s nonstop, and it’s often overwhelming. Too much external noise can bury us under a sensory overload, but too much internal noise can disorient us just as quickly. There are many different meditation traditions, but broadly speaking what any silent meditation practice offers is an opportunity to step out of the path of these rushing thoughts and observe them, dispassionately, with the awareness that while they may pass through us, they do not define us. Given enough time and commitment, we can come deeper and deeper into ourselves- a knowledge of who we are outside the rushing river of what we think about all day. The spiritual teacher Eckhart Tolle writes, “When you become aware of silence, immediately there is that state of inner still alertness. You are present. You have stepped out of thousands of years of collective human conditioning.” In other words, you have sat in your one square inch of silence, and now the native noise of who you really are can begin to speak to you.

This is all good and well for us. A silent temple feels nice and refreshing. It’s a lovely, if temporary, antidote to the literal and metaphorical noise that’s nearly constant in our world. So let’s say that the temple is a factory of success, and that we have become 100% in tune to the native noise in our soul. That’s wonderful. But now we step out of the temple, and into the rest of the world, to see what we might carry into it.

The Buddha was known for cultivating what many of his followers term a “noble silence.” Apparently he drove his students crazy with his persistent refusal to answer questions- not just any questions, but the deepest, most existential, yet ultimately unanswerable questions of life. For the Buddha, there was no point in speaking merely for the sake of speaking if the question had no answer. In those situations, silence was preferable. And yet, the noble silence of the Buddha was just as full as the One Square Inch of the rainforest in Olympic National Park. This silence has purpose, and obligation. In the words of the Buddhist practitioner Danielle Shroyer, in choosing noble silence, “We choose the fullness of silence, not a sense of emptiness without words. That’s an important but subtle shift. Instead of listening in order to talk, we listen in order to understand. Instead of filling the space with words, we focus on the fullness that already exists without our brazen attempts to dominate it. There is an element of Sabbath to this; in the silence, the power of Presence, or Being, simply rests. And we rest in it.”

Just as in the rainforest which does not ask for our noisy contributions, we can move through our daily lives exercising noble silence at every opportunity. We can sit in a state of listening, and of being. In Buddhism this goes hand-in-hand with the principle of Right Speech, one of the key practices of the Eightfold Path leading to liberation from suffering. Right Speech is defined simply as speech that doesn’t harm, and there are five guidelines for determining what constitutes non-harmful speech:

• Is it timely?

• Is it true?

• Is it gentle?

• Is it beneficial?

• Is it spoken with a mind of good will?

You may notice that none of these parameters coexist very peacefully with questions such as, “Is it the first thing to pop into your head? Evaluating these parameters takes consideration, which is to say, those of us who wish to avoid harm could all do with a healthy-sized dose of noble silence before speaking.

In essence, noble silence is preparation for exercising Right Speech. And that means noble silence is not keeping your head above earthly matters and refusing to engage in this world. Doing so may bring you into the realm of noble silence’s evil twin, which many practitioners term “ignoble silence.” Ignoble silence is when we don’t speak out when someone is suffering, or when we see oppression, or when atrocities are committed in our name. It is knowing, either consciously or unconsciously, that the world is calling for your Right Speech- and refusing to offer it.

Earlier I shared a reading about the Buddhist monk Thich Nhat Hanh, also known as “Thay,” a man whose reverence for silence lives on in the practices of Plum Village, the monastery he founded.

In Plum Village, Thay used a daily practice of silent meditation to tap into a deep connection not just with his inner self but also with others. Practicing mindful silence as he walked or ate in the company of others who were doing the same could even at times lead to what he termed “a thundering silence,” full of the collective energy of the community. “In this silence,” wrote Thay, “I could hear the wind and the birds so much more vividly. Before that, I’d heard the birds and the wind, but not in the same way, because I didn’t have the deepest kind of silence.”

Inevitably, it is impossible to pay such deep attention to those around you without emerging with at least somewhat of a sense of your place in the harmony of all things. To recognize that the lives of others are as full and complex and heartbreaking as your own. And are deeply deserving of compassion. And compassion deserves action.

Accordingly, Thay knew when it was time to no longer be silent. In 1964 amid the violence of the Vietnam War he wrote,

“Here in the presence of the undisturbed stars,

in the invisible presence of all people still alive on Earth,

let me raise my voice to denounce this dreadful war,

this murder of brothers by brothers!

Whoever is listening, be my witness:

I cannot accept this war.

I never could, I never will.

I must say this a thousand times before I am killed.”

Thay emerged as one of the most prominent opponents of the war, even as he refused to take sides- instead, lodging his support firmly with the peasant class and all who were committed to a nonviolent resolution of the war.

For Thay, noble silence begets deep listening. Deep listening begets compassion. Compassion begets action. The Costa Rican diplomat Christiana Figueres specifically referenced Thay’s teachings on deep listening as the reason for her success leading negotiations in the Paris Climate Accords in 2015. When faced with 195 countries, all with different and sometimes mutually exclusive priorities, Figueres used her own power of silence to take in countless stories of suffering and urgency, listening deeply for the common ground that could ultimately emerge, independent of her own biases or priorities. It’s no exaggeration to say that deep listening changes the world.

Our world today, and certainly our politics today, demand our attention. Every headline demands a response, and doesn’t it so often feel like there’s a glaring red timer hovering above each of those demands? There are sides to be taken, opinions to be formed, voices to be raised. We must not remain silent. But you, small soft creature in an infinite timeless universe, you who have definitely NOT been personally charged with the salvation of all mankind, I promise you have time to stop. And listen deeply. You have time to take in the native noise around you, and to decide (with full awareness of your place in things) what you will now contribute to this moment.

We often say we are defined by our words and our deeds, and I suppose this is true. But our words and deeds themselves are defined by the moments of silence in between them. Moments that are full and nourishing, if used well. We take these moments of silence in the knowledge and preparation that when it counts, we will certainly not be silent.

May the silence within you and outside of you open you to the wonder of native noise.

May this native noise center you, and guide you.

Until the moment when at last you speak,

In full harmony with the world around you.

Blessed Be, and Amen.

The first gift I can remember crying over I received when I was in the Peace Corps in Niger. I had a small plot of farmland which I had been tilling, hoping to prove to my neighbors (and to myself) that like them, I had the grit and fortitude to labor for hours in 110 degree heat in order to produce something useful. Unfortunately, after several days my hands were a mess of blisters. I had a couple bandaids and scraps of fabric to wrap around my hands, but I lived in the middle of nowhere. There was no local Home Depot I could simply stop by to pick up what I needed.

Then one day I hiked into the closest market town, stopped by the post office, and discovered I had a package from one of my mother’s friends- a woman named Virginia who I didn’t even know particularly well. A package from anyone is an amazing gift under any circumstances in the Peace Corps, but this one! Out of all the items she possibly could have sent me, I could hardly believe my eyes when I opened the box and took out a pair of gardening gloves.

I had never told my parents or Virginia or anyone else really how much I was struggling with my hands in that garden. On the card she had written, “I just thought these might come in handy sometime.” I cried. And in the next few weeks, I harvested my okra, sesame and peanuts with stronger hands, and then I had something real and concrete and useful to share with my neighbors.

There have been other gifts that have also stood out. There was my first Barbie doll, which came on the heels of me haranguing a local rec center Santa over why he hadn’t bought it yet. And there was the student last year who wrote me a 16-page hand-illustrated graphic novel about her quest to understand the geography of the midnight sun, in a truly fascinating testament to how her autistic mind works.

On the giving end, I once brought a gift of local pickled okra and quails’ eggs and fresh-picked berries to a friend who I was staying with in West Virginia and was surprised to see how quickly the gift was put into use. I was used to gifts being saved, maybe for special occasions. But instead, we brought the jars to her parents’ house for dinner that evening and they were empty by the end. Throughout the meal, the gifts inspired conversations about the best type of eggs we’ve eaten, and memories of vegetable gardens, and more. The whole evening turned out to be a lovely gift.

In our extractive world there is, of course, a version of gift-giving that is materialistic, transactional, and unsatisfying. Think Black Friday. Think the pressure to spend a certain amount of money. Think the expectations and dynamics within certain families to top last year’s gift, or the eternal question of what to get for someone who has everything and thus needs nothing.

There is a stressful and careless way to engage in gift giving, but as our words just a few moments ago demonstrate, a gift doesn’t have to be this way. The right gift is a thing of beauty and joy. It need not be something physical. We can give our time, our support, our advice. My friend Laura, for example, gives me the gift of book recommendations, and in this sense, she is responsible for two of my sermons including this one, which I am in turn (very humbly) presenting as a gift to you.

In particular, Laura introduced me to the work of indigenous botanist Robin Wall Kimmerer, author of Braiding Sweetgrass, which I have spoken about before in this space. In her newest work “The Serviceberry,” Kimmerer shares her view of gift exchange as the fundamental basis for life on earth, as all life begins and is sustained with gifts from the earth. All we eat, all we breathe, all we move through is based upon gifts freely given from Mother Earth. Water, air, and soil sustain us. Her central example is that of the Serviceberry- a plant that provides valuable sustenance to wildlife and to people, and a gift borne from other gifts, as she writes: “[the berries] represent hundreds of gift exchanges that led up to my blue-stained fingers: the Maples who gave their leaves to the soil, the countless invertebrates and microbes who exchanged nutrients and energy to build the humus in which a Serviceberry seed could take root, the Cedar Waxwing who dropped the seed, the sun, the rain, the early spring flies who pollinated the flowers, the farmer who wielded the shovel to tenderly settle the seedlings. They are all parts of the gift exchange by which everyone gets what they need.”

How much more meaningful every thing around us becomes if we greet it in this way as a gift! The awareness of a beautiful thing freely given cannot help but instill us with gratitude. So next let’s ask, how do you accept a gift?

Well first, as all our parents doubtlessly told us from the moment we were able to speak, we say thank you. We might do this by fully taking in the gift, turning it over in our hands, appreciating it with intention and mindfulness. We don’t ask why we didn’t get more, or get something different. We appreciate it for what it is- something given in love, and often something we didn’t have before. As Kimmerer writes from her perspective as an Anishinaabe tribal member, “Our oldest teaching stories remind us that the failure to show gratitude dishonors the gift and brings serious consequences. If you dishonor the Beavers by taking too many they will leave. If you waste the Corn, you’ll go hungry.”

So first, there is gratitude. And next, in accepting a gift we must also commit ourselves to the gentle practice of reciprocity. This doesn’t need to be literal, or starkly transactional. There is nothing you can (or should) purchase at Walmart or on Amazon Prime Day that will adequately thank the bees for pollinating flowers. Kimmerer writes, “When I speak about reciprocity as a relationship, let me be clear. I don’t mean a bilateral relationship in which an obligation is incurred, and can then be discharged with a reciprocal ‘payment.’ I mean keeping the gift in motion in a way that is open and diffuse, so that the gift does not accumulate and stagnate, but keeps moving, like the gift of berries through an ecosystem.”

In my yard there is some unknown creature who must have been grateful when, at some point I don’t even remember, I tossed an overripe tomato into the compost pit. This unknown creature ate the tomato, and shortly thereafter, excreted the waste. That’s the only explanation I can think of for why three tomato plants have taken it upon themselves to grow in a corner of the yard where I never planted them. I’ve made the most gorgeous tomato pies with these surprise gifts. I now till the soil more carefully around the new plants, improving their environment in gratitude for their unexpected presence. And the few tomatoes with gentle nibbles on them I didn’t harvest, but left in place for other creatures who have clearly found them as delicious as I have. I hope we will all- me, the plants, the unknown creature- be in our symbiotic relationship for some time.

Kimmerer asks us, what would it mean for us to place this type of gift economy from the natural world at the center of all things, in lieu of the stark transactional nature of the capitalist system that currently contains us? There are ways to pay the gift forward beyond just the natural realm. You might, for example, go to the grocery store and recognize the “gift” of the produce you see, in particular knowing the exploitative immigrant labor used to pick it and the risks those laborers run just by showing up to work in this current national climate. You might pay forward the gratitude by volunteering with or donating to an organization which benefits those immigrants (and not merely advocating for them to be able to return to those punishing jobs, but to also be more fairly compensated for their labor under better conditions).

You might even attend a plant sale at your local church and be moved by the time and effort its members put into nurturing these living things so that they will flourish in your home. Or you attend a concert, and are moved by the beauty of the music and its message. And that might, in turn, move you to commit yourself just a little deeper to that church community, be it through your service on a committee or a financial pledge to help keep its ministry alive. Repaying a gift comes in as many forms as the gift itself- you can give of your time, your money, your expertise, or whatever abounds within you.

For Kimmerer, the key difference between our current global economy and a gift economy is the role of scarcity vs. abundance. Most definitions of economics center around the idea of scarcity- how we make decisions when resources are limited. On its face, this makes sense. All of us only have a certain amount of time and energy to give, and we shouldn’t use resources indiscriminately or without foresight. However, as wealth inequality deepens around the world these dynamics of scarcity start to feel very much beside the point. Almost a quarter of global wealth is held by just 31 individuals. In a world where Jeff Bezos could spend a million dollars a day for the next 600 years and still be richer than you and I will ever be, it is beyond time to question the narrative that there simply isn’t enough to go around.

In a gift economy, says Kimmerer, it is abundance rather than scarcity which defines the system. We first focus not on how much we can take, but what we have to give. The mindful exchange of gifts –where no one takes more than they actually need and no one hoards what others could use– ensures sustainability. Because the exchange is ongoing and diffuse, the world isn’t divided into winners and losers or debtors and creditors. What benefits one is not a loss to the other, but simply a way of moving the gift forward through the economy.

To be clear, abundance is not synonymous with infinite resources. Embracing a gift-giving economy necessitates a certain assumption- namely, that we live on a finite planet, which is more concrete and true than the economic system we’ve imposed upon it. It’s almost out of fashion, passe, to talk about our relationship with the earth and her gifts as being the primal thing. But it IS the primal thing, it is the ONLY thing. Everything, absolutely everything, comes down to how we share her resources and who we allow to partake.

Unfortunately, in our current global economic system we have done our best to erase the natural world from our calculations. We’ve allowed corporations like Nestle to sell public goods like water back to us in plastic bottles fashioned from fossil fuels. We mobilize large and expensive supply chains to ensure that Americans can eat whatever products they want to eat when they want to eat them, without regard to the resources involved in getting them to us. We sell off public lands to private entities allowing them to cut us off from the Earth’s resources while turning a profit from them themselves. We’ve replaced biodiversity with more lucrative monoculture crops. Our leading metric for a successful system is capital, rather than sustainability. We are artificially rationing, commodifying, and dishonouring the freely given gifts of the Earth, and if we continue this way, it will kill us.

Lately, I have found myself looking for new economies. Here’s the thing. We live under the government of the richest country ever to exist on earth. The billionaires and corporations who have purchased that government have no interest in sharing this abundance with us. It is time to start looking for ways to opt out, to the extent that we can. We will have more success recognizing abundance and exercising gift giving in our neighborhoods, mutual aid societies, workplaces, and other community spaces. Including, of course, our churches.

I’ve been regularly attending the online services of the Freedom Church of the Poor, a project of the Kairos Center for Religions, Rights and Social Justice (one of the anchors of the Poor People’s Campaign). During a recent service, a minister named Katrina Zezza spoke about one of her projects in her town of Beacon, New York. It is a community space that began as a place for spiritual conversation and has since grown to include art, community organizing, and a partnership with a soup kitchen- all organized around the principles of mutual aid. If you’re unfamiliar with the concept of mutual aid, it is not a model of charity. A charity typically involves a one directional flow of resources from those who have money and power to those who don’t, and in doing so might actually reinforce the harmful hierarchical structures it purports to destroy. From my own personal experience, they also involve a LOT of paperwork. In contrast, mutual aid springs from a place of collective abundance- that all people have power and skills and resources which can be shared to benefit the community. People both give and receive. In a soup kitchen, for example, this might mean that some grow vegetables, others show up to cook, others serve, others clean. In short, everyone brings a gift, and no one leaves empty-handed.

Minister Zezza reflects on this work, and then she says: “The world we need to create already exists in pockets, and the spirit can connect us.”

I don’t imagine I’ll forget her words for some time. Messages of hope can feel rare in these times, but her words are just so simply, demonstrably true. We live against a system that often makes us feel forgotten, but we do not have to be owned by it. We can choose what gets our attention and who receives our gifts of abundance, and nurture that which nurtures us.

Think about New Orleans after a hurricane. Watch the canoes up and down the street, checking on neighbors. Watch the residents with a power source setting up charging stations and the mutual aid societies distributing water and the community lighthouses providing respite, including in this very building. By all logic, a natural disaster should not provide a demonstration ground for great abundance, but somehow it is everywhere. After all, a disaster strips everything down to its essentials. It becomes easy to see what you have and don’t have, what you need and don’t really need. And the value of sharing any abundance you have with your neighbor is self-evident; you are sending a gift through your community to be put into immediate use, knowing that if fortunes turn, your gift will return to you in the form you need.

That is the ethos of the gift economy. If you consume all the berries, there are no seeds left to be planted. By the same token, if we hoard resources for ourselves instead of circulating them through our communities, everything around us stagnates. People, communities, systems starve for lack of resources. And when our time of need comes, there is nothing that can be given back to us.

But if you take only what you need and tend carefully to the rest, your harvest grows. People who have been cared for, just like berries, grow strong and abundant.

As Kimmerer puts it, “all flourishing is mutual.”

It’s a radical reimagining of what a sustainable economy that works for all could look like. This isn’t an easy or an overnight thing, but as Kimmerer and Minister Zezza in New York point out, the seeds are there already, in pockets, in communities, in willing people who already honor the gifts of our world and pass them on.

The author Arundhati Roy writes, “Our strategy should be not only to confront empire, but to lay siege to it. To deprive it of oxygen. To shame it. To mock it. With our art, our music, our literature, our stubbornness, our joy, our brilliance, our sheer relentlessness, and our ability to tell our own stories. Stories that are different from the ones we’re being brainwashed to believe. The corporate revolution will collapse if we refuse to buy what they are selling – their ideas, their version of history, their wars, their weapons, their notion of inevitability.”

In a way, the invitation to participate in the gift economy is an invitation to tell your own story about this world. Your story can redefine the plot. You can set your story on a planet, not in an economic system. You can choose new heroes– not ones who maximize shareholder value, but ones who teach and care and create art and sing and till the earth and make sure everyone gets enough to eat. And at last, you can write the moral at the end of the new story: that all flourishing is mutual. The gifts we give others are bestowed back upon ourselves. The system is healthiest when the gifts circulate within it.

The Arundhati Roy quote I shared above finishes with this: “Another world is not only possible, she is on her way. On a quiet day, I can hear her breathing.”

Yes. Listen for it! There are gifts in this world for the taking, and there are gifts within you for the giving. Something better will be built. We have already started.

Amen, and blessed be.

I love my students so much. I still don't know how well I'm Preparing Them for the Future, but we are having fun.

Relatedly, I am obsessed with my coworkers. Every single one of them is amazing. I'm glad that despite Everything we can still form villages like this for young people who really need it.

During a frustrating moment I'm not proud of, I told a student she was acting like a five-year-old and she shot back "Well, YOU look like a forty-year-old!" and I'm still chuckling when I think about that. I'm 44.

They all ask if I have kids and I say I have ninety of them and three cats and that that's enough, and they all nod like it's the wisest thing they've ever heard.

Our custodians only speak Spanish and Alejandra is so generous in how she talks with me. She chooses her words carefully and is patient when I don't understand. She is very easy to talk to and she builds my confidence, and next week I want to tell her how grateful I am.

Waking up early enough to have tea in bed is absolutely my favorite thing right now.

Speaking of tea, I let my students pass around my looseleaf Lapsang Souchong and now one of them asks to keep the jar by his desk for aromatherapy.

Bean loves Bumblebutt SO much and it breaks my heart when BB loses patience and bops him on the head. To be fair though, Bean really can't take a hint. I think Calvin is fed up with peacekeeping and doesn't spend much time inside anymore.

Time for me to finally buy some fabric scissors.

The first time around I was really digging independent journalists. This time around I'm really digging artists.

I wish we would give people the benefit of the doubt that they're doing things. The narrative that no one is doing anything is false and demoralizing and doesn't really serve anything. That being said, we all need to do more. And also, some need to do way, way less.

Sermon given 7/20/25 at Community Church-Unitarian Universalist of New Orleans, LA. Service notes at end.

In 2020 as we all moved our lives deep into our homes, I finally got an Instagram account. Facebook was ok for following people I know, although damn my friends posted some depressing things. On Instagram, however, I purposely didn’t follow anyone I knew. I could open the app’s Explore page and be greeted by a grid of windows into strangers’ lives. These weren’t famous people I was following, or even people with great insights or funny commentary. Instead, they were normal people from all over the world who invited me to get ready with them in the morning as they applied makeup or made coffee, to spend the day with them as they checked emails or went to the gym, or did any other number of utterly mundane (and honestly quite boring!) tasks- in many cases the same ones I was doing myself. I might find that an hour had passed in that app and all I had done was watch people I don’t know load a week’s worth of lunches into Tupperware containers, again and again and again.

At the time, I couldn’t figure out why these videos had such a hold on me. As life in a larger sense, the national and global sense, proceeded to break down even further, every evening I would retreat more deeply into the unremarkable lives of strangers. I had to see how they folded their duvets, whether they were morning or evening showerers, how many steps their skincare routine was. Millions of us were watching the same thing, so I was onto something, I just don’t know what.

Maybe it was simply the notion that my brain, evolved over millions of years to be in tune to my immediate surroundings and yet destined in the 21st century to be bombarded with 24 hours news of horrors near and far, simply did not want to think about a pandemic. Or genocide, or fascism. I wanted these little daily routines being carried out all over the world to be all there was in this world.

On social media, all videos are curated to an extent. Most are edited and filtered to show at least a somewhat romanticized view of daily routines- the colors a bit softer, the timeframe compressed to make it seem like cleaning the kitchen actually takes no time at all. It’s tempting (almost required!) to say, “That’s not what life is really like”. Maybe so, but honestly- is the video any less special because of it? For me, I knew that the editing was not the thing drawing me in. The subject itself was the thing.

In perusing comments online, it seemed there was at least one person who agreed with me. As one commenter quoted the author Haley Nahman, “[T]he little stuff always mattered, even when I treated it like a nuisance. These days I really do believe chores give my life meaning. Not just because they present texture and struggle and a necessary counterpart to rest (all true), but because maintenance is in itself profound. Caring for ourselves, for other people, for our homes, for plants and other animals- these are the unfinishable projects of our lives. We do them over and over not to conquer them, or for personal gain, but to maintain and nourish them, with no greater expectation. Given how swayed humans are by the pursuit of growth, wealth, ownership and power, I think this is very sweet and pure. Almost spiritual.”

Almost spiritual! That’s a pretty lofty adjective to use to describe household chores. But indeed, there are many spiritual thinkers who entreat us to zoom in on the ordinary. The Vietnamese Buddhist monk Thich Nhat Hanh once wrote beautifully about the simple task of doing the dishes: “I enjoy taking my time with each dish, being fully aware of the dish, the water, and each movement of my hands. I know that if I hurry in order to eat dessert sooner, the time of washing dishes will be unpleasant and not worth living. That would be a pity, for each minute, each second of life is a miracle. The dishes themselves and that fact that I am here washing them are miracles. If I am incapable of washing dishes joyfully, if I want to finish them quickly so I can go and have dessert or a cup of tea, I will be equally incapable of enjoying my dessert or my tea when I finally have them.”

For Thich Nhat Hanh, the enjoyment of the ordinary tasks of life is rooted in the philosophy of mindfulness and the idea that joy can arrive from being truly present in the moment. Yet in Buddhism, mindfulness is just one aspect of a path to enlightenment and its role is deeper than just enjoyment of the moment. By paying close and impartial attention to moments which come and go endlessly, the Buddhist practitioner is led to the insight that nothing in life is permanent. And if nothing is permanent, nothing we gain in life is kept forever. We then see that desire is the root of all suffering. Because what we gain from our desire is never permanent, we will always want more.

The author of Ecclesiastes in the Hebrew Bible, in words they attribute to Kohelet, Son of David, says something similar in what I consider to be one of the most beautiful passages of the Bible. The rich, he tells us, are addicted to their pursuit of “more.” The author doesn’t merely denounce them for this; he also implies pity for them, for as he concludes, they will never be truly happy: “All their days they eat in darkness, with great frustration, affliction and anger.” As for the source of a truer satisfaction in life, he adds: “This is what I have observed to be good: that it is appropriate for a person to eat, to drink and to find satisfaction in their toilsome labor under the sun during the few days of life God has given them—for this is their lot.”

Eating, drinking, doing the dishes– if these thinkers are to be believed, these simple things aren’t a warmup act for something better; they are the true substance of life. I don’t think it’s an accident that so many of the great poets– especially those beloved by many UUs such as Mary Oliver and Wendell Berry– focus their attention on the small and readily at hand. I know that’s been true for me as I’ve gotten older. In my life, the process of aging has been one of contraction. The world has gotten smaller, but also deeper. Priorities have shifted to the immediate, and the local. I used to need exotic travels and grand romances- now, I’m increasingly content with listening to birdsong from the front porch, and rising frequently from my seat to let the cats in, and out, and in, and out.

So, I think we are on this earth to do very ordinary things. In these times, however, surrounded by conflicts and injustices we simply can’t ignore, we are regularly called upon to do extraordinary things- and what a pain that it should have to be! If we allowed everyday miracles to suffice for our fulfillment, perhaps we wouldn’t take more than we need like the rich men in Ecclesiastes. And if we didn’t take more than we need, perhaps such severe injustices wouldn’t persist in our world.

Amid these injustices, when we consider our purpose on this planet we might overlook the ordinary and reach instead for some pretty lofty concepts. Why are we here? We are here to fight for justice. For freedom. For the least among us. But we should always be asking ourselves, what exactly are we fighting to protect, or bring about? “Freedom,” “justice”- these are high ideals, but looking at them closer, they are manifested in the most ordinary of moments. Around the world, billions of us are striving not to dominate, but simply to exist in a remarkably mundane way. For a trans person to go to the restroom. For a person to tap clean, drinkable water from their kitchen sink. For every child to fall asleep at night in a very ordinary room with very ordinary noises in the street outside, and with a very ordinary day ahead- not the disorientation and dread of a war zone.

In 2019 while migrant children were being separated from their parents and held at detention camps along the southern border, the writer Dana Stevens wrote a piece for Slate Magazine which she titled “Toothpaste and Soap.” These two items, she wrote, are “ordinary, everyday substances;” they are “such banal necessities as to be symbols of monotony.” And yet, being so conspicuously absent from the detention camps (and this being by design), they took on a whole new meaning for this journalist and mother. “The littlest kids there,” she wrote, “the infants and toddlers, don’t know the words for soap or toothpaste yet. They don’t miss the items in themselves, only the feelings of adult contact and loving physical care with which they associate these substances. To be kept clean and warm and well-fed, to smell nice as you fall asleep, to have a toothbrush and a blanket and a soccer ball, above all, to have someone who cares that you have these things: This is in some primal way to belong in the world.”

Eating. Drinking. Dishes. Toothpaste. Soap. If this is what the world was like for everyone, it would be enough. OH, it would be enough. Who could possibly claim to need more?

What happens when we decide that these things are not enough? There are so many examples in our world of what happens next. We seek domination, and money, and territory, and fame, and oil.

Because some refuse to be satisfied, the ordinary stuff of life is increasingly commodified around the world. Take the Nestle corporation, for example, who for years withdrew tens of millions of gallons of water from the San Bernardino National Forest without a valid permit in place, even as drought conditions worsened throughout the state. Amid similar scandals worldwide, Nestle’s CEO called the idea that water access be considered a human right an “extreme” position. Corporations such as Monsanto regularly sue small-scale farmers who save and replant their patented seeds, forcing dependency on a multinational corporation even as they plant on their own land. In our public spheres, we debate whether an education or a doctor’s visit or breathable air should be a right we all have, or if we will allow corporations to sell these common goods back to us.

Pushing back against this greed to make sure that we and our communities have enough is the reason why we are so often forced away from our daily routines and into the grand struggle we didn’t ask for. We must add extra work onto the work of simply living.

At the same time, I am not going to tell you to abandon that work because we can’t. Our conscience and our faith won’t allow that. But I also want to remind The Soft Animal That Is You that you can, and deserve to, derive happiness and satisfaction simply from being here and living. Ordinary things are enough. A life of habits and repetition contains within itself enough seeds to provide us with wonder and joy all of our days if only we would allow it to be so.

I suppose another reason why I like my little Instagram world is that it’s proof that even while we watch our country slide into authoritarian rule, there’s still time to make and enjoy a really good cup of tea. From Instagram, I watch people in Gaza feed and cuddle feral cats even as the bombs drop. Girls dance at the Kakumi refugee camp in Kenya. These small acts serve as proof of life- that as the Easter hymn goes, always, always something sings. When the greed of oligarchs threatens your very survival, just to go on living is one big act of rebellion.

The small tasks and chores that maintain our everyday lives are fundamentally acts of worship. They are a way to reclaim the essential goodness of life, to remind ourselves that to draw breath for 80 or so years amid the limitless time and space of the universe is nothing short of miraculous. When Mary Oliver asks us in her poem “A Summer Day” what we plan to do with our one wild and precious life, she is not looking for a list of accomplishments. She is wondering how much we’ve paid attention, how many small miracles will have passed us by unnoticed and unappreciated before we move on from this life.

One last anecdote I’ll share, because its purity gets me every time. A few years ago, a friend of mine worked as a social worker in a transitional house for adults with severe mental illness. She said that one day the staff noticed some colorful construction paper had gone missing from the office–not anything to worry about, but something they noticed. Eventually the mystery was solved when they peeked in the bedroom of one of their newer residents and saw the walls adorned with colorful butterflies that she had cut from the missing paper. She was sorry she hadn’t mentioned taking it, she explained to the staff. It’s just that this small room of hers in the transitional house was the only time in her life she’d had a room of her own and she’d wanted to make it a little more personal.

So we have eating and drinking, and doing the dishes, and toothpaste and soap, and now paper butterflies in a room of one’s own. May we never take these things for granted. In times of war or disaster or personal crisis, the ordinary is what we miss. As Dana Stevens wrote so eloquently about migrant children, these simple things are “in some primal way to belong in the world.” At our core, we fit into our everyday surroundings like a hand in a glove. The act of making coffee is far more real than currency; a load of clean laundry more concrete than a credit score.

After you leave this room today, make sure you pay attention to these ordinary things. As our last hymn plays, listen to the lyrics and how the notes come together to form a melody. Let our voices fill your senses. During coffee hour, take in the smell and the taste of what you choose to eat and drink. Strike up conversations with people whose inner lives are as rich as your own. At home, enjoy the smell and the warmth of clean laundry and the softness of your pet's fur. Set an alarm for the job you are privileged to go to tomorrow, one which pays your bills and provides a service to the world. From every corner take in the utter richness of life, which is fleeting and precious and an absolute gift.

You belong to this world, and it waits for you. Blessed Be.

Opening Words: “The Summer Day” by Mary Oliver
Reading #1: “The Patience of Ordinary Things” by Pat Schneider
Reading #2: Ecclesiastes 5: 10-18
Benediction: “What We Need is Here” by Wendell Berry

Sermon given 6/29/25 at Community Church-UU, New Orleans, LA (link to readings at end)

249 years as a republic. We are so close to making it to 250, which is a wonderfully round number. It’s a number that sounds very successful. But, like anything else in life, it is by no means guaranteed.

I wish we were on the same page as a nation about how to move ourselves forward, but we’re not. Perhaps one of the hardest truths to reckon with in times such as these is that we as a nation will always be, to a degree, divided. There are 340 million of us, and there would be something severely wrong with us if we did agree on everything. Conflict is inevitable. And we will always, always fall short of the ideal of who we say we want to be. Unfortunately, that’s simply the nature of the ideal.

Believe it or not, there are still a few things we apparently agree on in this country. Last year, the Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research polled people on the core beliefs that formed their identity as Americans. In this poll, greater than 90% of people agreed that each of the following are core components of the American identity: the right of everyone to equal protection under the law, the right to vote, and freedom of speech. I think it’s worth keeping in mind that we do share many of the same values with our fellow Americans, even if we operationalize them very differently.

And we want to be proud of where we’re from, don’t we? Even those of us who might not feel too patriotic at the moment.

Let’s talk for a moment about that word “patriot.” The word is derived from the Greek, but first entered English from its use in French- “patriote,” or “fellow countryman.” In Europe, the word was originally devoid of nationalistic associations- a patriot was simply someone with whom you shared your country. If you loved and supported your monarch, you were a “good” patriot– though, eventually this qualifier was dropped and to say you were simply a “patriot” was enough to convey your love for your country. By the end of the 17th century, however, the word had also taken on an ironic meaning- one who claimed to support their nation’s government, but whose actions betrayed this.

It was this ironic meaning that the American founders eventually embraced, as people who loved their new country but definitely not their monarch. Leading up to the American Revolution, Benjamin Franklin defined a patriot as “a person who advocates or promotes the independence of his native soil or people from the country or union of countries of which it is a colony.” When Independence was won, this specific definition was dropped and the meaning of the word evolved into how we understand it today.

And just how do we understand it today? The term is anything but value-neutral. Not only do I doubt that as a nation we can agree on a definition, I doubt we can even agree on a connotation. Use of the word today is largely centered on -or, some might say, co-opted by- the political far right. For me, the word “patriotism” conjures up images of a tacky American Flag bikini. The Capitol on January 6th. Obama-era birtherism. A sprawling border wall. A gun.

These are not images I’m comfortable with. When I see a congressperson and their family posing for their Christmas Card with AR-15’s, I cringe like the embarrassed friend of the drunk at the party. What, America? Oh, I don’t know her. I’m not with her. Maybe you’re the same. Maybe you’re ashamed of the values espoused by some of our fellow Americans. Or maybe it’s a little deeper- the shame of simply having your eyes open in a broken country. From a white supremacist rally and murder in Charleston, to a black box ICE detention center in Jena, Louisiana, to Derek Chauvin’s knee on George Floyd’s neck– how much we want to cry out, this is not who we are.

But look around, starting from the first steps of the colonizers on the continent- from the Indian Removal Act, to massacres in Tulsa and My Lai, and now to Gaza and Iran, and to countless other injustices and horrors, I’m sorry to say that this is absolutely who we have been, and who we are.

“America never was America to me.”

Let’s talk for a moment about Langston Hughes. Born in the height of the Jim Crow era, descended from Black enslaved great-grandmothers and white slaveholder great-grandfathers, Hughes needed no one to raise his consciousness about the broken promise of America for people of color.

There’s a parallel but also a contrast between Hughes’ entreaty to “Let America be America again” and the more contemporary desire to “Make America Great Again.” They are both rooted in an admission of brokenness- what we have now doesn't work– followed by an ideal of who we could be. But “Make America Great Again” is false nostalgia for an illusion, a poor memory of “the good old days” that were actually quite tough if you were brown, black, poor, disabled, female, queer, elderly, ill. The term “Make America Great Again” is generally evoked as an appeal for strength- for stronger borders, tougher masculinity, an iron-fisted foreign policy. Those who betray that idea of strength must then retreat into the background, hidden once more like they were for most of history. Life would be great if women stopped demanding equal pay and embraced their child-rearing roles. If we let our vehicles guzzle gas and our industries pollute without limits. If that disabled person identifying barriers to work would instead just admit they’re lazy. America used to be strong and if you stand in the way of that strength, it’s not because you’re pointing out one of her blind spots- it’s because you don’t love America. Why else would you stand in the way of her greatness?

When our perceived “greatness” is tied to one group’s perspective on our history, we might understand why a concept such as critical race theory is so threatening to some- it challenges the notion that a certain type of person built this country and a certain type should get the credit for it. It doesn’t merely add new heroes, it also suggests our current ones might be complex. Or worse, not heroic at all. In essence, it complicates things. It’s so much easier to go forth as a nation when you don’t need to seriously consider other perspectives radically different from your own. If you want to go fast, go alone, right?

But fellow Americans, especially those of the MAGA acolyte variety, Langston Hughes is on to you. He understands the vision just as much as you do. He does not reject the desirability of greatness. His greatness is just a bit more expansive; one that leaves no one behind.

Let America be America again.

Let it be the dream it used to be.

Let it be the pioneer on the plain

Seeking a home where he himself is free.

(America never was America to me.)

Let America be the dream the dreamers dreamed—

Let it be that great strong land of love

Where never kings connive nor tyrants scheme

That any man be crushed by one above.

(It never was America to me.)

When Langston was still a baby his father left the family and settled in Mexico in an attempt to escape the stifling racism of the U.S. Langston probably could have taken the same path– he did stay with his father briefly after high school– but his maternal grandmother had instilled him with a great sense of pride in his family and in his race. Mary Patterson Langston was an abolitionist and the first Black woman to attend Oberlin College. She had married an abolitionist and Black suffrage activist, and their sacrifices and fortitude were the basis of the stories she told her grandson. He later recalled, “Through my grandmother's stories always life moved, moved heroically toward an end. Nobody ever cried in my grandmother's stories. They worked, or schemed, or fought.” And so while his father stayed in Mexico, Hughes chose to live and fight in America- the same America that had betrayed him and his people so deeply.

How is that for strength?

Unlike “Make America Great Again,” which seeks a return to a status quo that hardly worked for anyone, Hughes’ “Let America Be America Again” returns us back further to the source of the vision itself- and asks us to get it right this time.

O, let my land be a land where Liberty

Is crowned with no false patriotic wreath,

But opportunity is real, and life is free,

Equality is in the air we breathe.

Unfortunately, for some Americans today, to refuse to don one’s false patriotic wreath is tantamount to not loving one’s country. We often require the performance of patriotism more so than the values behind it. To protest a war or take a knee during the anthem is seen as ingratitude or an insult. But I do love my country. Very much.

And I want to tell you why.

As a Geography teacher, early in the year I like to introduce my students to the Human Development Index. After we talk through its indicators related to education, healthcare, and income, I ask them where they think the U.S. lies relative to other nations on the scale. Generally speaking, the students agree that we’re somewhere in the middle. Many are then shocked to see how high we actually rank in terms of global development. And we can’t blame them for their surprise- how can we look so good on paper when things feel so broken?

If I do say so myself, I am very well-traveled. I lived in Slovakia for 5 years, and Niger for 2 years before that, and 5 months in Ireland before that. I spent 2 months in India, and 3 months on a boat traveling around the world. Altogether, I’ve traveled to about 40 countries. I consider myself to be in a pretty good position to compare life in various places.

I’ve been to countries that would absolutely love to be able to complete routine tasks online or on the phone instead of showing up in an office to pay a bribe. I’ve been to countries where I didn’t feel safe stepping outside alone as a woman, and even been in situations where I was forbidden to do so. While America’s challenges with racism are out there in the public square, vigorously being discussed, I’ve been in other countries where most people steadfastly denied there were racial issues to reckon with at all, to the detriment of their minority citizens. And for that matter, I’ve been to plenty of countries idealized in the Western media as beacons for social democracy- and yet so many of them, too, are hearing the drumbeats of isolationism and right-wing nationalism that so many of us hear at home today. The world’s lands are connected, after all. What affects one affects the other.

There is a little brokenness everywhere. That’s the nature of 8 billion people sharing a planet, with all its fractured interlocking histories and deep memories and uncertain futures. The US –again, 340 million of us– is large and complex and utterly impossible to govern in a way that works for everyone.

Things that work the way they’re supposed to aren’t very noticeable, which is why the many things that are NOT working for us right now are so visible and painful. They’re a source of deep outrage. But that outrage is also one of our great strengths.

I love America. I do. And like any person or creature or thing that I love, seeing her fail to live up to her ideal fills me with outrage. But because I love her, I can’t turn away. I’ve come to believe that we are defined by what we choose to fight for, or choose not to fight for. And we are further defined by whether we fight for ourselves alone, or for others around us as well. A call for our nation’s accountability to her people is an act of love. I agree with the great historian Howard Zinn when he writes, “While some people think that dissent is unpatriotic, I would argue that dissent is the highest form of patriotism. In fact, if patriotism means being true to the principles for which your country is supposed to stand, then certainly the right to dissent is one of those principles. And if we’re exercising that right to dissent, it’s a patriotic act.”

Our spiritual ancestors in the Unitarian and Universalist churches have not shied away from this dissent. The ministers Thomas Wentworth Higginson and Theodore Parker were part of the “Secret Six” who funded and helped plan abolitionist John Brown’s attempted raid on Harper’s Ferry (and after Brown’s death, Higginson was the only one who didn’t flee the U.S. and who maintained his public support for Brown’s actions throughout his life). Viola Liuzzo threw herself into the work of the SCLC, marching and volunteering as a driver in Selma before being gunned down by 4 KKK members. The poet Frances Ellen Watkins Harper was one of our nation’s first truly intersectional activists. Her speech at the National Women’s Rights Convention in 1866 called out white women suffragists for failing to incorporate Black suffrage into their advocacy, briefly leading to the creation of a new pro-Black suffrage organization. And when the women’s rights activist Lucy Stone heard her friend, the outspoken abolitionist Stephen Symonds Foster, denounced for his so-called “Unitarian beliefs,” she had the type of conversion that is familiar to so many of us here as she began wondering if she herself was Unitarian. Our history of UU dissent, though always imperfect and often shortsighted, has been the natural outgrowth of a faith that champions free will in an ethical framework and extends the grace of God to every creature under the sun.

This tradition includes you, members of CCUU, and you are absolutely patriotic. Proof of your patriotism is in every act of resistance in which you engage in the company of fellow patriots. Some say the way to fight for your country is to go abroad and kill people. We know there's more to it than that. You fight for your country, too. You fight for your country in Zoom meetings, and community trainings, and the voting booth, and under the Claiborne Ave bridge. Your outrage and determination to neither accept nor look away from your nation’s flaws are an act of deep love. It is a love that serves no government or ideology blindly, but instead leads with love for community.

Amid the considerable flaws of our country, the avowal “this is not who we are” is demonstrably false, and arguably insulting to the marginalized voices which have been pointing out for centuries that this is indeed who we are. Instead, I propose a reframing more along the lines of Hughes’ avowal that “America will Be”: This is who we are, but this is not who we will choose to be. We can and will choose to dissent. We can and will choose to expand on the original patriots’ vision until it reaches the scope of Hughes’s, and then some.

I don’t know the future of our country –I can’t even guarantee we’ll make it to our 250th– but I do know that there will never be a shortage of committed, inspiring, and dissenting patriots in our midst. This is the nation of James Baldwin, who writes, “I love America more than any other country in the world and, exactly for this reason, I insist on the right to criticize her perpetually.” This is the nation of Edward Abbey, who writes, “A patriot must always be ready to defend his country against his government.” This is the nation of Barbara Ehrenreich, who writes, “No matter that patriotism is too often the refuge of scoundrels. Dissent, rebellion, and all-around hell-raising remain the true duty of patriots.”

I am a patriot because everywhere I turn, I see this beautiful dissent. It comes from the very privileged who have little to gain from speaking out, and from the most marginalized who risk the most. It comes from those whose ancestors have benefitted from the dominant narrative of our country for centuries, and from those who, like Langston Hughes, have been betrayed by it again and again. It comes from the joyful and inspired, and from the angry and embittered.

Our work is not easy. Our alliances are not perfect. Our future is uncertain. And still we go forward. In this land which is large and complex and contains multitudes, we continue the sacred work of bending the moral arc of the universe toward justice.

Happy Independence Day, and Blessed Be.

• Opening Words: America by Claude McKay

• Reading #1: A selection of responses to the Reddit post, “Non-Americans, what do you like the most about America?”

• Reading #2: Make America America Again by Langston Hughes, performed by Also Billingslea

• Benediction: from Howard Zinn

It is early May, which as we New Orleanians know, is a very precious time. In just a month our world will be almost unfathomably hot but right now the mornings are still cool, the heat of the day is still bearable. The wind is usually lively and pleasant, some scent of jasmine and sweet olive still lingers. And if you’re the sort of person who is able to live in the moment, you can (and should) allow yourself a moment of pure joy, to take it in without the context of the absolute climate chaos which we are in.

I teach 9th grade geography. In the beginning of the year, after we’ve worked out our north from our south and our latitude from our longitude, I try to ground our upcoming exploration of world cultures in the concept of the Anthropocene. The Anthropocene refers to a proposed geologic epoch that some say we are in, one which is characterized by the presence and influence of humans being evident in the fossil record tens of thousands of years from now. In other words, biological proof that humans are permanently and on a large scale altering this planet where we live. For those who subscribe to the concept of the Anthropocene, there is debate about when it begins. Some say it began 200 years ago during the Industrial Revolution when fossil fuels were first burned on a large scale, releasing greenhouse gasses into the atmosphere. Others say it began with nuclear bomb testing in the 1950’s. And more recently, others have proposed that it dates from the first presence of microplastics in, well, just about everything, as it turns out, including in us.

And still others argue that even the idea of searching for the Anthropocene is less evidence of our influence and more of our own vanity- that humans, a species that has been around for just .007% of our planet’s history, could never leave such a mark as to be visible hundreds of thousands of years from now. That may well be the case. I hope it is. But even if not settled as a scientific concept, the symbolism of the Anthropocene idea is useful for understanding our world. It can be distilled into this: we have changed things on this planet, and changed them greatly, and not for the better. And we very well may not come back from that.

I don’t enjoy dwelling on our impact any more than I’m sure you do, so let’s just get through this next part quickly. By the end of this century we may be seeing daily temperature highs of fully 10 degrees above the highs seen at the end of the 20th century. By this time we can also see up to 8 feet of sea level rise on average, with some communities, such as those on the Gulf of Mexico, experiencing the fastest rise. By century’s end, our global flood plains can increase by 45%. As we are already learning, even a single foot of sea level rise damages critical infrastructure such as roads, sewage treatment plants, and power plants. For each degree Celsius of global warming we can expect to see a 7 percent increase in precipitation during extreme storms. Category 4 and 5 hurricanes will become more common. The Arctic is warming twice as fast as the rest of the planet and in 15 years could be completely ice-free in the summer. As the polar ice sheets melt the surrounding ocean absorbs more heat, which in turn speeds up the warming process even more and also contributes to ocean acidification and in turn to the devastation of local ecosystems. Pests, pathogens and invasive species thrive in disrupted ecosystems in ways we are still not always able to predict. We’ve lost 85% of our wetlands since the 1700’s to the detriment of the species who depend on them. Overall climate change is considered a major factor in accelerating a 6th mass extinction for our planet with over 42,000 species at risk of being wiped out. As for humans, climate change will be the cause of approximately 250,000 annual deaths by about 2030, wars over water rights are likely to become more common, and an unprecedented global climate refugee crisis is likely to facilitate the rise of far-right extremism and exacerbate income inequality. Globally, more than 1 billion people could be displaced by rising seas and other impacts of climate change by 2050.

And driving all this is the fact that, as we heard in our readings today, humans have used more of the planet’s resources in the last twenty seconds of our great cosmic day than in the first 23 hours, 59 minutes and 40 seconds. Put into real terms, what that means is that we have used more resources (including burning fossil fuels) since 1950 than in all of the nearly 300,000 years of our species’ history prior.

Does it make you feel powerful to know what we’ve done with the five seconds that we’ve been on this planet?

When I bring this information up with my 9th graders this is the point where at least a few will usually say, “that’s it! I’m moving to Mars!” They want to leave Earth for Mars for the same reason that so many of them want to leave New Orleans as soon as they graduate- because at 14 years old they’re still fairly new to this world, and there are enough disturbing things around them that they naturally think- there must be something better than this. For me and my colleagues, their older and wiser teachers, part of our job is to help them understand, no. Trust me- this place, this city, this planet- is pretty damn great. You’re not going to find anything that compares to this. Do NOT give up on her just yet.

If the litany of apocalyptic woes I just shared hurts your heart, maybe it is at least a small comfort to reflect a little on how we got here. This great acceleration in the burning of fossil fuels began during the Industrial Revolution, which was not just a time for factories- it was a time for leaps forward in transportation, in sanitation, and medicine. Before we started burning gas in automobiles, the manure and dust that came with horses in cities was a major public health concern; cars were seen as a game changer for our air, our lungs, and the overall cleanliness of our cities. The petrochemical industry has also given us plastics, and plastics (for all their faults) comprise syringes, stents, catheters, insulin pens, pacemakers, and other life-saving devices. With all these resources we have scraped from the earth we have cured diseases, responded quickly to emergencies, connected with our loved ones, and so much more. And when you’re in the midst of innovation, it feels like progress, not a betrayal of the land.

Our human greed and constant desire for more, more, more may be the biggest part of our Anthropocene story. But around the edges of that story is also love. I believe that throughout history, the vast majority of us have just tried to do right by our own conscience, and to act on behalf of our loved ones in the name of a better life. I think that was true 100,000 years ago, and during the Industrial Revolution, and I think it’s true now. Let's not blame our ancestors for trying to build a better life, for themselves and for us.

And that brings me to one of the most unpopular opinions I hold: I love humans. I really do. We’re creative, and passionate, and hilarious, and sometimes intelligent. And I love this world, and as I tell my kids who are trying to jump in a spaceship with Elon Musk, I want to stay in this world. And I want them to stay, and I want you to stay.

What I don’t want to do, what I don’t think I have the energy to keep doing is, as Mary Oliver puts it, walk on my knees through the desert for a hundred miles repenting. I believe that the shame of knowing the incredible destruction wrought by the cumulative actions of humans over our time on the planet has propelled us into grief, and inaction, and forgetfulness of the wonderful things we humans are capable of.

Earlier this morning I shared with you the myth of Skywoman as told by the Potawatomi botanist Robin Wall Kimmerer in the opening pages of her amazing work “Braiding Sweetgrass.” According to the story passed down by the indigenous groups of the Great Lakes region, Skywoman fell from the heavens into a new world, our world, where she was completely at the mercy of its creatures in order to survive. Kimmerer lets us know that “like any good guest, Skywoman did not come empty-handed.” She brought with her the elements needed to turn the world from brown to green, and nuts and seeds to return the favor to those creatures who had helped her. She was welcome on this earth, and she lived up to her welcome.

We are creatures of this planet like any other, and like Skywoman before us, we belong here and (and this is my 2nd unpopular opinion of the day) I believe we are welcome here. In fact, I believe that our natural state here is one of welcome. After she shares the Skywoman myth Kimmerer goes on to lament a conversation she once had with her undergraduate seminar students where she asked them to think of examples of positive interactions between people and the land, and, so enmeshed as they were in age of the Anthropocene, they just couldn’t do it. She writes, “As the land becomes impoverished, so too does the scope of their vision.”

Take a moment to check in with yourself, and with the scope of your own vision of what humans can do to bring healing to this land. Do you think healing is possible? The shame at our past mistakes can paralyze us. It can make us feel like we are no longer welcome, that we’ve broken the contract we’ve made with this earth to care for Her, and that She would be better off if we weren’t around to mess things up any worse than we already have. Should we just go to Mars?

Kimmerer often speaks of the “Original Instructions” which the Anishinaabe Creator god gave to all humans in the very beginning, to be passed down. The Original Instructions are not commandements like the ones received by Moses, they are “prescriptions” for behaving responsibly on this planet and as part of a community. A call to listen to plants, and animals, and the air and the water and rocks, listening for what to harvest, and when, and how much. Or the names and natures of Earth's creatures, how to use them, how to honor them. The Original Instructions cannot be separated from the land because they involve listening deeply to the land- the land is the Instructor.

This is clearly not something we’ve done effectively in the Anthropocene. As our thirst for new lands and resources to exploit has grown and as our world has become increasingly globalized, more and more people are displaced (indeed, often displace themselves) from their ancestral lands. At the same time, numerous modern inventions such as refrigeration, air conditioning and high speed travel have tricked us into thinking we don’t actually depend on this land. In many senses, we are a long way from home. Says Kimmerer: “After all these generations since Columbus, some of the wisest of Native elders still puzzle over people who came to our shores. They look at the toll on the land and say, ‘The problem with these people is that they don’t have two feet on the shore. One is still on the boat. They don’t seem to know whether they’re staying or not.’” This same observation is heard from some contemporary scholars who see in the social pathologies and relentless materialist culture the fruit of homelessness, of a rootless past. America has been called the home of second chances. For the sake of the peoples and the land, the urgent work…may be to set aside the ways of the colonist and become Indigenous to place.”

Kimmerer recognizes the ways that colonization devastates both the colonized and the colonizers: for the descendants of the colonizers, for example, of which I am one, we no longer know what it means to be indigenous to place. But Kimmerer reminds us that Skywoman herself was an immigrant to our world, and as such, the invitation to be Indigenous to Place, to listen for and follow the wisdom of the Original Instructions, has been extended to all since the very beginning.

Yet at the same time, as the climate changes, old truths about our land often no longer hold. The land simply doesn’t behave the same as it did 50, 100, or 1,000 years ago. What I like about the indigenous wisdom of the Original Instructions as shared by Kimmerer is that they are rooted in a deep sense of presence. It’s much more than old stories about what to plant and when. It is paying attention to the land beneath you at this moment, wherever you are and wherever you’re from, asking it questions and listening carefully for answers. In the Anthropocene, the nature of each generation’s tasks to complete are therefore different, yet the Original Instructions remain the same.

Kimmerer, who is a botanist, was once asked by a group of indigenous basket makers who depended on sweetgrass to explore why the sacred plant was disappearing from some of its historical range, and whether different methods of harvesting might point to the cause. She and her graduate student, Laurie, pressed on with the research despite a complete lack of enthusiasm from their university, where the dean had told them, “of course when you harvest something it damages the population. There’s nothing to study.” In other words, humans get in the way, humans destroy. But Kimmerer and Laurie carefully surveyed local sweetgrass populations and compared those areas which are harvested for basket making with areas left untouched by humans. Eventually, they came to this clear conclusion: the grass from the harvested areas thrived, while the grass from the untouched areas withered. Says Kimmerer, “Laurie’s findings might have been surprising to academic ecologists but were consistent with the theory voiced by our ancestors: if we use a plant respectfully it will stay with us and flourish. If we ignore it, it will go away.”

In the Anthropocene, it is stories like this which sustain me. Dare to believe that the earth still loves you, and perhaps, in small ways, needs you.

In my partner’s yard in Mississippi last summer, I hacked the smothering grapevine from the canopy of pine and magnolia trees until I was covered in blisters and rashes. After learning that the vine can kill these trees by blocking their light source, I also learned that the mature trees they target are the ones most effective at combating climate change and that’s what my quest to save a few of our prettier trees was doing. When it got too hot to pull vines, as it very quickly did, I looked for other ways to serve the land’s needs. We kept the small pond filled with a trickle of water from a nearby well to provide refuge to wildlife in the summer months, and the trail cam showed that this was happening- foxes, turtles, coyotes, racoons, armadillos, and the neighbor’s dog all partook of this water source that would not exist without us. We set up a trail cam and began to learn which animals to expect when. Without grapevine our trees flourished, and with water the animals came. We loved the land, and then it started loving us back.

It’s just one yard, we’re not going to reverse climate change in just one yard. And these may sound like personal solutions to a systemic problem. In a way I suppose they are. But these exercises in paying attention to the Original Instructions are also about healing the relationship you have with the land around you, or maybe even finding a meaningful relationship with the land for the first time- regaining something that, at some point in your long lineage, was lost to your ancestors. And if you take joy from these experiences, perhaps it is a small proof that the land loves you back.

We are mourning a planet which is very much changed, but which is also very much still here. Do not let premature grief or shame blind you to the joy of a beautiful day which, even in the Anthropocene, are plentiful. Do not let it divert you from your path home to indigeneity, a path back to us once again feeling welcome here, in the only home we have ever known.

You can be brave and face the hard truths of living in the Anthropocene. And you can turn around and face the path that you walked, and that your ancestors walked before you, and you can extend to them your grace and forgiveness for all that we’ve done. Then, you can extend the same to yourself. And with humility and courage and optimism you can walk back, until you are home again.

Welcome back, and blessed be.

Photo Credit: Alisdare Hickson

Man, I miss Douglas Adams.

Some artists were simply taken from us too soon. Adams passed away at the age of 49, leaving a legacy of hilarious and insightful science fiction. He was also a staunch technology enthusiast, being a very early adopter of email and the first person in Europe to purchase a Mac computer in 1984. Were he alive today he would be 74 years old, and I would desperately love to know what he would think of AI’s potential. I think if anyone would be able to change my mind about it, he would.

One of his characters, the Electric Monk, is a thought experiment. The Electric Monk has been programmed to believe things for a human race that has become far too busy to nurture their own faith. But over time the Monk has absorbed so much information indiscriminately that it’s riddled with mistakes, believing contradictory or illogical things, incapable of self-correcting through reason. It brings to mind the Google AI model which infamously told users that geologists recommend we eat one rock a day, an insight the model apparently learned from an article on the satirical news site The Onion. Technology can take on a life of its own, but it seems humanity still has a place. For the time being.

Of course, the question of the balance between the human and the non-human, the seen and the unseen, is not a new one for our species. Religious and philosophical traditions have spent millennia attempting to discern the spark of the divine in everyday life, something which elevates our existence beyond the ordinary and visible.

And now, we welcome AI into our lives. We have articles (and increasingly books) written entirely by machines. We have images and videos conjured out of near nothingness, depicting people that never have and never will exist. All these things are beyond the ordinary themselves, guided into existence by an invisible hand, somewhat real, and yet lacking something- not the spark of the divine, but the spark of humanity. Monks have meditated, nuns have prayed, dervishes have whirled in order to transcend their own humanity and seek a closer relationship with the unseen, the magical, the divine, while here in 2025 I am locked in conversation with a robot on a customer service call, screaming “REPRESENTATIVE” in desperate search for a human connection.

The computer scientist and futurist Ray Kurzweil believes that AI is advancing so rapidly that by 2045, humans will have achieved the “singularity,” a merging of human and artificial intelligence wherein our capillaries are fused with nanobots and we become capable of a trillion calculations per second. As technology spurs advancements in medicine to which we may quite literally be connected, immortality is not out of the question. Perhaps our age-old human quest to commune with the divine has culminated at last. As another sci fi author, Arthur C. Clarke reminds us, “Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.”

I’ve listened to Kurzweil speak. He is a man of tremendous optimism about the future, and he seems to view the singularity as both a foregone conclusion and an unquestioningly positive thing. And yet he completely failed my personal litmus test for a decent futurist, when an interviewer asked him about the role of AI in solving the climate crisis. Climate change will be dealt with by the increasingly competitive cost of solar energy, he says. When pressed further about the geopolitical realities of a world dependent on oil, Kurzweil gave the verbal equivalent of a shrug. Those realities don’t need to be accounted for in his model, he says. Once costs for solar come down, the world will pivot just like that, and all will be well.

I am deeply, deeply skeptical of anyone who views progress through the narrow lens of infinite growth on a finite planet. It reminds me of people like Musk, who want to scrape minerals and water and fossil fuels from this earth so he can get himself to Mars. You know Mars, right? It’s that big dead thing out in that big dead space full of other dead things that stretch out for more miles than we can even comprehend away from this beautiful blue and green jewel we live on.

The unfettered pursuit of technological greatness without ever asking whether or not it’s worth it.

And with that, we've come to the part of the sermon that I just couldn't quite finish. I just can’t tie it all together as much as I’ve tried, as much as I think about this all the time. After all, I too am a child of Google and autocorrect and autocomplete, and my attention span and patience for critical thinking have absolutely taken a hit in my adult years. Here is what I do know, even if I can't fully articulate it as a single idea. The optimism over merging human and artificial intelligence, this technology created by humans with human wisdom but designed to replace humans, the devastating environmental impact of AI, the greed for uncontrolled growth on a finite planet, even billionaires in space- these ideas are all connected. Perhaps what they have in common is this: they imply we've given up on the promise of humanity on this earth.

I have said it before in this space and I will say it again- I love humans. I love us here in New Orleans for staying up late at night creating Mardi Gras costumes. I love this man on TikTok who twirls a Swiffer mop like a baton while he lip syncs to pop songs. He brings me such joy, and who but a human would ever think to do something like that? I love the anonymous hero in Kentucky who once sent Mitch McConnell turtle food. I loved spending hours crafting this sermon as a labor of love, when ChatGPT could have written something in a fraction of the time. And I love the fact that you came here today, and the continual affirmation in this space that seeking community with other humans is as much a part of our nature as seeking food or shelter.

I am not blind to our many faults, but I will always love and fight for my fellow humans. AI models may have been fed the sum total of human knowledge, but guess what? So have we. We have learned and grown from each other for thousands of years. We have formed opinions and morals and stood for them. We have rejected ideas that haven’t worked and refused to promote ideas that aren’t moral. We have done what the machine cannot, and called upon conscience. We have done these things so very un-perfectly, but determinedly. Sometimes, I am very proud of us.

We may not ever achieve the singularity, of fusing artificial and human intelligence. Or we might, and it might be great! Maybe AI will solve the climate crisis. Maybe a particularly powerful AI model will freeze the assets of every billionaire on the planet, concluding logically and dispassionately that it is the only way to achieve an equitable society.

I don’t know. I promise to keep my mind open, albeit with one hand on my axe, Luddite-style, in case there’s any machine that needs smashing.

Fellow humans, I love you. Imperfect and messy as we are, I trust our spirit. When mine flags, I take refuge in community, in what is utterly and unmistakably human. May we all be blessed, flawed, and ever striving toward our potential in a broken and beautiful world.

Opening Words: All of Us are Beautiful by Thomas Rhodes

Reading #1:

from “Salmon of Doubt” by Douglas Adams

Reading #2: from “Dirk Gently’s Holistic Detective Agency” by Douglas Adams

Benediction: from “The Anthropocene Reviewed” by John Green

(note: I’ve searched high and low for the original creator of this image depicting Luddite frame breakers, but unfortunately their name appears to be lost to the ages.)

At some point between last school year and this one, I began to notice a very unsettling phenomenon. My freshmen Geography students, many of whom think France is its own continent, that Hawaii is a foreign country, and that the US gained its independence from Britain in the 1980’s, were suddenly all capable of absolutely flawless grammar. They could construct a sentence which seamlessly wove together disparate ideas, which didn’t sacrifice meaning for brevity! Their capacity for analysis suddenly leapt forward as well. Whereas at the beginning of last year a student may have summarized an article on Central American migration by writing “people are leaving cuz life is really hard there and I think it’s crazy how they go through so much to get to the US,” now they were able to write “Central American migration is primarily driven by a complex mix of factors including extreme poverty, lack of economic opportunities, widespread violence from gangs and drug cartels, political instability, corruption, natural disasters exacerbated by climate change, and food insecurity, leading many people to seek better lives by migrating to the United States or other countries in the region.” I mean, they were pointing out things that weren’t even in the article. What skill!

It was all AI, of course. AI-generated work has been a scourge of teachers since the introduction of ChatGPT. Long gone are the days where we could detect unoriginal thought by copy/pasting student work into Google to find where it was plagiarized from. Plagiarism is no longer necessary! Let the internet do the plagiarism for you. While you’re at it, why don’t you open an AI image generator and accompany your report with a lovely photo of a 13-fingered child embracing a baby tiger as Donald Trump prays over them? The possibilities are truly endless.

Right now we are in AI’s awkward preteen phase, where the technology’s many missteps are the subjects of ridicule and eye-rolls. Just around the corner, though, we are promised great things. Artificial Intelligence will aid us in diagnosing diseases, automating unpleasant and time-consuming tasks, and even bring about the “end of work” as we know it. In my world, it will even optimize curricula to improve student learning outcomes. My colleagues may be frustrated with our students’ over-reliance on platforms such as ChatGPT, but they also appreciate the way those same platforms have helped them plan lessons or provide feedback on student work. I wouldn’t say they fully embrace the technology, but they’re open to its potential. More so than I am, I would say. For I am a Luddite.

Today, “Luddite” is a somewhat derogatory term thrown at those who fear, or are at least suspicious of, new forms of technology. Technology critics will usually take care to distance themselves from the term: “I’m not a Luddite, but…” Yet the true history of the Luddites is fascinating, bloody, enraging, and uplifting all at once- and it fits very neatly into the recursive timeline of the world, the timeline which we seem doomed to repeat, across space and across time, as long as the rich and the working class exist. In the early 1800s, Britain faced a difficult economic climate amid the expense of the Napoleonic Wars and escalating tensions with the United States. To save money, textile factory owners moved to replace the highly skilled weavers they employed with new machinery and unskilled labor. The items produced were significantly less expensive to make but of inferior quality, and the new workers were paid far less than the artisans they had replaced. In response, pockets of highly organized resistance emerged across the country. Known as the Luddites after a (most likely) mythical apprentice named Ned Ludd who had allegedly used similar tactics, they broke into factories and began smashing the new machines that had replaced them. In some cities the destruction was accompanied by open letters to factory owners and government officials, calling for general labor reforms such as the creation of unions, establishment of a minimum wage and an end to child labor. At the urging of the upper classes, the government responded to the uprisings with full force and with gunfire. Many Luddites were killed, and the uprisings finally squashed when the British government made machine breaking a crime punishable by death.

The Luddites did not break machines out of fear of the machine itself. They broke them because it was the best tool they had available to them to rail against a system that had rendered their skills obsolete and cost them their jobs during an economic crisis. Machine breaking hit the factory owners where it hurt -their bottom line- and was a technique that could easily be replicated in different cities, whereas the distance between them made other forms of organized resistance more difficult.

Factory and mill owners defended their new technology at the time, saying it allowed people to get more of what they wanted and cheaply. Convenience at the cost of quality, and of livelihoods.

Today, we are being sold the same bill of goods with AI. Information is available to us instantaneously, built upon collective years of human research, intellect and experience, nearly entirely uncompensated by the tech lords that have repackaged it. The insult the Luddites must have felt at seeing their skilled craftsmanship replaced by machines is echoed today in academics whose research is used without attribution and artists whose styles are co-opted in sterile emulations of art. As ever, the product delivered is inferior and the profits coming from these innovations are concentrated at the top.

Elon Musk is leading a group of investors offering nearly $100 billion to purchase OpenAI, despite owning his own competing AI company. Among the world’s 500 wealthiest individuals, 96% of their increase in wealth in the first 2 months of 2024 came from AI. Rich men are getting richer, even though they couldn’t spend down their wealth in a thousand lifetimes. Meanwhile, the World Economic Forum concluded in 2023 that while AI could create up to 69 million new jobs over 5 years, up to 83 million could be lost. According to Goldman Sachs, the number is closer to 300 million potentially lost.

The environmental impact is also significant. According to a study by Google and UC Berkeley, training a generative AI model such as ChatGPT consumes enough energy to power about 120 average U.S. homes for a year, and generates about 552 tons of carbon dioxide. Once trained, the energy use continues; a typical query to an AI model expends about 5 times more energy than a Google search. As everyone gets into the AI game, new data centers are being built at a rapid pace. If these data centers were a country, they would be the 11th highest consumer of electricity in the world. They rely on rare earth minerals for their construction, and gulp fresh water for their cooling systems. As a researcher from MIT starkly concluded, “The demand for new data centers cannot be met in a sustainable way.”

Eh, such is the march of progress, we might say. With apologies to the Luddites, few of us could now imagine or have patience for a non-mechanized textile industry. Perhaps one day we’ll say the same thing about the tedious tasks of doing our own research or trying to find art that we like. People have always been skeptical of progress and then come to accept it, we’ll say, that’s just how progress works. But the optimistic idea of constant growth as both inevitable and primarily positive is essentially a piece of capitalist propaganda, and as such, I’m inclined to be particularly Luddite about it. I have zero interest in lining the pockets of billionaires to save myself a few minutes of lesson planning. I am a proud (and quite frankly pissed off) Luddite, and I invite you to become one, too.

So, some recommendations:

1. Since everyone who sounds the alarm about the dangers of AI is quickly bombarded with tales of its potential, hold this vision in mind and call the technology’s founders to account. If these noble aims are indeed the end goal (and not oodles of money for its founders), press the founders every day on producing these changes. There is only so much time that we should bear the loss of income and credit to artists, writers, and thinkers as we await the promise of a cure for all humanity’s ills.

2. Like with any new industry, look for exploitation and speak out against it wherever you find it. Remember that Musk, who controls some of this technology and seeks to control even more, who is currently instructing DOGE to use AI to assess which federal employees deserve their jobs, is the exact same person who is seeking to slash Social Security, Medicaid, and other benefits. AI might one day deliver on the promise of “the end of work,” but how does this benefit us without Universal Basic Income or robust social programs? Without these institutions, “the end of work” is just “mass unemployment.”

3. Smash systems, Luddite-style, if you have to. I don’t mean break into a data center with an axe (although if you did that, I would totally contribute to your legal fund). Instead, refuse to participate. Do not use generative AI models. Do not share social media images or posts unless you can verify and credit their human origin. Check your personal settings in Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, Discord, Twitter, and other platforms to opt out of giving them permission to use your data to train their models. Just as the Luddites chose a technique that could be replicated from anywhere, boycotts do not require your participation from a centralized location. From your own computer in your own home, you can refuse to feed the machine, and in the process, you can slowly break it.

4. And finally, consider AI through the lens of your faith. We’ve already permanently outsourced so many aspects of our life to technology, and it’s worth thinking about where we want to draw the line- outsourcing our own critical thinking? Our morality? I am a humanist, and humanism is at its core a philosophy elevating the human ability for reason, self-expression and self-definition, and conscientious moral action. But what is humanism in a world where the news and culture we humans consume, the range of views we are exposed to and use as the basis for our opinions, are increasingly delivered to us by machines?

Part II in next post.

Y’all- at least it is over.

It has been one HECK of an election season. It has literally lasted years. This election had everything! Childless cat ladies. Tiananmen Square. Weather-controlling machines. They’re eating the dogs. They’re eating the cats. Sex change operations at school. Falling out of a coconut tree. Hannibal Lecter. A fight at Arlington Cemetery. An incumbent withdrawing from the race. An assassination attempt. Another assassination attempt. Elon Musk. Russian bots. Garbage trucks.

And now- it’s over. But of course, it’s not really over, it’s just beginning, or continuing, or resuming, and everyone in this room knows exactly what I mean by that.

But enough about the country. How are YOU?

Are you eating enough? Resting? Do you lie awake at night fretting over things you can’t change? Things that would be horrible if they came to pass but have not yet done so? Are you walking through the world mindfully and in the moment, or is your mind living fitfully in an uncertain future? Are you in right relationship with the people around you, or do you really, REALLY just wish some of them would go away?

Let me be honest with you about how I am. I have gone nearly all in on tribalism. Yes, I have the same cloying sign in front of my house that a lot of us bought in the wake of the first Trump presidency- you know the one. In warm colors and three languages. No matter where you’re from, we’re glad you’re our neighbor. Y’all- the sign is a lie. I am beyond fed up with some of my neighbors. I am fed up with alternative facts and bad science and anti-intellectualism and the idea that an adulterous, bloodthirsty racist and rapist will save this country through Christian nationalism because that is the will of straight white America Jesus. And these are my fellow countrymen, and yours, and that would be just as true under a Harris presidency as under a Trump presidency.

I’m guessing that like me, you’re not great. And I don’t even know who you voted for, and I don’t need to. There is polling to suggest that despite our great divisions in this country, there is one thing we actually all agree on- regardless of our political affiliation. We are all terrified. Maybe the beast that looms large in your nightmares is coming to deport immigrants, or maybe it’s coming to import critical race theory- but we all see a beast of some kind, and we’re all, again, terrified.

I was trying to think the other day about what made this election season so much more stressful for me than 2020, or 2016, and I think it’s one of scale. In the last couple cycles, I saw one clear enemy. As time went on and his true colors emerged, I naively thought we’d all come around. Not be on the same page, maybe, but perhaps reading the same book. I hoped-slash-believed that a critical mass of people would see the inherent dangers of indulging his leadership and we’d turn this world around. That’s not been happening. In 2016 I saw one clear enemy. In 2024, I saw over 70 million. That’s not a number that just dissipates regardless of who wins.

In investigating and trying to understand some of the deep ideological divisions that have arisen in the U.S. and her native Canada, the anti-capitalist author and critic Naomi Klein speaks of the unsettling middle ground that we share with the so-called “Mirror World.” The “Mirror World” is her term for the millions of Americans (or in Klein’s case, also Canadians, or perhaps other Westerners) that we share our country (or countries) with who agree with the consensus that our national and global politics have taken a very, VERY wrong turn- but in the Mirror World, what they don’t agree with Klein on (or with others who share her views) is what that threat looks like. Across the political and social spectrums, for example, there seems to be widespread agreement that our democracy is at risk of falling into fascism. We just don't happen to agree on who the fascists are. Is a fascist leader one who refuses to accept the results of a democratic election, or is that label better applied to one who seeks to limit unfettered access to assault weapons?

Says Klein, “Elites are sucking us dry - our money, our labor, our time, our data. So dry that large parts of our planet are beginning to spontaneously combust. The Davos elite aren't eating our children, but they are eating our children's futures, and that is plenty bad. QAnon believers imagine secret tunnels underneath pizza parlors in Central Park, the better to traffic children. This is fantasy, but there are tunnels under some major cities, and they do house and hide the poor, the sick, the drug dependent, the discarded. Conspiracy theorists get the facts wrong but they often get the feelings right - the feeling that every human misery is someone else's profit, the feeling of being exhausted by predation and extraction, the feeling that important truths are being hidden. The word for the system driving those feelings starts with c, but if no one ever taught you how capitalism works, then it's easy to see how you might confuse it with another c-word conspiracy.”

In trying to understand the millions of Americans who think and vote so differently from her, Klein’s point is this: in the Mirror World, they’re not just like us, but they’re not our opposites, either.

In this country, though we are divided by our specific fears, we are united by the concept of fear itself. If only we could turn this tenuous middle ground into something on which we can build a coalition in a deeply divided country.

Meanwhile, with grief speaking loudly for so many of us, we struggle even to maintain common cause with our allies. Klein, who for reference is politically left of nearly every member of the U.S. Congress, calls out her allies for so often failing to build a bigger tent. She writes, “on the Democratic socialist left, we favor social policies that are inclusive and caring- universal public health care, well-funded public schools, decarceration, and rights for migrants. But left movements often behave in ways that are neither inclusive nor caring. We also don't put enough thought into how to build alliances with people who aren't already in our movements. Sure, we pay lip service to reaching out, but in practice most of us, even many who claim to be staunchly anti-police spend a lot of time policing our movement’s borders, turning on people who see themselves as on our side, making our ranks smaller, not larger. When we have differences, we tend to focus on them obsessively, finding as many opportunities as possible to break apart. Moreover, when entire categories of people are reduced to their race and gender, and labeled" privileged”, there is little room to confront the myriad ways that working-class white men and women are abused under our predatory capitalist order, with left-wing movements losing many opportunities for alliances that would make us stronger and more powerful.”

I’m assuming you have some anger toward at least some of your fellow Americans at the moment– left or right, enemies or maybe people you thought were your allies. Your friends, social media, internet memes, even powerful leaders in your community might tell you it is not your responsibility to love your fellow country people in a difficult moment, even that there is honor and conscience in cutting them off and shutting them out. But I’m sorry, I don’t think your faith is going to tell you that. Some of our spiritual ancestors, the early Universalists, affirmed that a loving parent God does not send even the worst of sinners to an eternal hell. And today, there’s a lot of people I just want to tell to go to hell. But it’s not part of my faith to do so.

Enter Phillip Moffit, Buddhist scholar, whose writings I gratefully came across while I was doing some fairly significant post-Tuesday edits to this sermon. Moffit writes: “To meet hatred and loss with love and a generous heart is the most difficult practice imaginable. Sometimes I hesitate to teach it, for I have my own struggles with anger and hardening of the heart as a reaction to terrible and unjust acts. Yet what is the purpose of a practice if you are not going to use it in life’s difficult moments? … The spiritual practice[s] of forgiveness…compassion and love, [are] the most powerful ground you can prepare for the future well-being of today’s children. If they see you violent in thoughts, words, and actions, they will learn violence as a reaction, no matter what you tell them. But if they see you meet hate with love, they will manifest this as adults. To repeat the Buddha, “Hate never yet dispelled hate; Only love dispels hate.”

A common Buddhist meditation exercise, which many of you may be familiar with, is the Loving-Kindness meditation. In a version of this exercise practitioners are challenged to extend compassion and loving kindness first to a loved one, then to a mere acquaintance, next to themselves, and finally to a difficult person, or an enemy. I do this meditation from time to time, and like a diligent student, I challenge myself and I take my choice of enemy seriously. One enemy I often choose is Stephen Miller. He who architected the Trump-era family separation policy, promoted a plan to carry out mass arrests of undocumented immigrants across ten US cities, and referenced white nationalist and neo-Nazi publications as he shaped White House policy. The man is odious. And in my meditation, after I offer my wish that first my family, and then the person who walks their dog on my street, and then that myself be peaceful, at ease, and free from harm, I turn my attention to this odious man. And with all the compassion I can possibly muster, I wish that Stephen Miller be peaceful, at ease, and free from harm.

Has this exercise been successful in bringing me to a place of peace with Stephen Miller? Hell no. But this is, after all, an exercise, and the difficult last step of this exercise exists for a reason. Because the spark of the divine that lives within all of us does not discriminate. In fact, I do not know a single religious tradition in which (when interpreted faithfully) even the most noxious politician, or billionaire, or what have you, is not every inch as much a child of God as you or I. I kind of hate that, but I believe it.

Moffit anticipates these emotions. He writes: “You may feel as though you are being disloyal to others or betraying the victims. You may experience great comfort and a sense of belonging through sharing in the anger of the larger community and not want to lose this feeling. You may feel secure in the energy of the community’s rage and feel more frightened when you start to walk your own path. …Each of these emotions is understandable, and maybe you are not ready to embrace the act of forgiving.” Because, after all, this is a practice. Not something to mastered right away.

He continues: “Forgiveness practice is about liberating your own feelings and finding meaning in the worst of life’s events. You practice [it] to be free of the inner violence of your rage, and you do not abandon the pursuit of right action. In fact, you gain clear seeing that allows you to use skillful means in bringing sustainable peace.”

For Moffit, rage is an issue not because it’s unjustified, but because it consumes the one who holds it. Instead, he says, compassion and forgiveness are forces which do not ignore rage, but which harness it and transform it into something more useful- outrage. He says, “They both have determination, passion, and lead to action; but rage is narrow, short-term, and blinded by fury, while outrage is broad, clear, steady, and committed to a sustainable solution.”

Extending compassion out through the curtain of our rage, recognizing the humanity, the divine, even, in our fellow country people is not just a nice thing to do, and it’s not a betrayal of our values. It is a practice in line with our beliefs, and it might be the only thing that can perform the alchemy of turning rage into outrage. At the beginning of this message, I asked you, “how are you?” And I admit, while I do wish you well for your own sake, I have an ulterior motive. I want you strong and uplifted for the work ahead, work that we invariably must undertake together.

Keep working on your growing edge. Keep expanding your tent of compassion in the ways you can. Keep challenging yourself to find common ground with your fellow children of God. You do not need to, nor should you, abandon your principles or compromise on your values. Many people will NOT meet you halfway on this. That is not the point. You must exercise compassion not to cede ground, but to build your own resilience. Rage consumes. But hate never yet dispelled hate; Only love dispels hate.

And all of this, by the way- recognition of the divine in our fellow humans, loving kindness meditation, embrace of others’ humanity in order to keep our own- all in good time. Many of us are currently in a season of Smashing Things. Fair enough. Smash away. Grieve. Rage. But stay attuned to the moment when you can begin to convert rage into outrage, to fuel the holy work of justice building that began well before us and goes ever on. The pendulum swings. The arc of the moral universe bends. We will feel worse than this one day, but also better. The struggle continues, one step at a time, knowing that not a single one of those steps will be taken alone.

May you be blessed. May you be filled with loving kindness. May the spark of the divine in you recognize the spark of the divine in all those around you. May it all be so, as we all work to make it so.

Opening Words: The Great Turning by Lisa Garcia-Sampson

Reading #1: For a Leader by John O’Donohue

Reading #2: From “Doppelganger” by Naomi Klein

Benediction: post from Rebecca Solnit

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