Dear Friends,

It has been 97 days since your UUFM leadership closed the Fellowship in response to COVID-19. That feels like a long time. We are doing our best, as a religious community and as individuals, to protect our most vulnerable people, including healthcare workers. We are finding ways to stay connected as a religious community through online worship and meetings, story videos, spiritual exploration, and justice action. We all make more phone calls and answer more email, write more letters and wave from a distance more often than we ever imagined possible. It has been so long, and no end in sight. Who wants our reality, who wants our world to be like this? How can any of us be happy, with such restriction and so much death from one cause?

And it has been 22 days straight of protests for justice since the killing of George Floyd by a police office in Minneapolis. That, too, feels like a long time. But it is not that long, really, when you consider that systematic destruction of black and brown bodies has been perpetrated on this continent for more than 400 years. It is not that long when your narrative of living shifts from noticing structural oppression only when a shocking death makes the national news to these horrifying moments as the fear hovering over your daily life. Some of us must live with the shadow of racism always bearing down upon life itself. How can any of us be happy, with that as a normal reality for so many, and so much death from one cause?

How will we survive this isolation, that caused by COVID-19 as well as that engendered by our confrontation with the injustice and inequities baked into our cultural fabric? As a white person prone to despair in these times, I take my cue from those who have not only survived but who thrive, in spite of a racist nightmare that has yet to end. Black and Brown people live through systemic oppression by making community, by making art and music, by pooling resources and making food. By living, vibrantly and vitally even as oppression bears down.

It is not possible to be always joyful, but neither is it possible to always despair. So I offer you this song of joy, truth-telling and exuberant. If you like something more traditional, there is this song.

I pray you seek ways to face the truth of our world—both sorrowful and full of joy—as you remember, today and every day, that you are loved, you are worthy, your welcome, and you are needed. May you feel it so, and may it be so.

 

Blessings, Rev. Rita