Dear friends,

American author, professor, feminist, and social activist bell hooks wrote: “Beloved community is formed not by the eradication of difference but by its affirmation, by each of us claiming the identities and cultural legacies that shape who we are and how we live in the world.” hooks urges us to value and embrace our human differences, our identities and histories, as the reality that is the world. Look around, and you see it is simply so. We are diverse like melons are, like finches are, like fish and prairie flowers and oak trees are. So much variety. And we know what variety is good for: it is adaptive to climate and amount of sunlight or rainfall. It delights the eyes and ears even as it fulfills niches in ecosystems and habitat variation. Climate, ecosystems, habitats—both earth-created and human made. If we wish for diversity in our diet and our yards, what on earth would lead us to desire “the same” among human beings? How could that ever be a good?

To affirm our difference is to open ourselves with generous curiosity about the range of human identities and experiences that emerge from our mysterious beingness, our adaptations and strengths arising from comfort, from adversity, from genetics and enculturation. May we delight in ourselves—not only in ourselves alone, those who we are like, but all the diverse range of human beingness resplendent in our world. Not simply to sample the tastes, but to learn how we love, how we survive, how we thrive, despite the pain and sorrow of ordinary life as well as that imposed by injustice. May we all be good teachers and good learners, as you remember, today and every day, that you are loved, you are worthy, you are welcome, and you are needed. May you feel it so, and may it be so.

Blessings, Rev. Rita (she/hers)