Minister’s Message

Dear friends,
I began my sermon on last Sunday telling you that I have taught myself (again) simple knitting. And I have been knitting furiously for a week. I’m knitting now (between typing!). No secret messages woven in. I am no Madame LaFarge from A Tale of Two Cities, one of my favorite Dickens novels. No secret messages except to myself, that I might sustain a peaceful mind as I watch the congressional debate on the question of impeachment. It is hard to muster much passion for administrative work when so much hangs in the balance.

What is most heavy for me are the calls for “healing,” when healing seems to mean ignoring the lies told about the latest elections and the egregious attack on the Congress as it sought to fulfill its constitutional duty. How can there be healing with no accountability? How can there be reconciliation without repentance? If you believe grace can always be granted, does it not come when wretchedness is admitted? For a wound to heal, it has to be cleaned.

It is not hard to imagine differences of opinion and of policy concerning how to fund healthcare, how to ensure equity in education, how to train police. In fact, it is easy to imagine multiple ways to achieve any of these things and more. And it is also possible to imagine that some people are held as undeserving of healthcare and equal education, it is possible to imagine poor training that institutionalizes and invites disproportion official violence against some people and proportionally less toward others. It is possible to imagine it because we see the evidence of it every day.

But it is not possible to believe this is right or good. It is not possible to link one’s own thoughts and behavior to such actions without reflection on what our Unitarian Universalist values require of us. We must, all of us, imagine a world where fascist, Nazi, white nationalist ideology and behavior can never again be normalized, can never again be positioned as a mere difference of opinion or policy. These are hideous beliefs that cannot be permitted to regain or to maintain power within our institutions. We must imagine a world without this nightmare and work to make it so. Then healing can be imagined. Then healing can begin.

May we use our imaginations in the service of creating good for ourselves, each other, and our world, 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)