Dear Friends,

I confess that I have spent more time than I ought to listening to the Congressional Hearings to Impeach the sitting President of the United States. It feels like the proverbial car wreck—it is hideous, and I can’t look away. I have an endless pit in my stomach, a constant set of refrains running through my head—Can the President really be this corrupt? Why does half our citizens, when polled, see mere political rivalry instead of unethical intent and behavior? How will we recover, when will we recover, from being such a divided country? Why has truth become so elusive?

I know there are many answers to these questions, from a range of perspectives and with much historical analysis to justify differing explanations. But I feel these questions as a sort of existential frustration: What should I be doing in this moment that feels like a catastrophe? I don’t have an ultimate answer, but three things come to mind and heart.

I refer once more to the quotation you may have read in the Weekly last week (and thank you to Macey Page for sending it my way in the first place): Somatic Naturalist and Embodiment Mentor Erin Geesaman Rabke has this to say about slowing down: “The times are very urgent. We must slow down. [. . .] Why? When we go at our habitual speed, we can only do what we already know how to do. This is true neuro-muscularly, personally, and culturally. When we slow down, there’s a chance for something new and unprecedented (and perhaps far more wise) to emerge. When we slow down, we’re moving at a speed where we can evolve, not just charge forward in known patterns of behavior.” The first thing I must do, and what I urge all of you to do, is slow down, in whatever ways work best for you. Take a break and enable new ways of perceiving the situation sink in through the spaciousness of relaxing.

And the second thing is: live our Unitarian Universalist values in whatever ways you can, daily and faithfully. Strive to hold as inherently worthy and dignified someone with whom you disagree. Serve justice. Deepen spiritually. Search for truth rather an accept a received truth. Practice compassion. Recognize your interconnectedness with the planet and your communities. You all have your own ways to do this. Please ACT rather than just think about what you hold dear.

And the third thing I encourage: Foster democratic process, and by this I mean vote, encourage voting, talk about voting, get involved with an organization that promotes voting, make phone calls about voting, and, when the time comes, drive folks to the polls. Exercise your vote, not because you need your candidate to win, not because you need your opponent to lose, but because you want to make your values and your judgment visible within our common reality. Exercise democracy, because you want to act as a citizen, taking responsibility for the state of our culture and the mores of our country.

It will be a struggle, as last Sunday’s speaker Mr. Bukata Hayes said when he quoted Frederick Douglass. Nothing is won without a struggle. Let ours be a worthy struggle, full of love of our human neighbors, even when we disagree.

Blessings, Rev. Rita