This is what Ayako Nakajima, our Japanese teacher told me as we looked out at the red maple-covered hills, our first autumn in Japan. Aki ha omoi. Perhaps she sensed that the golden light of autumn was flooding me with memories of a home that seemed so far away. Are you sometimes overwhelmed with memories in autumn?
This week, on a glistening autumn day, I remembered someone in our church teen group in Eau Claire, Wisconsin. Autumn was the most beautiful season. The huge Dutch Elm trees formed a brilliant arch through which I raced on my bicycle. The face I remember wore bright red lipstick and smudged eye makeup. And when I conjure her face, I feel a tug at my heart.
Looking back, I see much that I didn’t see then. I see that she was looking for belonging in our teen group. Even though from the outside, I certainly appeared to belong, I didn’t feel it. And since I didn’t feel it, I didn’t extend belonging to that girl. Looking back, I regret that I did not give her what I wanted: kindness and welcome. Looking back, do you have regrets?
As Unitarian Universalists, we can get so wrapped up in justice or getting our committee work done that we forget to be kind. We can forget, as I did, to extend a sense of belonging. In Rev. Sarah’s envisioning workshop and at our community chats, you have brought up the importance of our welcome.
Kathleen, Tracy, and I have been working on the structure of how we welcome new people to Granite Peak. Soon, we will be spiffing up our outer and inner spaces. That is all-important. And more important than any of that is how each of us extends kindness and an invitation to belong. No structure or new carpet will substitute for that.
After my parents died in an accident, my siblings and I learned about all of the ordinary kindnesses they brought to their neighbors. One neighbor dependedon my mother to send off and welcome home her special needs child at the neighborhood bus stop. As I have come to know you, I have seen the many kindnesses that you extend to the greater community, to your neighbors, and to each other. I have seen how the pantry volunteers are extending belonging to the people who visit our pantry.
On sparkling autumn afternoons, I also remember those who extended kindness to me. Unexpectedly. A hand on my arm. Words of forgiveness and grace. These are important building blocks for that aspirational place, Beloved Community. As we ponder our inner and outer welcome, may we build these structures on a foundation of kindness. That will make the Granite Peak UU Congregation a beacon in a storm. We will be a place that nurtures belonging.
During a sabbatical year spent in the Washington D.C. area, I studied the 400 years of enslavement on this continent. I intentionally visited historical sites with a new perspective of enslaved people. Along the way, I heard of a pastor living in Leesburg, Virginia, who was impassioned with the preservation of a recently discovered grave site of enslaved people that was under threat. She was intent on preserving the history at that place, by consecrating the graves and establishing an interpretive center that would explain the history. If I had stayed in Virginia, I would have joined in her work of valuing the remains of people whose lives and deaths had been made invisible. Her work of justice struck a chord deep within me.
At the end of that year, only a couple of months be-fore relocating to Prescott, I took an opportunity to study Spanish in Oaxaca for three weeks. One of my professors, Lorena Gurrola, taught the literature of Mexican female authors. For four years, I have continued this study of women writers who are often not included in studies of Latin American literature.
The most recent text of this weekly class is Vindictas, a collection of short stories written by Latin American female writers. In the prologue, the editors speak of their work in gathering the anthology as “exhumación” of forgotten stories. In the process, they tell us, the women themselves are made visible by a history that would have forgotten them. I believe that making these women and their work visible is a work of justice.
In January 2011, reading about the life of Rosa Parks to prepare for the yearly MLK Sunday sermon, I found that she had been an advocate for many African American women in trouble. Among those women, I found Recy Taylor. Born in Abbeville, Alabama, as a young wife and mother, she was violated by a gang of white men who, despite all the evidence, were declared not guilty.
In spite of Rosa Park’s advocacy in publicizing this nationally, the men were never prosecuted. When I found Recy Taylor’s story she was in her 90s and still demanding an apology from the state of Alabama. She finally received one on Mother’s Day of 2011.
Her courage to continue to demand the justice of an apology inspired Mary Lou and me to write a song “Calling for Sweet Justice.” Throughout the next years, we wrote songs that became a larger work: “Women of Courage.” Many of these songs exhume women who have been invisible and put them in the spotlight where they should be testaments of courage that are foundational to our own acts of courage in the world.
Some of the women, such as Eleanor Roosevelt and Hellen Keller, did not need to be exhumed. Their names are known. And yet, even these women’s legacies became softened and marginalized within the patriarchal educational structure. In “Women of Courage,” Eleanor Roosevelt emerges as a civil rights advocate in a car on the way to give a workshop on non-violence, a $25,000 bounty on her head by the KKK.
We find Helen Keller, a woman living with disabilities, on a dance floor with Martha Graham, demanding to understand and participate in dance. And, the song that precedes hers celebrates the life of Viola Jimulla, a Yavapai woman suddenly taking on the role of chieftess of the Yavapai people.
The radical nature of this work is seen in the recent fears that have emerged around teaching children the “whole” history of this country and the world. Books are being banned that offer the stories and knowledge that are foundational to the healing of both human communities and the natural world. By revealing these women and their courageous lives, the songs and stories of “Women of Courage,” have the power to crack open the patriarchal system of education and liberate these women from a burial ground. Exhumed and celebrated, they give us the power to see the past differently and inspire the merciful, loving, conquering movements that will change our shared future.
Dear Friends,
In my sermon about walking 500 miles along the Chemin du Puy this past June and July, I told you about getting lost. At first, I didn’t know that I was lost. I kept hoping that I had arrived in the village that was supposed to be on the other side of a dense forest. A village called “Domain of the Savage Beast.” But when I asked the only person who was outside in the small village, she told me that I was somewhere else entirely.
As we sat on the stone ledge of her garden, she took the opportunity to tell me that there were savage beasts in that forest. The wolves often took lambs and a girl from the village had been bitten by a snake. It had taken her six months to recover. For the 30 minutes that we spent together, she tried to fill me with fear. She told me of the arguments that had led her away from her family in Aix en Provence to begin a life in that village.
However, she had not found peace in the village. Her neighbors did not quarrel but there was reason to be afraid, she told me. I am grateful that this woman’s fear was so clear that I could see it and reject it. Sometimes fear-mongering is less obvious. It can take us by surprise.
In mid-August, Sukey Jones made me aware of Mayor Goode’s proposal to add to city ordinances to restrict entry to drag shows, as well as making them more costly. This change in the ordinance would send a message of fear. Spreading fear was the tactic of the Nazis during WWII. Spreading fear about what the Jews, homosexuals, gypsies, and others would do, opened the way to penalizing ordinances that led step by incremental step to the Holocaust.
We must reject the message of fear and stand with those who are targeted. The message of fear under-mines our ability to think clearly. Fear makes us unsafe. I encourage all of us to listen to ourselves when we talk: Are we spreading courage or fear? It is my hope that Granite Peak is a place where we spread courage to one another out into the world. As your minister, I promise to engage in the work of van- quishing my own fears so that I can be a source of courage for you when you need it.
In October, I will be talking about the life of Etty Hillesum, a mentor of mine whose work gives me courage whenever I need it. A Jew in Nazi-occupied Amsterdam, writes, “We have to fight them daily, like fleas, those many small worries about the mor- row, for they sap our energies. We make mental pro- vision for the days to come, and everything turns out differently. Sufficient unto the day. The things that have to be done must be done, and for the rest, we must not allow ourselves to become infested with thousands of petty fears and worries...
Ultimately, we have just one moral duty to reclaim large areas of peace in ourselves, more and more peace, and to reflect it toward others. And the more peace there is in us, the more peace there will also be in our troubled world.”
Amen and may it be so!