Grateful to bring you our next installment in our bi-weekly messages with a prayer, a contemporary spiritual and justice leader and a song speaking to our spirits. This is our second of several offerings featuring UUs in Chicago doing radical work for justice. One contemporary spiritual and justice leader to lean on, one prayer for our messy lives, and one song to strengthen and soothe.

RADICAL CONTEMPORARY SPIRITUAL AND JUSTICE LEADER

Ronnie Boyd on imagining and honoring her ancestors: “I love books and I love reading and sometimes I forget that Black slaves were forbidden from learning how to read so centuries later to be a Black woman who can read, is educated, and works on political ed is fucking rad if I do say so myself.”

"I often feel I am trapped inside someone else's imagination, and I must engage my own imagination in order to break free." - adrienne maree brown, Emergent Strategies

You may have heard me say that this is no time for a casual faith and no time to go it alone. I mean it with every fiber of my being. And it’s out of those convictions that I am joining the Poor People’s Campaign: A National Call for a Moral Revival to engage in direct action on May 14th at the nation’s capital with other denominational leaders and national justice partners, and thousands of clergy, activists, and impacted people. 

Grateful to bring you our next installment in our bi-weekly messages with a prayer, an ancestor and a song speaking to our spirits. This week Megan Selby curates the first of several offerings featuring UUs in Chicago doing radical work for justice. One contemporary spiritual and justice leader to lean on, one prayer for our messy lives, and one song to strengthen and soothe.

RADICAL CONTEMPORARY SPIRITUAL AND JUSTICE LEADER

“I have met hundreds of people from many different organizations purporting to be allies of incarcerated and formerly-incarcerated people in the 16 months I have been out of prison. However, the people whom I can call on for support are few in comparison to the number of people and organizations I've come across. I have come to believe there is a difference between ally and community. The idea of allyship to me seems to suggest a temporary connection -- once a shared goal is accomplished, all the people involved go their separate ways. It is practical, yes, and necessary to have allies in any movement, but to me allyship feels very dry and dispassionate.

Grateful to bring you our next installment in our bi-weekly messages with a prayer, an ancestor and a song speaking to our spirits. This week Megan Selby, who is supporting some of our work while Nora Rasman is on leave with Gente4Abrams, curates our offering. One ancestor to lean on, one prayer for our messy lives, and one song to strengthen and soothe.

ANCESTOR

“Her devotion to liberty made her an anarchist; her hostility to patriarchy made her a feminist. She was too much the former to join the organized women’s movements of her day, and too much the latter to ally with mainline political anarchists- most of them men- whose devotion to liberty often stopped short of women’s liberation.” 

Kate Cooper Austin (1864–1902) was an American journalist, feminist, and anarchist. She was born into a Universalist and spiritualist family of strong women (1). Her politic and work would more likely be a comfortable fit in a modern UU church than it was in her time. Her association with free thought and free love movements were not acceptable to many of her contemporaries which may be way she isn’t represented among Universalist histories and perhaps why she never affiliated with a Universalist church after childhood. Such histories tend to do their best to quickly move past the admission that some Universalists of the time were devoted to spiritualism and free love. Her social location as poor, rural, anarchist, feminist woman must play some role in her relative obscurity in modern times, in spite of her being a member of the American Press Writers' Association (2). She wrote for many working-class and radical newspapers, publishing almost 200 articles advocating for more expansive, inclusive movements for gender and social justice. 

We’ll be back in two weeks with bi-weekly messages with a prayer, an ancestor and a song speaking to our spirits. This week we bring you a longer reflection on sacrifice in honor of Passover and Holy Week. 

I went to an herbalism clinic this month for the first time to explore what plants could offer me and to learn more about the ways of healing we didn’t really talk about in my house growing up. There was a beautiful wooden plaque in the middle of the tinctures and bottles and plants. It read, "There is only the hard way." 

The friendly herbalist assured me that it wasn’t that they wanted things to be hard – no - it was just that we are often seduced by the idea in our heads that there is an easy way. And if we could just find that one, easy way, all would be well. 

We are so excited to bring you the last episode from Season 2 of Fortification: Spiritual Sustenance for Movement Leadership. In December, we had an opportunity to have conversations with a number of members Auburn's Resilient Leaders Across a Fractured Country, amplifying the lessons of spiritually-resilient leaders in the South, Midwest, and Southwest.

In today's conversation Caitlin speaks Paulina Helm-Hernández. Paulina Helm-Hernández is a queer femme cha-cha girl, artist, trainer, political organizer, strategist; troublemaker-at-large from Veracrúz, Mexico. She grew up in rural North Carolina, and is currently growing roots in Atlanta, GA. She is recent past Co-Director of Southerners on New Ground (SONG), having joined the staff after coordinating the Southern regional youth activism program at the Highlander Research & Education Center for over 4 years. Paulina has a background in farm worker and immigrant/refugee rights organizing, cultural work, youth organizing, anti-violence work, and liberation work that centers people most affected by violence, poverty, war and racism. Paulina is also a founding member of the national First Nations / Two Spirit Collective, a queer & trans indigenous movement-building cadre, and has served on the boards of YouthAction, Student Action with Farmworkers and The Third Wave Foundation. Paulina currently sits on the Vision and Strategies Council of Kindred Southern Healing Justice Collective, and is always exploring ways to deepen political unity with people willing to fight and organize for collective liberation.

Grateful to bring you our next installment in our bi-weekly messages with a prayer, an ancestor and a song speaking to our spirits. We hope these resources may offer what we need in order to be courageously, steadily, humbly, on the side of love. One ancestor to lean on, one prayer for our messy lives, and one song to strengthen and soothe. Today we dive into sacrifice - what we are able to offer, what we are willing to do, and who we will become. Check out a bonus recommendation below from Southern Foodways podcast, Gravy.

“But the real sacrifice was the huge danger, the risk that they undertook in putting us up…those are all sung heroes. Heroes every one of them."  - Elizabeth Holtzman in conversation with Rosalind Bentley. 

What we have to give and what sacrifice means for us can look so many different ways. Check out this podcast about Hostesses of the Movement, Black women who took leadership and risks to resource and support organizing throughout the Civil Rights Movement.

ANCESTOR

Lydia Maria Child was a white Unitarian author, editor and activist committed to abolition, women’s rights and Indigenous sovereignty. She was an outspoken critic of Unitarianism in her day, including deep concern with Unitarian leaders’ unwillingness to explicitly and fully embrace abolitionism and their “cold intellectual respectability”. In her writings, she called upon readers to address the contradiction of the institution of slavery within Christianity, the extraordinary moral and physical degradation it perpetuated, sexual violence and the responsibility of the North in maintaining the system. There is much to learn from Child’s work today. You can read more about her here.

We are so excited to bring you the next set of interviews of Fortification: Spiritual Sustenance for Movement Leadership. In December, we had an opportunity to have conversations with a number of members Auburn's Resilient Leaders Across a Fractured Country, amplifying the lessons of spiritually-resilient leaders in the South, Midwest, and Southwest.

In today's conversation Caitlin speaks with Rev. Allyn Maxfield-Steele, the current co-director of the Highlander Research and Education Center in Tennessee. Allyn was raised in Texas, Germany and North Carolina and is an ordained minister in the Christian Church (Disciples of Christ) who has served congregations in Juneau, Alaska, Nashville, and Springfield, TN. Allyn’s focus and interests lie at the intersection of radical pastoral care, institutional transformation, dismantling toxic white masculinities, and liberation-driven ministry and movement building, especially in rural and small town communities. He comes to Highlander from the Scarritt Bennett Center in Nashville, where he has served as a member of the education team.  In the conversation, they talk about the necessity of white folks in supporting, resourcing and flanking Black women leaders, the particularities and importance of rural and small town organizing, any possibilities of the growth and transformation of faith institutions and more.

Changing circumstances require nimble solutions. In a recent Ancient Song Doula Services training that Nora attended, the trainers remarked that for those anticipating the arrival of a baby making goals for birth is recommended over making plans for birth. Because birth, like many major life events, can be messy, chaotic, unpredictable and change at any time. Organizing for long-term change and transformation isn’t any different. We have to keep our eye on the prize while being gentle, flexible and rigorous in our approach. Today we are returning to you with our bi-weekly messages honoring an ancestor to lean on, sharing a prayer for our messy lives and a song to strengthen and soothe. We hope you find them of use to you and yours.

ANCESTOR

Egbert Ethelred Brown was a pastor who found his political assessment inextricably linked with his faith expression. Originally an Episcopalian, then Methodist lay preacher, Rev. Brown would go on to become a Unitarian minister. Though enrolled at Meadville Theological school in 1907, Rev. Brown was targeted and deported to his home country of Jamaica. Years later, Rev. Brown returned to the United States to complete his studies and go on to become the first Black man to be ordained a Unitarian minister. Rev. Brown was involved in the Jamaican trade union movement, racial justice in the United States and organizing for independence and due to a lack of ongoing financial support, his family relocate to the U.S. in 1920. He would go on to found the Harlem Community Church despite inconsistent support from both the British and Foreign Unitarian Association and the American Unitarian Association that throughout his jobs would require him to take on additional jobs.

Like Ethelred may we be persistent in our vision and creative in our implementation.