From Your Interim Minister,
I haven’t done much blogging of late, but did want to get out a note here following the Women’s March in Washington, DC last Saturday.
As many of you know, several members and friends (eight, including yours truly) of FCU made the trip on a bus—one of two—chartered via the UU Church of Nashua, NH where I had a long-time ministry. I wasn’t sure I had two consecutive nights on a bus in me at this point in my life, but I’m glad I made the trip. It was good to be with some of your FCU congregants, and to re-connect with some of my former Nashua UU congregants.
I’ve never been in a crowd that size! Absolutely amazing. I’m aware that the presence of those nearly half-million people, along with the hundreds of thousands of others who assembled in cities across America, hardly served to deter the highly troubling direction that the current Presidential administration is already taking. But it did well demonstrate that the voices of resistance—which are also the voices of justice and decency—will not be silenced in the days ahead.
My sermon for this Sunday (January 29) is largely given over to my take on Robert Hunter’s song Ripple, but I’ll share with you now some of the words with which I’ll be ending it—in the hope that you won’t mind hearing them twice if you’re in church on Sunday!
Here they are:
“As disaffected as I feel with the current state of the American Presidency—a disaffection I’ve never felt before, and my memories of our country’s Presidents go back to Mr. Eisenhower—I came home feeling good. Being in the midst of the throngs that were there, and then learning of similar kinds of throngs that were gathering in cities and towns across America, did give me the assurance that this is still my country, and it is still worth staying in the struggle for.
“Feeling good is not the same thing as being naïve. To return to the song we’ve been exploring, for those of us who seek to stand on the side of love, for those of us who seek to be agents of that moral arc of the universe bending towards justice, the road ahead is anything but a simple highway. It will be a difficult road at times. The way in which we travel it will determine whether we as a society are headed for yet another dawn—or for the dark of night. I came away from last weekend hopeful that we as a nation will choose the dawn, rather than surrender to the dark of night.”
Peace friends…and stay in the struggle,
Rev. Steve
Carolyn McCreary says
I am reading this in the wakefulness of my night.