#preaching material

I love these details because they reveal to me a God who is immersed in creation, deeply embedded within the lives of God’s beloved. Ours is a God who knows how to mend clothes and bake bread, a God familiar with the planting and harvest seasons, the traditions of bridesmaids, and the tickle of wool on the back of the neck."

...Will you say to us that the odds are too great? Will you tell us the struggle is too hard? Will your message to us be that the forces of life militate against our arrival as full persons, and that you send your deepest regrets?

Or will there be another message—of longing, of hope, of solidarity with our yearnings, of commitment to our causes, whatever the cost? The choice is yours, and though we might prefer it otherwise, we must choose in this crucial moment of human history."

A fitting Lenten read: The Darkness Divine by the Unitarian Universalist Rev. Dr. Kristen L. Harper.

ID: book pages titled "A Theology of Darkness," beginning with a poem titled "The Darkness Divine" [breaks added for readability] and continue into prose paragraphs:

" God resides in depths of darkness as in the light of sunbeams. The moon shines brighter surrounded by night and life is secure in the black waters of the womb.

As the night sky littered with stars demonstrates again and again, there is beauty in darkness and beauty in light— one no more brilliant then the other, one no more necessary than the other, one always complementing the other.

Without the heated darkness of the Universe, splitting neutrons, electrons, and protons from atoms, life and light would never be.

The task for us today is to recognize God in both — To see the divine in the rich brown earth, the textured black walnut, as well as the white snow and the pale pink jellyfish. To see the sacred in the panther and the swan. To embrace the dignity of the Black Madonna, as it is embodied in the Virgin Mary.

The task for us today is to look into the multifaceted colors of the onyx and see the miraculous spectrum of color produced in the prism of a diamond.

To begin the dismantling of our racist language, we first need a new theology of darkness—a new way to relate to the darkness, blackness, and brownness that surrounds us, and to the people whose skin is often reflected in our disempowering language. Poetry can help us cultivate a different relationship with and to blackness and darkness. In the darkness exists a time for rest, a time of regeneration and healing, a time of safety and nourishment, and a time of letting go to relax in God's embrace.

As a spiritual humanist, I believe that which we call God — the energetic force of love and creation — is within us and around us, connecting and empowering us as we move toward one another and through the world. While there are many definitions of theology, I lead with a theology rooted in relationship with one another, the earth, God, the spirit of life, all that is holy, and the higher good that can occur when we recognize and affirm our interdependence. This relationship, both conscious and unconscious, impacts how we operate in the world, how we view and treat others, and how we respond to injustices in which we play a part. "

Last image shows the back cover of the book, which has a blurb and then a pic of the author, a Black woman with dark hair and glasses smiling at the viewer, next to an about the author section:

" Too often in U.S. culture-and notably in faith communities— a culture of white supremacy is reinforced in damaging but unexamined ways.

In The Darkness Divine, minister and poet Kristen L. Harper confronts and unpacks the language, imagery, buzzwords, and cultural touchstones that demean and dehumanize Black people but are so commonplace they can easily escape notice.

More importantly, in a brilliant arrangement of essays and poems in the vein of Claudia Rankine, Harper lifts up the strength, beauty, and resilience of Black people and outlines a path forward. She invites readers to explore what they have learned and assimilated so they might de-center whiteness and stretch their understanding and imagination to radically transform perceptions of blackness.

While directed at her own Unitarian Universalist tradition, The Darkness Divine is a powerful and loving challenge to all those committed to the work of dismantling white supremacy.

ID: a tweet by _grimm @ExileGrimm reading, What's the dumbest beliefs you had as a child?

When I was 4-5 I swore that bird seeds grew birds, thus the name. When my parents asked me to prove it to them, I planted a pile of bird seeds.

The next day there were loads of birds where I planted the seeds, showing I was right.”

A second tweet reads, “I wondered why my parents still objected to this idea after I proved it worked, so I thought they were hiding this secret from me because they were worried I'd grow a massive flock of birds and they'd not be able to tell me what to do.” / end id

"Slavery is not an indefinable mass of flesh. It is a particular, specific enslaved woman, whose mind is active as your own, whose range of feeling is as vast as your own; who prefers the way the light falls in one particular spot in the woods, who enjoys fishing where the water eddies in a nearby stream, who loves her mother in her own complicated way, thinks her sister talks too loud, has a favorite cousin, a favorite season, who excels at dressmaking and knows, inside herself, that she is as intelligent and capable as anyone.

'Slavery' is this same woman born in a world that loudly proclaims its love of freedom and inscribes this love in its essential texts, a world in which these same professors hold this woman a slave, hold her mother a slave, her father a slave, her daughter a slave, and when this woman peers back into the generations all she sees is the enslaved.

She can hope for more. She can imagine some future for her grandchildren. But when she dies, the world—which is really the only world she can ever know—ends. For this woman, enslavement is not a parable. It is damnation. It is the never-ending night.

And the length of that night is most of our history. Never forget that we were enslaved in this country longer than we have been free. Never forget that for 250 years black people were born into chains — whole generations followed by more generations who knew nothing but chains. 

You must struggle to truly remember this past in all its nuance, error, and humanity. You must resist the common urge toward the comforting narrative of divine law, toward fairy tales that imply some irrepressible justice.

The enslaved were not bricks in your road, and their lives were not chapters in your redemptive history. They were people turned to fuel for the American machine.

Enslavement was not destined to end, and it is wrong to claim our present circumstance—no matter how improved—as the redemption for the lives of people who never asked for the posthumous, untouchable glory of dying for their children. 

Our triumphs can never compensate for this. Perhaps our triumphs are not even the point. Perhaps struggle is all we have because the god of history is an atheist, and nothing about his world is meant to be. So you must wake up every morning knowing that no promise is unbreakable, least of all the promise of waking up at all. This is not despair. These are the preferences of the universe itself: verbs over nouns, actions over states, struggle over hope. ..."