I attended the Liberal Religious Educators Association (LREDA) in October of 2022. This transformational conference brought us to the Legacy Museum and Memorial in Montgomery, Alabama. We then returned to the historic city of Birmingham to process and be guided in deepening our understanding of the trauma that indentured people, dragged from their homes and families, somehow endured (and many did not). How that ancestral trauma has continued to plague their descendents. Yet, our Black worship leaders at the LREDA conference held us in love, reminding us that ‘justice is love in action.”
From segregation to lynching to mass incarceration, anytime Black Americans have made progress in the United States in education, politics, or economic and social status, the opposite of love in action occurs: “violence is hate in action.”
Just as a person descended from slaves holds that trauma in their DNA, as a white person I hold the DNA of heinous acts of European violence to both indigenous and Black people., This conference helped me see hope in how the denomination to which I proudly belong (Unitarian Universalism) can collectively move forward by working for LOVE and Justice. We left the conference with a personal plan for our work back home to bring justice forward.
We must recognize changes in our country that are based on the reactions to Black progress, from the backlash to Black Lives Matter, to politics swinging wildly after an African-American president. Whether you are White, Black, Indigenous, or a Person of Color (BIPOC), processing the racism in our land damages our souls. As we take the spiritual journey together, naming our role in racism and processing it can do our souls good and help us all actively move forward with spiritual power. It is important to name what is happening and find ways to process it so that we can move forward in love.
I welcome your concerns and challenges with racism in our sessions. We are all experiencing liberation together and may we find ways to free all so
