“Oscar Romero, 1968-2015, Whittier, California,” Diana Matar
as preached April 12, 2026 at the First Unitarian Universalist Church of Houston
The early Greek historian Herodotus stated that he wrote history “in the hope of preserving from decay the remembrance of what men have done.” More than two millennia later the Czech and British photographer Markéta Luskačová described “[p]hotography … as a weapon against forgetting.”
Preserving from decay, a weapon against forgetting, this Sunday we engage in the ancient religious practice of seeking the spiritual in the aesthetic. Theologians have long taught that the divine is known through the beautiful. “Without beauty, there … [is] no life,” write the contemporaries Rita Nakashima Brock and Rebecca Parker. “Late have I loved Thee, O Beauty so ancient and so new; late have I loved Thee!” sang the ancient theologian Augustine. He asserted that it is through beauty that we come to know the sacred.
Conscious of the beauty that surrounds, this morning we consider how the complicated interplay between beauty, memory, and mourning–elements that bind us together religiously–might open the way towards hope. We do so through an engagement with the photography of Diana Matar, whose lusciously composed, rich landscapes have blessed our sanctuary with her question, “Can photographs bear the burden of history?”
It is not an easy question to answer. Nor is it the only one whose weight we will seek to bear this morning. As we cast it and other questions into the deep, I invite you to open yourself to the space that we collectively inhabit. I am not sure about you, but I do not attend to the resonant power of our sanctuary as much as I should.
I spend a lot of time here. Sunday mornings leading the service, Fridays–and Sundays before dawn–pacing through the aisles seeking words for you, Thursdays, Wednesdays, Tuesdays chatting with the facilities team, our staff, the odd contractor worrying about the state of the pews, the status of the roof, the wear on the cork floor, the future of the organ, imagining what the space might be in the weeks, months, and years to come. Rarely, though, do I contemplate the fullness of the space, sanctuary.
One of my favorite readings by the Unitarian Universalist theologian William Schulz points to that fullness. Schulz wrote:
Come into this place of peace
and let its silence heal your spirit;
Come into this place of memory
and let its history warm your soul;
Come into this place of prophecy
and power
and let its vision change your heart.
Schulz did not explicitly name the place to which he was referring. It is a safe guess that he was writing about a congregation’s sanctuary, a place not unlike this one. Sanctuaries are places where we come seeking peace, refuge from the world. They are places where we endeavor to remember what has been. They are places where we seek to call into being what might be.
What has been, what might be, the theologian Filipe Maia observes that past losses are tied to future aspirations. Writing about “mournful resistance,” he describes the act of “giving name to someone … absent” with the work of creating “a hope for a new story.” This “dual gesture of naming while invoking something to come” lies at the core of many religious practices around death and dying.
Death and dying are weighty subjects. Religion is about what binds us together. Unitarian Universalist theologian Forrest Church liked to emphasize this through the etymology of the word human. “All the words that relate to it,” he noted, “are illuminating: humane, humanitarian, humor, humility, humble, and humus.” That last is the Latin root, meaning “ground” or “soil.” The very thing we call ourselves, human, denoting our shared destiny. “[T]he mortar of mortality binds us to one another,” Church said.
We gather to celebrate what binds us together. We are not merely connected by our future fate. We are just as strongly linked by the life we share in between. The Easter story, the rites of spring, which we celebrated last week is typically organized around the triumph of life over death. The cold of the tomb is transformed into the warmth of the womb. Jesus arises from the soil and stone not a bruised and bloody mess of bones but a man gloriously reborn.
My own instinct is to take the story in a different direction. Rather than the resurrection of the dead, the center of traditional Easter tellings, I suggest the resurrection of the living. This is the waking up to the world as it is, opening to the beauty that surrounds, recognizing “Paradise is here.”
Acknowledging “Paradise is here,” that is how theologians Rita Nakashima Brock and Rebecca Parker describe one of our central religious tasks. Call it the resurrection of the living, you seemed to agree with me on this point Sunday previous in the receiving line. One of you said, “the resurrection is in us.” Another pointed to the pocket prairie we are building out front of the sanctuary–the interwoven greenery of Black-eyed Susans, Firewheels, Prairie Verbena, and, well, I know not what–and said, “this is the resurrection of the living.”
It is a statement of the human condition. We can name the absence of native habitat. We can do something about it, bring back the butterflies, bees, make way for the hummingbirds, observe, strengthen, the sacred in the beautiful.
The sacred in the beautiful, here we turn more intensely to Diana Matar’s work. Her exhibition, “My America,” is living with us until the middle of May. It is the fourth such exhibition we have mounted as a participating space for FotoFest. One of the largest and most important festivals for lens-based art in the world, we engage with it as a way of living our mission to be “a pillar congregation for Houstonians of many faiths.” By opening our space to the arts, we transform our sanctuary into a civic space–a place where all can come and bear witness to the intersection of the sacred and the beautiful.
The sacred and the beautiful, their difficult entanglement is something that Diana’s work strives to provide. In her two most known projects, the books Evidence and My America, she seeks the presence in absence. Evidence arose from her efforts know something of her father-in-law, the Libyan dissident Jaballa Matar. He was disappeared by Gaddafi’s regime. They never met.
His absence from her family inspired an ongoing body of work, as Diana writes, “in numerous countries documenting landscapes where people have died due to state inflicted-violence.” Crafting Evidence took her across Egypt, Libya, and Italy looking at places where Jaballa had once been. She made images of Cairo where he had lived. She “focused … [her] camera on locations where people had been imprisoned and killed by the regime.” She “photographed trees on the streets where Gaddafi had ordered the killing of exiles.” In all of these places she found herself asking the question, “Do landscapes hold memory?” In them she documented what existed after the violence, a chair, the “prison barracks, apartment blocks and underground bunkers,” where people had been tortured. Elsewhere she photographed “closest living thing that still remains that could have witnessed the killing: a tree, a mature plant.”
What comes after, that profoundly religious question, a gesture towards the resurrection of the living, “the resolute denial and resistance of the present order,” as Filipe Maia names it, that points towards hope, it haunts Evidence. It also haunts My America, fifty of the book’s photographs grace our walls.
My America, it is difficult work. It offers a devastating critique of this country’s law enforcement. It pushes us to ask why the United States leads wealthy countries in lethal encounters with the people who are supposed to keep us safe. No country in Europe, no country where elections are largely free and often fair, has a similar rate of fatal police encounters.
Each photograph documents the site where someone was killed by the police. Each image recalls the story of a death of a citizen by their erstwhile protectors. Diana carefully reconstructed, from the evidence available–court testimonies, records from bodycams, news reports–what happened on “a landscape,” in her words, “where an act of injustice … occurred.”
What she found complicates narratives around police violence. Her work points just as firmly towards collective responsibility as it does towards individual action. The book My America contains the transcript from a bodycam of one officer during the killing of an individual by another officer. Right there is a signal, the celebrated use of bodycams by law enforcement does not stop police violence. The remedies needed, the steps that must be taken to correct the situation, lie deeper, are more difficult to attain.
The transcript recounts the death of an unnamed man. He died from police bullets. He was probably mentally unwell. He was definitely armed–certainly with a revolver, likely with a rifle. Why should someone who is struggling so have access to lethal weapons? There must be a better way to care for him than to send equally armed police officers to confront him. From the transcript it appears that they were poorly trained in deescalation tactics. It seems as if they leaned towards confrontation and away from consolation.
Many of the stories that Diana reconstructed for My America offer similar narratives. Take those of Oscar Romero and Randall Waddel, which we feature on the sanctuary wall. Both men were acting erratically. The police officers who engaged with them were not equipped to respond to their behavior appropriately. Romero was drunk and belligerent. Waddel was diagnosed with a schizoaffective disorder. Their confrontations with law enforcement did not result in them getting help. The choices our government has made–to fund law enforcement over social services, to fail to regulate to arms, to not provide adequate health care for all people– meant that their encounters with police ended with their deaths.
There is much more that could and should be said. The awful mess that is this country’s white supremacist and anti-worker legal system can be castigated at length. It is like James Baldwin wrote about the imprisoned. “I do not claim that everyone in prison … is innocent, but I do claim that the law, as it operates, is guilty, and that the prisoners, therefore, are all unjustly imprisoned.”
Such injustice is systemic. Like most things, like the climate crisis, the war in Iran, the devastation of Gaza, the lack of accountability for the Epstein class, it is largely both known who is responsible and what is to be done. It is just that somehow, for some reason, we humans do not do those things. There are, of course, books, dissertations, documentaries, conversations, dialogues, that explain in great detail why we do not do them. Usually, the reasons can be reduced in some level the willful cruelty or avarice of the powers and principalities of the hour. I could say more but I suspect you know how that sermon ends.
Instead, let me give you a few more words from Baldwin and point again to Diana’s photographs. He tells that we should go “to the unprotected … and listen to their testimony.” She offers something of that testimony through her images with the simple titles like “Oscar Romero, 1968-2015, Whittier, California” and their pairing with complicated stories. Each picture is a record of the place where someone died from the police, the title like a tombstone.
The title like a tombstone, sanctuaries are places of memory. Many ancient ones record, even contain, the remains of important lives. Walk into a cathedral or a dissenting chapel in England and you are likely to find upon the walls, inscribed on the floors, the names of venerated figures, who in most Christian traditions, the congregation awaits to be reunited with when comes the resurrection of the dead. We shall be reunited, such architectural and mortuary acts proclaim, in the fullness of the coming of the Lord.
My humanist perspective, offering the resurrection of the living rather than dead, prompts no such promise. But nonetheless Diana’s photographs with their tombstone like titles calls us towards another sort of awakening. They call to recognize the collective responsibility that lies behind individual acts. They urge us to wake up to the difficult reality that we humans are both cause of and balm to much of the suffering that we face. In no other wealthy country in the world do interactions between law enforcement and those they are supposed to protect so frequently turn fatal. Looking to the United Kingdom, to France, to Japan, to Canada, to so many other countries, we can say we already know what must be done to stop people from being killed by police. Better health care, better social services, not nearly as many guns, the answers are there. What must be done to make such things so?
Reflecting in My America, Diana writes, “Making art is often more an exercise in asking questions than it is in finding answers.” There is great truth in that. My role too is, in the words of the poet Fatimah Ashgar, to acknowledge “Every year I manage to live on this earth / I collect more questions than answers.”
But it is also to uplift those words from William Schulz that I shared earlier. This is a “place of prophecy and power.” Its “vision [can] change your heart.” That change of heart is something we hope to inspire when we choose to live amid work like “My America.” It is a visual reminder of that call we offer each other in this place of sanctuary so often. That call is captured in the words of the poet Mirabai, “Get up, stop sleeping–the days of a life are short.”
The days of a life are short. Another poet, Mary Oliver asks us, “Tell me, what is it you plan to do / With your one wild and precious life?” Memorializing the dead, those who died because the legal system itself, in Baldwin’s words, is guilty, who perished because society–which is to say all of us–have not fully realized our responsibilities to each other, is one way we are challenged to answer that question. There are so many others: pocket prairies, remembering that the resurrection is in us, devoting ourselves week-to-week to recalling what has been done so that we might choose to do something different. These are the challenges, the promises, we offer each other. They are found in the petals of a wildflower outside our sanctuary doors and on the walls when we share exceptional landscapes. They come when we remember that the possibility to wake up resides within each of us and that we are truly called to wake up together.
That it might be so, I invite the congregation to say Amen.
