as prepared for the First Unitarian Universalist Church of Houston, July 13, 2025
Recent events have been overwhelming, for me personally, for my family, for our congregation, and, indeed, for many in the state of Texas. I have been in something of a state of shock from the relentless media cycle and sheer number of hateful messages that we have received. The convergence of a horrific disaster, an increasingly toxic social media landscape, and systemic white supremacy have all come together to form a series of overlapping traumas.
Some of you have been impacted more by these traumas than others. Some have undergone the ultimate awfulness of losing loved ones in the deluge in Central Texas. I know that the death toll is rising. Many are still missing. It is likely that by the time the final count is in there will be more than three hundred dead. Far too many children, at Camp Mystic and elsewhere, have died. Just as with any other tragedy, my heart goes out to everyone who has lost a loved one from the rising waters.
Horrible events often trigger earlier traumas. Texas floods all too often. Even for those who have not lost loved ones, memories of previous disasters can bring uncontrollable emotions. Grief, rage, fear, anger, terror, and stress weigh upon many of us.
No words can fully address the situation. Whatever I say, my sermon will be inadequate. Knowing this, I offer a prayer for the sermon itself.
May the ground of being upon which we rest,
stir the love that is in my heart,
so that I might find words
that bring healing and hope
and inspire those that hear them
to do what they can to bring
a more beautiful world into being.
Knowing the inadequacy of the sermon, I provide a prayer as a reminder that in times like these we are called to return to the fundamentals at the core of our communion. I lift up three: holding love at the center, blessing the world, and spiritual practice.
Heartbreak, it is what a lot of us are experiencing. I want to have faith, as the poet denise levertov advises, that our hearts will mend like broken bones. But I know that even if it does, it will never be the same. Perhaps you feel the same way.
In the muck and mire of this I have myself turning to words from Fyodor Dostoyevsky. He wrote, “love in action is a harsh and dreadful thing compared with love in dreams. Love in dreams is greedy for immediate action … [People] will … give their lives if … the ordeal does not last long … But active love is labor and fortitude.”
Love in action is a harsh and dreadful thing. In the past week, I have tried to remain loving even as I have felt my heart rendered into a thousand pieces. That is to say, I have attempted to remain faithful to our covenant. We say that love is the spirit of our congregation. We do not always think of what kind of love we are summoning in such a statement. I suspect that many of us envision that we are referring to the love of dreams, an easy love that does not situate itself in the anguish of the world. I know that I would certainly prefer a love that feels effortless and undemanding to one that can be named a harsh and dreadful thing.
I want to remind you that everything that has happened has taken place within a much larger, difficult, context. That context should not be primarily about comments someone made on social media. It should be about the ways in which governmental policy and the leadership of Camp Mystic created a situation where a flash flood could kill so many. It should be about the power of Right-wing social media to mobilize a mob capable of unrelentingly targeting individuals and institutions–including the institution of our church. It should be about how the structures of white supremacy endanger some while promising others safety. We live at a moment when the most powerful amongst us are taking hateful actions and making hateful statements with little consequence.
Rather than focusing on any of this we should be naming the ways in which the politics of cruelty are running rampant in our society. This is not the first climate disaster that has occurred in Texas. It will not be the last. But as with both previous and future disasters, it could have been mitigated if we had a state and federal government that cared about building real infrastructure rather than ensuring that the rich continue to have more.
Today is not the time to talk about such matters in depth other than to say that I feel horror at the ways in which the congregation has been targeted. My partner and I have both received hundreds, if not thousands, of racist comments, messages, and even threats. I know that First Unitarian Universalist’s staff have borne the brunt of an enormous amount of hate. And that a number of members of the congregation have experienced connected awfulness. Frankly, it has the appearance of a coordinated attack. All of this makes me immensely sad.
Unfortunately, it is not something that should be entirely unexpected. We live in a city riven rough with the scars of segregation. We are in a state in the heart of the neo-Confederacy. We live in a country governed by the politics of cruelty. In the midst of this we have been attempting to build a multiracial congregation that offers the world a foretaste of the multiracial democracy that must come, that is to come, if this country and, indeed, all of humanity is to have a future.
This is not an easy thing. It is not the love of dreams. It is love in action. In the pursuit of this love in action we will make mistakes. I will make mistakes. I already have. Perhaps you have to. But we should not leave each other in the valley of the shadow of death. Instead let us take the poet Rumi’s words to heart:
Ours is not a caravan of despair.
Come, even if you have broken your vow
a thousand times
Come, yet again, come, come.
At a moment like this we are called to consider the ways in which our covenant has been broken and what we need to do to repair it. I want to learn what is on your hearts. When I get back to Houston I will be calling every member of the congregation to understand how all this has impacted you and discover your thoughts on how we can best move forward together.
I do not anticipate that it will be a task that is undemanding or without pain. But living through these times with integrity and striving to build a multiracial and anti-racist community are neither simple nor painless projects. We have chosen to live together in community. We aspire to build a more beautiful world. There are words that John F. Kennedy, Jr. spoke in Houston dear to many of you that get at the mess of all of this. He said, “We choose to … do … [these] things, not because they are hard, because … [they] will serve to organize and measure the best of our energies and skills.”
It is through the struggle towards the greater that we each become a little greater ourselves. The road we travel along is not smooth. It is rough and rocky. Sometimes we stumble. Sometimes we fall. Sometimes we pick each other up along the way. Traveling together we do what we can to make the journey easier and better bless the world.
Blessing the world, when the road gets rough, I sometimes turn to the Universalist minister Quillen Shinn’s sermon “Paradise.” It is the first recorded sermon in our tradition offered in Houston. I think of it as part of our congregational bedrock.
There are two passages that I lift up. The first, “a change of purpose, we may regard … as a start toward the heavenly life.” The second, “we … live … to make this world a Paradise, a pleasant, happy place for all to live in.” These passages suggest to us how we might create a politics of care devoted to blessing the world.
A change of purpose is the start toward the heavenly life, these words are a reminder that the work that we must do is not all focused outwards. It must require careful introspection into our own parts in the systems of oppression that must be transformed if we are to build a more beautiful world.
We are not charged to stay in the valley of the shadow of death. We are charged to remember that we live to make this world a pleasant, happy place for all to live in. This is perhaps the harder part. It requires us to recognize that world in which we live makes comfort for some and creates catastrophes for others.
The Houston Chronicle, in its editorial about the flood, has observed that “Our politicians choose to ignore … calls to action after each unprecedented flood.” Rather than investing in the infrastructure that will prevent flooding or pursuing policies that will mitigate the climate crisis, they, over and over again, focus on policies that allow for the maximization of profit and the targeting of Black and Brown communities. If we truly bless the world we must name this dynamic and understand that it can only be overcome if we are willing to sit in discomfort.
In that same editorial, the Chronicle claims that “Texas needs a culture shift.” First Unitarian Universalist can be part of that culture shift. It will not be easy. I will make mistakes. You will make mistakes. We will make mistakes together. But, I believe, through all the grief and anger, by choosing to bless the world, by holding love at the center, and holding up spiritual practice, we can do our small part. We will not stay in the valley of the shadow of death, but travel the road together into what comes next.
We are a religious community. Together, we struggle with the world’s tragedies. It is through spiritual practice that we discover how to stay grounded and rooted in love instead of fear or anger. Spiritual practice, there is a commonplace misattributed to the Buddhist monk Thich Nhat Hanh. It runs something like, “You should sit in mediation for 20 minutes every day–unless you are too busy. Then you should sit for an hour.”
In these times spiritual practice helps calm the maelstroms within so that we might focus on making our way through the maelstroms without. Some of you have regular spiritual practices: meditation, yoga, centering prayer, journal writing, the reading of poetry:
Shall we not shudder?
Shall we not flee
Into the shelter, the dear thick shelter
Of the familiar
Propitious haze? ~ Gwendolyn Brooks
We gave thanks for the story, for all parts of the story
because it was by the light of those challenges we knew
ourselves–
We asked for forgiveness.
We laid down our burdens next to each other. ~ Joy Harjo
Heart breaks but mends
like good bone. ~ denise levertov
If you have such a practice, I invite you to take some comfort in it today, tomorrow, and in the days to come. It will quiet heart’s cries. It will help you find your center.
If you do not have a practice, it is not hard to develop one. The Latin root of the word spiritual is spiritus. Spiritus means breath or breathing. As we breathe we are each connected to each other–for we share the same planet–and, ultimately, the all of being.
Spiritual practice can be thought of as the practice of breathing, an instinctual habit that binds us together as children of this good green Earth. Many spiritual practices simply remind us to pay attention to this reality and bring it to the fore of our consciousness. If you do not have a practice already then tonight, in the cool of the evening, you might consider taking a mindful walk and observing your breath as you move through the Texas summer. Together let us practice the “Meditation on Breathing” by Sarah Dan Jones:
When I breathe in,
I breathe in peace
When I breathe out,
I breathe out love
Breathe in, breathe out
Breathe in, breathe out
When I breathe in,
I breathe in peace
When I breathe out,
I breathe out love
Breathe in, breathe out
Breathe in, breathe out
Spiritual practice can help us to recall that our theological tradition is centered on love. As the President of our Association, Sofía Betancourt, has reminded us, this is no simple or glib understanding of love. “It is a love,” she writes, “that expects nothing less of us than the rebuilding of this struggling world.” It is a commitment to stay with each other in “connection and care” even as “love and justice” have pushed “us in ways we never expected.” The “need to bear such a love in … the world is heartbreakingly large.”
Those are the words I have to offer you this day. They came from the love that is in my heart and from the ground of being on which we rest. May they be enough, not for always, but for right now. That it might be so, I invite the congregation to say Amen and join me in singing the “Meditation on Breathing.”
