2025 Berry Street Essay: The Reverend Leela Sinha

Before I begin, I want to say a few things:

First of all I want to express my deep gratitude: to the committee, to Janette and Rev Melissa and the whole UUMA staff, to everyone who has kindly and enthusiastically supported me, and to all of you, for being here, in community, for the collective work of continuing to become ourselves.

Apology to non-US listeners 

If you are not from the US, you may find some of what I have to say tonight somewhat less relevant, for which I am sorry.  I know we have a history of failing to be as inclusive as we might be of our international members, and I hope that you will find enough here to support your ministry no matter where you find yourself.

 

Finally, I want to say this: I know this is the Berry St Essay, and that its long history is mostly to stick to theory.  I also know that these times are not like other times and we maybe stick to theory at our peril.  So we’ll have some theory, and some practice, and some story.  Mischief and its power is preserved through story, and we can put some respect there, from here.  And now let us begin.

 

Introduction

Imagine for a moment that you are not surrounded. 

Imagine for a moment that there is nothing clawing at your back,

No teeth, no gravelling, looming shadow, no threatening clouds.

Imagine for a moment that you are surrounded, surrounded, not just one or two deep, but all the way to the end of a benevolent universe, surrounded by people who value health and happiness, community and joy.

Imagine that within us, among us, we are not fighting.

…

Don’t flinch

Don’t tell me it’s too painful to dream

If hope has a cost, if progress has a cost, let this be it.  For once, our suffering can mean something.

 

If there is torture we inflict on ourselves, let it cease.

If there is unneeded misery, let it cease.

Let us create the world we want here, beginning now.

…

We are in a crisis. 

And our job is to write our way out

To sing our way out

To talk our way out our job is

To lead the way out our job is to listen listen listen until we hear the way out our job is to

Get us all out

To get free together 

What our job is not,

 is to pretend that this is smaller or simpler or easier than it is, to downplay or gaslight or ignore, our job is not to lull each other and our people into a false sense of security until the water begins to bubble our job is not 

To acquiesce to go along to flow to go with it our job is not

To get people killed disappeared injured separated trapped

Our job

Is to speak the truth, speak the truth in love and help one another

Seeking will only get us so far at some point we have to say the thing and then we have to do it

But we know something. 

We know that we cannot just say it bald faced sometimes we know that the fear in everyone’s hearts will likely mean that they will stop their ears and refuse to hear that they will ignore the Jeep, the rowboat, and the helicopter and then accuse us of abandoning them when they are drowning on the rooftops we have seen this before

We have seen it in the Bible, with the prophets, with Moses and the red sea, people are people and we are ever thus, this is not new, and we are no better than others, it is on us to reach deep for the guidance and press past the insistent desire to pretend it’s all okay. 

It is on us. That is the mantle we took up, that is the stole we donned on the day of our ordination, in answer to our call, that is what we committed to. We are not at liberty to ignore it. 

We of all people. 

We are not at liberty to ignore it. We were made for this, made over in the fires and waters of formation we were made for this. 

 

What we need is

A transformative mischief. 

PLAY/WHY MISCHIEF

 

We’ve been trying to be good, but maybe we’ve been trying too hard.  Maybe we’re being too earnest.  Maybe we are wanting the good grade in goodness more than we’re wanting the result: a thing that is both normal to want and possible to achieve. But here’s where the mischief comes in: mischief and play are close twins.

Playing is the fastest way to learn. There’s that statistic that says that it takes hundreds of repetitions or months to learn something, unless you learn it while playing, in which case it takes weeks.  Unfortunately we lost the citation–the researcher died with incomplete notes.

But play lights up different parts of our brain. It engages our neuroplasticity in different ways. And that’s where the mischief is. That’s why it’s so important. 

a transformative mischief is a game of imagination, not a game in the competitive sense but in the possibility sense, in the well, why Not sense?

 

We need a game.

We need a way in.

We need a secret door. 

 

SECRET DOORS and SLEDGEHAMMERS

When I was a child, I attended church at our congregation in Stamford, Connecticut. Its a beautiful old stone building. And along the back of the chancel is a curved panel of carved wooden arches. 

But one of those panels is different. One day they showed us, I think it was probably coming of age, that one panel was an actual door, the kind of door the minister could step out of onto the chancel (although in my time there, he never did). The building is old enough that the fellowship hall is behind the chancel and the door faces the street, so the minister always came from the front of the sanctuary anyway. But that door was magic. It captivated me. I don’t remember much about that church anymore, I left it when I was 13, but I remember that, still, I remember feeling an inexplicable draw to the mischief and the mystery of that door. 

 

It was part of my call, probably. That small voice whispering probably. 

 

But it is so emblematic of subtle change.

 

We cannot lie to ourselves or each other about the crisis we are in but neither can or should we assume that the only way to get the message across is a sledgehammer. 

 

I have been, in my life, perhaps too fond of sledgehammers. When the frustration and the fear—and the passion–build high enough it’s hard not to want to do something that will crash through the resistance. 

 

But when I was in massage school I learned something. The fascia in your muscles gets stuck to itself like wadded up Saran wrap. And if you try to unwad it by pulling, it tears. 

But if you lay it flat, press your fingers through it gently like swimming through cornstarch and water, slowly and broadly, it will work itself out. 

If you enter a muscle from a place that is already soft and go along the lines of tension, it will open. Way will open.  Possibility will open.

 

You cannot beat tyranny with a baseball bat and expect it to relent. 

 

That is not how any of the stories go. Not snow treasure, not d day, not the revolutionary war. 

 

But there are stories and there are natural inclinations that offer another path, that we can follow: snow treasure and d day and the revolutionary war;  aikido, and Hamilton. 

 

We have choices.

 

We have a job.

 

And we have ourselves.

 

SMALL IS NIMBLE

 

We, collectively, have one of the best sets of labs for learning how to do things differently.

We are not going to succeed following the ancient rules of engagement.  Row after row of soldiers, shooting in perfect lines.

We don’t have that kind of force, and it’s not who we want to be.

We must find another way.  Sometimes we will fail.  Sometimes we will succeed.  It will go much better when we experiment first on a small scale.

 

But every one of our organizations is small scale, small enough.  Small enough to be nimble. Small enough to be resilient.  Small enough to be clever.  Small enough to take chances.  Even our large churches, the 1200 and 1800 member ones, even the institution of the UUA itself.  Small enough.

 

In Hamilton, they sing, “Take the bullets out of your guns. The bullets out your guns.  We move under cover and we move as one… We cannot let a stray gunshot give us away” (Hamilton, The World Turned Upside Down) .  In that battle they took the bullets out of their guns, affixed their bayonets, and approached at night.  It was too risky to have the bullets; they didn’t have the firepower to win that way; that wasn’t how they were doing things.

 

Instead, nighttime approach.  Fixed bayonets.  No shooting.  We have to choose terms on which we can prevail as us.

 

We get to choose our terms.  We get to choose the terms.

…

Part of our gift as ministers, as leaders, part of our gift as religious communities, part of our gift is to live into that which is possible and not that which we are told by the forces of empire that we must accept. The forces of empire do not serve the people, and it has ever been thus.

 

We do not serve the empire, and it should have ever been thus.  Since it cannot change in the past, the second best time to begin is now.

Even in worlds before, worlds and times before times, institutions of faith have had the possibility, the opportunity to create something different.  

In Saving Paradise, we we hear from our colleagues, Rita Nakashima Brock and Rebecca Parker, even the early Christian church was not a force of empire.

They gathered to create community; to have something different. To take care of each other. Faith as resistance.  Faith as care.  

 

Other new faiths, or branches of faiths, were also created to make alternatives.  New religion is itself sometimes a transformative mischief.

Even as faiths have been bent and twisted to serve the powers around them they have also offered something else.  For every faction that bent the knee there was a faction that kept its honor.

Despite the horrors, we also come from a long tradition of offering an alternative to the vision of the empire, not just the imagined future of the empire, but the enlivened present. It doesn’t have to be this way, we say; it can be different, and it can be different now.

 

***

DIFFERENT NOW (holy now?)

 

Claudia Steinbaum gets that.  She’s doing it.  Now.

She has 83% approval rating five months into her presidency in Mexico.

Graffiti everywhere shouting joy about her.

She serves her people, and they are delighted.

The country she serves is aligned behind that service, to the people, and it is glorious.  

This is a leadership we can learn from.

 

And there are others.

Like Hamilton.  Like aikido.

Like Robin Hood.

 

ROBIN HOOD

 

I fell in love with Robin Hood when I was really young. One of my earliest memories is being in the haunted house in the children’s chapel at the Westport Church in a borrowed Robin Hood costume when I was five years old. I loved this costume. It was one of the few times that I had a costume that was actually what I imagined it should be, but it was also one of the first times I felt like I was who I wanted to be—at least for a minute, I was IN my aspirational form. But somewhere in there, in the dark of the haunted house, my special Robin Hood hat got lost. And I was inconsolable. I came out and I sobbed and I sobbed and I sobbed. And finally they had to pause the haunted house, turn on the lights, find the hat and bring it out to me. 

 

When I was seven, I read Howard Pyle’s Merry Adventures of Robin Hood, which  to me, is the Definitive Collection. It was there that I found the stories that showed me why I should like him, why I should admire him, why he was who I wanted to be when I grew up. 

 

He’s still that important.  He’s still who I want to be when I grow up.

 

There’s a lot to work with.

 

Robin Hood is kind of like Jesus. He has this mythos, this legend that surrounds him. 

We don’t 100% know that he existed, but we’re pretty sure that there was somebody with sort of that name who may or may not have been good, but who was definitely a robber sometime in the 1300s maybe a little earlier.

We know that the gest of Robin Hood is from the 1300s and we know that there are many, many, many, many, many stories about him after that, for so long that we know that it is impossible that all of them are about the same person, but the body of stories around Robin Hood has become a kind of mythological, ethical text that we can take for some advice.

As with Jesus, at some point it only sort of matters whether it really happened.

What matters is that people preserved these stories, 

repeated these stories. 

were inspired by these stories. 

What matters is that they changed how they thought and how they acted because of these stories.

Like the stories about Jesus, there are some stories that show up again and again and again, some stories that are somewhat verifiable by tracking the other characters in those stories, some characters who are very old, some characters who are more recent, all characters straddling the line between fiction and some ancient truth. 

 

As far as we know this myth is about a man, a bunch of men, who gathered in a forest—at first as outlaws banding together to take care of each other, to live in community, and then to do crimes–but not just any crimes, at first, survival crimes—killing deer so they could eat; stealing gold so they could survive.  And then mostly crimes to right wrongs done by the evil and the exploitative who had driven them to the woods in the first place.

By the time the stories start to coalesce and take the form that we know today. Robin is under the protection of King Richard The Lionhearted, who is away fighting in the Crusades. (That has its own ethical issues, but they are largely abstracted in his absence.) Richard’s brother John, has been left in charge, and here’s where we start to see the moral shape of the story.

 Prince John is selfish.

Prince John wants to enrich himself. 

Prince John doesn’t care about the people that he is charged with caring for. 

 

No version of the story draws this picture more clearly than the classic Disney film, the one with the fox for Robin.  I have never seen a lion more craven than John in that movie.

 

Being a noble has always meant that you are supposed to be taking care of the people who are under you. You were supposed to be making sure that you provided for their needs. You were supposed to be making sure that if they were supporting you, that you were using the proceeds to support them. That’s not always how it worked out, but that’s how it was supposed to work.  We knew what a good noble or king was, even when it wasn’t happening.

And Prince John did not do any of that. The implication is that King Richard did, although we almost never see King Richard in the actual stories, because he’s out of town.

There’s no one who can go over the king. The king is where everything stops. 

So Robin Hood can’t–enraged though he might be by the corruption that he sees in Prince John–he can’t directly fight back. There’s no raising an army to overthrow the King’s representative. Not in that moment.  Not in that kingdom.

So what does he do instead? 

What can you do instead when you know that direct confrontation will have little or no impact on the outcome, what can you do instead when you know you don’t have the people or the weapons or the social or political power to straight up replace one leader with another, and the king who should be a king is gone.

He’s out of town, and this is before cell phones.

And anyway, what are you going to do? Write him a letter that says, Dear King Richard, please come back. Your brother is being a jerk?

Now, Robin Hood does have the advantage of knowing that King Richard will come back eventually (if he doesn’t get killed), but he also has the disadvantage of having no idea when that will be. 

Meanwhile, he has to make things better, in the moment, because people are suffering and starving and being executed and dying in that moment, not later.  Not in the future.  The future matters but it doesn’t matter as much as the now, because without something changing there will be no appreciable future to worry about.  So he has to make things better, starting with himself, a bounty on his head because he shot a deer in the king’s forest and the foresters are petty bureaucrats who are drunk on small power.

He has to make things better without getting himself killed, because if he gets himself killed, he’s no longer able to do anything. 

So what skills does he have?  What are his tools?  What is the locus of his power? People talk a lot about Robin Hood’s prowess with the bow and arrow. He was an incredibly good shot. 

But his true gift was his craftiness, his creativity, his wiliness, his mischievousness—his ability to come in under the wire and change things before anyone noticed, and then slip out again—like a fox. 

 

These are the stories that people living under a tyrant told about their hero, what their hero looked like, what they needed from him, how he would lead, what kind of person he would be, and how cleverly he used the systems he was in for his own ends.

 

He would go to the tournament that was supposed to attract him. He would go. He would go in disguise, but he would go…and then he would leave behind some kind of calling card, in the spirit of, I want them to know it was me.

 

There’s even one story about how he got himself employed in the castle, and he worked there for some time, having fun, redistributing resources, making connections, learning the layout of the castle. And then he quit before he could be found out…but he goes back to shoot an arrow with a scroll on it through the window while dinner is being served to say, oh yeah, it was me.  This is not an act of hubris—ok maybe it’s a little hubris—but it’s an act of destabilization.  I know you.  I know your household.  I lived under your roof and you didn’t even notice.  Look sharp.  I’m only not dangerous because I don’t want to be.

 

Also, he was a different kind of highway robber. He would stop a party of wealthy people on the highway like every other robber, but he wouldn’t attack them.  He’d bring them back to the forest and feast with them, get them laughing and drinking good beer and eating venison—the king’s deer, mind you.  He’d do the thing they didn’t expect; he’d engage them in the pleasures of the outlaw life.  He’d change the narrative.  He didn’t want to torture them.  He didn’t want to harm them, as such.  He just wanted to make his point.

 

And THEN he’d relieve them of all the gold they didn’t need and tell them that he’d be sure and use it for good causes.

Not being the monster people are expecting—that’s part of the mischief.

 

Notably, some of his targets were wealthy churchmen.  Also notably, a lot of these stories predate the Church of England, but not all of them.  

 

Robin Hood didn’t like greed, and he didn’t like excessive wealth, and he didn’t like hypocrisy or abuse of power.  He also didn’t like poverty.  

So he did something about it, from where he was with the tools he had.

And here we see what they believed a good leader is.

 

According to these stories, a good leader fills the needs of the people–He provided each of the merry men with cloth of lincoln green and a stipend for his needs and desires.  And for people in need, he provided charity and support.

A good leader pays attention. A good leader listens. And a good leader is partly evidenced by the fact that he had hundreds of men gathered around him. 

Some versions of the stories talk about how they had perfected an actual whisper network. The men would all climb up into the crowns of the trees and whisper a message between them so they could get a message to the edge of the forest faster than the fastest runner could fly. They practiced listening and memorizing and repeating the message so they did not have the telephone game problem, because as followers, it was important that they get the message right.

They followed well because they knew it was in their interest to do so, and because they were inspired.

 

What I’ve loved about Robin Hood since the beginning, is that he did his best to do very little harm. He tried really hard not to hurt people physically or socially or monetarily, and he was always driven by justice.

 

The real Robin Hood may have just been a common thief—we don’t know–but the stories, the stories us what people value. 

The stories tell us what people wanted to hold and believe: that there was someone who was smart and powerful and nimble and clever and kind and funny and compassionate, someone who could stand up against the forces of empire, when the power structures became destructive and evil; someone who could lead.  Someone they wanted to follow.

They wanted to believe.

Robin’s band grows because he is public about what he does and what he believes, and because his works are known, and where people encounter him, they want to stay with him. They want what he’s offering in a world of injustice and uncertainty. 

They want who he is. They want to be part of it.

That’s how things grow.

 

and he’s not the only one.

 

Robin the mythic character is part of a long line of mythic characters, mischief makers, people who were more clever than the power holders around them, and who knew which levers to push, which levers to pull, which buttons were sewed on where. They knew how to hook into the existing power structures and use them rather than winning by bald faced opposition and brute force.

**

That’s not to say that a little loud opposition doesn’t have its place.  It absolutely does.  And raising a wall of objection still does have an impact.  Often, unfortunately, it means that the force is just redirected elsewhere, perhaps quietly, perhaps harder to catch.

 

Which is why it is also good to find the people who know how to direct the redirection, how to change the path without anyone noticing until it’s late.

 

Who do you know, like that?

 

FOLLOWERSHIP

 

Who would you follow?  Not just ok-fine-follow but HOLY CRAP AM I EXCITED TO FOLLOW follow?

 

What does followership mean to you?

 

To what or whom are you willing to surrender?

 

If that makes you itchy, I’m pretty sure that makes you normal in our UU ranks.  But it is important.  Especially now.

How much energy are we wasting on “just for the sake of argument”?

especially when it comes to movement forward?

Would you follow someone imperfect?

 

How would you do that?

 

How would you know if this is a time to speak up or if it’s not that important?  

 

How would you know if these are material imperfections or just your pet peeves?

 

Because our Robin Hoods, our mischief makers, are never going to be perfect…but they are already among us.

 

INTENSIVES

 

So…Who are the mischief makers among us? 

 

The mischief makers are usually the intensives. 

 

Who are the intensives? This is from a model I developed–some of you have heard my workshop about it.  The intensives are the intense people, the too much people, the people who challenge your world views, who hold you to higher standards than you’re willing to meet, the intensives are probably the people who run your social justice program. 

 

The intensives are the people you might have said care too much–or are too much.

 

Those are your inciters to mischief. 

 

They’re not always right, but they’re not always wrong.

And they’re already here, they’re already among us. You may be one of them. (We are already here. We are already among us.)

 

Mischief has two parts. It has ideation and it has implementation. 

 

And so often it gets hung up, not at the ideation portion, but at the implementation portion, 

We do a pretty good job of sitting around the table and fantasizing, sometimes.  But then we stop.  We lose momentum.  We lack follow-through.  We worry about the propriety of what we are considering.

 

But we have in-house experts in mischief.  Perhaps we should listen to them.

 

We have people among us who already know what it might look like to incite mischief, who can imagine the process of inciting mischief, who can actually implement the plan to make mischief–without even thinking about it.

 

 Those people are sometimes our professionals and sometimes our members and sometimes our outcasts

 

(Don’t look at me like that. You know, we have outcasts. I’ve been a Unitarian Universalist all my life, and I have never been in a Unitarian Universalist space where there were not outcasts. They’re the ones we question. They’re the ones that we are skeptical of. They’re the ones that people get warned off of in coffee hour conversations, or in the parking lot. They’re the ones that make people uncomfortable. They’re the ones that challenge the status quo. They’re the ones often who stand alone at coffee hour looking around at all the little clusters of people having conversations. They’re the ones where, if they show up in your chalice group, everyone sort of sighs uncomfortably and wonders if the facilitator can handle them, because often they’re also the ones who need something more or something different, who envision something more or something different. They’re people who don’t fall into the usual patterns, they break the rules, but not the rules that we all agree should be broken, but the other rules, the ones that we like to pretend are immutable reality,

and sometimes ritual is important, and sometimes ritual is a trap. These are the people that call us again and again to ask which one is happening now.

 

They are also sometimes the people we call on in a crisis when everything goes to hell. These are the people who spend their lives knowing what to do in a crisis, often because they’ve spent their lives in crisis. And they have the bruises to show for it. 

 

These are the people that know how to think so far outside the box that the box is no longer visible, that boxes are no longer a construct that the universe does not hold the concept of box. Sometimes that’s inconvenient, sometimes it’s useful. )

 

They are the ones you automatically plan to reject as soon as they open their mouths.  

 

Which is often how we miss the opportunity for mischief.  When you decide someone has nothing good to offer that would outweigh the trouble they bring, make sure it is true.  Make sure it is for the right reasons.  Make sure that trouble isn’t good trouble, knocking at the door, waiting to be recognized as a path forward.

 

Examine it, but put it to the ethos and vision test, not the convenience and comfort test.

We mischief makers are here, together with you, some of whom are also mischief makers.

 

We stand on the threshold. We live in the liminal space.

 

We see and do and say things that other people are not able or willing to say, see and do and be.

 

We are your mischief makers. We are already here. We need to be invited in,

IMPLEMENTATION #1

 

and not just for the moment of the speaking the idea. It is an extraordinary gift to be here in front of you right now, it is also extraordinarily rare, less rare than it used to be. 

 

And I want to know what happens with these words when you go home. We know what we should be doing. We know how we should be doing, but for some reason, we are struggling to do it, struggling over and over, struggling with each other, struggling in our places and our time. 

 

We are just struggling. It is hard, it is hard to do even when  we know what to do. And so I can tell you what I think we should do all day long, which is kind of the point of this essay series, to figure out what we should do. To move back a little bit, get some perspective, learn some things, figure out how we could do what we do better? So I can tell you what I think, and you can think it with me or not, but the real question is, how will we actually do this?

 

IMPLEMENTATION #2

We cannot let ourselves be controlled by our fear of doing it differently from the way we’ve always done it. 

Imagine going back to your organization or your congregation or your collegial group or your board, and sitting down and saying, what would we have to do? 

What would have to change? 

How would we have to be to be different right now…for that world that we want, right now?

 

And knowing that that is discomfitng, knowing that that is upsetting in a world full of upsetting. How can we care and carry care for and carry one another through that?

How can we make it exciting and steadying and survivable? Because we are keeping ourselves; the most important thing that needs to stay the same right now is our values–what we believe in. In order to keep those the same, the way we behave has to change. Everything else has to become different,

Because this is a moment where the institutions we’ve relied on to back us up, are failing to hold the values at the center—not that they were ever perfect.  

It is up to us, collectively—not just UUs, but all of us who hold those values dear–to chart the course, and it’s up to us to create the models. It’s up to us to imagine the possibilities and see if we can get ourselves out of this mess.

 

And that might take some loud.  It might take some front and center.  But mostly it’s probably subtle, and not infrequently, an inside job.

 

**

ENEMY WITHIN #1

Unfortunately, we tend to trip on our own feet.  We are not peaceful among ourselves, and among us the unrest we face is often coming from inside the house.   And then we lose our integrity.  And then we lose our credibility.  And then where are we?

…

But why?  What is going on?

I had lots of choices about how to present this essay, and I chose to do it this way, old school, no powerpoint.

But I did want you to have the one handout that you’re getting now.

 

A few months ago, there was a declassified document going around the internet. It became available some years ago, but someone found it, and it became popular for a second. I recognized it immediately—I’ve been noodling on it for a while.

It’s a field guide to sabotage written by the OSS, which is the predecessor of the CIA, and the copy that’s going around is from World War Two. It uses language like quislings, and mostly it talks about how to get sugar into gas tanks and things like that. But at the very end, page 28, to 32 of the original document, there’s a little bit about how to sabotage an organization. I thought it was interesting. I’ll read you a short excerpt here but you have much more of it in your hands. 

(11) General Interference with Organizations and “

Production

(a) Organizations and Conferences

(1) Insist on doing everything through

“channels.” Never permit short-cuts to be taken

in order to expedite decisions.

 

(3) When possible, refer all matters to ‘

committees, for “further study and consideration.”

Attempt to make the committees as large

as possible – never less than five.

(4) Bring up irrelevant issues as frequently

as possible.

(5) Haggle over precise wordings of communications,

minutes, resolutions.

(6) Refer back to matters decided upon at

the last meeting and attempt to re-open the

question of the advisability of that decision,

(7) Advocate “caution.” Be reasonable”

and urge your fellow-conferees to be “reasonable”

and avoid haste which might result in

embarrassments or difficulties later on.

(8) Be worried about the propriety of any

decision – raise the question of whether such

action as is contemplated is within the jurisdiction

of the group or whether it might conflict

with the policy of some higher echelon.

 

(b) Managers and Supervisors –

(1) Demand written orders.

…Ask endless

questions or engage in long correspondence

about such orders. Quibble over them when you

can.

…

‘(11) Hold conferences when there is more,

critical work to be done.

…

 

Mischief is a sword that swings both ways.  As much as we can take it up, it can also be used against us.  

 

Remember, it comes in sideways.

It looks like the opposite of what it is.

It seems harmless.

 

As Douglas Adams reminds us, mostly harmless is harmless

 

…until it’s not.

 

…

AIKIDO

I have not studied aikido, but when I was in college, aikido was very popular among my friends, and the one thing I picked up is this principle of redirection.

If someone is coming right at you, in a lot of martial arts you’d block—stop the force, brace for impact, maybe try to respond in kind.

But you have other choices.

You can take the energy they are already expending and shift its focus, just move it over, maybe even add to it, but get out of the way.  

 

You pull them a little bit to one side or the other, you change a little bit,, use the momentum they already have, use the systems of power that are already in place, change what’s happening the tiniest bit to get where you want to go.

 

You cannot beat empire with a baseball bat and expect it to relent.  

But if you pull right, it might fall on its face.

…

I’m sure you’re wondering how the entire left ended up running its business according to this sabotage manual.  Me too!  How does something so destructive get so embedded?  What pulled us sideways?

 

(I have some guesses.)

 

But that’s almost not important. 

 

What’s important now is that this sabotage manual is how someone or something—internal or external–is pulling us just a little to the side of where we’re trying to go.

And we’ve learned it so well, they don’t even have to be in the room for us to be doing it. We have embedded this in our systems. We have embedded this in our habits. Some of us are slowly wiggling free, but it is slow,

and when we combine this with the white supremacy that we know is in play in all of our institutions that we constantly have to guard against.

And we think about the ideals of behavior, tone policing and culturally based critiques that keep people out of leadership.

 

It becomes fairly evident that there’s more here. It becomes fairly evident. that we could stop it. 

We are doing this to ourselves now, but we do not have to carry on doing this to ourselves—this is not a tradition we have to keep—

BUT in order to stop doing this to ourselves, we have to consider the possibility that at some point we weren’t doing it, and something happened and now we are.

Wouldn’t it be amazing if we stopped again?

What if we could stop wasting our energy on so much resistance because our forward momentum was so strong; because where we are going is so powerful?  

(That’s what we are up against, a forward momentum that is trying to bowl us over.)

What if our momentum became the new redirect?

 

Of course that begs the question, 

…

 

Where are we going?

 

OUR JOB #2 (IMAGINE is here too)

Who must form vision if not us? 

It is not arrogance to say that that is our literal job. It is our .job. and our call to imagine beyond what anyone else can reach. Our job is to be wide and deep and stretchy and impossible before breakfast.

Especially.

.especially now we must imagine. We are secretly ranked with the artists, why do you think sacred spaces have always been filled with such beauty and such feeling? We, too, make art– sacred, exquisite art, the imagination of humanity has been vested with us–not only us–but enough with us.

The painters and the poets and the musicians and us, we are all the same–we are all that magical and sacred, ineffable thing, and this is our job to reify what we can dream.

It is our job to reify what we can dream .

Not alone, but together, not alone but with all the people, bring all the people in, sanctuary is where we can dream in safety. Sanctuary is what makes imagination possible,

–no wonder they want to violate it. Because they long so hard it hurts and it cracks and the blood of a thousand fears and furies pours out along the fissure, they want to feel Okay and they are sure beauty is not the way to that.

They are right. Beauty will lead to ecstasy and passion and unpredictability. It will lead to discomfort.

We must practice discomfort.

If any among us feel entitled to comfort, let them undo that now. For we can luxuriate in it when it comes but we cannot grow complacent. Always we must be ready to don our traveling shoes and carry on carry forward, carry into the unease of transformation for it is there that life is.

For once our suffering can mean something.

Of course, it’s not all suffering.  Some of the best moments are a surprise.  And closer to home than we think.

**

TRICKSTER STORIES

Robin hood is part of a long line.  And that line, as it turns out, is partly mine.

When I was born, my father won the discussion about my name, choosing it and then transliterating my name from Hindi’s Devanagari script to Roman characters, L–ee–l–ah.  What does it mean, my mother asked?  Playful, he told her.

As it turns out–as it often turned out–that was a convenient half-truth.  When I was in India when I was 24 on my big what-the-hell-is-my-heritage-about-anyway trip (it was bound to happen) three of my several-times-removed-cousins, giggling, asked me if I knew what my name meant.  I answered but their giggles had me suspicious.  “…playful?” I said, unsure, suddenly. 

They giggled again. More whispering behind hands, as if I could possibly have lip-read their amused Hindi. 

Of course now, I was curious.  A little defensive.  Uncertain.  And a little irate, if truth must be told.  My father had a long habit of not quite giving me all the information I needed for things, which led me to learn to look it up for myself but also was exhausting.    

“Wait, what does it mean then?”

Entirely much more giggling.  Finally I got it out of them, in broken Hindi and English with some extravagant gesturing to bridge the gap.  It more or less came down to “the erotic play of the gods that created the universe”…

oh, just that then.

oh and also?  Krishna’s playful mischief.

…whatnow?

I didn’t grow up steeped in Hinduism, although it rubbed off on me in a thousand tiny ways, easter lily pollen turning everything slightly orange while looking entirely innocent.  So I had never heard of Krishna Leela before that moment.

Krishna Leela is the mischief that the god Krishna plays, often to teach humans a lesson.  Apparently my father expected/hoped/intuited that I would become the embodiment of that thing (and probably afterward regretted that he was right).  

When Krishna was a child, even, his mother tied the yogurt up at the ceiling, out of the way, so he couldn’t eat it all.  

 

Krishna got a group of friends together and they built a human/god pyramid to get it down.

He is like that his whole life.

Our family’s goddess has always been and continues to be Kali, and by adjacency, Shiva.  My own altar has Ardhanarishvara on it also, because of course it does, but even they are from the Shiv/Shakti branch of the pantheon.  Krishna is one of the faces of Vishnu, the preserver, another branch on the Hindu family tree.  But he and Radha, his consort, have always held a special place in my heart.

And apparently there’s a reason for that.

So Krishna, who loves to play the field with gopis and tends to represent generosity and abundance and possibility in the stories, but is also the one who delivers the Bhagavad Gita as Arjuna’s charioteer in the Mahabharata (he has his serious side), has this…playful, transformative mischief.  His tricks become parables in the tradition of tricksters everywhere, and they are collectively called Leela.  Krishna Leela.

And my first thought when I finally found all this out?

Well, that tracks.

My father, the trickster.  My namesake, the tricks themselves.  Me, the trickster.

And there are so many more. Parvati looked mostly harmless…until she became Kali.

In the human world,

There’s a story of an Indian hero, I saw this from shiv ramdas on Bluesky, about how this guy was once being hunted on a train so he disguised himself as the conductor and went car to car with the searchers, helping them look.

In the book snow treasure, there is a true story of children who secured the gold bullion of Norway for future and for allies by sledding it from its storage caves to the coast, and hiding it under snowmen.

Everyone has power somewhere.  Their power was in being children.

 

Where is your power?  If the trick is that you are not who you have thought yourself to be, who you have been told you are, who you have been handed by empire, who are you and what can you do?

 

Who will you help?

Who will you harm?

 

ENEMY WITHIN #2

 

The beauty of a well made mischief is that it is as harmless as possible to the innocent, and even to the guilty.

But we must retain our own integrity.

 

When the opponent becomes the enemy, how then shall we respond?

When do we have to attack the people on the highway?  Or do we?

How shall we know our enemy?

What within us might also be the enemy?

 

We must remove ourselves from cruelty and vengeance, and instead imagine another justice.

One in which the officers search the whole train car with us, while we are disguised, and come up empty, and go home.

If you have not trained yourself in these thinkings, you could do worse than to begin with Birbal and Robin Hood and Krishna and Anansi the spider.

These are not new forms of thought, not new ideas.

Beloveds, we can turn the drawing upside down and copy it that way. Draw what is there, not what you wish for, so you can then build your wishes and not history’s blueprints.

 

Where do you think you know you don’t belong? Maybe you do belong there.

Where do you think you cannot succeed? Maybe you can.

Maybe we can.

What do you think is justice?  What could it be instead?

In what place, in what ways do we need to give up our shoulders or our spine to slip through the gap, to be soft enough to not be hurt by temporary reformation of  what appears to be vital and inherent shape or color?

Could we walk upright anyway, even as an octopus?

Is walking bipedally that important? What else is important?

In what ways have we been lied to about being upright, beloveds? In what moments are we the ones lying to ourselves?

In what ways could our lies reveal truths about us, beloveds?

How else could we be, and if we were to be like that what would be possible? What would be different?

 

I offered you page 28 of a federal sabotage manual.

If any of these remind you of policies or procedures you may have seen or traditions you may have seen somewhere I invite you to consider their location in a .sabotage. manual.

 

And if you try to change them watch the very things rise up. Watch us Page 28 sabotage ourselves.

 

 What hydras do we have in our midst?

When Kali emerged from Parvathi’s protective fury it was to defeat a demon that grew more heads when one was cut off and more selves from each drop of blood that hit the ground. Kali drank the blood. The demon was a riddle. Her tongue was a carpet, a solution, rage answering horror.

How have we lied to ourselves out of habit or conditioning with the best of intentions beloveds?

How shall we free ourselves from these shackles together?

How shall we free ourselves from fruitless arguments and petty disagreements and ideas of impossibility? There is a world burning and the demon will make quick work of our dear ones.

If we cannot agree on something, what is the most playful way to move together away from world destruction?

Maybe someone is moving already—can we  follow them? 

Can following be the unexpected move?

In the book apartment therapy the author recommends that you re conceive your space by sitting somewhere you never sit to understand the room differently.

 

BE UNEXPECTED

Where else can we sit? What does the sanctuary look like from outside the locked door? Could it also be a fortress? A foyer? A stargate, or at least a gateway?

Everything can be something else.

Staff structures.

Classrooms.

Ways of Learning. Knowing. Being.

 

“Every tool is a weapon if you hold it right.” (Ani DiFranco)

But Any weapon can also be a tool.

**

Every weapon—even religion.

We, of all faiths, know how to be unexpectedly religious.  And we know how terribly religion can be weaponized.

 

But what if we didn’t do that?  What if…unexpectedly, 

…mischeviously religious instead?

 

We could be teaching people how to be Unitarian Universalists.

Our lore is that we figure it out for ourselves, each of us.

.but what if that is abandonment of hungry beginners who do not know how to fish?

We teach our kids.

Learning is not debasement.

What if we taught our adults?

How shall we be good unitarian universalists?  And How can we even discuss it if we haven’t been practicing?

 

How are we and our people practicing?

Let’s turn it all upside down.

because It’s not working.

But the faith is strong.

And So many people need us. The world needs us. 

 

Where are we?

We have .got. To stop whimpering in the corner collectively. We have good work happening in some quarters. But the rest of us are lost.

 

Fulghum has an essay about hide and seek and how you shouldn’t hide too well, you gotta make it possible to get found.

 

BE UU

We gotta get ourselves found. We are lost from our own faith, we have stopped practicing together, loudly enough to rock the boat. We need to be in sync in a way we haven’t been for a generation, since before my time.

We like mischief and we are proud of it.

I learned this stuff in church!

 

THIS IS US (HISTORY AND LEGACY)

 

If we are to contribute to that change; if we are to seed that movement of our world, who are you going to start with?

 transformative mischief is powerful and nimble and creative and playful and everywhere. Which bit is your bit? The time is now.

 

We are neither alone nor inventing this anew, nor starting a movement among ourselves.

 

We have a legacy of our own, of mischief, of rebellion, of choosing outside and outside and outside because outside the norm is so often where our values lie.  We have our honor, as John Proctor says.  Sometimes we recognize the heroes before it’s too late; mostly we recognize them generations later.  

 

We do not need to look elsewhere and also we come from such a long line of elsewhere.

 

We come from history.  We bend the arc of history.  We make history.

 

How shall we be Unitarian Universalist now?  Do we teach it enough?  I would suggest not.  Do we live it enough?  

 

In this moment that remains to be seen.

 

I believe in us, I believe every one of us wants to be convictable of our faith because we are convicted of our faith.  We are convinced to the bones—or at least enough–that this is the right path for us and it is leading us to the best choices if only we can listen hard enough.  Because I also believe in free will—that we make our own decisions informed by…or despite…the wisdom we have available to us.

 

We are not flawless, and I am not demanding that.  We are capable of more and better, and I DO expect that.

 

LEARNED IT IN CHURCH

 

COMMUNITY

To do that, We need community so we can practice together, practice uphill, practice pushing the stone while not allowing the stone to become the thing that unites us.  

 

But we do need communities of practice—communities where we do the thing, and talk about the thing we did, and then try to do it better.  Repeat.  Repeat.  Repeat.

 

Oh wait, that’s ritual.  Meaning-infused repetition meant to transform ourselves and the world.  Ritual and meaning and spirit and community.  That’s religion.  Oh look, that’s religion.  We .are. a religion.

 

What do we do, but also how do we do it?  That’s the part we can teach.  How to be in community.  How to be in healthy conflict.  How to call people in.  How to set and hold boundaries.  How to run a meeting.  How to make space for all the feelings.  How to stand down.  How to listen without advising or interrupting.  How to do what is needed.  How to give what is asked for.  How to communicate clearly.  How to be together.  How to pray.

 

How not to assume people know things.  How to define belonging without assuming people know things when they first arrive.  How to require people to learn things. How to help people know things.  How to welcome people in.  

 

I learned all that in church—in youth group, in Sunday School– what I know I learned mostly before I turned 18, mostly in our congregations, and in local, district, and national youth programming.  We learned by practice. We learned by doing.  We learned by existing cultural norms set by the youth before us.

 

(TRADITION)

 

We can choose to learn; we can choose to support our youth; we can choose not to dismantle the carefully built organizations that support our youth.  They are the carriers of our faith and we keep destroying their temples, and with them losing generations of leaders.  We can learn from them.  We need to learn from them.

 

When we know these things, when we do not fall prey to page 28, we can do almost anything, and we can do it in love.

We have done this before.  I learned this in church about rebels and heretics, about sex, a, y, s (About your Sexuality) itself was a brilliant piece of transformative mischief.

BE UU, BE UNEXPECTED

We said, What is the most radical thing a church can do about sexuality education? We could talk about sex in church, and we could talk about it openly, and we could talk about it broadly. We could talk about it non judgmentally. We could be the opposite of what everybody thinks church is about sex, because that’s what’s in alignment with our true values. We could do something completely different, and we did, and that program specifically changed my life in so many ways.

 

It changed my life around sexuality. It changed my life around leadership, and it changed how I think about learning and education and growth.

 

I committed myself to leadership in the Unitarian Universalist Association because of the existence of AYS when I was 13,

everything since that is downhill, because in that program, we were proving that we were somebody that I could be proud of, that we did things that were complicated and hard in the world because they backed up what we believed in,

 

…and it certainly didn’t hurt that it went against everyone else’s expectations of what church was. Because even at that age, I had run into a lot of discomfort among my peers with the fact that I was a church kid. 

How could we do the opposite of what everyone expects a church to do when churches are being the worst version of themselves? How can we do the opposite of what we expect ourselves to do when we are being the worst version of ourselves? 

How can we hold onto the dream long enough to give it roots and wings?

How can we be what would make you proud? Proud, fiercely proud, Want-to-shout-it-to-the-sky proud. 

What would make you proud to be part of this community?

 

 We can ask those same questions about everything, whatever we are doing, however we are doing it, let’s ask those questions.

Not to tear ourselves apart, but to bring us all together.

Mischief can happen quietly, solo. That’s not a bad thing.  Need-to-know-basis is security, and often effectiveness, in action. But the spirit and binding ideals and inspiration happen together.

But unfortunately we often as those ask that question of leaders and then…we watch as their ideas get watered down by committees and through process and fear. 

What if we didn’t do that to each other? How small does the group need to be before you can just do it?

 How will we go home and hand pick the five or ten people in our organizations that we think can make a difference right now. For starters, just start small and individual.

 

What would it be like if we actually moved this? 

 

What would it be like if we actually change that? 

 

What would it be like to drive this forward? 

 

How would that go? 

 

And move with them, traverse with them in the dreaming from where you are across the gap to the vision. Build the whole picture out. Tell the story.  Use the imagining that we have to show who the world could be, if this were different.

 

How?  The answer is with us already.  If we do it together, it works.

together—with other people.  

Don’t do it alone.

 

DO IT NOW

We know that when multiple people go to a conference together, they tend to implement whatever they learn better, because when they go back, they’re not alone. They’re not trying to explain the magic that happened by themselves. 

 

Right now, I’m going to invite you to take out your phones, if they’re not already out or your notepads, wherever you’re taking notes, and  write down the names five people that you’re going to invite into your mischief.

 

…it can be a small mischief.  If starting it is not your gift, maybe it’s someone who can start it with you.

 

The same way toxicity grows, so too can joy and needed transformation.  Use the tool in unexpected ways.  Come in the side door.  Leave before people notice.

 

Exchange contact information with two people sitting next to you.  Get in touch after GA.  Remember and imagine together.

 

IMAGINE

 

We have the opportunity to imagine and live into something richer, fuller. happier, stronger;

The most powerful thing we can do is imagine.

Imagine something better.  

Imagine something bolder.  

Imagine something effective and full of care and shot through with our values.  

 

What we can imagine, we can create. (probably)

And every congregation, every community, every small group a sandbox.

 

 Imagine using our congregations and our institutions and our organizations to create the thing in microcosm: tiny instances, everywhere of strong, caring community, of fully funded systems, reconceived methods for growth and teaching and learning and community building.  Bigger umbrellas.  Wider-open doors.  More mutable, more interdependent, more strong, more safe, more US.

 

What would it look like? 

What would it feel like?

I know we always say that people are slow and institutions need to move slowly, and certainly there are risks to moving fast.

Certainly people are scared. But are we not scared now? If we aren’t we should be. 

Should we not let our fear of becoming something that is anathema to ourselves be stronger than our fear of changing our ways?

how can we make sure that who we are–our values, our core–doesn’t change, even if that means everything else has to be different?

 

What mischief will you start so that we can live into a world that is different, so that we can live into the world that we still dream about despite everything, so that we can live into the world where nobody has to worry about fleeing a country for their life, where nobody has to fear that they won’t have any place to go.

 

My internship supervisor Brian Kopke of blessed memory, used to get this little twinkle in his eye, and a little crooked grin…  And then he’d say, “let’s run an experiment”. 

Let’s imagine, he meant, in realtime, with real players.  Let’s try something.  Let’s play.

And he led that church for over 20 years.

Ministries, like stories, like parables, endure for all kinds of reasons, but the good ones endure because there is something bold and kind and true about them, not because they are perfect.  And the truest thing is that you’re either changing or you’re dead—just ask anyone in perimenopause, the changes never truly stopped. 

They don’t stop. Life is lived in motion.

Imagination is motion.

**Let’s run an experiment.

This is where a good mischief begins.  

Response to Berry Street Essay

Response by The Reverend Doctor Adam Robersmith