Berry Street Essay
A Moderated Conversation
Rev. Theresa Ines Soto, Moderator
June 24, 2020

Danielle Di Bona

The Reverend Danielle Di Bona (she/her/hers) is a bi-racial Wampanog-Italian woman whose passions include her Unitarian Universalist faith, loving that faith into its most beloved self, her community of people of color (DRUUMM,) and her three dogs.

Currently she aspires to become really and totally retired, but until then Danielle serves as the Palliative Care chaplain at South Shore Hospital in Weymouth MA. She also serves as one of the chaplains to the UUA BOT, DRUUMM and Finding Our Way Home, as well as a board member of the Church of the Larger Fellowship.

These visionaries, Joseph, Kimberly, Theresa

Joseph Santos-Lyons

Joseph Santos-Lyons (he/him pronouns) is a biracial Asian-American (Chinese and Czech) organizer and minister based in Antipolo City, The Philippines. He grew up UU in the Pacific Northwest and found his first calling in youth and young adult ministry. After ordination, Joseph returned to Oregon and served the Asian and Pacific Islander community through APANO for over a decade.

Today Joseph is serving as DRUUMM consulting minister, and cultivating a new cohousing, chapel and retreat space in Southeast Asia through the Center for Organizing, Renewal and Leadership. He is also beginning a doctor of ministry at the Pacific School of Religion. Joseph and his partner Aimee co-parent their three children and stay engaged with the UU Church of the Philippines and the Church of the Larger Fellowship.

and turn the corner that allows all of us to see a vibrant horizon”

Rev. Kimberly Quinn Johnson

Kimberly’s ministry lives at nexus of faith formation, youth ministry, and racial justice. She is minister of the UU congregation of the South Fork, on the east end of Long Island. Kimberly further serves our faith through her work with BLUU (Black Lives of UU), the UU College of Social Justice, UU Class Conversations, and the UU Women’s Federation. The core of Kimberly’s ministry is creating spaces and experiences for people to connect to the sacred, and to express that connection in the world.

A larger love,

A more embracing hope,

A deeper joy in this life we share.

I am grateful to serve today, as your moderator and respondent. My name is Rev. Theresa Ines Soto. I am the lead minister of the First Unitarian Church of Oakland. Last year, it was my privilege to offer the InSpirit meditation manual, Spilling the Light. Thank you to each of you who have supported, shared, and loved that book. My partner is the Rev. Sean Parker Dennison, who serves the Rogue Valley Unitarian Universalist Fellowship in Ashland, Oregon. I am grateful for our respective and family service.

Now that you have experienced this Halley’s Comet of a Berry Street moment, a blaze visible for a short period, every 75-76 years, you have a chance to reflect. Halley’s Comet won’t be back for 41 more years, 2061. This rare is our opportunity.

I must also invite you to the very specific work of refusing to stay with guilt and committing to curiosity. One of the things white guilt would do is press you into a position of sorrow over substance. And we could, visit a wisecrack or a pun about an apology and move on, but instead allow me to direct you to the words of n tuz a keh shawngay Ntozake Shange For colored girls who have considered suicide/when the rainbow is enuf

“one thing I don’t need

is any more apologies

i got sorry greetin me at my front door

you can keep yrs

i don’t know what to do wit em

they don’t open doors

or bring the sun back

they don’t make me happy

or get a mornin paper

didn’t nobody stop usin my tears to wash cars

cuz a sorry.”

What, then, are you meant to do with your grief about the portion of worldbuilding that you have left undone? What will you do to make the truth alive and free that Black Lives Matter?

Allow your legacy to be your absolution.

This is not an unprecedented way to practice Unitarian Universalism.

For that story, we return to Ohio in the year 1918. Rev. WHG Carter planted a storefront church on West Fifth Street in Cincinnati. The Temple of the Unitarian Brotherhood. It turns out that the church received no support. Whatsoever. In fact, some of the most significant undercutting that Rev. Carter received was from the American Unitarian Association. District executive Lon Ray Call, who reported that Rev. Gray was, “ a kindly man, quite intelligent”; and went on to say, “I do not recommend Unitarian fellowship for Mr. Carter or subsidy for his movement.” Shortly after Call’s report, the Temple of the Unitarian Brotherhood closed. On his deathbed, Lon Ray Call would say, “I am sorry if I have contributed to harm of the ministry of a , good man.”

Many sorrys. Lots of sorrys.

We find, however, that the story doesn’t end there. I’m going to pause here to tell you about a little white flower with leaves that are thin and pointy. It’s called narrow-leafed campion, silene stenophylla, and it grows in far easter Siberia and other very cold places. Some of the oldest seeds ever to sprout were narrow-leafed campion. They were over ten thousand years old. Now, it matters what you hear me say this means. It doesn’t necessarily mean that everything is going to be all right. In order for everything to be all right you have to make it all right. But what it does mean is this: IT IS NOT TOO LATE FOR YOU TO ACT. You have the potency of a 10,000 year old seed. Together, we have not only its potency, but also its power to thrive and bloom.

And that’s what happened in Cincinnati. In 1998 the Reverend Sharon Dittmer told the story of WHG Carter’s Church in a sermon at the North Hill Fellowship, and the people took the responsibility to make amends, to act in the present.

Walter Herz, a church historian in the congregation said, “We can’t let this drop. We ought to find out more about this family.”

What about you? After a suitable period of guilt, are you going to let it drop? Or are you going to find out more about this family? About your Black, indigenous and people of color kin who have been unsupported, excluded, or left behind?

On January 13 and 14, 2001, the Cincinnati church had a special observance of reconciliation; Rev. Carter’s family was invited. Starita Smith, the great-granddaughter of Rev. Carter accepted the apology the church offered with these words:

“I am skeptical of, “the recent wave of apologies to Black people for everything from slavery to neglect of Africa…”

“You are supposed to be the most liberal of the mainstream denominations…”

It is very meaningful to me that you took the initiative to acknowledge a history that must be embarrassing for you, and to make amends in the present for what was wrong in the past. But we must also acknowledge that racial reconciliation…requires commitment…

“The important thing to me about your work is that it continues, and you remain committed to a mission that sometimes has no big, dramatic victories in sight.”

Do you? Do you remain committed to a mission of racial wholeness even when there are no big, dramatic victories in sight?

In her book, Pedagogies of Crossing: Meditations of Feminism, Sexual Politics, Memory, and the Sacred, Jacqui Alexander urges this about the power of our relationships to dismantle oppression: “We would have to unlearn an impulse that allows mythologies about each other to replace knowing about one another. We would need to cultivate a way of knowing in which we direct our social, cultural, psychic, and spiritually marked attention on each other. We cannot afford to cease yearning for each others’ company.”

White supremacy has not only allowed you to suppose that the relationships that oppression damages and unravels weren’t that important anyway, but it also has allowed you to fool yourself into thinking that, somehow, you can still achieve full liberation without those people over there. Those people over there are us. This. Right here.

Some people will still try to tell you that our oppression isn’t real, that it’s our own fault. Those are words and ideas, but they aren’t true ones. Are we supposed to wait another 80 years for amends? Usually a Berry Street respondent gives another angle to the body of the lecture. It’s probably not too different to boil it down to these three things, but I bring them to you as my very best Unitarian Universalist possibilities:

Feeling sorry is internal work; making amends can transform our relationships and our world.
It is not too late for you to act. Whatever is telling you that is lying.
We, our right relationships and our best right actions, are our clearest means to liberation.
Bonus: Hurry up. Do it.