A Prayer for Those Grieving Someone Who Was Difficult in Their Lives
Losing someone you love is painful.
Losing someone you struggled with is confusing.
Part of you is relieved they are gone.
Part of you thought you’d feel more free.
Part of you is still sad, lost without the tension between you.
Guns: Relationship Status: “It’s complicated.”
I first held a gun when I was eight years old. One of my uncles let me fire his new pistol. I still remember the strain of trying to hold the heavy gun steady so he wouldn’t think I was too weak to try it. All these years later, I vividly remember the incredible rush of power that washed over me as I fired that pistol.
I was eight years old and I held in my hand a tool that could spit fire and knock a beer can off a fence several yards away. I was eight years old and I held in my hand a tool that could have ended the life of the uncle who handed it to me. It is difficult to articulate how much power surged through my little being. I swear I heard the Scots heritage in my mutt-blood swim screaming to the surface with a mighty roar…
Nine years later, the older brother of the uncle who first handed me a gun died after being shot by another family member. Not long after that, the father of my classmate was killed while responding to a domestic violence call. The man who killed him was devastated to realize, once he descended from his pain-killer induced high, that he had killed not only a police officer, but a friend.
Four years ago, my partner called me at the hospital where I was working as a chaplain to let me know that he was not one of the two white men shot to death a block away from my house (where a heroin deal apparently turned deadly). Shortly before that, I had watched an ambulance come claim the body of a sixteen year old boy, victim of a drive by shooting at the other end of my street.
I have lived in the rural life and the urban life and what each had in common was:
- a sense of powerlessness about how the world is run and
- deaths by firearms.
Our country (and colonial powers around the world) has a history of taking away a population’s weapons and property (i.e. indigenous peoples, Japanese-American relocation camps, mass incarceration through a government-created drug war…) when people in power decide to do so. How then, to trust that you really will be safer by giving up your guns?
Christian social justice activist and writer Jim Wallis proclaims:
Former assumptions and shared notions about fairness, agreements, reciprocity, mutual benefits, social values, and expected futures have all but disappeared. The collapse of financial systems and the resulting economic crisis not only have caused instability, insecurity, and human pain; they have also generated a growing disbelief and fundamental distrust in the way things operate and how decisions are made.
I confess that I am grateful to finally live in a gun-free home, I freak out just a bit when even toy guns are pointed at me or anyone I love, and I would love to trust that I could walk through my neighborhood at night without hearing gunfire. But I was also here in New Orleans when the National Guard rolled through with their Humvees and their guns and I know what it feels like to be occupied by a military force – first denied access to my home and property, then patrolled and subject to interrogation once home again.
My faith and my lived experience teaches that life is rarely an either/or proposition. In this interdependent web of all existence, we are all connected, tangled together in a tapestry of history and mystery. It’s complicated.
It is hazardous to talk glibly about gun control unless we talk about creating a nation that is welcoming, safe, and empowering for all people. This conversation is complex and deserves real discernment, not sound bites and bullet points.
Guns do not provide actual safety. They provide a sense of power. [Bear witness: our government is not at all ready to give up its guns, its sense of power.]
I suspect that if we are going to end gun violence, we will have to address the collective needs of all – urban and rural, white and people of color, individuals and institutions – who feel powerless without their guns.
Standing on the Shoulders of Giants
As we approach the 40th anniversary of the Roe v. Wade Supreme Court decision, I am grateful to have been born and raised in a religious tradition, Unitarian Universalism, that has stood strong through the history of the struggle for reproductive justice. Today, I lift my voice to thank some of those Unitarians, Universalists, and Unitarian Universalists who have gone before, and who labor currently, for women’s equality, health and moral agency.
It’s always risky to call out folks simply because we share an identity, especially a religious identity. It can seem as if we are separating ourselves, or declaring ourselves to be part of a club. For me, this is an act taken to ground myself. As my own congregation prepares to hold an online service honoring the complexity and dignity of all families engaged in making moral choices around reproductive issues, I have been asked, “How dare you speak out about this, as if we all agree?”
I would never believe that a few thousand Unitarian Universalists would agree about anything whatsoever! All the studies show that people of other religions don’t begin to agree either, however, and yet their leaders have no trouble declaring that they speak the absolute truth, God’s truth. They claim that God is pro-life, anti-abortion, against women’s equality. So I, who have spent my life laboring in interfaith coalitions lifting up this other point of view, feel it is incumbent upon me to speak clearly as well.
Here come my thanks, to those who have gone before me and labor still, who ground me in this work, who dared before me and handed their daring to me.
I thank Margaret Sanger, who opened the first clinic in Brooklyn in 1916, violating obscenity laws for telling women how to prevent unwanted pregnancies. While we certainly challenge her beliefs on eugenics, she had nothing if not bold courage!
I thank all of those who labored for women’s suffrage, women and men, Universalists and Unitarians, allowing politicians to be elected who would support women’s equality. Abigail Adams, Susan B. Anthony, Rev. Antoinette Brown Blackwell, Rev. Olympia Brown, Julia Ward Howe, Rev. Lydia Jenkins, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, and so many others. I lift up your names with gratitude. Amendment 19, 1919. 19 is our lucky number.
I thank all of the Unitarian and Universalist women who worked to make birth control legal and available in the US. I think of the church women, whose names I do not know, who looked through birth notices in Connecticut papers and mailed information to new mothers, illegally offering them birth control access. They weren’t just being kind; they were spoiling for a fight. Eventually they got one, and in 1965, in Griswald v. Connecticut, the Supreme Court ruled that criminalization of birth control violated the right to marital privacy.
I thank all of the Unitarian, Universalist, and Unitarian Universalists who worked to make abortion safe and legal. The women, and leadership, of First Dallas UU congregation moved this case forward. UUs passed statements at our General Assemblies beginning in 1963. Clergy, especially men, were part of founding and leading the Clergy Consultation service. Hundreds of people were involved with this; many of whose names I don’t know. Please share your own knowledge in the comments section!
I thank the religious educators who, in 1967, agreed that comprehensive sexuality education is part of religious education, and began the groundbreaking sexuality education programs that have been part of religious education programs ever since. There are thousands to name here—deryk Calderwood, Rev. Eugene Navias, Judith Frediani, Rev. Sarah Gibb Millspaugh, and dozens of other writers and curriculum editors. Hundreds of teachers and youth advisors who have led young people through it.
I thank those who continue to focus their ministries on reproductive justice and sexual morality. I think of Rev. Deborah Haffner, Rev. Robert Keithan, Rev. Kelli Clement, to name only a few. I thank the congregations who are actively engaged with supporting reproductive justice. There are so many folks to thank here! Please add their names in the comments section.
Finally, I thank the Unitarians, Universalists, and Unitarian Univeralists who have laid your bodies on the line supporting women as they struggle through these difficult choices. People in medical clinics, providing escort services, literally standing by women. I think especially of my late friend, June Barrett, who was shot in Pensacola Florida, while providing escort service to women as part of her service to the Pensacola UU congregation. June’s husband, Colonel James Barrett, and the doctor they were escorting, Dr. John Britton, were killed. As she lay still in the truck, wounded, but not dead, with these bodies beside her, she told herself that she survived for one reason: To continue to help women have access to legal and safe reproductive choice. This she did until her death.
How dare I speak out about reproductive justice? I can honestly say that I have been given this daring by thousands of others upon whose shoulders I stand. Please join us on Tuesday, January 22, at 3 PM and 7 PM Eastern time, for our online service at www.livestream.com/questformeaning. We’ll be gathering as part of a long tradition.
Like-Hearted People
“You need not think alike to love alike.”
This was the wisdom of Francis David, spiritual advisor to King John Sigismund of Transylvania, the Unitarian king who pronounced the first edict of religious toleration in the year 1568.
You need not think alike to love alike.
At Unitarian Universalist gatherings, I sometimes hear “it is so nice to be with a group of like-minded people.” Beloveds, it is tempting, in the not-so-liberal parts of these United States, to take refuge in liberal religion. Here you are welcome. We often say in worship welcomes “no matter your gender, your race, your ethnicity, your sexuality, your age, your size, the color of your eyes – you are welcome here.”
Your politics, however…Your education level…these might matter …
Seeking sanctuary with like-minded people, while a deeply understandable and very human response, is not the basis of our faith. We are called to honor the inherent worth and dignity of all in our interdependent web of existence– no matter how people vote, what they believe, or where they went to school. Liberal religion is grounded in a theology of inclusion. As Rev. Marilyn Sewell states, “at the center of our faith is not belief, but love.” Love. We are a people of covenant, a people of promise. And we promise to love one another.
During a dialogue on race and class with a group of UU volunteers in New Orleans, one group member casually mentioned the “white trash-y” trailer park area across the tracks in his midwestern home town.
I felt the term sizzle across my skin, leaving a faint contrail of anger and shame… White trash. Trailer trash. Humans who have the skin color of privilege, but few other privileges. Who often live in generational cycles of poverty, who generally have few educational opportunities. Who have had nothing for generations but their pride and their whiteness, neither of which keeps the refrigerator full or pays rent, much less a mortgage.
I remember the day I received a copy of my birth certificate, ordered for the purpose of applying for my first passport. There, in black and white, and forever a part of my American identity: “Place of residence at time of birth: Fort Fredericka Trailer Park.”
I am often reminded in subtle and not so subtle ways that I am welcome in Unitarian Universalism because I am the exception, not the rule of my people. I left my home state after high school, struggled through a liberal arts college education that my public education had not quite prepared me for, got a passport and studied abroad in Central America on scholarship. Much of this was possible because my father joined the Navy at 19, put his body on the line for a chance to break the cycle of poverty and violence that he grew up in. Much of this was possible because my grandmother believed it was important to educate girls to and insisted that her daughter have the same chance to graduate from high school as her sons. It was not a question in my house whether I was going to college after high school. The only question was how I was gonna pay for it.
Without these breaks, these formational pattern changers, I would not be a Unitarian Universalist minister. The educational requirements alone for the training would have been barrier enough, let alone the cost of them…
Come, come whoever you are
We sing and we say these words from the 13th century Sufi Mystic Rumi:
Wander, worshiper, lover of leaving
Though you’ve broken your vows a thousand times
Come, yet again come
Our Unitarian legacy is tolerance, our Universalist legacy is radical salvation for all souls. How then can we reconcile the promise of our faith with the practice of our faith?
It is not faithful to write off a group of people because they do not sound like you, do not think like you, do not have the same life experiences as you. We know this to be true in the marrow of our bones. We know it and so we work on radical hospitality, begin Welcoming Congregation programs, have A Dialogue on Race and Ethnicity. And this is good, faithful work!
Please let us remember, in our stretching, that everyone means everyone. As we discern our internalized superiority and inferiority around race, gender, and sexuality, let us also remember to check our assumptions and oppressions around class and educational privilege.
We are not called to be a faith of like-minded people. We are called to worship and work together as like-hearted people – loving all of creation with compassion and curiosity.
“You need not think alike to love alike.”
Come, come, whoever you are. May you find yourself welcome here.
A Prayer for Birthmothers, Not in an Open Adoption
Your relinquishment has been my biggest blessing.
Your very life has made my own shimmer
with joy, laughter, the words “my child…”
Adoptive mothers, like me, shout our love from the rooftops.
Adoptive fathers howl thanks.
We sing infinite gratitude,
placing it on lanterns that light up the whole city, the forest.
A Place in the Family
I pretty much only listen to radio in the car, which explains how I stumbled on just a few minutes of a call-in show which featured an evolutionary biologist. I suppose it shouldn’t have been surprising that the question I heard as I was pulling into my driveway went something like this: “Scientists have looked at millions of fossils, but no one has found the fossil that shows the transition from a fish to a lizard, or a chimp to a human. Why should I believe that I’m related to a chimp or a giraffe or sludge at the bottom of the sea when there’s no real evidence?”
I tend to be a little…unsympathetic toward this kind of question. Luckily, I was alone in my car as I shouted back at the caller: “DNA! Have you never heard of a little thing called DNA?” Fortunately, the presenter responded calmly that the caller had brought an excellent question. Then he went on to describe how, based on their scientific knowledge, he and a colleague had predicted where one would find a fossil that showed the transition of species from fish to lizard, and what such a fossil might look like. And then they found it. Where they had predicted (Canada), and with many—but not all—of the characteristics they had expected to find.
The biologist went on to explain how DNA shows us the way in which we are related to all other living beings. “It’s beautiful!” he said. “The chimpanzees are our close cousins and the sea sludge is a distant cousin and the giraffe is somewhere in the middle, but we’re all related.”
And then I got it. The two world views I was hearing about were not simply between someone sophisticated in the uses of the scientific method and someone with less understanding. The caller didn’t want to be related to a chimp or a giraffe or, God forbid, sea sludge. He wanted to be the pinnacle of creation, something utterly different from—and better than—the rest of the living world. To see himself as related to a giraffe would mean being shoved off of the pedestal, removed from his rightful place in the Great Chain of Being. Being related to a chimp would, I imagine, mean losing his relationship with the God who had placed him, as a human, in dominion over the rest of the world.
The biologist, by contrast, couldn’t have been happier to be related to sea sludge. He loved being cousins with the chimp and the giraffe, and his devotion to understanding more and more of the family genealogy was part and parcel with his joy in being a part of the family of things. I don’t know anything about this man’s theology, but as someone who shares his joy in this web of relations, I would imagine that if he believes in God at all, it is a God who is within all beings, in relationship with all beings. He, or at any rate, I, would find the Holy in the whole creative process of evolution, in the unfolding of diversity over time. There would be no worry about losing a relationship with God if we tumbled from the top of the pyramid, because God was never at the top to begin with. Neither were we humans. God was—is—in the connections, in all the crazy ways that we are interrelated with the Family of Life.
I have no idea whether anything shifted in the caller when he heard about the fish/lizard fossil or the linked DNA. How could he process such information, when the price of believing it was so high? But I couldn’t help but wonder whether it felt lonely up there, at the top of the Great Chain, looking up toward God and the angels in the invisible distance, disconnected from the chimps and giraffes and lizards below. Me, I’d rather be down here with the sea sludge, representing just one of the crazy cousins in this massive family gathering we call Planet Earth.
We Are All In This Together
“If middle-class Americans do not feel threatened by the slow encroachment of the police state or the Patriot Act, it is because they live comfortably enough and exercise their liberties very lightly, never testing the boundaries. You never know you are in a prison unless you try the door.” ― Joe Bageant, Deer Hunting with Jesus: Dispatches from America’s Class War
“I spent Thanksgiving Day in Central Lock-up!”
Waiting for keys to be cut in the local hardware store this week, I was completely drawn into the generously shared story of another customer with the shop’s owner. “Pulled over for not coming to a complete stop.” An initial infraction, no grace from those in power, a questionable ensuing search of the vehicle, an old open beer can giving the opportunity to turn a citation into a charge that was later thrown out by a judge as having no merit – later. After spending Thanksgiving in jail. And missing a day of work for court. Which cost him. Literally.
Living one infraction away from lock-up is a situation that is truer for more people in this country than we care to admit. Living paycheck to paycheck is a situation that is truer for more people in this country than we care to admit.
One in three Americans who grew up middle-class has slipped down the income ladder as an adult, according to a 2011 report by the Pew Charitable Trusts.*
One in three Americans who grew up middle-class has slipped down the income ladder.
Others are clinging desperately to the rung they are on.
Upward mobility, the American holy grail, is not guaranteed.
Neither is physical freedom, when prisons are a national industry, investments that can be found in a market prospectus.
Beloveds, if this sounds irrelevant to your life, try the door a bit. See how far your liberties can be exercised if you challenge an economic system that gives 50% of the American population less than 2.5% of the national wealth. See how far your liberties can be exercised if you challenge one of the thousands of ordinances, rules, and laws wrapped around your neighborhood, your state, your country.
The myth of pulling oneself up by one’s own boot straps, the myth of prisons existing only to house bad guys – slowly these are proven to be falsehoods, lies that have been used to justify closing our eyes to the human costs of comfort for a few.
Let us name the house we live in. Let us recognize that in working for the common good, we make a good life more possible for ourselves, our family, our beloveds. This is faithful work. Dear ones, we are all in this together. May we build beloved community together. For everyone.
* Drawn from the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth (a group of 12,000 interviews that researchers have followed since 1979), the report “focused on people who were middle-class teenagers in 1979 and who were between 39 and 44 years old in 2004 and 2006. It defines people as middle-class if they fall between the 30th and 70th percentiles in income distribution, which for a family of four is between $32,900 and $64,000 a year in 2010 dollars. People were deemed downwardly mobile if they fell below the 30th percentile in income, if their income rank was 20 or more percentiles below their parents’ rank, or if they earn at least 20 percent less than their parents.”
What Do We Owe?
I was talking recently with a friend who is struggling with the question of how extensively to remodel the house that she and her husband just bought. Water damage means that they’re going to have quite a lot of repair work to do on the back wall, which brought up the question whether they should bite the bullet and move the wall back, making room for a larger kitchen. They have the money to make the larger improvement, although just barely. But my friend can’t quite wrap her head around spending that kind of money on expanding their house, when the world is full of so many much more desperate expenses. Can it be right to spend many thousands of dollars fixing up your house, when that money might be sufficient to build a school in India or Africa, when that money could make a house ravaged by Hurricane Sandy livable, when that money could get 100 women started in small businesses through an organization like Kiva?
How much do we owe ourselves and our families? How much do we owe our neighbors? How much do we owe our fellow human beings in distant places? How much do we owe pets, wild animals, the environment? Do we owe anything at all? Does anything at all rightfully belong to us?
If the answer to the question of what we owe is “nothing,” then taxes are an unfair imposition of the collective upon the individual. What is ours is ours. We worked for it (or inherited it) and we deserve to do with it as we please. If other people want things, they can go out and work and earn the money to pay for those things themselves. If the answer to what we owe is “everything,” then it’s time to join a commune, to live in a collectivist society in which everything is shared for the benefit of the common good.
Most of us, however, live in that ambiguous place in between. We want schools and police and roads and emergency relief funds, and we don’t mind doing our part to pay for them. Most of us don’t think that people who lose their jobs should go hungry, that children should lack health care, that people with disabilities should be just left to fend for themselves. We want clean air and water. We feel sad about children dying of hunger or disease, regardless of where they might live. We worry about the extinction of species and the effects of climate change. We want to be part of a compassionate human community, a respectful web of all life.
But we also want to be able to remodel the house or take a vacation or buy electronic gadgets. We want to enjoy the fruits of our labor—even the fruits of our unearned good fortune. So how much do we keep? How much do we give away?
Some decisions, of course, are made for us. The government expects us to pay our taxes, and we can end up in jail if we don’t pony up. On the other hand, we elect representatives to speak for us. Some of those representatives come down pretty hard on the “owe nothing” side, while others are quite willing to raise taxes if they think the circumstances warrant it. Our vote gives us some responsibility for how those decisions are made.
But beyond the vote, each of us has to decide that unanswerable question over and over. What is mine? What do I owe to some larger good? And if there’s a single right answer to those questions, I’ve certainly never heard it.
What I have to suggest is an experiment. Call it the joy test. If you have $50 to spare, make a deliberate choice on how to spend it: a shelter for the homeless, a pair of shoes, an arts organization, a nice dinner out, your retirement account. Commit the money, and then ask yourself how you feel about that choice. Does it bring you joy? Does it do something to ease a sense of anxiety or does your sense of discomfort grow? How does it feel a week, a month later?
I don’t know if the joy test is any kind of adequate answer as to what we owe to others and ourselves. But I have a sense that leading with our hearts, with our deepest joy, might be a step down the right path. Let me know what you find out.
A Heretic Mulls Over Epiphany
Today is The Epiphany, when Christians celebrate as the day when Jesus was revealed to the Gentiles as the Son of God. But what of us who don’t hold this belief–who believe instead that Jesus was a teacher, a prophet, a healer, but not uniquely marked as the Son of God? What does Epiphany mean for us?
Are we still waiting for revelation? Some would say yes; that we don’t have eyes to see. Until we see that Jesus is the one and only Son of God, we are still unfinished. These are the folks who often try to ‘save’ us.
Many Christians, thankfully, are more generous of spirit than that. They embrace a God of love who is not all about damning people who don’t agree on specific creeds or beliefs.
I think of the United Church of Christ’s slogan, “God is still speaking,” with the big comma next to it. This contrasts with that bumper sticker theology: “God wrote it. I read it. That settles it.” Epiphanies are still happening, says that comma. Revelation is not sealed.
Popularly, the word epiphany, with a small ‘e’, means “a sudden manifestation of the essence or meaning of something. a comprehension or perception of reality by means of a sudden intuitive realization.” This morning, I’m wondering if letting go of the one Big Capital E Epiphany as the one and only Truth might help to allow more of these small ‘e’, daily epiphanies, truths. It seems to me that a belief that you already have The Truth kind of stops you from looking for it any more! Others will disagree with me, I’m sure.
I believe that Jesus was an exceptional, exemplary role model for the rest of us. A great teacher, healer, minister, human being. But he was a human. (I count myself lucky to be born in a century where I won’t be burned at the stake for saying that!)
In Unitarian Universalist congregations, we frequently read these words from Sophia Lyon Fahs on Christmas Eve: “No angels herald their beginnings/ No prophets predict their future courses/ No wisemen see a star to show where to find the babe that will save humankind/ Yet each night a child is born is a holy night.”
The Buddhist monk Thich Nhat Hanh has written, “It is probable that the next Buddha will not take the form of an individual. The next Buddha may take the form of a community, a community practicing understanding and loving kindness, a community practicing mindful living. This may be the most important thing we can do for the survival of the earth.”
Each night a child is born is a holy night; one more person who may be part of the community which helps the earth to survive has just joined us! These, to me, are the most hope-filled saving words I know. They are also a sharp jab, when I think of the way that many of these holy people are being treated.
My child—my beloved, brilliant, beautiful, wise, child—was adopted from a remote village in China. Had she not come to the United States by way of adoption, it is highly likely that the only way I would know of her very existence, even theoretically, would be through handling something that she, and millions like her, manufactured ‘for me’ in some windowless factory. Her back sore and her eyes blurry, she might be making my iPhone, or iPad, or a piece of clothing or some weird plastic item. This is, after all, how I know, the only way I am related to, thousands and thousands of children and adults in poor parts of the world. Through the goods which they make for people like me.
Yet, because I know my child personally, I know that she is brilliant, and beautiful, and funny, and opinionated, and has dreams of how her own life and the world should be. Just as I would know each of those children in the windowless room to be, given the chance to know them. If I don’t have eyes to see those other kids, does it mean that they cease to be any less holy? Or is it my own holiness that is diminished, by benefiting from their mistreatment?
So happy Epiphany, or Happy epiphanies, or may your life bring you ever more comprehension and sharpening of focus. Wherever we are, whatever we believe, may we all become part of a community committed to the survival of the earth. Whether we agree or disagree about theology, we are all in this together!
Joyful Epiphany
Sunday, January 6th, marks the celebration of Epiphany – a.k.a. Twelfth Night, Three Kings Day, la Fiesta de Reyes. Epiphany honors many sacred events within Christian traditions – the day the child Jesus was visited by the Magi, the baptism of Jesus, his first miracle of turning water into wine at a wedding .
In New Orleans, however, January 6th is most widely celebrated as the night we transition into a new season – from Holiday to Carnival. [Note: We have four fairly distinct seasons in New Orleans: Holiday, Carnival, Festival, and Hurricane.]
The seasonal changes brought by Epiphany are quite visible. Red, green, and blue lights are exchanged for purple, green, and gold lights. Doors and windows bedecked with Christmas wreaths and menorahs transform into doors decorated with Carnival wreaths, masks, and Mardi Gras beads. And the music changes too – carols are gone, replaced by Mardi Gras tunes.
Epiphany is the first day of King Cake season. It is the night of Phunny Phorty Phellows, hopping onto the St. Charles Avenue streetcars, heralding the start of Carnival. It is the birthday of Joan of Arc, the Maid of Orleans, and a carnival krewe marches in her honor from the Bienville statue (representing the founding of New Orleans) to the Joan of Arc statue at Decatur and St. Phillip Street.
Epiphany is the night we welcome collective joy, in the form of Carnival, back onto center stage in our lives.
Carnival offers us an opportunity to take a break from taking ourselves so seriously, from our expectations about how the world should be, and gives us a chance to engage in the healing joy of communal celebration. The work of transforming ourselves and the world is on-going. And it is through seasonally and repeatedly choosing joy that we can find the energy we need to continually commit to this work.
“I think that the energy to do all those things [to help make the world a better place] comes from choosing joy,” writes the Church of the Larger Fellowship’s Lynn Ungar. “You can inspire people to a certain degree by sheer terror…However, if we’re going to keep those changes going, if we’re going to find new and creative ways to build better lives, then I think we’re going to have to draw on some deep wells of joy.”
Epiphany opens the lid on a deep well of joy for me and my city.
What is your source of joy?
Where do you find your energy to make the world a better place?
