Podcast: Download (Duration: 57:04 — 52.3MB)
Subscribe: More
Leslie MacFadyen and Carlton Smith join The VUU to talk about their Movement for Black Lives Session at GA2016. How do we connect the desire to show up for racial justice with the reality of risk? The VUU is hosted by Meg Riley, Joanna Fontaine Crawford, Tom Schade, Aisha Hauser, and Hank Pierce. The VUU airs Thursdays at 11 am ET. This episode first aired March 17, 2016.
Podcast: Download (Duration: 55:23 — 25.4MB)
Subscribe: More
Carlton Smith, Lena Gardner, and Leslie Butler MacFadyen meet with the VUU regulars to talk about the Movement for Black Lives and UU. The VUU is hosted by Meg Riley and Joanna Fontaine Crawford and airs Thursdays at 11 am ET. This episode first aired January 21, 2016.
Podcast: Download (Duration: 1:01:06 — 28.0MB)
Subscribe: More
Leslie MacFadyen, Kenny Wiley and Lena Gardner talk with The VUU team about showing up and supporting. The VUU is hosted by Meg Riley and Joanna Fontaine Crawford and airs on Thursdays at 11 am ET. This episode first aired December 17, 2015. The VUU will be taking a break for the holidays and will return on January 7, 2016.
“Lena Gardner is the development director of a Unitarian Universalist Congregation, the Church of the Larger Fellowship, faith without walls!” If I’d been wearing something with buttons, they might have popped off from my pride as I heard those words, spoken from the stage to a room packed with glamorously dressed people last night at a gala for OutFront Minnesota. Read more →
Last November, I lay down with just under a hundred other people on an interstate highway in Minneapolis. Along with thousands in cities across the country, we stopped the cars, we carried signs and we chanted and sang, saying Black Lives Matter in every way that we could. My brother called me from Texas, and said, “Hey, did you shut down I-35 today?” I responded, “Well, yes, me and a few others.” He said, “It made news down here. That’s dope. My freedom fighter sister.” That was just over six months ago, it was the start of what has been a nonstop whirlwind of actions, public witness, and personal challenges for me. Read more →
Maybe we could just sit down and cry together first. In the presence of Black rage. In the presence of white shame. In the presence of grief and despair and the overwhelming knowledge that white men with guns just keep killing people. In the devastating remembrance that this is not the first time that a white man with a gun has chosen a place of worship as the most devastating possible place to exact horrific violence.
We need to say out loud that this was another act of violent white supremacy, not just a disturbed individual. It matters that we point out that, as with almost every instance of mass violence, it was a man who committed this atrocity, with a man’s sense of entitlement to assert his will at whatever cost to those around him. We need to say out loud that once again gun violence has cost innocent people their lives, that while a man bent on doing damage with a knife can certainly hurt people, guns kill people far more rapidly and efficiently than anything else.
And then we need to sit with the fact that this horrific act was committed in a church. That it wasn’t random that the killer chose the AME church that has been such a force for Black empowerment and leadership development. That it wasn’t random that violence was perpetrated in a temple of peace. That this man sat and prayed with his victims for an hour before he attacked, and God did nothing to stop him. That the only way that God will ever stop the violence—not just the brutality of mass shootings, but also the daily violence of racism in all its massive and tiny iterations—is if we are committed, individually and collectively, to being God’s voice, God’s hands, God’s pain and rage, God’s impulse toward love and justice.
There is so much to be done, so many rents in the fabric of our common life that we can only hope are possible to stitch or patch together. There is so much that each of us is called to do. But maybe first we could just sit down together for a little while and cry.
Can you give $5 or more to sustain the ministries of the Church of the Larger Fellowship?
If preferred, you can text amount to give to 84-321
Quest for Meaning is a program of the Church of the Larger Fellowship (CLF).
As a Unitarian Universalist congregation with no geographical boundary, the CLF creates global spiritual community, rooted in profound love, which cultivates wonder, imagination, and the courage to act.