January 2017 – bodily integrity

With a Lion at Her Feet

January 29, 2017March 16, 2017Meghann Robern

Listen to the sermon here:

or watch and listen to the sermon on Facebook.

Thekla. A young woman, caught up in a culture wherein she is denied all control over her life. Her mother makes her decisions for her, and she is engaged to a man who believes he is entitled to her submission — something which is validated by all those around them. Thekla has been denied affirmation of her inherent worth and dignity.

But then, she is given the chance to hear the teachings of Paul. She hears someone speak of love that rises above all injustice, of equality that knows no sex or gender. She hears a voice telling her that she is a person and not a thing. For teaching her this, Paul is thrown in jail. Think about that. Think about how powerful words can be, and how dangerous they are to people who hoard and abuse their power.

Regardless, Thekla has tasted freedom, freedom of her heart and freedom from her chains. Neither her mother nor her betrothed find that they can control her anymore, and while Paul is merely imprisoned, Thekla’s own mother asks for her to be burned. People oppressed by a system are most often taught that they must collaborate willingly in the system in order to survive.

Now, I know this story has some miracles in it. I’m not asking you to take them literally. What I want to do is invite you to consider them as metaphor for the immense power of the religious community to love, and protect, and change the fabric of the world around us. Thekla is saved from the pyre by an outpouring of rain; we learn that Paul and his people were actively praying for her deliverance.

What would it take for us to become the rain — single drops, each of us, overwhelmed by the magnitude of putting out a raging fire. And yet, when joined together, we become a downpour, extinguishing fires of hate and injustice. Rabbi Shana Mackler, of the Temple, taught me a saying that has become essential to my spiritual life this last week. “Pray as if everything is up to God. Act as if everything is up to you.”

Prayer, of course, means different things to different people. And maybe you’re not the kind of person who finds prayer to be very useful in your life. But I would offer up that because prayer can take so many different forms, and that one of those forms is to act as a direct conduit to our conscience, that maybe it’s not so irrelevant to all of us in these times. The Sikhs go to daily prayers because they believe that hearing and chanting the words of the Guru Granth attunes them to the needs of the universe each day. Prayer can be engaging with our personal gods, or with our still, small voice. However your personal spiritual journey has, and continues to unfold, prayer is not about quieting and soothing the mind, like meditation, but rather is about actively engaging your inner self to help choose the course of your outer life. This religious community offers up a mission, and shared values, to help guide us in this constant discernment.

Pray as if you are part of something bigger than yourself — a world that encompasses far more than one person’s experience. Act as if loving that world, and all the people in it, begins with you.

Let us return now to Thekla. Reunited with Paul, they travel to Antioch, where a powerful government man first tries to buy Thekla from Paul, and then, finding that she is not owned, immediately forces himself upon her in a public street and in broad daylight. He just grabs her and starts kissing her. Apparently he can’t help himself. She fights back, in the process ripping his clothes and knocking his crown off his head. Once again the world in which she lives is trying to make her into an object, and she finds the courage to resist from the love and empowering message taught to her by her religious community. Even though, once again, she finds herself under arrest and sentenced to death, while the power figure trying to control and objectify her, trying to make her less than human, is allowed to continue as a public figure and government leader.

But Thekla will not be silenced. She will not be contained. She not only believes that she has inherent worth and dignity, but she has also been told this, and shown this, by her religious community. She preaches about it to all who will listen, including the people of the house where she is kept locked up until it is her time to be thrown to the beasts.

And here we have another miracle. The lioness, the fierce beast meant to kill Thekla, most likely starved and abused by keepers in order to increase the violence of the demonstration, walks up and lays at her feet. Another creature, trapped in the system, decides to say, “Not this time.” They try again the next day, and not only does another lioness refuse to attack, but it protects her from the other beasts released into the theatre.

“Not this time.”

In this story, the beasts are not less than humans, but merely a different aspect of creation. They represent the diversity of this world, and the fundamental, interdependent web of which we are all a part. The lions have not necessarily heard Thekla preach, nor have they been converted. They simply see an injustice being perpetuated, one tied to their own captivity and oppression — because we are all tied to each other — and they rise up in solidarity.

“Not this time. And never again.”

Now, here’s the part that I love, and that has led to institutional western Christianity to run away screaming from this text.

In the midst of all this — a theatre of execution games, wild beasts running around, crowds of people, half of whom are screaming for her death while the other half are so moved they shower her with gifts thrown from the stands — in the midst of all this, she sees a tank of water, and says, “Oh look! This is a perfect time to baptise myself!” And throws herself in. She baptises herself. She doesn’t need Paul, or anyone else to declare her fit for it. She doesn’t need someone to bless the water. She doesn’t need someone else’s hand to be involved at all.

When this story began, she was a person trapped, with no autonomy over her life except to sit at her window, waiting for her mother or her future husband to make decisions for her. It is through hearing a message of love and acceptance, for everyone, not just some, that led her to make her first escape. It is through experiencing how that religious community lived their message, in deed as well as in word, that empowered her to claim her personhood, even when it was threatened. It was knowing that she was not alone, even if they were not physically by her side, that allowed her to know she could create herself however she wished, as long as it could be held over and against the values of love and justice she had been taught by her religious community.

Freshly baptised, and with the beasts dead around her, and half the crowd cheering for her, the powers that be are forced to let her go. She returns to Paul, and he tells her to go forth into the world and to preach of what she knows. She spends the rest of her long life doing that, and becoming a healer. She brings the religious community with her wherever she goes, working to heal those around her of their fear, anger, loneliness. She lives a life of compassion and strength, offering comfort and love to those who need it the most. She prays as if everything is up to God, and she acts as if everything is up to her.

So here we are, now, almost two thousand years later. While we may not cleave to Thekla’s Christianity, we can absolutely relate to her experience of how a community built on love and justice can heal us and empower us to live in the world. The Acts of Paul and Thekla was a text written to justify women as religious leaders and preachers, but it is ultimately, for me, about personhood. Replace her identity as a woman with any other oppressed identity — being black, being Muslim, etc. — and little about the story changes. How do we, as Unitarian Universalists, live into our legacy of a religious community built on love and justice?

Today we are welcoming new members. They have decided not only to participate in the shared ownership of and responsibility for this congregation and its ministries They also are promising to uphold and live into this congregation’s mission. Being a part of this religious community, in addition to our seven UU principles, means answering a call to create community, nurture spiritual growth, and act on our values in the larger world. We are not, as many claim,a community in which you can believe or do anything you want. We are a community in which we celebrate the diversity of our lives, and the diversity of our spiritual journeys, and we are called to believe only that which our conscience allows us. What we claim in this space, when we are gathered in safety, means nothing if we do not also live into it when we are separated, and the beasts are coming for us and those around us.

This congregation is a sanctuary. That means it is a place where those who need safety are met with protection. That those who have been hurt and battered outside our walls will find healing. That those who are tired and weary will find rest. That those whose voices have been silenced will be encouraged to share their stories. That those who are lonely will find companionship. That those of us who, like Thekla, have learned that they are worthy of love just because they exist, will in turn teach it, show it, to those of us still struggling to love ourselves.

May it be so.

Big Magic

January 22, 2017March 16, 2017Meghann Robern

Listen to the sermon here:

Big Magic

or watch and listen to the sermon on Facebook.

You may have figured out by now that my usual preaching style is to start with an opening — a story, a quote, a news story. Build it up into larger context, link it to one or more of our seven principles. Lift up the power of community to heal and restore, and then send you out with a call for living into our mission and values outside of this sanctuary.

Yes, I am that predictable.

Today, I am starting at the end. Because I believe we are at a crossroads in our human history, and I need you to hear this. If you take nothing else home with you today, please take this:

You have within you, right now, just as you are, everything you need to meet your muse, to engage with your genius, to raise your dead, to reclaim your creativity from where our culture told you to toss it in the gutter.

You have within in you the power to reconnect with that mysterious thing that calls to us from an early age. That force which led human beings to draw pictures on cave walls well before they developed agriculture. The need to create poured out of us thirty thousand years before we thought to cultivate reliable sources of food.

And creativity is not about making a product. That’s just something else to be sold. And, once again, our culture tells us that’s the only way creativity is valid — is if its value is about money.

The most important thing you can create is yourself, in relationship with the world around you.

Our reading today was an excerpt from Elizabeth Gilbert’s book Big Magic, in which she tells us her thoughts on why it is so important to extricate artistry and creativity from the concepts of suffering and torture. Valerie and I chose this story because it focuses on something a person, Susan does entirely for themselves. It’s not about winning medals, or performing in shows. There is no audience, no sponsorships, no livelihood waiting at the end of each ice skating session. This person has resurrected something from their childhood that gave them joy, that helped them live into their entire being.

And recognizing that as an adult — raising that feeling from the dead — and putting it back into her life, helped her become a better person overall. A better co-worker, a better friend, a better daughter. Putting it back in her life made her better, and that made her better to others.

Living into yourself, into your truth, can take so many different forms and expressions. Ruth chases her poems around her yard. Susan ice skates three times a week. I went back to school after ten years and became a minister. President George W. Bush became a painter. Every day, someone either learns something new about themselves, or rediscovers something left behind. Every day.

The question is, do we keep it, even if we have to chase it down and catch it by the tail, or do we allow it to slip through our fingers?

This brings me to our meditation, and confronting our fears. Fear of failure, fear of ineptitude, fear of putting time and effort into something that doesn’t bring us more stuff or money to buy more stuff. Fear of mediocrity, as if being average is a bad thing.

Well, if you were here on New Year’s Day, you know that I’m less than mediocre at running. I’m pretty bad at it. But in doing it, I’ve found something that goes deeper in me than running to win. And, if you were here on New Year’s Day, you also heard me attempt to make up a song verse and sing it with no rehearsal. Twice. To make the point I had to make up something totally different for the second service. We didn’t plan that to embarrass me, or anyone else who bravely came down to make up their own verses. We did it to lift up creativity as something that can, and often should be, fun and delightful and messy. That by sharing our experiments, and our bravery in taking these risks when we do so, there is nothing to fear.

And our meditation today reminds us that stories to embolden and inspire us to live into our own wonder and joy are not just coming from those around us, but from our own past. We can look not just to what we may have overlooked or tossed aside in our childhood, but also in our histories. Systems, especially family systems, carry long memories even when the details are forgotten. The homes in which we grow up, either by birth or by adoption, imprint their ghosts upon us. Sometimes they are malevolent, yes. But just as often, they are benevolent. They are our permission slip to chase the fullness of our being and co-create ourselves with the multiverse.

And, this is just when we’re working at the individual level.

There’s that saying that charity begins at home, which is often thrown around as an argument to be less charitable, actually. But in reality the original meaning of the phrase was about growth outward being a natural result of tending to the needs inward. That by starting with generosity in the home, one would naturally become more generous outside the home, because it would be an everyday practice well-integrated into one’s life.

So what I want to ask you today, is what would it feel like for you to be generous to yourself? What would it feel like to begin living into the affirmation of the inherent worth and dignity of every person, by affirm that about yourself?

So much of the fear we have around claiming our creativity is that we are taught to hate ourselves, and then to turn that self-hate out onto others around us who have less power. We witness it when the poor white worker, who is made that way by the policies of the rich, is convinced that their poverty is the fault of the black worker or the immigrant instead of the executive maintaining low wages and breaking unions. We are taught it when we are told that if something we love to do won’t pay us money, that we need to find an alternative to do with our lives, and we are a disappointment if we don’t succeed in filling our bank accounts.

Charity, generosity begins at home. What happens if we recognize that because we are worthy of health care, that has to mean everyone is, too? If creative expression is fundamental to our creation as humans — however you believe that creation to have come about — that has to mean that we should support learning how to empower it and express it in our homes and in our schools.

But most of all, in communities like this congregation, that exist to provide safe, loving, supportive environments for people to learn and grow — we have to support each other in being brave, in running toward the thing that inspires us instead of watching it disappear because we are afraid.

Fear is how we allow people to control and manipulate us. Fear is how we get convinced to back down when there’s a fight that needs to be had — a fight for our own sake as often s a fight for the sake of others. And when the fear becomes constant enough, when the anxiety is chronic, we become reactive, and apathetic. We dismiss it when people in power blatantly lie to our faces and get away with it. We insulate ourselves, and try to avoid drawing attention. We become collaborators with our own slow destruction instead of collaborating with our creative potential.

And nowhere was that creative potential more apparent than in the marches across the world yesterday. This was not an exercise put forward by “coastal elites”. It wasn’t even limited to big cities. Mentone, Alabama, population 360, had fifty people come together for their Women’s March. That’s 14% percent of the town’s entire population. In Alabama. Talk about creative expression. The smaller cities and towns, in the nation’s heartland, the turnout was just as astonishing, and this is where the oppression is the greatest, where their presence was needed the most.

In some of the bigger cities, so many people showed up that the entire route was filled from beginning to end, and they couldn’t actually march anywhere. So they shared food, shared stories. They played, and danced, and they sang.

But whether these gatherings had marching or not, they were an unstoppable outpouring of energy, just like those cave paintings on the wall from the infancy of our beginnings. They began from a single idea, tied to our country history of resistance to tyranny and oppression, and inextricable from thousands of years of patriarchy that has made white women second class citizens, and racism that has debased women of colour even more. The Women’s Marches were not only the largest protest in our nation’s history, they were a celebration of expression without fear. Of solidarity, and community, and of what it means to support each other in the diversity of our journeys into self-discovery and wonder.

They showed us what it looks, and sounds, and feels like to hold hands and stick together, like we’ve supposed to have been doing since kindergarten.

And so, I’ve come back around again to where I began. The most important thing you can create in this lifetime is yourself in relationship with the world around you. This is not a luxury. This is not a waste. This is not an irresponsible choice.

It is necessary. It is essential. It is vital.

Generosity begins at home, with you loving yourself so that you may pour that love out into others. Love yourself so that you can learn what the fullness of your being can be. Love yourself so that you are strong enough to learn from the wonder and joy of the diversity in our world, and not run away from it.

Love yourself, so that you may trust yourself, and chase your muse until you can grab it and hold it close.

May it be so.

Distributed Denial of Service

January 8, 2017March 16, 2017Meghann Robern

Listen to the sermon here:

Distributed Denial of Service

or watch and listen to the sermon on Facebook

In his reflection, Steve spoke of experiences in which he witnessed the immense gulf between different populations in our world, a gulf that is only growing as our ability to innovate technology increases and the very valid attention being paid to STEM education — to science, technology, engineering, and math — is redirected at the expense of the humanities, philosophy, and religious studies?

One area is not inherently better than the other — they inform and shape each other. Steve’s identity as a Unitarian Universalist, his commitment to living into our principles, gave him the insight to both appreciate the technology in his hand as a positive tool for fostering connections and joy of community, while at the same time recognizing how it was preventing him from helping someone experiencing great distress.

The hymn that was chosen to follow Steve’s reflection this morning was chosen deliberately because of its particular message that is far from the truth for millions of people in our national communities, and billions of people around the world. It takes the time to mention creatures of “high and lowly birth”, but fails to acknowledge that such categories are more often than not human constructions of systems that keep the power with the already-privileged and disenfranchise those who are born into such a hierarchy. It totally ignores that life, and the struggles within for so many, are not a precious gift, but are in fact an endless stream of disappointments and suffering. And telling people living those lives that they should be grateful just to be alive is making the choice to diminish their narrative, to erase their story.

If we, as UUs, are going to sing about Life Being the Greatest Gift, then we need to commit ourselves to working to make that true for everyone. The moral arc of the universe only bends towards justice when we make it so.

So what does the story of the Tower of Babel teach us about how we can accomplish this? The conventional western Christian take on this story is that it’s about a community driven by “arrogance”. They realize they can build a very tall tower, a tower that can reach so high it can touch God, and they want to do so in order to make a name for themselves. And remember, historically, temples for gods were built to acknowledge their space in the sky, not the area on the ground. They were symbolic of something that could not be reached by those born of earth.

So this attempt to build a tower offends God, because, God claims, if they can do this, then there’s nothing they can’t achieve. So God decides to scramble everyone;s languages, so they can no longer communicate. They become separate communities, and the gulf between them grows.

That’s a pretty crappy thing for God to do, eh?

Yeah, that’s not my God.

Here’s my take on this story for your consideration — the people in the community lost touch with each other, and became so distant from each other in communication and experience, because they were using their innovation and gifts as a community for the wrong thing.

This community set about to build a tower as high as they could, just because they could. Imagine the resources that must have been put into it. Yeah, there were job for a while, but once it’s built… what does it do? What does it symbolize? An accomplishment that will stand there and mean nothing as the government is bankrupt from paying for it and the citizens experience massive unemployment. It is not God who breaks this community aparts and creates the dissonance between its citizens — it is the people themselves.

Imagine, instead, if the community has thought about what they would build before they did it. Instead of building it just to make a name for themselves, what if, knowing that they were capable of great things that would lead them to innovate and explore, they chose instead to build a thing that would keep them connected when they spread out into the world? What if they invested all those resources and all that time in a structure that would allow them to continue to communicate with each other, and hear each other’s stories of both joys and sorrows, across time and space?

Imagine how strong they would be. Imagine what they could accomplish, and what they could overcome. Imagine the larger world they could create. Sounds a lot like the shared values we strive for when we covenant to affirm and promote our seven principles.

It also sounds really threatening to those who hold and hoard power, like that really crappy God that wants to keep them from knowing what they can achieve.

What God does in this story is the Biblical version of a distributed denial of service attack. Now, for those of you in the room who use the internet, you may have experienced one of these attacks and not known it. What happens is that someone decides they want to stop you from accessing Amazon,com, or another website, for whatever reason. So they create a program that sends so many requests to that site, that it can’t handle all the requests and overloads. When people who want to use the site try to access, they can’t. It’s like someone intentionally keeping all phone lines busy so people can’t use them, or a group of people intentionally crowding into the doorway of a store so others can’t get in.

It’s frustrating, and oftentimes the average person doesn’t know what’s actually happening, so they take it their negative feelings on the victim of the attack. The website has not only lost its presence, but without awareness, its reputation and ability to recover are also affected.

What that God does in the story of the Tower of Babel is a distributed denial of service. He shuts down the people’s access to each other, and makes them think it’s their own fault. And he does it because they were going to know their own power to shape the future of the world.

We are currently living in an era such as this, where the people in power are using our own innovations to attack our ability to live into our seven principles and make them a reality. Technology is a tool, and all tools are only and good or an evil as the choices people make when using them. Twitter, Facebook, the internet, have allowed people to lead revolutions across the world. They’ve also allowed white supremacists to organize and consolidate their power without us noticing. And, this use of technology and innovation is nothing new in human history.

While we were planning this service together, Steve showed me the Never Again Tech pledge statement. This is an excerpt:

We, the undersigned, are employees of tech organizations and companies based in the United States. We are engineers, designers, business executives, and others whose jobs include managing or processing data about people. We are choosing to stand in solidarity with Muslim Americans, immigrants, and all people whose lives and livelihoods are threatened by the incoming administration’s proposed data collection policies. We refuse to build a database of people based on their Constitutionally-protected religious beliefs. We refuse to facilitate mass deportations of people the government believes to be undesirable.

We have educated ourselves on the history of threats like these, and on the roles that technology and technologists played in carrying them out. We see how IBM collaborated to digitize and streamline the Holocaust, contributing to the deaths of six million Jews and millions of others. We recall the internment of Japanese Americans during the Second World War. We recognize that mass deportations precipitated the very atrocity the word genocide was created to describe: the murder of 1.5 million Armenians in Turkey. We acknowledge that genocides are not merely a relic of the distant past—among others, Tutsi Rwandans and Bosnian Muslims have been victims in our lifetimes.

Today we stand together to say: not on our watch, and never again.

The story of the Tower of Babel is a warning to us about where and when we are, right here, right now. As we celebrate the life-affirming, community-building aspects of the technology we build, we are also witnessing an increasing chasm between communities, a separation based on class and resources. This separation is perpetuated and enhanced by people with an agenda to attack the nature of objective reality. Spin masters and fake news combined with the soundbite attention span have created a world in which public leaders can blatantly lie, and there are no consequences. This is only made worse by the idea that these technological platforms are somehow inherently neutral or apolitical.

The Tower of Babel failed, and divided the people who built it, because they were focusing on the wrong thing. They were building something just for the sake of building it. Instead of looking up to an empty sky, I would offer today that we should look at the whole setting — earth, sea, and sky. That we intentionally takes these amazing creations of humanity and take that innovation one step further — to combine our science with our morality and use both to build a world in which we empower communication and community. We already have the capability to do so much — we must keep building to manifest our sixth principle: our goal of world community with peace, liberty, and justice for all.

May it be so.

The Courage of Creativity

January 1, 2017March 16, 2017Meghann Robern

Listen to the sermon here:

The Courage of Creativity

or watch and listen to the sermon on Facebook

Y’all would not believe the time I have had writing this sermon for today. Oh, the irony of getting writers’ block on a piece about creativity! But there you go. Stuck on that blank, white page. Kids home from school for a second full week, that definitely didn’t help. But I had to pull it together somehow, because this is the first worship service of 2017, new beginnings, new goals, new inspirations for my beloved congregation!

And that, I realized, was my problem. My creativity was blocked because I was afraid of failing, of letting down the people who need me to be creative and inspiring and… courageous.

The origin of “courage” is the French word for heart: “coeur”. To have courage is to live with your heart. Bravery comes into it because a lot of the time living with your heart is really scary. If we’re lucky, it’s not. But living with your heart means putting your heart out in front, to take the lead. It leaves our heart exposed, vulnerable.

A heart in that position takes enough beatings, and it might not have the resilience to recover. That makes me hesitate, every single time.

Brene Brown once asked herself, when she was examining her own vulnerability, “does this mean that our capacity for wholeheartedness can never be greater than our willingness to be broken-hearted?”

I spent many years afraid of a broken, irreparable heart. I saw it as a fragile thing, made of glass, easily shattered, unless every movement was known ahead of time and carefully planned. It was a safe life. And it was devoid of true creativity — the creating of me.

When I finally started down this path to professional ministry, after years of not leading with my heart, it became clear that I had to learn how to take risks, how to be courageous in my creativity. Because how can I serve a congregation if I can’t show them who I really am?

Last year, when I first told you the story about why I started running, it was about proving something, about proving someone else wrong in their assumptions about me. It was, in a way, a creation narrative, and it happened to succeed.

What I talk less about, at least from the pulpit, is how I fail every single time I put on those running shoes.

I’m really bad at it. I’m slow. I always look ridiculous, even in my snazzy outfits. I sweat buckets, and I smell no matter how much deodorant I put on, and I’ve never, ever, ever had a runner’s high. I fail at running on a regular basis.

And then, I do it all over again. Sometimes, over thirteen miles worth.

And yeah, someone hands me a shiny medal and I get to eat a lot of really terrible but delicious food for one day. But what I come away with, and what leads me to always sign up for another race so I have to keep training, is that I did something that I am not good at, that I will never be good at. I did something just for the experience of doing it… and I didn’t die. I survived, and it hurt a lot, and my heart is a little stronger each time because of it. What was once made of glass, that I was afraid would turn to stone if I let it be hurt too much, turns out to be a living muscle, warm and flexible and willing to lead me into amazing new realities of my own making.

I may have started running with a purpose, with an expected result. But it soon became something I did for its own sake, because of the experience itself. When Marie Curie wrote about her life’s work, she said:

We must not forget that when radium was discovered no one knew that it would prove useful in hospitals. The work was one of pure science. And this is a proof that scientific work must not be considered from the point of view of the direct usefulness of it. It must be done for itself, for the beauty of science, and then there is always the chance that a scientific discovery may become like the radium a benefit for humanity.

While scientists sometimes describe the things they encounter in their work as beautiful, it’s not often that we as a culture consider the act of science itself as an art, as a creative act of beauty. And yet, it is. Science, in the way the Marie Curie approached it, was worthy of doing for its own sake, and by equating it with music, and painting, and language, it then also must be held over and against the demands of the humanities — our morality and ethics.

One cannot tell the story of Marie Curie’s discovery of radium, and the good it did for many lives as a cancer treatment, without also telling the story of how unchecked consumerism took this scientific, artistic discovery, and proceeded to market it without further experimentation. These people were all absolutely convinced that there was nothing else to be learned, no more creativity to be found, except what could line their pockets.

Instead of doing what Marie did — continuing in the science, in the creative act of loving the world by learning about it — they assumed a false state of static, complete knowledge. Radium began to be used in cosmetics, as store-bought health aids, and in the most well-known case, in paint used on watches. The women who did this work, who were told to lick their paintbrushes to make points for detailed work, are known to history as the Radium Girls, whose lawsuits barely covered their living and medical expenses as the cancer caused from the radium exposure slowly killed them.

Even Marie Curie herself died from near-constant exposure to radioactive elements throughout her career, although she lived much longer than the people who consumed radium products.

The Radium Girls were not given the full breadth of knowledge, and even when they began to investigate, the company outright lied to them to protect their assets.

And yet, Marie Curie, who was forced to flee her home and her country to a strange place where she had no connections, no safety net, changed the world not because she could, but because she felt compelled to try new things and see what would happen. The results of these experiments, as we have also learned, cannot be put to use without ethical and moral examination. But Marie Curie was willing to risk her own life in order to live it to what she felt was the fullest extent.

Last year, one of Rev Gail’s sermons talked about how, when seeking to innovate, if you can aim, then it’s not really innovation. Because if you can aim at it, it’s known territory. True creativity, true experimentation, requires a willingness to shoot without a target. It requires shooting just to see where it lands.

What that reminds me of is how people talk about desperation. “Any port in a storm.” “Settling for what you can get.” So often that’s framed as a bad thing. And yeah, if you’re only going to shoot once, and commit yourself to wherever it is that you end up, probably not the best idea. Leading with the heart, having courage, truly embracing creativity, is being willing to shoot without a target, and then do it again if the result doesn’t work.

Innovation is scary. Creativity is scary. Because they are unknown, and our lizard brains hate the unknown. Unknown means danger.

But the unknown is also where we find freedom from our chains. The unknown is where we catch the glimmer of our vision, the tiniest seed of possibility. The unknown is where we must go to build something that works better than what we already have.

And that, my friends, is ultimately why creativity is so very very scary — because, by its nature, it seeks to undo the status quo. It seeks to undermine stability, to make you examine everything that you’ve been told is how it ought to be. It’s why artists are the first prophets of a revolution, it’s why tyrannical regimes seek to keep people so desperate and anxious that they cannot feel the pull of their hearts, and it’s why the rich and powerful always seek to own and control scientific innovation.

And I’m going to let you in on a secret.

That courageous, creative prophet who will change the world?

It’s you.

Whether it’s writing, or a science experiment, or designing a new education curriculum, or painting, or engineering, or any number of other things… something as yet unknown in the world, is calling from your heart.

In this new year, let us in this community help each other find our courage. Let us help each other explore the beauty in this world just because it exists. Let us find freedom in celebrating our creativity, no matter how scary, and no matter how many times we fail.

May it be so.