Dear UU Miami Family,
There is a word I want to hand back to you this week. It gets spat on cable news like an accusation. It gets printed on banners as a warning about people like us. The word is woke.
Long before it was an insult, it was survival advice. In 1938, the Black folk singer Lead Belly recorded a song about the Scottsboro Boys, nine Black teenagers falsely accused in Alabama, and in his spoken coda he advised Black travelers passing through that state to stay woke and keep their eyes open. That is the word’s birthplace. It was never an ideology. It was wisdom from people for whom falling asleep to injustice could be fatal. To be woke, in its original tongue, meant simply this: stay awake to what is being done to people, especially the people it is being done to quietly.
Hear that, and then hear our Second Principle: justice, equity, and compassion in human relations. Tell me how anyone practices a single word of it asleep. You cannot do justice to what you refuse to see. You cannot build equity while looking away. Compassion with closed eyes is just sentiment. Staying awake is not a political fashion for us. It is a sacred duty, written into the second promise of our faith.
And there are powers that would prefer a sleeping country. They would soften the textbooks until slavery reads like a labor arrangement. They have moved against our universities, the places a nation keeps its eyes, using money as the anesthetic. The courts have been waking us up. Just days ago, two federal judges struck down new rules that would have stripped loan forgiveness from public servants whose employers engaged in diversity work the administration disapproved of, warning that the rules threatened to impose the government’s viewpoints on employers and overstepped the agency’s power. In May, another federal court ruled that the mass termination of more than a thousand humanities grants was unconstitutional viewpoint discrimination, and the judge put it in nine words we could frame in our lobby: a government has “no license to suppress disfavored ideas.” The courts are saying, in the language of law, what our faith says in the language of principle. Conscience is not government property. AAUP + 3
Now the harder paragraph, the one I write to us. Wakefulness has a counterfeit, and it is sold on our side of the street too. It looks like certainty wearing the costume of enlightenment. It distrusts any thought with an unfamiliar accent. It grades people before it meets them, and it will not share a table with a certain red hat, as if proximity were contamination. Friends, when we do that, we are not awake. We have simply fallen asleep facing the other direction, dreaming a dream in which we are the only ones who can see. And we have broken last week’s promise before breakfast. Every person. No exceptions. The moment our wakefulness needs an enemy to stay warm, it has stopped being the Second Principle and started being the very system of division we say we oppose.
Let me be honest with you, because pastoral care without honesty is decoration. Some hearts are locked from the inside, and no conversation will open them. Boundaries are real, and you are not required to argue with a wall. But the loudest voices are not most people. Most people, wherever they place themselves on the spectrum, still want to understand, still respond to facts wrapped in respect, still soften when someone listens to their fears instead of cataloguing their errors. Reaching them requires the one place both rigidities refuse to go: the messy middle, where we listen to one another’s fears, hopes, and stubborn love of life. That middle is not mush. It is the construction site. Justice gets built there, including for people whose version of justice needs some tender care before it loves more widely. Equity gets lived there, an openness practiced on actual neighbors rather than preached at them. Compassion gets tested there, for everyone being chewed up by a machinery of division that profits from our contempt in both directions.
Dr. King, writing from a Birmingham jail cell to clergy who wanted him quieter, said the movement needed nonviolent gadflies, irritants of conscience whose questions create the tension a society requires in order to rise. That is the wokeness I am recruiting for. Let us be the annoying ones. Annoyingly awake to injustice. Annoyingly awake to our own blind spots. Annoyingly unwilling to hand anyone the label of enemy, no matter who is demanding we do so. A gadfly does not sting to wound. It stings to wake.
So yes, call this congregation woke. We will wear it the way the word was first meant, eyes open, in every direction, including inward.
This Sunday we walk our Second Principle together: justice, equity, and compassion in human relations. Come and practice staying awake with me.
Peace,
Rev. Dr. Harold Marrero