This Sunday, our #BeingUU summer reaches its fifth station, and the principle waiting for us there is the one that ties our spiritual life to our common life: the right of conscience and the use of the democratic process, within our congregations and in society at large.
Notice, for the third week running, that our principles keep marrying two things and daring us to keep them together. Conscience, and democracy. The voice, and the vote. Conscience is the quiet voice that refuses to be voted down. Democracy is the promise that every voice gets counted. Split them apart, and each one sickens. A conscience with no democracy is a whisper with no hands. A democracy with no conscience is machinery with no soul, a counting device that can count its way to cruelty. Our faith binds them into one promise, and this Sunday we will ask what that binding costs.
Because our people found out.
In March of 1965, in Selma, Alabama, Black citizens who had organized for years for the simple right to vote were beaten on the Edmund Pettus Bridge. That night, Dr. King sent out a call: come. And ours came. Unitarian Universalist ministers and laypeople traveled to Selma in remarkable numbers, answering Black leadership with their bodies rather than their sympathy. One of them, the Reverend James Reeb, had already moved his family into a Black neighborhood in Boston because he believed racial justice required shared life. Two nights after he arrived in Selma, he was attacked outside a café and died of his wounds. Days later, Viola Liuzzo, a UU laywoman from Detroit, a mother of five who could not keep watching from her living room, was murdered by Klansmen while driving marchers home. When President Johnson stood before Congress to demand the Voting Rights Act, our martyr’s name was in the nation’s grief.
That is the Fifth Principle with names and faces. Conscience answered, and the vote was won.
And this Sunday, we will tell the story honestly, which means telling it all. The movement was conceived, organized, and sustained by Black communities who had endured terror for generations, and Jimmie Lee Jackson, the young Black deacon whose killing sparked the marches, received a fraction of the mourning that our white martyrs did. The country woke more fully for Reeb and Liuzzo than it ever did for him, and that disparity is part of the record too. Our legacy at Selma is courageous and incomplete. We showed up, and we were changed. We also went home to congregations that still had their own bridges to cross, and some of us still do. Conscience, it turns out, is not a trophy we won in 1965. It is a voice that keeps asking.
So come this Sunday ready for a service that honors the marchers, mourns the martyrs, tells the truth, and then hands the unfinished work to us, because our ancestors helped imagine this democracy, and we are still responsible for it.
And come for one more reason. This Sunday brings a special musical surprise: two new soloists will share their gifts with us as we build our music ministry at UU Miami. This is the beginning of something we have been dreaming toward, and in the months ahead we will start planning a volunteer choir, a place where your voice, yes, yours, can join the song. It is no accident that this begins on the Sunday of the Fifth Principle. A choir is what democracy sounds like when it works: many voices, none erased, made into something none of us could sing alone.
The voice is yours. The vote is ours. See you Sunday.
Peace,
Rev. Dr. Harold Marrero