If you are reading this, you are alive. Let’s celebrate that! Take a full breath. Let your face find the shape of a soft smile of contentment. Inhale another breath of celebration: “I am alive.” Exhale with gratitude.

How does that feel? What possibilities does connecting through your breath open for you?

Yesterday I began writing this Staying Connected piece about anxiety, about the constancy of collective stress, fear and struggle in these times that weighs on each of us, and about the anatomy of my own struggle with anxiety over my lifetime. I wrote about how “possibility” seems distant when I am in constant worry; how my breath gets shallow, my world gets small…I feel alone and powerless. I wrote about finding practices for connecting with oneself.

Then, last evening I attended the launch party for Together Lab, a project of justice movement and ministry innovators in Oregon. (And not to worry; the party was outdoors, masked and socially distanced, and everyone was vaccinated.) Together Lab’s evolving project is a shift “from isolation and competition to the cultivation of a leader-full ecology of resources and relationships.” They steward the emergence of interfaith leaders who work in collaboration, mutual support, and accompaniment, finding shared values and issues on which to strategize together. Together Lab centers cohorts — groups for action, reflection and organizing — form the core of their approach, “where we work together through the different seasons, tilling the grounds, fertilizing, adding compost, planting seeds.” Being in community with these innovators helps to keep my roots nourished.

Near the end of the evening, Juan Carlos la Puente Tapia, a strategizing team member of Together Lab, gave a blessing to the group. He began simply. “We are alive. And we are together. Let us celebrate.” 

The evening reconnected me with what I love about serving our church’s Social Justice Program. It’s about the possibilities that arise when we are in community together. There is so much to grieve and worry about in these times. Solidarity with others is not only a strategy for getting things done, it is a balm for the soul.

While the Covid safety precautions — now extended with no clear end — have made it difficult to find ways to be together, I look back to the last eighteen months and marvel at how the Social Justice Community at First Unitarian has remained in relationship and in motion. Reflecting the organizing model that Together Lab nurtures, our social justice work is done in relationship with others who engage our principles and values for change. Our eleven Social Justice Action Groups and our Speaking of Justice newsletter team are communities of varying sizes who focus on particular justice issues. All of the action groups learn, nurture the spirit, and act collaboratively. If you are looking for a place to ground your activism, each of our action groups would welcome you.

Our Social Justice Leadership Team guides how we connect with each other to nurture the relationships and the spirit that sustain our justice ministry. Together we think about how the overarching themes of anti-racism and anti-oppression are woven into all aspects of our justice mission, and we look for the ways that we all can lean back into our justice community when we need to grieve or rage, when we need inspiration, when we can celebrate our “wins.”  

Whether or not you are currently connected to a Social Justice Action Group, we welcome all First Unitarian congregants who hold social justice as a center of your faith to join us in our Social Justice Retreat on Saturday, September 25th from 8:30am-noon. Look for the forthcoming announcements in the e-News to register.

What is possible when we are connected to ourselves and to each other? The simple invitation to celebrate being alive and being together opens up doorways to possibility. Marge Piercy wrote “The Low Road” that ends with these words. (Watch Stacyann Chin read the whole poem here.)

it starts when you care 

to act, it starts when you do

it again after they said no, 

it starts when you say We 

and know who you mean, 

and each day 

you mean one more. 

May your breath connect you to this moment. And may you nourish the soil of community through which the fruits of possibility grow.