This is a post drafted some time ago, but released only now. I had to sit with this for a while before it was ready to go. But, now it is…
The above video came about during the family separation crisis of 2018, when Rev. Avende and I were working toward creating a cohesive response to what was (frankly) the most confusingly scary thing that had happened in the current Trump administration up to that point.
As Priests, we have a responsibility to our membership to help them find words when there are no words. We say this commonly about funerals, terrorist attacks, weddings, and blessings, but we say it less often about humanitarian crises in our own country. Even as Priests, we’re affected, I think, by the “it can’t happen here” narrative, even though I’ve repeatedly indicated on social media that it already has.
I go through stages on these sorts of things: my first reaction is to find those words, to write a prayer or create something that is easy to share out. I wrote a bit about this on my LiveJournal (back when that was a thing worth linking to: I’ve already done it twice in this post!) and my process.
The day this broke wide, as I found myself wishing I had access to both Photoshop and my large backlog of weird and useful stock photos, I remembered I had a prayer that might work as a band-aid for now; I shared a graphic that dealt with the fear of immigrants that has become so unfortunately en vogue across the globe recently (which has much more to do with skin color than a lot of people would like to admit).
I have a deep love for the Mother of Exiles that is the goddess Liberty, and I was pleased that this graphic still made some sense in context (though it wasn’t perfect).
This gave me a start, a place to work from. It was something that resonated with a few people, even though it was old and not specifically related. And most importantly for my own sanity, it gave me a step toward action that I could build on (because the hardest part is always starting).
After ADF put out its statement (which was, predictably, weaker than some wanted and too strong for others, because that’s how it goes), Rev. Avende and I started discussing some co-writing for prayers we could share.
Somewhere in the conversation, one or the other of us came up with the idea of a follow-along ritual that had, as its central working, calling your representatives.
Last night, we recorded it (calling our own reps in it), and I got it ready for publication this morning.
Here’s where it got sticky…
We wrote this intending to call specifically for support of a number of things: particular bills, individual actions, and certain statements we thought were useful.
But this, of course, led us to the question: what could we do?
In the United States, churches and all 501(c)3 organizations, are limited in what sort of speech they are allowed when it comes to politics: this is, in many ways, only fair, as the government is not permitted to regulate churches, so churches should not be permitted to attempt to regulate the government.
But this particular act by our government was something beyond the pale for Rev. Avende and me. We worked very hard to try and figure out how to respond. And we did exactly what we tell others to do in the video: we called our reps during the Working, and told them exactly how we felt.
It was the next morning, during editing and posting, that I realized that for the first time, there was a problem that we, as Priests, couldn’t handle with our full Voice. There were laws and precedent in the way.
I ended up re-encoding the video three or four times, as each time I read another document on the IRS pages that said, “Whoops, no: you can’t tell people to do that, silly priests!”
So, “WTF Can We Say?”
What we determined we could say was this:
We can’t advocate for a specific bit of legislation, or for someone in our congregation to cast a particular type of vote, but
We can call our representatives, senators, and other elected officials, and
We can engage in protests and activism in our role as clergy, and
We can call folks to action, asking them to call their reps or register to vote, and
We can discuss current events, encourage actions, and make moral statements so long as they don’t trip over the first point here.
At the end of the day, we still ended up with a powerful statement, and strong ritual action, and we stayed within the bounds of what religious speech is allowed to do in our country. But it hurt to be less vocal than we felt was warranted. I remember seething my anger over messenger apps to Rev. Avende and others about how every time I thought we had it right (and I know: we were completely in the right on this), something else would come up and we’d have to re-work what was said, or edit another item from the original ritual.
For all who saw the video and called their reps, I thank you. If you haven’t, I encourage you to watch the video any time you need to call your reps.
Know that we do this work for you, and we do it often… even if we can’t always find ways to talk about it to you.
