A Word with Rev Gordon (05/01)

Dear Beloved Community,

This May, we ground ourselves in the sacred theme: Love as Equity. Not love as charity. Not love as niceness. But love as justice, as truth-telling, as transformation. The kind of love that demands change—within us and around us.

We celebrate Mother’s Day, honoring all who mother. We remember Memorial Day, and with it, we ask: Who gets remembered? Who is erased? Where is the equity for Black people in the United States of America—especially those whose labor, pain, and dignity built this very nation?

The True Origins of Memorial Day: Black Love, Black Labor, Black Liberation

Let us remember: Memorial Day began with formerly enslaved Black Americans in Charleston, South Carolina, just weeks after the Civil War ended in 1865.

On May 1 of that year, more than 10,000 people—mostly freed Black men, women, and children—gathered to honor Union soldiers who had died in a Confederate prison camp and been buried in a mass grave. Black folks exhumed the bodies, gave them proper individual burials, and built a memorial arch with the words: “Martyrs of the Race Course.”

They decorated the graves with flowers, held processions, sang spirituals, and preached of freedom. It was a radical act of equity, memory, and sacred dignity.

“This was the first Memorial Day. Not born from the power of empire, but from the hands of those who had been enslaved. They remembered, because they knew what it meant to be forgotten.” — Dr. David W. Blight, historian

This is not just history—it is theology. It is the work of restorative justice through love.

So we ask again:
Where is the equity for Black people in America?
Where is the return on the investment of blood, prayer, and soul?
Where is the collective recognition of Black grief, Black love, Black contributions, and Black futures?

A Unitarian Universalist Call to Truth and Love

“We affirm the inherent worth and dignity of every person.” — UU First Principle

This principle cannot be passive. If we are to truly honor it, we must reckon with the nation’s racial inheritance. We must center Black lives—not just in crisis—but in our stories, leadership, reparations, and remembrance.

“To center love means to change who holds the microphone, who sets the agenda, who gets grieved, and who gets saved.” — Rev Dr Sofia Betancourt, UUA President

To love equitably means redistributing power. It means naming the pain. It means re-centering the people who have been structurally and spiritually marginalized.

From Mother’s Day to Memorial Day: The Equity of Grief and Glory

This May, we also hold Mother’s Day—a day born of peace activism, and now, a complex moment for many. We honor all who mother: those who raised us, loved us, broke through systemic barriers for us. We remember mothers who are grieving—especially Black, Brown, and Indigenous mothers who have lost children to police violence, to poverty, to war, to injustice.

“The dead are never dead to us, until we have forgotten them.” — George Eliot

Let us remember. Let us love, loudly and truthfully. Let us hold this month as sacred.

Love as Equity means:

• Telling the full truth of our history, not just the convenient parts.
• Reclaiming stories that have been stolen or suppressed.
• Creating systems where dignity is not rationed but rooted.

“Love is the only force capable of transforming an enemy into a friend.” — Rev Dr Martin Luther King Jr.
“We are each other’s harvest; we are each other’s business; we are each other’s magnitude and bond.”
— Gwendolyn Brooks

“Even after all this time, the sun never says to the earth, ‘You owe me.’ Look what happens with a love like that—it lights the whole sky.” — Hafiz (Sufi poet)

May this May be a season of liberated memory, healing truth, and courageous love.

With you in the sacred work,

Rev Gordon

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