Rev. Joseph Boyd
Many I know have heard the verdict convicting the police officer who killed George Floyd, and have heard the responses from Floyd’s family and others in understanding what this verdict means. What has been shared is the enormous toll this has taken: the enormous amount and number of protests to hold one person accountable for one person’s death. But as we know, it is not just one person, not about one police officer or one black American male in Minneapolis, Minnesota. It’s about all of us, the stories we tell, and the ones we’ve ignored for so long. It’s about each and every one of us. Some of Floyd’s family have shared that they can breathe a little easier, but that the path toward justice still beckons. True justice in its fullest sense has yet to be achieved.

I’ve been thinking what that means this past week: What is true justice? And related to our theme this morning, what role does grieving play in true justice, and what role does grieving play in our life as a single person and as an entire culture? It’s a big question, and I don’t think I’m going to answer this question definitively, but my hope is that we may be able to open ourselves up a little more, to find the space to breathe a bit more, and find the courage to see grieving as a path of becoming more real and true. I appreciated that definition of grieving from our reading written by Saeed Jones. Grieving is a process of becoming more real. Grieving is a process where we find the courage to become more real.

Grieving only happens when we lose something, and we allow ourselves to acknowledge that we’ve lost something. I’ve learned that losing something and acknowledging that we’ve lost something, are two different things. Every day we are losing something or someone. Every day we are losing one day of our life, and the life of those we love. After losing someone, each day is one day lived without that person. This is true for all of us. It’s not just true for you or true for me, or only true for those who are victims of misfortune. It is true for all of us. You don’t have to be very old to experience losing someone dear. It’s a very tender truth, but it’s a truth.

One could argue that our entire culture is built to distract us from this truth, by focusing instead on what we can gain, accumulate, save, build up around us. But as I’ve said, losing something and acknowledging that we’re losing something, are two very different things. We can spend a long time losing, day by day, until one day we are forced to acknowledge it. I affirm the goodness of life, and I’m grateful for the opportunity of being alive on this day with all of you. I affirm the wonder and gift of being alive with all of you, as fleeting as it may be. And I’ve come to the conclusion that truly affirming life must include an affirmation of loss. Life and loss go together, and you can’t separate them.

There is no one right way to grieve any loss we have. But I have experienced and I have witnessed ways that grief can open and affirm our life, and ways that grief can close us off from life, from the immediate rush of being alive. I’ve experienced both, and perhaps you have too. I don’t think one is better than the other, or one is more true. But I have been reflecting on what has made it possible for me at times to feel more deeply connected to being alive, more connected to being human, more connected to all of you in grieving, in acknowledging loss.

Some of you may remember that this was part of my call to ministry. It was by being in a church community like this, I was given just enough support, just enough space, to acknowledge the full loss of my father and the loss of my childhood religion a decade before I found a Unitarian Universalist Church. I have experienced the great difference between losing someone and losing a whole way of life, and how different it is to actually acknowledge and grieve that loss. It is a world of difference. It was through the full acknowledgement of what I lost, in a church like this, that I felt and saw as if for the first time what I still had. I saw that I was still alive. This wasn’t an academic fact, but a lived experience. I felt what it was to be alive, truly alive, which included loss. I knew viscerally life is vulnerable and tomorrow is not promised to any of us, including myself. Out of that experience, came a calling, a way to live. It’s the life I’m living now with all of you.

But one thing I’ve learned and appreciated over the years is that my losses are not just my losses. They are intimately connected to the sense of loss that is universal to all of us in each of our particular ways. I have seen more clearly how my story is not just my story, it is part of the human story, a unique manifestation of what is true for every single one of us.

I think it is very tempting to see loss or death as the enemy, as the antithesis of life. Because it’s so hard sometimes. And it knocks us over. And it shocks us. And it doesn’t really make any sense. And it seems so unfair and unnecessary. All of these feelings are true.

But there is more to it than that, if we can stay with it, acknowledge it, with the support of a community like this. I think we get a chance to become more real. It seems on the surface that what will make us happy is the exact opposite of reality: the belief that we’ll live forever, the sense that we’re not really aging, the hope that things will stay the same, and everyone we love including ourselves will stay the same. It seems that if we could just make that true, we could be happy. It’s a paradox that the thing that makes us truly happy in a deep and profound way is the thing we try mightily to avoid: what is real.

I think like Saeed Jones that what is real is what is most healing, even when it’s not what we want, even when it’s hard and shocking. What is real, what is true, what connects all of us – that is our real happiness, if we can acknowledge it, feel it, digest it. I’m becoming more convinced that except for a few exceptions, this kind of happiness is impossible to achieve by ourselves. We need others. We need a community like this. We need a community that can hold us as we acknowledge, feel, digest, and become.

I knew someone who bought a house near Santa Fe, New Mexico with his wife. It was an old stucco house in an attractive part of the desert away from civilization. Both of them were incredibly busy people who traveled nationally and internationally most of the year, and she always wanted a place where she could come recharge, rest, and be. Six days after they signed the closing papers, seemingly out of nowhere, she died of a heart attack in her early fifties, and this man was shocked completely to the core. He later said that his wife was always much more compassionate and feelings oriented, taking the time to be and listen to people. He was always on the go, and never made as much time for people, busy with some project. He said: I have the desire to become more like her, now that she can’t. I will dedicate myself to being more compassionate, to take more time to really listen to people, to slow down. He was fully aware of what he was doing. He said: It wasn’t just my wife that died. It was part of me too. She took who I was with her, and now another person is emerging. Maybe part of her is becoming me.

I had a friend who told me something similar. He said: “You know when you’re dead, you can’t do anything.” He said: It’s so obvious, but I never fully acknowledged it. “When you’re dead, you can’t do anything.” He had recently lost a good friend of his. He said: I guess I’ll do what he can’t.

I’ve been thinking about George Floyd, about how he’s not here anymore, in that form anyway. His life has become our life. What can we do now that he can’t anymore? I think there’s a lot that we can do, and it begins with becoming more human, more real.

I see in the next months and perhaps years it will be important to take time to acknowledge what we’ve lost in this past year. For each of us, that might be a different acknowledgement. But one thing gives me comfort, one that is real and true. All those acknowledged losses are connected, not one of them isolated or alone. Each loss we’ve had is also our community’s loss, and imagine if we lived that truth every single day. Who would we become if we could acknowledge this? I think we would all spend more time in tears, and I think we would spend more time laughing. I think we would spend less time worrying about innocuous things. I think we would take more time to listen to each other, and respect each other. I don’t think we would need to spend as much time protesting. I think our view of justice would widen to include more than condemnation and punishment. It would include how we can also support each other in finding redemption, transformation, becoming. I think we would be able to move out of the story of perpetrator and victim, into the truth of reality, the truth of person and person. We would see ourselves differently and we would live differently, and not because someone told us to, or because someone would punish us if we didn’t. We would fear reality less. We would respect loss as a truth of living, and we would find a way to use that truth to be kinder toward each other, more gentle, more sincere, more tender.

We would see racism for what it is: an insidious attempt to avoid reality, to avoid the reality that we are bound up with each other always and forever. Racism offers the lie that we are entitled to gain based on birth or color of skin, and the promise of gain is always a destructive lie. The lie that we can gain at the expense at someone’s loss. That is a lie – now and forever. The truth is one person’s loss is our loss, and my loss is the world’s loss. Acknowledging that we realize what we’ve always had: our humanity which is deepened and affirmed by what is real.

Many people criticize churches for leading people away from reality. But I think our church is different, or at least that’s my intention. I think the greatest pain is being separate from what is real, and we spend enough time doing that in our everyday life. I see this as a place where we are given support and permission to get in touch with what is real, and love is the most real thing there is. Our losses don’t need to diminish us. They can connect us, if we have the right conditions, the right support, and the openness for it. We are always connected, even if we’re not in a place to open ourselves to acknowledging it. With the support of a church like this, grieving is a path of becoming more real, of being able to appreciate who we’re becoming.  Within a community like this, death is not just a loss in the ordinary use of that word. It opens us to more love, more truth, more caring, more justice. It opens us up to more courage.

I love that Saeed Jones came out his uncle about being gay as he was planning his mother’s funeral. In a place of loss, he must have felt he had nothing left to lose, so he took a risk. And in taking that risk, he was returned with a smile, an acknowledgement. His uncle smiled because he could acknowledge what was real before his nephew could. And that was a relief. The simple acknowledgement of reality, the reality of two people who saw and cared for each other.

May we do that for each other. May we acknowledge the reality of each other. May we acknowledge the reality of loss. May we acknowledge the power of becoming in its aftermath, and may we participate in this becoming. May we become more real, and in so doing become more understanding and loving. May we acknowledge that one person’s loss is our loss and vice versa, and this means more love, much, much, more love. May we become what is real, and in so doing, commit ourselves to what the dead cannot.