August 17, 2025: Freedom Dreams and Possibility

Rev. Susan Frederick-Gray

Part of cultivating possibility in our lives and the future means defending freedom. Even dreaming is an act of freedom. How do we keep dreams alive in an unfree time?

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Sermon Text

Freedom Dreams and Possibility

Rev. Susan Frederick-Gray

UU Church of Bloomington

August 17, 2025

READING

from American science fiction and fantasy writer, Ursula K. Le Guin’s acceptance speech for the National Book Foundation Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters in 2014

In her speech, she talks about the importance of writers, but there is such wisdom in these words about our need not just for writers, but for teachers,

for parents, for mentors, for leaders. So when she says "writers" - let's remember that she could be talking about each of us in our own roles.

She writes: "Hard times are coming, when we'll be wanting the voices of writers who can see alternatives to how we live now, can see through our fear-stricken society and its obsessive technologies to other ways of being, and even imagine real grounds for hope. We'll need writers who can remember freedom-poets, visionaries-realists of a larger reality."

SERMON Freedom Dreams and Possibility

Ursula Le Guin writes, "Hard times are coming." Indeed, hard times are here.

There are so many examples - the unspeakable suffering and violence continuing across the globe - in Ukraine, Sudan, Gaza, Myanmar. The increasing destruction of storms, fires, floods, and droughts devastating communities. And this past week, we witnessed again the U.S. President sending troops to a U.S. city - this time seeking to take control of the police force in Washington, D.C. and putting national guard and federal law enforcement on the streets.

The rise of nationalistic and authoritarian leaders and movements here and around the globe are a clear and present danger to freedom. And we take a moment to hold in solidarity the people of Washington, D.C. We, alongside them, reject this nationalization of local police forces and reject the militarization of our cities. And we join the calls for D.C. statehood - and the right to local control for the residents of D.C.

We remember the Revolution began as a rejection of standing armies in the streets. This is authoritarianism - plain and simple. The specific targeting of communities of color and majority Black and People of Color cities is reminiscent of the fascism of Nazi Germany and the long history of white supremacist ideology in the U.S.

But, I am not resigned to it. We must not be resigned to it. We must keep resisting, keep finding ways to educate our communities against this tyranny. We must find ways to practice solidarity with our immigrant neighbors and cities on the U.S front lines, to upend the effort to expand prisons and detention centers. We must find our own ways to remember and practice freedom - and to not comply with the shredding of liberty, democracy, and the Constitution.

We are living in an increasingly unfree time - and it didn't happen all at once. It is not just the President's latest authoritarian actions. The constant drum of fear of our neighbors (particularly but not exclusively immigrant neighbors) that has justified the increased militarization of our borders and police forces has been growing for decades - and our "obsessive technology" and lack of privacy protections that have us living under constant surveillance. This is not freedom. It seems Ursula Le Guin foresaw clearly what was ahead - as perhaps the best science fiction writers do. And though she died a few years ago, her words still charge us today. "We need [people] who can remember freedom-poets, visionaries - realists of a larger reality.”

This is why, in part, I find myself drawn to speculative fiction these days - particularly that of Black, Indigenous, People of Color writers, LGBTQ and women writers. These writers have a way of seeing more clearly the dangers already present in our systems and what could be - might be -

instead.

A powerful example is Octavia Butler's series - Parable of the Sower and Parable of the Talents. It is difficult reading as the protagonist Lauren Oya Olamina tries to survive the multiple ravages of living in a time of climate destruction, authoritarianism, and extreme inequality and poverty that breeds violence. In the book, her disability, and in some ways her gift, is an extreme form of empathy - it is dangerous particularly in a word so full of harm and suffering. But, in the midst of the suffering she creates a new theology - one that calls her and her followers to a different way of being - one that emphasizes community, care for each other, and understanding how change is constant - for us and for our world - nothing is fixed. It reminds us that we help change things and are changed by them. It is powerful - it reminds us of our freedom to act. And, the Earthseed theology she creates resonates with what we need today.

And thanks to the recommendation of Bill Breeden and the gift from Glorianne Leck, this summer I read the science fiction novel, Woman on the Edge of Time by Marge Piercy. The story focuses on the protagonist - Consela "Connie" - a Latina woman who has been confined to a mental institution largely because of poverty. Yet, Connie has experiences of being pulled into the future - a future far different than her present.

There are so many compelling things about the future that Piercy describes. It is clear that this future is unfolding post (but also in the middle of) major upheavals and climate devastation. The people's lives and decisions are oriented around trying to rejuvenate the earth and its waters and live sustainably. In this future, there are more expansive understandings of gender, parenting, and participatory democracy. For example, children are not conditioned differently by gender and they don't use any gendered pronouns - just per and person! Piercy wrote this in 1976. What foresight! And what beauty to have so much of the book center around community, love, parenting, and children and to imagine children growing up without gender boxes and parents parenting without gender boxes! And here and now, when there is so much fear mongering around gender - all in an effort to reinforce a gender binary - and more specifically as a tool to reinforce patriarchy - it felt freeing to imagine what it might be like not to go backward, but to go forward.

It wasn't scary like the fear-mongering we get over trans kids. It was - it is incredible/irresistible to imagine a society where kids and adults are socialized into community, care, creativity, science, the arts, parenting, cooking, nature, farming all without an emphasis on gender. This is liberating and visionary - and reminds us of the larger reality that patriarchy is a construct we all - of every gender - suffer under. And what might be possible if we were free of it!

As Le Guin rerminds us (with my slight adaptation), "We need voices who can see alternatives to how we live now, can see through our fear-stricken society and its obsessive technologies to other ways of being, and even imagine real grounds for hope. We...need [people] who can remember freedom-poets, visionaries - realists of a larger reality."

In the story Stephanie shared with our children, we are reminded of how important it is to imagine what can be - beyond what is. To see it and describe it with such detail - that we can not only see it, we can nearly breathe it - so that it might feed our spirits and our strength.

In Piercy's book, Connie asks her friends in the future about how they changed things, and they tell her "we lost and lost until we won." Later they remind her (given her own reality of being stuck and tested on in a mental institution), "There's always a thing you can deny an oppressor, if only your allegiance. Your belief. Your co-oping [cooperating]. Often even with vastly unequal power, you can find or force an opening to fight back. In your time many without power found ways to fight. Till that became a power."

How can we all prepare ourselves to find ways to not comply, to not cooperate?

As National Guard troops and federal law enforcement are stationed in D.C., I want to celebrate those who find ways not to cooperate, to deny allegiance. I want to celebrate all those in the streets calling out the shame and injustice of troops in the streets. And I want to celebrate the sandwich guy.

You all know the sandwich guy? A 37-year-old white guy who threw his sandwich at these troops in the streets. I know that seems silly - but it was perfect for the absurdity of what is happening - and it wasn't violent.

And the overreaction of his being arrested and charged with a felony just displays that the issue is not public safety freedom - the troops on the streets are there as an act of aggression against the community - and a display meant to demand compliance and control.

It is not just the speculative fiction writers that need to imagine what can be. It is all of us. Because we have a responsibility to be a part of those visionaries "realists of the larger reality.”

The choice of those words is powerful - because it is not about being optimists or pessimists - we must be honest about our condition - but more so, honest about the larger reality in which we live. This larger reality tells us that we depend on the earth for our lives - that water is life - that we need one another and that community makes us strong. The larger reality points us beyond greed, beyond the fictions of patriarchy and white supremacy and imperialism, beyond the systems of control that undermine freedom; points us to a greater truth, a greater faith that what is whole and good in us is our ability to love and care for each other - and that to survive we need to care for one another - everyone - as our people, and this earth as our home.

And it is not an easy road to refuse; to refuse to be complicit in injustice. But it is the path of integrity and faithfulness.

I want to end with something from our own Unitarian history - from a writer remembering freedom and calling us to faithfulness with a larger reality.

James Russell Lowell was a famed American poet of the mid 19th century, son of a Unitarian minister, friends of the transcendentalists - Henry David Thoreau, Emerson and Margaret Fuller. He put his faith in what he called "universal Love."

And like the Transcendentalists and many Unitarians of the time, James Russell Lowell was an abolitionist and an opponent of the Mexican American war, which many understood as a blatant land grab and an effort to extend slavery.

In 1845, on the eve of the War, Lowell wrote the poem, “Once to Every Man and Nation.” Later, in 1896 it was set to music and made a hymn, found in Christian hymnals throughout the country. We will sing it in a moment. The poem reminds us that there are times when we must choose between truth and falsehood and the struggle of being faithful to truth, when those in power choose wrong. The hymn has been used in other justice movements - Martin Luther King quoted it reminding us that even as wrong remains on the throne - truth pulls us to the future. It was also used in the student movement in South Korea in the mid-70s. Before we sing it, I wanted to read a few of the lines from the poem - to hear its message clearly.

"Once to every [soul] and nation

comes the moment to decide,

in the strife of truth with falsehood,

for the good or evil side;...

"Then to side with truth is noble,

when we share her wretched crust,

Ere [before] her cause bring fame and profit,

‘tis prosp'rous to be just;

"Then it is the brave [who] chooses

while the coward stands aside,

till the multitude make virtue

of the faith they had denied

"Though the cause of evil prosper,

the truth alone is strong;

though her portion be the scaffold,

and upon the throne be wrong;

yet that scaffold sways the future,....”

With Lowell, with Le Guin, with those resisting in D.C. and here - so, too, will we hold fast to freedom and dreams of freedom. May they strengthen us for the work we are called to do. May they give our spirits hope and keep us true.