Today’s installment comes from the Rev. Victoria Safford, who serves White Bear Unitarian Universalist Church in Mahtomedi, MN. This article from 2004 appeared in The Nation:

The Gates of Hope

By Rev. Victoria Safford

In his book On the Rez, Ian Frazier tells a story about South Dakota’s Pine Ridge Reservation. In the fall of 1988 the Pine Ridge girls’ basketball team played an away game in Lead, South Dakota. It was one of those times when the host gym was dense with anti-Indian hostility. Lead fans waved food stamps, yelling fake Indian war cries and epithets like “squaw” and “gut-eater.” Usually, the Pine Ridge girls made their entrances according to height, led by the tallest seniors. When they hesitated to face the hostile crowd, a 14-year-old freshman named SuAnne offered to go first. She surprised her teammates and silenced the crowd by performing the Lakota shawl dance — “graceful and modest and show-offy all at the same time,” in Frazier’s words — and then singing in Lakota. SuAnne managed to reverse the crowd’s hostility — until they even cheered and applauded. “Of course, Pine Ridge went on to win the game.”

Here’s another story of daring, of the meeting of our passion and the world’s great hunger for justice: Thirty years ago, to march in the streets of any city, as a gay man or a lesbian, openly, took wild courage, outrageous imagination. But there was more. Those who were there tell us that once you have glimpsed the world as it might be, as it ought to be, as it’s going to be (however that vision appears to you), it is impossible to live anymore compliant and complacent in the world as it is.

(Read on … )