Archive | October 2025

The Compass in Compassion

The Compass in Compassion
David R. Weiss – October 19, 2025
Merging Waters Unitarian Universalist Congregation
New Brighton, Minnesota

This is the message I shared in my congregation this past Sunday. You can access it as a pdf here if you prefer.

NOTE: Because I intentionally echo some of the images in the service readings in my message, I’m including slightly abridged versions of those readings here.

Opening Words: “Charge from the Earth,” by Irene Glasse and Rev. Dr. Rebekah Savage

There is a song beneath the soil. Ten million, million voices raise their call in no human language. Life flows through the tangle of roots, mycelium, microbiota, and crawling burrowing tunneling life.

The song flows upward through trunks and stems and blades of tender grasses and races out into the air. It is picked up and carried on no human tongues. It is in the footfall of paw and hoof, it hums in the buzz of wings and the fluttering of feathers, it shines on scales and fins and slithering skins.

And if we are quiet and pay attention, sometimes we remember that we are part of this song as well and we have notes to sing. But what happens when we humans forget that the life around us is part of us? That these lives have no less inherent worth and dignity? How many more singers of the earthsong will go silent forever?

Today, we are charged to remember. To know that as we live together in community, we are also in community with the silently singing lives in the vast congregation of the earth as well. The interdependent web of existence is no allegory. It is as real as the heart beating within our chests. We are so charged in the name of the sacred song, the tapestry of life of which we are a part: let us remember, and then act.

Reading: from Chris Jerrey’s commentary on Hospicing Modernity by Vanessa Machado de Oliviera

Modernity, Oliviera claims, is not about being contemporary or cutting edge, nor is it about technology or science. It is the state humans adopt when they believe they are separate from nature and not reliant on each other. It is when we view the planet as a storehouse of resources, rather than an organism. It is about viewing non-human animals as livestock, rather than brothers and sisters. It is thinking that polluting a river is okay because the human concept of profit is more important than the life of a waterway. It is about regarding a forest as timber rather than a complex web of life. It is the Slave Triangle, it is using Agent Orange in Vietnam, and it is the lies of the oil companies to defer action on climate change. It is the story of separation, of how humans have cut themselves off from the rest of life on planet Earth by believing that we can do precisely as we wish without repercussions.

We were wrong. Yet generations of modernity as the driving force of the Western world mean that it is everywhere. It is the story we hear whilst growing up and finding our place in the world. It shapes our education and what we do with the things we learn. It reaches deep inside us, filtering our view of the world, deciding what is possible and what is not, severing links with ancient wisdom and the diversity of human experience. It is a restrictive template for how we experience our own lives.

Story for All Ages: “Necessary Equipment” by Karen G. Johnston, based on a true story that happened in Iceland in December 2024.

[The story recounted an incident in which social media posts reported that a young swan was stuck, frozen to the ice on a pond, and seemed to be dying. The post sparked many responses, but one person posted, “I am on my way. With the necessary equipment.” That equipment turned out to be a thermos of hot water, a surfboard (in case the ice failed), and a friend.]

Song: “By Breath” by Sara Thomsen

[Through four nature-filled verses, this song unfolds its refrain: “By breath, by blood, by body, by spirit, we are all one.”

MY MESSAGE: THE COMPASS IN COMPASSION

CARE FOR THE EARTH—IN A TIME OF COLLAPSE?

Today’s twin themes are Cultivating Compassion and Care for the Earth. But that leaves a stark truth unsaid. Our real task is to care for the earth—in a time of collapse. Anything short of this is a task for another time.

I could spend the next twenty minutes supporting this claim. But I have more to say than that. So, I’ll just reference one recent headline.

For fifty years now we’ve known—beyond doubt—that rising CO2 levels could eventually imperil us. And we’ve determined that 350 parts per millions of CO2 in Earth’s atmosphere is the “safe upper limit” for a climate hospitable to human civilization. Above that, a host of reactions begin that threaten the stability of ocean currents, growing seasons, ice caps, and much more.

In 1987 (the year my son was born), CO2 hit 350 parts per million. In the years since, it has soared past that safe upper limit, rising year after year without interruption. Just last week (10/15/2025) The Guardian reported that last year CO2 reached (another) record level of 424 parts per million. Worse, last year’s increase was the largest single year increase in CO2 since 1957 when modern record-keeping began. We’re far past 350, and we’re accelerating.

The truth is we aren’t asking about how to care for the earth in a vacuum—as though by learning some green practices, we can keep the planet pristine. Earth as we know it is dying. We may tend some of her wounds, but the juggernaut of extractive industrial consumptive capitalism is such that even the wounds we tend, will be torn open again before long.

So, I am saying the hard part out loud and up front. Our care for the earth is going to look a lot more like hospice then healing. I don’t say that lightly. I say it because we need to know. UU’s have been at the forefront of many social justice causes because our principles and values have helped us to discern truth and act with resolute conviction, even when it has been challenging and uncomfortable. This is one such time. I beg of us, that we hold tightly to our values and lean into the tumult, to be of service as best we can.

COMING HOME . . . TO A PLACE WE’VE NEVER BEFORE

To do that, we must come home.

Now, “home” was a topic of major discussion a few days ago when I discussed my thoughts for today with my Second Tuesday conversation group. I got more pushback for this choice of image, than anything else. Let me explain why I’m holding onto it, including how I mean it—and how I don’t.

It’s true, for some people “home” is not a happy memory; maybe not even a happy present. I lived for three years in a violent marriage that left me regularly bruised on the outside and broken on the inside. I know “home” can hold ambiguous meanings or worse.

It’s true, there are people who live far closer to the land than most of us do. But even farmers, naturalists, ecologists, even off-gridders—while they may understand the land, its creatures, and its systems better than most of us, they were still formed by a civilization built on a lie. Most of them are not “home” in the sense I mean. Unless you’re talking about the Bushmen of the Kalahari (or some other indigenous people largely untouched by the West) there are very few people “at home” in the way I mean it.

It’s true, “home” can wrongly suggest I’m inviting us back to some pristine earlier time some generations ago. No. Home, as I mean it, is nowhere behind us. It is only up ahead. And only if we chose to go there. In this sense, even the few tribes that still know many of the old ways, are no longer “home”; because their wisdom—which is real—will be shaken by a world made unknown to them because it is dying on account of forces beyond anything they can fathom.

In fact, that future will be marked decisively—for all us—by displacement, by homelessness to one degree or another. So why then speak of coming “home”?! Because I believe “home” still means something profoundly good, even if for some, that meaning is intuited in painful contradiction of our own experience.

By “home” I mean being in a dynamic relationship with our surroundings that is honest, trustworthy, and life-giving. In that sense, I’m asking us to come home to Earth. If we wish to care for the web of life in all its diversity, to be of service to the plants and animals, to the waters, skies and land, we must come home.

And right now, we are far away.

THE STORY THAT TOOK US FAR FROM HOME

Vanessa Oliviera was born into the overlap and conflict between indigenous heritage and the West. Today she works at the crossroads of indigenous wisdom and the Western worldview. In Hospicing Modernity, she argues that Modernity is governed by a Story of Separation that tells us we are separate from nature. That animals can become livestock, because they’re not our siblings; that the soil and water and air can be the endless recipients of our pollution and waste because they’re not living webs of relationship—at least not with us.

The first whispers of Separation began much earlier, with patriarchy, agriculture, domesticated animals, and anthropocentric cosmologies. What we’ve called “civilization”—urban settlements with science, leisure, and the arts, but also class structure, extractive and exploitive economies, and accumulative wealth—fed on the Story of Separation for several millennia before Modernity emerged.

But in the culmination of the scientific and industrial revolutions, powered by seemingly unlimited access to fossil fuels, and amplified by the globalization of economics and information, Modernity became a threat to life on Earth.

This notion that we were somehow separate from the natural world, was foolhardy from the first, but Modernity embedded it in every facet of our lives. It’s now the DNA of the systems we’ve built. Capitalism foremost. But our economic and banking systems; our transportation and manufacturing systems; our education and social systems; even our cultural and belief systems have all been shaped by a story that sets apartness rather than relationship at the heart of reality.

Vanessa says we were taught, generation after generation . . . to be separate—until today when our neurophysiology so limits our ability to sense and perceive nature that our separateness seems real.

Human beings once knew Earth was alive. That we were singers within a chorus that began in the soil beneath our feet and echoed in the trees and animals alongside us. Our distant ancestors knew Earth as home. We might even have entertained that distant memory in our own childhood imaginations . . . before the Story of Separation had its way with us.

It is demonstrably (and devastatingly!) “true” that the stories telling us we were “more” than Earthlings—somehow apart from Earth itself and all its limits—those stories led us to new heights, which we called “civilizations,” each one grander than the one before it. “Progress” was a rush to our egos and seemed such proof of our genius. Never mind that we achieved this by utter lack of civility toward our fellows, human and otherwise.

But now the repercussions of our “progress” are here. Rising CO2, warming temperatures, vanishing insects, weakening ocean currents, increasingly fraught weather, and collapsing carbon sinks to name just a few. The fractures are everywhere.

How do we care for THIS world? We must go home.

HUNGRY FOR HOME

And yet here we are, FAR from home, lost in a world now increasingly and inexorably un-worlding itself all around us. We have wandered so far and for so long in this Story of Separation, how will we ever find our way home from here?

I suggest the compass that can lead us home can be found in a stuffed bear named Winnie-the-Pooh. Hear me out. Because we need wisdom anchored in images that stay with us.

There is a tale in which Pooh and his friends are out adventuring and get lost. Tigger is unfazed, but also frenetically unhelpful. Rabbit denies they’re lost—and stalwartly leads them in circles until panic sets in and he goes off on his own. As Pooh and Piglet take a rest in the small clearing they’ve now come to for the umpteenth time, Piglet names out loud his fear that they’re lost and wonders how they will ever find their way home.

Suddenly, Piglet is startled by a noise, but Pooh explains, “My tummy rumbled. Now then, let’s go home.” Piglet is confused and asks Pooh if he really knows the way. Pooh responds, “No, Piglet, but I’ve got twelve pots of honey in my cupboard, and they’ve been calling to my tummy. I couldn’t hear them before because Tigger and Rabbit were talking so much. I think I know where they’re calling from now, so come on. We’ll just follow my tummy.”

And sure enough, Pooh’s rumbling tummy guides them home.

It’s interesting; there’s a Greek word used frequently in the New Testament Gospels: splagchnizomai. It actually means tummies rumbling. Okay, literally, it means “to be moved deep in your bowels”—pretty much the same thing. When the Gospels describe Jesus as having a rumbling tummy, it’s translated as COMPASSION. Beyond pity, sympathy, or even empathy, splagchnizomai names that restlessness so deep in your gut that it drives you to act.

I offer Pooh’s rumbling tummy to remind us to trust compassion to lead us home.

ALLOWING OUR GUTS TO WRENCH

However, we will encounter challenges as we use compassion as our compass to go home.

Even for Pooh, the challenge was to hear the rumbling itself. Both the frenzy of Tigger and the adamant denials of Rabbit make it impossible for Pooh to hear his own tummy until he sat in silence. Vanessa would say the Story of Separation contains both Tiggers and Rabbits determined to keep us from hearing the rumbling in our own tummies.

Just ask yourself, which of your personal habits (your thinking, eating, entertainment, news, purchasing) and which institutional forces around you (where you work, live, and shop; your credit cards, debts, government) reinforce the Story of Separation and keep you from being moved so deeply in your gut by the suffering in the natural world that you cannot fail to act. I’m betting this isn’t a short list for any of us.

So, the first challenge is to become aware of how loud the Lie of Separation is in our lives, and then to call its bluff. Joanna Macy, a contemporary saint of ecological renewal, was a Buddhist practitioner and a scholar of systems thinking. She just died in July at 96. Her life’s work was to overcome the Story of Separation. In fact, the trainings she developed are known as “The Work that Reconnects.” Joanna was convinced our connectedness to the web of life ran so deep, far deeper than any of the noise generated by the Lie of Separation, that if we just genuinely pause and listen, we will hear the music of that song inviting us to learn its tune once again.

The second challenge is harder. Because while that song—the music of all the beings in the interdependent web—is just waiting for us. And while that music can indeed evoke reverence and wonder. In a dying world, as we choose to listen beyond the Separation that has framed our lives, we will hear cascades of grief upon grief upon grief.

The creatures, the plants and forests, the soil are all suffering on account of the damage done to this living Earth by a story that set one being—humans—outside the web. And while we may be happy to savor the reverence and wonder that nature can still evoke, the rumbling in our tummies, the compassion that is our compass, that will be felt as grief.

Compassion means, literally, to suffer with, and our journey home will lead us into the felt suffering of the world that we had learned we were separate from. And there, we will discover that we were never apart from all other living things. That intimate connection remains, like the still embers of a fire, deep in our bones.

But that discovery has two distinct steps. As we open ourselves to the pain of the world, we will feel that suffering (not ours, the world’s). And while that grief may seem overwhelming, it is ultimately our passport home. Because as we allow that grief to move through us, we will experience a rebirth of kinship deep in our souls. We will remember that we have always been kin to all that is on Earth. And that will be the first hint that we are nearly home.

THE NECESSARY EQUIPMENT

I end with three strong intuitions about coming home and some thoughts on “the necessary equipment” to care for a dying planet.

These days are fraught—and not just for the wider Earth community. Many members of our human community are also in peril. Immigrants and trans persons, the poor, persons of color, and women, all find their rights and wellbeing under attack as fascism asserts itself in this land. And across the globe there is no pause in human suffering. The Lie of Separation tells us humans matter most. But I say, far from distracting us from fascism here or suffering elsewhere, remembering our kinship with Earth will further deepen our care for our fellow humans. This is not either/or; it is emphatically both/and.

Second, it is critical that we include our youth and young adults as we come home. They are growing up smack on the fault line of the false promises of separation and consumption while both our natural world and social world are fracturing. They likely already feel the pain of the world. It’s essential that we help them recognize that pain as a beacon home.

Third, our inward commitment to compassion will take expression in diverse ways. I will suggest a few this morning. But ultimately, the journey itself will be generative of the actions we’ll need. Like you, I am a refugee from the Story of Separation. Our shared understanding of “home” will deepen and emerge as we go.

Now, the necessary equipment.

First is opening ourselves to compassion, both as the restless yearning in our gut and also as the ceaseless (and often senseless) suffering of our sibling creatures on the planet. Compassion is a muscle of sorts. As we use it, it will strengthen and be capable of more.

Alongside compassion, a host of personal and communal rituals and practices may help us. Think of them as “experiments in the Truth of Inseparability.” Some will work better than others. But we’ll only learn which ones work best by trying them out.

For starters, ask your five senses to help you know the world . . . intimately. Let compassion join your sight, sound, taste, smell, and touch. Pay attention to what evokes wonder and joy—and what evokes grief, perhaps even rage.

In light of the Truth of Inseparability, consider if the choices you make regarding pesticides, insecticides, and herbicides; or the food you eat; or the personal products you use. This isn’t about chasing ethical purity. All life takes life in order to live. It’s about becoming more intentional in choices that either reinforce the Lie of Separation or reclaim the Truth of Inseparability. Remember, too, simplicity is green. And, like compassion, simplicity is a muscle that can reach further the more we exercise it.

Read an introductory book on permaculture. This can get detailed and dense, but an introductory book can expand your imagination about what it might mean for agricultural, household, or even urban policies and practices to experiment with the Truth of Inseparability.

Create a meditative labyrinth (or really any simple trail) that features plants and animals that have gone extinct because of human activity in Modernity. Such a trail would ask us to really encounter, even briefly, the suffering wrought on our world by the Story of Separation. Not to make us feel guilty. Rather, to feel the world’s pain deeply so we remember our kinship with it. Imagine walking that trail with Sara Thomsen’s “By Breath” playing in the background.

Make green burial part of your own funeral plans. When we die, nothing pays final tribute to the Lie of Separation quite like taking extra steps to keep our dead body from re-entering the cycle of life. And it’s hard to overstate how shifting our death rituals away from Separation and toward Inseparability could harness the energy of these liminal moments for truth.

The last “necessary equipment,” just like in today’s story for all generation, is company. Everything I’ve mentioned above is more doable if we do it together. Additionally, because there will be waves of grief that wash over us as we go, it’s equally important that we cultivate communal wonder and joy to steady us. Things like our monthly Coffee House will be needed all the more as we make our way home.

Okay, that was A LOT. But it is no small task: to consider cultivating compassion as we care for the earth in a time of collapse.

Still, I leave you with two concluding words of wisdom.

Vanessa Oliviera says it is helpful to remember we are both insufficient and indispensable for the work that awaits us. The song of Life is not a solo for any species. We can’t sing it by ourselves, but there are notes that only our voices can hit. The song needs all of us.

Lastly, I said earlier that the future will be marked decisively—for all us—by displacement, by homelessness to one degree or another.

So, let’s be clear: home is not a place. It is a dynamic living relationship with the web of Life, especially those strands of the web nearest to us. As we move our hearts and our lives in the direction of compassion, the journey itself becomes our home.

May it be so.

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David Weiss is a theologian, writer, poet and hymnist, “writing into the whirlwind” of contemporary challenges, joys, and sorrows around climate crisis, sexuality, justice, peace, and family. Reach him at drw59mn@gmail.com. Read more at www.davidrweiss.com where he blogs under the theme, “Full Frontal Faith: Erring on the Edge of Honest.” Support him in Writing into the Whirlwind at www.patreon.com/fullfrontalfaith.

Homecoming: Times Three

Oct21

[A poem I wrote contemplating the changing seasons in my life from climate crisis to collapse to cancer …]

Homecoming: Times Three

‘Twas seven years ago, or eight,
I found myself awake—and late;
The rising heat, so clear to see,
It seemed to set a task for me.

And so, I set my mind and heart
A map to draw, a path to chart;
To summon all of us to meet
This moment well and cool the heat.

I read and thought and read some more
Then wrestled ‘til the words did pour;
‘Twas finitude the theme I sounded,
That life by death was wisely bounded.

That if we wished to know our worth
The truth is we’re at home on Earth;
The limits that we live within
Are bodied grace, not sign of sin

Could we but learn “enough” to seek
We might avert a future bleak.
From prairie blooms to river’s foam,
It would be well if we came home.

. . .

But then three years ago, or four,
It dawned on me that so much more
Than heat alone was now at play—
That other forces ruled the day.

It seemed to me—and seems so still
That all our efforts are for nil
Collapse will be—not if, but when
This earth our home no less, but then—

When home is all a wounded heart,
An ecosystem torn apart,
A world undone by endless more,
With peril now for all in store.

How might we claim this home as ours?
By leveraging forgotten powers:
Boundless care and boundless sorrow
And tenderness to meet tomorrow.

Through simple joys and generous tears
Through choosing right despite our fears
Behold in awe our starlit dome
Amid Collapse we yet come home.

. . .

Mere months ago, as few as three,
Collapse came home—and came for me.
When cancer flipped my world on end
And all the words that I had penned—

About a world on edge out there
Returned to me and laid me bare.
Does finitude feel noble still,
When it comes time to pay your bill?

What does it cost to call death wise,
Until it stares you in the eyes?
My body now a petri dish;
Ten side effects for every wish.

That wounded heart—it’s not just mine
My kids are six; my grandkids nine;
And Margaret, ever at my side,
Our love runs deep and just as wide.

With care and sorrow, joy and tears,
With gratitude for all the years,
Should I, too soon, return to loam,
This journey, too, is coming home.

. . .

September 5, 2025
David R. Weiss

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Courting Kali, Goddess of Destruction

Oct17

Courting Kali: My Eight-Week Fling with the Goddess of Destruction

I lay in this stillness, waiting for her to come.
Sweat bottoms and underwear lowered to my hips,
I am exposed, vulnerable, and hungry.
My longing is not less than erotic,
because in ways that only she can deliver,
she will complete me. So I hope.
And so, I long for her coming.

Suddenly a flash of light and the portal opens;
right beneath me the table itself jumps
announcing her presence in trembling alarm.
Now the room is abuzz—“understated” is not her thing.
Next I know—what I want, what I need—she mounts me.
Her touch is ephemeral; for all my anticipation,
everything I feel is in my head; everything I need is in my gut.

My life (yours, too) rests on mortality:
the consistent—faithful!—dying of my own cells,
making mundane renewal—mundane life—possible.
But now some band of renegade cells,
cancerous prostate cells, have reneged on mortality.
Having chosen life everlasting—their choice imperils
my much more limited yet beloved life.

And so, here I am, courting Kali,
Hindu goddess of destruction and death.
Sure, by outward appearance it seems for these eight weeks
I’m getting zapped by intensity-modulated radiation
targeting my prostate bed and pelvic lymph nodes,
but these stakes are existential—far too personal
to settle for anything less than the goddess herself.

I see the bright flash of light, and I whisper,
“Welcome, Kali, sweet mother of chaos.”
I feel the table beneath me shift as she crouches,
and I nod my assent to her killing instinct.
The room fills with the buzz of her affection,
and I whisper sweet nothings into her ears
while her hands (all four of them) bring the death
I need for life.

October 17, 2025 – David R. Weiss

I’ve been chronicling my prostate cancer journey since my diagnosis in January 2025.
Find my first set of blogs (January-June 2025) in a pdf here: When Cancer Comes Calling: Innocence.
Find my second set of blogs (July-August 2025) in a pdf here: When Cancer Comes Calling: Awakening.
My third set (September 2025 and beyond) is under the theme “Soundings.” So far it includes:
#1 Self-Advocacy: Sorry—Not Sorry.
#2 ADT – Making Deals with the Devil
#3 Courting Kali, Goddess of Destruction

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UUA Article II: Anti-Fascism is Us

Oct7

UUA Article II: Anti-Fascism is Us
David R. Weiss – October 7, 2025

Find a PDH version HERE.

[A message to my co-conspirators (those who breathe alongside me) in the Unitarian Universalist tradition, although the values that animate our lives will resonate with many others.]

Beloveds,

The time for unmistakable clarity is upon us.

We are now living under a fascist regime. Consider the features: hyper-nationalism; cult-like veneration of the leader; open disdain for democratic elections; repression of protest and critique; demonizing one’s adversaries; ignoring the courts; rampant militarism—including the intentional terrorizing of immigrant communities; rampant self-serving corruption that enriches the few, impoverishes the many, and scapegoats the vulnerable. We are witnessing a textbook unfolding of fascism in real time.

That clarity, however, is mere preamble for the clarity to which we are now called.

I suspect most UU’s tilt anti-fascist on impulse. Our twin historical roots centered the primacy of love (Universalism) and the priority of reason and free conscience (Unitarianism). And it’s likely that one or both of these sentiments drew us to this tradition. But these same sentiments are ones that fascism is wont to condemn or even criminalize.

Our commitments have often put us out of step with societal norms and have occasionally proven costly. We have our own roster of martyrs—from Michael Servetus (d. 1553) to Rev. James Reeb (d. 1965)—whose lived convictions cost them their lives. We have ample reason to be wary of authoritarianism, religious or secular. And fascism is unbridled authoritarianism. Of course, we are almost instinctively against that.

And yet, in this moment—as fascism becomes the ruling logic in our country—we need more than an intuitive impulse that is anti-fascist. Today it is critical for UU’s to be explicitly aware of and reflectively articulate about our often implicit anti-fascist leaning. For several reasons.

1. Becoming explicit and articulate will enable us to be in deeper covenant within and across our congregations. Because fascism is utterly antithetical to our shared values, being anti-fascist is expressive of our UU faith/identity. It is foundational for our covenantal solidarity.

2. This will also help us reach out to family, friends, and others who may be troubled by what is transpiring in our nation, but whose misgivings have not yet crystalized into a clear position or into actual resistance. We won’t persuade everyone. Yet, if we are thoughtful and clear we will persuade some few. And under fascism every few matters.

3. This will also set us in solidarity with immigrants, trans persons, the poor and unhoused, persons of color, protestors, and others who are being dehumanized, even demonized, by the rhetoric of this fascist regime, and its echoes in the streets and on social media. Our witness to our anti-fascist convictions may well be life-giving to those who find their lives under daily assault.

4. This will also sow seeds of possibility. Fascism’s theatrical displays of power and brute force aim to create the perception that it is inevitable and unstoppable—that resistance is not just futile, but unimaginable. Even while fascism plays out in our country, our faithful counter witness creates space for the imagination of liberation and Beloved Community to persist.

5. Finally, our clarity about the deep roots of our anti-fascism is critical because these convictions may prove costly. Fascism operates by a dynamic of domination. We will not resist it without risk. We may begin in ways that carry lesser risks, but we cannot know in advance how much further we may find ourselves called to act. Or how intolerant this regime’s fascism will be of even minor or merely symbolic resistance. Thus, the simple clarity of our convictions needs to be held heart by heart.

At any given moment one or more of these reasons may take priority because of the context. But I expect all five are likely to be front and center in our lives at different times.

As my title suggests, Article II of our UUA bylaws—which names the shared convictions around which we have covenanted to live—provides a framework for an anti-fascist faith. The foundational values by which we make meaning and pursue moral discernment are intrinsically and, upon reflection, explicitly anti-fascist. Let me show you.

We affirm Liberating Love at the center of life—the core of life’s purpose and meaning, the basis of life’s flourishing, and the motivation for our aspirations and actions. Fascism, because it trades in brute force as its currency, can only acknowledge love as a quaint feeling best domesticated and limited to personal relationships with no role in political and civic life. We know otherwise.

Fascism wants to replace love with order. In doing so, it denies the mystery, whimsy, and diversity that are the signature of Love across the cosmos from distant quasars to quantum mechanics and to the inmost sanctum of the human heart. The only anti-dote to fascism is the persistent choice of Liberating Love. So, in this moment we earnestly choose Love.

We value Justice—believing that systems of impartial judgment place a needed check on power and provide the infrastructure for sound democratic practices which benefit our lives at all levels. As Cornel West has said, “Justice is what love looks like in public.”

Fascism, however, has no use for justice except as the coerced or masqueraded approval of its unchecked power. Hence, the vetting of judges for ideological fidelity to the nearly unlimited reach of Executive power—and the disregard and disparagement of judges who still try to place checks on power. Fascism views justice, like love, as a quaint notion no longer relevant in a society where power is accorded absolute value.

Our commitment to justice sets us at odds with the injustices that are endemic to fascism. Insofar as we attest by our words and deeds to the ultimacy of Love as that which empowers not only our lives but also the just and liberating fabric of our communities, we set ourselves on a collision course with fascism. Not because we want that fight, but because we want to be faithful.

We value Pluralism because we regard diverse views and multiple voices essential for the pursuit of truth, the work of justice, and the joy of fellowship. We affirm difference as an echo of Love’s rampant creativity in the world and a fundamental good in our common life.

But fascism, as the embodiment of political arrogance and narcissism, considers the regime and its leaders as the sole arbiter of truth. Its hyper-nationalism never celebrates the nation’s diversity, but rather claims that only a certain sliver of a population represents the true nation. In this regime it is Americans of white European ancestry who matter. (Those who are nonwhite but willing to be loyal servants in the regime are praised, but when their usefulness to the regime runs out, they will be discarded quickly and brutishly.)

Fascism is driven to belittle, condemn, or altogether erase difference. From mocking public figures with differing views to dismissing minority voices and erasing their history, from demonizing immigrants to dehumanizing trans persons, fascism’s behavior relentlessly endangers both pluralism and persons. We will need to be equally relentless in actively valuing pluralism in our practices and in our public witness.

We value Interdependence—understanding it to be a fundamental truth, both ecologically and socially. Any one of us is, only because others are. And we humans are, only within a complex web of all else that is. Yet we humans have shown ourselves all too capable of choosing to actively deny this truth. Indeed, we have created economies and worldviews that operate against interdependence, thereby placing humanity and all members of the Earth community in peril. Thus, to say we value interdependence, is to say we choose to live by this truth.

In contrast, for fascism, interdependence is heresy. Fascism insists, loudly and belligerently, that its power (alone!) defines all relations and renders them subservient to its desires. Hence, its full-scale assault on the interwoven reality of immigrants in our economy and communities, its disregard for the community of nations, its aggressive denial of basic human rights, its undoing of the green policies of past administrations, and its ignorant rejection of the finitude of our world.

These very real echoes of interdependence elicit only contempt from fascism. Our valuing independence as essential to healthy community will invite contempt from this regime as well.

We value Equity as the practical manifestation of pluralism, interdependence, and justice across a social system. Equity seeks to ensure that all have the opportunities and resources necessary to flourish. AND—that no one holds or controls such a disproportionate share of power or resources that this prevents equity from being realized. Ultimately, we value equity because it reflects our bedrock conviction of the intrinsic dignity of each person.

But fascism reduces every person to their transactional value to the regime, inevitably reducing many to precarity, others to poverty, and others to sheer contempt—their transactional value being only to serve as scapegoats for the regime. This only amplifies the grotesque inequity capitalism has already brought about despite the abundance of material goods.

We will never establish equity in a society ruled by a fascist regime. Still, we can pursue equity in our congregations, our partnerships, our social justice initiatives, and our personal lives. In doing so, we bear witness to the possibility of a world other than the one fascism wants to dictate.

We value Generosity as an authentic response to our awareness that Life is ultimately Gift. In all its ecological and social complexity, all its spiritual/mystical depth, Life unconditionally offers itself to us. The reverence—surpassing awe—that we feel at Life’s Gift echoes in the generosity that emerges in our relations with others.

Fascism, however, because it is steeped in self-veneration, has no capacity for genuine awe or reverence. It may reward its inside players gratuitously but divvying up the spoils of goods stolen from the labor of others or from the Earth is the very perversion of generosity. When every relationship is rendered transactional, generosity is a concept devoid of meaning … except as corruption. Hence, the rejection of empathy and the open assault on those in need.

Our practice of generosity will not merely make us appear weak or foolish, it will directly challenge the lie of fascism’s ruthless logic.

Finally, we value Transformation for two reasons. At the personal level it is the promise and pathway of personal growth and self-understanding. In this aspect, transformation honors the unique and sacred character of each person’s journey. Fascism pays lip service to the heroic journey, but in reality, except for the elite few, it imposes crushing conformity on everyone else. To value personal transformation in a fascist society is to refuse—to resist, even to subvert—the pressure of conformation.

In its historical-communal aspect, transformation names the importance of discerning our vocation across time and place. We regularly ask as a community, “What form shall faithfulness to Liberating Love take … here, in this place and in this moment?” (Our recent revision of Article II is evidence of our commitment to transformation in our internal denominational life.) But under fascism all transformation is at the dictate of the regime. There is no room for communal conscience, only for conforming to the regime’s demands. Thus, every fascist regime including the present one cannot tolerate the dissenting voices of comedians, poets, artists, or religious leaders. Because such persons sustain our civic capacity to imagine things otherwise than they now are.

Genuine transformation, both personal and communal-societal, is antithetical to fascism.

Our Unitarian Universalist values are the foundation of our covenantal fidelity to one another. They shape our faith and the life we envision together. They guide our aspirations to be a liberating and transformative presence in the world. They do not dictate specific opinions or actions for us. They represent something more like the musical key in which we have chosen to improvise our music. Still, seven-for-seven these values—anchored deep in our consciences by intuition and mutuality—provide a musical key in which all our faithful improvisation will be anti-fascist. Not because we choose to be in opposition to the current regime, but because fascism is in utter opposition to our chosen faith.

On September 22, 2025, this regime designated Antifa as a domestic terrorist organization. There is, of course, no such actual organization as Antifa. The term refers to something like an organic but largely uncoordinated alliance of efforts across a wide diversity of tactics (ranging from disciplined nonviolence to strategic property destruction) that share a singular concern: to oppose the rise and reach of fascism in societies. Indeed, it is satirically emblematic that this regime would declare Antifa a domestic terrorist organization. Any government that declares a movement that is by definition and by historical practice anti-fascist is by implication itself FASCIST.

I suspect most of the shadowy, autonomous, disconnected groups that might quietly and legitimately own the designation antifa would view our efforts too timid for their taste. Still, it’s noteworthy that our “brand” symbol, the flaming chalice, has its own anti-fascist origins in 1941 during World War II. Created by an Austrian artist refugee—the flaming chalice was first used by the Unitarian Service Committee as an “official” seal on the altogether unofficial travel documents they issued to assist countless refugees in their escape from the fascism of the Nazi regime.

As we live our way into this precarious moment with Liberating Love as our compass, our calling is clear. With the flaming chalice as our emblem, we must consider our respective contexts and our unique gifts, placing our values in the service of our faithful imagination. Our worship, from ritual to reading to reflection; our congregational practices, from polity to planning to fellowship and mutual care; and our public engagement, from welcome and outreach to witness and advocacy—All of these should be unapologetically and explicitly anti-fascist. Neither for our sake nor for the world’s sake can we afford to be discreet and unnoticed. Not now.

Our Unitarian Universalist faith, centered as it is in Liberating Love with an array of mutually supporting values, is anti-fascist from first to the last. Article II makes clear: Anti-fascism is us.

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David Weiss is a theologian, writer, poet and hymnist, “writing into the whirlwind” of contemporary challenges, joys, and sorrows around climate crisis, sexuality, justice, peace, and family. Reach him at drw59mn@gmail.com. Read more at www.davidrweiss.com where he blogs under the theme, “Full Frontal Faith: Erring on the Edge of Honest.” Support him in Writing into the Whirlwind at www.patreon.com/fullfrontalfaith.