Read this week’s issue of The Weekly Liberal here: The Weekly Liberal October 24

In this week’s newsletter, Rev. Jen Crow writes:

Love is an act of resistance. This is the phrase that anchors me as our country careens along a course that frustrates, angers, frightens and harms me and the people I love. Love is an act of resistance. 

We start with ourselves. Caring for ourselves, the great guide, Audre Lorde, taught us, is “not self-indulgence, it is self preservation, and that is an act of political warfare.” If we are to create change in this world, we must survive, keeping alive the wisdom and creativity that lives in each of our souls.

We start with each other. Revolutions, the great writer Toni Cade Bambara taught, come from relationships, not rhetoric. Revolutionary relationships cross boundaries and borders, they focus on an ethic of care and deep listening. In revolutionary relationships, we acknowledge our limitations, we take responsibility for harms done, and we begin again in love. Revolutionary relationships, not rhetoric, fuel revolutions. 

We start with the world. Love, bell hooks thankfully continues to teach us, is not a feeling, but an action. How do we bring love to life in the world through our words and our deeds? Love in action will be the foundation of the world of equality and justice, wisdom, creativity and care we long for. 
So in a time when the rhetoric of our country’s leaders is often vile and hurtful, let us lean in to love as an act of resistance. Love for ourselves, love for each other, and love for the world we dream about that sometimes is and still can be. 

How will you practice love this week?

Let me know.

Love,
Rev. Jen