Our acknowledgment practice each Sunday 
is an opportunity to pause, 
breathe, 
and honor the ancestors of this land — 
the Kaw, the Osage, the Pawnee, 
their descendants in diaspora, 
and our own ancestors, wherever they may have lived. 
We acknowledge, too, our own future as ancestors. 
We, ancestors and descendants, love to be free. 
We thrive in the freedom to live peacefully with the beings around us, 
to care for our communities, 
to nourish roots that hold us close, 
to spread wings that take us far. 
We know that true freedom is found in interdependence,
in learning our own unique expression of love for life and neighbor.

The artist and activist Ai Weiwei says,
    Freedom is a pretty strange thing. 
    Once you’ve experienced it, 
    it remains in your heart 
    and no one can take it away. 
    Then as an individual 
    you can be more powerful than a country.

During the Sunday Service on June 1, we honored Norbert Čapek, whose intuition led him to religious freedom as a young adult, whose great heart and great mind remained free even as he was bound by a tyrannical government.

And we recognize people like him all over the world, 
all throughout history, 
who have remained free and powerful witnesses to freedom, 
even when everything falls apart. 
Other spiritual leaders, ordained and not, 
who insist on finding flowers in the cracks of genocide.

• Those who did not survive the camps and the marches but made it possible for others to go on. 
• Activist historians who insist on telling old stories to break their patterns, like those in Namibia who marked their first Genocide Remembrance Day and asked, again, for Germany to make reparations for the 1904-08 genocide.
• Journalists and media workers like Moataz Rajab in Gaza who continue to risk their lives for truth because staying safe is an even greater risk for their values.
• Political prisoners like Mahmoud Khalil.
• Aid workers who go toward conflict rather than away, and fight back when they are blocked.
• Queer and trans youth and people of all ages, and allies, who continue to show us how to live and love authentically.
• Healers and models of healing, who remind us to keep breathing, keep drinking water and eating well and taking time to rest, because we can’t fight fascism if we don’t love our own bodies
• And all of us who keep talking, keep witnessing, keep agitating for change. 

Like Maia Čapek, we spread a communion of flowers across the free world to help everyone wake up to beauty, to resilience.

If you missed the June 1 service or want to learn more about Čapek and his flower communion ritual, here is a great essay.