Guest blog by Brad Offutt
I was really wondering what she’d say in her Ware Lecture to all the virtually assembled UUs at the end of the General Assembly. Stacey Abrams is brilliant and well-informed, so she certainly would know to whom she was to speak – a liberal group professing no creed and identifying as spiritual but also committed to social action. An over-eighty-percent white group. A group in the midst of deciding how to address white supremacy. What would she say? What would be the guidance from the highly intelligent brain of a Black female activist, politician, writer, and avowed Christian? It wasn’t at all what I might have expected.

Stacey Abrams told us that she had spent most of that day in Black neighborhoods, encouraging people to get vaccinated against COVID-19. She found the residents of those neighborhoods to be, at heart, “prayerful and powerful.” She recalled her parents (both Methodist ministers) and their life-long lesson to her – don’t take yourself too seriously. Then came the core of her message to us, centered on three concepts:

1. Imagination. Imagine a better world and picture yourself doing the work to get there. She encouraged an attitude of “opportunistic responsibility.” Her focus was on doing, not intellectualizing.
2. Demand. Demand more. And I thought she was about to talk about demanding an end to white supremacy. She did not. She made a moving plea for everyone to create a space for the disenfranchised to say, for themselves, what they need. Help all prayerful, hopeful people to have a voice; don’t think you can, or should, speak for them.
3. Protection. Hold leaders accountable for their policies and actions. And – very strong emphasis here – invest in communities. True community protects. I imagined her right here in Port Townsend, urging all of us to get involved in making Peter’s Place, and Pat’s Place, and Seventh Haven work. And work as part of our community.

Her closing, very powerful thought, if perhaps difficult for some to hear: “We are children of a God who sees us, but who tells us that we are responsible on this Earth for crafting our narrative and crafting our future.”

So what I had expected might be a forceful message telling me to feel guilty and ashamed turned out to be just the opposite. Stacey Abrams asked us all to join her in the joy of getting to work, right where we are, right now.