Be a Rainbow (w/ Maya Angelou and Sweet Honey)

Preached at Cedars Unitarian Universalist Church on November 1, 2024

So I’m gonna take a moment to call into the pulpit with me my beloved ancestors who are long dead who have been kind to me who have given me love. Be with me now. 

This includes Donna Moore, recently departed and beloved by this congregation and beyond, she is the only person who ever booed me. It was in this room. And it was hilarious. 

I was preaching from this pulpit and I said something self deprecating and Donna took issue with me putting myself down. And she didn’t hold back. BOO! One of my favorite stories ever. She was a rainbow in so many clouds. So come now and be with me Donna. Be with us. We need you know. We need that truth telling spirit. Come be with us now.

For those who don’t know me, I am Rev. Jessica Star Rockers. I was a member here at Cedars for about a decade before I went to Meadville Lombard Theological School, one of our UU seminaries, and then in January 2019 with the help of this congregation I was ordained into the Unitarian Universalist ministry. I went on to serve as the minister of Kitsap UU Fellowship in Bremerton for three years, through the early days of the pandemic. And before we could fully come back together after that, I crashed and burned and abruptly resigned. 

And I want to share a little bit about my story because I know Cedars has experienced something similar recently. It is a similar grief that we share. And I'm honored that the board has hired me to offer spiritual care to those who need it for the next six months. Please know you can call me or text or whatever you need. Or if you hear of someone else who needs a phone call or visit from me, you can let me know. I invite you to reach out. 

Not to put too fine a point on it but someday I will be one of the ancestors of this congregation. My family and I put love and time and talent and treasure into this place and in return this congregation gifted me and my family a spiritual path which changed our lives in the most wonderful ways. And it happened here. Something truly magical. And this is part of the history of this church. I am so grateful to be part of this history. And whatever happens in my life and whatever happens in this church when I am long gone I hope no one ever forgets I was ordained here. A congregation that ordains a new minister is a congregation that has loved someone into ministry. That is an incredible amount of love to do that for someone. It is an incredible gift. And as one of the future ancestors of this place I want to say a little bit about what happened to my ministry.

And here is what happened: my dad died. Pretty tragically and painfully from the effects of alcoholism. This was amidst the stress of the early pandemic and online church and a dozen memorial services, several of young people. My health was suffering and I was burning out. Because ministry in its current form is a burn out profession. And then my dad died.

And in grief I lost my mind. If you have grieved the tragic loss of someone close to you, perhaps you know what I’m talking about. Grief in all forms can make you lose grip with reality. Suddenly I didn’t know who I was or what it all meant. What was the story I was supposed to be telling? The one I’d been telling didn’t make sense anymore. It was like grief came and tore apart the pieces of my Self and scattered them on the floor. 

I tried to figure out how to continue my ministry admist the deep grieving I was doing, but there was no way. Grief itself was a spiritual journey that was calling me out of the pulpit into the wilderness. We all know how Jesus wandered in the wilderness, for 40 days and nights. The Jewish people wandered in the desert for 40 years. These are familiar stories from our religious traditions. But I hadn’t thought much about the spiritual journey of wandering. And while it’s true that all who wander may not be lost, I have to say, in the spiritual tradition of wandering, you are lost. You are most certainly lost.

Joan Didion writes about the insanity of grief in her book The Year of Magical Thinking. 

“Grief turns out to be a place none of us know until we reach it. We anticipate (we know) that someone close to us could die, but we do not look beyond the few days or weeks that immediately follow such an imagined death. We misconstrue the nature of even those few days or weeks. We might expect if the death is sudden to feel shock. We do not expect the shock to be obliterative, dislocating to both body and mind. We might expect that we will be prostrate, inconsolable, crazy with loss. We do not expect to be literally crazy, cool customers who believe that their dead husband is about to return and will need his shoes. In the version of grief we imagine, the model will be "healing." A certain forward movement will prevail. Nor can we know ahead of the fact… the unending absence that follows, the void, the very opposite of meaning, the relentless succession of moments during which we will confront the experience of meaninglessness itself.”

I think I have been grieving nonstop for the last four years, nearly five. From when the pandemic started honestly, and the grief compounded itself with one tragedy after another, until I finally had no choice but to stop and admit I was wandering. I was lost. And I had to face it and move on.

The grieving didn’t stop, it simply became a wisdom that I carry with me. Still so present I can’t seem to stop talking about it and preaching on it. I cherish it. And today, on a day we are honoring our beloved ancestors, on all saints or all souls, Samhain, dia de los muertos, our dead are with us. Many of us are plunged back into the acute stages of grieving, even after we have felt the forward momentum of healing, as Didion says it isn’t linear. It is a spiral we move around. Each time gaining a little more perspective, a little more distance, but still traveling in that circle of loss.

That is the feeling of wandering, of being lost, going round and round in circles. But the spiral is sacred. In Greek myth, the labyrinth is the passage from the human to the divine. If you’ve ever walked a labyrinth you know, it disorients your body and your mind. It takes you the opposite way that your sense of direction tells you to go. It releases you from linear thinking. And it opens you to deeper truths. And then the horror of the Minotaur, the monster within. With whom you must make peace before retracing your steps and traveling the labyrinth back again, to find your way out.

Sometimes I wonder if I haven’t been grieving since 2016, since that election took our national discourse into places I never could have imagined. The cruelty of our world, of our country, was exposed in a new generation. We thought we had solved some of the issues of sexism and racism and homophobia. But instead of making peace with minotaurs these old prejudices persisted and took on new and unimaginably brutal forms. And now we vote again, and we wait and we pray, and I don’t know about you but I’m feeling that familiar anxiety. Will this be 2016 or 2020? Are we just traveling deeper into this same spiral, lost and wandering, grieving in perpetuity?

When it looks like the sun wasn’t gonna shine no more, God put a rainbow in the clouds.

I love rainbows. As I traveled the labyrinth spiral back out of grief the last couple years I started trading out all of the dark colored clothes in my closet for bright ones. Pinks and purples, stripes and polka dots, sweaters with cats and flowers and rainbows. There’s a term for this. It’s called dopamine dressing. When you intentionally dress in bright colors to lift your mood.

And I started working at Eagle Harbor Congregational Church, where I had once served as an intern. Not as a minister, but a church manager. And I tried to be of service. The way I learned growing up in Catholic Churches, the way I learned in 12-step groups, the way I learned in this congregation. This place is one of the formative places where I learned how to focus on being a rainbow in someone else’s cloud. And every time I do that I get beyond myself and am lifted out of grief and depression. It’s the ultimate in dopamine dressing, when you actually try to become a rainbow. 

Because that’s what happens when we shine our light. We become rainbows. The light that our eyes perceive as white is actually made up of many colors. When it is refracted the colors are separated and we can see each one. Gilbert Baker, who designed the first rainbow pride flag, says the rainbow symbolizes freedom and love and liberation. And in the Christian tradition of course it symbolizes the promise of hope. 

The rainbow is a symbol of love gifted to us from our Christian ancestors and our LGBTQ ancestors. And from Maya Angelou, one of my favorite ancestors, who reminds us that moving through the labyrinth of life and of grief, when we are lost in the wilderness and going in circles and all we see are clouds, is to call for help. To those living but to those who have passed on as well. Calling into our heart and into our space all of those who have been rainbows to us. So who is it for you? Who comes to mind when you think of someone who has lit the way for you during dark times. Who shone their light so bright they refracted into an array of color. And even though they are passed on, their light still shines the way for you?

I invite you to say their name out loud. Loudly into this space, or quietly to yourself. I will name Genevieve and Mazzina, Walter, Bud and my dad Poppa Pete.

Be with us now, beloved ones. Help carry us through our seasons of grief. Remind us of the strength and joy and love it took to get here. Though we may feel lost, let us remember we are not alone. And may we remember that even when we are lost, even when we are going round and round in circles, even when it feels hopeless, we carry forth with us the teaching that all we have to do to save ourselves, to save the world, is let our light shine for another, and be a rainbow in someone else’s cloud.

Thank you for being a blessing to me. May we all go forth and be a blessing to others.