The Spaces In Between

I gave this Message on December 1st, 2024.

Hi everyone both here in Poplar Ridge and online. Welcome. My name is River Vooris, and I use they/them pronouns. I live here in Poplar Ridge and I am an LGBTQ educator, researcher, and advocate. We are joined by Mary Jo Granger at the piano, Rob Howard on tech, and John Reed hosting our Zoom meeting.

I want to start with a short piece from Octavia Butler’s book “Parable of the Sower:”

Create no images of God.
Accept the images
that god has provided.
They are everywhere,
In everything.
God is change–
Seed to tree,
tree to forest;
Rain to river;
river to sea;
Grubs to bees,
bees to swarm.
From one, many;
from many, one;
Forever uniting, growing, dissolving–
Forever Changing,
The universe
is God’s self-portrait.

― from Earthseed: Book of the Living

First Hymn: Turn, Turn, Turn by Peter Seeger

Readings:

When people say,
“we have made it
through worse before”
— Clint Smith, in Volume 19 of Read Wildness

all I hear is the wind slapping against the gravestones
of those who did not make it, those who did not
survive to see the confetti fall from the sky, those who

did not live to watch the parade roll down the street.
I have grown accustomed to a lifetime of aphorisms
meant to assuage my fears, pithy sayings meant to

convey that everything ends up fine in the end. There is no
solace in rearranging language to make a different word
tell the same lie. Sometimes the moral arc of the universe

does not bend in a direction that will comfort us.
Sometimes it bends in ways we don’t expect & there are
people who fall off in the process. Please, dear reader,

do not say I am hopeless, I believe there is a better future
to fight for, I simply accept the possibility that I may not
live to see it. I have grown weary of telling myself lies

that I might one day begin to believe. We are not all left
standing after the war has ended. Some of us have
become ghosts by the time the dust has settled.

Almost Midnight
By Deborah A. Miranda, published on Split This Rock

Wife and dogs have gone to bed.
I sit here with the front door open.

Crickets sing patiently, a long lullaby
in lazy harmony. Rain falls

on our tin roof; sharp taps of reality,
start and stop. I breathe myself back

into my body. Come back, self. You’ve
been out fighting demons and bullies

and liars. You’ve been talking
to an electronic box with no ears.

You’ve been cheering for a democracy
that doesn’t exist. We’re all walking on bones.

Some of us are walking on more bones
than others. Breathe. Back into the body,

little one. The human world is broken,
but so beautifully. Corruption of the soul

never shows scars; when you don’t resist,
no wounds exist. Breathe, breathe it back.

In this world, we live in bodies of flesh.
In this world our souls tether themselves

with blood. This is a good thing. Otherwise
we might take wing into darkness,

never touch our Mother, twist language
into silvery shapes. Breathe now. Let

the crickets tell you their truth.
Let it be yours, for now.

Joys and Concerns and Musical Interlude

Message: Today is World AIDS day, a day to remember those lost to HIV and AIDS-related illnesses, honor people living with HIV today, and commit to ending HIV.

My senior year of college, I helped bring several panels of the AIDS memorial quilt to Bucknell University, through my work at the LGBTQ Office. The panels hung on the walls of the campus art gallery, memorializing loved ones lost to the virus. I will never forget the panel dedicated to David, my creative writing professor’s partner, covered in the outlines of his friend’s hands, nor the sound of names being read out-loud by volunteers from a massive binder that contained names of everyone included on the more than 45,000 panels that made up the full Quilt.

I am grateful that Fran McDaniel, the director of the LGBTQ Office introduced me to the Quilt, and to the amazing work of AIDS activists, who continue to shape my ideas of how change is possible in times of despair, and what it means to leave behind a legacy. As Clint Smith points out in his poem, not everyone survives the dark times, but we can still hope and fight for a better world.

Today, on World AIDS Day, the first day of December, the darkest month, I want to talk about Faith and share with you some of my core Spiritual beliefs. One of the things that I appreciate about this Meeting is that we are always invited to translate the Message into our own words/understanding of God and the Spirit. This Gathering of Friends has been a place where I have been able to spend many hours meditating on what it means to believe or not believe in a God, what God might look like, and what it means to be a part of a Faith community.

I grew up Atheist, in a predominantly Christian community of mostly Methodists, Presbyterians, and Episcopalians. My family was the only one I knew who did not go to Church on Sundays. At age 9, a friend told me I was going to Hell because I didn’t believe in Jesus. I told her, “Well, I don’t believe in Hell either, so I don’t care.”

My dad was raised Catholic. When he was six, his dad died of an allergic reaction to a medication given during a hospital procedure. The Priest told my Nana not to take the children to the funeral; they were not even told that their dad had died until after he was buried. My dad grew up cynical and angry about religion, and frustrated with people who placated his grief with the idea that “God works in mysterious ways.”

My mom’s parents are atheists, but she grew up attending the Church of England at Easter and Christmas, and enjoyed the music and the stories. She is fairly spiritual–in a pagan-ecologist way, and always told me growing up that there is more to the world than what we are able to see. Her beliefs about the power of the moon, and the stars don’t always align with my own, but I appreciate that she offers quite a different perspective than my dad.

Even though my family wasn’t religious, I went to Vacation Bible School because my friends did, and I wanted to join in the fun. Living in a community where everyone went to Church, I internalized a lot of the religious messaging around me, which meant that I felt a lot of shame when I realized I wasn’t straight at age 16.

The hate and judgement that I felt from many Christians and the way that certain Christians have used the Bible against LGBTQ folks meant that for a long time I mistrusted Christians. I came of age in the early 2000s when Exodus International was a powerful organization championing conversion therapy and Westboro Baptist Church was picketing funerals. I could not understand how someone could be a part of the Faith community, and also part of the LGBTQ community.

One of the first people that I met who was gay, and had a strong Faith tradition was Fran, the director of the LGBTQ office, who was my mentor and second mom. She was a Quaker and her partner was very involved in the local Friend community. While we never talked much about her faith, I knew that it was an important part of her life, and she is one of the reasons that I was drawn here to the Meeting House in Poplar Ridge when we were looking for a house in 2022.

Fran died suddenly of a strep infection a year after I graduated from Bucknell. Her death followed the death of a childhood friend from suicide and two grandparents, and I was completely bereft and lost.

And I was angry. I was especially angry at all the people who told me that she was in a better place, and that I would see her in Heaven one day. I didn’t believe those things; they were not a comfort, they felt like hollow words. Yet, I also yearned for that kind of Faith. For the first time, I felt lost Spiritually as I grappled with feelings of grief and questions about mortality.

The year after Fran died, I often drove up to Bucknell, to visit with her partner, Therese, and to be with the community who had loved her. Often, as I drove I would see red-tail hawks flying along Route 15, or sitting on the wires. As a birder, I am often looking out for birds, but it seemed significant how often I would see the red-tails on those drives. On campus at University of Maryland, where I had started graduate school, there was a resident pair of red-tail hawks. The campus was huge–and yet, every time I was on campus, walking from building to building, I was accompanied by one of them.

It felt like these birds were a sign from Fran, saying “you are not alone.” At first, I fought against this idea. But then, I began to soften, and I became more open to accepting these messages. If Fran had become a part of the universe, as I believe–energy changing form–then she was all around me. Why not receive a message of her love through a feathered friend?

When we got married this summer, after the courthouse ceremony we went to Emerson Park to take some photos. As we were walking towards the Gazebo, we heard the call of a red-tail hawk, and looked up to see it flying directly over our heads. “Fran!” I said, with a smile and tears.

Indigo and I have been attending Meeting for two and half years now. I am grateful for the community that we have found, and for the opportunity to reflect and question my Spiritual beliefs. I especially appreciate the diversity of voices and texts that we discuss here.

I am still not sure that I believe in God. It is hard for me to believe in the idea of an omniscient, omnipotent, loving God when I see so much pain and suffering in the world. It is hard for me to see people using religion as a way to cause harm, or to abdicate their responsibility to create change by saying that they are “sending thoughts and prayers” or that “god has a plan.”

But, I do believe that there is more in the world than we will ever know or be able to describe with human language. And I know there are many ways to translate religious texts.

I believe in community, and the power of individuals coming together to support one another and to create change. I believe that we CAN create a better world. AIDS activists changed history, culture, and medical science through their work. And I have seen how community and having one adult who believes in them and supports them can change a young LGBTQ person’s life.

I believe in the importance of asking questions about the universe and what it means to be human, and in the power and mystery of that natural world.

I believe in the power of the breath, and the value of space and time to meditate and sit with ourselves and our bodies and our souls.

Right now, many of us are holding grief and despair as we face what the next few months and years will bring. As I said in my last Message, it is important to sit with discomfort, to acknowledge what is lost. And I want us to hold onto hope. To have Faith that a better world is possible.

I began Meeting with the poem “Almost Midnight” by Deborah Miranda, who is an enrolled member of the Ohlone-Costanoan Esselen Nation of the Greater Monterey Bay Area in California. She wrote this poem in 2018, in the middle of Trump’s first presidency. It is a poem that I have returned to many times over the years, and one that I have taught in my Intro to Women and Gender Studies course. Students appreciate the invitation to breathe–and the focus on returning to the body.

We often spend time discussing the final lines, and what they might mean.

“In this world, we live in bodies of flesh.
In this world our souls tether themselves

with blood. This is a good thing. Otherwise
we might take wing into darkness,

never touch our Mother, twist language
into silvery shapes. Breathe now. Let

the crickets tell you their truth.
Let it be yours, for now.”

My students and I talk about the word Mother, which is capitalized. Is this a reference to the Creator? What does it mean to twist language into silvery shapes? What is the crickets’ truth?

As we move into Silent worship, and meditate on these questions and the question of Faith. I invite you to breathe yourself back to the body, and to consider what it means to be tethered to both the human world, and the Spiritual world as well. What do you believe in? What does Faith mean to you?

Silent worship

Hymn: Imagine

Closing prayer or message:

I want to leave you with a final poem, by (not enrolled tribal member) two-spirit poet Qwo Li Driskill from their book Walking With Ghosts.

Grandmother Spider’s Lesson for an Urban Indian Queer

She clings to her web, four stories up, holds fast against the Seattle wind and rain. Her abdomen is a perfect black bead that catches light like a crystal. Her legs delicate as an infant’s hands. She weaves a night threaded with moonbeams. Grandmother is alive, four stories up. “Grandmother,” I say, “we never stop spinning from one death to another, from one impossible situation to the next. This is a city where homeless Indians have their noses broken by skinheads, where Queer kids sell their bodies to eat tomorrow. We have no reflections here. They think we should be ghosts.”

Sugar, she laughs, just keep weaving. Don’t let them tear you down. Look, I am alive, four stories up! They build skyscrapers on top of our homes, but we are still here.

Her body is silhouetted against the Seattle skyline, miracle spider alive four stories up.

Cling fast, she tells me. Keep weaving, life will stick.