“We are our grandmothers’ prayers. We are our grandfathers’ dreaming.” 
—Ysaye M. Barnwell

I am the grateful beneficiary of my ancestors’ imagination. Their courage blesses my life and the lives of my children.

My great-great-grandparents lived in Wilmington, NC during the waning days of slavery, the pressure cooker years before the start of the Civil War. They were free Black people, but their freedom was limited by law and circumstance. Their relative freedom depended on the passes they carried and the whims of the White people among whom they lived. Free Black people could be re-enslaved for modest infractions, real or imagined. They lived on a knife’s edge.

This was the only reality they had ever known, the only place they had ever lived. The world beyond Wilmington must have felt like a great, unfathomable void, the edge of the earth on world maps drawn before people discovered the earth was round.

Despite this uncertainty and danger, they opened to the possibility of a different future. They packed up, picked up and moved on. They made the treacherous journey north to Oberlin, Ohio then continued east to New England. Moving north of the Mason-Dixon line didn’t mean full access to the rights of citizenship, but it did open new doors of opportunity and they chose to move through those doors.

William A. Hazel, the first Unitarian in my family, was a Black man born in the South before the abolition of slavery. As an adult, he attended the First Parish in Cambridge, MA. His life was a liberation journey, seeded by imagination and fed by courage, blessing the all of us who came after.

A century and a half later, I hope that my practice of Unitarian Universalism will also be a liberation journey, imaginative and brave. I pray that my journey will forge pathways of possibility for my three children—who are now eighteen, fifteen, and ten years old—and for the generations who follow.

Prayer

Spirit of love and freedom, teach me to imagine the impossible so that it may become possible. Help me to risk unfurling into something new, so that the lives of my children and their children may be blessed and expanded.