Welcome to THIRTY DAYS OF LOVE, beginning Martin Luther King, Jr. Day and culminating with Valentine’s Day! THIRTY DAYS OF LOVE is a collective visioning process about making sense of the present moment, and what we are called to do. We aim to accomplish this through self-reflection, active listening, sharing personal and community stories, and celebrating our lives and our heroes for their courageous love.

THIRTY DAYS OF LOVE offers daily, direct actions for love, and the calendar is a template to guide you through a meaningful THIRTY DAYS. But your participation is envisioned as a process, not an event.

While there is great power in collective action, the beauty of Standing on the Side of Love is its “open source” spirit, so bring your own ideas, actions, and traditions with you for this journey.

(via National Standing on the Side of Love Month: The Story of Us, The Story of Now « Standing On The Side Of Love)

Stand for the “Beloved Community.”

Speaking of love, I love being a UU.

This interview with Vincent Harding was very compelling, and this story was riveting. I teach about the Mississippi Freedom Summer in my social movements classes, and stories like this promise to make those considerations spring to life.

beingblog:

You’ll Never Hear Kumbaya the Same Way Again

by Trent Gilliss, senior editor

There are a few moments from behind the glass that stop me dead in my tracks — times during an interview when a wise voice creates a new opportunity to hear something differently. To challenge a conceit. To envelop the listener in the womb of silent storytelling and place one in a position of listening profundity. Vincent Harding did just that.

In the audio above, the theologian and speechwriter for Martin Luther King Jr. creates that vulnerable opening and ever so gently corrects, without admonishment, when the “Kumbaya” is referred to as a soft and squishy moment of song:

“Whenever somebody jokes about “Kumbaya,” my mind goes back to the Mississippi summer experience where the movement folks in Mississippi were inviting co-workers to come from all over the country, especially student types to come and help in the process of voter registration and freedom school teaching and taking great risks on behalf of that state and of this nation. …

In group after group, people were singing:

‘Kumbaya. “Come by here my Lord. Somebody’s missing Lord. Come by here.”’

I could never laugh at kumbaya moments after that. Because I saw that almost no one went home from there. This whole group of people decided that they were going to continue on the path that they had committed themselves to and a great part of the reason why they were able to do that was because of the strength and the power and the commitment that had been gained through that experience of just singing together, Kumbaya.”

I know I’ve used this this reference to a “kumbaya moment” in a slightly pejorative way. This no longer holds true. I can no longer judge using this label. Let Vincent Harding’s story be a lesson for us all.

We’re producing the radio show now and it’ll be released on February 24th.