Dear Members and Friends of First Church:

It is with sadness that I announce that we will not be holding in-person services at neither our Museum District nor Thoreau campuses. The Unitarian Universalist Association has asked that all congregations suspend gatherings of more than 25 people — including worship and religious education — effective immediately. The rapid spread of the virus that causes COVID-19 indicates that proceeding at this time with an abundance of caution is the best response we can have to this global health emergency.

The staff, Board President and Vice President, and I all know that our religious community is a vital source of comfort, healing, sustenance and strength during these difficult and uncertain times. Effective this Sunday, we will be moving our services online so that we can continue our work of caring for each other, bringing more beauty and joy in the world, and providing solace and inspiration to all who wish to join with us. Rev. Scott will be providing the congregation an online sermon titled “Loving Compassion Into the World.” It will be available starting at 5:00 p.m. Sunday via our YouTube channel and website. Links to it will also be sent out via email and social media. Starting on Sunday, March 22nd, we will be offering online services at 10:30 a.m. At that time, we will be posting a video service complete with music from our award-winning, Music Director, Mark Vogel, readings by both our ministers, a visual meditation, and, of course, a sermon. I will be preaching next week’s service, “Once upon a time we had… time,” on how feminist theology can help us through this health crisis. Following the March 22nd service, and going forward, our Director of Religious Education, Carol Burrus, will hosting a virtual gathering for all ages at 11:45 a.m. via Zoom.

We all owe the staff many thanks for their rapid and professional response to this crisis. More information about our virtual gatherings will be available next week.

In the meantime, as of this writing, the Museum District building will remain open during normal hours of operation, 9:00 a.m. to 4:00 p.m., Mondays through Fridays. And our FotoFest exhibition “Now is the Time,” will remain open from 2:00 p.m. to 6:00 p.m., Mondays through Fridays. Small groups of less than twenty-five people will be allowed to meet during their regular scheduled times on Mondays, Tuesdays, Thursdays, and Fridays. This Sunday small groups will be allowed to meet during their regular times. Starting on March 22nd, the Museum District campus will be closed to everyone on Sundays. Small groups of less than twenty-five people can continue to meet at Thoreau at the discretion of the Campus Advisory Team. If there are further changes about the status of either building we will let people know immediately. Throughout this time, small groups are encouraged to consider meeting via Zoom.

We are in the process of developing plans to provide pastoral care online. Look for more information about online small group meetings and pastoral care in the coming days.

In advising us how best to proceed during this global health emergency, Unitarian Universalist President, the Rev. Susan Frederick-Gray, has told the leaders of member congregations:

Remember that, as we have to adapt quickly and try new things, perfection is never the goal. The goal is to care for one another and live compassionately. Know that your care and intention really makes a difference to your community and to your own well-being. I am enormously grateful for all of you and the leadership you provide our congregations. I love you and I am proud of the way that Unitarian Universalists are taking the situation seriously and responding out of deep care.

Susan’s words are a wise balm for all of us. We need to love each other, live with compassion, and proceed with as much care and caution as we can. You are all on my heart and if you have any concerns or pastoral needs at this time do not hesitate to contact me. I will see you online soon and will live with the hope that I will see you in-person as soon as it safe for us to gather again.

love,

Colin

I am a bit late in posting this but here are the ten most popular blog posts from my blog in 2019:

1. “Letter to Demetrias” and “On the Possibility of Not Sinning,” Pelagius
2. Some Thoughts on Ministerial Tenure
3. In the Interim, May 2019
4. Statement from the University of Rojava
5. Minns Lecture Announcement
6. Black Humanism
7. Disrupting White Supremacy
8. Easter 2019
9. Collective Memory (Tree of Life sermon)
10. The Right Hand of Fellowship at the Ordination of Sarah Prickett

And, in case anyone is interested, here are the most popular blog posts of all time:

1. “Letter to Demetrias” and “On the Possibility of Not Sinning,” Pelagius
2. Minns Lecture Announcement
3. Starting as the Interim Senior Minister, First Unitarian Universalist Church, Greater Houston, Texas
4. Collective Memory (Tree of Life sermon)
5. Some Thoughts on Ministerial Tenure
6. The River May Not Be Turned Aside
7. A Tribute to the Rev. Kay Jorgensen
8. Abolition Democracy (Unity Temple)
9. President Trump’s Klan-like Rhetoric
10. Acknowledgements

Finally, my list from 2018 is available by clicking here.

Imagination is the theme for worship in February. February is Black History Month and the month we kick off First Houston’s annual stewardship drive. Imagination is central to both.

First Houston’s initial founding minister was the Universalist circuit rider Quillen Hamilton Shinn. He inspired the people who started First Houston to create a congregation that preached that God loved everyone without exception. It was a bold vision in the 1890s and it remains a bold one today. It provided the spark that started this congregation, a congregation that has done so much to bring Unitarian Universalism to Houston and Fort Bend County. What might our imaginations and our generosity bring in the future?

It is not an easy question to answer. And it is not a question that we can answer by ourselves. Unitarian Universalist congregations provide us with a space to collectively struggle with the question and imagine how we might best answer it. They are unique places where we can both imagine a different world, encounter the spiritual resources necessary to create one, and then come together to work to build one. And that brings me directly to stewardship.

Stewardship is the act of sustaining the community across the generations. We give money and time–sometimes reframed as our talents and treasure–to First Houston because we know that it gives our lives more spiritual depth and increases our collective capacity to love the Hell out of the world. We give money and time to First Houston because we want to see it continue into the future. We have the congregation because previous generations sustained it so that it might be here for us. Which is to say, they imagined that the congregation would have a future and then they set about creating that future through their generosity.

The theme of our stewardship campaign is “Loving the Hell Out of the World.” The phrase comes from the Rev. Joanna Fontaine Crawford who was inspired by the theology of our Universalist ancestors. In the words of the Rev. Susan Frederick-Gray, “Our Universalists ancestors didn’t believe in hell, except for the ones we create here in this life. What would it mean to show up in the places where hell, where suffering and violence, persecution and inhumanity, prevail and to bring an active, powerful form of love that affirms dignity, liberation, and peace?” What would it mean, in other words, if we devoted ourselves to loving the Hell out of the world?

This brings me to the black radical imagination. Writing about the history of African American social movements, the historian Robin Kelley places what he calls the black radical imagination at the center of Black History. Over the course of last several hundred years, as people of color have resisted white supremacy, the black radical imagination has provided, in Kelley’s words, visions of “spaces where the energies of love and imagination are understood and respected as powerful social forces.” Such visions have been a crucial resource for building communities that are different in character and composition than the predominantly white and capitalist society that sustains white supremacy, is fueling the climate crisis and the global assault on democracy. Such visions are necessary if we are to devote ourselves to the great task of collective liberation.

Visions from the black radical imagination are one of the resources I look to when I attempt to imagine a future in which Hell has been loved out of the world. In Kelley’s words, it offers visions “of new social relationships, new ways of living and interacting, new attitudes toward work and leisure and community.” That is exactly what the world needs now and exactly what First Houston, at its very best, can offer. So, I hope you’ll join us throughout the month as we explore the imagination and begin our stewardship campaign.

Aiding us in our efforts this month are outstanding guest preachers. On February 9th Aisha Hauser will be returning to First Houston to preach “Leading with Love and Liberation.” And on February 16th we will be welcoming the Rev. Duncan Teague. He will be preaching on “‘Houston, We Have a Problem,’ When My Imagination Failed Me.”

During her time with us, Ms. Hauser will be leading two important workshops on February 8th. The morning’s workship will be on microagressions and the afternoon’s will be on bystander training. More information about both can be found on our website. I hope you can join us for both!

Sun Ra is a musician whose interstellar free form jazz invites listeners to imagine a universe where the destructive rules that govern our society have been overturned and hell has been loved out of the world. I offer a few of his words as my closing poem:

Imagination is a Magic carpet
Upon which we may soar
To distant lands and climes
And even go beyond the moon
To any in the sky
If we came from
nowhere here
Why can’t we go somewhere there?

love,

Colin

Happy New Year!

As I write this month’s column, I am in Michigan visiting my parents for the winter holidays. It is snowing outside – a soft blanket covers the ground and the roads alike. Winter weather brings a sense of peace and respite. There is a fire in the fireplace and I have spent the last few days enjoying my family and relaxing. Wherever you are spending the first days of the New Year, I hope you are finding a similar time to pause.

We are beginning a new decade and like many people, I find myself both taking stock of the last ten years of my life and looking ahead. Since 2010, my life has been filled with changes. My kids are bigger. One is a senior in college, the other is in Middle School. I live in a new city. It would actually take me several paragraphs to attempt to list all of the changes in my life.

The same would be true if I tried to list the changes in the world. It has been a mixed bag, filled with positives and negatives. Throughout the globe poverty has decreased, literacy has increased, and childhood mortality has declined. At the same time, the United States has gone through a severe recession and experienced a resurgence of white supremacist populism and white supremacist violence. The climate crisis has grown ever more urgent. And shifts in technology and the continuing rise of social media have accelerated the pace of societal change.

Ten years from now, the world and my own life will have changed again. Given the rate of change, it is hard to imagine exactly what society will be like. The climate crisis means that the next decade will be the most crucial in human history. It will determine whether or not we, as a human species, address the causes of global warming. Depending on the choices we make, ten years from now the world could either be in dire shape or on the path to a vibrant, sustainable future. Either way, it will be very different than it is now.

The fate of Unitarian Universalism over the next decade will be determined by whether or not we live up to our commitment to be a relevant religion. We will thrive if religious communities like First UU Church equip people to confront society’s challenges and adjust to its changes. We will fade into irrelevance if we do not.

While we answer the question of whether or not we are a relevant religion on a grand scale, we will also have to continue answering this question individually, on a personal scale. No matter what happens, in the midst of all the world’s changes, some things will remain constant. The cycle of life and death, birth and aging, will continue. The Earth will orbit the sun as it always has. The Moon will bring tides to the water. And people will need to find meaning in the rich mess of our lives. They will ask questions about the meaning of life and the power of love.

First UU Church’s challenge over the next decade will be this: Can we be a religious community that is relevant to the great crisis of the hour while at the same time providing a spiritual home for people throughout the days of their lives? I think First UU Church can. And because I believe this, I also think that the brightest days for both Unitarian Universalism and First UU Church are in the future. I look forward to seeing how the next ten years unfold.

love,

Colin

P.S. I would be remiss not to offer you a few final words of poetry. Here’s a mildly obtuse piece by Ravi Shankar that captures something of the feel of the New Year’s snow:

“Snowfall”

Particulate as ash, new year’s first snow falls
upon peaked roofs, car hoods, undulant hills,
in imitation of motion that moves the way

static cascades down screens when the cable
zaps out, persistent & granular with a flicker
of legibility that dissipates before it can be

interpolated into any succession of imagery.
One hour stretches sixty minutes into a field
of white flurry: hexagonal lattices of water

molecules that accumulate in drifts too soon
strewn with sand, hewn into browning
mounds by plow blade, left to turn to slush.

I have an op-ed in the September 20, 2019 Houston Chronicle. I wrote it in support of the global climate strike. Many members of the congregation I serve, the First Unitarian Universalist Church of Houston, will be participating. 

I am really excited to be with you for another year of interim ministry. I am very much looking forward to what we have coming up! Most of our work together in the next months will revolve around three overlapping tasks. First, we will be preparing for the developmental ministry that will follow my interim ministry. This ministry will last between five and seven years. It will be designed with the explicit intention of addressing long standing issues and patterns that have led to conflict in the past and prevented First Church from realizing its full potential. Over the next few months the Board and I will be leading a number of activities designed to help identify the goals for the developmental ministry.

Second, we will be laying the groundwork for future visioning work. In order to have an impactful future, First Church needs to answer the question: What is the purpose of First Church? The actual task of defining a vision, writing a new vision statement (and possibly a congregational covenant), will most likely occur after my interim ministry. Casting an effective vision for a congregation takes time. It requires a cultural shift within the congregation. That means an interim period is an ideal time to start preparing for future visioning work.

Third, whatever ultimate vision the congregation develops for itself, it is clear that the global crises of the hour demand a Unitarian Universalist response. We are in a period of grave crisis. Much of life on Earth is threatened by the human driven climate emergency. In the United States, we face the intertwined crises of resurgent white supremacy and the potential dissolution of democratic culture and institutions. In order for Unitarian Universalism, and First Church, to matter we must face these crises, recognize that they collectively represent a profound moral and spiritual crisis, and devote ourselves to the task of developing the spiritual practices and theological resources to confront them.

Essentially this means that we must figure out new ways of being in world, both as individuals and as a community. This year in worship and through some of our adult programs and social justice efforts we will be attempting to imagine, and live, these new ways of being. Each month we will focus on a different worship theme that is suggestive of the crises we face and the new ways of being we might develop to face them. Our theme for September is Disruption and over the course of the month we will be exploring each of the three major crises and the disruptions they bring. At the Museum District, our September 8th service will focus on disrupting white supremacy. Our September 15th service ask us to consider the question: What is a religious response to the climate emergency? And on September 29th we will devote ourselves to threats that are disrupting democratic institutions and norms in the United States. The Thoreau campus will be following its own worship schedule during this time. Look for details about it in Scott Cooper’s column and in upcoming newsletters.

Throughout the year we will be bringing exciting guest preachers and programs to help us on our collective path. Paula Cole Jones will be joining us in September to work with the Board and the staff and to offer us a sermon at Museum District on September 22nd. Jones is the founder of ADORE (A Dialogue on Race & Ethnicity), a former president of DRUUMM (Diverse and Revolutionary Unitarian Universalist Multicultural Ministries) and an independent consultant specializing in multicultural competencies and institutional change. She is also a longtime member of All Souls Church Unitarian, in Washington, DC.

Throughout the year we will also be working to integrate more Spanish into our worship services. Spanish is the second most spoken language in Houston and we have a number of members who are native Spanish speakers. In an effort to have a more multiculturally welcoming service we will be including Spanish language choral anthems, hymns, and readings at once a month. We will also be singing our chalice lighting in both English and Spanish. To support this work we plan to purchase sufficient copies of Las Voces del Camino, the UUA’s Spanish hymnal for the congregation. We will be launching a hymnal drive during Hispanic Heritage Month (September 15 to October 15, 2019). You can underwrite the purchase of a hymnal for $18. Hymnal underwriters will have their contributions memorialized with bookplates in each hymnal that they underwrite.

So, it is going to be a busy year! And I am excited for the work we will do together, the opportunities for personal and collective growth it brings, and possibilities of collective liberation it will open up for us! It wouldn’t a column if I didn’t close with a bit of poetry. Here’s a fragment of “Heal the Cracks in the Bell of the World” by Martin Espada:

Listen to the bells in a town with a flagpole on Main Street,
a rooster weathervane keeping watch atop the Meeting House,
the congregation gathering to sing in times of great silence.
Here the bells rock their heads of bronze as if to say:
Melt the bullets into bells, melt the bullets into bells.
Here the bells raise their heavy heads as if to say:
Melt the cannons into bells, melt the cannons into bells.
Here the bells sing of a world where weapons crumble deep
in the earth, and no one remembers where they were buried.
Now the bells pass the word at midnight in the ancient language
of bronze, from bell to bell, like ships smuggling news of liberation
from island to island, the song rippling through the clouds.

Now the bells chime like the muscle beating in every chest,
heal the cracks in the bell of every face listening to the bells.
The chimes heal the cracks in the bell of the moon.
The chimes heal the cracks in the bell of the world.

love,

Colin

This year during my vacation in England and France I published almost daily blog posts. My writing was experiment to see if I could maintain a regular posting schedule. I also wanted to create a record of the trip. I went with my parents and son. I am not sure how many more long trips we will be able to take together and I thought it would be nice to have a travel log.

Over the month, I wrote four sets of posts. Each set was composed in one of the places where we were staying: Arles, Paris, Sers, and London. My posts tended to fall into four general, often overlapping, themes. I wrote about art, food, places, and politics. My favorite posts about art revolved around family friends Markéta Luskačová and Libuse Jarcovjakova. I summarized the restaurants we visited with posts about places to eat in London and Paris and paid tribute to Cadenheads in London. I wrote about the streets of Arles, Parc de la Villette in Paris, Chateau d’If off the coast of Marseille, the fascinating Château de La Rochefoucauld, and the disgust I felt at Versailles. I composed a meditation on the relation between fashion and politics as walked the Rue de Turenne and I met with a retired professor of political science, a journalist, and some anarchists to discuss the state of French politics. And I offered some pastoral words in the wake of a wave of mass shootings in the United States.

If the object was create a travel log that I will use to remember the trip, my blogging was absolutely a success. The same can be said if the objective was to increase the traffic to my blog. It roughly doubled over the course of the time that I kept the blog. The five posts that generated the most traffic were: Rue de Turenne (or some thoughts on champagne socialism); Reflecting on the Mass Shootings in Dayton, El Paso, Gilroy, and Southhaven from London; Château de La Rochefoucauld; It is the Job of the Far Left to Organize the Margins; and Europe 2019.

Composing a daily blog was a time consuming labor. It took me between 30 minutes and an hour and a half each day. It is not something that I will be continuing now that I am back in Houston. Instead, my blog will largely return to being a place for me to publish the texts of my sermons, letters to the congregation I serve, and announcements about upcoming events. On occasion, I will post other things but for the moment I will be focusing my non-sermon related writing on my scholarship.

Our trip home was relatively simple compared with our trip to London from Sers. It only involved two modes of transit: airplanes and automobiles. We decided not to take the Heathrow Express. The cost of buying four tickets was roughly the same as the cost of hiring a black car to Heathrow. So, we took a black car, complete with London cabbie, from the flat to the airport and then caught our flight to New York. In New York, after we cleared customs, we had to transfer between JFK and LaGuardia. In order to save money I bought tickets from Houston to New York and then from New York to Europe rather than connecting flights through the airlines (I saved over $1,000 this way). We took a New York taxi and then flew home to Houston. Once there we hired a car service via an app and made it home around midnight. We were greeted by a happy cat (or at least loudly purring cat who couldn’t keep off of us if I refrain from anthropomorphizing him).

My blog posts about London are:

London Restaurants
Markéta Luskačová
Many Happy Future Shocks to You
The Last Bottle in the Country
The Cat Owned the Flat
Reflecting on the Mass Shootings in Dayton, El Paso, Gilroy, and Southhaven from London

Since this is my last post on London, I want to close by praising London cabbies. In London, taxi driving is highly regulated. It is a solid middle income job and getting a job as a taxi driver requires passing a special test, called The Knowledge, and waiting for a few years for an opening (in order to get a job driving from one of the airports you have to be able to speak at least two languages as well). The Knowledge is nothing more than understanding how to navigate through London’s notoriously mazing streets. Cabbies pride themselves in having The Knowledge. And its benefits, even in the age of GPS, sometimes show themselves. On our way to the airport the GPS wanted us to go the wrong way down a one-way street–the street had been converted into being one way for the day. The driver ignored the GPS recommendation and got us to the airport 15 minutes before the GPS on my phone said we supposed to get there, all the while obeying the speed limit. It was an impressive, if minor, victory of man over machine. I am sure that at some point in the near future apps like Waze will outperform The Knowlege. But that moment has not yet come. When I commented on our arrival time to the airport the driver, as if on cue, told me, “It’s ‘cause I got The Knowledge, sir.”

Like Paris, London is one of the great food cities of the world. On this trip, we ate at two of the city’s most iconic restaurants—St. John and Ottolenghi. We had a number of pub meals, some memorable and some easily forgettable, and fantastic pizza. We also ate mediocre noodles at Menya Ramen House (my son argued, and I agree with him, that the Sunday afternoon ramen—with homemade noodles and broth—served out of paper cups at Ebisuya in Medford is significantly better) and had some innovative dim sum at a place called BaoziInn.

Ottolenghi

My parents made reservations three months in advance so we could have dinner at the eponymous restaurant of Yotam Ottolenghi—author of numerous popular cookbooks that form a staple in our houses. The thing that surprised me most about Ottolenghi was its modest price. Unlike the two high end restaurants we ate in France, Ottolenghi is quite affordable—plenty of the items on the menu cost less than 15 pounds. In truth, it’s the wine that really costs. If you’re in London, on a budget, and want to eat there, two people could probably have a world class meal without drinks for under 60 pounds (maybe even under 50).

The menu is divided into two sections. There are a bunch of pre-made dishes—essentially tapas—that they have in the window for passersby to see. These are all cold and all delicious. The most memorable was a grilled gem lettuce salad (grilled lettuce being something that I very much like and rarely find on the menu anywhere).

The other part of the menu is the larger hot dishes that come from the kitchen. We got a whole sole to share amongst the three adults, for reasons that are unclear to me neither of my children like seafood, while my son had pork chops (which he split with my father). We had a couple of other hot dishes, the mackerel being most memorable, and finished with some great desserts (the British usually call them puddings) which were flavorful and not too sweet.

St. John

We had dinner with Marketa Luskacova our last night in London at St. John Bread and Wine in Spitalfields. Years ago, it was almost impossible to get into. These days it is still quite popular, but St. John Bread and Wine was able to accommodate a party of five with a few days’ notice. Like Ottolenghi, it is surprisingly affordable. The total cost of meal for five, with drinks, was about the same cost as a meal at a fairly good mid-priced place in Houston. The food, however, was in a different class.

St. John is credited with launching a Renaissance in British cooking. When it opened it did something completely different—it offered a well executed return to classic British cooking. Not pub food, or the high-end stuff that, at the time, was basically trying to imitate French or Italian, but the food that the British made for themselves from local ingredients prior to the wars.

It advocated something they called nose to tail cooking—making use of every part of the animal—which I appreciated in the 1990s and still appreciate today (I didn’t partake in it then (as I was, at the time, a vegetarian) or now (currently being a pescatarian)). St. John also returned to vegetables that had been forgotten or where rarely used—samphire being one—perfected the Welsh Rarebit, and just generally celebrated local food.

I love St. John because despite all of this it is the opposite of pretentious. The tables are refurbished wood and the chairs exhibit a utilitarian happenstance like beauty rather than an intentional elegance. What’s more, it is quite possible to eat there for the same price as a meal of fish and chips. Their Welsh Rarebit is something like a seven pounds. That, a green salad to accompany it, and a glass to wash it down won’t set you back more than fifteen pounds.

Smokehouse Islington

We ate here our first afternoon in London. It is located right up the street from the flat we rented for the week. Overall the meal was quite nice—the best bit probably being their homemade kimchi—but the part we enjoyed most was the sticky toffee pudding. Sticky toffee pudding is a classic British dessert and sometimes can be a bit cloying. This version was just about perfect, spicy and deep with a sweet, but not overwhelming, toffee.

Santore

Over the years, I have become something of a pizza connoisseur. As a single parent, I have often had to take my son along with me on preaching and speaking gigs. Part of the deal is that whenever he accompanies, we try the local pizza place that is reputed to be the best. I have lost track of the number of pizza places we’ve eaten at together but it’s easily over fifty.

Our consensus is that the best pizza we’ve had is from Santarpio’s in Boston. It is one of the oldest pizza places in the United States. I took my son there for all of his birthdays between the ages of six and ten and we made sure to eat there when we were in Boston for my first Minns lecture.

Santore is second on the list (I would actually put it first, but I doubt my son would forgive me). Located in the Exmouth Market, they make pizza by the meter. The sauce is amazing (fined ground tomato without too much garlic), the cheese excellent, and the presentation, well the presentation is something else.

Baozilnn

We had dim sum for lunch our last day in London before going to go see Hamilton. We wanted someplace near Hamleys, where my son and I spent the morning, from which we could to travel the theater easily afterwards. BaoziInn specializes in colorful dim sum, basically dumplings cooked in dough that’s been naturally colored with beet or spinach juice. Overall, it was among the better dim sum I have had (the salt and pepper squid was exceptional). My son really liked their soup dumplings and there was a cloud ear fungus dish that was something else.

Of the five restaurants I have mentioned, I would definitely go back to Ottolenghi, St. John and Santore. BaoziInn and Smokehouse were both good, but I would only go to them again if they happened to be convenient. The dim sum at BaoziInn is a fun experience but in truth its not as good as Windsor Dim Sum Cafe in Boston, where my family went regularly when we lived there. And Smokehouse is basically a less interesting, and less well executed, version of St. John.

My parents have been friends with the Czech photographer Marketa Luskacova since shortly after my father first started teaching in the United Kingdom. They met her when she was a young single mother living in exile. It was the early 1980s and she was a political dissident who had fled the Communist East for the relative freedom of the West. While she was not a fan of the Marxist-Leninist Stalinist regime in her own country, she was no advocate for Thatcher’s Britain either. She spent most of her time making photographs of working-class people who were on the edge of British society and threatened by neoliberalism.

Her most famous photography from the 1970s and 1980s is her series on the performers, hustlers, street people, and vendors who made up the community of Spitalfields Market. Her photography of them earned her praise from, and friendship with, John Berger. It also provided an important document, an artifact of historical memory, that attested to the diversity of human culture under threat from the neoliberal vision—musicians who made their own eccentric instruments, cobblers who handmade quality shoes in their shops not as luxury goods but as necessities for workers, and people regularly creating, rather than consuming, their own culture around rubbish can fires and wooden crates.

It was fitting, then, that we met Marketa for dinner at St. John Bread and Wine opposite Spitalfields. St. John’s might be my favorite restaurant anywhere. I will write about our meal in my London restaurant round-up. For now, I’ll focus on the conversation. Marketa is always illuminating. She is always thinking, feeling, trying to understand her own aesthetic, considering what it means to be an artist, how her medium enables her to see the world, always seeking the spiritual dimension—which for her always has a deeply political element to it, even if the politics are never explicitly stated. They’re there in her subject matter and her framing.

Marketa brought perhaps a fifty test prints from her ongoing series on a Czech carnival that she’s been shooting for nineteen years. Here was her first insight, there is much to be gained by returning to a subject and community year after year—depth of relationship, sensitivity to change over time, and not a bit of self-discovery. And that’s where she offered a second insight, there’s often an emotional disconnect between when she does her strongest work and how she’s feeling. She confessed that she didn’t particularly enjoy this year’s carnival. Over the last two decades it has grown from perhaps eighty people to over five thousand. Going this year was, for her, kind of a miserable experience—too many people observing, not participating, not wearing masks, making a spectacle of the whole thing. And yet, when she started to review her test prints, she realized that she had taken some of the strongest photographs of the carnival yet. Conversely, she confessed, that when she is feeling euphoric, carried away by the joyous feeling of the crowd, she often takes photographs that are not particularly good. Her own internal euphoria often causes her to misjudge what she’s doing—to think it is better than it is.

I can relate. I usually hate my sermons before I preach them. Often, it is the texts that turn out to be my best work—texts that get anthologized, republished in magazines, or assigned in college courses—that I have most negative reactions to prior to preaching. I suspect that is because that when I do my best work, I am deeply emotionally connected to it and this makes me aware of its flaws rather than its strengths just as I am about to put it out in the world.

I know that I am not alone in this. Not only does Marketa’s experience resonate with mine, but I have had a few conversations with my friend Titonton Duvante over the years on the subject. Titonton has been a techno innovator for almost thirty years. When he is really on, really connected with what he is doing, he is amongst the best electronic musicians out there. I have listened to a few thousand DJ and live sets over the last twenty-five plus years and some of Titonton’s are among the most memorable. But here’s the thing, he’s told me that there’s an exact relation between how nervous he feels, how anxious he is, and how good his performance ends up being. If he’s really nervous, on the verge of losing it nervous, then almost he inevitably offers a masterful performance. If not, then not.

Clearly there’s something about the emotional investment an artist has in their art—and preachers are, amongst other things, artists—that is closely correlated to their artistic production.

Back to Marketa… While we were together, she talked a bit about her recent show at the Tate and her upcoming show at the Martin Parr Foundation in Bristol. She and my parents had an extended conversation, which I won’t relate, about the various economic challenges artists face. And she shared that last year she received the Jan Masaryk Honorary Medal from the Czech government. Of course, Marketa had a story about Jan Masaryk.

Her grandmother loved Jan Masaryk, thought he was a humane, sensible, and cultured leader. When the Stalinists seized power, they threw Jan Masaryk out of a window. He died. Marketa was four and she remembers her grandmother being completely distraught, sobbing, over and over again, “They’ve killed Masaryk. They’ve killed Masaryk.”

She told me that when she received the Jan Masaryk Honorary Medal she thought of her grandmother. She imagined her smiling down from heaven on that day, proud of her granddaughter who had resisted the Stalinists and was now being honored with a medal named for a political leader who she had admired.

Spitalfields has changed. The street culture that Marketa photograph is entirely gone—washed away by upmarket shops and good. The cobblers who handmade shoes for the working poor have been replaced by boutique stores that sell fancy shoes, still handmade, to the affluent. Neoliberalism has succeeded in destroying so much of the vibrancy and power of the working-class throughout not just Britain, but the world. And yet, there’s something about Marketa’s story of her grandmother and the Jan Masaryk Honorary Medal. It isn’t about anything as quaint as triumph of good over evil or the inevitable collapse of totalitarian regimes or anything else that I might find truly comforting. It has more to do with the power of perseverance and the truth that the future is always unwritten and that resistance, in some for another, continues. And that there is great power to be found in preserving, through stories, through photographs, in all the forms we can. We create records of resistance, memories and stories, so that, even after its defeat—for Jan Masaryk was certainly defeated—our resistance might continue to inspire future resistance to tyranny.