Make Sure You Tell the Bees

Sunday, August 17, 2025

The Rev. Dr. Marian Stewart (she/her)

Ohio Organizing Manager, Faith in Public Life

Queer Unitarian Universalist

Shhh. Don’t fly away. I’ve got something to tell you.

But first, the ritual. Prepare the bees. Get a cloth. Drape it over the hive. Or just rotate the hive away from the light. Either way, invite the bees into silence. Ask them to suspend the known and await the unknown. In the darkness, ask the bees to wait. Quietly. So they know.

Change is coming.

On this World Honeybee Day, which is always the third Saturday of August, I invite you to also go into the dark and sit. Wait. What do you need to tell the bees?

As a gay person growing up in the old South, I struggled coming out. It was dangerous. I ended up coming out several times. Parental responses of “How can I hold my head up in public” to “I hate you” cut me to the core. I went into deep silence. Unaddressed self-loathing underlaid the loss of future jobs, housing, and even my church. In the end, I also lost my biological family.

And yet, I found a way to survive. I grew into a delicate acceptance but mostly flew under the radar. I learned to be quiet. Hidden. Even from myself. Smiles and conversational mirrors let me escape focus. I got by. I was fortunate. I could pass.

My soul couldn’t pass though. And I was terrified to face the darkness. I knew, if I went there, the truth had to come out.

I had always admired people who lived their life in the fullness of who they were. Such bravery. Such brilliance. I learned over time though, that for some, the air of confidence hid their own version of self-deception or loathing. They too were afraid of the dark nights of the soul.

You could tell the people who had done their work though. Through hard times and good, there was always a light in them. It was from the inside. Like their souls were guiding the way. I wanted that too. But I knew, I had to first go into the dark.

Mystics, saints, and sages have always invited us into the dark. To be still. To be quiet. In his despair, Jesus went into the garden. He submitted, ‘Not my will, but yours be done.’ Jesus did not submit his spirit to the authorities; he kept his faith. In my world, my faith calls me to be true. In the dark of my soul, the truth shines a light.

Others might have known who I was before I owned it myself. To be public though, I had to first hold myself to the truth. I am who I am. I am a wonderfully created being out of the stardust that forms all of who we are.

Just as there are an estimated 3.5 trillion honeybees flying around the world, there are billions and billions of individual points of light who are our fellow human beings. No two are alike and each has their own gifts. I do too. So do you.

One thing I’ve learned is that our gifts grow and glow best with light.

Folk tradition tells us we, as beekeepers, our duty is to inform the bees when any major change occurs. Whether it be the death of a beekeeper and the announcement of a new caretaker, or the birth, marriage, or death of a loved one. We must tell the bees.

When we face our own crisis of identity, we are – for the moment – the bees. We go into the dark and wait. Who are we? What is our truth? When we are ready, we find the agency of self to pull back the drape away from the hive of our soul and dare to shine. We become the beekeeper and inform the world of our change. I have done my work, or at least enough of it, to claim my fullness and let my light shine. Hello world.

I invite you into the ritual of telling the bees. First, you must find a cloth…go into the dark…

When you acknowledge the light of your truth, you and I and everyone else will know, the bees – our family, by blood or love, and our friends – will not fly away.

The Doctrine of Discovery

Monday, August 11, 2025

Happy Monday, my friends! Recently, I read a special issue of Cross Currents dedicated to the Doctrine of Discovery. With apologies to my fellow theological, historical, and legal nerds for some generalizations, the doctrine is the amalgamation of three papal bulls (proclamations from the pope that once carried the weight of law in Catholic countries) and other religious teachings and secular legal decisions regarding two major parts of the European colonial project specifically in the Americas, but extended globally as well. First, the doctrine held (one could argue that the present tense is more appropriate) that any unoccupied or “vacant” land found by a Christian kingdom could be claimed by that kingdom unless another Christian kingdom had already claimed it. Second, assuming it was impossible to reason that the land was unoccupied, as was the case when the Spanish encountered the sophisticated kingdom of the Aztecs and the French and English “discovered” the Iroquois (among many other examples where Europeans found themselves dealing with developed nation-states rather than nomadic “savages”), the Europeans were permitted to regard the people, constructed using Christian supremacist and racist ideas, as, to use a statistical term, a null set. They could literally regard whole populations as legally and theologically nonexistent in order to claim the land for their country because, if the native inhabitants didn’t exist, then under the first part of the doctrine, the land was free to become part of a kingdom’s territorial holdings.

It doesn’t take a deep knowledge of history or critical theory to understand what these arguments led to particularly in the Americas. With the strokes of pens several popes, European rulers, and an assortment of scholars created a system that continues to plague former colonies and BIPOC communities today. If the land was vacant, then it was open to colonization. If the land was occupied by some of the largest cities on earth at the time, as was the case with the Aztecs, then it could still become a project of colonization, because non-Christian brown bodies[1] weren’t legally or theologically “real.” And if these bodies weren’t real then they could be enslaved, abused, and killed without moral or ethical concern.

I imagine that many of us have a fairly pastoral image of the pre-colonial continents which became North America and South America. We imagine landscapes devoid of development with vast forests teaming with animal life and Disney’s Pocahontas singing “The Color of the Wind.” That was the history taught to us in school, through whitewashed history books, and via cultural artifacts from the peaceful natives “welcoming” Columbus and his men to their land to the communal sharing of the first “Thanksgiving” to depictions of the “noble savage” giving up their “wild” ways to embrace Christianity and Western standards of living. Yet several nations of Native Americans were already living with developed legal systems which were closer to the ideal of what Europeans called “democracy” long before Columbus got lost and wound up in the Caribbean. The Aztec, Mayan, and Incan civilizations were as developed as any European civilization (in many cases more developed) with thriving cities and scientific and engineering knowledge and projects which often was well beyond that of the Europeans. Lest you think, “But their weapons weren’t as advanced;” imagine living in societies where war was not a major driver of innovation.

Though the terms have changed and the Doctrine of Discovery has lost much of its religious, particularly Catholic, foundation it nevertheless continues to influence geopolitics and the exploitation of civilizations and their resources. We see this dynamic most blatantly in the extraction of natural and mineral resources from countries in Africa and more recently Ukraine as well. The Global North-driven economy and telecommunications empire require rare earth minerals found most abundantly in Africa, especially in countries with long histories of colonial interference and exploitation.

Where have you learned about the Doctrine of Discovery? Has the Doctrine of Discovery impacted your life or your culture?

Let us pray: Dear God, we confess our complicity in the historical, generational, and current suffering of our siblings because of the legacy and lived realities of the Doctrine of Discovery. We mourn the legal and theological arguments which have judged your sacred creation as open to exploitation and your people as null, nonexistent, and less than human. Empower us, God, to dismantle this doctrine and remove it from our laws and court decisions permanently. May we restore our relationship with our siblings and with the interconnected web of life which includes us. We ask this in the name of your son, our liberator, Jesus. Amen.

Blessings on your weeks, my friends! Please let me know if there is anything I can do for you.

Faithfully,

Ben +

[1] There are plenty of examples and evidence to say that the color of the bodies had more to do with constructing their existence than their religious identity, but that goes beyond the scope of this essay.

Celebrate Your Birthday – Regardless

Sunday, August 10, 2025

The Rev. Dr. Sigrid Rother (she/her)

Pastor, Westerville Community United Church of Christ

Allied Christian

“For it was you, who formed my inward parts; you knit me together in my mother’s womb. I praise you, for I am fearfully and wonderfully made. Wonderful are your works; that I know very well. My frame was not hidden from you, when I was being made in secret, intricately woven in the depths of the earth. Your eyes beheld my unformed substance. In your book were written all the days that were formed for me, when none of them as yet existed” (Psalm 139:13-16).

I love to see how other people celebrate their birthdays. Some people are very creative and do something besides cake and ice cream.

Recently, my friends did something extraordinary: One husband prepared gifts and surprises for the other husband all month long. These gifts were not all monetary gifts. The majority of gifts were expressions of time, and love for each other- either memories of time spent together or events planned for in the future. The receiving husband posted pictures of this month-long celebration on social media. Every day for 30 days, we witnessed the excitement, dedication, and love between them. It was so much fun to enjoy their month-long birthday celebration together.

Happy birthday to you – regardless of when your birthday is. Celebrate you. You are made in the image of God. You are created by and with love. You are God’s masterpiece—regardless of what the voices (in your head or outside voices) tell you. You are unique—and there is only one of you—even if you are an identical twin. There is no second you in the whole wide world—and that’s to be celebrated. You are loved. God created you.