An excerpt from an unpublished sermon of Rev. Dr. Edgar Rivera Colon at Faith + Work Firist Unitarian Church of Orange, NJ

When we attend to the tears of a grief-stricken activist, we enact the collective mourning work which transfigures into what Robert Sember names “redemptive solidarity.” The wrenching pain of mourning is the affective antechamber to the possibility of joy and collective forward motion. Our tears are the salt of history that leaven more human futures. Thus, what we at first cognize as interruptions to liberating works are the intervening enabling conditions for the materialization of our deepest desires for social and spiritual transformations. Sember alerts us to the alignment of the “poetry of feeling” and “immanent freedom”: they share a homeplace in the soul work that our times require.