Unbroken

Journey through the echoes of the past and discover the profound questions that challenge us to redefine our narratives and relationships. In the quest for wholeness, what choices will we make to ensure our stories uplift rather than wound?

The message was delivered on Sunday, February 8, 2026, at All Souls Unitarian Church in Tulsa, Oklahoma, by Rev. Randy Lewis.

Endurance with Memory

What does love actually feel like? To you. The kind your body remembers after life has already left its mark. After surviving.

This Black History Month, it would be easy to stand up here and talk about Black resilience. And that story matters. It deserves to be told—and told well. But I want to be honest. Something always feels unfinished when that’s the only story we tell.

I’ve been in plenty of services that lift up the best of Black history. They’re hopeful. They’re inspiring. And I don’t leave untouched. But I often leave with the sense that something important didn’t get said. That some part of the truth stayed in the shadows. That we celebrated survival without naming what it cost. And I don’t think we can afford to keep skipping that part.

There’s another side of the story—that doesn’t fit cleanly into celebration. Yes, we survived. But we did not all survive intact—or shall I say whole. Oppression didn’t just attack bodies in public. It moved indoors. And nowhere was that more visible than in the lives of Black people during Jim Crow.

The Weight of Powerlessness

During Jim Crow, Black men specifically learned early what powerlessness felt like in the body. Standing still while a white man spoke to you however he wanted to. Being watched in stores. Stopped on roads. Questioned without cause. Being called boy no matter your age. Stepping off the sidewalk if a white person happens to be on it. Working sun-up to sun-down, paid just enough to survive, never enough to get ahead.

Knowing that looking at someone the wrong way could cost you your job, your freedom, or your life. And when that becomes daily—when humiliation is routine, when restraint is constant—something happens inside a person. That pressure doesn’t disappear. It goes somewhere. And when pain has nowhere safe to land, it doesn’t stay contained. It will express itself. But you best not show anger in public.

And for Black men what could not be expressed safely out there was sometimes expressed violently in here. Not because those Black men were monsters. But because domination and oppression deform.

Brokenness at Home

What slavery and Jim Crow enforced in public life didn’t stay there—it followed people home. It sat in the chest. Tightened the jaw. Lived in the hands. Inside homes strained by poverty, fear, and exhaustion, violence became the language of compliance.

The Black family became the one place authority could still be exercised. Fear was mistaken for protection. Pain was taught as preparation. “Beat them now, so the world doesn’t beat them worse later,” they said. That logic did not grow out of cruelty. It grew out of terror.

And once violence becomes a language, it teaches and recycles itself. So generation after generation learned the same lesson: survival first, softness later—if ever. That’s not myth. Not accusation. That is documented history. And with that, brokenness became inheritance.

Memory Lane

Now, my much older brothers used to tell stories about my grandmother that scared me. They talked about how, when they got out of order, she would strip them naked, tie them to the bed, and whip them. That image lived in me long before I ever understood it.

What made it confusing is this: When I was growing up, my grandmother was the sweetest person I knew. Gentle. Soft-spoken. Kind. I didn’t know that version of her. It wasn’t until years later—long after she was gone—that I stopped and really thought about how wild that story sounded.

First she stripped them naked, as if humiliation was part of punishment. Then she tied them down. So they couldn’t run. So they couldn’t escape. And then she whipped them.

Corporal punishment wasn’t hidden in the Black community. It was open. It was expected. It was defended. And it still is. The preachers were quick to quote: “Spare the rod, spoil the child.” I heard that verse quoted many, many, many times. I was paddled growing up—by my mother, by schoolteachers—but they never tied me down. And even as a child, I knew there was a line. I saw how quickly discipline could turn into something else. I saw how fear got confused with love. So I promised myself that if I ever had children, I would not whip them. Sometimes I joke that maybe I made the wrong choice—but that’s just a joke. Mostly.

The Inheritance Traced

But here’s where it gets closer. My grandmother’s mother—my great-grandmother—the only memory I have of her is her whipping me. I was about five years old. There were these beautiful bottles of perfume on my grandmother’s dresser. I remember that clearly. I picked one up and smelled it. That’s all.

She saw me. She told me to come there. She was an invalid by then—unable to walk—sitting in a recliner. And I came. She started hitting me with the belt. Every time I tried to move away, she called me back. In hindsight, I could’ve run. She would’ve never caught me. But I didn’t. And that’s the only memory I have of her.

Years later, while doing research on the Freedman descendants of the Five Civilized Tribes, something clicked. The mother of my great-grandmother who whipped me—had been enslaved. And suddenly I began asking questions I had never asked before.

Where did my grandmother get the idea of tying children down? Where did that method come from? Was that learned? Was that inherited? Was that a legacy of what had been done to her and her mother?

I learned that my great-great-grandmother was enslaved and later listed as a Freedman. I found her interview—her own words—as she applied for citizenship as a Freedman in the Choctaw Nation. Some of the earliest recorded words of formerly enslaved people are preserved in the Dawes Indian Rolls. And there it was. Her voice. Her testimony. She named the man who owned her—a man named Robert A. Turnbull of the Choctaw Nation.

And I then realized how close I was to slavery. Not abstract close. Not historical close. Family close. One generation away from someone who had been owned. I was in the space as a five-year-old with someone whose mother held a memory in her body.

And I started thinking about that word—Freedman. Freed to what extent? Freed from chains, but not from memory. Freed from ownership, but not from the practices that trained the body, the hands. Freed by law, but still living inside the echoes of what captivity taught. And suddenly, tying children down didn’t feel so distant. It felt inherited.

The Wilderness Between Freedom and Healing

And then I remembered—we already have a story for this. In the Jewish Exodus story, freedom comes first. Healing does not. The people are released from Egypt, but Egypt is not yet released from them. Their bodies know how to obey. Their nervous systems still expect punishment. So they wander.

Not because their God got lost—but because a generation shaped by slavery could not yet live inside freedom. The text is honest enough to say: not everyone crosses over. Forty years. Not because freedom was unclear—but because bodies trained in bondage could not yet handle freedom. Survival kept them alive. But it could not carry them all the way.

We tell ourselves that was long ago. But history has a way of repeating the wilderness when freedom is declared faster than it is embodied. And each time, a generation paid the cost of having to wait inside unfinished freedom. Which means the wilderness isn’t just a place behind us. Sometimes it’s the space between what we’ve been freed from and what we don’t yet know how to live without.

White Souls, Damaged Differently

Sometimes the space between freedom and healing doesn’t just shape the ones who were bound. If this story stayed only about Black pain, some of you could listen politely and leave unchanged. So it matters to say this plainly. The same system that brutalized Black bodies also damaged white souls. Not equally. Not in the same ways. But decisively. And if we don’t name that, part of the truth remains untouched.

The Emotional Construction of Whiteness

UU Theologian Thandeka describes what she calls “the emotional construction of whiteness.” Her argument is not about blame; it is about formation. Whiteness was not only a social position; it was a discipline.

White children were taught, often without words, that belonging depended on: emotional restraint, moral superiority, loyalty to the rules, by not identifying too closely with Blackness, by not questioning the rule makers, even when the rules were cruel. Very early, white children learned the boundaries, not by choice, but by conditioning. And that conditioning came at a cost.

The Price of Compliance

The system promised safety, order, superiority. What it delivered was something else: emotional constriction, fear of losing status, silence where truth should have been spoken. Loyalty to lies that required constant defense—lies you had to keep believing even when your own eyes were telling you otherwise.

Belonging was exchanged for obedience. Many lost the ability to grieve honestly, the freedom to love without conditions and calculation. Relationships were cut off for daring to cross racial lines. And because the system rewarded compliance, stepping outside it carried consequences: exile, shame, economic threat, social cancellation. That is damage. Not redemptive. Just damage.

What the “White N-Word” Names

Thandeka was preparing to release a new blog series, entitled “Today’s White N-Word,” only instead of the N-word, she wanted to spell it out. I argued with her about not using the full word. But she insisted. She said I was missing the point. Because the language is provocative. This wasn’t about equal pain. It was about equal pressure. About how domination always needs a word to tell people where they belong—and where they don’t.

Poor white people, dissenting white people, noncompliant white people were also disciplined. Treated as embarrassing, expendable, or disposable. You see this pattern today in how certain white people protesting are being treated. And for some, this is the first time they’ve felt what it’s like to be targeted by power rather than protected by it. What it feels like when systems stop assuming your innocence.

We’ve seen this before. Systems that survive on domination never stop with their first target. When violence fails to contain one group, it doesn’t retire—it recruits. White workers were exploited. White labor was devalued. White bodies were sent to die in wars that protected wealth they would never see. And still many were taught to believe that they were winning. That they were better, or at least, better off. That lie did damage too.

Shared Brokenness

This system did not only divide us by race. It pulled us apart—from ourselves, from our neighbors, from our own humanity. Black people were taught to survive under threat. White people were taught to survive by compliance. Both required disconnection. Both required silence. Both left wounds that the body learned to carry.

Civil Rights attorney and author of Just Mercy Bryan Stevenson writes, “We share the condition of brokenness even if our brokenness is not equivalent… Our shared brokenness connects us… Our brokenness is the source of our common humanity, the basis for our shared search for comfort, meaning and healing.”

This is about shared injury inside an unequal system. We’ve been naming what shaped us—whether we asked for it or not. Survival and damage share the same address. That is the truth. And sometimes what we’re seeing isn’t who someone is—it’s what their body learned to do to stay alive.

Dietrich Bonhoeffer—the Lutheran pastor and anti-Nazi dissident—wrote from his prison cell: “Learn to regard people less in the light of what they do or omit to do, and more in the light of what they suffer.”

Bonhoeffer understood suffering—but he also warned about what happens when suffering, when brokenness goes unexamined and is allowed to rise to power, without ever being faced. Some people rise to power not because they are whole, but because survival has taught them how to dominate before they ever learned how to heal. And when unexamined suffering gains power, it governs through fear. And fear doesn’t stay contained. It gets pushed outward—onto families, onto communities, onto nations.

The Line Between Broken and Whole

And know this, my friends: the difference is not between broken people and unbroken people. That line doesn’t exist. The difference is between those who don’t know they are broken and those who do. Between those who hide their fractures behind power, and those who live honestly with them. One leaves casualties. The other leaves witnesses.

Legacy: What We Do With the Mark

We’ve talked a lot today about survival. About what it takes to make it through what should never have been ours to carry. Survival kept us alive. But survival is not the same as freedom. Freedom asks a different question. Not what happened to you? But what will you do with what happened to you? That’s where “unbroken” lives. Not in pretending nothing hurt. Not in proving we’re strong. But in choosing how we live now that we know what survival costs.

Now some people get wounded and spend the rest of their lives handing out that wound. Brokenness doesn’t have to turn bitter. Pain doesn’t have to turn cruel. What we carry will leave something behind—one way or another. And unbroken doesn’t mean untouched. It means the breaking stopped with us. And I don’t want to be the person whose presence becomes someone else’s scar.

We don’t choose how moments land. Sometimes it’s a moment so small no one thought it mattered—except the person who never forgot it. So choose your moments. Leave something that steadies someone. Leave something that lets them breathe.

The Exodus doesn’t end with arrival. It ends with a question—whether a people shaped by survival can learn another way to live. That question didn’t end in the desert. We are still answering it. Freedom doesn’t ask us to arrive. It asks us to keep learning how not to wound each other on the way.