Message given at Durham Friends Meeting, June 14, 2026
Rob Levin, rob@roblevin.net, Portland Friends Meeting

Good morning, Friends. I’m here with you today because of a hula hoop
performance at a holiday burlesque show in early December. Since that night, I
feel as though I’ve been fording a river, leaping from one rock to the next. But
there’s no path laid out, it’s one leap and one rock at a time. Thing is, I don’t
know how wide the river is, I can’t see the other side. Maybe it’s even an ocean.
It’s the morning of Saturday, December 6. I’m walking home from a coffee
shop. I check my phone, and see some messages from a group of local clergy
and faith leaders who get together to coordinate social justice actions. I had
been mostly on the periphery of this group for the past year or so, feeling like
an imposter. I’m “just” a Quaker, not clergy. Not a “leader.” Not even sure on
certain days where my “faith” is. I had joined the group because I was hoping
their faith would rub off on me, inspire me, give me courage. So far, it hadn’t
quite happened.

To that point, I had spent most of last year turning away, covering my ears,
despairing. So many dreadful things were happening, and so rapidly, that I
couldn’t bring myself to take action. Yes, I went to the occasional No Kings
Day, or de-escalation training. But I kept feeling that I wasn’t meeting the
moment, that my halfhearted responses did not rise to the level of the harm
that was occurring. Somebody should be doing something! I thought. Pushing
away the obvious subtext, of course, that I was a somebody, that I could be
doing something. But mostly, I didn’t. I turned away. I occasionally wondered,
what was my red line, the horrible last straw that would get me out of my chair
to finally do something? Did I even have a red line anymore?

This particular morning in December, the clergy group messages were all about
immigrants detained in the Cumberland County Jail in Portland. The group
had organized a weekly vigil over the past month or so, but I hadn’t found the
time to show up. There were about 50 detainees at any given time, many
languishing for months on end. Among them was Vivian, an 18-year-old girl
who had been there for almost a year, snatched away from her Massachusetts
home the previous March, just before she was to graduate high school. She
had written a letter, a response to one that the Multifaith Group had sent to
her. I started to read Vivian’s letter, and then I quickly closed the message and
played a game on my phone instead. I just wanted to relax and enjoy my
Saturday. Once again, I looked away, and covered my ears.

That night, I attended a holiday burlesque show called ‘Twas the Night Before
Fascism. I had received free tickets, and went on a lark with my wife and our
friends. It was all part of the plan, to relax and enjoy the weekend. Don’t think
too hard about anything, don’t feel too much.

Like any good burlesque, it was a mashup of music and dancing. The creators
adopted the premise of an old fashioned radio variety show, airing one last time
on the night before the government shut down the airwaves once and for all.
There was lots of hilarity, mocking of certain individuals in the federal
government, it was a rollicking good time – if a little close to our present day
reality. And then towards the end, the lights dimmed, and a young woman
walked onto the stage, barefoot with a set of hula hoops. Ladies and
gentlemen… we present to you, Nettie Loops! Music started, a female singer,
and Nettie Loops began twirling. As the pace picked up, I realized that I was
watching a talented hula hooper. Very talented. And this song, what was this
song? I’d never heard it before. All kinds of dizzying lyrics about our current
political moment, my brain couldn’t quite process it all. But by the third time
around the chorus was becoming quite clear to me. I will read the words to
you, but they won’t quite do justice to the song:

You gave the man your eyes
So you could sleep at night
But you still hear their cries
You can’t outrun this shame
This land was yours and mine
Until they bled it dry
History won’t be kind
To those who turn the other way
Can you hear them crying?
Will you still be silent?

These words filled the dark room, all while Nettie Loops bedazzled us with her
impressive hooping, spinning a half dozen hulas around her arms, now her
legs, now her neck, now every part of her body. Her was this talented
performer, putting on a beautiful spectacle for her audience. And then turning
the lens back on us with those haunting lyrics. The act ended and I felt a lump
in my throat, a tugging at my heart. I went home after the show and listened to
that song five times on repeat. It’s called Have Your Heard the News Today, by
Earth to Eve.

The next morning, at Meeting for Worship, I Quaked about my experience the
night before. I Quaked hard, friends. Something was moving in me. I didn’t
quite know what it was yet.

And now for the first leap to a rock in the river: The week after the hula hoop
moment, I made it to the jail vigil for the first time. I continued to go through
the rest of December. January came, and with it the ICE enforcement surge.
Next rock in the river: I organized a pray-in at Senator Collins’ office. Nine faith
leaders, myself included, were arrested. We had 30 hours from conception to
the launch of the action, with a one-foot snowstorm in between. Way opened
over and over during that process. Starting with Leslie Manning, who
immediately agreed to be our police liaison and jail support. Side note: They
separated those of us who’d been arrested along binary gender lines and placed
us in two police vans. And as the four of us males were sitting in the dark of
the windowless van on the way to jail, we sang out a rich rendition of Lean on
Me.

Next rock: Around that same time, at Quarterly Meeting, I heard this wild story
about someone who became a sponsor to help free an ICE detainee. She wound
up spontaneously flying to Texas, picking him up at a random bus station, and
driving with him back to Maine over four days. Hi Wendy! Next rock in the
river, here it is: Wendy told us that one of the greatest needs to support
immigrants in detention was more sponsors. People like her who could use
their privilege as (primarily) white citizens of stable income to vouch for those
in detention. With the help of the Multifaith Group, I put together a list of 15
volunteers, and my wife and I each sponsored a detainee.

Next rock: I read a story in the Press Herald, about the inhumane conditions at
an ICE facility in Burlington, Massachusetts, just north of Boston. Lack of
basic hygiene supplies, detainees sleeping on floors for a week or two at a time,
in an office park building never meant to hold people overnight. Somebody
should be doing something about this, I thought once again, quickly followed by
phone calls to Massachusetts faith leaders, who passed me along lovingly from
one person to the next, until I eventually found a group that had conducted
two civil disobedience actions outside the Burlington facility. They were looking
to do a third action, but had run out of steam. I helped to bring together about
50 Mainers and Massachusettsans, many of them Quakers, for the third round
of civil disobedience action outside the ICE facility, on a Tuesday in April.

I found my red line, friends. For better or for worse, it wasn’t dismantling
federal agencies. Maybe it should have been, but it wasn’t pardoning violent
criminals. Or trashing the planet. It wasn’t even messing with me and my
rights. No, my red line, like so many others in Los Angeles, Chicago,
Minneapolis, and then Maine, was when they came for my neighbors.
And yes, I found my courage, I finally met the moment, and I’m proud of what
I’ve done over the past few months, along with so many other Quakers and
people of faith. But here’s the hard part I have to share with you this morning:
Much of the time I still want to turn away. Suffering and injustice continues.
It’s not quite as obvious as it was in January, during the surge. But arrests of
our neighbors continue, in Maine and elsewhere. And I’m still tempted to turn
away, every single day. Some days, I do, and that’s ok. We can’t show up at
every moment, we all deserve moments of rest and checking out.

But I worry that I’ll go back to my life of relative comfort, back to turning away,
back to covering up my ears. And I ask for your help, friends. Because that
rock in the river that I’m standing on? We’re actually standing on it together,
all of us. And it’s rough out here. We’re going to lose our balance from time to
time, and we’re going to need to lean on each other if we’re going to find and
leap to the next rock. I ask you to listen with me, to not turn away, to not cover
your ears. I ask you to hold me to account. I ask you to keep inspiring me with
your actions.

Let me paint one last scene for you: Exactly one week after our civil
disobedience action in April at the Burlington, Mass ICE facility, I was
unexpectedly right back at the same spot. This time to pick up Pastor Rufino
as he was being released by ICE after two weeks in jail. I had met the Pastor in
January, because the Angolan man assigned to me as a sponsor was a
congregant in the pastor’s church. Now Pastor Rufino was being freed on bond,
and I was waiting in the parking lot as ICE released people one-by-one through
the front door. While waiting, I met Katie Holicky, an Episcopal Priest at St.
Paul’s up the road in Brunswick. Katie was waiting for another Maine abductee
to be released, to take her home. As we waited, a woman in a hijab hesitantly
emerged from the building. Katie walked up to greet her. As Katie enfolded the
newly freed woman in her arms, the woman in the hijab let out the deepest sob
I have ever heard from an adult human being. Her body heaved and her head
rested on Katie’s shoulder, as she continued a primal wail. It was a cry of
deepest lamentation, a raw expression of personal suffering, tinged with relief
at being freed, and also echoing sorrow writ large in the world.

With this scene in mind, I close with the closing lyrics from the song I heard at
that burlesque show that night in early December:

Can you hear them crying?
Will you still be silent?
Can we hear them crying? Will we still be silent?….