“Do We Know How It Would Feel to Be Free?” - Rev. Andrew Millard, Guest Worship Leader

When it comes to singing Billy Taylor’s “I Wish I Knew How It Would Feel to Be Free” (as popularized by Nina Simone) as one of our hymns — #151 in Singing the Living Tradition — some urge caution to those who enjoy white privilege on the basis that we don’t know what it’s like not to be free. As the Rev. Kimberley Debus puts it, “we don’t have, in our living memory, a deep, soul-rooted knowledge of what it means to be in chains. We just don’t.” Given the ways in which racism and other oppressions ultimately deny everyone’s humanity, though, do we actually know how freedom feels?

Rev. Andrew (he/they/A) has served the Mission of the Unitarian Universalist Fellowship of the Peninsula in Newport News since 2010. Born and raised in England, he studied physics and then theology, and now lives in Gloucester.

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