Liberation is Liberation

We went to France in April carrying ordinary vacation anticipation — Paris first, with its beauty and history and cathedral light. Then we picked up our youngest child Kallan in Nantes and began moving toward something heavier than we’d planned. Normandy changed everything. Stan’s pilgrimage was the beaches and the memorials — Sainte-Mère-Église, Utah, Omaha, the American Cemetery, Pointe du Hoc. Mine was the churches. Every village had one, and I couldn’t pass them without stopping. I kept lighting candles as wordless prayers. Notre Dame in Paris. The basilica in Nantes. And finally Bayeux Cathedral, on the morning of my friend Troy’s funeral, while his family gathered in Georgia and I stood in Normandy — unable to be there in body, present in every other way I knew how.

The weight of the D-Day sites is hard to put into words. Standing at Omaha Beach and doing the math. Walking among nearly ten thousand white crosses above the sea. Asking out loud — and meaning it — whether we are still the people capable of that kind of sacrifice for something larger than ourselves. The honest answer felt uncertain. It still does.

And then, in the middle of all that, Kallan found a café.

Selma Alabama. In Bayeux, France. A green awning, a wall-sized mural of the Edmund Pettus Bridge, a neon sign glowing I have a dream. The owner is a French woman named Selma who discovered the Ava DuVernay film in 2014 and understood, for the first time, why her parents had given her that name. She and her husband, Gregory, named her café after a city she had never visited but already loved. 

We are people from Alabama. We lived in Birmingham for twenty-seven years. We know that story in our bones — the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church, the bridge, the jail where Dr. King wrote his letter. And here it was, in a café in Normandy, woven into the very same conversation as D-Day and liberation and sacrifice and the question of what we are willing to give so that freedom might prevail. Gregory said the important thing is to remember the fights waged in Selma — and throughout the world — and to keep fighting.

It became impossible to separate the threads.

The beaches and the bridge. The crosses and the candles. The soldiers who held Pegasus Bridge in the dark and the marchers who crossed the Edmund Pettus Bridge in the daylight. Liberation is liberation. The fight for it doesn’t end. It just changes shape.

I have thought about the timing ever since. We were in Bayeux standing in front of that mural of the Edmund Pettus Bridge. And in those very same days, three people from our own region were on a pilgrimage of their own. From April 13th to the 19th, D’Arcy Blosser, Tom Mason, and Sally Mason traveled from Atlanta to Montgomery to Selma to Jackson to Memphis — walking in the footsteps of the civil rights movement. They crossed the Edmund Pettus Bridge. They walked among the steel monuments at the National Memorial for Peace and Justice. They sat with people who had done the marching and lived to tell it. You can read more about their journey here.

So while I was lighting candles and looking at a painted bridge on a café wall in Normandy, three Nebraska Disciples were walking the real one. The same days. The same bridge. An ocean apart, and somehow side by side. I don’t think I will ever be able to untangle those two pilgrimages, and I have stopped trying. The bridge in Selma, the bridge on a wall in Bayeux, and the road three of our own walked that very week are all the same bridge. We don’t get to visit it as tourists and leave the history behind us. We’re still on this bridge together.

A couple of weeks later, the Supreme Court, in Louisiana v. Callais, effectively gutted Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act — the very heart of the law that those marchers in Selma bled to make possible in 1965. The bridge on Selma’s wall in Bayeux is the same bridge that produced the protection the Court just hollowed out, sixty-one years later. I say this as a Christian and an Alabamian who knows what that bridge cost, and who grieves to watch its fruit treated as something the nation has outgrown.

But here is what I keep returning to. The call of the Gospel—to bring good news, to set captives free, to turn strangers into neighbors—is never finished, and it is never safe. Each generation is handed a stretch of the bridge to cross, in whatever form the crossing takes in their time. The soldiers had theirs. The marchers had theirs. Selma in Bayeux has hers. D’Arcy and Tom and Sally took up theirs on that pilgrimage in April. And ours is in front of us now.

We ended the trip at Giverny. Monet’s garden in full spring — wisteria and peonies, the lily pond doing exactly what it does in every painting, except real and alive and almost unbearably beautiful. Monet painted those water lilies during the First World War. He just kept painting. That is not escape. That is defiance. That is faith that beauty matters even when — especially when — everything around it is burning.

We came home holding all of it. The grief and the beauty. The heartbreak and the hope. The knowledge that some people, in every generation, choose a different way — and the conviction that it needs to be more of us.

The worst thing is never the last thing. Love wins in the end. This is our costly, hard-won, resurrection truth.

That is what France gave us. And that, friends across Nebraska, is the work still in front of us: to keep crossing the bridge, in our own time, in our own state, with our own stretch of it to walk. Liberation is liberation. Let’s keep going — together.

June 4, 2026 – Rev. Robin Blakemore