From the Fourth National Climate Assessment, US Global Change Research Program:
“Humanity’s effect on the Earth system, through the large-scale combustion of fossil fuels and widespread deforestation and the resulting release of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere, as well as through emissions of other greenhouse gases . . . is unprecedented. There is significant potential for humanity’s effort on the planet to result in unanticipated surprises and a broad consensus that the further and faster the Earth system is pushed toward warning, the greater risk of surprises. . . .
“The probability of such surprises – some of which may be abrupt and/or irreversible – increases at eh influence of human activities on the climate system increases.”
From Leaves of Grass by Walt Whitman
We are nature, long have we been absent, but now we return.
We become plants, trunks, foliage, roots, bark,
We are bedded to the ground in the openings side by side
We browse, we are two among the wild herds,
We are two fishes swimming
We are what locust blossoms are, we drop scents around lanes mornings and evenings
We prowl fang’d and four-footed in the woods
We are clouds driving overhead
We are seas mingling
We are what the atmosphere is, transparent, receptive
We are snow, rain, cold, darkness
We have circled and circled
till we have arrived home, again.
SERMON
It was an early summer afternoon a year ago when my wife, Debbie, and I were touring the historic district of Charleston, South Carolina. I had seen dark clouds on the horizon, so I made sure to pack an umbrella for our walk.
Sure enough, on leaving some music venue we were greeted by an intense rain shower. We waited for a while, hoping the storm would let up, but, if anything, it intensified. We needed to get back to the apartment we had rented. So, we just decided to hoof it and hope we didn’t get too wet.
After walking a few blocks, though, we were startled by what we found. Reaching Market Street, a central east-west street that marked the site of a historic slave market, we found not pavement, but a river. This is no exaggeration. The murky brown water was moving fast and had climbed over the curb onto the sidewalk.
We watched as some daring folks tried wading across, walking in water that was knee-deep, and deeper in places. As the rain began to let up, we decided to chance it, and slowly slogged across. In a bedraggled state, we eventually made it back to the apartment.
Now, sudden rainstorms are nothing new for Charleston. But what we experienced was something that is. Sea levels in the area have risen so high that street sewers that empty into the river get quickly overwhelmed in a strong rain, and the water has no place to go other than the streets.
These events are now common, and storm surges from hurricanes like Irma last fall regularly flood almost the entire district. Charleston, together with other low-lying cities like Miami and New Orleans, are ground zero for a great storm that’s rising: a storm that promises not just wet feet for tourists but the transformation of our country, of the world.
It is pointless now to argue about the truth of climate change. It is an established fact, as is the role that we humans have played, are playing to bring it about. The question before us now, the ethical demand, is how we, the inheritors of this legacy, will turn this juggernaut that has enriched us in so many ways and yet also threatens our very existence.
As you heard James read from the Fourth National Climate Assessment, published last fall, the urgency for action comes as much from what we don’t know as what we do. First, though, a few details.
The way that we humans are altering the climate, through the burning of fossil fuels and development that strips forests and other landscapes, the report says, “is unprecedented.” The result is that we are living in the warmest period in the history of modern civilization. Sixteen of the warmest years on record were the last 17 years.
But it’s not just average high temperatures that are the trouble. There are more extremes of temperature and precipitation – more heat waves and violent storms – that are playing havoc with agriculture, and damaging homes, cities, landscapes and infrastructure – things like the fire – flood cycle in California.
Also, the effects of warming vary dramatically. In the last 50 years, for example, average air temperatures in Alaska and the Arctic have risen twice as fast as average global temperatures. One result is that Arctic ice is melting at a rapid rate, having thinned by 4 to 7 feet since the 1980s and is melting at least 15 more days per year. It also results in the melting of permafrost, which adds heat-trapping methane to the atmosphere. Even more, it is disrupting massive weather patterns, such as the path of the jet stream and El Nino events.
And, since most of the excess heat we create – 93% of it – is absorbed in the oceans, it warms the water. That’s a problem because warming water expands, creating a 5- to 10-fold increase in coastal flooding since 1960. Warmer water also absorbs increasing amounts of CO2, making the ocean more acidic. That, in turn, endangers shellfish and other sea life.
All of this is so new, the scientists tell us, we’re not entirely sure what it’s effects will be. But there is, they say, “significant potential” that “unanticipated surprises” await us, and that, likely, “the further and faster” that we are pushed toward warming, “the greater the risk of surprises.”
What kind of surprises? Among the possibilities, the report says, are “shifts in the Earth’s climate system.” This could mean such worries as collapse of polar ice sheets, changes in ocean currents, widespread heat, drought and wildfires. None of these changes are academic. They would result in inundated coastal cities, massive extinction of species, agricultural collapse and, with it, starvation, epidemic illness, and, likely, war. Yeah, pretty darn gloomy stuff!
The problem is that we humans are not especially adept at responding to hazards that loom in the distance. We like our emergencies smack in the face, up close and personal, where we can save the day with heroic action.
The problem is that factors driving climate change take many years to build up. What scientists are telling us is that waiting until the worst effects are upon us will make it too late for our responses to have much impact. Instead of reducing the impacts of climate change, we will be left merely to respond to them, and meanwhile, endure the enormous losses they bring.
Oddly, to remedy this, what they are asking for is something a little bit like faith. They are asking that policy makers and ordinary folks like us take the risk of trusting in the discipline of science that has brought humankind such bounty and act now to heed its warnings.
But we can’t expect that will be easy. It will require discomfort, sacrifice, and loss. Dialing back the fossil fuel economy and scaling back our heedless pace of development zero in on the engines of wealth of our time. And both those in charge and those who depend on those engines for their livelihoods will be loath to change. However earnest our pleas, however artful our science, we face a tough time turning the battleship of commerce.
But there is also a spark of hope: Many creative people are at work on technologies, spawning businesses and organizing communities in ways that help us live better in tune with the Earth’s living systems. We just need to be prepared for when the hard push-back comes. The current administration in Washington gives us a good picture of what that looks like.
Meanwhile, what is required of us, may be something like a Palm Sunday spirit: a willingness to enter challenging spaces – the marketplace of ideas, the halls of debate, heck, conversations with our neighbors – guided by our faith in a greater world and a greater love.
These are places where communicating our commitment to the web of life that embraces us, that sustains us, of which we are inescapably a part, is so important. So is our respect for human ingenuity that has helped us make sense of and make a home on Earth – in other words, science.
Think your words will make no difference? Don’t bet on it. Katharine Hayhoe, a climate scientist who is married to an evangelical minister and spoke recently in Asheville, was asked recently what was the most important action that people concerned about climate change could take. She said: talk about it. Most people don’t, she added. Maybe you don’t want to pick a fight or start an argument. But, she said, “there are lots of positive ways to connect with people on things they already care about and why it matters to us and what we can do about it.”
It’s hard to overstate the importance of this work. For what’s at stake truly is our salvation and the salvation of the Earth as we know it. None of this work is new to us as Unitarian Universalists. Respect for the natural world has been central to us for centuries.
One example who my colleague Susan Ritchie points to is the work of UU theologian Bernard Loomer. Loomer argued that interdependence is the condition of all life. And this interdependence, he said, is what gives rise to love. Love is sparked when we see how we are connected to another, and it grows as we see the unfolding interconnection of all things.
In time, we see that all of the ways that we have sought to insulate ourselves from the Web of life, to proclaim our uniqueness over and above it, have only done us damage.
With Walt Whitman, “we are nature”: joined with flowers and roots and foliage, with wild herds, fishes swimming, seas mingling, with snow and rain, with deserts and ice, with forests and plains. We have circled and circled till we have arrived home. And having arrived we are called to act. We are called to truly know the world and ourselves.
It is something, as Mary Oliver suggests, that we know we need. Little by little, she says, we let go of our fears, our misgivings. And we hear a new voice that we recognize as our own, one that keeps us company as we stride deeper and deeper into the world determined to do the only thing we can do determined to save the only life, the only world that we can save.
From “Trees: Reflections and Poems” by Herman Hesse
“For me, trees have always been the most penetrating preachers. I revere them when they live in tribes and families, in forests and groves. . . . In their highest boughs the world rustles, their roots rest in infinity, but they do not lose themselves there. They struggle with all the force of their lives for one thing only: to fulfill themselves. Nothing is holier, nothing is more exemplary than a tree.”
From Lab Girl by Hope Jahren
“Plant numbers are staggering: there are eight billion trees just within the protected forests of the western United States. The ratio of trees to people in America is well over two hundred. As a rule, people live among plants but they don’t really see them. Since I’ve discovered these numbers, I can see little else.
So, humor me for a minute, and look out your window. What do you see? You probably see things that people make, like cars and buildings.
Now look again. Did you see something green? If you did, you saw one of the few things left in the world that people cannot make. . . . Perhaps you are lucky enough to see a tree. That tree was designed about three hundred million years ago. The mining of the atmosphere, the cell-laying, the wax-spackling, plumbing, and pigmentation took a few months at most, giving rise to nothing more or less perfect than a leaf. There are about as many leaves on one tree as there are hairs on your head. It’s pretty impressive
Now focus your gaze on just one leaf. People don’t know how to make a leaf, but they know how to destroy one. In the last 10 years, we’ve cut down more than 50 billion trees. One-third of the Earth’s land used to be covered in forest. Every 10 years we cut down about 1% of this total forest, never to be regrown. That represents a land area about the size of France. One France after another for decades has been wiped from the globe. That’s more than one trillion leaves that are ripped from their source of nourishment every single day. And it seems like nobody cares. But we should care. We should care for the same basic reason that we are always bound to care: because someone died who didn’t have to.”
SERMON
Something’s happening? Can you feel it? You can sure see it, though it’s not always obvious. In some places it appears as just a faint haze, in others, it’s an explosion of color that knocks your socks off. But wherever you look, there’s something going on: something opening, emerging, awakening.
It’s nothing new, in fact, it’s millions of years older than our very species. And yet each year it is fresh and vital and alive. The biblical prophet Isaiah captured its spirit: “For you shall go out in joy and be led back in peace; The mountains, the hills before you shall burst into song
And all the trees of the field shall clap their hands.”
It is our way as humans to interpret the world through our own organs and appendages. So, it’s no surprise that we feel we must metaphorically append hands to the branches of trees to imagine how they might express joy. But at this time of year, it’s plain to see that they have no need of them. Take a look at the branch tips of the tree of your choice and watch how living tissue in the form of flowers or leaves emerges extravagantly from their tough winter cover. And tell me that isn’t something very much like joy.
The rising of the sap! It’s a capacity that I must admit I almost envy: Imagine looking forward to this moment each year when your being is suffused with new energy arising from your very rootedness in life. How would that feel? Would you not also seek out that capacity within to put forth new life, new hope, new being?
As Hope Jahren puts it, we all live among plants but many of us don’t really see them. They are ornaments to our living space or a source of raw materials for our many projects. But there are times of year – emergent spring being one – when they are in our faces demanding attention. So, let us take advantage of this moment to let go of our focus on the human for a bit and turn our thoughts, our senses, our respect to one group of our fellow beings: the trees.
Living in Asheville we are blessed with such awesome beauty and variety when it comes to trees. And even this, we know, is but a shadow of what we once had: before lumber workers cleared our forests, denuding mountainsides, losing many layers of topsoil, before pests that we humans introduced extirpated towering chestnut groves, and even now are infecting elm, hemlock, beech. And still, trees return, finding niches amid the crags to sink their roots and seek out the sun.
Many of us find our fascination sparked by favorite trees. I can think of a few: the larch planted by our porch with its soft green needles that flame bronze before cascading to the ground in autumn; the Russian elm towering some 70 feet over our yard, home to families of woodpeckers, and especially in spring the cherry outside the window of my home office that someday soon will erupt into pinkish white blossoms.
Yet, our fascination with individuals can mean that we literally fail to see the forest for the trees. David George Haskell, an acclaimed botanist at the University of the South in Tennessee, spent time tracking trees in locations around the world, and he found a common theme at each location.
Virginia Woolf, he said, had it right when she wrote that real life is the common life, not the “little separate lives which we live as individuals.” For trees, this means their survival depends on relationship – with other trees that they communicate with through roots but even more important a whole ecosystem of fungi, bacteria, insects and more.
Electrical and chemical signals are generated that nourish and protect roots as they grow, that discourage diseases and diffuse sunlight on leaves. It isn’t a stretch, Haskell says, to say forests “think,” so complex are the many connections among the organisms that contribute to the health of the whole.
Peter Wohlleben, a German forester, pushes the metaphor even further, speaking of the “hidden life of trees.” Trees, he argues, are fundamentally “social beings.” They have been shown to communicate in ways that we arguably could call scent, taste, and sound.
Beeches, spruce, and oak, he says, register pain when a caterpillar munches their leaves, then emit a compound that makes the leaves distasteful. Elms and pines can defect the saliva of harmful insects, then emit pheromones that attract other insects that devour the pest.
The salicylic acid in willows, precursor of aspirin, works the same way to discourage insect attackers.
Wohlleben describes what others have called a “wood-wide web” of roots and fungus filaments that links trees via electrical signals that while pokey compared to computers – moving only about one-third an inch per second – is incredibly dense, with one teaspoon of forest soil containing many miles of filaments.
What all these connections help accomplish are ways for trees to take care of each other. The rugged individualist ethic that echoes among humans has no place among plants.
For trees, it begins in their relationship to fungi. The threads of fungi that nourish the tree are in intimate partnership with it. They actually grow into the soft root hairs, creating a partnership that neither can leave.
This is how the tree connects with the web of life that sustains it and how the fungus finds a source of food. That network assures that the tree will endure, even if it is damaged or invaded by pests because the web can direct nutrients from other trees to help the weaker tree survive.
We, too, get drawn into this web, though in ways that are a little less obvious. Forests are huge shapers of our weather and climate. Simply by their presence trees shape landscapes. As Wohlleben tells it, for every square yard of forest there are 27 square yards of leaves or needles of trees, and all of that greenery captures a lot of rainfall. Some of it is absorbed by leaves, some filters down to roots, and some is evaporated back into the air. All those processes keep much of the water in the forest, rather than running off the land.
And the tons water vapor that results – whether evaporated from the surface of leaves or transpired from the trees themselves – create clouds that release rain in neighboring areas. So, clearcutting forests not only disturbs the immediate area, it also changes weather patterns, leaving widespread areas much drier and subject to wide temperature swings. There are other benefits, too. Cities plant trees for more than just aesthetic pleasure. Trees draw out soot and other pollutants from the air. Living in well-planted neighborhoods we find that we can breathe easier than in treeless ones.
More importantly, forests are also among the most efficient collectors of the greenhouse gas carbon dioxide. Over the course of its life, the average tree collects about 22 tons of carbon dioxide in its trunks, branches, and roots. Some of it returns to the air when the tree dies, but most is locked up in in the ecosystem, as creatures munch it into smaller and smaller pieces that filter down into the soil, forming humus, and, if it is left alone long enough, coal.
Today, though, Wohlleben says, very little coal is being formed. With the rapid clearing of forests, fallen trees don’t get to rot, and disturbed humus is heated up and consumed, sending more carbon dioxide into the air. The filling of swamps closes off another carbon sink.
As beneficial as trees are, you’d think we’d do more to protect them. Sadly, the trajectory is not good. David Haskell took a look at data from the Landsat satellite, which has been tracking the Earths vegetation and terrain. He found that the area of land covered by forests is plunging. From 2000 to 2012, he said, 2.3 million square kilometers of forest were lost and only 800,000 regrow.
In the Boreal area – the Northern temperate forests where we live – losses outstripped gains by more than 2 to 1. These regions are also warming faster than elsewhere and experiencing more frequent fires. All this turns these forests from one of the most important carbon sinks – where carbon is absorbed and stored – to carbon sources that add carbon to the atmosphere. Warming also stresses trees by disrupting their leafing patterns, and milder weather allows pests to thrive.
Here’s where we humans might reenter the story: What are we to make of all this? What does it call for from us? It’s plain that global trends on which we have some influence are radically influencing what is happening to life on Earth. Changing conditions, of course, are nothing new. Earth’s climate and the distribution of life have evolved in many ways over time. And Darwin’s theories tell us that life will respond: some things will prosper, others will disappear depending on how well adapted they are to new conditions.
One response to all this might be: so be it! We’ll just see how it comes out. We’ll lose the hemlocks, but maybe the maples will come on. And what if one of the species on the chopping block is us? Rising sea levels, advancing deserts, resistant superbugs. Any number of trends could spell big trouble.
No, we need to find a better approach. David Haskell suggests we explore an ethic he calls “unselfing.” Essentially, it means centering our concern not in our individual interest but in the context of relationship. It’s an approach that, he says, “breaks the barrier between humans and the rest of life’s community.” And, Haskell argues, it rests in an appreciation of beauty.
Beauty, he says, is not something ephemeral. Consider that mathematicians use beauty as a guide. The best equations are those that are simple and elegant, and that points to beauty as a guidepost for truth. It is not a quality we impose on something; it is something that is inherent to it.
And it’s something, Haskell says, that scientists recognize, too. “Someone who listens to a prairie, a city, a forest for decades can tell when the place loses its coherence, its rhythms. Through sustained attention, beauty and ugliness, in their intermingled complexity, become heard.” So, he argues, “if some form of objective moral truth about life’s ecology exists and transcends our nervous chatter, it is located within the relationships that constitute the network of life.”
Once we attend to relationship – the relationship among different beings, between them and us, our thinking becomes “unselfed,” our gaze focused no longer inward but outward. And it leads to an ethic of belonging, a sense that we are part of a larger reality, which is the true context of our lives.
This is the spirit that calls people like Emerson to declare: “Nature never wears a mean appearance. Neither does the wisest person extort its secret or lose curiosity by finding out all its perfection.” Beauty speaks to us; it calls to us.
So, as David Haskell puts it, “We unself into birds, trees, parasitic worms, and sooner or later soil: beyond species and individuals, we open up to the community from which we are made.” And what better time than spring to do so: to unself into bark and bud, into flower and root, all these fellow beings linked with us in the thin veneer of life that we occupy on this rocky planet hurtling through space.
“You have to make a lot of choices in life; at a certain point, you have to decide what is really important and then really get behind it. It is beyond, it would be nice; it is more like, What is the holdup? Why aren’t you doing something? That voice has gotten louder and louder over time.”
“Your Gifts” by Rebecca Parker
Your gifts
whatever you discover them to be
can be used to bless or curse the world,
The mind’s power,
The strength of the hands,
The reach of the heart,
the gift of speaking, listening, imagining, seeing, waiting.
Any of these can draw down the prison door
hoard bread
abandon the poor,
obscure what is holy
comply with injustice
or withhold love.
You must answer this questions:
What will you do with your gifts?
Choose to bless the world.
SERMON
How’s it going for you? Could you use a few bucks, some dead presidents in your wallet? You know what I mean: some bread, a little cabbage, a few clams. We could all use a little moolah, dough, scratch, some of that lucre.
Does anybody have any doubt what I’m talking about? Yeah, money. O, money, money, money, you make me crazy. How many of us have sung that song? The income and the outgo, getting and spending, here one day, gone the next.
I could go on, but you get the picture. Part of why all these tropes about money hang around in our culture, I think, is that so many of us are uncomfortable talking about it in the cold, sober light of day.
Instead, a blend of shame and romance prevails, and when we finally sit down to the “serious talk” about where money comes from and how we use it, our eyes glaze over. Oh, so complicated, we say, or maybe just boring.
There are many practical reasons for attending to our use of money. The decisions we make, after all, can go a long way determining if we achieve what we want in life.
But there are spiritual ones as well. What money means to us and how we use it speak to what we truly care about, what matters in our lives. And stumbling along in fear, denial, fantasy, or shame over money only keeps us from the kind of peace and joy that come from living truly, from bringing our values to life. Not for nothing does the Bible say, “where your treasure is, there your heart will be also.”
But please don’t take this as another wagging finger. It’s the rare person who doesn’t struggle and fret over money: not just how much we have but what we do with it. It’s a struggle that I remain in myself, and, like most of us, it goes back to my childhood.
When I was growing up, money was one of the things that we never talked about. My father had a good job and was proud of being “the provider,” and part of that was keeping money talk to himself. We never really talked much about what things cost, how my parents made spending decisions, or what they were doing to plan for the future.
That meant that when the time came for me to launch into the working world I didn’t have much idea about how to manage money but instead sort of stumbled along as best I could. My wife, Debbie, on the other hand, grew up in a household where money was frequently discussed, but among parents who, while successful, had childhoods that were shaped by their families’ struggles in the Depression.
So, in building a household it took us some time to negotiate spending and saving practices. And we were tested, especially in the early years, getting by on my humble salary as a beginning newspaper reporter while Debbie was at home caring for infant daughters. In time, though, things got better as Debbie returned to work part-time and my salary edged higher.
As we moved out of what felt like a hand-to-mouth existence we had the space to begin thinking about putting money aside and devoting at least some to causes greater than ourselves.
At the time, we were relatively new members of a tiny Unitarian Universalist fellowship in Charleston, West Virginia. Annual budget drives were haphazard things where church leaders made general announcements about the congregation’s needs and waited to see what came in. The response, as you can imagine, was: not much.
One year one of our members decided that wasn’t good enough, and she persuaded the leadership that members should be visited and asked to give.
I vividly remember her visit to our home. Elaine was her name, and her pitch was clear: there were maybe 50 households in our fellowship, she said, and we depended on each other. Debbie and I both held leadership positions at the time, and, while Elaine thanked us for the time we gave, she said for the congregation to endure it depended on all of us giving money, too, and not just a token but an amount that was significant to us.
It was for me the beginning of a dawning awareness. We grow up in a busy world with so much we take for granted, so much we can avail ourselves of, from the streets we drive on to families that we depend on. It’s not until adulthood, often, that we get any sense that we have the power to shape that world.
Our choices help determine what prospers and what fails, what endures and what dies away. Yes, the world is big and our resources are small, but they’re not nothing.
Money is a funny thing. At the simplest level, it’s nothing especially complicated: just a medium of exchange – a way of getting things we want from others in exchange for giving things we have.
We can do this by bartering, but that can get complicated. Money makes it easier. Because it’s not just things that have value. We ourselves are money-makers. We can create value by offering others our toil or our talent. Indeed, for most of us, that’s where the lion’s share of our money comes from.
But, of course, just like the things we want, our toil and talent are not inexhaustible resources. They are the expending of our own life energy, something that is not only finite, as our lives are finite, but also deeply precious to us. It is our time on earth, the use to which we put our muscles, our brains, our passions, our love.
What was it that Lin-Manuel Miranda wrote about Alexander Hamilton, that he wrote like he was “running out of time”? We are all running out of time. The question before us is how we will spend it and the money it makes for us.
Knowing this, we could hardly be blamed for hunkering down and holding tight to as much money as we can. But as any financial advisor will tell you, that’s also the best way to reduce its value.
Stuff your mattress with greenbacks, and inflation will gobble them up in time. For, money has no absolute value. It has meaning only in the marketplace.
Now, of course, it’s also true that we don’t want to use it all. There are many sober investments that we can and should make to ensure that some of our money lasts and even grows. We want a cushion against hard times, and things like funds for retirement, children’s college accounts and something to pass on to the future. But still, the fact remains that spend we must. But how?
Well, here things get interesting, don’t they? There’s something intoxicating about money in our pocket, and our consumerist economy knows that in fact feeds on it. An extraordinary amount of energy is spent every day tempting and titillating us in the most creative ways. And, let’s face it, we as a society respond with gusto in our spending.
Is that a bad thing? Well, in principle, no. Why not enjoy some of the pleasures and comforts that come with a vibrant economy? The challenge is setting limits because, after all, our funds have limits. Money spent on pleasure is money taken away from more pedestrian but practical needs as well as all the work underway to bring about a better world.
And even more, devotion to pleasure can easily take us down a road to pure selfishness and such grief as addiction and crippling debt, not to speak of environmental destruction and ultimately the breakdown of community.
But let’s be clear that for all the talk of the root of all evil, the problem here is not money itself. Money, remember, is neutral, merely a medium of exchange. The problem is what we choose to make money mean.
If our money is our precious life energy acting in the world, then it is an extension of our being: our passion, our love, our strength, our hope at work. Squander it and we waste the very power we have to give our lives meaning, to have made a difference, to have mattered at all in our brief stay in this life.
How, then, shall we use it, this vessel of our life energy?
Use it to change the world. Use it to bring into being that which couldn’t be without you, that scintilla of possibility that you might blow into flame. The choice is ours each time we open our wallets or pull out our credit cards. We are sending our life energy into the world. We can’t entirely foresee what effect we will have, but we might just help bring a new world into being.
I’ve thought of that first canvass visit that I received in West Virginia many times, of how it invited me to see that I might have a hand in shaping the world. And in that tiny fellowship, it was never clearer how important my small part might be, and how it is incumbent on each of us to nurture visions of hope into being.
Mark Ewert, who you heard me quote earlier and once was a consultant to this congregation, speaks of this as cultivating a practice of generosity. This is different than occasionally responding to appeals from organizations that you support. It is making giving a foundation stone to your financial life. What it means, he says, “is holding the intention to be giving in any way that you can.”
In practice, he says, it “requires you to open your heart and hands in a way that activates your belief in enough, or at least helps you act as if you believe there is enough for you.”
This is hard for many of us, he says, since “nearly everyone has an underlying belief in scarcity or adequacy, regardless of their wealth or poverty.” But a practice of giving opens us to the network of social support that sustains the world and helps us see how we, too, are supported.
So, the inner voice that prompts to give us is no longer, as he quotes one interviewee, “it would be nice,” but instead something more like “what is the holdup, what aren’t you doing something?”
We open our annual budget drive, friends, hoping that the voice you will hear inside in response to our request for your financial commitment will sound something like that, that you might help us build what Mark Ewert calls “a community of generosity,” one that uses its energies and resources to leverage change far greater than we could accomplish individually.
It is a matter of viewing our financial resources as one of the many gifts we have to bring to the world, gifts that, as Rebecca Parker remarks, can be used for good or ill, a blessing or a curse.
May it be our part to use our gifts to bless the world.
“I am an American. My life was on the streets of NYC, and one of the most terrible things was to discover what means to be black in the world. You watch as you get older the corpses of your brothers and sisters pile up around you, too young to have done anything. And you realize that when you try to stand up and look the world in the face like you have right to be here, you have attacked power structure of the western world. Forget the negro problem. What we ought to look at is how brother is murdering brother, knowing that he is his brother.
“The real problem is not whether you are willing to look at your life be responsible for it and change it. It is that the American people are unable to realize that I am flesh of their flesh, bone of their bones, created by them, my blood, my father’s blood is in that soil.”
Apologizing, with humility Forgiving, with humility
Being forgiven, through Grace.
Creating the Beloved Community – Together
We are ONE.
SERMON
Rachel Kaadzi Ghansah tells the story in her essay “The Weight” of how she made up her mind to visit the house where the writer James Baldwin spent his last days in France.
Actually, it was a friend’s idea, she writes. He said that he knew from a trip to France where the house was in the sunny Cote d’Azur region. They could see the house, then walk up the road to the hotel that Baldwin frequented and have some drinks – make a day of it. It was, she acknowledged, a bit of a lark. After all, she says, she was just beginning to make a bit of money from her writing and her finances were precarious.
Also, she said, while she liked Baldwin, it was, “in a divested way.” He was, after all, a literary lion in the African-American community. But she found him off-putting, in her words: “the strangely accented, ponderous way he spoke in interviews. . . the bored, above-it-all figure that white people revered because he could stay collected while the streets boiled.” And his decision to escape to France and avoid the fate that many black Americans of his generations suffered. But, since she was in London anyway on another assignment, it would be an easy trip. She decided to go.
On the train ride to Provence, she found her thoughts begin to shift to the first time she bumped up against Baldwin. She had been hired as an intern at what she describes as “one of the nation’s oldest magazines.” Shortly after arriving, she was informed that she was believed to be the first black intern that the magazine had hired. Instead of assuring her, that news, she said, made her feel “like an oddity,” making her wonder if she was hired for her talent or as “merely” as a product of affirmative action.
After a few weeks, when she was the only intern asked to do physical labor – reorganize the magazine’s archives – she fretted over whether to object to that. She was rewarded, though, when searching through old index cards to discover one noting a payment to Baldwin in 1965 for one of his most famous essays. It reminded her that Baldwin was one of the few who had escaped the tangle of America’s racism and written himself into the canon of great literature.
She got to Baldwin’s former home, and from the outside, she writes, it looked “ethereal.” She could imagine his garden, the dining room where he hosted the likes of Josephine Baker, a house full of life and books.
What she found inside was something different: a shambles overgrown with vines, empty of furniture with missing doors and smashed windows, though still with a kitchen featuring an orange sink and purple shelves, but posted with notices from a company tasked with tearing the house down. It was, she said, the first time she fully understood the weight the Baldwin carried.
Ghansah’s essay is one of nearly 20 collected in a book published last year called “The Fire This Time: A New Generation Speaks About Race.” And each of them speaks to the challenge that they feel Baldwin’s book, “The Fire Next Time,” published more than 50 years ago, offers today.
We come to an interesting moment these days in this nation’s struggles for racial reconciliation. We are nearing the close of the half-century celebrations of the great Civil Rights victories of the 60s – the Montgomery bus boycott, the Birmingham protests, the Selma march, concluding on a somber note this coming April when we mark the 50th anniversary of the murder of the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. at a Memphis motel.
So, perhaps it’s appropriate that this should be James Baldwin’s time. A man very much aligned with the great struggles of the Civil Rights era, yet outside them. An artful writer whose style appealed more to literary societies than the streets. A gay man who enjoyed the cadences of Biblical preachers but was not a believer. An ex-patriot who made his residence in France in his 20s, yet returned regularly to the U.S. for literary tours, where he was a reliably provocative media presence.
Now, 30 years after his death at the Provencal home that Ghansah visited, his voice has returned to us in a stunning documentary by Raoul Peck called “I Am Not Your Negro.” Peck splices together video of Baldwin’s appearances with interviewers like Dick Cavett with footage from both Civil Rights marches and recent racial conflicts, such as the protests at Ferguson, Missouri, narrated by the actor Samuel Jackson speaking Baldwin’s words.
It’s a haunting and disturbing film, not least because Baldwin’s laments about race in America sound so contemporary. But also because the film is premised on a proposal Baldwin made for a book that he never ended up writing. That book was to include sketches of three great Civil Rights leaders whom he knew – Medger Evers, Malcolm X , and King – all of whom were born after him, yet died a good 20 years before he did.
It is in a sense both eulogy and manifesto, the case he sought to make for the work before us all. “There are days,” he tells interviewer Dick Cavett in the movie, “when you wonder what your role is in this country and what your future is, how you’re going to reconcile yourself to a situation here, and how you are going to communicate to the vast, heedless, unthinking cruel white majority that you are here. I’m terrified by the moral apathy, the death of the heart, that is happening in my country. These people don’t even think I’m human. They have become in themselves moral monsters.”
It echoes the perspective that Baldwin offered in The Fire Next Time, in a piece written as a letter to his nephew, James, named after him. Black people, he told his nephew, as they get older watch “the corpses of your brothers and sisters pile up around you, too young to have done anything. And you realize that when you try to stand up and look the world in the face like you have a right to be here, you have attacked the power structure of the western world. Forget the negro problem: what we ought to look at is how brother is murdering brother, knowing that he is his brother.”
I find it remarkable how Baldwin’s argument connects with some of the most prophetic voices today. Last Thursday, Michelle Alexander came to UNC-A to be interviewed before hundreds at the Kimmel Arena on her take on next steps in this struggle.
In the years after King died, she said, the movement took a turn toward what she called “professional civil rights advocacy,” where organizers worked to become “political insiders who were focused on advocacy and lobbying,” but failed to take note of a backlash that was brewing. Now, she said, “we’re moving from an understanding of civil rights as a political and legal concern to a profound moral and spiritual crisis facing this nation.”
It’s no surprise that Alexander closed her celebrated book, The New Jim Crow, with an extended quotation from The Fire Next Time:
“This is the crime of which I accuse my country and my countrymen,” Baldwin writes, “and for which I and history will never forgive them, that they have destroyed and are destroying hundreds of thousands of lives and do not know it and do not want to know it.”
And still, Baldwin urges his nephew to remember that each of thr people who write him off, “are your brothers – your lost, younger brothers. And if the word integration means anything, this is what it means: that we, with love, shall force our brothers to see themselves as they are, to cease fleeing from reality and begin to change it.”
His words echo those I heard just the next day, Friday, in a similar community interview with Patrice Khan-Cullors, one of the founders of the Black Lives Matter movement. She told a gathering of about 200 at Rainbow Community that she worried a bit about where this powerful movement she helped launch goes next.
“Too many people,” she said, “are being discarded. We need to understand how to be in community and not let the toxicity of these times infect us.”
The work of the movement, Khan-Cullors said, is to find out how to cultivate not just resistance, but also what she called “community care.”
We are only beginning to understand what community care might look like in this context. As each of these prophetic voices attest, it is centered on a conviction in radical equality, radical inclusion, radical compassion: radical in the sense that they admit no qualifiers: equality, except for; inclusion, except for; compassion, except for.
We must all of us be all in. And to make that happen requires, as Hope Johnson suggests in the reading you heard earlier, that we understand all the dimensions of the seemingly simple phrase: We are one.
To begin with, she says, “we” is not a haphazard noun; it doesn’t happen by coincidence. “We” is created, acknowledged, accepted. When I draw another person into a “we” I intentionally assert that the two of us are Iinked in some important way, we are involved in each other and so at least potentially of concern to each other. As Hope puts it, we two diverse souls with our individual natures, individual thoughts, individual histories join as “proudly kindred spirits.
What we make of that moment of shared interest, shared destiny is for us to decide. It can be cultivated and deepened, or it can be squandered and ignored. But it is there before us – a choice to reach out, to align ourselves with another, to explore what we share.
We ARE: As two people joined as “we” there is so much we might share – working, eating, laughing, playing, telling and hearing stories. And, who knows, maybe taking the risk to trust, opening up, trying to understand, struggling, making mistakes, apologizing, forgiving, being forgiven, learning to love our neighbors, learning to love ourselves.
What was it that James Baldwin said? “We will sacrifice all the beauty of our lives, we will imprison ourselves in totems, taboos . . . steeples, races, armies, flags, nations, in order to deny the fact of death, the only fact we have. It seems to me that one ought to rejoice in the act of death – ought to decide, indeed, to earn one’s death by confronting with passion the conundrum of life.”
It is a charge as old as Deuteronomy: “I have set before you life and death, blessings and curses. Choose life that you and your children may live.”
So, what will it take us to choose life? Us choosing life, choosing a way that might bring about the flourishing of every soul, each of us wildly diverse in so many ways, yet at our core indivisible, one.
Baldwin was skeptical that we were capable of such a turn. “I am tired,” he told Cavett in one of those interviews. “I don’t know how it will come about. I know no matter how it comes about it will be bloody, it will be hard. I believe we can do something with this country that’s never been done before. We don’t need numbers; we need passion.”
And the question before us now is whether we are willing to bring passion to that work. For himself, Baldwin said, “I can’t be a pessimist because I’m alive. To be a pessimist means you have agreed that human live is an academic matter. So, I’m forced to be an optimist. I’m forced to believe that we can survive because I have survived. But the future of the negro in this country is precisely as bright or as dark as the future of this country. And it’s up to the American people whether or not they’re going to face, deal with and embrace this stranger who they have maligned for so long.”
Up to us to decide if we are ready to affirm with full heart and no exceptions: we are one.
Edict of Religious Toleration, decreed at the Diet of Torda, January 6, 1568:
“His Majesty, our Lord, reaffirms that in every place the preachers shall preach and explain the Gospel, each according to his understanding of it.
And if the congregation like it, well, if not, no one shall compel them, for their souls would not be satisfied, but they shall be permitted to keep a preacher whose teaching they approve.
Therefore none of the superintendents or others shall abuse the preachers, no one shall be reviled for his religion by anyone, according to the previous statutes, and it is not permitted that anyone should threaten anyone else by imprisonment or by removal from his post for his teaching. For faith is the gift of God, this comes from hearing, which hearing is by the word of God.”
Ours is a young religious tradition. We date the founding of the two movements that joined to make us who we are today –Unitarianism and Universalism – just 200 years ago in colonial New England. Yet, from our earliest days scholars and historians have located tendrils of the faith we live now in exemplars who paved the way for liberal religion, who posed questions that challenged orthodoxy, who declared the primacy, the natural right of all people to free faith, centered in what their own yearning hearts and their own searching minds declare.
It is, as you might imagine, a tumultuous story with no common through-line. Looking at the history of religion in the West, what we see tends to be one faction or another striving to establish a prevailing orthodoxy. Free faith has few advocates. Yet, here and there it emerges: a brief light that opens a path and offers an example for those who follow.
Today, at the start of a new year, we turn to one story, one of the oldest we know, where for a moment the possibility of free faith raised its head. We go back to a time and place that have been largely ignored by the history books, a small province in Eastern Europe in the 16th century that we know as Transylvania, in present-day Romania.
Though outside the mainstream of European culture, it was a geopolitical hot spot at the time, where the Muslim Ottoman Empire was vying for influence with the Holy Roman Empire. So, both politically and religiously the whole region was boiling with controversy for several centuries. But that controversy together with periodic warfare and shifting religious factions also set the stage in the middle of the century for an unprecedented experiment in religious tolerance.
The stage was set in 1540 with a royal succession – the death of Transylvania’s king, John Zapolya, two weeks after the birth of his son, John Sigismund. It was a time of shifting loyalties and Zapolya was worried that at his death the Hapsburg empire would seek to take over the country.
So, he had asked Suleiman, the Ottoman Sultan, to watch over his wife, Queen Isabella, and son, and to protect his country’s independence. At Zaploya’s death, Then the two-year-old Sigsmund was named king, Queen Isabella served as his regent, and Suleiman’s protection preserved the tiny nation’s brief independence of Catholic rule.
Religiously, it was a time of great turmoil. Lutheran and Calvinist reformers were pushing out Catholics, and Greek Orthodox expanded their presence. Amid this, Isabella and her son found solace in a friend, Giorgio Biandrata, an Italian physician who brought news of a newly emerging religious reform movement, one that rejected the doctrine of the trinity and declared that God is one. He called it Unitarian.
Hoping to avoid conflict over religion, Queen Isabella decreed in 1557 that every person may maintain whatever religious faith they wish without offense to any. The Queen died two years later, leaving the throne to her 19-year-old son John Sigismund.
Despite her decree, though, disputes heated up among contesting religious sects. So, in January 1568 John Sigismund called an assembly called the Diet of Torda where he issued the edict that you heard James read earlier.
Though it never circulated far from Transylvania, it still stands as one of the most remarkable documents in the contentious history of religion in Europe:the first decree of religious tolerance.
It proclaims room for preachers of whatever stripe to make their case without being threatened or reviled. But even more amazing is what it says about the listeners: having heard the preachers speak members of the congregation can judge for themselves if they like it.
If so, “well.” “If not, no one shall compel them, for their souls would not be satisfied.”
To our modern ears, these words are unsurprising. Well, of course, right? It’s easy to miss how revolutionary they were. After all, religious coercion at the time was widespread. The purpose of preaching was not to persuade or argue. It was to lay out what its speaker believed to be God’s holy truth. Often, to dispute or argue with the preacher was to risk personal ruin, even torture.
But John Sigismund said, no. Our souls will never be satisfied by a faith that is forced down our throats. Freedom is at the heart of a true and vital faith.
And 450 years later we UUs celebrate this edict because it marks a nascent moment when principles at the center of our liberal faith were established in this out-of-the-way kingdom. For John Sigismund didn’t just invent this notion. I told you that he was influenced early in life by this doctor friend of his mother’s, Giorgio Biandrata. Biandrata, in turn, was part of a network of humanist and liberal religious thinkers ranging from Italy to Poland.
Perhaps his most important contact was with a spiritually restless, one-time Catholic priest named David Ferenc, or Francis David. David was a brilliant preacher and scholar who had been converted to Lutheranism and then Calvinism, serving at different times for as bishop of both faiths. Eventually he shifted to a Unitarian perspective, and Biandrata arranged for him to be appointed court preacher under Sigismund.
To get a flavor of David’s influence, here are a few famous quotes from his work:
“Salvation must be accomplished on this Earth.” “The most important spiritual function is conscience, the source of all spiritual joy and happiness.” “Conscience will not be quieted by anything other than truth and justice.”
David’s urging led Sigismund to call the Diet of Torda, and a year after the Edict was decreed Sigismund declared himself a Unitarian, making him the first – and only – Unitarian king. By all accounts, the first few years after the decree was a rich and prosperous time in Transylvania. The range of religions that found protection under Sigismund’s decree is astonishing: Catholic, Lutheran, Calvinist, Unitarian as well as Orthodox Christians, Jews and Muslims.
But even more it gave birth to a new religious movement first under Francis David’s leadership then as an independent network of churches. Sadly, two years after Sigismund’s conversion he died in an accident under clouded circumstances. His successor was Catholic who had no interest in David’s experimental theology. David lost favor, was charged with heresy and died in prison.
The Unitarian Church of Transylvania, though, endured and still does in the hill country of Romania, despite many campaigns of persecution over the years. It still maintains more than 100 parishes and tens of thousands of worshippers.
So, ancient history, right? Uplifting story, inspiring people – Yay! But I want to suggest that there’s more than that for us here. The anesthetizing distance of history tends to push all the struggles of times past far away. “Yeah, it certainly was amazing what they endured,” and then we move on.
Well, hold on a moment. We don’t have to dig too deep into the circumstances surrounding the Diet of Torda to see some eerie parallels and sobering lessons for our own time.
Like the hill country people of 16th century Transylvania, we live at time of turmoil and transition. It’s different for us, of course. We have less cause to fear being persecuted for our religious beliefs. More troubling are global trends that are dividing people not so much by faith but by income, by class, by race, by ethnicity, by nationality, by gender.
And it’s not just the fact of these splits that is the trouble but the way that they contribute to and reinforce a culture of privilege and entitlement, a kind of Darwinian grab game that serves those that get and leaves the rest in the dust.
And religion? Where is religion today in the midst of this? Well, it’s hard to say. Forms of religion certainly exist. We can count the edifices and total up the clergy. But it’s plain that as a force religion is shrinking: its numbers are declining and its influence is waning. We liberals are not exempt. We, too, are struggling.
So, what are we to make of all this? Lisa Martinovic’s poem that you heard earlier is one that I shared with you some years ago, but it seems all the more apropos as we enter this new year.
What’s ailing us? I think she’s right: We’ve moved away from the edge. It’s not that we’re not troubled by the state of the world, but we so enjoy being cozened by comfort or the aspiration for comfort that we turn aside. Faced with the ache of compelling moral crises, we compromise, dither, deny and delay.
We may not frame it that way, but “the great mushy middle”, as she calls it, has come to feel like a pretty OK place, where homogenized culture is piped into our homes, heck, into our ear buds or the watches on our wrists, where the gig economy gives us just enough to get by. There’s not much security there, but it’s safe enough, warm enough to survive for a while.
Yet, let’s face it, it’s hardly a place where our souls are satisfied. And here is the message of Torda for our time: It matters that our souls are satisfied.
The pursuit of pleasure is nice, but it doesn’t satisfy our souls.
Walling our lives off among people who agree with us,
who look like us, sound like us, feel like us may feel safe,
but it doesn’t satisfy our souls.
Of course, it’s true that once we venture outside of our cocoon, take off our virtual reality visors we’re on uncertain terrain: we’re on the edge. And, as Lisa Martinovic reminds us, the edge is a place where “There are no disguises, everybody is naked, all bets are off, and the game’s not rigged.”
Yeah, it’s uncomfortable: “Your heart’s pounding, you’re shaking, you’re scared because everything is initiation.” At yet it is there that our souls, that beautiful wholeness, that profound integrity at the center of our beings comes alive.
Somewhere, somehow there needs to be someone who speaks up for the soul, who honors it, not just in ourselves but in every person, and who commits to creating the conditions that can bring out its flourishing.
This is the work of religion, our religion, that cherishes freedom because it is the condition by which people come to life so that they might celebrate the wonder, the beauty, the inherent worth of our original blessedness and join in the creation of beloved community.
And here’s the thing. It doesn’t happen in some safe hideaway: it happens on the edge. Seeking to shelter ourselves from change doesn’t mean that the change isn’t coming. It’s here. Now.
So, friends, let us take this time of resolutions to rededicate ourselves to the lessons our forebears teach: that even in a time of turmoil it matters that we take the risk to act, to affirm and live into a hopeful faith that gathers us in gratitude and points us toward the work of reclaiming human dignity and compassion. Join me, won’t you?
Let go of your misgivings, whatever is holding you back, and run, don’t walk, to the edge.
Despair is my private pain Born from what I have failed to say failed to do failed to overcome. Be still my inner self let me rise to you let me reach down into your pain and soothe you. I turn to you to renew my life I turn to the world the streets of the city the worn tapestries of brokerage firms crack dealers private estates personal things in the bag lady’s cart rage and pain in the faces that turn from me afraid of their own inner worlds. This common world I love anew as the lifeblood of generations who refused to surrender their humanity in an inhumane world courses through my veins. From within this world my despair is transformed to hope and I begin anew the legacy of caring.
SERMON
Resistance. What’s that about? I think we all have an idea. I push, you push back, right? You get in my way. You refuse to comply.
It’s a power dynamic, but subtler than outright opposition, at least at first, isn’t it? Often that’s because the party doing the resisting is at some disadvantage to the one they oppose. The other may be bigger, stronger, better funded, and deeply ensconced in a system constructed to keep them right where they are, calling the shots at the top of the heap.
And once perched there, it is their way, a la the Borg of Star Trek, to flaunt their power and warn us that “resistance is futile.” And yet, as movements of liberation have learned across the ages, in truth it hardly ever is. Resistance accomplished with persistence, fueled by integrity and compassion, done with creativity and grit can undo the Borgs and the bullies, however fearsome they may seem to be.
To enter a conversation today about how that might be I’m inviting us to enter a great old story celebrated right now by our Jewish neighbors. It has its own cautions and challenges but also important lessons for the path of resistance.
It takes us back some 2,200 years to a tumultuous time for the Jewish people when they had to endure a succession of foreign despots with different designs on Palestine. And as you can imagine, as each arrived he found the Jews inconveniently opposed to his program. Each designed his own strategy to get around this. Some oppressed them, others sought to co-opt Jewish leaders and had some success, though many still opposed them.
The most radical program came from a Syrian named Antiochus Epiphanes, who in 168 BC sent soldiers to take over Jerusalem. Many Jews chafed at the increasing restrictions on Jewish practices that Antiochus ordered, culminating with widespread killings and the installation of Greek idols in the temple.
In response, a clan of Jewish priests known as the Hasmoneans, or Maccabees, then withdrew from Jerusalem and planned a revolt. In time, the revolt devolved into a civil war that took in not only the Maccabees and the soldiers, but also Jews who had adopted Greek practices. After a series of battles, the Maccabees prevailed.
On returning to Jerusalem, they discovered the Temple to be in shambles. The first book of Maccabees, an apocryphal scripture that was never included in the Jewish Bible, describes in detail how the Temple was restored. It was then that leaders declared that an eight-day festival of “Hanukkah,” which translates from Hebrew simply as “dedication,” should be held to purify and consecrate the temple.
The bit about oil found in a vessel that was enough to keep the flame on the menorah burning for a day lasting the full eight days of the festival is a nice bit of theater attributed to creative rabbis some seven centuries after the event. Still, it nicely turns the focus of the story away from a bloody civil war and back toward a more profound message that resistance can pay off, and even more that oppressed peoples have a right to self-determination, or, as our choir just reminded us, a right to freedom to be who they are.
It’s a message that’s especially fitting at this time when so many people in different settings are struggling for freedom and self-determination but also seeing some fruits of resistance.
I think, for example, of the recent senatorial election in Alabama. Much has been said about the political ramifications of this shift, which are huge. But as I watched election returns last week my thoughts turned to the celebrations that I attended two years ago of the 50th anniversary of the Civil Rights march on Selma.
I remember at the time being deeply moved, standing on the Edmund Pettis Bridge, site of the bloody 1965 attack on civil rights workers, packed in with a racially diverse crowd laughing and singing freedom songs. But there was a wistfulness there, too. To be honest, there’s not much to modern-day Selma.
Yes, its leadership is African-American, but economically it’s a shell of what it once was, as are many communities with African-American majorities in Alabama. Yes, freedom came with the Voting Rights Act, but only freedom of a sort. Political and economic leadership still lies mostly in the hands of whites, and blacks continue to suffer.
But as the election returns rolled in last Tuesday, it became clear that black voters in numbers unprecedented in Alabama history were turning the election away from one man, a candidate of the white power structure who pined for a pre-Civil War U.S., and toward another a man, a candidate of the insurgents, who had successfully prosecuted men who in 1963 bombed a Birmingham church, killing four black girls, one of the defining outrages of the Civil Rights era.
And it seemed a bit of cosmic justice that it was Dallas County, home of Selma, that pushed that ex-prosecutor over the top in that Senate race. Not exactly the victory of the Maccabees, perhaps, since among other things we can’t know how all this will play out in the long run. But for a moment it offers us a window into the power of resistance, of how even against long odds people can make a change.
And from here I want to point to one more movement of resistance that is roiling our nation. It may not have reached its Maccabees moment yet, but with the momentum, it’s gathered so far there is reason to hope. I speak of the campaign against sexual harassment and abuse.
I like the way that Time magazine frames those who have brought the issue before us in its latest “Person of the Year” issue: The Silence Breakers.
Like every campaign for freedom, it is about standing up to people in power. Yet, this one is complicated even further since it’s centered on sex, our most intimate selves, something private and close. Perpetrators learned to use that wish for privacy as a weapon to warn their victims with Bork-like assurance that “resistance is futile.”
It took brave women willing to break the silence, to offer their own stories and risk ridicule, to report the stories of others and risk professional ruin, in order for the story to be told.
The fall-out has been both encouraging and dispiriting. Encouraging in that breaking the logjam of silence has encouraged many women to tell their own stories, opening paths to healing and renewal. New Internet memes – “I believe them” and “Me, too” – have helped amplify the campaign and give confidence to those taking the risk of telling their stories.
The campaign has also dislodged some notorious abusers from positions of power or authority. It’s encouraged men to take stock of their behavior and opened conversations around practices in offices and other organizational settings.
It’s been dispiriting, though, to see some abusers simply take shelter in denial. And while high profile cases make the news, many more stay in the shadows, where unchanged power dynamics put women who voice allegations of abuse at a risk they can’t afford. The work of silence breaking remains, and for those of us, women and men, committed to changing the dynamic, we are challenged to find ways to raise the notion of resistance to another level.
In an essay in Time, the novelist Gillian Flynn writes that as much as she admires the courageous women who raised their voices, in her words, “I don’t feel triumphant, I feel humiliated and angry.”
Along with the stories bravery and perseverance, she writes, this campaign has also surfaced a toxic Internet culture of shaming and degradation and all the boys club abuses that are baked into corporate culture
“Threats to women abound,” Flynn writes. “We are underrepresented everywhere, underpaid by everyone and underestimated all over.”
All of this comes home to her, she says, when she looks at her children her 3-year-old daughter, who she describes as “fearless, vibrant,” and perhaps even more her “sweet” 7-year-old son.
How to assure that they are neither, in her words, “crushed by this world” nor drawn in one way or another into the cycle of abuse swimming around them? It begins, she says, with how we choose to raise them.
“My son,” she writes, “recently asked me, ‘Why aren’t there any shirts that say BOY POWER?’”
“I could have talked about male entitlement,” she says, “and the male gaze, the wage gap and Weinstein. But I thought: If the myriad GIRL POWER shirts are meant to encourage female strength and confidence, a BOY POWER shirt might make male empathy and respect dynamic. There were no BOY POWER shirts, so I had to DIY (do-it-yourself) an iron-on. Now, there’s at least one.”
Resistance has many dimensions. It is in part naming and working to remove signs of oppression wherever we can. It is also work to reframe the ways that we are with each other, owning the stumbles we make, but holding in view like a polestar the truth at the center of our beings: our and each other’s incalculable inherent worth and our and each other’s right to be who we are.
It is the holy flame we each carry that even when dimmed by circumstance endures.
Like Thandeka, we may mourn and despair all that we have failed to say, to do, to overcome, but still within there is a source of renewal and strength, that invites us into new hope, entering the legacy of caring.
“Pain and death will always be the same. But under the pavements trembling like a pulse, under the buildings trembling like a cry, under the waste of time under the hoof of the beast above broken bones of cities, there will be something growing like a flower, something bursting from the earth again, forever deathless, faithful, coming into life like April.”
An Arundel Tomb by Philip Larkin
Side by side, their faces blurred,
The earl and countess lie in stone,
Their proper habits vaguely shown
As jointed armour, stiffened pleat,
And that faint hint of the absurd—
The little dogs under their feet.
Such plainness of the pre-baroque
Hardly involves the eye, until
It meets his left-hand gauntlet, still
Clasped empty in the other; and
One sees, with a sharp tender shock,
His hand withdrawn, holding her hand.
They would not think to lie so long.
Such faithfulness in effigy
Was just a detail friends would see:
A sculptor’s sweet commissioned grace
Thrown off in helping to prolong
The Latin names around the base.
They would not guess how early in
Their supine stationary voyage
The air would change to soundless damage,
Turn the old tenantry away;
How soon succeeding eyes begin
To look, not read. Rigidly they
Persisted, linked, through lengths and breadths
Of time. Snow fell, undated. Light
Each summer thronged the glass. A bright
Litter of birdcalls strewed the same
Bone-riddled ground. And up the paths
The endless altered people came,
Washing at their identity.
Now, helpless in the hollow of
An unarmorial age, a trough
Of smoke in slow suspended skeins
Above their scrap of history,
Only an attitude remains:
Time has transfigured them into
Untruth. The stone fidelity
They hardly meant has come to be
Their final blazon, and to prove
Our almost-instinct almost true:
What will survive of us is love.
SERMON
A year after the last presidential election we can hardly be blamed for feeling a bit like Thomas Wolfe’s George Webber at the start of his famous novel “You Can’t Go Home Again.” Arriving in the early 1920s in “Libya Hill,” the home of his boyhood (a thinly veiled reference to a place you know well), Webber discovers a boom going on.
Real estate speculation is making many people rich but not compassionate; in fact, the opposite. Everyone seems to be out for the main chance, corporate chieftains are martinets who seek to create needs, not satisfy them, and, as one reviewer put it, “salesmanship is the enemy of truth.”
What’s more, Webber discovers himself to be persona non grata for an earlier novel he wrote that exposed embarrassing secrets of his family and friends. Eventually, circumstances lead him to high-tail it out of town.
Soon afterward, the town finds its comeuppance with the arrival of the Great Depression, which wipes out much of the elusive wealth accumulated in previous years. And Webber takes off to Europe to sulk and brood. //
With the stock market last week soaring to new heights while tax legislation is moving through Congress that promises to enrich the wealthy, multiply the nation’s ballooning debt and punish lower-income Americans, the picture Wolfe drew nearly a century ago is beginning to feel eerily familiar.
Add to that the culture of lying and deceit that is settling in in the halls of power in this country, and the perfidy and flagrant violation of trust of powerful men who blithely dismiss, diminish or deny well-documented allegations of assault and abuse, and we can hardly be blamed for, like George Webber, wanting to check out.
All the more reason, then, that we attend to the message that Wolfe offers to close his novel. Webber later discovers in Europe the same ills that led him to leave his home town, and on returning finds cause for hope. As the nation began to emerge from the Depression, its leaders wanted to cling to the past, Wolfe writes, “but they were wrong. They did not know that you can’t go home again. America had come to the end of something and to the beginning of something else.”
As he put it in the excerpt you heard earlier, “pain and death will always be the same,” and still there is a force within us “growing like a flower . . . coming into life like April.”
We are well aware of all the forces of division at work now, centered as they are in fear and the scape-goating of vulnerable people, and we can see them fueling movements toward separatism here and abroad.
All this is alarming and also nothing new. As historians point out, the last century offers chapter and verse on how easy it is for separatism to take root and how it can lead to monstrous evil. But here’s the caveat: can, but needn’t. There is nothing inevitable about any of this, and there are lessons for us in how we might nudge history in a different direction by digging back in and recommitting to values of compassion and hope.
Yale historian Timothy Snyder recently wrote about some of these learnings in a slim book entitled Tyranny: Twenty Lessons from the 20th Century. Here are a few:
Do not obey in advance. We want to be good people and give our leaders the benefit of the doubt. But, Snyder says, we need to be wary of he calls “anticipatory obedience,” where we compromise our principles at a new leader’s bidding. What feels like a gesture of respect can end up being interpreted as a greenlight for leaders to do whatever they want.
Defend institutions. It is easy to criticize our fallible institutions, Snyder says, but it’s worth remembering that they were created to preserve our freedom and dignity, and if they are to do that they need our help. They do not protect themselves.
“The mistake,” he says, “is to assume that rulers who came to power through institutions cannot change or destroy institutions – even when that is exactly what they have announced that they will do.” They can, and they do.
Take responsibility for the face of the world. “The symbols of today,” he says, “enable the reality of tomorrow. Notice the swasticas and other signs of hate. Do not look away, and do not get used to them. Remove them yourself and set an example for others to do so.”
Stand out. As Snyder puts it, “Someone has to. It is easy to follow along. It can feel strange to do or say something different. But without that unease, there is no freedom.” And that doesn’t necessarily means standing alone. Part of what we here exist to do is to help you find in community the hope, the faith, the courage to live into and proclaim your values.
Investigate. Figure things out for yourself. Steer clear of rhetoric. Demand facts. As Snyder puts it, “it is your ability to discern facts that makes you an individual, and our collective trust in common knowledge that makes us a society.”
Make eye contact and small talk, and not just with your buddies. “This is not just polite,” he says. “It is part of being a citizen and a responsible member of society. It is also a way to stay in touch with your surroundings, break down social barriers, and understand who you should and should not trust.”
Be as courageous as you can. We each have our own limits to what we can do, yet even a little courage offered at the right time can have a stronger influence on events than we expect.
Learning the lessons of history is good practice. It teaches us the danger behind what Dictionary.Com declared as the word of year for 2017 – complicit: “choosing to be involved in an illegal or wrongful act.” Perhaps it’s a sign of a turning at work now that the Web site reported that there had been multiple spikes in the number of people looking up that word this year. Dictionary.com speculated that this may be, “Because of noteworthy stories of those who have refused to be complicit in the face of oppression and wrongdoing.”
In the face of this, some of us will find our way to brave public acts. Others of us will be involved in what Matthew Fox called “the small work in the Great Work.”
It is rising each day and putting our hearts and the little bit of genius that we are blessed with to work for what my colleague Victoria Safford calls “the larger Life and larger Love that some call holy, some call God, some call History, and others call simply larger than themselves.”
In her essay, “The Small Work and The Great Work,” Safford tells of a conversation she had with a woman who is a psychiatrist at a college health clinic. “We were sitting once not long after a student she had known, and counseled, committed suicide in a dormitory,” she wrote. “My friend the doctor, the healer, held the loss very closely in those first few days, not unprofessionally but deeply, fully – as you or I would have, had this been someone in our care.”
“At one point (with tears streaming down her face), she looked up in defiance (this is the only word for it) and spoke explicitly of her vocation, as if out of the ashes of that day she were renewing a vow, or making a new covenant. She spoke of her vocation, and of yours and mine.
“She said, ‘You know I cannot save them. I am not here to save anybody or to save the world. All I can do – what I am called to do – is plant myself at the gates of Hope.
“Sometimes they come in; sometimes they walk by. But I stand there every day and I call out till my lungs are sore with calling, and beckon and urge them in toward beautiful life and love.’”
In one way or another, we all stand at those gates, bringing what gifts we have, beckoning and urging. It is, says Victoria Safford, “a sometimes lonely place, the place of truth-telling, about your own soul first of all and its condition, the place of resistance and defiance, the piece of ground from which you see the world both as it is and as it could be, as it will be; the place from which you glimpse not only struggle, but joy in the struggle.”
It is the place in Seamus Heaney’s poem where “hope and history rhyme,” where we give up the denial that leaves us saying, “Oh, I’m sure everything will be all right,” as well as the frantic despair that tells us that the world is going to hell so we might as well let it implode.
Thomas Wolfe was right: we can’t go home again. The 0ld scripts that gave us comfort are outdated and need to be rethought, but the principles, the values that underlie them do not. They are soil from which something new must struggle to be reborn.
Meanwhile, those of us called to a larger life, a larger love, don’t have the luxury of waiting for that birth. We must be its midwives. There is no manual for how we’re going to do this. We’re all amateurs here. But we have the tools we need. Staying in touch. Listening, Learning. Honing the tools of democracy. Honoring the worth and integrity of every human being. Marshalling the power of our collective trust in common knowledge. Standing at the gates of hope. Being as courageous as we can. And when the time comes, when the moment is right: to push!
It is said that Philip Larkin was uncomfortable with the fuss that was made of his poem, “An Arundel Tomb,” especially its famous final line – “What will survive of us is love.” He felt that readers who pulled the words out of the context of the poem mistook his intent. If you recall, Larkin’s poem finds irony in those words being the lasting legacy of this couple, since he suspects that they didn’t choose them, in fact probably never saw them, that they were likely added by the sculptor to fill out a phrase of Latin on the base.
“Time,” he says, “has transfigured them into untruth. The stone finality they hardly meant has come to be their final blazon, and to prove our almost-instinct almost true.”
His words – “almost-instinct, almost true” – tip the reader off to Larkin’s wariness that we take the sentimentality of that phrase too seriously.
And it’s true. Sugary sweet sentiment can so easily distract us from complicated truths that are harder to hear and yet crucial to our understanding. When the music swells and the happy talk starts, we need to be careful of how far we are carried along.
Still, it’s interesting to reflect that when a gravestone marking Larkin’s death was added to Poet’s Corner in Westminster Abbey in 2016 the final words of “An Arundel Tomb” were inscribed there.
I wonder what Larkin would have thought of that. Was this a “stone finality that he hardly meant?” I don’t think so. I think it’s a fitting epitaph, for I think he was referring not to some mawkish sentimentality but to the deepest, strongest, most hopeful part of each of us, the love that casts out fear, the love that awakens us to the meaning of our lives.
In the end, I think he was right: when we add up the successes, the failures, the joys, the foibles of our brief lives, all that will have mattered is how we gave ourselves to love. When we look for a source of hope, we will find it in love. When we are called to rise from defeat or to find a way forward after loss, we will find it in the embrace of love. When we look for the strength finally to push, we will discover it in love.
Our task, then, is not to check out, not to let ourselves be discouraged, but to dig back in, to reaffirm the truths our hearts proclaim and find in them the hope that carries us on. Let us make of that our epitaph.
The same stream of life that runs through my veins night and day
runs through the world and dances in rhythmic measures.
It is the same life that shoots in joy
through the numberless blades of grass
and breaks into tumultuous waves of leaves and flowers.
It is the same life that is rocked
In the ocean cradle of birth and death,
In ebb and flow.
I feel my limbs are made glorious
by the touch of this world of life.
And my pride is from the life-throb of ages
dancing in my blood this moment.
From “Haggia Sophia” by Thomas Merton
“There is in all visible things an invisible fecundity, a dimmed light, a meek namelessness, a hidden wholeness. This mysterious Unity and Integrity is Wisdom, the Mother of all. Natura naturans. There is in all things an inexhaustible sweetness and purity, a silence that is a fount of action and joy. It rises up in wordless gentleness and flows out of me from the unseen roots of all created being, welcoming me tenderly, saluting me with indescribable humility, This is at once my own being, my own nature. . . .”
So, when did it you first experience it?
For me, I think back to a time when I was growing up in suburban New Jersey in a newly-built, ranch-style home on a half-acre that had been carved out of a one-time farmer’s field that was overgrown with second-growth woods.
Those woods, scraggly and unimpressive as they may have been, were for me a refuge. The oldest of five children born in seven years to busy parents, I longed for space to get away to where my thoughts could be my own. And the woods were that for me.
In years past I’ve reflected that that early experience bred in me what has been a life-long love of the woods and my predilection even now during hard times to set out for a forest path, the wilder the better, to find solace and perspective.
But in preparing for this service, on reading over Merton’s words and Tagore’s words and those of the writer and educator Parker Palmer, which I’ll share later, I’ve come to understand my early experiences from a different vantage. I’ve come to see that it was in those nondescript woods I not only encountered nature; I also first became acquainted with what I could alternately refer to as my center, my self, my soul.
Something rings in me when I hear Thomas Merton’s words describing it: a hidden wholeness, an inexhaustible source of sweetness and purity, an invisible fecundity, a silence that is the fount of action and joy.
I couldn’t have fathomed this way of framing it when I was younger, and yet these words resonate with the way that I remember that it felt. Wholeness, for sure. But, oh, if I could only have learned then to affirm it as a source of sweetness and integrity, as the very birthplace of whatever gifts, whatever small genius I may have to offer the world, the origin of joy and the foundation of whatever meaningful and compassionate action it is mine to accomplish in this brief life.
Instead, sad to say, as years went by doubts I came to learn often overshadowed that early insight, that early intuition. But, I also can look back on moments where it shone through, where bit by bit I came into who I was at heart. I’ve now reached the time in my life when I think I’m more attuned to my true self than I ever was before, though I’ve still got a lot more learning to do.
We’re in territory here that every religious tradition that I know of touches on. My colleague Victoria Safford describes it as “the part of you that is most uniquely you, deeper than mind, more durable even than your will – and holy if you like that word, or sacred. It is the essence of identity, radiant with dignity and worth.”
The Irish priest John O’Donohue writes, “There is a voice within you that no one, not even you, has ever heard – the music of your own spirit. It takes a long time to sift through the more superficial voices on your own gift in order to enter into the deep significance and tonality of your Otherness. When you speak from that deep, inner voice, you are really speaking from the unique tabernacle of your own presence.”
Christians call it the soul. Buddhists call it original nature. Jews call it the spark of the divine. Hindus call it Atman. Humanists call it identity and integrity. Each of those names carries different descriptors and radically different theologies, yet they each also point to a universal experience of true identity that is fundamentally ours.
And for all of them, coming to know and affirm this part of ourselves is central to the religious life because in a basic way this gives us a sense of agency and purpose. Knowing who we are teaches us that we are not flotsam and jetsam being blown across the world. We are beings with worth and integrity, as well as, in Merton’s words, sweetness and beauty, capable of meaningful action and joy.
So, how is it that so often it seems that instead we are stuck in the mire of doubt and despair, doing damage to each other and the earth?
I’ve long been drawn to Parker Palmer’s way of framing all this. We begin with the notion that we are each born with a true self, what Matthew Fox calls an “original blessing.” The problem is, Parker says, that “from the moment of birth onward, the soul or true self is assailed by deforming forces from without and within.” That is to say, not only do other people impinge on us, but we can create our own demons in how we respond. So, many of us take on lives of what Palmer calls “self-impersonation,” identities that we create to respond to the circumstances we face but have little to do with who are.
In time, we may even lose touch with the true self we sought to protect. And when that happens, he said, we are at risk of losing our moral compass, that sense of identity that grounds us.
“I have met too many people,” Palmer writes, “who suffer from an empty self. They have a bottomless pit where their identity should be – an inner void they try to fill with competitive success, consumerism, sexism, racism, or anything that might give them the illusion of being better than others.”
It is the kind of attitude that looks like self-centeredness but actually has its origin in no sense of self at all. What may appear as a selfish act, Parker says, is actually an effort to fill the emptiness we feel inside, often in ways that harm us or bring grief to others.
We don’t necessarily do it intentionally, but because we have lost connection with our own inner integrity we allow ourselves to be co-opted into someone else’s scheme, a scheme that offers no true benefits for us but profits the other in any number of ways.
Others of us may be aware of an inner true self but shelter it from others around us. So, we live a divided life, split between the constructed self that we show to the larger world and the hidden identity we keep to ourselves.
We may get by, even succeed materially living like that, but inside we never lose sight of the lie at the center of how we live our lives. And that lie works on us, often breeding anxiety, self-loathing, or just numbness. It makes for a precarious existence. So, how do we recover our true self, that hidden wholeness that is our birthright?
Palmer argues that we must find or create safe space for our true self to show itself. This is not as easy as may sound. Our true self has experienced enough wounds to be wary. It may be hidden away, but it is not soft or weak. Instead, he says, it is more like a wild animal, and like a wild animal it is “tough, resilient, resourceful, savvy and self-sufficient.”
I love this image because it invites us to see our true self as a source of strength and courage. It is something, he says, that knows how to survive in hard places, but it is also shy, seeking safety in the dense underbrush. It won’t be flushed out, or badgered or harangued into showing itself.
Palmer tells the story of his own history with depression, which he came to see as centered in a lost sense of self. The experience, he says, left him in a “deadly darkness,” where “the faculties that I had always depended on collapsed. My intellect was useless; my emotions were dead; my will was impotent; my ego was shattered.”
All the same, he said, “from time to time, deep in the thickets of my inner wilderness, I could sense the presence of something that knew how to stay alive even when the rest of me wanted to die. That something was my tough and tenacious soul.”
Inner work can help acquaint us with our true self, but we can never fully come into ourselves by ourselves. We need engagement with a community.
Unfortunately, community is not always a safe place. As Parker Palmer puts it, “community in our culture too often means a group of people who go crashing through the woods together, scaring the soul away. In spaces ranging from congregations to classrooms, we preach and teach, assert and argue, claim and proclaim, admonish and advise, and generally behave in ways that drive everything original and wild into hiding.”
In these circumstances, he says, “the intellect, emotions, will, and ego may emerge, but not the soul: we scare off all the soulful things, like respectful relationship, goodwill, and hope.”
What we need, he argues, is a context that respects the solitude of our individual selves while affirming our deep connection to one another.
In such a setting, he says, “Solitude does not necessarily mean living apart from others; rather it means never living apart from one’s self.” While community, he says, “does not mean necessarily living face-to-face with others; rather it means never losing the awareness that we are connected to each other.”
Creating that sort of context requires that communities like ours develop a kind of discipline, discipline that counteracts a prevailing culture that measures the worth of people by what they produce, by their gender, their race, and the dozen other ways we judge one another as we compete for glory and gain.
The discipline that we need, says Parker Palmer, is one that is centered in cultivating the soul, the true self, the hidden wholeness within each of us, and elevating it from a shy presence we seek in the forest to a teacher.
To do this, he has offered the model of what he calls circles of trust. These are places where people gather in small numbers and listen to each other without judgment, without seeking to instruct or fix, offering each other simply open and honest questions and providing space for the soul, the true self to appear.
It’s a model very much like our covenant and theme groups – places where the only business before us is that we each invite each other’s true self to be present and help each other into deeper awareness of what our lives call for from us.
With that grounding we are ready to engage in the tough work of building a life, of being a compassionate presence, of organizing for change.
I look back to those early days in the woods and I find my dawning awareness that I was a being with my own integrity. It was an awareness that Tagore’s words speak to so powerfully.
“The same stream of life that runs through my veins night and day runs through the world and dances in rhythmic measures.” I am not separated from the vast buzz and beauty around me. I move in it and it moves in me.
“It is the same life that shoots in joy through the numberless blades of grass and breaks into tumultuous waves of leaves and flowers.” Wherever I look I see other co-equal beings, each of us, “rocked in the ocean cradle of birth and death, of ebb and flow,” each of us “made glorious by the touch of this world of life.”
I am not better or worse, greater or lesser. My hope, my destiny is wrapped up with it all.
It was a perspective that invited me out of myself, invited me to see in the eyes of others a similar spark, to see a similar union that links us all.
“Who are you,” says Victoria Safford, “is a complicated question. Who are you? And whose? And why, and how, and who says so? Who gets to say? The soul is a spark deep within, inviolate, your own, and you stoke that fire with new vitality your whole life long, shining your bright flame and warming your hands at the hearts of strangers and lovers and everyone else.”
May our work here invite us each to know and affirm our true selves and those of our companions that in community we might awaken to the joy of life, the beauty of relationship and duty to all of the living.
Some of the hardest work in our lives is deciding where we draw the circle of our concern. We begin with our family, sure, but how much wider? This season of turning reminds us that for people who were dear to us, even when they die they stay with us in important ways. Our newly formed Covenant of UU Pagans will help us celebrate. But, who else do we include? Later this Sunday, our congregation will vote on whether to offer sanctuary to people in Asheville facing what they consider unfair deportation from their homes and families. So, who’s in our circle?
The Lord appeared to Abraham[a] by the oaks[b] of Mamre, as he sat at the entrance of his tent in the heat of the day. 2 He looked up and saw three men standing near him. When he saw them, he ran from the tent entrance to meet them, and bowed down to the ground. 3 He said, “My lord, if I find favor with you, do not pass by your servant. 4 Let a little water be brought, and wash your feet, and rest yourselves under the tree. 5 Let me bring a little bread, that you may refresh yourselves, and after that you may pass on—since you have come to your servant.” So they said, “Do as you have said.” 6 And Abraham hastened into the tent to Sarah, and said, “Make ready quickly three measures[c] of choice flour, knead it, and make cakes.” 7 Abraham ran to the herd, and took a calf, tender and good, and gave it to the servant, who hastened to prepare it. 8 Then he took curds and milk and the calf that he had prepared, and set it before them; and he stood by them under the tree while they ate.
SERMON
A year after the June 2016 shootings at the Pulse nightclub in Orlando, Florida, Omar Delgado, a police officer from a neighboring community who was one of the first responders at the scene, told USA Today that the scene that greeted him when he arrived at that tragedy still stays fixed in his mind.
In a room that only minutes before had been a full-out party, the only sound he heard as he entered was cell phones scattered across the floor ringing incessantly.
“I knew it was a loved one trying to reach that person, and they were never going to pick up that phone again,” he said. “It was horrific.”
Officer Delgado was among 25 people associated with the Pulse shooting who were profiled by an organization called Dear World, which travels the world photographing people associated with conflict or disaster. You can find it on the Web.
Each subject is depicted with a message written in black marker on some part of his or her body. One survivor of the shooting wrote on his arms “nowhere left to hide.” The mother of one who died had written on her chest, “I went to the bedroom and he wasn’t there.” Officer Delgado had written on his arm, “I wish I could have answered their phones.”
Unlike most of the events that Dear World documents, though, the Orlando shooting was not a military conflict or natural disaster. It was a hate crime.
At about 2 a.m. on June 12, 2016, Omar Mateen, a 29-year-old security guard who had expressed hatred for gays, entered Pulse, a gay nightclub packed with patrons, and opened fire with a pistol and semi-automatic assault rifle. His three-hour rampage left 49 dead and 53 injured.
Mateen struck on what the bar had advertised as Latin Night. So, many of those injured or killed were part of a gay Latinx culture in the Orlando area that had been particularly marginalized. The incident sent shockwaves through many communities, but perhaps most powerfully it illuminated how splintered our society has become and how fragile and dangerous life can be for those of us who are deemed by someone else to be other.
Other. Different. Unlike. And, therefore, feared, held in suspicion, even despised.
The passage Nancy read earlier from Genesis suggests how long such suspicion has plagued us. Altogether, the stories in the Hebrew Bible associated with Abraham, a chief patriarch of Jewish tradition, are few. But key among them is this brief tale of hospitality.
It comes just after Abraham and his first son, Ishmael, have been circumcised and so received the sign of the covenant between them and God. Shortly afterward, Abraham is surprised to see three men whom he doesn’t recognize appear at his tent. He makes no inquiry of them – Who are you? Where did you come from? Anything like that.
Instead, he bows and asks them: Won’t you take some rest and let me feed you? And then he sets off to ordering the food and waits until they have consumed them before troubling them any further.
Soon after he learns some miraculous news – his wife, Sarah, quite old and thought to be barren, will give birth to a child. And it becomes clear that these are not just any guests but angels who have arrived with much to tell him.
What miraculous news might visitors, people who are unfamiliar, others unlike us whom we chance to meet, have to give us about who we are and what the world, the future holds for us? It’s a question we don’t seem much to entertain these days. We’re more inclined to seek out the familiar, people who remind us of ourselves or other people we know. The rest, well, they can take care of themselves.
In sum, we appear to be suffering from a failure of empathy, and perhaps, as some people suggest, empathy’s tragic flaw. Now, that’s kind of hard to hear, right? We’re raised to be empathetic. We tell our children to be slow to judge another person. Try walking a mile in his or her shoes. See? He/she is a lot like us after all.
And, you know, that’s not a bad thing. In fact, it’s a good thing, but in the long run it may not be enough. Here’s why: The fact is that there are people we’re going to have an awful hard time learning to empathize with. They are so different from us that we really can’t see wrapping our heads around their situation. In fact, we’re more likely to fantasize a bit about how we think things are for them, imagining a life for them that has nothing to do with their real world. It may persuade us that we understand them when we really don’t.
The Nasruddin tale is a good example. He arrives at the wealthy man’s feast wishing he had time to change his soiled clothes, but figuring that his host would be more troubled if he arrived late. No, better to honor his hospitality and be prompt. But he arrives and find that his host and the guests can’t see past his soiled clothes. He is shunned and ignored.
Embarrassed he goes back home and changes into his finest clothes, which prompt a generous welcome from his host and the others. So, he concludes it is his clothes, not him, that was wanted at the party and blithely stuffs his pockets.
The story makes an obvious point about human vanity, but it also offers a subtler lesson about the tyranny of visual cues that we use to decide how to relate to one another.
The writer Sarah Sentilles says that for years she taught art and learned how indelible visual impressions can be. “Labeling someone as either like you or not like you, as friend or enemy,” she says, “hangs on perception, and perception is warped by the lenses through which you’ve been trained to look at the world.”
These lenses teach us how to identify an “other,” so that in the end, she says, “otherness is made, not found. It is learned, imagined, and imposed.” In that way, it works against empathy. We may try to empathize with someone who seems different from us, thinking “I know he’s strange, but give them a chance.” Meanwhile, perceptual cues inside of us that we’re not even conscious of may be shouting, “No, no: scary!”
What would happen, she says, if on encountering someone different from ourselves we didn’t just turn on the empathy script – “OK, now she’s a person just like you. Find out what you share.”
Instead, in her words, “what if we were to let confrontation with otherness, with difference, give us pause? What if encountering someone I don’t understand raised questions about my limited view, about the lenses through which I’ve been trained to see the world, about the agendas driving how difference is demonized?”
That’s a pretty different script, right?
The truth is we do others a far greater honor if we enter into relationship expecting that the person we meet will exceed our understanding of them. We do, of course, seek out common interests, but how about if we also came to enjoy, perhaps even treasure the richness and qualities in that person beyond our own experience and understanding.
To my mind, it is one way that we realize our first Unitarian Universalist principle – affirming and promoting the inherent worth and dignity of every person. What gives each person worth and dignity is not the qualities that we share or that we happen to like about them, but each person’s inherent beauty and genius, that which makes that person unique, irreplaceable, unlike any person who has ever lived. It is that which we seek to know and cherish in each other.
As the philosopher Judith Butler puts it, this understanding affects our ethical stance. Ethical awareness, she says, “surfaces not when we think we know the most about each other, but when we have the courage to recognize the limits of what we know.”
That brings us back to our choir’s uplifting anthem. Do you remember it? “Safe Places for the Heart”? This piece wasn’t just written in a vacuum. It was written as a response to the Pulse nightclub massacre.
“My heart will be a home for you, where in the window of our dreams the cause of right comes shining through, where every word is kind, where every spoken word is kind, where outstretched arms embrace diversity and open affirming minds encourage others to be free, striving for equality, respecting each one’s dignity to love who we were born to be.”
The song invites us to take stock of how we regard this or any highly marginalized group of people. And I offer it up this Sunday when we reflect on giving and receiving forgiveness because I think it pushes us. At least, it pushes me.
“Outstretched arms embrace diversity and open affirming minds encourage others to be free.” Hmm. Really? I don’t know. I don’t want to load on you, but for myself, I have to admit that there are certainly folks for whom my empathy gets strained. I feel badly, yes, but outstretched arms? You know, not so much.
Each year I invite us into the litany of atonement we just experienced not as a mere exercise, but to invite us all to reflect. For myself, remaining silent when a single voice would have made a difference? Yup. Letting my fears make me rigid and inaccessible? Yup.
So, what do we do with that? Well, to begin with we confess it and admit the sorrow that it gives us to do so. Then we go about the work of repair, forgiving ourselves for coming up short in our own expectations, which gives us the courage to forgive others their own trespasses, and then look to begin again. Not from a position of judgment or feigned superiority, but from curiosity, humility, wonder: from love.
It is a place where we pause and reflect. It can be hard to enter into relationship with people different from us. We can embarrass ourselves and make mistakes.
Parker Palmer tells the story he heard from the director of a Jewish Community who hired a gentile woman to act as a receptionist. The director said they instructed her that when she answered the phone she was to say, “Jewish Community Center – Shalom.”
You remember shalom.
He said he happened to be listening when the woman took her first call and said, “Jewish Community Center – Shazam!”
And so we laugh, “Oh, boy, did I mess up. I’ve got a lot to learn.” And we turn up our curiosity. What more do I need to know here?
Because beneath the sweet words of an anthem like the one the choir sang is the acquaintance with something terrible and cruel. “When stares despise the way we love, our eyes will speak of deeper grace ‘cause love keeps truth within its sight.”
That deeper grace, deeper truth is a unity beneath all difference, a unity that does not make us all the same but makes us all worthy. Behind the rituals of atonement is the prayer that through this practice we may in time change how we respond to those we deem to be others in our midst. That we learn to be slower to judgment and quicker to self-examination, less rigid, more curious. So that having abandoned the illusion of separateness we may forgive ourselves and each other, and begin again in love.
Starting here, what do you want to remember? How sunlight creeps along a shining floor? What scent of old wood hovers, what softened
sound from outside fills the air?
Will you ever bring a better gift for the world than the breathing respect that you carry wherever you go right now? Are you waiting for time to show you some better thoughts?
When you turn around, starting here, lift this
new glimpse that you found; carry into evening all that you want from this day. This interval you spent reading or hearing this, keep it for life –
What can anyone give you greater than now, starting here, right in this room, when you turn around?
From “What They Dreamed by Ours to Do” by Rebecca Parker
(When our congregations were asked what their dreams are for the UU movement, a strong majority said their highest hope was “to become a visible and influential force for good in the world.” How do we do that?)
“We do not need more money, although money always helps . . . . We do not need more people, though it would be good to have them . . . . To be an influential force good, what we need to do is establish more strongly in our congregational life the practices that embody loving, just, and sustainable community. We need to be what we want to see and make visible an alternative to the forms of oppression, alienation, and injustice alive in our time.”
SERMON
Each summer I make a point of signing up for a wheel-based pottery class at a local pottery studio. Pottery is something I’ve enjoyed playing with on and off since college, and Asheville is such a great center for ceramics that I often meet the most impressive artists in those studios.
I have no great ambitions for myself. My talents are quite modest, but I enjoy the process. I love working with clay, the way it feels, the way it responds to how you shape it.
I remember how frustrated I was the first few times I tried to center the clay, the way it would wobble-wobble-wobble, and it seemed to take forever using all my might before I could wrestle it into the center of the wheel.
These days centering is no big deal, even five or six pounds of clay for some larger bowls that I’ve made. It’s not that I’m any stronger. It’s just that I have a better sense of what I’m doing. I don’t fight the clay; I work with it. I’ve learned where, when and how to apply pressure to get the result I want. And that just comes with practice.
Practice gives me more than just facility. It gives me a sense of and a fondness for the material I’m working with and the beauty it makes possible. In time, I’ve found I get a deeper sense of the artistic possibilities in shaping clay. I come to admire artists for what they were able to accomplish, which opens new possibilities for my own work.
I’ve made a few pieces – some I’m even proud of. It’s always fun to see what comes out of the kiln. But to be honest it is not so much the product as the process that draws me. I look forward to each class as a way to explore a new dimension of this work, to challenge myself to try out more difficult forms. Inevitably at some point, I bump into limits of my understanding or ability and get frustrated. But then there’s an instructor or classmate who offers a tip, and I’m back at it.
It’s a process that I expect many of you recognize who have ever tried your hands at any skill, from playing the clarinet to baking a pie, to planting a flourishing garden: Something calls you to a particular art or skill. So, you seek out instruction and find that, at first, you’re awkward and uncertain. If you’re like me, you may even get impatient with how slow the learning seems to come.
But then, before you realize it, the clay in your hands, the piano keys beneath your fingers, the mountain slope under your skies, is something you begin to know, and even love.
How do you get to Carnegie Hall, the old saw goes? Practice, practice.
This fall your Board of Trustees is leading you in a process to help us discern what we as a congregation are called to do. It’s a challenging time to be asking this question, with so much that is important to us in play.
But, we have a pretty good idea of where we begin. As Unitarian Universalists, we are joined with more than 1,000 other congregations across this country by our seven principles, commitments to affirm such things as the inherent worth and dignity of all, justice and compassion, acceptance and encouragement to spiritual growth, the right of conscience and a goal of world community, as well as a free and responsible search for meaning and respect for the interdependent web of all existence of which we are a part.
If it’s been a while since you’ve looked at them or if this is new to you, I invite you to find a time to look them over in the first pages on our gray hymnal. Take a look, too, at what we consider to be the primary sources that we draw from as a religious tradition.
Beyond these principles, we as a congregation have identified core values that we believe guide us in our work: connection, inspiration, compassion & justice.
We also gather here under our covenant – words that affirm commitments we make to care for and support each other, to celebrate our diversity but also to attend openly to differences and to create healing by listening and speaking in the spirit of love.
These are words we recite at congregational meetings and upon welcoming newcomers into our congregation, yet we are still challenged by Rebecca Parker’s observation that, “Covenant is brought into being through practice. Our verbal promises are just the frosting on the cake.”
The question remains, then, what shall we do? How will we devote our limited resources of time, talent, and money to accomplish what best serves our hopes for the world, this community and each other?
In the next several weeks there will be opportunities for you to participate in this conversation. The Board has recruited UUCA members to facilitate conversations at 11 meetings on different days and times in the next several weeks to address this question.
I sat with them in their training yesterday, and I think you’ll find the process illuminating. You can sign up today in Sandburg Hall after the service, and I hope you will. It’s a unique chance to help guide where we are going as a congregation. I’ll be fascinated to learn what comes of it.
But I’ve chosen this topic as you embark on that journey to urge that in answering that question you consider how you might frame your answers in the context of practice.
Why practice? Well, to begin with, practice gives us work for the long haul. We exist as a congregation not to accomplish a specific end by a specific point in time but to be agents of transformation. And transformation is hard. It requires that we pace ourselves and develop strategies that keep us focused even in hardship, disappointment, and loss.
My model for this work is John Lewis, one of the last surviving leaders of the Civil Rights movement. He is famous for saying that, in the end, the Civil Rights Movement was not about achieving specific political ends but, in his words, “about seeing a philosophy made manifest in our society that recognized the inextricable connection we have to each other.”
Seen from that perspective, he said, each of the acts of the movement – the victories and the defeats – were only steps along the way. Writing in 2012, Lewis added, “Yes, the election of Barak Obama represents a significant step, but it is not an ending. It I not even a beginning; it is one important act in a continuum of change. . . . It is another milestone on the nation’s road to freedom.”
“We must accept one central truth and responsibility as participants in a democracy,” he said “Freedom is not a state; it is an act. It is not some enchanted garden perched high on a distant plateau where we can finally sit down and rest. Freedom is the continuous action we all must take, and each generation must do its part to create and even more fair, more just society.”
Freedom, in other words, is a practice. So, the question returns to us: What practices will keep us centered, hopeful, united and strong as we move, bit by bit, toward our goal?
A focus on practice reminds us that some of the hardest work in creating the change we want to see is changing ourselves. Remember, when learning a new skill, it’s a little rocky at first. We make mistakes and get frustrated. And even then, the best-laid plans go easily astray. We get distracted. We get busy. We want to do better, but it all seems like too much.
Remembering that lasting change can’t be accomplished overnight, we begin with the small steps. What can we do today, right now that might take us at least a tiny step along the way? This past week our Associate Minister Lisa Bovee-Kemper offered a few ideas at our Wednesday Thing.
Feeling grumpy? How about filling a Gratitude Jar with prompts that remind you how much you have cause to be grateful for? Are folks in your house a little over the edge right now? How about digging into the family Calm Down Box or the Boredom Jar? Maybe it’s a game, a book of poetry, a packet of tea, or just a blankie. Surely there’s something there that can dial down the level of stress or craziness in your house at that moment.
While some were filling boxes or jars, I led others in silent meditation, and Bruce Larson gathered others still to talk about peacemaking. All of these are simple things to do, but they become powerful when we make them personal practices, activities that we rely on to center and ground us, that reminds us to focus on what connects us with others, on living into the people we want to be.
Rebecca Parker in our reading captures the sense of it: “To be an influential force for good,” she said, “what we need to do is establish more strongly in our congregational life the practices that embody loving, just and sustainable community.”
Practices also offer us a way to stay true to what matters to us even when we reach the end of our rope when we have no clue of the next step to take. Chris Lattimore Howard writing in Christian Century magazine recalled a night early in his chaplaincy training where he and his supervisory were dashing from crisis to crisis with barely a moment to think.
At one point, Howard says, he flippantly said to his supervisor, “Man, this is out of control.” The chaplain, he said, stopped and turned to him, saying, “Not being in control is part of the discipline.”
So it is for us. There is much that we will encounter that will surprise us or knock us off our equilibrium. So, we need to develop practices that can keep us grounded and focused and true to who we are and aspire to be.
How do the promises of our covenant become practices? How do our values focus our work? How do our principles guide our hands and feet? How does all of this link us to the larger work of transforming the world? Each generation pressed by both the outrages and the radiant possibilities of its time confronts such questions. How shall we respond? What halting skills do we cultivate such that we may be fully present to our age, struggling at first with the wobble-wobble-wobble of awkward uncertainty until we get the hang of the work until we learn where to apply the pressure with true skill so that we truly be a blessing to the world?
The opportunity is before us. As William Stafford reminded us, what can anyone give you greater than now, starting here right in this room, when you turn around?
The most living moment comes when those who love each other meet each
other’s eyes and in what flows between them then. To see your face
in a crowd of others, or alone on a frightening street, I weep for that.
Our tears improve the earth. The
time you scolded me, your gratitude
your laughing, always your qualities increase the soul. Seeing you is a
wine that does not muddle or numb. We sit inside the cypress shadow
where amazement and clear thought twine their slow growth into us.
SERMON
In a bizarre way, it seems hardly surprising that in these days when our national conversation is being conducted via Twitter blasts and playground name-calling, where hate is elevated to “just another perspective” and our leaders carelessly bandy about the prospects of nuclear war, where we find ourselves worrying whether, in the words of William Butler Yeats, “the best all lack conviction, while the worst are full of passionate intensity” we have hurricanes queued up across the Atlantic like kids waiting for a Ferris wheel ride, each one competing with the last for superlatives that we hardly have words for – most rain ever, greatest intensity ever measured.
What next? We want to ask.
Residents of Florida, Texas, or the Carolinas have places to evacuate to, knowing that, however bad the damage, they can return to rebuild. The rest of us, though, face an even more daunting rebuilding campaign suffused with deep uncertainty about whether it can even be done.
I heard a radio interview last week with Ta-Nehisi Coates, whose upcoming book, We Were Eight Years in Power, examines the impact of Barak Obama’s presidency in light of the 19th century Reconstruction Era. The picture that Coates painted of the world today in that interview was pretty bleak, especially in its impact on African-Americans and other marginalized people. Finally, the interviewer broke in and asked what he saw as signs of hope. Surely there must be something he can point to. Coates stammered a bit and replied, “No. . . . Not really”
But then he clarified what he meant. Clearly, people need to get on with their lives, he said. People will find a way in the world. Parents will raise children. But that great liberal optimism that has hung around since the 60s, the notion that peace and brotherhood are just a good social program or two away, has no currency with him.
The African-American experience, he said, tells a different story. It says that white supremacy is so deeply marbled in American society that it may never be exterminated. It is something that he figures that his children and his children’s children, and so on will have to struggle with. As Coates wrote in an earlier book, Between the World and Me, lamenting to his son, “I’m sorry that I cannot make it OK. I’m sorry that I cannot save you.”
But then he was quick to add – “but not that sorry.” Perhaps, he said, that very vulnerability that so worries him brings his son closer to the meaning of life, the true vulnerability that encumbers us all but that those of us sheltered by privilege are less able to discern.
Sadly, what may be most distinctive about this era is that those of us with white skin and Eurocentric names are finally coming to understand at a gut level the distress that people of color have known for generations.
In part, what has sheltered us is the illusion of agency, the old notion that we are masters of our fate, captains of our voyages, who can grab what we want, and to heck with the rest. It is a notion that is in high ascendance as I speak.
What it is in essence is the first of many walls we build between ourselves and others, not just between us and the marginalized but between us and every other person we encounter. It a diminished way to live, and even worse it tolls great danger ahead the possibility of communal being.
We experience it in the despair we see emerging in everything from opioid addiction to soaring suicide rates, across all races and cultures, though centered right now in the majority whites. We could post Narcan on every street corner, but the fixes we need go deeper than that. We need a reaffirmation of the very basis of what joins us all, deeper than race or culture, than nation or economic status, than religion or ethnicity, than gender identity, age, body type, health capacity, physical ability, than every way we humans have found to wall ourselves off from one another.
For a Sufi like Rumi, the point of religious practice was to experience the divine, to know that mysterious essence that he believed resides within and enlivens all things, including ourselves. Rumi’s poetry often refers to this essence as love, and not some tame or chaste love, but a love that sounds intoxicating, even erotic. Yet, the language he uses here is metaphor, intended to refer not so much to actual lovers but to invite listeners to awaken to a rhythm that is moving in their lives. As he says in one poem, “We rarely hear the music, but we are dancing to it nonetheless.
Embracing that rhythm gives us a new vantage on the world. In the poem that Louise read earlier, Rumi imagines two who have caught that rhythm meeting on a city street. The image is almost like something from a Hollywood movie where eyes meet and the music swells and the two lovers run to each other’s arms.
In Rumi’s imagining, though, the scene is different. The point is not a physical embrace but a spiritual one. The experience of one seeing the other, he says, “is a wine that does not muddle or numb.” Instead, it awakens. It is what he calls “the most living moment” because in that moment the two are utterly vulnerable to each other, experiencing each other’s qualities in a way that Rumi says, “increase the soul.”
The title of this service comes from another of Rumi’s poems called “The Music Master.” “You that love lovers, this is your home,” he declares. It sounds almost nonsensical at first blush, though perhaps you have a little better sense of it now, especially in light of its closing couplet: “Lovers don’t finally meet somewhere. They are in each other all along.”
The separation we experience from one another is an illusion, a lie. Yes, we are distinguishable beings, but the deeper truth, as the choir’s anthem declared, is that “We are one.”
“When we walk, when we sleep, when we rise, when we laugh, when we sing, when we cry, when we run. We are one.”
And what does that verse that composer Brian Tate found in the Book of Deuteronomy say will come of that discovery? We shall love one another with all our hearts and our souls and our might.
We may pull back from Deuteronomy’s or Rumi’s words: Excessive, just too much. But are they really any stranger, any more excessive than the Christian scripture in the Book of Matthew? “You have heard it said, “You shall love your neighbor and hate your energy, But I say to you, Love your neighbor and pray for those who persecute you.” A peculiar thing, this love stuff!
Thomas Merton told the story in his book Conjectures of a Guilty Bystander about an experience he had one day in 1958 while running errands for his monastery in Louisville, Kentucky. Merton turned the corner at Fourth and Walnut streets, when, as he put it, “I was suddenly overwhelmed with the realization that I loved all those people, that they were mine and I was theirs, that we could not be alien to one another even though we were total strangers.”
It was, he said, “like waking from a dream of separateness, and of spurious self-isolation. . . .”
So, back on the street again. What’s that about? I can tell you I’ve been to that street corner in Louisville, and there is nothing particularly distinctive about it, other than the plaque describing Merton’s epiphany. But, of course, there didn’t need to be. The place was not the point. The interaction was.
For a moment, Merton dropped out of the bubble of his own self-consciousness and woke to a deeper consciousness of those before him. “It was,” he said, “as if I suddenly saw the secret beauty of their hearts, where neither sin nor desire nor self-knowledge can reach, the core of their reality.” If only, he said, “we could see each other that way all the time.”
If only. So, what does testimony like Merton’s do to you? Do you roll your eyes, say, “Wow, that’s freaky”? I could hardly blame you. It is, once again, kind of over the top, and Merton himself frames it within his own Catholic theology.
All that notwithstanding, I have to admit that it has stuck with me. And I think that’s likely because in some inexpressible way it speaks to experiences of my own – perhaps you, too – when I have felt in some way lifted and connected with others, even strangers who at least for that moment became precious to me, when I was lifted out of the bubble of my own self-consciousness and experienced the beauty and wonder of others in all their fullness.
It sounds grander than it was. There was no angel breaking in. It came instead with a settling of my mind and heart, a letting go and taking up. And, yes, it does not go too far to call it love, though I know that that’s a word I have to be careful of.
I like the way that Carter Hayward frames it. Love, she says, “is a choice – not simply, or necessarily, a rational choice, but rather a willingness to be present to others without pretense or guile.” It is, she says, “a conversion to humanity – a willingness to participate with others in the healing of a broken world and broken lives.”
Love as a choice. It’s so contrary to how we imagine this sort of thing. We think that love comes welling up out of nowhere, comes over us, changes everything. But, just as with Rumi, we’re talking about something different here. We’re talking about what Rumi described as “wine that does not muddle or numb,” love that serves the purpose not of intoxication or sensual thrill but of “increasing the soul.”
Increasing the soul and releasing the self, releasing fear and shame that grow like a carapace that covers the vulnerability that makes it possible for us to connect in the first place, and then taking the risk to magnify ourselves in wider and wider encounter.
You that love lovers, who embrace the vulnerability of this moment and the strength of human integrity to meet it, who assume risk as real and see no certain result, yet who choose all the same to be converted to humanity, to be present to others whatever their story, whatever their struggle without pretense or guile, this is your home.
May it be our part to succeed so well at this work that we, too, may look at strangers on the street with conviction that they are ours and we theirs. And may it be that a spirit of respect and care, of healing and wholeness will so suffuse this place that it radiates out to help heal this wounded world.
It was last March that we at UUCA hosted a gathering of hundreds of people who took part in a peaceful march in Asheville in support of undocumented immigrants and in protest of accelerating arrests and deportations that were tearing apart people’s lives. Ever since then many of our members have been in conversation about what part we as a congregation might play in this increasing justice concern.
Last spring a group of our members expressed interest in UUCA joining congregations of different faith traditions across the country in providing physical sanctuary to undocumented immigrants facing deportation. Our Board of Trustees asked those members to research all that making such a commitment might entail and what consequences we might face by taking such an action. The members came together as a Sanctuary Working Group and spent the summer researching those questions, holding Town Hall Meetings and making contacts with immigration advocates and people in the Latinx community as well as members of other churches interested in sanctuary.
Last Tuesday the board reviewed what the Sanctuary Working Group had to report as well as further information that staff had discovered and agreed to convene a congregational meeting at 4 p.m. on Sunday, October 29 where the congregation would be asked to decide if we would provide sanctuary on our campus.
It is an immense step for us to consider, and I’m grateful to the Sanctuary Working Group and my colleague Associate Minister Lisa Bovee-Kemper for doing so much to vet the many complex dimensions of this decision. You will be hearing and reading more about what this decision would mean, its impact on us as a congregation, and what it calls for from us. For now let me share these initial details with you:
We expect that any guests we keep in sanctuary would be housed at 23 Edwin. We expect they would occupy an upstairs bedroom and have access to the kitchen and shower downstairs. We have learned from others who have done this that we would not have to segregate space for them. We could share the space, so we would not have to make major changes to the building or interrupt regular church operations, including maintaining offices upstairs and holding meetings downstairs.
We would not intentionally violate any laws. We would announce publicly the presence of our guests and, since we would consider this use of the building a form of practicing our faith, we would not violate our zoning as a church. Our insurance agent has assured us this action would have no impact on our insurance.
While our community would be called on to assist a person or family in sanctuary, other congregations committed to sanctuary work are volunteering help to reduce the impact on our congregation. By the time of the vote, you will learn more about the nature of the help that has been offered.
Of course, most of these are just logistical considerations. The deeper question for each of us to consider is, “Is this what we are called to do?” Commitment to sanctuary means more than just offering space. It means orienting our social justice work toward building a culture of sanctuary in this part of the world, affirming that these endangered immigrants and other marginalized people are our neighbors who have claim on our attention, on our commitment to justice, on our love, that part of our work as a congregation is to contribute to the building of places of hope and peace.
And wouldn’t you know it, this question comes at a time of great synergy when our Board of Trustees is inviting us to reflect on how we live our values. In the next month or so you’ll have a chance to join facilitated conversations to help us discern what the values that we identified last fall as core to our work as a congregation call us to in the world. Look for the LOV (Living Our Values) announcements and make sure to find a time to join the conversation in one group or another.
Once they gather your thinking on that, the Board will use your thoughts to refocus our Mission Statement and the Ends that drive our work as a congregation. On October 29, before we vote on the sanctuary proposal you will hear what conclusions the board has come to.
This is challenging work at a challenging time, but it is good work, our work, exactly what we should be doing. As the mystic Howard Thurman put it:
How good it is to center down!
To sit quietly and see one’s self pass by!
The streets of our minds seethe with endless traffic;
Our spirits resound with clashings, with noisy silences,
While something deep within hungers and thirsts
for the still moment and the resting lull.
With full intensity we seek, ere the quiet passes,
Gathered around a bed at Brooks Howell home last May, two of my siblings, a hospice nurse, my wife, Debbie, and I watched as my mother’s breathing slowed and then finally stopped. Her passing was quiet and peaceful – a good death in many ways. But for most of us in that room it was a door opening into untraveled territory.
We all know that we will lose our parents someday. Still, when the moment comes that we do – first one, then the other – there is something unreal about the experience. As complicated as our relationships with them inevitably are, our parents loom as a huge influence in our lives. They are after all the origin of our being.
The psychologist Alexander Levy argues that the moment when the last of our parents dies is a unique time. From the beginning of our lives, he says, an important part of how we identify ourselves to others and even ourselves is as somebody’s child. It gives us an anchor to family, to a heritage, a context.
That heritage doesn’t change when we lose our last living parent, but our relation to it does. It moves, in a sense to the history books, away from living parents. Yes, sisters, brothers, aunts, uncles and so on are there, but it’s different. We feel, he said, something like an orphan.
On one level that sounds silly. We think of orphans as children. As adults, all of us have spent many years building our own identities that are separate from our parents. At the same, he said, parents often are like figures in the rearview mirror, providing a glimpse of where and who we’ve been as we head into the unknown. What happens when there’s no one in the rearview mirror?
Levy says he was caught up short when, after the death of his last parent, he reflected that, “there is no longer anyone who would ever again claim me as their child.” No one was living who knew his story, who had been present at his birth, who walked with him on his first day at school, who celebrated his successes and consoled his failures.
In my mother’s last months as she drifted into dementia she sometimes struggled to recognize me, but she almost always eventually did. And when she did, her face would break out into a beautiful smile, and she would announce my name and say, “I always said if I ever had a son, I would name him Mark.” I’ll never hear those words again.
So, there is a grief at such a passing that is profound and unlike any other. And yet, Levy observes, that grief also teaches us something about ourselves. For grief is not something that comes from outside us. It is our heart’s response to a loss. As Levy puts it, “the source of grief’s breath-taking energy comes from within ourselves.”
It also alerts us to our own impermanence and so urges us to focus the time we have on what matters for us. It reminds us how precious the people we love are in our lives. In an important way, Levy says, “when the second parent dies, the rest of adulthood begins.”
So, in the wake of our parents’ passing we struggle to come to terms with who they were and in the light of their lives who we are: what there is to celebrate, what there is to mourn, what to take stock of and what to let go of, and how to find a way forward into the days that remain for us.
I entered the story of my mother’s life when she was 25 years old, barely a year into marriage with a 27-year-old psychiatry resident. She had grown up the oldest child of a Boston newspaper man, though wounded by the death of her mother at age 5. A patient and loving stepmother, though, came in later and kept the family together. Cynthia excelled in school and ended up in college with a BA in English.
My birth was only the start for this couple. It was the time of the baby boom generation, and my parents boomed with the rest of them, giving birth to a total of five children in seven years. For my mother, this busy household with a psychiatrist husband working 60 to 70 hours a week left her time to be little more than a homemaker.
But as we made our way into school, she began looking for professional opportunities of her own. Given her background, teaching was a natural choice. A master’s in teaching led her to teaching in private schools in the area, but it still wasn’t quite the right fit.
Our family had been active in the Unitarian Church of Princeton, New Jersey, since moving to the area, and my mother was deeply involved. When the position of Religious Education Director came up, she saw the opening she had been looking for and got the job. It was a rich time for us and the church. My mother was not only an excellent writer and speaker, but she had the soul of an artist, and so she brought wonderful creativity to that work.
Before long she felt the tug to take it further, and so seminary beckoned. Tied down with a busy family, she couldn’t travel far, so she chose the nearest seminary she could find. That turned out to be a conservative Dutch Reformed school that was not exactly crazy about women students, no less Unitarian Universalists.
Undaunted, she dove in, outing herself in her papers as, in her words, “a humanist agnostic,” “a feminist of the 1981 Betty Friedan school” and “the heretic of the class.” I was long gone to college by this time, and only heard about most of it second hand. But not long after I was called to this church I received a package from my mother containing a paper from seminary she had written 20 years before on the conservative theologian Karl Barth.
I couldn’t help noticing, as I think she hoped I would, that it was peppered with positive comments from the professor and an “A” at the end with the remark, “Marvelous paper. You’re really in the thick of it, aren’t you?” And she clearly was.
I’m sad to say that I didn’t really know my mother as a minister. During the 14 years of her ministry, before she retired in 1999, Debbie and I were half a continent away in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, raising a family of our own. But I know a bit about her impact from what I’ve since learned from her colleagues, especially women.
She was part of a wedge of women ministers entering our movement in the 1980s who struggled against a patriarchy that was deeply imbedded in our movement. My mother had several brief ministries in the metro New York area, but also was frequently tapped as a consultant for conflicted congregations and as a mentor for many women colleagues trying to find their way.
As a writer and preacher, she made her mark with her deft use of poetry and her own creative spirit. In one sermon late in her life she told of attending the ordination of her niece, a Presbyterian, and being confronted by a man who insisted, “You Unitarians aren’t religious; you don’t believe in God.” She writes that she tried to feel him out on what he meant by God, and he would have none of it. Finally, she responded that, well, perhaps we didn’t believe in God as he understood it, “but we believe in Glory, Grandeur and Gentleness.”
Glory, she said: that which “takes the human potential and holds it high and wide for all to celebrate and amaze.” Grandeur, the greatness of the world, the cosmos, which “none of us own but all of us share in its expansiveness.” And Gentleness, that in us which treasures precious moments, connections among loved ones and friends, which takes time to know textures, and beauty, that upholds compassion and care.
In that context she told the story of her uncle Nat. “In the winter of my sixth year,” she says, “I searched the heavens for my recently dead mother and for God, whatever that was, as my maternal grandmother had instructed me. ‘Your mother is in heaven with God.’
“It became difficult to trust well-meaning adults with their non-answers. ‘How sad your mother has passed away.’ Passed away? Where? How? My father, whom I did trust, was wrapped in grief and work. His silent hugs saved my young soul.”
The next summer, she says, “I was taken to see Uncle Nat, a family physician. He took my hand, looked me in the eyes. ‘I know you are sad because your mother died. But I know that what she would want is for you to grow up to be a big strong girl. What you need is a strawberry ice cream cone and jumping in the hay in your grandfather’s barn.’
“Who was Uncle Nat? Someone who named my pain and offered a prescription to jump start my life. My pain was serious, but so was my life. He found the balance that made sense to me. Death is the gnaw of nothing, an unexplained void to children and adult. Whatever the cause, whatever the abruptness, death needs the honor of truth.”
It was her way to lean into, rather than outright reject, traditional religious language. When we explore what the word gets at, she felt, perhaps we find it not as alien as we had at first.
And perhaps nowhere is this clearer than in her love of cummings’ sonnet. As she read that poem, the God who is thanked is not some distant being, removed from the world. It is both subsumed in and embracing all that is, everything “which is natural which is infinite which is yes.”
And yet in the poem there is something transcendental, if not transcendent that she feels cummings, the son of a Unitarian minister, points to here, a quality of beauty and wonder of simple yesness that we are called to see.
My mother used to tell of how when I was an infant and she and my father were in their first apartment she posted pictures of Van Gogh paintings on the wall and pointed them out to me, “Look.”
Perhaps Mary Oliver, one of my mother’s favorite poets, put it best, “Whoever you are, no matter how lonely, the world offers itself to your imagination.”
That was certainly how she felt, and that perspective may be her greatest legacy to me. Don’t just glide through life: open your eyes, open your ears, open your mind: Look! And don’t just look: you are a part of this, too. Bring your own creativity, your own vision, your own genius and play! And play we have, my siblings and I, and I am grateful for the urging she gave us.
But of course, as with any family, it wasn’t all just play with us. While my mother could be endearing and attentive, she could also be dismissive and self-absorbed. We do our loved ones and ourselves no good insisting on canonization or nothing at death. We each have struggled in our own ways. Part of living and loving is finding ways to give each other some slack.
As we were sitting around my mother’s bed at Brooks Howell, I remembered that hospice, which was overseeing her care, recommends that at death we find a way to say four phrases to our loved ones that we all want to hear, words of assurance and care.
So, trying to remember the phrases, I spoke them to my mother: “Thank you. I love you. I forgive you . . . .” and for the life of me I couldn’t remember the last one. I looked to the hospice nurse for help and she reminded me, “Please forgive me.”
I chuckled to myself: But of course! We are so ready to be magnanimous to our dying loved ones, assuring them of our love, our gratitude, our forgiveness, but even then it can be hard to own the role that we have played in whatever may have divided us. So, yes, I leaned over to my mother’s ear and said, “please forgive me.”
I can’t know what she heard. It was very near the end. But I found some peace in saying it, in acknowledging the mutuality of our love even at the brink of the mystery.
So, life as an orphan has proven to be an odd thing, as I’m sure many of you know who have experienced it. My mother has appeared in some dreams – always much younger than she was – not as someone I engage with, just a character in the scene.
Maybe her presence there will evolve. We’ll see. As Alexander Levy predicted, I see the world a little differently: less concerned about the expectations of others, more determined to be true to who I am, deeply appreciating the ones I love, and even more grateful for the life I have.
I find myself less worried about my achievements and more drawn, where I can, to be an agent of compassion and hope. With my last parent gone and the reality of my own death looming before me with unsettling clarity I have come to realize that I can’t know what the impact of all I have done will be. So, how will I use this “breath-taking energy” that Levy says I have awakened to now? My hope is that somehow I will be a gift to the world, to the embodied mass of humankind. It seems to me that if I could be a link in the chain of love that passes from one generation to the next, it will have been enough.
“We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness, – That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, – That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its power in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness.”
LET AMERICAN BE AMERICA AGAIN by Langston Hughes
Let America be America again.
Let it be the dream it used to be.
Let it be the pioneer on the plain
Seeking a home where he himself is free.
(America never was America to me.)
Let America be the dream the dreamers dreamed—
Let it be that great strong land of love
Where never kings connive nor tyrants scheme
That any man be crushed by one above.
(It never was America to me.)
O, let my land be a land where Liberty
Is crowned with no false patriotic wreath,
But opportunity is real, and life is free,
Equality is in the air we breathe.
(There’s never been equality for me,
Nor freedom in this “homeland of the free.”)
Say, who are you that mumbles in the dark?
And who are you that draws your veil across the stars?
I am the poor white, fooled and pushed apart,
I am the Negro bearing slavery’s scars.
I am the red man driven from the land,
I am the immigrant clutching the hope I seek—
And finding only the same old stupid plan
Of dog eat dog, of mighty crush the weak.
I am the young man, full of strength and hope,
Tangled in that ancient endless chain
Of profit, power, gain, of grab the land!
Of grab the gold! Of grab the ways of satisfying need!
Of work the men! Of take the pay!
Of owning everything for one’s own greed!
I am the farmer, bondsman to the soil.
I am the worker sold to the machine.
I am the Negro, servant to you all.
I am the people, humble, hungry, mean—
Hungry yet today despite the dream.
Beaten yet today—O, Pioneers!
I am the man who never got ahead,
The poorest worker bartered through the years.
Yet I’m the one who dreamt our basic dream
In the Old World while still a serf of kings,
Who dreamt a dream so strong, so brave, so true,
That even yet its mighty daring sings
In every brick and stone, in every furrow turned
That’s made America the land it has become.
O, I’m the man who sailed those early seas
In search of what I meant to be my home—
For I’m the one who left dark Ireland’s shore,
And Poland’s plain, and England’s grassy lea,
And torn from Black Africa’s strand I came
To build a “homeland of the free.”
The free?
Who said the free? Not me?
Surely not me? The millions on relief today?
The millions shot down when we strike?
The millions who have nothing for our pay?
For all the dreams we’ve dreamed
And all the songs we’ve sung
And all the hopes we’ve held
And all the flags we’ve hung,
The millions who have nothing for our pay—
Except the dream that’s almost dead today.
O, let America be America again—
The land that never has been yet—
And yet must be—the land where every man is free.
The land that’s mine—the poor man’s, Indian’s, Negro’s, ME—
Who made America,
Whose sweat and blood, whose faith and pain,
Whose hand at the foundry, whose plow in the rain,
Must bring back our mighty dream again.
Sure, call me any ugly name you choose—
The steel of freedom does not stain.
From those who live like leeches on the people’s lives,
We must take back our land again,
America!
O, yes,
I say it plain,
America never was America to me,
And yet I swear this oath—
America will be!
Out of the rack and ruin of our gangster death,
The rape and rot of graft, and stealth, and lies,
We, the people, must redeem
The land, the mines, the plants, the rivers.
The mountains and the endless plain—
All, all the stretch of these great green states—
And make America again!
SERMON
For about a decade, Danielle Allen paid her dues as a young history scholar putting undergraduates through their paces at the University of Chicago. Many of them were among the nation’s most elite students – brilliant, high-achieving young people, as she puts it – “rolling in from their dorm room beds with tousled hair right into class.”
But she also served another, very different population – adult students, many of them, she said, “without jobs, or working two jobs or stuck in dead-end part-time jobs,” juggling children’s schedules, daycare and the city bus service. These folks should have arrived for classes bone-tired, but instead, she said, they “pulsed with energy.”
The two groups met in the same classroom – though at different times – and read the same books, ranging from the Greek Antigone to Toni Morrison’s “Beloved”. In each circle, she said, “we were making worlds: naming life’s constitutive events, clarifying our principles, and testing against one another’s wits our accounts of what was happening around us.”
But, for her, Allen said, the most transformative experience she had in that class was with what she called her “life-tested night students” studying not some classic work of history or literature, but the Declaration of Independence.
Not a one of them had ever read it or had any notion that it had anything to do with them. Instead, as she put it, “It represented institutions and power, everything that solidified a world that had, as life turned out, delivered them so much grief, so much to overcome.”
The experience, she said, changed her own perspective on this celebrated document. Most people read the Declaration as a cry for freedom, for liberation – it is, after all, a call for independence. But Allen says that if you read it closely you discover something more. Underpinning that call is a new claim about the source of legitimate government centered in the notion of what Allen calls “political equality.”
What makes the Declaration important, she concluded, is not simply its historic role in the birth of this country but its enduring and deeply relevant vision of how and why democracy works. And it’s a vision that she fears we are losing.
I wonder if she’s right. Cased in glass like an artifact of ancient times, quoted in sound bite snippets taken out of context, the Declaration is honored more than it is read. That was certainly true of me until I stumbled on Allen’s recent book, Our Declaration, which got me thinking about this.
Danielle Allen speaks from a unique perspective, an African-American scholar of mixed parentage: on one side, Midwestern, progressive whites, on the other Caribbean blacks who included in their number one-time slaves and Baptist preachers. As it happens, she says, the Declaration was something that figured strongly in her family, even as the subject of debates at the dinner table. It made no difference that it was drawn up by white men of property who never intended that it extend to people like them, her family regarded the Declaration as part of their patrimony.
Allen’s night class renewed her interest in the Declaration less as a historical document than as a goad to people to engage in public life. “I wanted to bring it to life for them,” she said, “as citizens, as thinkers, as political deliberators and decision makers. I wanted them to understand that democratic power belonged to them. I wanted them to own the Declaration of Independence.”
So, in this contentious time when so many of us feel that democracy is disappointing them, just ahead of our annual celebration of Independence Day, I thought it would be worth our accepting Allen’s invitation to reflect more deeply on this great argument for democratic power that is part of our patrimony, too.
Allen wants us to focus on the notion of equality that we find in the Declaration. Asked where to locate equality in the Declaration of Independence, we’re inclined to go right to the start of the first sentence of the second paragraph: “We hold these truths to be self-evident that all men are created equal.” Boom! There you go.
Except, Allen points out, the sentence doesn’t end there, so the thought isn’t quite complete. It goes on: “that they are endowed by the Creator with certain unalienable rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness.” So, the framers aren’t saying we’re all the same – clearly we’re not – but we are equal in being born with certain rights. Everybody gets them. It just comes with the package.
OK, I get it: we’re equal in all having certain rights and . . . Wait! The sentence isn’t finished yet. It goes on: “That to secure these rights, governments are instituted among men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, that whenever any form of government becomes destructive of these Ends it is the Right of the People to alter or abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness.”
What? Are you kidding? No, really that’s it. That full passage from the Declaration that you heard Jennifer read earlier is actually one sentence. The Declaration is not exactly beach reading. That last phrase is important, though, because it addresses a lingering concern.
Yes, we are each born wanting, needing to live, to be free and to do that which fulfills us. But we are given no guarantee that we will get all or any of that. Lots of people don’t. So, how do we convert these wishes and needs into rights? The short answer is by something else that the framers argued is also part of the make-up of every person, as natural as breathing, something Allen sums up as “politics,” or, as the Declaration says, the institution of governments.
People secure what they consider their rights, making it possible for them to live as they want to live, by means of organizing themselves. As fed up as we get sometimes at how government performs, it is essential to securing our rights. And not just any form of government will do. To be legitimate, it must be, the founders declared, “derived from the consent of the governed.”
This is all wrapped up with the earlier part, another “self-evident truth.” So, you see that great long sentence is not just laying out a few observations before it gets to the important stuff, i.e. “listen, king. We’re done with you.” It is summarizing a philosophy of government, one that they claim is grounded in nature, in the world as it is.
This is what gives them the confidence to say that if people are being ruled in a way that fails to respect those rights – as they claimed King George had – then they have the natural right to alter or overthrow that government and set up another that provides for their safety and happiness. It’s worth noting that the Declaration celebrates independence not as an end in itself but as a means to creating another form of governance that better serves the people.
Danielle Allen points out that for all the struggles the founders were enduring at the time the argument at the center of the Declaration is a remarkably sunny one: that every one of us is a competent judge of our needs and what brings us happiness, and that through conversation and negotiation that respects our mutual needs and wants we are capable of building a government that serves us all.
Pie in the sky? Maybe: 241 years later the goal is still far off, and, some would say, moving further. And certainly, not all agree with this perspective. Monarchists, despots, racists, misogynists – anyone who holds themselves as better than others, who claims the right to decide others’ destiny. Sadly, the world and our own politics is populated with a distressing number of such folks, who even while demeaning government seek to secure its power and blessings for themselves.
There are many like the adults who showed up for Allen’s night classes who see little in the Declaration that has anything to say to them, people for whom flowery talk of “equality” is just so much palaver. For these people, Langston Hughes’ poem, “Let American be America again, written in 1936, is as relevant now as it was then.
O, let my land be a land where Liberty
Is crowned with no false patriotic wreath,
But opportunity is real, and life is free,
Equality is in the air we breath.
And then in parentheses:
(There’s never been equality for me.
Nor freedom in this “homeland of the free.”)
Who is speaking here? Hughes offers us litany:
The poor white, fooled and pushed apart
The Negros bearing slavery’s scars,
The red man driven from the land,
The immigrant clutching hope.
And many more as well.
I am the people, he says, humble, hungry, mean.
But a Declaration of Independence? Really?
The free? Who said the free?
Not me, Surely not me. . . .
O, let America be America again
The land that never has been yet
And yet must be – the land where every man is free.
This brings us to a key point for Danielle Allen, probably the most controversial argument in her book. We read the Declaration as making a case for freedom, and there’s no question that it does. But Allen argues that when you look closely, you find that, in her words, “equality has precedence over freedom; only on the basis of equality can freedom be securely achieved.”
So, let’s stop a moment and reflect on that. We’ve already acknowledged that freedom to live as we want is important, one of the founders’ “inalienable rights.” Yet, the Declaration also suggests that in order to be converted from a want into a right it needs to be secured by a government in which all have equal ownership.
As Danielle Allen puts it, “Equality is the foundation of freedom because from a commitment to equality emerges the people itself – we, the people – with the power both to create a shared world in which all can flourish and to defend it from encroachers.”
And so from this we learn, or have to be reminded, that democratic power does not live in institutions; it belongs to the people. Always does, always has. But oddly we are so often ready to cede that power to others, people stronger, richer, craftier, more bellicose. And suddenly “democratic” power simply becomes another form of oppression. The question before us, then, is how we reclaim that power for ourselves and each other.
I’m persuaded by Danielle Allen that we would serve ourselves better if we would deemphasize freedom for a bit and look for ways to raise up equality, a principal at the heart of our faith, one that affirms the inherent worth and dignity of every person. Commitment to equality, seeing each person as of equal value, equal worth, is a fundamental building stone to creating the Beloved Community. It is the beating heart that welcomes all, that comforts all, that holds us in mutual embrace. It is the fragile hope that called to our forebears, that calls to now, the means by which we diverse and sometimes disputatious people might some day be one.
Sunday, June 25, 2017 10am
Rev. Mark Ward, Lead Minister
Readings: US Declaration of Independence and “Let America Be America Again,” by Langston Hughes
For about a decade, Danielle Allen paid her dues as a young history scholar putting undergraduates through their paces at the University of Chicago. Many of them were among the nation’s most elite students – brilliant, high-achieving young people, as she puts it – “rolling in from their dorm room beds with tousled hair right into class.”
But she also served another, very different population – adult students, many of them, she said, “without jobs, or working two jobs or stuck in dead-end part-time jobs,” juggling children’s schedules, daycare and the city bus service. These folks should have arrived for classes bone-tired, but instead, she said, they “pulsed with energy.”
The two groups met in the same classroom – though at different times – and read the same books, ranging from the Greek Antigone to Toni Morrison’s “Beloved”. In each circle, she said, “we were making worlds: naming life’s constitutive events, clarifying our principles, and testing against one another’s wits our accounts of what was happening around us. But, for her, Allen said, the most transformative experience she had in that class was with what she called her “life-tested night students” studying not some classic work of history or literature, but the Declaration of Independence.
Not a one of them had ever read it or had any notion that it had anything to do with them. Instead, as she put it, “It represented institutions and power, everything that solidified a world that had, as life turned out, delivered them so much grief, so much to overcome.” The experience, she said, changed her own perspective on this celebrated document. Most people read the Declaration as a cry for freedom, for liberation – it is, after all, a call for independence. But Allen says that if you read it closely you discover something more. Underpinning that call is a new claim about the source of legitimate government centered in the notion of what Allen calls “political equality.” What makes the Declaration important, she concluded, is not simply its historic role in the birth of this country but its enduring and deeply relevant vision of how and why democracy works. And it’s a vision that she fears we are losing.
I wonder if she’s right. Cased in glass like an artifact of ancient times, quoted in sound bite snippets taken out of context, the Declaration is honored more than it is read. That was certainly true of me until I stumbled on Allen’s recent book, Our Declaration, which got me thinking about this.
Danielle Allen speaks from a unique perspective, an African-American scholar of mixed parentage: on one side, Midwestern, progressive whites, on the other Caribbean blacks who included in their number one-time slaves and Baptist preachers. As it happens, she says, the Declaration was something that figured strongly in her family, even as the subject of debates at the dinner table. It made no difference that it was drawn up by white men of property who never intended that it should extend to people like them, her family regarded the Declaration as part of their patrimony.
Allen’s night class renewed her interest in the Declaration less as a historical document than as a goad to people to engage in public life. “I wanted to bring it to life for them,” she said, “as citizens, as thinkers, as political deliberators and decision-makers. I wanted them to understand that democratic power belonged to them. I wanted them to own the Declaration of Independence.”
So, in this contentious time when so many of us feel that democracy is disappointing them, just ahead of our annual celebration of Independence Day, I thought it would be worth our accepting Allen’s invitation to reflect more deeply on this great argument for democratic power that is part of our patrimony, too.
Allen wants us to focus on the notion of equality that we find in the Declaration. Asked where to locate equality in the Declaration of Independence, we’re inclined to go right to the start of the first sentence of the second paragraph: “We hold these truths to be self-evident that all men are created equal.” Boom! There you go.
Except, Allen points out, the sentence doesn’t end there, so the thought isn’t quite complete. It goes on: “that they are endowed by the Creator with certain unalienable rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness.” So, the framers aren’t saying we’re all the same – clearly we’re not – but we are equal in being born with certain rights. Everybody gets them. It just comes with the package.
OK, I get it: we’re equal in all having certain rights and . . . Wait! The sentence isn’t finished yet. It goes on: “That to secure these rights, governments are instituted among men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, that whenever any form of government becomes destructive of these Ends it is the Right of the People to alter or abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness.”
What? Are you kidding? No, really that’s it. That full passage from the Declaration that you heard Jennifer read earlier is actually one sentence. The Declaration is not exactly beach reading. That last phrase is important, though, because it addresses a lingering concern.
Yes, we are each born wanting, needing to live, to be free and to do that which fulfills us. But we are given no guarantee that we will get all or any of that. Lots of people don’t. So, how do we convert these wishes and needs into rights? The short answer is by something else that the framers argued is also part of the make-up of every person, as natural as breathing, something Allen sums up as “politics,” or, as the Declaration says, the institution of governments.
People secure what they consider their rights, making it possible for them to live as they want to live, by means of organizing themselves. As fed up as we get sometimes at how government performs, it is essential to securing our rights. And not just any form of government will do. To be legitimate, it must be, the founders declared, “derived from the consent of the governed.”
This is all wrapped up with the earlier part, another “self-evident truth.” So, you see that great long sentence is not just laying out a few observations before it gets to the important stuff, i.e. “Listen, king. We’re done with you.” It is summarizing a philosophy of government, one that they claim is grounded in nature, in the world as it is.
This is what gives them the confidence to say that if people are being ruled in a way that fails to respect those rights – as they claimed King George had – then they have the natural right to alter or overthrow that government and set up another that provides for their safety and happiness. It’s worth noting that the Declaration celebrates independence not as an end in itself but as a means to creating another form of governance that better serves the people.
Danielle Allen points out that for all the struggles the founders were enduring at the time, the argument at the center of the Declaration is a remarkably sunny one: that every one of us is a competent judge of our needs and what brings us happiness, and that through conversation and negotiation that respects our mutual needs and wants we are capable of building a government that serves us all.
Pie in the sky? Maybe: 241 years later the goal is still far off, and, some would say, moving further. And certainly, not all agree with this perspective. Monarchists, despots, racists, misogynists – anyone who holds themselves as better than others, who claims the right to decide others’ destiny. Sadly, the world and our own politics is populated with a distressing number of such folks, who even while demeaning government seek to secure its power and blessings for themselves.
There are many like the adults who showed up for Allen’s night classes who see little in the Declaration that has anything to say to them, people for whom flowery talk of “equality” is just so much palaver. For these people, Langston Hughes’ poem, “Let American be America Again,” written in 1936, is as relevant now as it was then.
O, let my land be a land where Liberty Is crowned with no false patriotic wreath, But opportunity is real, and life is free, Equality is in the air we breath.
And then in parentheses: (There’s never been equality for me. Nor freedom in this “homeland of the free.”)
Who is speaking here? Hughes offers us litany:
The poor white, fooled and pushed apart The Negros bearing slavery’s scars, The red man driven from the land, The immigrant clutching hope.
And many more as well.
I am the people, he says, humble, hungry, mean.
But a Declaration of Independence? Really?
The free? Who said the free? Not me, Surely not me. . . . O, let America be America again The land that never has been yet And yet must be – the land where every man is free.
This brings us to a key point for Danielle Allen, probably the most controversial argument in her book. We read the Declaration as making a case for freedom, and there’s no question that it does. But Allen argues that when you look closely, you find that, in her words, “equality has precedence over freedom; only on the basis of equality can freedom be securely achieved.”
So, let’s stop a moment and reflect on that. We’ve already acknowledged that freedom to live as we want is important, one of the founders’ “inalienable rights.” Yet, the Declaration also suggests that in order to be converted from a want into a right it needs to be secured by a government in which all have equal ownership. As Danielle Allen puts it, “Equality is the foundation of freedom because from a commitment to equality emerges the people itself – we, the people – with the power both to create a shared world in which all can flourish and to defend it from encroachers.”
And so from this we learn, or have to be reminded, that democratic power does not live in institutions; it belongs to the people. Always does, always has. But oddly we are so often ready to cede that power to others, people stronger, richer, craftier, more bellicose. And suddenly “democratic” power simply becomes another form of oppression. The question before us, then, is how we reclaim that power for ourselves and each other.
I’m persuaded by Danielle Allen that we would serve ourselves better if we would deemphasize freedom for a bit and look for ways to raise up equality, a principal at the heart of our faith, one that affirms the inherent worth and dignity of every person. Commitment to equality, seeing each person as of equal value, equal worth, is a fundamental building stone to creating the Beloved Community. It is the beating heart that welcomes all, that comforts all, that holds us in mutual embrace. It is the fragile hope that called to our forebears, that calls to us now, the means by which we diverse and sometimes disputatious people might some day be one.
