Sometimes we need to take a step away
to see something we care about more clearly,
to size it up in the larger context of our lives.
So, today we gather in different space
with a big screen, stage and theater seating,
but none of this changes who we are:
people who join as one community
in an ongoing journey of religious discovery
inviting each of us to a walk of faith.
This space may feel strange, but it is soon made familiar,
for we hallow it with our hopes;
we bless it with our laughter.
May this time away renew our spirits
and inspire our service to the vision we hold
of peace and freedom, of justice and love
made real in beloved community.
SERMON: Rev. Mark Ward, Lead Minister–
Randy Pausch would have been the first person to tell you that he had always been a nerdy kind of guy. He was the kind of kid who brought a dictionary to the dinner table and whose hero was Captain Kirk of the Starship Enterprise.
Growing up in suburban Maryland in the 1960s and 70s, he persuaded his parents to let him decorate the walls of his room with his own drawings of cool stuff. His idea of cool stuff was a rocket ship, a submarine, pieces from a chess set, and the quadratic equation. He even painted a silver elevator door on one wall with up and down buttons and, above the door, floor numbers one through six, with the number “three” illuminated, in his one-story, ranch-style home.
Like many kids, he spent a lot of time in his imagination, dreaming about futuristic things like alien worlds and flying in space ships. So, for Randy the big event of his young life was a trip to Disneyworld in California. He couldn’t believe the amazing rides he went on and all the cool things he could do. He walked away determined to make stuff like that some day.
As you can imagine, Randy was pretty good in school. In fact, he went on to get a PhD in computer science and got a job as a college professor. But even then he hadn’t given up on his dream of getting inside the rides at Disneyland. The funny thing was that when he wrote to the people at Disney who designed the rides – they called themselves Imagineers – they didn’t seem to be interested in hearing from him.
Here he was teaching college students how to create virtual reality scenes on their computers. He felt sure he could contribute something to the people at Disney, but no dice. Randy was undeterred. As he saw it, those hurdles were there just to make him show how badly he wanted to do it.
One day he learned that Disney was developing a new ride based on the movie “Aladdin” that would use elements of virtual reality. So, again he pestered the Disney people until finally one of them agreed to meet with him. He says he probably did 80 hours of research for the interview and talked to every virtual reality expert he could find. In the end the Disney person agreed to let Randy work there during his upcoming six-month sabbatical. So, he finally got to work at Disney.
Randy tells the story of one night on a warm California night driving home from the Imagineering headquarters in a convertible with the soundtrack of “The Lion King” playing on his stereo and tears streaming down his cheeks.
And that wasn’t the end of Randy’s connection with Disney. Coming back to the university where he worked, he arranged for some of his students to have internships at Disney. His class on “Building Virtual Worlds” invited people across academic disciplines to enroll and turned out to be among the most popular at the university. Randy eventually was recruited to write the entry on Virtual Reality for the World Book encyclopedia, and the teaching tool he created to introduce students to virtual reality, called Alice, is being used across the world to teach people computer programming.
By the summer of 2006, at 45 years old, you’d have to say that Randy was a pretty happy, successful man. Not only was he a celebrated college professor, but also he was married to a woman he adored and had three young children.
But then came these strange pains in his abdomen that he couldn’t explain. A battery of tests gave him sobering news. He had pancreatic cancer, a particularly deadly form of the disease. But Randy was determined to stay alive for his family. He underwent difficult surgery, chemotherapy, radiation, but in the end the cancer came back.
Walking out of that appointment after learning that his life could end in months, Randy realized that he’d need to find a different perspective on the days ahead, a perspective that helped him make the best of what life he had left.
One reason we know so much about Randy’s story is that earlier in the same year he received those disappointing test results he had been recruited by the university to take part in a lecture series in which star faculty were invited to reflect on their lives. It was called “The Last Lecture Series.” Never before, though, had the person giving the lecture known for a fact that he or she would not live long after giving the lecture. It really would be Randy’s last.
Randy wasn’t sure at first if it was a good idea to go through with it: preparing a lecture would take time from his family and his energy was waning. But he finally decided to go ahead with it because he hoped that sharing the passion that he had given to his life might encourage others to find a path to fulfilling their own dreams.
I want to tell you a bit more about what Randy had to say at that last lecture. But first I want to talk to you about why it came to my mind to tell you his story at this service where we have gathered here in this downtown performance space in one strong body to celebrate this community and talk about why we support it.
Like Randy, most of us go about our lives knowing in a general kind of way that the days given to us are limited, but figuring that the time when those days would end are far off. Like the boy in our story we have moments in our lives when we receive love, or guidance, or wisdom. We experience how good those moments feel. We have a sense of being deeply connected to each other, to our own inner calling, and to the world. And we say to ourselves, “I’m always going to remember this moment.”
But memory fades. Life moves on. We get busy with other things. In his lecture, Randy talked about how he felt that he “won the lottery” with the parents he had. He grew up always knowing that he was loved and supported. When he headed off to academia – top grades, top honors – he was a kind of golden boy, feeling pretty cocky, like he could do anything. He was, he admitted in his lecture, a bit of a “jerk.”
Randy said it was a legendary computer science professor in college who set him straight. One day the professor took him out for a walk, put an arm around his shoulders and said, “Randy, it’s such a shame that people perceive you as being so arrogant, because it’s going to limit what you’re going to be able to accomplish in life.”
Now, I don’t think that any of us necessarily arrives at this congregation as a “jerk.” But we all come here with things to learn and blind spots that limit how we experience each other and the world. Part of what we offer as a community is safe space for each of us to learn and grow. We gather for small group ministry, in classes, in dinner and hiking groups and more. All of this is religious work, for it connects us to life-affirming values that can help us grow into compassionate, spiritually mature, loving and giving people.
It probably won’t surprise you to learn that Randy showed up to give his “last lecture” wearing his Disney Imagineers polo shirt. Even with his PhD and other academic credentials, that shirt remained special to him because it symbolized a dream that had stayed with him since he was a boy that he was able to achieve.
And what made it important was not just that it was a childhood dream, but that it connected him to an important part of himself, a passion to create scenes and images that help people better understand the world. In a book he wrote about his last lecture, Randy said that as a high-tech guy, he never really understood what actors and artists were talking about when they talked about things inside of themselves that “needed to come out.” His lecture, he said, taught him that throughout his life there had been many things inside him that needed to come out.
And of course that’s true of all of us. The writer and teacher Joseph Campbell studied many different religious traditions, and the advice he gave his students about their own religious searches was, “follow your bliss.”
He was clear, though, that “follow your bliss” meant more than just “do what you like.” It meant finding that path, that pursuit that you are most passionate about and giving yourself to it. And there, he argued, you will find your own fullest potential and the way that you can serve your community to the greatest possible extent.
Here’s what he said: “If you follow your bliss, you put yourself on a kind of track that has been there all the while, waiting for you, and the life that you ought to be living is the one you are living.”
Notice that Campbell didn’t identify any one track, any one way that he argued would bring you bliss. Rather, he said, it is up to us to find the track that is ours and to be aware that the track will shift and change as we learn and grow.
There are many things we find ourselves passionate about over the course of our lives, from baseball to ballet, from rose gardening to rock and roll. We are all of us Imagineers of a sort, looking for ways to put our passions to work in our lives. But beneath all of that is something more, some way that we feel connected more deeply to each other and everything around us. From time to time something resonates within us, perhaps in a beautiful spot, listening to music, reading a poem, or sitting gathered in worship or with someone we love.
We struggle for words to describe this feeling, this knowing, this emerging truth. And so in each other’s company we try them out. We venture haltingly, listen carefully, reflect what we hear and affirm, or simply let silence work on us.
When I look back at the trajectory of my own life, I am amazed at how I have changed and in ways that I never could have guessed, nor do I believe that I am done with my changes. But I am grateful for a religious home that makes room for those changes and gives me companions who are ready to journey with me.
That’s what a religious community like this is for, to create a place where we can discover and name our deepest passions, our places of bliss, and put them work in our lives and in service to the greater world.
As your order of service reminds you, this is Stewardship Sunday, when we kick off the Annual Budget Drive that asks you to make financial commitments that will sustain this community for the year ahead. So, here’s my pitch. I promise it will be short.
The colorful brochure you received today describes how this congregation proposes to spend its money in the coming year in worship, education, caring and outreach and to support programs and maintain the campus where all of this happens.
I must tell you, it is such a privilege to serve this vital beacon of liberal religion. In the eight years I’ve been your minister you have grown and deepened as a community and stood fast as an advocate of justice, freedom and love. I’m proud of you.
This year, though, our Annual Budget Drive presents us with a challenge. In recent years, we have used money from a grant and bequests to help fund staff and programming needed to serve the congregation we have grown to be. We need to close that gap with our pledges. I have worked with the staff to keep next year’s budget tight. The only significant increase for the coming year is a 2% cost-of-living increase for all staff. This is important, since many of our staff received no increase last year. And for some of our part-time workers it will ensure that we remain a Living Wage employer.
To do all that, we ask you to consider a one-time major increase in your pledge. Details are in the brochure. We know that not everyone is in a position to increase, although we are encouraged by the results of some of our first visits. So far our team has received commitments of $101,450, well on our way toward our goal of $640,000.
Thank you so much to those who have responded, and as you weigh your options, please bring to mind the hopes and passions that this community serves.
Even though Randy Pausch was, by his own description, a high-tech kind of guy, the religious part of his life mattered to him, too. And that’s why he and his family were members of a Unitarian Universalist church in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. In an interview with the UU World magazine in the last months of his life, Randy said that the support of his church community had made a big difference to his family.
It was a place where, like this congregation, people heard the heartbeats of each other’s passions, where they carried the baskets of each other’s gifts to a crossroads where they could be shared.
Randy died on July 25, 2008, a little over four years ago. His family was with him, and he knew he was loved. I reflect that in the past few weeks I’ve conducted memorial services for two of our members, Joe Haun and Joe Major. And it was good to have a number of you there with me helping to tell their stories and comfort their friends and families.
This is what we do for each other. It’s part of the passion that we bring to this community, the love that we give and receive in one another’s company.
When I think of all this, my mind turns back to the words of our opening hymn, “drifting here with my ship’s companions, all we kindred pilgrim souls, making our way by the lights of the heavens in our beautiful blue boat home.”
I’ve said before that sometimes our sanctuary back on Edwin Place feels like a big boat, with all of us gathered together, sometimes sailing under sunny sides, sometimes riding out a storm. And even though this space today really bears no resemblance to that one, with you here I can almost imagine us there: a place where our hopes and passions, where the commitments we make to each other fuel a fire that keeps love alive.
So, let me begin with myself. All of my life I have identified with the male gender. Growing up I knew myself as a “boy,” placing myself in the same group as people who identified themselves or were identified to me as male, and distinguished myself from “girls,” people I identified, or others identified or who identified themselves as female.
I can’t specifically recall when I began to awaken to myself as a sexual being, but I’m guessing it was around the age of 11 or 12, and, with the exception with some consensual touching with a male friend at around that time, I have always been drawn to people who I identified as women as sexual partners. In my life today I live in a monogamous couple with the only person with whom I am intimate, my wife.
Now, let me acknowledge that this is not the sort of information that we ordinarily exchange with each other, and I am not offering my own tale with the expectation that you will all suddenly start sharing your own stories with each other. We are all entitled to our privacy. We have the right to decide for ourselves how much of the details of our lives to share and with whom to share them.
Instead, I offer my own story to draw attention to several interesting aspects of stories like mine in our culture and the consequences they have for our religious lives. In the vernacular we use today I am identified as “straight” or heterosexual: a man who is attracted sexually exclusively to “the other sex”: women.
But more importantly, and here’s where the trouble starts, my sexual orientation is widely conceived as “normal”: the standard, the way things are supposed to be. As such, it loads me up with all sorts of privilege. In any public setting, people feel comfortable asking me about my wife and making provisions to include her in social gatherings. I am entitled to thousands of benefits under federal, state and local law.
But, beyond all that is a privilege that people with a sexual orientation like mine have a hard time wrapping our heads around. If you are regarded as “normal,” then no matter where you go, you are “just folks”: Nothing out of the ordinary. On meeting you, people give you the benefit of the doubt and are ready to think well of you.
If your sexual orientation is different, it can be otherwise. If it’s true that my sexual orientation is “the norm,” then any other arrangement is, by definition, “deviant.” It deviates, strays from, the norm. Now, technically speaking, all of that is simply the language of science, but part of what this demonstrates is the way in which the language of science can be employed to obscure, misinform and oppress.
So, where do we get this idea of what normal is? It’s true that we humans are issued two basic varieties of plumbing when it comes to the machinery of reproduction. But even there the story isn’t as simple as it looks. There are many variations in our physical make-up as well as in our genetic heritage that shape sexual identity and expression.
And, of course, it’s often remarked that our most important sexual organ is to be found not between our legs but perched on top of our necks. How shall we calibrate anything like “normal” when it comes to the extraordinary variety of human desire?
The writer Hanne Blank sought to track down the history of this notion of a “normal” sexual expression and discovered something interesting, which is contained in the title to her recent book: “Straight – The Surprisingly Short History of Heterosexuality.”
Yes, she writes, men and women have always had sex, but the notion that people have particular sexual orientations and that one might be identified as normal has only existed for something like a century and a half.
She traces the term “heterosexuality” back to Germany in 1869 during efforts to modernize Germany’s ancient legal codes. One legislator had his eye on eliminating a provision that stipulated harsh punishment for men having sex with men, arguing that it was wrong to punish actions that harmed no one. “Homosexuals” and “heterosexuals,” he said, were simply two types of human beings.
Nothing came of his efforts – Hitler later used that provision in German law to imprison and murder homosexuals in concentration camps during World War II – but that new word – heterosexual – later made its way to medical texts. There, though, it took a different turn and was used to describe what was then called “healthy sexuality.”
The word first appeared in Merriam-Webster’s dictionary in 1934, where it was described as “manifestation of sexual passion for one of the opposite sex; normal sexuality.”
Meanwhile, the growing influence of Sigmund Freud carried this conversation in a new direction. Freud held that heterosexuality was the norm among adults, but that to reach that state our innate sexual impulses must be channeled properly as we grow up. He argued that any other orientation – from disinterest in sex to same-sex attraction – was the result of trauma or some arrested development. It was by definition dysfunctional and in need of treatment to be cured.
Mental health professionals have since repudiated this theory of Freud’s, though it took the American Psychiatric Association until 1973 to declassify homosexuality as a mental disorder. In the meantime, the notion that there is something wrong with anyone who doesn’t identify exclusively as heterosexual suffused our culture and remains embedded in many people’s understanding.
Alfred Kinsey’s work in the 1950s opened a door beyond that. From interviews with thousands of men and women about their sex lives he learned that the variety of people’s sexual desires and experiences were far greater than most suspected. He proposed that people’s sexual responses ran on a continuum of seven stages from exclusively heterosexual to exclusively homosexual. But what was especially important is that he offered the data without judgment.
His studies opened a conversation about not only sexual orientation, but also practices. Where do you draw the line? What counts as heterosexual, homosexual, and what else? As scientific as these distinctions are made to sound, the actual science is pretty hazy.
As Hanne Blank puts it, “science has yet to prove that heterosexuality – or indeed any sexuality – exists in any way that is relevant to material science.” Researchers have gone hunting for the “gay gene,” sought traces of the “heterosexual brain” and tried to tease out the ingredients of the hormonal cocktail that determines sexual orientation. None of it has paid out yet.
It may be, she says, that for these categories that seem so important to us – homosexual, heterosexual – there simply aren’t any physical, biological distinctions significant enough to separate people into what’s called “natural kinds.” Perhaps this is just one of many aspects of human variability.
Also, as the conversation around sexual orientation has continued we’ve come to realize how limiting these old notions are. People today identify not only as gay or straight, but also as bisexual, attracted to both genders, and gender queer, rejecting traditional images of either masculinity or femininity.
And the whole notion gender itself is proving problematic. Different combinations of our X and Y chromosomes may place us on one side or another of what is traditionally recognized as male and female, and that designation may or may not gibe with the sexual identity we claim. Some people born with what is considered a conventional physical identity grow into a different sexual identity and so come to know themselves as transgender. One researcher has suggested that instead of two genders we might recognize as many as five.
We’ve also come to realize that what we call sexual orientation encompasses a broader range of feelings and identities than were previously considered. Researchers who have updated Kinsey’s scale have expanded the reach of questions they pursue.
Participants are asked not only about who they have had sex with but also about who their sexual fantasies are about, who they are attracted to, who they are emotionally drawn to, who they prefer to exchange non-sexual physical affection with, who they prefer to socialize with, what sexual identity they socialize with, how they identify themselves and how they identify the political personality they express to the world.
Each of these areas touches on different ways we relate to others, how we are drawn to them and how we interact with them in ways we don’t often think of as sexual yet that shape our experience of our sexual being.
As a straight man who came of age some 50 years ago I have to admit that much of this is still a little hard for me to understand. But as a religious person who is committed to affirming the inherent worth and dignity of every person I recognize that my understanding it is not the point. Ultimately, my concern is not how or why people are drawn to each other, but that their interaction is not exploitive, harmful, or abusive. If, in the words of Marge Piercy, they are living a life they can endure; if they are making love that is loving, then it is something I can honor and bless.
When we define a narrow standard and declare all outside it to be deviant, we shut people off from the reality of their lives. And, as Adrienne Rich warned, whatever is unnamed, undepicted, censored, misnamed, made difficult-to-come-by, buried in memory under inadequate or lying language becomes not merely unspoken, but unspeakable. And so, is it any wonder how often people declared to be other, outsider, deviant choose to hide themselves or even end their lives rather than suffer disapprobation and shame?
We as a religious community have a duty to call those people back from the edge, to be, as Holly Near urged, a gentle, loving people, to widen the tent of acceptance and affirmation, to declare a new normal that embraces the broad diversity of human identity and expression.
Walt Whitman, poet of America and flamboyantly gay man, captured a truth of our lives in his poem. In the 1890s, highpoint of the Victorian Era, that laced up period where human intimacies were not discussed in polite society, he declared, “I sing the body electric.”
And isn’t it so? From early in infancy we are aware of an electricity that moves in our bodies, that sings to us – different songs in different seasons, to be sure – but singing all the same. We’re not always sure what we hear, and sometimes the tune changes – louder, softer, suddenly shifting to a different key.
In the end, as Whitman puts it, that passion that arises within us “balks account.” There is no telling whence it comes, or even, really, fully describing it, but in and of itself it is perfect. That is to say, it is what it is; it is ours.
It is not something that needs to be explained. It is merely something that is to be known. And that knowing in all its full dimensions is not easy, not for any of us. We test and experiment, bounce in and out of relationship, and if we’re lucky come to an understanding, an understanding grounded in loving relationship.
In such relationships, we learn, it is possible to find fulfillment, to find peace in the expression of our truth, embracing the curious, breathing, laughing flesh of our physical being, and being content to affirm that, while all things please the soul, these please the soul well.
I was taken a couple of weeks ago as I was standing with about 70 or 80 people in the basement of First Congregational Church downtown after one of the “We Do” actions by the Campaign for Southern Equality at Buncombe County’s Register of Deeds office. Seven same-sex couples, one after another, had just gone to the counter, asked for marriage licenses and been politely denied. It had been a carefully choreographed moment, as each of these has been, framed to bring attention to an injustice written into this state’s laws, their refusal to recognize the sanctity of commitments between people of the same gender, by the very people who seek that right.
For several of the participants, this was a return trip, only the most recent occasion when they had taken part in such an action. As we stood in the church hall, they were each given an opportunity to speak about the experience. What caught my attention was that in their reflections these women focused their remarks not so much on the moment of being turned back in the registrar’s office, but on the cheers that came from the dozens of people who awaited them outside.
No matter how often she does it, one woman told the group, she’s amazed every time by the warmth she feels in that moment. “The emotion doesn’t abate” were her words. It brought me back to what had been going through my own mind only a short time before.
As I loitered on the grass outside that nondescript office building in downtown Asheville, shifting my weight from foot to foot as these couples offered themselves to the unavailing machinery of bureaucracy I found myself reflecting for a moment on whether I was clear why I was doing this?
The action had come in the middle of a busy day and as time dragged on I had begun nervously eyeing my watch, thinking about the rest of the day, the commitments piled on my calendar. It wasn’t until the couples emerged from the building and smiled shyly as the dozens of us there hooted and cheered. It wasn’t until I heard the choke in their voices in their thanks to those gathered that it dawned on me again – oh, yes, that’s right: standing on the side of love.
In this congregation we argue that there are three dimensions in the religious life – within, the interior reflections that we each engage in to clarify for ourselves the source of our spirituality and what it demands of us; among, the ways we gather with each other to learn and grow, to share our lives and support each other; and beyond, the ways that we carry our own learning and reflections into our larger lives and in service to justice.
We tend to get the within piece, the individual search for meaning, pretty quickly. It is, after all, what got us in the door. We needed a religious community where there was room for us, where we weren’t going to get squeezed in a box or guilt-tripped, a place that was safe and accepted us fully so that we could explore our spiritual sides.
And the among piece comes with being a part of a community, finding our niche, people we can connect with, activities that engage us. This part comes easier for some than for others. More socially oriented people usually gather their clan or find their comfort spot pretty quickly, while some shyer folks can feel overwhelmed or marginalized. It’s a place where we as a community stumble at times and people can fall away. So, we work at building systems that help us all connect with each other and stay in touch.
The beyond piece is interesting. It’s not uncommon that people arrive at our congregation with a history of their own engagement with justice work. So, they don’t need to be persuaded that there’s a connection between their inner work and their work in the world.
And yet it has always seemed to me that we are less than clear about the nature of that connection, what creates that bridge. So, today let me be plain: the connection is love.
There. That was easy. Are we done? No, hardly.
Let’s step back a moment. I want to acknowledge that the word love can be and often is thrown around pretty freely. “I only did that/said that because I love you.” “We only hurt the ones we love.” Yadda, Yadda, right?
I’m reminded of the ambivalence I’ve experienced at times over the years among some people in our movement when we get started talking about love.
I remember years ago when I was still in seminary getting push-back from a long-time member at my home congregation after a service that I led. She said she objected to my using the word “love” to describe how we in the congregation sought to regard each other. “I would really describe it more as ‘respect’,” she told me.
And I remember some years ago us gathering in this sanctuary to talk through the key concepts that we wanted included in the mission statement for this congregation. Individual search for meaning, freedom, justice – all these came quickly. Love took a while to emerge.
So, what’s that about? Well, part of it, I think, has to do with what is often rightful skepticism. We’ve heard talk of love in other religious settings, and it can feel pretty squishy and even inauthentic, bound up, as it often is, with a theology we just don’t buy.
You remember the Peanuts cartoon: Lucy is taunting her younger brother, Linus, for his dreams of being a doctor. “You could never be a doctor,” she says. “You know why? Because you don’t love mankind. That’s why.” And Linus replies, “I love mankind. It’s people I can’t stand.”
And that’s the rub, isn’t it? Love, Love, Love. Yeah, great when we’re singing along with the Beatles, but less easy or obvious when we’re confronted with people acting in ugly or disrespectful ways.
In a recent article, the philosopher Stephen Asma writes that as nice as the idea of universalized love may seem, it’s not really how the world works. Empathy, he says, is not something that we can just conjure up by willing it so. Instead, in his words, it’s “a natural biological event – an activity, a process.”
“The feeling of care,” he writes, “is triggered by a perception or internal awareness and soon swells, flooding the brain and body with subjective feelings and behaviors (and oxytocin and opioids). Care is like sprint racing. It takes time – duration, energy, systemic warm-up and cool-down, practice and a strange mixture of pleasure and pain (attraction and repulsion). Like sprinting, it’s not the kind of thing you can do all the time. You will literally break the system in short order, if you ramp-up the care system every time you see someone in need. The nightly news would render you literally exhausted.”
Sure, our heart strings vibrate a bit in response to the suffering of others, but that’s nothing like what he calls “the kinds of active preferential devotions that we marshal for members of our respective tribes,” in others words, family and our circle of closest friends.
Now, there is certainly truth in what he says. We have special bonds to those closest to us that set our hearts racing. And to suggest that we can live in such a way as to raise our feelings about everyone we know – heck, everyone on earth – to that level is pretty foolish. But, really, that’s not what we’re talking about here.
Love, after all, has many dimensions. Yes, it applies to those with whom we are most intimate, but it also applies to other relationships as well in different ways. I think the theologian Paul Tillich puts his finger on it when he remarks that, “love is the moving power of life.” It is what drives everything to everything else. It is the way in which we and all that we care about are realized.
Some years ago, the writer Karen Armstrong, won a prize from the TED talks to come up with an idea for making the world a better place. Being a scholar of religion, she chose to investigate ways that religion, the source of so much divisiveness in the world, might help people live together in mutual respect.
The project she chose was to bring together leaders of a half dozen religious traditions to see if, working together, they could create what she called a Charter for Compassion that, in her words, “would restore compassion to the heart of religious and moral life.”
Her book, Twelve Steps to a Compassionate Life, which T.S. read from earlier, lays out a program, distilled from teachings of the world religions, detailing how anyone might learn to cultivate compassion in their daily lives. Her program leads us through disciplines we might anticipate – cultivating empathy, mindfulness, compassion for ourselves, and so on.
But a key element, she said, is the admission of how little we really know about each other, that there is a mystery at the core of each of us that eludes our grasp. This, she noted, is part of what’s expressed in the Hindu greeting, “Namaste,” where, bowing with joined hands, one honors the sacred mystery of another. Too often, Armstrong says, our interactions with each other lack that reverence. Without thinking, we make blithe assumptions about others, often based on our own needs, fears, ambitions or desires.
But on occasion we are shaken out of our ordinary way of thinking. It may be an unexpected encounter, chancing on some natural beauty or coming on a particularly haunting piece of music.
In some way we experience what Armstrong identifies as a moment of what the Greeks call ekstasis, where for a time we step outside our own perspective and see the world from a different vantage.
This is the image that Jane Hirshfield’s poem suggests to me: a state of mind where we can identify with everything around us – the trees shedding golden leaves, the fish in the pond, the water itself – a place of deep appreciation, where for a moment we are given over to life, where our heart is calm and still, refusing nothing.
It is in such a place, I think, that we recognize love as the moving power of life, the power that carries us from our inner work within to our gathering among to our encounter with a larger world beyond us.
And, of course, this circuit continues, as our work beyond informs our work within that inspires our gathering and round we go again. The more practiced we become, the more easily our heart engages.
This, it seems to me, is much of the work we are doing here – inviting each other to engage our hearts at different stages, in different places. It will require risking at times and loosening our grip on old certainties. But in the end it is no great reach to locate ourselves in such a way so that we are standing on the side of love. It is where we want to be anyway.
As you approach Kelly Ingram Park on the outskirts of downtown in Birmingham, Alabama, there is nothing much to distinguish it. Filling a full city block, it’s planted with trees and crossed by meandering paths. It’s not until you enter and catch sight of the sculptures planted along the paths that you get a hint of the tumultuous events that were centered there, now half a century ago.
One depicts two children, life size, on one side of the path, looking stolidly through bars representing a jail on the other side of the path. Another depicts a water cannon on a tripod aimed at two children against a wall, one crouched over, the other facing the wall with her arms held in front of her, her back turned to the cannon.
The most arresting may be the sculpture that appears on the cover of your order of service depicting guard dogs leaping aggressively from walls on each side of the path with barely enough space for a person to walk between.
Last fall this park was the first stop on the Living Legacy Tour of Civil Rights sites of the South that I took part in. As one for whom most of the Civil Rights struggles of the 60s were mostly snatches of news clips reaching my pre-teen eyes or ears, it was a good place to start. Fifty years after those formative times we have lost many of the concrete reminders of what was going on and what was at stake then. But Kelly Ingram Park remains a place where history in its most graphic form is in our faces demanding to be known.
So, in this month of beginning when we also celebrate the legacy of Martin Luther King Jr. I wanted to focus our reflection on Birmingham, a place where the Civil Rights struggle was reborn into a movement that transformed our nation and continues to challenge us today.
Protests against racial discrimination had their beginning in Birmingham in the early 50s, when a petition seeking the hiring of blacks as police officers was denied. In 1956, a newly formed Alabama Christian Movement for Human Rights, headed by Rev. Fred Shuttlesworth, following up on the successful Montgomery bus boycott launched an action to integrate city buses there. It got nowhere, though. The leaders were arrested, and the powerful council headed by Bull Conner ruled that continued segregation was necessary to prevent “friction” between the races.
A high profile racial killing and repeated Klan cross burnings made many wary of going further. Over the next six years 17 black homes or churches were bombed with no arrests made, giving the city the nickname of “Bombingham.”
It wasn’t until January 1963, the 100th anniversary of the Emancipation Proclamation, that national civil rights groups came together to build a coordinated strategy for dealing with segregation in Birmingham. Most actions up until then had taken place in small towns. Birmingham was a complex and vibrant city, a center of the steel industry, and, despite small town ways, more cosmopolitan. Birmingham also posed a challenge in logistics – the recruiting and directing of many people – and enlisting allies. The local black clergy association, for one, was deeply suspicious of the group.
But the issue was heating up. The arrival of Freedom Riders in May 1961 brought renewed attention to segregation, and in May 1962 college students conducted a voter registration drive and “selective buying” campaign that severely reduced black purchases. Determined to move forward, a gathering that King chaired in Savannah, Georgia launched what became known as Project C, for Confrontation – a campaign of boycotts, marches and nonviolent resistance to start in Birmingham that spring.
Birmingham itself, though, was in transition. The city’s three-member council was being replaced by a nine-member council and mayor. Many moderate whites and their black allies saw this as a moment to end the Bull Conner era.
In the March election, just as the desegregation actions were beginning, Conner and his opponent, Albert Boutwell, were tied in the election for mayor. The moderates urged King to delay any actions, fearing a blow-up that would work to Conner’s favor. In the April run-off, Conner was defeated, but incredibly he and the other two commissioners refused to step down, leaving a divided government and Conner still in charge of the police.
The protests began the next day with lunch counter sit-ins, but most of the counters just closed down. Protests in subsequent days sputtered as well. Little was reported about them in the news media, and Boutwell, the new mayor, urged people of both races to, in his words, “calmly ignore what is not being attempted in Birmingham.”
Still, King was determined to go through with his plans. So, on April 12, Good Friday, he joined a protest march, violating a city injunction prohibiting him from leading demonstrations, and was arrested and jailed. In jail, he learned in a phone call to his wife, Coretta, that President Kennedy had called to ask her about him. But he was discouraged to find himself criticized in much of the national media as a radical, with Birmingham’s Mayor Boutwell, of all people, being quoted as calling for “mutual respect and understanding.”
But what really irked him was a letter published on the front page of the Birmingham newspaper from what are described as eight “leading Protestant, Catholic, and Jewish clerics” attacking the protests as “untimely”, saying they would “incite hatred and violence” and that such “extreme measures” were not justified.
These were the very people who at some level King had seen as allies, leaders who had objected to Governor George Wallace’s declaration of “segregation, now and forever!” at his inauguration only four months before. For him, it was an awakening, a moment of clarity. As he began scribbling on margin of the newspaper he discovered a new voice, a more universal, prophetic voice. He framed his indignation as personal disappointment, but the point he made was broader. He was zeroing in on the tamed and temporizing church, the one that affirmed high principle, but stepped away when the principle was most clearly at stake. Against the claims of clerics that he was creating tension, he invited them to observe something that from their place of personal privilege they had missed.
Those who were marching, he reminded them, “are not the creators of the tension. We merely bring to the surface the hidden tension that is already alive.” And leaving no question of how strongly he felt, he turned to a vivid metaphor, comparing racism to a boil that, rather than be ignored, “must be opened with all its pus-flowing ugliness to the natural medicines of air and light before it can be cured.” There was no turning back now. The stakes were too high.
Just how high became clear days after King was released from jail. Other movement leaders had been training high school students in non-violent methods, and when King returned they urged a bold shift in strategy. Rather than seeking to enlist fearful adults, it would be the children who would lead the next wave of marches.
On May 2nd at around 1 p.m. a group of about 50 high school students marched two abreast out of 16th Street Baptist Church singing “We Shall Overcome” as bystanders watched in Kelly Ingram Park across the street. They were promptly arrested by police for violating court injunctions and were loaded into paddy wagons. But no sooner was one group arrested than another group emerged from the church.
And so it continued throughout the day. By nightfall some 600 children were in police custody and the city was running out of places to put them. So, the next day the police strategy shifted from arrest to deterrence. Bull Conner ordered fire hoses brought in and as the children approached he warned them to turn back, “or you might get wet.” They did.
Many of the first group retreated after being soaked, but others just sat on the sidewalk and endured the spray. So, Conner ordered water cannons that forced the spray from two hoses into a single nozzle – devices said to be capable of stripping the bark off trees at 100 feet. Television cameras captured the spray from those hoses propelling children tumbling over and over down the street, as if in a high wind.
Meanwhile, organizers directed other groups of protesting children away from the hoses, outflanking firefighters with hoses. So, Conner ordered K-9 units to rush the demonstrators with dogs. City leaders and pundits criticized march leaders for putting children in danger, but King replied that these people showed no such tender solicitude when it came to the many deprivations these children endured due to segregation.
A couple of days of pandemonium ended with a truce of sorts between the march leaders and the city, but the tide had turned. As the protests continued, white business leaders began meeting secretly to talk about how to end this stand-off, and eventually King was brought quietly into the conversation. After several tense days, a settlement was announced that would integrate Birmingham’s public facilities – rest rooms, water fountains, lunch counters – release prisoners of the movement who remained in jail and set up a biracial committee to hear ongoing concerns.
The agreement left much to be done. Several bombings followed, including the home of King’s brother, A.D., and the motel where King usually stayed, followed by some rioting in response.
But the agreement held, and, what must have been sweet in King’s ears, a month later President Kennedy gave his first address on the subject of civil rights, and his words echoed King’s rhetoric in his Letter from the Birmingham City Jail:
“We preach freedom around the world, and we mean it,” Kennedy said, “And we cherish our freedom here at home. But are we to say to the world – and much more importantly, to each other – that this is the land of the free, except for negroes, that we have no second-class citizens, except for Negroes, that we have no class or caste system, no ghettos, no master race, except with respect for Negroes?” Extemporaneously, he added, “we owe them, and we owe ourselves, a better country.”
In one of the sad ironies of the Civil Rights movement, among those listening in his car radio to Kennedy’s address that night was Medger Evers, a field worker for the NAACP in Jackson, Mississippi. Evers’ wife had let the children stay up late to let them hear what their father thought of the speech. When Evers arrived home, he had barely gotten out of his car before he was shot with a deer rifle; he died shortly afterward.
King went on in August to give his electrifying speech in the March on Washington, but in Birmingham, controversy still surrounded desegregation. In September President Kennedy federalized National Guard troops to protect black students after a federal judge ordered that they be admitted to three public schools.
Only five days later, at 16th Street Baptist Church as preparations were being made for Youth Sunday – “The Love that Forgives” was the topic – a bomb exploded in a stairway of the church leading to the sanctuary and four girls preparing to take part in the service were killed. The city was stunned, and at a service where King spoke remembering the girls, 8,000 people attended, including 800 pastors of both races. A small black marker outside of 16th Street Baptist inscribed with the names of the murdered girls may be the most haunting memorial of the Civil Rights Era in Birmingham today.
50 years later, then, we are left wondering what this transformative time, only about eight months at a pivotal moment in American history, has to teach us.
Audre Lorde’s searing poem serves as a reminder of what was and remains at stake for people in such oppressed circumstances. It’s a perspective few of us here have ever glimpsed, of living on a shoreline where the simplest decisions – where to step, whom to talk to – are potentially life threatening, where fear is wielded by those in power as a weapon to silence, fear, even, of the rising and setting of the sun, of full or empty stomachs, fear that those we love will be snatched from us, fear that our voices will put us in danger or be misconstrued, yet knowing that silence perpetuates the soul-killing reality of their lives.
In the end, as Martin Luther King Jr. recognized, as the students pouring from 16th Street Baptist Church understood, it was better to speak, since as far as their oppressors were concerned, they were never meant to survive.
This is the awakening that King experienced while writing his letter from the Birmingham City Jail. The seeming moderation of the white clergy was in the end a repudiation of the black populace and their claim that their very being was at stake in the segregated South. Their call for order in the face of injustice and humiliation made clear where they stood on this crucial question of survival.
Return again, return again, return to the home of your soul.
And what’s remarkable is that facing that existential threat, King elected not to dismiss or demean his critics. Instead, he appealed to them to look to their hearts, to find that vital and hopeful essence within them and then see the same essence in those with standing up to high-power hoses and police dogs, to feel the deep human connection to each of them.
Return to who you are, Return to what you are.
Return to where you are born and reborn again.
By that essential nature – the light of human conscience, he called it – he appealed to them, too, to awaken, to see in these marchers people of dignity and worth, brothers and sisters in a struggle for freedom.
Return again, return again, return to the home of your soul.
Sad to say, it was an imaginative leap too large for most to make. And so, while the genius and moral strength of the Civil Rights movement won many victories for an oppressed people, we are left even today with a kind of spiritual deadness that pervades many conversations around race.
It may be, as Naomi Shihab Nye says, that too few of us have learned the “tender gravity” of kindness. Perhaps it is because we have not experienced or acknowledged the losses and the sorrows that have piled up around us, experiences, she tells us, that teach kindness as the deepest thing inside.
Amid all this tumult, the tragedies that continue to multiply, it may be that it is only kindness that makes sense anymore, kindness that makes no judgment, that simply sees in the other, one like ourselves.
It’s a continuing legacy from the struggles of Birmingham: that we might step beyond our comfort and risk coming to know the larger truth of our oneness as one people.
Even today, many years later, there is something in me that resists going there. It was 1999, with all its cosmological portent – the coming of a new century, a new millennium. But I didn’t attend to much of it, stuck as I was in my own “slough of despond,” as John Bunyan once called it.
After 20 years in newspaper journalism, 15 of them at one newspaper, steadily working my way up in positions of increasing prominence and visibility, I had, without entirely knowing how or why, been bumped out of a job I loved. Oh, I could say it wasn’t my fault, that it was economic pressure, pressures, really, that were affecting the whole industry that forced the cutbacks that my employer undertook.
I wasn’t the only one affected. Some people lost their jobs. At least I was still working. All the same, the position I ended up with didn’t feel like a plum. I had been a reporter with a byline with relatively flexible hours, hunting out and then writing stories in a field I enjoyed. My new assignment had me working second shift, parked in front of a computer for eight hours a day picking over other people’s copy.
To say I was unhappy doesn’t quite tell it. What it really felt like was repudiation, a judgment that I had been weighed and found wanting, that I had not simply failed but that I was, in fact, “a failure.” The metaphor that Bunyan offers in Pilgrim’s Progress is a good one. This place feels like a swamp where you wallow about, bedaubed by dirt, addled, unsure of any way out with this soul-sapping burden on your back, weighing you down.
Anticipating the direction where my life seemed to be taking me, I asked the people organizing worship services at the UU church we attended whether I might address the subject in a worship service. Sure, they said.
And thus emerged my sermon, “The Art of Failing.” I cringe a bit now looking back at it. I certainly felt very brave standing in front of those folks confessing my misfortune and asserting that there was some “art” to be found in that moment. We’ve all heard the talk – taking lemons and making lemonade, making “beautiful” failures that bring us to some transformative place. In the moment, though, it was hard to see how that happens. Most of what I remember feeling at the time was how hollow the message coming from my mouth felt in my own ears.
Failing isn’t something that we like to dwell on much, and the further on we get in our lives such losses feel less like setbacks and more like existential judgments. It’s said that when you’re in your 20s or early 30s you have this narrative running in your head – “I’m young, I have promise. I have everything going for me.” Setbacks, sure, but you recalibrate, lick your wounds a little and move on.
For me, this sermon came right about the time of my 46th birthday. Whatever narrative I might have thought I was living had faded, and the passing of time was taking on new weight. I was in need of a new story, but where would it come from?
Beginning again – it’s a fact of life. Jobs change, marriages fail, stuff happens. We need to let something go and find a new direction. Where do we start? It’s tempting to begin, as I did, by making our lives as full as possible. I began scrambling for free-lance writing jobs, bearing down on my resume and getting it around. All productive stuff, at one level, but also in many ways it was work to keep my frantic mind occupied. If I was busy, I wouldn’t have to dwell on the fear and sadness I was feeling. But at the same time this busyness kept me from opening to something new.
The Buddhist writer Pema Chodron remarks that fear often arises from a sense of poverty, a feeling that we are lacking something and we need to scramble somehow to find it and fill our gaping need.
We can’t relax with ourselves. Instead, we are preoccupied by this script that runs as if on a loop, repeating over and over, reciting our inadequacies. Wherever we go, it runs like elevator music, below the level of our consciousness, until every once in a while something happens that seems to reinforce this script. Then, the music swells and we’re reminded: there it is again, proof of our inadequacy.
Where’s the way out? I’ve suggested this month that we might think of the process of beginning as a discipline. Oddly enough, in this circumstance, beginning starts with a full stop. Like rebooting a balky hard drive, we need to disrupt the scripts and simply be present to ourselves: unrated, unevaluated, unjudged.
Let the busy mind settle down:
enter into a moment where we are not awaiting,
not hoping, not longing,
just welcoming, accepting.
In that space, Pema Chodron says, in time we experience a pause, as if awakening from a dream. Here we find a moment of what the Buddhist’s call maitri, a complete acceptance, or unconditional friendship with ourselves as we are. It’s not something new that suddenly arises. It’s not a matter of fixing or improving some debility, making up for some lack, but a settled awareness of and appreciation for who we are. It is in essence accepting our inherent worthiness.
Pema Chodron is careful to distinguish this from the phenomenon that she calls “self cherishing.” This is essentially the practice of seeking always to protect and comfort ourselves, seeking to assure that we are always happy and in no distress. To do this, though, we put up walls against potentially disturbing experience and become self-absorbed.
It is, as the Buddhists say, the root of all suffering, and it is the center of our experience of failure. Failure, after all, is the experience of falling short of our expectation. And where does the expectation come from? Well, it is the dream of the ego. We cherish this image that we have constructed of ourselves. We persuade ourselves that it is us, oh marvelous, wonderful us. We may even grow a feeling of entitlement. It’s what we’re due, after all. We’ve put in the time; we’ve hit the marks.
But, no. Sorry, not going to happen. We can rant, we can weep, we can withdraw, and still, there it is: evidence, in the end, not of our unworthiness, but of the unworthy expectations we have created for ourselves.
And here the Buddhists offer an interesting perspective that takes some reflecting to sort through. They say that we need to just sit with ourselves, letting go of the scripts, the expectations, the assignments we give to ourselves. And with all of that cleared out, something appears: something true, something good. And here’s where the twist comes in: Pema Chodron argues that as soon as we begin to know ourselves, we begin to forget ourselves. We no longer need to be so self-involved. From that settled place we not only fully appreciate ourselves, but we also appreciate others and the wider world.
The story is told that early in his career the writer E.B. White wrote a letter to his wife, Katherine Sergeant Angell saying that he felt like a failure and thought he ought to give up working at the New Yorker, where he was one of its treasured writers. Angell wrote back to say that whatever his misgivings, there was no denying that he was a writer, and a good one. “For you to give up now would be like a violinist good enough to perform in one of the four or five leading orchestras in the world giving up fiddling because he couldn’t be Heifetz. It doesn’t seem sensible for such a person to give up music, the thing he most loved in the world, because he can’t be Heifetz.
It’s a feeling that any of us knows. Given the chance, most of us wouldn’t have any trouble naming half a dozen people who perform whatever calling we may have better then we do.
And? None of that changes the truth that we live, how we are called to be who we are. It is ironic that one of the ways we best assure our own suffering is to create extravagant and heroic visions of ourselves – the best, the richest, the smartest, the foxiest, the suavest – images we can only disappoint.
Part of beginning again is correcting our vision, giving ourselves the space to see who we are, how the world is, the abundant reality we inhabit. I think this is what draws me to Wislawa Szymborska’s poem – her picture of life as scattered images, snapshots of seemingly random moments that knit themselves into our experience. The world for each of us is described not by some overarching scheme but by a collection of these moments – getting covered in leaves, stroking the fur of a dog, a nighttime conversation with the light off, stumbling on a stone, following a spark on the wind with our eyes.
They are our context. That doesn’t give them any privileged meaning, but they do locate us. They are the place where we begin. And so, perhaps life is less like the scroll of a heroic journey than a series of improv workshops. And we could hardly want a better guide on this path than Tina Fey.
So, here we are, you and I, entering this scene. One or another of us, or perhaps the leader of this workshop, or someone from the audience tosses a premise into our midst. What do we do? Well, calling the game off or withdrawing into ourselves isn’t an option. We’re in this. The only way forward is through.
So, what does Tiny say? The first rule of improvisation is: agree. Don’t question the premise, don’t dispute the scene. Accept it and then engage willingly with those that you’re thrown in with. Our own ego fades into the background as we give ourselves to the circumstances before us. Start with a “Yes,” Tina says, and see where that takes you.
But don’t stop there. In improvisation, we need to do more than just say “Yes” to the situation. We also need to add something of our own – our own insight, our own compassion, our own genius to the situation. This doesn’t mean pontificating or philosophizing or otherwise commenting on the situation at hand. It means stepping in and helping to advance the action, to move the situation forward.
That’s the second rule of improvisation. Don’t be afraid to contribute. Forget about second-guessing yourself. “Oh, I don’t think it‘s good enough.” Launch into it. Anything that keeps the action moving will keep the scene alive.
And in making your contributions don’t be timid or tentative. The least helpful addition to the scene is the offering of questions. What’s going on? Where are we? Who are you? Your guess is as good as mine. In posing questions, we take ourselves out of the scene and put the onus on others to move it forward. Take ownership of your perspective, your insight, your vision. You may open a wonderful new direction for the scene to take.
And that, of course, leads to what Tina Fey calls “the best rule,” the fundamental assumption underlying all improv work: There are no mistakes, only opportunities!
Really? Oh, gosh I don’t know. I mean, sure, this is fun – life is an improv workshop. I get it. But there are no mistakes? I don’t know about you, but I make all kinds of mistakes, and some of them are real whoppers. Only opportunities? Isn’t that a little Pollyannaish?
Well, OK. Let me tweak that a little. Yeah, we make mistakes. Perhaps a better way to put it is: there are no failures. Failure, remember, implies exhausting our resources, coming to an end. Our mistakes do not bring us to an end: they merely bring us up short.
Like working through an improv scene that gets convoluted and confused, we discover that we need to shift gears and find a different path. It may not be newspaper journalism any more. Perhaps it’s a line of work that not only provides an outlet for writing but also opens up my heart.
So, yes, opportunities: happy accidents, in Tina Fey’s words. We are offered many opportunities in our lives to begin again: to find our callings, to begin new relationships, to let go of unhelpful scripts. And we begin by making friends with ourselves, the jumble of experience, insight and aptitude that we carry into the abundant reality of the world.
In the end, it’s enough. We’re enough. So may it be.
Music was the center of this single service at the year’s end. Together, we sang and learned about some of our favorite hymns, rounds, and chants. All voices were welcomed for this intergenerational service. (Audio of this service cannot be published on the website due to copyright laws.)
