The Cost of Freedom

This is the text of the reflections I offered on Sunday, May 26, 2019 to the congregation I serve in Charlottesville, Virginia.

Every year until his death in 2012, Senator Daniel Inouye introduced legislation to change the date of Memorial Day from what it is now, the last Monday in May, back to what it had been before, May 30^th (regardless of what day that fell on in any given year).  That change occurred back in 1968.  If Inouye, who entered the Senate in 1963, took up this cause immediately, he would have introduced this bill over 40 times.

Marking Memorial Day on May 30^th goes back to the mid-1800s.  The precursor of Memorial Day was Decoration Day.  The “official” history, the one we most likely learned in school (if we learned about any of this at all), is that in 1868, three years after the Civil War ended, the head of an organization of Union veterans, Maj. Gen. John A. Logan, declared that May 30^th should be a day for decorating the graves of the more than 620,000 soldiers who died during the war, “whose bodies,” he wrote, “now lie in almost every village and hamlet churchyard in the land.”   It didn’t matter on which side of the war you’d fought – Logan believed that the ultimate sacrifice paid by both Union and Confederate soldiers alike deserved to be remembered.  It is said that he thought the day should be celebrated in the spring, and that May 30^th was chosen because it was a date on which no battle had been fought, making it a day to honor all the soldiers who died in all the battles of the war.

The story we most likely weren’t taught in school is that in 1865, at the very tail end of the war, as the white residents of Charleston, South Carolina fled the city in advance of the arrival of Union troops, the Black citizens remained, welcoming the troops back to the city where the war had begun four years earlier. 

A makeshift prison for Union soldiers had been erected in the middle of what had been a race track.  The men who died there buried hastily in a mass grave.  After the Union soldiers arrived, Black workmen from Charleston dug up the remains of those soldiers and re-buried them with proper respect, creating a proper cemetery.  Above the entrance they placed a sign that read, “Martyrs of the Race Track.”  This new cemetery was dedicated on May 1^st, with a parade that included 10,000 people and which the New York Tribune described as “a procession of friends and mourners as South Carolina and the United States never saw before.”  It seems to me that this, truly, was the 1^st Decoration Day, and is the real root of our modern Memorial Day.

But why did Senator Inouye, and a large number of veteran’s groups, care about the date on which Memorial Day fell?  Why would he try year after year for more than forty years to get it changed?  The last Monday in May is easy to remember and plan for; May 30^th would be a Saturday one year and then a few years later it’d be a Wednesday; it’d keep moving throughout the week.  Inouye fought for the change in part because the last Monday in May made it so easy to plan for.  He, and as I said, a great many others, feared that what was going to be planned for each year was not how to honor the people who had died while serving in our nation’s military.  Instead, people would be figuring out what to do with a three-day weekend and the official beginning of summer.  In 2015, Marine Corps veteran Jennie Haskamp wrote a piece for The Washington Post in which she shared her frustration that meaning of Memorial Day had become “grilled meat, super-duper discounts, a day (or two) off work, beer, potato salad and porches draped in bunting.”  She argued that it should be a day to remember and reflect on the truth that freedom comes at a cost.

Stephen Stills – of Crosby, Stills, Nash, and Young – wrote a haunting song called, “Find the Cost of Freedom” which came out as the B side to their song, “Ohio,” written about the Kent State massacre.  The song is deceptively simple – it’s just two lines long:

“Find the cost of freedom buried in the ground. 
Mother Earth will swallow you, lay your body down.” 

Simple, right?  The complexity, the ambiguity of the song comes when you ask yourself who it’s talking to and what it’s talking about.  Soldiers are told that they are fighting for freedom, fighting to defend democracy, fighting to make the world more safe.  And I don’t know anyone who has ever served in the military, especially during times of war, who doesn’t know all too well that those things come at a cost.  Rows, and rows, and rows of headstones in Arlington National Cemetery; column after column, line after line of names on those polished black granite walls of the Vietnam War Memorial.  More importantly, and more impactfully, the cost of this particular father/mother/brother/sister/friend who will never attend another Memorial Day picnic.  This may not have been the band’s intention, but this song is talking to and about them.

At the same time, though, those who were protesting the military industrial machine also saw themselves as fighting for freedom; it was clear that they, too, needed to be willing to “lay their body down.”  And nearly every mass protest since, nearly every concerted effort for change, has seen at least some, “buried in the ground.” The song talks to, and about, them as well.

There are a number of different kinds of freedom, all of which come at a cost.

A woman who speaks up about sexual harassment in the workplace, seeking freedom from the prison of misogyny, has often paid for that freedom with the loss of her position and having her reputation dragged through the mud.  A trans teen who comes out, seeking freedom from the false identity society demands of them, may pay the cost of that freedom in rejection by family and friends, and all too often with emotional, psychic, and bodily harm.  A woman of color who dares to speak her truth in her own voice, seeking freedom from the oppression of a society that demands she speak and act in ways acceptable to white folk, can pay for that freedom by having to endure an angry backlash and attacks on her character.

There is a cost to freedom.

When someone comes to realize that divorce is the right thing for them, seeking freedom from a painful and maybe even dangerous marriage, they pay for that freedom in friends who take sides, loss of income, or status, or the dream of what they’d thought life would be like.  Choosing to leave the safety of a career, seeking freedom from something soul-sucking to pursue a passion, has the cost of the incredulity of those around them and the loss of what our society deems “security.”

The Catholic priest and Trappist monk Fr. Thomas Merton said that the purpose of our lives is to free ourselves from the “false self” in which we are trapped, so that we can live deeply, fully, richly the life of our “true self.”  This is something every religious tradition teaches – that we live imprisoned in suffering, delusion, sleep, sin, not-life, and that we should wake up and strive for freedom.

In the Hebrew scriptures it is said that it took Moses and the Israelites 40 years of wandering in the desert after leaving their captivity in Egypt before they entered the Promised Land of Canaan.  The distance between the two could actually have been traversed in less than two weeks.  One rabbinic interpretation is that God led them on that long, wandering way because all of those who had grown up with a captive’s experience and a captive’s mentality had to die before the people could enter the freedom of the Promised Land. 

Is there something in your life that you feel traps you, preventing you from living full and free?  Is there something that you do, or don’t do, because you feel that you “should,” or that it’s “expected” of you?  Is there some part of you that is stunted, held back, imprisoned?  Our faith challenges us to risk the discomfort, the pain, even, of striving for freedom – ours and that of “all of us imprisoned,” as our Opening Hymn put it. 

It tells us too, though, that there will always be a cost.  The journey from what was to what can be always requires us to leave things behind, even things that have been precious to us; it always calls for a “death” of some kind.  That is why so many of us so rarely attempt it.  We fear the cost will be too high.  Yet the experience of those who have come before us, and even our own lived experience, tells us that the cost of not making this journey, of remaining in our prisons, is even higher still.

This is one of the reasons that we so highly value community, because change is frightening and potentially dangerous … nearly impossible if we try it alone.  Together, though, we can encourage one another, inspire one another, carry one another when the going gets really tough.  And when we make it to the other side, enter the freedom of our own “promised land,” we may one day be able to look back at that which we left behind, that which had had to die, and then clean and decorate their graves knowing that the cost we paid was worth it.

May it be so.

Surprised by Joy

Elwyn Brooks White, better known as E. B. White, may be best known as the author of Charlotte’sWeb and Stuart Little, or, by people of a certain age, the co-author of a little volume often called Strunk & White or, more accurately The Elements of Style.  (Some people shudder at the memory of it; others delight in its clarity and decisiveness.  Most are surprised to know that it was written by the same author who wrote Charlotte’s Web.)

For 50 years White was a contributor to The New Yorker, most often writing what the magazine calls "Newsbreaks" which are short, witty comments on oddly worded writing, under various categories such as "Block That Metaphor."  (I got some of my love of words from these pieces, which my mother delightedly shared with me.)  White won a special Pulitzer Prize in 1978 for (in the words of the award), "his letters, essays and the full body of his work.”  He also received the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 1963.

In my research I came across this description of White that I just have to share with you all.  James Thurber, who also delighted my mother and me, once described White as a quiet man who disliked publicity and who, during his time at The New Yorker, would slip out of his office via the fire escape to a nearby branch of Schrafft's to avoid visitors whom he didn't know.  Thurber wrote:

Most of us, out of a politeness made up of faint curiosity and profound resignation, go out to meet the smiling stranger with a gesture of surrender and a fixed grin, but White has always taken to the fire escape. He has avoided the Man in the Reception Room as he has avoided the interviewer, the photographer, the microphone, the rostrum, the literary tea, and the Stork Club [a trendy nightclub in Manhattan]. His life is his own. He is the only writer of prominence I know of who could walk through the Algonquin lobby or between the tables at Jack and Charlie's and be recognized only by his friends.

White and his family came to live full-time at their farmhouse on the coast of Maine.  By all accounts he loved his life on the farm, relishing the delights – and there’s that word again – of the natural world that surrounded him.  In fact, he once stopped in his barn, captivated, watching a spider spinning her egg sac.  That spider eventually became “Charlotte.”  The Newbury Award winning author Kate DiCamillo, in her foreword to Charlotte's Web, quoted White as saying, "All that I hope to say in books, all that I ever hope to say, is that I love the world." All that I hope to say in books, all that I ever hope to say, is that I love the world.”

I tell you all of this to give you something of the background of the man who said the quote that’s at the heart of this morning’s service:

“I arise in the morning torn between a desire to improve the world and a desire to enjoy the world. This makes it hard to plan the day.”

It’s also sometimes remembered as (and I prefer this version):

“I arise in the morning torn between a desire to save the world and a desire to savor the world. This makes it hard to plan the day.”

There’s a condition known as “compassion fatigue,” or, “secondary traumatic stress.”  I’d wager that many of us, maybe most of us here, know at least a little something about it.  I cannot tell you how many people have told me that they’ve had to stop watching the news because they just can’t take it (especially since the Presidential election this past year, but honestly, for years and years before that as well).  We see:

• The seemingly constant shootings of unarmed black men by police officers who too often face no charges;
  
• The obscene income gap between the “haves” and the “have-nots” – a gap that is growing, leaving far too many people struggling just to eke out the most basic level of living;
  
• The rape culture in which we live and which is taken as the norm, apparently accepting (or ignoring) that a sexual assault occurs on average once every 2 minutes, and that one-in-five women will be raped at some point in their lives (a percentage that is significantly higher for women in LGBTQ communities);
  
• The so-called school-to-prison pipeline, pandemic in communities of color, which can be argued to begin as young as preschool, where black children are roughly 3 ½ times more likely than white children to receive one or more out-of-school suspensions;
  
• Environmental degradation so profound that many scientists think are nearing the point of no return, if we haven’t passed that already;
  
• Utter disregard for any kind of civil discourse, or even belief in things like “facts;”
  
• The intentional and explicit targeting of people in historically marginalized communities, rolling back any progress seen toward societal recognition of their full humanity;
  
• The disintegration, here and abroad, of the building blocs of democratic societies;

Of course, I could go on (and on, and on), yet just hearing such a list threatens to burn out even more people.  I recently re-watched the movie Where the Wild Things Are, in which the wild thing Carol at one point angrily shouts a litany of things that are wrong on their island, among which he includes the fact that the sun is dying and will have essentially burned out in something like 5 to 6 billion years.  The point?  Live is hard.

And I haven’t even brought up all of the local, personal tragedies and traumas we face – people we know who have just received serious health news, or our own receipt of a serious prognosis; the death of loved ones; accidents with catastrophic consequences (and even not so catastrophic ones); job loss or insecurity; addictions; divorces …

I could go on with this list, too, yet the point is the same:  life is hard.  And there is so much that is wrong with the world that many of us wake in the morning desiring to save the world.  Or we go to bed nearly broken by the secondary traumatic stress we find ourselves having to endure.  It’s as if the world itself, as if life itself, is one of J. K. Rowling’s Dementors – creatures who drain “peace, hope, and happiness out of the air around them.”  The world we live in threatens to such the joy from our lives, and has already done so in some cases.

There’s a story from the Buddhist tradition which tells of a mother who’d just gone through the death of her child.  Distraught, overcome, she seeks out the Buddha, whose teachings are said to be “medicine,” and begs him to bring her son back to life.  The Buddha tells her that she must bring him a mustard seed from a house that has known no suffering.  The woman goes door to door, asking for a mustard seed, but when she asks if there had ever been any suffering there, at each home she is told of some difficult thing the family had had to endure at some point.  After going to all of the houses in her village, the woman, undaunted, begins to visit neighboring villages, yet her experience is always the same.  Over time, though, the woman’s frantic desperation begins to be somewhat tempered by the kindness of the people she meets, the empathy and care she experiences, the evidence that even despite their sufferings the people she visits have gone on with their lives.  Finally, the woman returns to the Buddha.  “Have you found the seed from the house that has known no suffering?” he asks.  “I have found no such home,” she replied, “yet I now know that I am not alone.”  “That is good,” the Buddha said.  “I can not return your dead child to life, but I can return your life to you.  Go in peace.”

The Protestant theologian Frederick Buechner once wrote:

"You are alive. It needn't have been so. It wasn't so once, and it will not be so forever. But it is so now. And what is it like: to be alive in this maybe one place of all places anywhere where life is? Live a day of it and see. Take any day and be alive in it. Nobody claims that it will be entirely painless, but no matter. It is your birthday, and there are many presents to open. The world is to open."

“[T]here are many presents to open.  The world is to open.”

E. B. White was born in 1899, and died in 1985.  During those years he certainly saw how painful, how cruel, how hard life can be.  He saw wars, the civil rights struggle, the Great Depression.  He knew how much the world needed saving. 

And yet …  (Those who know me could have guessed that there’d be an “and yet” before we were through here, right?)

White knew how hard life in this world can be, and yet he also knew life’s wonders.  And so, he arose each morning “torn by the desire to save the world and to savor the world.”  For years I’d thought that it was this phrase, this seeming conundrum, that was the important point of thiS quotation.  I’ve lately come to realize that it’s actually what I’d thought was the throw-away that is the point.  “I arise in the morning torn between a desire to save the world and a desire to savor the world. This makes it hard to plan the day.”  This makes it hard to plan my day.  He is talking about making an active, conscious choice.  A choice he makes each day.  He knows the world needs saving – oh how we know that too, we know so, so, so many ways that our world needs us to work for its salvation.  He also knows how worthy the world is of being savored.  And he is torn, as so many of us are.  Yet he also knows that it is within his power to choose where he will put his focus.  He gets to plan his day; it isn’t planned for him by either the savoring nor the saving.  And so it is for us, too.

It’s not easy, but as Buechner said, nobody claimed that it would be “entirely painless.”  That doesn’t mean it’s impossible, though.  And I’m going to tell you this morning — and remind myself — that it’s absolutely possible.  We … can … choose … day-by-day … whether we have the strength today to save, or whether we need to restore ourselves with a little savoring. 

One last thought:

While it’s true that we often need to make a choice, we don’t always.  Sometimes that savoring can be part of the saving.  In fact, you might say that sometimes the ability to savor the world saves the act of striving to save it from completely burning us out.

A few weeks back I told the story of the activist Emma Goldman, who is remembered as saying “If I can’t dance, I don’t want to be part of your revolution.”  It’s more likely that what she actually said was something more like, “what’s the point of a revolution if you can’t dance?”  Either way, the point is the same.  When we’re involved in the work of striving to save the world, when we’re knee deep in the effort to address the ubiquitous injustices we can’t help but see all around us, it is essential that we take – that we make – the time to dance, sing, laugh, savor.  Rev. Alex put it really well last week:  “Pick your tool, if you have not already. And continue your work, side-by-side. And, sing some work songs while you are at it.”

Look around you.  The people you are sitting with, and most likely you, yourself, are people who are involved in the work of making the world a better place, have been involved in that work … some of you for a very long time.  Look around you.  [Seriously, look at the people around you.]  Drink in their beauty (remembering to remember your own, of course).  Let their commitment(s) inspire you.  There are so many good examples in this room of people committed to making this world a better, more just, more love-filled place.  Savor one another.  And then let’s back the work of saving this hurting, beautiful world.

Pax tecum,

RevWik

On Falling and Rising

Her marriage had imploded, leaving her a divorced, single mother, dependent on welfare to get her from day-to-day.  She was severely depressed, and things felt so bad to her that she considered suicide.  To make matters worse, perhaps, she also was an aspiring author.  She said ever since she had learned what a writer was, she wanted to be one.  So she would take her baby and a number of yellow legal pads down to a local coffee shop, where the baby would sleep in her carriage, and the woman would nurse one coffee, and write.

She finally did finish the novel she’d been working on, but then couldn’t find a publisher.  Some say she was rejected 9 times, others 12, but it is certain that the head of the publishing house that finally did pick the book up never actually read the manuscript himself.  He’d given it to his eight year old daughter, who proceeded to nag him for months, wanting to know what happened next. 

And, so, Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone was published.

As far back as the 5^th century B.C.E., the Chinese Philosopher Confucius was teaching, “Our greatest glory is not in never falling, but in rising every time we fall.”  Nanakorobi Yaoki is a Japanese saying that translates as, “Fall seven times; rise eight times.”  (This is metaphoric, of course.  It’s not the physical act of “falling” and “rising” that we’re talking about here, but the “falling” and “rising” of our spirits, of our courage, of our resolve, of our living.)

There are so many stories about people who proved that on that eighth time rising miraculous things can happen.  (A quick search turned up hundreds of such stories, and I’ve got tell you – editing them down to the one’s I’m going to tell you was really, really hard.)  Here are a few:

• Harrison Ford was told by movie execs that he simply didn’t have what it takes to be a star

• Before I Love Lucy, Lucille Ball was widely regarded as a failed actress, nothing more than a B movie star.  Even her drama instructors didn’t feel she could make it, telling her to try another profession.

• Walt Disney was fired by a newspaper editor because, “he lacked imagination and had no good ideas.”   But he went on to start … a number of businesses that didn’t last too long and ended with bankruptcy and failure.

• After an aspiring actor’s first screen test, an MGM Testing Director noted, “Can’t act. Can’t sing. Slightly bald. Can dance a little.” He was talking about Fred Astaire.

• Emily Dickinson wrote almost 1800 works, yet had fewer than a dozen poems published in her lifetime.

• Madeleine L'Engle's, A Wrinkle in Time was rejected 26 times before it was picked up.

• Early in Elvis Presley’s career, the manager of the Grand Ole Opry fired him after just one performance, saying, “You ain’t goin’ nowhere, son. You ought to go back to drivin’ a truck.”

• William Golding’s book Lord of the Flies. — often included on lists of best novels ever written — was rejected 21 times.

• Robert Pirsig’s highly influential, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance was turned down 121.

• Stephen King’s first novel, Carrie, was rejected 30 times.  In his early days, King has said, he would take all of the rejection notes he got and put them on a nail in the wall.  Eventually there were so many that the nail fell down.  So, he replaced it with a spike and kept on writing.

Nanakorobi Yaoki Whether they knew the words or not, all of these people fell a whole lot more than seven times, and all of them rose at least one more time than they fell.

Three more stories.  (I can’t resist):

• Ludwig van Beethoven’s teachers thought he was hopeless and would never succeed as either a violinist or a composer.

• Thomas Edison’s earliest teachers thought that he was “too stupid to learn anything,” and he was fired from his first two jobs for not being productive enough. And you may have heard the famous story that when working to create the filament for his incandescent light, he made something like 1,000 attempts before finally getting it right.  When asked how he dealt with so much failure he said, “I never failed.  I successfully discovered 1,000 ways it wouldn’t work.”

• This last story is one of someone who is perhaps best known for his starring role in the seminal film Space Jam, or maybe because he’s often referred to as the greatest basketball player who ever lived, Michael Jordan has said, “I have missed more than 9,000 shots in my career. I have lost almost 300 games. On 26 occasions I have been entrusted to take the game winning shot, and I missed. I have failed over and over and over again in my life. And that is why I succeed.” 

Look at it from either side: “I never failed.  I successfully discovered 1,000 ways it wouldn’t work.” or “I have failed over and over again in my life.  And that is why I succeed.”  It essentially comes down to Nanakorobi Yaoki and the promise that if only we can rise more than we fall …

I would wager that most of us haven’t faced situations as dramatic as these, yet I’d also bet that we’ve all had times in our lives when we felt as if the cards were stacked against us, as though nothing would – or could – go right, as though we knew that other shoe was going to drop pretty soon (and that there was an infinite amount of shoes after that one).  No doubt most of us have been knocked down more than once, and I know that in my own life there’ve been times when I thought I just simply didn’t have it in me to get up again.  Any of you been there?

Now keep in mind: the reason the stories I’ve just shared are so inspiring is that we know the outcome.  We know what the people in them didn’t know at the time, because at the time most of those people probably felt just as badly as we do when we’ve been knocked down (or out).   They did not know that success was around the corner.  After Carrie was rejected so many times, Stephen King gave up, and threw the manuscript in the garbage.  It’s a good thing that his wife fished it out and encouraged him to try again, because he’s now published more than 90 books. At the time, though, he had no idea of what lay ahead of him.  At the time, all of that rejection, all of that “failure,” all of that falling down was as devastating for him as it can be for us.

Brené Brown, who has her own story of falling and rising, has put it quite simply, “The truth is that falling hurts. The dare is to keep being brave and feel your way back up.”  There it is.  When you don’t know how things could possibly turn out okay in the end, all we know is that falling down hurts.  Because it does.  It hurts a lot. 

So it’s no wonder that a whole lot of people simply stop daring, stop taking risks, stop … well … stop starting up again when all that we know has come to a grinding halt.  “The truth is that falling hurts. The dare is to keep being brave and feel your way back up.”

I recently read somewhere that that Japanese proverb has a second part.  Fall seven times.  Rise eight times.  Your life begins today.

That is why we are encouraged to rise that eighth time.  That is the reason we’re told to get up again even when getting up seems like the last thing we can possibly do, the last thing we can possibly want to do because the falling down has hurt so much and we really don’t want to get hurt any more.

The author, historian, and philosopher, Will Durant, collaborated with his equally impressive wife, Ariel Durant, in writing the 11-volume work, The Story of Civilization.  I’d imagine that after all that he’d know a thing or two about the human experience.  Here’s something he said:

“Forget mistakes. Forget failures. Forget everything except what you are going to do right now, and do it. Today is your lucky day.”

It is worth our continuing to risk falling, to actually experience falling, and failing, over and over again, because, no matter how many times we’ve fallen, when we rise again our lives can begin again.  Living this way is worth the risks because the promise of a new start, the promise of a new path, the promise of a (re)new(ed) life is waiting for us.  This is true whether we’re talking about individuals or a community like this.  Taking the risk – the risk of falling, the risk of failing, the risk of hurting is worth it because of what we can find on the other side.

Pax tecum,

RevWik

How Do You Want to Bloom Here?

This is the text of the reflection I offered to the congregation I serve on Sunday, April 25th, 2018.  (If you prefer, you can listen to it.) 

I want to thank those of you – both here and not here this morning – who have taken the step of formalizing your membership in this community.  The two things I like to say to new members are:  congratulations (because you’ve joined a wonderful congregation), and thank you (because by your joining, and by bringing the gifts and spirit only you have, you are making it more wonderful still).  So, congratulations and thank you.

I must say, though, that you’ve picked an … interesting … time to take this step.  There’s supposedly an ancient Chinese saying, “May you live in interesting times,” said not as a blessing, but a curse.  “May you live in … interesting … times.”  It turns out that it isn’t a bit of ancient Chinese philosophy, yet we certainly can understand using the word “interesting” as an ironic euphemism for … well … for the kind of times we’re living in.  And while I could be talking about “the times we’re living in” in relation to this time in our nation, or this time in our city, this morning I’m most interested in the … interesting … times we find ourselves in here in our congregation.

This is a time when many people are questioning whether or not this is the right congregation for them, or who don’t know if they want to, or even if they can, go with it in the direction it seems to be going.  This is a time when people are even wondering about whether Unitarian Universalism, as a faith tradition, is what they’d thought it was, and whether they can honestly and with integrity continue to call themselves UUs.  As I said, this is very much an … interesting … time to be joining TJMC.  You’re joining just as a lot of people are wondering about, and fearing for, the future of the congregation.  There are those who are saying that we’re in a time of crisis.

Not me.  Not me.  I believe firmly that his disconcerting disquiet and disequilibrium we’re experiencing right now is not a problem.  I think it’s a good thing, something to lean into it. I see it as an opportunity. 

My Mother-in-Law, herself a retired Methodist minister (and well versed in the ways of congregational life), asked me just the other day if what has been happening at our church had “calmed down” at all.  I told her that I certainly hope things haven’t calmed down too much.  I reminded her of the Rev. Dr. King saying that there are some things to which we all should be “maladjusted.”

I want to be clear that I don’t think being uncomfortable just for the sake of feeling uncomfortable is a good thing.  Nor have I forgotten that while the famous description of religion’s purpose is about “afflicting the comfortable,” it also says that our work as a faith community is about “comforting the afflicted.”  I know that; I do.  Yet don’t we all know how easy it is to move from comfort to complacency?  And sometimes it can be hard to keep track of who, in our culture, needs comforting and who’s in need of some afflicting.  This isn’t another sermon about our racial justice work, or even about the current controversies surrounding us.  I’m really talking this morning about how our faith invites us to live our lives, you and me.

Unitarian Universalist unequivocally calls us to reject complacency in all its forms.  At its best, and perhaps more than any other of the organized religious responses to life we humans have developed, it calls on us to refuse to be too settled, too satisfied.  It calls on us to question … everything … and to keep on questioning.  As one of our hymns puts it, we believe that, “to question is the answer,” or as an old bumper stick said, “Unitarian Universalism – leaving no answer unquestioned.”  We are famously not bound by creed or dogma; we are charged with searching for truth and meaning – on our own and in community – and understand this to be a life-long search.

One of my favorite spiritual teachers is the astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson.  (If you’ve never seen the video of him giving a talk that’s usually described as “the greatest sermon ever,” it’s well worth Googling when you get home.)  He has said that for a real scientist is kind of disappointing if an experiment proves their hypothesis, because then it’s all over and done with.  The excitement comes when an experiment doesn’t prove your hypothesis and opens up a whole new host of questions.  According to Tyson, it’s the questions, not the answers, which drive the scientific enterprise; scientists are much more interested in exploring the currently-still-mysterious, rather than simply creating a catalogue of the known.

I love this so much because I think that it’s the purpose of our Unitarian Universalist faith as well.  When we’re at our best, it’s the enterprise our congregations exist to help each of us, and all of us, engage.  We are not supposed to be satisfied with the answers we found ten years ago, fifteen years ago, twenty years ago, or even, necessarily, last year.  We believe in evolution not just in biology, but in our understanding as well.

Years ago, while serving another congregation, I had a sign on the board in front of the church for several months.  It said: “If you can’t change your mind, how do you know you still have one?”  The Christian theologian, and Catholic Saint, Augustine of Hippo said way back in the 5^th century, si comprehendis non est Deus.  (One of the few bits of Latin I remember.) That translates as, “If you understand it, it’s not God.”  And I’d say that whatever terms or images we use to describe Ultimate Reality, that Spirit of Life we sing about most Sundays, our faith calls us to have that same awareness and attitude:  if we understand it, it’s not … It.  That’s why we’re called to the search for truth and meaning, and not to the celebratory party for truth and meaning discovered.

But this is hard.  It is hard to keep questioning our answers.  It’s hard to keep looking for new ways of seeing, listening for new ways of hearing, finding new ways of being in the world – especially when the laundry’s been piling up, and the fridge is getting a little empty.  With so much … chaos … swirling around us it would be nice to have something solid to hold on to.  Yet just as comfort can change to complacency, something solid can easily become something stagnant.

This is why I think that this … interesting … time of disquiet and discomfort is not a crisis but an opportunity.  It is an opportunity, for us as individuals and as a congregation, to really wrestle with – or, as I prefer to say – to dance with our principles, our values, and our understandings of things.  It’s an opportunity to re-examine what we really believe, something our faith doesn’t dictate to us but, rather, invites us to discover for ourselves.  It is an opportunity to ask questions:  What does it mean to be truly welcoming if in welcoming some people we unavoidably exclude others?  What does it mean to be committed to being a truly safe place for people who have historically been, and are being still, marginalized if it means things we’re accustomed to have to change?  What does it mean to disagree with others, risky though that might feel, yet still be one community?  (Can we trust each other enough to do that?  What does it mean if we can’t?)  What does my “belonging” to this community mean?  What expectations can I reasonably have, and what can be expected of me?  Do my wants, my perceived needs, my desires, my preferences have to be met for me to say that things are “going well”?  (What is the measure of the “success,” if you will, of our mutual ministry?)  What are the limits – or are there limits – to my commitment to this place and these people?  Do I really belong here? 

These are the kinds of questions people say that they’re dancing with these days precisely because of the … interesting … times in which we find ourselves.  Yet the truth is, these are the kind of questions we ought to be dancing with all the time!

Mickey ScottBey Jones, an anti-racist organizer, has written about real, deep, transformative relationships with perhaps a surprising metaphor.  Deep, transformative relationships are the kind I hope we’d agree we ought to be striving to create here, and we might think of them as cool and comforting, soothing and supportive.  Yet Mickey ScottBey Jones wrote:

[R]elationship is the sandpaper that wears away our resistance to change. Relationship is the abrasion that agitates enough to make a way forward … it smooths the way for the sacred, even as it rubs us raw.

Relationship is the sandpaper of life.

We are being offered an opportunity – again, as individuals and as a community – to ask ourselves deep and fundamental questions about our faith tradition, our own faith, the purpose of this community (and others like it), and about the meaning of our membership in it.  At its best, a faith community offers us an opportunity to discover the way into our fullness, an opportunity to truly bloom.  In our faith tradition we are challenged to discover that way for ourselves, and to keep discovering new dimensions of that “way,” so that our blooming can become ever more beautiful and fragrant. 

For me, the most important question in all of this is whether we will make good use of this opportunity.  The question to that is something that only you, and all of us together, can answer.

[The Parting Words were the well-known quotation about question by Rainer Maria Rilke from Letters to a Young Poet.  They are well worth remembering in just about any times, be they ... interesting ... or not.]

Pax tecum,

RevWik

The Mirror Has Been Held Up. Are We Brave Enough To Look?

This is the text of the entire service held Wednesday evening, February 28, 2018.  It was to have been a service celebrating the 75th Anniversary of the Founding of the Congregation -- there was to have been a time for families together, a community dinner, a service of celebration, and ... cake!  A racist event which took place earlier in the week demanded a change of plans.  Simply, how could we sit around together, eating cake, when something like this happened within, and from within, the very community we were to be celebrating?  The celebration has not been canceled, but it has been postponed, because congregational leadership recognized that what we really needed at this time was an honest look at what happened, and what it says about our community.  [I will be reflecting on these themes further in my sermon this coming Sunday.]

GREETINGS

Good evening.  This was to be a celebration of the anniversary of the founding of this congregation.  But then, just three days ago, on Monday morning, our Director of Administration and Finance, Christina Rivera, was doing her job, going through the mail that had accumulated over the weekend.  Along with the bills and the solicitations there was a plain piece of paper which said,

“quit your whining.  it’s always about racism with you.  you have a job to do do it.  we went into debt for your full time and now you complain?  your kids must be so proud at least they are just half and maybe they are learning from their dad.  you should be thankful and get to working.”

Someone had had those thoughts about a member of our staff, a fellow Unitarian Universalist, about another human being, and that person apparently thought that it was okay to type those thoughts up, print them out, and place them, anonymously, into the mailbox on Chris’ door.  It seems virtually certain that whoever did this is a member of the congregation, and it appears likely that they committed this undeniably and inexcusably racist act on Sunday.  With the knowledge of this hateful incident swirling around us, this just doesn’t seem like the time to be celebrating.

Yet our history is not irrelevant to what’s happening now.  75 years ago today 15 women and men declared that they wanted to be – that they were – a church.  The woman who started it all by placing a classified ad in The Daily Progress had been told that it was unlikely a town as small as Charlottesville was then would be able to create and nurture a Unitarian congregation.  She was, in fact, discouraged from trying to do this.  Yet, as she said at the time in a letter to a friend, “I am not easily discouraged and we can see what we can do.” 

Carrie Baker was not easily discouraged, and throughout the 75 years of our existence this congregation has shown time and time again that we are not “easily discouraged” either.  It hasn’t always been smooth sailing – there have been times when events in the wider world or right here in the congregation have caused real uneasiness and distress; times when the ordained minister or the lay leadership were taking the congregation in a direction not everyone wanted to go; times when support (financial and otherwise) dropped off precipitously; times when even beloved members felt the need to break off their connection to this place and these people; times when we have disappointed one another, hurt one another, damaged one another and it seemed that the fabric of the community was being damaged, too … perhaps damaged beyond repair.  Yet in looking back over the history of this congregation it is clear that while we have no doubt been discouraged more than a few times, we have yet to be so discouraged as to truly give up on one another.

WORDS OF WELCOME   

Adam Slate, the President of our Board of Trustees, likes to say that he looks at this church as a family.  What we witnessed this week is not how families – is not how healthy families – behave.  It’s not who we say we are, or want to be.

Each Sunday morning we say with one another Words of Welcome that are intended to describe the kind of community we wish to be, a community that, as I often say, “welcomes all who would work to make this a world in which all are welcome.”  So I’d invite us to say those words together now:

Whoever you are, Whomever you love,
However you express your identity;
Whatever your situation in life,
Whatever your experience of the holy,
Your presence here is a gift.
Whether you are filled with sadness,
Overflowing with joy,
Needing to be alone with yourself,
Or eager to engage with others,
You have a place here.
We all have a place here.
We all are welcome here.                                      

LIGHTING THE CHALICE 

We kindle a flame of power, illuminating the Holy in each of our faces.
We recognize in the flame a passionate commitment to our shared faith.
We are held and carried from day to day, week to week, in the shining of the light.
This flame is mine, as well as yours.
We are brought together on this day, called to growth, to expansion, within its glow.
What does your heart know while beholding this holy fire?
~ Adrian L.H. Graham

I invite you to think about that question as James plays our Prelude, to think about what your heart knows while you behold this holy fire here tonight.

PRELUDE

REFLECTION

In the first sermon delivered here, in the then brand-new building, the Rev. Malcolm Sutherland said this:

You are invited to draw your attention to the fact that in all its simplicity and its beauty, this building is not a church.  It was designed to serve a church.  It was designed to make more effective a church.  It was designed to inspire a church.  But it is not a church.

You are the church .  […]

So we are not opening a church this morning.. We are opening a home for our church.  This physical home is fully worthy of our highest aspirations.  The question is simply – can we prove ourselves worthy of our new home?

If it is to be a beautiful church – as beautiful as its home – it will be because you are living beautiful lives.  And how we need beauty today:  there is ugliness and distortion enough. 

How we need beauty today:  there is ugliness and distortion enough.

He said in that first sermon that to be a church worthy of this beautiful home we would need to be strong, significant, courageous, fearless, and devoted.  In his last sermon here he said that the congregation needed to ask itself (as each of us individually needs to ask ourselves, he was quick to point out):  Why is it so damned hard to live up to and out from our values?  Again and again he returned to the question, “Why don’t we?”   Why don’t we do the things we know we should do?  Why aren’t we being the kind of people we know we want to be?  Why don’t we take the kind of risks we know our faith calls us to?  Why don’t we really, deeply trust each other more than we do?  Why don’t we recognize how much we, ourselves, have to change, instead of focusing so much of our attention on the ways other folks are falling short? 

I’m not even necessarily talking about the “big things” here.  The obvious things.  The things we can justifiably say we are doing, or which we can honestly say simply aren’t possible for us to do.  I’m really talking about all of the little ways we betray ourselves, betray our values, don’t do the something that we could have done.  Why don’t we do those things?  But all of these questions really boil down to one: Why don’t we live our faith?

I don’t know how any of you would respond to that question, but I know that I am chastened, humbled.  And I know that it really gets real when I stop myself from asking these questions of the vague “we” and, instead, force myself to ask them only of myself.  Why don’t I?  Because it’s easier not to.  Why don’t I?  Because I already feel overstretched, and my life can be hard enough as it is.  Why don’t I?  Because I figure someone else is going to do it, and it’s not really my problem.  Why don’t I?  Because I’m not so bad, right?  I mean, other people are a lot worse than me – look at those guys over there!  Why don’t I?  Because I’m afraid that I’ll be rejected somehow if I do.  Why don’t I?  Because I’m comfortable the way things are, and I know – I know – that if I do I’ll be less comfortable.  Why don’t I?  That’s a question worth pondering. 

The last words of Malcolm’s last sermon to this congregation were the question:  “Why don’t we?”.

The person who anonymously wrote and then delivered that hateful (and hate-filled) message to Chris has done something reprehensible – and they dragged Christina’s two incredible boys and her lovely husband into it.  What this person did is inexcusable, and I cannot say clearly or forcefully enough that such behavior will not be tolerated – can not be tolerated if we’re who we say we are.  The person who sent that message has placed themselves so far outside the boundaries of our covenant that I can’t imagine how they can say the words “Beloved Community,” or “inherent worth and dignity,” without bursting into flame because of the blaspheme of their hypocrisy.

Yet I need to say with equal clarity and conviction that the rest of us are not without responsibility for what happened this week.  Each of us, all of us – and I do mean “us,” myself no less than anyone else, maybe even more so because of my role here – we all have to recognize our complicity, because some how we have allowed a climate, an atmosphere, an environment to exist in which something like this can happen.  A climate in which one of us could believe this violent racist act was okay.

What happened this week is the most egregious, yet it’s not the only example of what we have allowed to grow in our community.  I talked several weeks ago at some length in my sermon about how upset some members of the congregation were about my January report to the Board. I shared that several of the people who were upset had contacted the Board and/or the Committee on the Ministry to share their feelings, as well they should have. You may or may not know, however, that someone else created an anonymous email account, and then sent an anonymous email, seemingly for the express purpose of directing a select group of congregants to check out that report, and then, after sending that email, immediately closed the account.  Let me be clear – the anonymous nature of this act was not okay.  Sharing my Board report and encouraging others to read it – fine.  Essential to the honest life of our community, actually.  It’s doing so anonymously, having no accountability and taking no responsibility – that is what’s out of covenant.

People expressed their dismay over this person’s behavior, of course, yet it really shouldn’t have been too surprising.  We think it unfortunate, yet accept, that there are groups of congregants who get together informally to talk with each other about their concerns and complaints.  They do this outside of any committee or leadership structure – which is why these have often been called “parking lot conversations.” And because they do this “offline,” as it were, there is no accountability to the larger congregation.  None of this is secret, yet no one calls them back into covenant – and they are out of covenant because they rarely, if ever, actually try to reach out to the people they’re concerned or complaining about.  Please make no mistake, we give this behavior our tacit approval each time one of us says that we really wish this kind of thing wasn’t happening but we engage in it ourselves, or see others doing it, and do not say directly and forthrightly that such behavior is out of covenant, that it’s not constructive, that it’s destructive and has no place in our Unitarian Universalist community.

Please hear that I am not saying any of this to divide us, to make this about any kind of “us” and “them.”   My goal, instead, is quite the opposite – I’m saying what I’m saying because I want to help us be more unified, with a clearer and deeper understanding of just what it means, and just what it takes, to be who we say we are and want to be.  That’s my job here.  So I’m going to take this a little further, knowing that I’ll upset some people.  (Knowing that I already have.)  We show our tacit approval of anonymous notes in people’s mailboxes every time we insist that members of the congregation must have the option of giving feedback anonymously in surveys, questionnaires, and communications with the Committee on the Ministry.  I’ve heard the argument that some people are afraid to attach their name to their opinions, that they won’t feel comfortable or safe if they have to sign their name.  But if that’s really the case, our community has much greater problems than whatever it is the person’s complaining about. 

If we have not created a community in which people know that it’s safe to express themselves, no matter who they disagree with; a congregation in which we hold one another – and want to be held, ourselves – accountable for our behavior; in which we can be clear that there are things antithetical to our values and our visions, that not everything is welcome – then we have created a community in which someone can feel okay about leaving an anonymous note that a Klansman would be proud to have written in the mailbox of one of our staff members.

Back in Divinity School I learned that the Biblical word Christians translate into English as “sin” is actually seven or eight words, each with its own meaning.  One is, “sitting down when I should have stood up,” and I know that I am guilty of that.  And I’ll say without hesitation or apology, that I know everyone else in here is, too.  Can anyone honestly say that they have never let pass a racist joke, or some behind-their-back gossip, or some subtle or not-so-subtle bullying behavior, or someone shutting someone else down, or any other kind of behavior that you knew was not what we’d be doing as a community if we were at our best?  If we’re really honest with ourselves, how can we not recognize that we all share culpability?

I am sure that some of you may be feeling castigated, attacked, reprimanded and chastised.  I understand because, remember, I’ve also been talking to and about myself this whole time.  I haven’t laid anything on any of you that I haven’t also laid on myself.  And even as I’m saying this I’m feeling uneasy and a little bit defensive.  But I have learned that sometimes – maybe even often – the umbrage we feel when someone points out our flaws and failings is an incredibly effective deflection device.  I get angry at you for saying harsh things about me rather than taking the opportunity to listen with an open mind and heart, and then to ask myself, deeply and sincerely, if there might be any truth in what you’ve said. 

Oh that’s hard.  That’s really, really hard.  It is so much easier to just write you off.  But we can’t write this off, friends.  Our covenant doesn’t call on us to be so kind to one another that people believe – even unconsciously – that they can get away with saying or doing just about anything.  Our covenant calls us, as Malcolm Sutherland said that first morning in this space, to be “strong, significant, courageous, fearless, and devoted” to the values and visions of our faith.  A mirror has been held up for us to look at ourselves.  My questions is whether we are brave enough to look at what it shows us.

A TIME OF SILENCE, CANDLES, AND SAND

There is no question – the work of building Beloved Community is hard.  It’s dirty.  It’s bruising.  We’ll hunger and thirst.  Yet it is the work we have committed ourselves to doing; it’s the work we have been called on to do.  But it’s not work we can do in the head alone, and there have been a lot of words tonight (and there are still a few more to come).  So why don’t we now, as we do each Sunday, take a time for silence, a time for letting go of the words, letting go of the thoughts, and getting down into the feelings.  After a time I will invite the chime to sound, and some of us may feel the urge to come forward to light Candles of Hope and Remembrance, or write in the Sands of Forgiveness and Atonement.  Others may choose to stay right where you are now, continuing to hold the silence and the stillness in your body as well as your heart.  Through all of this, James will play, and when this time is done, we will move directly into singing together the hymn so many feel as a prayer, “#123, “Spirit of Life.”

HYMN:  #123, “Spirit of Life”

LITANY: THE PROMISE THAT BINDS  (By Viola Abbitt)

About a month ago we joined with Unitarian Universalist congregations around the country in designing our worship experience so that the voices of black Unitarian Universalists were centered, so that the experiences of black Unitarian Universalists could be heard, without comment or qualifiers, without interpretation, within the discomfort which that caused for many of us – us UUs who identify as white who’d never experienced our faith in those ways.  Who’d never imagined that it could be experienced in those ways.  Many of us left that service stunned, saddened, and unable to un-see or un-hear what we’d heard and seen that morning.

One of the elements of that service was a litany written by Viola Abbitt which she calls “The Promise That Binds.”  I would note that there are three different responses in your Order of Service.  Each is subtly different, and those differences are important.  (We’ll say the first response several times, and I’ll give you a visual clue when it’s time to change to the second, and then to the third.)

Loving inclusion has been an elusive goal within our congregations.

We are a covenantal people, and the promise of our faith, which was enough to bring us together, should have been enough to bind us together in love.

 Many hearts have been, and often continue to be, broken, time and again.

We are a covenantal people, and the promise of our faith, which was enough to bring us together, should have been enough to bind us together in love.

The names of many of those of us who helped to make this denomination great were erased, their existence forgotten.

We are a covenantal people, and the promise of our faith, which was enough to bring us together, should have been enough to bind us together in love.

The pulpits and pews which should have been warm and welcoming, were instead sometimes cold and unforgiving.

We are a covenantal people, and the promise of our faith, which was enough to bring us together, should have been enough to bind us together in love.

People who were considered pillars in their communities, were sometimes considered pariahs within the walls of our congregations.

We are a covenantal people, and the promise of our faith, which was enough to bring us together, should have been enough to bind us together in love.

Many of us straddle two worlds: one of filiation and one of faith.

We are a covenantal people, and the promise of our faith, which was enough to bring us together, should be enough to bind us together in love.

Our beauty is that we are all different, and yet not different from one another.  None of us should be considered exceptions, nor should we be subjected to baseless assumptions.

We are a covenantal people, and the promise of our faith, which was enough to bring us together, should be enough to bind us together in love.

The future of this faith is reliant on and belongs to all who embrace religious liberalism. Let us never forget that…

We are a covenantal people, and the promise of our faith, which was enough to bring us together, is enough to bind us together in love.

OFFERING

If we really want to make a difference, if we really want to see real change so that we can become who we know we need to be – as individuals, as congregations, and as a movement – then we need to not only appreciate those who have for far too long been marginalized members of our communities, we have to actively support them.  Our offering tonight – and again this Sunday, as well – will be dedicated to helping a newly formed organization within our Unitarian Universalist Association: the Black Lives of Unitarian Universalism Organizing Collective.  As a national ministry for and by black-identified Unitarian Universalists, BLUU embodies a liberating community of all ages. A community that lifts up the lives, and stories and the leadership of those who have been marginalized and silenced. A community that brings hope, when hope is hard to find. And a community that calls us to wrestle with the gap between our theology and our practice in the world.

In October of 2016, the UUA Board of Trustees made a bold $5.3 million commitment to fund black leaders in Unitarian Universalism, and to support ministry to black-identified Unitarian Universalists. In the late 1960s, our Association was asked to take steps to address the silencing and marginalization of Black Unitarian Universalists. Though there was an initial affirmation of this commitment, it ultimately went unfulfilled and the promise was broken.  This commitment of the UUA Board is, in part, an attempt to fulfill that promise.

Tonight, I am asking you to help fulfill this promise. This effort needs your help.  Please be as generous as you can.

DEDICATION OF THE OFFERING

We accept these gifts with gratitude.

May we use them wisely, and for the highest good.

HYMN:  #1, “May Nothing Evil Cross This Door”

BENEDICTION & EXTINGUISHING THE CHALICE  

Each Sunday our Benediction begins, "Go out into the world in peace."  But I can't say that tonight.  Dr. King said that there are some things to which we all should be maladjusted.  So ... Go out into the world maladjusted.   Have courage.  Hold on to what is good.  Return to no person evil for evil, strengthen the fainthearted, support the weak, help the suffering, and be who you know you should be, and help us be who we know we should be.  There is so much ugliness and distortion in the world.  Blessed Be.

POSTLUDE  

This came to one of us, from one of us.  We MUST do better!

Pax tecum,

RevWik