I Dream a World

This is the text of the reflections I offered on Sunday, March 3, 2018, to the congregation I serve in Charlottesville, Virginia.  The Opening and Closing readings were the incredible "Let America Be America Again!" by the incomparable Langston Hughes.

Langston Hughes wrote “I Dream a World” in 1929.  34 years before the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. famously talked about his dream in front of approximately a quarter of a million people at the Lincoln Memorial in 1963.  Another 49 years would pass before the UUA published the Tapestry of Faith curricula, “Building the World We Dream About.”  There’s a whole lot of dreaming going on.

Which should hardly be surprising.  It takes dreamers to imagine a world other than the world as it is, a world where “[one person] no other [person] will scorn, where love will bless the earth and peace its paths adorn.”  As Rodgers and Hammerstein put it, admittedly in a very different context, “You gotta have a dream, if you don’t have a dream, how you gonna make a dream come true?”

Yet there’s a danger here – a danger perhaps especially for good-hearted, well-meaning liberal white folk like … well … like most of us here this morning and most of us in our Unitarian Universalist faith.  The Rev. Nancy McDonald Ladd, easily one of my top two or three UU preachers, has recently published her first book – After the Good News:  progressive faith beyond optimism.  The description on the back of the book says, “With humor and humanity, Ladd calls religious progressives to greater authenticity and truth-telling rather than blind optimism.”  There is definitely humor and humanity in this book, and also courage; compassion; boldness; truth-telling (to be sure); history; rebuke; challenge; hope; deep, deep thinking; and oh so much love.  She know us; she loves us; she is us; and from within that knowing, loving, and being she writes:

“For much of the past hundred years, even through wars, devastation, and the insidious persistence of systemic racism, modernist religious liberals in Eurocentric churches [meaning us] have preached about our near-unlimited capacity to fix just about everything that is broken.  We believe in ourselves so completely that the ‘good news’ has become a good word about our own capacity to heal things, leaving little room for honest atonement or our own complicity in brokenness.”

She says,

“[Y]es, with Theodore Parker and Dr. King, we believe that ‘the arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice,’ … [but] why are we so quick to focus on the ‘bending toward justice’ bit rather than honestly addressing the maddeningly long length of the arc – especially for people who live and struggle and lead at the margins of power?”

Because – and these are my words now – religious liberals, including us, have become comfortably complacent and complacently comfortable in our role as the shining beacon, the moral compass, pointing the way to that Beloved Community we “dream about.”  We look around us and see the morass of misogyny, the depths of depraved white supremacy, the incomprehensible income inequality, the xenophobia, the anti-Muslim, anti-immigrant, anti-transgender, anti-homosexual, anti-Semitic, anti- … well … the anti-just-about-anything-that-isn’t-white, we look around us and see all of that and know with absolute certainty that we offer both an alternative and an antidote.  We look around us “out there” and see all of that, and we look around us “in here” and see all of these beautiful, good-hearted, well-meaning, truly inspiring liberal folk who have in so many cases dedicated their lives to changing that world into the world we dream of.  (The fact that we are mostly white, mostly middle class, mostly well educated is seen as nothing more than a coincidence.)

My parents raised their children to be feminists, non-racists, believers in the vision, the dream, of a world in which all people are welcomed, in which everyone – absolutely everyone – had a seat at the table.  The problem is, as Nancy points out (and I’ll quote her again):

“[T]he table progressive religion invites everyone to, no matter how broad and expansive it may be, is almost always set by people who believe they are white.  Those same white people who set the table have chosen to repeatedly align that white identity with the predominant power structures of their day.

Among the difficult truths we are called to grapple with is the fact that oppressive power structures undergird every single era of progressive optimism in this country.  […] the great institutions of liberal faith were and are inextricably interconnected with systems of supremacy, patriarch, and oppression.”

Last week was the one-year anniversary of a racist attack on a member of our community most likely by a member of our community.  Our Director of Administration and Finance, Christina Rivera, came in to work, took her mail out of the box on her office door, and found among the bills and requests for rooms an anonymous racist note that was directed not only at her, but at her husband and her kids.  One year ago I responded to this attack, as did the senior leadership of this congregation, strongly and clearly, and holy – or unholy – hell broke loose.  [Here is Christina's own response.]

I had preached on racism before.  I had begun to use the term “white supremacy” before, a term which scholars and activists of color have said is a more accurate description of what had heretofore been called, simply, “racism.”  I said unequivocally that if we’re serious about dismantling the systems and structures of the white supremacy culture, if we’re serious about changing the world “out there” as it is now, into the truly multi-cultural Beloved Community we dream about, then we who identify or are identified as white will need to be the ones who change.  We will need to face, and deal with, the discomfort that unavoidably comes with change.  We will have to become “comfortable with being uncomfortable,” or, as Dr. King put it so marvelously, we are going to have to be “maladjusted.” 

Time after time, sermon after sermon, I preached this same message – we, those of us who identify, or are identified, as white are going to have to shoulder the cross of dis-ease, dis-equilibrium, discomfort – and was greeted with the white liberal equivalent of shouts of “Amen!” and “Preach it brother.”  On that handshake line over there person after person said that I was “brave,” and “bold,” and “saying what needs to be said.”

And then, one year ago, I actually made us uncomfortable.  I had the audacity to disrupt our equilibrium.   I said that we – good hearted, well meaning, liberal white folks who have unquestionably toiled mightily in the vineyards of social change and the movements for justice – that we are complicit in the racism that revealed itself in our own home.  And more than that, I said, unequivocally, that whoever wrote that note is not welcome here.  And boy did people get upset.

In her truth-telling Nancy says, “Those who are accustomed to privilege consider it reasonable to expect comfort and assurance of their own fundamental decency.”  She doesn’t exclude herself from this truth, and neither do it.  Yet when we – those of us who identify, or are identified, as white – really and truly open ourselves up to seeing with new eyes, looking beyond, or through, the veil of the norms and assumptions of our cultural inculcation we will have to acknowledge that we – as individuals and as institutions – often unconsciously participate in, and unwittingly perpetuate those systems and structure upon which our society is built.

In especially potent section of her book, Nancy takes us backward from the liberal church we know today, back through our history, to show us our roots:

“Well past the beginning of the twenty-first century, liberal churches continued to remember the good old days of twentieth-century modernism.  The great modernist churches of the mid-twentieth century were tied to the concept of unending societal potential birthed after the industrial revolution.  That vison of unending societal potential was in turn tied to patriarchal and racially unjust systems that benefited from the oppression they decried.

The prevailing cultural and socioeconomic ethos of this gospel of unending progress was built by and for white men with significant power.  They exercised that power through seemingly benevolent dominion over the earth, its peoples, and its mysteries alike.”

She concludes,

“So, that explains a lot of things.”

We are complicit, all of us are.  How could we not be?  Unless we are consciously and pro-actively creating and living in radically new ways of being in the world, then we are reinforcing the way things are right now whether we want to or not.  Whether we declare our desire to change things.  Even as we work for the transformation of society.  Unless we are willing to live within a transformed reality ourselves while we do so, we are working against ourselves unaware.

This doesn’t mean that we are bad people.  We’re not.  This doesn’t mean that there is no distinction between us and those who carried tiki torches through our city two years ago.  There obviously is.  This doesn’t mean that we should flagellate ourselves with whips of guilt and shame.  We are, we truly are good-hearted, well-meaning folks who put our hearts, minds, and souls into fighting the good fight and striving for our mutual liberation.

This does mean that we need to recognize that if there is ever going to be change in this world, we – especially those of us who identify or are identified as white – are going to have to learn to be “comfortable being uncomfortable” … even when we are actually made uncomfortable!  It does mean that we’re going to have to recognize that some of what we hold sacred, even some of our most cherished ideals and values that we have for so long bravely and lovingly espoused, even these must be examined for their unintended consequences and their role in perpetuating what we are working to dismantle. 

And it means that when we dream dreams, when we see visions, when we strive to build a new way out of the world as it is toward the world as we know it can be, we have to make sure that they’re not just our dreams, conditioned as they unavoidably are by the culture in which we “live, and move, and have our being.”  It means that we need to listen to the dreams of those who have been historically, and who are still, relegated to the margins, to make their dreams our dreams, even when, and perhaps especially when, those dreams challenge our comfort and threaten to upend everything we know about ourselves.

This is scary my friends.  And believe me, it’s as scary for me as it is for you because it’s new terrain for all of us and little in the life I’ve lived so far has prepared me for this.  I do not, can not, know what the future will look like, or the path to get there, because it is a new future we are called to build, unlike, and not simply an extension of what we have known.  Yet if we hold one another in love – whether we see things the same way, or say things the same way, or strive in the same ways – then we can, together, be part of helping that dream become a reality.

I’ll end with the words of one of my predecessors in this pulpit, the Rev. Wayne Arnason:

Take courage friends.
The way is often hard, the path is never clear,
and the stakes are very high.
Take courage.
For deep down, there is another truth:
you are not alone.

Amen.


Pax tecum,

RevWik

To Wake or Not to Wake

On Monday I said that I would write more about the extraordinarily book Between the World and Me by Ta-Nehisi Coates.  Coates is a national correspondent for The Atlantic, and the recipient of the National Magazine Award, the Hillman Prize for Opinion and Analysis, and the George Polk Award for his writing.  His first book was the memoir The Beautiful Struggle, and he gained prominence in the mainstream media for his 2014 cover story in The Atlantic, "The Case for Reparations."  Of his most recent book, Toni Morrison wrote:

"I've been wondering who might fill the intellectual void that plagued me after James Baldwin died.  Clearly it is Ta-Nehisi Coates.  The language of Between the World and Me, like Coates's journey, is visceral, eloquent, and beautifully redemptive.  And its examination of the hazards and hopes of black male life is as profound as it is revelatory.  It is require reading."

I couldn't agree more, especially with her assertion that it is -- or, I would say, should be -- required  reading.  Coates's writing is both beautiful and brutal.  His analysis is clear and challenging, painfully so.  He writes of his respect and admiration of Malcolm X -- his example and his rhetoric -- and again and again while reading Between the World and Me I felt as though I were reading the words of  Malik el-Shabazz himself.  Perhaps his description of his feelings toward Malcolm X can better describe what I mean:

Malcolm was the first political pragmatist I knew, the first honest man I'd ever heard.  He was unconcerned with making the people who believed they were white [a phrase Coates uses again and again] comfortable in their belief.  If he was angry, he said so.  If he hated, he hated because it was human for the enslvaved to hate the enslaver, natural as Prometheus hating the birds.  He would not turn the other cheek for you.  He would not be a better man for you.  He would not be your morality.  Malcolm spoke like a man who was free, like a black man above the laws that proscribed our imagination.  I identified with him. (p. 36)

Coates, too, shows no sign of wanting to make those of us who believe we are white comfortable.  And he doesn't.  With his unflinchingly honest description of what it has meant to him to be black in America, and his biting analysis of where we are and how we got here, those of us who believe we are white who read this book will be extremely discomforted.  I found myself weeping over much of what I read, sitting convicted by much of the rest.  It is no hyperbole to say that I was hanged, broken-open, by the experience of reading this book.  And reading this book is an experience.

Americans believe in the reality of 'race' as a defined, indubitable feature of the natural world.  Racism -- the need to ascribe bone-deep features to people and then humiliate, reduce, and destroy them -- inevitably follows from this inalterable condition.  In this way, racism is rendered as the innocent daughter of Mother Nature, and one is left to deplore the Middle Passage or the Trail of Tears the way one deplores an earthquake, or a tornado, or any other phenomenon that can be cast as beyond the handiwork of men. 

But race is is the child of racism, not the father.  And the process of naming 'the people' has never been a mater of genealogy and physiognomy so much as one of hierarchy, (p. 7)

In all of the work I have done to try to understand the bubble of privilege in which I exist, and the systems and structures that privileged "my kind" while inescapably denigrating everyone else, I have never come across this analysis of race and racism.  Others have made the point that race is a human construct rather than a biological truth, yet Coates takes this idea and makes use of it in making sense of the history of racism, and its current incarnation, in ways that I have never encountered before.

I've said that his writing is both beautiful and brutal.  This passage should suffice as example:

Slavery is not an indefinable mass of flesh.  It is a particular, specific enslaved woman, whose mind is active as your own, whose range of feeling is as vast as your own; who prefers the way the light falls in one particular spot in the woods, who enjoys fishing where the water eddies in a nearby stream, who loves her mother in her own complicated way, who thinks her sister talks to loud, has a favorite cousin, a favorite season, who excels at dress-making and knows, inside herself, that she is as intelligent and as capable as anyone.  "Slavery" is this same woman born in a world that loudly proclaims its love of freedom and inscribes this love in its essential texts, a world in which these same professors hold this woman a slave, hold her mother a slave, her father a slave, her daughter a slave, and when this woman peers back into the generations all she sees is the enslaved. ... Never forget that we were enslaved in this country longer than we have been free.  Never forget that for 250 years black people were born into chains -- whole generations followed by more generations who knew nothing but chains. (pp. 69-70)

As we read this book, especially those of us who Coates would say "believe we are white," -- "need to believe we are white" -- we are essentially voyeurs, for it is written as a letter to his fifteen year old son.  It is written in the context of all that has been happening that has lifted issues of race into the consciousness of white America in a way not experienced since the Civil Rights Era -- the murders of Michael Brown, Eric Garner, Trayvon Martin, Tamir Rice, and all the others (including the often overlooked women such as Aiyana Stanley-Jones, Tarika Wilson, Kathryn Johnston, and Tanisha Anderson) who have been killed in recent encounters with police, as well as the near-universal lack of convictions or even accountability for the people who fired the killing shot.  He is writing in the age of Black Lives Matter and the defensively dismissive response of All Lives Matter.  Of those who would argue that there is no conscious plan or pattern in all of this, no conspiracy, Coates says:

But what one "means" is neither important nor relevant.  It is not necessary that you believe that the officer who choked Eric Garner set out hat day to destroy a body.  All you need to understand is that the officer carries with him the power of the American state and the weight of an American legacy, and they necessitate that of the bodies destroyed every year, some wild and disproportionate number of them will be black. (p. 103)

He notes that those of us who desperately want to be identified as white are able to continue to justify the Myth of America's commitment to freedom is our ability to forget our past.

The forgetting is habit, is yet another necessary component of the Dream.  They have forgotten the scale of theft that enriched them in slavery; the terror that allowed them, for a century, to pilfer the vote, the segregationist policy that gave them their suburbs.  (p. 143)

There is so much more I could say of Between the World and Me -- his descriptions of growing up on the streets of Baltimore, his experiences of what he calls "The Mecca" at Howard University, the murder of a friend at the hands of the police, the birth and raising of his sons, and ever so much more.  There are so many more passages I could lift up and out in the hope that at least some of it will be read.   I will end with just one more.  In writing of those who struggled, who laid down their safety and their lives, during the Civil Rights movement of the 50s and 60s he writes:

Perhaps that was, is, the hope of the movement:  to awaken the Dreamers, to rouse them to the facts of what their need to be white, to talk like they are white, to think that they are white, which is to think that they are beyond the design flaws of humanity, as done to the world. (p. 147)

I return to Toni Morrison's assessment -- that this book is, should be, needs to be required reading. And digested.  And shared.  Widely.  I believe -- more accurately, I suppose, I hope -- that if it were those of us who are so ensnared in the Dream that we don't even know it as such will indeed be roused.  And, being roused, might be able to work with all those who need us to work with them to change the reality behind the Dream.

Please.  Read this book.  And then lend it so someone.

RevWik


P.S. -- The most recent issue of UU World magazine includes a transcript of a discussion that took place among five Unitarian Universalists of color about Ta-Nehisi Coates's book Between the World and Me. 

Happy International Philippe Petit Danced Between the Towers Day!

"Magic Triangle"
© 2012 Jean-Louis Blondeau
All rights reserved.  
Used with permission.
See Jean-Louis Blondeau Photography

When I finally saw him in person he was dressed all in black, from his top hat to his shoes, and was riding his unicycle like a mad-man, zig-zagging through pedestrian traffic in Washington Square Park in New York City.  He stopped by a lamp post and, with a piece of chalk, drew a circle on the sidewalk.  Then he started to work.

What amazed me was that he didn't call attention to himself.  Aside, that is, from careening through the crowds perched on a unicycle and carrying a bag of juggling props -- that kind of got people's attention.

I mean he didn't make a big deal about who he was.  What he'd done.

He simply began to juggle -- and even that wasn't especially flashy.  Three balls -- simple, white lacrosse balls -- and his pattern was small and tight.  Like he was.  An extremely slender man, he was not particularly physically impressive.  Except for his face.  He had the smile of a mischievous elf and the sparkle in his eye is rarely seen outside the world of faerie.

It was clear to me that a lot of the people in the crowd that gathered didn't know who he was -- just another street performer out on a summer afternoon.

But this was Philippe Petite -- the man who, shortly after 7:15 am on August 7, 1974, stepped off the top of one of the World Trade Center towers and onto the 3/4" cable he and his co-conspirators had spent the better part of the night rigging.  The wire stretched the 200' between the twin towers.  It was about a quarter of a mile above the street below.

And it was here, amidst the clouds and the soaring seagulls, that Philippe Petit danced for approximately forty-five minutes.  And changed the world.

At least for me.

I was twelve years old at the time of Monsieur Petit's "artistic crime of the century," as it's been called.  I was already a magician, a bit of a clown, and I wanted . . . to be him.  I wanted his skills, of course, but I also wanted his audacity.  I wanted his whimsy, his magic.  I wanted his insanely poetic vision.  I wanted his courageous commitment to his art.

When asked why he would do something that was at once both illegal and so incredibly foolhardy -- he did this cross with no net and no safety cables! -- Petit answered, "There is no why."  He said that to demand a "why" was such an American thing to do.  Finally, when he could no longer resist the pressure for an answer he said this, "When I see three balls, I juggle; when I see two towers, I walk."

He did this thing for no other reason than that it cried out to be done and that the doing of it would be so very, very beautiful.  I have read that Albert Einstein said that he realized the equations of his General Theory of Relativity were correct because they were . . . beautiful.  I fear that the dominant culture within which I live is almost entirely bereft of this understanding of beauty -- that it proves the "rightness" of things and that it is, in and of itself, all the reason one needs for doing something incredible.

Several years ago I began to intentionally celebrate what I came to call International Philippe Petit Danced Between the Towers Day.  I talk about Petit's walk with whoever I can get to listen.  (Most likely . . . again!)  I look at photographs of it.  (And here is an incredible collection, taken by his friend and collaborator Jean-Louis Blondeau.)  And I watch the awesome film Man on Wire.  I immerse myself in this legendary event. 

This year, as part of my celebration, I'm going to take out my own white lacrosse balls and do a little juggling.  Because ultimately the story of Philippe Petit's dance between the towers is not simply the story of an incredible individual doing an inconceivable thing.  That's the myth, and the myth has a certain magic to it.  Yet the truth is no doubt far more complex.  It'd be the story of a group of ordinary people who created together an extraordinary experience -- for themselves and for the world.  I hope that that story is eventually told.

One of the most incredible things of all, for me, about my encounter with Philippe Petit in Washington Square Park all those many years later is that I have heard him say that his dance between the towers was, for him, like the dance I saw him do between the lamp posts in Washington Square and that both, in fact, are just expressions of the dance he does every day of his life.

So . . . I still want to be Philippe Petit . . . living my life, like his, dancing on the tight rope.  And I also want to be like Jean-Louis Blondeau, Jean François Heckel, Annie Allix, Jim Moore, Jean-Pierre Dousseau, Barry Greenhouse, and all of the others who were equally invested and equally involved in purusing their own dreams.  Most of all, I suppose, I am inspired to be myself.

May you be as well.

Happy International Philippe Petit Danced Between the Towers Day!

In Gassho,

RevWik

PS -- This is the best International Philippe Petit Danced Between the Towers Day in the history of its celebration! In order to use the photograph of Petit as a juggler, I reached out to ask permission of Jean-Louis Blondeau, the photographer and Petit's collaborator on the World Trade Center walk. And he responded! One of his requests in response for his permission was that he have the opportunity to read this post before it was published, so that he could see in what context his work would be used. This means I have now had several e-mail exchanges with the man I personally consider to be as integrally involved in Petit's feat as the cable itself or, for that matter, Petit's feet! No one can accomplish something like what happened 38 years ago today entirely on her or his own. That is another lesson I take from that dance. Thank you, Monsieur Blondeau.