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.

Junteenth: a sermon

This is the sermon I delivered on Sunday, June 19, 2016 at the congregation I serve in Charlottesville, Virginia, the Thomas Jefferson Memorial Church - Unitarian Universalist.  You listen to it if you'd prefer.

I am embarrassed to say that I had never heard of “Juneteenth” until relatively recently.  I keep discovering just how much American history I never learned and, perhaps even more disturbingly, that no one ever thought important enough to try to teach me – all that history that gets lifted up each February, for instance, as though Black history and American history are not the same thing.  We don’t have a White history month, or a Straight, Cisgender Male history month, because as far as the wider society goes, that is American history.  Everything else is relegated to appendices and footnotes.

So:  “Juneteenth” is a fusing of “June” and “Nineteenth,” because it was on June 19, 1865 that Union General Gordon Granger stood on the balcony of a prominent building in Galveston, Texas and read aloud “General Order No. 3,” which said, in part:

The people of Texas are informed that, in accordance with a proclamation from the Executive of the United States, all slaves are free. This involves an absolute equality of personal rights and rights of property between former masters and slaves, and the connection heretofore existing between them becomes that between employer and hired labor.

Can you imagine what that would have felt like for the, now, formerly enslaved population of Galveston?  They hadn’t yet heard about President Lincoln’s Proclamation of their freedom some three and a half years earlier, so this was a day that would cry out to be memorialized.  Juneteenth celebrations became annual events throughout Texas and, eventually, throughout the United States.  By 2008, nearly half of US states observed the holiday.  As of May of last year, 45 of the 50 states (and the District of Columbia) have formally and officially recognized the observance of Juneteenth, even here in Virginia.

Juneteenth is a really big thing, and I had never even heard of it.  Maybe this is new to some of you, too.  I would ask how that is possible, but we all know the answer, don’t we?  The dominant culture in which we live, the dominant narrative that defines us as a country, does not have time, or energy, or focus, or interest, really, in anything other than itself.  That’s why we have Black History Month in February, and Women’s History Month in March, and LGBT History Month in October, and Transgender Awareness Month in November (just to name a few).  This is one way that our culture – and by “our culture” I am referring to the dominant culture made by, for, and about people who look more or less like me – can recognize the undeniable fact that ours is not a homogeneous society while simultaneously reinforcing the “otherness” of everybody who … doesn’t look more or less like me.

One dimension of this dominant culture’s narrative is a mindset of what I’ll call “been there, done that, cross it off the list.”  Here are two examples of I mean by that:

·       Slavery was terrible, awful, heinous, but we fought and won the Civil War and the Emancipation Proclamation put an end to slavery.  Been there, done that, cross it off the list.

·       The Jim Crow era was terrible, awful, heinous, but the Civil Rights battles of the 50s and 60s won equality for all.  I mean look, today we even have a Black President!  Been there, done that, cross it off the list.

But that’s not how it works, of course.  The truth is that there is a river of pain that runs through our nation’s history, a river of torment and torture, a river of separation and segregation and dehumanization and demonization, a river that has never stopped flowing.  Ever.  We – and right now I’m really talking to people, like me, who’ve been raised to think of ourselves as White – we would like to think that at least it has gone underground, or slowed to a trickle, but it hasn’t, except, perhaps, in our own mind’s eye.  But we need to think this, we need to believe this, because if we didn’t we wouldn’t be able to go to sleep at night, so wet would our sheets be from all our tears.  Yet we – and here I do mean “we,” inclusively and collectively, meaning “we” as in “all of us” – we need to see together the truth of things as they really are.  We need to see those things that some of us try so hard not to see and some of us are so continually forced to see.  Here’s one such thing that seems appropriate to see on Juneteenth 2016:

The slaves weren’t freed when Lincoln declared their emancipation, nor when General Granger stood on that balcony, nor when President Johnson signed the Voting Rights Act of 1965, nor when Barack Obama was sworn in as the 44^th President of the same United States in which his wife’s ancestors had been enslaved.  Certain freedoms, yes, have been grudgingly conceded, but real freedom?  The freedom to be and be seen as whole, as the individual you are and as part of the human family?  The freedom to have your value and worth affirmed and celebrated?  That has not yet been won, not yet wrested from the slaver’s fist. Not been there, not done that yet, nothing to cross off the list.

The Rev. Dr. Pauli Murray is one of the largely unknown and unsung heroes of the struggles for African American rights, and LGBT rights, and women’s rights.  She was the first female African American Episcopal priest, the first African American to receive a Doctor of Juridical Science degree from Yale Law School, a civil rights activist (fighting against both Jim Crow and what she called “Jane Crow”), a poet of profundity and power, and a friend of my mom’s.  She referred to herself as, “America’s problem child.”  (“I have never been able to accept what I believe to be an injustice,” she wrote. “Perhaps it is because of this I am America’s problem child, and will continue to be.”)  In many of her poems Pauli gave voice to the experience of what another great African American poet, Langston Hughes called, “a dream deferred,” this experience of the ongoing denial of the fundamental right to be seen as more than three-fifths of a person.  In the face of that, how can you keep on hoping for things to change?  What can hope mean when time and time again you have seen your hope whipped, and lynched, and set upon by dogs and firehoses, and denigrated and sneered at by what passes for politicians these days?  Here’s one of Pauli’s poems:

Hope is a crushed stalk

Between clenched fingers.

Hope is a bird’s wing

Broken by a stone.

Hope is a word in a tuneless ditty —

A word whispered with the wind,

A dream of forty acres and a mule,

A cabin of one’s own and a moment to rest,

A name and place for one’s children

And children’s children at last . . .

Hope is a song in a weary throat.

Give me a song of hope

And a world where I can sing it.

Give me a song of faith

And a people to believe in it.

Give me a song of kindliness

And a country where I can live it.

Give me a song of hope and love

And a brown girl’s heart to hear it.

This is the still unfulfilled promise of Junteenth – a song of hope, and a world in which it can be sung by everyone; a song of faith, and a people who will truly believe it; a song of kindliness and a country in which it can be lived out; and a song of hope and love without having to give up who and what we are.  Hope is a song in a weary throat.  [This, by the way, was the original title of Pauli's autobiography, Song in a Weary Throat.  Someone at the publishing house, no doubt, decided that for the second printing the title should be changed to Pauli Murray: The Autobiography of a Black Activist, Feminist, Lawyer, Priest, and Poet.  It might be more descriptive for people who'd never heard of her, but oh what poetry was lost!]                               

One year ago this past week Dylan Roof walked into a Bible Study at Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Charleston, South Carolina and murdered 9 people, at least in part because he did not see African Americans as fully human, at least not in the way he saw himself.  He apparently had not heard about the “absolute equality” affirmed by General Granger in Galveston one hundred and fifty-one years ago today, or he’d heard but didn’t believe it, and so he could believe that murdering these people was a justified and acceptable act.

This past week Omar Mateen walked into the nightclub Pulse in Orlando, Florida and murdered 49 people (wounding an additional 53), at least in part because he did not see people in the LGBTQ community, or the Latino community as fully human, at least not in the way he saw himself.  And whether it was this blind and blinding hatred, or the distortions and perversions of a twisted religious ideology, Mateen was able to believe that his murdering these people was a justified and acceptable act.

When you can deny the fundamental humanity of someone, you can justify doing just about anything to them.  It doesn’t count if they don’t count.  Fifty-three years ago, on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial, the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. called the Declaration of Independence’s assertion that “all […] are created equal” to be a “promissory note” that had not yet been made good on.  It still hasn’t.  And so the weary throat must keep singing.

Someone else who knew and beautifully expressed that song was the poet-queen Maya Angelou.  She speaks of it in one of her most well-known and oft-quoted poems, “I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings,”

The free bird leaps

On the back of the wind

And floats downstream

And dips his wings

In the orange sun rays

And dares to claim the sky.

But a bird that stalks

Down his narrow cage

Can seldom see through

His bars of rage

His wings are clipped

And his feet are tied

So he opens his throat to sing.

The caged bird sings

With a fearful trill

Of the things unknown

But longed for still

And his tune is heard

On the distant hill

For the caged bird sings of freedom.

The free bird thinks of another breeze

And the trade winds soft through the sighing trees

And the fat worms waiting on a dawn-bright lawn

And he names the sky his own.

But a caged bird stands on the grave of dreams

His shadow shouts on a nightmare scream

His wings are clipped and his feet are tied

So he opens his throat to sing.

The caged bird sings

With a fearful trill

Of the things unknown

But longed for still

And his tune is heard

On the distant hill

For the caged bird sings of freedom.

Oh the throats that sing this song may indeed by weary, yet the song remains strong.  This song has many variations, yet still it is one song – the song of freedom and a long-ago made promise fulfilled.  But here’s some good news:  Dylan Roof didn’t silence it; Omar Pateen didn’t stop its steady beat; Donald Trump and his crowds can’t drown it out. 

But there’s work to be done.  We – those of us who have been taught that we are White – need to take it up, add our voices to those who have been singing so long that their throats are weary – oh so weary – of singing this song that should never have had to be sung.

the song of hope, and a world in which it can be sung by everyone; the song of faith, and a people who will truly believe it; the song of kindliness and a country in which it can be lived out; the song of hope and love without having to give up who and what we are to sing it. 

May it be so.

Pax tecum,

RevWik

Liberating Yourself; Liberating Others

This is the sermon I offered to the congregation I serve on March 6, 2016.  As always you can listen if you prefer.

Reading:  “Our deepest fear ..." by Marianne Williamson

I want you to look with me in your mind’s eye at a pastel drawing.  There is a figure, sitting on a bench.  The drawing is simple; there are no details; the face is an oval and the body a barely disguised rectangle.  But the edges are soft, and the colors are a swirl of indigo, red, and orange.  The grey bench on which the figure is sitting is in a cage, a cell, and on the floor there are what appear to be open arm and leg shackles.  The door of the cell is open, too.  And the whole thing is encircled by rough curves of blacks and deep blues and purples.

So there’s a figure, sitting in a cage, but the door is open and there are shackles that have been removed.  There’s a sadness, a loneliness to the image.  Can you see it?

Beneath the drawing there’s a scriptural reference:  Isaiah 43: 1-2.  In this passage from the Hebrew Scriptures the figure of God is speaking to the prophet Isaiah (and really, of course, to the nation of Israel as a whole),

But now, this is what the LORD says—[the one] who created you, Jacob, [the one] who formed you, Israel: "Do not fear, for I have redeemed you; I have summoned you by name; you are mine.  When you pass through the waters, I will be with you; and when you pass through the rivers, they will not sweep over you. When you walk through the fire, you will not be burned; the flames will not set you ablaze.”

I drew that picture several years ago, and I chose that text.  Or, rather, it was the other way around.  I was on retreat, and we’d been sent to our rooms to meditate on a piece of scripture.  We were given a couple of pages of options to choose from – there were passages from the Hebrew Scriptures, the Christian New Testament, as well as some pieces of secular poetry.  That passage from Isaiah was the one that called out to me.

I sat with it for about half an hour … maybe forty-five minutes.  And as I let the words seep into and through me, the image I’ve described came to me unbidden:  a person sadly sitting in a jail cell even though the door was open and the chains were removed.  He – I – was imprisoned not because of any externally imposed judgement, but rather because of a sentence I had given myself.

I remembered all of this as I was thinking this week about the theme for this month – “What does it mean to be a people of liberation?”  What does it mean to say that our Unitarian Universalist faith calls on us to be about the work of liberation (in the world and in our own lives)? 

Maybe you can relate to some of the feelings that led me to meditate on that passage and to draw that picture of the person and the jail cell.  Maybe you can relate to feeling trapped, imprisoned even, in a job you don’t like but need in order to pay the bills.  Or the worry that even with this job you don’t know how you’ll make it through the month.  Or the blinding fear that if you don’t find a job soon you have no idea what you’ll do.

Or maybe you’re locked in a relationship that isn’t really a relationship anymore because the other person has withdrawn – from the marriage, or the family.  Maybe it’s in that absence that you find yourself imprisoned.  Locked out can be as bad as being locked in.  Either way you’ve got the feeling that you’re stuck over here, while everything else is happening over here, and no matter how hard you try you just can’t get out of where you are to get into where you want to be.

For me it was a spiritual isolation, a spiritual imprisonment, that I was dealing with on that retreat.  And as I meditated on that passage from the book of Isaiah I was struck by its beginning, “Do not fear, for I have redeemed you.”  Later the point is made even more clearly, “Your ransom has been paid.”  What struck me, from that frame of reference, was that it wasn’t God who’d condemned me, judged me and found me guilty; it was me.  My ransom had been paid; I’d been redeemed; the door was open and the chains were on the floor.  But there I was nonetheless – imprisoned and in need of liberation … from myself.

Hold that thought for a minute.  I want to take this in a slightly different direction now, because there’s another kind of imprisonment I’d wager that all of us know.  A moment ago Arthur read a passage by New Age guru Marianne Williamson, a passage you’ll still sometimes see erroneously attributed to one or the other of Nelson Mandela’s 1994 Inaugural Addresses.  In it she asks, on our behalf, “Who am I to be brilliant, gorgeous, talented, fabulous?”  (That’s how I first knew it wasn’t really by Mandela.  I couldn’t imagine that he’d have thrown around words like, “gorgeous” or “fabulous.”)

Who am I to be … ?  What?  What is it that you don’t think you have the right to be?  Happy?  Content with your life?  Creative?  Assertive?  Generous?  Brave?  Emotionally available?  A leader?

Maybe you secretly love music but were told you couldn’t carry a tune.  (Or, as I’ve said about my father, “couldn’t carry a tune in a bucket if it were stapled to his forehead.”)  Or you’ve wanted to paint, or write, or dance but hold yourself back because you ask yourself, over and over again, whenever you’re on the verge of giving it a go, “Who am I to be …?” whatever it is you’re wanting to be.

Or maybe it’s more serious.  Maybe society has been telling you who and what you can and can’t be.  Maybe you’ve heard it so often that you find yourself at some level believing it and, so, asking yourself:  Who am I to be happily out as gay, lesbian, or bisexual?  Who am I to be free to express my gender as I know myself and not how I might look to others?  Who am I to be …?

Now … here’s where things come together.  At least, here’s where things come together for me.  I hope they do for you, too.  One of the things it means to say that we Unitarian Universalists are a people of liberation is that we Unitarian Universalists keep doing what we’ve been doing, and keep trying to do, here – to create a community where “whoever you are, whomever you love, and however you express your identity” you are welcome and have a place.   We don’t always live up to that vision, but we do try.  We do try.

I don’t want to at all deny the very real dangers there are for some of us to truly, and publicly, claim and be who we know ourselves to be.  There can be real consequences, serious consequences, even life and death consequences to being our full selves in places where that kind of self isn’t welcomed.  But part of what it means for us to claim to be a people of liberation is recognizing that our people, all those heretical Unitarians and Universalists who came before us, have paid our ransom, opened the doors and taken off the shackles others have put on us (or that we’ve put on ourselves).   It means that we are compelled –  by our faith, by our identity as Unitarian Universalists, as a people of liberation – to create communities in which it is safe to come out into the freedom to be who we are, liberated from the images to which others would have us conform.

And that brings us to the Marianne Williamson quote again, and the full title of the sermon, because she says, at the end, “[A]s we let our own light shine, we unconsciously give other people permission to do the same. As we are liberated from our own fear, our presence automatically liberates others.”  Liberating ourselves; liberating others.  It’s one of the things being a people of liberation means, and it’s one of the things that happens here in this beloved community.

Each year at our Coming of Age service at least one of our young people says, in one way or another, that this has been a place – and sometimes the only place – where they could really be themselves.  The only place they felt free, the only place they felt safe, to be who they really are without feeling caged, imprisoned, in society’s judgments of who they should be.  This place, and sometimes only this place.

And this happens in Unitarian Universalist congregations around the country.  There are so many testimonies to this:  Unitarian Universalism, our liberating faith, not only touches lives … not only changes lives … it saves lives.  With no hyperbole I can say that there are people alive today because a Unitarian Universalist congregation provided for them a community that was liberating.

Our pledge drive is under way, and this really isn’t a commercial for it, yet I can’t help but mention it in the context of this sermon because when being asked what this community means to you, to me, to any of us we most often think about what it has done for us.  Maybe it’s provided some intellectual stimulation over the years, or developed and nurtured some good friendships, or given us a place to hear some awesome music.  What we don’t often think about is what it has done for others, and what it can do for others if it’s supported not just enough to survive from year to year but to grow and thrive.

We Unitarian Universalists are a people of liberation, and this congregation, this community, can be a place of liberation – for ourselves, for one another, and for those who may yet be inspired and encouraged by our examples. 

Letting Go and Moving On

So far this month we’ve been looking at what it means to be a person of letting go, what it means to practice letting go in our daily lives.  So far we’ve been looking at what I’d call the “easy” side of letting go.  Yes, both Alex and I have been clear that letting go is never really easy, but as we’ve largely been talking about letting go of things we know we need to let go of, we’ve been relatively easy on you all.  Today I’m going to dig us in a bit deeper.  What about when it’s things we don’t think we should let go of that we’re talking about?

I don’t need to give a list of illustrations here because I know that most of us can think all too readily of something that has happened to us that is – or, at least, if it were to happen to us would be – entirely impossible to let go of.  Harms done; pain inflicted; abuse perpetrated; wrongs that just can’t be righted.  Sometimes these things have had devastating effects on us – life-changing effects.  To this day we’re still wounded, still bruised, still aching.  How in the world could we ever be expected to let go?

Because let’s face it – we all know that in sermons like this “letting go” is a code-word for “forgiveness.”  And that’s where a lot of us get hung up, because when we hear talk of “forgiveness” we hear the phrase “forgive and forget” even when it’s not what’s actually said.  Most of us are conditioned to think that “forgiving” someone for something that they’ve done requires our “forgetting” the thing that was done or, at least, “forgetting” the effect it had on us.  The sometimes devastating, sometimes life-changing, effect it had on us.

In 2014 Archbishop Desmond Tutu (who was, among other things, head of South Africa’s “Truth and Reconciliation Commission”) wrote a book titled, The Book of Forgiving: The FourfoldPath for Healing Ourselves and Our World.  I’m going to quote from it a lot this morning.  Here’s something he had to say about forgiving and forgetting:

“Forgiveness does not relieve someone of responsibility for what they have done. Forgiveness does not erase accountability. It is not about turning a blind eye or even turning the other cheek. It is not about letting someone off the hook or saying it is okay to do something monstrous. Forgiveness is simply about understanding that every one of us is both inherently good and inherently flawed. Within every hopeless situation and every seemingly hopeless person lies the possibility of transformation.”

That shouldn’t be unfamiliar to us Unitarian Universalists.  The First Principle that holds our movement together is the affirmation of, “the inherent worth and dignity of every person.”  As I noted last month, “inherent” means that this “worth and dignity” is an integrated and integral part of our character as human beings.  It is unchanging and unchangeable.  Even when we do something “monstrous” there remains, however crusted over, the fundamental reality of our inherent worth.  No matter what another person does to us, we and they are part of one human family.  I’ll come back to Bishop Tutu again as he addresses head-on a question we may find ourselves asking:

“What about evil, you may ask? Aren’t some people just evil, just monsters, and aren’t such people just unforgivable? I do believe there are monstrous and evil acts, but I do not believe those who commit such acts are monsters or evil. To relegate someone to the level of monster is to deny that person’s ability to change and to take away that person’s accountability for his or her actions and behavior.”

This is, of course, another way of saying that nothing we can do can take away that fundamental, inherent worth we have as members of the human family.  But it’s his last point that I think is so fascinating!  When we call somebody a monster, or say that they are just plain evil, we really do declare them unaccountable for what they’ve done – a monster, after all, does monstrous things.  How then, really, can we blame them we they do so?  A person, on the other hand, who acts monstrously can fairly be called to account for their actions.  That’s as challenging an idea as it is a powerful one, because it’s so easy to think of people who do bad things – to us or to others – as “bad people.”  It is so hard to think of them as just people. 

Let me share with you three quotes from three people who each endured unimaginable abuse at the hands of others, who had every right to hold on to anger, bitterness, and hatred toward those others, yet who each found a way to let go of their pain and who refused to lose sight of the basic humanity of their tormentors:

Nelson Mandela said, “If you want to make peace with your enemy, you have to work with your enemy.  Then he becomes your partner.” 

Mohandas Gandhi said, “Whenever you are confronted with an enemy, conquer him with love.”  

And Tenzin Gyatso, the current Dalai Lama, whose homeland is still subjugated under Chinese occupation, said, “I defeat my enemy when I make him my friend.” 

Of course, these are extraordinary men, aren’t they?  To be sure, of course, it’s not just men who’ve exemplify this perspective.  I just as easily could have quoted Chinese journalist Gao Yu, Iranian student activist Bahareh Hedayat, the Ukrainian politician Nadiya Savchenko, or any of the many powerful women who have similarly paid dearly for their courage.  (Earlier this fall the examples of 20 female political prisoners from 13 countries were highlighted in a social media campaign called "Free the 20."  I’ll have a link to it when the sermon’s published online.)  These women and men, and countless others, have endured suffering which we here this morning could never fully imagine – suffering abuse, imprisonment, and torture at the hands of repressive regimes for the crime, essentially, of standing up for what is right.  Yet the vast majority of these people have refused to be embittered by their experiences.  But, again, these are extraordinary people, aren’t they?  I mean, no one could expect us – you and me – to be like them.

Well … remember our focus for the month.  We’re asking ourselves the question of what it means to be a person of letting go.  Maybe even more specifically, what it means that our Unitarian Universalist faith call on us to be people of letting go.  At least part of the answer is that we don’t get to give ourselves that easy out.  Our faith demands of us that we recognize that the only difference between us and the Mandelas, and the Dalai Lamas, and the Aung San Suu Kyis of the world is that they are better at it, that they’re more practiced at it.  Yet true as that is, it’s no excuse for us not to try.  But how are we supposed to go about even trying?  

Nelson Mandela may have given us a clue when he said, “As I walked out the door toward the gate that would lead to my freedom, I knew if I didn't leave my bitterness and hatred behind, I'd still be in prison.”  I knew if I didn't leave my bitterness and hatred behind, I'd still be in prison.

I’ll understand if you’re thinking that that’s still an “easier for you to say” kind of thing, but he really has given us a clue.  He’s telling us that he didn’t let go of his bitterness and hatred only out of respect for the “inherent worth and dignity” of his captors.  He didn’t do it just out some kind of empathy, recognizing them as part of an unjust system that was bigger than they were.  He’s telling us that he also did it for himself.  He’s telling us that he did it so that he wouldn’t have to remain in prison while his captors roamed free.  “As I walked out the door toward the gate that would lead to my freedom, I knew if I didn't leave my bitterness and hatred behind, I'd still be in prison.”

When you come down with the flu, you want to get better, don’t you?  And when you break a bone you want it to heal.  But what about when our sense of self or our dignity is broken?  What about when our heart is broken, or our faith in humanity is infected by whatever it was that happened to us?  What about when it isn’t our immune system that’s been compromised but our sense of simple safety in the world?  It’s harder then, isn’t it?

Part of why it’s harder is, again, our innate understanding of coded language.  When our well-meaning friends and families encourage us to “let it go,” “get over it,” “move on with our lives” we intuit, or at some level suspect, that part of what they’re really saying is that they want us to pretend it never happened.  No doubt that’s often, if unconsciously, true.  My pain is uncomfortable for you to be around, and you would like to be able to pretend that this thing – whatever it was – never happened so that you can get back to life as you’ve known it.  Of course, consciously what you mean when you tell me to “let it go and move on” is that you worry that I’m going to remain imprisoned.  It’s been said that when we refuses to forgive someone it’s as though we’ve drunk poison in the expectation that the other person will die.  Those who encourage us to “let go” don’t want to see us keep drinking poison.

And, of course, they’re right to be worried.  To quote Bishop Tutu again,

“When we ignore the pain, [which could be another way of saying “when we hold on to it” or “when we refuse to let it go”] it grows bigger and bigger, and like an abscess that is never drained, eventually it will rupture. When that happens, it can reach into every area of our lives—our health, our families, our jobs, our friendships, our faith, and our very ability to feel joy may be diminished by the fallout from resentments, anger, and hurts that are never named.”

But despite our friends’ – and even our own – best intentions this isn’t so easy to do because … well … for a lot of reasons, but a big one is that we’re afraid.  We’re afraid that if we forgive this person we’d somehow be saying that what they did wasn’t that wrong, wasn’t that bad, that it was, now that we’re looking back at it, in some sense “okay.”   We’re afraid that if we let go of our pain and our anger that in that letting go we’ll be giving our tacit approval and that we’ll allow the person who committed the act to forget what they did.

As you can imagine, Bishop Tutu has something to say about this, too.  He wrote:

“Forgiveness doesn’t mean pretending things aren’t as they really are. Forgiveness is a recognition that there is a ghastliness that has happened. Forgiveness doesn’t mean trying to paper over the cracks. Forgiveness means that both the wronged and the culprits of those wrongs acknowledge that something happened.”

That was the goal of South Africa’s “Truthand Reconciliation Commission,” and all the ones formed in other countries that have followed in its footsteps.  And the Commission was really well-named because the name really says it.  The purpose was to bring to light the truth of what happened – the unvarnished, honest, no-holds-barred, at times horrific truth.  Naming it, recognizing it as being as bad as it was, owning its effects on me … that’s the first step. 

Then there’s the reconciliation part.  Victims and victimizers were brought together so that one could say to the other the truth of what happened.  In fact, both were given a chance to speak their truths.  And then the question was asked, “what would it take to reconcile?”  Not, “how can we wipe the past away?”  Not, “how can we make it all somehow ‘okay’?”  Not, “how can we pretend nothing all that bad really happened?”  Not, in other words, “how can we let the person who did this off the hook?”  None of those would be at all good – for either person!  Instead, the question is about how we can return to a state in which everyone can recognize each other’s common humanity; how we can get to a place where everyone can again see one another as members of the same human family,

And that’s where the work of it all comes in.  It’s not easy – no matter what self-help slogans and internet memes might encourage you to believe.  The Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. once said, “Forgiveness is not a one-time act.  It is a permanent attitude.”  And the development over time – in “step by excruciatingly incremental step,” as I said a few weeks back – is part of what it means to be a person of letting go.  Even – and perhaps, really, most especially –  when what needs to be let go of is as difficult, and as painful, as this.

Maybe not surprisingly, I’m going to give Bishop Tutu the final word:

“Forgiving [and I think we could also say “letting go”] is not forgetting; it’s actually remembering--remembering and not using your right to hit back. It’s a second chance for a new beginning.”  He said, “We are not responsible for what breaks us, but we can be responsible for what puts us back together again.”

Pax tecum,

RevWik

Nelson Mandela, Martin Luther King, Jr., and Aung San Suu Kyi looking from their internal freedom through the bars of their external captivity.

This is the text of a sermon delievered at the Thomas Jefferson Memorial Church - Unitarian Universalist in Charlottesville, Virginia on Sunday, Ocrtober 18, 2015.  If you prefer, you can listen to the sermon.

Deconstructing Bondage & Freedom

This is the text of the sermon I preached on Sunday, March 8th, 2015 at the Thomas Jefferson Memorial Church - Unitarian Universalist in Charlottesville, VA.  If you'd like, you can also listen to a podcast.

Opening Words:  The Road fromSelma by June Brindel

 Sermon:

“When a person places the proper value on freedom, there is nothing under the sun that he will not do to acquire that freedom. Whenever you hear a man saying he wants freedom, but in the next breath he is going to tell you what he won't do to get it, or what he doesn't believe in doing in order to get it, he doesn't believe in freedom. A man who believes in freedom will do anything under the sun to acquire... or preserve his freedom.”

That’s Malcolm X talking (and I kept his gender specific language in place for historicity’s sake).  “A person who believes in freedom will do anything under the sun to acquire... or preserve that freedom.”  “Whenever you hear someone saying they want freedom, but in the next breath tells you what they won't do to get it, or what they don’t believe in doing in order to get it, that person doesn't believe in freedom.”

It doesn’t take a lot to see that in this Malcolm is taking a crack at the Rev. Dr. King, and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, and Student Nonviolent Coordinating Council, and the hundreds of people who fifty years ago today were in Selma nursing the wounds of “Bloody Sunday,” and the thousands of people – white and black – who were on their way there to stand in solidarity and to march, eventually, all the way to Montgomery.  The folks President Obama was talking about yesterday, the ones he described as, “ordinary Americans willing to endure billy clubs and the chastening rod; tear gas and the trampling hoof; men and women who despite the gush of blood and splintered bone would stay true to their North Star and keep marching toward justice.”  These are the people Malcolm X is dismissing as not really believing in, not really understanding, freedom.

What we have here is a clash of ideologies or, perhaps even more accurately, of strategies.  Malcolm X said, "We declare our right on this earth...to be a human being, to be respected as a human being, to be given the rights of a human being in this society, on this earth, in this day, which we intend to bring into existence by any means necessary."  If Dr. King said that “We must pursue peaceful ends through peaceful means,” then Malcolm X was essentially saying that those seeking freedom must have the freedom to choose how they’re going to do it.

“I don't favor violence,” he said. “If we could bring about recognition and respect of our people by peaceful means, well and good. Everybody would like to reach his objectives peacefully. But I'm also a realist. The only people in this country who are asked to be nonviolent are black people."  He also said, “"I don't mean go out and get violent; but at the same time you should never be nonviolent unless you run into some nonviolence. I'm nonviolent with those who are nonviolent with me. But when you drop that violence on me, then you've made me go insane, and I'm not responsible for what I do."

Martin Luther King, on the other hand, believed that “hatred and bitterness can never cure the disease of fear, only love can do that [and that] we must evolve for all human conflict a method which rejects revenge, aggression, and retaliation.”  He said, “Nonviolence is a powerful and just weapon. which cuts without wounding and ennobles the [one] who wields it. It is a sword that heals.”

Malcolm X said, “Concerning nonviolence: It is criminal to teach a man not to defend himself, when he is the constant victim of brutal attacks. It is legal and lawful to own a shotgun or a rifle. We believe in obeying the law.” 

What we have here is a clash of ideologies or, perhaps even more accurately, a clash of strategies.  And this clash reveals a paradox – can violence ever achieve peace?  Can limits ever lead to freedom?  It’s this later one that I really want to dig into this morning.

Miriam Webster’s Dictionary defines “freedom” as, “the quality or state of being free,” which it further defines as “liberation from slavery or restraint or from the power of another (in other words, independence),” and, “the absence of necessity, coercion, or constraint in choice or action.”  And by this definition it seems as though Malcolm X was on to something – if freedom is “the absence of necessity, coercion, or constraint in choice or action,” then how can you achieve freedom if the road you’re going to take to get there is, of necessity, constrained in advance by a principle like nonviolence?

And I’ve got to tell you, the more I read about what went on in Selma 50 years ago the more respect for I have for the discipline, the restraint, the limits that those peaceful freedom fighters placed on themselves, and the strength and courage it took to remain true to them.

Last week I talked about Mark Morrison-Reed’s book, TheSelma Awakening.  This week it’s Richard Leonard’s Call to Selma:  eighteen days of witness.  Richard Leonard was the Minister of Religious Education at the Community Church of New York 50 years ago, and he was one of the hundreds of clergy and lay people who responded to Dr. King’s call and headed down to Selma to stand in solidarity.  He went expecting to be gone just a couple of days.  He stayed for eighteen.  (But don’t worry, by the seventh day he finally managed to call home and tell his wife and kids that he’d gone.)  This book, published back in 2002, is the story of his experiences during those days, as reconstructed from the notes and journal he kept at that time.  What makes Call to Selma so moving is that it is the story told from eye level.  It’s doesn’t depict the perspective of the leadership, but the rank and file.  It’s not the story of the people making the decisions, but of the ones who, in faith, acted on them.

And what a story it is.  

We know, I hope, about that first march, the one that happened 50 years ago yesterday, the one where the marchers hadn’t even gotten all the way over the Edmund Pettus bridge when they were set upon by police with billy clubs and tear gas – Bloody Sunday.  And we may know about the march two days later, on March 9^th, that came to be called Turnaround Tuesday, because the marchers voluntarily turned around in order not to violate the federal court order prohibiting a march (to show their respect for the law), yet also having gotten just a little bit further than they had two days before (to demonstrate their resolve).  And then there was that third march, which started on March 21 and ended with 25,000 people marching up to the state house in Montgomery on March 25^th.

In between there was the lesser known stalemate at the so-called “Berlin Wall.”  With the road to Montgomery blocked by a federal injunction, and hundreds of people wanting and needing to do something, organizers decided on March 10^th, the day after Reverends Reeb, Miller, and Olsen were attacked, the organizers decided to march to the Dallas County Courthouse.  Almost immediately they were met by Mayor Smitherman and Chief Baker, and rows and rows of police officers stretching across Sylvan Street, blocking their way.  This faceoff would continue for six days – night and day, good weather or rain (and there was apparently a lot of hard rain that week).  At one point Chief Baker strung a clothesline across the street to physically demarcate what we might call now “a line in the sand.”  The story of the hours and days on that line is powerful stuff, no less powerful than the stories of the meetings between King and Johnson, for instance.

But to bring us back to that paradox, here were hundreds of women, children, and men who were fighting for their freedom, yet who were incredibly disciplined about it.  They knew that an “anything goes” kind of anarchic freedom could get them all killed and, maybe worse, hurt their cause.  Leonard tells of seeing at one point a hand, coming out of the rows further back, with a pair of scissors poised to cut Chief Baker’s “Berlin Wall,” and then, almost immediately, another hand reached out and pulled the first hand back.  There were times when folks wanted to push through that line, to break through those “stiff ranked troopers / white as a shroud / rimming the road from Selma” the way our Opening Words imagined the ghosts of Reeb and Jackson, Evers and Till, and those four little girls from Birmingham doing.  Oh they wanted to, but they didn’t.  Their actions were dictated by necessity; seriously constrained and restricted.  There were things many of them wanted to do but that they would not do.  They gave up freedom to gain freedom.

And that may be an important point to highlight.  These weren’t constraints placed upon them from the outside; these were limits voluntarily imposed on themselves.  If you choose to limit your own freedom, is your freedom truly limited? 

That’s something I think Malcolm X may have missed.  And you’d think he would have understood this.  After all, members of the Nation of Islam denied themselves the pleasures of the use of alcohol, tobacco, and other drugs … eating meat.  Members adhered to a strict dress code and what’s been described as a military discipline.  Yet they accepted, even embraced, these limitations to their freedom because of the sense of greater freedom such discipline made possible.  (The word “Islam” itself, the Arabic word, means “submission” as in “submission to the will of Allah.”)  All of this Malcolm understood and it didn’t bother him at all.  Here he understood that an unbridled, no-limits freedom was potentially dangerous and damaging.

King understood the power of self-control, of discipline, of making the choice to limit one’s choices on behalf of a greater freedom.  His belief in the power of nonviolence came from two very different sources.  One, the Hindu Mohandas Gandhi, whom King once called “the guiding light of our technique of nonviolent social change.”  Gandhi is remembered as saying about meeting violence with nonviolence, “They may torture my body, break my bones, even kill me. Then they will have my dead body, but not my obedience.”   The other inspiration, of course, would have been Jesus who exemplified devotion to love and truth even if that meant his own execution.  Jesus who was remembered as, even from the cross, asking for mercy for those who tortured him.

So why talk about all this this morning?  In part because this is the 50^th anniversary of those events in Selma and we need to remember because, despite how far we’ve come as a nation there is still so much farther we have to go.

But there’s another reason as well.  The dominant culture in which we swim tells us in ways both subtle and overt that we should let nothing stand in the way of our “pursuit of happiness.”  The culture of conspicuous consumption and on-demand … everything … is presented as the highest ideal, and we are inculcated with the notion that our highest goal should be the freedom to do what we want when we want.  We’re told, in short, that bondage is bad and freedom is good.

Yet without its banks a flowing river becomes a swamp.  “Make channels for the streams of love where they may broadly run,” goes the hymn.  Without those channels forward movement is dissipated.  This is true of a fight for civil rights; this is true for the living of our own lives.

When I hear somebody talking about freedom – or anything of value that they seek – and then, in the same breath, hear them say what they’re not going to do to get it, or what they don’t believe in doing to get it, then I feel certain that they eventually will.

Pax tecum,

RevWik