The Inevitability of Victory

This is the text of the reflection I offered on Sunday, April 7, 2019 at the congregation I serve in Charlottesville, Virginia.

It was just after 6:00 in the evening on Thursday, April 4^th.*  The Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. had arrived in Memphis just the day before.  His plane out of Atlanta had been delayed because of a bomb threat, but he’d made it there in time to speak as scheduled at Bishop Charles Mason Temple.  The address he gave that night has come to be known by the name “I’ve Been to the Mountaintop” because of what he said at its end:

“I don't know what will happen now. We've got some difficult days ahead. But it doesn't matter with me now. Because I've been to the mountaintop. And I don't mind. Like anybody, I would like to live a long life. Longevity has its place. But I'm not concerned about that now. I just want to do God's will. And He's allowed me to go up to the mountain. And I've looked over. And I've seen the promised land. I may not get there with you. But I want you to know tonight, that we, as a people, will get to the promised land! And so I'm happy, tonight. I'm not worried about anything. I'm not fearing any man. My eyes have seen the glory of the coming of the Lord!”

The next day, and at the age of only 39, he was dead.

On April 4^th, 1968, the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. stepped out onto the second-floor balcony of the Lorraine Hotel.  He’d not only stayed in this hotel before, but he and the Rev. Ralph Abernathy had stayed in that exact same room so many times that it was colloquially known as “the King-Abernathy suite.”  It was a chilly evening.  Jesse Jackson had just told Dr. King that he really should take a coat with him, and King had teased Jackson about how casually the later was dressed.  As he walked out room 306, Dr. King asked one of the musicians who’d be playing that night to “make sure [to] play ‘Take My Hand, Precious Lord’ … [and to] play it real pretty.”

The day had been tense.  A federal judge had issued a restraining order against the march that had been scheduled for that coming Monday in support of striking sanitation workers, the reason King was in Memphis.  Throughout that Thursday, leaders of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference had been in court, arguing to have the injunction lifted.  The city said it was worried about violence; SCLC reiterated its commitment to non-violence.  Right around 4:30 Judge Bailey Brown issued his ruling lifting the ban and allowing the march to go forward.  By about 5:00, Andrew Young had returned to the Lorraine to deliver the good news.  Yet perhaps because of all the tension that had been building up a fight broke out – a pillow fight!  That’s right.  Just before he was murdered by a bigot’s bullet, the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. and his companions had been giddy, having a pillow fight and worrying about whether or not to take a coat against the evening chill. 

And then a single bullet fired from a bathroom window in a boarding house across the street brought an end to the levity.  Dr. King lay in a pool of his own blood.  An hour later he would be dead. 

Several years ago I developed a Unitarian Universalist service to fall on the Christian holy day of Good Friday – “A Memorial to the Martyrs.”  It provides an opportunity to pause and reflect on those, both known and unknown, who have given their lives in the pursuit of justice.  Jesus, of course, and also eco-martyrs like Chico Mendes, and Jairo Sandoval.  There’s Oscar Romero, Harvey Milk, Ingrid Washinawatok, Stephen Biko, Mohandas Gandhi, Malcolm X, Viola Liuzzo, and, of course, Martin Luther King, Jr.  And you know I could go on … for a long time.

One year, as I prepared to lead this service, I was feeling a bit of despair.  A lot of despair, actually.  Maybe you’ve felt this kind of despair, too:  despair that so many people have been killed, are being murdered, simply because they were trying to make the world a better place.  So many, oh so many who, like anybody, would have liked to have lived a long life. (“Longevity has its place.”)  So many people who knew full well the dangers that you face, and that face you, when you are working for real change, yet who refused to be “concerned about that.”  At least not so concerned that they let it stop them.  I was despairing – and I expect at times you have too – because of just how often, despite their courageous commitment, they were stopped by a gun, or a knife, or a fist.

I’m honest, I wasn’t just feeling despair; I was also feeling hopeless.  Who here this morning hasn’t felt that sometimes, too?  That night the future looked to me bleak, and my hope for change was weak.  The promise of justice rolling down like an ever-flowing stream felt like an empty promise, because those who want things to stay just like they are seem to always be able to build a bigger damnable dam.  (Or, if you would prefer, a “wall.”)  If preachers are supposed to inspire hope, to provide uplifit, I surely didn’t know how I was going to do it that night.  As the choir just sang,** I was asking myself:

Will justice ever roll down?

Will justice ever roll down? 

Hope that calls in vain,

So much hurt and pain, 

Sorrow all around...

Have you ever asked that?  Have you ever felt a sense of futility in all this work for change?

That evening my wife – wise woman that she is (except for that one time when she for some unfathomable reason said, “yes”) – suggested to me that I was looking at the wrong thing.  Yes, the list of people who have been martyred in the name of justice is agonizingly long.  And yes, their example of sacrifice – their willing sacrifice – should never be forgotten.  Yet, she reminded me, the list of people who those sacrifices have inspired, who are working right now, or who lived out their lives in service to that vision of a better world … well that list is really, really long.

I believe it was that same year that I came across this cartoon.  “The odd thing about assassins, Dr. King,” a seated Mahatma Gandhi is saying to a standing Dr. King, “is that they think they’ve killed you.”  I truly do not mean to be flip, but I can’t help thinking of Obi-Wan saying to Vadar, “If you strike me down I shall become more powerful than you could possibly imagine.”  “The odd thing about assassins, Dr. King, is that they think they’ve killed you.”  A verse in Peter Gabriel’s song Biko puts it like this: “You can blow out a candle, but you can’t put out a fire.  Once the flames begin to catch, the wind will blow it higher.”  The guns, the knives, the fists are strong enough to stop a person, yet not so strong as to stop a vision.  In fact, they seem to always end up amplifying it.

In the fantastic film Gandhi – which if you haven’t seen you should go home and watch it this afternoon … this evening at the latest – there is a scene in which Gandhi is speaking to people who will be participating in a demonstration of satyagraha (the “insistent holding on to truth” which is the power of non-violent action).  He acknowledges that there will be risks, saying:

“They may torture my body, break my bones, even kill me – then they will have my dead body, not my obedience.”

And when the assassin’s bullets took his life, they did not take his commitment, his passion, his spirit of justice-seeking.  And neither was Dr. King’s faith in that “moral arc of the universe,” bending “toward justice,” his belief in the inevitability of victory, his unshakable certainty of the arrival of all people in the “promised land” he saw from “the mountaintop” – that was not silenced on April 4, 1968.  It lived on.  It has lived on.  And the good news is that with the spirit of all who have died in the name of a better world, it continues to feed and nurtures today’s seekers of justice.

If I am to tell the truth as I deliver this Good News of the inevitability of victory this morning, I must offer a word of caution.

A few weeks ago I talked a lot about the new book by my colleague the Rev. Nancy McDonald Ladd, After The Good News: progressive religion beyond optimism.  She notes that there is a danger faced particularly by large-hearted, well-meaning liberal folks like us (and even more particularly by large-hearted, well-meaning, liberal middle-class, well-educated white folks like most of us here).  So few of us have our own direct, lived experience of the injustices we are committed to ending.  So few of us have personally suffered under the oppressions we strive to dismantle.  And because of that distance, it is actually pretty easy to find hope.  It’s actually pretty easy for us to believe in a better world, because to a greater or lesser extent most of us have been living in a better world than most of those who experience injustice first hand. 

For many of us, maybe even most of us, our vision of the future is derived from our experience of comfort and privilege.  It is, even if we don’t say it this way, the hope that one day everyone will be free to live “the American Dream,” not as it now so perverted, but as we believe it was meant to be.  Yet such a hope, such a vision, is ultimately doomed to failure because “the American Dream,” in any form, is, itself, the source of oppression, the reality in which all oppressions are rooted.  So the caution is this truth:  the Beloved Community will not be a better version of what we have today.  That toward which we strive will be a way of life that that has been transformed into something radically, disorientingly, discomfortingly new – un-imaginably different from anything we, especially those of us who identify or are identified as white, have ever seen.

To work for that vision takes a kind of commitment, a kind of courage, a kind of faith, a kind of hope that is nearly impossible for those of us who have known more comfort than suffering, more opportunity than struggle.  Such unshakable certainty in the inevitability of victory can only – only – take root and grow in the lives of those how do not stand apart from, but are, instead, intimately connected to suffering and struggling.  That’s because only a hope that is rooted in the struggle and the suffering, can transcend it; only a faith that is born in pain can survive the pain that is inevitable as we create, together, the true, and new, Beloved Community we all need so desperately.  And that means you, I, we (most definitely I) must find ways to step out of our zones of comfort and into the places of suffering, to not simply name it but to know it, directly, immediately, in our bones. 

I know, most of you know, that despair is easy to fall into.  Hopelessness is always just outside our door, waiting for an invitation to come in to our lives.  Yet those who have known the suffering, the anguish, the pain of oppression declare unequivocally that the promised land is our final destination, and that we are destined get there.  No matter how stony the road, no matter how many are martyred on the journey, victory is inevitable.  And one day “We shall overcome,” will be truly transformed and become “We have overcome.”

Pax tecum,

RevWik

Notes:

* The choir sang “Will Justice Roll Down?”  Words and Music by Jason Shelton.

** The details about Dr. King’s last days and hours come from both the Wikipedia article about Dr. King’s assassination, and also from a project of the Atlanta Constitution and Chanel 2 Action News in which, for the 50^th anniversary of the assassination they covered the events as if they were live tweeted.

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.

Happy Birthday, Gandhi-Ji

"Generations to come will scarce believe that such a one as this in flesh and blood
did walk upon this earth."  (Albert Einstein reflecting on the life of Mohandas K. Gandhi)

 

I was in college when Richard Attenborough's film about Gandhi came out.  My friends and I were floored by it; moved by it; profoundly touched by it.  I'd say that in the first week it was out we must have gone four or five times to see it.  (To be honest, by the fourth time we went we were smuggling in large bags full of our own popcorn and were only a little self-conscious about stuffing huge handfuls of popcorn into our mouths while Ben Kingsley was onscreen asking for "water . . . and a little lemon.")

I do understand that there was more than a little hagiography in that film, and yet from all that I've read over the years since, it painted a fairly accurate portrait.  It might have been ever so impressionistic, but that doesn't mean that it's not true.

And, so, each year I try to mark Gandhi-ji's birthday.  Sometimes it's just being quietly aware of the anniversary.  Some days I re-watch the movie.  And some days I just try to be a little bit better than I am, so that I can help the world to become a little bit better than it is.

This year I've written this post, discovered this lovely photograph, and wish to encourage anyone reading this to spend a little more time to read a collection of Gandhi's thoughts.

Pax tecum,

RevWik

My Life is My Message

I have long loved this quote from Mohandas Ghandi.  He is reported to have said it in response to someone asking him to sum up his message in a succinct way.  "My life is my message," was his reply.  And so, in a very true and deep way, it was.

"Generations to come will not believe that such a man as this, in flesh and blood, did walk upon the earth."  That's what Albert Einstein said at the end of Gandhi's life.  He could tell that someday, people would imagine that they were listening to legends when they heard about his life.  Perhaps somebody said something similar about St. Francis.  Or Jesus.

But I was recently reminded of Ghandi when my colleague Peter Bowden used a story from Gandhi's life as a starting point for a marvelous piece in his own UU Growth Blog.  The story he used was of the time a woman brought her son to Gandhi, asking him to tell the boy to stop eating sugar because it is so unhealthy.  Surely the boy would listen to Gandhi-ji.  Gandhi said that he would do it, but asked her to bring the boy back to him in three days.  Three days later the mother and son returned, and when the boy was brought before him Gandhi simply said, "stop eating sugar.  It's bad for you."  The mother said, "Why couldn't you have said that to him when we were here three days ago?"  Gandhi replied, "Because three days ago I was still eating sugar."

I like what Peter did with this story, but I found it taking me to a different place.  How many of the sermons I've preached over the years should I have really put off preaching for a metaphorical three days until I'd taken there message fully to heart?  (How many would I still not be able to preach by this standard?)  As I prepare to return to the pulpit in the fall, I'd like to keep the following two principles in mind:

• Don't tell people to do things that I, myself, am not doing
• Don't spend a lot of time telling people what to do

The first principle is pretty obvious, in the context of the story, but the second one . . .  Isn't that what most people think preaching's all about?  Well, I don't think I did a lot of that in the congregations I've served thus far -- at least not directly and explicitly -- because we Unitarian Universalists aren't the kind of people who take well to being told what to do by some kind of external authority.  Yet, if I'm honest, I'll bet that over the years I've indicated and implied paths that I, myself, rarely if ever dare to tread.  I'd like to think not, but I'm sure it's true.

And so in this next time 'round I want to be more careful.  I want to hold my own feet to the proverbial fire even more than the congregation's.  I would like, when my time in the professional ministry is done, to be able to answer, should anyone care to ask me to sum up the message I'd delivered, that my life was my message too.

In Gassho,

RevWik