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

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