While I lived in Oregon, I had a blind date with a Jewish historian. A mutual friend of ours thought we should meet. It was at about this time of year, right before Passover and Easter. I have to say there was no romantic chemistry between us but I am indebted to him for our conversation over dinner which has helped me to make some sense of our faith. I had said to him that I envied the Jewish ritual celebrations of Shabbat and Passover as I also did the ritual remembrance of the Passion of Jesus in Christian churches.
The idea of participating every year in a lifelong, centuries-old repetition of events like the tasting of bitter herbs at the seder or walking the stations of the cross, or breaking bread and sipping wine in remembrance of the Last Supper of Jesus, events that changed religious history and united a people, is very moving to me. I said that while we have many stories including those of Judaism and Christianity, and while our denominational history is Judeo-Christian, and while we are an activist faith proudly in the tradition of Hebrew and Christian prophets and reformers, we did not have any such centering story and spiritually deepening ritual in contemporary Unitarian Universalism. In fact, some observances like serving communion became deeply controversial.
Ralph Waldo Emerson left the ministry of the Unitarian Church he was serving in Massachusetts in the early nineteenth century because he could no longer, in good conscience, serve communion. Modern, predominantly Christian, Unitarian and Universalist churches serve communion at some time other than the regular worship service so that everyone has a choice whether to participate. West Coast and Floridian UU churches tend to avoid the whole business altogether as not worth the controversy. Personally, having grown up Presbyterian with fond memories of the passing through the congregation of trays of tiny tinkling glasses of grape juice and perfect squares of white bread to the tune of stories of the Last Supper, I feel regret that my skepticism and critique of portions of both religions has made my occasional recent participation in these rituals feel insincere. The word “sincere,” from Latin derivation, means without wax. My practice of the Passover seder and of communion is “with wax.” It feels patched together, piecework, taking this and not that, keeping intellectual distance as I watch hands, tongue and voice perform the rituals I still wish would hold their power for me.
My date, who was an admirer of our UU public activism and an observer of our history, replied that Unitarian Universalism seemed to him to be a religion characterized by “an absence of tragedy.” I've been turning this idea over ever since, because his description immediately rang true to me. I wonder if our avoidance of Christianity, even open rebellion against it, is an avoidance of the hard demands of the life of the cross. I wonder if the reminder of the liberation of the Hebrews from slavery in Egypt runs too close to home for Americans who wish to forget our history of enslaving and persecuting people of color: blacks, Native Americans, Japanese and Mexican farm workers to be specific.
Moving this week into the both tragic and liberating events celebrated by Palm Sunday, Passover and Easter seems a good time to reflect on the importance of tragedy and suffering in the formation and practice of religion. Listening to NPR yesterday with three speakers on the life of faith in a time of war makes it all very real. I am led to question whether, in not claiming the centrality of a crucifix, for example, we have found any compelling alternative.
What is tragedy anyway? And, how could I possibly agree that we are a religion without tragedy? While I was serving our congregation in Hillsboro, Oregon, one man in his thirties became sick with meningitis and died within four days of becoming ill. He was divorced, his two small children lived with his former wife. He had struggled to find steady and meaningful employment. He was not an easy man for folks to befriend so was often isolated. I had just had lunch with him the week before this happened. He had a new job. He was beginning to find friends. His visits with his daughters were good. I left feeling his life had just turned in a positive direction for him. And then, out of nowhere, he got sick and died.
A couple in their forties in the congregation with two teenage sons, went out in their car for a rare dinner out without the kids. A car, driven by a young woman jokingly passing some friends in another car on Cornelius Pass Road hit their car head on. Chris was killed instantly and Bryan was in a coma for weeks. His body recovered over years. Their congregation and I are still trying to make sense of it all.
These were tragedies, senseless tragedies, tragedies that could befall any of us, any day. But, tragedy is not only an unfortunate or calamitous event like illness or accident. The tragedies of the Greeks or of Shakespeare are dramas in which the actor faces conflict with the forces of destiny or circumstance or character or society by which he or she is inevitably overcome. These dramas represent a whole worldview, an approach to life, the polar opposite from a Shakespearean “As You Like It” or “Midsummer Night's Dream” which depict a comedic world view where everything always works out for the best in the end. In the tragic worldview, there are forces like those of the Fates or of God which are beyond our control.
Judaism and Christianity contain tragic events, a culture of suffering or sacrifice to Higher Powers and a strong message of explaining human life with a tragic worldview. Judaism is marked by a history of hardship in a society is characterized by racial prejudice against those of Jewish heritage. The central ritual of Judaism recounts the tragedy of exile and slavery in Egypt. The recitation of tragic events in the Passover Haggadah has been compounded in modern history by the Holocaust in Germany and Europe and the protection of an embattled Jewish state in Israel. As we have been urged recently by the production of films such as “Schindler's List,” “Sophie's Choice,” and most recently “The Piano,” the Holocaust is a tragedy of such dimensions and of such risk of repetition, as we know from hate groups in the United States and even Germany, that we must repeatedly be reminded of it so as not to repeat it, human nature being what it is.
The central event in the midst of much of Christianity is the crucifixion of Jesus on the cross following betrayal by fellow Jews, even his own disciples. Peter, who denied he knew Jesus three times from the time of the Passover meal until the cock crowed the next morning, is the rock upon which the Christian church is built. St. Peter's Basilica in Rome is his extraordinary monument. In much of Catholic and Protestant Christianity human beings are born sinners and can only be saved by accepting Christ as their personal Savior. Furthermore, the world as we know it will come to a tragic end, an apocalypse. For some the wars in the Middle East are the fulfillment of that inexorable destiny.
Even Buddhism, a non-theist religion, arose in response to the awareness of tragedy by Gautama. Gautama's wealthy father endeavored to keep his son from experiencing suffering or the awareness of poverty, aging and death. It was only when he escaped his father's enclosure of denial of anything but plenty and happiness that Gautama sought to wander the earth in pursuit of a way of in which he could stay present to the whole of life experience. Buddhist meditation encourages a full awareness of all the positive and frightening feelings to which we are prey, but then teaches the practice of non-attachment. Non-attachment is a way to remain present in the midst of suffering with loving kindness and compassion.
There are modern cultural examples of a tragic worldview too. The conflicts in Yugoslavia and Afghanistan are centuries old. The people of Kosovo and Kabul are caught up in a history they were born into and events egged on by a dictator or a Taliban they did not elect, living in a world where bombs are the Clinton and two Bush administrations' treatment of choice for aggression. It is as if fate dictates their destiny. Our only option, in a tragic worldview, is to submit to forces beyond our ken and beyond our control. Fighting divine authority is hopeless. We must put ourselves in their care, as in the will of God, the dictates of the Bible or practicing traditional rituals, faithfully, and hope that “God will provide” or that “Father knows best.” When you hear the phrase, “God willing,” or “Inch/Allah” listen for an underlying tragic worldview.
I believe, the tragic worldview underlies the continuing resistance to legislating compassionate dying. Jack Kevorkian was convicted of second degree murder for giving a lethal injection to a man dying of the devastating Lou Gehrig's disease. In fact, if he is guilty of murder, it should have been a first degree conviction for his act was clearly premeditated. ALS is a disease in which the mind remains absolutely clear and unaffected but you watch while your nerves fail to send signals to more and more parts of the body until you cannot walk, you cannot eat or talk, you, finally, cannot breathe. Opponents to medical euthanasia may offer legitimate drug-induced relief of suffering, but the underlying justification is that our life is God given and it is not right to take it away by human hands even our own hands. Calling upon the Hippocratic oath as if nothing has been learned in medicine about the quality of life since Hippocrates, is a call to an authoritarian religion, an enforcer of fate, a fate worse than death, that of unbearable suffering. UU work in support of compassionate dying says we can take our life and death into our own hands.
While one of us may wish to experience all of life even our particular natural death, another may, with a terminal disease, wish to end their life while they are still aware and comfortable and before their body wastes away or pain can only be relieved by the dulling of the senses through increasing doses of drugs. For all we might wish that Kevorkian's persistent media-enticing tactics would just go away, his intent is to change our laws toward compassion
Persistent peacework in the times of détente often becomes annoying. Many of us, myself included, would like not to look at the presence of violence all the time. I'm busy. I would prefer just to deal with it when it comes towards me, not when it is affecting someone else or some other nation. And if I can duck when it does come, I'll duck, even after 9-11
I am often in good company. In America, Unitarian Universalism and most of American Civil Religion as well as secular culture has lost its willingness to confront suffering and thus has ironically succumbed to a tragic world view. Accepting the affluent life as normative, many UU's have unwittingly bought into the predeterminism of Calvin. We are preordained to be among the elect for whom tragedy is mostly absent or hidden, or merely personal. Social tragedy has been ghettoized on streets other than suburban streets where most of our congregations reside. On television, violence has been dissociated from suffering. It has become more stimulant than pain. Personal illness and death are often relegated to specialists: doctors, retirement homes, hospitals and sanitized funeral homes. We are often stunned by death in a way an Emily Dickinson or a Ralph Waldo Emerson of yesteryear, or an urban poor black family or an Iraqi of today are not. Ironically, President Bush believes he can overcome Fate and change the tragic shape of the Middle East. But his method of violence against violence is anything but a transformation. It is more of the same.
When I am honest, my avoidance of peace work in times of détente is also an avoidance of suffering and the hard work of creating non-violent alternatives to aggression for managing conflicts. Rather than say, I am helpless in the face of a world which only understands military might, we can do better. We can, if we have courage and passion for the task, overcome the will of a God, shaped on the metaphor of all-powerful kingship, and the history of nations whose boundaries were decided by warfare. Gandhi had that kind of courage and passion. Martin Luther King did too. Both men came, it is true, to tragic personal ends, but neither man had a tragic world view. Gandhi denied that the culture of caste and the culture of colonialism would define the way he would lead his life. He drew from a religion and a Conviction, capital C, centered in compassion, not Fate, the wherewithal to overturn oppression.
Rosa Parks refused to accept segregation as ordained by fate, bible and history. Martin King supported her defining action with a movement for civil rights and economic justice.
Gandhi, a Hindu, which, in many ways, is a religion close to modern Unitarian Universalism, wrote, “If you want something really important to be done, you must not merely satisfy the reason. You must move the heart also. The appeal to reason is more to the head, but the penetration of the heart comes from suffering. It opens the inner understanding.”
If there is to be an alternative to future wars, such as that in Yugoslavia and in Israel, there will have to be an international peace movement that begins with the children and thus with the families of people the world around. Only when we have a worldwide mission of peace and armies of non-violent activists instead of bombers, will peace have a chancePlease don't misunderstand me. I am not arguing for a pursuit of suffering or masochism, but I want to observe aloud, in this passion week, that a religion based on the avoidance of the symbols and martyrs of suffering and humility runs the risk of losing the emotional power to act.
What then can I offer?
Both Moses in Exodus and Jesus in the Gospel accounts argued against fate, which in their worlds was the will of God. God told Moses to save his people from the Egyptians. He told Moses to say God said so. Moses demanded to know God's name if he was to take on such Godly power as to save his people. God said, “Tell them 'I am who I am' sent me. But Moses said “they'll never believe me.” So God promised him three signs: a staff turned to a snake, a hand turned leprous, and if all that failed, water turned to blood before their eyes.
Then Moses said, God, you know I have a speech impediment. They'll never understand me. And God jumped back with the suggestion that Moses tell his brother Aaron of God's message and then Aaron who is a good speaker could repeat the message to the people. Moses' resistance was real and human. But an ironic, as opposed to a tragic, God wouldn't let him get away with it.
Jesus went to the Garden of Gethsemane. He spoke to God in prayer. He wanted to be sure he had heard God correctly. It took three times hearing the message in his head before he accepted that this was the right path, this path to the cross. I see these stories as building a partnership with God, as the route toward liberation and justice, not of obedience to a dictator God or Fate.
When we choose stories of partnership in the work for justice, like the story of Moses in argument with God, we are left more with a feeling of joy and determination than of sorrow even in the midst of inevitable suffering. When we gain inspiration from a tale of Jesus riding a mere donkey before crowds strewing his path with palms in Jerusalem, we may become willing to acknowledge our own privilege and learn we too can humble ourselves enough to make a difference in this world. We can base our religion not on the joy of consumption but the joy of relinquishment; not on the primacy of suffering but the goal of reducing the suffering of others; not on a solitary hero, but on a human community of faith with a mission.
Our challenge is to fashion a covenanting community where there is love so great that we can admit the presence of tragedy and survive; where as, in Marvin Baumel's last night recounting of past good deeds and misdeeds, we can laugh at ourselves and determine to do better. It is through remembering exile and slavery that the people can come to freedom; it is through the desolation of Good Friday that the people can come to Easter; it is through the experience of suffering that people can come to Understanding. It is in the arms of a communal love greater than any of which we are individually capable that we can be comforted, strengthened and go on.
Kurt Vonnegut, (1) born on Armistice Day, 1922, is now an octogenarian writer of fourteen novels, three non-fiction works, three plays and a collection or two of short stories. He was born in Indianapolis to Kurt Sr. and Edith Lieber Vonnegut. His mother was daughter of a millionaire brewer and his father was an architect. His great-grandfather Clemens owned the Vonnegut Hardware Chain. He is proud to be a Hoosier. He graduated in 1940 from Shortridge High School where he had been editor of the student newspaper. He attended Cornell University until he enlisted in the Army in 1943. He was captured by the Germans in the Battle of the Bulge. He worked in a factory in Dresden until he was freed by the Russians in 1945. He wrote, The factory was making a vitamin enriched malt syrup for pregnant women, It tasted like honey laced with hickory smoke. It was good.(2) Probably his most famous novel, Slaughterhouse Five, not published until 1969, was inspired by his experiences, saved from harm, in a refrigerated meat locker during the bombing of Dresden. After he was saved, he and the other saved prisoners were forced “to work as corpse miners, breaking into shelters” and cellars “where 135,000 Hansels and Gretels had been baked like gingerbread men” by the firestorm that raged overhead. He had to bring the bodies out sometimes still clutching their valuables in their laps. (3)
It takes chutzpah even to introduce the subject of multiculturalism in the Americas, in the United States, in Florida, in the Unitarian Universalist Association, and, I suspect, in this congregation. But I do it because, if we are to realize the rainbow of peace, we must be willing to embrace this topic of conversation. And, I go further, I believe as a religious body in our global village we must be willing to embrace with interest, with dedication, with even fervor, the multiplicity of cultures who knock on our door and even those that don't. Before I even get into the subject, I want to give a notion of where we could end up by quoting from a book I am reading avidly by Richard Rodriguez called Brown. Irv has loaned it to me.
A shaggy dog story is a long meandering story which is only funny because the punch line is so flat you wondered why the tale was told at all. The challenge whenever you hear a sermon is to figure out if it is a shaggy dog story or if it has a point worth listening for.
God calls out of the burning bush,
scarlet with camellias, golden embers at their centers.
“Moses, Moses,” God says;
“Rachel, Rachel,” God says,
“Jesu, Jesu,” God says.
And, when God sees that we have stopped to notice,
God calls our names also.
And, when our fear has subsided,
when the clouds of confusion have cleared,
when we are moved to speak, we say,
“Here I am!”
Then God says, “Remove the sandals from your feet
for the place on which you stand is holy ground.”
Barefooted, we stand stark still, listening, listening.
Then, when we are moved,
Then, when we are moved to speak, we say,
deliberately, we say,
“Here I am. Send me.”
He was affected by seeing the art and beauty of Dresden destroyed unnecessarily by Allied air forces. Dresden was not supposed to be attacked as there were no troops stationed nor war industries there. As someone who grew up in an affluent family, he also was forced to live with hunger for six months while in the prison camp. He lost 41 pounds and so he feels he “has paid his dues.” And he learned there that governments lie in times of war. The Allies bombed Dresden and then they lied about it. Vonnegut is often called a pacifist because he writes so scathingly of war. He also says, in later years, that, if there were a just war, he would enlist again but only in the infantry. But mostly, Vonnegut is one who writes about, exposes to light, what many would keep hidden, the true horrors of war. Mother Night is also about World War II, published earlier than Slaughterhouse, in 1966. He says it has three morals: “We are what we pretend to be, so we must be careful about what we pretend to be.” “When you're dead you're dead.” “Make love when you can. It's good for you.” Mother Night is a novel about an American spy, Howard W. Campbell, whose pretense was that he was a Nazi radio propagandist, a shrewd and loathsome anti-Semite. Under this cover he was able to relay home secrets regarding Nazi operations through code. When he was able to go home, he became a hero to American anti-Semites. It was only by being arrested as a war criminal that he was able to begin to extricate himself from his cover. Through Mother Night he is able to expose atrocities of war and bigotry. He exposes the depths to which humanity may sink and often for no extricable good reason. And, he does his part to prevent forgetfulness of the Holocaust which by 1966 he is witnessing even among young Jews. Vonnegut is a student of history and of anthropology. Through satire and ridicule, mixing in moments of compassion and beauty, he uses what he knows of human nature to drive his points home.
Vonnegut “worked at the Chicago City News Bureau, while he attended the University of Chicago, pursuing graduate studies in anthropology. In 1947 he moved to Schenectady, N.Y. and worked in public relations for General Electric.” He was a PR man for research scientists at GE that allowed him to probe, firsthand, into science and technology laboratories. His first novel Player Piano, published when he was 29, was a science fiction account of what he learned at GE. Little boxes, fandangled tools, were replacing human beings. Vonnegut's brother was a scientist who invented a chemical to make ice in clouds. In Cat's Cradle it becomes a lethal weapon called “ice-nine” able to be hidden in a vial on a person.
Vonnegut had two marriages and seven children, three with his first wife Jane Cox, his chidhood sweetheart, three whom he adopted when his brother-in-law was killed in an auto accident and his sister died a few days later of cancer, and one whom he and his second wife Jill Krementz, a photographer, adopted. His marriages were sometimes a struggle because he was such a pessimist and his wives wished for optimism. He learned to make up happy outcomes for them.
He got his writing start publishing short stories in magazines, a great publishing entry for young writers which ended with television. Now we get our stories on the tube to Vonnegut's regret. He praises handling the book or magazine, getting comfortable in a chair, turning the pages, wriggling around some more. Reading is much more involving than the tube, especially if you read with a pencil in hand, maybe a journal by your side or a companion with whom to share the good lines and ideas. We didn't used to call readers couch potatoes. Reading was somehow more praiseworthy.
After Cat's Cradle Vonnegut's third novel, he experienced acclaim as a writer. He wrote a lot to support his family. Later he taught, and gave speeches, received awards like the Living Legend award from his home state of Indiana as well as honorary degrees.
He lived at least until 2000 in New York City where his brownstone was ravaged by fire and he was critically afflicted. He was hired to teach at Smith College some months after that and one website gives rumors that he is working on a new book even though he claimed Timequake published in 1997 would be his last. Its title is rumored to be “If God Were Alive Today He'd Be an Atheist.” He published another in 1999, God Bless You Dr. Kevorkian, which is a series of quick interviews with those recently dead by someone almost dead.
I have been most intrigued by Vonnegut's religious writings. He is for sure a humanist, titular head of the American Humanist Society, and by report, although I have not been able to verify it through his books, a Unitarian Universalist. We are proud to claim him. Despite his humanism, his books are filled with references to God and Heaven. And he created his own religion called Bokonism described in Cat's Cradle. Norman told me the other day that he's decided he is a Bokonist so it is clearly a living religion. One of the rituals of Bokonism is that two people lie on their backs with their feet raised and touching one another. It's worth a try! No telling what it might do for you. Vonnegut writes that this ritual of bok-maru or the mingling of awarenesses, sole to sole, makes it impossible not to love that person as long as the feet of each one are “clean and nicely tended.(4)
The main tenet of Bokonism seems to be that people are drawn together from all walks of life to work out some purpose known only to God. Sometimes people come into my office to say that they are lacking a purpose in life. I hear their stories and agree that they are seeming to wander from one thing to the next without coherence, without direction. To wander is not the same as to be connected, to be drawn to someone or something however irrational that pull may seem to be. Northrup Fry used to say, “Follow your bliss.” Perhaps Vonnegut would say follow your gut or your attractions or your libido. Pay attention to what moves you. Let it move you toward another, into your karass where you may catch a glimmer of “God's” purpose. And yet, Vonnegut does not believe in God. And yet, he expects to go to heaven and he doesn't believe there is another outcome, like Hell. So, he must be a Universalist! Howard Zinn at General Assembly this year said he agreed with Kurt Vonnegut on original sin. He said Vonnegut believes in original virtue. I suspect that Vonnegut would also agree with Howard Zinn that “rebellion starts with culture”. Zinn's current improbable optimism is based on poets who are writing anti-war poetry. Vonnegut's sanity was preserved by writing and maybe ours by reading him. By the way, Kurt Vonnegut was the Ware Lecturer at our General Assembly in 1987. Another tenet of Bokonism is the importance of a religion providing people with better and better lies because Truth was the enemy of the people because truth was so terrible. (5) You might say that fiction, like religion, tells lies to make life more worth living.
Here is a quote from a Playboy Magazine interview with Vonnegut. (6) It rings too true today:
Playboy: The Vietnam war has cost us even more than the space program.
(They had just been discussing the space program.) What do you think it's done to us?
Vonnegut: It's broken our hearts. It prolonged something we started to do to ourselves at Hiroshima; it's simply a continuation of that: an awareness of how ruthless we are. And it's taken away the illusion that we have some control over our Government. I think we have lost control of our Government. Vietnam made it clear that the ordinary citizen had no way to approach his Government, not even by civil disobedience or by mass demonstration. The Government wasn't going to respond no matter what the citizen did. That was a withering lesson.
I remember feeling that way, brokenhearted, in the 1980's after five years or so of anti-nuclear demonstrations by tens of thousands of people, some of whom did hard time in Federal Prisons for spilling their own blood on US-made bombs. Our demonstrations and mass marches and artistic attempts at direct non-violent action did not keep intermediate range nuclear missiles from being placed in Europe. I too became pessimistic about peace in the face of man's love of war and war toys. But I also treasure those experiences, especially riding the bus to jail after protesting at the Lawrence Livermore Nuclear Weapons Laboratory, as some of the most unequivocal and pure to my values. If the Government (and I notice Vonnegut capitalizes Government) won't listen to its citizens, if as Vonnegut says, scientists “have learned that anything they turn up will be applied if it can be. It's a law of life that if you turn up something that can be used violently, it will be used violently,” then to avoid despair we must find other reasons to stand up for what we believe, personal reasons, religious reasons, sustainable reasons that will give others hope to pursue their highest and best values, as well.
Vonnegut told the graduating class of Bennington College in 1970, that despite what their professors had tried to do, (i.e. to remove their superstitions), he begged them “to believe the most ridiculous superstition of all: that humanity is at the center of the universe, the fulfiller or the frustrator of the grandest dreams of God Almighty. If you can believe that, and make others believe it, then there might be hope for us. Human beings might stop treating each other like garbage, might begin to treasure and protect each other instead.” (8) A humanist comfortable with God talk, he could be talking about Iraq or Afghanistan or Israel, where the combatants on all sides must be implored to stop treating each other like garbage and to “treasure and protect each other instead.”
My reasons for hope include thankfulness for artists like Picasso, writers like Vonnegut, musicians like Pete Seeger, and for activists whose palette is the market, the website, the parade, the classroom, the journal, street theater, the faith community. My reasons for hope include small town, rural village, city neighborhood purity. The co-op. The organic garden. The free school. The independent press. The town meeting. The writer's group. The women's sewing circle and terrorist society before terrorism got such a bad name. I love it that Rumsfeld is now so scared of what people are saying about the Patriot Act that he has to roam the country to tout his disinformation. Maybe, just maybe, he'll have a chance to listen to what our citizen's are saying in small towns like South Miami. At least, we, who have had a forum to expose The Patriot Act, have made him notice that we are not all yes men. Maybe Vonnegut is not correct that citizen action cannot change government. At least it causes itches for political know-it-alls to scratch.
I am thankful for Kurt Vonnegut whose real religious practice, as I see it, is to speak out against injustice and foma or lies. He helps us to overcome despair with a cat's cradle, “a pulling of the strings of our life back together” again and again. Perhaps there is “no damned cat, no damned cradle,” no God, no Heaven, but he reminds us there are “Houses of Hope and Mercy in the Jungle.” There are Albert Schweitzers.
I will close with a piece of advice from Kurt Vonnegut quoted in the Miami Herald, Sept 12, 1999: (8) He says, “Try this.”
Write a six line poem which is rhymed. Make it as good as you can. Really work on it. This is with nobody else around, and nobody else knows what you're doing. When you've got it in perfect shape, for you, tear it up in little pieces. Take these pieces and distribute them between widely separated trash receptacles. Please don't try to memorize the poem. Please don't ever tell anybody you wrote it. You'll still have gotten your complete reward. People are idiots not to write poems or try to paint pictures or to dance or to write a piece of music just because they can't make a living at it. Practicing the arts is not a way to make a living. It's a way to make your soul grow.
I will add that it is a way to grow your muscle. We need both soul and muscle. Vonnegut has both.
“…the best history of the United States I ever read is not a history of battles and presidents and such, but H.L Mencken's The American Language, an epic of nouns and verbs and proverbs, things we pick up and put down by name.” “ Nativists who want to declare English the official language of the United States do not understand the omnivorous appetite of the language they wish to protect. Neither do they realize that their protection would harm our tongue. --- Those Americans whou sould build a fence around American English to forestall the Trojan burrito would turn American into a frightened tongue, a shrinking little oyster tongue, as Frnch has lately become, priested over by the Ancients of the Académie, who fret so about le weekend (1).
Rodriguez is talking about language, about the debate over bilingualism. He praises “American” our version of the English language which is now polyglot. I want to spy into Mencken's, American Language, because I imagine that it includes all the words and proverbs we have adopted into common speech from all the world's languages. I hope it gives their origins. My vision of multiculture for the church is like that dictionary: it would honor and include and celebrate the cultures, customs, scriptures, shades and lights of any culture we individuals wish to uphold, as well asthose which swirl, like Florida's fantastic, multi-layered clouds, around our doors and even our globe.
I would like to invite you to imagine we have had the chutzpah to adopt a mission to be, intentionally to be, a congregation which is multicultural in membership and celebration, in art and music, in our leadership and in our social activism. It takes chutzpah for a congregation even to imagine being multicultural. Any sociologist will tell you, that, if you want to grow, you do it by building on homogeneities not differences. The whole principle of congregating is usually to come together around commonalities.
But sociologists have another message for congregations wanting to grow. It is essential to pay attention to the current social context in which an organization sits – its sitz im leben. The tendency is to continue a congregation based on the context that was there when the congregation was created. A sanctuary congregation which looks inward, or which is hidden in the woods, may barely notice that the world around it, the demography of the neighborhood has changed; and, that that demography matters if the congregation wants to remain relevant, vital, ever-restoring itself, ever rejuvenating, ever having a religious impact on the society which surrounds it.
Ouch. Change. As the welcoming song “Enter, Rejoice and Come In” says, Don't be afraid of some change. Don't be afraid of some change. Today will be a joyful day. Enter, rejoice and come in! Don't be afraid of some change. Are they kidding? Change is scary!
When I applied to be your minister over a year ago, I was especially attracted to the multi-cultural nature of the area and to the ethnic diversity of the congregation. That may surprise you, because still we are pretty homogeneous, but compared to other UU congregations, we are indeed diverse. I don't have exact statistics, but I would guess we have at least eight ethnic sub-cultures represented here. Maybe one-sixth of our members and friends are not European-American. And European-American is as much a market basket category as is Hispanic, a bunching term coined by Richard Nixon. “Hispanic,” like the words “Latino” or “Asian” used on the west coast masks the multitude of countries and ethnic sub-cultures within those countries. Hispanic is a word used only in America to promote the melting pot. Americanization. Rather let us have a garden, leading to bouquets, where each shape and color and fragrance enhances the whole.
But to return to statistics, when I moved to Miami a year ago, I was told that Miami-Dade was over 50% Hispanic. This week, I heard that 52% of the people in Miami-Dade are “foreign-born” and that the county is over 60% Hispanic. Wow! What do those figures of our surrounding demography say to us. Will we be a sanctuary away or a welcome table for.
The French say, vive la difference! But it is usually common interests and shared values and agreed upon rules of behavior that keep groups together and growing in membership and celebration.
Unitarian Universalists probably prove this point. In the range of mainline denominations we are of medium size. But medium size means about 75 people at worship on Sunday mornings and a membership under 150. We like to say that we celebrate differences particularly in the realm of ideas. We encourage people to think for themselves and to develop their own credos. We encourage tolerance of difference, but, in fact, sociologically we are very similar. Only about 1 and a half to two percent of our membership on this continent is of people who are non-white.
So, what are we doing bucking a trend, and going against the wisdom of sociologists? And what does a mission statement promoting multiculturalism mean to our daily lives as individuals and as a congregation? Is it realistic to have a value of diversity instead of homogeneity. Will such a value hep us to resolve the inevitable conflicts? How can we encourage our multicultural chutzpah?
Here are some reasons for choosing a mission of becoming multicultural:
our congregation resides in a culturally diverse neighborhood and city, one of the first stops of immigrants from the south, and one which is multiclass, diverse in sexual and affectional orientation and which attracts people of the widest age range. People of grand age leave their hometowns to come here for their last decades. While young immigrants from everywhere have children.
many of us have chosen of our own free will to live in this diverse neighborhood; we didn't just inherit it;
the demographics of society are changing to be increasingly multicultural and we are committed to being part of a religion which is relevant to the world we live in and representative of that society;
our Unitarian Universalist principles urge us toward affirming the traditions of many cultures, the worth and dignity of every person and the goal of world community with peace and justice for all.
cultures different from our own excite our curiosity, not just in a book sense but an experiential sense. I once passed a sign on a religious building that caught my eye. The sign read: House of Prayer for all Peoples. I am sorry I never explored what goes on inside that temple!
cultures different from our own expand our own possibilities of becoming. One of life's greatest gifts is the possibility of experiencing as much of its biological, geographical, and cultural variety as possible
and finally, on my list, this diverse community allows me to give something back to Life and to our society for all the gifts I have received. I believe we, with our theology, our principles, our wonderful people, have special contributions to make because we care, make because we honor diversity, because we value lifelong learning and because we believe in acting on our beliefs.
I do believe what the mission I propose we articulate takes chutzpah. I believe to keep on keeping on with becoming increasingly multicultural, we must indeed have a mission and a sense of zeal and commitment about that mission. I believe such a mission takes leadership, and I think lots about how I can be a better religious leader in this setting. But leadership in such a complex endeavor must be shared. It will require all of our abilities and all of our gumption to realize such a mission. It will require, as one person said about their own church in a book called, Embracing Diversity: Leadership in Multicultural Congregations:(2) “It required stubborn lay people who caught the pastor's vision and stayed with the congregation's struggle to re-envision itself.” We would be re-envisioning not only a congregation but a movement and I believe a society; a faith community where we are not bound by the cultures of our youth, but are emboldened by the cultures which surround us. Our broader vision is that all the congregations of FloridaDistrict will benefit and learn from what we are doing in Miami. Certainly, the area we draw from is also increasingly diverse. But, as you know, changing a congregational culture from relative ethnic homogeneity to increasing ethnic heterogeniety is not a simple decision. It takes lots of ever renewed intentionality and lots of action and reflection on the actions we initiate. That transition does not happen magically. And, it will never happen in isolation.
Our congregation has an advantage over many UU congregations in that we are already ethnically diverse. We can build on what we bring. If we create welcoming pathways, each of you can bring to the table what you most value of your multi-cultures. We can hold events where we literally wave flags of our heritages, share the foods we grew up with, teach one another the proverbs learned at mother's knee in her language, as well; learn songs, rituals, uncover poetry such as we heard this morning, dance with Tibetan monks and welcome mixed heritage families. We can develop a reputation of a place to go where ethnic diversity is celebrated. Yesterday I held a wedding interview for a woman from mainland China and a man who grew up in Italy and the United States. They live in New York and want to be married in Miami because it is a place their friends of many nationalities from all over the world want to come, I will add, in November!
What we are doing, naturally now and I hope intentionally later is a grand opportunity to stretch our humanity by experiencing, in this most intimate of settings - our spiritual home, the perspective and celebrations of many cultures. What is happening is that the culture of each of us is being expanded into a greater ability to love and to become. The task of being a Unitarian Universalist includes those two: becoming all we can be as individuals, and learning to love ever more deeply, as a community. You are each part of our community as we are part of yours. I look forward to our becoming ever more …. together.
Take a few moments to reflect upon the many cultures you carry inside of you:
the culture of your mother and of your father or of a significant adult who helped to raise you
the culture of your home town or the town or city or suburb you most identify with, growing up
the culture of someone whom you perceived as different from you when you were growing up but whose habits or dress or community you were attracted to and perhaps sampled
if you left home, in young adulthood, what is the first culture you chose to migrate towards: was it similar to your childhood's or different? Did you move into it easily or was it difficult? Do you try to bring those around you towards your culture or do you enjoy participating in and taking on theirs?
In your current life, what are the distinct cultures which surround you? Do you move to mix in with these multi-cultures or to stay pretty close to your own home and familiar patterns? Do you experience fear, pleasure, anticipation, curiosity as you come in contact with a culture different from your own? Stay with this question for a moment and explore the texture of your thoughts and feelings as you remember your response to another culture.
Often, becoming aware of another's culture leads us to reflect more deeply on our own. What is there about your own culture which you would like to affirm and develop in our congregation? What gifts of your own multi-cultures do you bring?
And finally, what cultures from the peoples of South Florida and the world do you wish were represented here, in your membership, in your celebrations, in the experiences you share with your children? What can you do to bring persons of those culture into a deep welcome in your congregation?
Take a few moments in silence to reflect on what being multicultural, here, means to you.
A tall tale is a tale that might start with a real person or a fictional character, but the more times it is told, the more embellished and exaggerated it gets. I can't help but wonder if the name tall tale comes from the stories of tall Paul Bunyan and his Blue Ox Babe. Here's the start of one of those collected and retold by Mary Pope Osbourne:
It seems an amazing baby was once born in the state of Maine. When he was only two weeks old, he weighed more than a hundren pounds, and for breakfast every morning he ate five dozen eggs, ten sacks of potatoes, and a half barrel of mush made from a whole sack of cornmeal. But the baby's strangest feature was his big curly black beard. It was so big and bushy that every morning his poor mother had to comb it with a pine tree.(1)
Tall tales came out of 19th century Americana when taming the wilderness was scary and ambitious enough on its own. The tall tales told around the campfire or the barroom gave laughter, pleasure and incentive to the adventurers heading west, south and north. The lies were so absurd that everyone, even children, knew they stretched the truth. Yet, they encouraged the imagination and the will to stretch physically as well, and allowed punier folk to chuckle and forgive themselves their smaller foibles.
Shaggy dog stories and tall tales, fairy tales and myths, romances and later science fiction were all lies of one kind or another. America has a great tradition of storytelling. America has imported stories from all lands and cultures. Our culture is enriched by them. Such “lies” are meant to lead us to truths about our selves and our world.
Bald-faced lies enter into another genre of falsehood. A bald-face is a horse with a white streak from his forehead to his nose. A bald-faced lie is an untruth right out in the open without camouflage.
Many lies are not so forthcoming. They are hidden among the bushes. The bushes may be a whole system of prevarication so thick even the liar has misplaced the truth along the way. The reasons for the lies may be quite healthy self-preservation, physically or psychically.
Some of us have been reading the delightful recent novel, The Secret Life of Bees, by Sue Monk Kidd. The whole story is about a fourteen year white old girl's stack of lies to preserve herself from an awful memory, from a tyrannical father and from arrest in saving her black nanny Rosaleen from police brutality and imprisonment. The girl, Lily, spends the novel coming of age, coming to courage, finding a safe household and loving adults who will make it possible for her to face her truths. Her stack of lies is intricate as honeycomb. She needed intelligence to keep her tall tales straight. The honey was the sweet truth. When the honey is extracted, it can be smeared on everything, even the Black Madonna, the fierce godhead of the household. The eventual truth allowed Lily to become a whole, transparent person.
Transparency to the self is the first goal. How can we face and incorporate and even come to cherish the whole truth about ourselves.
The second goal is to apply truth-being and telling to one's life in the world; to create an aesthetic out of truth-telling – a beautiful existence, in French souci de l'existence belle. For the philosopher Michel Foucault, “The art of existence is truth-telling – le dire vrai. Foucault uses the Greek word parrhesia for truth-telling which “involves the presence of another.” You are willing and able to speak the truth in the presence of another who is also a parrhesiast (2).
To be a parrhesiast in fourth century Greece one had to meet certain conditions. I am quoting from an article on Foucault by Thomas Flynn. “Of course, he had to speak the truth, but this truth could not be merely a de facto verity, a mere coincidence of speech with fact. He had to really believe it himself and to manifest that belief. Moreover, in speaking the truth, the parrhesiast had to run a personal risk before the other to whom he spoke. There was risk of violence at the hand of the interlocutor. Traditionally, the messenger always ran the risk of learning the truth as well. So parrhesia entailed the courage of the truth on both sides of the ledger, but especially on the part of the speaker.” (3)
The third goal is to so influence society, from the family to the government, home economics to corporate and global economics, that it would be possible to tell the truth out loud without dire consequences. Today, it is still risky to be a whistleblower, whether as tattletaler in the family or the exposer of deception and fraud in the marketplace. People commit suicide over being the leakers of truth. The messengers of hard truths still get killed.
Sissela Bok in her book Lying: Moral Choice in Public and Private Life, now in its third edition, defines lying as “an intentionally deceptive message in the form of a statement (4). “When we undertake to deceive others intentionally, we communicate messages meant to mislead them, meant to make them believe what we ourselves do not believe. We can do so through gesture, through disguise, by means of action or inaction, even through silence. Which of these innumerable deceptive messages are also lies? I shall define as a lie any intentionally deceptive message which is stated (5).
What I especially appreciate about Bok's book is that she shows how hard it is in modern society to tell the truth. She is a few years behind us in her examples, but she shows how much pressure there is on people in business and government to shade or distort the truth. The middleclass parent wants their child to get a scholarship so distorts their financial application. The student wants to pass the test that will get them into college so hides notes in his or her palm. When I was a senior in high school taking the NY regents exam, my teacher came by looking at my paper and moved his finger to point at something I had done wrong. I didn't change it, perhaps because I didn't have a better answer, but I was amazed that he did it. He wanted me to get a good grade.
The businessperson or the new corporate executive is so pressured to make a profit to keep afloat or to keep one's job that they fudge the statistics or go through intricate computations to hide the facts. The whole Enron scandal was a revelation of the honeycomb of lies that is possible. Lately, I heard that two major well-respected New York banks were a part of the prevarication to keep Enron afloat. Whom can we trust?
The whole Iraq mess is scary not only because we, the people, the Congress, the United Nations, the Brits, were duped into going to war unnecessarily, but because our elected officials will still not become transparent, but issue statements that are crazy-making. We live in a Halloween house of spooks and mirrors. What wraith will jump out at us next? And each wraith is re-imaged, and distorted and impossible to catch as it bounces from one teller or observer to the next. In the Nike case before the courts, it is being determined if false advertising can be legitimated as free speech. That is, which is the higher value before the law honesty or the free speech that allows false advertising? On NPR this week, I heard some earnest government spokeswoman's cover-up of our President's subterfuge regarding what he knew before going to war and wondered if she knew the truth herself or if she had just bought so much party line, had been fed so much propaganda, that the truth was lost forever.
Sissela Bok has come to the conclusion that if we do not change the ethos of America, in universities, law, medical and business schools, in government offices, such as Social Security, and in home life as well, it will not be safe enough or profitable enough to tell the truth. Today, we must add church life to that as well. The scandals rocking the Catholic Church are not just about child sexual abuse, they are about an august religious institution telling years of lies to vulnerable people and to one another as church leaders, priests, bishops, for God's sake.
Bok (6) suggests simple things like telling parents that their financial records, income tax reports, whatever, may be called for so that the temptation to lie will be removed. She suggests that ways be found for truth telling in business to be profitable. The whistleblower can be rewarded. The government can give contracts to truthful businesses instead of just to those who give kickbacks to politicians. College courses can teach ethics to their future professionals.
What I loved about The Secret Life of Bees was the picture of a homely household full of African American eccentrics and their friends who both spoke the truth and made it safe enough for a white Southern child to trust them enough to find and tell her own truth.
Most if not all of us tell lies at one time or another. Some are little white lies about how nice someone's outlandish dress or hat looks, or how we are feeling fine when we aren't; some are bald-faced lies; some are covert lies so buried we wouldn't recognize the truth if we fell over it. Our UU statement of principles asks us to covenant to affirm and promote the free and responsible search for truth and meaning. What might that mean in the context of the topic of parrhesia or truth-telling and of lying? In a lofty sense, the search for truth and meaning today is obvious and relatively safe. In past times, truths like the round earth rotating around the sun were themselves dangerous for their messengers. Today scientific breakthroughs are usually applauded as are the accumulations of knowledge in the heads of scholars and liberal church folk alike.
But in a down-to-earth sense, being transparent in relationships and in society at large can still be dangerous. Can the church teach people to tell the truth with love instead of hiding the truth out of “love” or fear? Can we support each other in truth-telling through our small groups and individual friendships? Can we create rituals of forgiveness for past transgressions so that we don't have to carry them forever on our hearts? Next weekend begins Yom Kippur. In the Jewish tradition it is a chance to come clean through self-reflection, confession and intention to make amends and do better in the future. It is a chance to clean up the old so that the new year starts with a fresh page. In our tradition, it is only through constant and renewing attention and even a purposeful ferreting out of the truth within the self and in our relationships that we can keep ourselves living an aesthetic of truthfulness. We can practice good and clear communication. We can practice observing questionable behavior out loud. We can create safe places to air our fears about telling the truth. We can be prophetic about demanding that our public leaders come clean, tell the citizenry what is real.
Parrhesia is a right of the American citizen (7). Parrhesia for citizens comes with true democracy. We are witnessing in Miami the city and national government's finagling to prevent the masses from having our say. This is a move to limit democracy to an elite who believe themselves to know better what is good for the polis than the ignorant masses. It is urgent that we speak up to change the perception of government so that citizen speech is encouraged not discouraged.
This truth-telling is a big topic and I have only scratched the surface. I hope your response time in a moment and in future conversations will help us think this through further. Let us practice free speech here so we are confident to practice free speech in our homes, our workplaces and in the public square.
I will close with a tall tale collected by Jane Yolen which puts all this search for Truth capital T in perspective. It is called The Old Lady in the Cave (8).
“I want to know Truth,” he said to his wife.
“Then you should seek her,” she replied.
So the man put his house and all his worldly goods in his wife's name (she being adamant on that point) and went out on the road a beggar after Truth.
He searched up the hills and down in the valleys for her. He went into small village s and large towns; into the forests and along the coasts of the great wide sea; into dark, grim wastes and lush meadows pied with flowers. He looked for days and for weeks and for months.
And then one day, atop a high mountain, in a small cave, he found her.
Truth was a wizened old woman with but a single tooth left in her head. Her hair hung down onto her shoulders in lank, greasy strands. The skin on her face was the brown of old parchment and as dry, stretched over prominent bones. But when she signaled to him with a hand crabbed with age, her voice was low and lyrical and pure and it was then that he knew he had found Truth.
He stayed a year and a day with her and he learned all that she had to teach. And when the year and a day was up, he stood at the mouth of the cave ready to leave for home.
“My Lady Truth,” he said, “you have taught me so much and I would do something for you before I leave. Is there anything you wish?”
Truth put her head to one side and considered. Then she raised an ancient finger. “When you speak of me,” she said, “tell them I am young and beautiful!”