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By Rev. Preston K. Mears Jr.
April 6, 2008
Our times both challenge us and frighten us. Will the war ever end
with anything positive to show for it? Will our economy recover from
the years of deficit spending or will inflation take off with
everything costing too much and years of savings reduced by runaway
inflation? And what about you and me and the challenges we face as a
church community? Can we keep it together? Can we become stronger
and better? And, what about me? There is always the proverbial me,
myself and I.
Chris Bell read to us excerpts from, ‘Towards a More Perfect Union”
delivered by Barak Obama recently in Philadelphia. It states clearly
where we are as a people. And, recognizing ourselves as a people is
very much like finding our own center. I should pause here and note,
for Internal Revenue Purposes, my sermon is no more of a political
speech than President Abraham Lincoln’s Second Inaugural or Dr.
Martin Luther King’s last speech about the “Promised Land.” On a
personal note, I do find it refreshing that all three current
Presidential candidates are people of character.
I believe the journey we are on is within ourselves, among ourselves
and in our larger society; it is all one. Fundamentally, it is a
journey through which the invisible becomes visible, a journey
through which we come to see ourselves and our neighbors clearly. It
also means going beyond all of those polarities that are used to
define our world: good and bad, right and wrong, win or lose, guilty
or not guilty selfish and selfless, successful and unsuccessful. We
all are on a continuum between any of those polarities and it is
better to forget the polarities. I am good and you are bad and so I
am okay? I don’t think so!
Two things we need for our journey: reality and discipline. The two
turn together. Without discipline, reality is invisible to us and
without reality our discipline has no meaning. The Barak Obama
speech reminded me powerfully of this truth. Our reality is that our
union is not perfect. In the Jefferson Memorial read Jefferson’s
words about the godlessness of there being slave and master, and yet
he was not able to free his slaves during his life time nor even in
his will. And my friends will tell me that was a long time ago and
we are really past all of that. I was 25 years old when my classmate
Jonathan Daniels was murdered for doing voter registration work.
That was not long ago and just two years later Dr. King was murdered
in Memphis, not long ago. Should I speak of these things, my friends
are awkward with me and mutter that was then, and change the
subject, and too often I give up and let it go at that. It will keep
for another day.
The challenge I find is that the reality is not fully visible and
who will change what is not seen? A most poignant description of our
society is Ralph Ellison’s, The Invisible Man. We don’t see the
other, and, tragically, we lose sight of at least a part of
ourselves. The problem is human and it plays out from whatever side
of whatever divide. It takes courage and it takes discipline to come
to see ourselves where we are. As Barak Obama put it, “And if we
walk away now, if we simply retreat into our respective corners, we
will never be able to come together and solve challenges like health
care, or education, or the need to find good jobs for every
American.” Can we hear the significance of these words? Barak Obama
uses the metaphor of people being in their corners. Two weeks ago
Chris Bell used the metaphor of our starting off in boxes and
needing to open them or even getting out of them. The fact that with
some exceptions, Sunday morning is the most boxed up time. And we
are here not content to be stuck in a box.
Individually, it is hard work and part of what we need to be about
on our own life journey in all of our relationships as well as our
understanding of our society. To get out of our boxes is to have the
invisible be visible. Can we discipline ourselves to see, or
perhaps, to see better? I have been a self-disciplined person as a
student, as an athlete, in my work and as a runner for over 30
years. My journey is not new to me. Twelve years ago when Laurie (my
wife) and I started attending Davies, there was much I knew and
understood. I understand more now and I have more to learn and more
to do. We all do.
Reality and discipline go together. I use the word discipline in its
old fashioned meaning: “To instruct, to learn.” In religious orders,
“The Discipline” referred to the rules for daily living—getting up,
praying, washing, praying, eating, praying, working, praying,
studying, praying and sleeping. Discipline for my wife the teacher
is going to school day after day having prepared her lessons that
students may learn and become their own reality. Discipline for my
sister the artist is repeating the mechanics of her craft again and
again until they are unconscious and art begins to emerge from her
work and the art becomes its own reality. Discipline for the writers
and poets among us is wrestling with the words until the image or
the analysis is its own reality. Discipline for Chris Bell as a
soldier was to become so practiced in the giving and receiving of
orders that he could react effectively under duress in the face
fearful realities.
Someone I found to be fascinating: Pope John the 23rd, the Pope that
called the Second Vatican Council held in 1962, spent much of his
life in an Italian monastic order that had a monastic discipline
that we here would find to be primitive, simplistic and stultifying.
It is, if you are curious about human nature, fascinating to follow
him through his book, Journey of a Soul. When asked why he was
calling the Vatican Council (only the second one in the history of
the church), he simply went to a window and opened it. The reality
of the church and its mission were so visible to him, that he could
express it with a gesture simply and completely. It seems that by
losing himself in his monastic discipline he emerged perceptive and
able to make visible the cost of an insular church.
In religion, one hears paradoxical words about, “Losing one’s life
in order to gain it,” or, “Emptying oneself in order to be filled.”
Sounds like religious claptrap to some but is really grounded in our
basic human structure. For many of us, one of the most disciplining
experiences in our lives is parenting. How is it that the mothers
here, and the fathers who chucked being macho for being nurturing,
can hear and recognize their baby’s cry before any of the rest of us
even tune in to the fact that a baby is crying? There are the
repeated nights, and days (Dare I say discipline?) that we have put
ourselves aside and are so attuned to that “other” that we recognize
a cry before most even know there was a cry. We lose ourselves and,
at the end, we become more.
To approach this religious truth about discipline and the invisible
becoming visible from a different direction: Modern psychotherapy.
The common theme between varying psychoanalytic models and
psychotherapeutic approaches is that of being able to describe the
experiences and the feelings that frighten us and cripple us. In
naming our fears and our most hurtful feelings, we empty ourselves
of them, or, at least, their power to cripple us. What weird ways we
humans behave. When we are most full of ourselves and all of our
baggage, we are least able to see ourselves and we don’t see the
other. That which should be visible to us is invisible. Full of
ourselves, we say, “It is your fault!” Marriage counseling 101 is
challenging people to really listen. To listen, we have to turn off
the noise in our own heads. When we do empty our head of our own
noise, our own fears, our own egotistical “stuff,” we create room
for the other. Ironically, as others are important to us, we become
more important. The process happens here. In our ADORE (A Dialogue
on Race and Ethnicity) sessions, I let go of what is in my head and
just listen and, in the process, in that discipline, I learn as
other people’s experience of our world become visible to me.
The dynamic applies to us as a community of people who seek to grow
in our wisdom and understanding. Yesterday that mosaic of who we are
was being made by my being at home working on this sermon, by others
working here yesterday cleaning our common space and painting rooms
to enhance our programs for our children and youth. Together, in
wide variety of ways, we paint a picture, write a story, play or
sing a song of what it is to be human. There is a point at which the
art, or the music, or the poem becomes more than the creator. And
when that happens, the artist is not lost but fulfilled. Finding our
own center in this creation that is Davies is to let go of fears and
hurts and being disciplined in offering what we can in hope and
trust. Sometimes, finding our own center here means being quiet and
simply listening. Can we recognize that we become more as we let go
and that indeed we are becoming people who find what was invisible
has become visible?
The Barak Obama speech challenges the people of America to get out
of our respective corners of racism, sexism, and classism. The point
of it is not who should be the next president but that we need to
get out of our corners with personal and social baggage. The words
are no longer his since they describe at this point in time the
truth of what is and what might be. Part of my center is that I am a
restless person with the corners, the boxes. The corners are there
to be seen, and I am on center here with others who are restless. We
are a restless people willing to risk and to love.
We will sing the civil rights song, “We Shall Overcome” in a minute.
Laurie and I, the summer we met in 1960, were taught this song by a
folk singer at the Highlander School in Tennessee by the name of Guy
Carawan. We were captivated by the hymn but clueless as to where our
lives would be headed or the power of the hymn. The next time we
heard the hymn was at the funeral for Jonathan Daniels on a hillside
outside of Keene, New Hampshire. The service was a moving, to be
sure, staid Episcopal Service. Then at the end, the black students
who had been organizing the voter registration effort in Selma,
Alabama made a circle and swaying, sang, “We Shall Overcome” until
all of us there were drawn together in the singing of the hymn and
in our shared grief and hope. For some the hymn is sentimentality, a
piece of history; for others it is both celebration for the journey
traveled so far and a prayer for what can be.
Dr. Martin Luther King spoke of the seeing the “Promised Land.” He
was speaking of real possibilities in people’s experience—the “first
fruits of the spirit,” to use a Bible expression. We celebrate the
possibilities of what can be by being touched by our diverse and
beautiful children signing up front for us, “Spirit of Life.” Is
that sentimentality or is it a celebration of what is and, at the
same time, a prayer for so much more that can be? I pray that we
continue our journeys together and what has been invisible becomes
visible to us, that, indeed, in losing ourselves in this journey, we
find ourselves.
Please join me in singing Hymn 169, “We Shall Overcome.”
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