Standing on the Shoulders of Giants
As we approach the 40th anniversary of the Roe v. Wade Supreme Court decision, I am grateful to have been born and raised in a religious tradition, Unitarian Universalism, that has stood strong through the history of the struggle for reproductive justice. Today, I lift my voice to thank some of those Unitarians, Universalists, and Unitarian Universalists who have gone before, and who labor currently, for women’s equality, health and moral agency.
It’s always risky to call out folks simply because we share an identity, especially a religious identity. It can seem as if we are separating ourselves, or declaring ourselves to be part of a club. For me, this is an act taken to ground myself. As my own congregation prepares to hold an online service honoring the complexity and dignity of all families engaged in making moral choices around reproductive issues, I have been asked, “How dare you speak out about this, as if we all agree?”
I would never believe that a few thousand Unitarian Universalists would agree about anything whatsoever! All the studies show that people of other religions don’t begin to agree either, however, and yet their leaders have no trouble declaring that they speak the absolute truth, God’s truth. They claim that God is pro-life, anti-abortion, against women’s equality. So I, who have spent my life laboring in interfaith coalitions lifting up this other point of view, feel it is incumbent upon me to speak clearly as well.
Here come my thanks, to those who have gone before me and labor still, who ground me in this work, who dared before me and handed their daring to me.
I thank Margaret Sanger, who opened the first clinic in Brooklyn in 1916, violating obscenity laws for telling women how to prevent unwanted pregnancies. While we certainly challenge her beliefs on eugenics, she had nothing if not bold courage!
I thank all of those who labored for women’s suffrage, women and men, Universalists and Unitarians, allowing politicians to be elected who would support women’s equality. Abigail Adams, Susan B. Anthony, Rev. Antoinette Brown Blackwell, Rev. Olympia Brown, Julia Ward Howe, Rev. Lydia Jenkins, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, and so many others. I lift up your names with gratitude. Amendment 19, 1919. 19 is our lucky number.
I thank all of the Unitarian and Universalist women who worked to make birth control legal and available in the US. I think of the church women, whose names I do not know, who looked through birth notices in Connecticut papers and mailed information to new mothers, illegally offering them birth control access. They weren’t just being kind; they were spoiling for a fight. Eventually they got one, and in 1965, in Griswald v. Connecticut, the Supreme Court ruled that criminalization of birth control violated the right to marital privacy.
I thank all of the Unitarian, Universalist, and Unitarian Universalists who worked to make abortion safe and legal. The women, and leadership, of First Dallas UU congregation moved this case forward. UUs passed statements at our General Assemblies beginning in 1963. Clergy, especially men, were part of founding and leading the Clergy Consultation service. Hundreds of people were involved with this; many of whose names I don’t know. Please share your own knowledge in the comments section!
I thank the religious educators who, in 1967, agreed that comprehensive sexuality education is part of religious education, and began the groundbreaking sexuality education programs that have been part of religious education programs ever since. There are thousands to name here—deryk Calderwood, Rev. Eugene Navias, Judith Frediani, Rev. Sarah Gibb Millspaugh, and dozens of other writers and curriculum editors. Hundreds of teachers and youth advisors who have led young people through it.
I thank those who continue to focus their ministries on reproductive justice and sexual morality. I think of Rev. Deborah Haffner, Rev. Robert Keithan, Rev. Kelli Clement, to name only a few. I thank the congregations who are actively engaged with supporting reproductive justice. There are so many folks to thank here! Please add their names in the comments section.
Finally, I thank the Unitarians, Universalists, and Unitarian Univeralists who have laid your bodies on the line supporting women as they struggle through these difficult choices. People in medical clinics, providing escort services, literally standing by women. I think especially of my late friend, June Barrett, who was shot in Pensacola Florida, while providing escort service to women as part of her service to the Pensacola UU congregation. June’s husband, Colonel James Barrett, and the doctor they were escorting, Dr. John Britton, were killed. As she lay still in the truck, wounded, but not dead, with these bodies beside her, she told herself that she survived for one reason: To continue to help women have access to legal and safe reproductive choice. This she did until her death.
How dare I speak out about reproductive justice? I can honestly say that I have been given this daring by thousands of others upon whose shoulders I stand. Please join us on Tuesday, January 22, at 3 PM and 7 PM Eastern time, for our online service at www.livestream.com/questformeaning. We’ll be gathering as part of a long tradition.
Like-Hearted People
“You need not think alike to love alike.”
This was the wisdom of Francis David, spiritual advisor to King John Sigismund of Transylvania, the Unitarian king who pronounced the first edict of religious toleration in the year 1568.
You need not think alike to love alike.
At Unitarian Universalist gatherings, I sometimes hear “it is so nice to be with a group of like-minded people.” Beloveds, it is tempting, in the not-so-liberal parts of these United States, to take refuge in liberal religion. Here you are welcome. We often say in worship welcomes “no matter your gender, your race, your ethnicity, your sexuality, your age, your size, the color of your eyes – you are welcome here.”
Your politics, however…Your education level…these might matter …
Seeking sanctuary with like-minded people, while a deeply understandable and very human response, is not the basis of our faith. We are called to honor the inherent worth and dignity of all in our interdependent web of existence– no matter how people vote, what they believe, or where they went to school. Liberal religion is grounded in a theology of inclusion. As Rev. Marilyn Sewell states, “at the center of our faith is not belief, but love.” Love. We are a people of covenant, a people of promise. And we promise to love one another.
During a dialogue on race and class with a group of UU volunteers in New Orleans, one group member casually mentioned the “white trash-y” trailer park area across the tracks in his midwestern home town.
I felt the term sizzle across my skin, leaving a faint contrail of anger and shame… White trash. Trailer trash. Humans who have the skin color of privilege, but few other privileges. Who often live in generational cycles of poverty, who generally have few educational opportunities. Who have had nothing for generations but their pride and their whiteness, neither of which keeps the refrigerator full or pays rent, much less a mortgage.
I remember the day I received a copy of my birth certificate, ordered for the purpose of applying for my first passport. There, in black and white, and forever a part of my American identity: “Place of residence at time of birth: Fort Fredericka Trailer Park.”
I am often reminded in subtle and not so subtle ways that I am welcome in Unitarian Universalism because I am the exception, not the rule of my people. I left my home state after high school, struggled through a liberal arts college education that my public education had not quite prepared me for, got a passport and studied abroad in Central America on scholarship. Much of this was possible because my father joined the Navy at 19, put his body on the line for a chance to break the cycle of poverty and violence that he grew up in. Much of this was possible because my grandmother believed it was important to educate girls to and insisted that her daughter have the same chance to graduate from high school as her sons. It was not a question in my house whether I was going to college after high school. The only question was how I was gonna pay for it.
Without these breaks, these formational pattern changers, I would not be a Unitarian Universalist minister. The educational requirements alone for the training would have been barrier enough, let alone the cost of them…
Come, come whoever you are
We sing and we say these words from the 13th century Sufi Mystic Rumi:
Wander, worshiper, lover of leaving
Though you’ve broken your vows a thousand times
Come, yet again come
Our Unitarian legacy is tolerance, our Universalist legacy is radical salvation for all souls. How then can we reconcile the promise of our faith with the practice of our faith?
It is not faithful to write off a group of people because they do not sound like you, do not think like you, do not have the same life experiences as you. We know this to be true in the marrow of our bones. We know it and so we work on radical hospitality, begin Welcoming Congregation programs, have A Dialogue on Race and Ethnicity. And this is good, faithful work!
Please let us remember, in our stretching, that everyone means everyone. As we discern our internalized superiority and inferiority around race, gender, and sexuality, let us also remember to check our assumptions and oppressions around class and educational privilege.
We are not called to be a faith of like-minded people. We are called to worship and work together as like-hearted people – loving all of creation with compassion and curiosity.
“You need not think alike to love alike.”
Come, come, whoever you are. May you find yourself welcome here.
A Place in the Family
I pretty much only listen to radio in the car, which explains how I stumbled on just a few minutes of a call-in show which featured an evolutionary biologist. I suppose it shouldn’t have been surprising that the question I heard as I was pulling into my driveway went something like this: “Scientists have looked at millions of fossils, but no one has found the fossil that shows the transition from a fish to a lizard, or a chimp to a human. Why should I believe that I’m related to a chimp or a giraffe or sludge at the bottom of the sea when there’s no real evidence?”
I tend to be a little…unsympathetic toward this kind of question. Luckily, I was alone in my car as I shouted back at the caller: “DNA! Have you never heard of a little thing called DNA?” Fortunately, the presenter responded calmly that the caller had brought an excellent question. Then he went on to describe how, based on their scientific knowledge, he and a colleague had predicted where one would find a fossil that showed the transition of species from fish to lizard, and what such a fossil might look like. And then they found it. Where they had predicted (Canada), and with many—but not all—of the characteristics they had expected to find.
The biologist went on to explain how DNA shows us the way in which we are related to all other living beings. “It’s beautiful!” he said. “The chimpanzees are our close cousins and the sea sludge is a distant cousin and the giraffe is somewhere in the middle, but we’re all related.”
And then I got it. The two world views I was hearing about were not simply between someone sophisticated in the uses of the scientific method and someone with less understanding. The caller didn’t want to be related to a chimp or a giraffe or, God forbid, sea sludge. He wanted to be the pinnacle of creation, something utterly different from—and better than—the rest of the living world. To see himself as related to a giraffe would mean being shoved off of the pedestal, removed from his rightful place in the Great Chain of Being. Being related to a chimp would, I imagine, mean losing his relationship with the God who had placed him, as a human, in dominion over the rest of the world.
The biologist, by contrast, couldn’t have been happier to be related to sea sludge. He loved being cousins with the chimp and the giraffe, and his devotion to understanding more and more of the family genealogy was part and parcel with his joy in being a part of the family of things. I don’t know anything about this man’s theology, but as someone who shares his joy in this web of relations, I would imagine that if he believes in God at all, it is a God who is within all beings, in relationship with all beings. He, or at any rate, I, would find the Holy in the whole creative process of evolution, in the unfolding of diversity over time. There would be no worry about losing a relationship with God if we tumbled from the top of the pyramid, because God was never at the top to begin with. Neither were we humans. God was—is—in the connections, in all the crazy ways that we are interrelated with the Family of Life.
I have no idea whether anything shifted in the caller when he heard about the fish/lizard fossil or the linked DNA. How could he process such information, when the price of believing it was so high? But I couldn’t help but wonder whether it felt lonely up there, at the top of the Great Chain, looking up toward God and the angels in the invisible distance, disconnected from the chimps and giraffes and lizards below. Me, I’d rather be down here with the sea sludge, representing just one of the crazy cousins in this massive family gathering we call Planet Earth.
We Are All In This Together
“If middle-class Americans do not feel threatened by the slow encroachment of the police state or the Patriot Act, it is because they live comfortably enough and exercise their liberties very lightly, never testing the boundaries. You never know you are in a prison unless you try the door.” ― Joe Bageant, Deer Hunting with Jesus: Dispatches from America’s Class War
“I spent Thanksgiving Day in Central Lock-up!”
Waiting for keys to be cut in the local hardware store this week, I was completely drawn into the generously shared story of another customer with the shop’s owner. “Pulled over for not coming to a complete stop.” An initial infraction, no grace from those in power, a questionable ensuing search of the vehicle, an old open beer can giving the opportunity to turn a citation into a charge that was later thrown out by a judge as having no merit – later. After spending Thanksgiving in jail. And missing a day of work for court. Which cost him. Literally.
Living one infraction away from lock-up is a situation that is truer for more people in this country than we care to admit. Living paycheck to paycheck is a situation that is truer for more people in this country than we care to admit.
One in three Americans who grew up middle-class has slipped down the income ladder as an adult, according to a 2011 report by the Pew Charitable Trusts.*
One in three Americans who grew up middle-class has slipped down the income ladder.
Others are clinging desperately to the rung they are on.
Upward mobility, the American holy grail, is not guaranteed.
Neither is physical freedom, when prisons are a national industry, investments that can be found in a market prospectus.
Beloveds, if this sounds irrelevant to your life, try the door a bit. See how far your liberties can be exercised if you challenge an economic system that gives 50% of the American population less than 2.5% of the national wealth. See how far your liberties can be exercised if you challenge one of the thousands of ordinances, rules, and laws wrapped around your neighborhood, your state, your country.
The myth of pulling oneself up by one’s own boot straps, the myth of prisons existing only to house bad guys – slowly these are proven to be falsehoods, lies that have been used to justify closing our eyes to the human costs of comfort for a few.
Let us name the house we live in. Let us recognize that in working for the common good, we make a good life more possible for ourselves, our family, our beloveds. This is faithful work. Dear ones, we are all in this together. May we build beloved community together. For everyone.
* Drawn from the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth (a group of 12,000 interviews that researchers have followed since 1979), the report “focused on people who were middle-class teenagers in 1979 and who were between 39 and 44 years old in 2004 and 2006. It defines people as middle-class if they fall between the 30th and 70th percentiles in income distribution, which for a family of four is between $32,900 and $64,000 a year in 2010 dollars. People were deemed downwardly mobile if they fell below the 30th percentile in income, if their income rank was 20 or more percentiles below their parents’ rank, or if they earn at least 20 percent less than their parents.”
A Heretic Mulls Over Epiphany
Today is The Epiphany, when Christians celebrate as the day when Jesus was revealed to the Gentiles as the Son of God. But what of us who don’t hold this belief–who believe instead that Jesus was a teacher, a prophet, a healer, but not uniquely marked as the Son of God? What does Epiphany mean for us?
Are we still waiting for revelation? Some would say yes; that we don’t have eyes to see. Until we see that Jesus is the one and only Son of God, we are still unfinished. These are the folks who often try to ‘save’ us.
Many Christians, thankfully, are more generous of spirit than that. They embrace a God of love who is not all about damning people who don’t agree on specific creeds or beliefs.
I think of the United Church of Christ’s slogan, “God is still speaking,” with the big comma next to it. This contrasts with that bumper sticker theology: “God wrote it. I read it. That settles it.” Epiphanies are still happening, says that comma. Revelation is not sealed.
Popularly, the word epiphany, with a small ‘e’, means “a sudden manifestation of the essence or meaning of something. a comprehension or perception of reality by means of a sudden intuitive realization.” This morning, I’m wondering if letting go of the one Big Capital E Epiphany as the one and only Truth might help to allow more of these small ‘e’, daily epiphanies, truths. It seems to me that a belief that you already have The Truth kind of stops you from looking for it any more! Others will disagree with me, I’m sure.
I believe that Jesus was an exceptional, exemplary role model for the rest of us. A great teacher, healer, minister, human being. But he was a human. (I count myself lucky to be born in a century where I won’t be burned at the stake for saying that!)
In Unitarian Universalist congregations, we frequently read these words from Sophia Lyon Fahs on Christmas Eve: “No angels herald their beginnings/ No prophets predict their future courses/ No wisemen see a star to show where to find the babe that will save humankind/ Yet each night a child is born is a holy night.”
The Buddhist monk Thich Nhat Hanh has written, “It is probable that the next Buddha will not take the form of an individual. The next Buddha may take the form of a community, a community practicing understanding and loving kindness, a community practicing mindful living. This may be the most important thing we can do for the survival of the earth.”
Each night a child is born is a holy night; one more person who may be part of the community which helps the earth to survive has just joined us! These, to me, are the most hope-filled saving words I know. They are also a sharp jab, when I think of the way that many of these holy people are being treated.
My child—my beloved, brilliant, beautiful, wise, child—was adopted from a remote village in China. Had she not come to the United States by way of adoption, it is highly likely that the only way I would know of her very existence, even theoretically, would be through handling something that she, and millions like her, manufactured ‘for me’ in some windowless factory. Her back sore and her eyes blurry, she might be making my iPhone, or iPad, or a piece of clothing or some weird plastic item. This is, after all, how I know, the only way I am related to, thousands and thousands of children and adults in poor parts of the world. Through the goods which they make for people like me.
Yet, because I know my child personally, I know that she is brilliant, and beautiful, and funny, and opinionated, and has dreams of how her own life and the world should be. Just as I would know each of those children in the windowless room to be, given the chance to know them. If I don’t have eyes to see those other kids, does it mean that they cease to be any less holy? Or is it my own holiness that is diminished, by benefiting from their mistreatment?
So happy Epiphany, or Happy epiphanies, or may your life bring you ever more comprehension and sharpening of focus. Wherever we are, whatever we believe, may we all become part of a community committed to the survival of the earth. Whether we agree or disagree about theology, we are all in this together!
What a Day for a Daydream!
It turns out I’m not as good at daydreaming as I used to be. When I was about nine, my mother would have to physically rouse me from my bed, not because I was sleeping, but because I was spending happy hours imagining my life as Mrs. Paul McCartney.
My fantasies involved boats, castles, me on stage at Beatles concerts—that is, ‘me’ bearing no physical resemblance to any adult I might ever grow up and become. I was devastated when, one day, somehow, I let my dream slip out and my older brother said scornfully, “Why would Paul McCartney marry a nine year old in Akron, Ohio?”
After that I got more realistic. I moved on to George Harrison, the youngest Beatle. Perhaps that first ‘realistic’ decision was the beginning of the demise of my fantasizing prowess.
Because these days, it turns out, I’m no good at daydreaming at all. Over the years I’ve gotten much better at planning, and actually executing plans. I’ve moved across country, switched jobs, launched projects, had a wedding, adopted a kid—done all kinds of other things that took hundreds, if not thousands, of tiny acts and choices, promptly scratched off my to-do list. But somewhere in there, daydreaming fell off the table.
I didn’t know how bad I’d gotten at it until my spiritual teacher gave me an assignment this week. Take time each day, she said. Stare into space. Daydream. Imagine what would be most fulfilling, delicious, inspiring, to do and to be. It doesn’t matter if you’ll never do it, if no one ever could. Just see what you imagine! Find your young self, see through her eyes!
What once would have been a breeze is now really hard. Back then, along with being tall and willowy and beautiful, and marrying a Beatle, I had every intention of being super-wealthy, being a famous writer, traveling to the most exotic places. Now my rational mind jumps right in. Super-wealthy? I say? You want to be part of the one percent? And instead of enjoying, even for a moment, some delicious luxury vacation, or even the philanthropist I might become, I am fuming about the ‘fiscal cliff’ and drafting imaginary letters to Congress. Word by word.
I think what my spiritual teacher is pointing me to (though she is a bit cryptic and never says why she gives me the particular assignments she does) is to find joy in the longing itself. To allow the imagining to take on a life of its own, but primarily to allow that quality of desire and longing to truly take root in me, until I remember what my young self knew—that we are made to dream, as well as to act.
So, here’s what I’ll do, needing structure to help me out. I’m piling up all of the magazines, random bits of ribbon or paper and 2012 calendars in the house, which I would otherwise be recycling as I clean up the holiday wreckage. I picture looking through all of the materials with one focus—to find items which evoke longing in me, which provoke desire, even if I’m not sure exactly why!
After I gather up images, words, whatever I want—ribbons, sheets of color, fabrics, who knows? I’ll piece them together to see how they fit, to see what shapes they make.
And then, at the end of the day, I’ll have—I don’t know what!!! A jumbled mess? A picture of young Paul McCartney, back when he was cuter than a puppy? What I hope to have is a little bit of a snapshot about what longing feels like in me, so that I can begin to recognize its voice when it whispers in my ear. So that I can become a respectful vessel for my heart’s deepest longings. So I get better at this again.
On New Years’ Day, I plan to go through my usual practice, with friends, of making gratitude boards for the year that’s over, and a vision board for the year that’s coming—same process of cutting and pasting, but with a very different focus as I look through my materials. This time, celebrating 2012 and envisioning things I actually hope and plan to do in 2013.
I’m going to be really curious to see what effect, if any, my extra session of fantasizing has on the visioning process. The fun thing about creative experiments is that you can never guess their results!
However you see in 2013, however you imagine it and live it, may it be full of blessings for you and yours. See you next year!
Love & Grief: Two Sides of the Same Coin
One night as the on-call hospital chaplain, I witnessed the end of three marriages, each representing over 50 years of love and struggle, as death claimed the husbands. The depth of grief of each wife haunted me for days. Was this the price of great love? Such great pain? This is what I have to look forward to after years of joy with my beloved?
I found myself restlessly meditating, pacing and praying, trying to unpack the promise of pain. In a sudden flash of insight, I realized that grief and love are two sides of the same coin – AND this is not cause for despair.
Life is about spending that coin. Loving with all my heart, grieving what is lost along the way, and loving more.
I learned to find gifts in sorrow, learning in the bad times. Hope.
I do not grieve what I do not love. Great grief is a sign of great love – and great love is a gift beyond compare. When my parents die, if they die before I do, I will mourn deeply, painfully, for years. Just the thought of not being able to call my mom and dad is enough for tears to spring to my eyes some days. But I have stood with children who do not mourn the loss of their parents, who mourn more for the lack of love they felt as a child than for the grief of their parents’ death. So I know, beyond a shadow of a doubt that love is the gift. I would far rather mourn the loss of a great love, than have no love to grieve.
This really is hope for me. Not that loss is inevitable, no – but that if I love with all my being, the grief will be sharp and deep and clean. The pain will be intense and there will ever be an ache – but an ache of life well loved, not the ache of regrets nor of despair. I look to the beautiful and the sweet, because it will always lift me towards hope. The price of love is steep, but it is nothing compared to the life sucking numbness of not loving, not caring, not trying.
The great deception is that there is safety – that we can protect ourselves or our loved ones from harm. The truth is that life is mystery, change is constant, control is a figment of the human imagination. When I can be present to the truth that nothing is promised – all life is gift, then despair has a harder time getting a grip in my psyche. Each involuntary and thoughtless breath is amazing, is unearned and unearnable. Grace, by another name.
Years ago, I read the words of Anne Lamott, “I do not understand the mystery of grace – only that it meets us where we are and does not leave us where it found us.” “Ah,” said my soul. “Yes!” My source of hope lies in that mystery. I trust the universe to be endlessly creative, to be rife with paradox, to seek generativity. Life will! In the most inconceivable places and times and situations, life insists most creatively and assertively. And death will too. Two sides of the same coin, much like love and grief.
And so, I live holding all that I love lightly and tightly.
Lightly enough that it may take its own path, tightly enough that it never doubts my love.
It is a spiritual practice.
It is a daily struggle.
It is a daily joy.
For So the Children Come
For each child that’s born
A morning star rises
and sings to the universe
who we are
On November 12th of this year, three congregations co-ordained me, giving me a new name – Reverend Deanna Vandiver. On the morning of December 21st, Katherine Grace was born and I received another name – Aunt De!
Beloveds, that every child born could arrive so loved, so cared for as my beautiful niece, baby Kate… For so the children come into this world, into our lives, and we – we are called to love them enough to begin what Howard Thurman called the work of Christmas: “finding the lost, healing the broken, feeding the hungry, releasing prisoners, rebuilding nations, making peace among brothers [and sisters], making music in the heart.”
There is no such thing as “somebody else’s baby.” They are all our children, our beloved miracles of life to care for, to care about, and to commit to healing a broken world so that they may not suffer unnecessarily. As our nation grieves the death of the slain children in Newtown, CT, we are deeply aware of our accountability for their lives and the lives of all children who are harmed by violence and the devaluation of life.
Unitarian Universalist theology tells us that we are a part of an interconnected web of creation, related to and in relationship with each thread of creation. Our society tells us that we are isolated individuals, worth only what we can produce or inherit, and that violence is a credible response to violence. We tenders of the web of life know that violence increases alienation & fear, hides the connections we have to each other, allows us to become numb to the miracle of life, to the wonders of this universe.
My mother has a calendar of days in her bathroom. On the day my niece was born, the wisdom of the calendar instructed “Give people a piece of your heart, instead of a piece of your mind.” Navigating the dynamics of multiple families, hospital policies, and fear for my baby sister’s health with very little sleep, that nugget of wisdom was salvific for me. Life lived from a place of gratitude and wonder is very different from a life lived from a place of ingratitude, anger, and fear.
We who grieve the beloveds of Sandy Hook Elementary are also called to grieve the 800 “civilian casualties” of our country’s drone strikes in Pakistan in the last four years, for the children who are caught in cross-fire in our urban centers, for every child who has lost a parent in the endless US military actions. We understand that we are not called to stand on the side of love for some children. We are called to stand on the side of love for all children. No matter what we think about their choices, their policies, or their cultures, our hearts are called to honor the inherent worth and dignity of all creation.
Beloveds, each child that’s born is a holy child. You are a miracle. So is your neighbor. As we swim through the ocean of the universe, may we remember this wisdom born of a child called Jesus. Love your neighbor as yourself – and beloveds, love yourself – because if you cannot have compassion for the spark of creation that is your being, you will be able to deny compassion to other sparks of creation.
Give yourself and your neighbor a piece of your heart instead of a piece of your mind. See how quickly this begins the work of Christmas…
For so the children come, and so they have been coming for thousands of years…may each child born find peace and love in our hearts and good will toward all of creation as we commit to doing the work of Christmas.
For each child that’s born
A morning star rises
and sings to the universe
who we are
What Makes Us Safe
It is only natural that in the wake of the horrific shootings at Sandy Hook Elementary, the world of social media is awash with solutions, things that we should have done to prevent this tragedy, things that we urgently need to do to prevent more such tragedies, things that will make us safe. Some of these suggestions strike me as downright bizarre, such as the idea that we need to arm teachers so that they can protect their classrooms. Hmm…guns in the classroom—what could possibly go wrong? Some of these suggestions are, to my mind, flat-out offensive, such as the claim that this tragedy happened because we have taken God out of the schools, and that “God will ‘bless the USA’ when we put him back in it.” Really? God allowed innocent children to die out of a fit of pique over the lack of prayer in school? Who would believe in such a God?
Other suggestions make more sense to me: that we should limit the sale of assault weapons, or require gun owners to carry liability insurance, or that we control the sale of ammunition. Still other people are arguing for better mental health care, to which I can only say “about time.”
Unfortunately, the more I think about it (and like much of the country I’ve been thinking about it obsessively for days), the less I think that any of these solutions—including the ones I like—are going to really make us safe. By all means, let’s have sensible laws limiting weapons. But no, we’re not going to get all the dangerous weapons out of the hands of dangerous people. Or people who were never dangerous until the moment that they snapped. Absolutely, let’s give people better access to mental health care. But even if we could assure compliance with medication and therapy not every illness responds will to treatment. And we will never be able to know for sure the difference between someone who is dangerous and someone who is merely volatile.
And really, if you get down to it, even if we were able to prevent every shooting spree, that’s hardly a guarantee of safety. No amount of control over people’s behavior could prevent the devastation of Hurricane Sandy, or Katrina before that. As someone who lives pretty much on top of a fault line in California I know that a devastating earthquake in the area where I live is basically inevitable – a matter of when, not if. While I in no way agree with people like Adam Lanza’s mother who prepare for cataclysm by stockpiling weapons, given the ever-increasing effects of climate change, I would say that expecting disaster is not unrealistic.
The question is what we plan to do about it. We could prepare our children for the possibility of school shootings by sending them to school with a gun (as one parent is bizarrely said to have done). Or we could teach them to be kind to loners and misfits, to report or stand up to bullies, to tell an adult when another child seems depressed or distraught. We could deal with crime in our neighborhoods by arming ourselves. Or we could get to know our neighbors, and keep an eye on one other’s houses so that we are prepared to call the police if something seems amiss. We could stockpile food and weapons so that in a local or national emergency we are prepared to defend ourselves against all comers, prepared to go it alone. Or we could support increased money for the government emergency services that we are sure to increasingly need. And we can get together to fill sandbags when it seems like the floodwaters are coming, or find ways to share electricity with those who are without power after the storm comes, or offer shelter to those who have lost their homes.
This is what people did for Hurricanes Sandy and Katrina. In the aftermath of 9/11 people poured into New York to search the rubble or support the first responders. When a section of freeway collapsed during the 1989 Loma Prieta earthquake folks in that “dangerous” neighborhood converged to help the injured and look for people who might be trapped. This is what we do. This is who we are.
The conservative entertainment complex and the NRA make a lot of money selling fear, and solutions to fear that involve scapegoating, isolation and the capacity to inflict damage before someone gets to you. And yes, that gut-level defensive reaction is who we are, too.
But we get to choose what we act on. We get to choose what we practice, so that when the time of crisis comes our habitual ways of being come to the fore. What makes us safe is the ongoing work of caring for the vulnerable; loving our neighbors; living, like the lilies of the field, in the beauty of the moment rather than in the fear of what might come. We will never be safe. Safety just isn’t part of this package we call life. But we can harbor one another, creating all the safety we can muster in this dangerous world.
Invocation in a time of sorrow
Tomorrow morning in the congregation I serve, we will open our worship for all ages with these words:
There are a lot of good and beautiful things in our world.
There are a lot of scary things in our world.
Sometimes we feel great joy and a lot of hope. Sometimes we are brokenhearted and afraid.
We are here in our church this morning because there are a lot of good and beautiful things here. Here, we are surrounded by people that care. Here, we love, and we are loved.
It’s okay to be afraid sometimes. It’s normal to feel pain or anger when something terrible happens. Everybody feels those things sometimes. It’s a part of life.
When those times come, think of places like this. Think of people like the kind people that are here.
We know we don’t have all the answers. Here, we can at least share our questions. And here, we can share a lot more than that: we can share our thoughts and ideas, we can share our pain and our hope. Here, we can remember that we are not alone.
We are here in our church this morning because there are a lot of good and beautiful things here. We’re also here to learn how to bring good and beautiful things into the world.
