Finding the Blessing
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I was standing beside a small mountain waterfall at a Shinto shrine in the mountains outside Nagoya during my first visit to Japan. The Guji, or head priest, of the Tsubaki Grand Shrine had invited me to take part in a Shinto cleansing ritual called misogi. The ritual practice involves stepping into the waterfall and allowing the water to cleanse not only the body but also the spirit.
Unitarian Universalism has had a long relationship with the Japanese religious community. Each UUA president makes the pilgrimage to Japan to renew and strengthen those relationships.
Shinto is the indigenous faith of Japan. Shinto understands that, in living our daily lives, we are drawn away from what they call the way of the Kami, the way of the Spirit of Life, and our lives get out of balance. They don’t use the language of sin, but there is a profound appreciation for human fallibility. The cleansing rituals are designed to restore balance, to recognize our interdependence and help people move back toward right relationship when they become alienated from the Kami.
Did I mention that it was November and a light snow was falling? Or that I was wearing only the ritual loincloth and headband?
The Guji led us in ritual exercise and prayer, which made the cold more bearable. He taught us the prayer to say under the waterfall, holding our hands together with the middle fingers extended. It translates roughly as “purify my soul, wash my spirit, purify the five senses and my mind.” He also told us not to obsess about remembering the Japanese. The goal was to be present to the experience and allow the Kami, the spirit, to cleanse the soul.
I was expectant and terrified. One of my predecessors told me that during his misogi, he was so cold he didn’t even attempt the prayer. He simply shouted: “Sweet Baby Jesus” over and over. But I knew that I had to “do what the spirit says do.”
I loved the experience. It was unbelievably cold, and I mangled the prayer. But a priest had to pull me out. I would have stayed too long for my own good. All my concerns were driven from my mind. I could only focus on that moment. And I emerged from the water feeling…not forgiven exactly…cleansed really is the only word that comes close. I felt like I was starting afresh.
The day before my visit to the Tsubaki Grand Shrine found me in Hiroshima. Much of the town has been rebuilt, but the memorial is surrounded only by the emptiness that remained after our attack. The museum shows the devastation, the tens of thousands of non-combatant civilians killed by the atomic blast and its aftermath. The images of the suffering and the death were hard to view.
I placed a wreath at the memorial, offered a silent prayer for forgiveness and confronted the reality that it was my country that had intentionally dropped that bomb.
How do we deal with collective responsibility? How do we deal with our participation in identities that we did not choose? With decisions we did not make?
I am a citizen of the United States, an American. But I certainly did not make the decision to drop that bomb on Hiroshima. How can I be responsible? How can I have any accountability for that devastation? Does the accident of my birth mean that I am personally culpable? Do I need to ask forgiveness? Who would I ask?
If you have had the privilege of traveling abroad you have been in the conversation that goes: “We love the American people. It’s the US government we hate.” In many places, we’re getting a bit of a pass these days with Obama in the White House, but I’ve had that conversation many times, and it always makes me uncomfortable.
That conversation lets me off the hook just a bit too easily. The reality is that the “fall out” of that day in Hiroshima has shaped me in ways that are real, though often hard for me to see. I am a baby-boomer who grew up with an image of America as the most powerful nation on earth, an image made possible by Hiroshima. I grew up in a long period of economic expansion, made possible by the victory in Japan. I grew up being taught that the US was justified in dropping the bombs because it saved many American lives. I saw that story told at the Harry S Truman museum just this summer.
Author James Baldwin said: “What passes for identity in America is a series of myths about one’s heroic ancestors.” Our civic culture tells us that America has always been in the right, despite the voices on the margins that have offered an alternative narrative. But standing at the memorial in Hiroshima, I knew that I could not avoid my place in history. As an American, I could not avoid responsibility.
It’s like the many conversations I’ve had with white people about race. “I’m not prejudiced. I’ve never kept black people down. I’ve worked hard all my life. Some of my best friends are….”
All of those statements can be true, and often are, but by living in a society that was built on prejudice and which depends on the presence of a permanent underclass of people of color, white people cannot avoid participating in a system that oppresses, a system that has privileged them. Its not about individual guilt or innocence; it’s not about individual culpability. It is a collective reality in which we all live.
My hunch is that queer folks, disabled folks and recent immigrants remember conversations that sound eerily similar.
It is easier, often, not to know some things. And far more comfortable not to ask some questions.
Brewster, Massachusetts, is on Cape Cod. The UU church there is quintessentially New England: white clapboard, tall steeple, beautiful windows, right on the town green. The congregation is made up of good progressive folks. They have worked hard for justice, most recently around marriage equality and BGLT rights.
But the church was built by wealthy merchants and sea captains in the 18th century. The walls of the fellowship hall are lined with pictures of sailing ships, which they were proud to display.
A few years ago, one congregant asked what might seem to be an obvious question: “What were those ships carrying?” They took the question seriously, did their research, and found that many of those ships had been slavers and that, in fact, a good bit of the money that had built that beautiful church had come from the slave trade.
Knowing that history was challenging for them, especially for the few descendants of those captains who were still members. But it proved to be a blessing. They were able to reclaim their history and create a narrative about how that congregation had grown, had struggled to know what they were called to do and been transformed in the process. It was a narrative that acknowledged their past but did not leave them trapped in it.
Unitarian Universalists affirm as one of our seven principles “respect for the interdependent web of all existence of which we are a part.” We normally understand that statement as an
affirmation of our part in the natural world, and it supports our work for environmental justice. But the interdependent web is also geographical. We are a part of a world community. The web does not stop at our borders, no matter how tall the fences we may build.
And the interdependent web also exists in time. It connects us to our history, to the history of our nations and to a future. This is a faith of both memory and hope.
That evening in Japan, the Guji hosted a dinner for us. The senior priests were there and members of the shrine’s board of trustees, including Mr. Feruta, a retired nuclear physicist and chair of the Grand Shrine’s board. We celebrated our long history of partnership.
But even as I enjoyed the warm hospitality, I was still trying to process my visit to Hiroshima, to understand my place in that story. I finally asked the question that was in my heart.
How could the Japanese people have forgiven America for dropping those atomic bombs, for killing so many innocent civilians?
It was a conversation stopper. After a moment, Mr. Feruta thanked me for the question. He said that in his decades- long contact with Americans, no one had ever asked. He asked if he could think before responding and the conversation at the table started up again.
Later in the evening Mr. Feruta offered his answer. He said: “Yes, we have forgiven you. We have not forgotten. So many families had members or friends who died as a result of the bomb.
We were able to forgive you because we have come to see the bombs, finally, as a blessing.
Japan was on a dangerous course in those days,” he said. “If America, if you, had not dropped those bombs and ended the war, we would have continued on that path. We would still be a militaristic nation, searching always for more raw materials, more territory, and more glory.
If you had not dropped those bombs, we would have become you…and it would have crippled our spirit.”
“We would have become you.”
Never have I felt the weight of being an American press on me so heavily. But the blessing for me was to know the reality of which he spoke. The knowing allowed me to sleep that night.
What would collective forgiveness look like? It’s hard to imagine. The Episcopal Church has offered a formal apology to the African and African-American communities for their role in the transatlantic slave trade. I think that was a good thing for them to do, after careful discernment and investigation of their history.
Might it be more helpful, though, for us all to know our story fully enough so that we can avoid the harms that demand forgiveness? Aren’t we now, as a nation, creating yet more need for forgiveness?
The poet Maya Angelou writes: “History, despite its wrenching pain, cannot be unlived, but if faced with courage, need not be lived again.”
The first step in finding forgiveness is knowing, knowing that forgiveness is necessary. If we can know our past and our present, not just the heroic version; if we can resist denial of our participation in the systems of privilege we would change, then perhaps we can, in fact, summon our courage and help the universe bend toward justice.
Bill, as he prefers to be called, is well known for his service as President of the Unitarian Universalist Association (2001-2009). His tenure was marked by strong public witness for social justice and support for marginalized communities, commitments he continues here in Portland.
Bill’s commitment to liberal religion dates to his teenage years, when he was an active member of the First Unitarian Church of Cincinnati, Ohio. He served as the president of Liberal Religious Youth, the continental Unitarian Universalist (UU) youth organization. He had a successful career in the corporate world and ran his own business in the housing field. In later years he returned to Cincinnati and served his home church as a lay leader until he answered the call to ministry in 1992.
After completing his Master of Divinity degree at Starr King School for the Ministry in 1995, Bill joined the UUA staff where he served until he was elected to the Presidency. Bill earned his B.A. from Harvard in 1968 and also holds honorary doctorates from Tufts University and Meadville/Lombard Theological School.
During his years of service to the denomination (“a seventeen year detour,” as he describes it), Bill never lost his goal of being a pastor to a congregation. “My service at First Church fulfills my calling to ministry. I am finally able to preach to congregants whose stories I know, whose children I’ve dedicated and whose elders I have memorialized.”
Bill was the first African American to lead any traditionally white denomination, and was named one of the ten most influential Black religious leaders in the US in both 2005 and 2006. He and his wife Maria have four adult children, and one grandchild, William Rider Sinkford, born in July 2008.
- Rise in Body or in Spirit - February 1, 2017
- In Translation - September 1, 2014
- Finding the Blessing - March 1, 2011
