How Does Our Faith Hold Brokenness?
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In Duluth, Minnesota, in the center of the city, there is a statue of three young men, college-aged, strong and hopeful, looking out of the stone toward the world. On a summer night in 1920, not so very long ago, these three—Isaac McGhie, Elias Clayton, and Elmer Jackson—were lynched there by a mob that may have numbered as many as ten thousand people. The three were road workers for a traveling circus, arrested days before on charges of raping a white woman. The crowd broke into the jail and dragged them to a lamppost. It did not take very long for these thousands of citizens to gather themselves around a murderous idea. Not even the circus would have brought out ten thousand people without notice.
Evil was easily organized, as it so often is, from the fragments of possibility that lie around, ever ready, the tiny sharp shards of potential, the fertile seeds that exist inside each one of us. Of the ten thousand, a few were masterminds and most were “merely” spectators, carrying no weapons, no coils of premeditated rope. But how to draw lines? So often evil shows itself not as a monolith, but as a patchwork composed of a great many very small pieces.
Eighty-three years later a different crowd gathered in that same street, some of them descendents of those present the first time. This patchwork of humanity was smaller, and no doubt more difficult to organize, than the first, but this one was lovely and intentional, healing and brave. The people of Duluth—African Americans and white Americans and others—came together to tell this story out loud, publicly, to claim shared ownership of this history which for decades had been hidden like a festering family secret. Onto the monument they dedicated are carved the words of Edmund Burke: An event has happened upon which it is difficult to speak and impossible to remain silent.
Unitarian Universalism is often accused of remaining silent, of being “soft on crime,” unwilling to look evil in the eye and admit that some human beings, by their choices, have stepped across an invisible but absolute line, forfeiting forgiveness. The early Universalists did believe that every person is redeemable, salvageable, possessed of worth and even dignity, no matter what—but this was less a statement about human nature than about the nature of God, who was Love and nothing else for them, understanding and nothing less for them, forgiveness absolutely, if one would be forgiven.
The real concern of the Universalists, and an abiding concern for their descendants, was judgment, and who gets to do it, and on what grounds. Who is fit to say whose soul might be beyond repair? They disbelieved, vehemently, in the eternal punishment of hell, but not in hell entirely. They held that we are punished not for our sins but by them, every day. Our wholeness, our holiness, is torn; our spirit becomes sick. They disbelieved in the doctrine of original sin, at least as it was roared from raging pulpits; but more, they disbelieved in the myth of original goodness, that there ever was a golden age, an innocent time when happy human beings tended the garden of the earth and then made some kind of awful first mistake.
There was no mistake, they said, no apple and no snake. Free will was inherent in us all along. We make hell for one another while we live, they said, by cruel action and selfish inaction; sometimes we make hell for ourselves, and live there ‘til we die.
Evil is the capacity within and among us to break sacred connection with ourselves, with each other, with the Holy, and further, to deny this breakage or to call it virtue. The soil in which it flourishes is a rich compost of ignorance, arrogance, fear and delusion—mostly self-delusion. Sunlight beats it back. Humility stunts its growth. Truth telling, truth seeking, truth speaking, secret-breaking, brave naming, bearing witness—all weaken its resolve and threaten its potential. Saying and singing and teaching to children, and carving into stone from time to time the words, Here happened an event upon which it is difficult to speak and impossible to remain silent—this is good practice. This is how connection begins, sacred connection, and how it is restored. This is part of what the church is for.
The church exists, in part, to remember—to rescue from vast silence stories that might not otherwise be heard, to ask questions that might not otherwise be asked, and to celebrate victories and mourn losses that might otherwise be forgotten. To bless what might go unblessed. The church is part of society—and this is never more clear than when it is complicit in society’s ignorance, arrogance or evil. But it stands apart as well, charged to see the world both as it is and as it could be. This remembering, this naming of truth, the telling of stories forgotten, forbidden and hidden, both terrible and beautiful, is one way that we hold brokenness, injustice and suffering. For us, it could be called a sacrament, the sacrament of the living word.
I have come to believe about human beings that we require food, water, shelter, air, and stories. Something in us needs to speak and to be heard, to forgive and be forgiven, to sing and hear music, to speak our truth and listen for the truths of others. Part of our vocation as human beings, and as religious human beings, is to aid and abet the transmission of beauty and truth.
My husband will say on those occasions when the weight of the world is closing in and the evidence against hope mounts as I read the news, when I start confusing cynicism with pragmatism, and I sigh, “I’m so tired, I’m so discouraged”—he’ll say, in the kindest way: “What kind of entitled grandiosity of privilege is this, to think that you or I or anyone has the right to sever the bright thread of hope, the tradition of dedication to the common good and faith in the people’s power to imagine great change and great risks and then take them; the beautiful, proud history of work for human rights and freedom? We’re only here to pass it on,” he’ll say. “All you have to do is keep the fire burning for a little while, and pass it on. You have no right to put it out.” Not in so many words, but that’s about what Ross will say.
It’s what we say every Sunday. The sacrament of celebration involves memory, as much as it involves forward-looking hope. The church can hold evil and injustice only if it holds the story of resistance, too. It’s not the mourning, but the dancing, that will move our people out of the sanctuary and into the street, into the statehouse, where the life of prayer is embodied.
Excerpted from Rev. Victoria Safford’s “How does our faith hold brokenness, injustice and suffering?” published in A People So Bold: Theology and Ministry for Unitarian Universalists. This book is available through the UUA Bookstore (or 800-215-9076) or the CLF library (617-948-6150).
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