Religare: to Tie Back Together
Sunday,
November 7, 2004
Rev.
Gretchen Woods
CHALICE LIGHTING
modified from Starhawk,
“The Road Forward,” November 3, 2004
The changes we need to
make are deep and systemic, and no politician’s victory will make them for
us. Perhaps had Kerry won, we would be
on an easier road. Now the way ahead will be hard and stony, yet it may turn
out to be a steeper but shorter path than the easier one we lost.
I am worried about the aftermath
of this election. This, as we all know by now, has been the most polarized,
nastiest campaign in the history of the United States. And with good reason –
the stakes are very, very high. Mudslinging, knee-jerking, and untruths are
flying in all directions. Is it likely, after the votes are cast, that all this
will end? Will we, all of a sudden, become a peaceable community in which the
minority lives comfortably with the decision of the majority? Doubt it. Call me
cynical.
And there’s a mess out there. I
don’t need to remind you about the war, social security, marriage equality,
healthcare, the economy, etc. – you know the litany of woes. You are some of
the most informed and politically active people in the nation. There’s a mess
out there. Will the newly elected officials be able to clean it up without a
whole lot of help from everybody?
I am worried about the aftermath
of this election. I am worried that we will set out hearts too firmly on the
success of one candidate or place our blame too firmly on another. This is a
democracy and we are people of good faith with integrity. How can we make this
world a better place? Regardless of what happens on November 2nd?
The election will soon be over,
but the democracy, hopefully, with all its flaws and foibles, is here to stay.
And democracy is a lot of hard work.
A foundational religious question
is: How do we live in community with people different from ourselves? The
election won’t answer that question, it will only raise more. Our work, our
ministry, to the world, will have just begun again. May you minister from the
best part of your self, remembering that you are very precious and that you are
connected in ways you may or may not understand to everything and every one.
Keep the faith.
Like our lay leader today, I
recognize that it is possible that not all of you are distressed by the results
of this year’s election. And I feel I must respond to the emotions I heard in
your phone calls, emails, and conversations with me in the grocery store.
I did not sleep well on Tuesday night after the Election Party for
the Services Auction. I got to sleep around midnight and awoke on Wednesday at
about 3:30AM, never returning to sleep despite many attempts through meditation
and using the breath to honor my deep and varying emotions of hope and fear. I
knew I had done the right thing by retrieving the service for today. I wanted
to be with you, but I was not certain what to say. I just knew we needed to
be together as a religious community in all of our responses to this
election. We needed to be together to do the religious thing: to tie our lives
back together. (I thank Roberta Hall for graciously agreeing to speak about
race on January 16.)
Then, when I did get up and move
through my meditations for the day, early morning light in the flowering cherry
trees blessed me with the vision of the flaming bush: orange and apricot,
alight with fire, raised my sagging spirits. “Take off you shoes, you stand on
holy ground.” Surely we must remain open to such beauty. And open to the idea
that the ground around us bears the holy, that there is still much good in our
world to soothe our souls, there is still much to tie our lives back together.
Then, around 11:30AM, I heard
Edwards and Kerry concede on NPR and learned that Constitutional Amendment 36
passed, and, for the first time in my life, I cried over the results of an
election. I wondered what future this country held for me, as the only openly
queer clergy left in this city in a state beleaguered by anti-gay ballot
measures. I am well aware that anti-gay violence always escalates after like
decisions, because fringe people take such votes as approval for violent
behavior. Tom Disrud, my openly gay colleague at First Portland, has already
received a long, nasty piece of hate mail from a neighbor. In a meeting here
several weeks ago, I was told I am “too intensely lesbian” and preach on
lesbianism “all the time.” What are my options when that is the topic cynically
used to “get out the vote?” Our building has been threatened with fire because
we had a sign publicly announcing our stance in favor of legalizing same-sex
marriage. So it begins . . .
But this is not truly a beginning.
It is part of the much larger march of human being on this planet, and we need
to keep that in mind. So today, I give us permission to grieve in community, in
all that means; to deepen our study and education about issues; to consider
Joanna Macy’s “Marching Orders” for the future, regardless of our present; and
to offer a call to tie our lives back together, remembering that religare is the Latin root for religion: to tie
our lives back together.
“First, You Cry,” Betty Rollins
asserted. She was writing about receiving a diagnosis of breast cancer. In like
manner, I believe we must be open to our grief, including the rage and
depression that come with it. We must begin by acknowledging what is. Starhawk
puts it this way:
On election
night, I felt an intensity of grief, rage and anguish that rivaled any of the
worst nights of my life. Not so much that Kerry lost, but that millions of
people could vote for Bush, apparently because they define “morality” as
preventing two people who love each other from making a legally-recognized commitment,
while turning a blind eye to a regime that has invaded another country for
totally invalidated reasons, lied to the American people, legitimized sexual
torture, and all the rest of it. It’s
enough to challenge one’s faith not just in Americans, but in the essential
goodness of human beings. Can we apply
to join another species? The wolves,
perhaps?
I want to
acknowledge my own grief, rage and despair.
People often look to me for words of hope - and I have some - but they
come only when I let myself feel just as rotten and awful as I’m sure you
do. Van Jones, organizer of Books Not
Bars here in the Bay Area, says we need to learn to grieve as a movement, and
also to celebrate - and the two are linked. This is a moment to grieve, which
means also to yell and scream and be mad as hell, to question whether life
makes any sense at all, and then maybe to crawl under the covers and rest, for
a bit.
Boy, did I relate?! I immediately let a nasty cold catch me
and have spent the next three days slightly comatose. And I am also here
with you today, trying ot help tie our lives back together. I think we not only
need to grieve, but to do it in places where we know our values are shared and
our emotions will not be devalued, whether it is within a political party, a
commune, non-governmental organization, or religious community. We need to
connect with others who share our perspectives and/or situations, as Starhawk
notes:
Yesterday, I really
didn’t want to get out of bed, but I went
to the demonstration anyway. I would have liked to curl up in fetal
position and sleep for possibly the next four years, but I roused myself to go
down to the plaza and join those hard core souls who had planned to rally and
march for health care regardless of who won.
I did it because I felt it is exactly what we need to do, the
counterintuitive thing - advance instead of retreat, carry on, see our friends,
support each other, share our grief, rage and shock. It felt good, to march down Market Street, to stop at the hotels
where workers are striking and support them, to make some small, renewed effort
at continuing to build the alliances we need.
We need
one another to share our grief and rage. It does no good to broadcast it to the
opposition, because those who disagree will only hear our rage, not the
rightness of our position. I learned that from my own bitter experience, when
my rage was un-heard because people were defending against the rage, rather
than hearing the righteousness of my argument. But it is a great help to
ventilate with our supporters and friends in a safe community.
This is
the place for that. I remember well a long-time member of the first
congregation I served, Margaret Carlson, who never missed a chance to point out
that she became a Unitarian Universalist because that fellowship was the only
place that a person could oppose Joseph McCarthy in the 1950’s. Margaret died a
confirmed UU because that religious community existed.
But
grieving is not the same as abdicating, as Starhawk pointed out. Even as we
grieve, we continue to speak truth to power with love (That’s the hard part,
isn’t it?), to study the issues and build better arguments for positive change.
We must become able to offer the moral alternatives to those “moral values”
that captured voters. Rabbi Michael Lerner points out that we need a “spiritual
left” that reminds people of all perspectives that we are morally called to
attend to the poor, to love our neighbors, to respond to violence with
non-violence, and, above all, to care for our planet rather than squander it in
hopes of a better world in death.
(http://www.commondreams.org/views04/1104-01.htm) We need to stop abdicating
spiritual power and moral values, of which we have many. The Rev. Jody Shipley,
one of my mentors, put up a poster in her church that said, “Your trouble, my
dear, is that you have a wishbone where you backbone ought to be.” Let’s
collectively reclaim our spiritual backbones – and put them to use holding our
world with love.
We need to
keep reminding people of the dangers of “black box” voting for which there is
no paper trail to justify the discrepancies between the exit polls and the
votes that counted. We need to keep reminding people that the environmental
laws that made this country a model for the rest of the world in the 1970’s
have been “sunsetted” with no remark and/or seriously compromised by the
current administration. We need to keep calling for universal health care for
all people – and universal civil rights for all people. And we need to do it
with zest and relish. It really irritates those who want us to be miserable if
we are having fun.
I was
blessed by the “Nature and the Sacred” conference last week. Joanna Macy, who has built her life work on
breaking through despair and paralysis over issues of nuclear disarmament and
peace, offered “marching orders” for all of us, orders that seem even more
important and powerful than they were before the election:
1) Ground in
Gratitude¾be able to
say and mean “Wow!” at the beauty of the trees, the majesty of great music, the
wonder of animals at play, the glory of an elegant mathematical solution the
ineffable in a moment of love. This is
primarily spiritual, as it takes for granted that we can connect with
something that feeds our spirits and be grateful for it, even if it is only a
purring kitten.
2) Don’t Be
Afraid of the Dark¾Don’t
pathologize pain. Let it move through and away. Acknowledge sorrow, but don’t
get stuck in it. Suffer with other beings, and also find ways to celebrate with
them. The Dark is not the only thing in the world, unless we focus on it as if
it was. Let yourself see the burning bushes around you!
Dennis
Kucinich has this to say about that:
So, let's
grieve over the loss of this election, but let's come together and realize that
it's the unity that we have expressed over these last few years which gives us
real power to bring forth creative change. That, even in this moment of seeming
political darkness, we can find some light - and that light is within each
of us. (italics mine)
3) Act your
Age¾Your real
age, the age of the universe (15 billion years), or at least the planet (4 1/2
billion years). The stuff we are made of has been around at least that long.
Let’s act as if we know it. As Macy says, “Nothing can ever separate you from
the life that brought you forth.” And I would add, “Nothing can separate you
from the love that brought you forth!” We have a lot of experience to take into
account and upon which to build our awareness.
4) Just show
up! – just keep going. No feeling is final. Let them move through and keep
doing what you need to do. And there is much to do. Pick something! One of our
congregants offers me this advice when I am obviously down: “Left foot, right
foot, left foot, right foot, left foot, right foot . . . “ Thanks, Til.
Dennis Kucinich offers these
thoughts:
. . . while
George Bush is certainly going to have a lot to say about what happens in the
next four years, he's not the only one.
You, I and
those with whom we've worked over the last few years have the opportunity to
participate in creating a whole new dialog in America and the world. We may not
have the kind of momentum we had hoped for, which we hoped a Kerry victory
would bring, but we do have our own courage - and our own quality of heart -
which will hold us in good stead in what will surely be some very challenging
times ahead.
I think we need
to go through this period of grieving over the election, and then we have to
get ready to bring some closure and move on, and go to a place of real action
again, of real heart-centered action, of willingness to take on the challenges
which this administration is bringing to our nation and the world.
We need to
rededicate ourselves to working for peace. Not just further empowering the
anti-war movement, but to look at peace as a creative endeavor, where we bring
ourselves into working for peace in our relationships, in our communities.
The Department
of Peace becomes ever more imperative. And the eleven states whose Democratic
delegations took a strong stand in favor of a Department of Peace will be focal
points of all our efforts to get congressional delegations to begin to sign on
in support of this concept, which is aimed at making non-violence an organizing
principle in our society. If there was ever a time when we needed that
approach, it's now.
On health care:
in many states across this country, new initiatives are being aimed at the
state level to help develop a kind of a universal health care approach within a
state. People in Oregon tried it a few years ago and I think they're going to
come back. There's a burgeoning effort in the state of Ohio. We need to look
and see what we can do to promote health care in this country, and to get
people organized around it.
The
environment: we know this administration is not going to be good for the
environment - but we also know that we have the opportunity to push forward, at
every level, development of alternative energies.
You know, we're looking at soaring
natural gas prices in the next few months. This gives us some leverage to get
popular support for an effort to develop energy alternatives. (As if we didn't
need that - get that - with the higher gas prices.) But we know with the oil
companies having a resurgence in political power with the re-election of George
Bush, it gives us also the ability to galvanize public support for the
development of alternative energy.
As I said
before, don’t let the enormity of the problems overwhelm you. Pick one. Each of
us has something we can bring to the table for positive change.
Edward
Everett Hale wrote:
I am only one
But still I am one.
I cannot do everything,
But still I can do something.
And because I cannot do everything
I will not refuse to do the
something that I can do.
Yes, we
need to grieve, but we cannot afford the paralysis of despair. We can and must
be at the center of a new movement to create a “spiritual left,” emphasizing
the deep connections of our Unitarian Universalist values, values that have a
place as much as the “moral values” that drove those who voted in the majority
– if they were the majority.
We, each
of us, can support each other in this religious community so that we may go
forward with respect, with responsibility, and with relish for the process,
knowing that we share our values with those who gather and that we can study,
serve, and celebrate life here with reason, freedom, and acceptance for the
great diversity of human being. We can be at the heart of a new spiritual and
moral progressive movement that ties our lives back together with love.
I close with words from our reading by the Rev. Joan
Montagnes:
Our work, our ministry, to the
world, will have just begun again. May you minister from the best part of your
self, remembering that you are very precious and that you are connected in ways
you may or may not understand to everything and every one.
Keep the faith.
So Be It! Blessed Be!