Sermon 9.4.16
Rev. Emily Wright-Magoon
Division. It seems to be everywhere, especially in these mere months before a presidential election. The news of late has been full of division: over Trump and Hillary, over Black Lives Matter and Blue Lives Matter – now even a White Lives Matter group – plus ISIS, immigration, white supremacy, riots and protests, building a wall…
The division has not only been evident in the rhetoric but also in real violence…so much violence this summer. As we were still reeling from the shooting in Orlando, a cascade of more bad news kept hitting: terrorist attacks across the globe, the deaths of Philando Castile and Alton Sterling, the deaths of police in Dallas and other cities, the names kept adding to each other…
It felt like my heart kept breaking and breaking…
…And yet I kept returning to the words of Clarissa Pinkola Estes:
“My friends, do not lose heart. We were made for these times.”
Yes: even these times where our very democracy feels broken by division; yes, even these times where you probably don’t bring up politics unless you’re ready for name-calling, yes, even these times where one candidate’s supporters listen to the other candidates’ supporters and cannot fathom how they could vote for them.
“My friends, do not lose heart. We were made for these times.”
…Because deep in our spiritual DNA is the commitment to “We the People”: to a government of the people, by the people, for the people.
The United States undertook a grand experiment in becoming a democracy (talk to me later if you think we’re instead a republic – I think it’s both/and). In the 1800s, the French intellectual Alexis de Tocqueville visited the U.S. and wrote a famous book called Democracy in America. In his country of France the upper class held all the cards, and the law prohibited any assembly of more than 20 people without special permission.
So, as you might imagine, he was struck by America, saying:
No sooner do you set foot on American soil than you find yourself in a sort of tumult. A confused clamor rises up on all sides, and a thousand voices reach your ears, each expressing some social need. Everything is in motion around you. The people of one district have come together to decide whether to build a church; in another they’re working to elect a representative. Farther off, delegates from the countryside are hurrying into town to advise on certain local improvement; in another village the farmers have left their fields to debate plans for a road or a school. Some citizens assemble for the sole purpose of declaring their disapproval of the government’s policies, while others proclaim that the men holding office are fathers of their country.
This description reminds us that democracy is not just about those people we elect in Washington D.C. – It’s about us. Too often we escape our responsibilities as citizens in a democracy by focusing our disappointments – or our hopes – solely on our elected officials.
Yet, as the Quaker writer Parker Palmer says,
If American democracy fails, the ultimate cause will not be a foreign invasion or the power of big money or the greed and dishonesty of some elected officials or a military coup or the internal communist/socialist/fascist takeover that keeps some Americans awake at night. It will happen because we—you and I—became so fearful of each other, of our differences and the future, that we unraveled the civic community on which democracy depends, losing our power…to call it back to its highest form.
It’s tempting to blame our troubles on all of these other forces because the work of democracy is difficult. As Tocqueville described it, it’s a “confused clamor.” Molly Ivins said,
The thing about democracy, beloveds, is that it is not neat, orderly, or quiet. It requires a certain relish for confusion.
And yet, this tumultuous democratic process has brought us great social progress – yes, often slow, often halting, sometimes one step forward and two steps back, but sure progress.
Could the founding fathers of our country have imagined that women would one day vote, and work, and even perhaps be President; and could they have imagined, as Michelle Obama has recently reminded us, that the house that slaves built would one day be filled by an African American first family.
“We the People” is in our DNA as a country.
It is also in our spiritual DNA as Unitarian Universalists.
After all, Unitarian Universalism as we know it, came to be in America, with a democratic form of governance called congregational polity that was bold and radical. And our fifth principle includes a commitment to the use of the democratic process.
And, again: the democratic process is not merely about bringing our opinion to the polls, placing our vote, and then celebrating or bemoaning what our elected officials create…
The great spiritual thinker Thomas Merton said, “Our basic problem is not political, it is apolitical and human.”
Democracy begins with us, with the conversations we have within ourselves and among each other, with the way we choose to relate, the actions we take, the trust we have in our fellow citizens to join with us, the ways we invite one another in…
Democracy begins in the heart.
And I don’t mean the heart, solely as in emotion.
As the Quaker author Parker Palmer explains,
‘Heart’ comes from the Latin cor, so in its original meaning, it points to the core of the human self, that center-place where all of our ways of knowing converge: intellectual, emotional, sensory, intuitive, imaginative, experiential, relational, and bodily, among others. … Cor is also the Latin root from which we get the word courage. When all that we know of self and world comes together in the center-place called the heart, we are more likely to find the courage to act humanely on what we know.
So, you, see, we were made for these times.
And yet, we must practice. This is why Tocqueville talked about democracy requiring certain “habits of the heart.”
In his book Healing the Heart of Democracy, Parker Palmer picks up where Tocqueville left off, and recommends five habits of the heart.
Today we’ll talk about the first habit of the heart: Understanding that We Are All in This Together.
We are all in this together – not just with those like us, but also with those incredibly different from us. Though we may often deny it, what affects one of us affects all of us.
Abraham Lincoln encouraged this habit of the heart. Even though he could not prevent the Civil War – that war in which our only enemies were each other – he urged us to come to an understanding that we are all in this together. He held out a radical hope, evident in his inaugural address delivered just weeks before the Civil War broke out.
Hear his words now with ears for today:
We are not enemies but friends. We must not be enemies. Though passion may have strained it must not break our bonds of affection. The mystic chords of memory, stretching from every battlefield and patriot grave to every living heart and hearthstone all over this broad land, will yet swell the chorus of the Union, when again touched, as surely they will be, by the better angels of our nature.
Cultivating habits of the heart can bring out the better angels of our nature that tell us we are not enemies…. that tell us we are actually all in this together….that tell us there is an interdependence by which we are all connected.
Interdependence is our 7th principle of Unitarian Universalism, so again, this is also part of our spiritual DNA.
As we just spoke in our responsive reading:
We are one after all, you and I;
Together we suffer,
Together exist,
And forever will recreate each other.
– Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, adapted
Sounds lovely but what does it mean?
We often think of the interdependent web in terms of our relation to nature, and, thankfully, it has become fairly easy for us to see how, for example, one person’s degradation – or nurture – of the earth affects all of ecology.
Sometimes it is harder to see how this principle of interdependence is also true even only in the human realm – we often quote Martin Luther King’s words: “we are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality.” But what does that mean?
To me, I think about every “good” thing or “bad” thing that happens to each of us. None of these happened solely by our own design or solely by chance.
Each was affected by a string of actions made or not made by others… A teacher that nurtured a child that became your mother; a bully that tormented a boy that became your boss; the cancer in your grandmother that was planted by decisions made by a committee of people who chose to pollute the land; the terrorist fueled by pain from his murdered family; the vote you were able to cast because of the hunger strikes of protesters decades ago; the art class you took because some lawmakers decided arts were good for public education.
Each of these causes and effects, windy paths though they may sometimes seem, has, too, before it – and after it – scores and scores of other causes and effects: ripples of action and inaction, love and hate and everything in between, creating what we know as our lives.
We are not isolated islands. We are tied together, “and forever will recreate each other.”
I think we often choose to ignore our interdependence because it opens us to suffering.
We see that the world is very big, we see that there is much suffering, and we see that we are not in total control. That storm of realizations can be a lot for our hearts to hold.
It leads to one of the most basic human questions, a question that has been answered with both wars and with treaties, with both depression and with immense human creativity….
…the question of “What shall we do with our suffering?”
Instead of numbing ourselves from suffering, or defending ourselves, or isolating ourselves…we can have the courage to let the cries of the world break our hearts. For a heart broken open is a heart that has ceased to see division, a heart that is open to the oneness of all things.
Imagine if we could sit down with a person with whom we vehemently disagree, for some of you it may be a Trump supporter, for some it may be a Black Lives Matter activist, whoever it may be…and what if, just for one conversation, instead of each of us articulating our opinions, we could ask each other about our suffering; we could speak from the heart with one other about our losses and griefs, our great fears and doubts.
I don’t pretend that from this conversation we will all magically come to consensus, or change each other’s minds – and I certainly hope we wouldn’t begin to merely “tolerate” each other.
But I imagine that opening our hearts to each other’s suffering would create a connection, and from this connection we could recommit ourselves to a process by which, even in the midst of our deep and real differences, we can create a world of peace.
For, whether we realize it or not, the truth is that we are stuck with each other.
We are wound and bound together, creating the world we live in.
May we cultivate habits of the heart that make it a good world.
For we were made for these times.
– Rev. Emily Wright-Magoon