10.2.16
Rev. Emily Wright-Magoon
Opening Words from Rev. Victoria Safford
Our mission is to plant ourselves at the gates of hope–not the prudent gates of Optimism, which are somewhat narrower; nor the stalwart, boring gates of Common Sense; nor the strident gates of Self-Righteousness, which creak on shrill and angry hinges…; nor the cheerful, flimsy garden gate of “Everything Is Gonna Be All Right.” But a different, sometimes lonely place, of truth-telling about your own soul first of all and its condition, the place of resistance and defiance, from which you see the world both as it is and as it could be, as it will be; the place from which you glimpse not only struggle but joy in the struggle.
And we stand there, beckoning and calling, telling people what we’re seeing, asking them what they see.
Sermon
COGNITIVE DISSONANCE
In the midst of this election, one of the most frustrating bits of information I have come across you can find in an NPR report of a study done by the University of Michigan. They found that, when people are presented with facts that contradict their deeply held beliefs – it is more likely that they cling even more strongly to their beliefs than change them.
My cynical side hears this and responds, “So, what, then, is the point of fact-checking the debates?!”
Many times our beliefs are part of our identities; they sometimes form our friend groups and associations. So, accepting new information might mean not only changing our minds, but being at odds with our friends and our affiliations.
This is the damage done by the “Us & Them” mentality. We talked about this Us & Them mentality in Part 2 of this sermon series on Democracy.
Now we are on to Part 3, which brings me to the other reason that this phenomenon happens. We do not know what to do with the experience of cognitive dissonance. Just as the world becomes broken down into US & THEM, truth gets broken down into THIS OR THAT.
So we can be very uncomfortable when we find ourselves in between – in a place of doubt, ambiguity, or paradox.
REALITY AND POSSIBILITY
So today, in Part 3, we are talking about the THIRD Habit of the Heart for Healing Democracy: Holding Tensions in Life-Giving Ways.
We are faced every day in our lives with tensions – there’s the tension between life as it is and life as we hope it may be.
That’s why I am so frustrated with that study: because I have seen people change their minds – I know it is possible. Education has been a big part of my life. My mom and stepdad were teachers; I myself went through a huge intellectual awakening in college; I taught in an urban high school in Boston; I have seen minds open, I have seen people hungry for information – and not just information, but curiosity, wonder, challenge, paradox, change.
I have SEEN it happen – in my life and in other people’s lives.
And so how do I live with this hope – this deep experience of possibility AT THE SAME TIME AS I see so much over which to despair?
Parker Palmer, who wrote the book that inspired this sermon series, calls this in-between path Living in the Tragic Gap. It’s the gap between reality and possibility, between despair and hope, between confusion and clarity.
THE TRAGIC GAP
In the Tragic Gap, we faithfully hold two things we know are both true, but are in tension. One tragic gap for me is being a working mom. I know it is important for me to spend a lot of time with my daughter, and I want to. I also know it is important for me to be a minister, and I want to. These are often in conflict. Some days I feel like I fail at both. Other days, I know that being a mom makes me a better minister, and being a minister makes me a better mom. I am called to hold these in tension and still act.
What tensions do you hold?
There’s the tension of grief – of moving through the world without someone you love – knowing they are gone but your grief is still there, your love is still there.
There’s the tension of relationships – of people you love who have needs or traits that conflict with your own and you know will never be resolved, and yet you find a way to go on together
LOVE ACTS FROM IN BETWEEN
LOVE helps us continue to hold these tensions. LOVE – and FAITH.
Likewise, despite how divided we seem to be in our democracy, what helps us remain engaged is LOVE.
The Christian minister William Sloane Coffin said:
There are three kinds of patriots, two bad, one good. The bad ones are the uncritical lovers and the loveless critics. Good patriots carry on a lover’s quarrel with their country, a reflection of God’s lover’s quarrel with all the world.
A lover’s quarrel with their country. And it’s okay if you’re not crazy about the word “country” … what we’re talking about here is our home. Our fellow people. Our way of life.
DEMOCRACY AND TENSION
Our democracy was intended to generate the creative energy produced by conflict. Look at our separation of powers, our checks and balances, our oppositional systems of justice… The founders knew we will never all agree on everything.
I know that even within this congregation we have very VERY different viewpoints on important questions.
And this congregation was founded, before we were even in this building, in part because people loved to come together and discuss different ideas with people who didn’t necessarily all agree in their opinions, but agreed on the goal – that through conversation, we get to a place we couldn’t have arrived talking only with those like ourselves.
Like Parker Palmer says, democracy is “taking the tension of our differences and using it as an engine to keep moving forward.”
But, man, the “tension of our differences” does not sound like a fun place! And Parker Palmer knows that – that’s why he calls it the Tragic Gap – also not a rosy picture.
And because it’s difficult, instead of standing in the middle, holding the tension; we fall one way or the other: into “corrosive cynicism” or into “irrelevant idealism.” Both take us out of the action.
ENDING TENSION
“Tension is a sign of life, and the end of tension is a sign of death.” (Parker Palmer)
“The Final Solution” was the name given by the Nazis to what we know as the Holocaust.
When Hitler took power, the Germans were in a vulnerable place weakened by war, an economic crisis, and multiple social issues – probably not unlike the place we are in post 9/11 – with fear of terrorism, immigration, race relations, and war-torn refugees.
People studying our current election have found what they are calling a rise in authoritarianism – in response to massive social changes and external threats, some people respond by gravitating toward authoritarianism: artificial clarity, strongman leaders, “traditional” values, and a scorn for outsiders. This is what happened in Germany.
This is what happens when we cannot cope with cognitive dissonance, when we cannot deal with difference, when we see tension as too stressful.
POSITIVE TENSION
But in fact tension gets a bad rap. In the realm of tension, psychologists distinguish between distress, which is negative and destructive, and eustress, which is positive and an impetus for growth.
I’d bet you’re in fact quite familiar with four sources of eustress:
Good art,
good education,
good democracy,
and good religion
help us hold positive tension.
Good art helps us into paradigms that language cannot access;
Good education… take science, the realm of education we may think is most closely related to one truth – and yet good scientists know that every new truth is likely to be followed by another new truth that may contradict the previous.
Good religion invites us into stories and rituals, parables and community… that embrace ambiguity, that enlarge our imaginations to live meaningfully and faithfully even amidst questions and suffering.
In fact, our own Unitarian Universalist Seven Principles seek to hold together tensions: Look at our third principle:
Acceptance of one another and encouragement to spiritual growth. What a tension, a necessary paradox of both accepting one another as we are, and encouraging each other to grow.
Our fourth principle: A free AND responsible search for truth and meaning.
And our fifth principle: The right of conscience and the use of the democratic process. So: we all have the right to our own conscience – what we believe – but we also believe we must participate in the democratic process with others – which isn’t just about voting our opinion but also about getting into conversations open to the idea that we might change our minds.
JOHN WOOLMAN
I’ll close with a story that gets at the tension in this fifth principle.
John Woolman was a Quaker in the 1700s who was torn by the contradiction he saw between the Quaker belief in human equality and the fact that many Quaker gentry owned slaves. He refused to make that tension disappear by ignoring it, by rationalizing it, or through violence or isolation. Instead, he brought the tension before his Quaker community and asked them to consider it, and to free their slaves.
Quakers make decisions by consensus instead of majority rule, and his local group was unable to come to a consensus. But they chose to continue to hold the tension, and act within it, by supporting Woolman as he pursued his concern.
For the next 20 years, Woolman traveled up and down the East Coast visiting with fellow Quakers in their homes and meeting houses. Remember this was even before the Revolutionary war.
Woolman did not convince many right away, but he held to his beliefs – He wore undyed clothing because dye was a product of slave labor; he refused to eat sugar; as a guest, he would fast rather than eat food prepared by slaves, or he would pay them for their work; if he learned he had unintentionally benefited from a slave’s work, he would find a discreet and anonymous way to pay them.
Woolman held this tension for decades – and he did it out of his deep religious practices. In his journal he wrote
Before I was 7 years old, I began to be acquainted with the operations of divine love.
And he spoke from this love – people listened to him because he spoke out of love and respect, not shame. His concern was not only for the slaves, but for the slave holders whose hearts he believed were being diminished by holding fellow humans in slavery.
And then, after decades of this work, Quakers became the first community in America to free their slaves, some 80 years before the Civil War – that’s a lifetime!
In 1783, Quakers petitioned Congress to correct the “complicated evils” and “unrighteous commerce” created by the enslavement of human beings. And Quakers played a key role in developing the Underground Railroad.
HOLDING THE TENSION, AS A COMMUNITY
This story is in part a story about next week’s sermon: the 4th habit of the heart: Personal Voice and Agency. But it’s also about this 3rd Habit of the Heart: Holding Tensions in Life-Giving Ways.
Woolman held his own tension about belonging to a community that didn’t practice Christian love the way he understood it. And the Quakers held their own tension about keeping among them someone who was challenging them. Neither Woolman nor the community chose to resolve the tension prematurely by taking a quick vote, or banishing Woolman, or appeasing him with a happy but meaningless outcome.
They kept at it, trusting tension to do its work, with faith that they would find a way through together, embedded in a religious practice that valued “that of God in everyone.” They kept at it… until, as Parker Palmer says, they “arrived at a decision of historic proportions.”
Moreover, Woolman’s story shows us that sometimes in holding the tension, we create the tension, so that we call our communities into honesty and discernment. Woolman created the tension by continuing to bring it up.
We come together to church to cultivate the patience, the wisdom, the faith that allows us to live in the tragic gap – to hold the tensions in our own lives, and in our democracy.
As Parker Palmer says,
the democratic experiment is endless, unless we blow up the lab, and the explosives to do the job are found within us. But so also is the heart’s alchemy that can turn suffering into community, conflict into the energy of creativity, and tension into an opening toward the common good.
May it be so.
– Rev. Emily Wright-Magoon