Sermon
October 7, 2018
Rev. Emily Wright-Magoon
Audio
Part1:
Part 2:
If you have ever experienced clinical depression, you probably know one of its trademark tricks: when it’s real bad, it tricks you into thinking that
everything is bad,
everything has always been bad,
and everything will always be bad.
You lose touch with that part of yourself that remembers any lightness you ever had. And you can’t see past this moment into a future moment when the cloud might lift.
In her book “Hope in the Dark,” Rebecca Solnit says that this is where we often are as a people when we despair about the state of things. We end up with a kind of collective depression that keeps us from cultivating hope.
This despair and apathy is rooted, she says, in an amnesia about the past:
The status quo would like you to believe that it is immutable, inevitable, and invulnerable, and lack of memory of a dynamically changing world reinforces this view….When you don’t know how much things have changed, you don’t see that they are changing or they have changed.
In her book, Solnit dives not only into the specifics of U.S. history – but also world history – to remind us that not only have things in fact gotten better, but that these changes for the better have always happened not in a linear, cause-and-effect kind of a way but a dynamic, organic motion.
If we look at Dr. Christine Blasey Ford’s testimony this week, and Judge Kavanaugh’s ultimate confirmation, yesterday, to the Supreme Court – it could be viewed as a total loss in light of our UU principles.
And certainly there is much to grieve and rage about.
But then you remember that only about 30 years ago sexual harassment was not widely recognized, and marital rape was not yet illegal in all fifty states.
Anita Hill is often seen as testifying in vain about Clarence Thomas’ confirmation to the Supreme Court in 1991, but she sparked many long-game transformations, including a doubling of reports of sexual harassment in the workplace as women recognized themselves in Anita Hill’s story.
And how could that have happened without the feminism of the 60s – not only the most visible elements, but also the small groups meeting in homes for consciousness-raising.
Those feminists from the 60s might have thought nothing was happening in the 90s and early 2000s after Anita Hill’s testimony, but what was happening just wasn’t as exciting: in those decades, more and more women were entering positions of power as writers, judges, lawyers, college presidents, doctors, etc…and so “when an explosive new era of feminism began in late 2012 with the reaction to campus anti-rape activists, the Steubenville rape case, and the New Delhi rape-torture-murder,” women were in position to assert that these things were real and wrong and needed to change.((Solnit – Hope in the Dark))
I was a college chaplain during the rise of campus discussions about sexual assault, and I saw the change happen as young women started coming together to talk openly about their experiences of assault…as they led the way in defining and teaching what “consent” means…and even as some of the male students started conversation groups to question how toxic forms of masculinity shape them.
I never could have imagined those conversations happening while I was a college student less than ten years prior. And of course there’s the recent watershed #metoo movement, and everything that’s happened in between.
So, we can certainly grieve and rage that Dr. Christine Blasey Ford’s testimony was disregarded by the slim majority of those in power, but we cannot say that her testimony was pointless.
Thoreau’s writing wasn’t understood in his own time. Only two of his books were published while he was alive – and not well-received. And yet many decades later, his writings, especially those on civil disobedience, inspired Gandhi, Emma Goldman, Leo Tolstoy, Dr. King, and the ripples of change spread on.
With a proper view of history, we know that Dr. Blasey Ford won’t have to wait decades to know if her testimony changed anything.
Acts of courage and truth-telling are courageous, and can set off underground tremors which one day become an earthquake.
Solnit says:
Causes and effects assume history marches forward, but history is not an army. It is a crab scuttling sideways, a drip of soft water wearing away stone, an earthquake breaking centuries of tension. Sometimes one person inspires a movement, or her words do decades later; sometimes a few passionate people change the world; sometimes they start a mass movement and millions do; sometimes those millions are stirred by the same outrage or the same ideal and change comes upon us like a change of weather.
Likewise, Grace Lee Boggs, in her book, The Next American Revolution: Sustainable Activism for the Twenty-First Century, says:
Civil and voting rights for blacks didn’t come from the White House … They came after the Montgomery Bus Boycott of 1955–56, the Freedom Rides in 1961, the Children’s Crusade in Birmingham in 1963, the Mississippi Freedom Summer and Freedom Schools in 1964, and the Selma-to-Montgomery march in 1965. In other words, they came only after hundreds of thousands of black Americans and their white supporters had accepted the challenge and risks of ourselves making or becoming the changes we want to see in the world.
…Today’s good news is that Americans in all walks of life have begun to create another America from the ground up in many unforeseen ways. In our bones we sense that this is no ordinary time. It is a time of deep change, not just of social structure and economy but also of ourselves.
Gloria Steinem has said that in the 60s there weren’t as many people engaged as there are now.
But we also know certain things look pretty bad right now.
Like Charles Dickens said in his novel set before and during the French Revolution, it is the best of times, it is the worst of times.
And the cofounder of the environmental group 350.org has said, “everything’s coming together while everything’s falling apart.”
And the environmental activist Joanna Macy calls our time both “The Great Unraveling” and “The Great Turning.”
Many believe that what we’re seeing around us is the death throes of the power system that has thus far favored white, patriarchal hegemony. Rebecca Solnit says, “some plants die from the center and grow outward.”
Many of those who want to make America great again want to go back to the 50’s when women were in the kitchen, gays were in the closet, and non-white people were held down by Jim Crow.
It may seem, especially with yesterday’s Supreme Court decision, that this 50’s mindset will win out, but in fact this mindset is what Michelle Alexander calls just a “surge of resistance to a rapidly swelling river” – a last ditch effort to dam up the ever-flowing river of social and democratic progress.
A new nation is struggling to be born, a multiracial, multiethnic, multifaith, egalitarian democracy in which every life and every voice truly matters. In recent years, we’ve seen glimpses of this new nation at Standing Rock, in the streets of Ferguson, in the eyes of the Dreamers, in the voices of teenagers from Parkland and Chicago, as well as at L.G.B.T. pride celebrations, the Women’s March and the camps of Occupy Wall Street. – Michelle Alexander, “We Are Not the Resistance”
So she cautions us not to call these movements for peace and justice the resistance, as if we are resisting some almost inevitable decline of humanity.
Instead, history shows us that progress has been more the course of this “revolutionary river.” Likewise, our own Unitarian Theodore Parker referred to the moral arc of the universe which bends toward justice.
Michelle Alexander says, “In fact, the whole of American history can be described as a struggle between those who truly embraced the revolutionary idea of freedom, equality and justice for all and those who resisted.”
Getting picky about the language of “resistance” is important.
Our language, stories, and visions for our work in the world do make a difference. “Resistance” is a “reactive state of mind,” tempting us to set our sights too low, to “forget our ultimate purpose and place in history.” (Alexander)
So much of change begins in the imagination – this is why art of all kinds, and story, and symbol – are huge, often unacknowledged parts of social change movements. And this is why change usually begins on the margins…where people aren’t as set in the vision held by the status quo.
So change happens not like an archer hitting the bull’s eye of the target, but more like mushrooms.
After a rain mushrooms appear on the surface of the earth as if from nowhere. Many do so from a vast underground fungus that remains invisible and largely unknown. What we call mushrooms mycologists call the fruiting body of the larger, less visible fungus. Uprisings and revolutions are often considered to be spontaneous, but less visible long-term organizing and groundwork – or underground work – often laid the foundation….Power comes from the shadows and the margins…Our hope is in the dark around the edges, not the limelight of center stage. –Rebecca Solnit, Hope in the Dark
I’ll close this part 1 of my sermon with a quote by Arundhati Roy: “Another world is not only possible, she is on her way. On a quiet day, I can hear her breathing.”
PART 2
So, let’s get back to hope. “Hope in the Dark” is the title of this sermon and of Rebecca Solnit’s book on which I’ve relied so heavily because it is just that good.
Hope in the Dark.
But Rebecca Solnit says she doesn’t mean the dark as in the bad, but as in the inscrutable – the unknowable – the uncertain future.
She says,
Hope locates itself in the premises that we don’t know what will happen and that in the spaciousness of uncertainty is room to act. When you recognize uncertainty, you recognize that you may be able to influence the outcomes — you alone or you in concert with a few dozen or several million others. Hope is an embrace of the unknown and the unknowable, an alternative to the certainty of both optimists and pessimists. Optimists think it will all be fine without our involvement; pessimists take the opposite position; both excuse themselves from acting. It’s the belief that what we do matters even though how and when it may matter, who and what it may impact, are not things we can know beforehand. We may not, in fact, know them afterward either, but they matter all the same, and history is full of people whose influence was most powerful after they were gone.
So hope is not about wearing rose-colored glasses. Hope is not abdicating responsibility. Hope sees with clarity the realities before us, and still finds openings, possibilities: room in which to act.
There is a certain privilege in being able to yield to complacency, despair or apathy. Just as research has found that the poorest people are the most generous with their money, it’s true that the most desperate people are the most hopeful. For those who have the most at stake, the alternative to hope is death or torture or no future for their children. And, likewise, for them, typically hope is not just praying that someone else will save them, but hope takes shape in courageous action – crossing a desert, or reaching out to a stranger, or getting on a boat, or putting their body on the line…
Solnit says:
…Hope is an ax you break down doors with in an emergency…hope should show you out the door, because… Hope just means another world might be possible, not promised, not guaranteed. Hope calls for action; action is impossible without hope.
So, now I’ll close with some practical spiritual and social practices. For these I’ll turn to the environmentalist Joanna Macy and her work on “Active Hope.”
She gives us practical directions for doing our part to make sure the Great Unraveling becomes the Great Turning.
She calls this work the “Work that Reconnects” and it involves a spiral of four parts:
Gratitude,
Honoring our Pain,
Seeing with New Eyes,
Going Forth
For those of us in grief or anger over the Supreme Court confirmation of yesterday, we can apply this directly there.
Depending on where we are, we might need more or less time for each of these parts. (We might need to stay with “Honoring Our Pain” for a very long time.) But I can imagine applying this work like so:
Gratitude for those who told their stories with courage, those who listened, those who asked the hard questions, the thousands who called their Senators, those who protested in the courtroom.
Honoring Our Pain – especially if we are ourselves sexual assault survivors, taking the time to honor the pain of seeing a woman not be believed, of seeing her claims not be fully investigated. If we are someone who has been a perpetrator of assault, we take time to listen to other’s pain, to find accountability, to repair.
If we are someone who has reason to believe our life or the life of our loved ones may be affected by this future Supreme Court, we take time to honor our pain and our fear.
Then we “see with new eyes”…we look and listen to what we’ve learned – about courage, about pain, about the systems we live in. We look with those new eyes at our own families and communities – and even in ourselves – to see what needs to be named, healed, understood.
And then: We Go Forth. We act.
And the spiral continues.
In terms of our action, Joanna Macy describes Three Dimensions:
First Dimension: Holding Actions (slow down the damage) (i.e. protecting old growth forests, legislation, rallies)
Second Dimension: Life-Sustaining Systems and Practices – aka Gaian Structures (reinvention, reimagination, questioning, and transformation) (micro-lending, sustainable agriculture, fair-trade practices)
Third Dimension: Shift in Consciousness – seeing the connected self, deepening our sense of belonging, crafting new stories and visions (embodying the change we wish to see) (“the inner frontier of change”)
Making Hope in the Dark requires cultivating a deep sense of possibility, rooting ourselves in the many stories of ordinary people making extraordinary change, and strengthening one another to act for our hopes. These are all gifts of a religious community such as ours. We cannot do it alone. What a gift to do it together.
-Rev. Emily Wright-Magoon