January
19, 2020 Rev. Laura Bogle Foothills UU Fellowship
“Getting
there from here”
Monthly
worship theme: Thresholds
Reading
for Meditation
The
late poet John O’Donohue says, “If you go back to the etymology of the word
“threshold,” it comes from “threshing,” which is to separate the grain from the
husk. So the threshold, in a way, is a place where you move into more critical
and challenging and worthy fullness.
“There
are huge thresholds in every life. You know that, for instance, if you are in
the middle of your life in a busy evening, fifty things to do and you get a
phone call that somebody you love is suddenly dying, it takes ten seconds to
communicate that information. But when you put the phone down, you are already
standing in a different world. Suddenly everything that seems so important
before is all gone and now you are thinking of this. So the given world that we
think is there and the solid ground we are on is so tentative. And a threshold
is a line which separates two territories of spirit, and very often how we
cross is the key thing.”
Prospective
Immigrants Please Note
by Adrienne Rich
Either you will
go through this door
or you will not go through.
If you go through
there is always the risk
of remembering your name.
Things look at you doubly
and you must look back
and let them happen.
If you do not go through
it is possible
to live worthily
to maintain your attitudes
to hold your position
to die bravely
but much will blind you,
much will evade you,
at what cost who knows?
The door itself makes no promises.
It is only a door.
by Adrienne Rich
Either you will
go through this door
or you will not go through.
If you go through
there is always the risk
of remembering your name.
Things look at you doubly
and you must look back
and let them happen.
If you do not go through
it is possible
to live worthily
to maintain your attitudes
to hold your position
to die bravely
but much will blind you,
much will evade you,
at what cost who knows?
The door itself makes no promises.
It is only a door.
I
recently visited a wondrous place– a big warehouse-size artist installation
called Meow Wolf. It’s really hard to
describe the whole thing, but this is the thing that I want to tell you about:
You walk into a house, like a normal house with a living room and a dining room
and a bathroom and bedrooms, you think things are the way they are supposed to
be. But you are looking for clues to a
mystery-- so then in the kitchen, you venture to open the refrigerator and you
discover you can walk right in and through a brightly lit tunnel to find
yourself in an alternate reality. Or you
might open the closet door in the normal bedroom and realize you can go past
the coats and keep going into a room full strange lights and creatures. You
cross a threshold and enter another place, a little bit beautiful and a little
bit scary, and definitely weird.
The
meaning you make of this alternate reality, like all art, like life, is kind of
up to you.
This
is a good metaphor for what I think has happened to some of us over the last
three years. Whether it was election
night 2016 or inauguration day or any one of many possible moments since then,
some of us have found ourselves crossing a threshold – or perhaps being kicked
across a threshold -- into a different reality.
All
of a sudden what we thought was true about our country, about who we are, about
what we can fundamentally count on, has been upended and the national political
conversation seems surreal at best.
There
is a grief that comes when you realize that what you thought was reality, is
not actually reality—
When
you realize that the democracy you thought you were living in is not actually
real. That perhaps the “progress” we’ve
made towards justice and equality isn’t as solid as we thought.
The
writer Michelle Goldberg wrote in the New York Times earlier this month: “For anyone who was, like me, born after the
civil rights movement finally made democracy in America real, liberal democracy
has always been part of the climate, as easy to take for granted as clean air
or the changing of the seasons. When I contemplate the sort of illiberal
oligarchy that would await my children should Donald Trump win another term,
the scale of the loss feels so vast that I can barely process it.” (https://www.nytimes.com/2019/12/13/opinion/sunday/trump-democracy.html )
So,
if you’ve been feeling grief and despair, you know you are not alone, and I
want to recognize those feelings as very real and very valid.
And there are some people in this country who have always
been living in this alternate reality—a reality where we are subject to massive
social control and incarceration, misogyny, racist ideology, and economic
suffering. There are even many who would
disagree with Goldberg when she says the civil rights movement made democracy
real.
Over
50 years ago, Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., whose birth we celebrate this
weekend, spoke about “The Other America.” He spoke about how it is possible to live in the
United States and be shielded from this Other America. He describes it as a place that “has a daily
ugliness about it that transforms the buoyancy of hope into the fatigue of
despair.” Some of us are getting perhaps
our first experience of this Other America.
(https://www.beaconbroadside.com/broadside/2018/03/martin-luther-king-jrs-the-other-america-still-radical-50-years-later.html)
The
Civil Rights movement and all people’s
movements for liberation have always depended on the fact that some
people who don’t already live in The Other America wake up to the fact that
it exists, and they voluntarily or involuntarily cross a threshold to join
the people living in the Other America. I
am talking about people with power and privilege using that power and privilege
to stand in the Other America, to stand with the people who live there, and to
work together to redistribute that power and privilege in the cause of liberation
for all people, not just the few.
That’s
what Dr. King did when he went to Memphis to stand with striking sanitation
workers there, where he was killed.
That’s what white clergy people, like Rev. James Reeb, did when they
heeded Dr. King’s call to come to Selma after Bloody Sunday, where he was killed.
That’s
what the supporters of Greta Thunberg and Malala and Ruby and all those young
people that Amy Beth told us about in our Wisdom Lesson did and are doing– crossing
a threshold to be where those young people lead them.
And
that’s what thousands of people in our country have been doing lately when they
protest the politics of racial superiority --
Michelle
Alexander, author of the New Jim Crow wrote this week: “If there is any silver
lining to be found in the election of Donald Trump to the presidency, it is
that millions of people have been inspired to demonstrate solidarity on a large
scale across the lines of gender, race, religion and class in defense of those
who have been demonized and targeted for elimination. Trump’s blatant racial
demagogy has awakened many from their “colorblind” slumber and spurred
collective action to oppose the Muslim ban and the border wall, and to create
sanctuaries for immigrants in their places of worship and local communities.” (https://www.nytimes.com/2020/01/17/opinion/sunday/michelle-alexander-new-jim-crow.html?fbclid=IwAR3GRExGF630wckBSy2dLTL4e6zxrYDocB27AOdkWtmtodSSwxlS2dSN2zo)
We
have seen how out of grief and despair can come powerful, hopeful actions of
solidarity.
If
the election of Donald Trump kicked some of us across a threshold where we see
reality more clearly, and stand more strongly with The Other America, then I
believe we as an entire nation are on yet another threshold. While the dream of American democracy
has never been fully realized, yes even after the civil rights movement, I do
think we are closer than we have ever been to becoming an authoritarian state
without even the pretense of attempting to live up to democratic ideals.
Now
I know some of you would really love for me to stand up here and talk about the
impeachment trial of Donald Trump. That’s
what you have CNN for, and I’m not going to do it.
I
do want to say something to you that I said back in November of 2016. I’m your minister and I love you no matter
what your politics are. And. I have and
will continue to speak about what my personal views are, and where I think our
moral and ethical commitments as Unitarian Universalists call us to go.
According
to the Washington Post, as of December 2019 Donald Trump had made well over 15,000
false or misleading claims since taking office.
He too is creating his own alternate reality. Is this the reality we want to live in? Will we let him push us across the threshold
into his reality? (https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2019/12/16/president-trump-has-made-false-or-misleading-claims-over-days/)
This
morning, I want to remind us, we have the power to resist by envisioning where
we want to go, and making that world a reality.
Dr.
King, said in his very last speech in Memphis, the night before he was
assassinated, “I've seen the Promised Land.
I may
not get there with you. But I
want you to
know tonight, that we, as a people, will get to the promised land.”
Dr.
Howard Thurman, the spiritual adviser to the civil rights movement, a
generation older than Dr. King, born in 1899, once said, “There are two
questions that we have to ask ourselves. The first is 'Where am I going?' and
the second is 'Who will go with me?' If you ever get these questions in
the wrong order, you are in trouble.”
So
let’s pause for a moment and think about what that promised land looks
like. Because when we lose sight of that
vision, then all hope is lost. What does
that promised land look like for you?
And now, do you know what a vision of the promised land looks like for
the most marginalized people in our community?
If not, who do you want to ask?
We
have to get more and more clear about where we want to go, hold on to that
vision, and then we have to have the guts to walk through the door, across a
threshold to get there.
Here’s
the thing about a threshold: it means being changed. It might mean losing some people and
relationships if there are some folks who aren’t willing to go there with
you. John O’Donahue reminds us that the
word threshold is related to threshing the grain, separating the wheat from the
chaff, getting really clear about what is most important. As he says, it is to “move into more critical
and challenging and worthy fullness.”
If
you haven’t changed how you are living your life, if you haven’t done something
you have never done before, then you haven’t crossed the threshold towards the
promised land.
There
is no way to walk across the threshold towards the promised land and not risk
something.
Poet
Adrienne rich says “Either you will go through this door, or you will not go
through.”
It
is possible to stay here in Trump’s alternate reality, maybe even to take a
step back into the previous world where some of us thought everything would be
ok, though you now know it is not real.
Poet Adrienne Rich says,
If
you do not go through
it is possible
to live worthily
to maintain your attitudes
to hold your position
to die bravely
but much will blind you,
much will evade you,
at what cost who knows?
it is possible
to live worthily
to maintain your attitudes
to hold your position
to die bravely
but much will blind you,
much will evade you,
at what cost who knows?
In
an interview with Bill Moyers Rich had this to say about this poem: “I think in this poem, what I am talking
about is the choice that we can make, to move deeper into things, or simply to
live worthily, maintain your attitudes, hold your position, even die bravely,
but not to see what might have been seen. Not to grasp what might have been
grasped. And that is a choice, for us all….” (https://billmoyers.com/story/adrienne-richs-prospective-immigrants-please-note/)
That
is the question before us right now, folks, even though some of us are already
tired. I am speaking more specifically
to those of us with race, class, and gender privilege. Will we move even deeper into things, to see
and grasp even more, to move even deeper into “a critical and challenging
fullness?”
I
would submit to you that simply watching the news, and gathering information
and opinions, and sharing those opinions online or only with people who agree
with you is not crossing the threshold we need to cross now.
Will
you risk yourself? Will you risk your
name being remembered? Will you risk
doing something you’ve never done before?
Will you risk being in deep committed relationships of solidarity with
the most marginalized? Will you risk
living as if the promised land of freedom and equality is something we are
responsible for creating every day? Will
you risk being changed?
I
have a few specific suggestions:
-If
you have never called the Governor today would be a good day – you can ask him
not to sign the bill on his desk that would allow adoption agencies to continue
to receive tax payer $$ even if they discriminate against LGBTQ people and
religious minorities seeking to become parents.
If you are a straight person, I especially challenge you to take that
action.
-If
you have never gone to visit your County Commissioner, tomorrow would be a good
day to set up an appointment and let your commissioner know that your faith
calls you to welcome the stranger and care for the vulnerable, and how you want
Blount County to be a welcoming place for all, including refugees.
-If
you are male identified and you have never had a conversation with another man
about misogyny, then this week would be a good week. And I would challenge you to figure out what
feminist organization or woman leaders you can support with your actions and
your money.
-If
you have never given money to a political candidate, this would be a good year. Or to an organization that
is led by people of color or anyone under the age of 35, and is mobilizing
voters, today would be a good day.
-If
you have never knocked on doors to register people to vote, you can do that
right here in Blount County this Saturday
-If
you have never shown up at a protest rally, or never risked getting arrested,
what do you need to do to prepare yourself to be ready to do that?
-If
you have never had a real conversation with your neighbor about what your Unitarian
Universalist values are, and what you really think about immigration or racism
or LGBTQ rights or climate change – this week is as good as any.
If
you have done all of these things, and I know some of you have, then what is
the next threshold for you?
And
when you take that next step across whatever the next threshold is for you,
know that you are not alone, because you belong to this community of faith,
where each week we gather to re-center ourselves in the power of Love, to
re-envision the promised land, to ask if we are seeing everything we ought to
be seeing, to challenge one another to risk our lives and our names in the
service of freedom and justice.
Only
together will we get there from here.
Only together, across all kinds of lines that separate us, will we be
able to create a glimpse of the promised land. So do not get side tracked and
distracted by the impeachment trial or your Twitter feed or a conflict amongst
candidates. Neither a Senate trial nor a
particular candidate will save our democracy.
What will save our democracy, is loving, sustained, organized action by
engaged citizens who are willing risk themselves to move us into The Other
America we want to see.
May
it be so. Amen.