2018.1.14 “There is No One But Us”
Time for All Ages: Litany of
the Generations
Reading from Holy the Firm by Annie Dillard
“There
is no one but us. There is no one to send, not a clean hand or a pure heart on
the face of the earth or in the earth—only us… unfit, not yet ready, having
each of us chosen wrongly, made a false start, yielded to impulse and the tangled
comfort of pleasures, and grown exhausted, unable to seek the thread, weak, and
uninvolved. But there is no one but us. There has never been.”
Reading from Stride Toward Freedom by Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.
“Human progress is neither automatic nor
inevitable. Even a superficial look at history reveals that no social
advance rolls in on the wheels inevitability….Without persistent effort, time
itself becomes an ally of the insurgent and primitive forces of … social
destruction. This is no time for apathy or complacency. This is a
time for vigorous and positive action.”
++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
Some
of you know that last November I was unexpectedly able to take a brief trip with
my partner to Europe. I mostly was in
Germany, but also took the train to Amsterdam for a couple of days, where I
stayed with a dear old friend who has lived there now for 8 years or so. So good to get historical perspective – we (and
by that I really mean white folks in the US) tend to live with such a short
vantage point on history. As if
everything is now, 50 years ago is the distant past, to say nothing of 150
years ago, or 17 generations ago, and nothing that happened that long ago could
possibly have any bearing on our own moral life, or the state of our souls.
So,
when I was in Amsterdam I spent one whole day alone, wandering around the old
Jewish section of town. I went to the
Jewish historical museum, literally built on top of what used to be 4 different
synagogues. I then went to the Esnoga, the
synagogue that was built between 1670 - 1675 by Portuguese Jews who had moved to
more cosmopolitan Amsterdam, fleeing persecution during the Inquisition.
It
is an enormous, beautiful place of worship, still an active worshipping community
and also serving as a museum. It was
built at the same time as the grandchildren of the first enslaved people in the
United States were being born. The rows
of wooden benches in the synagogue have compartments under the seats—little cubbies—where
men could store their items for worship.
Each had their own designated seat.
During WWII when more and more men were disappearing, the community kept
their things locked up in their compartments, to remember them. Some of those items are still on display, a
reminder of the people who lived, not that long ago; and who did not
survive.
I
was left with a sense of amazement that the synagogue itself was still standing,
through the centuries, including and especially through WWII. The past was present.
And
then I went to the final stop of the day—the Dutch Resistance museum—which takes
you through the years of WWII and explores the ways that Dutch people did – and
did not—resist Nazism. It was the very
first section of the museum that continues to haunt me—
the
section which covered the time period when Hitler first invaded and occupied
Holland, and the year or two right after.
Through personal stories of regular people the exhibition focused on the
dilemmas that people were confronted with during the occupation. To what extent should one adapt to the new
situation and did one dare to resist?
For those in positions of power, especially governmental power, should
they stay in those positions and try to use that power to resist from the
inside? Or should they resign and work
from outside the system? Then there was
the problem of the initial strategy that the occupying Germans pursued: to be gentle on the Dutch at first; to try to
win them over to their Aryan nationalism.
For a great many people, after the
initial invasion and occupation, life went back to normal for a while.
That
evening, back at my friend’s house, I was reviewing the day with her and her
partner, who is Dutch. I shared with
them how powerful I thought the Resistance museum was, the examples of great
bravery and sacrifice, the examples of complicated ethical calculations.
And
then her partner, interrupted me to say—“We did not resist. The Dutch people hardly did anything. We like to think we did, we have a whole
museum dedicated to that story – but really, the vast majority of people did
nothing. We were all complicit.” There are
many ways to tell the same story.
…
Did
you know that Dictionary.com named “complicit” as the 2017 word of the year? I’m not sure exactly why they chose it, but here’s why I want to talk about it today: I can imagine the thousands of people in this
last year, especially people of racial or gender privilege asking themselves, “Am
I part of the problem? Have I been
enabling/propping up/complicit with
white supremacy, with toxic male supremacy, with fascism, with xenophobia, etc?” Some of us are asking those questions for the
very first time, and it’s good to be asking it.
Others of us ask it several times a day, and worry about it, as if we
could somehow distance ourselves from what is happening in our country, as if
we could ever give a definitive “no” to the answer “Am I complicit?” Of course we are.
The
root of the word is the same as the root of the word complicate. Comes from the Latin complicare = to fold
together. One thing is connected to
another is connected to another is connected to another. Stories exist on top of stories, our lives
are multi-dimensional, actual history cannot be told in one voice. As Dr. King said, “In a real sense, all life
is inter-related. We are tied in a
single garment of destiny, caught in an inescapably network of mutuality. And whatever affects one directly affects all
indirectly.”
I
want you to imagine a kind of garment with me --- you know what smocking is? You
most often see it on little girls’ handmade dresses. It’s a method of embroidery that gathers up a
huge amount of cloth, folds it up into tiny little creases so it becomes much
smaller. There’s this nice orderly pattern embroidered on top of it, tightly
holding and folding together so much of the fabric. So much is hidden
underneath, in the complicated folds and creases. You wouldn’t be able to tell just how much
fabric is there unless you unraveled that embroidery, picked out the stitches
and let the fabric open up.
This
is my image today for history, how the powerful tell history, and how we can
re-tell history towards our freedom and our opening up.
We,
all of us, are born into structures and systems and a history that make us
complicit, whether we choose to be or not.
We are born into certain dominant stories about history, practically
written on us like the embroidery on a smocked dress. Often neat and tidy stories, that appear
beautiful on the surface, but hide so much underneath.
As
Dr. King said in one of his sermons collected in the book Strength to Love, “We are made by history.” He went on to say in that same passage: “Who doubts that today most [people] today
are… shaped by the patterns of the majority? Or to change the figure, most
people, and Christians in particular, are thermometers that record or register
the temperature of majority opinion, not thermostats that transform and
regulate the temperature of society.”
Dr.
King, like the Hebrew prophets, like Jesus, like all great prophets and
resistors of Empire, was someone who asked us to wake up to a wider, more
inclusive history; to wake up to how we are shaped by that wider history in
ways we often don’t realize, ways we don’t see.
He
asked us to tease apart the nice orderly story we were telling about the
history of the United States, to open up the folds and creases and expose the
hidden stories, so that we might be more honest about who we are. But not just to re-tell history to somehow
get it more correct—we do this to also shape history and to shape the future,
so that we might be more just, so that we might be more loving, so that there
might be more freedom in this land.
“Human
progress is neither automatic or inevitable” he said. It is up to us to take the history we have
been born into, to tell the truth about it as much as we can, and shape it
towards a different future. This is how
we resist simply being acted upon by the forces of the powerful who usually
tell history, and so shape it to their own ends.
The
poet W.H. Auden wrote in 1939, just a few weeks after the beginning of WWII “All I have is a voice to undo the folded
lie.”
Last
weekend the Blount County United Faith Committee sponsored a forum entitled “Jesus
and Race” and focused on prompting reflection on what followers of Jesus are
called to do and to be in response to on-going systemic racism in the US.
It
began with a telling of history from two perspectives. Two people using their voices to undo the
folded lie. A white woman, SM Atchley who
was a student at MHS in 1963 when schools were desegregated here, and an African
American man Ron Coffin who was one of the first 4 to enter MHS that year.
SM
recalled the first day the new students entered the school building. How they were surrounded by police, and by
people, students watching as they walked towards the school. How they entered the school and then
disappeared, how they were not at the school assembly that morning. How they were not allowed to be in the same
classrooms together. How they had to
enter the classrooms after the bell rang and all the other students were
seated. How they were separated and
alone. And she remembered for us,
emotionally, how when they walked up to that school building, there was no one
walking with them.
How
she didn’t walk with them, didn’t speak with them. How ever since that day,
when she was just 16 years old, she wonders, Could she have walked with them? What else could she have done? Most
importantly, what can she do now?
And
Ron, in telling his own history of that time, reminded us of what a brutal year
1963 was. When those 4 students walked
into Maryville High School in September they were walking surrounded not just
by police, but by a context of national movement and change, violence and
assassinations. The March on Washington
had just happened. And just a week later
the 16th Street church in Birmingham was bombed, killing 4 young
girls. Ron reminded us that as we
remember and tell history, it’s important to be specific with our words, lest
we tell another a folded lie – He said, it was desegregation that happened in 1963, not integration. Integration would have meant an inclusion not just of
those four students, but some of the African American teachers and
administrators from their school, and a recognition of their full humanity, and
a recognition of their right to bring all of who they are into that school.
Right
here there is a deeper, more complicated history to be unfolded.
And
when we do that, when we listen to that history, as we did during our Time for
All Ages this morning, we are reminded of what Annie Dillard wrote--
“There
is not a clean hand or a pure heart.” There
is not someone somewhere else with the moral innocence to save us or tell us
what to do.
Through
history we are all folded together, we each are always, already complicit, in
each other’s complicated lives. “There
is no one but us.”
Perhaps
the question to be asking, especially today, is not “Are we complicit?” But how?
How did we get here? Whose stories am I listening to? And what will I do
to shape this history towards something different, to bend the arc a little
further towards justice in my time?
The
final words written on the walls of the Dutch Resistance museum, as you exit
the exhibit are a quote from the Dutch writer Remco Campert, whose father died
in a Nazi concentration camp: “Asking yourself a question, that’s how
resistance begins. And then ask that
very question to someone else.”
To
what extent do we adapt? How much are we willing to question? And how much are
we willing to do to resist?
We
are made by history, AND we are called to be questioners and shapers of
history. We are called not just by Dr.
King but by the spirits of all the ancestors—those who walked with King, those
who stood silently by; those who died in enslavement, those who did the
enslaving; those who died in the concentration camps, those who resisted, those
who went along to get along; those whose stories we tell and those whose
stories we have forgotten. May we listen
to that call just as much, if not more than we listen to the loud voices in their
places of power today.
May
we keep asking our questions—
Questions about our own lives, and
how it is intertwined with the histories we learn, and the histories we don’t
learn;
Questions about our elected leaders,
about the way things are today, and the way things could be.
We
are the ones living in this time, in this history-in-the-making.
Let
us continue to claim our power, and our responsibility
So
that in the next generation, or 17 generations from now, a different history
will be remembered.
May
it be so. Amen.
No comments:
Post a Comment