2020.1.19 "Getting There from Here"

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.

+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++ 

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?

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.