Healing Body and Soul

Healing Body and Soul

Sermon delivered on Feb. 19, 2017

Rev. Laura Bogle

Readings

From the novel Gilead by Marilyn Robinson.  The whole book is a letter written by an elderly minister to his young son.  In it he recalls a time in his childhood when he “baptised” a bunch of kittens.  He says,

“I still remember how those warm little brows felt under the palm of my hand.  Everyone has petted a cat, but to touch one like that, with the pure intention of blessing it, is a very different thing.  It stays in the mind. …There is a reality in blessing…. It doesn’t enhance sacredness, but it acknowledges it, and there is a power in that.  I have felt it pass through me, so to speak.  The sensation is of really knowing a creature, I mean really feeling its mysterious life and your own mysterious life at the same time. (23)”

From The Body Keeps the Score: Brain, Mind and Body in the Healing of Trauma by Dr. Bessel van der Kolk.  He is recalling his early training as a psychiatrist at the Massachusetts Mental Health Center:

“I remember asking [our great teacher Elvin Semrad] once: ‘What would you call this patient—schizophrenic or schizoaffective?’  He paused and stroked his chin, apparently deep in thought.  ‘I think I’d call him Michael McIntyre,’ he replied.

Semrad taught us that most human suffering is related to love and loss and that the job of therapists is to help people ‘acknowledge, experience, and bear’ the reality of life—with all its pleasures and heartbreak. … He often said that people can never get better without knowing what they know and feeling what they feel.

I remember being surprised to hear this distinguished old Harvard professor confess how comforted he was to feel his wife’s bum against him as he fell asleep at night.  By disclosing such simple human needs in himself he helped us recognize how basic they were to our lives.  Failure to attend to them results in stunted existence, no matter how lofty our thoughts and worldly accomplishments.  

Healing, he told us, depends on experiential knowledge: You can be fully in charge of your life only if you can acknowledge the reality of your body, in all its visceral dimensions.”  (p. 26-27)

Our story this morning, about little Maggie and her three friends, helps us to understand the difference between a cure and healing.  The friends learned that healing is not so much about doing something but about being something.  About being present in their bodies next to and even touching another person who is suffering.  They may not be able to cure the girls’ sickness but they sure can help heal her spirit of loneliness.

Dr. Michael Lerner, who has spent decades supporting people with cancer, writes:  “Healing can be described as a physical, emotional, mental and spiritual process of coming home.”  (http://www.awakin.org/read/view.php?tid=1066 )

Science is telling us that that kind of healing, the kind that keeps loneliness at bay, the kind that involves physical touch, the kind that brings you home to yourself, is also an important part of the health of our bodies, spirits and minds.

LissaRankin is a medical doctor who has spent several years thinking about, writing about the connections between physical healing and our spiritual, emotional lives.

One of the studies that she points to was one conducted in Roseto, PA, beginning in the early 1960s.  The local medical doctor had noticed that the very low, practically non-existent rate of heart disease and heart attacks in the community which otherwise seemed to have lots of high risk factors.  What kept the men there, who ate meatballs fried in lard, and smoked and drank with abandon healthier than people in neighboring towns?

After a 50-year study, the main conclusion was: community.  Living in community, in this case an Italian immigrant community, closely connected to others, lowered stress. Relationships nourish the health of the body.

Lissa Rankin on physiology of loneliness:  “When we feel socially isolated, then the limbic system goes into threat. The flight or fight response. (the stress response.)

The body is beautifully equipped with natural self-healing mechanisms.  … We have natural longevity enhancements built into our bodies.  But here’s the kicker: those natural self healing mechanisms only work when the nervous system is in the relaxation response.  When we know that we belong, when we can feel ourselves in love, in community, in tribe, then the nervous system relaxes.”

Americans have high rates of being in stress response, and lonely people have even higher rates.

Consider this, according to Lissa Rankin:

Obesity increases your mortality by 23%

Alcohol abuse by 37%

Loneliness by 45%

Robert Waldinger, researcher at Harvard, followed 700 men over 75 years, and found that “the people that fared the best were the people that leaned into relationships with family, with friends, with community.”

Lissa Rankin asks, “When was the last time your [medical] doctor prescribed healing your loneliness as part of your [physical] wellness plan?”

There is deep connection between our mental/spiritual health, our bodies, and our social relationships.  Trauma expert Dr. Bessel van der Kolk has worked over decades helping people who have experienced extreme trauma – survivors of catastrophes, war veterans, those who have experienced rape, neglect, abuse.  In his book The Body Keeps the Score, he shares his journey as a psychiatrist from a medical model of caring for conditions like PTSD, that focused primarily on medication and sometimes talk therapy, to a broader model that incorporates our physical bodies and yes, our social relationships. 

“You can be fully in charge of your life only if you can acknowledge the reality of your body, in all its visceral dimensions.”

He has also come to believe that “Restoring relationships and community is central to restoring well-being.”  When we isolate people as only a patient who is to receive a cure from someone or somewhere else—a doctor, a minister, a magician, a pill—then we “separate suffering people from their community and alienate them from an inner sense of self.” (p. 38)

Sometimes in our seeking to cure or to fix, we actually make the problem worse by isolating, stigmatizing, separating.

Now, I’m not telling ya’ll to never be alone. As an introvert myself, I *need* time alone to recharge and reconnect with myself.  Solitude and loneliness are not the same thing. I’m asking you think about whether and when you are lonely;  who around us in our community might be lonely?  When and how are you touched—appropriately, with love and care for boundaries?  Who in our community is not touched?  When you notice that, what can you do?

Just this week I had a conversation with someone who recently found out an old, dear friend is dying, probably will die very soon.  What can I do, he asked me.  What should I do?  I feel helpless.

The best I can offer you, I said, is to simply be with the person.  Then you’ll know if and when they need or want something more.  You cannot cure this person of their disease, but you can make sure they don’t feel alone.

It’s something I have to re-learn myself, over and over, that so very often we can’t fix each other—whether cancer or depression. 

For a year in seminary I worked as an intern chaplain at San Francisco General Hospital.  It’s a Level One Trauma hospital for the region, and it is also the hospital that people who have very little supports—the homeless, the marginalized, the poor and mentally ill—are usually taken first.  The chaplaincy program there was a special one, a little bit different from many other models I have encountered. It was volunteer-based, most of them lay people, who had been coming for years and years. 

It was different because of how the program was started.  Called Sojourn chaplaincy…  begun as a ministry of care and compassion during the AIDS crisis of the 80s.  SFGH was the first hospital in the country to have a ward just for those suffering from HIV and AIDS,  And remember at that time, in those early years, the stigma.  How gay men especially, who had often already been abandoned by their families, were abandoned yet again by communities, churches, even medical establishments who treated them with fear and loathing.

Imagine the loneliness in that suffering.  Imagine the difference it made simply to have another human being come to your room and hold your hand, touch your forehead, speak with you, look you in the eyes.  That is how Sojourn Chaplaincy began.  Not to save people or to force religion upon them, but to simply be a human healing presence. 

During my time there I was witness to the power of connecting in relationship, the power of simple bodily touch – and sometimes in specifically religious ways, only when this was invited and asked for.  I began to think about how religious rituals like blessing and praying and anointing—rubbing a forehead or a hand with oil—are ways we embody that broader web of relationships, the love that holds us all.  Holding a hand or touching a shoulder I could have the experience of “really feeling their mysterious life and my own mysterious life at the same time.”

Being part of a religious community, engaging in spiritual practice can be a powerful way to take care of our physical health—partly because of the connection it provides.  Lissa Rankin lists 10 health habits they don’t teach in medical school and one that she includes is to attend religious services!

“Attend religious services. Individuals who attend religious services regularly live 7 ½ years longer (almost 14 years longer for African-Americans) than those who never or rarely attend religious gatherings. One study found that high levels of religious involvement were associated with lower rates of circulatory diseases, digestive diseases, respiratory diseases, and just about every other disease studied. But this is only the case if your religion is in alignment with your authentic self. If going to church or temple or the mosque relaxes your nervous system, it’s good for your health. But if it stresses you out, you’re better off staying home.”

It is not just any social connection that helps--The key here is that it is about feeling accepted, and accepting others.  Getting beyond the separation of differences that pull us apart.  Being able to be your full authentic self, flawed and whole at the same time.  Coming home to yourself.

The healing stories of Jesus can be understood in this “coming home to yourself” way.

Perhaps more than any other primary religious figure or prophet Jesus’ ministry was focused on healing.  No less than 37 stories of Jesus healing a person or a group of people in the Gospels.

Now like the rest of the Bible, if you take everything literally you are often likely to end up in the weeds.

There’s a long strand of Christian thought that the disability and illness that Jesus cured came about because of the ill persons’ sin, and could even be traced back to humanity’s fall in the garden of Eden.   But if a person just has enough and the right kind of faith and piety then that person will be cured, restored to perfection.  We certainly saw that kind of theology at play—and still do—during the AIDS crisis, when ill and suffering people were blamed for their own suffering.  They were sick because they were gay, etc.

Now this theology doesn’t fit in our Unitarian Universalist worldview that affirms the basic goodness of life and humanity, and the persistent affirmation that every single body is sacred.  That is a strand of theology that has just as long a history in Christianity, but happens to have not been the one present in our dominant culture! 

Many of us may say we don’t believe it, but still carry around the dominant thinking, catching ourselves thinking – It’s my fault I’m sick, I didn’t take good enough care of myself, I haven’t been good enough, I haven’t given enough, etc.

It’s my fault I’m depressed, there is something wrong with me, I’m broken and can’t be fixed.

I love what the poet Mary Oliver has to say about this: “You do not have to be good.  You do not have to walk on your knees for a hundred miles through the desert.  You only have to let the soft animal of your body love what it loves.” (Wild Geese)

I personally like to think Jesus would have said the same thing. 

There’s a different way to understand Jesus’ healing stories, if we use our spiritual imagination, and look at the larger context of the biblical times.  Think about who Jesus heals:  women, lepers, the mentally ill, the blind.  Jesus transgresses social separation to be in bodily contact with those who have been outcast, isolated, shunned.  Those who no one else would touch.

If we focus on the healing in these stories, and not the cure, perhaps they are more believable to our rational, scientific UU sensibilities.  It is hard to believe that a leper’s disease might be cured simply by the touch of another human being.  But might that person be healed?  Might they come back home to themselves? 

Might they feel their wholeness, all of who they are, recognized and affirmed?

Last week we heard about the Japanese concept of kintsukuroi—the practice of returning broken pottery to its original shape, gluing the pieces back together with gold between the cracks.  The resulting piece of pottery is both broken and whole at the same time. 

Each one of us is imperfect in our bodies; in our culture we like to label some people as disabled—as if we don’t all have differing physical abilities.  As if we won’t all at some point, if we are lucky, face changes in our physical abilities due to age.

I also like to say that each one of us exists on a spectrum of mental health, day to day.  Some days and seasons I’m mentally healthier than others.

We each one of us are flawed, imperfect in our bodies, broken at times by life’s experiences.  If we threw everyone who is broken away, there would be no one left. 

As a community of faith we seek to hold the brokenness and wholeness at the same time.  Like a broken bowl held together with a small seam of gold. 

As a community of faith we seek to re-connect our bodies and spirits for healing.

As we have been acknowledging for weeks now, these are difficult times, times of uncertainty, times of anxiety, fear, anger and sadness.

We need to be able to bring our full selves, including our vulnerable bodies, to the work of justice, and our task of loving the hell-ish places out of this world.

We need one another to be well, to be strong, to survive. 

We will not heal ourselves alone, but together – we can.

We cannot heal our community alone, but together—we can.

We need all the resources we can muster.  And so today I am offering a healing ritual, an embodied blessing.  You are invited to come forward for a blessing on your hands with oil – extra virgin olive oil! – and few healing words. Bring your imperfect and whole self forward; I will greet you with my imperfect and whole self.

Blessing:

“You are not alone -- I bless you with Love—may Love be a source of your strength.”

May it be so.  Amen.

Sex and Spirit

Sex and Spirit: Our UU Ethic and Theology of Sexuality                    

Rev. Laura Bogle

February 5th, 2017

For over 40 years the Unitarian Universalist Association has been engaged in comprehensive, values-based sexuality education.  What are the ethical values that ground that programming for children, youth and adults?  What does our faith have to say about bodies, sex, sexuality and reproductive justice? 

Readings

Butch Hancock (musician, quoted in “The Education of Shelby Knox” documentary 2005):

“Life in Lubbock, Texas, taught me two things: One is that God loves you and you're going to burn in Hell. The other is that sex is the most awful, filthy thing on earth and you should save it for someone you love.”

South American writer Eduardo Galeano:  "The Church says: The body is a sin. Science says: The body is a machine. Advertising says: The body is a business. The body says: I am a fiesta.”

From Josh Ritter’s song, “Gettin’ Ready to Get Down”:

“Eve ate the apple 'cause the apple was sweet
What kinda god would ever keep a girl
From getting what she needs?”

I love this Josh Ritter song we just heard because it paints the whole story for you – a young girl full of herself and her feelings and her passion – Mama and Papa and Pastor see where that might go – send her off to a Bible college thinking they can control her.  Thinking that a religious control and denial of her body will save her soul.  But somehow she manages to hear a different message in the gospels:

“Be good to everybody, be a strength to the weak
A joy to the joyful, the laughter in the grief
And give your love freely to whoever that you please
Don't let nobody tell you 'bout who you oughta be”

She comes out of that Bible college just as powerful and full of herself as before.  A walking miracle, she’s still getting’ ready to get down.  And you know what “getting’ down” means, right? – well, what you are probably thinking right now.  But it can also mean getting real, getting down to business, taking no crap from anyone.

Not an accident that this story song is about a woman—we in western Christianity-dominated culture have a history of focusing on women’s sexuality, controlling women’s sexuality, as a way to control women’s power.  A long, long history that is way out of the scope of my sermon this morning.  Women and young girls are simultaneously bombarded with messages about how they should look to appeal to a male gaze and at the same time subject to incredibly harsh judgement if they step outside of a very proscribed circle of sexuality.

Men and boys don’t escape these confusing messages either.

Who here grew up with the message that Butch Hancock received—sex is dirty and you save it for the person you love?

Who here heard contradictory messages about sex and sexuality growing up?

I remember growing up, I went to a K-8 school.  And when I hit middle school years, when often you start having school dances and such, we had no such thing at my school.  You see for a couple years there our principal was also a Baptist preacher and was not in favor of dances or dancing in general.  Apparently 12 year olds moving their bodies to music was a little too dangerous.  So it wasn’t until my 8^th grade year and a new principal arrived that we finally had a school dance.  I still remember what I wore to that dance, and how I felt going to that dance.  The excitement and the dread.

One year: no dancing, because sinful.  The next year: everyone encouraged to get dressed up and fancy (I wore my first mini-skirt!) and go dance with someone of the opposite sex.  

There’s some mixed messages for you.

Maybe your parents didn’t talk to you about sex; or maybe they did and it was an awkward embarrassing blip in a much longer stretch of silence on the topic. Or maybe your parents did try over time really hard to give you the information and the values; to normalize the conversations you needed to make good decisions for yourself. Regardless, we are all still swimming upstream in a culture that promotes a certain glorification of sex and sexuality, and at the same time our culture is steeped in a White Anglo-Saxon Protestant kind of puritanism. 

We are surrounded by sex and sexualized images on TV, commercials, movies, internet—and yet there are *very* few places we can talk openly and honestly about our sexual selves or our sexuality without being embarrassed or judged or worse shamed. 

It is in part because of these contradictory messages that the Unitarian Universalist Association first launched sexuality education for children and youth in our congregations. 

Rev. Sarah Gibb Millspaugh writes in her essay about the history of sex ed in our congregations that, no surprise, UU’s have long been in the forefront of issues like family planning – way back in 1929 the General Convention of the Universalist Church in America passed a resolution in favor of family planning.  It was the sexual revolution of the 1960’s that threw open some of the more rigidly held rules in our society—no sex before marriage for instance—and raised a lot of complex and tough ethical questions for Unitarian Universalists.  Again, no surprise, our congregations were often places that embraced the increased sexual freedom, liberation from stifling gender roles, and questioning of cultural norms.  It was not that ethical principles were thrown out the window, but a different kind of ethical basis was in operation. Rather than a set of hard and fast rules about which acts were or were not OK, there were guidelines based on values. 

Sarah Gibb Millspaugh writes: 

“Theologians, philosophers, and average UUs wrestled with the implications of such new guidelines—a “New Morality,” one based in “situation ethics,” where the right or wrong of a sexual act could not be determined by the type of act alone. Love mattered. Emotions mattered. Individuals’ values and beliefs mattered.”  (see her full article here:  http://www.uuworld.org/articles/40-years-sexuality-education )

It’s a lot more complicated to navigate a set of guidelines than a list of rules.  It takes more self-knowledge, more discernment, more responsibility.

And so it was that the first UU sex ed program for teenagers began in the late 60’s.  Called About Your Sexuality or AYS, complete with filmstrips and very focused on health and equipping teens with scientific knowledge about their bodies and reproduction.

I recently had a conversation with Shirley Brooks, who was chair of the religious education committee at TVUUC when AYS was first being tested in the congregations and she remembers, as someone raised Baptist in the South, feeling uncomfortable with some of the content and letting the UUA staff know that. 

Even when adults affirmed that educating youth about sex and sexual health was good, it could be hard to put it into practice if you yourself had never had a chance to examine your own attitudes and values, to get a bit more comfortable yourself having a conversation about sex.

And so the next step in our evolution was to grow the programming to reach all ages.  Beginning in the early 90s a new curriculum—Our Whole Lives, or OWL--was developed in concert with the United Church of Christ. What is so amazing about OWL is that it is truly a lifespan curriculum, with age appropriate modules for K-1, 4-6, 7-9, 10-12, young adults, adults.  And this year the UUA is field testing a new curriculum just for older adults—those over 50.  Each of these programs, no matter the age group, are rooted in four primary values:  self-worth, sexual health, responsibility, and justice and inclusivity.

OWL recognizes that if we expect teenagers to be able to reflect critically about their values related to their sexuality, then we better start laying the foundation when they 5 years old. 

And it recognizes that our teenage years are not the only times that we need education about sex and sexuality.  It recognizes that sexuality is an integral part of who we are for Our Whole Lives.  And, importantly, OWL curricula make the assumption that sexuality, in its many expressions, is fundamentally a good part of the human experience—not a sin, nothing to be ashamed of or covered up.  It is this fundamentally good sexuality that is distorted or damaged by societal “violence, exploitation, alienation, dishonesty, abuse of power, and the treatment of persons as objects” (OWL brochure).

The OWL curricula are not explicitly religious, and they are used in a wide range of settings – not just UU congregations—but these assumptions I just outlined are certainly rooted in our liberal theological understandings.  The very fact that we do comprehensive sexuality education in church and we call it Our Whole Lives is a theological statement itself!  We put our very embodiment into the center of who we are as a people of faith.

My colleague Rev. Gretchen Haley has written:

“Early Christian thinkers – influenced by Plato, Aristotle and Hellenism, imagined human life dualistically – body and soul separate. The soul was eternal and of God, the body was sinful and to be overcome in service of saving the soul.

In the 17th century, the philosopher Rene Descartes further systematized the division –
promoting a dualism of mind and body. Descartes is the one who proclaimed ‘I think therefore I am.’ The brain means you are a person; your body – inconsequential -incidental, secondary, and problematic – something to be controlled or managed in service of the real you – your mind.

Feminist, queer and other progressive philosophers and theologians finally and thankfully critiqued this dualism – and science further revealed its flaws. A liberal theological anthropology – that is an understanding of the human person – refuses to separate the parts in any way – but rather approaches humanity as one – one of body, mind, spirit, all one. All connected, all alive, indivisible, all gifts of God, or of the universe, all worthy of love and belonging….”

Our first principle, affirming the inherent worth and dignity of every person, means every person’s body, and their sexuality too.  And when I say sexuality, I’m not just talking about having sex.  A holistic and integrated viewpoint tells us that sexuality encompasses so much more – it is related to our identity, how we are intimate in lots of ways with others and our selves. Sexuality is related to sensuality—how we experience the world through our senses.  It has to do with power and relationships.  And it has to do with basic physical health and reproduction.

Our sexuality can be the site of both the greatest pleasure and the deepest pain we experience in our lives.  Both the place of deep creativity and love, and the place of destructive alienation from love.  It’s not an accident that self-worth is listed as the first of the core values present in all of OWL programming.  In our western culture so much human struggle around self-esteem and worth is tied to our bodies and whether we and others perceive our bodies to be powerful, attractive, healthy, sexy, or even just normal.

In the OWL curriculum for 4-6 grades there’s an exercise that has kids standing in a circle and step in when a statement is read that is true for them.  Want to try it?   You can raise your hands instead. 

Statements: Anyone who has brown eyes.

Anyone who has siblings.

Anyone who likes ice cream.

Anyone who is the youngest in the family.

Anyone who is the oldest in their family.

Anyone who is the only child in their family.

Anyone who is a twin or multiple.

Anyone who is a middle child.

Anyone who wishes they were an adult.  (or wishes they were younger)

Anyone who loves their family.

Anyone who sometimes gets mad at or disagrees with someone in their family.

Anyone who has talked with a parent or caregiver or a child about growing older and body changes.

Anyone who thinks they are normal.

Ooh, it’s that last one that’s a little tough, even for the adults in the room.

How do you know what’s “normal”?

We all absorb very narrow stories, most often in the media about what is normal.

Two recent examples of moments when I realized the unspoken, unconscious idea I have about what is normal.

Anyone watch the NBC sitcom “This is Us”?  Sitcom about a family, including three siblings.  The sister is played by actress Chrissy Metz who is fantastic.  And Chrissy is also a very large person.  The size of woman that you don’t often see on TV sitcoms.  And what is so great about her story-line is that it includes romance and yes, sex.  It is a sign of how narrowly defined our stories are that to see an example of a beautiful large woman having a successful and sexy romance is totally surprising. 

What is normal?

The other example I have to share is an interview I heard recently on NPR with a veteran and his wife.  (http://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2017/01/01/507749611/for-veterans-trauma-of-war-can-persist-in-struggles-with-sexual-intimacy )  They were talking on national public radio about the impact that the vet’s service and his PTSD had not just on their marriage in general, but on their sex life and their sexuality. The whole interview was so tender, so vulnerable; so unlike anything I had ever heard in a public setting.  What a gift they gave to so many listening, who might have been wondering if they were abnormal for the ways they too struggled.

UU Rev. Rob Keithan: “If studying sexuality has taught me anything, it’s that virtually everyone will struggle with sexual health and happiness at some point in our lives, if not throughout our lives. If our religious community stays silent on the subject, then our faith becomes just one more entity sending us the message that our struggles with sexuality should be hidden; that our only option is to wrestle with them in isolation.”

The UUA began offering sex ed for our youth to help them navigate changing times and social mores.  Over the years we have realized that when we do it well, it’s not just something for the kids, as if adults have it all figured out.  It’s a project we all must be engaged in, and a project that this central to living out our progressive religious heritage.  We are not a church that says the body is a sin.  We are the church that says the body is a fiesta, and you better be prepared when you go to that party. We are the church that says we will work to make that joyful celebration of our bodily selves a felt reality for each of us; to be whole, holy, empowered, respected, and healthy.  We are the church that says rather than pushing our sexuality to the side, or keeping in the closet, or even relegating it just to the bedroom—we will actually save our souls when we bring sexuality out into the light of day.  That it is through talking about the beauty and risks, the pleasure and the pain of our sexual lives that we might be healed.

It is in our congregation’s three-year plan to offer the OWL curriculum for one age group in the coming year.  We might consider at some point opening the program to others in our community; families who may not be UU but who want their kids to experience a values-focussed, comprehensive sexuality education program.

If we want to do that we will need trained facilitators and a commitment from the congregation for us all to engage.  If you think you might be interested in getting trained to be an OWL facilitator, I invite you to talk with me.

A final note on preaching about sexuality in the current context – I planned this topic a long time ago—well before I knew what the political world would be like in February 2017.  And a couple of weeks ago I almost scrapped it. Why is it important to preach about bodies and sexuality in this current context?  Here’s what I came to:

When we have elected a person to the highest office in the land who has called women and parts of women’s bodies names that objectify and degrade, and has perhaps acted in on that objectification, then it’s more important than ever that we model what mature and healthy and just sexuality looks like. 

And I’m not talking about the President’s choice of words.  I have a good friend who took her 8 year old daughter to the Women’s March.  Her cardboard sign had this awesome kids’ drawing of a kitty cat on it and it said “This pussy grabs back.”  I know some people were shocked to see an 8 year old carrying a sign like that.  But when we get more outraged about a word than we are about the actual treatment of women and girls in this country something is seriously wrong.

Here’s the other reason I think our focus on embodiment this month and today’s topic of sexuality comes right on time.  We experience this world in and through our bodies.  There is no other way to experience it.  Our deepest spiritual experiences are through our bodies.  Our emotions come through our bodies.  And our ethical knowledge, our discernment of right and wrong, is developed in our bodies. 

Yesterday I played and snuggled and sometimes struggled with my daughters.  It was a felt, bodily experience.  Holding them, drying tears, smelling their heads, carrying them when they are too heavy, cleaning up their sticky fingers after breakfast with syrup…. 

When I stop and let myself really feel this bodily connection, the work it takes to sustain the bodies of my children, the pleasure I take in feeling their little bodies next to mine, the life force that flows between us in these exchanges—then I can’t help but have empathy for the parent who is fleeing violence and war, the parent who moves in search of a better life, to simply keep body and soul together, to keep the bodies of their children alive and well-fed and flourishing.

Marvin Ellison, professor of Christian Ethics is also a gay man (and I learned recently originally from Knoxville!) and author of the book “Erotic Justice: a Liberating Ethic of Sexuality” published in 1996.  In it he says “As sensuous human beings, we know and value the world and therefore become self-directing moral agents only as we feel connected in and through our bodies.  …Moral knowing is rooted in feeling, and we depend on sensuality to grasp and value the world.  When sexuality is feared and evaded, people lack responsiveness and run the risk of becoming out of touch with what causes joy, suffering, and vulnerability, including their own.  A people alienated from their bodies are more likely to be content with, and even at home with, pain and oppression.”

When we cherish and appreciate our own bodies and are able to take pleasure in bodily connection, when we are in touch with the vulnerability of our bodies and the bodies of those we love, when we understand these bodies and these connections of the body as sacred—then we extend that sacredness to all. 

Perhaps that’s what the young girl in Josh Ritter’s song knew.  That oppression of her body would lead to oppression of her loving spirit, and then oppression of others around her.  Walt Whitman knew that in his very bones when he wrote “I sing the Body Electric” way back in 1855.  I want to leave you with a bit of his poem today:

"I sing the body electric, 

The armies of those I love engirth me and I engirth them, 

They will not let me off till I go with them, respond to them, 

And discorrupt them, and charge them full with the charge of the soul. 

…

The man’s body is sacred and the woman’s body is sacred, 

No matter who it is, it is sacred—is it the meanest one in the laborers’ gang? 

Is it one of the dull-faced immigrants just landed on the wharf? 

Each belongs here or anywhere just as much as the well-off, just as much as you, 

Each has his or her place in the procession."

May we be dis-corrupters, uniting body and soul, in the service of more life, more freedom, more justice for all; each body belonging here, a sacred bit of God, a sacred bit of the stars that made us.

May it be so. And amen.

A People of Integrity: Building an Anti-Racist Identity

“A People of Integrity: Building an Anti-Racist Identity”
Rev. Laura Bogle
Sermon delivered January 17, 2016

Reading from Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King’s Letter from a Birmingham Jail:  (1963)
"I must confess that over the past few years I have been gravely disappointed with the white moderate. I have almost reached the regrettable conclusion that the Negro’s great stumbling block in his stride toward freedom is not the White Citizen’s Counciler or the Ku Klux Klanner, but the white moderate, who is more devoted to “order” than to justice; who prefers a negative peace which is the absence of tension to a positive peace which is the presence of justice; who constantly says: “I agree with you in the goal you seek, but I cannot agree with your methods of direct action”; who paternalistically believes he can set the timetable for another man’s freedom; who lives by a mythical concept of time and who constantly advises the Negro to wait for a “more convenient season.”


Just as King’s letter from a Birmingham jail had a specific audience in mind (white moderates, especially white clergy, during the campaign for voting rights in Alabama), so does my sermon today.
As a white person I am speaking today to other white people.

I begin with a story, and I want to go back in history farther than Dr. King’s time.
It was December 1848 and a married couple, Ellen and William Craft, who had been enslaved in Georgia, made their way through the dangerous paths 1,000 miles north, towards their freedom, with help along the way from Quaker abolitionists and free blacks running the Underground Railroad.   When they got to Boston, they found work and they found a home, and they eventually found a church at the Unitarian congregation led by Rev. Theodore Parker, one of the most prominent clergy in the United States at the time.

A couple of years later, in 1850, Congress passed the Fugitive Slave Law, which not only provided for returning people who had escaped slavery to masters who had owned them in the south, but it actually required citizens in the North to aid in their capture.  Officials who did not arrest an alleged runaway were liable for a fine of up to $1000 (a huge sum of money in those days).  Any private citizen found to be aiding a fugitive also risked six months in jail and a $1000 fine.

Well, Theodore Parker was one of the folks who began to organize a Vigilance Committee in Boston, designed to protect "the colored inhabitants of Boston from any invasion of their rights."  These were people who were prepared to break this law that forced citizens in states where slavery had been abolished to still participate in what they saw was evil.  Not a month after the passage of the Fugitive Slave Law, slave-catchers from Georgia came to Boston to find the Crafts and bring them back.  The Vigilance Committee went into action and Theodore Parker provided sanctuary to Ellen in his own home.  The story goes that he kept a loaded pistol in his study at the ready.
He wrote:
“This [Fugitive Slave] law has brought us into the most intimate connection with the sin of slavery. I have been obliged to take my own parishioners into my house to keep them out of the clutches of the kidnapper. Yes, gentlemen, I have been obliged to do that; and then to keep my doors guarded by day as well as by night. …This I have done in Boston; in the middle of the nineteenth century; been obliged to do it to defend the [innocent] members of my own church, women as well as men!"

In the end, Parker and the Vigilance Committee were successful in keeping the Crafts from being re-captured.  In order to ensure their safety, they were sent to England where slavery had been abolished, with resources to start a new life.

Furious about this new law, Parker wrote to the President of the United States who had signed it into law and was enforcing it.  Anyone happen to know who it was in 1850?  Millard Fillmore.  Anyone know what religion Millard Fillmore claimed?  He was also a Unitarian. Fillmore was anti-slavery, but he was a moderate and believed in compromise, believed he had to uphold the law of the land in order to preserve the Union.

Theodore Parker didn’t live to see the end of slavery in the United States.  But he, along with many others, white and black, were part of organizing bravely for its end.  (story adapted from resources at uua.org and danielharper.org)

I tell you this story today because it helps me to think about having both these two legacies as part of
my Unitarian heritage, and as part of my heritage as a white person living in the United States.
I, we, have inherited both the legacy of Theodore Parker and other prophetic witnesses through the generations who have defied the law, defied the rules of society, in service of what Parker called “the eternal law of God.”

And we have inherited the legacy of Millard Fillmore, and other white moderates, who have sought to keep order, often at the expense of justice.
Just as I know I also in my own family tree have members who sided with the confederacy and members who sided with the union.  Members who owned slaves, and members who did not and worked for its end.

My question is how we, white people today, hold this true, complex history – and the much longer history that surrounds it—with integrity.

On the surface, to be white in this country means a certain basic, uncomplicated thing. Something that those of us who are white don’t really have to think about.  Many of us, myself included, walk through the world often unaware of the privileges that pave our way.

For others of us as we come to consciousness about the disparities in treatment between white folks and people of color, whiteness has become something that some of us have grown to be ashamed of or at the very least, uncomfortable with.

Others of us, UUs especially, want just to affirm our deeply held belief that all people are born with inherent worth and dignity, and skin color has nothing to do it.  We wish to be colorblind and attempt to live our individual lives that way.  To say simply, ALL lives matter.

Well, I do believe that all lives matter.  But history is important.  Social context is important.  We may be born with that fundamental sacredness, but we are also born into history and into systems and societies.  We are born with that history marking us.

How do I, a white person in 2016, grapple with how I came to be defined as white in the first place?   How is it that peoples from diverse places in Europe became something called “white”—people from England, France, Germany, Scotland, Holland, Switzerland, Poland, Spain and eventually the Irish, Italians and Eastern European Jews all gave up something to become “white.”  Which really meant not “black.”  How do I explore and acknowledge the costs of this whiteness?

And how do I learn about and re-claim the powerful stories, often untold, of those white people who refused to play by the rules of whiteness that keep everyone in their place?

Now, fast forward in time if you will to 1991.  These are the words of Allen Johnson, from his book “Privilege, Power, and Difference”:
“In 1991, a black motorist named Rodney King suffered a brutal beating at the hands of police officers in Los Angeles.  When his assailants were acquitted—in spite of evidence that included a video-tape of the incident—and riots broke out in Los Angeles, King uttered the exasperated plea that would become famous as it echoed across the long history and deep divide of racism in the United States. ‘Can’t we all just get along?’
His words formed a simple yet eloquent summary of the current state of our racial dilemma, what the black leader and scholar W.E.B. Du Bois called a century ago ‘the problem of the color line.’  But in King’s few words, he said more than that.  Past his exasperation lies a real and serious question, one that has haunted us ever since the Civil War brought down the institution of US slavery.” (p. 1)
Like any serious question, it sits and waits for what it deserves, which is a serious answer.”

I was a high school student in 1991, and I remember sitting in my almost entirely white classroom over at William Blount High School, watching the news show that got piped into the school, watching the coverage of Rodney King getting beaten half to death in broad day light and watching coverage of what the news channels called riots, and I don’t remember a single adult inviting a serious conversation about it.  It was as if it was something that didn’t concern us, although I know plenty of my classmates were watching and wondering “What is going on here?  How can this happen?  How is this related to me?”

Believe me, we learned a lot by the silence of the adults around us.  But we didn’t learn any serious answers.

And now, in the year 2016, I am one of the adults in the room, and I wonder do I have any serious answers to offer?  Any answers to the question of Rodney King,

Or the lives of Trayvon Martin
Michael Brown and and the people of Ferguson
Eric Garner
12 year old Tamir Rice
Freddie Gray
Sandra Bland
The Charleston 9 and Mother Emmanuel Church

Do I have any answers to the questions that are begged when I watch scenes of teenagers at a suburban Texas pool party or a young girl in a South Carolina classroom?

Do I have any serious answers to the questions of an economic system built on the oppression of people of color such that in 2015, according to Forbes magazine, the median black household wealth was just 6% of median white household wealth?  (http://www.forbes.com/sites/laurashin/2015/03/26/the-racial-wealth-gap-why-a-typical-white-household-has-16-times-the-wealth-of-a-black-one/#2715e4857a0b5b7f8cad6c5b )

Where do the huge questions of these lives and these deaths call me, as a white person?

I've been looking for some serious answers, for myself, for my children.  I am a white person, yet I do not want to aid and abet the forces of racism that depend on my complicity.

In her recent article entitled White Debt (http://www.nytimes.com/2015/12/06/magazine/white-debt.html?_r=1 ), Eula Biss writes, “Whiteness is not a kinship or culture.  White people are no more closely related to one another, genetically than we are to black people….What binds us is that we share a system of social advantages that can be traced to the advent of slavery in the colonies that became the United States.  ‘There is, in fact, no white community,’ as James Baldwin writes.  Whiteness is not who you are.  Which is why it is entirely possible to despise whiteness without disliking yourself.”

Eula Biss had a conversation with her young son as he was learning about the legacy of slavery in this country and he said “I don’t want to be on this team.”  She said to him: “You might be stuck on this team, but you don’t have to play by its rules.”

She says, “For me, whiteness is not an identity but a moral problem.”

Whiteness is a paradox:  it is a totally created fiction, something that does not really exist outside of human constructs.  And yet, it is very real in its operation, in the impact it has, on all of us.

Another writer Ta-Nehisi Coates, describes whiteness in a letter he wrote to his 14 year old black son. In the book, entitled Between the World and Me, he says to his son, “’White America’ is a syndicate arrayed to protect its exclusive power to dominate and control our bodies.  Sometimes this power is direct (lynching), and sometimes it is insidious (redlining).  But however it appears, the power of domination and exclusion is central to the belief of being white, and without it, ‘white people,’ would cease to exist for want of reasons.” (p. 42)

This system of white supremacy (and here I am not talking about skin heads), which privileges some at the expense of others, means spiritual death for those it privileges.  Not being fully, truly alive as a human being.

Last year some of us gathered for a series of conversations to learn and talk together about race. These were called “Beloved Conversations” and one exercise in particular has stuck with me.  We shared in our group stories of encountering race in some way in our community, a racially charged situation, or a time when we realized that race was a factor in an interaction.  I told my own story about witnessing a racist interaction and doing nothing, saying nothing. And then we discussed how it felt to tell that story.  And every single one of us shared feeling words like guilt, shame, confusion, powerlessness.

The moral costs of being white in the United States are huge.  These feelings we have let us know that something is amiss, that something is not right.

When we enact whiteness, we lose our fundamental linkage to all of humanity.  Like I did when I felt too uncomfortable to point out to another white person that their comment was offensive.  It was too hard and too scary.  And I lost something important in that moment, a bit of my own integrity.

When we enact whiteness, we lose our own fundamental spiritual freedom.  We are not able to be the people we were born to be, free to love.

Allen Johnson says “We are not prisoners to some natural order that pits us hopelessly and endlessly against one another.  We are prisoners to something, but its closer to our own making than we realize.” (p.4)

Whiteness and a historically white supremacist system binds us all in in a way that diminishes our humanity.

But the good news is this:  It is not the natural order of things!  Because “whiteness” is not a natural identity it means we can refuse to collude, refuse to be complicit, refuse to act like a good white person.  We don’t have to stay stuck in guilt, shame, and confusion. And therein lies our hope!

Martin Luther King Jr. said to those gathered for the Ware lecture at the Unitarian Universalist Association General Assembly in Hollywood, Florida, in 1966:
"My friends, there are some things in our nation and in our world to which I'm proud to be maladjusted. And I call upon you to be maladjusted and all people of good will to be maladjusted to these things until the good society is realized."

Let’s be maladjusted to the rules of whiteness that tell us race only needs to be conversation if there’s a person of color in the room and they bring it up.

Let’s be maladjusted to the rules of whiteness that tell us we have to be completely enlightened and have it all figured out before we speak up and speak out.

Let’s be maladjusted to the rules of whiteness that tell us to prioritize order – the way things are done according to the law of this time—over justice—the way things are done according to love.

Let’s be maladjusted to the rules of this white supremacy culture that means black and brown children have to have conversations with their parents about how to be safe and survive in this world at a very early age; conversations that do not cross my mind as I send my 4 year old daughter out into the world.  But perhaps I need to let her know, because shielding her from this reality for other people will not save her soul.

Just as no child is born a racist, no child is born an anti-racist either.

Becoming an anti-racist does not mean hating white folks, and if you are white, it doesn’t mean hating yourself!  It means hating the white supremacy that has shaped our culture, and yes shaped our own souls into something less than human, less than loving, less than just.

Many of us most of the time are neither racist or anti-racist.  We are simply non-racists. (check out this video: http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/video/2016/jan/13/marlon-james-are-you-racist-video )  We don’t use racial slurs.  We believe in the equality and inherent worth and dignity of all.  We would never support a candidate for office who spewed racist hatred.  We are appalled by white supremacist organizations like the Ku Klux Klan.

We roll our eyes when the confederate flag lovers get together for a rally like they did last July at Midland Plaza.

But as UU anti-racist activist Chris Crass challenges us, Will we let the most vocal white people speaking about race be the racists?

Many UU congregations around this country have said no.
At last summer’s General Assembly, our association passed a resolution Action of Immediate Witness, calling on all our congregations to support the Black Lives Matter movement, to engage in learning and action together for racial justice.  (http://www.uua.org/statements/support-black-lives-matter-movement )
Many congregation have decided to put a “Black Lives Matter” sign in front of their place of worship, including our sister congregation in Oak Ridge.  Perhaps a seemingly small, symbolic act. What difference does it make, you might ask?
Hearing the backlash might help you understand how this seemingly innocuous act can really matter.

Many, many UU congregations have had their banners stolen or vandalized, some of them multiple times.  Others have had to deal with attacks on social media and in the news.
Taking the step to put up a public sign and deal with the consequences has also meant being in relationship with others in the community, building relationships with other congregations and organizations working for racial justice, learning about the realities for people of color in their community, committing to showing up – to not just talk the talk but walk the walk.

After their Black Lives Matter banner had been vandalized several times, the people of River Road UU Church in Bethesda, MD, began a weekly Friday night vigil.  Physically standing on the road next to the sign and holding the names of victims of racist violence.

Despite the seemingly constant barrage of bad news, news to be grieved, I believe these are hopeful times!  There is a powerful movement growing, with people of color at the lead, and supported by white anti-racist allies, that is providing serious answers to the fundamental questions of race in this country.  There are so many ways to contribute to this hope.

I heard a story just this past week from a white woman who has a Black Lives Matter bumper sticker on her car.  She was at the recycling center dropping off her stuff when another white woman came up to her and said, thank you so much for having that message on your car.  They connected.  By having that message on her car, she broke the code that says white folks don’t talk about race, because they don’t have to talk about race.  And she invited a conversation with a stranger, who she is now connected with.  Here in Blount County.

Maybe you are not a bumper sticker person.  But what is it YOU can do, and what can WE do together to break the code of silence, to live into a different way of being white, to be more often not just a non-racist, but an active, beautiful, force against racist systems and for the flourishing of all life?

Let us draw on the heritage we inherit from Theodore Parker and those who came after him, and draw on the courage we get from our fellow white Unitarian Universalists who are taking action all over this country today,

As Chris Crass says, “The goal isn’t to prove to others that we aren’t racist; it is to develop the capacity of our faith community… to rise up against white supremacy.”

Let’s do that, in the ways we can, with what we have, where we are, so we can all get free.
Amen.

Closing words
Theodore Parker, in his book Ten Sermons of Religion wrote these words, echoed in the next century by Dr. King:
"I do not pretend to understand the moral universe; the arc is a long one, my eye reaches but little ways; I cannot calculate the curve and complete the figure by the experience of sight; I can divine it by conscience. And from what I see I am sure it bends towards justice."

Ch, Ch, Ch, Changes

January 1^st, 2017

Rev. Laura Bogle

Reading:

The Way by Edwin Muir

Friend, I have lost the way.

__The way leads on.

Is there another way?

__The way is one.

I must retrace the track.

__It's lost and gone.

Back, I must travel back!

__None goes there, none.

Then I'll make here my place --

__The road runs on --

Stand still and set my face-

__The road leaps on.

Stay here, forever stay.

__None stays here, none.

I cannot find the way.

__The way leads on.

Oh, places I have passed!

_That journey's done.

And what will come at last?

__The way leads on.

This last week I’ve spent some time with my partner’s family up in Indiana.

It was cold up there!

One day we took the two year old twins for a walk, we bundled them up and we put their little knit mittens. And put them up on our backs and off we went.

Mittens on two year olds is a gamble if they aren’t somehow attached.  And sure enough when we got back to the house we realized that each one of them had lost one of their mittens somewhere along the way.  Mittens that their Meemaw, whose house we were staying at, had very lovingly knit just for them. Oh dear.

The day of our departure I decided that I’d go out and look along the road we had walked down, see if I could find those mittens.  And so I did.  It had snowed a tiny bit by then and I thought, those white mittens won’t stand out, I’ll never see them.  But I walked and I looked.

And just when I thought there’s no way I’d find them, there was one of them.  It gave me hope so I kept walking, and pretty soon there was the other one!  I was so proud and I brought them back to be reunited with their pair.

If only it were so easy to cope with other changes and loss in life.  To simply retrace our steps and go back to where we were, and all will be restored as it was. 

Finding the lost mittens helped me feel like I could in some way control the chaos and unpredictability of life.  You see, this week was also the first holiday time we spent in Indiana without my partner's beloved step-father, Papa to our girls, who died in May of this year.  We did some of the same things as we have always done at the holidays.  But nothing felt quite the same.  The underlying absence of this person changed it all.  It wasn’t just that we are sad that Roland is gone and miss him, which is of course very true.  Roland’s absence also has changed us.  

The family dynamic is different.  What we do together is different.  Our conversations are different without him. 

I don’t always deal quickly or easily with change, even really good changes.  It takes me time to adjust.  Usually I have to have a period of pretending things aren’t really that different, or a time of trying to make things stay the same.  That never feels very good, because it is not dealing with reality, and a tension builds—a tension between the way I wish things were and the way things actually are.  Being a parent of young children has challenged me more than anything else to pay attention to and accept change.  For instance, right now I really don’t want to admit that the twins are transitioning out of their daily afternoon nap.  Just like some of us really don’t want to admit that in about three weeks a different kind of transition will be happening in the White House.

The Buddhist teacher Pema Chodron says that “When we resist change, it’s called suffering. But when we can completely let go and not struggle against it, when we can embrace the groundlessness of our situation and relax into it’s dynamic quality, that’s called enlightenment.”

“When we resist change, it’s called suffering.”

Pair that wisdom with the words of ancient Greek philosopher, Heraklietos,  “Change alone is unchanging.”  No wonder he was known as the weeping philosopher!

2017, like every year before it, promises change. That is all we can count on.  Perhaps 2017 promises even more change than other years.  It is a time of great instability and shifting ground in our world and our country.  We feel it in our hearts, in our families, in our communities. 

There are some changes ahead that I really, really, really don’t want to accept; that I don’t want to normalize. 

Today I want to remind us that accepting a change does not mean approving of it or normalizing it.  Accepting a change does not mean liking it, or staying silent about the pain it causes you.  Accepting a change does not mean letting it control you. 

This year I want to be challenged by Pema Chodron’s words to embrace groundlessness and relax into its dynamic quality.  A dynamic means there is a back and forth – that change does not just move in one direction.

We can predict some changes will come that we won’t like, that we wish weren’t happening, but more will follow.  Take heart in the lyrics of Sam Cooke—

“There been times that I thought I couldn't last for long
But now I think I'm able to carry on

It's been a long, a long time coming
But I know a change gon' come, oh yes it will”

Take heart in the lyrics of Bob Dylan:

“The slowest now
Will later be fast
As the present now
Will later be past
The order is rapidly fading
And the first one now will later be last
Cause the times they are a-changing “

We can count on the fact that there will be change. 

It is up to us, the human community, with the help of that Power which is greater than any one of us, to face the changes that come, to move forward through them and to nurture more change that brings new life and love into this world.

You are invited now to participate in our ritual of letting go and opening up for the new year.

What in your life would you like to release, to let go of, or to move towards acceptance of?  You are invited to write these on your piece of paper and then when you are ready come forward to release them into the bowl of water on the table.

Set one or two intentions:  What would you like to make more room for in this coming year?  What change would you like to nurture—either in yourself or in your community?  How will you open to the gifts of your life, even in times of great change?  You are invited to take a marker and write these directly on our table cloth here.  Words, pictures, and symbols all are fine. 

With serenity, we release what is written here into the service of health and growth in 2017.

The Way the Leads On

With courage, we set these intentions written here in the service of health and growth in 2017.

The Way Leads On