You Can't Say You Can't Play

Sermon

Map Reading Skills
Barbara Brown Taylor, Christian Century, March 21-28, 2001

Two friends who were men, were driving to a retreat center in Bangor, Pennsylvania. They had rented a car with a global positioning system to help them navigate. From the Philadelphia airport to the retreat center's driveway, they were under the watchful eye of a satellite that tracked their every move.

The "Never Lost" computer screen was mounted between the front seats of the car. When the men turned it on, they followed the directions on the menu, first typing in their destination and then choosing, among other options, the "most expressways" method of getting there. Once done, a pleasant female voice announced, "Calculating route." Then they heard a "bong" that sounded similar to that of an elevator door closing. A street grid of Philadelphia appeared on the screen and the voice said, "Turn left out of the parking lot."

The men reported that for the next 3 hours they did whatever the pleasant woman told them to do. At one point, they made a wrong turn into a shopping center parking lot. "Return to designated route," the voice said. While they looked for a place to turn around, the elevator doors sounded repeatedly, "bong, bong, bong. Return to designated route," the voice insisted until they did. While they were embarrassed to have goofed, they were also relieved to discover that they truly could not get lost.

As they neared the retreat center, the voice alerted them, "Approaching left turn nine miles." She repeated the alert every mile, but when she said, "Approaching left turn .5 miles," the exit was clearly visible on the right side. "There’s our exit!" the passenger cried. "But she says its on the left!" the driver replied, caught in the grips of an existential crisis. Should he trust the voice that spoke to him from the eye in the sky, or should he believe his own eyes? The solid concrete wall on his left convinced him to risk autonomy. He swerved across two empty lanes and squeaked onto the exit ramp.

Both driver and passenger braced themselves for the bongs, but they never came. As it turns out they had exited off a 360 degree cloverleaf and were now turning in the direction the voice had told them to. The satellite had simply overlooked the exit ramp. Quite by accident, the men had lived out a parable about practicing faith in a postmodern age.

She continues.......................................................................

To belong to a religion is to receive a vision of the world that is embedded in sacred stories about how to get around in such a world. These narrative maps constitute a moral positioning system, as they link human life on earth to the [metaphorical] "eye in the sky."

In Christianity they call these maps scripture and tradition. Reason is our map-reading skill, but because we are busy people and studying the maps take time, plenty of us have been happy to subscribe to "Never Lost" systems that will read the maps for us. All we have to do is follow the instructions of those who have volunteered to show us the way, turning wherever they tell us to turn. Eventually, we trust, we will reach our destination.

But then one day the voice says, "approaching left turn" while the exit is clearly visible on the right, and we do not know what to do. Do we trust the interpreter or do we trust our own eyes? Some of us pull over to consult the maps for ourselves, and are stunned by what we find in the glove compartment. In some cases, we may have different versions of the same map. Other maps have been revised so many times that the vellum has holes in it, and parts of them are so old that we cannot unfold them without destroying them. In one postmodern moment, our faith in the positioning system fails. Meanwhile, there is a real road ahead with at least two ways to turn. What's a traveler to do?

Some still hang on to the ancient Christian maps, although the world encountered today (seems) far more complicated… Most of the mountains are still there, but some of the vast green patches are deserts now, and there are new roads all over the place. Some of them connect to Bethlehem to Mecca or Bodh Gaya. Others lead to towns called Darwin and Los Alamos. Since these roads are not on any of the old maps, my religious community is divided about whether they should be traveled. Some members have posted signs that warn "Beware here lie dragons" while others have formed explorer clubs.

...........................................................................
I like to explore, only I know that I really can get lost. The maps have backtracks, dead ends and loop the loops all over them. This is why it took people a long time to find the Promised Land, even with God in the lead.

The reading ends.

Sermon:
Good morning.

Thank you for the invitation to preach here and thank you Anita for helping me feel comfortable doing so.

It is quite fitting that this is the only other Unitarian Universalist church I have visited on a Sunday morning since moving here 5 years ago. That this church was the last Universalist extension effort, while All Souls the first Unitarian one, at least in this area, completes a circle of sorts and I like that.

Washington D.C., in its early years was sometimes referred to as "the city of magnificent distances" though Charles Dickens wrote that it might more appropriately be named "the City of Magnificent Intentions." I am unsure of the magnificent distance reference, as the Beltway had not yet been imagined, but I can attest that it is indeed a city full of unrealized possibility.

Even more so, I find, our churches are practically brimming with the same. Not an expert in our history, but a student nonetheless – we have been at this place before and have let it pass by. This time it can be different.

In 1819, Channing delivered the sermon in Baltimore which was to spark a fire in our tradition. Shortly thereafter, a group of men met to establish a Unitarian church in the nation's capital and held their first public worship. The next month, a resolution, to "erect a place of divine worship upon Unitarian principles in the City of Washington" was proposed by William Greenleaf Eliot. A year and some months later, the First Unitarian Church, Washington, D.C., changing its name later to All Souls, was formally organized. At the time of its founding, William Greenleaf Eliot’s son, also so named, was 15 years old. He grew up to be the founding minister of the First Unitarian church of St. Louis, my home church, another one of those circles I like, and the founder of Washington University. But more than this, Like his parents before him, he was a religious humanitarian and an activist – prophetically acting if not preaching from his pulpit in St. Louis to grow up a city that was fairer to it’s marginalized citizens because of his presence. And in so doing helped build a good city for everyone.

A succession of efforts, both Unitarian and Universalist since then has brought us to this moment. Again. We were here before – in the 1820s and again in the 1950s. At the beginning of the 21st century, history and context have provided us another opportunity but only if we become who as a religious faith tradition we are meant to be.

Unitarian Universalism has often been called a movement and it's not a description I am personally fond of. It sounds too secular, as if we are embarrassed by our religious center – by religious words such as faith and tradition. I know it is meant to indicate our affinity for progress and change and well, movement. But still, we are a religious community and when we act like one, inspired by religious ideas, we come closer to who we really are.

Just as Barbara Taylor Bradford pointed out in this mornings reading when referring to that sheaf of maps in our glove compartments that most of us have by now thrown out, Amitai Etzioni in his book, The Spirit of Community, points out, that we have done away with old forms, connections, rules, traditions, but have put nothing much in their place. He writes, "moral transitions often work this way: deconstruction comes quickly. A vacuum prevails. Reconstruction is slow. This is where we are now: it is time to reconstruct."

The term "You Can’t Say You Can’t Play" is from the beautiful book by educator Vivian Gussin Paley, and a MacArthur "Genius" Award winner, about her attempt to institute such a rule at a small private school where she was the headmistress. Being told you can't play or being invited to play is at the center of a child's relationship to school and the single more important factor in their qualitative relationship to learning. The words of rejection are familiar: You can't play; don't sit by me; stop following us; I don't want you for a partner; go away. As adults, these are socially unacceptable directives, at times we hold in one hand our aversion to such behavior while in the other we participate in practices which achieve the same effect. Why do children say it and why as adults do we let them?

The book chronicles her decision, after illuminating group discussions with all the children about whether the rule should become. Few are enthusiastic though all eagerly share instances of their hurt and sadness when they have been excluded. There are children who sheepishly support the rule, but almost to a one, they are the children who are routinely excluded over and over and over again. The children who exhibit the greatest propensity and skill inusing their personal power adamantly reject the new rule. The vast majority are unconvinced that it could possibly work.

One particularly poignant conversation is between Paley and a 5th grade boy who says, "In your whole life you are not going to go through life never being excluded. So you may as well learn it now. Kids are going to get into the habit of thinking they are not going to to be excluded so much and it isn’t true." Paley replies, that "maybe our classrooms can be nicer than the outside rule." I would have pointed out that at the very least he will learn how not to exlude and maybe that's worth something more.

I remember thinking, after reading this book only a few years ago, well – there you have it – the reason we have still not yet made it to the Promised land. We still say: You can't work here. You can't play live here. You can't play here. We say it to women. We say it to people of color. We say to the differently abled. We say it to the poor. We say it to gay people. We say it to the Iranian and the Jew. We say to the ill. We say to the Christian. We say it to the conservative.

Children tell the story of exclusion because they are learning about power and how it works – I understand this. As a parent this was one of my most difficult parenting conundrums and I am not sure I ever got it right. And I do this for a living!

That said, I am with Paley – there are limits to forced associations. She tells one child, "It isn't a matter of punishing someone, it's more a case of protecting someone." And the trying counts for a lot.

Alan Bloom pointed out to us that we have a "democratic personality" whose only absolute is freedom and whose primary value is equality and it faces a tension with the idea of natural difference. In a democracy it is particularly painful to confront intrinsic differences in cultures, in abilities, in views, in possibilities.

However, in an article titled "Why Boys Don’t Play with Dolls," Katha Pollitt counters that "theories of innate differences let us all of the hook allowing us to take the path of least resistance to the dominant culture …But the thing that theories do most of all is tell adults that the adult world plays pretty much by the same old rules and its right to do so… Kids aren’t born religious, polite or kind or able to remember where they put their sneakers. Inculcating these behaviors and the values behind them is a tremendous amount of work involving all of us." Or as Wordsworth’s epic poem reminds us, "What we have loved, others will love; and we will teach them how."

What stories do you love? Those stories would be, I am guessing, one of the reasons you attend this church versus another and it is these stories that define who we are – and who we can become and I bet they are surprisingly similar.

The stories I love are those about our national beginnings, even knowing that the persons involved lived contradictory lives from what they were creating.

I humbly receive the narrative of that first thanksgiving, with a small "t" even knowing that 50 years later the children of the Pilgrims brutally turned to the children of the first guests and said,"this land is my land" NOW. You can't play anymore. Go away." The truth is that the idea of Native Americans and Pilgrims celebrating together is an overwhelmingly powerful narrative precisely because the two were strangers. If the story had been about one settlement helping another, I suspect if would not have endured. The narrative we have chosen to keep telling reminds us that anything is possible. This is the purpose of narratives. To help us make dreams come true. The narrative that all men are created equal which is an adult version of "you can’t say" has inspired thousands of men and women in this country and elsewhere.

More importantly for us as Unitarian Universalists, these particular narratives that both celebrate and teach that everyone is allowed to play, is who we are as a faith tradition. The Unitarian Universalist map is full of roads that have been traveled to the place where everyone can play. The names of the roads are: Harpers Ferry, Viola Lizzou, Transylvania, Theodore Parker, Susan B. Anthony, James Reeb, Olympia Brown, you own Sammy Schnetzler, the Coffins, Grubbs, and Hedins, Doris Berg and King John Sigsmund, Margaret Fuller, A. Powell Davies, and on and on. The roads stop at places called abolition, religious rights, civil rights, women's rights, gay and lesbian rights, sexuality education and more. Each of these places are who we are and who as a faith tradition we can yet become – these places are a blend of love, faith and reason.

What is the cost of us of not teaching a new narrative to our children? I think the cost is Iraq and Bosnia, the Middle East and certainly Darfur. But there remain, as Bradford tells us, plenty of old mountains left too. Closer to home, the cost is our distrust in each other around our inclusion or exclusion of Christian concepts, language and practices or even our more recent dustups over governance. The biggest expense, I believe though, is living our lives with the vague unease that we are not doing enough because we don't know what to do.

An ancient Zen story tells of the master who poured tea into a student's cup long after it was already filled, to demonstrate that learning requires some emptiness. Unless there is an emptiness, sometimes called yearning, no learning is likely to occur. Emptiness – am I alone in almost not knowing what this feels like any longer?

Yanklevoich Partners, the polling firm occasionally asks Americans how many think life has become too complicated twenty years ago, just over half said yes. Ten years ago, that proportion had climbed to 73 percent. I can't imagine what it might be now. It is an interesting statistic and I sometimes wonder what those who lived in the early to mid-century answered, having fought two World Wars and an economic depression? Our boomer complications, too much of everything, money, opportunity and choice, seem to me minor by comparison. But perhaps many in this 73 percent figured our inability to eradicate racism and gender inequality or narrow the growing poverty gap in their complications. Perhaps they too considered Los Alamos. Maybe even then the Middle East.

In 1998 professional people worked an average of 52.3 hours/week which no doubt is just catching up to blue collar workers who may now even be working longer than this. When we are too busy , we are more vulnerable to the excesses of the culture and we are tempted to heed those signs that warn "Beyond here lie dragons." Sometimes we are just too tired to fight them. Cultivating emptiness indeed.

I wish it was enough to model goodness. But it isn't. We need to become mindful of where the signs are posted that read GO AWAY. We have to we make time to tell the new story and back it up with explanation and conversation, over and over. All of us. I fail at this almost every day but lately, at least, I am beginning to see the signs where I missed them before. This is something.

Forrest Church reminds us that the "question is one of growth. He offers, for instance, that he has no aptitude for being gay. What he does have though is an aptitude for growing beyond the human territory into which he was born. He says, "I can visit other human lands, awaken the beauty of difference, rejoice in dissimilarity, become more secure in my own distinctiveness and less threatened by the distinctiveness of others. Our challenge is to love those who are different and learn from them. What matters is how we move from who we are to who we might become" or as Einstein said, "the purpose of life is to become."

Let this be our “purpose driven life." Not to quibble about that book or philosophy, but it will take something like that. But so did abolition and civil rights.

In a NYT obituary written in 1997 for Dean Kelley, Methodist minister and a defender of the rights of people of all faiths, it was recounted that he said hat "strictness and discipline were what attracted large numbers of peoples to churches, especially conservative ones. He noted with regret that he could find no evidence of a thriving, high demand religious movement devoted to justice, freedom, beauty and respect for others."

Let us become that religious movement.

We can. I dare say, with the news so bleak, with the stories replete with values and practices remaining to be constructed for our postmodern time, we have the narrative that can lead our children to the Promised Land. Yes, others make the same claim. We have made the same claim before. But with a radical recommitment to the old idea of "you can't say you can't play" and all of its required behavior changes, we can "become a thriving high demand religious movement devoted to justice, freedom, beauty and respect for others."

Amen.

To help us get there I recommend we develop a specially branded UUGPS, which isn’t an eye in the sky but a vein running rich between head and heart, helping to chart our voyage which will probably be similar to the journey described by the modern Greek poet Constanine Cavavis’ in his poem Ithaca:

When you start on your journey to Ithaca,
Then pray that the road is long,
Full of adventure, full of knowledge.
Do not fear the Lestrygonians
And the Cyclopes and the angry Poseidon.
You will never meet these on your path,
if your thoughts remain lofty, if a fine
emotion touches your body and your spirit.
You will never meet the Lestrygonians,
the Cyclopes and the fierce Poseidon,
if you do not carry them within your soul,
if your soul does not raise them up before you.

Then pray that the road is long.
That the summer mornings are many,
That you will enter ports seen for the first time with such pleasure, with such joy!
Stop at Phoenician markets,
And purchase fine merchandise,
mother-of-pearl and corals, amber and ebony,
and pleasurable perfumes of all kinds,
buy as many pleasurable perfumes as you can;
visit hosts of Egyptian cities,
to learn and learn from those who have knowledge.

Always keep Ithaca fixed in your mind.
To arrive there is your ultimate goal.
But do not hurry the voyage at all.
It is better to let it last for long years;
And even to anchor at the isle when you are old,
rich with all that your have gained on the way,
Not expecting that Ithaca will offer you riches.

Ithaca has given you the beautiful voyage.
Without her you would never taken the road.
But she has nothing more to give you.

And if you find her poor, Ithaca has not defrauded you.
With the great wisdom you gained, with so much experience,
You must surely have understood by then what Ithacas mean.

Amen.