Becoming, Awake

Sermon

Thank you for this invitation to speak in this storied pulpit.

I come from a tradition of storytellers, and one story I often heard was about the man who would only look for his lost keys under the glow of a street lamp! That story was always held moral sway over my life. In fact, one of the reasons I’ve always found myself at home in UU communities is because I feel like it is a group of people whose natural inclination is look outside the norm. So, this morning I feel like I am visiting cousins, aunts and uncles.

Thank you for your warm hospitality and words of welcome.

I'm also fortunate to have what I call "friends of the heart" who have chosen to be here with me and us in this community. Some have come from as close as D.C. – and others as far as New Jersey, even New Zealand. I know my parents are not paying you enough to be this supportive…but, I love you anyway!….

This morning's reading is from a story that is sketched into our national memory. A passage from the Velveteen Rabbit:

READING:
"What is real? Asked the Rabbit of the Skin Horse one day.

"Real isn’t how you are made,” said the Skin Horse. When a child loves you for a long, long time, not just to play with, but REALLY loves you, then you become Real.

"Does it hurt" asked the Rabbit?
"Sometimes", said the Skin Horse, for he was always truthful.
Becoming Real doesn’t happen all at once. You become. It takes a long time.

That’s why it doesn't often happen to people who break easily, or have sharp edges, or who have to be carefully kept.

Generally, by the time you are real, most of your hair has been loved off, and your eyes drop out and you get loose in the joints and very shabby. But these things don't matter at all, because once you are Real, you can’t be ugly, except to people who don't understand."

PAUSE. Drink water?

Sing: spirit of life (whimsically).

Spirit of life, come unto me
Sing in my heart, all the stirring of compassion.
Blow in the wind, rise in the sea
Move in my hand, give my life the shape of justice.
Roots hold me close,
Wings set me free.
Spirit of life come to me, come to me.

One of the simple pleasures I often give to myself is the gift of seeing a movie at 4:00 on a weekday afternoon. There's something a bit scandalous about that kind of activity, especially for a working adult!

As a way to justify this sort of behavior, I often convince myself that breaking up the day in this sort of way gives me an opportunity to freshen my mind, or to place an island in the midst of a river of tasks, and errands, and projects, and people who command my attention.

So a mid-day movie, for me, is an opportunity to escape the facts of my life that I can't change. Now, as a UU, this provides a particular kind of challenge, for it is one of the few times when we say to another person, "I’ve got no need to be in charge, take me where you will!" Now, mind you, we get back into the drivers seat as soon as the movie ends – we debate, criticize performances, discuss the pros and cons of the music or how the movie ended. But, that's another story. The point I'm trying to make is, during movies, if only for a few hours, we give ourselves permission for a director to take us into a fantasy world. We put on the skin of another person, or we tuck ourselves into the folds of another era. Movies allow us to check into someone's life with the ease of checking into a hotel. If only in the most shallow of ways, we become some-thing, some-one we are not.

For example, this summer I found myself wrapped up in the antics of a 10-year-old girl and her family in the film, Little Miss Sunshine. Likewise, I checked into the catacombs of Truman Capote's head, and Al Gore's environmental project, and paid witness to Superman's return to planet earth through the amazing wonder of IMAX theater.

During each of these arts-based experiences, I found that my imagination was awakened. I found myself thinking about life experiences in different ways. I discovered that I was meeting myself in ways that sometimes surprised me.

Today, particularly as we transition from the familiarity of these past and glorious summer months, I thought it would be interesting and useful to think about how to make BOTH our selves – and our communities – congruent with in the words of our favorite hymns, where "justice shall roll down like waters, and peace like an ever flowing stream."

What I want to consider is how we, a justice-oriented spiritual community might go about building a land that is full of possibilities. A world where the goal is not to protect what is familiar, but to become. To become awake to who / we / are / not yet. [repeat]

As I began working my way through this issue, I became mindful that expanding how we think about our selves – how we think about our life experiences – requires us to get VERY comfortable with the idea of change, and that's something we as human beings tend to not like doing. It requires that we consider framing things that are UNfamiliar or "different" not as a something that we put up with, but as something we relish, and becomes a natural way in which we live-in-the-world.

Our great American cultural critic James Baldwin once said, "not everything that is faced can be changed, but nothing can be changed until it is faced." So, maybe we should start this exploration by thinking about what does it mean to organize our lives so that when we see a forest, we get curious about what we’ll find inside the woods, as opposed to being frightened by the unknown that lives inside.

As you well know, my friends, this is hard work.

For example, I teach at George Mason University – Go Patriots! – and, as most of the WORLD now knows, we became known as the "Giant Slayers of College Hoops" when we worked – and some say weaseled – our way into the NCAA Final Four National Basketball tournament this past spring. While it was an amazing ride for our community, the UU in me often found myself asking the question: why is this underdog story so fascinating and warming to our national hearts? After all, if we really believe that everyone who works hard, has a good spirit, and puts forth the effort has an equal chance… Well, why was Cinderella ride so captivating? Our Public Relations office has figured out that we received $80 million dollars in free advertising for the university because this rag-a-muffin, team of short but impassioned ball players did not realize that they were misfits in the world of college hoops. I would say that our team didn't believe the hype from Basketball Royalty that they did not belong in the NCAA Final Four Championship.

What is it about these stores of winning against the odds that makes us get all weepy and emotional when we crown a new American Idol, or when a disabled athlete wins an Olympic Medal, or when Superman saves planet Earth?

So,. it seems to me the first step might be to give ourselves permission to re-vision what it means to be successful given the national myths that organize our lives. What does success look like? Who and how do we decide what gets valued? And, what happens when different people give different answers to that question?

For example, I'm sure I’m not the only one here who has ever wondered about the underbelly of the term, "over-achiever." As a society, we often throw out this phrase for someone who has the NERVE to do something that was not expected of that person. Maybe that's just the qualities and gifts that that person holds? Who set the mysterious bar for what it means to achieve normally or to overachieve? And, why are we surprised when the spirit inside each of does what "spirit" does: free us to become something we did not think ourselves capable of becoming?

To my mind, the stories we tell ourselves as a society and, thus, what we tend to uncritically think about ourselves can become massive roadblocks to becoming our best and fullest selves.

And, as a person who is always concerned about what it means to walk a spiritual path that is guided by justice and fairness, I have to wonder what this means for us as a spiritual community, a community that tries to build an inclusive Welcoming Table right here on earth?

I think about what this looks like in my own life.

As a child growing up in Oklahoma City, Oklahoma, my parents – who came of age during the later years of the Great Depression – were pretty clear that my African American heritage would be a stumbling block for the White world, so they taught me the skills and habits of heart to overcome the boundaries others wanted to place around me. They wanted me to see the world in an expansive way, .as a place where anything was possible. And, though there have often been times when I have to assert myself, I have to say that their wisdom seems, well, pretty wise.

But, there is another perspective that needs to be considered. It's a pretty rare occasion when I am around a group of people – especially in UU circles – who do not have college degrees, or health insurance, or the ability to make decisions with a sense of confidence that their dreams can come true. Yet, a recent edition of The Journal of Blacks in Higher Education reported at the close of last year that "it will be a century or more before the percentage of Blacks with Ph.D.s would mirror the percentage of blacks the American work force."

So, for me – and us – it gets personal. The question for me becomes, what happened in my life? And, even more important, what does it take for my story to not be so unusual? What's is it that in the air about our expectations about ourselves and others that needs to be addressed and corrected?

How can we create communities of care where we are aware of the differences that make us special, but at the same time, we refuse stereotypes and oppressive labels that don't enable us to become who and what we can be.

I think, too, of this morning's reading of the conversation between the rabbit and the Skin Horse. I hear in this conversation a lot of wisdom. The Skin Horse says:

"It doesn’t happen all at once. You become. It takes a long time. That's why it doesn’t often happen to people who break easily, or have sharp edges, or who have to be carefully kept. Generally, by the time you are real, most of your hair has been loved off [that explains why I’m bald, I guess!], and your eyes drop out and you get loose in the joints and very shabby. But these things don't matter at all, because once you are Real, you can't be ugly, except to people who don't understand."

I do have to say, that this is not the most attractive argument for convincing people that change is a good thing. Can you imagine the Hair Club for Men using the Velveteen Rabbit as a marketing ploy!? I think not!

But, the wisdom of the Skin Horse comes through loudly. There is something important about being honest with ourselves if we hope to create real relationships of integrity with each other. There is something about doing hard work over a long period of time. And, there seems to be something about the kinds of people who can still stand strong at the end of such a struggle…. "it doesn’t often happen to people who break easily, or have sharp edges, or who have to be carefully kept."

You know, as a child I often thought of my mother as Nurse Ratchet. But, as an adult, I've had to re-think that assumption. As a professional woman of color – who could turn out a PTA meeting or unbraid a department store clerk who refused her equal service – there was an important lesson she was teaching me about what it meant to organize my life in order to become who I was not yet. She was teaching me to be conscious of the false boundaries that were being set around me. She was teaching me to speak my truth to power. She was teaching me about having the faith to put my ideas and my heart into action. She was teaching me the ideology or respect, even when I was not being respected. She was teaching me that the greatest of all things is love.

Like the Skin Horse, she was teaching me, that, at the end of the day, it doesn't matter. Once you are real, you can't be ugly. Which is to say, once you are honest and true with yourself, it's your character that matters most. Everything else is, well, simply marketing for The Hair Club for Men.

As you have probably realized, story-telling is very important to me. The author Tom Spanbauer says "the only thing that keeps us from floating off with the wind is our stories. They give us a name and put us in a place. [Stories] allow us to keep on touching."

So, I find myself wondering what kind of stories we tell within our Unitarian Universalist Faith? How do we prepare ourselves as a community to be honest with others who we may not know. How do we prepare ourselves to meet the stranger within our own being, of being open to surprises – some of which may be unwelcomed – about our very selves?

Well, you're going to have a chance to consider that first-hand sometime over the year. As Megan Foley noted last month in her review of the General Assembly of all UU churches this summer, every UU congregation is asked to create one event this coming year that looks at how it welcomes the stranger at its gate, with a special emphasis on issues of socioeconomic class, race, and ethnicity.

This is a huge challenge for our denomination. When you look at the demographics – not only of UU churches, but churches across the United States – fewer than 6% of them are actually multi-racial, which translates as 20% of the congregation being of different ethnic/racial groups. In many of these situations, the mix is not because of intentionality, but because one community is "moving out of the neighborhood" and another group is moving in. The congregation is mixed only because of gentrification or urbanization. Martin Luther King famously remarked, almost 40 years ago, that the most segregated hour in America is on Sunday mornings. That's still true today.

So, how does an institution like a religious community think of itself as promoting practices and conditions that allow us to get comfortable with the different racial patters that control our lives? How does a church become what it is not yet?

Again, this is extraordinarily difficult work.

In addition to watching great movies this summer, I've been doing a lot of reading. Of particular note is a book called, Blink by Malcolm Gladwell. You might have read his first book, The Tipping Point. Well, here, Malcolm provides more insight into how the sociology of our interactions impact human relationships.

In a nutshell, Malcolm observes that in the "blink of an eye," we know things subconsciously that we often discount. An example from the Art World might be the famous painting of a pipe, and the caption says, "this is not a pipe." Well, each of us has seen pipes all our lives, when we see a pipe, we say, "that’s a pipe."

Gladwell asks the question: what happens when what we see and think is real, but, upon introspection of our assumptions, turn out to misinformed?

A horrible example from our recent past is the incident in New York City when a group of nervous police officers were called to a neighborhood where a crime was suspected of taking place. Roaming the streets with lights flashing, another nervous person – who had heard that cops in NYC were not friendly to immigrants – tired to avoid trouble by running into his apartment building. The cops misread his flight as that of a guilty man. One of the four cops on the scene thought he heard another cop say the fleeting man had a gun that had been fired. The rest is history: the unarmed African immigrant was shot 58 times.

Yes, the African Immigrant was killed with real bullets, yet, as Malcolm Gladwell and countless other people will attest, there are other types of bullets that kill. Legal Scholar Patricia Williams calls this a kind of "spirit murder." We shoot these kinds of bullets at each other all the time. Sometimes they kill the spirit of our gender, or the social class in which we were raised, our sexual orientation…unfortunately, the list can go on and on.

Yet, there is hope, but it's a tough kind of hope. There is new line of research that is emerging from scientists and social scientists who study the brain. Having done a pretty good job of charting out how the brain creates webs of meaning that we call upon every moment of our lives, they have also begun to explore how we re-wire our brains to think and act in new, justice-minded ways.

For example, one scientists argues that for every time we have a negative encounter with bias and prejudice, it takes SEVEN positive experiences to counteract that one negative experience.

Think about your own life, and how difficult it is to overcome harmful words or experiences.

Allow me a quick example. This past week, at the opening luncheon for faculty, I offered to my colleagues at the table that I would bring back a glass of tea for each of them when I went to the buffet table. Hey, I'm a nice guy! At any rate, as I filled up three glasses, a White person – whom I'd never seen before – just assumed that I was part of the wait staff , and without asking for permission, literally started picking up glasses for himself. Well, I politely said, "excuse me, but I'm filling these glasses for my colleagues. Would you like for me to fill one for you?" He, realized that this was a "blink" moment, and said, "I’m glad you have a sense of humor about these things." He smiled and walked away.

Well, according to the social scientist, it will take SEVEN positive experiences with white people for me to not immediately jump to the conclusion that I am servant-boy every time I have a service-based encounter with a white person.

The same holds true for whites as well. I am still amazed that in 2006 I have 30- and 40-year-old graduate students who tell me, "Mark, you're the first African American person I have ever had as an instructor. Thank you." I have no idea what they are thanking me for, but such comments make me hope-filled that my positive experience with them will reverse socializations that suggest that persons of color are somehow deficient.

So what do we do with all of this? How can this spiritual community grapple with creating policies and practices that allow us to experience seven positive experiences that lessen the killing of our spirit?

When I return to my own narrative – my life story – I found places where my potential to "become who I am not yet" was in full measure. Even though schools, and churches, and places of work were not perfect, there were a variety of people and practices that said to me, in one way or another, that you're welcome here. This is a place where we will see you for who you are, and ALSO provide room for who you will become.

And, at the same time, these places seemed to gather Skin Horse wisdom and realize that, hello, we'll NEVER be perfect, but we have to try, to sit patiently with our mis-steps and disappointments – with our ugliness – and not be too afraid of breaking.

A couple of weeks ago I spent an afternoon swimming with a group of friends, one of which was a four-year old boy who was still smarting from an accident that required stitches. As he was talking about the ordeal, he offered an amazing bit of wisdom. One friend asked if the accident hurt, and the little boy said, "well, if you cry when you get hurt, then you know you’re alive." Out of the mouth of babes! Well, yes, if you're crying you know that you're not dead, and for a four-year-old, that's something that makes sense in his mind.

At first glace, I just chuckled at the earnestness of his tender voice. Then, I took a second thought. How true that is: it is often only when experience something that jars us into a new reality that we stop and pay attention.
The same must be true in our communities of care and relationship. As individuals and as a spiritual community, we must find ways to be open to experience we don't – and sometimes can’t understand. We must strive to meet strangeness with a sense of curiosity, even awe.

This requires, my friends, the ability to live with our eyes wide open. It requires that the ears of our ears open to hear in new ways. It requires that the eyes of our eyes become wide awake to both ourselves, and those in our midst. Like the wise Skin Horse from the Velveteen Rabbit, we know that we will grow weary. Our hair may fall out, our eyes will droop, but, at the end of the day, each of us will know that we are real.

Each of will know what matters.

So may it be. Amen.