“Hope Never Ever Trickles Down”
A Sermon for the West Seattle Unitarian Universalist Fellowship
March 5, 2006
Rev. Peg Boyle Morgan
PRAYER
"The Cure of Troy" Seamus Heaney
Human beings suffer.
They torture one another.
They get hurt, and get hard.
No poem or play or song
Can fully right a wrong
Inflicted and endured.
The innocent in gaols
Beat on their bars together.
A hunger-striker's father
Stands in the graveyard dumb.
The police widow in veils
Faints at the funeral home.
History says, Don't hope
On this side of the grave.
But then, once in a lifetime,
The longed-for tidal wave
Of justice can rise up,
And hope and history rhyme.
So hope for a great sea-change
On the far side of revenge.
Believe that a further shore
Is reachable from here.
Believe in miracles
And cures and healing wells.
Call miracle self-healing:
The utter, self-revealing
Double-take of feeling.
If there's fire on the mountain
Or lightening and storm
And a god speaks from the sky
That means someone is hearing
The outcry and birth cry
Of new life at its term.
It means that once in a lifetime
That justice can rise up,
And hope and history rhyme.
Gracious Spirit of creation
Dear God.
Be with us in these troubled times.
The way is often hard.
Our fears are too much with us.
The path to justice is never clear,
And the stakes are very high.
Help us find that ground of love
Which can support and nurture us.
Help us find that ground
On which we can stand
To help make hope and history rhyme.
Help us to know
That while we are the only ones,
We are not alone.
Amen.
SERMON
Will D. Campbell, is a minister and was the chaplain at the University of Mississippi during the tumultuous years of the 1950’s. In his later years he has become a writer of what he terms “rare” books, but he hastens to add: that means “rarely bought.” And he is the minister that the character Rev. Will B. Dunn of the comic Kudzu was fashioned after, with his black pilgrim hat and his crocked cane. Are you familiar with Kudzu and Will B. Dunn? The comic strip used to be on the Seattle PI comics page. A book of Kudzu comics sits on my coffee table, because I love laughing at minister jokes, --maybe it’s a way to take myself a little less seriously. Like the series where Rev. Will B. Dunn is playing on his church’s basketball team in a tournament against other churches of varying denominations. They’d just played and won against a conservative Christian church’s team and he’s walking away chatting with a teammate: “[what a game!] We really hammered First Fundamentalist. I totally shut down their hot-shot point guard, held him scoreless.” And his friend says: “You were really talking … [to him out there on the court] What were you saying?” “Oh, nothing much” Rev. Dunn says, “Just that he’d burn in hell if he scored on me!” Nothing like using someone else’s theology to your advantage.
But my favorite reminds me of conversations here in the Fellowship about what religious words are acceptable. Rev. Will B. Dunn is receiving feedback from a parishioner, who tells him he doesn’t like the word “sinners.” Rev. Dunn replies, “let me get this straight—the word “sinners” is spiritually incorrect? “You got it!” his parishioner replies. “People of foibles is more sensitive, supportive and nurturing!” “I see” said Rev. Dunn.
“People of foibles, repent!”
To which the parishioner replies: “repent” is too harsh—how about “reflect, reconsider, take a look at”?
Or perhaps “check it out?” Rev. Dunn replies a little sarcastically.
People of foibles, check it out!
Well, back to the real minister, Rev. Campbell--he was interviewed by Studs Terkel, for his latest book on the subject of hope. In that interview he shared the story of being on a trip in Jackson, Mississippi. The day was September 11, 2001. He went down into the hotel lobby. He tells the story this way:
“The lobby was just filled with people, and everyone was glued to the television. I saw this little girl pulling on her mother’s skirt, and her mother was just hysterical watching the television. The little girl kept saying ‘What’d we do?’
A little child, when they’re punished, they know they’ve done something bad. ‘What’d we do?’ I thought, That may be the most profound question, the question no politician in this country has tried to answer. The only thing they say is, ‘what are we going to do about it?’ The little girl was asking the right question.”
And Rev. Campbell continues his reflection:
We’ve done a lot. The thousands of people who die every day from starvation. I’m not saying that we as a nation caused it, but we as a rich nation could, by God, have prevented a great deal of it, and still can. And our policies in the Near East, for God’s sake…I don’t know what the answer is …, but I know goddamn well the answer is not to go over there and bomb the hell out of Baghdad.
And then he returns to his memory of the little girl and says:
…I can say I found hope in the little girl’s question. That this little four-year-old was asking the elders, ‘What did we do?’ Hopefully the mother had to think about that when she went back home, around her own hearth with her family, and said, “Little Katie asked a good question: What did we do?’
We have done a lot, both life enhancing and life detracting; on the latter we need only turn on the news to hear the things our country has done in the name of promoting democracy and exporting freedom. These days it feels to me that a vice grip is tightening around us, squeezing to death remnants of our country’s international prestige, eliminating our civil and religious freedoms, bankrupting our federal treasury and decimating our social service safety nets. One wonders whether having hope for getting out of this political and social mess is a deluded fantasy. Maybe this time it has gone too far. Maybe hope is a dirty trick at the bottom of Pandora’s box.
And then Emily Dickinson comes along speaking of hope in her famous poem:
“Hope” is the thing with feathers—
That perches in the soul—
And sings the tune without the words—
And never stops—at all—
And sweetest—in the Gale – is heard
And sore must be the storm
That could abash the little Bird—
That kept so many warm.
And sings the tune without the words—indeed, hope is not something that is based on words, hope is not found in logical thinking that could assure us we will meet our desired outcome. Hope has nothing to do with quantifiable estimates of positive and negative possibilities. Hope is not grounded in assurances and formulas or the chance throw of dice.
Hope is based in meaning, found in the ideals that we base our lives on. It is “perched in our soul”-- that place within us where we experience what is most meaningful to us. Indeed, as idealists wanting to bring about a whole new order of peace and justice on our planet earth, our justice work is the embodiment--the physical manifestation of our hope. Through our actions we become hope. Hope isn’t for wimps. Wimps see the certain trend lines that predict defeat, and they jump ship into despair or apathy, not wanting to be on a losing side. No, hope is for the strong hearted, who are not deterred by what is going wrong because who they are calls them to continue working to bring about the best that they and the world can be. Rather than having our lives guided by the fluctuating feelings of confidence and defeat that we experience from day to day as our causes take a giant step forward and then two other steps back or sideways, the strong hearted among us will stay the course--guided by our values and by a vision we are committed to.
And what hope offers is the belief that different futures are possible. In this way, hope becomes a subversive force, and we who embody hope become subversive, pluralizing politics by organizing our dissent against the status quo, publicizing our ideals and our specific demands so that others catch wind of our ideals and energy and can climb on board.
As the very first words of his book on hope: Stud Terkel said “Hope has never trickled down. It has always sprung up.” It springs up from the growing energy of more and more people communicating and collaborating towards a common goal. In the book: A History of Hope: When Americans Have Dared to Dream of a Better Future, author James Fraser chronicles a long list of moments in our country’s history when people have embodied hope despite long odds: the Revolution of 1776, the anti-slavery movement, the suffrage movement, labor organizing, Vietnam protests, civil and cultural rights and equity for all, and now the movement we see excitingly unfolding before our eyes-- civil rights for gay and lesbian people.
All of these movements began as grassroots movements, a few people with a vision, talking to each other, gaining strength and momentum from their association. Someday, but not in my lifetime, I envision the source of hope for peace and justice to come from our highest elected officials, like it did for the Czech Republic with their elected President Vaclav Havel. That country had the wisdom to elect a poor playwright who was articulate and committed about civil rights. (My sermon on Havel is on our web site). And Costa Rica just elected a Nobel Peace Prize recipient as their President. Until such time as this country has the wisdom to do likewise, and the consciousness such wisdom requires, --until such time, I look to three sources of hope, none of which trickle down from the top, all springing up from the people:
First source of hope: people coming together to share their stories, to express their yearnings, and to decide how to unite as one in the political arena. —and-- like the little girl on September 11th—people asking hard questions and directing them to our elected officials. I know that the other Washington seems very far away, and that at times we may slump with the thought that just any one of us can’t make a difference with these big problems—each one of us just a drop in the bucket, but as the author of Diet For a Small Planet Frances More Lappe says, being a drop in the bucket is powerful—as long as you believe in the bucket. You have to know that the bucket is there, and if you do, then you know that as long as you join with lots of other drops in the bucket, pretty soon the bucket is full. So my first source of hope is groups of people who gather together, and collaborations of groups of people like the West Seattle Neighbors for Peace.
Second source of hope: The instability of injustice. I believe injustice is brought about by selfishness, and that history shows that injustice only lasts so long, before more and more people rise up and take their society in a new direction. While we each have within us the capacity and experience of being selfish and destructive to others, a stronger capacity, seemingly a redeeming tendency of our analytical and spiritual abilities is to act in cooperative and compassionate ways. And this is hard wired. Just this week some new research was reported by a reputable German group, that showed how toddlers are naturally inclined to be helpful to others, how they want to assist others. When someone would drop an item on the floor, the toddlers would by and large try to pick it up and hand it to the person. As humans, we are hard wired for cooperation and as a whole will only stand meanness so long.
Michael Nagler, who teaches a non-violence course in Berkeley, tells the story of Gandhi coming through Rome in 1931, on his way back from a major political conference. Mussolini asked him what he thought of the fascist empire he was building in Italy. Gutsy Gandhi replied: “You’re building a house of cards.” For Gandhi believed that building a society on the premise that human beings will continue to want to be pitted against each other, is weak and ultimately temporary. Violent narcissistic societies are based upon a lie, says Nagler, the lie that says that humans don’t care about each other, and that we can find fulfillment alone. Over and over we have seen that humanity has eventually reacted to totalitarianism and its negation of human dignity.
And as Nagler states: “How long can human beings support a system that constructs their own irrelevancy? As totalitarianism exerts its grim toll, the human spirit must rise once again with the triumphant assertion that we are spiritual beings, deeply interconnected and bound together by a destiny of great meaning.”
So the first two sources of hope: people coming together as mutual drops in the bucket, and …the instability of the injustice system.
Third Source of Hope: My third source of hope is our continual evolution as human beings. We’ve come a long way in our physical evolution, changing and developing as it was advantageous to our physical needs. The kind of critical evolution which is needed now, and which I see flowering more and more each day, is the spiritual evolution of consciousness in which we each know in very deep ways that we are not separate people relying on ourselves alone for success—no, we are fully interdependent beings, interdependent with all of humanity, and interdependent with all life on this planet. As the world gets smaller, more and more of us are hearing the stories of people halfway around the planet, stories of their lives and dreams, and such sharing allows us to know our common humanity.
As our global consciousness increases through our radically changing ways of knowing what is happening all around the world, so our awareness of how we as humans are affecting this planet is growing. As the consciousness of Buddhism seeps into western societies, challenging dualist notions of good and evil, humans and non-human, --our evolution continues. We are the generation that knows at least unconsciously that the earth would be better off without humans. From this awareness I believe will come a change in our consciousness, altering our self awareness, from the arrogant biblical attitude that we are on earth to have dominion over all-- to a greater humility that asks the question: What is our obligation to our earth and its threatened living species? How does our survival depend upon the survival of other living things?
Our current international situation has thrown a monkey wrench into our entrenched western attitude of thinking that we knew what was best for ourselves and for the rest of the world. We are learning first hand that force is weak and that democracy is not necessarily the best political system for all countries. We are learning at great cost that collaboration and cooperation are strengths. We are learning that our enlightenment as human beings is not complete, and that any conviction that we are so knowledgeable and wise needs to be tempered with a humility and understanding that our knowledge is only provisional.
We are learning that when we dig ourselves into fiery holes, that past certainties are irrelevant to today’s changing physical, economic, and spiritual needs, and that we had better begin by stepping back in awe and wonder at this world that is not so much in our dominion after all—and we had better begin to ask questions, like—“What did we do?” and “Just who and what the heck do we think we are?” And we had better begin to understand that the dualities of good and evil, in ourselves and in the world’s political spectrums, is a falsity that is driving us to the brink. And we must understand that the duality of we and they and win and lose are our downfall.
If we can embrace such a humility, such a state of not knowing; if we can realize an awareness that we are more interdependent than not; if we can climb into the bucket together and act out of a deeper consciousness of who we are, then hope can fly in with bright blue feathers, and perch in our soul.
May it be so. Amen
1 Michael Nagler. The Search for a Nonviolent Future. 2004.
2 Tikkun, Nov./Dec. 2004 p. 48.