"Are You All Right?" - the Reverend Alison Hyder

October 7, 2003 - the Unitarian Universalist Meeting House of Provincetown

The years of our lives are short, our lives precarious. Our days and nights go hurrying on and there is scarcely time to do the little that we might. Yet we find time for bitterness, for petty treason and evasion. What can we do to stretch our hearts enough to lose their littleness? Here we are – all of us – bound together in a common destiny. Living our lives between the briefness of the daylight and the dark. Kindred in this, each lighted by the same precarious, flickering flame of life, how does it happen that we are not kindred in all things else? How strange and foolish are these walls of separation that divide us!

PRAYER: by St. Francis of Assisi

Lord, make me an instrument of your peace;
where there is hatred, let me sow love;
when there is injury, pardon;
where there is doubt, faith;
where there is despair, hope;
where there is darkness, light;
and where there is sadness, joy.
Grant that I may not so much seek
to be consoled as to console;
to be understood, as to understand,
to be loved as to love;
for it is in giving that we receive,
it is in pardoning that we are pardoned,
and it is in dying that we awaken to eternal life.

READING: by Victor Frankl, from The Doctor of the Soul

If all people were perfect every individual would be replaceable by anyone else. From the very imperfection of individuals comes the indispensability and interchangeability of each individual…. In a mosaic, similarly, every particle, every individual piece of stone is incomplete, imperfect as it were, in form and color; its meaning follows only from its use in the whole. If each of the tesserae [the tiles] contained the whole – like a miniature – each could be replaced by any of the others… Just as the uniqueness of the tessera is a value only in relation to the whole, so the uniqueness of the human personality finds its meaning in its role in an integral whole. Thus the meaning of the human person points beyond its own limits, toward the community…. The meaning of the individual comes to fulfillment in the community.

SERMON: “Are You All Right?” - Rev. Alison Hyder

This is kind of a strange time of year in Provincetown. It’s a transitional time, when those of us who live here have to maintain our equilibrium while we rediscover something of our own identities and nature. The tourist season is over, but there are still tourists and guests. It is not Carnival, or family week; there are no groups of Bears or Golden Threads. Fantasia Fair and women’s week are still a month away. Even the Red Hat brigade left in a day. We are on our own.

But we are still shaped by the lessons of the summer. We can’t help but be affected by the many people we meet, comparing ourselves to them, and judging them for their choices. That is how humans form their identities. We react to the people around us: their clothes, their mannerisms, their mistakes and passions and their attractions. Maybe we envy them, or maybe we’re repulsed. But each reaction tells us a little more about our own values and choices, who we are and why.

Many people come to Provincetown for just that reason. We want a place where we can be ourselves, fully and wholly, without penalty or shame. Provincetown fosters growth. There are many outlets for creativity and for service as well as for the more hedonistic pursuits. The quiet winter months provide an intimacy that encourages reflection. And like any small town, privacy is limited. Gossip has a way of confronting us with … well, let’s just say some serious food for thought. Whether true or not, other’s perceptions of us always make us think about who we are – and who we really want to be.

This is all well and good – rather wonderful, in fact – but it can also promote judgmentalism and factions. Sometimes we forget how hard it was for us to find ourselves and claim our full humanity. Each step changed us. Some were risky and challenged every comfortable habit and prejudice we had learned. Even the easiest changes transformed us into someone new. And yet we think of other people as static and unchangeable. So we criticize other people for making different choices, or just for being different than us, when they could be simply at another, maybe earlier stage in their growth. In seeking validation for our own life path, we may demean others because they made another choice.

They say that no one is more zealous than a convert. Frequently, by the time we finally achieve the solution to a troubling issue, we assume that it must also be right for everyone else. We become dogmatic, even aggressive about the “truth.” Whether it is giving up meat or alcohol, or choosing breast reconstruction after a mastectomy, or finding Jesus, we want to proclaim our truth, and share our discovery with everyone. The trouble comes when we believe that what is best for us is the one and only way, and when we confuse paths with principles. Our identity becomes threatened by all the choices we didn’t make, all the many other ways there are of being human.

Donald Hogan said, “I am not an idealist, nor a cynic, but merely unafraid of contradictions. I have seen men face each other when both were right, yet each was determined to kill the other, which was wrong. What each man saw was an image of the other, made by someone else. That is what we are prisoners of.” [Harper’s Magazine, Jan. 1972, quoted by Alice Walker in Her Blue Body Everything We Know]. We label each other (and ourselves), make easy judgments, deride and discriminate against others based on stereotypes – not just of outsiders, but even within our community. For instance, some gay men won’t mix with lesbians, or even with other kinds of gay men. Some black and Asian people mistrust each other. There are many other examples. We keep to our own kind, ignore slurs and jokes about other groups, and assume a superiority generally based on ignorance.

Luckily, that phase often passes. Once we become more self-assured and comfortable with our choices, we usually become more tolerant. We understand how hard it is to live a life of integrity and wholeness. We learn the value of compassion.

The fact is, you cannot be all right, if we are not all right. Fascism (in all its forms – racism, classism, fundamentalism) restricts everyone – even those in charge. Everyone is assigned a place, and must conform to their role. No, only by allowing others the freedom of choice, of individual expression, even of imperfection, can we affirm our own individuality. Unless we, ourselves, create a culture that encourages diversity and trusts democracy, none of us will be free. None of us will be allowed the full range of our humanity. We won’t be able to grow.

And growth is essential to life. No one stays a child forever. That label falls away and we assume new roles, new personas. We may continue to be a daughter or son, but its meaning changes as we also become a lawyer or healer, a parent, a widow. We understand ourselves anew as we learn new skills, explore sexual expression, passions and abilities. Each role teaches us something new about ourselves, and about society. And what we learn is that truth is fluid. Even something as innate as character is influenced by context. We are not the same person with our mothers as our employers or our friends, because each has their own expectations and needs. And we respond in kind.

So why should it surprise us that identity is not fixed?

During a conference given by the W.E.B. Du Bois Institute at Harvard, a widely traveled anthropologist recounted with amusement the chameleon nature of her image. She says, “In America, color-coded identities are the norm, so here I am a black woman. But to the South Sea Island tribe I study, all outsiders are other, and all others are identified by the word for ‘white.’ Visually, I am close to the islanders’ color, but I am an outsider – therefore I am white! In Brazil I am seen as a member of cultura bianca, white Western culture, as opposed to Afro-Brazilian culture, whereas in Europe I am perceived, first and foremost, not as black but as an American, second as a woman, third or fourth as a person of African descent. What color am I?” she asked the assemblage. [Quoted in “Hymn,” by Emily Hiestand, The Atlantic Monthly, July, 1998]

Who we are is relative to our context and audience. America seems to want the barrier of race to divide and distract our focus from other issues. And yet the people who participated in Swim for Life don’t know whom they are helping; if they are kind and generous or petty and embittered, straight or gay. There are plenty of people in our society who understand the beauty of diversity and thrive on challenge and change. They welcome outsiders as teachers and counselors, people who can show them their own reflection through new eyes. Surprising things happen when cultures combine.

White writer Emily Hiestand learned a lot about the perception of identity when she joined a black church. Mostly she was accepted and welcomed by the church community, and she felt at home with the warmth and energy of the services. But she found that she was not the only one who had to cope with differences and assumptions.

One day, Hiestand volunteered to cook for a church supper. “I have made,” she says,

a large pot of Portuguese kale soup, a hearty, fragrant soup that people have loved at my table for twenty years. I am attending my soup, which sits between a bubbling macaroni-and-cheese casserole and a huge bowl of rice and peas, from behind the buffet table, ladle in hand. The first people through the buffet line look at the unfamiliar soup skeptically.
“What is it?” one hungry teenage lad asks.
“Portuguese kale soup,” I say proudly, ladle raised for action.
“I’ll have the macaroni casserole, thank you.”
Nine or ten more people in line give the soup one look and pass it up. My debut is not going well.
Finally someone comes along and asks, “Is it collard greens?”
“No, it’s kale greens.”
“No, thanks,” he replies, but he has given me a clue.
“It’s greens and beans,” I say, truthfully, to the next person who asks – the choir director, Brother Philip.
“Oh, I’ll have some,” he says, and upon tasting this greens and beans, adds loudly, “It works for me.”
Brother Philip’s endorsement gets me two more takers, and then a young lady comes along and peers with interest at the soup.
“This looks like Italian minestrone,” she says hopefully.
“Well, yes,” I say. “It’s a lot like minestrone – almost exactly.”
The young woman has two helpings, and her girlfriend asks for the recipe. Hovering near the line, but not in it, is a young man who has obviously overheard the several names already given to this soup. Now he steps up to the table with a sly grin.
“I wonder if your soup could be a jambalaya?”
“Yes,” I say, without hesitation or shame. “It’s jambalaya.”
“Oh, this is my lucky day,” he says, chuckling. “So, if you will, please put that jambalaya over the rice and peas. Not too much sauce,” he adds, showing me how to make the concoction. Tasting the mélange, he says, “That’s bug!”
Now all this young man’s friends want the bug jambalaya spooned over rice and peas – all except one man with braids, who says he thinks my soup looks more like North African food.
“Isn’t that North African beans?” he asks?
“North Africa is very near Portugal,” I say. [“Hymn,” by Emily Hiestand, The Atlantic Monthly, July, 1998]

North Africa is near Portugal, and greens and beans cross many cultures and continents. Once Hiestand helped her friends recontextualize her strange Portuguese soup, they were able to accept and appreciate it. They not only valued her, but they learned to value their own taste-buds through a new experience. They grew through the encounter.

The fact is that we are more alike across our little clans than we are within them. It is only our judgments that make us distant. We have to allow ourselves to see the similarities, and not be blinkered by expectation or habit. And that is why judging and limiting others for their appearance or lifestyle or beliefs stunt and restrict us. Walls keep others out, but they also cage us inside. We may be safe, but we’re stuck.

Victor Frankl reminds us that

If all people were perfect every individual would be replaceable by anyone else. From the very imperfection of individuals comes the indispensability and interchangeability of each individual…. In a mosaic, [like in a soup or in a bouquet of flowers], similarly, every particle, every individual piece of stone is incomplete, imperfect as it were, in form and color; its meaning follows only from its use in the whole. If each of the tesserae contained the whole – like a miniature – each could be replaced by any of the others… Just as the uniqueness of the tessera is a value only in relation to the whole, so the uniqueness of the human personality finds its meaning in its role in an integral whole. Thus the meaning of the human person points beyond its own limits, toward the community…. The meaning of the individual comes to fulfillment in the community.

That is the beauty of our liberal faith. Here we understand the wealth of diversity of belief and experience. Some of us bring gifts of healing, others of practicality or organization. Some like to work unseen in the background, others rally the congregation with their enthusiasm and confidence. The humanists learn from those who believe in reincarnation, and Buddhist and Christian combine. We are unafraid of contradictions. Instead of clinging to one strict creed, we each have the freedom to integrate new understandings and to discard harmful or outmoded beliefs. We can share a joy and an excitement borne of discovery, knowing that we are seen for ourselves. We are limited only by our own fears.

Do you really own yourself, fully and freely? Or are you bound up and controlled by old stereotypes and assumptions, habits of hatred that limit your growth? Are you all right? Or are you sure?

William Ellery Channing summed it up in 1830, preaching to the Governor and legislature of Massachusetts:
“I call that mind free” he said, “ which sets no bounds to its love; which, wherever they are seen, delights in virtue and sympathizes with suffering: which recognizes in all beings the image of God and the rights of God’s children, and offers itself up a willing sacrifice to the cause of humankind.”

CLOSING WORDS: by Hosea Ballou

If we agree in love, there is no disagreement that can do us any injury, but if we do not, no other agreement can do us any good. Let us endeavor to keep the unity of the spirit in the bonds of peace.

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