"The Inclusive Heart" - the Reverend Alison Hyder

January 19, 2003 - the Unitarian Universalist Meeting House of Provincetown

Over the local stations, one by one,
Announcers list disasters like dark poems
That always happen in the skull of winter.
But once again the storm has passed us by:
Lovely and moderate, the snow lies down
While shouting children hurry back to play,
And scarved and smiling citizens once more
Sweep down their easy paths of pride and welcome.

And what else might we do? Let us be truthful.
Two counties north the storm has taken lives.
Tow counties north, to us, is far away, -
A land of trees, a wing upon a map,
A wild place never visited, - so we
Forget with ease each far mortality.

Peacefully from our frozen yards we watch
Our children running on the mild white hills.
This is the landscape that we understand, -
And till the principle of things takes root,
How shall examples move us from our calm?
I do not say that it is not a fault.
I only say, except as we have loved,
All news arrives as from a distant land.

PRAYER by Rabbi Jack Reimer

We cannot merely pray to God to end war;
For the world was made in such a way
That we must find our own path of peace
Within ourselves and with our neighbor.

We cannot merely pray to God to root out prejudice;
For we already have eyes
With which to see the good in all people
If we would only judge them rightly.

We cannot merely pray to God to end starvation;
For we already have the resources
With which to feed the entire world
If we would only use them wisely.

We cannot merely pray to God to end despair;
For we already have the power
To clear away slums and to give hope
If we would only use our power justly.

We cannot merely pray to God to end disease;
For we already have great minds
With which to search out cures and healings
If we would only use them constructively.

Therefore we pray instead
For strength, determination, and will power,
To do instead of merely to pray;
To become instead of merely to wish;
That our world may be safe,
And that our lives may be blessed.


READING: by Martin Luther King, Jr: “A Christmas Sermon on Peace”

[As I traveled in India and saw the depths of the poverty there – the conditions -] …I found myself saying that we in America cannot stand idly by and not be concerned…Something within me cried out, ‘oh, no, because the destiny of the United States is tied up with the destiny of India – with the destiny of every other country.’
All this is simply to say that all life is interrelated. We are caught up in an inescapable network of mutuality; tied in a single garment of destiny. Whatever affects one directly, affects all indirectly. As long as there is poverty in the world, no man can be totally rich even if he has a billion dollars. As long as diseases are rampant and millions of people cannot expect to live more than 20 or 30 years, no man can be totally healthy, even if he just got a clean bill of health from the finest clinic in America. Strangely enough, I can never be what I ought to be until you are what you ought to be. This is the way the world is made… the interrelated structure of reality. John Donne caught it a few centuries ago and could cry out, ‘No man is an island, entire of itself; every man is a piece of the continent, a part of the main….any man’s death diminishes me because I am involved in mankind. And therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls: it tolls for thee.’
If we are to realize the American dream, we must cultivate the world perspective.
There is another thing quite closely related to this. We must keep our moral and spiritual progress abreast with our scientific and technical advance. This poses another dilemma of modern man. We have allowed our civilization to outdistance our culture… We have allowed the means by which we live to outdistance the ends for which we live… and so we are in danger now of ending up with guided missiles in the hands of misguided men. This is what the poet Thoreau meant when he said, ‘Improved means to an unimproved end.’ If we are to survive today and realize the dream of our mission and the dream of the world, we must bridge the gulf and somehow keep the means by which we live abreast with the ends for which we live.

SERMON: “The Inclusive Heart” - Rev. Alison Hyder

A friend once came to the famous essayist Charles Lamb, and said, “I want to introduce you to Mr. So-and-So.”
“No, thank you,” said Lamb. “I don’t like the man.”
“But you don’t even know him!” said his friend.
“I know,” said Lamb. “That is why I don’t like him.”

It’s easy to laugh, of course, but many of us secretly agree with Charles Lamb. We all make judgments of strangers, and assess them according to their similarity to the norm. Do they match our expectations? Challenge our fears? Appear strange or startling or disquieting? What will they do to rock our comfortable world?
It is hard to accept outsiders. After all, if they were one of us we would already know them. We’d see them at parties or attend the same concerts. We’d know their uncles or cousins, who they had dated, where they walked their dog. We’d be able to fit them into the larger pattern of our society.
This is how the world used to be. People lived in small towns or social circles, divided by class and ethnicity. Everyone had their place and was expected to stay there, moving within certain bounds. So you knew who was miserly, and who had failed 6th grade, and you heard the stories about your neighbor’s first wife. When push came to shove, everyone stuck together. You knew where you belonged.
People are tribal creatures. We form relationships within circles of cultures that have expected behaviors and forms of communication. We learn how close to stand to each other when we talk, what kind of eye contact to make, the rules of hospitality when paying calls or celebrating a birth.
Even now, with our increased mobility and the dissolving of ethnic identity, Americans create tribes, with customs and specialized language. The workplace forms one society, our age group another. Gays and lesbians have created symbols and fashions to reveal themselves to insiders, just as Blacks and Latinos wear slogans that express their pride. We want others to recognize us and identify with us, when we’re in Paris or Dayton or the Cape Cod Mall. Our sweatshirts herald the tribe of Provincetown or Starbucks; our shoes speak in a language that the right people will decode.
We cannot know everyone. The people who study this sort of thing have determined that the human brain is only capable of knowing about 150 people. Above that number, most of us are unable to process the kind of social information and interactive relationships about each person that constitutes a core relationship. In culture after culture, that is the size that tends to come up (and why it can be so hard for churches to grow, but that’s another sermon altogether). More than that and a group will start fragmenting and losing focus. It’s called the rule of 150. [See Malcolm Gladwell, The Tipping Point, p 175-181]. The number of relationships that we can deeply and actively nurture, our ”sympathy group,” is, of course, much smaller than that.
But don’t start counting up your friends and relatives right now. Just trust me on this one.
Obviously, we can be acquainted with far more people (and animals) than 150. We wait tables, stand in lines, attend classes. We have conversations and encounters with dozens of strangers on a daily basis. And we do so on the basis of commonalities and social cues. We recognize our shared humanity, the normal composition of eyes and lips and chin, the sound of a laugh. We understand the universality of pain, the human need for beauty and meaning. People are the same all over. That we know. But we have to decide to care. We can make our hearts inclusive as an act of will.
“Except as we have loved,” Mary Oliver writes, “All news arrives as from a distant land.” The snowstorm hits two counties north, to some other people, anonymous, unloved. We need an excuse to grieve, a reason to be disturbed. We have to feel that we have some connection to other beings before we are touched by their plight. What is that quote? – “One death is a tragedy, a million is a statistic.” Joseph Stalin said that, and he displayed an unfortunate understanding of the human psyche. We need our poster boys to put a face on a problem.
The media has done a tremendous service in this area. Michael J. Fox and Christopher Reeve have raised both awareness and funding for medical research. The reporting of Matthew Shepherd’s death made gay bashing visible. The New York Times dedicated itself to publishing photographs and stories of every single person who died in the World Trade Center attacks simply as a tribute to their humanity.
But, of course, the media also, to a large extend, determines whose stories we will hear, and how we will perceive them, focusing on Bosnia but not the Congo or Sierra Leone, ignoring labor issues, highlighting violence by black men.
Mary Pipher says, “We Americans watch more movies about space aliens and serial killers than we do about Vietnamese children.” [The Middle of Everywhere – the World’s Refugees Come to Our Town p. 149]. Mary Pipher is a psychologist in Lincoln, Nebraska, a Unitarian Universalist whose inclusive principles have led her to work with refugees as a cultural broker. She helps them to understand how to navigate the school system, to buy a car, to use our ovens and mailboxes and find familiar foods - all the bewildering aspects of our consumer life. The immigrants range from Iraqi laborers and doctors to Somali engineers to Vietnamese and Laotian farmers. Most of these people have been displaced by war and violence. Many have been raped and tortured, seen people shot. They have lived in barren refugee camps and hidden out in caves and gullies. And these are the lucky ones. They all had some attribute – optimism, flexibility, endurance, or charm – that impressed the authorities, and gained them entrance.
When Pipher was growing up, she longed to see exotic places and experience other cultures. But now she needs only to open up her time, and her heart, to the people around her. More and more the INS – the Immigration and Naturalization Services – is placing refugees in the Midwest and the South, in towns with low crime and unemployment rates: Lincoln and Fargo, and Nashville, Tennessee, where they have found mostly a kind of bemused but sincere welcome. They are given orientations and temporary allowances, though within weeks most have found jobs. They will have to reimburse the government for the cost of their airfare – something that on minimum wage can take years. Many speak little English at first, and so can’t work in their former professions. A lot wind up in factories.
Pipher encourages others to be cultural brokers, too, and in her book, The Middle of Everywhere, explains how and why. Refugees often have a hard time adjusting to American ways, especially if they watch a lot of television. They see Jerry Springer and violent cop shows and commercials for junk foods, and find American values alarming and crude. Rarely do they see themselves reflected in our culture. They need us to show them the best of America, and that we can be kind and honorable and compassionate with them.
Pipher finds that most refugees come from cultures that place group and family loyalties above individuality. She has discovered a lot from them about generosity and resilience, and learned what courage looks like. They rarely complain. Even the poorest refugees share freely of what they have, and they do most things in community. They don’t understand our rigid concept of time. They are used to waiting for what they need, and making each happiness last.
Mary Pipher has met many victims of the Gulf War, people who supported the US against Saddam Hussein. When the U.S. pulled out, Hussein killed thousands of American sympathizers, and became even more oppressive and cruel. There is no question that Hussein is feared by his own people, who have suffered under his reign. And yet, most of the refugees have family left in Iraq and in camps in Saudi Arabia. What would another war do to the citizens of this country, the children and women and men already weary and distrustful of American intentions? We know who will suffer the most. But whose interests will be served? It is not an easy question.
Martin Luther King, Jr. spent his last years speaking for peace. He knew that violence usually begets more violence. His personal faith reminded him that we are all related, “caught up in an inescapable network of mutuality” that war mutilates but cannot deny. Nowhere is that clearer than in our own country. As more refugees come here for asylum, we may find ourselves hearing the other side of American actions and policies, of poverty, displacement and reprisal. “What is needed,” King said, “is a realization that power without love is reckless and abusive, and love without power is sentimental and anemic. Power at its best is love implementing the demands of justice, and justice at its best is power correcting everything that stands against love.”
It is not easy, or perhaps even natural, to care about other people so very different from us. Humans are, after all, tribal in our affections, limited in our social capacity. But we don’t have to feel someone’s pain to understand their plight and to seek to help them. According to bell hooks, love is an act of will. In her book, All About Love: New Visions the cultural critic and professor says that love is not a feeling, but a verb. Love is an action, wherein we seek to nurture our own and another’s spiritual growth.
We know the effects of starvation and disease. We understand fear and suffering. So we can apply the lessons of love without having to experience affection. We can help people that we don’t know. This is the kind of tangible, practical love that King talked about, and that Dorothea Dix and Gandhi and Mother Teresa applied. We can develop an inclusive heart that contains all people within its borders.

Henri Nouwen said [in 1975],

In our world full of strangers, estranged from their own past, culture and country, from their neighbors, friends and family, from their deepest self and their God, we witness a painful search for a hospitable place where life can be lived without fear and where community can be found.
Although many, we might say most, strangers in this world become easily the victim of a fearful hostility, it is possible for men and women…to offer an open and hospitable space where strangers can cast off their strangeness and become our fellow human beings.
The movement from hostility to hospitality is hard and full of difficulties. Our society seems to be increasingly full of fearful, defensive, aggressive people anxiously clinging to their property and inclined to look at their surrounding world with suspicion, always expecting an enemy suddenly to appear, intrude, and do harm.
But still, this is our vocation: to convert the hostis into a hospes, the enemy into a guest and to create the free and fearless space where brotherhood and sisterhood can be formed and fully experienced.

All life is interrelated, a “network of mutuality.” Our destiny is not exclusive, but neither are our dreams. They are the same as people all the world around. Peace, and opportunity, and people to love. It isn’t much to ask. And it is not too much to offer.

CLOSING WORDS: by Alice Walker

Surely the earth can be saved
by all the people
who insist
on love.

Surely the earth can be saved for us.

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