"Where It Itches" - the Reverend Alison Hyder
April 29, 2001 - the Unitarian Universalist Meeting House of Provincetown
Opening words: from “The Choice to Bless the World” by Rebecca Parker
Your gifts -- whatever you discover them to be --
can be used to bless or curse the world.The mind's power, the strength of the hands, the reaches of the heart the gift of speaking, listening, imagining, seeming, waiting.
Any of these can serve to feed the hungry,
bind up wounds,
welcome the stranger,
praise what is sacred,
do the work of justice
or offer love.Any of these can draw down the prison door,
hoard bread,
abandon the poor,
obscure what is holy,
comply with injustice
or withhold loveYou must answer this question:
What will you do with your gifts?Choose to bless the world
Reading: by UU Rev. David Baumbaugh, written for the ordination of
a young minister
Once upon a time, we believed that the church and its ministry should equip people for the struggle to save the world. But in these days, we are content if we can simply make people feel a little better about themselves. We call it spirituality and focus the energies of the church upon the interior, the personal, the private. We call it spirituality and do not recognize that it is but one more style of narcissism. We call it spirituality and do not understand that it is not faith but self-absorption masquerading as faith.
All around us, our world cries out for redemption. We live in a world in which the few seek out and consume empty calories, while the many suffer hunger and malnutrition. We live in a world in which wealth continues to be transferred from the poor to the rich and to concentrate in the hands of fewer and fewer individuals. We live in a world in which the few lust after spiritual fulfillment, while the many drag out lives defined by despair and hopelessness. We live in a world in which the long-term viability of the planet is expendable, virtue is privatized and the ethic of the main-chance dominates.
In such a world we have dared to redefine the religious imperative in terms of meaningful spiritual development, telling ourselves that once we have achieved a meaningful spirituality, once we have discerned our spiritual fulfillment there will be time to take care of the world.
Every fiber of my being cries out against this trivialized understanding of the church and its ministry. We have not been called into being in order to take in each other’s emotional laundry. We have not been called into being to serve ourselves, to enrich our interior lives, to justify our narrow vision…The purpose of the church is the salvation of the world. The purpose of its ministry, lay and clergy, is to enlist people in a vision which lifts them out of dumb fascination with themselves as part of an ongoing venture, responsible to generations past and to generations yet to come for building a world of justice and peace, of mercy and hope.
Sermon: ”Where It Itches” - Rev. Alison Hyder
This is
from The Book of Embraces, by the Uruguayan journalist Eduardo Galeano:
The preacher Miguel Brun told me that a few years ago he had visited the
Indians of the Paraguayan Chaco. He was part of an evangelizing mission.
The missionaries visited a chief who was considered very wise. The chief,
a quiet, fat man, listened without blinking to the religious propaganda
that they read to him in his own language. When they finished, the missionaries
awaited a reaction.
The chief took his time, then said:
“That scratches. It scratches very hard and it scratches very well.”
And then he added:
“But it scratches where there isn’t any itch.”
[“The Function of Art/2” Eduardo Galeano, The Book of Embraces,
p. 30]
Religions, these days, many of them, are going through a lot of scratching motions. They tell us how to vote and what we can and can’t do with our bodies, and who God is and how to please him. These are confusing times (as always), and there are a lot of people looking for advice on how to live, who want to be among people who are following the same rules that they are, where good is familiar, and evil clearly defined, condemned, and repudiated.
All religions offer solutions to questions about God and about death, to the role of marriage and the right way to handle suffering or relate to animals or achieve salvation. But their answers leave some of us itchy and squirming. Many of us have left our former churches and temples in order to find something that gets closer to those hard-to-reach places beyond the rigid creeds. We’d rather find our own answers, want a spirituality that addresses our individual needs, that respects our personal truth and integrity.
We want to be able to think for ourselves, “work out our own salvation,” but far too often we fall into a spiritual complacency, superficial and benign. We pick and choose among a menu of spiritual options, nibbling here and there, filling our own plate, and throwing half of it away. Our love of self-help books is an attempt to find a deeper meaning and direction. But they place so much emphasis on personal growth and success, they wind up encouraging self-absorption by equating spirituality with achievement, whether it’s losing weight or swimming with dolphins or creating personal abundance in your life.
Too many of us feel stressed at the complexity of our lives, trying to balance the pressure to survive, to achieve some standard of comfort and independence, against increasing material expectations. And we’re no different than anyone else, facing the same pressures to conform and compete. We don’t have the time or the focus to think about religious matters and the implications of a faith we haven’t yet clarified. We’re good people, and we have beliefs and we try to be nice to others. We read inspirational manuals to fill that empty place within us. We’re bored with ourselves and our banal little problems, yet we’re afraid of change, afraid to lose what we already have by facing what others do not. We feel alienated from the earth and its changes, separated from our food (doubly so, now, with genetic alterations), from the goods we buy; bombarded by ads and manipulated by self-imposed stereotypes. We’re doing what we’re supposed to be doing, but still we’re dissatisfied and unfulfilled.
We’re scratching, but where is the itch?
I think a religion – all religions, certainly ours - should help us to live in right relationship, balancing our own needs with the needs of others. It should encourage us to examine our impact on other people, whether they’re across the table or around the world. David Bumbaugh, speaking at the ordination of a young UU minister, said: “the purpose of the church (the Unitarian Universalist church) is the salvation of the world. The purpose of its ministry, lay and clergy, is to enlist people in a vision which lifts them out of dumb fascination with themselves, which lifts them out of their little local universes, which helps them understand themselves as part of an ongoing venture, responsible to generations past and to generations yet to come for building a world of justice and peace, of mercy and hope.”
We long for a meaningful connection to others with whom we share this world. A religion that scratches where we itch, which inspires and invigorates us makes that connection tangible and real.
We Americans know that we are out of balance with the earth, taking more and more of the world’s resources, widening the gap, blindly, inexorably, uneasily. Every day, every new advance brings about increasing destruction of the natural world, the servitude of workers in factories and coffee fields, a wider gap in power. Our use of cell phones is killing Gorillas in the Congo. According to Newsweek, “the last Grauer’s Gorillas – as well as endangered elephants and antelopes – are being illegally hunted to feed miners searching for tantalum, a.k.a. coltan, a key ingredient in the capacitors that store energy in mobile phones.” [April 23, 2001, p5] Our institutions, our lives, are increasingly out of our control. We don’t know about many of the things our Government and corporations do in our name, for the sake of the economy or national security. And even simple living at the beach doesn’t come cheaply. Something – someone – has to give way. Our everyday, decent, normal American life – no different from many millions of others – is destroying the planet. And it makes us feel helpless and indignant and depressed.
I think that what we are itching for is something better, some sense of harmony and wholeness - grace, maybe. But there is no absolution without penance. We can’t just think ourselves whole. Integrity is not a sensation, although it can start with that, with a momentary consciousness of oneness with the earth, or a connection with a stranger or an article about refugees or Gorillas. But these moments have to convert us, somehow, to a new way of life, and keep changing us daily. Jean Shinoda Bolen said “To know what really is important to you, to have real sense of who you are and what would be deeply satisfying to you is not enough. You must also have the courage to act… Our word ‘courage’ comes from the French word Coeur, ‘heart’: Courage is a willingness to act from the heart, to let your heart lead the way, not knowing what will be required of you next, or if you can do it.” There is no inner peace without outer integrity, without the hard and constant effort to live gently and with intent.
It helps to have support, to have a community that is with you in your struggle, keeping you to the highest standards of truth and honor and compassion, helping you to think through the questions to the deeper questions below. How do you want to live on the earth? What can you do that would make a difference? What gifts can you bring to a broken and bleeding world?
In Latin America a few decades ago, in the face of poverty and oppression, small groups of villagers – farmers and schoolteachers and bakers and seamstresses - started meeting in study circles to read and re-examine the Bible. They began to take theology away from the priests and rulers, and re-discovered the radical Jesus, a Jesus in relation to the people. Instead of the complacent figure that was held up to them, the “gentle Jesus, meek and mild,” who accepted pain and oppression (as they were exhorted to do), the peasants empowered themselves by recognizing Jesus’s “preferential option for the poor.” Over time, this grass-roots Liberation Theology began to spread and grow, influencing both academic theologians and lay people throughout the world. Many middle-class Christians joined with the poor and the working class, inspired by “a new image of Jesus – a Jesus who is brother and sister, in solidarity on the journey toward liberation” because Jesus, in the gospels, committed himself to the outcast and the oppressed – women, the ill, the poor – in actions that improved their lot. He did not offer them panaceas but told them that the reign of God is now, whenever we demonstrate love in action. He recognized their personhood, their dignity. And we are asked nothing less.
José Míguez Bonino and Néstor Oscar Míguez, father and son theologians, write, “Jesus does not want admirers who investigate his words in order to fashion a new law, but followers who will dare to live as he teaches… by doing the truth.” [That You May Have Life, p47]. That truth includes political freedom and demands action. Far from affiliating with a church that serves the interest of the rich and powerful, Jesus’ work with the marginalized did not focus on the afterlife but on allowing them to function as equal participants within a community under God, but on earth.
Liberation Theology has been suppressed within the Catholic Church because it leans toward communism and threatens power structures. But it had a great influence across the world, and still does. It created a groundswell of Christians re-energized and committed to social struggle. Feminist and Third World interpretations of the Bibles are opening up Christianity to the marginalized in ways that are creating direct and powerful change. When I was in Divinity School, often the lone non-Christian – and Jewish, and bi, and female – it was heartening to see this side of Christianity, and not just the religious conservatives so vocal and powerful in the U.S. Indeed, truly to battle with the forces of oppression in this country (and in ourselves), we would do well to learn from our sisters and brothers in Central and South America, in Africa and Asia.
We have been given some help in this by a UU minister, Fred Muir of the Annapolis, Md, church. In his book A Reason For Hope: Liberation Theology Confronts a Liberal Faith, Muir provides us with a framework for re-creating the study groups that became such a grassroots force in Latin America. In redefining Liberation Theology for Unitarian Universalists, he acknowledges that many U Us want to think of God or reality as neutral – “not only [as he says] because they object to the notion of an omnipotent force taking on human-like qualities (such as making decisions) but also because they perceive that a God who plays favorites cannot be impartial and all-loving…”
But the
world is not in balance, and life is not fair. To believe in a God of
neutrality, in a God who does not choose sides, to believe in a God who
does not show a “preferential option for the poor” is to say
that the world ought to be the way it is now and that the poor deserve
to suffer; they are less human, their lives disposable. Muir quotes Robert
McAfee Brown, who says,
To think that we can be neutral in today’s world is to believe that
we can fail to be present, that we can afford the luxury of simply being
absent, taking no sides, no options. We are all present one way or another
in this historical moment and we either contribute to the liberation of
the oppressed of the world or we contribute to exploitation and injustice.
Or as we said in the 60s, “If you’re not part of the solution,
you’re part of the problem.” And of course, sometimes we are
both. We are good about some things. For instance, in this congregation
are those who drive as seldom as possible, have efficient wood pellet
stoves. One of you uses much of her spare energy and resources rescuing
stray animals. You advocate for affordable housing, shepherd hatchling
turtles. Others are healers and artists. But at the same time, none of
us are saints. We all ignore some problems. We pick our issues, choose
comfort over inconvenience and deal with the guilt.
But we can shift the balance a little bit more. Starting in May for 4 weeks, Mary Jo Hackett and I will be leading a 4-week group to discuss Muir’s book and begin talking about some of the issues of oppression and justice and the expectations of our own culture. We will form our own small study group and begin to look at our larger connection. How can we be more intentional in our choices about what we buy and do? How do we learn about the costs of our salmon, our electricity, our coffee, the way our country funds schools, or builds roads – and who pays the price? What do we have in common with Nicaraguan peasants? Anything at all? What’s tickling your conscience, making you squirm? Where do you itch? What issues enrage you, or fill you with despair? We invite you to join us, or form your own study circles. We have the responsibility to educate ourselves – and I think we also have a spiritual need to do so – to bless the world, by choice, by counteracting the direction in which we’re speeding along so ignorantly and unwittingly.
The liberation is for us too. It can mean freedom from complicity, from alienation from the world outside our own sphere. It argues for full humanity for all of us, by resisting the increasing concentration of power. We all have things we would like to change. But it isn’t easy, as we all know. We decide, slip back, make a move, leap forward, and run terrified back to where we started - but with some more knowledge this time. And so we try again, and move a little, our friends cheering us on. We come here, I think, for just that kind of support, to dispel somewhat the feelings of despair and passivity, and to feel a little hope in our own integrity and purpose. This Meeting House is not a refuge from the problems of the world, but a place of renewal for facing them.
“The church is foredoomed to failure in its struggle to redeem the world,” David Bumbaugh says. “If our vision is large enough, it is unlikely that any of us shall ever live in the world we dream. But we are not called to succeed; we are called to be faithful in the mission that is ours: the salvation of the world. And in a curious way, the only real failure is to ignore that call.
Closing Words: by Albert Camus
We must
mend
what has been torn apart,
make justice imaginable again in a world
so obviously unjust;
give happiness once more
to peoples poisoned by the misery of the century.
Naturally, it is a superhuman task.
But superhuman is the term
for tasks [we] take a long time to accomplish,
that’s all.
