Dr. John Young 8/26/07
UUCJ
Reminder:
Sermons are a verbal form of expression. These printed reflections do not
usually contain the stories, reference and spontaneous connections that John
makes when he does his sermons. The way to experience them is to attend the
Sunday service.
Making a Difference
There are many different ways to make a positive difference in the world. How can we test whether what we are doing is helping or hurting, nurturing or stifling, adding to peace and fulfillment or expanding conflict and despair? First, you do need to pay attention to your own feelings and experiences. However, second, you need even more to listen to the people you are working with and affecting. Third, you need to ask questions if you do not clearly understand their feelings and experiences. Fourth, you need to keep checking the data: if people you are trying to help are hurting more, feeling stifled, and upset with you, then probably you are not making a positive difference, and fifth, you need to change what you are doing. There may be moments of necessary tough love, but tough love is not a life style but a momentary technique to break through a barrier of communication, some habitual resistance, or an unbending arrogance. When people forget the love and get caught in the tough, they usually end up adding to the evil and chaos in the world instead of helping or actually being of service.
I got my own activist awakening in the civil rights and disarmament movements from the late fifties and since, but I believe that the feminist revolution that has unfolded during my adulthood has been the most significant and hopefully the most enduring transformation of our world. My thesis in this sermon today is that we need to continue the feminization of activism in order to ensure that our activism will be both effective and sustainable. We need to empower a synthesis of the healthiest portions of femaleness and maleness, to combine in Sharon Welsh’s terms, an ethics of rights with an ethics of care. We need to realize that usually all the parties to a dispute are still going to be there after the dispute is over, and that we, therefore, must place clear emphasis on learning to work together, to find ways to move forward that are mutually respectful and that grow beyond destroying the evil enemies of boyhood fantasies.
In the summer 07 issue of the UU World, there is a book review of two books related to Louisa May Alcott’s Little Women. The reviewer, Rosemary Bray McNatt, writes that “she, like every girl I knew was clear about which of the little women in that household I wanted to be: Jo: wild, willful, loving, honorable, and brave, millions of girls saw themselves not only as they were, but as they hoped one day to become.” One of the books reviewed is about Alcott’s father, the book is entitled March.
It has an imaginary confrontation between Margaret Day, a young woman active in the Underground Railway and Ralph Waldo Emerson. They are at a dinner party at the Thoreau family home, and Emerson cautions Miss Day about endangering her aged father because of her illegal activity in hiding fleeing slaves. Miss Day counters that if more prominent people like Emerson were active, antislavery work would not be confined to young women and old men. Emerson replies that a person can only do so much and that he always speaks up for a Negro if they are spoken ill of in his presence, and that he is thereby doing all that is in his power to do. Miss Day retorts: “Not in your power! You, who command great crowds in the Lyceum, who may write for any of a dozen eminent journals…to say that you can do no more is a sham, a disgrace, and a lie.”
The other book, Miss Alcott’ Email by Kit Bakke, is a fantasy interchange between Miss Alcott and the author who says: “What I really like about you is that it is worth the trouble to work hard to make your life into something. You have acted in the world as if you matter, as if you can make a difference….a person never knows for sure, but your lesson is to start. Reviewer McNatt concludes: “to learn that we can make a difference in the world is as important as any elevator speech.”
Most people most of their lives get caught in themselves. They get so consumed by their inner dramas that they never find the time or energy to be of much help to the world around them, much less the vast and complex worlds beyond their everyday concerns. Growing up is figuring out who you are, developing your capacities, and getting going on your life in ways that allow you to take care of yourself rather than remaining the responsibility of others. This is an important job, and it always takes up some of our time and attention, because we and the world keep changing, but it should not be all that life is about, that would be to remain a permanent child or adolescent.
Next is our intimate circle. This has traditionally been the primary focus for adult women. The feminist revolution has empowered women not to remain consumed by their intimate circle for their entire adult lives and has challenged men to find a better balance between making a living and having a life. Feminism has challenged all of us to do justice to our homes but also to use our homes and intimate circles as launching pads to change the world, to sustain the planet, to get beyond our tribal identities. Intimate circles are the natural centers of almost every human life, but they remain tribal. In the 21 century, humanity is doomed if its ideals and daily practices remain at a tribal level. If we remain caught there, we will cannibalize humanity and decimate the good Earth. I absolutely feel that men need to be fully responsible parents or keep their sperm or eggs under wraps. If you don’t have the time or fortitude to raise a family and do justice to friends, then, brother or sister, don’t expect the other people in your intimate circle to keep doing all the work of intimacy.
Doug Muder, in the current UU World, struggles with the fact that contemporary American UU congregations attract few working class people. Instead, we are from what he calls the professional class, and even the more upbeat section of that class, the people who not only have many possible life choices but have found inspiring paths within those choices. Coming from a working class background, Muder defines working class as “selling your time for money.” He makes the playful point that if you still play around in your work field in retirement; then, you are an affirming member of the professional class while people from the working class never do their job again once they have retired. Muder wonders whether people who see themselves as having no choices, as needing to continue to force themselves to do hard things don’t need a religion that says that is the way life is: with one right way, hard choices, and hopeful if far-off rewards. While, he surmises that people from the professional class can bask in a religion with a lot of choices, no single right way, many rewards and few or far-off punishments. He seeks a synthesis, and argues that we need a spirituality that combines wise discernment, practical inspiration, and support and reward for the necessary self-control it takes to make life’s remaining hard choices. I think he is right, but I think Unitarian Universalism is or could become that liberated but responsible faith.
I want us all to be like Carolyn McDade, to take care of ourselves, and to do justice to our intimate but tribal circle, but to also systematically spend a bunch of our time, energy and talent in the wider world. She may be right, it feels to me too as if some people are wasting too much of their good energies flinging themselves against implacable systems. I like her image of people spending much of their energies on creating the alternatives they want to see in the world. She has gathered groups of activists together and taught them to sing and play together. She has given them a worship community that empowers them to go back and change the world in their various ways. My long-time acquaintance Rosemary Matson said on the back page of the summer UU World: “We do not want a piece of the pie. It is still a patriarchal pie. We want to change the recipe.”
I don’t want to empower you simply to seize a bigger piece of a limited and outworn pie. I want us to change the recipe. I want us to all learn how to outgrow aggression, arrogance, and our oppressive and anti-social tendencies. This is not going to be easy. People are selfish, and we never become completely unselfish. The wisest and most mature of us can be transformed by some subtle word or deed by the people around us into a crying baby or a teenager having a crazy tantrum. Most of humanity still thinks that maturity means being successfully and responsibly tribal. I don’t think that is going to work in the 21st century. We not only need to outgrow tribalism, we need to outgrow regionalism and nationalism. We’ve got our work cut out for us.
In the 21st century, war is exposed as a juvenile male fantasy. Eliminating the evil doers is a childish dream. We need to stand up for what we believe, but we need to learn to do so without destroying our own principles and integrity and without violating others or destroying what we intended to save. Almost always, when the conflict ends, we all need to go home with our opponents, to live with them in cooperation and mutual respect. I suggest that we stop even using ‘war’ as a metaphor. Evil is not going to be eliminated because we all have some of what we most fear in our own hearts.
We do need self-discipline and sacrifice, courage and fortitude. Life is full of tough choices. However, what we need to become has at least as much to do with the traditional ‘womanly virtues’ as it does with the much overused traditional ‘male ideals.’ I continue to believe that the complete liberation of women throughout the world is the fastest path to human progress and to a sustainable future for the good Earth.
Concentrate upon making a new more
inclusive, peaceful, and just recipe. Take care of yourself, but don’t allow
yourself to spend your whole life in narcissism, and a self-sufficiency that
takes all of your time is narcissism. Take appropriate responsibility for your
chosen intimacies, but don’t become a full-time parent for your whole life.
Your children need a better model than that, and you deserve a life beyond your
children. We must all learn to grow beyond our comfort zones and to break out
of the constraints of our tribal identities. In these wider commitments,
whether it is within this congregation, in
Carolyn McDade takes care of herself and is responsible for her intimate circle, but she consistently pushes herself beyond her tribe and her comfort zone. I try to do that too, and I challenge you to do it for the rest of your life. Remember how Carolyn felt the evening when she composed Spirit of Life? “I felt dried out. I was tired of the world.” We all feel like that at times, and how was Carolyn McDade helped? Her friend, “Pat, just sat with me, and I loved her for that.” Many times, the way we make a difference is simply to be present, to sit with them in loving silence. And what did Carolyn McDade do when she went home that night? She sat in the darkness and composed Spirit of Life: her prayer and ours to give life the shape of justice, to stir compassion in ourselves and in others. We all need and deserve the roots of a community of faith, a spiritual home and family, our spiritual tribe, so that we can feel the wings of inspiration under us and face the winds of challenge and change with courage and endurance. We can change the world. We can make a difference, and we do not need to do it alone.