Living Through Limits
Rev. Mark Stringer
First Unitarian Church of Des Moines
1/17/09 & 1/18/09

 

“If only to save myself from bitterness, I have attempted to see my personal ordeals as an opportunity to transfigure myself and heal the people involved in the tragic situation which now obtains.  I have lived these past few years with the conviction that unearned suffering is redemptive.”  --Martin Luther King, Jr.

 

Meditation 

Each week we share a time of meditation, a time to center ourselves, to be as present as we can to this life that we share.  This week there has been much happening in the world upon which we could reflect or pray.  The continued violence in Gaza (and now, perhaps, a tenuous peace), the heroic story of a resourceful pilot and 155 lives that were spared from an untimely death, even the bone-chilling weather we have endured are all worthy topics of our meditation.  And then there is the impending inauguration of our new president, during a time of year when we honor the memory and legacy of Martin Luther King, Jr.  But even with all of this, I am drawn to begin our meditation time by sharing with you the innocence of children. These are just a few of the letters composed by students of 826 Valencia, a nonprofit writing and tutoring center with seven branches throughout the country not long after Barack Obama’s election.  These letters can be found in a new book entitled Thanks and Have Fun Running the Country.[1] 

Won’t you join me now in a spirit of meditation, reflection, laughter or prayer?

From Mireya, age 8, San Francisco

Dear Sir Obama,
These are the first 10 things you should do as president:
1. Make everyone read books.
2. Don’t let teachers give kids hard homework.
3. Make a law where kids only get one page of homework per week.
4. Kids can go visit you whenever they want.
5. Make volunteer tutors get paid.
6. Let the tutors do all the thinking.
7. Make universities free.
8. Make students get extra credit for everything.
9. Give teachers raises.
10. If No. 4 is approved, let kids visit the Oval Office, but don’t make it boring.

From  Kenja, age 6, Los Angeles
Dear Obama,
If I were president I would have fun, because I could run fast.

From Holly, age 9, San Francisco

Dear President/Mr. Obama,
The best thing about living in the White House would be running around like a maniac. The thing I would like least is the work.

From Pamela, age 11, Boston

Dear President Obama,
I am small, quiet, smart. I love to swim and play basketball. My mom and dad are from the Dominican Republic. I am going to the Dominican Republic next year. I think you should try to change the world by building shelters for the people who live in the streets. It’s the beginning of January, and it’s cold. Good luck being the president.

From Chandler, age 12, Chicago
Dear President Obama,
Here is a list of the first 10 things you should do as president:
1. Fly to the White House in a helicopter.
2. Walk in.
3. Wipe feet. 
4. Walk to the Oval Office. 
5. Sit down in a chair. 
6. Put hand-sanitizer on hands. 
7. Enjoy moment. 
8. Get up.
9. Get in car. 
10. Go to the dog pound.

From Catherine, age 6, Chicago
Dear President Obama,
If I were president, I would tell people to not talk too much. It wastes time. I’d also say to war: no more, no more, no more!

 

From Olivia, age 12, Seattle
Dear Obama,
I have grown up with a very liberal mom and a very conservative dad. Thank you for bringing my parents somewhat closer together. :) You are my idol Mr. Barack — I am partly African-American and I am very happy to see an African-American leading this country.

 

From Edwin, age 9, New York
Dear Pres. Obama,
Good job on winning. I heard about Area 51. I wanted to ask you if there are any U.F.O.’s there. I think that you should tell people in public the truth about Area 51. You would just maybe say, “That we will take care of it.” And do it.

From Chad, age 9, Los Angeles
Dear President Obama,
Could you help my family to get housecleaning jobs? I hope you will be a great president. If I were president, I would help all nations, even Hawaii. President Obama, I think you could help the world.

Readings

 

Our first reading is a meditation by Yvonne Seon, who in 1981, became the first African American woman to be ordained into Unitarian Universalist parish ministry.  She writes:

 

 

When I was a child, I would stand and gaze at the starry firmament and contemplate infinity. As I stood there, the boundary that is time dissolved; I expanded my Spirit to fill the boundary that is space. My being stilled and all fear, anxiety, and anguish disappeared. Forgotten were the chores, the homework, the ordinary around me. 

 

Transcending boundaries was fun in those days. But, as I reached adulthood, it became more difficult. More and more, the world was with me as I did chores and homework. More and more, my own fears were with me as I encountered others. More and more, I was aware of the boundaries of race, class, age, and sex. I felt myself cringe

as the bantering youth in the street came nearer. I felt myself become tearful as I encountered a senior citizen living with pain or the limited choices of a fixed income. I felt myself become angry as I was subjected to the indignities of being rejected by others because I am Black, because I am a woman, or because of the blind person or the openly gay person I was with. I felt myself become unwilling to acknowledge my oneness with the addicted person who is my friend or the homeless people sleeping on the benches in the park. 

 

Today, transcending boundaries is hard work. For one thing, I’ve created more of them since I was young, and I’ve built them higher and stronger than they once were. For another thing, I’m much more self-righteous and much less humble than I was then. Sometimes, when I am at my best, I remember that the “other” I distinguish myself from could be me in another time, another place, another circumstance. Then, I remember the words of a colleague who observed that it is “my racism, my sexism, my homophobia”

that I am called upon to address. So, I take a few deep breaths and begin to release the fears that are the boundaries between me and my fellow humans.[2]

 

Our second reading today is a collection of Martin Luther King, Jr. quotes in the form of a responsive reading (#584 in Singing the Living Tradition).

 

We are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny.

 

Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere.

 

There are some things in our social system to which all of us ought to be maladjusted.

 

Hatred and bitterness can never cure the disease of fear, only love can do that.

 

We must evolve for all human conflict a method which rejects revenge, aggression, and retaliation.

 

The foundation of such a method is love.

 

Before it is too late, we must narrow the gaping chasm between our proclamations of peace and our lowly deeds which precipitate and perpetuate war.

 

One day we must come to see that peace is not merely a distant goal that we seek but a means by which we arrive at that goal.

 

We must pursue peaceful ends through peaceful means.

 

We shall hew out of the mountain of despair, a stone of hope.

 

 

Sermon

Not so long ago, I thought I would be focusing my sermon today on the tension inherent in Barack Obama’s invitation to Pastor Rick Warren to give the invocation at his inauguration. And while I have chosen to go in another direction during my time with you, I do want to say a few words about the controversy.  As most of you know, the selection of Warren, the founder of the Saddleback Church (a church with tens of thousands of members), an author of books with readership in the millions, a national figure who has become known not only for his entrepreneurial leadership of a ever-growing evangelical movement, but for his work to alleviate worldwide poverty and disease, rankled many of Obama’s supporters because Warren and his church have articulated conservative religious and political views, including vocal opposition to gay rights, particularly the right to marry.  The implication in the uproar that ensued was “How dare the president that so many of us helped elect choose a person so diametrically opposed to what so many of us believe?”  I, too, was disappointed by the selection, at first. And, once I hear his invocation, I may be disappointed again.  The fact is that Rick Warren and I do not share many theological ideas.  And yet, I also know that our next president predicated his entire campaign on the notion that we need to be able and wiling to cross the lines that divide us, to see ourselves in our sisters and brothers, to hear each other out, even when we must respectfully disagree.  The selection of Rick Warren (or someone else like him) to speak at an event like this was not an aberration, or even, necessarily, a mistake.  It was the point.  In the nation that Barack Obama is asking us to envision and to embrace, all non-violent, non-coercive perspectives need a place at the table, with the expectation that in the exchange of ideas, the better ideas will eventually be adopted, even if the process to get us to that point may be difficult and pain-filled.  No doubt, Warren’s presence at this high-profile event will be painful to many, including gays and lesbians who he has said would not be welcome at his church were they “unwilling to repent of their homosexual lifestyle.”  But at least we know where the guy stands, and those of us who think he is missing the mark can stay away from his congregation and more carefully consider his comments on other issues.

 

Not long after the 2007 court ruling that enabled me to officiate the first legally recognized same-sex wedding in Iowa history, a group of pastors in town initiated a month of prayer and fasting, which they believed would help focus their people, and their God, on creating the conditions in which marriage would remain the sole property of heterosexual couples.  I found their mission absurd on a number of levels, but I would not want their voices silenced or relegated only to their particular congregations.  In fact, I believe they should have a larger stage for their views, particularly because I find them absurd.  In the free exchange of ideas upon which this country was built, all perspectives need to be heard.  As I told a local television news interviewer who sought my reaction to the prayer and fasting vigil, “Some people pray and fast, others interpret the constitution.  I believe in free-market rationality.”

 

To those opposed to my marriage equality views, I suppose my reaction was probably seen as sassy and smart aleck-y, just as I suppose I intended it to be. But if we want to have our own ideas heard, then we must be willing to hear the perspectives of others and let those viewpoints battle it out.  There is a wonderful A. Powell Davies passage that speaks to this point.  Davies, a renowned Unitarian minister and leader for civil rights during the McCarthy era, spoke about God needing no protectors, needing no shelter from inquiry.  While Davies’ ideas about God may be different from mine, his point applies to both our theologies.  If for me, the holy (God if you will) is to be found in the exchange that occurs when we are willing to be present enough to each other that we could have our understandings and commitments changed, if not transformed, then Davies declaration that “God lives in the open mind, in the power of its thought, the voice of its truth, the inner impulse of its honesty,” is right on the mark.  As Davies said, “God needs no protection, no shelter, no defenses.  Just give God room.”[3]

 

For those of you who remain concerned about Warren’s selection, I trust you may feel comforted to know that the man giving the benediction at the same inaugural event, the Rev. Joe Lowery, is not only a hero of the civil rights movement, but a vocal proponent for same-sex marriage. Which leads me to say “You go, Barack Obama!” Just give God (or creative interchange…) room, indeed!

 

But, as I’ve already mentioned, I want to spend the bulk of our time together in a different, though I think related, locale.

 

So many of the issues at the core of Martin Luther King Jr.’s legacy, and Barack Obama’s rise to become our 44^th president, have to do with identity, both theirs and ours as members of the human family.  As transformational figures asking us to transcend our differences, to see our individual lives as tied to each other, as linked, as woven together in a “single garment of destiny”, as not part of red and blue states, but the “United States”, they have asked us to reconsider the ways we frame our identities as sisters and brothers on a common journey from birth to death.  But as the Warren controversy (among countless others) so clearly reveals, identity of “the other” (whether we define the other by gender, or race, or class, or politics, or sexual orientation, or religion) is often based in exterior distinctions that enable us to ignore what we have in common. 

 

This week, I came across a provocative quote from the 20^th-century Catholic writer, poet, and social activist Thomas Merton.   “If you want to identify me,” he said,

 

“Ask me not where I live,

Or what I like to eat,

Or how I comb my hair,

But ask me what I am living for,

In detail,

And ask me what I think

Is keeping me from living fully

For the thing I want to live for.” [4]

 

In Merton’s words, we are invited into thoughtful reflection on the ways our idenities are often shaped by the surface of our lives, rather than by the depth.  We are most typically described and characterized (by others and by oursevles) by the outward conditions in which and through which we exist—our physical appearance and abilities, our access to material possesions and resources, our combination of genetically and socially-influenced personality traits, our intelligence (earned or inherited), our policital and religious proclivities, and our talents of expression.  All of these factors (and more) blended together, create our outward identities, unique and incomplete, every one.

 

Incomplete, because, as Merton suggests to us, if we really want to know a person, to discover that person’s most true identity, we should not simply assess her appearance or her apparent likes or dislikes or even her associations.  Rather, we should strip away these outer manifestations and search underneath into the yearnings that define what is most important to the person…what she is living for, and, what she believes is holding her back from living in such a way that those yearnings could be realized.

 

I found Merton’s words as I pondered the notion of “Living through Limits”, a theme for today that was inspired by the movie The Diving Bell and the Butterfly.  Based on a book by the same title, the movie is a dramatic portrayal of the true story of Jean-Dominique Bauby, who, as a highly-successful 43-year old editor of France’s Elle magazine, fell victim to a massive stroke that rendered him a victim of “locked-in syndrome”, a nearly total condition of paralyzation that some have described as the “closest thing to being buried alive.”  Jean-Do, as his many friends called him, was, before his stroke, known for his wit, his intelligence, and his ability to be the life of the party, but now, resigned to living his remaining days as a resident in a rehabilitation hospital outside of Paris, he is unable to move anything but his left eye.  In his adjustment to his new existence, Jean-Do must grapple with his lost identity, even as the inner workings of his consciousness and soul remain completely intact.  We share his journey to redefine himself—or is it reclaim the truest self that was always there?—as he struggles to make sense of his days and nights within the bars of his physical prison.   We are allowed into his inner journey because he, with the help of attentive nurses and friends, develops a method of communication via the blinking of his one good eye.  Letter by letter over the course of many weeks, Jean-Do blinks to an assistant the text of a book, an eloquent memoir of a life submerged in its own limitations (hence the title’s reference to the “diving bell”) even as he discovers an indomitable spirit within himself that still yearns to soar (as the “butterfly”), and sometimes does.

 

The movie and the book are both painful to experience and inspiring at the same time.  To see the life that Jean-Do once knew reduced to a mostly hidden and silent monologue is almost too much to bear because we see in his struggles a magnifcation (and intensification…) of the challenges each of us faces by nature of being human, particularly as we leave behind the easy boundary crossing of childhood for the ever-expanding boundaries of adulthood. We are all “locked in” one way or another, aren’t we?  Each of us is held back by limitations real and imagined that we must, if we are to survive, find ways to lovingly accept, if not live through and beyond.  And each of us is more or less silent, mostly unknown within the confines of our solitude, no matter how many connections or relationships we may nurture.  Ulimately, we are strangers (at least in part) to everyone, inlcuding sometimes ourselves.

 

No matter how locked in we may be, no matter the solitude and limitations each of us endures, aren’t we being called, one way or another to work with and live through our circumstances?  Or else, why would we endure at all? And, if as Thoman Merton suggests, that calling is at the heart of our true identity, what might that calling be?  Are we more similar than we might want to believe?

 

Jean-Do’s story can remind us of our own:
We yearn to be known,
to transcend the limitations and the solitude, the ulitmate alone-ness,
to be experienced in the full vulnerability of our humanity,
to love and to be loved, especially when we are most removed from the possibility.

And it is the memory of that loving,
if we are fortunate enough to have known it,

and the possibility of the loving yet to come,

that can lead us on.

 

Viktor Frankl also endured and wrote about his own forced immersion into a prision of solitude, in his case the humiliating physical and mental tortures of a Nazi concentration camp.  And he came to similar conclusions.  In the exhausting demands of his primitive and dehumanizing camp existence, Frankl found his true identity and hopefulness—indeed, his very humanity—by imagining and yearning for his loved ones.  He wrote about how, while on one of the countless marches through icy darkness that he and his fellow prisoners suffered, he regained his sense of self only by clinging to an imagined vision of his wife.  He wrote:

 

“For the first time in my life I saw the truth as it is set into song by so man poets, proclaimed as the final wisdom by so many thinkers.  The truth—that love is the ultimate and the highest goal to which man can aspire.  Then I grasped the meaning of the greatest secret that human poetry and human thought and belief have to impart: The salvation of man is through love and in love.”[5]

 

Even in the midst of the desolation and spiritual impoverishment of a concentration camp, Frankl found, much as Jean-Do later did, that the human imagination, and the memories and yearnings contained therein, were a place of refuge, inspiration and meaning for him.  As his inner life became more intense, his appreciation of beauty and life’s blessings became more pronounced as well.  He described a moment shared with his camp comrades:

 

“One evening, when we were already resting on the floor of our hut, dead tired, soup bowls in hand, a fellow prisioner rushed in and asked us to run out to the assembly grounds and see the wonderful sunset.  Standing outside we saw sinister clouds glowing in the west and colors, from steel blue to blood red.  The desolate gray mud huts provided a sharp contrast, while the puddles on the muddy ground reflected the glowing sky.  Then, after minutes of moving silence, one prisoner said to another, “How beautiful the world could be!”[6]

 

How beautiful the world could be!

 

It is the human imagination, an imagination inspired in its best moments by love and beauty, that can remain even when everything else may be stripped away.  It is this yearing for how beautiful the world could be that can keep us going despite all the reasons not to.  It is the human yearning for fulfillment that enables us to live through that which otherwise should hold us down, if not bury us alive.  And it is the human need to love and be loved to which we so gratefully return, even after the most perlious journeys into the darkness.

 

This week we saw the reports of the emergency Hudson River landing of a US Airways plane.  An interview with a survivor suggested that once the passengers were told to brace for a crash landing, people were more controlled than we might imagine.  He said, “It got really quiet and nobody said a word. There was a child crying. That was about it.”  Returned by perilous circumstances to their all-too human solitude, the passengers had reason to reflect on that which is most important, and high on that list, if not the only item, was the love they shared with others.  One survivor summed it up well when he reported,  “When I get home, I am going to take my nose and put it by [my daughter’s] ear, her little warm body and give her a nice kiss from Daddy. I'm alive. That's it. I don't have much else to say. We have a second chance in life."[7]

 

So what does a stroke victim, a concentration camp survivor and 155 travelers suddenly given a second chance in life have to do with Martin Luther King, Jr. and Rick Warren and Barack Obama?  Probably very little on the surface, in the ways that we typically assess identity.  But, in the depth of their humanity, in the ways that Thomas Merton suggested that we could truly know one another, they no doubt have a whole lot in common, just as every one of us does, each to the other.

 

And therein lies the true thrust of my message to you today.

 

As so many in our nation look forward to the inauguration festivities this week, we have good reason to consider the limitations that have been collectively lived through in order for us to witness the swearing in of our first African-American president.  How many lives have come and gone, yearning for enough racial equality in our nation so that this day might arrive?  How many boundaries had to be transcended over and over again, even when to do so seemed most futile, if not dangerous?  How much love has been longed for and shared in order to inspire and motivate those to be willing to cross the boundaries that needed to be crossed, to take the risks inherent in the free exchange of ideas, in the faith that a more just and free world can eventually come into being?

 

Boundaries, limitations, all the things that hold us apart and keep us from overcoming the fear that separates us, that keep us from grasping our “inescapable network of mutuality” can, in fact, be overcome.  This week’s events are a testimony to that fact.  Indeed, these boundaries are transcended all the time, usually in quiet, personal ways.  And we all have experience in boundary crossing by virtue of being human.  In fact, the experiences when we may be most despairing, most hesitant, most limited, most afraid to travel beyond that which we know, can offer us the greatest insight to our shared humanity and remind us, if not renew for us, the need for love that is ultimately at the core of it all. 

 

We each, in our own ways, gain glimpses of the promised land of which King spoke, the heaven on earth where people are judged not by their outward appearance, or politics, or religion, but by the content of their character.  And we each have responsibility to those we love (and those we have yet to love) to take whatever steps we can, small or large, to help make that promised land a destination for all our sisters and brothers.  For when we follow that calling—the calling toward the love that sustains us, and inspires us, and connects us to this precious life—then we shall indeed overcome.