Sermons Archive

Speak Up

20 September 2009, TPUUF

© 2009, Bryant Bossler Brown

—

Being the best-kept secret in religion does not serve us well. Does not serve well at all.

I know, proselytizing is not something we want to be accused of practicing. We’re in good company. The Dalai Lama says, “whoever tries to convert, it’s wrong, not good. I always believe it’s safer and better and reasonable to keep one’s own tradition or belief.”

No, we don’t want to be in the business of trying to convert someone. We don’t knock on doors or stand on street corners selling copies of the UU World. It’s not our way.

But then, there’s the fact that most Unitarian Universalists have come into this faith, have not been born into it – though that is, thankfully, changing, if what I heard from young folks at our General Assembly is true.

Some of us find our way here on our own. Most of us, I’d guess, have had to be told. Maybe brought.

You have heard my story of friends inviting my wife, Maggie, and me to their “really neat” church which turned out to be UU. That was almost forty years ago.

And perhaps I also told that we had heard the minister of that church “talking sense” on the radio. I am thankful, very thankful, that those people’s Unitarian Universalist faith was not a well-kept secret.

My very first contact with UUism was Ric Masten. He is a UU minister, a poet, a songwriter – “Let it Be a Dance” in our hymnal is his.

When Ric was active as a UU troubadour-minister, he performed on college campuses. I, college kid, heard him perform – sing his songs, read his poetry – in a corner of the Student Center at the University of Delaware.

He has a poem in which his mother asks, “Ricky, are you going to let them put reverend next to your name in the phone book?” That’s how Ric reads it. It’s funny now, but Ric, who became one of my favorite poets, never told the 18-year-old, college-kid me that he was a Unitarian Universalist minister. Or what that might mean.

Now, I can regret that – now, that I know what finally finding Unitarian Universalism has meant to my life.

I know that what we heard from Michael Durall, that “We [Unitarian Universalists] seem to be comfortable telling friends about good movies, books, and restaurants, but not about a good church.” – I know that doesn’t apply to anyone here. My experience, like his, is that most UUs are reluctant to talk about this good church; about this good faith. And, as Michael Durall says, that really needs to change.

So, there you are, driving along, and the National Public Radio station you listen to and support fades out. You push the scan button to find another N-P-R outlet. Have you noticed how many religious radio stations your scanner stops on?

Have you noticed that the political candidates feel obligated to address the Christian Broadcasters’ Association conventions?

Have you seen the huge billboards on the Pennsylvania Turnpike, just north of here, visible from both directions, which tell of sin and redemption?

At one time I was involved with a group trying to get a local-access channel on our cable service up in New Hampshire. This was an old cable company, so did not have local-access as part of their charter – we had to beg and try to convince them.

We were in the process of trying to get a channel. At this early point we were contacted by religious outlets asking for our rate card – they wanted to buy some of our air time for their programs, even before we had any air time.

While I worked in small-market commercial radio, one of my daily responsibilities was to get the Jimmy Swaggart Ministries radio program on the air, and the “Old Time Gospel Hour.” And another whose title I can’t remember.

The tapes and the payment checks came regularly every month – checks important to a small-market station.

And there was the Baptist church in the next town which broadcast its service, live, every Sunday morning. And “Laymen’s Gospel Hour,” – actually a half hour purchased, from their own meager resources, by two men, living and sharing their faith. And there were the ads by the Sunshine Church and Lovell’s Christian Book Store.

And this is on one 250-watt daytimer commercial A M radio station serving the booming metropolis of Newport, New Hampshire.

Many religious organizations feel called by their faith to share their good news. They have money to spend to get their message on the air. And they are willing to spend it. And, they collect money from their programs’ listeners. Lots of money.

As a chaplain I often found patients staring at the television late at night. The televangelists would tell them a version of good news involving their sin and an offer of salvation. And that has great value to many people. I would not deny anyone that.

But what of other versions of the good news? The good news we share here as we tell each other of the joy of finding this faith and this faith community? The good news of the inherent worth and dignity of every person?

The good news about reason and responsibility? The good news of a life-affirming faith? Where does someone clicking through the channels, scanning the radio frequencies, looking for comfort and answers, where do they hear about that good news?

A neighbor of ours in Germany asked questions about the church my family went off to on Sunday mornings. And he kept asking questions. I showed him the little wallet card with our Principles and Sources. He asked, with amazement, “Is there really a church like this?” I say “amazement,” because it was not clear whether he was seeing this as something wonderful or weird, but it was certainly not something he knew of, or even imagined could possibly be.

And there are the people whom I met as a chaplain who would begin by saying they didn’t go to church who, then, after long conversations about their spirit or about atheism or agnosticism or humanism, would ask, “Now, what is this church of yours?”

Trinity College in Hartford, Connecticut just this week released a study called The American Religious Identification Survey. It shows that folks who claim no faith affiliation are almost 19% of men in this country and 12% of women. Their numbers are growing. There are lots of atheists and agnostics among them, but most just don’t belong to an organized religion – they have often left the religion of their youth. Maybe, just maybe, if they knew of Unitarian Universalism, it might turn out to be their faith.

In a U-S-A Today article about the survey, one of the authors, Barry Kosmin, likens the faith-free folks’ beliefs to those of Thomas Jefferson and Thomas Paine.

Really, folks, we UUs lighting our chalice each week, then hiding the light under a bushel, does not make sense. We need to let our little light shine. We really need to speak up.

And I am so thankful to Nikki Giovanni for linking this speaking up to atonement – the Jewish Day of Atonement begins at sunset tonight, and next month is the anniversary of the Million Man March on Washington. Yom Kippur, if I understand the tradition, is about saying “I’m sorry,” not only as individuals to individuals, but as a people, as a nation, as the human race, for all we need to be sorry for and atone for. To accept responsibility for. Which was what the march was about. I am sorry. Here is what I can do to change the way it is.

Then, once I say I need to speak up, I need to consider what I am going to say.

We are stuck with the imprecision of the words we have to express what has the deepest meaning to us.

We Unitarian Universalists like to get the definitions straight – what exactly are we talking about? I’ve said that I sometimes have the feeling we should distribute dictionaries along with the hymn books.

Sometimes this defining feels like we waste time. We are reading ahead in the hymn, looking for the not-out-of-my-mouth words, instead of listening to and being part of our voices singing together.

If I say “food,” you could picture enchiladas or blintzes or sushi or burgers or moo goo gai pan. I’m probably thinking about spaghetti. Most of the time, it doesn’t matter. We can keep talking about eating or world hunger without defining our mental pictures and cultural references.

We use the word “love” without agreeing on its definition. I know it when I feel it. I know it when it is being shared. I know it when it is given to me. I know it when it is missing.

The same goes for “grief.” And “joy.” And “gratitude.” There are words like “god” and “spirit” and “soul” that have entries in the dictionary, but really have to be part of a life and its experience to have any meaning.

And, it seems to me, the words – whether they be “food” or “love”– the words have different meanings for each of us, but we can still use them to talk to each other – and talk with others – about what is really meaningful.

The same with “prayer” and “worship” and “church.”

That realization has served me well in conversations with seminary professors and students, when I’m leading a Bible study group in Nigeria, when I’m being a chaplain for hospital patients, and when I’m talking with Unitarian Universalists. We don’t always have to spend time defining things of the spirit. In fact, it may be better if we don’t try too hard; if we get on with what really needs to be said.

I am not saying that words are not important. Words like “I love you” and “I am sorry” and “I forgive you” are important to say and hear. Days of Atonement and Making Amends are part of deep spiritual practices that go to the very core of our humanity and enrich it.

And, paradoxically, it feels as if we can talk about what is important to our spirits without trying to define the indescribable, without trying to describe the ineffable. We can talk about what is important to our spirits even without talking about spirit.

It feels as if the deists and theists and humanists and mystics and poets and prophets and messiahs and gurus and all the rest who want to talk about what is really important – transcendent or immanent or both or neither – it feels as if they are all – as if we are all – circling around the same ideas with our different words.

What seems most crucial is to come together and to talk and to sing, and to listen, using the best words we have. Or, maybe, using no words. As we do. Here. Each week. As we can in the world that needs to hear the good news we have found; the good news that we grow and nurture and share.

Mission – now, there’s a word we are reluctant to use – that I am reluctant to use. I have had experiences with missionaries in Africa and Europe and on my front porch – experiences that reinforce the image in books like Poisonwood Bible and Things Fall Apart – images of overbearing, insensitive spreaders of religion; agents of conversion. The folks the Dalai Lama warns about.

All the medical help and education, and the brave and selfless acts that the word “missionary” means to many, gets lost in the convincing and converting.

We do write mission statements, where we set out our purpose. Why do we come together? How is this church different from the Lions Club or a community action agency or a political party? Or how is it different from any of the other religious institutions around here?

We do have a sense of some distinctive reason and intention for our gathering – some importance for there being a liberal religious voice, a Unitarian Universalist voice, in this area.

Mowing the grass and lighting the lights – that’s important, but that’s maintenance. What we do for peace, for justice and for each others’ spirits – that’s mission, in the best sense. How we represent a belief in the inherent worth and dignity of each person – that’s mission.

And to use another word we shy away from, that’s witness.

And that’s just words. Artists of all kinds try to touch on this idea that we can’t precisely picture, even in our own minds – ideas we do so want to share and explore with our fellow human beings. So we create our images and do our dances and write and perform our music. And sometimes, amazingly, wonderfully, we get so very close.

Sharing this UUism is a gift we can give the people looking for this faith, and to a world that needs people who live by our Seven Principles; who come together to build their own theologies – plural. Who work for justice for all.

This congregation does reach out with its programs and activities and presence here, and on the Web; in the groups we welcome to this building; in the concerts and speakers we present to the community; and with these open doors year ‘round. We sense and respond to a mission.

We’re not just dancing alone or with each other, or just to be seen. There is vital work to be done. By whatever word we use to describe it, we all have an important mission – a mission it is exciting and wonderful and enriching for me to see and share with you.

Every once in a while, our denomination, as a movement, speaks up: through our Unitarian Universalist Association and the UU Service Committee and UU Legislative Ministries.

We UUs have taken principled and courageous stands for civil rights and gender equality and marriage rights and gay rights and on many critical issues of our society and our world. We, as individuals and congregations and a denomination, have faced anger and backlash – have been on the receiving end of angry speech and of violent action. We have said “I will stand because today it doesn’t matter if I am alone I need to stand and testify.” Speaking up is for the brave.

We, as a congregation and as a denomination, are raising our voice, a voice that needs to be heard now. Now, when important issues of justice and fairness are being shouted down by deceit and distortion and demagoguery.

Think of the joy in your life when you found Unitarian Universalism, when you found Thomas Paine Unitarian Universalist Fellowship – joy that others might share if they just knew about this faith and this place. Think of the injustice you have seen and experienced. Think of all the opportunities and all the need for us to gather the best words we have and speak up.

So be it. Amen.

Sermon presented by Rev. Gabriele Parks

I’d like to start with a poem by the poet Robert Herrick, who lived from 1591-1674 in England:

Down with the rosemary, and so
Down with the bays and misletoe;
Down with the holly, ivy, all
Wherewith ye dress’d the Christmas hall;
That so the superstitious find
Not one least branch there left behind;
For look, how many leaves there be
Neglected there, maids, trust to me,
So many goblins you shall see.

This poem is called: “Ceremony upon Candlemas Eve.” Candlemas, which Catholics celebrate on Feb 2nd, is the last festival in the Christian year. The liturgical year, which is markedly different from the calendar year, is dated by reference to Christmas until February 2nd, subsequent holidays are calculated with reference to Easter. So Candlemas marks the end of the Christmas and Epiphany season. Its formal name is either the “Festival of the Purification of the Virgin” or the “Presentation of Jesus in the Temple” depending on which rite the Church follows.

The date of Candlemas is established by adding 40 days to the date set for the Nativity of Jesus. In the Roman Catholic Church, where Christmas is on December 25th, Candlemas is on February 2nd. In the Greek Orthodox Church, where the birth of Jesus is celebrated on Epiphany (January 6th), Candlemas is on February 14th. Hmmm, February 14th, does that remind you of yet another not-so-holy holiday?
Why 40 days, you might ask? Well, under Mosaic law, a mother who had given birth to a man-child was considered unclean for seven days; moreover, she was to remain for three and thirty days “in the blood of her purification.” Candlemas therefore corresponds to the day on which Mary, according to Jewish law, should have attended a ceremony of ritual purification. The gospel of Luke tells the story in Chapter 2, verse 22: “When the time came for their purification according to the law of Moses, they brought him up to Jerusalem to present him to the Lord 23 (as it is written in the law of the Lord, “Every firstborn male shall be designated as holy to the Lord”), 24 and they offered a sacrifice according to what is stated in the law of the Lord, “a pair of turtledoves or two young pigeons.”

So this explains the formal names given to the festival.

Let me digress a little bit, because I saw raised eyebrows when I mentioned that a woman was considered unclean. In today’s enlightened society, this might sound strange, and offensive. It might raise the hackles of feminists. However, in the agrarian society in which Mary lived, life was very hard for a woman. The average life expectancy was 22 years, mostly related to problems in childbirth, and to the hard work they did. But while a woman was considered “unclean,” she couldn’t do any cooking, or washing; and her husband stayed away from her. So those seven plus 33 days gave her a much needed break!

But back to our holiday: Candlemas is mostly a celebration of Mary, of her motherhood. Mary, the most unique of all women in the world! But there is another woman, also quite unique, connected with Candlemas. Let me tell you the story of Egeria. She was a nun who was determined to travel to Jerusalem and visit the sights there, and to observe as many religious rituals as she could. So that’s what she did. And she wrote long letters to her beloved fellow nuns at home. What’s so unique about this, you ask? Well – she did all that in the years 381 through 384 AD! Imagine, a single woman, traveling all the way from Northern Germany, across the Alps, and through Italy, crossing the Mediterranean, and finally getting to the Holy Land! She knew no fear! Let me read to you what she wrote in her tinerarium Peregrinatio (“Pilgrimage Itinerary”) about Candlemas: “XXVI The fortieth day after the Epiphany is undoubtedly celebrated here with the very highest honour, for on that day there is a procession, in which all take part, in the Anastasis, and all things are done in their order with the greatest joy, just as at Easter. All the priests, and after them the bishop, preach, always taking for their subject that part of the Gospel where Joseph and Mary brought the Lord into the Temple on the fortieth day. And when everything that is customary has been done in order, the sacrament is celebrated, and the dismissal takes place.” Egeria reported that this celebration took place on February 14th, which proves that in Jerusalem at that time, Christ’s birth was celebrated on January 6, Epiphany.

Late in time though it may be, Candlemas is still the most ancient of all the festivals in honor of the Virgin Mary. The date of the feast in Rome was moved forward to the 2nd of February, since during the late 4th century the Roman feast of Christ’s nativity been introduced as December 25th. Candlemas did become important enough to find its way into the secular calendar. It was the traditional day to remove the cattle from the hay meadows, and from the field that was to be ploughed and sown that spring. References to it are common in later medieval and early Modern literature; Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night is recorded as having its first performance on Candlemas Day, 1602. It remains one of the Scottish quarter days, at which debts are paid and law courts are in session.

In the Roman Catholic tradition it is the day on which believers bring beeswax candles to their local church to blessed for use in the church or in the home. Also, many churches bless all the candles they plan to use in the coming year.

In the British Isles, good weather at Candlemas is taken to indicate severe winter weather later. It is also the date that bears emerge from winter hibernation to inspect the weather; as well as wolves, who if they choose to return to their lairs on this day is interpreted as meaning severe weather will continue for another forty days at least. And as we all know, in the United States and Canada, Candlemas evolved into Groundhog Day.

In France, Candlemas (French: La Chandeleur) is celebrated with crêpes, which must be eaten only after eight p.m. If the cook can flip a crêpe while holding a coin in the other hand, the family is assured of prosperity throughout the coming year.

Sailors are often reluctant to set sail on Candlemas Day, believing that any voyage begun then will end in disaster – given the frequency of severe storms in February, this is not entirely without sense.

Modern neo-pagans have argued that Candlemas is a Christianization of an ancient pagan festival, Imbolc, which was celebrated in pre-Christian Europe at about the same time of year; this festival marked the mid-way point between the Winter Solstice and the Spring Equinox, and was celebrated with lights to hasten the coming of spring. It is the festival of the Goddess Brighid; which was “adopted” – or should I say adapted – by Christian missionaries as “St. Bridget.” Our Pagan Group will now share with you their ritual; honoring Brighid.

Sermon presented by Rev. Gabriele Parks

How many of you were here last week? Remember the responsive reading # 587 which Yvon Kennon read with you? The writer of this poem was a remarkable woman: one of the 20th centuries most lyrical and vibrant poets, Audre Lorde. She described herself as a “Black lesbian, mother, warrior, and poet”. However, her life was one that could not be summed up in a phrase. I want to share with you today some facts about her life, along with some of her marvelous poetry.
Audrey Geraldine Lorde was born on February 18, 1934 in New York City. As a young child, she decided to drop the “y” from the end of her name. This seems to have set a precedent in her life of self determination. She was the daughter of Caribbean immigrants from Grenada who settled in Harlem. A poem she wrote in 1992 shortly before her death gives insight into her relationship with her father:
“Inheritance – His”

My face resembles your face
less and less each day. When I was young
no one mistook whose child I was.
Features build coloring;
alone among my creamy fine-boned sisters
marked me Byron’s daughter.
No sun set when you died, but a door
opened onto my mother. After you left
she grieved her crumpled world aloft;
an iron fist sweated with business symbols
a printed blotter dwell in the house of Lord’s
your hollow voice changing down a hospital corridor
yea, though I walk through the valley
of the shadow of death
I will fear no evil.
My mother’s Grenville tales
spin through early summer evenings.
But you refused to speak of home
of stepping proud Black and penniless
into this land where only white men
ruled by money. How you labored
in the docks of the Hotel Astor
your bright wife a chambermaid upstairs
welded love and survival to ambition
as the land of promise withered
crashed the hotel closed
and you peddle dawn-bought apples
from a push-cart on Broadway.

Does an image of return
wealthy and triumphant
warm your chilblained fingers
as you count coins in the Manhattan snow
or is it only Linda
who dreams of home?
You bought old books at auctions
for my un-languaged world
gave me your idols Marcus Garvey Citizen Kane
and morsels from your dinner plate
when I was seven.
I owe you my Dahomeyan jaw
the free high school for gifted girls
no one else thought I should attend
and the darkness that we share.

Now I am older than you were when you died
overwork and silence exploding your brain.
You are gradually receding from my face.
Who were you outside the 23rd Psalm?
Knowing so little
how did I become so much
like you?

Audre was the youngest of three sisters, she was raised in Manhattan and attended a Catholic school. While she was still in high school, her first poem appeared in Seventeen magazine. She had tried to publish it in the high school journal, but the administration of the school felt that her work was too romantic for their literary journal. Audre graduated from Columbia University and Hunter College, where she later held the prestigious post of Thomas Hunter Chair of Literature. For seven years, from 1961 through 1968, she served as a librarian in New York public schools. In 1962, Lorde married Edward Rollins. They had two children, Elizabeth and Jonathon, but divorced in 1970.

While Lorde worked as a librarian, she refinied her talents as a writer. In 1968, she accepted a teaching position at Tougaloo College in Jackson, Mississippi where the violence that greeted the civil rights movement was close at hand every night. This period cemented the bond between her artistic talents and her dedication to the struggle against injustice. Listen to her famous poem COAL:

Coal is the total black, being spoken
from the earth’s inside.
There are many kinds of open
how a diamond comes into a knot of flame
how sound comes into a word, coloured
by who pays for what speaking.

Some words are open like a diamond
on glass windows
singing out within the passing crash of sun
There are words like stapled wagers
in a perforated book, -buy and sign and tear apart-
and come whatever wills all chances
the stub remains
an ill-pulled tooth with a ragged edge.
Some words live in my throat
breeding like adders. Others know sun
seeking like gypsies over my tongue
to explode through my lips
like young sparrows bursting from shell.
Some words
bedevil me.

Love is a word, another kind of open.
As the diamond comes into a knot of flame
I am Black because I come from the earth’s inside
now take my word for jewel in the open light.

Isn’t her use of language awesome?! Another one of her more powerful poems is “Needed: A Choral of Black Women’s Voices,” about two specific incidences of murdered black women. Not only does it bring to life the two victims, but it also has Lorde’s perspective as a narrator or leader of the women. The poem is divided into three “voices,” or parts, Lorde’s, and one part each for the two murdered women. In her parts she includes how bitter and oppressive these murders become because the victims are African-American women. Here is a short excerpt:

This woman is Black

so her blood is shed into silence

this woman is Black

so her death falls to earth

like the drippings of birds

to be washed away with silence and rain.

Lorde uses very little punctuation, so when a poem is read, there are few breaks in, or between lines, which creates a continuous flow of imagery and energy. She also chooses carefully which words will be capitalized. For instance in the excerpt I read, Lorde only capitalizes the word “Black.” Audre Lorde’s first volume of poems, The First Cities, was published in 1968. In 1968 she also became the writer-in-residence at Tougaloo College in Mississippi, where she discovered a love of teaching. In Tougaloo she also met her long-term partner, Frances Clayton. Here is one of the many poems she wrote for her:

These days

when you do say hello I am never sure

if you are being saucy or experimental or

merely protecting some new position.

Sometimes you gurgle while asleep

and I know tender places still intrigue you.

Now

when you question me on love

shall I recommend a dictionary

or myself?*

Until the early 70′s, much of her work focused on the transience of love; but in 1974 she published New York Head Shot and Museum. This book began her most political writing. In 1976, her collection Coal was released and shortly thereafter The Black Unicorn was published. Poet Adrienne Rich said of The Black Unicorn that “Lorde writes. . . . poems of elemental wildness and healing, nightmare and lucidity.” Although her work gained wide acclaim, she was also sharply criticized for her lack of inhibition. In an interview in the journal Callaloo, Lorde responded to her critics: “My sexuality is part and parcel of who I am, and my poetry comes from the intersection of me and my worlds. . . . Jesse Helms’s objection to my work is not about obscenity . . .or even about sex. It is about revolution and change. . . . Helms knows that my writing is aimed at his destruction, and the destruction of every single thing he stands for.”

In the essay “The Power of the Erotic,” Audre spoke eloquently about the importance of being in touch with one’s feelings and creativity. In a way, this is where Lorde’s sense of “community” began: understanding that if we don’t have a valued relationship with ourselves, we won’t have meaningful relationships with others. I’d like to read a few paragraphs to you:

“The erotic is a resource within each of us that lies in a deeply female and spiritual plane, firmly rooted in the power of our unexpressed or unrecognized feeling. . . Of course, women so empowered are dangerous. So we are taught to separate the erotic from most vital areas of our lives other than sex. . . .”

“The principal horror of any system which defines the good in terms of profit rather than in terms of human need, or which defines human need to exclusion of the psychic and emotional components of that need–the principal horror of such a system is that it robs our work of its erotic value, its erotic power and life appeal and fulfillment. Such a system reduces work to a travesty of necessities, a duty by which we earn bread or oblivion for ourselves and those we love. But this is tantamount to blinding a painter and then telling her to improve her work, and to enjoy the act of painting. It is not only next to impossible, it is also profoundly cruel.”

“During World War II, we bought sealed plastic packets of white, uncolored margarine, with a tiny, intense pellet of yellow coloring perched like a topaz just inside the clear skin of the bag. We would leave the margarine out for a while to soften, and then we would pinch the little pellet to break it inside the bag, releasing the rich yellowness into the soft pale mass of margarine. Then taking it carefully between our fingers, we would knead it gently back and forth, over and over, until the color had spread throughout the whole pound bag of margarine, thoroughly coloring it. I find the erotic such a kernel within myself. When released from its intense and constrained pellet, it flows through and colors my life with a kind of energy that heightens and sensitizes and strengthens all my experience.”

Audre Lorde received a host of awards and honors, including the Walt Whitman Citation of Merit, which conferred the mantle of New York State Poet for 1991-93. In designating her New York State’s Poet Laureate, the Governor, Mario Cuomo, said: “Her imagination is charged by a sharp sense of racial injustice and cruelty, of sexual prejudice . . . She cries out against it as the voice of indignant humanity. Audre Lorde is the voice of the eloquent outsider who speaks in a language that can reach and touch people everywhere.” All in all, Lorde published over a dozen books of poetry, and six books of prose. In addition to being a writer, Audre Lorde also was a Teacher and Activist. She was at the center of the movement to preserve and celebrate African American culture at a time when the destruction of these institutions was on the rise. And, she provided avenues of expression to future generations of writers by co-founding the Kitchen Table: Women of Color Press. Her dedication reached around the world when she formed the Sisterhood in Support of Sisters in South Africa. She was one of the featured speakers at the first national march for gay and lesbian liberation in DC in 1979. In 1989, she helped organize disaster relief efforts for St. Croix in the wake of Hurricane Hugo.

Late in life, Audre Lorde was given the African name Gamba Adisa, meaning “Warrior: She Who Makes Her Meaning Clear”. It is a name that applies to her whole life. Lorde’s son Jonathan Rollins recalled the warrior spirit that his mother possessed by stating that “. . . not fighting was not an option — We could lose. But we couldn’t not fight.” Audre Lorde was fighting on many fronts. She fought societal oppression as a Black person – fighting for racial justice; as a feminist,– fighting for equal rights for women; as a lesbian– fighting against homophobia and discrimination.

On a more personal level, as a poet, she fought for recognition as well as for financial survival; and as a person living with cancer, she constantly fought for a few more years, a few more months. Her life embodied more struggles than most of us had ever thought existed. Lorde bravely documented her 14-year battle against the cancer in “The Cancer Journals” and in her book of essays “A Burst of Light”. The Cancer Journals won the Gay Caucus Book of the Year award for 1981. Lorde wrote about her illness: ”The struggle with cancer now informs all my days, but it is only another face of that continuing battle for self-determination and survival that black women fight daily, often in triumph.”

She struggled against disease and against a medical establishment that was frequently indifferent to cultural differences and insensitive to women’s health issues. She stood in defiance to societal rules that said that she should hide the fact that she had breast cancer. Here is a poem she wrote about facing the certainty of death while around her life goes on:

The Electric Slide Boogie

New Year’s Day 1:16 AM
and my body is weary beyond
time to withdraw and rest
ample room allowed me in everyone’s head
but community calls
right over the threshold
drums beating through the walls
children playing their truck dramas
under the collapsible coat rack
in the narrow hallway outside my room

The TV lounge next door is wide open
it is midnight in Idaho
and the throb easy subtle spin
of the electric slide boogie
step-stepping
around the corner of the parlor
past the sweet clink
of dining room glasses
and the edged aroma of slightly overdone
dutch-apple pie
all laced together
with the rich dark laughter
of Gloria
and her higher-octave sisters

How hard it is to sleep
in the middle of life.

Audre Lorde, died in St Croix, Virgin Islands, on November 17, 1992. I would like to close with her poem “If You Come Softly”

If you come as softly
As the wind within the trees
You may hear what I hear
See what sorrow sees.

If you come as lightly
As threading dew
I will take you gladly
Nor ask more of you.

You may sit beside me
Silent as a breath
Only those who stay dead
Shall remember death.

And if you come I will be silent
Nor speak harsh words to you.
I will not ask you why now.
Or how, or what you do.

We shall sit here, softly
Beneath two different years
And the rich between us
Shall drink our tears.

Sermon presented by Rev. Gabriele Parks

Annemarie Ernst was a little more than ten years old when her father sent her to the house she had lived in all her life, to retrieve the family bible. The day before, Annemarie and her parents had been forced to leave their house to make room for a Polish family that was moved in by Russian occupational forces. Poland had received the former German provinces of West Prussia, Poznan, and Upper Silesia under the Treaty of Versailles after World War I.

Annemarie and her parents had been allowed to pack what they could carry, in their hands and on one cart. As they were moving out, the Polish family, themselves displaced from their home, moved in. They were apologetic, and tried to be as friendly as was possible under the circumstances. In the refugee camp in the nearby town, Annemarie’s father realized the next day that the family bible with all the information of the past generations of the Ernst family had been left behind.

Since Annemarie spoke some Polish, and since she was a child, the father asked her to go back to get it. She walked the 4 or 5 miles to her hometown, and when she got to the house of her childhood, she knocked on the door and asked the Polish lady whether she could go in to get the book. Permission was granted without hesitation.

As Annemarie walked through the familiar hallway, past her own bedroom, past the kitchen, and in to her father’s study, tears were streaming down her face. She was blinded by those tears when she reached for the big blue book, grabbed it, and ran back outside. She cried most of the way back to the refuge camp. When she gave the book to her father, he realized to his dismay that what Annemarie had brought back was her mother’s big old cookbook . . . But they couldn’t make her go back again; and she never saw her hometown again in her life.

This is how Annemarie’s nightmare began, and for her, it never quite ended until the day she died.

You probably guessed it: Annemarie was my mother. And we still have the old blue cookbook . . . Actually, it is most likely the only thing that has survived from this time.

Eventually, in Sept of 1939, Hitler declared war against Poland, and WWII started. The nightmare continued for six endless years. From the refugee camp in Breslau, the family moved to Chemnitz in Lower Saxony, where my grandfather tried to rebuild a life for himself and his family.

The war induced scarcity had devastating effects. All three were undernourished, and when my grandmother contracted typhoid fever, she did not have the strength to battle the disease, nor were the necessary medications available. She died at age 43, leaving behind a teenager and a prematurely aged husband.

In the course of the war, Annemarie was forced to flee four more times; she spent countless days in air raid shelters; the young man she had fallen in love with died as a soldier; she was raped by Russian soldiers on two separate occasions; one of those rapes resulted in a pregnancy which forced her to have an abortion at age 17.

After the end of the war, my mother and grandfather ended up in Bavaria, a country very foreign to their native Silesia. Although both states were German, the culture and especially the dialect couldn’t have been more different. She didn’t have a penny to her name; and no friends. Of the large Ernst clan only a few relatives survived; they helped her get settled in Passau which was to become my hometown.

Annemarie had to find a job, which was not easy because of the large number of refugees streaming into Bavaria, and because she never had a chance to finish her education. She also had to cope with her father, who had become hopelessly bitter, and who only lived in the past, not able to adjust to the new life she was trying to build.

Compared to my mother, my father had been lucky. Yes, he had been a soldier in the Wehrmacht, but he didn’t see too much fighting. He got sent to Finland first, were according to him they had a lot of fun; discovering the finish sauna and frolicking I the woods. Then he was transferred to Yugoslavia, where he got wounded in the shoulder by an errant bullet that ricocheted off a wall. After he recovered from this injury, he went back to battle, only to be captured and being a POW for a few months until the war ended. He did not talk about the war unless we specifically asked him; but I never had the impression that this reticence was due to memories too painful to dredge up. Also, he never displayed anything like PTSD.

However, his two younger brothers both went MIA. I remember that only last year at Christmas he was telling me that they had discovered German soldiers living somewhere in the former Soviet Union, and he was hoping that maybe at least one of them was his brother, maybe having amnesia or so. He never found closure, and till his death he talked frequently about Karl-Heinz and Reinhard, and how much he missed them.

Why am I telling you all this? My sister and I grew up with those stories, many of them in detail, some of them only hinted at. We heard them often, and in a way, they were “just stories.” Only when I became a mother, when I moved to another country, when I lost my mother much too early, did I start to realize what a horror my parents had lived through.

As a child, I sometimes resented hearing the same old stories again and again. But now I have come to understand that the reason my mother talked so much about her war experiences was that her losses were so manifold that she had no way to deal with all the grief but to talk about it. Her losses – I can’t even begin to imagine the pain and suffering she went through. But – and that’s why I’m talking about this to you – her losses also directly affected me and my sister, and they are indirectly affecting my daughters and my sister’s son. Because this is what war does!

Thomas Paine once said: If there must be trouble, let it be in my day, that my child may have peace. But it doesn’t work that way. War casualties – that’s not only those who get killed, those who lose their home, those who are raped or tortured. No, the casualties of war go beyond – into the next and the next generation. If there were such a thing as a “loss index,” if one could objectively measure pain and grief, the numbers would be so much higher.

I am also sharing my story with you because here, in this country, very few people have actually experienced war. Since the late 19th century, war is something that happens somewhere else. Yes, American parents have lost sons or daughters, wives have lost husbands, and children have lost fathers or mothers; and I do not want to downplay that. But the loss of health, of home, of property, of basic human rights, of dignity, that come with a war on your own soil, have not been experienced here since the end of the 19th century. Those losses have deep effects on the next generation, and – to use the Buddhist term of Dependent Causality – they affect all the following generations.
Let me give you a few examples: For both my mother and my father, the war interrupted their education and job training. My mother had been enrolled in a middle school for gifted and talented young people when she had to leave Silesia; my father had been, at age 19, Germany’s youngest department store manager. My mother would have been one of the “modern” young women of the 40s, with a brilliant career at one of the big universities, either Breslau or Berlin. There is no telling where my father could have gone with his uncanny business sense: in his late fifties he finally had a few deutsch marks saved to start some moderate investing, and whatever he touched seemed to turn to gold. My mother eventually got a job as a typist, and my father worked as a traveling salesman; both never experienced any job satisfaction.

Along with this loss of a financially secure and successful future came the loss of expectations and hope. It is understandable then that my mother wanted my sister and me to have the academic career she couldn’t have; but both of us failed, and she never got over her disappointment: she lost her expectations not once, but twice. My father was hoping that at least one of us would have some business sense, but, alas, neither one of us has clue when it comes to business administration or investments.

The Greek philosopher Pericles stated that “What you leave behind is not what is engraved in stone monuments, but what is woven into the lives of others.” The disappointment of our parents has been woven into the life of both my sister and me. For decades, we were both suffering from low self-esteem and the belief that we would never amount to much. Only in the last five years have I overcome this handicap, and my sister is now finally seeing a therapist to work through some of those same issues.

And of course there are effects on the next generation: I had suffered much from the pressure and then the disappointment of my mother, so I did not make any demands on my daughters. Not exactly the right approach either . . .

A less serious – but today the most visible – consequence of the losses that both my parents experienced is “hoarding.” Because when they got married, they literally owned only what they wore and what could be carried in a small suitcase, everything was used and reused until it literally fell apart. Any item that had potential use was kept. My favorite story here is the two winter coats my mother made for my sister and me from her father’s old coat. They looked great!

It sounds funny now, but my father cut out the zippers from old leather bags or pants before he threw them away and kept them, and I did the same until about ten years ago. As a child, I never perceived myself as being poor, but this inability to throw anything potentially useful away is clearly a result of the scarcity during my childhood. Both my daughters are hoarders, too, and my husband has given up long ago to try to change us.

Another casualty of the war that is not captured in the statistics is the health of the survivors; or rather the lack thereof. My mother’s physical and mental health was greatly damaged by the war. The mal-nourishment during her adolescence had weakened her digestive system, all her adult life she had problems with stomach and colon; and she died of stomach and colon cancer at age 62. The grief and long suffering because of the war was partly responsible, of course, and it made her a bitter and resentful woman.

I only have very few memories of my mother as a happy person. Those few occasions showed me how she could have been. Like her, my grandfather was bitter and angry. He died when I was only four years old, I had never seen him smile or play with us children. All my other grandparents had died in the war, along with most of my parents’ relatives. I have no aunts or uncles, no cousins, no extended family. The few relatives that made it through the war are scattered all over Germany. My mother found it very hard to make friends in Bavaria, partly because there was a lot of resentment of the locals towards refugees; and partly because the culture and language were so different. And, to be honest, my mother was very class conscious . . . So my parents did not have the relatives or the social support system that could have helped them to settle in better.

And here is another hidden war casualty: the marriage of my parents. You have to understand, when the war was over, about five million German soldiers had been killed. Most of them were between the age of 18 and 30. My mother was 22 in 1945, and there were only very few young men for her to chose from. She liked my father, I have no doubt about that, but they were not a good match. They were both from Silesia, and that attracted them to each other. But they were from a different social class, with different educational background, different hobbies, etc. And of course, the rapes and the abortion made their intimate relationship very strained.

My sister and I were very aware of this, and as adolescents we both vowed never to get married. And we both waited until we were in our thirties to finally “risk it.” A lot of our own marriage problems are directly related to the fact that we did not have a good model for marriage in our parents. But thank God we both have very patient husbands. .

Still, now it is our kids who struggle with relationships, because they in turn did not have very good models.

Finally, I want to mention the loss of one’s homeland. It is so much more than just the buildings, or the landscape. It’s your roots, your culture. Roots are incredibly important, They give you your identity. When you look at the metaphor of the tree, it is obvious that without roots you can’t grow. And when you are transplanted, your growth is stunted or delayed. In the soil are all the nutrients – in you family there is the wisdom of past generations. Much of this is irreplaceable.

My daughters, like me, never had the blessings of a large extended family. The wisdom I just mentioned that is often passed on through grandparents or aunts and uncles, the additional love one gets form one’s family, was not there. Only now, in their generation, is the family starting to grow again.

But there are a few more results of WWII that you might not think about: I still run into people occasionally who stop speaking to me when they hear my German accent. When my daughters went to school, they were confronted with literature that describes the many evil deeds and atrocities committed by the Germans. Nothing wrong with these books, but my daughters both denied their German heritage for many years.

A terrible parallel is happening right now: a distant cousin in Germany is married to a pediatrician whose family immigrated to Berlin from Turkey. He is a Muslim, and although he does not practice his faith, and his sons were baptized in the Lutheran church, they are persecuted by their classmates in elementary school. Another cost of war . . .

Allow me to get back to the beginning: the big blue book. As much as my sister and I enjoy checking out recipes from the 1920s and 30s, I would much rather know who my great grandparents were, and many other data from the Ernst family. The way it is for me, our family didn’t come into being until 1953 when my parents got married. I have always struggled with my identity. I love my homeland of Bavaria. But I was always an outsider there, despite being born there, because I never spoke the dialect the same way the locals did, and my life at home was very different from my peers life in the Bavarian village. That’s why I fight for the rights of immigrants, illegal or not. That’s why I make all my charitable donations to refugee organizations.

That’s why I wrote this sermon.

In the news from Iraq, you hear the numbers of American soldiers who got killed. Sometimes, very rarely, you hear conflicting numbers of Iraqi “casualties.” But nobody ever talks about the “casualties,” the losses, of the survivors: the parent-less children, the raped women, the displaced refugees. Those people who 20 and 40 years from now will still feel the effects of the war that’s raging today. Please, do not forget those victims, and their descendants. Every war has several generations of uncounted, unseen casualties. War is unbelievably evil. There is no just war!

You could probably argue that what happened to the Germans was just retribution for the atrocities that they committed. And maybe that’s true. But the consequences for the women and children, for the next two or three generations, are definitely NOT just.

If you go to GA in 2009, and if you are in the plenary session where we will discuss and vote on which direction the UUA should choose, “just war” or “pacifism,” I hope you will vote for pacifism. There is no just war! As a religious organization, we have to send this message to our leaders. To prove my point, I will close with a quote by Herman Goering, Nazi Reichsmarshall and Chief of the Luftwaffe (Air Force). He said on April 18, 1946:

“Naturally the common people don’t want war; neither in Russia, nor in England, nor in America, nor in Germany. That is understood. But after all, it is the leaders of the country who determine policy, and it is always a simple matter to drag the people along, whether it is a democracy, or a fascist dictatorship, or a parliament, or a communist dictatorship. Voice or no voice, the people can always be brought to the bidding of the leaders. That is easy. All you have to do is to tell them they are being attacked, and denounce the pacifists for lack of patriotism and exposing the country to danger. It works the same in any country.”