It’s All in the Neighborhood
A Sermon by
Rev. Louise Green
All Souls Church, Unitarian
Washington, D.C.
Sunday, 14 June 2009
Text: What can we do to stretch our hearts enough to lose their littleness? Here we are—all of us—all upon this planet, bound together in a common destiny. Living our lives between the briefness of the daylight and the dark. Kindred in this, each lighted by the same precarious, flickering flame of life, how does it happen that we are not kindred in all things else? How strange and foolish are these walls of separation that divide us! Rev. A Powell Davies, in Welcome: A Unitarian Universalist Primer
On this Neighborhood Justice Sunday, let’s begin with celebration. The heart-stretching work of Gail Oliver and Rev. Don Robinson just honored is a testimony to the creation of community, bringing down walls of separation to unite kindred spirits, as Rev. A. Powell Davies names. Over this last church year, so many of you kindled those same inner flames through Social Justice Ministries at All Souls and I’d like to celebrate that now.
You worked to cook and serve lunch on a fourth Saturday at Christ House, the hospital residence for formerly homeless neighbors on Columbia Road. You gave time as a tutor or teacher with our ESL program on Sunday afternoons, getting to know immigrant stories and offering partnership. You brought in a green bag of healthy groceries in the Thanksgiving Collection for neighborhood agencies, and presents for the 350 children and parents at the Posada Christmas party, offered with La Clinica del Pueblo. You worked on a construction service day organized by All Souls Housing Corporation, and helped read to kids or hang drywall with two All Souls groups who traveled to the Lower Ninth neighborhood recovery in New Orleans. You worked for justice by investing your money with the Open Door Housing Fund, supporting the UU Service Committee, UUs for Social Justice, or the UU United Nations Organization.
Perhaps you came to Washington Interfaith Network actions for the proposed supportive and affordable housing project on Spring Road, or the city-wide Neighborhood Investment Fund. You served on the Beckner Fund Committee and gave money grant for youth or immigrant organizing in our Ward 1 neighborhood. You helped create Earth Day Sunday and developed the UU Socially Responsible Investing Conference, both sponsored by our 7th Principle/Green Souls. You worked on your lines for the KUUMBA Players social justice theatre, or sat in the audience marveling at the costumes and inter-generational cast. You helped create the wonderful exhibit of the Hiroshima Children’s Drawings now in Pierce Hall, hung the kites and arranged the cherry blossoms for our Sunday opening reception.
You looked at photos and heard stories from the UUA African Pilgrimage trip—and next Sunday one of the leaders of the Unitarian church in Lagos, Nigeria will be here to worship with us. Your supported our Religious Education social justice projects: carried in canned goods or school supplies for Martha’s Table, spent time in the big painted tent for Darfur on our lawn, listened to youth speak about the Invisible Children campaign around child soldier abduction in Uganda.
There was so much more action, all places where we stretched our hearts with social justice ministries. Truly we have an abundance of generosity here, and genuine desire to organize, advocate, and serve. You did exactly what Rev. Davies suggested---recognized common destiny, stood for the whole, honoring the divine spark of others in community. In these ways, you created a web of relationships, within this congregation, and far beyond. Celebrate your ministry and name it holy, for, as Davies puts it, we are “Kindred in this, each lighted by the same precarious, flickering flame of life.”
Sometimes in the midst of daily living and struggle, we lose perspective of that light. We forget to hold as sacred the choices and actions taken for granted in a community such as All Souls. Our oneness as kindred spirits goes unnoticed, and the walls of separation take hold. Unexpectedly, I thought about this matter on Friday night at the Walt Disney film “Up!” in 3-D. Yes, this is how it is when I am working on a sermon--odd ideas come to me at unlikely moments! That night, I put on bulky, black plastic glasses to enjoy the strange effects of 3-D movie-making, and everything changed. Those glasses radically shift the view…without them, the film looks clear in the middle and sort of blurry all around the edges. When you put them on, things literally pop into a unified perspective, with depth, texture, and dimension you can’t perceive without the lenses. Suddenly, you feel like you are diving into the center of the scene, into the heart of the images.
I wondered, how might we come to perceive our daily lives in three dimensions, pop out of the mundane flatness of the two-dimensional walls, tethered to one perspective which we mistake for reality itself? My at times inconvenient calling to ministry has repeatedly untethered me with a disconcerting truth: one gift we receive from social justice work is the chance to experience life through a different lens. If I come to acknowledge that my perspective is not the only one that matters, but instead a particular pair of glasses that I wear--when I recognize that you wear your own glasses--life gets complicated and rich. We give a great deal to transform the world, of course, but what we receive is immeasurably valuable. This gift returned is the chance to experience love in three dimensions, potentially changing everything.
Let me explain what I mean about 3-D love, using an idea from Vessels of Peace: The Voyage Towards Spiritual Freedom, by Ellen Stephen and Doug Shadel. They offer a visual framework for evolving love that I find very useful. In the first internal ring, closest to myself, I develop love that puts me at the center of the universe. This helps me establish my security, my sense of connection and foundation, all quite necessary for growth into maturity. I come into consciousness as a person, and gain my bearings. However, there is a cost whenever I get stuck in this place, which all humans do repeatedly. The authors warn us that, “Love which is fixated on this first level of development is attachment, attachment to self-survival.” When in balance, security roots us profoundly, and may save our life some day. Out of balance, we can become narcissistic, believing our personal center is the center of the universe. We mistake our individual perspective for reality itself, and cannot make space for other views.
The second ring outward in growth recognizes my self as individual, yet also allows me to perceive you in your own right. At this level, the writers say the practice of justice is possible. They observe that, “If I am I, and you are you, we can negotiate. Loving at this stage means fairness and equity.” While we still notice groups we name as our own most fully, and see those that are different less clearly, we can potentially seek a balance. As the writers of Vessels of Peace put it, “At best this stage can bring about covenant; at worst, vendetta. The adverse side of negotiation, justice and contract is vengeance.” This very human and animal tendency to mark territory, my side or your side, our turf or your turf, may offer equality, or devolve into blame and resentment. Justice in balance allows loving space for many perspectives. I release some attachment to my own security in order to offer love, allowing room for your need to thrive as well.
This visual framework of love then offers a third dimension, moving beyond justice toward what the authors call gift. In this third ring, I might travel out beyond my tribal loyalties, past any conventional set of rules I was taught, all those prescriptive “shoulds” for my clan or yours. This place named freedom, beyond the first two dimensions of security and justice, is described as a containing risk with great reward:
The person can see what is, instead of what is generally supposed to be, and act out of choice…There is no longer the need for certainty, that if I scratch your back you scratch mine; that if am I good I will be rewarded. If certainty and reciprocity, and even “fairness” are no longer demanded, one can live by possibilities in a dynamic structure of change. It means that risk is possible. A person can then choose a course of action in any circumstance, not because of any external stress or pressure, but because he or she chooses to live that way…this also means freedom. The freedom to be one’s own self, and let others be themselves.
Traveling through the challenges of life, we are always balancing the three rings, processing and responding to what we experience. The social justice work we celebrate today is our best impulse to move out into the second and third dimensions of love that emerge from faith and ethical values—to shift from our own center of the universe, in order to acknowledge, even advocate for, some one else’s reality. At times, we move all the way to offer gifts we choose to make freely, without expectation of reward, without preconceptions about personal territory or equal space. When we love in three dimensions, in community, we create a space where risk is possible. We say more fully that, I am free to be me, you are free to be you, and we may enter into the trust that builds relationships over time. This is the winged work of spiritual freedom, woven from the roots of security, coming directly through our action for social justice.
In Welcome: A Unitarian Universalist Primer, Michael Schuler notes the perspective that often comes with a UU pair of glasses. He celebrates UUs as a wonderful free-thinking and authority-questioning people, while urging that we hold a corner of our inner rooms for trust:
Cherish your doubts, for doubt is the servant of truth.
Question your convictions, for beliefs too tightly held strangle the mind and its natural wisdom.
Suspect all certitudes, for the world whirls on, and nothing abides.
Yet in our inner rooms full of doubt, inquiry, and suspicion, let a room be reserved for trust.
For without trust, there is no space for communities to gather or for friendships to be forged.
Indeed, this is the small corner where we connect—and reconnect—with each other.
On this Neighborhood Justice Sunday, we celebrate and honor our expansive three-dimensional love for the wider community. May we create a congregation worthy of our Coming of Age youth, infused with the best of our collective ideals, yet softened by the knowledge that we experience only partial reality. Claim the transformative gift social justice ministry offers to each one of us, the humble realization of limited perspective.
Blessed Be and Amen.