Sermon Delivered to the Unitarian Universalist Church of East Aurora on December 13th, 2020

Chrissy Hart
14 min readJan 20, 2021

Opening Words:

“Beloveds, each morning we are asked to take a moral stand on the side of love. May we find the courage and compassion to love like the sun, to generate love in abundance for a world that sorely needs it.

Each time that I facilitate conversations on systemic oppression and solidarity, I am struck anew at how programed we are to defensiveness and denial. Each time, my challenge is to love, simply love. We are not machines, broken and in need of fixing. We are wounded warriors in the struggle of life and we need, each of us, compassionate love to call us to our whole and holy selves.

May we wake each day with the mission to generate love in this world as humbly and faithfully as the sun generates light. May we trust that we can lean on each other for comfort when the struggle is relentless. May we know in the bones of our bones that we are not alone. May this knowledge give us the courage to shine the light of compassion on everyone. No exceptions.”

Rev. Deanna Vandiver

Intro:

Good morning. It’s wonderful to be here with you, on — in the words of Mary Oliver — “this fresh morning in this broken world”.

As is abundantly obvious to all of us, we are firmly mired in the muck of a prolonged national moment of fracture, division, and disunity, a deep crisis of community, as it were. It seems especially poignant that the fever pitch of our partisan politics and democratic dysfunction peaked at the same moment that a global pandemic — unprecedented in a century — brought us to our collective knees. And even while many continue to deny or downplay this reality, we are all living it. I suspect that many of you, like me, have been overwhelmed by the scale of loss, the stress and uncertainty of quarantine, and the pervasive sense that we are no longer in this, together.

I want to talk a little bit about the (relatively unique) fact of growing up UU and how our liberal religious tradition has helped inform my worldview, choices, and career path. And then I’d like to share some thoughts (questions, really) about how we, as a community of UUs, meet this fractious national moment and the forthcoming trajectory of continued loss, recovery, and healing that will continue to challenge us.

The experience of growing up in this church provided an often stark contrast to that of being part of an overwhelmingly homogenous community. My school environment — in the Iroquois school district — was almost totally white, Catholic and Protestant, and my peers largely came from right-leaning and conservative families. Fitting in generally required conformity, and conformity required subscribing to a dominant culture that, in retrospect, was deeply toxic. I have a poignant memory of being called a “devil worshipper” in the sixth grade when I tried to explain to a classmate what a Unitarian Universalist is. The ethos of my high school was best summed up by our school motto, “striving to be the best”. It was a place that valued excellence and sameness at the expense of empathy and inclusion.

In retrospect, I appreciate how that environment helped foster in me a commitment to academic and athletic achievement and participation in a laundry list of extracurricular activities, and especially how it challenged me to grow comfortable with being a dissenting, challenging, and sometimes ridiculed voice. I developed a confidence early on in rendering opinions and expressing ideas that were counter to the status quo, which included a fair amount of casual misogyny, racism, homophobia, and bigotry. And none of this is to say that there weren’t a lot of positives to growing up in Elma — there certainly were, including a handful of inspiring teachers, administrators, and coaches and friendships that endure today.

I suspect that the experience of being raised UU, in a family where being UU was profoundly normal and intergenerational, and the contrasting experience of an educational environment that soundly and regularly challenged my UU values, was the foundation necessary for making a series of atypical and defining choices. Those choices and opportunities have led to a deeply fulfilling career focused on social justice and an inherent adaptability and curiosity that have served me well in living and working in different corners of the world.

I’ll spare you a laundry list of my resume but instead share a few highlights that I think demonstrate the privilege of being able to forge a sustainable career predicated on putting your values into action. Today, I work for a global public private partnership called Together for Girls. Our partnership consists of the US and Canadian governments, 7 UN agencies (including UNICEF, WHO, and UN Women), and several private sector entities. With technical support from the CDC, we support national governments to conduct comprehensive surveys on all forms of violence against children and youth, to provide an evidence base for comprehensive national policy responses. In turn, we use these data on physical, sexual, and emotional violence against children and youth to advocate at the global, regional, and national levels — in UN forums and regional forums like the African Union, and to national governments, including the U.S. government. We also work with civil society organizations in the countries that conduct surveys and will soon begin focused work on a global movement to end sexual violence against children.

Until the pandemic, I was privileged to travel for work every month or two — largely to sub-Saharan Africa — and to attend conferences and workshops in cities like Doha, Nairobi, Paris, Delhi, and Johannesburg. Since serving as a Peace Corps volunteer and living in Burkina Faso, West Africa, for two and a half years after college, I have increasingly found myself at home abroad (and, as a result, have developed a well-honed strategy for booking the most comfortable economy seats on long haul international flights!). I have worked for the UN, advocated to Members of Congress for foreign aid and foreign policy priorities, and even helped plan an event to honor human rights leaders at the White House (the Obama White House).

I have befriended and worked closely with people whose experiences have been so very different from my own, but with whom I share a core set of values and an ambition to do good, well. As I’ve come to understand the simple ways to forge connections across cultures and backgrounds, and so each time I visit a new place, I learn to say a dozen or so phrases in whatever the predominant language is — Portuguese, Haitian Kreyol, Arabic, Swahili, Tagalog.

I don’t for a moment take for granted the privileged position I hold, as a white, American traveling in the world, and the significance of intervening in policy- and decision-making that impacts the lives of people who live an ocean away. I am heartened as our global development and human rights sector wrestles with how to meaningfully imbue our work with a racial justice lens and commits to more meaningfully challenging structural injustice that privileges the lives and voices of the West over the rest.

But, increasingly, and especially over the last year, I have recognized a disconnect between my enthusiasm and skill at engaging cross-culturally, with people who are largely like-minded, and the disdain I possess for fellow citizens whose world views and politics aren’t aligned with my own.

I suspect this will sound familiar to many of you: a conversation at a dinner table, on a phone call or across a Zoom conference room, wherein the topic of conversation turns to Trump, his supporters, and ends with some sort of head-shaking and multiple utterances of disbelief. I have had this conversation a thousand times. In fact, on our family vacation with my parents and my partner’s parents this summer, my partner remarked, at the onset of another post-dinner Trump conversation, that we had had some form of the same conversation for the entire week.

Like many UUs, I’m drawn to Buddhism and have embraced practices of mindfulness and meditation to help alleviate persistent anxiety and navigate the challenges of the present with somewhat greater ease. I’ve really appreciated coming to understand the deep relationship between self-compassion and compassion for others or, as it’s often termed, lovingkindness. The concept of lovingkindness often brings to mind a favorite Unitarian reference to Martin Luther King, Jr.’s “beloved community”.

In September of this year, my partner and I moved from Brooklyn to Portland, ME. He was laid off just before the pandemic and so we took his unanticipated job search as the sign that our planned future move to literal greener pastures should be imminent. He got a job with a solar energy company in Portland and so, with appreciation for flexibility of my job, we packed up and headed north. We arrived just in time to pitch in with the Maine Democrats’ work to flip Maine’s Senate seat and ensure that the state’s electoral votes — which could be split — all went to Biden and Harris. I threw my energy into volunteering and canvassing neighbors (in a responsibly, masked and socially distanced fashion) to rally support for the Democratic ticket.

One Saturday, we showed up at the Maine Dems office in our part of Portland, having completed one volunteer shift we were waiting to begin another. That day, Elizabeth Warren was making the rounds in Maine to stump for Sara Gideon and energize the party’s volunteers. As we waited in the parking lot of a small strip mall with other volunteer canvassers, a truck pulled in flying a “Trump 2020” flag with a tagline that read “Fuck Your Feelings” — a rather shocking sight in deep blue Portland. Happily, that driver left before Senator Warren arrived, but I was left thinking about how hurt and angry a person has to be to so proudly and visibly advertise such a horrible sentiment.

On election day, as a volunteer poll watcher with the party, I found myself in rural Dixfield, Maine — a town of 2500 in the western part of the state. The gray (or would-be-gray)-haired ladies who turned out to run election after election, generously welcomed me and fed me chicken salad and cookies while I sat and observed voting and ballot tallying for 13 hours. After I called in the precinct’s results to the party at 9 pm, I got in my car and began the two-hour drive to Portland, listening to election results starting to trickle in and contemplating the day.

I thought about these women, gladly exercising their civic duty year after year; certainly a mixed partisan group. I thought about the men in camouflage who came in to vote after a morning spent hunting; the frazzled moms with kids in tow; the older blind woman whose husband filled out her ballot, sitting within earshot, close enough that I could hear her respond “Biden” and “the Democrats” when asked which candidates she chose. Dixfield saw record turnout — almost 80% — like much of the country and the state of Maine, which already boasts the highest voter turnout nationally. Like in 2016, Dixfield voted for Trump and the Republican Congressional candidates. But having watched an entire community turn out to vote throughout the day, greeting one another and cracking jokes with neighbors, I thought about their stories. Wondered how many of them came from families that had lived in Oxford County for generations. Considered that, at any given moment that day, I was probably the most educated person in the room. Wondered how they saw me, a stranger clad in citified clothes, watching them file in and cast their ballots? On a day fraught with deeply partisan allegiance and anxieties, I spent hours observing people I didn’t know, and wondering about their lives, their challenges and heartaches and worries, their hopes, and the priorities that drove each of them to fill in one bubble or another.

Fast forward a few weeks to an afternoon that I took off work in order to use the volunteer hours that my organization allots to each staff member, annually. I’d decided that I wanted to find a longer-term ‘volunteer home’ and signed up for my first shift with Preble Street, an organization in the heart of Portland, that’s nationally recognized as a model for the provision of wraparound services “to empower people experiencing problems with homelessness, housing, hunger, and poverty, and to advocate for solutions to these problems”.

I’d signed up to help with donation receiving and was welcomed by the receiving center coordinator, a 50-something man named Ray, seasonally bedecked in a Santa hat and a mask with a beard on it. It struck me immediately that Ray is a man who is passionate about what he does and how he does it.

As he showed me the ropes, Ray described how had recently re-arranged the entire warehouse and created a department store-like layout so that caseworkers and volunteers could easily find clothing, arranged by gender and size, toiletry items. and other necessities for beneficiaries. As someone who self-identifies as “a little type A”, I greatly admired Ray’s systematic approach to the receiving center. In turn, he seemed pretty pleased to have a quick and enthusiastic study to assist him for three hours. We filled case worker requests and unloaded and organized a massive donation of masks, socks, and underwear from a local business.

An obvious people-person, Ray asked me about myself. The conversation drifted to Maine and its urban-rural, coastal-inland (and partisan) divide. I told Ray how my partner Jon and I had been immediately struck by how at home we felt in our neighborhood. When we moved in, it was littered with “Black Lives Matter”, “Hate Has No Home Here” and Democratic campaign signs. To my total surprise, his response was “well, I fall at the other end of the spectrum”. To be honest, I was flabbergasted. I had assumed most everyone who worked at Preble Street — lots social justice types with social work degrees — fell to the left of center. But here was Ray, a self-described conservative, clearly motivated by his Christian faith, working at an organization that uses government funds to help people, including those that most of us choose to regularly ignore — the people muttering to themselves in city parks and soliciting donations at freeway exits. And also LGTBQ youth, African and Central American immigrants with limited English-language skills, and people struggling with addiction. In the space of a minute, he turned my assumptions on their head.

I thought about Ray yesterday, when Jon and I were driving back home from a hike. We were listening to one of my favorite authors, Brené Brown, interview President Barack Obama for her podcast, Dare to Lead. Brené interviewed Obama about his new book and asked him to talk about his mother, and some of the lessons and values she imparted to him. He described her, stating, “she was very suspicious of slogans and would not sign on to any particular program, and would always tell me, “The world’s complicated,” and was suspicious of people who were too sure of themselves and justified putting other people down or being mad at them just because they didn’t subscribe to a very particular ideological view. And I think that that is a part of her that I inherited. I always ascribe this basic Kansas, Midwestern common sense, home-spun values that she in turn got from my grandmother and got passed down to me, and particularly now at a time when so much of our public discourse is full of people who on all sides are just absolutely certain about everything, and assume that if somebody doesn’t agree with them, then they must just be horrible people who don’t understand anything. I’ve found that to be a saving grace, that kind of approach towards life.”

Obama’s description of his mother struck a deep chord with me. It reminded me of a quote by another favorite author, Terry Tempest Williams, who writes, “I wonder what would happen if you gave up your need to be right?” It’s a question I return to, again and again.

After we finished the Obama interview, we chose another podcast, NPR’s “Hidden Brain”. The latest episode was a revisitation of a 2019 piece titled “Screaming into a Void”, highlighting the feedback loops of outrage that dominate social media and much of our public discourse. The host, Shankar Vedantam, interviewed an Atlantic contributor, Julie Irwin Zimmerman, who had written a controversial piece in January 2019 in response to an incident that had occurred on the National Mall during the annual ‘March for Life” against reproductive rights. A viral video showed Catholic school boys from Kentucky — several wearing MAGA hats — mocking a group of indigenous Americans who were playing drums and singing. It depicted them engaging disrespectfully with an older man, doing tomahawk chops, and acting a lot like teenage boys might act when inadequately supervised. It was discomforting and offensive, but it wasn’t the stuff of national news. Yet, that’s what it became. Soon, social media was littered with opinions about the video, with people — myself included — decamping to opposite sides of judgement on these boys. In the end, a longer video emerged showing a much more complex and nuanced chain of events, in which the boys themselves were aggressively harassed by a group of Black Israelites and actually approached by the indigenous man depicted in the original video. In the end, the scenario was complicated when more details were presented, but the reactions to the video — and its escalation to national headline news — said something profound about where we are — where all of us are — as a nation.

The example Zimmerman presented demonstrated the dangers of unbridled and unfiltered outrage, and the cognitive rewards of confirmation bias that engagement with social media and our retreat into our rigid and separate camps can reap. The episode goes on to affirm the critical uses of outrage to highlight injustice and achieve meaningful and lasting social change through movements like Civil Rights and Black Lives Matter, but emphasizes that outrage can actually run counter to activist goals, and can replace meaningful engagement within our communities to affect change.

And so I’m led to a series of questions, without easy answers.

How do we — as a community of liberal religious people of conscience — balance compassion, empathy, and openness with the righteousness and steadfastness that this moment of intersecting crises — from COVID to racial injustice to an assault on democratic norms and values — demands?

How do we extend compassion and understanding to those who see things differently, while standing firmly in our convictions?

How do we help generate community in the face of deep division?

I don’t know, but what I increasingly understand is that if we don’t delve into the complexity of our interconnectedness with all our neighbors, including those with different allegiances and opinions, then I’m not sure where that gets us.

I recently heard from a high school friend, Julia, who told me that she drove by the church during a Wednesday afternoon Black Lives Matter vigil. She honked and waved in support and received waves and cheers from many of you in response. She told me that it brought her to tears. Like-minded people like my friend Julia are desperately seeking community and solace and freedom from fear and so, I suspect, are those whose views and values are very different from our own.

Closing Words

“Unless we are very, very careful, we doom each other by holding onto images of one another based on preconceptions that are in turn based on indifference to what is other than ourselves. This indifference can be, in its extreme, a form of murder and seems to me a rather common phenomenon. We claim autonomy for ourselves and forget that in so doing we can fall into the tyranny of defining other people as we would like them to be. By focusing on what we choose to acknowledge in them, we impose an insidious control on them. I notice that I have to pay careful attention in order to listen to others with an openness that allows them to be as they are, or as they think themselves to be. The shutters of my mind habitually flip open and click shut, and these little snaps form into patterns I arrange for myself. The opposite of this inattention is love, is the honoring of others in a way that grants them the grace of their own autonomy and allows mutual discovery.[…]Compassion is one of the purest springs of love.”

Anne Truitt

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