Who Owns The Conversation

Also titled, "Talking To People Who Are Not In The Room".
A sermon delivered at Mount Diablo Unitarian Universalist Church on November 6, 2016.

This was delivered on two services.  What is written here is what was planned but I did some ad lib as can be seen in this video.  Caveat:  I have terrible memory of details of my experiences. The details just as easily fall into myth.

Good morning to all.  Thank you for inviting me here.

Today I would like to talk about conversation.  Conversation is the unit of experience between a living thing and something else.  Doesn’t a rose in a vase speak to you?  When we hold space with someone in the silence of their hearts, don’t we communicate volumes of love to them?   Isn’t awareness of anything enough to let it change us?

A Syrian refugee at sea is in conversation with a Burundian in Canada.  I know the Burundian.  He was a refugee from Burundi.  He had fled to Canada.  He has not met that Syrian refugee, but the story has already changed his life and possibly his decision to flee Burundi towards Canada and not towards other countries. Yet that Burundian refugee never met that Syrian refugee.

Trayvon Martin is in conversation with a Hindu from India.  I lived with that Indian. He is my best friend.  His mother is said to be of pure Aryan race (the one from Persia).  His mother had married his farmer father. He despairs at how Black People are treated in America and how Trayvon Martin was gunned down.  Yet my Indian friend never met Trayvon Martin.

A Native American in Standing Rock is in conversation with a Unitarian from the Philippines.  That’s me.  I had been following their cause opposing the Dakota Access Pipleline.  But I never imagined I would travel 8 states in my trip to Standing Rock last Wednesday, to be with 500 other clergy from different faiths, and support water protectors and people of different National American nations in asserting their sovereignity over their land and water.  Or that I would even be quoted by Associated Press in an article along with UUA President Peter Morales and syndicated by ABCNews and two local papers in Wyoming and North Dakota.

Our narratives are really linked, isn’t it?  Water is such a huge part of the Philippines. Water is very much also a symbol of destruction in our country as we are visited by more than 10 storms a year with the increasing likelihood of supertyphoons.  Time Magazine dubbed us as the Most Storm Exposed Country In The World about 2 years ago. 

We are 7,000 islands.  Yes, there’s always a beach.  A study came out that we are the country that uses the word “love” the most.  A study at UC Berkeley said the Philippines is 9th on the top of the world’s list for happy countries, where depression is low.  We have a saying “Go to the beach” when one is sad. We are constantly surrounded by beaches, lakes, rivers, and falls. 

Your stories, and theirs and mine are in fact as linked as our waters.

If you have read that there are only 6 degrees of separation between any two people on earth, for people on Facebook, according to Facebook, that it is now down to 3 and a half.  I recently looked at my numbers.  In this app on Facebook, you just click a link and it will show you how many degrees of separation you have from anyone on Facebook.   Mark Zuckerberg, founder of Facebook, it appeared was at 3.17 degrees.   And of course, we know he has millions of Facebook followers.  Whereas I only have about 4,000 friends.  So it wouldn’t be surprising if my degrees of separation would be higher than his.   Well, guess what.  Zuckerberg: 3.17,  Tet Gallardo: 2.99.  Fascinating isn’t it?  Me closer to you than Mark Zuckerberg.

This probably sends shivers down the introvert spine. At least half of me is an introvert, that is the half that cannot tolerate small talk for long. That is the half that will try to isolate me from the rest of the world for days.  That is the half that is tired of getting wounded by too many microaggressions of people who don’t seem to understand me.   That is the half that probably spends more time on Facebook than Zuckerberg.

It is becoming more and more evident that we don’t just talk to people in the room. We are talking to people way beyond that which we can see.  Our narratives interact.  

Conversation is the backbone of human societies. Yet we do not know how to manage it.  Because it is easy to have a verbal exchange, we take it for granted and blabber away sometimes.  People used to say MUCH of our communication is non-verbal, but now we are finding that MOST of our communication is non-verbal.  Not just much but most.  And sometimes we don’t even have to be in the same room to communicate.  Sometimes we don’t even have to see each other.  Just knowing that a particular story exists somewhere in the world is enough for someone elsewhere to change their life.

We have technology that proves that after an earthquake struck Haiti, twitter and Facebook lit up with ideas on how to help and only within THREE hours the whole human race was in “an empathic embrace” with it.  Jeremy Rifkin is the scientist behind this.  He also says that when we see a human being suffer, for instance, so-called mirror neurons in our brains light up and mirror the neurons that light up in the brains of people actually experiencing the suffering.  Our brains are said to be soft-wired towards empathy because the first drive of human beings is not to be selfish but to belong.  You can see this if you google “The Empathic Civilization”.   

Studies have also found that social isolation kills more people than obesity does.  And there is even a Ted Talk by Robert Waldinger about a study where over 75 years they have tracked the lives of over 724 men, then only teenagers.  Half of them came from Harvard and half came from a poor community in Boston.   One of them became president of the United States.  And they found that good relationships are what makes for true happiness.   Good relationship protect bodies and brains.  People in good relationships stay mentally sharper longer as well as maintain ableness of the body longer.

Only last week, I was an Indian Canyon on a 4-day spiritual dance retreat with the Paiute and Shoshoni peoples.  And we found that they and us Filipinos have one word for mother, “Ina” and grandfather “Apo”.  Several generations and miles and thousands of years apart, and we retain the same words for the most important.   As I was there as one of the only 4 new people getting initiated in their ancient traditions,they let me become part of their rituals.  At one point, they let me carry the bull meat and channel it and speak about it before I served them personally at the feast.  There, about 36 other people were present.  At another time, they asked me to “pierce the veil” of the spiritual world so that it connects our ancestors better with us for our spiritual dance that night.   One of the Native Americans was Barbara.  She was half Filipino and she was in charge of piercing the veil.  She asked me and an American named Cathy to do the ritual with her.   This spiritual sensibility is not alien to me.  Among the 28 Unitarian congregations of the Philippines, many ministers are farmers living in the mountains and practice animist and pagan rituals, and many of them are faith healers.

So we went into a clearing, and shot the arrow with a bow into the dark woods, in the different directions – North, West, East, and South.  Each time listening only to where the arrow landed in the dark --- woosh --- and using only our ears, detect where it landed.  Then we would retrieve it by rituals of dedication before taking it back to center.   It was life-changing for me to be part of it.  During that weekend, an appeal was read from Standing Rock.  But still, I never imagined that I would be there with the water protectors and supporting Mother Earth.   In fact, most embarrassingly, among all the causes I’ve fought for over 30 years of social justice work, this was the closest I got to the mountains, rivers and lakes in protecting Mother Earth.  This was indeed a very rude awakening for me.

Let me wrap up by sharing with you 3 things I learned at Standing Rock:

First Lesson:  We all belong to tribes.  Even those who say they don’t.

As an elder told us as she came to the center of our meeting, “Where do you come from? Tell us about yourself, what brings you here, what is your purpose.  No, tell us, where do you really come from?”   And this to me is a shock and realizing that  “People of Color” initiatives only reinforce the idea that whiteness has no tribe or no race.  We all belong to tribes. We all do.  Even those who say they don’t.  When we come to the table, we bring our tribe and we should not deny it.

Lesson Two:   Privilege belongs to those who inherit the earth, not to those who have first dibs at owning it.

If these rich people were really so privileged, why do they take more and more from people who have nothing much?  If they were so privileged, how can they be so lacking in wisdom?  Is privilege the sensibility of a toddler who thinks they are the center of the world because we give them respect?  Why is it privilege when the Bundy brothers take over a piece of land and are not touched by police?  In every other part of the world, we call that corruption.   I call this the mentality of toddler supremacy.    Remember, there is no white, only tribes.

Third Lesson:  Conversation is a living thing. How do we feed it well?

Conversation is like water. It is the backbone of every relationship.  It connects people to people and carries with it lives, concerns, families, tribes, persons, longings, and myths.   How are we feeding good, honest, and open conversations?  How are we nurturing our lives through it?  How are we talking to people who are not in the room?

I have gone through 8 states on a road trip with 8 seminarians from Starr King and the GTU.  And you know what? We took care of our conversations.  We withstood our differences and showed as much love as we could in our diversity and through tests of hunger and exhaustion.  And we came back closer than before. And that gives me hope.   I ask you to please support Standing Rock.   Thank you.