Conversational Life

Sermon delivered at The Unitarian Universalist Fellowship of Redwood on February 5, 2017.

Good day everyone!  I’m happy to be here and yet also I’m very very tired. I have been without a day in the warm sea for 6 months now, but I also know I’m halfway done in this school year at Starr King.  It’s always a mix of the good and bad, isn’t it.  And everyday, I toil to correct assumptions people make about the Philippines.  And our president, Rodrigo Duterte, is not helping any. 

There’s more to be said, but this sermon is not about politics.  It’s about conversation.  It’s about how we come to conversation with a defense against being changed by it.   God bless people who change their minds after being shown scientific evidence or being told about reality, not alternative facts.

No one knows that last Thursday Duterte has suspended 23 large, long-established mining firms from plundering and pillaging our communities.  No one knows that he has thrown out the oligarchy’s exemptions from agrarian reform so that farmers can have genuine rights to land.  During his first 100 days in office, 700,000 drug users surrendered.  700,000 have tested positive and now overwhelm the rehabilitation systems, not killed.  The Philippines used to be the worst country in the world for journalists with 35 killed every year, now no more.  What can I say about the killings in the Philippines? Horrific! Sadly, 1,000 deaths a month has been the trend since last year, before Duterte. 

But people talk about it here as a blessing that they are not in the Philippines.  They are happy they are here and not there.  Even more so before the elections. Don’t we just love divides and classifications. First, these divides feel like choices as if people carefully decide which nation to belong to or which race.  If that were true, we may all be tanning in the Philippines. More than half a million Americans are there right now.

The Philippines has taken in refugees in every war since the 20^th century, including more than a thousand Holocaust refugees, half a million Vietnamese refugees, Russians, Chinese, Muslims.  The Donald might even say, “You’ll love it, it’s true”.

Second, divides and classifications make us feel a sense of self and even identity.  It’s like going into a Starbucks shop and saying I’d like a macchiato, extra-shot, with soy and honey, make that warm, not hot. Do that everyday, and you will feel that identity is real. Where I live back in Manila, 5 Starbucks stores are within a half mile of me.  That was my ritual. That identity kept me in a glamorized job that was not close to what I’m worth.

Third, these classifications and divides give us a feeling of freedom from something.  People here say, thank God I’m not in the Philippines, or thank God I’m not in Trump’s list.  Thank God, I’m not underprivileged. Thank God I’m privileged.

But which one is privileged? The person who can afford  the highly-priced fresh meal or the person who is born in a country where they get fresh meal without discrimination.  Are you privileged to be in a scarcity model of breaking your back and trampling on others to gain human rights or would you be privileged if you lived in an abundant society where human rights are for all?

Conversations are the best places to wage conflict and yet we don’t know how.  We are so used to divides in our conversation we don’t come into conversation to expose them and mend them, but to keep them secret. 

We are used to the conversational model of “shutting down” and “mic drop”.  Authoritarianism starts in such an insidious way.  We have glorified it in our CEOs and entrepreneurs.  It’s about who gets to be god first. It’s about conversations that early on establish positions of teacher and learner in a one-direction flow so that teacher is superior and learner is inferior and not questioning the expert.  It’s about ruining credibility with over-eager criticisms on a masteral level setting a bar so high as the eyebrow, no one passes.  It’s about the inability to adhere to our democratic principles. We can see the perpetuation of classroom models that fail to form learning communities.  We need intercessors between us because there are so many things in which we differ despite so many things in which we are the same, and that’s why we need community.    

Now why, why would real conversation be so scary?  David Whyte says, “No self survives a real conversation.” Truly we cannot come into any conversation without being changed in either of three ways: seeing the self, seeing the other, and seeing the relationship.   But we do this everyday. This is why we tend to be attracted to our opposite.  Conversation was meant to be a healthy dose of adversarial.  Why would this be scary?  Why would we be scared of admitting we are changed?  We wouldn’t want to tell truths in conversation to preserve some comfort level. We don’t we want to wage our conflicts fully present and in relationship, we would rather wage them in war.  Yet, truth-telling is the first act of justice.

When we ritualize whitewashing or revisionism or avoiding confrontation in conversation, we give fodder to the the injustices around us. If we don’t wage conflict well in conversation, we will wage it in wars.  We hardly see the rituals we have established in our everyday lives. The rituals of living now involve establishing routine that kills creativity, paying taxes to a government that does not redistribute wealth, going into traffic day in, day out, surrendering our truths, or hiding our personal convictions in an office meeting.  How many of us realize we are always in ceremony?  Conversation is ritual and ritual is conversation.  Whether they lead to change or revolution is up to us.

Rituals were once established by religions to help the imagination. For instance, sacraments supplies us with lenses in seeing rites of passage in terms of who we are, who are the others are, and what to expect of this new relationship between us and the world--- these are the three things we change in conversation – me, others, and relationship.  

Rituals are not just routines.  Lighting the chalice is not the same as clocking in for work.  

No one is stopping us from blessing the closest body of water and affirming that water is life by adopting a lake and making its purity levels a part of prayer.  There are no hindrances to blessing cohorts in ritual so that their imagination is well-aided by a community to help them see the potential of their teamwork.   

In my congregation back home, we formed a basketball team with a bunch of young people ages 13-18.  We didn’t know anything about basketball.  We just gave them a bunch of uniforms, told them to shoot and dribble.  They have never been in a competition before. But we did teach them Unitarian values.  Guess what? Out of the first 5 games they played, they won in 4.  All this, just developing a really good conversation between them.

Rituals are for helping us to see the unseen, the unimagined, and the obscured.  How about coming into a rally, bringing a ton of rainbow powder to bless the protesters, make the demonstration festive, and defuse the impending violent thoughts?  Emotions will hasten change faster than ideas ever will.  This is why we have Trump, by the way.

I’ve learned ritual early on.  When a kitten I adopted died and my 3 younger sisters, ages 15, 12, and 10 were so sad about it, I put the remains in a shoebox, dug the earth in our yard, played a small piano, and prayed with them.  I learned early on how easy it is to change the hearts of people, through the imagination. Our crisis is that of the imagination, some say. 

It is hard to imagine together as a beloved community when we have constantly put on a face and lied to each other. Since we don’t have a planet B, we must learn to be in relatioship even with our enemies.

Balanga is a small fishing village in the Philippines where there was a family with 8 kids. The house is always open to strangers who may eat and sleep whenever they want.  Filipinos are legendarily hospitable, nothing odd there. I noticed that home was never empty, there was always someone in the house, but never was this one person there alone.  And I asked the owner, why is this person not ever alone in the house? The owner said, because he’s a thief.   And yet they continue to welcome this thief, treat him like family, except just to not trust him with their belongings, so it worked that way. 

In Australia, there was a story of a man who went around knocking on doors to announce that he was new in the neighborhood and that by law he is required to inform each one that he is a sex offender.  Every one accepted him, but they just would not leave anyone alone with him, except his wife.

Everyone is flawed. What if we just come to accept that first.  What if we formed allyship coming out with our vulnerabilities?  Isn’t the revolution nothing else but allyship?

How then shall we form allyship when we are always competing on who gets to “drop the mic” or to deliver the “word”.

Well, I’m just about to test my theories by attempting to start up a campus ministry in UC Berkeley. I won’t know who to be, who they will be, who I’m getting, and how we shall relate to each other.  All I know is I want real conversation.  And that’s all I’m offering.  Let’s see how that’s going to change anything.