This is based on a sermon delivered at the Unitarian Universalist Church of Urbana in Urbana, Illinois on 8 January 2016. It will be available on podcast, along with the song Psalm for Change, which I sang in worship that day at www.uucuc.org. I will update this page as it is made available.
Good morning everyone. I am happy to be here. To stand with you in exploring what many people feel is a coming period of resistance. For me, this is a period of welcoming a bit of chaos.
If we keep doing the same things over and over, the results will also repeat themselves, like fear-mongering, racism, and violence. Our UU Churches have gained attendance since the elections. People are looking for more reminders of humanity in ritual. People are looking for ritual to imagine a better world, to seek the obscure, to find the invisible, and to tie loose ends. We need ritual more than ever, to remind us why we do things the way we do. I learned in Standing Rock, in North Dakota where there is an oil pipeline getting built on the reservation, the elders would constantly remind us, we are always in ritual. How we do ritual is how we do life. Yes, it's good to plant community gardens, meet every month for square dance, or form an online cohort, and explore other alternative gatherings, but without ritual, it is easy to forget what spirit we are invoking, or what culture we were aiming for. Conversation can easily meander into prejudice or be hijacked by white fragility. Ritual puts our values back into conscious affirmation.
In this respect, I am a big fan of Jesus the revolutionary. Such a brilliant gatherer of people. Perhaps as a community organizer, he chose a prostitute and the tax collector because they know secrets of society. Wasn’t Jesus known for knowing things about religious leaders and confronting them about it?
One of Jesus’s strategy was to bring ritual into revolution – ritualizing communion, sermons, healing, Qand A, self-care, and invoking higher wisdom. What is ritual? It is going into actions, repeated in prayerful ways, conducted in the spirit of enfolding gaze, and designed to be instructive in community culture.
See, community is constantly threatened. Community goes against so many things in America today, where the system forces us into living in alienation, isolated from proper participation in shaping and talking about how common our concerns are. We are kept from realizing how much empathy we have for one another. The system has been built to make white people feel rewarded, they call it privilege. “Privilege” is based on a scarcity model. Abundance is not about running the gauntlet to be called superhuman. In an abundant system, there are no heroes, there are only communities. A popular Buddhist monk in France who lives in Plum Village is Thich Nhat Hanh. He says, “One Buddha is not enough. The next Buddha is a sangha (a community).”
We all know being called superhuman for going through hoops is an illusion. Look at the two people who have survived primaries to become US presidential candidates. They don’t reflect the best in all of us, do they? Competition doesn’t make us better people. Yet, this scarcity mindset persists and many leaders around us perpetuate it.
You’ve got racists in the White House. Huge oil corporations ignoring human rights and civil liberties. Hate crimes against persons of color have escalated to more than a thousand since Election Day. Black Lives are bludgeoned in the public square, in broad daylight, our modern day executions. ISIS has killed more Muslims than non-Muslims, according to a CNN report. Believers in the Prophet are deprived of the peace they desire and here in the United States as they are named and blamed. These united states were built on the shoulders of people who have been enslaved, exploited, dismissed, excluded and obscured.
If we are looking for change, we must also be prepared to change. No self survives a real conversation, said David Whyte, a great poet, and a real prophetic voice. No self survives a real conversation. We cannot continue to be the same while changing the world. We have a Unitarian principle about the interdependent web of existence because it is self-evident. Even those who think only Trump should change should be ready to themselves be changed. Otherwise, we may get rid of Trump but the conditions that gave rise to this racist agenda will persist and will produce the same bigot.
Conversations are such powerful places to wage conflict. And yet we often come into conversation avoiding conflict. Then we go to war. We come into conversation not wanting to feel vulnerable or honest. Then we go to war. People would rather lose life than their ego.
Life is conflict. We do not live by avoiding conflict but by waging it well. We need to start being truthful to each other. Truth-telling is the first act of justice. Allen Ginsberg was once asked how he has come upon his own prophetic voice, he answered, “Tell your secrets.” The human struggle needs to be understood wide open in all its frailty indeed, honest, unafraid. Tell the truth. How about a ritual shouting our secrets with joys and concerns? (“I forgot to feed the cat!”) Just a thought.
Robert Bella has said that our crisis is that of the imagination. I believe, we can no longer imagine a common future because we have constantly lied to each other. We cannot even sit with each other in common grieving over the problems of society because we deny that they exist especially when we are benefiting from them while others are deprived their dignity.
In Berkeley, we have experimented with a ritual of community lamentations. See in this society, we are taught to hide emotions. In our exploration of ritual in Berkley, we welcomed gibberish, wailing, moaning, and groaning. Along with clanking coins on a brass vessel. (I lament climate change! Clank!) We welcomed dissonance. And it was discomforting. People are not used to public wailing. This is pretty common in the Middle East, with men crying in public squares. Thus their community is strong.
We have learned from this Trump election that emotions hasten change faster than ideas ever will. All these uncontained emotions, emotions that were let loose without community spirit and ritual, found community and ritual in Trump rallies. The hate speech, the violence against protesters, the degrading of women, all became ritual in Trump rallies. And he gained quite a good ground.
We need rituals to help us with our emotions. Listening to emotion is making room for the irrational bafflement, confusion, anger, or loss. New ideas do not win by force, but by emotion. When our irrational emotions can sit with an idea, then it has won. The idea that a Native Americans could go against giant oil companies and can win needs to first sit well with emotions in the room. This can be facilitated by ritual. And the Native Americans put up a sacred fire just for this resistance. And one day President Obama sayed the pipeline.
Perhaps to reflect our modern day struggle between nature and greed we can engage in a ritual of oil burning on water. Another idea. Our rituals have to reflect which revolution we are in.
Ideas will win by sharing it and by setting it free to be co-owned by others, to be embodied in the heart and human activity. There is no requirement to force an idea on others or to be violent. A simple but right question can unsettle authority. Resisting change, however, remains costly. Look at all the millions they spend suppressing truths and revising histories. Revolutions do not need to be wealthy. In fact, there are no poor allies if you truly believe in change. Again, another thing I learned from Jesus who took in the poor, the sick, the widow, and the hungry. The unorganized are an open potential. Because revolution is simply allyship. Period.
Truly there are destructive ideas that continue to persist even if they have been proven time and again to be bad on human beings, like competition versus cooperation, like wars instead of talking, like isolating the intellect versus community conversations, like objectification versus dignity. No matter how many generations pass, successes will always be temporary and incomplete. We need to examine our rituals again and again as we examine with new lenses again and again. As revelations continue to unfold again and again.
Do you know what Thomas Jefferson said, “Every generation needs a revolution”? Well, in the Philippines, it’s been 2 revolutions per generation. So I must come with some wisdom here.
Our rituals need to reflect each current revolution. How we do ritual is how we live. May we all break together in revolution and ritual in deepening trust and commitment.
