A sermon by F. Jay Deacon
Preached at the Unitarian Society of Northampton and Florence
January 12, 2003
Maybe you heard the report this week about the death in Chicago of Mamie Till Mobley.
In grainy newsreels from 1955, you can see tens of thousands of people crowding the Chicago street for a chance to enter a church where, inside, lying in an open casket, was Mamie's son, just turned 14 — Emmett Till, who had been savagely beaten and drowned by a white mob in Mississippi.
He'd been visiting relatives in Money, Mississippi. Mamie had warned him that Mississippi is not Chicago — that, in her words, it "liv[ed] by an entirely different set of rules." NPR ran an old interview where she recounts the day she said to him "Bo, if you see a white woman coming down the street, you get off the sidewalk and drop your head — don't even look at her." But he had gone into a store run by a white woman, and whistled. To him, it may have been a joke. To the whites of Mississippi, it was something very serious, breaking the moral code. One puts "moral" here in quotes. They had to avenge the breach. In the middle of the night two men came into the house where Emmett was visiting — without covering their faces or trying to hide who they were — and took Emmett away. His body was found in the river three days later.
When the body was recovered in the Tallahatchie River, the morticians begged Mamie not to look. She did look, and then she insisted others do the same as a testament to her son's suffering. She demanded that her son's body be displayed as it was in an open casket. She says she told the mortician, "No, Mr. Rayner, let the people see what I've seen." And she told the interviewer, "I was just willing to bear it all. I wanted everybody to know what happened to Emmett Till."1
For three days people passed the open casket, saw the choked-out tongue, the right eye hanging down his cheek, saw the mutilated nose. Fifty thousand people came to see what happened to Emmett Till. One out of five needed assistance to leave the church.
The trial was an utter sham. In that climate it is amazing, but courageous witnesses did come forward and testify at the trial. Yet the two men were acquitted after a single hour of deliberation by an all-white jury, and the case has never been reopened; and then the murderers made a profit by selling their confession, that they actually did it, to Look Magazine. Yet Mamie Till-Mobley could not bring herself to hate white people because, she said, such hatred would destroy her from within.
By her courage in the face of advice, convention, and her own grief, Mamie Till-Mobley ignited the quiet flame that took life as the American civil rights movement. Three months later, in Alabama, Rosa Parks refused to give up her seat on a Montgomery bus.
Heroic stories stir us: something inwardly responds; we feel all our best and noblest impulses reawakened. We need them. The life of the soul requires reminders of what inwardly we are and what outwardly we might be.
We need noble and heroic thoughts. Mamie Till Mobley had memorized many of Martin Luther King's speeches and could deliver them without notes.
It's the same with the stories of the wild courage of Theodore Parker, the first part of whose brilliant new biography appeared this fall; and of other Unitarians and Universalists whose birthdays we should note this month . . . Senator Charles Sumner; Olympia Brown; Servetus and Schweitzer; —
And of course, beyond our own faith-tradition, there is the birthday next week of Martin Luther King.
Emmett Till's murder, and his mother's response — and Parker's heroism, too — came at a time of great crisis and terror. Such times seem to draw out of us a quality of austerity and heroism. Today we gather while almost daily, more troops are massing in the Persian Gulf, and 150,000 will soon be there. There is a huge air armada. I don't think I need to repeat today my own protest of our government's course and its failure to understand what it is that makes for peace and security. Suffice it to say that this week the number three official at the State Department, John Bolton, even said: "There is no such thing as the United Nations. There is only the international community, which can only be led by the only remaining superpower, which is the United States."
It's a time, again, of crisis and fear, and we wonder — citizens, soldiers, people everywhere — what will be asked of us, what dangers we and those we love will face. There are a few things we know we can do, small, symbolic things.
This past week in our gathering of religious leaders of many stripes, we set plans for what we will do on the day war is announced — a gathering at First Church, to come together, to bear witness — but that is only the beginning, only a symbol, signalling far more to come. We wonder what these times will demand.
There is a despondency and cowardice about our times that we feel draining the life-energy of our souls.
William Ellery Channing had something to say about this:
There are seasons in human affairs, of inward and outward revolution, when new depths seem to be broken up in the soul, when new wants are unfolded in multitudes, and a new and undefined good is thirsted for. These are periods when the principles of experience need to be modified, when hope and trust and instinct claim a share with prudence in the guidance of affairs, when, in truth, to dare is the highest wisdom.
Or, as Emerson put it in his essay on Heroism, "Seen from the nook and chimney-side of prudence, [life] wears a ragged and dangerous front." But to those who came at life in the way he is talking about, "life is a festival." He says we must ignore the thunder, "take both reputation and life in [our] hand," and dare whatever confronts us with utter integrity and truth. Instead of going to war against imagined foreign enemies, he is talking about the inner stance of a warrier toward the things that compromise our souls, the snares that bait us away from self-trust and entice us to go mindlessly with the crowd, that make us forget our duty and our destiny, and that make us too preoccupied with our safety.
He wrote his essay on Heroism just after the publisher Elijah Lovejoy was murdered in 1837, murdered by a racist mob after his anti-slavery publishing house in Missouri and then Illinois had been harrassed for months, after several of his presses had been destroyed, one after another, but he kept publishing until the mob came back and firebombed his plant — Lovejoy, dying when it was better not to live. In Boston, Channing was finding his courage, too. He tried to hire Fanieul Hall to protest Lovejoy's murder and was refused, and his attempts to honor Lovejoy were denounced by a member of his own church, the Attorney General of Massachusetts, James Austin. Channing had to decide if he cared whether or not Mr. Austin approved. He finally did get the hall, and 5,000 people came, and he, and a lot of people, found their courage. Emerson wrote:
O friend, never strike sail to a fear! Come into port greatly, or sail with God the seas.2
Emerson wrote and delivered another essay, on Courage, just as the heroic John Brown was being executed for his raid on Harper's Ferry — maybe the quintessential example of a heroic act that is not immediately recognized as great or even good.
These are famous names. And yet, a hero is anybody who obeys the secret impulses of their own soul, ignoring even the best advice when it contradicts that inner light. A hero knows what it is to pursue her own course even when nobody else seems to understand, even when to do so at first draws severe criticism from good people who mean well. A hero is anybody who at some time or another pursues that inner path without regard to external rewards or material benefit. It doesn't have to be something that anybody else ever notices.
And the essential distinctive of such a person is self-trust, trust in the divine-human capacities at the heart of him. It is a quality that has learned to laugh at the littleness of popular culture and takes its pleasure in the ever-renewed assurance that it can handle whatever comes.
Awhile back I used, for a reading, a poem by Adrienne Rich, in which she writes
There must be those among whom
we can sit down
and weep,
and still be counted as warriors . . .
I think
you thought there was no such place for you,
and perhaps there was none then,
and perhaps there is none now;
but we will have to make it . . .
Here, even if nowhere else, here, we must be able to sit down and weep and still be counted as warriors.
What meets the eye this morning is two or three hundred bright shining faces, faces reflecting a certain joy and expectation, but concealing wounds and terrors and sorrows. If, instead of the faces we present to the world by day, we could see the dreams and nightmares we dream about ourselves by night, we would know something of the profundity of what is gathered here.
It doesn't matter who or what you are; everybody hurts, everybody has fears. Those great giant heroic figures whose lives inspire us. John Quincy Adams. But he suffered from severe, debilitating depression and his son took his own life. Margaret Fuller. Depression and headaches. William Ellery Channing seemed to be sick as often as he was well, and sometimes he seemed to live in terror of the logical consequences of his own ideas. Everybody hurts, and everybody is faced with the fundamental spiritual choice between living heroically and following the crowd, taking the easy way.
We reach out to others for help, sometimes with a kind of desperation. And there is a kind of help that others can give.
But the first fact is that the resources we need lie within us, not outside us. We find the divine outside ourselves only after we find the divine within.
Andrew Harvey had a dream: He is sitting by the sea on a beach, and a very beautiful figure was coming toward him from far off. He couldn't tell if it was male or female, but it was radiant, had a golden face, and was gazing with great love at him. It came and sat down by him in the sand. They cradled each other in their arms, and then he found the courage to ask, Who are you? It smiled and said, I am you. At that moment, he said, he woke up knowing that what he had met was his profound Self, his hidden Self, there behind all the different masks. Later he found parallels of the dream, almost verbatim, in Tibetan and Zoroastrian texts. And then he even had an old yogi in the south of India tell him the same dream.
What we are here to do is to meet the person we are.
But we struggle and we hurt and sometimes we sit down and weep. Who cares?
Does God care?
But that's the wrong question. Until we know the divine inside, the hero there, it's only sentimentality. It really doesn't matter how many gods are out there saying i am if you can't find the i am inside.
The aching soul who has not found the God-In-Here, there hero within, and is looking still for a God or hero Out-There — will ache and hurt and want and cringe in fear, without relief, as long as the search is conducted on the outside.
The one who cannot say I believe in you and recognize the divine in you, the hero in you, cannot help us.
What kind of community do we need?
Not one that thinks people are helpless and weak and miserable and minute. We need a community, and friends, who can see from the sure ground of their own divinity the divinity of all, the fire that runs through every person and thing. And who looks into that divine face in hushed silence, awe, and love.
But maybe I have this backwards. Maybe, when I cannot recognize the divine within, or the hero, dare not recognize it here, I might . . . dare to see it in someone else, and then, in that interchange, have the blindness taken away — and that hero, that divine radiance that I now know in somebody else, I may finally recognize in myself as well.
Our best friends and our most precious community are those that call us to our best, our highest selves, and will not abide our compromising ourself; those who do not ask us to follow them, but allow themselves to be inspired by our best, our most authentic and heroic living. Remember Emerson's words:
"There is a power in love to divine another's destiny better than that other can, and, by heroic encouragements, hold him to his task."3
And so some of what I am saying here may seem contrary to the things we hope for in a community, a congregation; and yet, I say they are essential to the health of our life together.
When we have done the great thing — no, I didn't say the famous thing, the popular thing, even the thing anybody else much notices — the great thing, the heroic one, on however minute a scale — sometimes then we do a strange and ungreat thing. We expect the praise or sympathy of others for doing something that, by its nature, is of finer quality than any praise, and that might not even be fully understood or appreciated until long afterwards, if ever. So Emerson says,
But when you have chosen your part, abide by it, and do not weakly try to reconcile yourself with the world. . . . Adhere to your own act, and congratulate yourself if you have done something strange and extravagant, and broken the monotony of a decorous age.
You have done something that is of such quality that it might inspire others — well, a lot of the time, almost by definition, that means something that others may not really appreciate right away. And also by definition, if you had done it to get praise or commendation from others, it was neither great nor heroic, was it? In your heart you know the difference. You know that one is the path of spiritual growth, and the other isn't. And then you ask, Do I really care about spiritual growth? Is it really precious to me? Do I want it? Is it really the pearl of great price? And if it is — well, that path is not the easy one, not the cheap one, not the one that brings immediate applause, but it is the way of love, and truth, and integrity, and self-trust.
Emerson wrote of heroism, addressing people in the humblest of circumstances with the same invitation:
Let us find room for this great guest in our small houses. The first step of worthiness will be to disabuse us of our superstitious associations with places and times, with number and size. . . . where the heart is, there the muses, there the gods sojourn, and not in any geography of fame. . . . Here we are; and, if we will tarry a little, we may come to learn that here is best. See to it, only, that thyself is here; — and art and nature, hope and fate, friends, angels, and the Supreme Being, shall not be absent from the chamber where thou sittest.
This invitation comes to everyone, in whatever station of life. Maybe Mamie Till Mobley's greatest heroism isn't even what she did when her son was murdered. Maybe it was her life-long work as a teacher in the Chicago Public Schools.
Courage and heroism is not some special essence, some cell in the brain; it is, instead, the state of health and freedom in everyone. It is the state of anyone who is free to do just that which is organic for him or her to do, to live out your highest impulses, to live close to your soul. Every person has their own kind of courage; each moment calls forth its own. It is a creative force that flows when any one of us learns that in us, and in the moment, are the energies to do what must be done; a force that flows when the mind and heart and soul are freed, at least for the moment, from fear, from comfort, from the crowd, from hope of personal gain.
We cannot know what tomorrow will bring but we can be certain that, as every day, tomorrow will open up great stores of energy, courage, and vision within us if we stay true to ourselves and the spiritual path that beckons.
Each of us, in every day, may find, close to our souls, in some deep place away from the tumult yet in its midst — find just what the day demands, so that our words and deeds may live in some future day in bolder, loftier eyes of those who follow us.
There are seasons in human affairs, said Channing in the midst of another crisis —
. . . seasons in human affairs, of inward and outward revolution, when new depths seem to be broken up in the soul, when new wants are unfolded in multitudes, and a new and undefined good is thirsted for. These are periods when the principles of experience need to be modified, when hope and trust and instinct claim a share with prudence in the guidance of affairs, when, in truth, to dare is the highest wisdom.
Amen.
In the heat of the American crisis in which the heroic souls of Parker, and Emerson, and Channing, and Elijah Lovejoy, and Sojourner Truth, lighted the gloom of those days, a young law student decided the movement needed music and poetry, and Jim Lowell began writing hymns that still grace our hymnal, including this last one, number 150: —
they are slaves who fear to speak for the fallen and the weak
they are slaves who will not choose hatred, scoffing, and abuse
rather than in silence shrink from the truth they needs must think
they are slaves who dare not be in the right with two or three.
"All whose boast it is," number 150.
2 Heroism.
3 Uses of Great Men, Library of America edition, 621.
From Emerson's essay, "Courage."
Every creature has a courage of his constitution fit for his duties . . . Each is strong, relying on is own, and each is betrayed when he seeks in himself the courage of others. . . .
True courage is not ostentatious; [they] who wish to inspire terror seem thereby to confess themselves cowards. Why do they rely on [terror], but because they know how potent it is with themselves? . . .
See too what good contagion belongs to it. Everywhere it finds its own with magnetic affinity. . . . The troops of Virginian infantry that had marched to guard the prison of John Brown ask leave to pay their respects to the prisoner. Poetry and eloquence catch the hint, and soar to a pitch unknown before. Everything feels the new breath except the old doting nigh-dead politicians, whose heart the trumpet of resurrection could not wake.
The charm of the best courages is that they are inventions, inspirations, flashes of genius. The hero could not have done the feat at another hour, in a lower mood. . . .
There are degrees of courage, and each step upward makes us acquainted with a higher virtue. Let us say then frankly that the education of the will is the object of our existence. . . .
He has not learned the lesson of life who does not every day surmount a fear. . . . Have the courage not to adopt another's courage. There is scope and cause and resistance enough for us in our proper work and circumstance. . . . If you have no faith in beneficent power above you, but see only an adamantine fate coiling its folds about Nature and man,then reflect that the best use of fate is to teach us courage . . . If you accept your thoughts as inspirations from the Supreme Intelligence, obey them when they prescribe difficult duties, because they come only so long as they are used; or, if your skepticism reaches to the last verge, and you have no confidence in any [mind outside yourself], then be brave, because there is one good opinion which must always be of consequence to you, namely, your own.
This week we have received the sad news of the unexpected death of Joe Baum. During these days may Shirley and Vicki and all who loved Joe feel the love and care of our hearts and the great esteem and affection in which Joe will be held forever.
For the splendor of great lives well lived, whose fragrance, the essential oil of their experience, enters the veins of living space and adds a glisten to every atom, enriching all of life — for those whose lives have lighted the world with beauty and goodness — we are filled with gratitude. From them may we learn the courage of life, the grace of love.
We have come apart from our daily round to seek again the quiet of this sacred space. Well we know our fears; well we know the noise with which our fears sometimes fill our minds. We have felt overwhelmed, defeated, exhausted. Yet here we have gathered, seeking the reassurance of each others' faces and voices, by the gift of courage in these lives, well lived. And we gather — drawn by a half-forgotten knowledge that from some deep wells of our selves we might draw unimagined supplies of courage, and wisdom, and, in the midst of all turmoil, great joy.
Let us draw deeply from that place, the mystery of Life Itself, and let it carry away, layer by layer, our fears, and cleanse our sight, and renew in us the joy and the courage of life.
And there let us find the grace not to forget, but to remember, the fears and hurt in the hearts of those about us, and trust in them, as in ourselves, the potentialities that lie hidden, and make room for the unfolding of each. Let us find grace to live true to that inner principle, and allow to flow the ever-renewing Life within us, in brave freedom.
William Ellery Channing
There are seasons in human affairs, of inward and outward revolution, when new depths seem to be broken up in the soul, when new wants are unfolded in multitudes, and a new and undefined good is thirsted for. These are periods when the principles of experience need to be modified, when hope and trust and instinct claim a share with prudence in the guidance of affairs, when, in truth, to dare is the highest wisdom.
Sermon ©copyright 2003 by F. Jay Deacon. All rights reserved.