A sermon by F. Jay Deacon
Preached at the Unitarian Society of Northampton and Florence
May 4, 2003
I was so very proud and gratified to see so many of you at Northampton's Pride Day! What a beautiful sight with our proud banner!
Today we gather in the name of a religious tradition so bold, so prophetic, that it gave shape to the notions of civil liberty, human rights and dignity, equality; while greatly expanding the circumference within which free minds might think fresh thoughts of their own. The faith of the free. Faith for the people everywhere, whatever their oppression, of all who make the world more fair, living their faith's confession!
Which is of some significance at a time when America has taken a plunge into the grim past, turning to superstition, fear, and theocracy.
After all, history, and the future of this human enterprise, has always been a struggle between the worst and the finest human possibilities. It demands of us not less than everything.
Religion concerns itself with the most fundamental issues of life; does so for good or for ill. It speaks to the purposes that drive our living, with human passions and possibilities. In doing so, it may serve either as a lock on the past, or as an engine of the evolution of consciousness.
It has driven the most barbaric of atrocities, and it has driven the most inspired unfoldings of magnificent human possibility.
On February 1, 1836, a a young Congressman from South Carolina named James Henry Hammond stood on the House floor to argue that the African must always be a slave because it is God's will as revealed in the Bible, and so, he said, "the hand of fate has united his color and destiny: Man cannot separate what God has joined." He spoke for the majority of the Congress. It was believed that the Bible endorsed Slavery. Many preachers said so, citing biblical passages.
Eventually, groups of Northerners would sign petitions to the Congress imploring them at least to end slavery in the District of Columbia. The Southern representatives were so shocked that anyone would dare interfere with this divinely-ordained system that they passed laws forbidding any petition on the subject of slavery from even coming before the Congress. And if anybody tried to travel into the South and speak or write against slavery, well, that would be a clear sign of contempt not only for the good people of the South who were only obeying the divine law, for the divine law itself, and must be punished as such. Congressman Hammond again:
I warn the abolitionsists, ignorant . . . barbarians as they are, that if chance shall throw any of them into our hands he may expect a felon's death. . . . The indignant feelings of an outraged people, to whose hearth-stones he is seeking to carry death and desolation, pronounce his doom; and if we failed to accord it to him . . . we would merit and expect the indignation of offended Heaven.1
When the Anti-Slavery Society of New York proposed in 1835 to hold its state convention in Utica, the local congressman, a friend of President Jackson, Representative Beardsley made this declaration:
The disgrace of having an Abolition Convention held in the city is a deeper one than that of twenty mobs, and . . . it would be better to have Utica razed to its foundations, or to have it destroyed like Sodom and Gomorrah, than to have the convention here.2
I tell you that, to put into context the recent remarks by national leaders including Senator Santorum of Pennsylvania, words dripping with contempt for gay and lesbian people, and the complicit silence of his party with which his remarks were met; to put into context court decisions like that of the Supreme Court of this land in Hardwick v. Bowers, quoting the Bible to sanction a contemptuous regime of discrimination — and God knows what further decisions from some of the judges now being confirmed by the Congress.
There was, certainly, an unquestionable entertainment value five years ago to Rev. Pat Robertson's utterances on his television network when he warned about the fate that would befall Orlando, Florida if it allowed Disney World host Gay Days week, and if the City of Orlando were to permit the flying of gay-themed banners from light poles to mark the event. Remember this?
If the United States wants to embrace `degrading passions' . . . if a condition like this will bring about the destruction of your nation; . . . if it'll bring about earthquakes, tornadoes and possibly a meteor, it isn't necessarily something we ought to open our arms to. And I would warn Orlando that you're right in the way of some serious hurricanes. I wouldn't wave those flags in God's face if I were you.
Earthquakes, tornadoes and possibly a meteor. He could have said widespread slaying of the first-born. But, you say, that is only Pat Robertson, a manifest nut. But he ran for President and he delivers millions of votes to the Republican Party, and when he calls their leaders, they listen.
And what about last week — when, trying to give some real meaning to the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, the United Nations Human Rights Commission considered a resolution expressing "deep concern at the occurrence of violations of human rights in the world against persons on the grounds of their sexual orientation", it was blocked because a handfulof states refused to support it: Saudi Arabia, Pakistan, Egypt, Libya and Malaysia — and the United States.
And what about Massachusetts, our Massachusetts, where, if the Supreme Judicial Court rules that an inequity against same-sex couples regarding the right to marry must be remedied, the Speaker of the House has vowed to push a Constitution amendment to shut us out permanently?
We all live in a culture permeated by a fear and loathing of sexuality and of same-sex love. It's bigger than you or me and our brilliant powers of reason!
And the truth this produces on the ground is the terrorizing, in ways both small and large, of the lives of gay and lesbian people, not to speak of bisexual and transgendered people. Let me offer an example or two.
If a young person is abused and humiliated in school because she is different in some way — it still happens —, she will probably go home to her parents and shortly be wrapped in loving, affirming arms. But if a young person is abused and humiliated in school because he is gay — and that happens day in and day out across this country — he will not dare tell his parents, at least not if he doesn't live in Northampton — and he will bear his hurt and rage in silence and isolation, because still, in too many homes, the idea of being gay is simply unspeakable.
And so is the fear and the hatred learned. And so I ask: How dare you, Senator Santorum, Senator Lott, Congressman DeLay, Speaker Finneran, or any other politician, or religious leader, or anybody else, how dare you presume to claim that your loves and relationships and families are good and godly and noble, and that ours are not; how dare you claim moral superiority over the loves and the families represented here!
And then there are the many recent pronouncements from one powerful religious body after another claiming divine sanction for the structures that exclude gay and lesbian people and treat us like a cosmic mistake.
And who will answer, and who will propose a fairer human community in which justice may prevail, and freedom, and the fulfillment of human possibility?
Before Stonewall, gay and lesbian Americans crept about in secrecy, in lonely isolation, in obedience to the unchallenged assumption that the preachers, and the Pat Robertsons and Trent Lotts and Dick Armeys and bishops and popes of the world are right. But on this day in 1969, a handful of drag queens and other queers fought back when another routine Police raid hit the Stonewall Bar on Christopher Street in New York City. Today we celebrate those voices that challenged the accepted order of oppression.
And we celebrate a religious tradition of voices that have never ceased to challenge the inadequate knowledge of the past, and the primitive prejudices, and the power of those who through force, intimidation, and privilege, maintain the systems that require the bondage and humiliation of others and deface in human faces the divine image.
The first Unitarian Universalist congregation I ever served was in Bangor, Maine. For months and years on end, the pastor of Bangor Baptist Church defamed gay and lesbian people from his pulpit. And then one day, a young gay man named Charlie Howard, 23 years old, was leaving the Unitarian Church of Bangor, on his way home from an Interweave meeting. He'd moved to Bangor from a smaller town for safety, but in Bangor, too, he was constantly harassed, and the gay couple who rented him a room in their house had their tires slashed forty times, while the police showed only contempt. And on this Saturday night, walking home from the one safe haven he knew, he was recognized by three Bangor High School students who jumped from their car and chased him, yelling "faggot" and "queer," and they beat him and threw him down, down the high stone bulkhead into the Kenduskeag Stream that runs through the downtown. After his death the preachers were as unrelenting as before, and the Bangor Daily News blamed his death on his own "effeminate manner." It was only the Unitarian Universalists who stood by him, and who demanded that Charlie Howard be remembered. And some of them weren't too sure, were pretty nervous. But they knew that their legitimate place was to lead, in Theodore Parker's words, by their own bold ideas, to lead the civilization of their age, and not to follow.
What happened in the halls of Congress when those 19th-century Southerners defended the institution of slavery? Who answered, and what was their response?
Surely there were, in that Chamber, the voices of the Free North, as well. What did they say in reply?
The answer may surprise you. The answer they gave was an apologetic silence. The more the Southern congressmen accused the abolitionists of being, and I am quoting, fanatics, murderers, accessories to infanticide, and fiends of hell — the more the Northerners figured they'd better not upset the Southerners anymore. They agreed to let Missouri come into the Union as a slave state. They agreed to the gag law that prevented petitions about slavery from coming before them. They agreed to the Fugitive Slave Law. At a time when the population of the young nation was 17 million, two and a half million human beings were enslaved — at such a time as that, they were awed into silence and passivity.
Here is what they thought. They thought that the end of slavery would come about somehow and eventually, by the gradual unfolding of historical forces. Daniel Webster was one who propounded this convenient view: slavery's demise was inevitable, so we would not have to do — should not do — anything to make it happen. Some scholars down to at least the middle of the twentieth century echoed this notion: slavery could have been ended just by the passage of time. In the twentieth century, white citizens often expressed a comparable attitude about the Jim Crow system that had hardened into place in the late nineteenth: time will change it — and time alone will change it.3
And what about the Free North? In the Northern states, abolitionists like the great Emerson were greeted wtih rocks, eggs, threats, cancellation of arrangements for their speeches, the breakup of meetings, editorial calls for repression by leading newspapers, and condemnation by leading citizens.
Those who called for the end of slavery, especially the immediate end of slavery, were called fanatics, radicals. And even those who were sympathetic with their aims thought they were impractical fools.
Theodore Parker, and Susan B. Anthony, and Emerson and Garrison and Charles Burleigh and the Alcotts and the Grimke sisters and a few more crazy radicals — they were all alone.
But they lifted their fearless voices and raged, and raged, and raged against the blindness of their times, against the stifling of human lives. And they were ridiculed and insulted and they raged, and raged, and raged some more, until the tide began to change.
They changed the tide. They reframed the debate. They shifted the center of gravity.
Two Unitarians — John Quincy Adams in the House and Charles Sumner in the Senate — raged and roared and shook the American conscience, and changed the center of gravity.
The Abolitionists didn't necessarily get a lot of thanks. When William Ellery Channing started to preach against slavery, his own Unitarian church in Boston ordered him not to preach anymore. When Theodore Parker organized the Boston Vigilance Committee, which snatched escaped slaves away from the fugitive slave hunters and saved them from the Fugitive Slave Law, the Unitarian headquarters stopped, for several years, printing his name in the Directory of Ministers. I know that. I went and looked in the archives. But we remember him, and Channing, and Emerson, and the others, because they spoke for our best selves, our highest possibilities; and we have long forgotten those smaller figures who could not see, beyond the unchallenged assumptions of their times, a larger future of human possibility. It is they who defined our mission and identity in the world and not the timid respectable.
Those bold souls remind us that progress and the continuation of the evolution of human consciousness is not done without resistance or without struggle.
You just have to decide which side you're on. Shall this religion serve as a lock on the past, or as an engine of human evolution? We get to decide for the future.
Fasten your seat belts and come with us. We are a people of the Edge. We don't dwell exactly in the mainstream. We belong to a religious tradition of prophets.
Unitarian Universalists are come-outers in terms of religion. Most of us came from somewhere else. We'd seen an edge. And the edge had defined the limitations of our lives and we were driven by a basic discontent about the narrow boundaries we found to human experience, awareness, and the quality of justice in the world. We have to push boundaries.
While creating a space for growth and healing, our mission in this world is to lead and to be leaders. To define the debate, not just respond to it, or, God forbid, ignore it. We must not be like those Northern politicians during the slavery debate, who boldly assumed the posture of mush and oatmeal.
There are those religious voices who inhabit the edge and push the boundaries.
Let us go forth proudly, in the name, and by the grace, of this great company of bold souls, the faith of the free.
by Dan DeLillo, 441-445 excerpted.
The plot was hard to follow. There was no plot. Just loneliness, barrenness, men hunted and raygunned, all happening in some netherland crevice. . . .
It seems you are witnessing an escape. Figures moving upward through gouged tunnels into a dark rainy night. A long scene of silhouettes and occasional tight shots, eyes peering in the dark. (441) . . .
These deformed faces, these were people who existed outside nationality and strict historical context. . . . The external features of the men and women did not tell you anything about class or social mission. They were people persecuted and altered, this was their typology—they were an inconvenient secret of the society around them.
There is a search party on the prowl, men on horseback strung out across the plain. They recapture some of the fugitives, they shackle and march them in somber lockstep, in tired mindless versions of the stage routines, and Klara saw it retrospectively, how the Rockettes had prefigured this, only it wasn't funny anymore, and they bare the faces of those who are still hooded, and the shots begin to engage a rhythm, long shot and close-up, landscape and face, waves of hypnotic repetition, and the music describes a kind of destiny, a brutish fate that bass-drums down the decades.
Klara was moved by the beauty and harshness of the scenes. You could feel a sense of character emerge from each rough unhooding, a life inside the eyes, a textured set of experiences, and an understanding seemed to travel through the audience, conveyed row by row in that mysterious telemetry of crowds. Ore maybe not so mysterious..
This is a film about Us and Them, isn't it?
They can say who they are, you have to lie. They control the language, you have to improvise and dissemble. They establish the limits of your existence. And the camp elements of the program, the choreography and some of the music, now tended to resemble sneak attacks on the dominant culture.
You try to imagine Eisenstein in the underground of bisexual Berlin, forty-five years ago, . . . (443-4)
All Eisenstein wants you to see, in the end, are the contradictions of being. You look at the faces of the screen and you see the mutilated yearning, the finer divisions of people and systems . . . (444)
Frederick Douglass, August 4, 1857—
Those who profess to favor freedom, and yet deprecate agitation, are men who want crops without plowing up the ground. They want rain without thunder and lightning. They want the ocean without the awful roar of its waters. This struggle may be a moral one; or it may be a physical one; or it may be both moral and physical; but it must be a struggle! Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did, and it never will. Find out just what people will submit to, and you have found out the exact amount of injustice and wrong which will be imposed upon them; and these will continue until they are resisted with either words or blows, or with both. The limits of tyrants are prescribed by the endurance of those whom they oppress.
The day comes bringing what it will, and gathered here with us are the joys and sorrows, the exuberance and the fears of all our days.
But to this place we have come, because we seek a subtler, more spacious place, a kingdom beyond the surface of things, a domain of soul and mind, where we know ourselves to be rich beyond measure, enveloped in energies of Love, made one with the heart of all things.
Even while we have our existence in the world of work and struggle, pain and pleasure, in the midst of the affairs of life: even while we pursue our daily round of what our days bring, even now — we draw from richer springs than eye can see, know ourselves participants in a realm not constrained by fear or by ignorance or by the limitations of the past, but forever new and free.
In this place, in this quiet, let the pores of our beings lay open to the divine wind. Let us know what is always near, never far, never closed to us, our deepest Home, the Earth from which we would grow, the Life that we would live in these days of our lives.
In this silence let us hear and know and live.