I Believe
By Janice Morris
Good Morning. My name is Janice Morris, and I was one of those fortunate enough to travel to New Orleans this past month with a group of wonderful UU folks, including our own Reverend Mary.
I say fortunate because I came away from it really feeling like I had been given a gift. First, I was able to see life through other people’s eyes. Secondly, I got to do physical work I had never done before. And finally, I left New Orleans with a greater appreciation of the value of each small blessing.
My job in New Orleans was to help lay cement board on the floor in Ms. Severe’s “double shotgun” house. Ms. Severe was a truly a lovely lady, with snow white hair, great cooking skills, and such a positive outlook on life she could make the sun rise in the morning. And above all, she was resilient. During one of the delicious lunches where she served us authentic New Orleans cuisine, she told us how committed she was to coming back after the storm and rebuilding her home. FEMA of course didn’t make it easy. But Hands On New Orleans, the organization staffed primarily by amazing young people in the Americorps program, stepped in to make her original house livable again.
Ms. Severe told us about the water rising on the day of the flood, and how she and her neighbors followed her brother single file through the current to high ground. All the while, her brother suffered flashbacks to Vietnam, imagining as they waded through the flood that he was sidestepping minefields.
Despite that harrowing experience, she persevered, and fought to come back to the city. What kept her going, I believe, was the idea of sanctuary – of getting back to a place that was familiar, welcoming, and a true home to her.
I believe Ms. Severe, like all of us, needs to know that out there in the world people care. That no matter whatever befalls us – flood, illness, lives lost – that we can find comfort and peace in our struggles by banding together with others.
I believe that in our search for spirituality, our UU community can be a sanctuary to us, just as we can be a sanctuary to others.
So as we live our daily lives, I believe we should keep our eyes open to every opportunity to be consciously kind in some way to our family, friends, neighbors, coworkers – even strangers. The point is, it doesn’t necessarily require a plane ticket and a week of your time in a reconstruction project.
Offering sanctuary is thinking every day how you can be a positive force in other people’s lives. By providing sanctuary to others - even in the smallest gesture – I believe we are at the same time slowly building a sanctuary for ourselves.
Poem
Apple Season in a Time of War
By Linda Pastan
The children are terrible
in their innocence,
and the frightened parents
can neither scold nor protect them
as the leaves continue to fall
like tiny portents
from the ancestral trees.
Weather is all
that remains unchanged,
with its accidental
almost merciful cruelties,
its winds, its falling temperatures.
But I can hear the children
whose laughter rings
like small but dangerous
hammers on an anvil.
I can hear the buzz of radio voices,
persistent as insects
on all the frequencies
of madness.Sermon
“A Place of Safety”
By Rev. Mary McKinnon Ganz
People in New Orleans are tired. They’re tired of explaining themselves, and mostly, they’re sick to death of the question – asked by well-meaning friends, people like you and me who live far from that vulnerable city – this question:
“Everything pretty much back to normal down there?”
The answer is no. It isn’t “normal.” Not only the 9th ward, but blocks and blocks of Lakeview, New Orleans East, Treme, and Gentilly, the blue collar, ethnically mixed backbone of that beautiful city, are still vacant. Houses stand empty, looking almost okay – almost … normal -- from the outside. Except, driving by, you might not see a soul. Except, when you slow down enough to look beyond the outer walls, when you can see into the homes, you see they are still gutted; they are just walls, standing as shells.
No, it isn’t normal in New Orleans, two years after Katrina. It isn’t normal in many places in the world. There is war, there is hunger, there are people who don’t have warm places to sleep, as the temperatures fall and the wind slices home.
I am sorry to bring these things to your attention. I am sorry to have read the poem about the discordant sound of children laughing during apple season in a time of war, especially on a Sunday when our own children have sung to us so beautifully here in this holy place; a Sunday when our intergenerational bellringers have made for us a joyful rhythm. It isdeeply painful to be confronted with this paradox of love and loss, safety and terror, innocence and evil.
I was glad to be with Janice and the members of this congregation in New Orleans – 12 of us in all. I want to thank those who have gone on these trips. Will those who were in New Orleans last month please stand up? – and now all who have gone on the previous trips, with Rev. Michael and Rev. Linda, would you stand up also? I want to thank all of you for your ministry in that city. There will be another trip at the end of April; you can find out more about it in Fellowship Hall after the service. What we have done there, matters. It was so obvious; people were so glad to see us. People said it to us, over and over again, “Nothing would have gotten done down here if it wasn’t for groups like yours.”
I don’t have any construction skills, so instead of doing work like Janice did, most days I went to the rec centers and painted playground equipment – swing sets and climbing structures – painted them bright primary colors, red, green, blue, orange, yellow. At first I thought – what does this have to do with rebuilding New Orleans? These things probably needed painting since before Noah’s flood. But then I began to imagine the children that would play on those swings, the moms and dads who would bring their children to this play structure. I imagined the courage it took them to come back, maybe the only family yet returned on their block; I imagined the FEMA trailers they might live in while they’re waitingfor someone to help them rebuild their home. And then I wondered if the bright colors they see at this park would lift their spirits, just a little. In this way I began to connect the work I was doing with the restoration of a great city.
When I started thinking that way, I began to see locations of hope in other places – popping up amid the destruction. Volunteers swarm into a block in the 9th ward and rebuild not just one, but a whole line of brightly painted houses. A woman living in her FEMA trailer hangs a flock of colored glass bottles on the branches of the dead tree outside her ruined home in midcity. Activists gather to do what is needed: a ministry of lawn mowing. A tree nursery. Free wireless internet in neighborhoods where a single computer might once have been a rarity. Amid the huge government failure to protect, and the huge government failure to restore, a crack appears, and life wells up. Death is there also. And life is there.
Since I’ve returned, though, at times I have found it harder to remember the hope; easier, somehow, to dwell on the pain, and on my anger. When I walked through Miss Evelyn’s ruined house, the one Barbara Johnson and Anne Mcknight worked to restore, I wanted to sit down and weep, and it is that feeling, I am sorry to tell you, that has stayed with me most powerfully. Maybe it’s because here at home it’s that much harder to know how to be useful.
How can we help create “home” for people in poverty living in this community? What to do about the new wedge of hate that some politicians are using to boost their own prospects, at the expense of undocumented workers, or any immigrant, or anyone – even third-generation Americans – with brown skin? And then there is the war in the Middle East, with its casualties in the hundreds of thousands. How can we create a locus of hope in Iraq? How in our own hearts?
Many of you know that I have, from time to time, retreated to the streets of San Francisco to spend a day or a week living with people who are among the poorest people of our country. This is a notebook I kept from my first weeklong street retreat, the one that scared me the most. Before I went, I wrote to everybody in my address book, asking them to send me poems or prayers to carry with me into the streets. I pasted their responses into this book, and kept them with a journal of my own observations and thoughts. This book has become a treasure to me, for when I find myself in pain over the state of the world, as I was on returning from New Orleans, I reach for it.
Most recently the book fell open to pages I had written about an exhibit that was on display at the San Francisco Public Library while I was on the streets. The Library is one of the places people who are homeless can go during the day to stay warm, and I spent a lot of time there during that week. Some years before, a criminal had surreptitiously and systematically defaced 600 books in the Library – all books about gay and lesbian issues, or about women’s health. It was a hate crime, and it was chilling. It went on for years before the perpetrator was caught.
In an inspired act of restoration, the Hormel Foundation and the Library sent the defaced books to more than a hundred different artists, who turned them into art. The result was an exhibit called “Reversing Vandalism: How Communities Can Transform Hate into Healing,” and this was on display at the Library during the week I was on the streets. I was amazed to find one of these works created by a teenager from my home church. She had pasted into one of the defaced books pictures of GLBT families from that church, people I knew and loved. In the center of the hollowed-out book, curled up, was a baby doll. She titled it, “A Book Big Enough for Me to Hide In.” Through her art, this young person was telling of her need for a place of safety, and that week, living on the streets, I could really relate.
Another artist made his book into the shape of a mandorla, similar to the one pictured on the front of your Order of Service – the Unitarian Universalist logo is in the shape of a “mandorla.” It would be easy to hate the vandal who did such a terrible thing, this artist wrote, but that hate and anger left no place where they could be in conversation. The overlapping circles – like the “common ground” our children sang about this morning – signify that there is a place of safety, a place where there is no “us” and “them,” where there is only “we.”
I feel hope when I can find that place where there is something I can do, where hate is not, where conversation is restored. This church, like this book, gives me the courage to keep looking for it.
Twenty-plus years ago, many of the immigrants coming to this country from Central America were fleeing civil war and oppressive regimes. Some had been victims of torture; some were certain they would be tortured if they returned. This church voted itself a “Sanctuary” and housed a family from El Salvador – a couple plus two children – in Reeb Hall. It was a decision of the heart; the government had said these people as a class were worthy of political asylum, but it was granting asylum to almost none of them. This church decided it would take the path of compassion, and shelter a family who had been denied.
The threat to undocumented workers today may seem less stark. But maybe it’s only the advantage of hindsight that makes the issues of the 1980s seem clearer than the ones that face immigrant communities today. It was not an easy thing, even in 1984, to vote ourselves a Sanctuary church. One-fifth of the people who voted on April 15, 1984, voted No.
Today, a group of people in this church is opening a conversation about our church’s role in the “New Sanctuary Movement,” which is endorsed by the Unitarian Universalist Association, to support people resisting deportation by legal means. You can find out more about what this might mean to this church at the Social Action table in coffee hour.
About the same time we became a Sanctuary church, there were people in this congregation who were active in support of the newly arrived and arriving Vietnamese community, legacies of our country’s war in Southeast Asia. We are now being asked to provide similar support to Iraqi refugees, people who believe themselves to be in danger because of their support for our soldiers. You can talk to Anne Bridgeman in Fellowship Hall to learn how you can support these families.
And in a few moments, you will be asked to give financial support in a Share the Plate collection for CIVIC – Campaign for Innocent Victims in Conflict. CIVIC is the only organization working to provide compensation to civilian victims of the war in Iraq and Afghanistan. CIVIC believes that warring nations have a duty to help those they harm, and it lobbies hard and effectively for that help.
Why am I telling you all this, especially within this sermon? Because I believe that we tend to get immobilized by despair, similar to the hopelessness I felt when I walked through Miss Evelyn’s ruined house in New Orleans. And because one of the things we learned in New Orleans is – in the words of Barbara Johnson – how good it feels to do something. When you complete a job like Janice’s work laying cement floor for Ms. Severe’s house in New Orleans, that’s satisfying. Writing a check to CIVIC or joining a committee to explore the next step for this church to move against the tide of hate that threatens our immigrant communities may not seem in the moment so much like concrete actions for the good – but they are. Like taking our values to the ballot box this Tuesday, they are gestures of hope; they are what we can do, in this time, in this place, to extend a place of safety to brothers and sisters in our community, and on the other side of the world. When you write your check or test ideas on a social action committee, try this: imagine a brightly painted swing set, orange and red and blue and green. Imagine the hope a family feels, when their children can play in such a place. Imagine you are creating a location of hope. Stand with that family on common ground. Go there now.
Benediction
Good people, go forth and build sanctuaries; build them everywhere, with gestures of kindness and hope. Make of your hearts a sanctuary also; open them wide for others to come and go in love. Keep the peace, until we meet again.
