Is It a Gift If We Don’t Have a Choice?
The Buy Nothing Facebook group I belong to mandates that all posts begin with either the word “gift”’ or the word “wish”. If you want to give something away you label it gift. If you’re looking for something, you label it wish. Most of us are pretty good about following the rules, and the moderators firmly remind us when we forget. Once in a while, however, another label shows up and the moderators don’t protest: gift/burden.
Sometimes Gift/Burdens are things that are broken or need a part but the giver thinks someone in the group might be handy enough to fix, resourceful enough to find the part, or creative enough to repurpose in another form. Other times the Gift/Burden is something that is whole and in perfect working order, and might be just the thing someone else is looking for. But because the giver has found it to take up too much space or be unwieldy or require a lot of maintenance or simply not worth the effort for whatever reason, they feel the need to warn potential recipients that it might be a gift but might also be a burden.
Our Soul Matters theme for October is The Gift of Heritage. The resource materials for the month fall into several categories, and some of them might more accurately be labeled gift/burden: on the heritage of trauma, on the heritage of grief, on shaping what the heritage of AI will be, on what we should have learned from the heritage of book banning, on holding on to the hard parts of UU history, on facing our American heritage honestly.
I asked the wrong question in my sermon title, “Is It a Gift If We Don’t Have a Choice?” Duh, Lisa. That’s sort of the definition of a gift, most of the time. What I really wanted to ask, what my lizard brain–the part of me ruled by impulse–was screaming was, “Trauma? Grief? The history of book banning? The hard parts of our faith’s history? The totality of our country’s history? These are part of our collective history and experience–our heritage–but c’mon, are they gifts?”
“Well,” my cortex replies, “remember the Rolling Stones. We don’t always get what we want, but if we try sometimes we just might find we get what we need. And besides, ‘if we do what we’ve always done, then we’ll get what we’ve always gotten.’” Or, to sound more learned, in the words of either Edmund Burke or George Santayana or Winston Churchill, ‘if we don’t remember the past we are destined, condemned or doomed to repeat it’.
We may, and probably do, differ in our understanding of whether or not the difficult, shameful, hard parts of our faith’s history or our country’s history are gifts; whether the trauma and grief of our individual histories are gifts. But mental health professionals tell us that often examining, telling the truth about, grieving for and raging at the trauma in an individual’s or family’s past, is the way toward a more hopeful, productive, satisfying and joy filled future–that is to say, a gift. And I think many of us will agree, however reluctantly, that the opportunity to examine, learn from, atone for or grieve for or rage at, the difficult, shameful, brutal, hard parts of our faith’s and country’s history, and then, having done that plot a new, more just, expansive and inclusive path forward–this opportunity, arduous as it is, is a gift.
The gift, for our country and for our faith, lies in acknowledging, along with the poet, that “being American is more than a pride we inherit —it’s the past we step into” and in taking active and deliberate part in “how we repair it”. If freeing ourselves from the destiny of repeating the past means remembering without being either swamped or frozen by it, but rather released into deliberate and prayerful repair of ongoing damage, then holding on to the hard parts of UU history, on facing our American heritage honestly are indeed gifts.
It’s not mere happenstance that the Soul Matters folks suggest both US history and UU history as fruitful areas for exploring the gift of heritage. For one thing, Unitarian Universalist history is deeply entwined with US history–specifically in that significant individuals in the early decades of our country were either Unitarian or Universalist, and generally in that Unitarianism, Universalism, and Unitarian Universalism grew up in this country, developing as institutions as the country developed as a nation. Unitarian theology and Universalist theology predate the United States and came into being in Europe, and Unitarian as an organized religion also took hold in England around the same time it was becoming established here. Nevertheless, institutionally and theologically, Unitarian Universalism as we know it today in the US is a pretty American faith.
Secondly, though we would like it to be otherwise, as the piece from Nathan Ryan points out but barely scratches the surface of, because it grew up on this soil and in this country, our faith’s involvement in our country’s history of racial violence, oppression, and injustice is a part of our heritage we need to examine honestly, the lingering effects of which we need to continue to reckon with today. As larger US society prefers stories of times and situations in which we did ‘the right’ thing with regard to race and equality over accounts of times and situations in which laws, traditions, unexamined habits and behaviors caused and still cause harm to BIPOC individuals, families and communities, so too with Unitarian Universalists. We tell the stories of Unitarian abolitionists at the time of the Civil War but not of the Unitarians who favored a more gradual approach to discontinuation of enslavement, nor of those Unitarians who profited directly or indirectly from it. We tell stories of the UUA Board of Trustees adjourning so that members could answer the call to travel to Selma after the first bloody and unsuccessful attempt to cross the Edmund Pettus bridge. We tell stories of those Unitarian Universalists who were beaten and killed in those in and around Selma and else during the Civil Rights era but not of the Unitarian, Universalist, and Unitarian Universalist congregations that refuse to call or hire religious professionals color, not of the teens and young adults of color subjected to discrimination, bullying, exclusion in at UU events and in UU spaces. We’d rather hear the young black female poet (Amanda Gorman) proclaim “there is always light,/if only we’re brave enough to see it,/if only we’re brave enough to be it,” than the young black male poet (Clint Smith)proclaim “Some of us have become ghosts by the time the dust has settled”. But both are true. Both describe the reality and the possibility of our country and our faith.
Finally, it makes sense that Soul Matters would suggest both UU history and US history as fruitful areas for exploration because among Unitarian Universalists, as among US citizens as a whole, there is not inconsiderable resistance to calls to examine our past and our present in order that our future might be the more just, loving, inclusive country or faith, a facade of which we present today. Some voices argue that teaching accurate accounts of racism and oppression in US history or literature or any part of a curriculum from kindergarten through college, amounts to ‘woke’ shaming of white children, making them feel bad about themselves for things that happened decades or more before they were born. Similarly, some voices within Unitarian Universalism argue that attention to systemic racism in our history and our current day association and congregations is a superfluous, shaming effort imposed by a ‘woke’ hierarchy.
In Caste: The Origins of Our Discontent, author Isabel Wilkerson offers two metaphors that cast such examinations of our roots in positive, constructive light:
“I love old houses. I’ve always lived in old houses. But old houses need a lot of work. The work is never done. Just when you think you’ve finished one renovation, it’s time to do something else; something else has gone wrong. That’s what our country is like. You may not want to go into that basement, but if you really don’t go into that basement, it’s at your own peril. Whatever you are ignoring is not going to go away. Whatever you’re ignoring is only going to get worse. Whatever you’re ignoring will be there to be reckoned with until you reckon with it. And I think that that’s what we’re called upon to do where we are right now.
“We in the developed world are like homeowners who inherited a house on a piece of land that is beautiful on the outside, but whose soil is unstable loam and rock, heaving and contracting over generations, cracks patched but the deeper ruptures waved away for decades, centuries even. Many people may rightly say,
"I had nothing to do with how this all started. I have nothing to do with the sins of the past. My ancestors never attacked indigenous people, never owned slaves." And, yes. Not one of us was here when this house was built. Our immediate ancestors may have had nothing to do with it, but here we are, the current occupants of a property with stress cracks and bowed walls and fissures built into the foundation. We are the heirs to whatever is right or wrong with it. We did not erect the uneven pillars or joists, but they are ours to deal with now.
"And any further deterioration is, in fact, on our hands…”
There is nothing shameful in having a history with some rot in it but ignoring the rot is surely deleterious to our future. The gift of an honest reckoning with the heritage of UU history and/or the heritage of US history is the chance to prevent further deterioration. The opportunity, as I said earlier, to start on the path to becoming who we’d like to believe we already are. To, in the words of our next hymn, speed onward the years when ‘another age advances, seers foretold in ancient song.’ Another age when our professed welcome and inclusion deepens in barrier free participation and leadership for BIPOC in all segments of our society and our congregations, bringing blessings down upon us all.
Our social justice committee–meeting today after church–and our anti-racism committee are great resources if you’re wondering where to get started unwrapping the gift of our UU or US heritage. I can offer some resources from my library as well, particularly about race and Unitarian Universalism. For myself, I’m going to start with Jingle Bells–or rather with the Pierpont brothers and their father, to familiarize myself with their array of views of enslavement and our legacy as a church once pastored by John Pierpont, Jr. I already wonder, each time I walk by the sign in Troup Square or listen to the trolleys full of tourists singing Jingle Bells, what it means for and about us, that that song and its composer is one of the things for which we are known. I expect my study will increase my discomfort. But the eventual gift will be a deeper knowledge and understanding of the history and therefore the present and future of this beloved congregation I currently serve. A gift, it turns out, that I am choosing, and that is also, probably what I need. Amen.