“Rouse us from tiredness, self-pity, whet us for use…
Lure us to fresh schemes of life…”
Those words of Clarke Wells, former minister of this church, point us toward the spiritual work of this season.
Spring has sprung. The trees are blooming. The crocuses and daffodils are up. Last week we saw temperatures above 70 degrees.
“Lure us to fresh schemes of life.”
Spring brings energy for a new start. There is that impulse to clean out those closets, to start again with a clean slate.
Rev, Vanessa Southern writes: “The school supply section of any store draws me like a moth to a flame. … I’m not sure why I’m drawn to [spiral bound notebooks and #2 pencils]. But I have a theory: For so many years, standing in those aisles, I could believe that my past did not determine my present…and the present was full of possibilities. …The school-supply aisles say…in bright colors and crisp clean paper… all things are possible [once] again.”
Fresh schemes of life.
Its tempting for me to just preach a sermon about the wonders of spring this morning, about new life and new dreams.
But this season I’m mindful of how the past cannot be simply disregarded…how the past…with all of its blessings and all of its challenges…how the past lives on in us…
As James Baldwin wrote: “History is not the past. It is the present. We carry our history with us. We are our history.”
The story that Mira offered, the Garden of Forgiveness, suggests that parts of our inheritance, the parts of our story that keep us locked in the hurts and harms of the past…that story suggests that those hurts and the habits of the heart that we develop in response…can be healed.
Someone…something…had to break the pattern…refuse to throw the next stone. We understand that.
But what we often fail to appreciate is how those patterns and habits are transmitted and persist.
Remember that the original hurt in the story took place long ago…the original dispute was not even remembered by the two sides that continued to enact the anger and distrust…they continued to embody a response to some long forgotten wrongs or series of wrongs…
And, of course, with each repetition, the pattern gets reinforced…strengthened.
Harms passed down through generations.
My children, who are now grown, and my wife, Maria, know that I am almost phobic about driving outside the city at night. I hate it. I will do almost anything to get to the lights of the city.
It is a fear response I know. And it is very embodied. I can feel my chest contract and my gut begin to churn. My breathing gets shallow. I’ve never gotten to anything like a full blown anxiety attack…yet those are the early symptoms.
Before you prepare yourselves to hear a horror story of a traumatic incident from my youth, let me tell you that I’ve never had a problem on a dark road at night…never been stopped…never been harmed…never.
As I person of color, it hasn’t escaped me that driving on dark country roads can put me at risk…I haven’t missed that… but so can driving on brightly lit city streets..the lighting seems to make no difference to police.
Driving in the city at night I am appropriately careful, not in terror.
But my body’s response is undeniable on dark country roads and I’ve invested some energy in trying to understand what that response is all about.
What I’ve found is a memory…a memory of driving with my mother, at night, out in the country, in western North Carolina when I was 8 or 9. I remember seeing her fear…terror really…when she had to drive on those dark country roads.
My mother was a strong woman. I never remember her backing down when I needed defense or when anyone less fortunate than we were needed support. I knew her to be fearless, in fact. But on those country roads, I saw terror in her face…saw the veins on her hands standing out as she held the steering wheel with an iron grip.
“We’ll be alright, Billy. Don’t worry.” was what she said. Her body clearly did not trust those words. And I didn’t see anything to worry about…except her fear.
Years later…I finally asked her about that night and she acknowledged that there had been an incident on a dark road when she was younger…I don’t need to share the details. Some of you can fill them in.
What she had passed down to me, however, was not that story but her response to that trauma. And that response lives on in my body and…because my children have seen that response in me…it no doubt lives in them as well.
“Children,” James Baldwin said, “have never been very good at listening to their elders, but they have never failed to imitate them.”
Harm, trauma gets passed down from generation to generation just as much…at least as much…as the stories of struggle and strength get passed down.
How does this all work?
Resmaa Menakem, an African American activist and therapist from Minneapolis, has been exploring how trauma operates across the generations.
Trauma is a potent word for some of us. I am going to use it, carefully I hope, because that is the term that Resmaa uses and the dynamic he has studied.
Trauma response, he argues in his book, My Grandmother’s Hands,” is a safety and survival strategy.
Trauma responses are located low in our brain stem…some call it the lizard brain…
That part of our brain has only a few responses to threat or harm: fight, flee or freeze.
When we are not able to fight or flee…we freeze and often get stuck in freeze mode…
Imagine…just imagine that you step off a curb downtown and get hit by a bicyclist. It is a frequent enough occurance. You’re knocked down but not hurt and continue on with your day and your life.
But you find that each time you approach that corner…or perhaps each time you approach any corner…you find your body naturally turning aside. You might find yourself automatically holding up your hands in a halt gesture as you step out into the street…even though no bicyclist is approaching.
These are movements you did not have a chance to make during the original event…so the responses got stuck in your body. They were never completed.
It can look at little strange to people who watch you now, who don’t know the context.
Resmaa writes: “The body wanted to fight (to protect) or flee but wasn’t able to do either, so it got stuck in freeze mode. It them developed strategies around this “stuckness” including extreme reactions, compulsions, strange likes and dislikes, seemingly irrational fears, and unusal avoidance…”
Think of my aversion to dark country roads…
“Unhealed trauma acts like a rock thrown into a pond; it causes ripples that move outward, affecting many other bodies over time. After months or years, unhealed trauma can appear to become part of someone’s personality. Over even longer periods of time …, it can become a family norm. And if it gets transmitted and compounded through multiple families and generations, it can start to look like culture.”
When the two young people finally sat down in the Garden of Forgiveness…what did they talk about? Did they talk about not understanding why the disagreement had started in the first place? Did they talk about how neither community had been able to enjoy the benefits of the river in peace? Did they talk about how stuck the two communities had become in the fight and how they both had been harmed?
Is this making sense to you? Are there habits in your family that seem a little strange… out of place…out of context? Are there individuals whose idiosyncratic behavior amuses or irritates…do you have a weird Uncle Harold or strange Cousin Gertrude that joins you on Thanksgiving? Or is coming for Easter? Are you sometimes one of those people?
Could it be that you are seeing responses to past trauma, past harms being enacted in yourself or in your family system?
As a society, as a people…and perhaps as people, period…as human beings…
We want to move to those fresh schemes of life…
But if we do not start from zero…if our slate is not blank and we carry with us all these habits of the heart, born of our responses to past hurts…
How can we move forward without building those responses into our vision for the future?
Think back to the example of being hit by that bicyclist. Those strange, decontextualized responses you find yourself making…turning aside…that halt gesture with your hands…
Those are all movements you didn’t have a chance to make during the original event…so they got stuck in your body. Those actions are expressions of the body yearning toward wholeness…toward completing gestures…so that the strong trauma response is no longer needed.
Resmaa argues that completing those actions sets up the conditions for healing. If done intentionally…mindful of the way history lives in us today.
I am working with this now, as you can tell. It strikes such chords at the personal level. I’m wondering, though, if this dynamic scales?
Bear with me as I spin out one possibility at the level of our collective lives.
Take the issue of race. You and I know that mass incarceration is just the latest structure of racial oppression…and our work as a congregation on that issue is deepening in powerful ways.
Every generation…since emancipation, and before…has wrestled with race. There is so much harm that has been passed down.
So, using the concepts from this trauma work, let’s ask the question of what actions have not been completed…what action was cut off that has kept us stuck for so long, that has kept us reenacting our various parts in a harmful racial drama?
Was the failure to provide reparations…at the time of abolition…that 40 acres and a mule that was promised but never delivered…the reconstruction that was cut short almost before it began…
Do we, as a society…have some actions that need to be completed so that we can move toward healing and reconciliation?
Does our society need to name the harm and the violence done more honestly, need to actually apologize and to beg forgiveness and to make concrete acts of restitution? Is that what is needed before our collective trauma can be redeemed?
There is energy around reparations again. I say again because this is not the first time reparations have been called for…not by a long shot.
I am not sure what reparations should or could look like…after all this time…
But the community of color has been constantly re-traumatized…you all know that…the harm did not end long ago. It has not ended today.
What I do know, is that most of our institutions have not even gotten to simple apology. Let alone confession. And that penance, that would be the religious term for reparations, penance has not usually even been on the table.
Just this spring, Princeton Theological Seminary students called on that institution to offer reparations for the role of its founders in the slave trade.
Is that what our institutions need to do?
There are precedents: Germany paid billions in reparations to victims of the Holocaust, South Africa compensated victims of apartheid. Even here in the US, our government finally compensated victims of Japanese internment during WWII…
The State of North Carolina compensated victims of its forced sterilization programs (most African American), Florida compensated victims of the Rosewood Race Riot of 1923 and the federal government finally compensated victims of the Tuskekee experiments on syphilis…all African American.
Native nations have been granted a kind of sovereignty, but are those casinos a kind of indirect reparation?
Reparation has some precedents.
In Unitarian Universalism, the money raised and given to BLUU, Black Lives of Unitarian Universalism, is an initial act of repair that allows Black UU’s the space to focus on our spiritual work.
I can’t promise…that the current work on trauma and recovery from trauma will allow fresh schemes of life to flourish.
I don’t know for certain. But the reflection is worthwhile, I believe.
Because for us all…black and white and brown and beige… to simply re-enact our practiced responses is guaranteed to leave us where we are.
There are a few other things I know.
The first and most important way to alleviate the results of trauma…is to stop the trauma.
FIRST stop the trauma.
And THEN search for ways to repair and restore.
I am certain, in my body, that we have been enacting and re-enacting our trauma responses for too long.
And I don’t know in the same way, but I believe that white individuals are also enacting responses to trauma. And that these habits of self-protection are becoming more pervasive, more entrenched leaving us all starved not only for justice but also for kindness.
We need to break the cycle…break so many cycles…so that our fresh schemes of life have a chance.
My preaching will get to rebirth this spring…I promise…
But we need to know our history and understand why these patterns have persisted for so long…so that our fresh schemes of life will not simply replicate the past but redeem it…so that we can all be set free.
“Rouse us from tiredness, self pity, whet us for use…” Former First Unitarian minister Clark Wells named the work of this season: renewal and the hope that spring proclaims.
Topics: Resilience