O Sister…I’m weary…my work’s been long…
Keep us steady through the storm.
O Sister, hear my hurts…keep us steady through the storm.
Resilience is our spiritual theme for February, another new one for us, and a central notion, a central…skill?…or is it a capacity? Resilience is certainly more than just a nice concept.
Resilience asks us how…and whether…we can keep on keepin’ on when we are hurt and weary, when we have been pressed down again and again. When the disrespect just keeps coming. When we fail and when our world fails us.
Resilience is about our response to trouble. And whether that trouble is a natural disaster…a flood, a fire…or one of the so many ways humans insist on oppressing one another…
Resilience is the story of coming back, of moving on…of not giving up or giving in.
As Maya Angelou wrote: “Someone was hurt before you, wronged before you, hungry before you, … beaten before you, humiliated before you…yet someone survived.”
Resilience is about survival.
But resilience is also about success. Maya Angelou concludes: “…yet someone survived. You can do anything you choose to do.”
Or in the words of Langston Hughes:
Beating your fists
Against the wall,
You break your bones
Against the wall—
But sometimes not.Walls have been known to fall…”
Survival and success. In the face of trouble. Resilience is about enduring but it is also about overcoming.
This is no simple theme.
Resilience, the word itself comes to us from Latin and means literally to “jump back up”…to “rebound.” I know this is a football weekend with the Super Bowl and all, but it is the basketball discipline of rebounding…that second and third effort…that not allowing failure to stop you…
It is the practice of rebounding that captures the original meaning of resilience.
The term, however, came to be closely associated with metallurgy, not sports or social change. In the art of working with metal, resilience describes how certain metals, when heated, will lose their shape, but when cooled they will almost amazingly recover their original form. A kind of structural memory, an integrity at the atomic level allows the metal to rebound to its essential form.
Its essential form. Some core in the metal remains unchanged. In traditional conservative theological terms…this is the point where we would start talking about the soul or the spirit.
As liberal religious folks, we tend to see body and spirit as one.
Resilience has come to mean “able to withstand or recover from difficult conditions”… physically and spiritually.
It is a reactive skill allowing us to deal with forces outside ourselves that trouble our bodies or our spirits.
In the words of St. Paul: “We are afflicted in every way, but not crushed; perplexed but not driven to despair; persecuted but not forsaken; struck down but not destroyed.” (2 Corinthians 4:8-9)
We rebound.
This is the beginning of Black History Month as well. A Black history month that has begun with a second African American announcing candidacy to become US President…two African Americans putting themselves forward to become our SECOND President of Color.
A Black History Month that has also begun with images of a governor, a Democrat at that, in Black face or in a KKK hood in his professional school yearbook. His response stone deaf even as his story has changed.
Our need for resilience remains all too real.
I am so glad that Cassandra shared the story of Marian Anderson this morning as an example of resilience.
Do you know that Marian Anderson died here in Portland. Late in her life she had come to live with her nephew, James DePriest, beloved music director of the Oregon Symphony. We have that connection to her story.
In my family, although the stories of the great African American “firsts” in sports…Joe Louis in boxing, Jackie Robinson in baseball…although those heroes were held up for me and my cousins…it was the story of Marian Anderson that I heard again and again.
To hear her sing “My Country Tis of Thee” this morning took me back to my childhood.
My aunt was a concert pianist as a young woman. Her father, Kemper Harrell, was for over 30 years Director of the Morehouse and Spellman College choirs of two of the great historically Black colleges in the US.
Father Harrell, as I called him, lived with my mother and me after he retired. Music meant a great deal in our family. And the story of Marian Anderson’s perseverance, her rebounding from exclusion after exclusion, her resilience and her eventual overcoming… She was held up as role model of what could be..of what we could be.
As I look back on that story, there are two things that I want to share with you and ask you to remember.
First, Marian Anderson did keep rebounding from the racism that would have kept her “in her place.” She was resilient. But she was also successful. Hers had become a world renowned voice by the time the Daughters of the American Revolution refused to allow her to rent their hall in 1939. She had toured in Europe, sung for kings and queens. Her resilience was not passive. She had already overcome.
Resilience should never mean just taking the punishment over and over. Resilience should never mean accepting the role of punching bag.
If resilience means returning to our core, remember that our core has inherent worth and dignity. Remember that we are already lovable and already loved. Remember our Universalist roots.
Suffering is not a source of salvation. In our theology, suffering is only suffering.
And if resilience calls us to return to our core, it calls us to empowerment not powerlessness, it calls us to affirmation and action not resignation.
That’s first.
But I also want to say more about Marion Anderson’s Lincoln Memorial concert. The story celebrates Eleanor Roosevelt for her role…how she resigned in protest from the DAR and convinced President Roosevelt to authorize that concert on the Washington Malll.
Eleanor Roosevelt is presented in that narration as the savior…the powerful, well-intended and well-connected, white savior. Marian Anderson and Howard University, the sponsor of her concert, are presented as the powerless people of color in need of the helping hand from the powerful, white benefactor.
I’m speaking without softening the language. If we are to embrace the truth rather than a sanitized narrative that ends up supporting the status quo, we have to deal with some sharp edges in this story.
In my home, I heard a somewhat different and more complete version of the story of that concert.
When the DAR refused Constitution Hall to Marion Anderson, and the DC Board of Education refused a similar request to use the auditorium of a large white public high school, Charles Russell, a co-founder of the NAACP and then chair of the DC Inter-Racial Committee, convened a gathering of dozens of organizations, church leaders and activists, including the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters, the CIO, the American Federation of Labor, and the National Negro Congress.
They created the Marian Anderson Citizen’s Committee, picketed the Board of Education and organized a mass protest. It was only in the furor that ensued from that organizing effort, that Eleanor Roosevelt was recruited into the controversy.
Please understand, I take nothing away from Eleanor Roosevelt. When she got involved, she did the right thing and her voice was probably needed to make that concert possible.
I take nothing away from Mrs. Roosevelt…in my family she was a hero…if not a saint.
But I ask you to remember that Marion Anderson’s success was a strategic success for the community…not simply an individual triumph. A strategic success in which the leadership of the community came together and decided to use Marian Anderson’s talent and her unquestioned success and fame, already achieved…to take one more step forward…not for Marian Anderson alone…but for the African American community…and therefore…for us all.
That concert was a strategic success for a collective goal…just as Rosa Parks’ decision on that bus in Montgomery, Alabama was part of a carefully developed strategy, a movement strategy. It was not the act of one woman who finally had been pushed beyond her capacity for resilience.
Resilience…it suggests the ability to bend…be flexible perhaps…
Resilience asks us to consider compromise as a way to deal with injustice…with being pressed down…even as we respond to our own suffering.
Resilience therefore runs counter to the dominant narrative in our faith, in Unitarian Universalism.
We hold up the story of Michael Servetus, who, in the 15th century, found no support for the notion of the Trinity in the New Testament. He wrote a book called, On the Errors of the Trinity…that got him named heretic by the Inquisition.
He fled Spain, then France, only to be imprisoned by John Calvin in Geneva. Righteous in his own certainty, he refused to recant his belief in one God, or his critique of Catholic doctrine and Protestant theology. He was burned at the stake with his book strapped to his thigh.
Servetus was an early Unitarian martyr.
We tell his story because it illustrates a core element of belief for us. Something that we return to.
But let me point out that resilience…plays little part in his story.
Arrogance…yes, that is certainly there. And individualism…a valuing of individual belief that…truth be told, I think few of us share today. How many of us would willingly burn for an article of belief?
It is also hard not to notice the traditional “maleness” of the Servetus story…I think there was more male ego than love involved for both Calvin and Servetus in that controversy.
So different from the stories of Marian Anderson and Rosa Parks.
We are in another period…thanks to our Trans and Gender-Queer siblings…another period when we are looking at the impact of those traditional male and female stereotypes and gender expectations…when we are questioning not only the value of those stereotypes but also their inflexibility and the violence rigidity of expectation can do to all of us, the way rigidity of expectation can keep us separated from the real and quite varied experience of living.
As we were putting this service together, John Boeling, our conductor this morning, came to me to ask if there was a problem with both the choir anthems being in women’s voice.
We think about these things as we plan worship here at First Unitarian. We are blessed with the Women’s Choir this morning…singing so well. We have a couple of hundred years in the western church tradition when the only music was written by men and in the male voice. We could go a couple of lifetimes with just female voice and still not have reached equity.
Forgive me…for playing the gender card here during Black History month. Resilience does rest, I think, somewhat more comfortably in that feminine gendering. Our friend Servetus, probably more comfortably on the male stereotype-side.
If we have learned nothing else, I hope we have learned that race and gender and gender-identity and class are all present for us…all of the time. We live at intersections of identities. And the only way I know to deal with that reality faithfully is to hold space in which we can all look at the ways they operate in our lives and in our community.
Do we need more flexibility? More willingness to compromise? More willingness to settle?
Do we need to be cultivating our rebounding skills? Preparing ourselves to come back from more defeats and more failures?
I can argue that our progressive willingness to compromise too easily, to come to the middle too fast…has not served us all that well.
Obama Care has proven more fragile than I ever imagined. I wonder if a single payer health care system would not have developed more traction, become more accepted, more relied on…if progressives had been willing to push for it.
Perhaps we need to cultivate a greater insistence on what we believe to be right.
What I am certain of is that we need a shift from a solely individual analysis of need, of responsibility and of resilience. A shift to a more liberating and collective frame.
Rev. Jill Cowie writes:
“You might think that people who have the capacity to withstand stress without breaking, or have inner strength and mental fortitude are resilient. But the research says resilience is more about what happens between us…[and among us]…than what happens within us. That it is communities that get us back on our feet…”
Communities like this one, where we cultivate the capacity for compassion and practice resilience together.
This sermon IS dedicated to those who survived:
Because life is a struggle and we have struggled
Because life is a gift and we have found a welcome to accept it
Because life is a flowering and we are committed to blossom and thrive.
This sermon IS dedicated to those who survive and thrive today…to us all as we move through these difficult days and discover there is resilience in our spirit. As we discover that we can choose to place love at our core.
May it be so. And Amen.
Prayer
Will you pray with me?
Spirit of Life. Source of resilience and of hope.
Great mystery in which we live and love.
May we discover and sustain more resilience
In our persons and in our communities.
May we discover that we can know
when to bend and when to stand,
so that life need not be an either/or choice.
May our commitments and our courage
Not close us off to the need for change.
May the love we know and the love
We share lighten our burdens.
May that love brighten our days,
And help us know, when we are weary
And worn down by the world…
Help us know that we can go on.
May it be so. And Amen.
Topics: Resilience