“Each person has a musical song [in] their bodies. …this is the hum from inside of you that can give you peace when you are really down. My grandmother had a hum, never a song. She would hum sitting in a rocking chair and I would listen. [That] was the song of her soul.”
That quote is from Tina Turner. Do you remember her story? Her amazing talent as a singer was discovered by Ike Turner, an established Black songwriter and producer. In the 1970’s, they married and performed together as Ike and Tina Turner. But Ike soon became jealous of Tina’s celebrity and turned abusive.
“What’s Love Got to Do With It” is the title of her most famous song and of the movie that tells the story of her struggle to break free from that relationship, her discovery of a resilience she never imagined was possible.
It was R&B
What’s love got to do with it? What’s love but a second hand emotion? Who needs a heart when a heart can be broken?
In that time of trouble, Tina Turner discovered Buddhism and a chanting practice that has sustained her for decades.
Nam Myoho Renge Kyo. Nam Myoho Renge Kyo.
She was raised a Baptist and reciting the Lord’s Prayer was a regular practice for her before she discovered Buddhism. “It didn’t matter that I changed from being a Baptist to being a Buddhist because I learned later that they’re all the same. They just use different words…Prayer is prayer. It doesn’t matter what holy words you chant…what matters is that you do it with all your involvement…[with all you heart]…”
Nam Myoho Renge Kyo
That practice allowed her to move beyond guilt, she says, and to love herself. She was able to sustain a radical love that empowered her to break free of the abuse and create a life with love at the center.
Love, Tina Turner came to say…came to know, has everything to do with resilience and the living of a life that matters.
Love has everything to do with it.
Tina Turner is not held up as a role model in many pulpits. Her life was tough and grainy…hard in many ways…
Just like so many of our lives. I think the reason that resilience is such a compelling subject for us is that most of our lives have some hard places…some loss…some disappointment…
All of us…or almost all… know places and times when we’ve been pressed down…sometimes pressed down again and again…
Resilience is a survival skill that allows us to come back, get back up, keep on keepin’ on…
Life just does not unfold as an unbroken path to success, to comfort, to satisfaction…
There is always loss. Even the most privileged and protected of us discover that we have to sustain life and love despite that loss. The less protected we are, the harder life can be.
The Garden of Eden story presents the hardness of life…the need to wrest sustenance from rocky soil and endure pain…that story presents the hardness of life as punishment for our human hubris and our disobedience.
Our liberal religious theology does not buy into our responsibility for the harshness of life.
But I can understand the Biblical writers building that into the story. There had to be some reason for so much pain and so much grief and so much loss in life. A loving God…surely…could have done better by us.
Theologian Frederick Buechner argues that the role of the preacher is not to promise an easy salvation…(Buechner was a Christian but a Christian with more questions of that tradition than most…)
The role of the preacher is …is to tell the truth, including the truth about the hardness of life.
But the hardness of life is not the only truth.
The hardness of life is not the final word.
Helen Keller expressed that same thought: “Although the world is full of suffering, it is also full of the overcoming of it.”
What’s love got to do with it? We cannot allow the hardness and the cruelty and the greed to be the last word.
It is that song of the soul that Tina Turner described. That …”hum from inside of you that can give you peace when you are really down.”
There is more to life than cruelty and greed. There is the overcoming of it.
Tina Turner talked about her grandmother and listening to her grandmother’s song. Our past…our ancestors…can provide one source of resilience.
“The resilience and spirit that carried our people to this day is what will carry us to our next great moment.” Those are words of Jefferson Keel of the National Congress of American Indians.
You know that I draw a lot from history…my own personal history and our collective history. And there is a reclaiming and a telling of the history of particular peoples, their struggles and their overcoming that is part of the cutting edge, in many ways, of our current work on oppression.
There is a new Indigenous Peoples History and a Queer History of the US that now have a place beside Howard Zinn’s People’s History on my bookshelf.
A Disability History. African American History. Latinx History.
Can I take just a moment for denominational pride that all of these new histories are published by our own Unitarian Universalist Beacon Press?
Our faith is part of the work of claiming our connection to the resilience that is our heritage.
Senator Tammy Baldwin writes: “All of us who are openly gay are living and writing the history of our movement. We are no more – and no less – heroic than the suffragists and the abolitionists of the 19th century; and the labor organizers, Freedom riders, Stonewall demonstrators, and environmentalists of the 20th century. We are ordinary people, living our lives and trying as civil-rights activist Dorothy Cotton said, to ‘fix what ain’t right’ in our world.”
And though we need to be careful not to simply appropriate the stories from other peoples and other cultures…we need to guard against that…but they can be real sources of inspiration.
These resiliences are our heritage.
Valerie Kaur is a civil rights activist and a Sikh, an American follower of that monotheistic faith that originated in the Punjab of India. Following September 11, Sikh’s were profiled and attacked just as were Muslims…and they still are. Some of the asylum seekers that we helped transition out of Sheridan prison in the fall were Sikh.
Sikhism is a universalist faith and has much to say about both love and resilience. I was inspired by a TED talk Valerie Kaur delivered, that was sent to me by a congregant a few weeks ago.
“You are brave,” her mother told her, as she “poured my grandfather’s prayer into my ear[during the birth of my son] …The hot winds cannot touch you. You are brave.”
“[My mother] already knew,” Valerie says, “what I was just beginning to name. That love is more than a rush of feeling that happens to us if we’re lucky. Love is sweet labor. Fierce. Bloody. Imperfect. Life-giving. A choice we make over and over again.”
A choice we make…over and over.
“Joy is the gift of love,” she says. “Grief is the price of love. Anger is the force that protects love.”
Wow. Or, more appropriately, amen.
Valerie Kaur: “I was a little girl growing up in California, where my family has lived and farmed for a century. When I was told that I would go to hell because I was not Christian, called a ‘black dog’ because I was not white, I ran to my grandfather’s arms. Papa Ji dried my tears—gave me words of Guru Nanak, the founder of the Sikh faith.
‘I see no stranger,’ said Nanak. ‘I see no enemy.’
My grandfather taught me that I could choose …[choose]…to see all the faces I meet and wonder about them. And if I wonder about them, then I will listen to their stories even when its hard. I will refuse to hate them even when they hate me. I will even vow to protect them when they are in harm’s way.”
That’s what it means to Valerie Kaur to be a Sikh. It is called walking the path of the warrior saint.
The first Sikh woman warrior rallied deserters from a great battle. Mai Bhago was her name. “You will not abandon the fight,” she told the deserters, “You will return to the fire and I will lead you.” She mounted a horse, donned a turban and became the one she was waiting for.
“My grandfather saw me as a warrior [even then when I was a little girl with two long braids].
Valerie speaks of that warrior path as the choice for revolutionary love.
(Again that word “choice.”)
Revolutionary love, she says, asks the question “who have we not yet tried to love.”
She draws from her heritage and her family and her faith, the resilience to see those around her not as threats, and not simply as categories…though the categories of identity are important , often holding the wounds we need most to heal…
Revolutionary love requires us to push through the fire with a warrior’s heart and a saint’s eyes so that one day…I am quoting her again…”one day you will see my son as your own and protect him when I am not there. You will tend to the wound in the ones who want to hurt him. You will teach him to love himself because you love yourself. You will whisper in his ear, as I whisper in yours, “You are brave. You are brave.”
Unitarian Universalists became known as the “love people” when we began wearing those yellow shirts…how many of you have one of them…those shirts that announced that we were on the “side of love”…
But love has to do with more than simply voicing commitment to a particular justice cause.
This week I asked the members of our Board of Trustees what resilience looked like for them and where they found resilience in their own lives.
In responding, they spoke of family and faith. Some spoke of this church and even service on the Board as a source of resilience. And a surprising number of them spoke of book groups they have been part of…for years…decades even. Of covenant and friendship groups that have met regularly, groups that they have been part of their lives over time.
They spoke of those individuals, those groups, members of this church who…over years…have seen them for who they are…with their strengths and their weaknesses…those individuals and groups who through faithful relationship have communicated again and again…you are lovable and you are loved…as you already are and as you change.
The groups and the individuals who whisper in our ears that the song of our souls, that tune our lives hum is a worthy and beautiful melody that is wanted and welcomed.
They were describing the impact of love…faithful over time…that can allow us to find resilience in our spirits…resilience that can be shared.
Rev. Barbara Pescan writes, in a piece entitled “Reunion:”
One of the old ones stood up
Into the morning light
And spoke to those who had come
Back to the river.
—Now we have come again to this place.
My life apart from you
Is not as strong.
Yes,
I have danced and
I have told the stories
At my own fire and
I have sung well, to all eight directions.
But when I am with you,
My friends,
I know better
Who it is in me
That sings.
Can we see each other and know ourselves seen as recipients of love…yes that…
But also as sources of love that can help and heal…
The songs of our souls call us to choose love rather than hate as the source of our resilience.
Love does not promise ease. Love promises the strength to deal with the hardness that comes with living. And the hardness that we can correct. Call it resilience. Call it faith. Call it dogged insistence that there is a better way. Call it the naïve willingness to work for a world in which our plenty is not purchased with the want of so many.
Call it the religious impulse, if you will, that sees other faces and wonders, but does not fear. That vision that sees tragedy with every young Black man gunned down by police…not justified self-defense. That vision that sees terrified children taken from their parents on the border…not danger we should wall ourselves away from.
Love is a choice and a discipline.
This is seeing with Love’s eyes and finding that love has everything to do with it.
This is the Love that runs between us,
Sustaining force of restoration,
The Love that nourishes and feeds us,
Binds us, each to our collective core…
Love will repair us, …
In the shadow of the trespass
In the warmth of one another
In the light of what, restored, we will become.
Prayer
Will you pray with me now?
Spirit of Life. Spirit of Love.
We do not ask you, whatever you may be,
We do not ask you to fix the world
But the world needs fixing.
We do not ask you to promise success
We do not ask you to make it easy to end injustice
Or provide blueprints for the Beloved Community.
We know that ours are the only hands on earth
That ours are the hearts that need to be healed.
We ask only that the movement of our lives
Point toward hope
And that our eyes be open to see the beauty
In the faces around us…all of the faces
We ask only that our ears be open
To hear the songs of the souls that journey with us
And our own song…
Sustaining us…
Giving us the resilience
And the courage
To answer your call
To answer the call of love.
Amen
Topics: Resilience