Waking To the Dark

A sermon offered at the Unitarian Universalist Church of Lafayette, Indiana

January 16^th 2005

by Rev. Hilary Landau Krivchenia

Martin Luther King, Jr.

I could never accept the fact of having to go to the back of a bus or sit in the segregated section of a train.  The first time I was seated behind a curtain in a dining car I felt as if the curtain had been dropped on my selfhood.  

Kenneth Waters

So then just tell them about "spiritual color" and tell them:

“whatever color love is, that’s the color of God;

whatever color justice is, that’s the color of God

whatever color peace is, that’s the color of God;

whatever color freedom is, that’s the color of God;

whatever color joy is, that’s the color of God;

whatever color healing is, that’s the color of God;

whatever color power is, that’s the color of God;

whatever color truth is, that’s the color of God.”

So then, regardless of who we are or where we come from, regardless of our own skin color or racial identity, we should strive to be God’s spiritual color. Amen.

Martin Luther King, Jr.

In Rip Van Winkle, the thing we usually remember is that Rip slept twenty years.  There is another important point that is almost overlooked.  It was the sign on the inn in the little town from which Rip departed and scaled the mountain for his sleep.  When he went up, the sign had a picture of King George.  When he came down, twenty years later, the sign had a picture of George Washington.  The striking thing about this story is that he slept through a revolution that would alter the course of human history.

All too many people fail to remain awake through great periods of change.  Today, our survival depends on our ability to stay awake, adjust to new ideas, remain vigilant and face the challenge of change. 

We are confronted with the fierce urgency of now.  The “tide in the affairs of men” does not remain at the flood; it ebbs.  We may cry out desperately for time to pause in her passage, but time is deaf to every plea and rushes on.  Over the bleached bones and jumbled residues of numerous civilizations are written the pathetic words: “Too Late.”  There is an invisible book that faithfully records our vigilance or our neglect. 

Sermon

When the tsunami roared through Asia, it took a couple of days for the magnitude of the tragedy to sink in.  The numbers are staggering and for every person lost there are grieving families, frightened neighbors, and struggling survivors.  The work of recovery will take years, and that’s only the material work.  The tsunami vividly illustrated the power of nature and the terrifying vulnerability of human life. 

            We have a responsibility to give aid and comfort – to help in rebuilding and in the healing.  We have a responsibility to learn to prevent such suffering in the future.

            I wondered how many people felt the need to help another part of the world through such a tragedy.  I wondered if the trauma of such a natural disaster could approximate the trauma of unnatural disasters – of which there have been countless in human history –here on September 11, 2001.  The water recedes, the dead will be found as they can be found, money will help with rebuilding and in time, well, the world won’t ever really go back to normal.  The sea didn’t attack with wanton hatred and deadly intent.  It simply felt a seismic shock and flung itself outward until it hit land.  Yet the sea moved with such ferocity as humans will never forget – like Pompeii.  As a species we respond to cataclysm with memory.  We’ll remember the tsunami for generations.

            As I reflected on the persistence of memory, Martin Luther King Sunday drew closer – until the Tsunami and the tide of history flowed together – both cataclysmic though different.  The tides of history cover us all.

            Martin Luther King, Jr. was born January 15, 1929.  He grew up in a nation drowning in fear and injustice.  He witnessed that cataclysm as only those can who see up close.  It hit his shore and it took his life in 1968.  He knew the perilous landscape in which he lived – he knew the danger and that there was no escape from that tide.

            He wrote “Over the bleached bones and jumbled residues of numerous civilizations are written the pathetic words: Too Late.”  I hear his urgency to respond to the tide of history and make his own and our lives count – in time.

            Our times are different from King’s and not so different.  There are visible, seemingly powerful African Americans, but it’s too soon for us to know if they’re just there, as Melissa Harris-Lacewell said, to make us feel better.  Poverty is increasing for black Americans, our prisons are packed with black men, our schools are failing children of color.  We live in a system built upon centuries of racism and it’s stubborn to eradicate.  It’s a reality of immense complexity.

            One aspect is the construct of race itself.  One website I visited said, “race is a pigment of the imagination.”  But what a powerful pigment.  It stays with us – in our grain.  It creates conscious and unconscious memory that lives from generation to generation.  Countee Cullen lived from 1903 to 1946.  He wrote:

Once riding in old Baltimore,
Heart-filled, head-filled with glee,
I saw a Baltimorean
Keep looking straight at me.

Now I was eight and very small,
And he was no whit bigger,
And so I smiled, but he poked out
His tongue, and called me, "Nigger."

I saw the whole of Baltimore
From May until December;
Of all the things that happened there
That's all that I remember.

            The memory of trauma lives in this nation.  I want to understand this memory and through understanding to seek healing, to seek the justice that King spoke of when he called us to see ourselves – all colors and nations as brothers and sisters. 

            Recently, I heard Melissa Harris-Lacewell, a professor of political science at the University of Chicago.  She shared with a group of ministers and theological students that, as a girl she’d assumed that God was colorless.  It never occurred to her –until she found herself with kids at school and the religions that they brought with them – that other people thought that God was white.  It shocked her.  Another poem by Cullen, reminds me of the confusion racism creates:

For a Lady I Know

She even thinks that up in heaven
Her class lies late and snores,
While poor black cherubs rise at seven
To do celestial chores.

            Harris-Lacewell was fortunate.  Her parents, an interracial, interfaith couple, decided to go to a Unitarian Universalist Church where her ideas would be affirmed.  Being of two races her awareness of color was a constant in her life.  She spoke of having feet in two worlds – but struggling to understand where she belonged.

            Zora Neal Hurston said: I do not always feel colored.  Even now I often achieve the unconscious Zora of Eatonville before the Hegira.  I have no separate feeling about being an American citizen and colored.  I am merely a fragment of the Great Soul that surges within the boundaries.  I feel most colored when I am thrown against a sharp white background.  Among the thousand white persons, I am a dark rock surged upon, and overswept... When covered by the water, I am; and the ebb but reveals me again.

            There’s that sea of historical awareness again – washing over lives and drowning the natural impulse to oneness and belonging.  It’s an awareness of the values humanity and history have packed into color.  Hurston said “Someone is always at my elbow reminding me that I am the granddaughter of slaves.”  It’s a reminder of that curtain in the train car that King spoke of -- that shrouded his selfhood.

            Race could be a celebration of the fabulous palette of nature, of complex and precious history.  Today, for that to become reality, we must face history with regret and sorrow – not with guilt both useless and crippling – but with a cleansing, compassionate sorrow that honors history and its lessons.

            I’m white.  I live in a world in which whiteness is the standard of normalcy.  I’m aware of color but there’s a way in which I don’t have to reflect.  My color is the norm – you see?  While I’ve done racial awareness exercises, there’s a felt level that I’ve seldom experienced – but I did this November, working the polls in Cincinnati.

            It was almost time for the polls to close at the Jerriel Baptist Church.  My coat was heavy-soaked with rain.  I’d been outside for more than twelve hours.  The precinct had largely voted.  The members of the Jerriel choir arrived for practice.  Vibrant, inspiring music filtered through the stained glass windows, looking warm in the cold night.  I wanted to go in and listen – but that felt like the height of cheek – to take my white self into that black congregation to enjoy the music they were making.  I knew that if I were outside a white church and a great choir began to sing I’d feel shy but able to look in to see if there was a non-disruptive way to listen.  I stood on an island of black in the sea of white and saw beyond my simple layer of whiteness to the fact of skin – its beauty and its foolishness – its attachment to my body and it’s baggage in society.  I felt my skin, like a swimmer drying off -- aware of being in air instead of water.  This was the awareness of my skin, their skin and the power that skin has been given.  What I felt and knew that night was something of the experience of color.  I can’t say that I know how people of color feel – though, as a Jew, I’m awake to the pain of millennia of struggle.  I can’t say that I know “the black experience” – it’s not a monolithic experience nor is it all bitter and yet – it’s the experience of countless people lost, families broken over generations, terror endured, freedom denied, countless traumas in this land, on our shore.  All ascribed to skin.  I awoke more deeply to the unfinished American Revolution, the unfinished Reconstruction, the unfinished Civil Rights movement – the tide of history and of our time.  I felt sadness -- awakening in the dark to my skin.  Moments of intense recognition usually settle in a milder form, sharpness softened by the passage of time -- particularly when you aren’t reminded repeatedly.  Later that night I drove home, where I could resume the normalcy of white again.  But I’d been changed.  Since then I’ve been hungry to understand on a cellular level the power that we’ve given color and the ways that that power endures.

Ellen Craft was a slave so light skinned she could pass for white, while her husband, William, was dark.  Ellen dressed as a white landowner traveling with her slave and they escaped to freedom.  Harris-Lacewell talked about 1892 when Homére Plessy went to sit in the "White" car of the East Louisiana Railroad.  Plessy was only 1/8 black and 7/8 white -- so light-skinned that he had to tell the conductor that he was black -- but under Louisiana law, he was considered black and therefore required to sit in the "Colored" car.  He was arrested and Judge Ferguson found him guilty of breaking the law.  Even one drop of black blood would make you black. 

            Well, at that rate, with what we know today – there’s not one of us would get to sit in the front of the bus.  Our blood is mixed back to the first ancestors, the mingling of explorers, slaveholders -- blood banks.  We live in a construct made by earthly law to serve the interests of fear and power not so many years ago.

It was to strike down Plessy vs. Ferguson and restore Civil Rights that Martin Luther King worked and preached.  For him, the sacred and justice were interconnected.  By justice he meant not retribution but fairness, the redress of wounds, and the creation of a system that makes room for all.  He spoke directly to the collective yearning for belonging: the wish to be embraced in our wholeness.  He said “we will hew out of the mountain of despair a stone of hope.”  He had hope because he had a vision of the divine, like Rev. Waters, that “whatever color love is, that’s the color of God.”

Waters, King, Harris-Lacewell weren’t speaking of the actual color of an anthropomorphic figure.  People say “God” as shorthand for that which is ultimate, divine.  To assign color to that sacred depth is, at best, idolatry -- at worst, soul killing.  King preached the word of the larger God to humanity – a God beyond color.

I found a photograph from Asia of workers looking through debris.  Above their masks you could see their many colors – yellow, brown, white.  On the ground among them was a pale body.  From a watery death and temporary tomb he had been salvaged and you couldn’t anymore tell what race he had been.  He was a universal, deathly paleness and soon he would be the whiteness of all bones.  A message left for all with hearts to feel, by the tide of human affairs.  A message that comes to us again and again as a plea that we turn our attention to essential matters of human caring and fairness, that we fulfill our better destiny and awaken to our times.  King said: Any religion that professes to be concerned about the souls of men and is not concerned about the slums that damn them, the economic conditions that strangle them and the social conditions that cripple them is a spiritually moribund religion awaiting burial.

King spoke to awaken humanity to the physical dimensions of the world – and their spiritual power.  He spoke to bring us back to life, awaken us to the dark – to the faces and places in the world where suffering is and justice waits.  He worked to bring out of the wise darkness the news that we are all sisters and brothers – akin in joy and suffering.  He called our attention to the tide of history and to call us to rise upon that tide and make a new faith -- one that heals the traumas to which we are heir, and relieves the terrors of human made and natural disaster.  Today, let us recognize his work, our work – let us be awake together.