Good Morning! This weekend we are celebrating Memorial Day. It is actually a secular holiday to remember those who died in war. There were over 600,000 men, soldiers from both the Union and Confederate forces, who perished during the Civil War. Decoration Day was begun initially to mark their graves and remember those who died. This eventually evolved officially into Memorial Day and expanded to include the decoration of the graves of all who were lost in war.
Today, for most people it marks the beginning of summer and is a national holiday during which we have picnics, barbecue and start the camping and swimming season. We bring on the party mood as this weekend marks the start of good times and the fun of summer. I am not sure how many of us pay attention any more to the “Remembering” part of this holiday, unless you have lost a loved one in war.
The question that I sat with on Thursday when writing this talk was the question, “Just what is it that we need to remember?” And that felt like a big, big question given the tension and unease in our nation this day. On this Memorial Day, 2018, I believe it is most fitting for us to remember the horror of war so that we stop thinking that the only way to solve our conflicts is to kill each other.
I believe it is essential to remember our common humanity and bonds of human kinship with one another. Our nation, and other nations around the globe, are in the midst of this energy of polarization, of building walls, “other-izing” and dehumanizing those with whom we disagree, those who “broke the law” in coming here. There is this global energy of building walls to keep out refugees. It is happening in Europe along the borders of Serbia and Croatia and in our country as well. And the tragedy of walls in Israel and Palestine and the mid-East is also a constant theme. And yet, as I looked at my great-Grandfather, Hermann Munster’s immigration and naturalization papers from 1845, I was keenly aware that he was not walled-out of America, or I would not be here.
Last week, if you recall, the talk ended with the story of the two wolves from the Cherokee tradition. There is within all of us two wolves, one that is evil or immature and one that is good, or more spiritually mature. The grandfather described these for his grandson who asked his grandfather, “Which one wins?” And the grandfather replied, “The one you feed.” What are we feeding right now? There is SO much focus and energy directed right now to feeding the wolf of anger, rage, fear, resentment and greed. The wolf of this wounded darkness is howling so loudly, we can’t hear anything but that, and our response is to want to just make it go away and stop.
However, I am fairly sure that is not going to happen. That wolf of darkness is crying out for healing, a healing in our national consciousness. It is a healing that did not happen after the Civil War. And just shutting up that voice will not help us move into the healing that we so clearly need in our national psyche. It is so tempting to yield to the “lure for a cure,” but that would be the cheap fix if we could even find it. I don’t think there is a “cure” for what ails us as a culture. It certainly is not in economic prosperity, for we have never been so prosperous as a people and so desperately unhappy as we collectively are today.
Today, our invitation is to hear that voice of collective pain no matter which “side” or “silo” it is coming from. When the mothers and wives and family “decorated” those graves from the Civil War, the grief was equally deep on both sides, Union and Confederate. We had the grieving, but it is clear we did not have healing, because the wounds have been so evident in these past few years. While this is not pretty, it is a look at reality that says we need a new national story, a narrative that describes how we come together to heal each other.
Our invitation to “remember” today is an invitation to find healing in the midst of the chaos, the fear and the pain. It calls us to deepen our understanding of what it means to love when we remember who we really are: emanations of that Light which is greater than we are. We are all a part of what is called by many, God. No matter what we believe, how we behave, whom we agree with or whom we disagree with, we are ALL part of that Divine Energy. Here is how James Findley, faculty at Richare Rohr’s Center for Action and Contemplation, describes this relationship with the Divine in his work, Intimacy: The Divine Ambush:
When God gazes at us and we gaze at God we light up. . . . And God lights up with joy of being recognized by the one that God created in God’s own image and likeness for the very sake of this recognition. It’s a state of visceral, emotional, intimate communion; a tender recognition of oneness that we might rest in it, resting in us . . . resting in this communion in each other, as each other, through each other, beyond each other in this endless interconnectedness of life itself, of love. [2]
It is a different kind of Memorial Day invitation to ask us to regard each other as “God sees at us,” and to mirror that for each other. We are asked to remember our shared Divinity/humanity lest our so-called silos once again become bunkers. How do we do that? I am not sure, but I recently heard a story of two people who were able to do that.
On the May 17th episode of On Being, Krista Tippet interviewed two young men, one of them, Derek Black, who grew up the heir apparent of a prominent white nationalist family. David Duke of the KKK was his godfather. After his white supremacy ideology was outed in college and he was ostracized, one of the only Orthodox Jews on campus-Matthew Stevenson- invited Derek to his weekly Friday night Shabbat dinners. Over two years of sharing this dinner, the two young men became friends and blazed a path for walking and healing some of the most challenging and rocky terrain of our time. Derek and Matthew now speak on college campuses across the nation about this healing process that began with an invitation to dinner on a Friday night.
If you listen to the conversation, you begin to hear the language of friendship that is called forth in this unlikely pairing of individuals. I have put a link to it in the written version of the talk, which will be distributed in the Wednesday Faith Lift. It is worth your time to listen to this conversation.
What needs to be noted is that a change of heart did not come about for either of these young men as a result of argument, rational or otherwise or political discourse. It happened slowly, over time, as they got to actually know one another and “see” the human being in one another, rather than the stereotype or caricature. They were mirrors for each other of the Gaze of God. It was and is a powerful story of transformation and it is an illustration of the Power of Love at work when space is held for all possibilites.
What does it mean for us to allow love to heal us as a nation? If we go back to the Civil War, which was truly a traumatic experience for our nation, we begin to see with new eyes that we cannot “cure” the diseases of racism that came from that time. We have to look at it a different way, as healing from trauma as noted by healer Anzaldúa in the article ”The Lure of Cure in Post-Traumatic Times”
Anzaldúa … (is) reminding us that healing is different from a cure. Cure implies an end, closure, and resolution. It implies that a problem has been remedied, that suffering has been eradicated. Healing, on the other hand, is messier. Healing is a way without assurance of an end. It can refer to a more unwieldy process of learning to live amid uncertainties…it means finding a way to live with wounds that will not simply go away.
The only way to live with those wounds is to begin to remember who we are and who “they are” and that we are all the Face of God. It is love that heals us all. And what is the nature of that Love? Well, I have a song for you today by the Pentatonix which imagines it more clearly that I ever could:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NLiWFUDJ95I
Blessings on the Path,
Rev. Deb