Unitarian Universalist Church of Palo Alto

Vote Your Way Out of Hell

Reverend Kurt Kuhwald
November 25, 2007
Palo Alto, CA

The history of voting in the United States is long, complex and difficult … and … it has a wonderfully inspiring struggle running though it like a bright banner against a dark and formidable sky. Against the elitist, wealthy forces promoting class and group separation, against ignorance and bigotry, against the fear of utter disempowerment, real efforts, efforts that extended over 200 years (that continue today), efforts paid for with lives, fortunes and sacred honor, efforts have been made to bring the full and free participation of denied group after denied group into the election process in the United States.

Most of us here know the history: The original limitations placed upon the population of the colonies, limitations of gender, landownership, race and religion (which automatically included sexual orientation) were all challenged time and time again by those marginalized, left out, forcibly oppressed, and those who allied with them.

These challenges brought victories: In 1856, landless white men secured the vote; in 1870, non-white men entered the electorate; in 1920, the constitution was finally changed to allow women to vote; in 1924 Indigenous people were given voting rights; in 1961 the residents of Washington D.C. became voters; and, lastly, in 1971 people between the ages of 18 and 21 were ushered into voting booths through the agency of constitutional amendment and given voting power.

The creation of this nation was, at its humanistic center, based on the argument over whether people living in the British colonies had the right to participate in their own governance, especially in their economic governance. The cry: “No taxation without representation!” struck right at the heart of the engines that were driving empire. It was a cry of dissent aimed at the abuse of economic greed dictating the kingdom’s political agenda. People of all classes declared that their voices should be heard when any decision about their lives was to be considered … because that is where the true authority had to be located: in their own lives, lived as individuals and as members of the collective.

That colonial declaration extends, true as an arrow, directly to this very moment in history. Along with those dissidents, we make the same demands today, against any government just as dictatorial and abusive, just as committed to its own power — whose ideological and political lust for power drives its economic agenda.

Voting is, of course, only one of the many forms that people use to create democracy for themselves, to level the economic and political playing fields; collective action, economic choices, and cultural and life-style choices are others. Voting is, however, a crucial form because it stands at the very center of where social power is generated and directed. That is, voting takes place at the nexus where the individual heart/mind meets the social covenant, the social covenant that overtly sanctions the place and importance of the individual’s person and the individual’s presence within the context of social existence.

But there is another domain in which the act of voting is crucial to our survival. It has to do with the question of authority, inner personal authority. It has to do with the fundamental locus of authority in our lives. To access some of the real texture of what it could mean to touch that place of authority in ourselves, bringing it into our collective experience, I need to “amble” a bit in order to bring together what might seem like disparate pieces into a focused perception of the power and place of … our preciousness. I believe it is from that exquisite and priceless place that our true power finds its source.

For the newsletter blurb announcing this Service I wrote: “Rev. Kurt A. Kuhwald will provide some guidance from the pulpit on how to apply the power of our preciousness to the dirty ways of the world. It will be good to get in touch, once again, with the heart of democracy. We deserve it.” And the title I created was: “Vote Your Way Out of Hell!”

The only hell that we know exists, according to our Universalist teachings and heritage, and according to our own lived experience, is right here on earth, right now. That hell is what Bruce Springsteen called, “the dirty ways of the world.” Those dirty ways, that hell, is all the more exacerbated in its virulence in today’s world because it stands in polar opposition to the promise that democracy — the very womb from which the strategy of voting is born — the promise democracy sings within our hearts. We know even more clearly that torture is abhorrent, that disproportionately distributed wealth is violent, that war is obsolete (not that it ever was a human necessity or a human good), that the poisonous and nefarious garden of “isms” is cancerous — we know all these are wrong in a heightened and clearer way, because we have envisioned true democracy.

We have envisioned that place called democracy, that place where our voices are heard and honored, where our errors are corrected by the wiser will and wisdom of our community, and where peace (and the justice inherent in it) is established through the experience and expression of collective dialogue.

In his book Radical Democracy, C. Douglas Lummis, writes:

The democratic spring does not roll around by itself, at a regular time. It comes only when people make it come. Without a great collective effort to bring it about, it might not come at all. And if we deceive ourselves into believing that it is summer when it is not, we are less likely to make that effort or even to grasp that it is necessary.

What we mostly have in the “actually existing representative democracies” is winter, with a lot of elaborate equipment designed to help us to survive it: “democratic institutions.” We are right to cherish those institutions; flawed as they are, we should never allow ourselves to be forced to face winter without them … . But we must not start thinking of the cave, which we originally entered to get out of the wind, as if it were the whole world, or confuse the stove with the sun. This is the error we fall into when we define democracy as identical to the institutions of the “actually existing democracies.” And this error is surely one of the reasons that, even in this age when virtually everybody claims to be a democrat, democracy itself has still no more than a fugitive existence.

So, drawing my ambling to a close, I extract these conclusions. In order to enter into a truly democratic life we need:

First,

to keep clarity about the “dirty ways of the world.” We keep clear by studying how Empire drives and expresses its domination in our locale and in our times. We also keep clear by holding true to our personal vision of what democracy really means, not just that the people rule, but how we ourselves “rule” when we act from out of our moral center, the locus where our true power lies.

Contacting our moral center is one of the major ways of understanding (by living) what the spiritual journey is all about. It means touching our inner dignity. It means supporting and encouraging our “voice,” the voice that speaks both our purest integrity and our heart’s clean sense of rightness about whatever issue we are addressing or confronting.

Contacting our moral center means arriving at the locus of our own authority … in a way that we know we are finally home once again. One way to express this is to say that when we come fully into the domain of our moral center we are experiencing the re-emergence of our true, our full, humanity.

I use the term “re-emergence” because in this society, in the world that all of us grew up in, it was impossible to hold on to the deep center of our true identity. Empire has existed for 5,000 years, and no one has escaped the tentacles of its abusive and oppressive power. So … when we come home to ourselves, we are essentially re-emerging from the oppression that has captured not only us but all of human kind. To come home to ourselves is the most primary, the purest and strongest act of dissent we can undertake. From that place the actions that we take, the defiance, as well as the affirmation we engage in, are grounded in truth, the truth of our very beings, our utter humanness.

It is this place, it is from this fount of energy and life, that we are being called now to act from. The times are too corrupt for anything less … and though we may only occassionally achieve this “level” of action, it is what we must strive for.

Secondly,

to enter into a truly democratic way of life, we need to be clear that in these times, to live democratically is to live a fugitive life. We cannot adjust to this society and live wholesomely. To find true health, true authenticity, we must live against the grain of our times — because these are the times of advancing empire; we must live in the border territories of society … as well as in the border territories of the selves that Empire has demanded of us, has forced us to conform to. Martin King made it very clear, there are some things to which we must be maladjusted: inequity, hate, violence, separation, domination … torture, war.

However, and here is the most difficult point it is given to me to deliver today, let there be no mistake: We have been overwhelmed; we have been forced to give ourselves up; we have been driven from the garden of our innocence and simple honesty; we have at some tier, some level, near our core, we have had to cut ourselves off from our selves, and of course from others — our brothers and sisters, our lovers, our children, our dear, dear friends. We have had to defend against the reality of life and its pain, by giving up our naturalness, our best thinking (particularly about relationships), our clear, unsullied intuition. And only when we acknowledge that reality at our very depths, to touch its utter despair, its maiming power, its soul-searing pain, are we then able to say …

But not completely. Not completely. Not completely, or we would not be here today. We would long ago have lost our lives, or given them up. Not completely … because we held on. We kept the flame of truth, the truth of our sweet and precious being, the flame of our real courage to live life, to face its difficulties, to honor its harshness as well as its beauty, we kept (although sometimes very faintly), we kept all of this and our deep love for life alive.

And therefore, we kept our true self alive. It is there. It is there waiting for our full, unhesitant, uncompromised and unrepentant affirmation. It is there waiting for us to fully and unashamedly claim it as ours.

Let us enter a brief moment of silence together so that we can rest with these words, words that are bigger than me. Words that I believe express a hidden truth that was meant to be spoken here, now, in this sanctuary, from this pulpit.

[ Silence. ]

To close, I offer the words of Rev. Ted Loder, Methodist minister who for many years plied the concrete canyons of New York City as a street minister:

Empower me
to be a bold participant,
rather than a timid saint in waiting,
in the difficult ordinariness of now;
to exercise the authority of honesty,
rather than to defer to power,
or deceive to get it;
to influence someone for justice,
rather than impress anyone for gain;
and, by grace, to find treasures
of joy, of friendship, of justice,
of peace and of love
hidden in the fields of the daily
life gives me to plow.

May it be so for you as well as for me … from now until the day we die.

All My Relations.
Ashé. Amen. Ameen. Shalom & Blessed Be.
Gracias y Namasté.

 

Worship Associate: Phyllis Cassel