Unitarian Universalist Church of Palo Alto

In Such a Time as This

Reverend Kurt Kuhwald
July 6, 2008
Palo Alto, CA

I first offered this sermon to the students and faculty of Starr King School for the Ministry, in Berkeley last spring. I share it with you today on the weekend of the Fourth of July, in adapted form, because had I not written it last spring, I would have written it now.

What a high and blessed honor it is to be able to stand here today at this mighty little pulpit, this little cabin of truth telling. What an honor to be given the rare opportunity to publicly speak my truth, to speak from my heart to all of you. And as I allow this honor, this gift to wash over me … I must say to you all, I find that from deep within my heart, from the core of my human depths, I must say …

I am concerned. I stand in this Sanctuary today, on this July Fourth Weekend, a time holy to many and a time of deep appraisal for many others … I stand here today deeply and gravely concerned … concerned about the Fate of the Earth and all Her Children … the children … here … you and I … children … here and in Iraq … children all over this beleaguered planet.

I stand before you today, grateful for the opportunity to speak to you; you all who by your relgious affiliation have chosen the Deep-River-Runner Path (the Deep-River-Runner Path); you who are dedicating yourselves to the work of human redemption, redemption in a time when there has been, and continues to be, an insane explosion of error, greed, violence, lying and rapaciousness by our national and global leaders; you all who are choosing to stand up on deck and show your light in the midst of a human driven storm the likes of which has never, never been seen before in the entire history of this planet.

My concern is not new. My concern is not new for it goes back over fifty years, in fact over fifty-five years ago, when as a seven or eight year old, I realized that if God knew everything, as the Fundamentalist Christian preachers were telling me in the Sunday school my parents left me off at each Sunday, and if God knew everything and was judging me for being bad, which is what those preachers also proclaimed, then when I tried to be good, act good, when I tried to think of ways to be good, or to justify my behavior, He would see inside my head and He would know how I was trying to cover my badness. I was overwhelmed by the existential trap I was caught in … the intensity of that trap for my young mind and spirit, had for me, something like the pressure cooker effect that that good man Tookie Williams, executed in San Quentin by the State, described about living in prison — it created, he reported from death row, an intensity that forces one’s awareness to mature powerfully and deeply, if one accepts the challenge. So you see, fully feeling and perceiving the trap laid by this uncompromising, judgmental, and ever-survelillant God forced me into autonomy, forced me to stand for my self … and I rebelled.

I did not quite step clear of believing that that God was there (He was far too big a social construct for my young spirit to overthrow), I stepped, rather, into my own autonomy, I stepped into my own power to choose against this God, to choose to be free and act by my own conscience.

I stand here today, speaking from out of that original rebellion, the rebellion of the human spirit that refuses to accept any God whose judgment is supposedly so critically pervasive, and so pervasively critical, that any attempts to exercise authentic choice are impossible, and doomed to failure. I stand here in the spirit of that rebellion saying that any God that would deny that my original nature, my deepest self, my precious being, is capable of self-governance, is in itself by its own inherent structure capable of living truthfully, honestly, morally/ethically, wholesomely — any God who would deny that is false and is born from dysfunctional human minds twisted by fear, fear layered with greed, hate and often the lust for power — as we see so rabidly today where theology is used to justify despoiling the Earth, abandoning people and waging war.

Furthermore, it was that dissident spirit, born in that seven year old’s mind and heart, that linked with a knowing faith in my own natural goodness. It was that dissident spirit that gave me the insights and the perspective to accurately see the craziness of the adult world around me — so that as I grew in age and maturity I was able to develop an ever deeper challenge to the teachings that humans were essentially depraved (the theological story of the time) or robotically at the mercy of stimulus and response dynamics that were essentially spiritless/soulless (the psychological story of the time).

It is always good to return to the child, the child who readily, easily and inherently knows the world is not only good, it is paradise — no matter what the next world might be (and it might be wonderful), this world is paradise! It is always good to return to the child’s voice (the voice of Beginner’s Mind, in the words of the late Bay Area Zen master Suzuki Roshi), that voice which spoke out so strongly, strongly and firmly and clearly with no doubts about its honesty, truthfulness, nor its absolute integrity and goodness. It is always good to return there to that child we were when we find ourselves now, on today’s level, face to face with grave concerns, concerns about violent human acts burning with pernicious intensity, concerns about draught ravaged horizons filled with toxic smoke and board rooms filled with those who arrogantly claim superiority over others.

It is that simple human voice, rising from the child and fully flowering in the mature adult, it is that simple voice that can guide us, that we must rely on, for it is that voice that will in fact save us — for that voice comes directly from the heart of the living Earth.

Let me read a piece written by Joanna Macy, one of my teachers and colleagues:

Each of us, I believe, is a gift the Earth is giving to itself now, a unique gift. Every anguish, betrayal, disappointment can even help prepare us for the work of healing. You don’t need to be extraordinary. If the world is to be healed through human efforts, I am convinced it will be by ordinary people, people whose love for this life is even greater than their fear. People who can open to the web of life that called us into being, and who can rest in the vitality of that larger body.

The times are corrosive, difficult and perilous. The signs and signals of this disorder are everywhere from the overstressed environment, to the horror of human suicide bombings, to the widespread obscenity of poverty, to the willingness to send young women and men to war for the private gain of the elite. But when the Vice-President of this country said, “We have to work sort of the dark side, if you will…It is a mean, nasty, dangerous, dirty business out there, and we have to operate in that arena.” (What he meant by “operating” in that arena, however, was fully committing to that arena, committing to the use of torture; preemptive, illegitimate, baseless war; warrantless surveillance; and on and on.) When that is the banner proclamation from the very center of our government, we know we are up against something far more than a simple misuse of power. We are looking into the very maw of dysfunction so profound, I, who rarely use the word, would name it evil.

But it did not spring into being overnight. This administration, and all the others across the globe that are so arrogant, so environmentally ignorant, so theologically narrow, so willing to promote an old and repressive story, the story of Empire, … they have been working their pathological dreams for a long, long time.

And the ancientness of that oppression, up against the freshness of the child heart and Beginner’s Mind, are the intersection of my words today. Standing in that intersection, let me say to you — again, from this wizened cupola of truth speaking — let me say that I believe this current violence, all the self-righteousness, the arrogance, the greed and exploitation, all the spread of a violent mentality and a pinched and narrow cosmology that has caused so much damage is to a significant degree the result of our own national behavior. We are faced with all of that, I believe, because all of that stems directly from the national refusal to be responsible for our destructive actions both past and present — despite all the good we intend and the good we do.

Having practiced psychotherapy in California for 15 years in my earlier life, I was keenly trained by the dilemmas of the individuals, families and groups I worked with. I was trained to understand the destructive power of repressed violence, which stems from the power of an over-arching suppression of memory that includes the overt denial of past behavior; I was also trained by seeing over and over a form of reaction formation whereby people cover their negative, violent memories and actions with “sunny,” socially acceptable behaviors meant to distract and delude both themselves and others. (Think of Donald Rumsfeld, former Secretary of Defense, saying, “Gosh, sometimes even I get scared of the mean person the media says I am.” [He may even have said, “Geewillikers!”) On the individual level, these psychological defenses invariably result in emotional meltdowns, physical distresses and illnesses, and, in the worst cases, the emergence of the repressed content into archetypes fueled by and characterized by enormous negative energy: The Dictator/Savior, the Demon Lover, centered in an individual; and on the collective level: the Apocalypse/Rapture.

My training and intuition tell me [as they told the other Jeremiah, the Rev. Jeremiah Wright, Barack Obama’s former minister] — my training and intuition tell me that, as Malcolm X once said, “The Chickens have come home to roost.” The Chickens, sick, swollen, toxic chickens, violent, malformed and mutated — the Chickens have come home to roost. What we have now is the direct and psychically logical result of deep and massive psychological denial which has prevented more humane and creative action.

My concern rises from that difficult dilemma. The question at the center of my concern is: How effective will responses be, responses such as recycling, voting in a new political savior, the creation of better and more intelligent technologies (as the young founders of Google proclaim) or even creating green jobs for brown people caught in poverty … how effective will our justice work be if we do not find a way collectively and individually to make conscious our transgressions, own our woundedness and expose our moral failures and our exploitation — and in some way to “confess” them? That is, to declare their destructiveness, and accept responsibility for them. How … if we do not fully own our entire human-cultural-societal-collective history through conscious acknowledgment grounded in humility — how can we expect to build a new society, a new direction, from a past that is now seeping into social reality as surely as the methane gasses will enter the atmosphere with the warming of the polar oceans, as surely as the Sun’s intense rays are now penetrating through the vast hole in the decaying ozone layer? How can we expect the human to be less responsive than the great processes of the earth to violence, exploitation and toxic dumping? How can we expect anything different when we ourselves are Earth processes, when we ourselves are the Earth made mobile and conscious?

My concern goes at least one step further: Where can we find hope? In the face of the collective intransigence and denial, of this nation in particular, for it is our nation afterall, what hope can we find to live on, to respond compassionately, to find enthusiasm, to be effective?

Let me say, clearly, that while there is a steep slide into chaos taking over our social institutions, there is also a revolution, there is a revolution growing below the radar of the mainstream media and the awareness of those in power. It is a new story entire. A story that runs wildly and naturally counter to the story of Empire. Joanna Macy calls it The Great Turning. As a compass to find our way in these times, this idea of the Great Turning is a deep, needed and powerful perception, a radical shift into a very different consciousness, for it reflects the emergence and creation of a new story, informed by indigenous wisdom, of human kind, this planet, and of the universe itself; it is a new more spacious yet Earth rooted, Earth grounded story that comes from our recognition that we are inseparable from the Earth; it comes from a deep comprehension that we have evolved out of and from the Earth’s deep processes and that our human wisdom is its wisdom. As Joanna recently wrote, “…life is a dynamic process, self-organizing to adapt and evolve. Just as it turned scales to feathers, gills to lungs, seawater to blood, so now, too, immense evolutionary pressures are at work [… immense evolutionary pressures are at work]. They are driving this revolution of ours through innumerable … intersecting alterations in the human capacity for conscious change.”

So … our present reality contains, undeniably includes, the fact of destructiveness and a headlong trajectory toward devastation … but … it also involves a widespread revolution. This revolution has been named as the third for the human species, the first being the agricultural revolution of the late Neolithic, the second being the industrial revolution of the past two centuries. Because the revolution we now enter must, if it is to succeed, be consciously chosen, it will be, in the words of former EPA administrator William Ruckelshaus, “absolutely unique in humanity’s stay on Earth.”

Joanna Macy’s take on all of this is, I feel, clear, noble and psychologically and spiritually insightful: “The Great Turning comes with no guarantees. Its risk of failure is its reality. Insisting on belief in a positive outcome puts blinders on us and burdens the heart. [Insisting on belief in a positive outcome puts blinders on us and burdens the heart.] We might manage to convince our selves that everything will surely turn out all right, but would such happy assurance elicit our greatest courage and creativity? [Would such happy assurance elicit our greatest courage and creativity?]

“The Great Turning, [she writes] as a compass pointing to the possible, helps me live with radical uncertainty. It also causes me to believe that, whether we succeed or not, the risks we take on behalf of life will bring forth dimensions of human intelligence and solidarity beyond any we have known.”

I believe that you here, whether you are yet fully aware of it or not, have stepped deeply and irrevocably into the circle of healing justice. I believe that you here have been called to take leadership to take the risks on behalf of life. That you here are called to mid-wife those dimensions of human intelligence and wisdom that will lead to a solidarity that is our only hope.

May you find the humility to accept this sacred charge.
May you find courage to take the high risks that are necessary.
May you discover, in your own hearts, guts, bodies, the natural springs of energy that you will need for this long and difficult path.
May you live your lives at the very forming edge of this global revolution and know your self as an authentic comrade of others, and child of the Earth.
May your work, your ministry, flourish as, loyal to your self, and to the pledges you promise, you grow in fearlessness and love.
May you feel the joy and the love that rises with the awareness that you are, you truly are doing all that you humanly can.

May it be so.

 

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

 

Reflection: Answering our Call to Life by Florence Haas