Mosaic Makers

By revjudegeiger

This sermon was preached at the Unitarian Universalist Fellowship in Huntington on 8/5/18. It looks at conversation as a core religious practice, at diversity as a social value, and at the increasingly fragmented extremes of contemporary political life.

Happy August everyone. It’s good to be back in the pulpit after my July break. We just heard a story from Rev. Meg Barnhouse, a UU minister serving our congregation in Austin. She’s talking about raising her sons with questions, and conversations, rather than them learning to talk atfolks, and to avoid talking at length without hearing the other. There’s a little bit of a jab at how so many boys are raised to become men who talk at, and talk at length. But it’s more about raising the next generation to learn to strive to be in conversation with those around them. Conversation – the bedrock of community. It’s essential to meaning, to connection, to understanding our neighbor. If loving our neighbor is a core religious principle, then conversation is a core religious practice.

Our nation, and our communities, seem to be drifting away from free dialogue, from conversations toward talking at one another. I don’t mean to suggest that every extreme notion, every hateful ideal seemingly plaguing us daily, should be normalized and respected. There are apologists aplenty for every hateful thing these days, and they deserve censure. Separating children from their parents on the border has no rationale based in merit or ethic; white supremacy is alive and well on our streets, and on the internet, and should be instantly and loudly rebuked. The media is clearly not the enemy of the people, and anyone espousing such reveals themselves as a fan of tyranny – that is a long-established fact if we make even a cursory look at the history books.

But I’m increasingly seeing otherwise normal views and opinions from traditional conservatives, everyday centrists, and progressives on the left, being blown out as radical ideas or extremist in perspective. Or ideas that once were a given, are now put into question. Talking points become wielded ateach other, much like our story where one kid speaks at length without making room for conversation. (Some of my liberal friends can’t seem to find common ground with some of my progressive friends, over the slightest difference of perspectives.)

And worse, views that are in the range of “normal” get framed as crazy. Just this week I’ve seen or heard TV, News, or social media decry the idea that ‘should someone working full time be paid enough to afford their rent’ as a radical left notion…. radically Leftist, to be able to work for a living. We now have the ability to 3D print plastic guns and there is a sizeable contingent that fervently believe blocking that, is a threatto their first and second amendment rights; as if not being able to trace killers were suddenly a social good, or not being able to screen known criminals were in our best interest. And apparently now, funding election security has become a partisan issue – as if the sanctity of our democratic process is suddenly a debatable point. This is not normal, and it should remain abnormal. But for all the rest, I think we have some work on our hands in reknitting the social fabric, for the common good. Conversation is a core religious practice.

I was talking with a Canadian colleague back in June while working on one of our UUA continental committees, and I casually made the old melting pot metaphor that most of us grew up hearing as normal. As soon as it came out of my mouth, I knew it was going to be problematic. The old goal of everyone coming to America and melting into one common identity, as if we were some primordial soup, was progressive in its day, but it’s regressive for us now. It doesn’t leave room for folks who were here before the US; it doesn’t leave room for folks who were brought here against their will. And especially saying that to a Canadian who has a different sense of national identity, it wasn’t a helpful phrase. She suggested what they prefer in Canada, when they are talking about people coming together – they say making a mosaic together.

         Now for the more cynical of us – I grew up in New Jersey, and I lived in New York for 15 years now – I know cynical. The cute phrases can make our eyes roll. But in our current climate where the absurd and hateful is given free press, and the normal and kind is called radical, I’m going to make room for any cute phrase that gives us a chance for imagining a new way. Mosaics are a better metaphor for both a national and a community roadmap.

The theme for this month, is Unity and Diversity. Each week this month we’ll reflect on what it means to be a people of Unity and a people of Diversity. How do we do both? When we build mosaics in arts, or on our bathroom tiles, we take a range of shapes and colors and blend them together to create a broader picture. What came before is still there, and its uniqueness is used to craft something new – unity and diversity. The melting pot ideology that informed my grandparents generation left my family speaking only English. My mother grew up hearing her grandparents speaking Italian, and her step-father speaking Spanish, but none of it stuck by adulthood, because her mother wanted to ‘help her become American’ – which meant then, onlyspeaking English. …I’m lesser for it. My grandmother had the best of intentions, but the melting pot metaphor hurt my family, and stole from me part of my heritage and culture. That shouldn’t be normal.

The image in the news of white people screaming at people to speak English in America, is the logical conclusion of a weaponized form of the melting pot. It’s also not normal – it’s a form of social sickness – it’s the inversion of loving our neighbor, that all religions teach us. It’s also an extreme form of talking atone another, rather than seeking conversation.

In many ways, it comes down to this: We have a quote at the top of our order of service from Audre Lorde that reads, “It is not our differences that divide us. It is our inability to recognize, accept, and celebrate those differences.” At the founding of our nation, we valued freedom, liberty, and justice for all – but the for all part meant mostly white male landowners – and of course heterosexual. That for all part would expand bit by bit over the decades – slowly. But we didn’t yet have in our national identity a sense that diversitywas a value we ascribed to – or celebrated. Diversity wouldn’t really become a national value until the 1960s (at best.) I never grew up in a world where that word wasn’t seen as a positive – in the broadest sense. But that’s comparatively new to our national identity. Valuing diversity seems normal to us now, but it wasn’t always so, and it appears that part of our nation wants to go back to a time when it wasn’t valued. As hate speech, and hate politics, become normalized at the highest level of our government, it’s increasingly coming under fire. “It is not our differences that divide us. It is our inability to recognize, accept, and celebrate those differences.”

If conversation is a core religious practice, we come now to our second core religious practice – developing the muscles that help us to recognize, accept and celebrate diversity, to celebrate our differences. The kneejerk toward sameness is more than unhealthy; it is dangerous for our neighbors. And as our world becomes smaller and smaller in this era of globalization, straining for sameness is dangerous for our nation and our planet. We’re all human, but we’re not all the same; and seeking to force everyone to melt into yoursense of identity, has never been the answer. We shouldn’t be treated less for our cultural background, and we shouldn’t ignore our cultural differences either, they are who we are.

Our central values change over time. Justice for all has become wider and more mature as we have developed as a people. Diversityhas become a moraland an ethic, and we are better for it. Audre Lorde reminds us to not only accept, and value, but to celebrateour differences, for they are praiseworthy. The art of mosaics only come about through those differences placed together. We as a people change and grow over time, and how we see and understand the world is circumscribed by the tenor of our philosophy, our education, and our religious wisdom. Do we hear in the news about a government sponsored “Religious Liberty Task Force” and know it to mean a body that will protect the rights of marginalized religious groups like Muslims, Sikhs and Jews (who still suffer under anti-Semitism in broad daylight,) or will it become religious and political code for ensconcing the religious bigotry of an already overly empowered and privileged extremely conservative and regressive form of fundamentalism that borders on religious law – the very opposite of what our nation was founded on? Doublespeak, and political grandstanding should not be wedded with true religious life, and as spiritual people, we need to remain stalwart against such travesties as the anathema they are. We must celebrate our differencesand not seek to replace spiritual righteousness with an empty monopoly of privilege. (Remember in the original Hebrew, “biblical righteousness” implied community, it meant solidarity with all the people, not the stridency of those already with power.) The stridency of poweris a cult form of Christianity, and holds no spiritual depth, or meaning.

We change and grow over time, as individuals and as a people. To stay with the general art metaphor that comes about from thinking of mosaics, art history reflects this growth. Classical art was often an expression of things as they were, studies in light and dark, studies in form, studies in contrasts and dualities. Impressionism would come along and rock the art world, as a study in how things appearedto the artist. Perspective and location all of sudden mattered. Modernism would argue that there was still one central truth, but we all saw it from our own understanding. Post-modernism (now 30 years old at least – wow), would radically say there were multiple truths simultaneously. Radical for Western philosophy, but plain as day when looking at our global world.

Balancing on the theological cusp between modernism and post-modernism, the Unitarian Universalist minister and theologian, Rev. Dr. Forrest Church would describe theology, spirit, and God as a Cathedral of All Souls. Each window in the cathedral was different, from clear, to mosaics that reflected all the world religions. He would suggest that God’s Light would emanate the same through each window, but each window would reflect it in accordance with it’s particular flavor. There is still one truth, but we each understand it according to our perspective and location in the cathedral. It’s a little like the story of the elephant and the blind men, each describing the part of the elephant they touch, as if it were the whole or essential elephant. They all have a piece of the puzzle, but arguing over which was right, as if all the rest were wrong, is a clear example of what Audre Lorde cautioned us against. Learning to celebrate our differences brings us closer to an intimation of what we can not see ourselves alone.