“ALL SOULS LOVE JAZZ”

ALL SOULS DAY HOMILY
UUCF REVIVAL COMMUNION SERVICE
West Shore UU Church, Rocky River, Ohio
The Rev. Melanie Morel-Ensminger
Friday, November 2, 2007

Scripture Readings: Ezekial 18:4, Psalm 145:10-11, Hebrews 12:1

“All souls are mine” says the Lord to Ezekiel, and in the Crescent City we’re glad to know God’s looking out for us, ‘cause it sure feels like no one else in authority is. We’ve fallen off the national radar, and must fend for ourselves, relying on the kindness of strangers.
Yesterday, as my plane circled over New Orleans for the first leg of my journey here, I could see spread out below me in the morning light a sea of tarp stretched over roofs, in the color known around town as FEMA blue. And I thought of what all those blue roofs mean to the people down there in my city – the losses of homes and belongings and precious keepsakes, the deaths of loved ones, the destruction of neighborhoods, the long diaspora and forced exile, the loss of jobs, the breakdown of the services and re-sources that ordinary Americans expect from their local, state and federal governments, the right to feel secure in your home. In some cases, the blue tarp was the last work done, and in the 2 years since the storm, the tarps have shredded and the tatters blow forlornly in the wind.
Another quote from scripture comes to me, from Zechariah, a vision of restoration to another devastated city:

Thus says the Lord of hosts: Old men and old women shall again sit in Jerusalem, each with staff in hand for very age. And the streets of the city shall be full of boys and girls playing in its streets. Thus says the Lord of hosts: If it is marvelous in the sight of the remnant of this people in these days, should it also be marvelous in my sight? says the Lord of hosts. (Zechariah 8:4-6)

The Postal Service reported recently in the media that the greater New Orleans area is now back up to over 80% of its pre-Katrina population, but judging from comments on the street and in letters to the editor, most of the remnant of this people does not believe it. Still, while the city does seem exceedingly empty in some quarters, it is true that old men and old women again sit on their stoops and comment on neighborhood doings, and certain streets are at times full of boys and girls at play. A musician friend of mine said to the crowd at a recent outdoor concert, “Idn’it great to see kids again? Remember how after the storm when there were no children in the city and how awful that was?” Children are back in the city, and it is indeed marvel-ous in our eyes; surely it is also marvelous in the eyes of God.
I am grateful for this opportunity to preach to you and bring you dis-patches form a drowned city, news from a wounded but still great city. I bring you greetings from a place where some values have been turned up-side-down. For example, how would you react to a giant pile of trash and debris outside a house or building in your neighborhood? I mean really big, spilling over the curb and into the street, huge. You’d be upset, right? You’d think, “What’s wrong with those people; somebody should do some-thing.”

In New Orleans, a gigantic pile of destroyed belongings and building debris is a sign of HOPE. New Orleanians drive by and grin, giving the workers there a thumbs-up. We think to ourselves, “Another house being worked on! Another family or business coming back!” and we’re giddy with happiness and optimism. A local candy maker has even memorialized these symbols of renewal with a special confection of pretzel sticks, coconut, raisins, and marshmallows drizzled over with chocolate, called “trash piles.” (They’re delicious – you can order them online at BlueFrog.com. We need the money.)

Yes, the New Orleans sense of humor is still evident since Katrina; it seems sometimes that a healthy sense of irony is one of the things keeping people afloat. But the biggest and best things keeping us sane and together are our music and culture. Jazz has always been the heartbeat of New Orleans, but since Katrina, it’s also our CPR, our nourishment, our true mir-ror. We need its reminder of the uses of many voices, the urgency of the hu-man heartbeat, the deliciousness of diversity, the necessity for improv and creativity.

It may be hard to believe, but in a diminished New Orleans, there is more music, and more free music, than ever before. If music is our medi-cine, then we’ve been prescribed regular doses. At every outdoor festival and concert, the crowd is white and black and Latino and Asian, young and old and middle-aged, middle-class and working class, little kids running around, dancing. We smile and greet each other, no longer strangers, but brothers and sisters in a shared adventure, fellow travelers. We share reno-vation stories, ask about each other’s Road Home money, curse our insur-ance companies, and shake our booties to the music, dancing with each other. We eat red beans’n’rice and jambalaya. All souls love jazz, and we thrive on that beat, we draw our sustenance from it. It is our communion.

As my son’s parain (godfather) says on his answering machine, “We’re just struggling to get back to abnormal.” Jazz helps, so do our fes-tivals, and our food. We keep up our cultural traditions, like going to the cemeteries on All Saints to leave chrysanthemums for our beloved dead, trying to ignore the destruction wreaked in our historic cities of the dead by the floodwaters. We secondline every chance we get to whatever brass band is out parading the streets. (Second-lining means following alongside and behind a brass band, dancing and waving handkerchiefs; the band is the “first line.”) We do our best to get back to abnormal.
This is not the first time that New Orleans has come close to total destruction; both the tides of history and tides of water have threatened us before. Back in 1870, New Orleans writer Lafcadio Hearn wrote about the conditions after the Civil War to a friend in Cincinnati. With apologies to our host congregation, I share with you a part of that epistle:

Times are not good here. The city is crumbling into ashes. It has been buried under a lava flood of taxes and frauds and maladmin-istrations so that it has become only a study for archaeologists. Its condition is so bad that when I write about it, as I intend to do soon, nobody will believe I am telling the truth. But it is better to live here in sackcloth and ashes than to own the whole state of Ohio.

So that’s how things are with us. We may be crazy, and we probably are, but we’d rather live in a drowned city we love with a thousand chal-lenges, than live somewhere clean and pristine and efficient. We are wounded but game, down but not out. We are held together by love – love for each other and our families and our ancestors and our neighborhoods and religious communities and our traditions and culture, and our music. We depend more than ever on the kindness of strangers. We are committed and determined about the rebirth and restoration of our beloved, messed-up city. We know that only those who have experienced death can experience resur-rection. We know that recovery is not a sprint, but a marathon. We are New Orleans and we believe, with all our hearts, in the powers of resurrection, communion, and connection.

Let us join our voices as one in our unison reading.

“FEAR NOT” A Sermon for Halloween

“FEAR NOT” A Sermon for Halloween

Sunday, October 28, 2007

The Rev. Melanie Morel-Ensminger

First Unitarian Universalist Church of New Orleans

Our country is awash in fear. Some of the fear is based in lived experience. People in the Northeast fear another terrorist attack; people in the Gulfcoast fear another hurricane; people in New Orleans fear crime. Some of the fear is engendered by our leaders, such as the ginning-up of hostility toward Iran, and dark hints that we need yet more internal security measures to be safe from sabotage. Some of the fears are politically-based. One on side, there is fear of a collapse of Medicare and Social Security, fear of losing jobs and savings, fear that the growing deficit will consume the budget and kill any hope for national health insurance. On the other side, there is fear that the country’s moral center has collapsed, fear that we will be seen by our foes as weak and vulnerable. Fear is the common currency of our times.

When an angel or divine messenger confronts someone in scripture, the first thing they say is, “Fear not.” It is one of the most common expressions in the Bible. Citations in the online Biblical concordance run to 8 pages; it appears 7 times in Genesis alone. It seems that from time immemorial, we human beings have had a lot of fears, and need a lot of reassurance. I’m certainly no angel, but this Halloween sermon has one important message for all of us: Fear not, be not afraid.

Personally, all this fear-mongering disgusts me, and I despise everyone who tries to manipulate us by using it. It’s not that I don’t have a healthy respect for some kinds of fear – a certain amount of fear I actually good for you. Dr. F. Forrester Church, minister of All Souls UU Church in Manhattan, (a church that’s been a good friend to us), wrote a book several years ago called Freedom from Fear, in which he describes 5 kinds of fear:

The 1^st is spontaneous fear, what Forrest calls “fright,” and it can save your life, as when a little voice in your head tells you the smooth-talking stranger cannot be trusted, or when, instinctively, you slam on the brakes to avoid hitting the car in front of you. Fright is a physical, adrenal response to perceived life threats that arises from the part of the brain called the amygdala – what some call “the animal brain” – without passing through the cerebral cortex or rational brain. In most of us, it passes quickly, leaving us with dry mouths and pounding hearts. (When this response occurs when no real danger exists, it’s called a panic attack and requires clinical attention.)

While fright is a physical fear, the 2^nd kind is intellectual – our old pal worry. Worry is the product of the rational and imaginative sides of our brain, allowing us to project our fears about what might happen into the future. While fright can be a good thing, giving us the instant response that could save our lives, worry serves no useful purpose. Let me say that again: Worry serves no useful purpose. What if our loved one is in a plane crash? What if I lose my job? What if the levees break again? The cure for worry is to realize that you can’t alter a single thing about the future by fretting about it, and there’s no proof that worrying makes you better able to cope.

The 3^rd fear id personal and emotional, what Forrest calls “emotional self-consciousness” which most of us would recognize immediately as insecurity, the fear of being seen as inadequate. This is the fear that makes many people avoid public speaking or occasions where they might be the focus of attention. This is the secret fear that causes so many of us to feel like a fake, no matter how self-confident we may seem from the outside. Almost all of us suffer fro this at least some of the time – I know I do! I’m concerned that my spouse might discover I’m not as wonderful as he thinks I am; I worry y’all might find out I’m that good of a minister. One trick to coping with this fear is to do your very best, and accept that you are “good-enough” – a good-enough spouse, good-enough person, good-enough parent – and that good-enough is truly good enough. Another good coping mechanism is to remember that everybody else is so centered on their insecurity that they’re not concentrating on you at all!

The 4^th fear is guilt. Guilt is the fear of being found out, of being caught at wrong-doing. Since every single one of us has done something wrong some time, we are easily tripped into guilt feelings. For example, how many of us feel a vague sense of unease when we see a police car behind us? Even if we are not speeding at that moment, we know we have driven over the speed limit in the past, if not today. While feeling guilty when we’ve actually committed an offense is a healthy sign of a working conscience, amorphous free-floating guilt can contribute to a general sense og anxiety, which can invite all 5 forms of fear into your life.

The 5^th and final form of fear is dread, the existential fear of being out of control and not in charge. Dread keeps us up in the middle of the night, the nameless, formless fear that we can’t keep bad things from happening. Our protests won’t stop all wars, our personal efforts to recycle won’t save the earth, and we can’t move hurricanes, stop wildfires, or quiet volcanoes. In the general scheme of things, we human beings are small and insignificant, and realizing this can sometimes bring a person to the edge of despair.

Since August 29, 2005, most New Orleanians have been living in a state of fear so pervasive that we don’t even consciously feel it any more. Most of us are riddled with fear, a lot of it unexamined and unacknowledged. The fear in this area since Katrina is compounded by the fact that all of us have something fearful in our pasts, and the hurricane and its aftermath gave us a hook to hang all our fears on. The costs of living in a constant atmosphere of enveloping fear are both psychic and physical – and the toll is being seen in the rise in stress-related diseases and the climbing rates of suicide and depression in the city. The price of all this fear is too high to pay.

Choosing to live without fear (relatively speaking, since you need to have your healthy fright response) means doing 4 simple but challenging things:

1^st, remember it’s not all about YOU. Fear is attracted to an unwarranted sense of self-importance. Forrest suggests suing the “1-hour rule” – whatever it is, it’ll likely be over in an hour, and you can deal with just an hour, can’t you?

2^nd, want what you have, and don’t obsess over what you don’t have or what you’ve lost. Focus on those folks in your life who love and care for you. Enjoy the possession, the partner, the job you have, and don’t get depressed over what you lack.

3^rd, do what you can; don’t despair over what you can’t. Yes, it’s true – you won’t be able to fix everything that is wrong in the world, and yes, it’s true, life is not fair – but don’t let that stop you from doing what you are able to do, and enjoying what you can.

4^th, be who you are; stop imagining a better self who lives a better life. As the Buddhists say, “Be here now,” and don’t focus excessively on the future or the past. Stop pretending to be who you are not – the relief will be tremendous.

In “The Wizard of Oz,” the Cowardly Lion is the most courageous character, yet he always afraid. When I was a girl and learned of all my dad had done in the labor and civil rights movements, I told him I was proud of him for being so brave. “Oh no, Mimi,” he told me, “I wasn’t brave – I was afraid all the time. I just did what had to be done.” True courage is NOT being fearless – courage is not letting your fears rule your life. “Fear not” does not mean having no fear. You will still be afraid, but freedom lies in choosing to go on, to walk through, live through, your fears, and come out on the other side, your true and authentic self, whole and safe and free. AMEN – ASHE – SHALOM – SALAAM – NAMASTE – BLESSED BE!