Sunday, July 27, 2008
Reading:
Every summer, I, like most UU ministers, spend quite a bit of time reading. Sometimes, I am determined to read books that I couldn’t possibly get a sermon out of, such as the biography of Louis Prima I’m in the midst of right now. (If there’s a sermon in Louie’s life, I haven’t found it!) Other times, I read books that are specifically aimed for an upcoming sermon, such as Naomi Klein’s provocative The Shock Doctrine. And then there are the books that I think I’m reading purely for pleasure, and suddenly discover a sermon nugget.
When I first read historian Gary Nash’s First City: Philadelphia and the Forging of Historical Memory, my intention was simply to enjoy some background about one of my favorite cities. But in the book, Nash reveals some very interesting misconceptions that have become historical truths. In doing so, he asks some questions that ended up leading to this sermon.
Nash is upfront about his intentions in First City – he wants not only to set the record straight, but to look at how history got crooked in the first place. He writes in the Introduction:
Woven into this history of Philadelphia is a second theme: how certain Philadelphians in the past wanted to remember the city’s history and how contests over managing and manipulating historical memory arose…Continuously under negotiation…has been a set of questions: What constitutes history? How is historical memory cultivated, perpetuated, deflected, and overturned? What do we need to know about the past, and who is entitled to reconstruct it? How does the past help us to make sense of the present? Who has the authority to answer these questions? Gary B. Nash, First City: Philadelphia and the Forging of Historical Memory, 2002.
So ends our Reading this morning.
Sermon:
It is a great honor and pleasure for me to be here with you in Baton Rouge this morning, for I feel as though I owe this congregation a debt of gratitude. In the aftermath of the Storms 3 years ago, this congregation opened the doors of this church and the doors to your hearts to welcome displaced UUs and other New Orleanians, and you began a volunteer ministry that continues in somewhat different form today. And you graciously hosted the memorial service of my close friend and First Church member David Gelfand at a time when First Church was still full of muck and mud and mold. First Church and I will always be grateful.
One of the joys of my return home to New Orleans is the reconnection with family. My sister and her husband, and my spouse and I have come up a monthly “Dinner & a Movie” night in which the host couple picks a movie and serves dinner. Recetnly, Eric and I chose “Rashoman.” In this classic by the Japanese director Akira Kurosawa, the story of a murder is retold from 4 different points of view – the murdered man, his wife (who may or may not have been raped), the highwayman, and a woodcutter who witnessed the events – leaving the viewer as jury. Which version is “true” and “correct”? Each person has to decide for themselves. We may find the director’s perspective in the remarks of one of the side characters, a peasant who says, “Men just want to forget the bad stuff, and believe in the made-up good stuff. It’s easier that way.”
Right after Hurricane Katrina, I experienced a sort of Rashomon of my own, when I first came home to Louisiana for David’s memorial service. I visited my family in New Orleans and we began sharing our stories. It was the first time we had been together since It happened, and our minds naturally wandered back to Hurricane Betsy in 1965. The trouble is, our memories didn’t mesh. I remembered things one way, Lili another, and Bonnie yet a third. We couldn’t agree on what happened when, and to whom, and there’s no way now to straighten it out. Each of us had differing memories of what had happened, who said what, and what was important. In end, we had to agree to disagree.
There’s a children’s game called “Whisper Down the Lane” in which a group will line up and the first one will whisper something to the second, who then repeats it to the third, and so on, until the tale reaches the last child in line. When I played this game as a girl at slumber parties, I was always amazed at how the story evolved from the front of the line to the end.
In the immediate aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, all of us, in Louisiana and around the country, were glued to our television sets and unwittingly witnessed a more insidious version of the game, as unsubstantiated rumors were passed on as fact, and as differing interpretations were put on actions, depending on the race of the person being depicted and the race of the person reporting the story. For example, whites seen leaving stores with merchandise were “gathering supplies” and “supporting their families” while blacks were “looting” and “stealing.” We know now that there never were any gangs of young African-American men wreaking havoc in the Superdome after the hurricane, there were no rapes or murders there nor in the Morial Convention Center, and there were no black snipers firing at rescue helicopters. The interesting things is how the media moved on, without giving the corrected stories equal play to the sensationalized early reports. (Last weekend, I led a “Race, Class, and Katrina Dialogue” for volunteers from Bard College who were staying at the newly-renamed New Orleans Rebirth Volunteer Center. They were AMAZED that those negative stories were not really true, and that there had not been corrective stories in the mainstream media.)
On any night of the week, you can play media Rashomon, by switching back and forth between a regular TV news broadcast, MSNBC, and the Fox channel. Which version of the story being reported is “true” and “correct”? There’s no way for those us outside the Washington Beltway to even hazard a guess, we have to decide for ourselves from the information we have (or think we have) and from the standpoint of our own biases and preferences and prejudices.
The questions Gary Nash asked, “What constitutes history? How is historical memory cultivated, perpetuated, deflected, and overturned? What do we need to know about the past, and who is entitled to reconstruct it? How does the past help us to make sense of the present? Who has the authority to answer these questions?” are not only true of history textbooks at every level, but also play out in UU congregations. Who is the author of your church’s official history? What events are highlighted? What is left out? Whose point of view is most represented? What group is not represented?
If a congregation wanted a complete version of its church history, it would be longer than an encyclopedia, since it would have to contain the points of view and experiences of every person who has ever been a member of the church as long as the church has existed. Even then, we would not be able to trust it completely, since it is well-known in law-enforcement circles that eye-witness testimony is not reliable. (Three-quarters of prison inmates cleared by DNA testing were originally identified by eyewitnesses. Several university studies of eye-witnesses have concluded that such testimony is inherently undependable.) A church history, then, like any other history, must pick what will be covered and must eventually restrict the number of perspectives featured.
In Cloudsplitter, his novel about the abolitionist John Brown, Russell Banks writes, “Truth is shaped strictly by the needs of those who wish to receive it.” When I was a young student in suburban New Orleans in the 1950s, there was only one way to tell the story of John Brown – he was a homicidal maniac, a crazy man who murdered to no purpose. Students in the North probably learned a slightly different picture of Brown, but since he threatened established order I figure even Yankee kids got a negative idea of him. Later, as a white adult striving to be anti-racist, I looked at John Brown with new eyes, learned of his religious convictions and saw how his complete dedication to ending a violent system led him, almost against his personal convictions, to using violence as means of ending the evil of slavery. I learned also that Unitarian heroes of mine, such as Theodore Parker, had known and supported Brown and did not think him crazy.
And it’s not just John Brown. As Louisianians, what do we know about Governor Pinckney Benton Stewart Pinchback, the first African-American governor of Louisiana (indeed, the ONLY African-American governor we have ever had in this state), the first African-American governor of ANY state. If you cannot remember anything positive about him from your Louisiana history classes, you might want to think whose interests are served by the deliberate denigration of this historic figure; or if you cannot remember anything at all him, you may want to reflect on who benefits from this collective forgetting. Part of learning to be anti-racist and anti-oppressive is to seek out the mistold and misremembered pieces of our local history, and our country’s history, to bring to light all the viewpoints and stories that are hidden and kept in the background. History is usually written, as the saying goes, by the winners, but real history, deep history, involves knowing what the losers thought as well.
“Truth is shaped strictly by the needs of those who wish to receive it.” It is not just the histories we are taught or the stories that we hear that we need to be wary of – it’s the stories we tell ourselves. A friend of mine used to say, “We’re always the hero in the movie of our own lives.” We generally credit ourselves with good motives, even when we mess up, and nearly always do the same with the people we love and feel close to, while most of us have trouble extending the same benefit of the doubt to those we dislike or disagree with, or those we are angry at. It is the opposite of what the peasant said in the movie Rashomon – sometimes we just want to forget the good stuff, and believe in the made-up bad stuff.
Point of view is important. Who’s telling the story matters – in our families, our relationships, our workplaces, our church, our state, and our country. In order to analyze any story we hear, and to honor the first principle of Unitarian Universalism, we have to ask ourselves, Whose point of view is this? Whose interests are served telling the story this way? What is the context or backstory? Are there any other interpretations that would also make sense? Whose point of view is left out? And when tempted to repeat a story, we should ask, Does retelling this story help to strengthen relationships and help the community, or might it have the opposite effect?
Let us dedicate ourselves to the health of our liberal religious movement and the state we love, and commit ourselves to actions that uphold human dignity and worth and strengthen our relationships. May this be so! AMEN – ASHE – SHALOM – SALAAM – NAMASTE – BLESSED BE!
