First Unitarian Universalist Church of New Orleans
Proclaimed throughout the centuries as the watchword of liberal faith, the cry “Revelation is not sealed,” sets us apart from more orthodox religions. Unitarian Universalists believe that divine revelation, or the disclosure of enduring truths, is not something that happened long, long ago and far away, but is a continuous, on-going process in the present. While those in traditional faiths can insist that one book or set of books written in ages past hold all the knowledge that human beings might ever need for decision-making in an ethical life, we hold to the position that God, or the Ultimate, speaks to us in many ways, in many places, in every time.
This principle of our free faith is the inspiration for this 4-part sermon series, searching for gospels of truth and meaning in some pretty unusual places. We urge you to invite your UU-leaning friends to this provocative and, we hope, inspirational, series. Next week, August 10th, UU ministerial aspirant and former Board president Deanna Vandiver will lead us in an examination of the lessons from Winnie the Pooh. On August 17th, we will look at the unexpected messages to be found in the animated television satire, “The Simpsons.” And on August 24th, we will close out the series with the gospel of “Lord of the Rings.” We start the series with a wildly popular but controversial books on the world of the young wizard Harry Potter.
There have always been fads in American childhood, crazes that seem to sweep through an entire generation of youngsters, causing near-riots in certain stores, and a lot of headaches for parents and teachers and other adults. Looking back at my own childhood (and revealing my age!), I remember hula hoops, yo-yos, bongo boards, and roller skates (the kind that attached to your shoes with a skate key). In my son’s childhood, there were Transformers and Pac Man and Magic trading and game cards. And there have been Cabbage Patch dolls, Tickle-Me Elmo, and hysteria over the release of certain new video games. But I cannot remember there ever having been the level of excitement and passion for a mere book series – books that don’t even have pictures! – that we’ve experienced with Harry Potter.
Imagine – parents and children lining up at midnight, not to see a superstar, not to get tickets to a concert, but just to buy a new book! It’s amazing and wonderful that author J. K. Rowling has found a way to get kids excited about reading, and to unite parents and children (and even grandparents!) in sharing the adventures of Harry, Hermione, Ron, Hagrid, Dumbledore, and all the rest.
While some conservative Christians have not been happy to see their children interested in books that contain witchcraft and sorcery, many other parents and teachers have been delighted by the quality of Rowling’s writing, the utter believability of her characters (especially the children), and the intricate interconnected plots of the books. What’s more, Harry Potter fans are aware that much more than just mere entertainment is taking place in these books. Strong moral and ethical values are being subtly conveyed. Indeed, if you Google “Harry Potter sermon,” you will find close to 20,000 entries, from Jewish to Congregationalist to Baptist and Presbyterian and Methodist to Unitarian Universalist, and by no means are the majority of them negative.
Please note that I am taking care in this sermon not to give away any important plot twists or crucial endings. For those of you not yet addicted to the books, I hope this little taste of Harry Potter will get you reading, and I don’t want to spoil any of your fun.
One of the first things we find out is that while Harry is gifted in the magic department, he (and we) discover that even magic takes hard work. Young wizards with budding superpowers actually have to go off to strict boarding school and study diligently and take difficult exams and get graded on their progress in wizardry – and when they don’t work hard enough, they fail. Their brooms refuse to fly, their potions curdle, and all kinds of chaos ensues when they don’t do their homework. Who would’ve thought that a popular children’s series ostensibly about magic would be secretly promoting the good old Protestant work ethic?
Second, we learn that magic exists, not in a special kingdom far away, but very close at hand. The magic in Harry Potter is all around us, but we Muggles are too busy and preoccupied to see it, and fail to notice. And even when we do, we discount it or refuse to believe it. How true that is in our lives, when we let busyness veil our eyes from the beauty and magic all around us – if only we would open our eyes and see it.
Third, from the first book onwards, readers of Harry Potter make an important discovery that many adult shave failed to grasp. Discerning between good and evil, friend and foe, is not as easy as it might first seem. Over and over, Harry has to learn not to judge from his first, or even his second, impression. Some people who seem to have ill intent turn out to have Harry’s best interests at heart; some who appeared to be open and friendly are revealed in the end to be turncoats.
What is the right thing to do? Who is our ally, and who is against us? When will a good decision turn out to have bad consequences? These questions keep recurring in the Harry Potter series, and every book has something of a surprise ending, showing that Harry, and the reader, may have badly misjudged a situation. The ambiguity of right and wrong and good and evil in Harry Potter are a good reminder to the rest of us about snap judgments or being swayed by our own impressions and prejudices.
Other lessons from Harry Potter loom equally large. We are clearly meant to know that real love requires sacrifice and loyalty. Most notably, Harry’s parents give up their lives to save his. But in other, lesser, instances, we see teachers sacrificing for students, and friends giving up something to help a friend. Harry is always shown taking his friends’ side, even when others have turned against them. Love isn’t about feeling great and being comfortable with one another in the good times – in Harry Potter, love means surrender to the needs of another, giving that which is precious for the good of those you love, and sticking with them through thick and thin. This too is a message we all need to hear – far too many people have been seduced by an image of love in which nobody has to give up anything, and no one is ever uncomfortable.
An enduring value we see in the gospel of Harry Potter is tolerance. Harry learns it is important to accept people for who they are – no matter how weird. Hagrid is a mountain of a man, somewhat given to clumsiness; one professor is often seen creeping around like cat, that one is ashen-faced and scary; Hermione is something of a precocious know-it-all, and Ron is poor and unpolished. But they all have their place, they all have their gifts, and they are all valued parts of Harry’s world. In our world, which seems to value only the rich and the beautiful and the athletic, we need the reminder of Harry Potter’s world, where appearances are not only unimportant, they are many times only temporary.
In Harry Potter, we find that those we love who have died stay with us forever in the Mirror of Memory – but we also learn that it is dangerous to try to live looking backward, as we wish things still were. While Harry will always cherish the image of his parents he can see in the magic mirror, he painfully comes to know that staying in front of it means losing one’s grip on real life. It is hard lesson that all of us who grieve must relearn for ourselves with every new loss.
One of the most important things we can learn from the gospel of Harry Potter is one that challenges our country right now. Evil is tempting, and most tempting of all is the urge to return evil for evil. In the Order of the Phoenix, Harry is mightily tempted to kill an adversary, an ally of the evil Valdemort, but resists, realizing that a good person cannot resort to evil tactics and still be good, that acting in the same manner as an evil enemy makes us the same as they. Would that that lesson could be brought home to those in military and political power in our country today!
Finally, every book in the series fairly sings with a message of hope. No matter how bad things seem, all is not lost. There will be another day, another chance, another go-round. While there is evil in the world, while there will be those who betray you, and while bad things will happen, there is always the idea that things can and will get better, and that, surrounded by friends and family and mentors, one can go on and face the future unafraid.
Whatever objections the Religious Right may have to Harry Potter, we Unitarian Universalists find someone we can relate to, and values we have always treasured – the value of education and hard work, of honing your personal skills and talents, the knowledge of the fundamentally ambiguous nature of human life, the insight that familial love and true friendship call for both sacrifice and loyalty, the glowing memory of those we love who have died acting as a beacon and an inspiration, the healing power of community, the unquenchable hope that keeps us going when things get rough. That’s the gospel of Harry Potter, and it sure is good news. AMEN – ASHE – SHALOM – SALAAM – NAMASTE – BLESSED BE!
Tuesday, August 5, 2008
“WHO’S TELLING THE STORY?” A Sermon by the Rev. Melanie Morel-Ensminger
Unitarian Church in Baton Rouge
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:
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!
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!
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