A sermon by Rev. Dr. Marilyn Sewell

Sunday, Feb. 27, 2000

First Unitarian Church, Portland, Oregon

All living organisms seek comfort—all, including we ourselves, move away from pain and towards pleasure. That is a given. This seeking of comfort takes many forms in our lives, not the least of which is the way we tidy up our thinking to rid ourselves of seeming contradictions, of incongruity. It is so much easier, is it not, to see the world in terms of black and white and to refuse to muck around in the subtleties of gray. If we can construct a world—imaginary, though it is—of neat categories and sub-categories—a kind of outline for living, then we can function with so much more ease and efficiency. Little boxes without topses.

The dualistic nature of our language and thought in the Western world colludes with this eagerness of the organism to classify and thereby put away in a safe place, tucked out of sight of our consciousness, those thoughts that might challenge our assumptions and disturb our clear and comfortable views. Thich Nhat Hanh, Vietnamese Buddhist monk, says that we are imprisoned by our ideas of good and evil. We want to go toward the good and get rid of all the evil. But we forget that the good can only exist in the presence and power of the non-good.

I like his analogy. He says when we look at a branch in a non-dualistic way, we see just this beautiful branch. But then we begin to distinguish: this is the left end of the branch, and this the right, and we want only the left (certainly we sometimes get that impression in our church). If the rightist is not there, how can there be a leftist? So suppose I do not want the right end of this branch, and so I break off this half of reality and throw it away. But as soon as I throw the unwanted half away, the end that remains becomes the "new right." No matter how many times the branch is broken, it will always have a right half. "This is, because that is." Reality is the wholeness of what is. We are inextricably interrelated, Thich Nhat Hanh says. We are not separate. The rose becomes the garbage, and the garbage becomes the rose. The non-prisoner is the prisoner. With this understanding, we begin to see that redemption is not the conquering of evil, but the knowing of our inevitable connection with all that is. We are able to look within and bear the pain of others, the same pain that is within us. We have moved to the heart of compassion.

Well, that was easy to say, wasn’t it? But saying and really knowing are two different things. Understanding that goodness and evil can co-exist in the same person, big-time. That they co-exist in us. Realizing that we are so connected that we cannot be unconnected. A child lies awake hearing his parents fight, and is frightened. We are connected to both parents and child, connected by our anger, by our fear. The wealthy man buys his wife a diamond bracelet for their anniversary. We are connected to him and to her. We are connected by our love of the things money can buy—and by our desire to please one we love. The prostitute makes herself ready for the john. We are connected to both the prostitute and to the john. We sell ourselves, too. And we take love, or the semblance of love, anywhere we can find it. And we take advantage of the weakness of others. We are so connected.

I have to confess that such understanding escapes me most of the time—not intellectually, I mean it escapes me at the level it really matters—at the heart level. I feel safer when I protect my heart from this truth. For one thing, I have to respect myself just to walk around in the world, much less to be a minister. So how can I admit to myself my pettiness, my selfishness, my deep anger, even my wish to do violence, when I think I abhor violence? I’m reminded of a woman I was talking with a few days ago. She was recounting the woes of a divorce long past, and regretting how vicious it all had become, before it was over. She said to me, "During the divorce, I wanted him dead." She stopped and thought a second and said, "No, let me correct that. During the divorce, I wanted to kill him."

And then of course there are the other qualities that are even harder to take in—you know, the ones we label "positive." How can I accept the immense power I have to love, the great tenderness in my heart? How can I really acknowledge my gifts and talents? Scary? Oh, yes. Repenting of evil thoughts and deeds is one thing—that’s easy compared to accepting our beauty and goodness. What would life require of me then? No, I think I’ll just try to hang in there with mediocrity. Now that’s a safe place to be.

Let me tell you about someone who has stretched her heart, has stretched to make it big enough to take in the contradictions in her life. I’m speaking of Sister Helen Prejean, who came to speak at our church recently. She is the author, of course, of the best-selling book Dead Man Walking, from which a moving film was made by Susan Sarandon. For those of you who do not know Sister Helen’s story, she is a nun who, as she said, "got to know poor people." She did this by going with some other sisters to live in the St. Thomas project, housing for poor black residents of New Orleans. Then she was asked by someone from the Prison Coalition to become a pen pal to a death-row inmate. She thought it fit it well with her work—death was rampant in the project—from guns, disease, addiction. She said, "I’d come to St. Thomas to serve the poor, and I assume that someone occupying a cell on Louisiana’s death row fits that category."

The name she was given was that of Patrick Sonnier, the convicted killer of two teenagers. That was the beginning—first letters and then visits, to Sonnier and to others. The book deals in most length with her relationship as spiritual advisor to a prisoner named Robert Willie, who—along with another man--had brutally raped a teenage girl and then stabbed her 17 times. Willie is cocky and unrepentant, with a jaunty little walk. His biggest worry, he tells Sister Helen, is about his mother. He can do it, he’s "ready to go," but he doesn’t know what he’ll do if his mother starts "crying and breaking down" in the death house. Sister Helen asks him about the young woman he killed, Faith Harvey: "Have you ever really faced her pain, felt it, taken it inside yourself? I’m saying all this to you because I’m your friend and I care about you and I just can’t see you going to your death and not owning up to the part you played in Faith’s death." "I am sorry, I really am sorry about Faith," he says. "I hope my death gives the Harveys some peace. I really do."

When the time comes for him to die, Sister Helen sees Robert Willie for the first time without his long-sleeved denim shirt. His arms are covered with tattoos. There’s a swastika and a skull, women’s names, and on one arm a naked woman. The press and the witnesses, including Faith’s parents Vernon and Elizabeth Harvey, arrive. Even as he walks to the electric chair, there is that same jaunty walk, the only way Sister Helen has ever seen him walk. Robert Willie has the guard hand Sister Helen his parting gift, a black knitted hat. "It’s probably pretty dirty," he says. "You’ll have to wash it." She thanks him for the hat. He thanks her for teaching him about God. She says to him, "When the time comes, look at me. Look at my face." She doesn’t close her eyes, as she has done for past executions. This time she watches everything.

This is not the story of a do-gooder nun who romanticizes death row and its inmates. No, Sister Helen reached out to the families of the victims, heard their rage, their anguish. She came to know the men whose job it was to execute these prisoners, men who often doubted the rightness of what they were doing. Her heart was big enough to take it all in.

Some of the victims’ family members were able to forgive the heinous deeds—not to ever forget, not that the pain would ever go away, but to forgive—to let go of the hate. Not so with Vernon Harvey. After the execution, he pours himself a drink and smiles, and says he’s sorry every victim doesn’t have the satisfaction of watching a murderer die. But he says Willie died too quickly, and he wishes Willie could have had the same kind of painful death that Faith had, and he hopes he fries in hell for all eternity.

Some days later Sister Helen visits with the Harvey family. She tells them about Robert Willie’s last hours and how he struggled to formulate his last words, tells them she believes he was sincere when he said he hoped his death would relieve their suffering. Vernon begins to cry. He just can’t get over Faith’s death, he says. It happened six years ago but for him it’s like yesterday, and he realizes now, with Robert Willie dead, he doesn’t have an object for his rage. Sister Helen reaches over and puts her hand on his arm. Reason and logic are useless here.

Sister Helen sees Vernon Harvey over and over with his signs and slogans at execution sites. There he is, with his wife and daughter Lizabeth, sitting in amber prison floodlights, seated in folding chairs near the gates. He wants to kill Robert Willie again and again and again. He can’t give it up, he’s caught in his hate.

I will not stand in judgment of Vernon Harvey. I cannot imagine the horror that would take hold of me if one of my boys was murdered. As a matter of fact, I myself am not very good at your garden variety, everyday kind of forgiveness. Usually the only way I can forgive is when my memory fails, and I forget what the person did to make me mad. Like Vernon Harvey, I’m much better at fighting than forgiving.

But I will say this. I’ve come to know that forgiveness is not chiefly about the other party—it is about myself. It is about my own healing and wholeness. If I cannot integrate evil into my world, if I rather return evil blow for blow, I am the one who will be consumed by it. Why do we forgive? Because when we encounter the abhorrent--and the abhorrent is part of our world--we must find some way to keep our soul intact.

I think of Kip Kinkel’s sister Kristin. Kip is the boy from Springfield who as you remember killed his parents and then the next day went to his school and killed 2 of his classmates and wounded 22 others. Kristin wrote, "The pain caused from losing my family, my reality and my idea of what is supposed to happen to good people is greater than I ever could have imagined. I miss my parents terribly. The loss of their presence in my life is indescribable." And yet Kristin says she still loves her brother. She has maintained contact with him and visits him regularly at the Lane County Jail. "Forgiveness is necessary," she says. "Forgiveness begins and sustains the healing process. To those victims who reached out a hand to support me, please know it meant more to me than you will ever know." To survive, Kristin Kinkel needs to continue to love her brother.

The most direct path to forgiveness is a hard and stony way, for you see it is about acknowledging our own monsters and forgiving ourselves. Do you remember journalist Terry Anderson, who was abducted by armed men in Beirut, Lebanon in 1985 and held captive for nearly seven years? The following is an excerpt from a poem of his, entitled "Satan":

"Satan is a name we use

for darkness in the world,

a goat on which we load

our most horrific sins,

to carry off our guilt.

But all the evil I have seen

was done by human beings.

It isn’t a dark angel

who rigs a car into a bomb,

or steals money meant for others’ food.

And it wasn’t any alien spirit

that chained me to this wall.

One of those who kidnapped me

said once: "No man believes he’s evil."

A penetrating and subtle thought

in these circumstances, and from him.

And that’s the mystery:

He’s not stupid, and doesn’t seem insane.

He knows I’ve done no harm to him or his.

He’s looked into my face

each day for years, and

heard me crying in the night.

Still he checks my chain,

makes sure my blindfold is secure,

then kneels outside my cell

and prays to Allah, merciful, compassionate.

I know too well the darker urges in myself,

the violence and the selfishness.

I’ve seen little in him I can’t recognize.

Or take another case. I was visiting the other day with someone who is terminally ill. We’ve had many conversations about what she needed to do to finish her time on this side before she goes to the other side, and she has been all but satisfied that she has tied up all the loose ends. There is just one incident that she keeps thinking about, and she finds it hard to forgive herself for her behavior. She said when she was a little girl, she threw the family cat against the wall. She couldn’t seem to let go of this. "It was such a mean thing to do," she would tell me. "I don’t know why I would do a thing like that." The last time she confessed this same incident I said to her, "You have a real mean streak in you, don’t you?" "Well, that’s really comforting!" she said. But she was smiling, and so was I. We all have a mean streak, and it’s OK. We try not to throw the cat against the wall, but sometimes we do. Then she remembered. "I know why I did it!" she said. "My grandmother had just died. She stayed with me in my room when I was a little girl, and I loved her so much, and she died, and I threw the cat against the wall." Just so. Isn’t that the way it is for most of us? We’re wounded, and we throw the cat against the wall.

Sometimes we are helped to grow our hearts, in spite of ourselves. The cat screeches, and we say, "Did I really do that?" Or we hear words coming out of our mouths that we never suspected were there—hurtful words, or lies. "Did I say that?" We are astonished that we are not the totally good people we thought we were. We become vulnerable through illness or pain or loss that life in all its wisdom visits upon us, and we say to ourselves, "Well, I guess I’d better join the human race." All these experiences are great levelers and will not allow us to remain aloof, above it all. We’re down here with all the others, frail and imperfect human beings, but human beings who have grown in compassion.

In other instances, we learn not to stereotype, because we are confronted with irrefutable evidence that our labels are too narrow, that people are bigger than we imagine them to be, and we have to let them out of the box we have constructed to spare ourselves complexity. For example, who would have guessed that the Rev. Jerry Falwell would invite 200 gay and lesbian Christians into dialogue with 200 fundamentalist Christians. "We are here," declared Falwell, "because innocent people of various faiths, racial and ethnic groups and sexual preferences have increasingly had their lives abruptly and violently ended by people with opposing views." Falwell was quick to note that his abiding belief about homosexuality—that it is sinful—has not changed. What had changed, however, was his understanding of how that belief can lead to harm for others. He has begun to recognize the cost of intolerence.

It seems that in the realm of politics and religion, we are most apt to fall into hard positions and decide that those who are not for us are against us. I have to tell you a little anecdote about myself that I’m not particularly proud of. A few years back I had a blind date with a visiting professor at one of our local colleges. Let’s call him Robert. He should be safe, I thought—a nice liberal academic. But then during the course of the conversation, he revealed to me that he invented things—I can’t remember what—and had a business on the side, which turned out to be quite lucrative. And then he happened to blunder into the comment that he "couldn’t afford health insurance" for his employees. I looked at him hard, and I said in my sweetest Southern voice, "Robert, you wouldn’t by chance be a Republican, would you?" He confessed he was, and I told him I just remembered a plane I had to catch. He was out of there. Of course I know that I have wonderful people that I love in my very own church who are--well, Republican. There are all kinds of Republicans.

And then sometimes we learn because we are asked to take in irreconcilable differences, we have to hold in our minds what we thought were mutually exclusive qualities, perhaps in someone we love. Can a man have an affair and still love his partner? Not always, but sometimes. This is not to say having an affair is a good way to go, but can it co-exist with love? Yes. What about the alcoholic who spends the family money on booze and ruins every holiday with his drunkenness? Does this mean he doesn’t care about his children? No, it means he is an alcoholic. His alcoholism is not directed at his children. So he can love and still be hurtful. Actually, we all can. And what about those instances in life when there are no "right" answers—just two ways, and both seem wrong. Do I leave my marriage, which is devoid of love, or do I hang in there for the children? I find myself pregnant, and I have few financial or emotional resources for another child. Do I have an abortion or do I have this baby? No easy answers sometimes. And in experiencing these times, we become less judgmental of others in their decision making, Again, we become more compassionate.

As for me, I confess that I long for neat categories and easy answers. I want to be on the side of the good, tilting at windmills. I want to fight against evil, which I tend to define as the "other," the not-me—you know, greedy people, difficult people, people with loose behavior, and of course, people who spend too much time savoring the world and not enough time saving it. But once in a while I escape that narrowness and go to a place where all opposites seem reconciled and reconcilable. One time that I remember was just so simple: It was near Christmas, and I was upstairs in my study, writing a sermon. My two grown sons were in the living room talking and enjoying being together. I stopped my work for a moment and looked out the window. Against a gray sky, big white flakes of snow were slowly drifting to the ground. In that moment, I felt a connection with all that is, and I knew that I was at one with existence. In that moment, there was not one thing in the world I would have changed.

Do I mean, not one thing in my world? No, I mean not one thing in the whole world. Everything seemed to be in place, all was as it should have been. What about war, pestilence, hunger, drought? Well, what about it? It was somehow all reconciled. The Buddhists might explain it this way: There is yin and there is yang, negative and positive energies, and they are neutralized and held together by the energy of the conciliatory principle. Everything is a necessary part of existence. Moreover—and this is what makes it all seem to work—moreover, there is a Great Good that is infinite and pure love, operating in the seen and unseen, that is within and without. A Great Good. We are in it, filled with it.

When I see all the suffering that is in our world, I am pushed to a place beyond knowledge, beyond even hope. I am pushed to a place of mystery, a place I know I will never understand, though I must trust completely in it. In this place beyond human knowing is something so trustworthy, so complete, that I know I need not question it. I need to just pay attention and try to give myself to it, get lost in it. It is the way of the Tao. Says Chuang Tzu:

"Tao is obscured when we understand only one of a pair of opposites,

or concentrate only on a partial aspect of being.

Then clear expression becomes muddled by mere wordplay,

affirming this one aspect and denying all the rest.

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

Abandon all thought of imposing a limit or taking sides: rest in direct intuition."

In other words, trust the whole that is beyond all the parts, trust that the limited perspective we have is not all there is. It is the same message that Job receives when God takes away his houses and lands, his sheep and cattle, his children, and his health. He is covered with boils and sitting on an ash heap. His wife advises, "Curse God and die." Job will not, but he does call out to God and ask, "Why? I have been a good and righteous man—why have I been so afflicted?" And God then answers Job out of the whirlwind and says, "Where were you when I laid the foundations of the earth? Tell me, if you know. Have you commanded the morning? Have you entered into the springs of the sea? Do you know where the light dwells, and the darkness?"

In other words, God says, excuse me, but what do you know? Aren’t you being just a little presumptuous to question me? You just need to go with the program. And Job does. And ultimately, though we rage and wonder and question and cry out in the night, we have to come to that same place, that resting in what is, in that Great Good that goes beyond our knowing. With that kind of humility comes heart big enough. With that kind of trust comes peace.

So be it. Amen.

PRAYER

One Whose Name We Do Not Know, we come before you humble in the face of the mysteries of our living. We would like to understand, we would like to control, and we cannot, and so we are much afraid. Give us the faith we need to go forward in the blindness of our lives, trusting that we are a part of the sacredness of this world, and knowing that we are loved just as we are. Amen.

BENEDICTION

Go now, and accept your faults and frailties--in fact give thanks for them, for through them you will come to love one another.

CALL TO WORSHIP

Good morning! I invite all of you here today—those who are long-time members and those who are here for the very first time; those whose hearts are full of joy, and those who are burdened with loss; those who see a clear path and those who are searching. May you be taken in and blessed by this church community. Come, let us worship together.

Copyright 2000, by Rev. Dr. Marilyn Sewell.  All rights reserved.