Fruit of Many Generations
Mr. Kelly Weisman Asproot-Jackson, Intern Minister
Arlington Street Church
October 8, 2006

I do not believe that I fully understand memory, but I do have a tendency to remember my rememberings. In the strange and dizzying ways that memories connect my present with my past, there are moments when, like so many things I can’t understand, they leave my teeth chattering for more. Visiting with a friend some months ago, sitting on her couch and watching a truly awful movie (whose name I am with holding, in my own interest), I found myself remembering, suddenly, vividly, a moment from a year before. Together, we were leading a group of Unitarian Universalist youth who were brainstorming around the question of “what do Unitarian Universalists believe?” This is a question that can stymie any age group, and when one of the group members acknowledged feeling lost about answering the question, my friend gave an answer that stuck with me, because it was just what I wish I had said.

She said, “I would begin with what you believe—that way we know for sure that at least one Unitarian Universalist believes it.” In the moment, that response answered the problem beautifully, and helped build momentum on a wonderful conversation. But I especially like that answer because of the way it illustrates something vital to this faith: it matters what each of us believes, and it matters that we learn our beliefs from each other. There is a tradition we share, of which we are each a part; to know that tradition, we must know each other.

And here, the preacher ought to stop, and show some consideration for the limits of his words. For well do I know that, on a Sunday morning we are never without guests and friends and neighbors in our number. We are not, everyone of us here this morning, all Unitarian Universalists. And even for those of us who are, I expect that none of us consider ourselves only Unitarian Universalists and nothing else at all besides. But we are together, in this place, in this moment, who and what so ever we are. Our individual pasts and presents touch here and now, even if never again, and so we ought also to be attentive to the quality of the community we are for this hour.

Earlier in the service, I mentioned the members of this congregation who are absent this morning, lending the work of their bodies and the meditations of their hearts to a kindred congregation in New Orleans. Service is the gift of this congregation, and their work is a living out of that commitment. It forms a part of the shared tradition of this church, and though they are not present here today, they are with us, and we with them, in their work on the Gulf Coast.

For many who live at a safe distance from the waters that all-but surround New Orleans, it has long been a practice to praise the long and storied history of that city, while abandoning the settlement and its residents to the terrible whims of weather and economy. In this case, as in so many others, the remembering and memorializing of history served to distract from the immediacy of the moment—offering comfort to the already comfortable and leaving affliction to the afflicted. Tomorrow is a federal holiday in the United States: it is Columbus Day. It is a day when we in the United States are encouraged to think on history. Mark Twain, the 19^th century satirist who got his start as a riverboat captain on the run from St. Louis to New Orleans had this to say of history: “The very ink with which all history is written is merely fluid prejudice.”[1]

It is hard to resist that sentiment, when a society schedules its sales on cars and appliances to commemorate the theft of two continents, with uncountable costs in lives and identities. The moments we inhabit are the products of history, of a vast web of events, and because they come to us as products of history, they come at a price which is staggering to consider. The conditions which allow us to shop for a car, eat a sandwich, write a poem or worship together all cost lives uncountable. Nations and peoples displaced and destroyed and a country built on a million million backs. It can feel horrible to acknowledge, I know, but it is only ever more terrible to ignore. Faced wisely, the unthinkable scope of the past calls out for a deeper valuing of life lived in this costly present, and a more urgent attention to the injustices which are ours to address.

There is another occasion to be marked this week: Wednesday, the 11^th, is National Coming Out Day, a day about the sharing of personal histories. It is a day for truth telling, with all of the implied power and danger. Theorist, activist and poet, Audre Lorde, asked the question “where is true history written / except in poems?”[2] hinting at the brokenness of official histories, and the necessity of resisting them with the force of personal narratives and the claiming of identity. It also again raises the question of memory: how will you choose to be remembered, and how will you remember yourself.

James Luther Adams, a famed theologian and former member of this congregation, once reflected on a memory from the childhood he spent in a fundamentalist Christian church.[3] The image in his mind was of a mural which adorned that church’s auditorium, depicting every era of the mythic history endorsed by that congregation, from the creation of the world through its ending and final judgement. Biblical events were illustrated, as were the highly-anticipated end times, with all the horror and pageantry of Armageddon mapped out in lurid detail. Adams saw a connection between the structure of this mural and the work of prophecy, the activity of challenging the status quo with a vision of a new and different future. That mural demonstrated the quality of epochal thinking: reading meaning into the past to divide it into “epochs”, studying the points at which one epoch gives way to the next and then predicting the next such turning point and the new age destined to follow. From Moses and Miriam to Malcolm X, this epochal thinking is the prophet’s work.

Here, in this sanctuary, we do not share such an official, authoritative story, and friends, I am glad that we do not. In its place, possibility, and responsibility, lie open to us instead. We have this opportunity to join our histories together and to share in them without demanding that they conform to the limits of a single story. Our responsibility, then, is to follow the Buddhist refrain of “I am also that”, accepting each others ancestors as our own by choice when not by birth or circumstance. It is from the mingling of our roots that the flower of story emerges. The wider and more varied our collective history, the deeper and more resonant our collective prophecy.

James Luther Adams also said, “By their roots shall you know them,”[4] turning a phrase from the Christian Testaments on its head. How true it is. It is our roots that we know ourselves as individuals, using the stories of our past to explain and justify our current thoughts, feelings and actions. In the same way, we know each other, understanding one another by the fragments of personal history we hold and discover. And it is by this same means that we know our communities, the places where our individual histories become one mutual history. Like the deep roots of long-lived trees, our roots are frequently hidden and often difficult to uncover—but so much is the good in doing just this, for it is the process that gives shape and purpose to the life fed by those same roots.

Sobonfu Some, theologian and author from Burkina Faso, writes that, to make change in the world, we must “look at ourselves as the eyes and voices of the Ancestors,” so that “we can begin to tackle the problem knowing we are not alone and that each one of us holds a piece of the puzzle.”[5] Our past is rich with lessons and resources for our present; the catch is that we have to do the hard work of deepening and expanding our understanding of that past in order to access all that it has to teach us. All of it is necessary, to show us who we are, and to feed who we will become. To live vitally with the past means acknowledging that we are not our own; our stories are not just the stories of individuals, but of the communities and relationships which connected, shaped, and empowered those individuals. We worship together this morning only because of countless others who are not here in body: Those who built this house of worship and first made it a spiritual home. Those who bore us, those who raised us, those who allowed us to reach this hour. Those who have never seen this sanctuary, but made it possible by the work of their hands in quarries and fields and in kitchens and in factories. To all of these, and more, do we owe this hour of ours.

Therefore, let us hold our histories with a willingness to face their complexities, their contradictions and their tragedies. In this way, may we be better prepared to listen to the common need and be ready for the new insights community may bring. The lessons of the past may just save our collective future. Let us open up the windows, unbar the doors and let the living air into our histories. Whole peoples, whole precincts, whole parts of human voice have been driven from this chorus for far too long. Let us work to bring them back in. And let us be ready to flower and grow in our religious understandings, for the past is the ground in which we flourish, and the future the sky for which we reach. We are the fruit of the generations which have come before us; we owe to them a debt of gratitude, and we are their only hope to see the world made whole.