A Vulnerable People

 Sermon by

Rev. Robert M. Hardies

All Souls Church, Unitarian

Washington, D.C.

Sunday, 2 November 2008

Two days before the most historic election of our lifetime, I sense among us both a palpable and irrepressible hope and an anxious vulnerability.  I thought I’d just go ahead and name that.  [Laughter]  Hope and vulnerability.  If we think about it, this really shouldn’t come as a surprise; hope and vulnerability go hand-in-hand.  To allow yourself to hope is to risk having your dreams dashed.  Just like allowing yourself to love is to risk having your heart broken.

But the substance of our hope for this election runs deeper, I think, than for previous elections.  This hope feels to me somehow qualitatively different, a hope that transcends mere partisan loyalty, a hope that seems to go even deeper than our passionate desire for change, that after eight years of incompetence, lying and war-mongering leadership that has compromised all of America’s best values.  [Applause]  Even deeper than that. For some of us this hope is deeply personal:  Can my children and grandchildren really grow up to be President of the United States some day?  And if I tell them that’s possible, am I lying to them or not?  For others of us, whether this is a realistic expectation or not, for many of us this election elicits a dream as big as the redemption of our nation’s long nightmare of slavery and racial injustice, a dream that, at long last, we might yet become the nation where all people, not some, may live out the fullness of their God-given potential.

Yes, we’ve allowed ourselves to dream big dreams this election, but with those big dreams comes big vulnerability.  I’ll never forget the story I read in The New York Times back before the South Carolina primary, a story about African-American women in South Carolina who were voting for Hillary Clinton.  The women shared some of their obvious reasons for support of Hillary:  they respected her, they trusted her and her husband.  But when the conversation turned to Barack Obama, something else surfaced.  The reporter asked one woman, “Why don’t you like Obama?”  And she said, “Well, I love Barack Obama but I’m not going to vote for him because America isn’t ready for a black man to be President.  But even if he were elected, someone would find a way to take it away from him.  I just can’t bear to see that happen.”

Back in February, at least, an Obama presidency was, for this woman, too big of a dream.  It entailed too much risk.  I imagine she’s come around to voting for him now.  But I’ll bet that fear still lingers.  I’ll bet that fear still lingers.

So maybe we’re feeling a little vulnerable about this election.  But that’s certainly not the only thing that’s got us feeling anxious these days, is it?  Our financial system is in crisis; the stock market has plummeted; companies are announcing massive layoffs.  It looks like we may be settling in for a long recession leaving many of us feeling anxious about our financial future.  Just last week, I ran into a colleague of mine who retired in June.  In September, he saw his retirement savings shrink by a third and now he’s worried he’ll have to go back to work in order to have enough to live on, and worried that, as a senior citizen, he might not be able to find a job.  You know, you can feel it; I feel it in the streets of this neighborhood around All Souls Church.  D.C. is cutting social services to balance its budget.  The non-profit organizations that support the poor in this neighborhood are watching their donations dry up and you can feel the desperation and the anxiety on the streets of Columbia Heights and Mount Pleasant and Adams Morgan.

So, with all of this going on, with our election 48 hours away, in the midst of an unprecedented economic crisis and with the chattering, 24-hour cable news network amping it all up and making us feel even more anxious, in the middle of all that, we come to church on Sunday and what do we have to do?  To remember the dead. To remember the dead. All Souls Day?  Just two days before the election?  The timing almost seems in poor taste.  Shouldn’t we wait until we actually have a little time to give the dead their due?  At the very least, it seems a case of poor planning.  I can almost hear you saying, “Well, Rob, couldn’t you have just this one year, taken All Souls Day and moved it somewhere else in the liturgical calendar?  During a slow news cycle?  [Laughter]  I mean, we’re Unitarians; we’re supposed to be able to do that stuff, aren’t we?  [Laughter]

But the liturgical calendar, it turns out, is a stubborn thing, and death even more so.  What was it that Emily Dickenson said?  “Because I would not stop for death, he kindly stopped for me.”  So, yes we will stop today.  We will pause in the midst of our anxious busyness to remember our dead.  And who knows?  Maybe All Souls Day will carry some lessons for us about how we might live in these anxious times.

Today I find myself remembering those from our own congregation who have died in the last year or so, those who just last year may have been sitting out in the pews with all of you:  Mary Jane Fisher, Nadine Smith, Oliver “Smitty” Smith, Ellen Moore, Hilda Mason.  One of the hard things about being a minister is over the years you have to say goodbye to so many people you fell in love with.  I guess that’s why All Souls Day is a special day for me at the church.  For me, it’s always felt like one of those times on the calendar, one of those liminal spaces when the barrier between the living and the dead is more permeable, when remembering feels more like communion, the communion of souls.

Who are you remembering this All Souls Day?  I want to actually invite all of us now to, just for a moment, close your eyes and take a deep breath, and call up the memory of those loved ones you wish to remember today.  Whose faces appear in your mind’s eye?  What do you remember of their love for you?  Of your love for them?  Our opening hymn this morning was taken from a poem by Anna Akhmatova:  “All my memories of love hang upon high stars.  All the souls I’ve lost to tears now the autumn jars;  and the air around me here thickens with their song;  sing again their nameless tunes; sing again, and strong.”  I don’t know about you, but as I recall my departed loved ones, my grandmother, my great-grandmother, Noni, who came here from Italy and lived through the Depression, it gives me a little perspective.  It gets me out of the immediacy of my own struggles and helps me remember that previous generations have struggled too and had overcome.  What’s more, as I recall their lives and struggle, I feel a kind of accompaniment, a strengthening presence, as the scripture says; I feel surrounded by a great cloud of witnesses.  It turns out that sometimes one of the best things that we can do when we’re feeling anxious and vulnerable is pause and draw strength from the dearly departed.

But I know how this goes.  Once we start remembering the dead, our thoughts don’t stop there.  I’ve officiated enough memorial services to know that any time we remember another person’s passing, our thoughts ultimately go to our own mortality.  And suddenly the reassurance that comes from remembering our ancestors turns to a kind of anxiety; if we thought that there was a high level of anxiety and vulnerability in the face of a tight election and the devastating economic crisis, that suddenly pales in comparison to the anxiety of our non-being.  We’re going to die, and there’s just nothing we can do to stop it.  Just nothing.

“I got out of bed on two strong legs.  It might have been otherwise. . . .  I took the dog uphill to the birch wood.  All morning, I did the work I love. . . .   It might have been otherwise.  . . .   I slept in a bed in a room with paintings on the walls, and planned another day just like this day.  But one day I know it will be otherwise.”  [“Otherwise,” by Jane Kenyon]I got out of bed

I find that this moment of clarity, this moment when our mortality breaks through to our lives and we can both recognize and accept it, has its own lessons for us, its own lessons about vulnerability that I want to be sure we take away with us today.  What this poem and this recognition teaches me, and should teach us, is that the real choice around our vulnerability is not whether or not we will be vulnerable.  It’s that, given our vulnerability, how will we respond?  How will we respond to our vulnerability?  Are we going to go around with our game faces on, being tough and shut down to the world?  Closed down to try to protect ourselves?  You know, I look around at our lives and I see so many things that seem like attempts to ward off or pretend that we are not vulnerable.  You know, we drive on the Beltway in our SUVs about six feet above everyone else, so we can feel safer.  Or we go home and we go into our gated community, or past our doorman if we live in the city.  Our insurance policies, our 401Ks, all of these things are designed to help ward off that feeling of vulnerability that we have, when in reality what we must do is accept that vulnerability and open ourselves up, to let our hearts (I like the way Shana put it), walk around outside of ourselves.  That’s painful.  Let our hearts walk around outside of ourselves.

The question is, will we respond to our vulnerability with fear and stinginess or with hope and generosity and a sense of solidarity with all the other vulnerable people around us?  When I was thinking about my ancestors this All Souls Day, a story came to me that I want to share with you to close today, a story about my great grandfather that I think gives us a lesson for how we might behave in these anxious and vulnerable times that we face.

My great grandfather,  Nicola Colagiovanni, came to this country from southern Italy, from Calabria.  Now, for those of you who aren’t Italian, or don’t know the fineries of class politics among Italians, the Calabrese are pretty much the bottom of the Italian social heap; they’re just a little above the Sicilians.  (I’m airing some Italian dirty laundry here.)  The Calabrese would make a big deal about that difference between them and the Sicilians, however.  At Ellis Island, Nicola Colagiovanni changed his name, as so many did when they came to this country and, before long, Nick Charles had moved to Rochester, New York, where he became a successful tailor.  But when the Depression hit, Nick’s business nearly collapsed.  He had to let go of all of his workers, except for his family members who continued to run the operation.  One day during the Depression, a man entered Nick’s shop.  His clothes were tattered and grimy; it was clear he was not there to have them tailored.  He said to my great-grandfather, “Can you spare some change; I need some money to buy food for my family.”  Nick reached into his pocket and he pulled out some loose change and he gave it to the man, who left.  When Nick turned back from the door, one of his sisters, my great-aunt Matilda who kept the books and managed the finances, looked at him with a stare that could kill.  “Nick Charles, you can’t afford to give that money away; you can barely support your own family.”  And Nick turned to her and he shrugged his shoulders and he said, “I know Mattie, I know.  But you never know when Il Signore will walk through your front door.”   When God will walk through your front door.

My grandmother used to love to tell this story about her father.  She especially loved that last line which she would always deliver in hushed tones.  But I think it does provide a lesson for us in these difficult and vulnerable times, because we do have a choice.  We have a choice to put our game faces on and to close ourselves down and to stint the hand of charity, to withdraw in fear.  Or, instead, to open up in hope and in love and in generosity, in solidarity to all our vulnerable brothers and sisters.  The choice before us is not whether or not we will be vulnerable, but how we respond to that vulnerability.  Let us respond with hope.  Let us respond with hope.      Amen.