The Devil You Know

A Sermon by

Rev. Robert M. Hardies

All Souls Church, Unitarian

Washington, D.C.

Sunday, 4 October 2009

Our reading this morning is from the Buddhist monk, Thich Nhat Han. It’s called “Call Me By My True Names,” and it was written, he explains, one morning after he had read the paper and taken in all the stories of pain in the world. You’ll hear some of them referenced in the poem. “Call Me By My True Names.”

The rhythm of my heart

is the birth and death of all that are alive.

I am the frog, swimming happily around

in the clear pond,

and I am the grass snake who

feeds himself on the frog.

I am the mayfly metamorphosing

on the surface of the river

and I am the bird which, when spring comes,

arrives to eat the mayfly.

I am the child in Uganda,

my legs as thin as bamboo sticks.

And I am the arms merchant

selling deadly weapons to Uganda.

I am the 12-year-old girl,

a refugee in a small boat,

who throws herself into the ocean

after being raped by a sea pirate.

And I am the pirate,

my heart not yet capable of love.

I am a member of the Politburo

with plenty of power in my hands.

And I am the man he forces to die slowly

in the death camp.

My joy is like spring,

so warm is makes flowers bloom.

My pain is like a river of tears, so full

it fills the four oceans.

Please call me by my true names

so I can hear all my cries and laughter at once,

so I can see that my joy and my pain are one.

Please call me by my true names

So I can wake up

and so the door of my heart can be opened

in compassion.

On the same day that the writer, James Baldwin, buried his father, a race riot broke out in Harlem. Even as the eulogy for the elder Baldwin was being preached at a tiny church on 125^th Street, just around the corner at the Hotel Braddock, a black solider and a white policeman got into a fight over a woman, igniting a powder keg of racial hatred. By the time the funeral was over, a few hours later, as Baldwin and his mother were driving to the cemetery, the hearse had to navigate through a burnt-out, shattered glass apocalypse.

Baldwin would later note that the race riots seemed a fitting coda to his father’s life, an example, he said, of God’s dark sense of humor. Because, you see, Baldwin believed that it was indeed racial hatred that had killed his father, his father’s hatred of the white world and his internalization of the hateful things that the white world had told him. As a preacher by trade, rage and hatred were both his religion and his daily bread, not to mention the tools with which he tried to raise his children. And as James Baldwin watched his father’s casket lowered into the grave, he had a chilling sense that if he weren’t careful, hatred would kill him too.

And so, one way of reading James Baldwin’s life and work is as one long attempt, search, for a way out of the hatred that killed his father. At the end of the essay in which he describes this scenario, Baldwin writes this, and listen here for a moment. He writes this: “It began to seem that one would have to hold in the mind forever two ideas which seemed to be in opposition. The first idea was acceptance, the acceptance, totally without rancor, of life as it is and people as they are. And in light of this idea, it goes without saying that injustice is a commonplace. But this did not mean,” he continues, “that one could be complacent, for the second idea was of equal power. And that was that one must never in one’s own life accept these injustices as commonplace but must fight them with all one’s strength.” So resistance and acceptance, in opposition and tension to one another. He continues: “This fight begins, however, in the heart and it now had been laid to my charge to keep my own heart free of hatred and despair. And this intimation made my heart heavy. And now that my father was irrecoverable, I wished that he had been beside me so that I could have searched his face for the answers which only the future would give me now.”

In this passage, Baldwin places before us a paradox. On one hand, he exhorts us to accept the world as it is and people as they are, to accept a certain kind of injustice without rancor. And on the other hand, he advocates resistance. And in the tension between these two, Baldwin’s hope is that through some combination of the two he will be able to struggle against injustice without letting hatred corrupt his heart. I find the paradox that Baldwin presents compelling because it is not only his dilemma; it’s ours too. How do we resist injustice? How do we resist evil without succumbing to the disease of hatred?

I’ll be honest with you. If I look back over the last eight years of my ministry with you here, that may rank as one of the most monumental challenges of those eight years. After seeing all of the evil that has happened during that time – a deadly terrorist attack, an unjustified war, state-sanctioned torture, the demonization of immigrants and gays and lesbians for political ends, the destruction of New Orleans and the botched recovery. After years of this kind of behavior, I struggle with how to carry out my prophetic role, which is to see and to name and to resist evil, without allowing it to infect me, to corrode my heart.

Another way of putting this question is, when does a struggle for justice cease to be a struggle for justice and instead become a self-righteous crusade against an opponent whom we have demonized? We all struggle with demonizing our enemies. You know, just as an example, over the last eight years or so, I’ve sometimes asked folks at All Souls, who or what is the greatest barrier for you in believing in the unity of the human family? Who is it that you’d have the hardest time opening your arms to and welcoming into the great family of All Souls? And you know what the most common answer was? Dick Cheney. [Laughter] Now, you know, I know as a pastor I should have intervened in those instances. I should have stepped in, I should have said something like, “We are all children of God. Dick Cheney is a child of God.” But you know what I did? I sat back and I nodded my head and I said, “I hear you.” [Laughter] So we’ve all got a long way to go. We’ve all got a long way to go.

And I bring this back to Baldwin’s dilemma which is ours. How do we resist injustice and evil passionately, yet with a heart of love? And as I’ve struggled with this question, I have found that the most helpful answers have come from the East. Now you all know that I am an unreconstructed Westerner in my religious and philosophical outlook. But an ongoing dialogue with Eastern thought, particularly Buddhism, always seems to prick my conscience and expose the fault lines of my hopelessly Judeo-Christian frame of mind. One case in point is this morning’s poem by Thich Nhat Han, “Call Me by My True Names.” For me, this poem is a lesson in the Buddhist understanding of good and evil which is very different from my own. It is a non-dualistic concept of good and evil, a belief that good and evil are inseparable, are inextricable, which is not the same as saying that good and evil are equivalent or that they’re the same things. Simply that they are inseparable, that every one of us and every one of our actions contains a little bit of both good and evil.

So Thich Nhat Han can say, I am the frog and I am the grass snake . . . I am the child with tiny legs in Uganda and I am the arms dealer in Uganda. I am the member of the Politburo and the person he has sentenced to death in the labor camp. Please call me by my true names. Faced with the reality of evil on all sides, Thich Nhat Han doesn’t project that evil onto others. He doesn’t demonize others. Instead, in a remarkable display of his large and supple soul, he takes it all in. He embraces it all, without rancor, without heaviness, without hatred. He’s a better man than I.

This poem has stuck in my craw for years, always undermining my tendency toward self-righteousness, always complicating my desire to see things in black and white. And for years I just wished it would go away. I didn’t really fully enter into the reality of the poem until I took seriously the evil that was inside of me. This sermon is called, “The Devil You Know.” And for most of us, the devil we know best is ourselves. If evil is indeed present in all beings and all things, then we are no exception. And I find that this Buddhist understanding of the non-duality of good and evil is helpful, not only in critiquing our self-righteousness toward others, but in overcoming our own guilt and shame and self-hatred that we have toward ourselves in the face of our own shortcomings and failings. Rather than weighing our failings down with millennia of either Jewish guilt or Christian guilt – you know, the Western tradition is very good at guilt – this Buddhist perspective simply accepts as a matter of course the fact that we are broken, the fact that we fail. Our limitations are part and parcel of the order of things. And this understanding can help us get past the grief and the denial and the guilt and the shame and, instead, allow us to focus on resisting and overcoming the failings that we find within ourselves.

Let me be personal here for a moment. It’s ironic that racism was the issue that brought James Baldwin to this insight because the same is true for me. I didn’t fully understand this idea of the non-dualism of good and evil until I confronted within myself what it means, really, to be a white person living in a nation built, in part, on a legacy of racial genocide and slavery. Like many white folks, I grew up in the blissful innocence of white privilege, reaping the benefits of the legacy of slavery and Jim Crow without ever acknowledging it and without examining the ways that I reinforced those systems of privilege and oppression. Then I got myself educated and, like what happens with a lot of white folks when that happens, is I felt a lot of guilt and shame. After having my eyes open, part of me wanted to deny my complicity, and put it over here. Part of me was overcome with guilt and shame. What I’ve found as I’ve been watching recent episodes in the American dialogue on race in this country is that it seems as though the white community is still toggling back and forth between these two poles of denial and guilt.

Well, I figured out pretty quickly that denial wasn’t very helpful. But what took me longer to realize was that guilt and shame were just as unhelpful in terms of actually confronting the sins of racism. People who feel guilty, I learned, usually behave in ways that ameliorate their guilt rather than correcting the sins that provoked their guilt. All Souls member, Mark Hicks, shared with me a saying that his grandmother used to share with him. She used to say, “You know, guilt is like a rocking chair; you got a whole lot of motion but you’re never going anywhere.” [Laughter] And that’s what guilt is like.

And so, slowly, I have learned to own the sins of racism and white privilege without that sense of guilt and shame, but rather with an acceptance more akin to Thich Nhat Han’s acceptance. And with that acceptance, the issue of race has become less emotionally charged for me, yet my commitment to anti-racism has become more integrated into my identity. The Buddhist notion of the non-duality of good and evil allows us to resist injustice without needing to engage in all the guilt and the shame.

Not long ago, one of my mentors, the Unitarian theologian, Rebecca Parker, gave me a great gift. At a conference not long ago, she said something that was very simple but which came to me like a revelation and which lifted a burden from my soul. She said, “We don’t need to hate evil. We don’t need to fear evil. We don’t need, even, to debate philosophically the origins of evil in the human heart or in society, where it comes from. What we need to do is to calmly and consistently and efficiently resist evil.” When she said that, it was like a lightness coming off my chest. It was like what Shana did with the kids earlier [referring to helping them learn to release tension]; it was like, “huuuh.” I can engage in the struggle for justice without allowing hatred, self-hatred, to corrupt and corrode my heart.

And that is my prayer for you too. Now, forgiveness is a big part of all of this. Forgiveness of self and forgiveness of others. And every year, on a Sunday close to Yom Kippur, we have a tradition here at All Souls of reciting the litany of atonement that is in the back of our hymnal. Over the years, this has become a significant ritual of forgiveness and reconciliation in our congregation. The refrain goes, “We forgive ourselves. We forgive each other. We begin again, in love.” We’re going to close my sermon today by reciting that litany together. But you don’t need to reach for your hymnal because we’re not going to use the hymnals. I want us to, in this time of reciting the litany, I want to invite you to bring into this space, into your heart, the places in your own lives where forgiveness and reconciliation are needed and to lift those up in our joint prayer. And I also want to ask you to lift up this congregation in your prayers. Some of you know that this last year has been a difficult one for the church and its leadership as we’ve struggled with a conflict with one of our board members. That process was painful for everyone involved, especially those close to the conflict. And so, I want to invite your prayers of ongoing healing and reconciliation for our congregation as well.

I want to invite you to stand, as you are able, and to take part in this litany. All you have to say, over and over again, is, repeat after me: We forgive ourselves. [We forgive ourselves.] We forgive each other. [We forgive each other.] We begin again in love. [We begin again in love.]

Without the hymnal, we’re able to look at each other and to have our hearts and our eyes and our hands open. The Litany of Atonement, number 637:

For remaining silent when a single voice would have made a difference