"United Nations Sunday"
by the Rev. Krista Taves
November 29, 2006
This past Monday, my neighbors and I awoke to the sound of helicopters circling overhead. When I stepped out for my morning walk, I saw black smoke billowing into the early morning sky. A large restaurant nearby was on fire. Like many, I was drawn to it, curious to see what a fire of that size looked like. The smoke was so thick it blocked the sun. The heavy smell of burning wood and oil and plastic settled over us in a thick acrid blanket. Waves of crackling flames licked at high rafters piercing sharply through the broken roof. I stayed there quite a while, mesmerized by the power of that fire. It was quite amazing.
What was also amazing was the well-coordinated response to the fire. The roads were lined with rescue vehicles. Men and women worked in an organized fashion to combat the flames. Everything that was needed to fight that fire was at their disposal. There was a well-connected web of resources they could tap into as soon as the need was there. There was no doubt that this fire was under control. So while the fire was dramatic, and certainly a tragedy for those who owned the restaurant and worked there, nothing about this fire threatened our way of life. This event could be managed and controlled, and basically, life would go on.
As citizens of a developed country, this is the expectation we have of life. A world where what we need is at our disposal. Where we expect that tragedy can be well-managed and held at bay. And when these expectations aren’t met, there is a sense that something is dramatically wrong. Something has failed and must be repaired. We have a sense of entitlement to a seamless fabric where what we need is available when we need it.
This is what it is like to have enough. This is what it is like to live in a country that says we have a right to have enough. This is what it is like to have more than enough.
Now you and I are likely very aware that there are many ways that this country is failing those expectations. Some of us have access to what we need, and others, an increasing number of others, do not. What happened after Hurricane Katrina made that very clear. But the fact is, we as a society saw the aftermath of Katrina as an avoidable tragedy, and we had a sense of entitlement to what we would have needed to prevent that tragedy. That sense of entitlement is woven into the beliefs we have about the nature and meaning of life. It is woven into our understanding of justice. It is woven into the ways we express our faith. It is woven into what we understand as right and wrong, and it is woven into how we understand ourselves as individuals seeking meaning and purpose in our lives.
Not surprisingly, our expectations of life have influenced millions around the world who want that kind of life for themselves. Millions hunger for a life of enough. By enough I don’t mean just material things, but equality, opportunity, education, human rights. It is why people are streaming over the border between the United States and Mexico. It is why we are witnessing an economic revolution in China the magnitude of which we have not seen since the industrial revolution swept through Britain in the 1700s. The hunger for enough is running rampant in Central and South America as country after country elects populist left leaning governments. Whether those governments will succeed in meeting the expectations of those who elected them is another matter, but it is the expectation of a life of enough for the common people that elected those governments. The hunger for enough, and the understanding that having enough is the ultimate form of justice and peace, is powerful and magnetic.
Today, I want to look at our particular responsibility in addressing that hunger. We are in a privileged country, wracked with its own inequalities, and yet as residents of one of the most powerful and wealthy nations in the world, there has always been a sense that this country and its citizens have a special role to play in promoting justice. We have a role to play in building the kind of peace that supports true justice for all humanity. As a country with one the highest rates of wealth per capita, we should be taking up some of those strands and reweaving them into tapestries that are failing those who depend on them.
And yet, it seems that the very experience of power and wealth, the experience of having enough, or more than enough, has insulated many of us from the suffering in the world. We can stare at a blazing fire, seeing the wealth of resources we have to combat it, and remain for the most part complacent because the fire we see, the one in the restaurant across the street, is being taken care of.
Some would say that the reason we are so complacent is because our very privilege has deadened us to the experience of suffering. Our sense of entitlement has numbed us. The experience of having enough for ourselves means that we don’t have a sense of urgency regarding the needs of others. It’s not our own personal pain so it doesn’t seem to affect us as if it were our own. There are those who say that we are only motivated to bring about change when we have the personal experience of pain, whether that pain is emotional, psychological or physical, and that it has to reach a certain threshold of discomfort before you’ll actually be motivated to do something about it. In our experience of privilege, we less frequently experience that motivating kind of pain that will actually lead us to do something about what is happening. So although we are among the most privileged in the world, we are increasingly known for our apathy and, ironically, we are often controlled by our fear of scarcity.
Unitarian Universalist minister Rebecca Ann Parker says that many of us who live in privilege have been estranged from our souls. We live in a sense of anesthetized feeling. Listen to what she says: “We are numb – not fully awake to life, to feeling, to seeing and knowing the world or to taking part in it in a soulful way. In the state of anesthetized feeling we risk doing harm to one another. Cut off from the music that sounds in the depths of our hearts, we may turn aside from those who are suffering or we may overlook the breathtakingly beautiful. .. Estranged from soul we neither laugh nor cry, we neither savor nor save the world… We move through our days in a cloud of numbness, aware that we aren’t feeling or thinking. We become passive, living with a sense that we are powerless in the presence of overwhelming systems of violence.”*
In our relative comfort, our numbness to the suffering of others has itself become a form of violence. In becoming complacent and taking for granted the very comforts that sustain us, we have become agents of injustice in the world. Rebecca Ann Parker is asking us to open ourselves to that reality, and to the reality that we live in a bubble, a manufactured bubble, and just outside its thin membrane is a huge and complex world with an incredible amount of beauty and suffering that should bring us to our knees. She is asking us to be open to that huge and complex world so that we can feel again, and so that we will be compelled to act.
There’s an ad playing on TV right now, called “Voices of Darfur” that is striking in its approach because its creators are clearly engaging an audience that they know is numbed out and emotionally estranged. Their goal is to get us to feel uncomfortable enough to pressure our government to take some concrete action in Darfur. I’m going to play the ad for you because it is so striking, and so unique in its approach, and I think it says a lot about the kind of people we have become. (http://www.savedarfur.org/pages/advertising_campaign)
What’s happening in this ad? First of all, we are not seeing any faces from Darfur. No black suffering faces. That is a conscious choice because the creators of this ad know that we have seen so many pictures of suffering African people that it is unlikely to cause us enough discomfort to move us to action. North Americans have become anesthetized to the image of the starving child with the bloated belly and the fly-infested eyes. It doesn’t work anymore. The creators of this ad are hoping that people who look like us, dress like us, and talk like us will pierce through our apathy and our numbness. They are banking that having seemingly middle-class Americans share such painful experiences will make us more uncomfortable than if those experiences were shared by people from Darfur. Why? Because we will give an American more importance and more value. It’s not a pretty truth, but it is reality.
I don’t imagine that any of us are comfortable with that reality. And I think that’s a good thing. I’m hoping that you and I are uncomfortable enough with that reality that we will take the risk to step outside of our suburban comfort zone, to step outside of the strip malls and the numbness, and feel. I hope that we can do this because I would hate for it to be true that the only way we will be compelled to act as agents of justice and peace is when our web begins to unravel to the point that our personal pain is strong enough to make up us wake up and take notice.
One of the cornerstones of our faith is empathy. Empathy means being able to feel deeply another person’s experience. As religious people we are called to be radically open and to be deeply affected by the experience of others. Not to be lost in their experience, you always hold onto your own self, but to feel keenly another’s reality. If they feel joy, feel their joy. If they feel pain, feel their pain. We are called to this kind of openness so that we can experience beauty and rejoice in it. We are also called to this kind of openness so that we will experience pain and sorrow and respond to it. The call to wholeness is a call to experiencing joy and pain. Ironically, you can’t fully feel either unless you can feel both.
As I stood there before that fire, I thought of these things, and I realized that part of the path towards greater spiritual maturity is to become more aware of injustice, and more hungry for peace, and more dissatisfied with all the various and sundry things that stand in the way of peace and justice, including our own apathy. As this has happened in my life, I know that I have become more uncomfortable with my comfortable life, more open to the injustices that arise from it, and more compelled to ask how I am called to respond to it. I don’t know that I have yet become so uncomfortable that I am actually responding in an adequate way to the injustices that so infuriate me, but I know that if I’m going to keep growing, if I’m going to be able to partake of a life where I have touched wholeness, I’m going to have to get closer to that discomfort and more willing to act.
We as people of faith are called to a holy discomfort. A sacred restlessness with not only the injustices around us, but also with the apathy, with the comforting lure of numbness. The apathy and the numbness allow us to languish in the misperception that we are powerless, that we can’t make a difference, that it’s not worth it, and as we languish in that comfortable apathy, the web unravels. As people of faith, we are called to something very different. The discomfort, the restlessness helps to unravel the lie and to approach the truth of what we can and must do.
So when we stand before the fire, the fire in our own backyard, and watch all the strands of that web come together, know that we are being called to more, much more.
So be it.
* Rebecca Ann Parker, Blessing the World: What Can Save Us Now, (Boston: Skinner House Books, 2006), p. 137.
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Send Questions or Comments to Rev. Taves: Minister@EmersonUUChapel.org
Updated: 12/14/06