Sermon by Rev. Alan Taylor
Preached at Unity Temple Unitarian Universalist Congregation
March 14, 2004
Reading:
From
Proverbs of Ashes by Rita Nakashima Brock and Rebecca Ann Parker
In 1805, in his Treatise on
Atonement, the American Universalist preacher Hosea Ballou said, ‘The belief
that the great Jehovah was offended with his creatures [to such a] degree, that
nothing but the death of Christ, or the endless misery of mankind, could appease
his anger, is an idea that has done more injury to the Christian religion than
the writings of all its opposers, for many centuries. The error has been fatal
to the life and spirit of the religion of Christ in our world; all those
principles which are to be dreaded by men have been believed to exist in God;
and professors have been moulded into the image of the Deity, and become more
cruel. …’
Do we really believe that God is appeased by cruelty, and
wants nothing more than our obedience? It becomes imperative that we ask this
question when we examine how theology sanctions human cruelty. If God is
imagined as a fatherly torturer, earthly parents are also justified, perhaps
even required, to teach through violence. Children are instructed to understand
their submission to pain as a form of love. Behind closed doors, in our own
community, spouses and children are battered by abusers who justify their
actions as necessary, loving discipline. ‘I only hit her because I love her.’
‘I’m only doing this for your own good.’ The child or the spouse who believes
that obedience is what God wants may put up with physical or sexual abuse in an
effort to be a good Christian.
Sermon:
At least one member of our
congregation was surprised to learn that Unity Temple has a Lenten adult
education series hosted by our Social Mission council, for she had no knowledge
of Lent and never had heard of it in a Unitarian Universalist context. Given
that our social mission’s council education classes this month are having such
low attendance, perhaps this is a sign that others are similarly perplexed about
Lent. The word Lent comes from the old English 'lenten', which simply means
spring. In the Christian calendar, it is a preparation or cleansing for
Easter--which has many different meanings for different people. Traditionally,
Lent begins with Ash Wednesday—you may have seen people with ashes on their
faces—and ends with Easter, a duration of 40 days. Of all the Christian
Holidays, Lent is the most spiritually meaningful, calling people toward
self-reflection, repairing broken relationships by seeking forgiveness, and
cultivating self-discipline.
What makes Lent so attractive to religious liberals is that
it provides a practice to deepen spiritually. In the Christian tradition, the
Lenten season has two primary components to its practice. One is "to face the
ashes", to acknowledge and come to terms with our human mortality. The other is
to face our moral and ethical failures and return to a renewal of our spiritual
life. The wearing of "sackcloth and ashes" as spoken of in the Bible serves as a
symbolic expression of moral repentance and spiritual renewal.
Coming at the end of winter, Lent is a good time for an
intentional practice of reflection. This time of reflection is celebrated not
only by Christian churches but also by many Unitarian Universalist congregations
that hold faith in the human capacity to change and grow. Lent gets an odd twist
in popular culture as a time of self-denial, a time to bring some sort of small
suffering into one’s life so as to better it. It gets an even odder twist with
the backdrop of Jesus’ violent death as a redemptive completion of the season,
perhaps this year more than ever given the recent release of Mel Gibson’s movie
about the violence endured by Jesus.
Violence, especially violence against women, children and
other vulnerable peoples is a cruel reality of a culture of domination. This
morning I want to grapple with this harsh reality and how Christianity can
either support this domination or resist it.
Rebecca Parker currently serves as the president of the
seminary I attended, Starr King School for the Ministry. Before becoming the
first woman seminary president in history, she was a liberal Methodist minister
in the pacific northwest. As a survivor of sexual abuse, she forthrightly
questioned in her sermons the culture of domination that made it possible for
women and children to be physically or sexually victimized while effectively
keeping them silent, or at least unheard. Two years ago, Rebecca published
Proverbs of Ashes with her fellow theologian and friend, Rita Nakashima
Brock. The subtitle is “Violence, Redemptive Suffering, and the Search for What
Saves Us.”
In their book, Rebecca relates the story of her small town
parish. She met weekly at noon with her women’s Bible class. Every Wednesday, as
they’d done for forty years, these ladies packed a brown-bag lunch and came to
church to read and discuss the Bible together. One of them said to Rebecca, “You
have to stop talking about women being oppressed and saying those things happen
to women, like battering and rape.” Rebecca was taken aback and asked why. As
Rebecca tells the story, “All at once, all the women burst into tears. One by
one they spoke.” Each woman shared of the violence in her own life. For some it
was in the past, such as the grandfather who beat grandmother terribly and when
the granddaughter tried to intervene, she was beaten too. Rebecca says the rage
and grief in one grown up granddaughter’s face and voice was as intense as if
the violence had happened that morning. Another woman said her husband hadn’t
talked with her for three months, and she had no idea why, that his attitude
tore her in pieces. Another woman in tears said, “Every day of my marriage I
feel like I have been raped,” saying that her husband actively dismisses her
thoughts, wishes, and opinions, that he acts against her will as if she had
none, and that she experiences this as a kind of rape.
Parker and Brock quote a woman named Lucia in their book,
“Mostly [my husband] is a good man. But sometimes he becomes very angry and he
hits me. He knocks me down. One time he broke my arm and I had to go to the
hospital. … I went to my priest twenty years ago. I’ve been trying to follow his
advice. The priest said I should rejoice in my sufferings because they bring me
closer to Jesus. … He said, ‘If you love Jesus, accept the beatings and bear
them gladly, as Jesus bore the cross.’”
Some people believe this is what it means to follow Jesus.
In the Bible it wasn’t Jesus who urged people to quietly suffer but instead the
writer of the book of 1 Peter. “For what credit is it, if when you do wrong and
are beaten for it you take it patiently? But if when you do right and suffer for
it you take it patiently, you have God’s approval. For to this you have been
called, because Christ also suffered for you, leaving you an example, that you
should follow in his steps. … Rejoice in so far as you share in Christ’s
sufferings.” 1 Peter 2:20-21, 4:13
I took the title of today’s sermon from Alice Miller’s book
of the same name: Thou Shalt Not Be Aware: Society’s Betrayal of the Child.
It was among the first books to break the silence about child abuse in western
society, published a mere twenty years ago in 1984. Miller demonstrates how
Sigmund Freud discovered and then unconsciously suppressed the horrific truth
that child abuse is far more pervasive than anyone imagined. In 1896 Freud
delivered a paper, “The Aetiology of Hysteria” in which he reports with great
clarity, directness, and persuasiveness that through analysis he discovered most
of his patients had been sexually abused. Though they themselves weren’t
initially aware, their healing began with the acknowledgement of their
experience. The intellectual culture from which Freud’s patients came could not
accept the scandalous assertion of widespread child abuse. The monstrous truth
Freud unearthed horrified him, so he was naturally and continually tempted to
disbelieve what he discovered about his patients. Freud, still young in his
career wished there could be another answer, and he devised one: his famous
drive theory of infantile sexuality. Both he and society readily embraced the
oedipal complex, I believe not on the merits of the theory, for it has glaring
faults, but because neither Freud nor society could accept that child abuse is a
widespread, systemic problem. The taboo led Freud and most psychoanalysts to
blame children for their own abuse. Freud once called a girl patient
“hysterical” who was molested by her father because she complained about her
molestation, (the father incidentally was a friend of Freud’s). Despite his
clear and persuasive findings in 1896, Freud became the champion of the belief
that children’s sensuousness is to be blamed for sexual assaults because “the
sexual constitution which is peculiar to children is precisely calculated to
provoke sexual [seductions].”
What a modern twist on original sin. Our psychological
problems come from our longing for sexual activity. Sounds all too similar to
another realm of violence: “just as women bring rape and domestic violence upon
themselves, children are to blame for whatever acts that siblings or adults may
do unto them.” Hogwash. Perhaps it is part of the human psyche to find ways to
turn away from difficult truths. Perhaps our culture is one characterized more
of domination than we care to admit. It appears to me that cultural and
religious oppression effectively silences all kinds of violence so as to avoid
dealing with its vicious patterns generation after generation, rather than
seeking to break the cycle. Just this past week, the newspapers report of rape
in the military, pedophilia in religious institutions, exploitation of
immigrants in both Mexico and the U.S., torture at prison camps, profound
neglect that left a teenager dead weighing only 23 pounds, the training of
terrorist methods in third world countries. I could go on.
Any religion worth its salt never condones violence and
exploitation of those most vulnerable. Genuine religion calls attention to the
culture of domination in our world and calls us to overcome it in our own lives
as well as joining in resistance to seeing it overcome in others’ lives.
I remember vividly when I first faced the horrific reality
that child abuse, both physical and sexual, is widespread. I was nineteen. It
was the summer after my first year of college. It was a fluke that I got the
internship at Clear Water Ranch, a psychiatric facility for abused children who
were taken out of their families by the courts and who did not have the behavior
to stay in foster placement. The facility had four houses that served 28
severely emotionally children. My job was to offer special time to children who
were doing well and to enhance the program. The toughest part of the job was
learning the histories and backgrounds of the children.
One girl, I will call Natasha was twelve years of age,
half-Jewish and half French, a lovely girl with large dark eyes and a sweet
smile. As we ate dinner one evening, she told me how she had been sexually
abused by two of her uncles and then put into foster care in a family where her
brother also forced her into sexual activity. She said, in a matter of fact tone
of voice, “I guess you could say I am an all around abused kid.” Fortunately
this beautiful child did well at Clear Water and successfully re-entered foster
care.
I also won’t ever forget Christine. She was the youngest of
three children at Clear Water that came from a child prostitution ring.
Christine, at age seven, came to the facility unable to wipe herself. She had a
frequently explosive temper. Her face always seemed set with a look of rage and
hate. One morning she stomped up to me, looked straight at me and said, “I like
your face” and then stomped away. That moment was a realization that there was
more to her than met the eye. I have often prayed that she will someday make
peace with her awful first few years.
I could tell you story after charming story of my
experiences with these children, and story after story of heartbreaking
histories of their lives. Children, broken by their experiences, yet so full of
life. Despite their background, the spark of life and a longing for wholeness
was clearly strong among many of them. I was also inspired by some of the
counselors. It isn’t easy working with severely emotionally disturbed children.
I identified the inner strength and compassion that these counselors exhibited
as what I wanted to cultivate in myself.
I returned to Clear Water after I graduated from college to
become a counselor. The agency had moved and was under a different
administration. This time, the work overwhelmed me. It was more exhausting and
emotionally draining than I could stand. When I left Clear Water a few months
later, a big part of me wanted to be in denial. I wanted to forget these
forgotten children. But I couldn’t. It was as if God had branded me with the
fate of returning to the work and devoting three later years of my life to
working with deeply troubled children.
While most of my friends from college went into graduate
school or took jobs with the potential for high incomes and prestige, I found
myself unable to stay away from working with abused children. My parents, like
my friends, were perplexed that I took this path after my terrible experience
with the work, let alone the costly liberal arts education. I suffered in this
work that I felt compelled to do. At times I was physically hurt, often
emotionally wrenched not simply by the histories of the children but by dealing
with the pent up rage that manifested itself in multitude ways, often on a daily
basis. It took tremendous inner resources just to contain the children who lost
control, to provide a therapeutic milieu, and to maintain responsibility for the
children, and in time, my staff.
Why would I voluntarily take on a considerable degree of
suffering in a job that paid poorly and didn’t appear to have any pragmatic use
for my future? A large part of it was that I was doing something helpful to
others, and the other reason was that I truly believed it was good for my own
character development. I lived with an unspoken assumption that I could not
mature—I could not cultivate the inner strength and compassion that I
sought—without devoting years to working with deeply troubled children. This
assumption raises an important religious question with which I have always
grappled: do we need to suffer to grow? does our maturing and growth as human
beings require us to, using Christian language, to bear our own cross? I think
this is so; however, we must be very careful about what it means to bear one’s
own cross. There is a huge difference between devoting prime years of one’s life
to extremely difficult work for the sake of others and being a child or spouse
who endures physical or sexual abuse.
The story about Jesus literally bearing his own cross is
one that can easily lead people to think they too should embrace self-sacrifice.
However, I believe the power of Jesus’ ministry was not his brutal death but his
teachings and example of being a source of love in the world. I am concerned
that Mel Gibson’s move on Jesus focuses solely on his last hours. Torture,
humiliation, and anguish of Jesus gets the message across that Jesus suffered
big time. Well, so do a lot of other people. And this suffering is not
ultimately redemptive. Violence is assisted by silences. To stop violence,
silences have to be broken.
For people who have been victimized by physical or sexual
violence, the cross one has to bear is not to remain silent in the face of
domination and oppression but to heal, to move toward wholeness, and to break
this silence, to move beyond the tacit assertion of western culture: “Thou Shalt
Not Be Aware.”
Judith Herman in Trauma and Recovery:
Traumatic events destroy the sustaining bonds between
individual and community. Those who have survived learn that their sense of
self, or worth, of humanity, depends upon a feeling of connection to others.
Rebecca Parker adds:
Restored, people return to ordinary life and expand their
concern to others—not as self-sacrifice but as self-possession. Present to
themselves and to the reality of others, they do not live in denial of
violence but in remembrance of presence. They have embraced a greater
knowledge of the world, of evil. When we come into such presence of ourselves
we are able to take responsibility for our actions and lives, in all their
ambiguity. And in that process of taking responsibility, we turn the corner
toward the practice of loving, the practice of transforming the world.
May it be so.
© Copyright 2004 Alan C.
Taylor, All Rights Reserved.
Benediction:
From
Proverbs of Ashes by Rita Nakashima Brock and Rebecca Ann Parker
We need a God who delights in
revolutionary disobedience and spirited protest. Was not Jesus one such as
this—a prophet who confronted injustices and risked oppression rather than
conform to an empire that enforced its oppressive will through violence? …
The dynamic of dominance and submission in human relations
is the heart of sin. What will save us from this? Does Jesus’ self sacrifice on
the cross end dominance and submission? No. Jesus’ crucifixion was a consequence
of domination, not its cure. An oppressive system killed him to silence him and
to threaten others who might follow him. Domination still operates in our world
and has left many lives bereft.
As for my question: Is suffering redemptive? This depends
on whether the suffering leads to self-sacrifice or self-possession.
