Holding On
Martin Luther King Day, 2008

This weekend, most congregations of all denominations in our city and across America are remembering Martin Luther King, Jr. Most clergy will use this opportunity to urge their members to get more involved, hands on, body and soul, in some joint effort to make this a better world, however their faith would define that.

In our congregations, that would be a classic example of, “preaching to the choir.” Most Americans of all stripes acknowledge that, despite our small numbers of fewer than 200,000 citizens in a national population of more than 300 million, there remains a higher percentage of Unitarian Universalists involved in social action than any other religious group. That’s us, members of one tiny group on this end of the rope, playing tug’o’war with huge, powerful interests on the other side. How tempting it would be to just let go and say, “The world is going to have to get along without me. I’m taking a break. I earned it.” Who could argue that you don’t deserve a rest, when the effort seems endless, the odds are against us, the victories are few and, it seems, never permanent?

As others have observed of us, when you are a mouse living in a herd of elephants, it’s not easy to persuade the herd to change direction. Even with the help of some other small creatures, maybe a few gerbils and a meerkat or two, with luck, perhaps even one or two rogue elephants, it’s never easy. We have to celebrate small successes. We have to be happy if we change the herd’s direction even a little, just a slight angle away from the cliff, toward safer ground for all the creatures.

Sometimes I wonder if those I admire most for their successful efforts to improve the world ever got tired, ever wanted to give up. You don’t have to delve far into their personal journals, confidential correspondence, private conversations and even some public statements to see that they did. Martin Luther King, Jr. acknowledged shortly before he died that, the recent disappointments in the Civil Rights movement had caused him to wonder aloud whether, “the dream” had become a nightmare. He warned that he might not be with them when they reached the prize, but, he assured his followers, “We as a people will reach the promised land.”

And we did reach a promised land, not nirvana, not Utopia, not perfection, just a place better than where we were in 1968. The ease with which I married a man from Africa, in Georgia, in 1998, must certainly be credited in major part to the insights and efforts of Martin Luther King, Jr., and the movement he led all across the South.

How did these folks continue, when the going got rough, when the going got dangerous, when to go on jeopardized their very existence, and they knew it, right down to the bone, they knew it?

I’ll confess, I get tired. I get tired of being told I’m wrong by persons with more clout than I have, more power, more resources, more influence and more victories. At such times, I look around for role models, stories of folks determined to make a better world their legacy, who hung on and hung in, in spite of it all. I find them when I research concepts like Integrity and Courage, not only for speeches and writings, but also for personal inspiration.

Within our own liberal religious movement, there are so many to choose from. My personal favorite is Margaret Sanger, founder of Planned Parenthood. It’s hard for us to go back and wrap our minds around the earliest concept of Planned Parenthood. Its offices and clinics are a common sight in most of the cities in which we’ve all lived. Even with protests, threats and actual hostility, it would be hard to truly envision what Sanger was up against in making it all happen the first time.

I remember how impressed I was when in graduate school I had to read the original lectures of Sigmund Freud, not so much with his theories, but with what he was up against. For example, in one speech, he emphasized and reemphasized this point—that if in the course of helping patients, physicians suggested that illnesses and discomforts their patients were experiencing may be manifestations of things other than physical, but instead perhaps by the psychological or emotional circumstances in their lives, and if those patients resisted or denied that possibility with great force and energy, that vehement denial, in and of itself, does not prove that the doctor is wrong.

In other words, if a doctor were to say to a patient something like, “The stresses in your family, particularly your wife’s depression following the death of your son, may be partially to blame for your stomach pain,” and that patient were to insist that neither his marriage nor their recent loss could have anything to do with his stomach pain, his vehement denial does not mean that you, the doctor, were in error when you suggested that possibility.

Freud’s audiences for his lectures were physicians, well educated, with years of practice. None of them had ever heard of such a concept as, “overreaction.” Freud observed it in his patients, named it and in his lectures, described it to colleagues in terms so gentle, his listeners were invited to at least consider the possibility that a patient might strongly deny something, that was in fact true. Some came to agree with Freud, eventually saying they had seen evidence of it in their own patients; other physicians simply thought Freud was crazy.

Today, even small children understand the truth of this basic psychological concept. You cannot view a coffee commercial without some character trying to calm down some stressed out colleague with words like, “Fred, you’re overreacting; you should switch to decaf.”

Can you imagine? Can we, who live in this world, imagine the uphill battle Freud had back in his world?

Can you imagine what it was like to be a woman delivering reliable birth control information to other women in a society which labeled the practice a felony? The law, which was clear, mandated that accurate birth control information could be distributed only to lawfully married men. By providing birth control information to women, even, in some cases—heaven forefend!—unmarried women, Sanger undeniably broke the law. Distribution of birth control information and devices made Sanger a felon, susceptible to arrest, imprisonment, and, along with her sister social activists who engaged in hunger strikes, liable to force feeding through tubes place into the stomach through the nose, an agonizing and sometimes physically damaging, though common and legal, prison custom in her day. Can you even imagine what it was like, what risk equal rights workers faced every day?

When I get tired, I think of Dorothy Day, founder of the Catholic Worker movement, who reminds us that no one has the right to feel hopeless, because there is still too much work to do. I remember Margaret Sanger, retaining her passion for women’s rights, in the midst of opposition forces larger and stronger than she, including the United States government, which was in the midst of debilitating slavery/anti-slavery conflict, refusing to postpone her work for some better time, instead boldly claiming equality for her gender now, insisting that: “A free race cannot be born with slave mothers.” Her words join others down the ages, words that inspire us still, those of Elie Wiesel, Judaic scholar and concentration camp survivor, who affirms that, “Silence is never the answer;” Mother Theresa, Nobel prize winner and minister to the poor, who said, “It is not how much we do but how much love we put into the doing;” Bobby Kennedy, who, following in a fallen brother's footsteps, reminded us that, "... if our times are difficult and perplexing, so are they challenging and filled with opportunity;" and Black civil rights activist, W.E.B. DuBois, who insisted that, “Now is the accepted time, not tomorrow, not some more convenient season.”

Now is the time, not tomorrow. No matter what it is that we care about, whatever positive thing for which we work, there is always a reasonable argument to be made that now is not the time. We are, or the world is, not yet ready. I’ve heard it again many times this election season. America is not ready for a woman president. America will not put a Black man in the White House, will never accept a Black first lady representing us around the world.

I do not think the folks I have heard say such things are “bad” people. Often they preface their remarks with a lament, saying it’s such a shame we cannot change, that it’s so sad America isn’t ready. It has been my observation that no one is ever ready. Everyone decides in retrospect, after the fact, that apparently we were finally ready. We have to do it first, then readiness or acceptance follows.

Was America ready for King? Was Pakistan ready for former Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto’s return? One could argue that both countries were not ready, since both these public figures were killed.

We know from their writings and speeches that both knew their lives were on the line. The ends they publicly pursued put them in immediate and grave danger. I’m sure they both were tired. I’m certain they got discouraged. And still, they kept their eyes on the prize and continued to work for change until their last breath.

Did they expect to die, or consider it necessary? I don’t think so. I think both leaders gladly would have accompanied their people into the Promised Land. Even if they were slightly surprised to have made it, I think they would have been happy to be both successful and alive. While they knew the possibility, and for Bhutto, the probability, of physical death was high, they pursued what they saw as a greater good, if not for themselves, then for those who would come after.

Can you imagine it, something for which you would be willing to die, not want to, but something so important you would take the risk?

I think I understood this most clearly when my roommate in graduate school opted for a social action ministry. After graduation and ordination by the Congregational Church, he went to the hot spot of the day, El Salvador, to work with the Jesuits in that war-torn country. After the Archbishop Oscar Romero was murdered in church in 1980, following a sermon in which he called for peace, Arturo Rivera was named his successor. Friends and colleagues who took groups of young adults down to El Salvador through the Witness for Peace program, returned expressing concern for our friend’s safety. They said that in public settings, Daniel, without calling much attention to his actions, routinely placed himself between the archbishop and the crowd. Obviously, that was the danger zone.

This worried me too, and at the first opportunity, I confronted him about it. How dare he put his life on the line when we all loved him and would miss him terribly if he got himself killed. Did he want to die? He countered easily and clearly, insisting that he certainly did not want to die. Before he left Chicago, he had met and married a Christian Socialist neighborhood organizer who accompanied him to El Salvador, and they had managed to have two daughters in a war zone. He wanted nothing more than to be part of those girls’ lives as they grew up. However, he tried to explain, and I tried to understand, in the San Salvador scheme of things, he was less necessary to the peace effort than was the archbishop. So in placing himself before the crowd, he wasn’t trying to get killed, he was simply putting a less valuable target between an important religious leader and potential flying bullets.

Daniel could make those distinctions. I cannot. That’s why he has long remained at the very top of my heroes list. Up there right beside him on my list is Mother Theresa. I could not imagine ever volunteering to do the work she volunteered to do. When I would see her helping someone die—she lived and worked in a never ending sea of dying—I could not imagine where she got her strength to make that choice, the tiny girl, born into a relatively affluent Yugoslavian family, called at age 18 to become an Irish nun, sent to India as a high school instructor to teach the daughters of the privileged, then, following a retreat to Darjeeling, called again to leave convent life to teach children of the slums of Calcutta, eventually founding the Missionaries of Charity to address the myriad needs of her students and their families.

Even as a young nun, she must have seen that the poverty of Calcutta was too much for one person to make a significant difference. Facing that, how could she say to herself, “Well, I’m going to do what I can anyway,” and proceed to teach the slum children, with no support of any kind, dependant totally on providence, writing in the dirt with a stick to teach language, in keeping with her expressed determination to teach all the children of the poor of Calcutta how to read and write?

Her health suffered, and yet she continued. With many ailments, including one heart attack while she was visiting the pope in Rome, and a second one later, still she continued, dying just 10 years ago, at age 87, bent and stooped beyond her years, still working to alleviate the suffering of others. What an exemplary life.

How did she do it? How did she do it for 50 years? Do you think she saw much improvement in the numbers of the ill and dying among Calcutta’s poor? What kept her going? I imagined, it was her faith. She chose to follow a strict interpretation of her religion’s mandate to assist and poor and suffering, I surmised.

Almost immediately after Mother Theresa’s death, there were calls for her beatification, for the church to begin the process of elevating her to sainthood, which the church seemed eager to do. At the preliminary moment for placing her within the system toward canonization, analyzing her deeds and achievements, Pope John Paul II appeared to agree with my earlier assessment, after he asked: ‘Where did Mother Teresa find the strength and perseverance to place herself completely at the service of others?” And he answered, “She found it in prayer and in the silent contemplation of Jesus Christ, his Holy Face, his Sacred Heart." That had been my conclusion as well.

And then, as you must have heard, fifty years of Mother Theresa’s private correspondence came to light, revealing a life of not confident faith, but surprisingly, near total doubt, doubt of such severity that most of us likely would have found it debilitating. Mother Theresa carried on.

A newly published collection of letters of Mother Teresa written to colleagues and superiors over 66 years, revealed only after her death that she was deeply tormented about her faith and suffered long periods of doubt , even about the existence of God.

"Jesus has a very special love for you,” she wrote in 1979 to her dear friend, Father Michael. “As for me,” she continued, “the silence and the emptiness is so great that I look and do not see, listen and do not hear.”

Commenting on a recent public speech, she wrote to one advisor who knew her well, that at the event, "I spoke as if my very heart [were] in love with God—[a] tender, personal love. If you [had been there], you would have said, ‘What hypocrisy.'"

Mother Teresa wanted her letters destroyed upon her death, and I for one am glad her wish was not honored. The Vatican ordered that they be preserved as potential relics of a saint, and so they became public just this fall, and we were able to know the contents. What a loss it would have been never to have known her.

Mother Theresa said that having to go to one of Calcutta’s many sheds provided for people to go when they die was not the real evil. The real evil, she insisted, was to lie there and die unloved. So she resolved to love them all, all the dying of Calcutta. She wasn’t able to, of course, but she made a terrific dent in the misery, and provided the gift, the miracle of love, to all she personally touched. She spread word of Calcutta’s need around the globe. Assistance arrived, many more hands, financial support and other resources, including her Nobel Prize money, spent in its entirely on alleviating the suffering of the poor.

Then she died, and there appeared those troublesome letters. Some found them unsettling because they had depended upon Mother Theresa’s unshakable faith to shore up or affirm the validity of their own. How could they do that after they learned Mother Theresa’s faith was the furthest thing from confident? At times it was nonexistent.

The letters were troublesome to me too, but for a completely different reason—they took away my easy caveat as to why she was able to choose a life of service to others in the most extreme way, while I choose to serve others in a much more modest way, as a parish minister.

Now I must face the fact that she didn’t choose the life of service because she loved god. She didn’t do it for the assurance of an eternal reward, as her religion promises. And she didn’t do it because of a strict interpretation of her Catholic faith. She wrote that she not only doubted Catholic theology, the specific mandates for righteous living prescribed by her church, she also doubted whether a god truly existed. She said she sent her prayers into a great, yawning emptiness. She received no answers, no sense of being heard by any deity or higher power. Her letters are of those of a suffering near atheist struggling mightily to become a heartfelt agnostic.

What did she do about her doubt? Did she throw up her hands and say, “Well, if I cannot be sure any of this is true, I think I’ll just rejoin my family, go home and live a prosperous life like my brothers.”

No, she saw a life without love as the world’s greatest evil, and decided to devote herself to remedying that, by loving as many of the world’s discarded people as she could, for as long as she had, no matter what the cost, for her whole life.

And that’s what she did.

At the moment, Mother Theresa is beatified, but not yet canonized. To the Catholic Church’s eternal credit, the official announcement is that her written expressions of doubt will not even slow her progress to sainthood. On the contrary, Vatican spokesmen say, she rises even higher in the church’s assessment of faithful living. I could not agree more.

Following the publication of her letters, however, I had a different dilemma, not as easily settled as that in Rome. Once we learned that Mother Theresa had no more faith in an immutable, revealed truth than I do, there went my excuse for not being more like her. I’m still not Mother Theresa, but I’ve had to find different excuses.

I’ve been a social activist since I was in my twenties. Back then, we thought we had made amazing progress. We thought young liberals had escorted the world around corners, that we that had created permanent, positive change that would last forever. If you had told us, back in the 1970's, that in the year 2000, one of the major controversies of the day would be over whether creation of the world in seven days could be taught in Texas schools as science, we would have laughed you right out of the conversation. No way could American culture lose that much ground in such a short time. These and other battles had been won once and for all, never to rear their ugly heads again. We believed that right on down to the ground. We were wrong.

There is a wonderful comedic line of dialogue in the hilarious and precious film, The Princess Bride, when the gnome offers the prince a short list of things humanity has learned for all time. On the list is the throw away comment, “Never start a land war in Southeast Asia.” We all laughed because we knew we had personally stopped that war. In hindsight, the gnome might have added, “Never start a land war in the Middle East.” It wasn’t something we foresaw.

Now in Iraq, we are in the midst of a war of many years duration. We hear on the news frightening commentary made by powerful men and women saying some of the same things that preceded this war, only now the target of the rhetoric is Iran.

We religious liberals are not a unified, politically liberal entity. There is a range of opinion among us regarding whether the war in Iraq is necessary or a disastrous mistake. There may be just as much varied opinion as to what our relationship with Iran is or ought to be. That doesn’t matter. As author Lynda Barry said of the wars that affected her family, this war is already in our DNA. The toll of the dead is heart wrenching. That’s not the worst of it. Suicide among combatants is epidemic. The military services monitor only those who take their lives while in uniform. Dedicated volunteers followed service men and women through the months following discharge. Adding their findings to those of the military, after surveying records from 43 states, the total their dedicated human resources could cover revealed that in 2007 alone, 120 men and women returning from this war, in and out of uniform, killed themselves. That’s 120 lives lost, not on a battlefield, here at home. The most common comment I heard made by family members left behind after a suicide, is that when their loved one returned, he wasn’t there. “I looked into his eyes,” the spouses say, “and he wasn’t there.” I can only guess at what they mean, but I noticed how often I heard it.

Suicide rates are not going down as this war continues, they are holding steady. In addition, a growing number of arrests is occurring among our returned military. We sent them into hell and told them to act human. We sent them home and told them to go back to normal. Some have not been able to, and have committed crimes, some serious, most involving drugs. They need to be stopped, of course. They also need effective programs of assistance, support and understanding, not prison.

As a society, we will be dealing with broken people for decades to come. I see so many wildly divergent estimates of casualties, some estimates as high as 50,000, returned veterans with missing limbs, loss of vision, loss of hearing, and that most common of wounds in wars like this, brain injuries. Often they are young men, who left behind families with young children and return to lives almost like those of children themselves, trying to learn to walk, to talk, to feed and dress themselves.

Some will never recover. As a society, we will never be the same. Regardless of how we feel about this war, about past wars, possible future ones, this much is clear. Young adults who did what we asked of them now need our help. They will need us for a long, long time.

This Christmas, my husband helped serve a holiday dinner to the needy in Pittsburgh, where he works. After circulating among diners, he told me that by his own unscientific survey, forty-five percent of the homeless men were Vietnam Vets. Nearly half. Can we learn from our own past, or are we doomed to repeat it?

In the end, it doesn’t matter that I’m not as effective nor as tireless as those I have admired, Martin Luther King, Jr., or Bobby Kennedy, or Margaret Sanger, or Mother Theresa. They had their doubts and they got tired too. This month of remembering Dr. King, do not allow anyone to drag Martin Luther King, Jr.’s memory down to the level of the perfect leader of a flawless movement. There is little to learn from the life of the two-dimensional, idealized hero you now read about in the history books. There is much to learn from his actual life and the true lives of all the leaders we admire. It’s good to know that they were not perfect. They were better than perfect. They were real.

And so are we.

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