DREAMING A NATION
And a Look Beyond

James Ishmael Ford
15 February, 2004

The Text
You do not have to be good.
You do not have to walk on your knees
for a hundred miles through the desert, repenting.
You only have to let the soft animal of your body
love what it loves.
Tell me about despair, yours, and I will tell you mine.
Meanwhile the world goes on.
Meanwhile the sun and the clear pebbles of the rain
are moving across the landscape,
over the prairies and the deep trees,
the mountains and the rivers.
Meanwhile the wild geese, high in the clean blue air,
are heading home again.
Whoever you are, no matter how lonely,
the world offers itself to your imagination,
calls to you like the wild geese, harsh and exciting--
over and over announcing your place
in the family of things.
Mary Oliver

Today I want to do three things. First I want to recall us to the dream that formed our nation, and to hold up how important it is as an assertion of human dignity and possibility. Then I want to talk a little about the shape of globalization, how it brings some powerful and good things into the world, and at the same time is causing terrible suffering for so many. And last as well as throughout this whole reflection, I want to call us to a healing vision for the world, and the possibility of action that is spiritually informed and genuinely meaningful. This is also a congregational reflection Sunday, so don’t worry, I’ll be brief, well as brief as I am capable of being, so there will be opportunity to share your thoughts on these critical questions for our times.

I think it particularly appropriate that the Unitarian Universalist minister and scholar Forrest Church opens his study The American Creed with a quote from Abraham Lincoln. As this is President’s Day weekend, I thought it doubly appropriate. “I have often inquired of myself,” Lincoln said in an extemporaneous address in 1861, “what great principle or idea it was that kept this Confederacy so long together. It was not the mere matter of separation of the colonies from the motherland, but that sentiment in the Declaration of Independence which gave liberty not alone to the people of this country, but hope to all the world, for all future time.” Let’s revisit that document Lincoln cites, and particularly the preamble, keeping in our minds and hearts the possibility these words speak of ancient faith and future possibility.

“We hold these truths to be self-evident; that all men are created equal; that they are endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable rights; that among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness; that to secure these rights, governments are instituted among men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed; that whenever any form of government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the right of the people to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new government, laying its foundation on such principles, and organizing its powers in such form as to them shall seem most likely to effect their safety and happiness.”

This is such a fascinating document. And, I believe, it contains the cornerstone of our liberal religious perspective. Let me unpack that. First, just the quickest on the reference to divine source. Our Unitarian Universalist theologian James Luther Adams spoke of “the pragmatic test of God’s existence.” Here the proof is to be found not in an appeal to some divinity, and then to truth-claims coming from God’s official spokesperson. But, rather divinity is to be found in the value of the assertion itself. So, here the claim “all are equal” is the question. But, we’re also given notice as we come upon this claim. It is so important this assertion needs to be approached after we’ve taken off our shoes and covered our heads. Because, if it is true, it is the word of God.

That said let me quickly remind us of our liberal spiritual way. The divine element of our human condition is our twined ability to feel and to reason. The myths of our ancestors said we were created in the image of God. Well, that image that essence we share with the divine is our heart and our head, feeling and thinking. These are the means by which we test and know.

And here the phrase we’re testing as possibly the word of God is actually “all men are created equal.” In this room the masculine-by-preference reference to men has a jangling clash to most of our ears. But perhaps that helps us to recall this is very much a human product, and only the eternal word of God in so far as it passes through the fires of human hearts and heads. I suggest that archaic term using men for all of us helps us to remember to test.

And testing through heart and head is our liberal spiritual way. Everything must be tested through these fires, but particularly those things that claim our allegiance, that claim to be cornerstone truth. So, let’s think about that amazing, absurd, and compelling assertion, “all are created equal.” On the face of it, we know this isn’t true. I’m not you, you are not me. We each of us have different gifts and different difficulties. We are different, and not particularly equal.

But, and this is the great mystery of it all: We also know from the depths of our being as a fundamental intuition of what is, that within the great web of life we are all woven out of each other. So, even granting inequality at one level, at the same time at some more basic place we are one and equal, each created out of the other. The liberal religious way which is enshrined in this political document is that we are precious individuals, all children of the same mother. That’s what those words “all are created equal” point to. And, I suggest, from this flows all sorts of consequences. Last week I spoke of what this means in the area of simple civil rights for gay and lesbian people.

Today, I want to spend the balance of my time exploring a little what all this might mean beyond our borders in this time of globalization. I did a web search using the terms globalization, Unitarian and sermon and turned up, among others, reflections by three UU ministers I particularly admire, David Herndon, Thomas Mikelson and Richard Gilbert. Intriguingly, all three of these imminent UU thinkers used New York Times Pulitzer Prize winning reporter Thomas Friedman’s book The Lexis and the Olive Tree as their touchstone for a consideration of globalization. An important book, I think, for those hoping to sort out at least a little the good and the ill that marks the emerging phenomenon that is named globalization.

Richard Gilbert opened his sermon with what has become a hoary old story featuring Bill Clinton, Bill Gates, the Dalai Lama and a hippie backpacker. Probably you’ve heard it. But, let’s have another go at it and see how it might be useful here. These four were in an airplane that was spinning out of control. The problem was there were only three parachutes.

Clinton declared, “I’m leader of the free-world (sort of dates this story), so I’d better take one of those parachutes. He grabs it and jumps. Next Bill Gates states, “I’m the smartest man in the world, so I better take one of those chutes, too.” He does and jumps. The Dalai Lama looks at the hippie and says “I’m an old man. You have your life ahead of you, so you take the last parachute.” The hippie replies, “Chill, man. The smartest dude in the world just jumped out of the airplane with my backpack.” I think this story dates from the eighties, at the very latest the mid-nineties, and the amazing work that the Gates Foundation has undertaken was not yet really happening.

Still, there is an image here that speaks to the problems at hand and how we might approach them. Richard Gilbert explains how “here we have a parable of globalization – the conflict of politics and economics, religion and humanity. Bill Clinton represents the power of politics in a world in which the US is the only superpower. Bill Gates embodies the triumph of the free market over all other economic forms, and its potential hazards. The Dalai Lama symbolizes the altruistic spirit of religion – most often missing in our haste to globalize the world. The hippie back-packer is a by-stander, but with a serious stake in all that is happening.” Not a bad summation of the situation, I think. And of the dangers, and of who will get those last two parachutes.

We are in a time where the forces that birthed in the west and particularly here in North America and especially in the United States are overtaking the entire world. Thomas Friedman provides another image to help us think about what it all is, and how we are going to deal with it; the source of the title for his book, The Lexus and the Olive Tree. It came to him while riding a bullet train in Japan. Half the world, it occurred to Friedman, was, is intent on building a better Lexus, obsessed with “modernizing, streamlining and privatizing their economies in order to thrive in the system of globalization.” While the other half is focused on what Friedman calls olive trees. “They represent everything that roots us, anchors us, identifies us in this world – whether it belongs to a family, a community, a tribe, a nation, a religion, or, most of all, a place called home.”

Don’t think there is a lot of choice in whether we’re going to globalize. It’s here. And it’s not going away. The only question really is how are we going to deal with it. Truthfully we can’t even simply abandon ourselves to it in its secular glory, questing after success and fortune and let the devil take the hindmost. Because the urge to the olive tree, to something deeper than simply the economics of it all will intrude; will come to the fore and give value and moral content to our globalized lives.

The real question is whose olive grove will prevail? Right now we’re seeing the first direct challenge to unrestrained markets and the commoditization of humanity and the world arising in the Middle East. Islam, particularly Islamic Fundamentalism has seen the danger and has arisen in response, in reaction; and offers an olive grove. Here at home our own forms of Christian Fundamentalism are contending to be the olive grove; also offering visions of value and moral content. There are others, as well. The vision of the Roman Catholic Church is another olive grove. And I suspect in the coming decades Catholic voices from the Third World will increasingly be heard.

Now, here I’m going to make an assertion. Fundamentalist and capital “O” Orthodox visions, by whatever name, and appealing to whatever divinity, I suggest, while doubtless containing some truth, even some beauty, are simply not rooted in the real world, in encountering the true mystery of what we are. They are essentially reactive and call us to narrow visions that deny our full possibility.

But, fortunately, there is another vision, another grove, one that truly contains life-giving waters and authentic nourishment. And it is that vision, that olive grove to which I call us on this day. I call us to remember the birthing of this nation and those mysterious and compelling words about all of us being born equal. I call us to continue to parse out the meaning of those words in the ways we are, as precious individuals, woven out of common stuff, our genuine mutuality, our profound interdependence. Here is a grove that contains authentic nourishment. Here is a message the peoples of the world need to hear. And, I believe, we should be shouting this message from the rooftops.

Actually, I want to pause at this spot. I think it’s time for congregational reflections. Where do you stand in all this? What do you think about our great American dream and how it might in fact be informed by our liberal spiritual way, and maybe even be the divine whispering hope to a hurting world? What do you think of the possibilities and dangers of globalization and how we might meet it? What do you think of that Lexus? And of that olive grove?

Congregational Reflections

Richard Gilbert draws upon a parable retold by another thinker I admire, Amitai Etzioni, “Two rabbinical students were debating when exactly the day begins. One claimed that the day started when a person could see a tree in the distance, and could tell if it were an oak or a fig. ‘No,’ the other replied, ‘the day begins when you see an animal in the distance and can determine if it is a sheep or a goat.’ The two students argued strenuously, and then decided to consult a rabbi. ‘You both have it wrong,’ the rabbi answered. ‘When you see a man in the distance, and you cannot tell if he is an Israeli or a Palestinian, but you are willing to claim him your brother, and when you see a woman in the distance and you cannot tell whether she is a Jew or a Muslim, but you are willing to call her sister, that is when the day begins.’”

Amen.