THOSE WHO EXPECT NO LOVE Reflections on Political Cartoons, Fundamentalism and a Way Through
19 February 2006
James Ishmael Ford

Text
Gather up
In the arms of your pity
The sick, the depraved,
The desperate, the tired,
All the scum
Of our weary city
Gather up
In the arms of your pity.
Gather up
In the arms of your love –
Those who expect
No love from above.
Langston Hughes

Today I want to explore, if just a little, the “why” of the violent reactions to those anti-Islamic cartoons first published in Denmark last September; demonstrations, riots and now murder that continues around the world. And with a consideration of that “why,” then to reflect a little on how we might respond. Of course, as I have come to understand the workings of the world, it is a rare event which has a single cause. With events as large as this it is probably impossible to tease out one thing or even two that can accurately be called the “reason it is happening.”

That acknowledged, I do see one very large thread within these events which I have begun to tease out, which I’ve thought a lot about, and which I want to reflect upon today. I want to explore the nature of alienation. I’m going to assert how the experience of alienation, as I think most here already know, is in fact pretty common among human beings. I suggest what we’re experiencing in these current events is rooted in a profound sense of alienation. I’m going to analyze this a bit. And then I’m going to point to some alternatives that I think might prove useful as we consider our place in the world.

As I launch into this I need to mention how over the last couple of years I’ve been reading lots of sermons, mostly Unitarian Universalist. The preachers I like to go back to tend to fill their sermons with personal anecdotes. They also seem to have an endless well from which they draw their stories. Sadly, as I look at my sermons, I seem to draw upon three or four anecdotes and thrash and hash them out till there’s pretty much nothing left. Well, I’m going back to one of those today, although you may be relieved to know I suspect there aren’t many more applications I can draw upon from it.

So here’s the anecdote, perhaps the last time; from a General Assembly, our denomination’s annual convention a couple of years ago. It was in the run up to the publication of the Commission on Appraisal’s study Engaging Our Theological Diversity. As part of their study they did focus groups with our various theological subsets, the largest of which, I think, are the UU Christians, UU Jews, UU Humanists, UU Pagans and UU Buddhists. I had the pleasure of being in the UU Buddhist focus group. Toward the end of GA, as we call the convention, one of the members of the Commission, and I, ran into each other in a hall. She said she thought I’d like to know something that came out of the various interviews. Turns out, she observed, that a common thread to the interviews was how each group felt marginalized. Except, she noted, the Buddhists.

Now, I’m not telling this to hold up how wonderful the Buddhists are. Even if I think that might be the case. Rather, I’m holding up the fact that human beings tend to feel marginalized, alienated, separated from others. And, there is an “and” here. And, this experience of alienation can, in some very real ways, be overcome. Ultimately, today’s sermon is about hope.

I’ve come to believe this experience of alienation, that is not being native, not belonging; is a primary human experience. It has to do with the walls of separation we all feel. It is birthed in every slight and hurt we experience, which becomes a deposit in some psychic bank account that draws a very heavy interest. Sometimes the slights are small; sometimes they’re terrible and continuous. The emotional range is from miffed to murder. In my own life one of those accounts has to do with class. As many here know (as I said, I only have three or four personal anecdotes) I was born into the American underclass. My grandmother was a maid, my father a petty criminal who in later years bounced from one bar tending job to another. More than once Christmas happened because of the local fire station. Even though somewhere along the line I became Middle Class (and I wrote this with a capital “M” and a capital “C.”), I’m acutely aware of how fragile this condition is; and it informs, and often poisons, my thoughts.

As I said, the inspiration for this reflection comes from the publication of those cartoons and the astonishing repercussions roiling throughout the Islamic world. I’ve also begun to notice some sense of counter-alienation, if that can be a real term; how many western observers, at least at the personal conversational level, note how the use of anti-Semitic and violently anti-western cartoons are embarrassingly common throughout the Muslim world. And it’s true. We are each of us cut off from the other, each seeing the other as dangerous.

Of course some of us are more dangerous than others. Another of the threads that make alienation has to do with power. Someone from the underclass notices what the upper classes are doing, while those in the upper classes think everything is normal. I can’t help but connect this phenomenon with the racial divide over the O. J. Simpson murder trial. The overwhelming majority of us who were white saw this case pretty open and shut. Simpson is a murderer. The overwhelming majority of us who were black saw a frame job. That sense of separation we all feel, that marks us as individuals, also feeds into our communities, and if a community feels itself marginalized long enough, it is as if a sense of alienation becomes a national characteristic.

Specifically for the Islamic world, a part of the world once one of the principal centers of intellectual as well as spiritual vitality is now, frankly, if it weren’t for oil, a backwater on the world scene. Another critical point: Much of the Islamic world spent many many years under the yoke of European imperialism. It’s so hard for us, the beneficiaries of that imperialism, to understand what that means. All that nastiness took place, for us, so long ago. At least for most of us. But that historic fact informs all of us in ways we barely notice, at least until something happens and we see how we react. Of course the great controversy birthed at the end of the Second World War, the creation of the state of Israel and the dispossession of the Palestinian people is, for the Islamic world, simply the continuation of European imperialism. It’s not the past. It’s the present. I can’t get that image out of my mind, where Rabbi Michael Lerner described a man jumping out of a burning building, only to fall on another man, breaking his back.

From where I sit Israel and Palestine are two nations, each with valid rights to claim. Israelis feel themselves an island in a sea of hostility, surrounded by people who wish their extermination. And they’re right. For much of the Islamic world, the sense of bitterness and suppression are a rage that boils, usually just beneath the surface; but which takes only the slightest event to burst forth, a raging, hot, flood. As we see today.

Today. Today is Sunday. We find ourselves within a community of faith. So, I want to shift the focus here from personal and national experiences of alienation to how this feeling of alienation plays out in religion. One of the great dangers facing us today is, I believe, a primary religious consequence of alienation: Fundamentalism. I think we need to unpack that word, just a little. The term was introduced in the early twentieth century referring to a new school within Christianity. By the end of the twentieth century sociologists had picked up the term to signify a phenomenon within possibly all modern religions. The upshot is there are a number of definitions attached to the word fundamentalism.

Recently I’ve become a fan of Wikipedia, the web based free encyclopedia. It’s an interesting experiment in nearly totally free access to editing copy. The Wikipedia article on “Fundamentalism” observes how “some refer to any literal-minded or intolerant philosophy with pretense of being the sole source of objective truth, as fundamentalist...” This is very popular usage. Here anyone who is intolerant is a fundamentalist. Hence uses like “Liberal fundamentalist,” “Humanist fundamentalist” or “Unitarian Universalist fundamentalist.” I believe this is a poor usage; that dissipates one of the most important phenomena in today’s world. Intolerance needs to be noted, and when it arises within our own hearts, needs to be addressed. But, fundamentalism isn’t really about intolerance.

Within that article is the vastly more important use, “fundamentalism is a modern phenomenon, characterized by a sense of embattled alienation in the midst of the surrounding culture, even where the culture may be nominally influenced by the adherent’s religion.” I would further refine this definition for fundamentalism as a religious response to a sense of alienation within culture, and specifically as a type of religious response to modernity. I need to underscore two points. First fundamentalism is about religion. And second, fundamentalism is about alienation. Personally, I’m most concerned about Christian Fundamentalism. But maybe we can see how dangerous the fundamentalist response is when we have a little distance on it, say as Islamic Fundamentalism.

Here we encounter religion distilled as alienation. Here we find our sense of separation sanctified. This is something terrible. It is a poison running through contemporary Islamic cultures; it is a poison running through American Christian culture. It is a tightening of a sense of self, a clutching at a dream of identity that is at core false. And, if it is not addressed, it threatens the whole world.

In the few minutes we have left here, the question needs to be, as people of faith, how do we respond to the sense of alienation that births riots, murder and fundamentalism? I’ve already suggested there are multiple causes for events. So, perhaps it should follow there needs be multiple responses. I want to underscore this point. As an example, as much as I want to be a pacifist, as much as I’m concerned with unintended consequences and how wars seem always to turn out badly; I think sometimes we do need to take stands, and sometimes those stands mean armed defense.

But if we wish to mitigate the suffering, whatever the range of our responses, it can’t simply be about guns. And here is where our liberal faith offers us something. I’m not suggesting in what follows any specific course of action, but I am pointing to a whole approach, a style, if you will, that can be very important.

Without a doubt when we encounter hatred, fear is a very natural response. The desire to suppress is another. I believe much of our national policy is based in those two emotions. And I think they’re doomed to failure, because they don’t address in any way the sense of alienation that weaves through these current events. Or, more accurately, they simply feed from the same poison, that false sense of separation.

Of course there are deep and true ways in which we are each of us different, and separate. But that’s not the whole of the truth. And if we embrace our separation as primary, we’re all lost. Then it’s tit for tat, an eye for an eye, and surely eventually we will all be blind, or dead.

So, here’s a dangerous suggestion. It acknowledges we may have to take many different actions to deal with specific concerns, particularly at the “geo-political” level. But, there is a stance we can embrace that gives us a vastly better chance of succeeding. And that is, how about following our intuition of essential connectedness? How about taking that image of the interdependent web, not as a lovely metaphor, but as the deep truth of our lives? How about noticing in the last analysis there is no other? As we come to the end of this reflection I’m going to throw a fistful of quotes at you. I suggest they point the way, if, that is, we allow ourselves to be open to their healing message.

One of my theological heroes, or I guess it’s heroines, is Rosemary Radford Reuther, professor emerita at the Pacific School of Religion. In her 1983 blockbuster theological investigation (published by our very own UU Beacon Press) Sexism and God-Talk she unpacked just what the divine might actually be. Trying to push the boundaries, she wrote of “God/ess, spelled g, o, d, then a slash, e, s, s. I prefer web or interconnectedness to point to this deep experience that unites us all. I hope she wouldn’t mind my quoting her substituting interconnectedness and intimacy for God/ess.

“(Knowing our interconnectedness) liberates us from this false and alienated world, not by an endless continuation of the same trajectory of alienation but as a constant break-through that points us to new possibilities that are, at the same time, the re-grounding of ourselves in the primordial matrix, the original harmony. The liberating encounter with (intimacy) is always an encounter with our authentic selves resurrected from underneath the alienated self. It is not experienced against, but in and through relationships, healing our broken relations with our bodies, with other people, with nature.”

This reaching out to the other as one of ours might seem the hardest thing in the world. It is a call to love the other as one’s self. But it is the secret to our healing. And it’s nowhere near as hard as it may seem. Let’s revisit the text for today, from Langston Hughes’ Litany, “Gather up/In the arms of your pity/The sick, the depraved,/The desperate, the tired,/All the scum/Of our weary city/Gather up/In the arms of your pity./Gather up/In the arms of your love –/Those who expect/No love from above.”

My current tag line in my email account is that quote from Meister Eckhardt.

"The eye through which I see God is the same eye through which God sees me; my eye and God's eye are one eye, one seeing, one knowing, one love." And, last, from my old friend and colleague David Weinstein, who once observed the “…fact (is) we are hopelessly, joyfully entangled with each other, each of us, a different season of the other.”

In this shift, this small shift, from grasping to openness, from indulging our isolation to embracing our connections, I believe, lays the salvation of the world. May we make this our sacred work.

Amen.