Ordination Sermon delivered by Rev. Dr. Rebecca Ann Parker
April 21, 2012
Unity Church—Unitarian
St. Paul, Minnesota
There were no mirrors in my Nana’s house
No mirrors in my Nana’s house
And the beauty I saw in everything was in her eyes
Like the rising of the sun
The world outside was a magical place
I only knew love, I never knew hate
And the beauty in everything was in her eyes
Like the rising of the sun
I begin with these song words from Ysaye Barnwell of Sweet Honey in the Rock. She sings of a grandmother whose love enabled a black girl child to know the beauty of the world and the beauty of herself even while growing up in material poverty in a world the denied and defiled that child’s beauty, in a world where then as now, black children with Skittles in one hand and iced tea in the other are hunted down by those who cannot see them.
This afternoon, we joyfully ordain Leon Dunkley to the Unitarian Universalist ministry. As we do, I invite us to remember the realities of suffering and injustice in our world and to contemplate the spiritual importance of beauty and the ministerial power of the artist. Why this theme? [laughter] It is obvious, of course. Today, we ordain an artist to the ministry. Among those who lead us, whose ministry shows us the way, we especially need the presence of artists.
Artists unveil life’s beauty and they expose the ways and the places in which beauty is defaced. Artists call us to reverence and to prophetic outrage. They testify to the sacred and they document the profane. They re-sensitize our desensitized minds and hearts and they call us to a higher ethic, one that faces into what is and is guided by a tangible taste of what can be.
The African theologian, Augustine…[laughter]…in one of his more brilliant and persuasive moves, turned at the end of his life to the theme of beauty. Beauty became for him, the face of God. Augustine taught that the rhythms of music and poetry were echoes or analogues for the presence of divine creativity and grace at work in the heart of all existence. By feeling and hearing music and poetry, the sound of the cello, the voice of two singing in harmony, the textures of the guitar, by feeling and hearing these things, the soul could be drawn back into right relationship with the holy. Desire could be awakened by delight. “And the meaning of desire,” Augustine said, “was that all longing, all restlessness ultimately led us home to God.”
Listen to these words from Augustine.
Oh, beauty, too late have I loved you.
You were with me but I was not with you.
Yet, you cried out and broke through my deafness.
You showered your brilliant light on me and dispelled my blindness.
Now, I have tasted you and I hunger and thirst for more.
I burn with desire for your embraces.
Unquote.
This is the ministry of the artist—to draw us to God, to the sacred in our selves and in our world, by awakening in us the rhythm and feel, the melody and harmony, the intensity, the sweetness, the soft-hard, the sweet-bitter, dissonant-dissolved jazz of life, the beauty of God. The music of that beauty, Augustine and other great mystics have taught, is always sounding. It is always with us. The only question is: Are we with it?
At the end of his essay, The Fire Next Time, after exposing the dynamics of racism, the ways humanity is beaten down and torn apart by the devastating exploitations of racial injustice, James Baldwin says, quote, “The question remains, What shall we do with all this beauty?”
Unquote.
Baldwin evokes the persistence and the resilience of beauty, the face of the holy shining through human beings even in the midst of all that we do that defaces one another. And finally, Baldwin’s prophetic call, like the prophetic call of so many artists, is not a call to outrage and pity which merely demands that the privileged become the paternalistic. It is a call, instead, to all of us to come together before the sacred altar of beauty and be transformed by the gentle and fierce insistence that that which is lovely not be defiled.
Macrena, the 4th-century Christian theologian wrote, quote, “God creates life. Life beholds beauty. Beauty begets love. Love is the life of God.”
Unquote.
There is a circular flow in this affirmation. It evokes movement from seeing beauty to responding with love, to come full circle home to the sacred source of all life.
In a Hindu text, Brahman speaks, “I am the self that swell in the heart of every mortal creature. I am the radiant sun among the light-givers. I am the sustainer. My face is everywhere.”
Unquote.
And Native American spirituality speaks of walking in beauty.
Beauty behind us.
Beauty before us.
Beauty above us.
Beauty beneath us.
Beauty within us.
When I was a small child, it was my Nana, my grandmother, who first taught me to sense the presence of the sacred shining out from the faces of human beings around me and from all living things. During summers of Wollochet Bay, which is a little estuary on Puget Sound where my grandparents had a log cabin, my grandmother took me on long walks through the woods. In the buzzing green and gold heat of August, while the fragrance of ripening blackberries dripped like honey in the air and the red wing blackbird sang from his perch in the reedy bank, my grandmother would carefully kneel beside me and teach me to observe the distinct features of all of the wayside plants and flowers.
“This is the monkey flower,” she’d say, showing me the swaying fragile fronds tipped with blossoms that looked like orchids. "This is the red-huckleberry and this is the Saskatoon berry. And here is the Cascara tree. Feel its smooth bark. It’s good for medicine. And here is the ginger root, growing in the shade of the Vine Maple. And here is the Wild Mint.”
She’d pinch a small stem of the Mint and place it in my hands and instruct me, “Taste the leaves. And feel how the stem is square. All of the members of the Mint family have square stems. See if you can find the other Mint family members here along the stream—the purple horse nettle, the self-heal plant."
Through my grandmother’s eyes and touch and words, I came to know the woods as a place of beauty—each thing with its own face, its own character and qualities. All of it intertwined in the tangled bank among the stream’s microhabitats within the forest canopy depended on the much of the earth, the sun and the rain and the interpenetrating air. I came to know myself, too, as loved and called to love.
There were no mirrors in my Nana’s house
No mirrors in my Nana’s house
And the beauty I saw in everything was in her eyes
Seeing the beauty of the Earth and feeling the interdependent web of existence of which we are all a part matters now more than ever. Theologian Norman Wirzba in his book, The Paradise of God, reminds us, quote, "Rates of soil erosion, water and air pollution, global warming, garbage production, species extinction, suburban sprawl, ozone depletion, deforestation, desertification as well as class envy, worker anxiety, stress, depression and boredom all indicate a narrowing of our ability to appreciate the broad natural and social context necessary for life. In the past,” he says, “we could readily abandon the places we wasted and find new territory to occupy. Creation’s fund, we might say, seemed inexhaustible and infinitely forgiving of our careless lives, but no longer.”
Unquote.
How do we face into the devastation of the natural world and human world, interdependent with that natural world? I suggest to you that what we need in order to address the threats is not despair, not anxiety, but an upwelling of a greater more passionate love for beauty, love for the earth and for one another. We must see the beauty to love the beauty and we must love the beauty to save and savor and protect it.
Elaine Scary, in her essay on beauty, says, quote, “Beauty is life-saving. Augustine,” she mentions, “described it as a plank amid the waves of the sea. Beauty quickens. It adrenalizes. It makes the heart beat fast. It makes life more vivid, animated, living, worth living. It comes to us through no work of our own and then leaves us prepared to undergo a giant labor.”
Unquote.
The labor of love for this earth and for one another requires us to go whatever distance is necessary to serve the creation with responsible devotion and wise care and to defend one another against dehumanizing acts of prejudice and injustice.
Recently, I watched documentary footage taken by a current Starr King student, Suzie Spangenburg. Suzie filmed Unitarian Universalists in Arizona two summers ago who answered the call to gather in Arizona to protest the implementation of SB 1070. People of faith and conscience could not stay of the sidelines. When children as young as six have been and are being detained, when sheriff’s deputies are taking the law into their own hands and conducting illegal raids, when families are being broken up in round-ups and when people with economic interests in the privatization of prisons and ties to white supremacist groups are behind the legislative efforts in states all across our nation that aim to imprison undocumented workers and turn them into slave labor.
People of faith from our communities and many others have been resisting these moves.
Katrina St. Clair, a UU from Tucson, Arizona, was among those who gathered with UUA president Peter Morales in Arizona and were jailed for protesting. Suzie documented in film this story.
While detained, Katrina was in a cell close to a group of undocumented Latina women who were scheduled to be deported back to Mexico or sent to prison. The night in jail was long. The detainees had no water. The air conditioning was turned down to 50˚. There were no blankets. There was no place to lie down except on the cement floor. The lights were kept on all the time. Guards banged the steel doors to keep everyone awake.
Across the distance between the cells, Katrina and others in their yellow, Standing on the Side of Love T-shirts—Have you got those here?—in their yellow, Standing on the Side of Love T-shirts signaled their support for the detainees. Making eye-contact with one of the Latina women, Katrina gestured, “I see you.” The woman nodded. “I love you,” Katrina continued to gesture. The woman’s eyes filled with tears.
“Sí, se pueda!” she mouthed, Caesar Chavez’s motto. “Yes, we can.”
When morning came, the yellow, Standing on the Side of Love protesters were released. They were relieved to be free from the traumatizing prison conditions but their hearts were torn by the knowledge that the undocumented immigrants had little chance of release. As Katrina was led away from the cell, she walked backwards in order to keep eye contact with the women still jailed. The woman she had connected with the night before pressed her face to the bars. As the distance between the two women grew, the imprisoned woman gestured to Katrina, “I see you. I love you. Sí, se pueda! Sí, se pueda!!” And the women mouthed the words together. Yes, we can!!
There were no mirrors in my Nana’s house
No mirrors in my Nana’s house
And the beauty I saw in everything was in her eyes
Like the rising of the sun
This is our calling today, to see life’s beauty and one another’s beauty and to insist that the bonds of connection with all of life not be broken. This is our calling, to answer James Baldwin’s question, What do we do with all this beauty? To answer it with our lives, with our yes!, we will love one another. We will love this world.
Leon, as we ordain you today, I give thanks for your gifts as an artist and I rejoice in the ministry you bring to us, that it is the ministry of the artist. Show us our beauty. Show us life’s beauty. Teach us to respond with ethical action, with fierce love, with justice-making, with courage, with holy delight.
Bring us home to God.
Amen.