Requiem and Reawakening
When I was in the 5th grade, I finally made it to the pinnacle of leadership at Beverly Hills Elementary School—I was named to the safety patrol. As a crossing guard, I was responsible for ensuring the safety of all the younger children needing to cross the road to get to school. And, since I was assigned to the busiest intersection right in front of the main entrance, I even had the most coveted position! I thought I had made it as the chief safety patrol.
Except… I wasn’t the chief at all. My classmates who were assigned to other crosswalks must have heard me bragging about my first-class assignment, because they went to the principal to confirm that indeed I was not the chief safety patrol, but merely one among many equal safety patrol students. I was quickly brought down a notch and put into my place. What a let-down to be told I wasn’t superior, or exceptional after all. I was just one in a crowd. That was the first in a series of painful lessons that life is not all about me!
Our mainstream culture tells us that we have to be exceptional to matter. And that to matter, we have to do great things. And that if you aren’t exceptionally terrific, you are likely exceptionally appalling. Those are pretty much the choices. On this All Saints’ Day, I invite us to reflect on what makes a saint, and what makes a rotten apple, and what happens to all the others in between.
We in the UCC traditionally celebrate All Saints’ Day on Nov 1 as a means of honoring those good people who have gone before us.
The ancient church rather made saints into an elite group of “super heroes.” The steps to becoming a saint in the Catholic Church are fairly daunting. Being a “servant of God” seems OK. But then, you need proof of a “heroic virtue,” miracles attributed to you, and even better—martyrdom.
Among these super heroes in Catholicism are the likes of St Francis of Assisi, who renounced material goods and embraced poverty, and who became the patron saint for the environment and animals. St Patrick brought Christianity to Ireland, and St Anthony, a miracle worker, was the patron saint of lost things. St. Hildegaard was a poet and physician who persisted in rebuking princes, bishops and popes throughout her life. Hildegaard is the patron saint of ecology, musicians, and writers. St. Theresa of Calcutta devoted her life to serving “the poorest of the poor” in India, all the while enduring a very long dark night of the soul. And St Kateri Tekakwitha, daughter of a Mohawk chief, endured much suffering and ridicule, but is remembered for her sense of joy and humor.
My least favorite saints, because of the centuries of harm their writings caused women, would be St. Augustine and St. Thomas Aquinas. But that is a sermon for another day.
The Church has established special feast days to honor the “big” saints, like some of those just mentioned. But Nov. 1 was set aside to remember also the “smaller” saints, that perhaps were never known as saints except to God and their closest circles. In typical fashion, though, the traditional Church has dichotomized sainthood: basically, you fall into one of two categories—you are a saint, one of God’s chosen, or you are a sinner, outside the fold, and doomed.
Luckily, being martyred is no longer a prerequisite for being named a saint. Even more fortunately, progressive people of faith might use a different definition for sainthood altogether. Of course no one really fits into the false dichotomy of being 100% saint or 100% apostate. Most of us are more on a spectrum of virtue and vice. And outside the evangelical tradition we are free to choose a more open and expansive belief about who is welcomed at the table and who is left out in the cold. In fact, Jesus really called into question the very idea of leaving anyone out in the cold—welcoming the “sinner” and befriending the “unclean” as he did. So perhaps we are all saints and we are all sinners at the same time.
As I reflect on this tumultuous year of 2020, I am reminded of some big and small saints who have died this year. Two of the most renown and revolutionary would be US Representative John Lewis and Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg.
John Lewis, known as the “Conscience of the US Congress,” dedicated his entire life to protecting human rights and civil liberties. One of the original 13 Freedom Riders, Lewis organized student activists, served as a keynote speaker at the 1963 March on Washington, and led 600 peaceful activists across the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma, Alabama in 1965. Despite more than 40 arrests, attacks, and injuries, he remained committed to the philosophy of nonviolence throughout his life. He served as a Georgia representative to the US Congress for 33 years. He died on July 17 this year.
Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg died Sept. 18 after serving on the US Supreme Court for 27 years. An outspoken voice for gender equality, Ginsburg’s groundbreaking case Moritz v. IRS, was the first to find that gender discrimination is a violation of the U.S. Constitution. Ginsburg authored the majority opinion in striking down exclusively male military academies, and she became the most liberal justice on the Supreme Court.
In addition to these icons, a lot of average Americans have died this year too. In fact, in many ways 2020 has become one interminably long Requiem. More than a million people worldwide have died from the Coronavirus since it first surfaced, including 200,000 people in the US who have lost their lives this year. These are not just numbers. We have known and loved some of these people—they were siblings or friends of ours.
At the same time, African Americans, who were more adversely impacted by the pandemic than their white counterparts, were also being killed by white police officers at horrifying rates. Breonna Taylor, a 26 year old African American woman asleep in her Louisville, Ky., apartment on March 13, was shot dead by police who forced entry into her home and gunned her down. Daniel Prude, an African American man with a known mental health history, was held to the ground by police until he died on March 23. And on May 25, 46-year-old George Floyd was arrested for allegedly using a counterfeit bill at a convenience store. Police officers held him down with a knee to his neck, while he repeatedly told them he couldn’t breathe. According to CBS News, police killed 164 black folx in the US in the first eight months of 2020.
All of this is occurring within the context of a volatile and polarizing election season in our country, where the election is being framed as a fight for the “soul” of America. This is not a new concept. Everyone from Martin Luther King Jr and Frederick Douglass in the past, to current-day Joe Biden, Donald Trump, and Franklin Graham have voiced that “the soul of the nation” is at stake. Clearly, that fight has been going on for a long time, and some even feel it has already been lost. Indeed, there is a lot of despair and hopelessness among those who believe the Great American Experiment has failed.
On this All Saints’ Day, as we contemplate the soul of the nation, and exercise our right and responsibility to vote, I’ve been thinking about the relative saintliness, or lack thereof, of our country. Many of us see our election season as a clear choice between the saint and the sinner, the good or the evil. But how do we see our country for what it really is? Like a human being so focused on the person she wants to be rather than the person she really is, how do we as a country begin to develop an understanding of ourselves that is more reality based, and that accounts for the ills and atrocities of our past as well as our successes and celebrations?
We might say that the United States has a self-perception problem, and that Christian principles have played a role in developing that problem. Thanks to a concept known as American Exceptionalism—somehow, this country believes it is unique among nations, and superior, and unstoppable. Therefore, we deserve to live the American dream, and lead the free world, and indeed all the world. We are the greatest country on earth. This idea may have spun out of the Doctrine of Discovery, dating back to the 13th century, which specified that any land not under the sovereignty of a Christian ruler, could be taken and owned on behalf of God. Our country did exactly that, and the doctrine of discovery is still woven into our country’s legal system, cited by the Supreme Court as recently as 2005, and even by our beloved RBG, as a reason to deny rights to indigenous groups. Add to that the doctrine of manifest destiny, and you have the makings of a country that believes whatever it does is righteous and superior, and blessed by God for success.
With founding philosophies like these, it’s no wonder we have problems.
But of course many of us are far from thinking too highly of ourselves as a country. Instead, we focus exclusively on the flaws. We see a country that failed to live up to its values from the moment the ink was applied to the parchment by the founding fathers … pronouncing that all men were created equal, after taking over a land that belonged to someone else, and while simultaneously enslaving, torturing, and murdering people of color with no regard for their personhood, much less their equality. The United States was built on a Caste system that that served as a blueprint for Nazi Germany.
However, dismissing the United States as a failed experiment just leads us from one extreme to the other—seeing a dichotomy again, either the perfect and the best, or the worst at the bottom of the heap. Finding hope as we face an electrified election season in a tragically divided nation invites us to look deeper at our own faith. If we truly believe that redemption is possible for us as individuals, might that even be true for a group of people, and for a nation? Even as flawed as we are? And really, what better option is there than to keep working for reform or revolution? We cannot give in and give up, nullifying the sacrifices of the saints who came before us. Becoming an ex-patriot or giving up on “a more perfect union” is a luxury for the privileged. I hope we stick it out to support our neighbors who have less voice and less choice than we do.
Many of us have focused all our spurn over the past four years onto a leader who enflames hatred, fosters discord, and seems to embody the worst of our country. But he is not the sum total of what is wrong with the United States. I look at him more as a symptom than a cause. And one good thing that has come out of the past four years is that we can see more clearly now who we really are, with the failings and flaws displayed from the highest office in the land. These failings are much easier to deal with when we can’t deny that they exist.
During his presidential bid, Sen. Cory Booker said, “If America hasn’t broken your heart, you don’t love [America] enough.” I believe our broken hearts are an indication of our investment in and our vision for what our country could be. We don’t feel heartbroken when there was no love to start with.
The USA has strong ideals, even if they haven’t ever come to full fruition, and even if they seem currently in jeopardy: Freedom of speech, religion, the press; a free and fair election process; a democracy of the people, by the people, for the people. I realize that too often, I am guilty of scoffing at the hypocrisy, but perhaps it would do more good for me to channel my anger and frustrations toward doing whatever I can to make those ideals more a reality. There are positive signs of change, if we look for them. We are trying to “get woke” to the injustices and make corrections. People of color and indigenous people are showing us the way. Protests are gaining momentum. Intersectionality is creating strong alliances, giving all kinds of marginalized people a greater voice and driving the US closer to its ideals.
Yes, our nation is deeply flawed. But it is also a young nation, finding its way. It is a work in progress, just like you and me. Sometimes we get taken down a notch, and learn hard lessons.
And. The story isn’t finished. We are writing the current chapter by our participation in the history that is being lived out now. We don’t have to be the super hero or the villain. Most change in history doesn’t happen solely because of an exceptional leader, good or bad. It happens because ordinary people care, or fail to care, and because they do what they can, or they give up. Our job right now, as “ordinary saints,” is not to be perfect. It is to keep going. To get back up again when we make mistakes. To learn from our failures. To keep trying to push ourselves and our country to be better.
Safety patrols who think they are the chief don’t have to be perfect to matter. Even though my self-perceptions were off, I still helped keep lots of kindergarteners safe throughout my 5th grade year. I learned important lessons about being part of a team rather than trying to shine brighter than everyone else. In much the same way, our ancestors didn’t have to be perfect for us to remember them fondly and to have learned important lessons from them. And, finally, our country doesn’t have to be perfect for us to still claim it and invest in it and work for it to be the country we need it to become. That is really what a true democracy is all about.
So whatever happens this week, know that the story isn’t over yet. Lean on trusted friends for support, and allow your best self to show up. You are standing on the shoulders of saints gone before you, and you are helping write the next chapter, however imperfect it may be. You don’t have to be Mother Theresa, or John Lewis, or St. Hildegaard. Just be your best self. The supporting cast is essential to the story’s success. May we play our role with integrity and justice and hope.
Amen.
