Liturgical Materials for Sunday the 28th of February, 2001
Mark Belletini, Minister First Unitarian Universalist Church of Columbus, Ohio
Opening Words [Next] [back to top]
We are here
to do as we always do this day,
to be together in peace as we celebrate life.
Here, amid the timeless structures
of music, word and silence
we are free to be who we are
and equally free to grow deeper in spirit,
deeper in understanding, and deeper in love, and
(assembly) And may our reason and passion keep us true to ourselves,
true to each other,
and true to those shared visions of what we might together become…
The Great Silence
[Next] [back
to top]
Ah, such a week!
So many colds and flue swelling
in people's torsos that schools close
and even the choir and congregation are diminished.
Coughs and fevers, sneezes and sickness…
Ah, such a week!
Rain and flurries and gray clouds and sun
in a strange salad of weather
that tugged at moods.
Ah, such a week!
Distant bombs echo in my ear,
reverberate in my heart,
in between all the voices that blame and accuse.
Ah, such a week!
Sunday comes as it always does,
after a week of six days.
And with it, a touchstone of silence
that reminds me that everything ends at last,
for the quiet is the one emblem of eternity
that I know of…not sickness, not weather,
not even the echo of bombs.
In the silence, there is room for strength.
In the silence, there are no swift answers.
In the silence, there can be found a deeper reality
than a week of days and moods and change
and conflict. In the silence, a letting go….
(bell sound)
Blest are all those who know in the silence
that they mourn or grieve.
Blest are all those who know in the silence
they rejoice and are glad for life.
Blest are all those who know in the silence
they are alive and mindful of this moment.
Blest are all those who know in the silence they are loved.
Blest are all those who know in the silence
that they struggle to love better today than yesterday.
Please feel free, blest companions, to name
Aloud, or in your heart, those in your lives
who help you to feel blest, fortunate, and loved.
(naming)
De profundis clamavi ad te, Amor; magna est veritas, et praevalet. Ergo rorate coeli, et nubes pluant iustum. Iubilate nunc canticum anticum dona nobis pacem.
From the depths I call out to you, Love; great is truth, which prevails. Therefore let the sky rain its dew, the clouds, their justice. Now sing the ancient canticle, grant us peace.
The First Reading
[Next] [back
to top]
comes from the extraordinary Malcolm X, a brief personal remembrance
from his Autobiography, written in 1964.
I remember one thing that marred this time for me; the movie "Gone With The Wind." When it played in Mason, Michigan I was the only Negro in the the theater, and when Butterfly McQueen went into her act, I felt like crawling under a rug.
The Second
Reading [Next]
[back to top]
comes from Toni Morrison's very first novel, written all the way back
in 1970. Its called The Bluest Eyes and its about a little African American
girl who is ashamed not to have blue eyes.
It had occurred to Pecola some time ago that if her eyes….those eyes that held the pictures and knew the sights….if those eyes of hers were different, that is to say, beautiful, she herself would be different. Each night without fail, she prayed for blue eyes. Fervently for a year she had prayed. Although somewhat discouraged, she was not without hope. To have something as wonderful as that happen would take a long, long time.
Sermon: Confronting Shame [Next] [back to top]
My esteemed colleague David Rankin often used to say that a pulpit could just as easily be called a confessional. He also used to say that it's only the particular and personal that has even the slightest chance of being truly universal. I tend to agree, especially on this morning, as I address the odd but compelling issue of shame.
As many, but certainly not all of you, know, I had a life-partner for over 16 years. We were together in California, from the late 1970's to the early 1990's. I have to say, for the most part, they were wonderful years.
After all, we celebrated so many elaborate holiday dinners with 20 or more good friends gathered round us, year after year. And I'd guess there were at least two hundred movies, plays and operas and such which we attended together in our16 years, and at least a dozen visits from god-children and out-of-state family members. We threw home seders and hand-decorated our Christmas trees. There were summer vacations up in the high Sierra at Anne and Rosemary's place, worship in each other's churches, and all the usual sorts of ordinary domestic work.
We wept in our very different styles as we attended the funerals of our friends, and worked on an AIDS quilt piece together to honor them. I am convinced the two of us had over a hundred silly rituals and songs we sang together, songs and rituals that got us through the week with affection and mutual support.
But it ended. After 16 years, it ended. I was devastated. How I ever preached the Sunday after the Friday when decision to part was finalized, I'll never know. I wrote my congregation a letter about it on the following Monday, and moved out of our loft two weeks later with the help of supportive friends.
I suppose I must have felt the usual run of feelings when such a thing happens. Anger. Disappointment. Regret. Teary grief. Depression. Fear. Even a sense of disbelief, of the spiritual surrealism of it all. But what hit me hardest, and surprised me the most, was the strength of my feelings of shame.
Oh, I didn't realize I was feeling shame at first. I just started by letting in that little voice that told me over and over again I was a failure. Next, my ordinary self-esteem seemed to go over the falls and crashed on the rocks below. Next, I suddenly lost confidence in my abilities. After all, I had not seen the split coming at me, and I felt embarrassed about that. I went through a period of refusing to counsel people who came to me for advice…after all, what could a person like me, who couldn't even see his own divorce coming, possibly have to say to anybody? I imagined the worst of what some people in the wider community were really thinking when they heard about it. "See? See? We knew it. Guys like that never stay together, do they? They have no capacity to commit. The whole lot of them are gutless. We knew it all the time."
I felt humiliated that I had to write letters about it to the church members, tell all my friends, and family.
I felt, in short, ashamed that my committed relationship of 16 years had ended so abruptly.
Yet I can honestly say that not one person, either in the church I served, in my chosen family, or in my blood family, ever offered me anything but the kindest and most tender compassion about this awful event in my life. To be fair, I suppose that's not just because of their love for me, but also, because not one person that I know has avoided either facing such an issue in their own lives, or in the lives of their children, parents, or friends. Divorce is hardly a unique event.
So where did my shame come from? Not from any particular voices of anyone I knew, but rather, from something I would call the Social Voice. This is an Authority conveyed by the media, novels, films, and idle romantic expectations commonly expressed over coffee and at parties. That Social Voice tells me that marriages are not supposed to end. You know how the traditional prayer-book ceremony puts it, a phrase which I would wager will echo in your mind as I remind you of it… To have and to hold in sickness and in health, till death us do part." Death, not divorce.
Now this is a story from my life where shame figured mightily. But I suspect David Rankin is right, and that the particulars of my little life might resonate in yours, whether or not you personally have ever known separation or divorce.
For instance, let's try something.
SHAME ON YOU! (spoken aloud as caustically as possible.)
Did you feel anything? Did you find yourself shrinking away a bit, repulsed? Were you filled with snippets of memories from childhood…or even yesterday?
It's a phrase most of us have heard at sometime or another, I'd wager. Maybe a hundred times or more. And it's a very instructive phrase too, for such a tiny sentence. Let me unpack it a bit.
First, let's look at the middle of the three words. The preposition itself suggests a major insight. It's "Shame ON you. It's not shame WITHIN you. Thus, shame comes from the outside, not the inside. It feels like something lain on your back by someone else.
Second, it's shame on YOU. Not me. You. It's something I can lay on you without you being able to lay anything back on me. Shame is basically a one way street, from me to you.
This makes sense. You see, I do not think that shame is something we are born with. The newborn who cries out, demands, and eliminates whenever and where ever it wants to, is quite literally "shameless."
It doesn't cover its own nakedness with blankets, or ever blush. But somehow, by the time we are adults, we don't cry out so much, and anyone who does is labeled overly-dramatic. We cover our nakedness, most always say, "please" and "thank you" when we want something; and, unless there is a severe medical problem, we can wait till a relatively convenient and private time to go to the bathroom. Shame is thus a learned response, and in its rare, healthier forms, it's clearly related to what many call "civilized behavior."
Third, the phrase is "SHAME on you," not "GUILT on you." Shame and guilt have been so often paired up in English that many of us think they mean mostly the same thing. But they are very, very different.
Guilt is a sudden recognition that you have transgressed a law, a code of conduct, a rule.
Shame is a painful feeling, almost always felt privately in a public setting. Shame is wanting to hide, or disappear. The feeling ranges from a sense of mild embarrassment or a sense of complete cringing humiliation. I think Malcolm X offers a clear picture of this feeling in his autobiography. Seeing the overly ingratiating performance of Butterfly McQueen, and knowing that African Americans would get nowhere in this world with such behavior, even though many white folks unconsciously encourage it, Malcolm says he felt like "crawling under a rug." A most excellent illustration.
Now you could, I suppose, feel shame about feeling guilty, but the two feelings do remain distinct. For example, a young man who is bragging about his sexual prowess to the other guys in the locker room all of a sudden feels guilty that he is treating his own girlfriend like a notch on a wall, and so he stops bragging and swaggering. He stops because he feels guilty on the inside….he has transgressed the rules of fair play and honesty. He has also transgressed his claimed relationship with his girlfriend, whom he genuinely likes. But now he feels shame before his friends that he feels such guilt…as one of "the guys," he somehow got it in his head that he is supposed to swagger and brag. Otherwise, he might not belong to this group of guys. And who doesn't want to belong to some groups somewhere?
Now this young man will not SAY he is ashamed aloud. That would be to lose face. So he may opt for some distraction instead, like suddenly proposing a trip to get some ice cream. If it works, he's lucky. If it does not, he may resort to being suddenly sullen and withdrawing, or even giving in to some irritability toward his fellows.
But perhaps this little story helps you to understand why shame is not the same thing as guilt.
You know, it's interesting. I've heard folks all my life telling me about how the religion of their childhood (almost the worst one of all the religions of the world) was filled with guilt, guilt, guilt. Yet it's funny. When you check the Bible itself, you find the word "guilt" is used only 18 times in all of the Hebrew and Greek scriptures together, and four of those times are bad translations of a Greek word "enochos," which only really means "subject to." Yet the world "shame," in precise translation, is found over 160 times in those testaments. And I dare say it's found quite a few more times in disguise.
Shame you see, rarely shows up at the party dressed as itself. It wears disguises in a perpetual costume ball. Sometimes anger, sometimes depression, or anxiety; sometimes a feeling of incompetence or unworthiness, a feeling of failure…even an external expression like extreme messiness may have a partial origin in some deep shame. And certainly, shame most clearly thrives wherever secrets are cultivated. Shame, in fact, is the veritable sunlight which pulls thorny secrets, like weeds, higher and higher into the common air.
Shame, I say, is the basis for a thousand stories in a thousand lives:
A mother is secretly ashamed that her son is left-handed. A brother is quietly ashamed that his younger sister is very obese. A woman is ashamed of her mother's drinking and cursing. A father is secretly ashamed that his eldest son is less than athletic, and his younger son is less than brilliant. An aunt is ashamed that her niece is in a wheel chair. A sister is ashamed that her brother is gay and wishes he wouldn't ever talk about it, or mention his partner-in-life at the supper table during holidays. A parent is ashamed that a son or daughter is losing a job, or not doing well at work. A famous athlete is ashamed that he lost the run. A famous doctor is ashamed that he has been married three times before age 35. A Roman Catholic grandmother is secretly ashamed that her grand-daughter is now an Episcopalian priest. A Unitarian Universalist man is quietly ashamed that his son, raised in the Sunday School of his own church, is now a Mormon Bishop. Suburban, well-to-do parents are ashamed of their son who is serving twenty years in prison. A man is ashamed to put on a bathing suit at the beach because he fears that he will hear comments that he looks like an ape. One woman is ashamed of her small bosom, another that she hates to cook. A ten-year-old is ashamed he cannot play baseball very well. A grandmother is ashamed that her 50-year-old daughter has married a 29-year-old man, a man younger than her eldest grandson. An atheist is ashamed of the mystical experiences of cosmic rapture he has had recently. And I have felt shame for the end of my marriage.
These are every-day examples. But there are even more poignant and life-crushing loads of shame placed on people's backs by the Social Voice. As Toni Morrison points out with complete simplicity, some folks live with shame about their whole being. They are ashamed of their color, their culture, their physical limitations. They are humiliated to be themselves. Pecola wants blue eyes and she prays for them…but that little African American girl is going to be very disappointed in the effectiveness of her prayers, even if she prays a hundred years. Such forms of shame as exemplified by Pecola are produced by the severe cultural perversities in every aspect of our civilization, perversities which support one color as central, one gender as tops, one sexuality as normal and the ability to walk, see and hear as primary abilities. Pecola's story is a fictional story, but I have met many like her in my life who are not fictional, and really do hate their own being. Thus I am convinced that working to encourage the world to welcome every form of diversity as equal in power, dignity and access is not some spiritual luxury but a basic necessity for claiming to be civilized at all.
Certainly I would never stoop to calling myself religious if that were not a central goal in my life.
Louis Armstrong, whose music has charmed this service several times this morning, also felt an extraordinary shame one day. It happened just after he was asked by our government in 1957 to go to the Soviet Union as " a good will ambassador for the United States." He said yes, of course, and made plans. But when Governor Faubus of Arkansas barred black children from entering school that year, Armstrong cancelled the tour. "If the people over there ask me what's wrong with my country, what am I supposed to say? When I see a crowd in Arkansas spitting on a little girl…do you dig me? I have a right to blow my top over injustice." Clearly, Armstrong felt a deep shame about what was going on in his country. To feel, as he once said, that it was "getting so bad" that black people didn't even "have a country" is surely a tragic and deep evocation of shame. But hear me, this is not a shame like Pecola's. Armstrong was not ashamed to be who he is. He was ashamed to be part and parcel of a nation where children are spit upon as they walk to school.
But this shame is a righteous shame, something akin to the "civilizing shame" I hinted at earlier. It is a shame which is clearly also a form of compassion…it is a shame which helps a large older man to identify and feel with a little girl who is spit upon. It's a form of shame which knows for sure that some things are unutterably wrong and without moral grounding, a form of shame which is often at the root of much social justice work.
Armstrong spoke out strongly, and angrily, calling President Eisenhower "two-faced." Armstrong paid for this outburst for many years…even, I think it's correct to say, for the rest of his life. Folks like Sammy Davis Jr. and Adam Clayton Powell took him to task for his intemperate language. Colleges and cities cancelled his performances, and influential columnists like Jim Bishop called for a boycott of his concerts.
Yet, despite the outcry against him, the shame Louis Armstrong felt must have been felt at least a little bit by others, no? After all, Eisenhower himself eventually did send troops into Arkansas to help walk little girls to school.
Remember what I said earlier? Armstrong's story reminded me of it. Shame disguises itself. It disguises itself not just as Armstrong's anger, but also as depression. And even, some psychologists I consulted say, as "air-headedness" or "frothy" behavior. It's greatest disguise, however, will be whereever people are keeping secrets. Whenever anyone keeps a secret (one that is not about a nifty surprise party for your best friend), then I'd say you're awfully close to a veritable fountain of shame.
Now when shame does show up without a mask… and it does now and then…it is more often demonstrated in posture than declared with words. You can see shame demonstrated by looking at the figures of Adam and Eve in the famous painting by Massacio on the covers of your order of celebration (or seen repainted in an expressionist way up here on the chancel). These were painted by the late artist, Mel Hanson, one of the sons of the woman who planted poppies along the roads in California, the amazing woman whom I spoke of last Mother's Day.
In both versions, Eve covers her breasts and slumps. She is totally ashamed to be driven out of paradise. Adam is bent and humiliated, and covers his loins with his hands. He is ashamed to have lied. These are dramatic postures, but they do convey, better than words, the bodily feeling that is shame.
But again, these are the most dramatic examples. The most common every-day evidence of shame is often the averted eye. Now don't turn into a pack of psychoanalysts and try to figure out what someone is ashamed of every time they avert their eyes from you…there are, after all, many reasons for averting eyes. But shame is one of the most common reasons.
We may avert our eyes, for example, ashamed that we may have repressed erotic feelings for the other person. We may avert our eyes because the other person is making us uncomfortable with their complaining, their crankiness, their negativity or even their talkativeness, and we are ashamed we can't just tell them we don't want to hear them talk anymore. And so we avert our eyes and pretend to listen. And I would bet most of you could think of a few hundred other examples.
I hope I have convinced you a bit that destructive, unacknowledged shame is one of the most pervasive, controlling and oppressive forces in the world today, a root cause of a whole lot of human misery. The example of Louis Armstrong's civilizing shame, or Scott Lewis's in his story to the children earlier, is a much, much rarer occurrence, believe me.
But what, if anything, can be done to lessen the impact of the more pervasive destructive form of shame?
I have several suggestions. First, I think it has to be admitted and recognized. This may take some spiritual archaeology…as I said, it wears disguises.
But, I assure you, shame can be seen and noticed. There are many bodily clues, ranging from the blush, to hunched shoulders and averted eyes, to avoidance of certain places or people. Furthermore, I suggest that damaging secrets need to be exposed, some anger seen for what it really might be, and certain forms of depression reinterpreted.
Second, we have to face the pain instead of saving face. After my break-up with Phil I kept on confronting my own shame by running away from it.
After months of depression and anger, I decided it was time to turn around and face it instead of running from it. I started to recite, each and every day, the wonderfully clear lines from the poet T. Carmi, which I have quoted many times before in this pulpit:
What happened really happened.
What happened really happened.
What happened really happened.
I believe with perfect faith that I'll have the strength to believe
that what happened, really happened.
Somehow, by saying these lines every day, I did indeed find the strength to accept what really happened, and to move on to live the rest of my life.
Third, I found out, from my experience of marital breakup, that in order to confront and face shame instead of saving face, I had to adjust my ideals, my expectations, which somehow had been thrust on me like a load too heavy to bear. I had to shed some of the burden I had accepted on my shoulders. I had to say, yes, a break-up is painful, but not some proof that I am a failure, or have betrayed the high ideals of marriage, to which I must say I still subscribe.
Furthermore, I had to admit to myself that I was not the spokesperson for sexual minorities everywhere, the red knight on a horse riding to defeat bigotry and ignorance at every front. I had to disavow my false belief that I should be always able to see all things coming at me, and be in perfect control of my life at all time. In short, I had to reduce my ego involvement, undermine my inflated self, and downsize my soul.
There is a lot more I could say, I suppose. But if this sermon got any longer, I might even start to feel ashamed.
Prayer
[back to top]
(Hymn: Wondrous Love)
O Wondrous Love!
I give thanks that I am who I am,
and not what others say or think I am.
I may fall down, sink deep, feel low,
but I am not ashamed of that.
After all I do not count the moon a failure
because it moves through phases,
now thick, now thin,
now a silver fingernail,
now a ghost.
For the moon and its monthly sermons, I give thanks.
No one else alive now, alive ever,
can be me. That is my job, to be who I am
without shame or apology,
however many times I sink down.Let any who swagger around me take a seat…
I'll take no more dictation from outside me.
Let all who tell me I should not be who I am
by even the subtlest innuendo of raised eyebrows
start packing,
for I now repel any shame that aims to shrink me.
For such freedom to be myself and no one else,
for the possibility of each person in this world
to be who they are and no one else,
I give public thanks.
And now with these words I turn from all shame
that tries to shape me to be someone I am not,
and come around to embrace you, O wondrous Love.
First UU Church Home |
Church Newsletters |
First UU Staff |
Sermons |
Elected Officers
Email Mark |
Email the Church
Office | Email
the Webmaster
Last update: 02/02/2002