“Creating Community, Creating Home”
UU Fellowship of Central Oregon
January 14, 2007
“So many of us are relatively new arrivals to this area.
What can we all do to actualize the Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr.’s dream of
creating diverse, multicultural, multiracial, intergenerational, and spiritually transformative community? We will ponder the realities of displacement, relocation, and intention together.”
“I know if I fail to make at least the attempt
I forfeit any right to hope that the world
will become better than it is now.”—Wendell Berry
When I interviewed for this position as your minister, I was asked several questions by the Search Committee, who had thoroughly studied my background. They knew I’d lived for many years in Portland, in New York City, in Philadelphia and in Berkeley, and also in Taos, New Mexico, and Duluth and Eveleth, Minnesota. They knew that in each place I had been involved in building and bridging communities, in trying to strengthen the relationships and bonds between people. One of the questions put to me was “how do you feel about the lack of diversity here in Central Oregon? Knowing that diversity is important to you, will you be…all right here?”
Now, I want to ponder with you the assumption of this question for a moment: “knowing that diversity is important to you.” How did they know that? What did they see?
They saw in me someone who has benefited in a thousand different ways from the richness of our contemporary world in which many cultures interact with one another.
I was brought up with a mantra from my stepfather at just about every meal. I’d be sitting there, at the dinner table, 11-years-old, say, facing a plate of eggplant parmesan or couscous paella or stew with mysterious unnamed ingredients that almost certainly included things I considered inedible, like, horror-of-horrors, mushrooms. I would sit there, facing The Plate, dreaming of my preferred chicken pot pie or grilled cheese sandwich. I envied my friends in their houses, who I assumed were all eating macaroni-and-cheese at every dinner and not experiencing nearly the torture I felt at the dinner table facing a plate of zucchini. But: I knew pleading would get me nowhere. My stepfather’s words would always be the same: “Heather. Just try it. Widen your bookshelf. Expand your mind.” To him, embracing more experiences, learning to every day try something new, would automatically make me a person who experienced more of life, had more sensations, more delights, more curiosity about other people and cultures and thus more enjoyment of the world.
The challenge, I believe, is precisely this—to see beyond our own dinner tables, in my case that of a comfortable, middle-class, mostly-white and thoroughly educated family—and see how our lives are interconnected with everyone else’s, particularly those in the community in which we live.
Religious studies professor Mary Elizabeth Hobgood writes this about how we think about the inequalities in our communities: “While we might be tempted to think that only those routinely disadvantaged by class, race, and sex/gender structures would wish to change them, I argue that everyone should want to change them because these systems, and the values and social relations they promote, harm even the privileged. …A Christian ethic worthy of the name must investigate how dominant behavior patterns and cultural values deeply distort and impoverish all relationships, even those of the privileged. Understanding the workings of class, race, and sex/gender systems is basic to an ethical life because these systems, and the institutional interactions that reproduce them, deeply condition the morality of our lives-in-relation” (8-9).
Ethics, morality, and our lives in relationship with one another and in community—these are exactly the issues that make examining the racial and class background of our community a religious task. How are we interacting with one another, and is it, to the best of our ability, out of our highest good, our optimism, our hopefulness, our faith, trust, generosity, and love?
The very first of our seven Unitarian Universalist principles is our covenant to affirm and promote the inherent worth and dignity of every person. This is a principle steeped in our Judeo-Christian tradition, it is a value common to many religious communities, Christian and Buddhist alike. Our lives throughout this community, this state, and this world are bound up with one another’s. To discount anyone as less than, as not worth considering, whether that be a person of color or someone whose opinion we completely disagree with, to discount anyone as not worth bothering about, as discardable—this is the beginning of our own death, our own throwing away of ourselves, our devaluing of life and spirit and possibility. We desperately need to keep wrestling with the dreams that seem unattainable, not because we’ll attain them by doing so, but because we’ll be nourishing the life and spirit and hope in ourselves as well.
“Come, build a land,” we sang a few moments ago, and we’ve sung this hymn often these past few months—perhaps some of you recognize it—“come, build a land where friends and strangers may create peace…where justice shall roll down like waters, and peace like an ever-flowing stream.” For me that line, the central refrain of the song, that line connects directly with the vision and intention of the Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr. He quoted those words from the writings of the Hebrew Bible Prophet Amos, and, as was one of his great gifts, gave them entirely new context and contemporary meaning. He quoted that call for “justice to roll down like waters” from a cell in a jail in Birmingham in 1963, where he witnessed the Birmingham police violently mistreat the other African-American prisoners, among them women and young girls, and where they, “on two occasions, refused to give us food because…we wanted to sing our grace together.” Justice in the South in 1963 had a very specific flavor to it, and the dream then was of freedom, voting, respect, safety, being treated as a human being and not as a thing.
This was another of King’s great gifts to us: the specific vision of a world very few people thought possible in 1963. Few people had yet conceived as concretely of a world in which “this nation will rise up and live out the true meaning of its creed: We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all people are created equal. A dream that one day on the red hills of Georgia, the sons of former slaves and the sons of former slave-owners will be able to sit down together at the table of brotherhood. A dream that [King’s] four little children will one day live in a nation where they will be judged not by the color of their skin but by the content of their character.”
This specific dream mesmerized a nation and galvanized a movement. What may seem like merely words found souls in need of hope and vision, opened hearts that had closed in discouragement and pain, and energized action that demanded a cultural sea-change. We are still reeling from the energy of these mere words, we are still, as a country, struggling to address the segregation that shape-shifts and takes new forms, decade after decade.
We live, here in Oregon, in what was for many years and not that long ago a “sundown state.” I wish that that phrase was about the beautiful landscape here, but, sadly, it is not. Author James Loewen has written a readable and powerful, incredibly well-researched book which examines our country’s legacy of sundown towns, and this is a short excerpt: “A sundown town is any organized jurisdiction that for decades [explicitly] kept African Americans or other groups from living in it and was thus ‘all-white’ on purpose. Beginning in about 1890 and continuing until 1968, white Americans established thousands of towns across the United States for whites only. (1968 is the last year these towns were intentionally established; they have continued to exist well beyond then.) There is reason to believe that more than half of all towns in Oregon (as well as Indiana and Ohio and other areas) were all-white on purpose (4-8). A swath of towns in southwestern Oregon were sundown towns, including Eugene, Umpqua, Grants Pass, Klamath Falls, Medford, and others” (410). Though these towns and this state have deleted the racial exclusion policies from the town hall lawbooks, still, these policies are part of our very recent past. I believe that it’s important to be aware of and to do what we can to address and overcome the harm, pain, and distrust that these laws have caused. Loewen describes: “Residential segregation exacerbates other forms of racial discrimination. Segregated neighborhoods make it easier to discriminate against [people of color] in schooling, housing, and city services, for instance. Residential segregation also causes employment inequalities by isolating [people of color] from the social networks where job openings are discussed. All-white communities also make it easier for their residents to think badly of nonwhite people. Stereotypes remain intact, unchallenged by contact with actual families of color living day-to-day lives”(17).[1]
In our immediate Central Oregon area, Jefferson County is the most ethnically diverse county with nearly 33.6 % of the population either of Hispanic or American Indian origin. Crook County’s Hispanic population doubled over the past decade, now totaling 5.6% of its total residents. Deschutes County is predominantly comprised of white residents, though more new residents with a variety of racial and ethnic heritages are moving here every day.
I go over all this because we are not an all-white community here, and the myth that we are only serves to make the lives and experiences of the people of color who live here invisible. Bend does not have a legacy of being a sundown town, on the books—thank goodness. As this city and this area continues to grow, we have opportunities, every day, to counter remarks and assumptions that we hear one another make, to engage in dialogue with those we meet around town about how to make this area more accessible and inviting, and to participate in our community in ways that challenge us and expand our own understanding of the human experience.
In order to be a part of creating a healthy, sustainable, thriving community, first we must do our own individual work of examining ourselves, the privileges we’ve benefited from, the opportunities we’ve had, and understand why it is in this American system that we’ve been blessed with those opportunities. If you, if I, if we, each and every one of us, know deep within us and believe that we are loved, that we have and are enough, then out of that sense of calm and trust will come the power and the determination to make sure that the same is true for others. Then, we must lift up our heads beyond our own individual lives and ask questions about how other people in our local community are doing. We must take the risks of getting to know new people, people beyond our comfortable established circles, we must allow ourselves to be vulnerable with one another in order to really connect with each other’s pain and each other’s struggles and dreams. This does take effort, reflection, intention, and action. “Only if we can stop the terrorism in our own hearts,” Alice Walker writes, “will we be able to stop terrorism in the world.”
Alice Walker reflects on Martin Luther King’s loss, on the deep love the African American community felt for him, and on where we’ve come since King was shot and killed in 1968. She writes: “He feared no man, he said. He had been to the mountaintop, seen the promised land. He might not get there with us, he said. But we, as a people, would someday get to the promised land. What did this mean? There are those who believe that because African-Americans can eat anywhere, sleep anywhere, buy houses and even airplanes almost anywhere, we have arrived at the promised land. Or, to be more accurate, they’ve arrived. Because there is still the huge problem of homeless people, sick and out-of-work people, the continued drugging of our youth in communities across the nation, plus the 1.2 million African American men in prison.” Walker states: “This is [not yet] the promised land seen by Martin Luther King” (171-172).
We can reach that land first by believing in its value, believing that when everyone’s basic needs are met, there will so much less fear and competition in the world, so much less violence. We can reach that land by beginning in our community to try, in our clumsy human ways, try to achieve the ideals of equality.
“Think Globally,” the bumper sticker goes, and “Act Locally.” In a community that is growing and changing on as dramatic a daily basis as Bend and Central Oregon is, there is possibility everywhere. In a town this size, every interaction between one individual and another has an impact. We can begin with each and every one of our daily interactions. We can welcome one another as crucial parts of this growing community, each of us quirky and particular in our own way, and each part of the fabric of this everchanging place. Alice Walker depicts this beautifully in a poem. She is speaking here about all Americans, young and old, gay and straight, documented and undocumented:
Want to show
Your love
For Americans
Love
Smile
When you see
One
Flowerlike
His
Turban
Rosepink.
Rejoice
At the
Eagle feather
In a grandfather’s
Braid.
If a sister
Bus rider’s hair
Is
Especially
Nappy,
A miracle
In itself
Praise
It.
How can there be
Homeless
In a land
So crammed
With houses
…
Love your country
By loving
Americans.
Love Americans.
Salute the Soul
& the Body
Of who we
Spectacularly
&
Sometimes
Pitifully are.
Love us. We are
The flag.”
Each of us has the ability, the power, to see possibility in one another and our communities where it is not now. The very act of extending love to each other includes seeing and acknowledging each other and each other’s experiences. Shaping community begins with a story we tell ourselves about the nature and possibility of the community to which we have arrived. Playwright Tony Kushner writes “To be a progressive person is to believe that there are ways to actively intervene against these evils [of racism, classism, and so forth]. To be a progressive person is to resist tribalism, separatism, is to resist the temptation to bunker down; to be progressive is to seek out connection” (7).
Kushner, who grew up in southern Louisiana, tells this Martin Luther King story: “One of my most vivid memories from childhood is from the day of Martin Luther King’s funeral. I watched it on TV with Maudi Lee Davis, the woman who worked as my family’s maid. Maudi cried throughout the broadcast, and I was both frightened and impressed—I felt her powerful grief connected us, her and me and my quiet hometown, with the struggle I knew was being waged in the world, in history. It was an instant in which one feels that one is being changed as the world is changed, and I believe I was.”
He goes on, “I don’t know what power it is in human beings that keeps us going against indescribable forces of destruction. I don’t know how any African-American, any person of color in this country stays sane, given…the whole machinery of American racism. I don’t know why it is every woman isn’t completely consumed all the time by debilitating rage. By means of what magic do people transform bitter centuries of enslavement and murder into Beauty and Grace? One mustn’t take these miracles of perseverance for granted, nor rejoice in them too much, forgetting the oceans of spilled blood of all the millions who didn’t make it. But something, some joy in us, refuses death, makes us stand against the overt and insidious violence practiced upon us” (51-52).
Let us each get involved in our community in the way that we best can in order to make our commitment to equality known. May our fervent belief in the interconnectedness of all people guide us to consider, every day, how we can share the abundance of our lives and learn from the wealth of a world filled with stimulating diversity. May we realize through our actions these words of the Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr.:“I am cognizant of the interrelatedness of all communities and states. I cannot sit idly by in Atlanta and not be concerned about what happens in Birmingham. Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere. We are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny. Whatever affects one directly, affects all indirectly.”
And so it is.
Amen.
CONGREGATIONAL RESPONSE AND REFLECTION
Let us take a few moments now for silence. I invite you to think about what these words have stirred in you, what they’ve reminded you of. How would you like to see this Central Oregon community evolve and change in the coming years? What dreams, what possibilities, can you give words to, that by doing so we might together vision something beautiful and unexpected? What longing for community do you feel here that you’re still seeking? Let us be together in silence for a few moments and then I’ll invite you to share some of your thoughts.
May you go out into this community energized by your own dream for how we can be in better relationship with one another, in our families, in our workplaces, in our towns, in our hearts. Let us now join each other in fellowship and conversation. Go with love, and go in peace.