A Time For Vision

A sermon by F. Jay Deacon

Hartford Welcoming Congregation Event

Friday, October 10, 2003

I grew up in a small town in South Jersey where there were no Pride Days, and no Welcoming Congregation to take me in. It was a pretty conventional town. It preserved the marks of society as it was in that era: mine was the one school bus out of the fleet that passed through the black neighborhood of a neighboring town and picked up “those kids.” And so every morning I had opportunity to note that the streets in that neighborhood were not paved, that the municipal sewer system didn't run there.

There were other marks of the community's conventionality. There were words that were never spoken. Particularly “gay” or “homosexual.” No one said those words.

Nearby was the small city of Lakewood, a mostly Jewish town. When there was a fire in Lakewood, Grandad would announce that it was caused by “Jewish Lightning,” for insurance.

The home in which I grew up was conventional. This particular home was Presbyterian, presided over by parents who meant to do right, and by their lights, they did right.

So when it turned out, first, that my brother-in-law was gay, they thought that to say, “Michael was such a nice young man before his illness,” was to say something compassionate. They couldn't have known the impact of their words on me.

They took their cues from the church.

Thomas Carlyle once wrote that churches and other religious communities come in three conditions: First

an audibly preaching and prophesying Church, which is the best; second, a Church that struggles to preach and prophesy, but cannot as yet, till its Pentecost come; and third and worst, a Church gone dumb with old age, or which only mumbles delirium prior to dissolution. (1)

That church of ours, though huge, was of the third type, mumbling delirium.

It helped to enforce a social apartheid, once a year holding a work-day to help fix up the African Methodist Episcopal Church, while itself remaining lily-white, and never raising a voice in the community about the fact that the streets in the black neighborhood were not paved, and that there was no city sewer there.

Writing from the jail in Birmingham, Alabama, Martin Luther King said this:

The contemporary Church is so often a weak, ineffectual voice with an uncertain sound. It is so often the arch-supporter of the status quo. Far from being disturbed by the presence of the Church, the power structure of the average community is consoled by the Church's silent and often vocal sanction of things as they are.

For me the truth came when I could deny it no longer, a student in an evangelical seminary soon to be graduated, to go where? do what? A religious clinical supervisor had publicly humiliated me for my apparent feelings for a classmate. I'd been told that unmarried ministers could not be placed in churches. And the theology I'd grown up with — built on ancient myth, and fears and prohibitions and prejudices — was crumbling. Yet for an evangelical Christian it was inconceivable to be gay. The truth came to me in a series of shattering, life-transforming dreams. There was no one in the world I inhabited who could tell me the truth, and overturn in my mind and heart all those frightful images of hell and damnation. But the truth came from the deep wells of my own soul, from where it must come, finally, for all of us.

You may know that I spent five years in Hartford, where, with some gutsy souls, I founded the Metropolitan Community Church in 1973. I wrote to all the remotely progressive congregations asking to rent space, but only one responded: so for the first year, we met in the chapel of this Unitarian Meetinghouse!

I still remember the Urban Environment Fair of 1977. It featured booths sponsored by various organizations, including ours, but this year it was to be on the lawn of St. Joseph's Cathedral. When we arrived in the morning of the fair we were informed that if we set up our booth, the cathedral would shut the whole fair down. I went first to the fabulously expensive parsonage where the door, on a chain, opened about five inches, and a nose stuck out to say No, I couldn't see Father Ferrigno. But, refusing to leave, I was permitted to speak with him on a phone. He said, “I know who you are! You're not a church at all! You're gay lib!”

He wouldn't relent, so my next stop was the phone booth in front of Arthur's Drug Store, which is now something else, where I called Channel 3, which dispatched a news crew, which arrived just in time to see us leave the cathedral grounds, followed by most of the other booths who joined us in protest, moving the whole fair across the street to the grounds of Aetna Insurance. Pretty soon Archbishop Whalen was on Channel 3 declaring that it was people like us what caused the fall of Rome.

It was a lot of years before I found my way to Unitarian Universalism. I stayed with MCC for ten years, but increasingly was met with published demands that my credentials be removed because I wasn't really a Christian. In South Jersey, I never saw a Unitarian. There Unitarian meant something like Communist. But one day in a worship forum in my Chicago church somebody named Eleanor said, “But Jay, aren't you really a Unitarian anyway?” But within a year, I had concluded that I was guilty as charged — really was a UU; had applied for a transfer of credentials, resigned, moved to Boston, and seen the Ministerial Fellowship Committee.

My first General Assembly was in 1984, in Columbus. I sat in the observer gallery and watched the Assembly debate a resolution affirming ministers in performing same-sex ceremonies of union. An elderly lady from Maine stood to make the old Adam-and-Steve argument, and then they voted to adopt the resolution, with no more than 25 No's, and I knew I was home.

The first UU congregation I served was in Bangor, Maine — where a 23 year old member named Charlie Howard had been murdered a year before. He'd been on his way home from an Interweave meeting (a UU group for queer people and their friends) at the Unitarian meeting-house when he was accosted by three high school kids who knew who he was and chased him down yelling “fag” and “queer.”

The Bangor Daily News ran an editorial entitled “Not a Martyr,” maintaining that while it's wrong to kill people, he did bring it upon himself on account of his effeminate ways.

That courageous congregation called, of all people, me. I was honored to conduct the first annual memorial service for Charlie Howard, which ended with a silent procession down to the Kenduskeag Stream, which runs rapidly in a deep trench through the center of town — where they had thrown Charlie to his death. No other congregation in Bangor would participate or otherwise touch the Charlie Howard memorial.

And then my work took me to the UUA, to conduct a continent-wide assessment of UU attitudes toward gay and lesbian people and to propose action steps in response.

We began with a survey — and thousands responded. The UUA Trustees were shaken by the bigotry that actually existed far from the General Assembly at the grass roots of UUism. We went on to invent the Welcoming Congregation Program and to shepherd it through adoption by the 1989 General Assembly.

And here we are! You cannot know what it means to me to be a part of this celebration!

It matters. It matters because:

* * THERE IS, permeating this culture, a powerful force of fear and loathing that frequently turns to hate and violence, a fear and loathing both fed and cherished by our religious traditions.

It is the same primitive fear and loathing, whether it's seen in the Massachusetts Bay Colony promulgating its famous “Body of Laws and Liberties” in 1641, which made lovemaking between men a crime punishable by death; — or whether it's seen in three high school boys, carefully taught it at home, who are throwing Charlie Howard off a bridge in Bangor, Maine, in July of 1984 —

or whether it's a majority of the Supreme Court of the United States in June 1986 handing down a ruling declaring that the right of privacy protects heterosexuals but does not extend to gay and lesbian people, not even in the privacy of their bedrooms — a ruling that upheld a Georgia law that quotes the Bible; —

or whether it's the Congress of the United States, in 1996, followed by several state legislatures and maybe even now the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, voting laws and amendments declaring same-sex love invalid and illegitimate; or the President with his bigoted declaration of National Family Protection Week that begins Sunday —

or whether it's one Protestant denomination after another reinforcing their denial of gay and lesbian clergy — and now the Anglican communion ripped asunder over a gay Bishop; or the Roman Catholic bishops of Massachusetts promoting the Defense of Marriage Amendment with its bigotry and then denying that it's anti-gay; and there was the Papal pronouncement that what we are is “objectively disordered,” and there was the Pope last January saying that families headed by same-sex couples are “inauthentic.”

What is this fear and loathing in the heart of this society? What was it that had me believing that what I am is an abomination in the eyes of God?

The religions and society of the past — have taught us to believe that.

The fear and loathing that I am talking about is a fear and loathing of the body and of sexuality, which our religious culture still profoundly believes, even if unconsciously, to be evils — as St. Augustine put it — evils forgivable only if they can be justified in the begetting of offspring. And all the guilt, and all the fear, and all the shadow side of guilty and fearful souls are laid on those scapegoat classes so long defined and enforced by our social and legal systems. Once, it was women burned as witches. And today, it is the people called Queer. This scapegoat status is maintained through a system of social apartheid:

We are still aliens in our own land. And you and I have felt that weight of oppression, borne it about. The most liberated, the most liberal-minded of us, has not lived in this world without being scarred by it.

And my mind travels back down the years of my life and all the love lost to this fear and loathing. And I want you to think of the loss, and the hurt, just for a moment. Because there is something in Nature that draws us to another with a kind of force and passion so that our worlds may be expanded by the world of another, so that we may find in intimate encounter with another something that awakens hidden possibility in each, and opens to us worlds of beauty, delight, growth, and fulfillment.

And what happens in the soul of a young person when every time that force of love is felt, it is a forbidden love, it is a sin and a shame, an unspeakable disgrace? What does that do to the soul?

How much, how very much love lost and dishonored there is —that we must mourn. And what becomes of neighborly love when a whole denomination votes its hate, when the governments of your state and nation vote their contempt?

Novelist James Agee wrote, “I believe that every human being is potentially capable, within his `limits,' of fully `realizing' his potentialities; that is, his being cheated and choked of it, is infinitely the ghastliest, commonest, and most inclusive of all the crimes of which the human world can accuse itself. . . . I know only that murder is being done against nearly every individual on the planet.” To which Michael Murphy adds, “Against the backdrop of the billions of years it took to give us our life and the brief time we have to experience it here, the dimensions of such waste are beyond calculation.”(2 )

May we remember, and mourn, the loss and denial of so much love.

William Blake related a dream of his in 1793. He had a friend, a righteous angel, who wanted to show him his eternal fate on account of his impious life. So the angel, so sure of his righteousness, took him down a treacherous pathway to show him his fate — to the edge of an immense horror, and they hung over it by the roots of trees looking down at a dark tempest of hell and smoke and cataracts and blood and fire and vast swimming spiders and the scaly folds of a monstrous serpent whose eyes appeared as two globes of crimson fire, from which the sea fled away in clouds of smoke. Whoa. Pretty awful. The righteous angel got scared and fled.

But in his dream Blake stays down in the forbidden place for awhile — just curious — wanted to see if the Divine might dwell here also. And darned if he didn't soon find this place actually to be a place of grace and beauty and delight.

After awhile he climbed back up to where his frightened angel waited. The angel was stunned — couldn't understand how Blake had managed to survive the blood and fire and serpents and all. So Blake told him.

He said: All that you saw was owing to your metaphysics, your religion. When you ran away and took your scary metaphysics with you, I found myself on a pleasant river bank by moonlight hearing a harpist play.

At the soul of this society is the righteous angel who looks at beauty and sees instead a hellish prospect of brimstone and monstrous serpents. And the righteous angels of the world have set out to slay what appears to them the monstrous serpents.

Shall we return to a world created by the outworn visions of past ages?

To do so would be to return to a narrower view of humanity, the chosen against the heathen. We may as well prepare for religious wars and theocratic rule. And right now there are those who are doing everything they can to impose such a rule.

Or shall we go back to the traditional meaning of “marriage” and “family,” which was, for long ages, defined in terms of labor and property and male privilege. It had little to do with romance or love or mutual respect. A marriage contract was a labor contract as well as a financial one. Not so long ago — in 1765 — Lord Blackstone, who consolidated British common law, explained how he understood the biblical idea that husband and wife are one flesh: “In law husband and wife are one person, and the husband is that person.” Maybe we should return to that. But every time I signed a marriage license, serving as an instrument of a discriminatory state, I diminished myself and you, too, and I cannot do it any more. And further — isn't it time to end the marriage of church and state that happens every time clergy sign state documents?

Suppose the real and urgent point of religion is not that it function as a lock on the past, but as an engine of the evolution of consciousness.

Speaking of dreams, Walt Whitman had one, too. He wrote:

I dream'd in a dream I saw a city invincible to the attacks of the whole of the rest of the earth. [10m]

I dream'd that was the new city of Friends,

Nothing was greater there than the quality of robust love . . .

It was seen every hour in the actions of the men [and women] of that city,

And in all their looks and words.

Tony Kushner writes:

The world howls without; it is at this moment a very terrible world. . . . Together we organize the world for ourselves, or at least we organize our understanding of it; we reflect it, refract it, criticize it, grieve over its savagery; and we help each other to discern, amidst the gathering dark, paths of resistance, pockets of peace, and places from whence hope may be plausibly expected . . .

It takes a deeply spiritual orientation to get what is going on, what world is dying, what world is coming into being.

So my question is today, Who has a dream? where is Vision?

I say we have a dream, even if in our fear and discouragement we have buried it so deeply within our hearts that we cannot at the moment find it. But I say the dream is potent enough to engage our creativity and our courage to find ways to make it real in this reactionary time.

Sometimes it seems that all religion is capable of doing is returning to ancient dreams as if they were the final vision. Make doctrines out of the dreams of others long ago and far away.

But the religious act consists not in returning to ancient dreams, but in the dreaming. And religion has served either as a lock on the past, or as an engine of evolution.

It remains for us to dream dreams and make them real — make a world large enough for love.

The future, if there is to be one, belongs to the dreamers. It doesn't belong to the outworn pronouncements of the bishops or the televangelists of the new right.

It belongs to those who are now remaking the world on the strength of a vision of life as one whole that cannot be divided asunder by hatred and fear.

Let there be Vision. Let there be those who, quite aware of the world that howls without, dare to live the Vision.

In the name of love.

***

(1) Thomas Carlyle, Sartor Resartus. Book Third. From edition edited by Charles Frederick Harrold. New York: Odyssey Press, 1937, p. 215.

2 George Leonarad and Michael Murphy. The Life We Are Given. New York: Tarcher/Putnam, 1995. p. 4.

Let us know of any comments, errors and corrections - thanks (revised 2/21/05)