Building Bridges
A Sermon by the Rev. Aaron McEmrys
Delivered to the Unitarian Society of Santa Barbara, March 22, 2009
Some years ago I was in Eastern Oregon, backpacking
in the Steen’s Mountain Wilderness. Steen’s rises straight up almost 10,000
feet above the desert floor like the spine of a magnificent dragon. It is one of the most wild and wonderful
places I have ever been, and yet it is seldom visited.
Getting there was an adventure in itself. First we drove from Portland all the way
across the state, across at one major mountain range and two smaller ones. We drove across desert and prairie and deep
forests, following winding roads that seemed to go in forever.
We eventually made it to the town of Burns, a
frontier town still, which is the last thing resembling a town for the next
several hours. Much later – a turn-off
onto thirty miles of washboard gravel road until we finally arrived at our
trailhead, one of the most remote places in the lower 48 states.
It was late, so we set up camp right there and
listened to the coyotes howl, aware in our very bones that we were far from
everything we knew – guests in a land that was not ours.
The morning broke on such beauty! We set off up the mountain, our footsteps
light in a universe of pine and birdsong.
We saw foxes, big horned sheep, wild horses and even crazy little high
altitude hummingbirds that I never knew existed before. Up the trail we went
for a few miles before we came to a fast-running stream – too fast, too steep
and too deep to cross.
I set about building a bridge. I found some suitable fallen trees and laid
them across to some rocks in the middle of the stream. They were very heavy and hard to move, so
just figuring out how to get them out there was a feat of engineering. Then I floated another fallen tree out to
the rock island where I was perched like a clumsy crane and pushed it across to
complete the bridge.
Crossing the bridge I felt a surge of excitement, as
if we were crossing from one world into another. I wondered how many other hikers had just turned back at this
very place, unable or unwilling to find a way across.
We were immediately rewarded, for there, just around
the first bend in the trail, in the middle of eastern Oregon’s wildest and most
forbidding desert, we found ourselves in a vast park-like meadow that looked
for all the world as if it had popped right out of Jane Eyre. Morning mist still hung low, and everything
seemed impossibly lush, as if we had somehow wandered into the Scottish
Highlands. I can still smell the great
swathes of heather, even now.
These are the kinds of things that can happen when
we build bridges.
We talk a lot about building bridges these days, but
it seems to be an increasingly difficult thing to do. Just building a makeshift bridge over thirty feet of mountain
stream was hard, time-consuming work, but building bridges between people, or
harder still – groups of people – is exponentially more difficult.
Our culture is becoming ever-more polarized, and as
it does, finding meaningful ways to connect with people who are different then
we is becoming harder and harder to do.
“If only we could just talk” people often say to me, “if only we could
just sit down and talk, find some common ground, then maybe we could find a way
forward.”
The assumption here is that if we do sit down and
talk we will discover our underlying commonality and all be able to get along
from that moment forth, as if our differences simply boil down to
misunderstanding or illusion. And perhaps this is so.
But there is another assumption here as well. That assumption is that if we could ever sit
down with the people on the other end of the spectrum – then, in due time, they
would recognize that we are right. Atheists and Christians; political liberals
and conservatives, all of us really - tend to be alike in this – “if only we
could sit down and really talk, if only they could really hear me…” And we just leave it there because we know
we are right, and we are confident that if the people across the fence from us
would just listen, then of course they would be converted.
But this isn’t really building bridges, is it? People sometimes talk as if it is, as if
merely engaging in dialogue with difference is
building bridges – but it isn’t – at least not so long as anyone at the table
has ulterior motives.
Last night I watched a documentary about abortion
called, “Lake of Fire.” In one scene we
see a crowd of pro-choice supporters outside a Planned Parenthood office
chanting and mocking the leader of a pro-life organization. “Jesus loves you”, they sarcastically chant
as he shouts back at them. Nothing new
about this sort of scene, I know, but the part that caught my eye is this: even
as the two groups were shouting at one another with absolute hatred and
contempt – the leader of the pro-life group kept looking triumphantly into the
camera and saying, “See? Look, these
people won’t even engage in dialogue, they can’t even talk like grown-ups –
see? This is what we’re up
against. Would you let these people
babysit your children?”
That was it.
Even as both sides lashed one another with undisguised hatred, the
leader was still able to pause between curses to jubilantly declare that “those
people” would not meet him in civil conversation. I suspect that if the pro-choice activists would have been
interviewed they would have said the same thing – “you just can’t talk to those
people.” Why was he so satisfied, even
jubilant about this?
The fact is that we live in a world full of genuine
difference. Some differences can be easily
bridged, while others are more difficult, and still others may be impossible to
bridge because the differences are so profound that connection is impossible.
When I was in elementary school I was taught that
the United States is the great melting pot, where people from all classes, all
religions and all nationalities came and were blended into one people, the
American people, as if somehow the melting process evaporated away all our
differences, leaving us with only the universal traits all Americans share,
what ever those might be.
This is why the first public schools were founded in
New York City. Endless boatloads of
immigrants, speaking a Babel of languages, washed up in waves, and the
self-appointed keepers of the culture started to worry that America was going
to cease being American under the pressure of all of these new influences. So some of the richest women in the City set
up the first free public schools in the United States – schools designed not to
educate, but to socialize. They were designed
to turn all these Italians, Poles, Russians, Irish, Catholics and Jews into Protestant
Americans. They would speak English, they
would change their names, they would
leave the old ways behind them. These
first public schools WERE the melting pot!
I think we still yearn for a melting pot like
this. Not a brutal or coercive one of
course, but still, a process through which people will put aside their
differences and come to embrace their essential shared humanity in a kind of
gentle assimilation. We remain uncomfortable, distrustful, of differences, and
so we try to minimize them, sweep them under the rug, and in our efforts to do
this we inadvertently rob ourselves of enrichment.
We are like small stones in the ocean. In the deepest, most still parts of the
ocean there is very little friction and comparatively little movement. Here a stone can rest for ages without
changing much at all. But in the
shallows, near the tide-line, the waves of life wash us against one another and
as we bump and grate and tumble all that friction slowly reveals our unique
inner beauty, leaving us shining and colorful, surrounded by countless other
shining and colorful stones which are in some ways, like us, and in other ways
not.
This revealing, refining friction – this friction
comes from all the ways we are different, not the ways we are the same.
But it is hard to be different. As much as we want to be open, accepting and
reasonable, we also want to be right.
In this confusing and unpredictable world of ours, it’s so comforting to
think that we are at least right about some
things, especially about the things that matter to us most – how our lives and
our world is organized.
This is one of the comforting things about
surrounding ourselves with like-minded people, and, one the flip-side, one of
the things that unsettles us when we come face to face with people who are very
different than we are. Different
political, social and religious worldviews can feel like challenges to our own
elusive attempts to make sense of this befuddling world of ours.
We struggle with this even here, in this church. We
don’t seem to have much trouble talking with one another about what we
think - but how comfortable are we
talking about what we believe? I mean
this is a religious community, right?
If we can’t talk about what we believe here, then where can we?
And yet, many people tell me they don’t feel
comfortable talking about their beliefs here.
There seems to be an unspoken agreement, they say, that this is a
no-no. Part of it may be that we don’t
want to make other people feel judged by our beliefs – but I think the biggest
barrier is that we are afraid of being judged ourselves. Sharing our beliefs is one of the most
intimate things we can do, it is like pulling back the curtain to share our
essential selves – and yet we do not often do it, afraid we’ll sound stupid, or
be judged - or worse – be rejected.
I had a conversation recently with a woman who,
after being here for quite some time, finally realized in talking with me that
it was okay that she didn’t believe in god.
What a relief! She had been quietly not believing for a long time, as
she had in other churches for the whole of her life, but she had never been
sure that her lack of belief would be okay, because she wasn’t sure what people
in this community really believed.
Another recent conversation was with someone who
confessed to me, a little shame-facedly, blushingly, that she felt a powerful
urge to pray – she didn’t know to what she felt called to pray to, how to do it, or even why – but it was such a powerful
pull that she couldn’t ignore it. She
was embarrassed to talk about it because she didn’t know if it was okay for
Unitarians to pray and she was afraid she wouldn’t be welcome anymore.
Or a thoughtful, shy, wonderful man, filled to the
very brim with integrity. He is liberal
on social issues and conservative on economic issues. Is that okay, he wants to know?
Is there a place for me here? Do
I have to be politically liberal across the board in order to be part of this
congregation? Because if not – where
can I possibly go?
In this community, so committed to openness, freedom
of belief and tolerance, how might we react to someone who says, “I love
Jesus?” I know, because I (a religious
humanist) say this myself from time to time, and the response I often get is a
sharp intake of breath, a narrowing of the eyes and a careful, “What do you
mean by that?”
What catches my attention in confessions like these
is not that people are struggling to figure out what they believe, because that
is one of the main things church is for, after all – but that so many people
don’t feel comfortable and safe talking about their struggles or their beliefs
here, in their own church. Sticking to
the subjects everyone seems to agree on - is this sometimes the price of
fitting in?
Building bridges is very important. Our world aches
as it is pulled ever further apart by the forces of opposition and
polarization. Building bridges is important, now more than ever, and we have
plenty of opportunity for that right here in this community.
Bridges span the distance between places and people;
they connect. But in order to build a good bridge we have to know where we are
building from. We have to be clear about who and what we
are. What is essential to us, what
makes us, as Unitarian Universalists for example, unique?
Unitarian Universalism is not an alternative to
religion nor a religious smorgasbord. What is essential to Unitarian
Universalism, and is thus the solid ground upon which we must build our
bridges, are these few things: Our belief in the inherent worth and dignity of
all people, our belief that all people should be free to search for truth and
meaning in their lives and our assertion that we are all interconnected in the
great web of life of which we are a part.
We are a religion more concerned with questions than with answers, and
one that welcomes all people of goodwill.
These are our Unitarian Universalist essentials, and
there is room for huge variation within these tall pillars. What are your
essentials? Where are you starting
from? This is step one.
To begin reaching out to others from here gets even
trickier, because the whole process has to be mutual. We can’t build bridges to hostile shores, no matter how much we might
wish otherwise. Bridges between people
have to be built from both sides of the river. There has to be genuine goodwill
all around, accompanied by a sincere desire to connect authentically. This means that any attempts to build
bridges while harboring secret hopes of converting or winning someone over will
be sure to fail. If anything, we should
try to remain open the reality that what we experience will change us, and that if anyone is to be
converted it might very well be us! We
have to truly respect what makes us different, even as we strive to build on
our commonality.
Good bridge building also requires that we listen
far more than we talk, and that we guarantee the safety of everyone
involved. Bridges are vital connectors
across which traffic, trade and people flow – but we cannot forget that when
things get bad – tanks and troops pour across them too. This is why the first thing people do when
they are frightened is to destroy all the bridges over which threats might
cross. Whether spanning deep ravines,
rushing rivers or the space between two people, bridge crossings are inherently
scary. So make your bridges safe.
There are many people we can bridge to, and there
are also some who we cannot – not now and perhaps not ever. So let us not focus
on the hardest bridges to build, but instead on the ones we can build right
now.
As you look around you this morning, look for
difference, not just commonality. Look
for difference and be eager to hear all about it. Be brave enough to tell people what you love, what you believe
and how you came to be the person you are. Pull back the curtain on your own
radiance!
All of life is possible only
because electrons, protons and neutrons build bridges between them. We are like this too. How much richness is right
here in this room, just waiting to be revealed? How much colorful variety, how
many babbling brooks, how many feelings and ideas and struggles? Let’s not just
talk about pluralism and diversity – let’s live it! Let us be the
kind of community that poet May Sarton is yearning for when she writes:
“No one comes to this house who is not
changed.
I meet no one here who does not change me.”[1]
Let our congregation
be like Venice, with boats and bridges as far as the eye can see.
May it be so.
© 2009, Aaron McEmrys,
Santa Barbara, CA
[1] May Sarton, “Gestalt at Sixty”, from Collected Poems, 1930-1993 (New York: W.W. Norton and Company, 1993).