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2 December 2007 My father has a metal tool that is a complete mystery to him…and for that matter, to the rest of us. It was among the tools he inherited from his father, and he doesn’t remember ever seeing it used. He’s researched online; he’s taken it to the curators of area museums, and they are equally mystified. There’s lots of speculation as to its purpose—the most probable being something to do with preparing chestnuts, but we really don’t know for sure. Clearly, it had a purpose…once upon a time. Add to that some things that were taught regularly in school when I was a student, that you would be hard pressed to find now: handwriting—or more specifically, penmanship. Shorthand...the class that ruined my spelling. While we can argue that it still would be helpful to teach penmanship, the advent of the computer made the need for shorthand obsolete. And carbon paper for multiple type-written copies? Please! Even languages are dying out at a rate of one every two weeks. That’s faster than the extinction of birds, mammals, fish, or plants. Since more than half the languages have no written form, no dictionary, no record of the accumulated knowledge and history of a vanished culture,[1] they are lost to us for all time, and we are the poorer for that loss. But the loss of some knowledge does not always make us poorer. For a period of time, it looked as the whole institution of slavery might be one of those losses…and the world would have been a far better place had trend continued. Sadly, it has made a roaring comeback, snaring the poor— primarily women and children—in its net.[2] What would it take not to learn systems of powerlessness? What would it take not to learn how to abuse power, how to take advantage of a position of strength? What would it take? I’m always impressed by the endless creativity of the human imagination when something simply is not an option. Kind of like Nancy Reagan’s “Just say ‘no’.” No: war is not an option; No: poverty is not an option; No: slavery is not an option. It’s simply not an option. “What would we do if war/slavery/poverty was not an option?” I like to think we would be much more creative. At the last meeting of the Confirmation class, we watched a good portion of the movie, Remember the Titans. It tells the true 1971 story of the football team from T. C. Williams High School in Alexandria, Virginia, after the Supreme Court strikes down the practice of segregation in our public schools. The popular white coach, Bill Yoast, is replaced as head coach by African-American Herman Boone. Resentment among the white teammates and townspeople over forced desegregation is borders violent, matched in equal measure by the African-American anxiety about being thrust into the nexus of the very personal playing out of a much larger social issue. In spite of the less-than-ideal circumstances and the equally challenging context, Yoast and Boone develop a healthy respect for one another. They don’t have a roadmap. They don’t even have role models for working things out on a day-to-day, sometimes hour-by-hour basis. What they do have is talent and determination, and a love of football that allows them to focus on something beyond themselves and their own intense feelings. What they don’t have is the national endorsement of a public school system that allows them to play their beloved game as segregated teams. Segregation has been removed as an option, it is no longer a choice. But what is extraordinary is how creative they become in the other choices now available to them. They unlearn patterns of prejudice and learn to work together as an integrated team. They unlearn assumptions and behaviors and learn new behaviors in their place. Not everyone makes it through the process. Not everyone is willing to let go of the learned patterns of privilege and hatred and fear. But the coaches do, and most of the team does. And along the way, the team becomes state champions. Along the way, they show an entire community that it can be done. And that in the doing, they become better people for the effort. Each of us in this sanctuary knows that we cannot claim “mission fully accomplished.” ‘Whites only’ drinking fountains may have disappeared, but it’s still news when a grocery store opens in certain areas of the District.[3] The same creativity that enabled the coaches and the team to do the hard work of unlearning systems of racism has been used by others to create—or more deeply entrench—new systems of privilege. We need to keep teaching our children how to walk in the ways of healing and affirmation. We need to keep teaching our children how to walk in the paths of light. And what about the ways of war? What will it take not to learn war any more? What kind of imagination is necessary to put our most creative minds to work, not on weapons systems, but on systems for reducing our carbon footprint? What kind of vision will it take to declare that using precious resources to build one more gun, deploy one more bomb is simply not an option? I don’t have a ready answer for this; I wish I did. But this I do know: slavery and segregation did not suddenly become illegal without the efforts of faithful people working against those demeaning behaviors long before the law caught up with the immorality. Long before segregation and slavery were ended, people of faith journeyed to the holy mountain to learn to walk in God’s ways. They laid the foundations, prepared the way. We are at day two of a brand new year…a year heralded with all the tinsel and trappings that proclaim the coming of the holidays—beginning in October. We can all chart the lists of must-do’s…services to prepare for, greens to be hung, letters to be written and mailed, gifts to be wrapped and shipped, holiday treats to be baked. We know beyond any doubt that much of the excitement and the stress of the season are commercially driven. But…these same trappings also work on us. They create within us an expectation, no matter how much we try to counter it, even with alternative practices. This isn’t all bad. However we approach the holiday season, with whatever mixture of anticipation, dread, excitement, despair, hope, cynicism, or joy, the season’s annual trek across our lives demands that we attend to it in some fashion. And to that extent, the holiday trappings are a very good thing. Because if we are to be attentive to learning God’s ways so that we may walk in God’s paths, then we need to pay attention to an array of possibilities. Maybe, just maybe, the proclamations of peace that accompany the season are God’s word to us as both vision and calling. Maybe, just maybe, every single time we hear the word “peace,” every single time we see it in print, it is just one more brick paving the way to a world in which war will no longer be an option. Maybe, just maybe, swords and spears and guns and bombs will become as obsolete as my father’s metal tool. And generations to come will look at them with the same revulsion we feel as we see the branding irons and shackles of slavery, or the museum pieces of the Civil Rights movement that proclaim “Whites only.” Maybe, just maybe, on this trip to God’s holy mountain we shall not learn war any more. # # # [1] The New York Times, “Languages Die, But Not Their Last Words,” John Noble Wilford, September 19, 2007, Science Section. |