WHOSE LIVES MATTER?
A Meditation on What My Grandmother Taught Me
A Sermon
James Ishmael Ford
18 October 2015
Pacific Unitarian Church
Rancho Palos Verdes, California
My father was a will-o’-the-wisp with more than a passing affection for the drink. In his life he never held steady employment. As a consequence we were poor, sometimes desperately poor, and we moved, a lot. On occasion as I think about from where I’ve come and where I’ve arrived I find I feel like a survivor in some catastrophe. Some look for a mark from God in such things. Me, I’m not inclined to thinking I’m marked by the divine for some special purpose. Instead, I look at my life and just think, “Oh, my! How lucky. How absolutely amazingly lucky!”
I mentioned this once in a sermon, how I see so much of my success in life determined by the luck of the draw. And this is a harsh truth. Among those totally out of my control factors was being born male. And, for today’s consideration, being born what we call white. After delivering that sermon friends from the congregation came to me and insisted, sometimes with a hint of ferocity in their voices, “No, no, you succeeded by being smart, and because you pulled up your socks and worked hard.” With what I thought was a hint of desperation in their voices, they’d say, “You earned it, all.”
As I think about those conversations I find my heart going to the Black Lives Matter movement. It arose in the wake of several dreadful events, where unarmed black men died in altercations with the police. In a number of these events the person who ended up dead was no angel. And some focus on that fact. Some wish to look at anything but the underlying reality that in our culture some lives in fact do matter more than others. Think of it as the luck of the draw.
Here’s one of those little secrets we don’t really like to dwell on. As a culture we’re just not as socially mobile as we like to tell ourselves. Our collective story of pull yourself up by your own bootstraps doesn’t actually work that way. Much of the truth of it, a great deal of it, is how in this life you need someone to give you a hand up. Now, at some level, we all have had that hand extended, or, more properly those hands. At some level, to some degree.
And this is important. When we don’t notice that hand we also don’t notice how if you are in some way not like the person with the hand to pull you up, that hand is much less likely to be extended. It is how things tend to work. And that, dear ones, is privilege. Privilege is about that hand up. And who gets. And who does not. It can take the shape of who reaches a hand out to whom, and, right up there with that, it can in the beat of a heart become a decision about whether or not to pull a trigger.
This year a lot of Unitarian Universalist ministers and congregations have made public stands holding the light on the matter of race within our culture, and specifically the matter of how people of African descent live in our culture. If you look hard, it turns out it isn’t a pretty picture.
And there’s been a backlash. Black Lives Matter banners have been defaced. The word “black” has been marked out or cut out or replaced with the word “all” as in “all lives matter.” And of course all lives matter. And I would add, of course blue lives matter. I can’t help but think of 9/11 and those images of those who rushed into the Twin towers when everyone else was fleeing to feel how deeply blue lives matter. But, that doesn’t mean there isn’t a need to specifically attend to the issue that gave rise to the original slogan, Black Lives Matter. And, perhaps, to look a little into why so many resist that slogan.
And one more thing. More than one UU minister has experienced pushback within their congregation for holding this issue up. I know one or two who think it may cost them their ministry. Me, I hear this and I think of that old saying attributed to Mohammed, that if you want to speak truth, you should have one foot in your horses’ stirrup when you speak.
So, here’s a truth, for many of us a hard truth to hear. Most of us in this room, not all of us, but most are where we are in significant part because of the conditions of our birth. And with those conditions, the various hands that have been extended out to us, that in part, in part, have gotten us to where we are. Now, I’m not asking anyone to feel guilty about this. Just a fact on the ground.
What I am asking is that we notice. Because if we see a problem, then we’re well on our way to doing something about it. And it turns out it really isn’t rocket science. A lot of our grandmothers have told us what needs to be done. Even when they weren’t quite able to do it themselves, they spoke deep truths we just need to actually hear.
An illustration. I was thirteen when my father went to jail. It wasn’t the first time he saw the inside of a prison, but it was the first time I knew about it. He’d been the manager of a liquor store in Hemet, California, when a friend of his said, “I just need to borrow the money ‘till Monday.” Today, I’d say his need to be one of the gang overcame his common sense. In this case my dad spent a year incarcerated because he agreed to that “loan.”
I took it all hard. And so my mother sent me up to Oakland to live with my grandmother and auntie. As soon as I arrived they enrolled me at the local junior high school. If there was another white kid in that school, I have no memory of it. What I do remember was being beaten up that first day, and again on the second day. The third day I learned how to hide, to make myself invisible. Of course, not always successfully. It was a hard year.
The only thing that saved me from imprinting some pretty awful things was my grandmother. She’d been poor her whole life, was not well-educated, and had no idea there might be alternatives to my going to that school, and if there were, how to manipulate the system to move me. We were poor people. We didn’t get the system. But, poor and lacking a formal education does not mean without wisdom. She taught me whether we had any power over those things happening to us or not, we could control how we reacted to those things that happened to us. Our actions were in our hands.
Of course getting a handle on what was going on, getting the space and perspective that allowed wise actions is easier said than done. For my grandma prayer was the major tool in her kit for how to deal with life. And so we prayed together. A lot. We prayed for things to get better. But that wasn’t the all of it. We prayed for my father who I was just learning to hate. We prayed for my mother who was having a hard time supporting herself and my younger brother. We prayed for each other. And we prayed for those kids at school. Most of whom my grandma told me had it harder than we did. As unlikely as that seemed to me.
Now these days I don’t believe in a deity somewhere in the sky who takes messages and fixes things. So, I look at what prayer might actually be. That first part about praying to change things, I think is only useful in reminding us to get up and do some changing. But those other prayers, I find myself thinking about them a lot. Leonard Cohen sings to us how there is “a crack in everything,” and “that’s how the light gets in.” Well, prayers can push that crack ever bigger, allowing ever more light, allowing the critical view that includes all of us. And that insight opens a way of wisdom.
These days I continue that practice, although I call it meditation, and it is a bit more clearly focused on the part that is opening up, being as wide as possible, noticing, letting everything rise as if it were reflected in a mirror. Just see. Just notice. And what is wonderful is how from that seeing things begin to happen. We begin to see how we can act. Grandma’s prayer for others started it all for me. Today, as prayer or meditation, this being radically open for some time every day is a practice I commend to all.
And here I find myself thinking of Black Lives Matter, and specifically of that hard and persistent truth: in our culture black lives don’t matter as much as white lives. For many, maybe for most, this not mattering as much manifests as just a smallest hesitation. But, and this is critical, the course of a life can hang on that small hesitation. On who reaches a hand out, or not. On who pulls a trigger or not. So, our call, ours here in this place, on this day when we’ve welcomed some children into our warm embrace, and I hope we are experiencing hope, is to notice. For their sake, for all our sakes.
Paying attention doesn’t fix everything. Of course not. I know I continue to carry wounds and prejudices and hesitations despite my years of practice. But giving some time to that open and mirror-like place regularly, allows me to see bigger, and to become ever more integrated with my own heart, and with the world beyond my skin. It worked for my grandmother as she applied it in her own way. And it has worked for me as I’ve applied it in mine. It has even allowed me to be open to challenge what I think is, and what I think is always going to be. Maybe even to pursue the deeper calls of that slogan Black Lives Matter and why there is such push back against it, maybe even within our own hearts.
I think of those children we’ve just welcomed, and our promises to them, and I think we must push. Push against our own hesitations. And push our community. Push to find the ways that truly make all lives matter by attending to the realities of where they don’t.
It’s hard. But. We must. If we care for our children. If we care for our own hearts. If we care at all, we must face into it.
See clearly, and act from that seeing. Our grandmothers’ lesson.
That easy. That hard. That important.
So be it. Blessed be. And, amen.
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