First Parish Bedford UU

“The Frailty of Privilege”

A Sermon by Dan McKanan,
Ralph Waldo Emerson UUA Senior Lecturer in Divinity at Harvard Divinity School

delivered at The First Parish in Bedford, Massachusetts, Unitarian Universalist

on Sunday, October 25, 2009

Reading:

From “Likeness to God” by William Ellery Channing

I do and I must reverence human nature. Neither the sneers of a worldly skepticism, nor the groans of a gloomy theology, disturb my faith in its godlike powers and tendencies. I know how it is despised, how it has been oppressed, how civil and religious establishments have for ages conspired to crush it. I know its history. I shut my eyes on none of its weaknesses and crimes. I understand the proofs, by which despotism demonstrates, that man is a wild beast, in want of a master, and only safe in chains. But, injured, trampled on, and scorned as our nature is, I still turn to it with intense sympathy and strong hope. The signatures of its origin and its end are impressed too deeply to be ever wholly effaced. I bless it for its kind affections, for its strong and tender love. I honor it for its struggles against oppression, for its growth and progress under the weight of so many chains and prejudices, for its achievements in science and art, and still more for its examples of heroic and saintly virtue. These are marks of a divine origin and the pledges of a celestial inheritance; and I thank God that my own lot is bound up with that of the human race.

Sermon

It’s good to be back! Actually, I’ve never been in this church before. But I was baptized here in Bedford, at the Lutheran Church of the Savior. I grew up first in Lexington, and then out in Pepperell. I moved to Chicago after college, and have lived mostly in the Midwest until I got the job at Harvard last year. So the past year and a half has been a time of extended homecoming for me.

For me, coming home has meant coming face to face with human frailty. A few weeks after I arrived on campus last year, I ran into a retired colleague who had been one of my professors when I was an undergraduate. In fact, he was my thesis advisor. I was always a little bit intimidated by him, so at first I hesitated to step up and re-introduce myself. But I finally got up the courage—and he didn’t remember me. Not at all. I said this or that to jog his memory—the years I was in school, the title of my thesis. Nothing. “I don’t remember much anymore,” he said sadly.

Similarly, I’ve spent much of the past year reconnecting with family members in hospital rooms, as my parents and siblings have come to terms with worn out knees, overworked backs, and the accumulated grief of the past two decades.

I shouldn’t be surprised. After twenty years, everyone is twenty years older. But the frailty also reflects the economy. In the past year, members of my once-prosperous family have experienced underwater mortgages, extended unemployment, surprise layoffs, bankruptcy—as well as deep anxiety about the financial future. For many of my loved ones, it seems that every path forward is blocked.

In one sense, human frailty simply means being unable to do what we want to do. Sometimes our frailty is physical, sometimes it is emotional. Whatever the cause, the nearly constant companion of frailty is a deep sense of moral shame. If I can’t do what I set out to do, then there must be something wrong with me. Maybe I’m not right with God, maybe I’m not right with nature. Maybe, we say in our frailty, if I prayed harder or took more vitamins or rode my bike to work I wouldn’t be facing this bankruptcy or surgery or divorce. And then we hear of another eco-conscious commuter who has had a bike accident. Even when we are doing everything right, we are frail.

And frailty has been a spiritual challenge for me. For most of my life, my spirituality has centered not on frailty but on the struggle against oppression. People are inherently good, I believe, and our potential is unlimited—but too often we are beaten down by racism, sexism, and injustice of every stripe. Like William Ellery Channing, I “reverence human nature” and its “godlike powers.” When human beings fall short, I tend to blame the system—what Channing called “civil and religious establishments.” The government. Big corporations. Class. Race. Sexism.

It is not easy to reconcile this worldview with simple, garden variety human frailty. Most of the suffering I’ve witnessed in the past year didn’t have much to do oppressive systems. Some of it had to do with simple biology: no one lives forever. Some of it had to do with bad choices about how many hours to work and how much money to borrow and what kind of food to eat. All of it had to do with bad luck. But very little had to do with exploitation or injustice or evil institutions.

It reminds me of a bicycle accident I had a few months before I moved back to Massachusetts. Lots of people helped me out—a police officer, an ambulance driver, an emergency room doctor, an oral surgeon. The first thing every one of them asked me was whether I’d been hit by a car. It would have made a difference for my medical insurance, of course. But I hadn’t been hit by a car, and so I had to explain my own frailty again and again. No, my feet just got tangled in the pedals. No, I don’t know why. No, there was no car anywhere near me. Trying to fit every bit of human frailty into the oppression paradigm is like trying to find a guilty car to go along with every bike accident.

What’s more, when I look at myself and my family through the lens of oppression, I’ve never seen us as part of the oppressed group. We are, instead, among the privileged. Some of my ancestors owned slaves; others took advantage of government homestead policies that were available only to white people. My parents are both college-educated; all of my siblings have master’s degrees. We were brought up to not to worry about money, and never to skimp on education. And yet we find ourselves, again and again, too frail to do the things we most desire.

People like me and my family often face a paradox. We have advantages that other people lack, and we imagine that these will insulate us from our own frailty. But instead our advantages cut us off from other people and from the interdependent web of life. As long as I have a big house, a fast car, and a big credit line, what else do I need? But sooner or later an economic crisis will take away the credit line, and failing eyesight will make me unable to drive. And then I might find myself alone, made more frail by my privileges.

I should be clear about how I use the word “privilege,” since different people use it in different ways. I don’t think that something is a “privilege” just because some people have it and others don’t. If something is essential to a full life, and if it is possible for everyone to have it, then I call it a right. A privilege, on the other hand, is something that I can only have because something has been taken away from somebody else. In its very nature, privilege breaks relationship. The fact that I have a house to live in isn’t a privilege—it is a right that is unjustly denied to many people. But the fact that my ancestors’ land and wealth was made available by the genocide of Native peoples—that’s privilege.

It’s also a good example of how privilege increases human frailty. When my ancestors killed and displaced the Native peoples of North America, the broken relationship deprived them of the ecological wisdom that had been accumulated over millennia spent on this continent. Now that lost knowledge is haunting all of us. We must rebuild relationships with surviving indigenous communities, join in their struggles for the land, restore the circle of human community, if we are to have any hope of healing our fevered planet.

Similarly, our current economic crisis can be traced to the American privilege of having the world’s greatest military. For too long, our confidence in our own strength made it easy for us to ignore economic imbalances in our relationships with other nations. We have imported and borrowed while others have exported and saved. And now we face challenges that military strength will never solve.

By this point, some of you may be feeling that you are the victims of a bait and switch. I started out by saying that my paradigm of oppression was not adequate to account for frailty, but I’ve managed to turn this around into a social justice sermon. Well, I won’t apologize. What I want to do instead is to challenge all of us to rethink our approach to social justice—to take into account the fact that the powerful and privileged are also frail and vulnerable. Just think how frail George W. Bush must have felt on the day of September 11, or Hurricane Katrina. Think how frail Barack Obama must feel each time a health care bill gets stalled in Congress.

To see the frailty of the powerful doesn’t mean letting the likes of Bernie Madoff off the hook. But it does mean trying to see the world through their eyes. Imagine how vulnerable Madoff must have felt when he realized that everyone expected him to work magic with their investments. Could he keep it up? What if he’d just been lucky in the past? When we recognize the frailty that tempted Madoff to abuse his power, we can devise strategies for weaving people like him back into the web of community.

Last summer, some of you may have followed the news story of the encounter between Harvard professor Henry Louis Gates and police officer James Crowley—the encounter that culminated in President Obama’s “beer summit.” For those of you who found yourself wishing that story would just go away, I apologize. I did follow it closely myself, in part because I had met my colleague Professor Gates for the first time just a few months before the incident.

As I see it, when Gates and Crowley met, each was pointedly aware of his own frailty and the privilege of the other. Professor Gates, who is 58 years old and walks with a cane, was probably exhausted, having just returned from a trip. He was frustrated that his front door lock was broken, and that he had been forced to break into his own house. Being confronted with a police officer investigating the apparent burglary meant he could not sit down, kick off his shoes, and relax. And because Professor Gates is African American, facing a police officer reminded him of all the statistics showing that black men are more likely to be stopped, questioned, arrested, and harassed by the police than white men in similar circumstances. From Gates’s perspective, he was one weak and tired man facing a four hundred year history of violence and oppression.

But that’s not what Sergeant Crowley saw. Crowley most likely saw himself as a hard-working cop trying to do his job. Working in Cambridge, he might have had previous encounters with Harvard professors who were full of their own class privilege. When he realized that Gates was trying to call the police and lodge a complaint, he probably felt afraid for his job security. And when Gates called him a racist, he had flashbacks to the day sixteen years earlier, when he had frantically tried to resuscitate Celtics star Reggie Lewis with CPR. It’s hard to imagine a deeper experience of frailty than trying, and failing, to save the life of another human being. At that time, apparently, some people accused Crowley of not trying hard enough because Lewis is black. It might have been only a few people who made that charge, but it’s easy to see how those cruel words would have stuck with Crowley, and echoed in his mind during his encounter with Gates. From Crowley’s perspective, he was a hardworking public servant, misunderstood and mistreated by the public he was trying to serve.

The truth is that BOTH Gates and Crowley were caught up in a system of class and race, a history bigger than either one of them. They were made frail not only by their physical weaknesses, but by years of broken relationship between blacks and whites and between Harvard and its neighbors. And everybody else was caught up in the same system. You may recall that there were several other people on the scene--Gates’s driver, another cop or two, the woman who first called the police, Gates’s neighbors. Not one of those people knew how to help Gates and Crowley gain a broader perspective. Not one, perhaps, was able to recognize and honor the deep frailty that each man was feeling.

What would have helped Gates and Crowley respond more creatively to one another’s frailty? I am not sure. One thing I learned from the incident is that it is never helpful to blame one person for a whole system of oppression. Was racism involved in the Gates-Crowley encounter? Absolutely. Was it helpful for Gates to say, “You’re the racist here”? Absolutely not.

More broadly, we need spiritual practices that will help us recognize the frailty of others, especially those others whom we see as powerful or threatening. The Buddhist metta meditation is one such practice: people direct compassionate thoughts first to themselves, then to their loved ones, then to strangers, and finally to enemies. Buddhist teacher Thich Nhat Hanh similarly challenged his fellow peace activists to write “love letters” rather than “protest letters” to political leaders. “We need to learn to write to the Congress and to the president . . . letters that they will not put in the trash can. We need to write the kind of letter that they will like to receive. . . . Because the people you write to are also persons like all of us.”

We also need practices that will help us embrace our own frailties, even see them as part of the giftedness we bring to the world. Back in 1826, the Unitarian minister Joseph Tuckerman pioneered what would become the UU Urban ministry by visiting and helping Boston’s poor. As a Harvard-educated minister, Tuckerman brought a lot of privilege to this work. But what really made it possible, I think, was his frailty. He had recently lost his church in Chelsea because of health problems and a failing voice, and the memory of his loss caused him to enter the “houses of the poor” “almost tremblingly.” He needed relationship and purpose as much as they needed food and fuel, and when those needs came together, reported his friend Channing, “it seemed as if a new fountain of love had been opened within him.”

A few decades ago, scholar Katie Cannon pioneered the tradition of “womanist ethics”—ethics from the point of view of African American women—by observing that traditional ethical theories all assume that people are free to do what they choose. Sometimes they even assume that people who aren’t perfectly free aren’t fully human. But for Black women facing enslavement or impoverishment, the starting point is not freedom but the sheer survival of the community. Ethics is not about finding the perfect course of action, but about exercising one’s limited power with invisible dignity, with quiet grace, with unshouted courage.

The experience of frailty reminds us that, to varying degrees, the same thing applies to everyone. Abstract ethical principles might tell me that I should be a prophetic witness against public injustice, a scholar who reads everything my colleagues write, a professor who inspires every student, a spouse who is deeply attentive to each conversation, a parent who never tires of playing games. But I can’t do it all. And so my character is revealed not by what I would do if I could do anything, but by what I actually do after my first plans have failed.

All of us, rich and poor, came into this world frail, hungry, unable to do anything for ourselves. Our first act, in our frailty, was to reach out for relationship—to taste our mother’s breast, to find again the warm connectedness of the womb. Without relationship, none of us would have lived a single day. And yet those relationships have been broken again and again. Some of us lose our mother on that very first day; some lose her after eighty years of loving connectedness. For some of us, frailty is made worse by poverty, violence, and disease; for some it is hidden away by wealth and power. But sooner or later, broken bodies and broken hearts will bring us back to where we started, and in our frailty we will reach out again. For warmth. For food. For one another. And our deepest love will be the love we find after our hearts have been broken.