Again
Brookfield Unitarian Universalist Church
October 17, 2021
Rev. Craig M. Nowak
I don’t know about you, but I’ve come to realize something that’s kind of unsettling…
The world is crazy.
Now, maybe it always has been, but, I’ll tell you, the more I see, read, or listen about what is going on in the world beyond the walls of my home, the convinced I become that we are living in a time of unprecedented madness.
Then again, maybe I’m just getting old.
I turn 52 in a few weeks- I know, still a kid to some of you- and in the last at few years I’ve found myself increasingly engaged in conversations with others reminiscing about something called, “the good old days.” Truth be told, as the spouse of antiques dealer I’ve spent the last 25 years among people reminiscing about “the good old days”. What’s different now is I’m not just listening, but reminiscing myself.
One of the things I’ve noticed over the years of listening to people reminisce about the past is that almost without exception, the past is remembered not only as better than the present, but hallowed as some unique golden age, the full glory of which we shall never see again. A time gone by we must be content to release and relive in our memories alone. I say almost without exception, because there are of course, exceptions. Every so often one meets a person who not only thinks the past really was some golden age, but thinks that past can…and should… be recreated. A sentiment politicians and pastors of a certain ilk seem to share.
Indeed, one the hazards of being a clergyman in a country that equates religion with the religious right is that when people learn that I’m a minister they sometimes assume I’m an arch conservative socially, politically and so on.
And so it was with a woman I met a few years ago.
The conversation started innocently enough. The woman, a stranger to me, had somehow managed to strike up a conversation with me about the challenges children face today that she and I didn’t have to deal with growing up…things like the pressures of social media and active shooter drills.
Soon we were sharing stories of playing outside, being allowed to ride our bikes what seemed like long distances from home so long as we were home before the street lights came on. Touched with a tinge of melancholy, our similar memories carried the nostalgic warmth that often characterizes longtime friendships.
Then things got weird.
I don’t know which one of us said the first thing that caused the hair on the back of the other’s neck to rise, but before too long pointed comments about race, welfare, shooting, and her speculations as to the reason her old neighborhood had gone “downhill” became intertwined with talk of the need to bring prayer back to public schools.
Soon it was apparent that while she and I shared some similar memories of childhood decades past, only one of us pined for a return to the way things were, an America, in the words of the poet Richard Blanco, “as great as it never really was.”
In retrospect, I could have asked the woman with whom I seemed to share so many similar memories with if she grew up in well-kept houses with yards outlined by neatly trimmed hedges and an old stone wall like I did. Or if her mother was blonde, a stay at home mom, and if her father went to the office every day, like mine. And if she, like my sister, had a brother who knew he liked boys instead of girls, but stayed silent and let it eat away at him from the inside rather than disturb the greatness of our picture postcard life for everyone else.
That she was a stranger, I didn’t get into it too deeply and instead offered a few edited thoughts, which to her seeming surprise, were quite counter to hers, and left it at that.
Now, I admit there’s a part of me that felt for her and others who would turn to and even follow a political or religious Pied Piper back to a known past rather than face an unknowable future. I get and indeed share the anxieties of this age in which we live. In fact, it is something never very far from me these days.
But there’s another part of me that wants to know what right she or anyone else has to assign and expect me to go back and play the part I was given so she and others can relive those alleged good old days for which she pined?
The unwillingness of many for whom the good old days weren’t so great to get back in line in order to restore that fictional greatness is an inconvenience many have a hard time accepting.
Sometime after football player turned civil rights activist Colin Kaepernick started “taking a knee” during the national anthem to protest racial injustice, mugs, tee-shirts, and bumperstickers began to appear emblazoned with the words, “Stand Up or Get Out.” Alongside these overtly commercialized expressions of outrage was another somewhat more subtle call for him to mind his place…some variation of, “I don’t mind him protesting, but he shouldn’t mix politics with sports.”
But justice is not politics.
Calling it such in a culture where politics, along with religion, are things to be avoided in polite company means advocating for justice becomes not only an inconvenience but inappropriate to those who are not interested or intentionally engaged in it. An echo from an America “as great as it never really was.” sounding in the present.
Wouldn’t it be nice instead to live in a country where the justification and toleration of injustice was considered inconvenient and inappropriate?
And wouldn’t be nice to live in country where the good life didn’t come in one size, one color, and from one or two corporate suppliers?
And wouldn’t it be nice if in this country women, all women, were recognized and fairly compensated for their work whether inside or outside the home? And that charges of abuse and violence toward them were taken as seriously as the excuses and denials of male perpetrators of abuse and violence.
And wouldn’t it be nice if the jobs Americans won’t do could be done by Americans, new Americans, those migrants and immigrants doing the work “illegally” today and paying into a system that threatens them with ruin rather than reward each new day.
And wouldn’t it be nice if we lived in a country where men were as valued for their effort as their achievements and a boy awakening to a different gender identity doesn’t get their head bashed in for trying on a dress.
Wound’t it be nice, indeed.
At a debate in 1965 at Cambridge University between the writer James Baldwin and William F. Buckley, Jr., then editor of the “National Review” Baldwin, who was black and gay, famously said, “It comes as a great shock around the age of five, or six, or seven, to discover that the flag to which you have pledged allegiance, along with everybody else, has not pledged allegiance to you.”
Oh how those words resonate with me.
I was unaware of Baldwin’s words and his debate with Buckley when I came out in 1996. Indeed, I wasn’t five, or six, or seven, but twenty-six when I discovered the flag to which I had pledged allegiance, along with everybody else, had not pledged allegiance to me. With two words, “I’m gay” I was instantly assigned second class status with different rights, like the right to be arrested for acting on being gay, the right to be fired or denied public accommodation for being gay, and the right to be beat up then accused of inciting gay panic by the perpetrator’s defense lawyer. By the way, LGBTQ folk still face those last two rights in many states, even some considered “blue”.
“But it’s better today,” I’m often reminded in the form of a question.
The long and short of it is, I’m not interested in returning to an America “as great as it never was.” even though some of it was good and carries some fond memories. Instead, I want to live into an America that’s again committed not just to the broader ideals as great as those written on the parchment of its founding documents but to their fulfillment, a nation where the flag anyone here pledges allegiance to pledges its allegiance to them in return.
And I’m not talking about politics. I’m talking about justice…the kind of faithful work Jonipher Kwong speaks of in our second reading. The spiritual work and practice of acknowledging and remedying an imperfect past and present and readying ourselves that a still imperfect but decidedly better tomorrow may yet emerge and flourish in each and for all.
And wouldn’t that be nice? Indeed, it might even be…great.
May it be so.
Amen and Blessed Be
Brookfield Unitarian Universalist Church
October 17, 2021
Rev. Craig M. Nowak
I don’t know about you, but I’ve come to realize something that’s kind of unsettling…
The world is crazy.
Now, maybe it always has been, but, I’ll tell you, the more I see, read, or listen about what is going on in the world beyond the walls of my home, the convinced I become that we are living in a time of unprecedented madness.
Then again, maybe I’m just getting old.
I turn 52 in a few weeks- I know, still a kid to some of you- and in the last at few years I’ve found myself increasingly engaged in conversations with others reminiscing about something called, “the good old days.” Truth be told, as the spouse of antiques dealer I’ve spent the last 25 years among people reminiscing about “the good old days”. What’s different now is I’m not just listening, but reminiscing myself.
One of the things I’ve noticed over the years of listening to people reminisce about the past is that almost without exception, the past is remembered not only as better than the present, but hallowed as some unique golden age, the full glory of which we shall never see again. A time gone by we must be content to release and relive in our memories alone. I say almost without exception, because there are of course, exceptions. Every so often one meets a person who not only thinks the past really was some golden age, but thinks that past can…and should… be recreated. A sentiment politicians and pastors of a certain ilk seem to share.
Indeed, one the hazards of being a clergyman in a country that equates religion with the religious right is that when people learn that I’m a minister they sometimes assume I’m an arch conservative socially, politically and so on.
And so it was with a woman I met a few years ago.
The conversation started innocently enough. The woman, a stranger to me, had somehow managed to strike up a conversation with me about the challenges children face today that she and I didn’t have to deal with growing up…things like the pressures of social media and active shooter drills.
Soon we were sharing stories of playing outside, being allowed to ride our bikes what seemed like long distances from home so long as we were home before the street lights came on. Touched with a tinge of melancholy, our similar memories carried the nostalgic warmth that often characterizes longtime friendships.
Then things got weird.
I don’t know which one of us said the first thing that caused the hair on the back of the other’s neck to rise, but before too long pointed comments about race, welfare, shooting, and her speculations as to the reason her old neighborhood had gone “downhill” became intertwined with talk of the need to bring prayer back to public schools.
Soon it was apparent that while she and I shared some similar memories of childhood decades past, only one of us pined for a return to the way things were, an America, in the words of the poet Richard Blanco, “as great as it never really was.”
In retrospect, I could have asked the woman with whom I seemed to share so many similar memories with if she grew up in well-kept houses with yards outlined by neatly trimmed hedges and an old stone wall like I did. Or if her mother was blonde, a stay at home mom, and if her father went to the office every day, like mine. And if she, like my sister, had a brother who knew he liked boys instead of girls, but stayed silent and let it eat away at him from the inside rather than disturb the greatness of our picture postcard life for everyone else.
That she was a stranger, I didn’t get into it too deeply and instead offered a few edited thoughts, which to her seeming surprise, were quite counter to hers, and left it at that.
Now, I admit there’s a part of me that felt for her and others who would turn to and even follow a political or religious Pied Piper back to a known past rather than face an unknowable future. I get and indeed share the anxieties of this age in which we live. In fact, it is something never very far from me these days.
But there’s another part of me that wants to know what right she or anyone else has to assign and expect me to go back and play the part I was given so she and others can relive those alleged good old days for which she pined?
The unwillingness of many for whom the good old days weren’t so great to get back in line in order to restore that fictional greatness is an inconvenience many have a hard time accepting.
Sometime after football player turned civil rights activist Colin Kaepernick started “taking a knee” during the national anthem to protest racial injustice, mugs, tee-shirts, and bumperstickers began to appear emblazoned with the words, “Stand Up or Get Out.” Alongside these overtly commercialized expressions of outrage was another somewhat more subtle call for him to mind his place…some variation of, “I don’t mind him protesting, but he shouldn’t mix politics with sports.”
But justice is not politics.
Calling it such in a culture where politics, along with religion, are things to be avoided in polite company means advocating for justice becomes not only an inconvenience but inappropriate to those who are not interested or intentionally engaged in it. An echo from an America “as great as it never really was.” sounding in the present.
Wouldn’t it be nice instead to live in a country where the justification and toleration of injustice was considered inconvenient and inappropriate?
And wouldn’t be nice to live in country where the good life didn’t come in one size, one color, and from one or two corporate suppliers?
And wouldn’t it be nice if in this country women, all women, were recognized and fairly compensated for their work whether inside or outside the home? And that charges of abuse and violence toward them were taken as seriously as the excuses and denials of male perpetrators of abuse and violence.
And wouldn’t it be nice if the jobs Americans won’t do could be done by Americans, new Americans, those migrants and immigrants doing the work “illegally” today and paying into a system that threatens them with ruin rather than reward each new day.
And wouldn’t it be nice if we lived in a country where men were as valued for their effort as their achievements and a boy awakening to a different gender identity doesn’t get their head bashed in for trying on a dress.
Wound’t it be nice, indeed.
At a debate in 1965 at Cambridge University between the writer James Baldwin and William F. Buckley, Jr., then editor of the “National Review” Baldwin, who was black and gay, famously said, “It comes as a great shock around the age of five, or six, or seven, to discover that the flag to which you have pledged allegiance, along with everybody else, has not pledged allegiance to you.”
Oh how those words resonate with me.
I was unaware of Baldwin’s words and his debate with Buckley when I came out in 1996. Indeed, I wasn’t five, or six, or seven, but twenty-six when I discovered the flag to which I had pledged allegiance, along with everybody else, had not pledged allegiance to me. With two words, “I’m gay” I was instantly assigned second class status with different rights, like the right to be arrested for acting on being gay, the right to be fired or denied public accommodation for being gay, and the right to be beat up then accused of inciting gay panic by the perpetrator’s defense lawyer. By the way, LGBTQ folk still face those last two rights in many states, even some considered “blue”.
“But it’s better today,” I’m often reminded in the form of a question.
The long and short of it is, I’m not interested in returning to an America “as great as it never was.” even though some of it was good and carries some fond memories. Instead, I want to live into an America that’s again committed not just to the broader ideals as great as those written on the parchment of its founding documents but to their fulfillment, a nation where the flag anyone here pledges allegiance to pledges its allegiance to them in return.
And I’m not talking about politics. I’m talking about justice…the kind of faithful work Jonipher Kwong speaks of in our second reading. The spiritual work and practice of acknowledging and remedying an imperfect past and present and readying ourselves that a still imperfect but decidedly better tomorrow may yet emerge and flourish in each and for all.
And wouldn’t that be nice? Indeed, it might even be…great.
May it be so.
Amen and Blessed Be