Kathy McCallie
Pastor, Church of the Open Arms UCC
May 3, 2007
NATIONAL DAY OF PRAYER--2007
I’m tired of speeches. Oh, don’t get me wrong. It is important to articulate our positions and encourage each other in the struggles for justice, freedom, and equality. But, I am longing for new action.
Remember Kierkegaard’s story of the duck church? The ducks waddled in every week and sat in their pews. Their duck preacher gave eloquent sermons charging them to realize their noble calling as ducks. “You are noble creatures! You can soar up, up into the sky… You can fly!” The ducks would nod their heads and say amen… and then they would waddle out of the church, back down the lane to their tedious lives.
The poet Rilke said, “Thinking is easy. Acting is difficult. To put one’s thoughts into action is the most difficult thing in the world.” I hope I am the only one who feels this way, but I am discouraged. We gather for events like this and see mostly the same few dozen faces year after year.
Cicero was convinced that the vast majority of people are happy as long as they have “bread and circuses.” They really don’t care what type of government they have at all. We are surrounded by a perilous over-abundance of material resources and diversions. Let’s ask ourselves not only what speeches can we make, but also what actions can we take that will make a difference?
I don’t pretend to have the answers, but I have been thinking about this a good bit, and I would suggest a few actions for us as leaders and activists in our community.
First, I think we can enter into sustained and creative discernment about how to connect young people and larger groups of people with our efforts for justice. Obviously we have been trying to do this all along. Maybe trying harder isn’t the answer. Maybe we need to try in new ways.
Secondly, we can hold each other accountable for taking direct actions in addition to voting, speaking out, and praying. These are important actions, but we need others, too. We need to organize and educate in new ways. We need inspired actions like Gandhi’s march to the sea or Martin Luther King’s march from Selma to Montgomery. Let’s remember that these were not safe, inexpensive or low-risk actions.
I look around and I know that I am preaching to the choir. I know the constant, faithful, innovative work you have been doing. You are the leaders and organizers working year after year for human rights, for religious freedom and tolerance, for justice and equality. I know we all get weary. So, I think we need to take action for our spiritual renewal and inspiration. Acts for spiritual rejuvenation are not time off from the struggle. Such acts are essential to the struggle. We will not make serious, long-lasting breakthroughs in our work on our own power alone. We have to be channels, vessels, servants of the divine – of God (whatever we call that mystery) – of the higher power.
So the third action I suggest is that we get serious about a love affair with nature. In other words, we need to savor the earth. Environmental educators have a new strategy that excites me. They realized that a campaign to “save the earth” instills a sense of despair or hopelessness. If we try to teach young people to “save the earth” it sound like an impossible effort, or maybe an effort that is too little too late. Instead, creative environmentalists are teaching children to savor the earth. Connection with the earth is connection with the divine. We can find power, vision, and hope from deepening our delight and wonder in connection with the earth.
Then perhaps, we can learn to savor our differences as people of different races, genders, sexual orientations, religions. What would our society look like if we savored the diversity, the questions, the challenges facing our world rather than approaching them as problems? Maybe then we could have one interfaith celebration on this day. We could celebrate the way we draw power, vision and inspiration from our faith, ethics, and spirituality that fuels our activism. We could do this in ways that do not dishonor or disrespect people whose beliefs are different from our own.
While we are trying to think ourselves and our society in to new ways of acting, let us also act ourselves into new ways of thinking.
