Sermon: Path of Dreams

“Path of Dreams”
Rev. Megan Lloyd Joiner
Unitarian Society of New Haven
March 17, 2019

Call to Worship: “Step Zero” by Gretchen Haley

If you had the chance to start again
To make your life from scratch
To decide what sort of person you would be
Who you would love, and
The content of your days, your hours
What songs would you sing to yourself,
or with others?
What prayers would you let fall from your lips
Urgently and with praise,
With mercy, or hope?
What blessings would you name and share,
with strangers, and friends?
If you could take now that first step
what journey would you begin
across deserts, or mountains –
or would you take to the sky,
which, despite the bitter cold
is still vast, and filled with light?

What work would you take,
what mischief would you make
with boldness, and bravery,
what failure would you embrace, and
what would you release,
and where in the end,
would you return, and call home?
In this new day

…no magic wishing or wondering
is required
for such a chance
is always available
As with the in, and out of our breath
to begin now
to live like we mean it
to see with new eyes
the life that is already and always available,
to respond to this gift

with wonder,
and gratitude…
to tend this flame
even when it breaks our heart
to keep showing up
to go with courage
into this dawning day.

Reading: Lessons from a Tiny Navigator by Nikita Gill

When I was a child afraid

of the nights intentions

someone I loved told me

it is full of strange and lovely truths

if you truly pay attention

They told me about dung beetles

who use the Milky Way

to navigate their path like seafarers

of older days as they traveled

ancient oceans’ dangerous lays.

And that on a clear night

if you are ever lost in the countryside

look up, and you can see

19,000,000,000,000,000 miles

into the exoskeleton map of cosmos.

So even now, when my heart

is full of fear of the dark,

I think of a tiny dung beetle

relying on a galaxy to find

its own way home.

And I reason if such

a tiny easily forgotten being

can learn to trust the stars,

then who am I not to look up at them

in hope and read them with love till I am home.

Sermon:

Refugees and academics, teenagers and college students, old men and little girls.

These are the people that were killed and injured on Friday in Christchurch, New Zealand.[i]

And as I read about their lives, cut short all too soon, cut short in a vicious act of hatred and white supremacy,
I reflected on what was lost in that attack.

At least 50 lives, to be sure.

But also lost: an innocence.

Law enforcement officers in New Zealand do not carry guns. They don’t usually need to. “We don’t have mass shootings in New Zealand,” I heard one reporter say.[ii]

Also lost was a sense of safety in the most sacred space, a house of worship, a spiritual home.

These mosques were home to people from all over the world, people seeking refuge and safety, a sense of normalcy after the terror of war, a new life in a new land, home.

And finally, lost were dreams, dreams upon dreams. The dreams of youth and of old age. The dreams of peace and freedom from oppression and hatred. The dreams of the student and the child, the dreams that keep a community vibrant and alive – shattered.

Today I had planned to speak to you about dreams – the dreams of this community. And I will.

But as I do, let us hold in love the Muslim community in Christchurch, the two mosques that faced violence there on Friday, the many other people afraid and traumatized, the entire community of that city and the nation of New Zealand, and Muslim communities the world over.

Let us remember that as a people, as a human race, we share the dream of peace and a world in which all people have a safe place to call home. This vision is far from the world we live in, and this is why we dedicate the work of our hearts and our hands to creating justice and peace, starting right here and spreading like ripples into the world around us.

These are lofty dreams, some might say. But I say, this is the core of our faith. For what are we – who are we – if we do not dream big?

I was reading Essence magazine while waiting in the doctor’s office a while ago, a feature on new books for kids, and the title of one caught my eye: Dream Big, Little One.[iii] A book by Vashti Harrison highlighting the lives of African-American women, a two-page spread for each woman – astronauts and scholars, sports stars and movie stars and musicians and spies, an explanation of their achievements and how the little one reading the book can follow in their footsteps: “Reach for the stars. Be bold. Go the distance.”

I would buy two, I decided. One for my daughter, Arden, and one for my friend Kierstin and her wife Jennifer’s baby girl. You’ve met Kierstin, she led worship here a couple of months ago on Martin Luther King weekend.

Our daughters are a few years apart. We send hand-me-downs and get back videos of Kierstin and Jenni’s little one walking in the shoes Arden walked in, shoes that our friend Sylvia walked in before Arden and were handed down to us.

These girls, the three of them so close to my heart, walking in the same shoes. New steps. Same shoes.

It’s not easy raising girls in today’s society. It never has been. Really, it’s not easy raising girls or raising boys or raising kids who don’t fit into the gendered boxes society wants to place them in. Many of you have struggled and are struggling as parents to offer your children – of all genders – a way forward that honors their humanity and the humanity of others. We teach them to treat others how they want to be treated. We focus on kindness and care and love.

We pray that their way will be smooth; we grieve with them when it is not. And in addition to shielding them from the daily news, we translate and edit and interpret bedtime stories – some of them the ones our parents read to us, some of them their parents read to them. The tropes of gendered expectations are handed down generation to generation and it is challenging – even now, with all we know – to interrupt them.

My husband, Anthony, and I emphasize with Arden how strong she is, how failure is part of the process and trying again is the most important thing. We tell her she can do anything, be anything, wear anything she wants. Still, she chooses pink, and reiterates to us how pink things are for girls and blue is for boys.

I remind her that boys can also wear anything they want and I remind her again of the history – that until the 1940s, the colors were reversed, and pink was for boys and blue was for girls[iv] – and that really, it’s all arbitrary
and the most important thing is for us to live into whoever we are and whoever we want to be.

We read Dream Big, Little One and she reminds me that she already knows about Mae Jemison[v] who was an engineer, a physician, and an astronaut, the first Black woman in space. Arden already knows about her because of another book given to her by Pam Niles here at USNH. I had forgotten Jemison was in that book. Arden remembered.

We read about Katherine Johnson[vi] of Hidden Figures fame, the mathematician who helped put astronauts on the moon. I explain how folks used to say that girls couldn’t or shouldn’t do math and how Katherine Johnson proved them wrong and how Arden’s new-found love of subtraction is connected to the complicated equations on Johnson’s page in the book.

Math with letters is a new concept, and then I show her some basic algebra. I get really excited about it. Arden is five. I reign myself in and we go back to “minus problems.” There’s plenty of time for algebra.

We read about Ella Fitzgerald[vii] and pull her up on a music streaming app, and soon Ella is crooning over the speakers in our living room. “Doesn’t she have an amazing voice?” I say to Arden. And we explain “scatting”
and how she is using her voice like an instrument. We listen for a while and tears come to my eyes as I hear Fitzgerald sing and marvel at what she must have seen during her career, what hardships she must have faced.

We read about Raven Wilkinson[viii] who died just last December, the first Black woman to have danced for a major ballet company. She danced with the Ballet Russe in 1955. We look her up online and watch videos of her dancing, find pictures of her that match the cartoon drawing in the book, learn from a documentary, Black Ballerina,[ix] about the discrimination she faced in her career, and I explain to my daughter that white people
told Wilkinson that she would never be a prima ballerina because of the color of her skin.

“Not in this country, though,” Arden says.

“Oh yes, baby,” I say. “In this country.”

She remembers a book about Martin Luther King and says, “He made it different.”

“Yes, he did,” I say, “he, and a lot of people with him – black people and white people and all sorts of people.

“Us too,” I say. “It’s important,” I say, “that we keep working for fairness and equality because there’s a lot that’s still not fair and still not equal. And working with other people to make things better for everyone is an important part of what we believe, and what we do and how we are in the world.”

We get to the end of the book, and she asks to read it again.

“Read it again, Mama!”

She is hungry for these stories, these painful, beautiful, triumphant stories. Dream big, little one, the book says.
There’s so much you can do. Just look at all the leaders that came before you.

I originally wanted to buy this book for Kierstin’s daughter because she is a little girl of color, and I wanted her to see all these amazing Black women who did such powerful things. And, as Arden begs me to read it again, I know deep in my bones how important it is for little white girls and little white boys to see them too, for all kids and all people to see them, to honor them – and not just in Black History or Women’s History Month, but all year – to look to them as role models and dreamers beckoning us to decide what kind of people we want to be, what we want to contribute, to think about how we might follow in their footsteps and be bold and brave and dream big.

William Butler Yeats wrote the poem that the choir sang so beautifully this morning:

Had I the heavens’ embroidered cloths,

Enwrought with golden and silver light,

The blue and the dim and the dark cloths

Of night and light and the half-light;

I would spread the cloths under your feet:

But I, being poor, have only my dreams;

I have spread my dreams under your feet;

Tread softly because you tread on my dreams.

What dreams have been spread before us? Spread under our feet? On whose dreams do we tread, not to destroy them (I don’t think that’s what the poet meant) but to be buoyed by them, lifted up, carried forward?

And how do we teach our children that they travel a path laid not by their own labor, but by those who came before them – their ancestors by blood, and those ancestors of spirit, women and men and people who fought and fight for their place in the world, in a society that told them – tells them – they are “less than,” women and men and people who lay a path of dreams for their children and all children to tread upon, a path even richer than one woven with the gold and silver light of heaven?

Let us remember the path on which we tread. A path laid by those who came before us – by our own parents and grandparents and the ancients who stare out of black and white photos and are now the stuff of family lore.

It’s a path laid by our spiritual ancestors, Unitarians and Universalists and Unitarian Universalists who labored for our free faith and our right to practice it, people who fought for the civil rights and human rights of the oppressed and forgotten.

It’s a path laid by the founders of this congregation who set out to create a Society in which people would “unite to express and enrich [their] spirituality and humanity; to seek meaning and truth in [their] lives; to discover, preserve and cultivate beauty around [them] and within [themselves]; to celebrate the joy of being together in song and story, myth and meditation; to continue religious education for [themselves] and [their] children; to foster tolerance and welcome diversity; to form a loving community that manifests this love in caring acts; and to work courageously for justice and peace in our world.”[x]

That is the purpose of the Unitarian Society of New Haven as outlined in our by-laws. It is, if we look at it in the right light, a path of dreams. It shimmers beneath our feet and stretches far into the distance, inviting us – daring us – to follow it.

There are so many ways we can follow that path.

I came into the kitchen here at USNH just the other day. I was mulling this sermon over in my head and my heart, thinking about the choir’s piece and dreams and dung beetles and stars, and I looked up, and there was a new bulletin board up in the Social Hall.

It read: “CONECT: Helping us live our dreams” on a background of stars. You’d think we’d planned it.
We didn’t.

Our membership in CONECT, which stands for Congregations Organized for a New Connecticut,[xi] is a major way that we continue the dream of working for justice and equity and fairness in an unjust and unequal and unfair society. CONECT is organizing congregations across Connecticut to work on many of the issues
that are closest to our hearts here at USNH, including immigration and racial justice, health care equity and preventing gun violence.

You’ll have an opportunity to vote on whether to continue our membership in CONECT on March 31^st. I invite you before then to check out the bulletin board and notices in your newsletter to learn about the ways that our work with CONECT helps amplify our voice and continue our courageous work for justice in Connecticut and beyond.

Our justice work, our work with CONECT, is just one way that we follow the path of dreams that has been laid before us. Religious education for adults and children, small group ministries, care for each other and our spiritual home, quiet moments of meditation and prayer, making space to unplug in an all-too digital world, living our values through our work and our lives, these are the ways we live the dreams of those who came before us.

So friends, will you take to the path, this path of dreams that just might lead you home? Will you begin the journey – continue the journey – here, with this crew of friends and strangers, your siblings in faith and justice and love?

Will you tend to the flame, respond to the gift of this place, with wonder and gratitude and your own gifts –
your talent, your time, your treasure? Will you set out with courage? Will you follow the path of dreams and look up to map the stars and make your way together in hope and in love?

Will you remember where you’ve come from and lay a new path for future generations – the ones who will come after you, taking new steps in your hand-me-down shoes?

Goethe famously wrote: “Whatever you can do, or dream you can, begin it. Boldness has genius, power and magic in it.”

Friends, as we begin this season of celebrating USNH and what it offers each and all of us, let us be bold. As we head into this season of reflecting on the role each person here holds as a Steward of this spiritual home, let us reach for the stars.

As we head into this season of raising the funds that make the dreams and the future of this congregation possible, let us go the distance.

Dream Big.

Believe in yourselves.

I believe in you with all my heart.

Notes

[i] https://edition.cnn.com/2019/03/15/asia/new-zealand-christchurch-attack-what-we-know-intl/index.html

[ii] https://www.nytimes.com/2019/03/15/world/asia/new-zealand-gun-laws.html

[iii] https://www.hachettebookgroup.com/titles/vashti-harrison/dream-big-little-one/9780316475099/

[iv] https://jezebel.com/the-history-of-pink-for-girls-blue-for-boys-5790638

[v] https://www.space.com/17169-mae-jemison-biography.html

[vi] https://www.nasa.gov/content/katherine-johnson-biography

[vii] http://www.ellafitzgerald.com/about/biography