Well, if ever doubt that there is a God, when the New Yorker arrives, there is almost always a cartoon that helps me out. I had long ago announced the title of this sermon, “Scared, Scarred, and Scared,” and so on Wednesday morning I’m leafing through, and there is this lovely cartoon of a young couple. They’re looking up into the starry heavens, holding hands. The woman is speaking; she says, “I’m not really religious. I’m just scared.” And I think we all know, no matter what religious tradition we grew up in, that fear is a huge, compelling, visceral component of motivation in religious life.
Now, when Charles Chauncy talked against hell-fire and damnation preaching, he knew what he was saying. George Whitefield, when he came to Boston once, was talking about whether it was a good thing he was there, and Charles Chauncy said, “Well, I don’t think so.” And Whitefield said, “Well, the Devil may agree with you.” You can pull out these arguments, these fears, to be scared. Now, Unitarian Universalists have long prided themselves on being courageous types, pull-themselves-up-by-their-own-bootstraps types, and for the most part we are; we’re a courageous bunch. But I have, through the years, occasionally needed to say (and even remind myself) that if we’re really going to speak to people the way people really are, the way they really come each and every Sunday, we have to be very clear that we’re not always brave; we’re not always in control; we’re not always on top of our game. We may look great (you look fabulous this morning), but we don’t always feel that way. There are lots of things in life for which we are most properly often scared. And I get scared; I don’t stand here as some Olympian figure who doesn’t know what fear is, because I do.
There is much in life to be scared of. Joe Kennedy was once asked what it was like to have so many children, and he said, “I’ll tell you what it feels like. It is to be a hostage to fortune.” And if there was ever a more poignant father’s words about what happened to his kids, I can’t imagine it. I’m frightened by what could happen to my own health, and the health of people that I love. I often worry about my kids: Are they safe? Are they OK? I’ve got one child in Washington, DC, and right now another in Florida, and Elizabeth right here; but you know, life is tough, isn’t it? You can’t control everything. You’re not in charge. We understand why there are fears, and why we can be scared in life.
Most of all, I think we’re scared of things that have scarred us in the past: things that have hurt us, wounded us deeply. We may have healed, but that doesn’t mean we don’t flinch, and it doesn’t mean that we’ve forgotten. Some of these scars we can see. ( It’s often said that for a minister, coffee hour is an organ recital; there are lots of operations that flow through the life of any congregation, and those scars are often shared with me.) But there are lots of scars that I never see, and only sometimes are shared; but they’re there, and they’re real.
And I’m not just talking about the scars we may bear upon our bodies, like the one on my chin. I’ve grown a handsome grey beard to cover it up, but I’ve had a big, long scar on my chin since the age of six, when I was dancing in the bathroom with a towel (and I don’t actually recommend it). Or the one that is still clearly visible on my brother’s forehead, from my enthusiastic shoveling of deep snow when we were growing up outside of Chicago.
Alice Walker tells a story. When she was a very, very young girl, she was hit in the eye with a BB gun; and when they took her in to see the doctor, after they realized that probably the sight would not be saved, the doctor told her that there would be scarring. It would be scarred the rest of her life. The doctor, looking into her eyes and shaking his head, said that eyes are sympathetic; if one is blind, the other is likely to be blind too; which scared the little girl to death. And from that cataract, that scar, that she carried on into life, the children would ask in one school after another, “What’s the matter with your eye?” One time her parents took her back into an old school because the taunting had become unbearable at her new school. They kept saying to her all through her life, being wounded in such a way, “You did not change. You’re all right, Alice.” But she knew better. She knew better. She remembers being fourteen and baby-sitting for her brother Bill, who lived in Boston. Bill realized that something was wrong with Alice, and so he took her to a doctor, where they removed much of the scarring, but leaving still a small bluish crater where the scar tissue was. And yet, her eye was still not straight, and wandered, as blind eyes will.
You know, these things happen. We all know they do. Marjorie Bowens-Wheatley, our minister in Tampa, and one of the great pioneers of our black ministers’ movement, just died. And strangely enough, in my mailbox was a sermon of hers that had been published by the denomination. She talked very movingly, in a sermon she wrote some time ago, about the things that had motivated her throughout her life, what she had done to hold onto her soul. She talked about the scars of her black evangelical upbringing, which had driven her into atheism; and then over the years, a softening stance, where she was attracted to the freedom she found in Unitarian Universalism, where she could hold onto what she said was something sacred.
She said, “I’m among those who are in perpetual recovery from intolerance, indeed abuse.” But that’s not where she stayed; and that’s not what she accepted for herself. She wrote in that sermon, published near the end of her life, that she claimed the words of Isaiah. They became very important to her:
The voice of the Eternal is upon me. For he has ordained me and called me forth to bring good news to the poor. He has sent me to proclaim release to all those in bondage, to recover sight to the blind, to liberate all the oppressed, to proclaim Jubilee.
She also said there was a Sufi story that was very important to her, and she said, “I give this as advice to all those struggling to discover their own truths, and to recover their own path.” The old Sufi story goes like this: If you want to move beyond a surface understanding of any religious tradition, you’ve got to dig a well. You’ve got to go into the depths of that tradition, if you are to find the living water that awaits your thirst. She said to find a religious path, and it can be any path, but go as deeply as you can to understand and to embrace it deeply. And that’s what we do when we’re scared, and that’s what we do when we’re scarred, and that’s what we do when we discover that we’re sacred.
I just read a book the other day called Is Nothing Sacred? It was an assemblage of philosophers who were atheists or agnostics, discussing whether (as the title goes): is nothing sacred. The actual title should have been, at least to my American ears, Is Anything Sacred? It was an absolutely fascinating book, as these are people that have long ago rejected visions of Heaven and Hell, sin and salvation, even God, and yet they too wrestle with the sacred. Even Richard Dawkins, who is perhaps the most famous atheist in the world today, says,
I do believe that there are things that are sacred. When you hold an ancient human skull from Africa, that’s sacred. When you stand before a Vermeer painting, there is a sacred quality.
And he says that if he would define what is sacred, it is what is meant to be preserved, and saved, and nurtured; something kept inviolate; something that must be saved once it is brought into being. And you know what that is? That’s you, and that’s this world, and that is the cosmos in which we wheel. That is what’s sacred: that which has been brought into being and must be saved as precious.
The scar comes from the Greek word eschara. It comes from a word meaning fireplace, I guess because in the old days our scars were not cosmetically treated or plastic-surgeried away, and they often left their mark as great red slashes. A scar is a fibrous tissue; it is a natural kind of healing. But unlike a broken bone, which can actually be stronger, our scars are actually weak; they tear easily. The Wikipedia says it is inferior functional-quality skin. It said words that really haunted me as I wrote this sermon: “No scar can ever be completely removed. It will always leave a trace.” And yes, they do. They really leave a trace.
And the word sacred? That which has been consecrated to a higher purpose. We are not only sacred; we can make other things sacred. We can make the people around us sacred; because we can honor, and revere, and make holy too; and we need always to take that as our goal in life. And you? You are sacred, as scarred as you are; and the more I live, the more I realize that maybe it is sometimes in our scars that we actually find what makes us sacred—the things that we have faced, and the things that we have survived, the frictions and abrasions of life, the tears and the tears, the struggle, the battle to become who we are. To be sacred and to be precious is not to be perfect, or untouched by life. We will leave this life plenty marked. We will be touched, and sometimes harshly. And I do not for a moment from this pulpit wish to romanticize, or to sentimentalize, or to do anything other than to take very seriously the scars you bear, and that I bear. I never wish to undervalue the times and places where your scars have come, visible or invisible. Nor my own, because my scars are now part of me, and I suggest part of you. So be it, and let them be blessed as best we can.
And I further say, in some cultures there is something called scarification. It is often seen as a rite of passage, from the Maori people in New Zealand, folks in New Guinea, and places in Africa. There will be an outer marking that denotes an inner emotional state, or a passage from one stage of life to another. And in these cultures, they look at scars far differently than we do. We often feel them as shameful, or something to deeply regret, and we strive to cover them up as best we can, often paying thousands of dollars to plastic surgeons. But for them, a scar can be a sign, for men and for women both, of courage, of a certain status in life that you’ve attained because of what you have endured, and even of honor, an inner reality that has an outward marking. And maybe we can learn something valuable from them, to not fear or hide our scars so much; but to be willing to be more vulnerable, and to share who we are, and what, frankly, we have earned in life, from those scared places and feelings.
In the end, Alice Walker was talking to her child one day. She writes,
I am 27, and my baby daughter is almost three, and since her birth I have worried about her discovery that her mother’s eyes are different than other people’s. Was she embarrassed? What will she say? Every day she watches a television program called Big Blue Marble. It begins with a picture of the earth as it appears from the moon. It is bluish, a little battered-looking, but full of light, with whitish clouds swirling around it; and every time I see it, I weep with love, as if it were a picture of Grandma’s house. And one day, when I am putting Rebecca down for a nap, and she suddenly focuses on my scarred eye, and something inside me cringes, gets ready to try to protect myself. And all children are cruel about physical differences; I know that from experience, and they don’t always have to be mean, but I assume that even Rebecca will be the same. But no; she studies my face intently as we stand, her inside and me outside her crib. She even holds my face maternally between her dimpled little hands. And then, looking every bit as serious and lawyer-like as her father, she says, as if it may just possibly have slipped my attention, “Mommy, there’s a world in your eye.” And then gently, but with great interest, “Mommy, where did you get that world in your eye?”
Scared, scarred, and sacred: that’s our situation. That’s who we are, and blessed be. Amen.
