Safe Space/Brave Space

Rev. Meg Barnhouse
October 21, 2018
First UU Church of Austin
4700 Grover Ave., Austin, TX 78756
austinuu.org

Our second End (goal) as a congregation is “We support and challenge one another in worship, spiritual growth and lifelong learning to practice a rich spiritual life” What forms can a spiritual life take? The job of a church is often described as “to comfort the afflicted and to afflict the comfortable.”

Call to Worship
Richard Jefferies

It is eternity now. I am in the midst of it. It is about me in the sunshine; I am in it as the butterfly in the light-laden air. Nothing has to come; it is now. Now is eternity; now is the immortal life.

Reading

Invitation to Brave Space
Micky ScottBey Jones – inspired by an unknown author’s poem

Together we will create brave space
Because there is no such thing as a “safe space”
We exist in the real world
We all carry scars and we have all caused wounds.
In this space
We seek to turn down the volume of the outside world,
We amplify voices that fight to be heard elsewhere,
We call each other to more truth and love
We have the right to start somewhere and continue to grow.
We have the responsibility to examine what we think we know,
We will not be perfect.
This space will not be perfect.
It will not always be what we wish it to be
But
It will be our brave space together,
and
We will work in it side by side.

Sermon

When I was looking around at the churches searching for ministers nine years ago, I was struck by this church’s materials, which said, about seven times more than any other church, that you wanted someone who could help you create a safe space in church. I took that seriously, and we’ve all been paying good attention to that since I got here eight years ago. Last year the congregation and the board revisited the Ends/Goals of the congregation, and, since the feeling of safety has been there, a great deal of courage was expressed. Now, we have a safe space which also wants to be a brave space. This has always been a justice-seeking church, and now the language of its goals reflects that even more sharply.

About once every ten years I re-read the book “Full Catastrophe Living,” by Jon Kabat-Zinn, Many of you know he teaches Mindfulness-based meditation at Johns Hopkins, one of the finest medical centers in the world. I read the book because I love to read, and I always hope that reading it will be the same as meditation, which I haven’t been able to do well, even though I’ve been giving it a try on and off for my whole adult life. I want to start meditation again because, not only does it help your brain, even to the point of creating new gray matter, it helps with inflammation. According to their studies, which are too significant to ignore. Inflammation makes my life harder, so I’m giving this another try. It’s a challenge to me. Why is it a challenge? I like reading and I like working, and just sitting there being aware of my breath feels like doing nothing. Even though it might be doing something really crucial for my body and my spirit, I have continued not to do it. Frustrating. I’m reminded of the letter by Paul in the Christian Scriptures where he says “the things I don’t want to do, I do, and the things I want to do, I don’t do.” As long as I’m squarely in the midst of the human condition, though, I know I’m not unusual in this regard.

In reading his book, though, one line jumped out at me, because I’m talking this morning about our church’s new Ends/Goals. We talked about the first one last month. The second goal the board wrote after listening to the congregation is this: “We support and challenge one another in worship, spiritual growth and lifelong learning to practice a rich spiritual life. ” The part that strikes me is that we support and challenge one another. What that means is that the board wants me to practice both sides of the preacher’s job. Those two sides are to be pastoral, which is related to the word for shepherd. To comfort, to heal, to speak tenderly to, to care for, to teach gently. Pastoral, and the other side is Prophetic. That is related to the word “prophet.” You could have told me that. Prophets are always shining the light on people’s shortcomings, calling people back into righteousness, scalding those who just want to be secure in their sense of themselves. People hate prophets. In the Jewish Scriptures, they get chased into the desert, thrown into holes, yelled at, jailed and even killed. To be pastoral and prophetic is the job of the minister of a church. An old saw says that the preacher’s job is Ôto comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable.” That always sounded a little smug to me. In my 35 years of being a minister, I’ve met very few people I would call comfortable. Life afflicts the comfortable.

I don’t like to scald people. I don’t like to scold people. I don’t learn well from being shamed or yelled at. I am called, however, to challenge people and to challenge the culture; ur broken culture, which is so busy trying to worship money and power, which is so engineered to keep the heavy-footed on top of everyone else. “You dress the mortal wound of my people as if it were superficial, saying peace, peace, where there is no peace.” That is the prophet Jeremiah.

We support and challenge each other, our goal says, toward growth into a rich spiritual life. We know how to support one another, I think, better than we know how to challenge. That’s what my experience tells me. It’s certainly what FB tells me. We roughly “call each other out” for infractions, we stomp on a person’s ignorance, we mock people’s attempts at solutions to problems. It can be ugly out there. Here is the line from the book that jumped out at me: “People blossom when challenged and wither when threatened.”

When I put this quotation on Facebook for my friends to chew on, the responses were wise and well thought out. Challenges involve hope, not fear. A threat is something intended to harm, and a challenge is intended for good. What about people who perceive the challenge as a threat? Even though it wasn’t intended that way? Does the responsibility lie with the person offering the challenge or with the person receiving the challenge? One of the most elegant responses said “Challenges are invitations to grow. Threats are warnings not to grow.” The place where most UUs are feeling threatened is in our trying to get right about whiteness culture, so I’m going to talk about that for a minute. Those of us who are people of color, people of the global majority, know a lot about the way things are arranged in this culture, to favor whiteness, and those of us who identify as white are trying to keep up. For some reason a lot of us who identify as white don’t react to the new knowledge about whiteness culture with curiosity and courage. We act as if we feel like something is going to be taken away from us, and we clutch our lives and list our liberal credentials and shut the windows tightly. It takes practice to respond with curiosity and courage. I’ve thought a lot about my various privileges over the years. When I ended my marriage to a man and came out, I noticed the loss of heterosexual privilege. I’ll talk about that in another sermon.

We all are complicated intersecting privileges: youth, health, race, gender-typical, neuro-typical, sexual preference, socio-economic background, and many more. We all have some and not others. Those who have more are playing the game of life in this culture at a lower level of difficulty than others. It behooves us to notice and talk about our level of difficulty, but whiteness culture seems to forbid it.

There are so many challenges in our lives, it seems a shame to add to them here in worship, but look. Our country is wicked, and it has been forever. We have made it our mission to try to help build the Beloved Community. If we ae going to do that, we are going to have to be uncomfortable some of the time – with sermon topics, with the music, with expressions of emotion in worship or lack of them. That’s what challenge feels like. No one is trying to take anything away from us. Wait, that’s not true. I experienced my world view taken away from me as I began to wake up to the situation of women in this culture, and in the global culture. Once I woke up to seeing the war on women, I couldn’t unsee it. It was everywhere. Once I woke up to seeing the war on brown, black and native people I couldn’t unsee it. My naivetee was taken from me.

That’s what I lost. Is that bad? Why do I feel rude in mentioning that every 28 hours in our country an unarmed black, brown or native person is killed by police? Why do I feel strident pointing out that three women a day in the US are killed by their husbands, partners or boyfriends? The hesitancy to point out facts is one of the symptoms of this culture. Shhhhh, and talk about the American Dream.

This is a hard world for many among us. You look at people’s outsides and they look so together, but so many people are hurting. We need one another’s support. I would ask you to think about giving ten times the support to people you know as you give challenge. I would ask that we challenge one another rarely, and with huge love and humility. The culture, on the other hand, has all the support it needs, it seems, and we should rise up and challenge it with loud intelligent voices, with reason and disruption and skill and all the power we can muster together.

If we can hold one another in love and respect, if we can meet challenges with curiosity and the courage to make mistakes and go on, if we can build a strong spiritual life, where we root our hearts in compassion, where we slow down to take a deep breath when we are confronted by something new, where we do what we say we will do, where we know who we are and who we want to be, we will enrich our own experience of life, and we will live better and be better to live with.

If We Do Not Venture Out
Marni Harmony (excerpted)

If, on a starlit night,
with the moon brightly shimmering,
We stay inside and do not venture out,
the evening universe remains a part of life we shall not know.

If, on a cloudy day,
with grayness infusing all
and rain dancing rivers in the grass,
We stay inside and do not venture out,
the stormy, threatening energy of
the universe remains a part of life we shall not know.

If, on a frosty morning,
dreading the chilling air before the sunrise,
We stay inside and do not venture out,
the awesome cold, quiet, and stillness of
the dawn universe remains a part of life we shall not know.

[…]

If we stay inside ourselves and do not venture out
then the Fullness of the universe
shall be unknown to us….

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