A Safe Place

Rev. Meg Barnhouse

October 14, 2012

Another part of our Covenant of Healthy Relations says that we promise “to make our church a safe place to express our deepest fears and our greatest joys.” What makes a place safe? How do you know abuse if you see it? What are its patterns and methods? How do you stop it?

Sermon: A Safe Place

The organization that is featured this morning that receives support from First UU is Front Steps. There are a lot of reasons why people end up on the street. For families who are homeless, it’s often the economy. For people who are on the streets by themselves, the reasons often include mental illness and substance abuse. Around two thirds of the adults on the street are there because of mental illness or substance abuse or some combination of those. Other reasons are domestic violence or being a gay teenager. The issues are tangled together. Some mental illness is triggered by substance abuse. Some is triggered by having been abused or neglected as a child. Some substance abuse is itself triggered by childhood abuse or neglect. Not everyone who was abused or neglected as a child struggles with mental illness or substance abuse, and not everyone who struggles with mental illness or substance abuse was abused or neglected as a child. I’m saying that in studies of homelessness, there is a significant overlap.

About 40 percent of the young people on the street are lesbian or gay. Other young people are on the street because they are abused physically or sexually at home. Some of that abuse is because the parents are substance abusers. This month is domestic violence awareness month, and we have just had national coming out day. It feels like a good time to touch on this tangle of issues, so we will not be ignorant of these things. And maybe we can figure out what to do about some of the roots of the problem.

One of the ways we help is by supporting the shelters for homeless people, for abused women and children. Another is to know about abuse so we can recognize it in our own lives and in the lives of our friends and family. I learned a lot about abuse when I helped start the shelter for battered women in Spartanburg. We didn’t do it exactly right. I realized that as I drove fast down the road with a woman in the passenger seat and her angry husband in the family station wagon with a rifle just a few cars behind us. We had asked the police to help, but they had said no. Now, of course, they work hand in hand with the shelter, but not at the beginning. But that is another sermon. We had a lot to learn really fast.

There is nothing simple about abuse. Most of it comes from people you love, people upon whom you depend for your life. Imagine for a moment that at some given moment this afternoon, the person you love most in the world attacks and hurts you. You have to leave. Where do you go? What do you take with you? What do you live on? They apologize and say it will never happen again, that they would rather lose their right arm than do that to you again. You forgive them, and everything is great. What a relief. Then the tension starts to build. You can feel it coming. It happens again.

If you are a kid, or if you were abused as a kid, your first thought is that you did something to deserve it. You ask yourself what you could do to be good enough so that it doesn’t happen again. If you were abused as a young child, it becomes more complicated in that your very wiring is affected so that your adrenaline pumps into your bloodstream at a lower threshold than people with less violent childhood experiences. It becomes even more complicated in that, for some who experience violence, the chaos and danger begin to feel familiar, sometimes more real than when things are peaceful.

Physical violence does not have to be in the picture for emotional or verbal abuse or neglect to be present. Emotional abuse most commonly consists of constant put-downs, belittling, explosions of rage, long days of silence, isolating you from friends and family, preventing you from doing what you want to do, either with intimidation or emotional blackmail. Emotional blackmail goes like this: “if you don’t do as I say, you don’t love me, or I will rage, there will be high drama, or I will hurt myself, or I will hurt things you love.

If you live with that, you might begin to feel that you are not good for anything, that you are just a burden, that you are unwanted wherever you are. It can make you feel ashamed inside, like there is something wrong with you.

Why am I talking about this here at church? Because I’m doing a sermon series on the covenant of healthy relations, which is our agreement on how we want to interact with one another, how we want to disagree, how we want to get things talked about, how we want to conduct ourselves. The section we’re looking at this morning says we want “to make our church a safe place to express our deepest fears and our greatest joys.”

The first sermon was about the word “covenant,” and all it implies. The second one, last Sunday, was about generously supporting the church with our time, treasure and talent.

We do a lot of things as a congregation, but if all we did was create a safe place for people to express their deepest fears and greatest joys, that would almost be enough. It would make one more safe public place in a world where there aren’t very many.

In order to be a safe place, it has to be somewhere a person won’t be attacked physically or verbally. A safe place should be free of outbursts of rage, it should be free of physical fear. Your sexual boundaries should be respected.

It should be a place where you can have your view and speak about it, even when others have a different view, a place where you will be listened to with respect, where when people disagree with one another they disagree with passion and with respect. Safety does not mean everyone agrees and everyone is sweet. During a discussion in another church far from here, a woman raised her hand and said “I’m not feeling heard.” The facilitator said, gently, “The gentleman who just spoke seemed to hear and understand your point very well. Could it be that you simply aren’t being agreed with?” In fact, when you disagree deeply with someone, it takes a lot of respect to engage with them and talk about your disagreement. When there is no respect, you don’t even have the will to engage, because it’s useless, so you are nice. And silent.

In churches that have felt unsafe, members have had very different experiences of the atmosphere and the events. In families where there is abuse, often it is directed at just one kid, not all of them, so the people in the family have very different experiences of life in that family. They tend to blame the person at whom the rage was directed. If those to whom it is not directed see it happening, they feel confused about what to do. If they can’t figure out how to make it stop, they may feel powerless or ashamed that they couldn’t make it stop. They blame themselves.

What is needed in order to live into a feeling of safety? Gentle interactions, acknowledgement of people’s right to their views and their feelings. Dependability, good structure, transparency, fun, allowance for disagreement, especially good strong disagreements where you learn that disagreement is not attack. The assumption of good intentions, where you hold on to the knowledge that people feel they are making the best decisions for the group, even though you feel they are absolutely wrong.

We make a safe place here not only so that we have a place to spread out wings and grow. We spread our wings so that we can help homeless people. We spread our wings so we can figure out how to reach out to gay teens to let them know they’re not going to hell, to let their parents know they don’t have to kick them out of the house. We’ve got a lot of work to do, but we’ve made a good start.

Stewardship Moment

Marisol Caballero

Last time I was in this pulpit I spoke to you all about coming home to UUism and being vocal enough to help others do the same thing. Many of you have heard me speak several times about my joy in joining the staff here as Interim Director of Lifespan Religious Education, especially in light of the fact that I started my ministerial journey here many, many years ago. It was the people within this church who helped me to discover my call to ministry and encouraged me to pursue this path. So, when Meg called me up over the summer and asked if I could come in and help you all with Religious Education for a bit, I was thrilled at the chance to come home and even more thrilled to be asked to stay a bit longer, as I have!

After completing my undergraduate degree at St. Edward’s, I headed to New York to attend Union Theological Seminary, all the while intending to someday return to Austin and do ministry in some form or another. I wasn’t sure of the particulars, only about Austin. I knew that I wanted to live and work in the place and community I had loved and that had nurtured my call. I moved right back here after I graduated seminary and worked with kids in a day care and as a substitute schoolteacher while I took some time to figure out next steps. While doing so, I surprised myself by gaining admission to a prestigious 12-month chaplaincy residency at the Medical Center of the University of California, San Francisco. From there, I was invited to apply and was later accepted to become the shared Ministerial Intern of Throop and Neighborhood UU Churches in Pasadena, CA.

These experiences were invaluable, yet all the while; I pined for Austin, Texas. I wanted to journey with and serve UU’s who understood better that as a Chicana and a Tejana, I have no confusion about whether I’m Mexican or American or Unitarian Universalist or Lesbian. In Texas and in this church, we create room for everyone to be their whole selves and we work together to celebrate those differences! Many UU’s I met in other states often didn’t understand my love for this place and its people and wondered why liberal religious folk would ever stick around such a place. I longed to journey with and to serve those Austin UU’s who look injustice and the face and say, “we will stand on the side oflove (not move aside) and see love prevail!”

I came back as fast as I could. And yes, I am overjoyed to be back home with you all. But, the journey here was a long one wrought with many hardships along the way. Preparation for UU ministry is a very involved and very expensive endeavor, especially when your family is not able to contribute anything. I worked and borrowed my way through both of my degrees only to find my household a fast statistic of the Great Recession, as they are now calling it. When we must operate from a place of scarcity for so long, it becomes so difficult to imagine abundance. So many of us, including this church, are standing in that same place- having operated through a narrative of scarcity, we must re-teach ourselves to recognize our multitude of blessings and begin to embody the wildest imaginings of our highest potential. This year, I am personally digging myself out of a hole; playing “catch-up” with my personal finances and grateful for the privilege to do so. I am not yet able to give to this church as much as I would like to. But, I’ll be as generous as I am able and I urge you all to do the same in your pledges. Let’s imagine, together, and then become the wildest imaginings of our highest potential. It is, after all our mission. Thank you.

Podcasts of this and other sermons are also available for free on iTunes. You can find them here.

http://itunes.apple.com/podcast/first-unitarian-universalist/id372427776