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Rev. Meg Barnhouse
June 14,  2015

We observe the 150th anniversary of Juneteenth. The Emancipation Proclamation of 1863 was not enforced in Texas until two years after it was made. Many enslaved men and women hadn’t heard that the government had declared them free. Juneteenth is the celebration of that good news.

I long to know what the US would be like if it had never been legal to capture, import and own other people. Agriculture would have developed differently. The distribution of wealth amongst us would be different. Most of us carry the psychological scars of it. I grew up for a time, during the early 1960’s, in North Carolina. I was taught about the institution of slavery. “Most people were kind to their slaves,” they said. “After emancipation, many slaves chose to stay with their masters. They didn’t want to leave them.” “Lincoln freed the slaves with the Emancipation Proclamation.” I always pictured this proclamation being read aloud and great rejoicing going up from the people. Joyous Black faces and emotional White faces of people saying “So long, it’s been great having you.” I didn’t really think about it that much. I had the privilege of not thinking about slavery much.

I remember the first time I heard the phrased “enslaved men and women.” It woke something up in me. Instead of calling people “slaves,” as if this were the kind of human they were, a category, easily made into an abstraction, these were women and men who had been enslaved. I supposed what it says is that I’m not “a slave” now, but the process of being enslaved would make me one. That is what happened to the men and women in that time. They were enslaved. I don’t like to say the word “slaves” any more. It doesn’t tell the story. Juneteenth celebrations in Austin are next Saturday. A parade, a gathering in the park, beauty contests and barbeque. Regular Texans celebrating. It’s a holiday here and in OK. Other states have Juneteenth celebrations too, but it’s not a holiday there.

The celebrations commemorate the beginning of the enforcement of the Emancipation Proclamation in Texas. See, the EP didn’t free that many people. Lincoln wanted to free the enslaved men and women gradually, granting financial compensation to the people who had been allowed to think of them as property. The EP was punitive in nature. After the Battle of Antietam, in MD, in Sept. of 1862, where 22,717 young men slaughtered one another in a corn field, Lincoln wrote in his proclamation that, as of Jan 1 of 1863, all enslaved men and women in states still in rebellion against the Union would be freed. Not those enslaved in Union states. Not if any Confederate states repented and rejoined the Union. Needless to say, no one in the rebellious states recognized the authority of Lincoln’s proclamation, so life continued as usual, only with war added, for the enslaved men and women of the South.

The war ended, I always thought, with Lee’s surrender at Appomattox in April 1865. Not really. He surrendered his armies, but there were other Confederate armies still fighting in the West. The spread of slavery across the Mississippi had been resisted. Kansas was in turmoil when about ready to join the US in the 1850’s (ten years before Appaomattox), as “free soil” folks skirmished with pro slavery forces that thought people should be able to bring “their property” with them when they came to farm. Non slave owners weren’t so much horrified, it seems, by the moral cesspool of slavery, as horrified that others would buy up all the good land and work it with people they’d already paid for, so didn’t have to pay. Horace Greeley of the NYTimes, (son of Horace Greeley, the first President of the American Unitarian Association, coined the phrase “Bleeding Kansas.” John Brown, who believed that armed raids were the way to overthrow slavery, was funded and armed by northern abolitionists, among them Ralph Waldo Emerson and his friends. I’m not sure how they felt when the arms they had bought were used by John Brown’s followers to kill five members of a pro slavery farming family in Kansas.

After Lee’s surrender, Union troops supported the enslaved families as they began living in freedom. There were few Union troops in the west, though. Texas had sent 70,000 troops to the war. Kirby Smith surrendered on May 26 (officially signed June 2). The last battle of the American Civil War was the Battle of Palmito Ranch in Texas on May 12 and 13. The last significant Confederate active force to surrender was the Confederate allied Cherokee Brigadier General Stand Watie and his Indian soldiers on June 23. You remember that the Cherokee and other First Nations were slaveholders.

So it wasn’t as if the enslaved people in Texas labored ignorant of the freedom of all others, for two years. No one was free until Appomattox. When General Granger and his 2,000 men sailed into Galveston, the war was still in its last gasps. General Granger began Order No. 3 with the following statement informing slaves of their new status as freed Americans: “The people of Texas are informed that in accordance with a Proclamation from the Executive of the United States, all slaves are free. This involves an absolute equality of rights and rights of property between former masters and slaves, and the connection heretofore existing between them becomes that between employer and free laborer.” Federal troops did not arrive in Texas to restore order until June 19, 1865, when Union Maj. Gen. Gordon Granger and 2,000 Union soldiers arrived on Galveston Island to take possession of the state and enforce the new freedoms of former slaves. The Texas holiday Juneteenth commemorates this date. The Stars and Stripes were not raised over Austin until June 25.

We celebrate the freedom of those who were enslaved and were freed. No one helped them. Some freed folks were given land formerly held by plantation owners, but Pres. Andrew Jackson gave that back to the plantation owners after a few years.

It’s land that is the basis of wealth. When there are laws against Black folks owning land, their families, for generations, will not be able to prosper. White settlers were given land, and, with it, the chance to make some wealth. Not all were able to do that, but many were. White folks were able to buy houses wherever they wanted to and it is only recently that Black homeowners have been able to buy in the suburbs.

The brave of old, given a sudden gift of freedom, were sometimes able to make good choices and strike good luck, even though most were not helped, and were, in fact, opposed at every turn by separate but equal schools with old text books and holes in the roof, by Jim Crow laws denying them access to the culture, by racist violence to keep them in their places. My friends, we all know that this is still going on. Let us be the ones to offer help. Let us be the ones who stand against this systematic burdening of the poor and people of color in our midst. It is time for things to be fair.

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

Most sermons delivered at the First UU Church of Austin during the past 15 years are available online through this website. You will find links to them in the right sidebar menu labeled Sermons. The Indexes link leads to tables of all sermons for each year listed by date (newest to oldest) with topic and speaker. Click on the topic to go to a sermon.

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Rev. Meg Barnhouse
June 7, 2015

Rev. Meg continues her fairy tale sermon series with a classic Japanese story, “The Boy Who Drew Cats.” How can we know what will make a difference? How do we know which efforts are large and which are small? How are the things which bring you joy used for the good of the whole?

Call to Worship
by Howard Thurman

“Don’t ask what the world needs. Ask what makes you come alive, and go do it. Because what the world needs is people who have come alive.”

Reading
A Letter to Agnes DeMille from Martha Graham

There is a vitality, a life force, a quickening
that is translated through you into action,
and because there is only one of you in all time,
this expression is unique.
If you block it,
it will never exist through any other medium and be lost.
The world will not have it.
It is not your business to determine how good it is;
nor how valuable it is;
nor how it compares with other expressions.
It is your business to keep it yours, clearly and directly,
to keep the channel open.
You do not even have to believe in yourself or your work.
You have to keep open and aware directly
of the urges that motivate you.
Keep the channel open.
No artist is pleased.
There is no satisfaction whatever at any time.
There is only a queer, divine dissatisfaction;
a blessed unrest that keeps us marching
and makes us more alive than the others.

Sermon

In the story of the boy who drew cats, he was pushed out of conventional places because of his difference, his passion. “You don’t fit here at the farm,” his family said. “Let’s take you to study with the monks.” It didn’t work out with the monks either. He didn’t want to study religion. He wanted to draw cats. He drew them in the margins of the scrolls from which they were supposed to be reading. He drew them in the dust while they were chanting. Eventually he had to leave, because he just didn’t fit there. The last piece of advice the monk gave him was to avoid large places, stick to small ones.

Maybe you have had the experience of being different from the people around you, of not fitting in. Some families, churches, towns, countries, have ways of pushing away the people who don’t fit. Somehow the enforcers of the system, from the church ladies who give you the stink eye when you don’t dress properly to kids who beat up other kids who seem weird to them to government death squads, all along the spectrum of enforcement, you can almost always tell when you don’t fit in a place, when everyone would be a lot more comfortable if you left. I hope none of you has ever felt that, but it’s a vain hope. Most of you have felt it ,at one time or another. It’s often a mistake to toss out the different ones, though. When everyone is too much the same, new ideas don’t happen and the society stagnates. Assumptions remain unchallenged. The potato famine happened because people were planting one type of potato, and it was susceptible to the blight that killed nearly the whole crop. It’s smarter to plan lots of different kinds of grain, potatoes, apples, etc. so if some get a disease, you don’t lose them all. Nature is nature, and humans aren’t the exception. In small native tribes the grandmothers keep track of who is related to whom, to keep people who are too closely related from marrying. First born kids are more likely to achieve highly in our culture. Out of the first 23 astronauts, 21 were first born. Second borns are more creative, with less horror of making mistakes. If you look at the biographies of great inventors, you’ll find most of them were second, third, seventh children. A culture needs the creative people. Austin’s creative class is what makes it so attractive, yet all of the musicians who give Austin its soul are no longer able to afford to live here, according to a new survey. Cherishing diversity is smart, but it’s hard for a culture that’s based on power and money.

The boy in our story is small, and he has an all-consuming passion. Most of us know someone who had a passion for playing the guitar, or for writing, or the piano or for dancing or painting, and they are drawn to doing it whether it’s a good time or not, whether people approve of the activity or not, whether they get paid well for it or not. Some of us are lucky enough to have a passion for something we can make a living doing, something people enjoy and approve of. That’s lovely. Most of us, even if it’s not all-consuming, have something we do that makes us come alive. Theologian Howard Thurman said, as you heard in our Call to Worship: “Don’t ask what the world needs. Ask what makes you come alive, and go do it. Because what the world needs is people who have come alive.

The boy is too ashamed that his difference, his passion, as gotten him tossed out of the second place, and he doesn’t want to go home. He takes to the road, and wanders closer and closer to the epicenter of the Goblin Rat King’s domain.

The Goblin Rat King is a destructive force, haunting the countryside, wreaking havoc and destruction, taking whatever it wants, spreading terror. We have forces like this in our world. He is an inner reality and an outer one. Most of us have a big fear inside, a Goblin Rat King, a big fear, or a terrible memory, a bad decision we made in the past, that keeps us trembling and limited. There are terrible Rat Kings out in the world. Sometimes it’s us, trying to spread our system of government or make things good for the shareholders of our corporations. Sometimes it’s a terror group, calling themselves a religious purge or freedom fighters. Almost everyone who spreads terror thinks they are doing it for the good of the whole. Make society safe for the “nice” people, making life hard for the “bad” people.

Often, though, the “nice” people are the rich people and the bad people are the poor folks, queer folks, mouthy folks always yapping about their rights, acting like they should have access to education, to health care, to food and clean water.

We try to separate the “nice” from the “bad” parts of ourselves as well, and we can be brutal in our inner enforcements. Our whole culture is based on overpowering, overcoming, controlling through will, through might, through force. We want to change the world, and we make great efforts. I even hear people changing Theodore Parker’s great saying about the arc of the universe bending toward justice. They say “we’ll bend that arc of the universe!”

In the Eastern tradition which is the context for this story, one good way of doing is by not-doing. The Tao Te Ching says when you’re grilling a fish and you poke it too much, you ruin it. When you rule a country and you interfere too much, try to control too much, you mess things up. Maybe you can just do what you do, be who you are, and the cats you drew will take care of the big bad obstacle while you’re asleep, curled up into a small space. You don’t have to arrive on the scene like the Avengers (not that there’s anything wrong with the Avengers) and clean up the place with might, speed and power. Maybe you can do a lot of good with your art, with your passion, with just doing what you do and not trying to force anyone to do anything. Maybe outer and inner demons can be conquered by our doing what it is our passion to do: gardening, writing, helping, offering hospitality, cooking, building, conversation.

Recent events here at our church have me thinking hard. The church has been asked to step into the ancient tradition of offering sanctuary to a refugee. In this ancient tradition, no place but a church has the privilege of being a sanctuary. Tradition holds that soldiers will not come into a house of worship and drag someone out. Our government adheres to that tradition, so far. The woman to whom we have offered sanctuary was pushed out of her home country because of her passion for helping other LGBT folks. She has had a hard time finding a welcoming sanctuary because she identifies as “queer,” and her partner identifies as “trans.” I The UU church and our partners at St. Andrews Presbyterian are the two churches standing up for her. A person with a passion will find her way, like a seed haunted by the sun, finding its way past rocks and grit to break through to the surface. (- St. Exupery) A church with a passion for art and justice will find its way.

I’ve been thinking a lot about shelter since we volunteered to give sanctuary to our new friend, the LGBT activist seeking sanctuary from Guatemala. I hear the Stones song in my head, and I wonder what it means “War, children, it’s just a shot away.” The Civil War started with one shot, from a Citadel cadet at Ft. Sumter. World War One started with a shot, an anarchist, armed by a government official, got lucky and ended up close enough to Archduke Ferdinand’s carriage to shoot him and his beloved wife.

When things are unstable, out of balance, it only takes a small thing to tip everything over into chaos. Might it make sense, then, for enough small things to tip in back into balance? Love, children, it’s just a kiss away. The bards Mick Jagger and Keith Richards seem to think that a small thing can make a big difference.

The boy in our story had the experience of his art conquering the big mean rat hurting the whole countryside. He lived in that temple the rest of his days, becoming a great artist. May our passion, our difference, be the way Nature comes through us, uniquely, in order to heal itself. May we be open to letting our demons be conquered through art rather than by power.

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

Most sermons delivered at the First UU Church of Austin during the past 15 years are available online through this website. You will find links to them in the right sidebar menu labeled Sermons. The Indexes link leads to tables of all sermons for each year listed by date (newest to oldest) with topic and speaker. Click on the topic to go to a sermon.

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Rev. Meg Barnhouse
May 24, 2015

Next in our sermon series on fairy tales, Rev. Meg explores the story of “Goldilocks and the Three Bears.” What does this story say about sharing? Manners? Entitlement? Home invasion? How welcoming are we called to be? Are we Goldilocks or are we the bears? And what does all of this have to do with Elijah of the Old Testament?

I was raised by a father who trusted the government. I was a teenager when Watergate happened, and I remember him saying “The President would not do something like this without a good reason. You can bet he knows more than we do about secret things, and I’m sure his reason for doing this was related to something we’re just not in a position to know.” My mother did not trust the government. She had grown up in India, and told us that you had to leave gifts for the mail man or he would “lose” your mail. Talking to the police one afternoon, she asked them “how late are you open?”

“Lady, this is the police station,” they said. “We’re always open.” She loved studying the American Revolution, though. In ninth grade had a history teacher from Great Britain who told us the Boston Massacre was when scared 17 year old British boys got hurt by angry Colonials who put big rocks into snowballs and were lobbing them at the British boys. Who opened fire. My mother was hopping mad about that one. I think she called the school, even though she was a teacher and generally disapproved of parents complaining to the school about teachers.

My father’s three other siblings were politically more radical. My Aunt Ruth, the Episcopal priest who taught in Dallas at Perkins Seminary, refused to put her social security number on anything. Not at a doctor’s office, not on a loan application, never. She gave me dire warnings about doing it. The other sister, Aunt Dorothy, lived in Nicaragua for a while after the Sandinistas took power, working as a Spanish-German translator. My dad shook his head over both of them and said they had been duped by the Communists.

I had college professors who’d been duped by the Communists as well, and they taught us about how the US government had supported certain corporations playing Goldilocks in South and Central America. Once they started lining it out for us, it was hard not to see corruption everywhere. We were taught about the origin of the term “Banana Republic.” It’s a contemptuous term for a country where the government is a puppet dictatorship set up for the enrichment of the dictator and the companies for whom he works. The United Fruit Company was frequently accused of bribing government officials in Central and South America in exchange for their support of the giant banana plantations. They were accused of exploiting their workers, paying negligible taxes to the governments of those countries, and working ruthlessly to suppress land rights for the people who farmed the land of those countries.

Latin American journalists sometimes referred to the company as el pulpo (“the octopus”), and its exploitation of workers was used by the communist activists to illustrate the concept of capitalist imperialism. Senator, then Secretary of State John Foster Dulles, in the Eisenhower administration, was a stern anti-Communist. The more you learn, though, the more his motives seem cloudy/complex/corrupt. His law firm, Sullivan & Cromwell, negotiated the land giveaways to the United Fruit Company in Guatemala and Honduras. His brother, Allen Dulles also did legal work for UF and sat on its board of directors. Allen Dulles became the head of the CIA under Eisenhower. Both Dulles brothers were on the UF payroll for 38 years. Conflict of interest? Henry Cabot Lodge, who was US Ambassador to the UN, owned a big chunk of UF stock; Ed Whitman, the UF public relations man, was married to Ann Whitman, Eisenhower’s personal secretary.

Cohen, Rich (2012). The Fish that Ate the Whale. New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux. p. 186.

The company claimed that they needed large tracts of extra land that they didn’t plan bananas on just in case of hurricanes or blight. Through close involvement with the government, they managed to keep the government from distributing land to farmers who wanted a share of the banana business. This creation or augmentation of government corruption, encouraging service to US interests, led to writer O. Henry coining the term “Banana Republic.” The United Fruit Company dominated regional transportation networks through its International Railways of Central America. UFCO branched out in 1913 by creating the Tropical Radio and Telegraph Company. They improved ports, built schools for people who worked for them. They discouraged the building of highways in order to support the railroads.

In 1954, the democratically elected Guatemalan government was toppled by U.S.-backed forces armed, trained and organized by the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency. (see Operation PBSUCCESS).

UFCO (the only corporation at the time to have a CIA code name, was the largest Guatemalan landowner and employer, and the newly overthrown government’s land reform included the expropriation of 40% of UFCO land.

We don’t have time this morning to go over all of the instances in which our government has destabilized other countries, whether trying to do something good or making those places safe for US business interests.

The US has been Goldilocks in many bears’ homes, grabbing what we want, breaking things here and there, then bribing the bear governments to make it legal for Goldilocks to keep coming in and taking whatever she wants. We have not been very good guests. In looking after the interests of the shareholders of some corporations, we have destabilized the homes and homelands of many people around the world.

Goldilocks is the story of a bad guest, who takes and breaks and doesn’t observe boundaries.

Here is the story I’d like to pair with Goldilocks, the story of a great guest.

From The Folk Literature of the Kurdistani Jews: An Anthology. Yona Sabar. (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, ©1982), 153-54.
http://www.yale.edu/yup

Once upon a time there lived a husband and wife who were very poor and had nothing at all in their house. The wife, who was pregnant, gave birth to a son at ten o’clock at night, but she had nothing with which to wrap the tender babe. The poor father groaned and cried, “We have no clothes, not even some wool, to cover the babe, and he may die by morning.”

Suddenly a man appeared, stood at the entrance to the room, and said, “Peace be upon you! Do you have some straw to lend me? My wife has just given birth, and we have nothing to lay the child on. He may die of the cold.” The couple replied, “We are very poor, but we do have some straw. If you want it, please take it.”

The man took his cloak, (the Hebrew word is tallit, “prayer shawl” or “cloak”) filled it with straw, thanked the couple, and went off. As he stepped outside he threw the straw down next to the door, but the couple did not notice. After the stranger had left, the husband said to his wife, “Look how rich we are! There are people who do not have even straw, and we are rich compared with them.”

In the morning the husband got up, went outside, and found there many silver and gold dinars. He called his wife and said to her, “Look how much silver and gold we have behind the door!” They realized then that the man who came at night to ask for straw was none other than the prophet Elijah, of blessed memory, and that the straw had turned into silver and gold.

The husband went to the marketplace and bought the necessities for his home, and the rest of the money he hid away in a vessel, saying to his wife, “Let us flee from this town, for its people are wicked and jealous. If they learn that we have become rich, they will slay us.”

So they fled to a town where no one knew them, and there they asked, “Is it possible to build here a fine, good house?” A man replied, “I have such a fine, good house. If you like it, well and good; if not, do not buy it.”

The couple decided to buy the house. In the evening they went to look at it. As they walked through the rooms, they noticed a bulge in one of the walls. The wife touched it with her finger, and behold, the stone moved from its place and revealed an opening in the wall full of silver and gold. The husband said to his wife, “Look, God has granted us even more than before.”

The next day the couple were about to talk to the landlord, but he said to them, “I am the same man to whom you gave straw, and I changed it into gold. That gold was the good luck of your son. This house is your own good luck, and the bulge in the wall is your wife’s good luck. May you live in happiness and good fortune. please know that I, the prophet Elijah, am blessing you.” Having finished his statement, the prophet Elijah ascended in flight to heaven. We have been asked to provide sanctuary for a guest.

There is nothing like a genuine call to ministry to snap things back into focus. By now you will have heard that we have been offered the opportunity to take a Guatemalan LGGBT activist in and provide her with sanctuary until her deportation order is lifted. She is eligible for a U-Visa, since she has been helpful to police here in prosecuting a crime. Her lawyer missed a paperwork deadline, so she spent seven months in detention before her partner (also undocumented, and a trans-person) could raise the money for the required 15,000.00 bond.

She must appear for deportation by June 11. The police must document her help in order for her deportation order to be rescinded, but that might take as much as 90 days, after the Juke 11 deadline. I’m giving you my best interpretation of the story as I currently understand it, as of this writing.

The request for sanctuary was brought to us suddenly. The Board of Trustees had a rich and soul-searching discussion, the sense of which, at the end can be summed up quoting one Board member. “If we don’t do this, then what DO we do?”

As Presbyterian colleague, Jim Rigby said to me as we talked about this situation, it is hard to be prepared fully when the “prophetic moment” presents itself, the moment when you are asked to walk your talk. “Your church said ‘yes,’ and then figured out how to do it. That makes you a prophetic church. Other churches say ‘Let’s figure out how to do this’ before they say ‘yes.’ That makes them traditional churches.

Much more will be communicated, and a conversation will begin among us about whether we want to just do this once or become a Sanctuary Church like so many UU, Methodist, Presbyterian, Roman Catholic and Quaker congregations did during the ’80’s. Please research “The Sanctuary Movement,” if you’d like to know more. This is a well-educated, smart and delightful civil rights activist we have a chance to support. Although we surely are not of one mind about immigration issues, we can step up and protect this one new friend.

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

Most sermons delivered at the First UU Church of Austin during the past 15 years are available online through this website. You will find links to them in the right sidebar menu labeled Sermons. The Indexes link leads to tables of all sermons for each year listed by date (newest to oldest) with topic and speaker. Click on the topic to go to a sermon.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

Rev. Meg Barnhouse
April 26, 2015

Second in our fairy tale sermon series, “Rumpelstiltskin” tells the story of a girl asked to spin straw into gold. She meets a trickster who solves her problem, but at what price? Rev. Meg recalls the tale of “The Impossible Task.”

Rumpelstiltskin

Once there was a miller who was poor, but who had a beautiful daughter. Now it happened that he had to go and speak to the king, and in order to make himself appear important he said to him, “I have a daughter who can spin straw into gold.”

The king said to the miller, “That is an art which pleases me well, if your daughter is as clever as you say, bring her tomorrow to my palace, and I will put her to the test.”

And when the girl was brought to him he took her into a room which was quite full of straw, gave her a spinning-wheel and a reel, and said, “Now set to work, and if by tomorrow morning early you have not spun this straw into gold during the night, you must die.”

Thereupon he himself locked up the room, and left her in it alone. So there sat the poor miller’s daughter, and for the life of her could not tell what to do, she had no idea how straw could be spun into gold, and she grew more and more frightened, until at last she began to weep.

But all at once the door opened, and in came a little man, and said, “Good evening, mistress miller, why are you crying so?”

“Alas,” answered the girl, “I have to spin straw into gold, and I do not know how to do it.”

“What will you give me,” said the manikin, “if I do it for you?”

“My necklace,” said the girl.

The little man took the necklace, seated himself in front of the wheel, and whirr, whirr, whirr, three turns, and the reel was full, then he put another on, and whirr, whirr, whirr, three times round, and the second was full too. And so it went on until the morning, when all the straw was spun, and all the reels were full of gold.

By daybreak the king was already there, and when he saw the gold he was astonished and delighted, but his heart became only more greedy. He had the miller’s daughter taken into another room full of straw, which was much larger, and commanded her to spin that also in one night if she valued her life. The girl knew not how to help herself, and was crying, when the door opened again, and the little man appeared, and said, “What will you give me if I spin that straw into gold for you?”

“The ring on my finger,” answered the girl.

The little man took the ring, again began to turn the wheel, and by morning had spun all the straw into glittering gold.

The king rejoiced beyond measure at the sight, but still he had not gold enough, and he had the miller’s daughter taken into a still larger room full of straw, and said, “You must spin this, too, in the course of this night, but if you succeed, you shall be my wife.”

Even if she be a miller’s daughter, thought he, I could not find a richer wife in the whole world.

When the girl was alone the manikin came again for the third time, and said, “What will you give me if I spin the straw for you this time also?”

“I have nothing left that I could give,” answered the girl.

“Then promise me, if you should become queen, to give me your first child.”

Who knows whether that will ever happen, thought the miller’s daughter, and, not knowing how else to help herself in this strait, she promised the manikin what he wanted, and for that he once more spun the straw into gold.

And when the king came in the morning, and found all as he had wished, he took her in marriage, and the pretty miller’s daughter became a queen.

A year after, she brought a beautiful child into the world, and she never gave a thought to the manikin. But suddenly he came into her room, and said, “Now give me what you promised.”

The queen was horror-struck, and offered the manikin all the riches of the kingdom if he would leave her the child. But the manikin said, “No, something alive is dearer to me than all the treasures in the world.”

Then the queen began to lament and cry, so that the manikin pitied her.

“I will give you three days, time,” said he, “if by that time you find out my name, then shall you keep your child.”

So the queen thought the whole night of all the names that she had ever heard, and she sent a messenger over the country to inquire, far and wide, for any other names that there might be. When the manikin came the next day, she began with Caspar, Melchior, Balthazar, and said all the names she knew, one after another, but to every one the little man said, “That is not my name.”

On the second day she had inquiries made in the neighborhood as to the names of the people there, and she repeated to the manikin the most uncommon and curious. Perhaps your name is Shortribs, or Sheepshanks, or Laceleg, but he always answered, “That is not my name.”

On the third day the messenger came back again, and said, “I have not been able to find a single new name, but as I came to a high mountain at the end of the forest, where the fox and the hare bid each other good night, there I saw a little house, and before the house a fire was burning, and round about the fire quite a ridiculous little man was jumping, he hopped upon one leg, and shouted –

‘Today I bake, tomorrow brew, the next I’ll have the young queen’s child. Ha, glad am I that no one knew that Rumpelstiltskin I am styled.'”

You may imagine how glad the queen was when she heard the name. And when soon afterwards the little man came in, and asked, “Now, mistress queen, what is my name?”

At first she said, “Is your name Conrad?”

“No.”

“Is your name Harry?”

“No.”

“Perhaps your name is Rumpelstiltskin?”

“The devil has told you that! The devil has told you that,” cried the little man, and in his anger he plunged his right foot so deep into the earth that his whole leg went in, and then in rage he pulled at his left leg so hard with both hands that he tore himself in two.

Sermon

When I was in my twenties I studied dream interpretation with a Jungian analyst who had retired from CT to the mountains near Asheville, NC. She had an enormous Bernese Mountain dog named Rigi who would lean against your knee while you talked. I would bring my dreams to her and she would teach me using my own material. We were discussing the meaning of a dream, and I’d come up with two or three things it could have meant to my life. She was nodding. “Well, is it this one or this other one, do you think?” I asked her. Meg, it’s not usually either/or, she said. It’s often both/and. Or, yes, all.

Here is a young woman who finds herself in trouble because her father bragged – lied – about how gifted she was. “She can spin straw into gold,” he told the king, and she said nothing. Not a peep. Was she intimidated? Scared of her father? Didn’t want to embarrass him? Did she hope that somehow she could figure it out? Did she like that description of herself? The king puts her in the room, not with a sweet “See what you can do, missy,” but “If you don’t make this happen, you’ll die.” Shut into the room full of straw, and tried a couple of spins and realized she couldn’t figure it out.

Sandra Cisneros writes about being in the south of France as a penniless grad student, being invited for dinner by another Latino couple who were going to serve Mexican food. Her hosts assumed she could make tortillas because she was Mexican. Her mother was born in Chicago, and her mother’s people were country folk who made flour tortillas. Her father’s people were middle class from Mexico City, and they went to the corner store for corn tortillas. She had never made one in her life. They tossed corn flour at her and told her to go for it. She thought of that poor girl in the roomful of straw. Then she figured it out. They weren’t pretty, but they tasted ok, her first tortillas.

The Impossible Task is a trope that appears in tales of every culture. The labors of Hercules, Cinderella having to separate spilled peas and lentils before she can go to the ball, Lucy and Ethel at the candy factory.

Our girl broke straw and wept, more and more desperate. No little birds came fluttering in, like they did with Cinderella. She hadn’t helped some ants who came to save the day. She had no kindly fairy godmother who would help her for free.

Her desperation calls out to a little gremlin who appears at her side and offers to help. He asks what she’ll give him to do the job. She gives him her necklace. He spins all of the straw in to lustrous, gleaming gold. The king is pleased. Her father is pleased. How delicious! She gets to keep her life. Does she come clean? No. She lets herself get locked into a larger room with more straw. Straw is good, and it has its uses, but it’s not gold, surely, and the king wanted more gold. Daddy wasn’t willing to rescue his special child, and so she found herself in tears again, faced with an impossible task. The little man comes back, takes her ring this time, and spins the straw into gold. The king and the girl’s dad are so happy! She’s so miserable!

This is a familiar situation to so many of us, especially when we’re young. Over our heads, expectations seeming to force us into taking on more than we can do. We accomplish seemly impossible things, pull them out somehow, with the help of some inspiration, some little bit of magic, some superhuman leap. We write the paper, we pull the all-nighter, we take care of our parent’s emotional needs even though we are only a kid, we close the deal.

It’s a triumph. But it costs. I’m not saying that calling upon that little bit of magic, that superhuman effort, is bad. I’m not saying it’s good. As my teaching analyst would have said, “Meg, it’s a just-so story.” It’s just so. She keeps going. With the final impossible task she is offered the life of her dreams. The stakes have been raised. You will be queen. If there is a child from this marriage, you will give it to me.

She doesn’t know whether the king will marry her, or if she’ll have a child, so she finds herself making a promise. She makes a vow, but doesn’t have all the information. He accomplishes this last impossible task, and the king marries her. He’s so happy about all that gold. She has a child, and loves that child with the power of a parent to love a child. Did she ever think about the little magic man? Who knows? One day, though, he appeared. He said he was there to claim his prize. She offers him necklaces and rings beyond measure, but he wants this love of her life, heart of her heart.

How do you get out of such a bargain? It’s like all the Appalachian Jack tales where Jack has made a deal with the devil to sell his soul. Desperate people do desperate things. When you’re backed into a corner you might marry someone you shouldn’t marry, you might do a crime if you think it will get you out of your mess, you might borrow money from a payday lender, or sell your soul to the devil. Robert Johnson, the blues man, was supposed to have done that. I found an article in a Fantasy magazine about how to cheat the devil if you’d sold your soul and you wanted it back. This little man was a kindly magic man, I think. He gave the queen three days to do the research and find out his name. If she could tell him his name in three days, she could keep her child. I don’t know why he gave her three days. He was within his rights to claim the child right away, but this is how the story goes. The queen is part of us, and the little magic man is part of us. So is the king, and the straw, and the gold. This is a story about naming, about finding your power. She sends her researchers throughout the kingdom to find her answer. As you heard in the story for all ages, for the next two nights the little magic man comes to her to find out if she’s learned his name. She cannot guess it. The third day, though, she’s gotten her answer from one of her hunters, who heard the little man gloating while dancing around his house. She pretends not to know it, but then she nails it!

He gets so mad that he stamps his foot so hard the earth swallows him up and he is never seen again.

Some scholars say this is a story that arose out of the anxiety created by the Industrial Revolution. Girls were leaving their families and working for the first time. They were making gold for the factory owners and they had their own money for the first time. Maybe folks were worried that it would hurt the children. Maybe that it would give the girls too much power. In a Patriarchal culture, independence in females has always caused anxiety.

Or it could be a story about growing up, figuring something out. I think this is a story of the beginning of a journey of the soul. The beginning of a journey from the desperate need to please, the willingness to submit to the expectations of others, at great cost to oneself. The queen has made the journey from scared young woman trying to please everyone to claiming her woman hood, and using all the resources as her command to protect her child and save her own life. She did it by tackling a task that was too much for her: transforming everyday ordinary material into something of value. She needed help doing it, and that help cost her. Lots of us face this. We throw ourselves at a goal, dig deep and make it happen. We get through school, we write books while we take care of our young children. We start businesses, we navigate relationships while working while raising families, we create art which doesn’t bring in any money to speak of, yet in stubbornness we continue and somehow, with help, we make it happen. Much is stripped away from us. We owe people. We get addicted to work or to adrenaline, we constantly balance pleasing others and finding our own authentic work. Our task is to name the beings we owe. Once we name them, they lose much of their power over us. The power of naming is strong in world tales. “The Tao which can be named is not the Tao,” says the Scripture of Taoism. Knowing the name of God is so powerful, the Jewish faith asks that one says “The Lord,” even when the letters of the name of God are there in the Scripture. Salespeople say your name over and over to try to influence you.

I was doing impossible things and realized that the name of the magic helping me was adrenaline. I was an adrenaline junkie and it was costing me. Pride is another little gremlin. I resisted the thought that I was just a human woman. I don’t know why that felt embarrassing to me. When I was a therapist, a young therapist, people would come to me saying “We’ve been through six therapists already. You are our last hope.” That used to hook me. I would work harder on people’s marriages than they did. I’d work harder on a teenager’s health than anyone else in the family would. Finally I realized what it was costing me. Then I became wiser. When people would say “We’ve been through six therapists, and you’re our last hope,” I would say “If six therapists haven’t been able to help you, I probably wont be able to either.” “Just try, ok?” “Ok, I’ll just try.” That was much better.

What is the name of the little bit of magic you use to do impossible things? It’s not bad, it’s not good, but it’s good to know what it’s costing you.

And this whole story takes an ordinary experience and gives it shine and value, it teaches us. If it sticks with you, wrestle with it for a while. If not, let it go and wait for the next one.

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