Poems, Prayers, and Mary Oliver

For LoraKim, who rose with Mary for a year, and then more than a year, and then ever afterward,
and shows me every day that my work is loving the world.

SPOKEN INVOCATION
“The Summer Day” by Mary Oliver
Who made this world?
Who made the swan, and the black bear?
Who made the grasshopper?
This grasshopper, I mean -
the one who has flung herself out of the grass,
the one who is eating sugar out of my hand,
who is moving her jaws back and forth instead of up and down -
who is gazing around with her enormous and complicated eyes.
Now she lifts her pale forearms and thoroughly washes her face.
Now she snaps her wings open, and floats away.
I don’t know exactly what a prayer is.
I do know how to pay attention, how to fall down
into the grass, how to kneel down in the grass,
how to be idle and blessed, how to stroll through the fields,
which is what I have been doing all day.
Tell me, what else should I have done?
Doesn’t everything die at last, and too soon?
Tell me, what is it you plan to do
with your one wild and precious life?

CHALICE LIGHTING
On the eleventh Sunday of the season, we dedicate our chalice to the fourth source of the living tradition we share: Jewish and Christian teachings which call us to respond to God’s love by loving our neighbors as ourselves. These chalice lighting words are from Mary Oliver:

“Hello, sun in my face. Hello you who made the morning and spread it over the fields… Watch now, how I start the day in happiness, in kindness.”

INTRODUCTION
We celebrate today the poetry of Mary Oliver and commemorate her birthday. Mary will turn 80 in a week and a half, on Sep 10.

She is far and away America’s best-selling poet. In a country where most people find poetry intimidating – convoluted and confusing – where poetry is regarded as a nice idea but not something one would want to spend much time with – Mary Oliver stands alone as a poet with a mass readership. With unadorned language and accessible themes, her poetry combines dark introspection with joyous release.

Three of her poems are in the back of our hymnal, including the responsive reading we’ll have today, and in the years since our hymnal was published in 1993 she has only grown in popularity among Unitarian Universalists. So often is she read from in Unitarian Universalist worship, that then-President of the UUA, Rev. William Sinkford, called Mary Oliver “one of our most important liturgists.”

Mary Oliver was born in the depression in a semi-rural suburb of Cleveland, Ohio. Her first poetry collection was published in 1963 when she was 28. Since then, 21 more books of poems, plus six books of prose have followed.

Her poems draw inspiration from nature. Her practice has been to go on long early-morning walks through the wetlands and forests around her home in Provincetown, Massachusetts at the tip end of Cape Cod. She simply walks and pays attention – stopping occasionally to jot down a note. She has written: “To pay attention, this is our endless and proper work.” Mary’s “Instructions for living a life” are:

• Pay attention. 
• Be astonished. 
• Tell about it.

And this is what she modeled. On her walks she paid attention and was astonished, and in her poems, she told us about it. She says:

"When it's over, I want to say: all my life I was a bride married to amazement. I was the bridegroom, taking the world into my arms."

In the late 1950s, Mary met photographer Molly Malone Cook, who would become her partner for over forty years. Mary later wrote: "I took one look and fell, hook and tumble." Until Molly died in 2005, the two lived together in Provincetown, and Molly was Mary’s literary agent.

Mary commented in a rare interview:

"When things are going well, you know, the walk does not get rapid or get anywhere: I finally just stop, and write. That's a successful walk!"

She says that she once found herself walking in the woods with no pen and later hid pencils in the trees so she would not be stuck in that place again. She might forget to bring a pen or pencil, but she always had her 3-by-5-inch hand-sewn notebook for recording impressions and phrases.

The Harvard Review describes her work as an antidote to

"inattention and the baroque conventions of our social and professional lives. She is a poet of wisdom and generosity whose vision allows us to look intimately at a world not of our making."

Critic Alicia Ostriker numbered Mary among America's finest poets:

"visionary as Emerson [... she is] among the few American poets who can describe and transmit ecstasy, while retaining a practical awareness of the world as one of predators and prey."

READING
Seven poems by Mary Oliver

“In Blackwater Woods”

Look, the trees are turning their own bodies into pillars of light,
are giving off the rich fragrance of cinnamon and fulfillment,
the long tapers of cattails are bursting and floating away over the blue shoulders of the ponds,
and every pond, no matter what its name is, is nameless now.
Every year everything I have ever learned in my lifetime leads back to this: the fires
and the black river of loss whose other side is salvation,
whose meaning none of us will ever know.
To live in this world you must be able to do three things:
to love what is mortal;
to hold it against your bones knowing your own life depends on it;
and, when the time comes to let it go, to let it go.

“Spring”

Somewhere a black bear has just risen from sleep and is staring down the mountain.
All night in the brisk and shallow restlessness of early spring.
I think of her, her four black fists flicking the gravel,
her tongue like a red fire touching the grass, the cold water.
There is only one question: how to love this world.
I think of her rising like a bland and leafy ledge to sharpen her claws against
the silence of the trees.
Whatever else my life is with its poems and its music and its glass cities,
it is also this dazzling darkness coming down the mountain breathing and tasting;
all day I think of her – her white teeth, her wordlessness, her perfect love.

“When Death Comes”

When death comes like the hungry bear in autumn;
when death comes and takes all the bright coins from his purse to buy me,
and snaps the purse shut;
when death comes like the measle-pox
when death comes like an iceberg between the shoulder blades,
I want to step through the door full of curiosity, wondering:
what is it going to be like, that cottage of darkness?
And therefore I look upon everything
as a brotherhood and a sisterhood,
and I look upon time as no more than an idea,
and I consider eternity as another possibility,
and I think of each life as a flower, as common
as a field daisy, and as singular,
and each name a comfortable music in the mouth,
tending, as all music does, toward silence,
and each body a lion of courage, and something
precious to the earth.
When it's over, I want to say all my life
I was a bride married to amazement.
I was the bridegroom, taking the world into my arms.
When it's over, I don't want to wonder
if I have made of my life something particular, and real.
I don't want to find myself sighing and frightened,
or full of argument.
I don't want to end up simply having visited this world

“One or Two Things”

Don't bother me.
I've just been born.
The butterfly's loping flight carries it through the country of the leaves
delicately, and well enough to get it
where it wants to go, wherever that is, stopping
here and there to fuzzle the damp throats
of flowers and the black mud; up
and down it swings, frenzied and aimless; and sometimes
for long delicious moments it is perfectly
lazy, riding motionless in the breeze on the soft stalk
of some ordinary flower.
The god of dirt came up to me many times and said
so many wise and delectable things, I lay on the grass listening
to his dog voice, crow voice, frog voice; now,
he said, and now, and never once mentioned forever,
which has nevertheless always been, like a sharp iron hoof, at the center of my mind.
One or two things are all you need to travel over the blue pond, over the deep
roughage of the trees and through the stiff flowers of lightning—some deep
memory of pleasure, some cutting knowledge of pain.
But to lift the hoof !
For that you need an idea.

“The Notebook”

“Six a.m. –
the small, pond turtle lifts its head into the air like a green toe.
It looks around.
What it sees is the whole world swirling back from darkness:
a red sun rising over the water, over the pines,
and the wind lifting, and the water-striders heading out,
and the white lilies opening their happy bodies.
The turtle doesn’t have a word for any of it –
The silky water or the enormous blue morning, or the curious affair of his own body.
On the shore I’m so busy scribbling and crossing out
I almost miss seeing him paddle away through the wet, black forest.
More and more the moments come to me: how much can the right word do?
Now a few of the lilies are a faint flamingo inside their white hearts
and there is still time to let the last roses of the sunrise float down into my uplifted eyes.”

“Mindful”

Every day I see or hear something that more or less
kills me with delight, that leaves me like a needle
in the haystack of light. It was what I was born for - to look, to listen,
to lose myself inside this soft world - to instruct myself over and over
in joy, and acclamation. Nor am I talking about the exceptional,
the fearful, the dreadful, the very extravagant - but of the ordinary, the common, the very drab,
the daily presentations. Oh, good scholar, I say to myself, how can you help
but grow wise with such teachings as these - the untrimmable light
of the world, the ocean's shine, the prayers that are made out of grass?

“Another Everyday Poem”

Every day I consider the lilies -- how they are dressed –
and the ravens -- how they are fed -- and how each of these is a miracle
of Lord-love and of sorrow -- for the lilies in their bright dresses
cannot last but wrinkle fast and fall, and the little ravens
in their windy nest rise up in such pleasure at the sight
of fresh meat that makes their lives sweet -- and what a puzzle it is that such brevity –
The lavish clothes, the ruddy food -- makes the world so full, so good.

PRAYER

“It doesn’t have to be the blue iris. It could be weeds in a vacant lot, or a few small stones. Just pay attention. Then patch a few words together – and don’t try to make them elaborate. This isn’t a contest but the doorway into thanks, and a silence in which another voice may speak.” (Mary Oliver, "Praying")

God of dirt, from which and for which we live:
Grow in us the faith to trust in your care even in the midst of pain. We are never alone, ever in your midst, and yet so often we seem astray and estranged.

We mourn this week and hold in our hearts:
The deaths of 15 from suicide bombers in Lahore, Pakistan, outside two Christian churches.
The destruction by ISIS of the 2000-year-old temple in Palmyra, Syria.
The chemical attack in Syria affecting dozens of civilians.
That continued use of rape as a weapon of war in many places throughout the world, where women are devalued and seen only as property;
Wildfires burning across five western stated.
The extreme volatility of stock markets worldwide.
The continuing flood of refugees largely from Afghanistan, Nigeria, Eritrea and Syria struggling through hardship and danger to seek a new life in Western European countries.

Where our hearts are fearful and constricted, may we find courage and hope.
Where our minds are infected by anxiety, may we find peace and reassurance.
Where our vision can see no possibility, may we find imagination and resistance.
Where our spirits are daunted and distrustful, may we find connection and strength.

We celebrate:
The work of “Doctors Without Borders” whose members are treating the all victims of that chemical attack in Syria.
The firefighters laboring at risk against those wildfires – they have come from as far away as Australia and New Zealand.
The one surviving panda cub born at the National Zoo in Washington, D.C.
The diplomatic agreement between North and South Korea, which will result in the reunions of families separated by the Korean War.
The courage and faith of former U.S. President Jimmy Carter dealing with his diagnosis of advanced cancer.
The resilience and courage of the people of New Orleans, ten years after Hurricane Katrina.

God of dirt, grow in us the resolve and capacity to be agents of healing love and liberating justice.

RESPONSIVE READING
Singing the Living Tradition, #536: “Morning Poem” by Mary Oliver.

Every morning the world is created.

Under the orange sticks of the sun the heaped ashes of the night turn into leaves again

And fasten themselves to the high branches— and the ponds appear like black cloth on which are painted islands of summer lilies.

If it is your nature to be happy you will swim away along the soft trails for hours, your imagination alighting everywhere.

And if your spirit carries within it the thorn that is heavier than lead— if it's all you can do to keep on trudging—

There is still somewhere deep within you a beast shouting that the earth is exactly what it wanted—

Each pond with its blazing lilies is a prayer heard and answered lavishly, every morning,

Whether or not you have ever dared to be happy, whether or not you have ever dared to pray.

SERMON

Our Unitarian Universal General Assembly happens every year in June. One of the highlights is always the Ware lecture. Cornel West gave the Ware lecture last June when General Assembly was in Portland. I was there in person, and it was an electrifying experience. Cornel West was rousing and impassioned. I hope you’ve had a chance to see the video of that – we had a showing here last month, and it’s online at uua.org.

Nine years earlier, at the 2006 General Assembly in St. Louis, I was in attendance for a very different Ware lecture. The speaker was Mary Oliver. The Rev. William G. Sinkford, then-President of the Unitarian Universalist Association, introduced Mary, and he said that while Unitarian Universalist worship draws from many sources, congregations use "none more effectively or more frequently than the work of Mary Oliver." Sinkford did call her "one of our most important liturgists." He also noted that she probably didn't plan that to happen.

Mary came on and read to us from her poems for about an hour. The 2006 Ware Lecture was a poetry reading. It was as moving and powerful in its way as Cornel West’s was in a very different way. Three thousand other Unitarian Universalists were with me sharing that experience of Mary simply reading her poems, and from the feeling in the room when it was over, it seemed that three thousand Unitarian Universalist hearts were overflowing with peacefulness and a gratitude for this Earth and this life.

About half-way through, after reading a lot of her more recent material, she said, “Here’s an old, old poem everybody wants me to read. So I’ll do it.” As she started into it, I found myself mouthing the words along with her because I know it by heart. It’s called “Wild Geese.”

You do not have to be good.
You do not have to walk on your knees
For a hundred miles through the desert, repenting.
You only have to let the soft animal of your body
love what it loves.
Tell me about despair, yours, and I will tell you mine.
Meanwhile the world goes on.
Meanwhile the sun and the clear pebbles of the rain
are moving across the landscapes,
over the prairies and the deep trees,
the mountains and the rivers.
Meanwhile the wild geese, high in the clean blue air,
are heading home again.
Whoever you are, no matter how lonely,
the world offers itself to your imagination,
calls to you like the wild geese, harsh and exciting --
over and over announcing your place
in the family of things.

We are surrounded by life of so many different kinds. Our lives are embedded in the rich network of life – your thread and mine woven into the fabric of this planet along with dogs and cats and hamsters, along with squirrels and chipmunks and deer, along with robins and nuthatches and goldfinches, along with cicadas and ants and mosquitos, along with trout and tadpoles and tuna -- along with geese. We’re woven together with all of them, and that’s our place – what we were made from and what we are made for.

And.

We get lost. Over and over we find ourselves in the place Dante found himself in at the beginning of The Inferno:

“Midway on our life’s journey, I found myself in dark woods, the right road lost.”

We seem to have gone astray – find ourselves feeling separated from that fabric only within which we can realize our wholeness. And we tackle the problem with the tool we have: this enormous brain of ours, bigger in proportion to our body size than any other animal’s. We deploy the elaborate structures of moral judgment and strategizing intellect and go to work figuring out to how to be better, figuring out where that right road was and how to get back to it, figuring out how to be good.

Then along comes this little poem. The first line says: You know what? You do not have to be good. You really don’t. You can put that burden down. You can stop beating yourself up, stop punishing yourself in the hope that such ritual acts of self-inflicted repentance will transform you. You do not have to be good.

"Really? I don’t? How could that be? Where’s the argument, the reasoning for this claim that I don’t have to be good? On what evidence?"

The first evidence the poet mentions is your despair. “Tell me about despair, yours,” she says, inviting you to make her argument for her. This is the fruit of all that trying to be good: it just leads to despair.

The second evidence is life going on. Sun and rain, falling in those clear pebbles, keep moving, moving across the landscape, prairie, trees, mountains, rivers. The earth, full of wide and intricate vistas, just keeps turning -- and it will keep turning, not caring whether you are good.

The third evidence, the real clincher, is those geese. They don’t have to be good. They can just be geese. Just being who they are, they belong. And that means you do, too. The bald fact that they exist -- that they flap their wings and honk and fly together in their goosey formations – they feed, and molt, and produce goslings – all the things that merely manifest their goosehood – thereby also proclaims that they belong on this Earth, this Earth that they bring forth even as it brings them forth.

That’s how they announce their own and therefore also your place in the family of things – that’s how they announce it over and over.

You have the undeniable and unimpeachable authority of geese vouching for your belonging, documenting your citizenship in this world, revealing that the family of all things has a place for you, telling you exactly what that place is. Because you have their guarantee, you don’t have to earn it. You really don’t have to be good. You just have to be you. Love what you love. That is all that is asked.

My UU minister colleague Rev. Amy Zucker Morgenstern argues that Mary Oliver’s poems are mediocre. Rev. Morgenstern finds Ms. Oliver’s poems too obvious. She says the lovely images inevitably draw to the predictable conclusion, where the poem tells you what the moral is, the lesson taught by the natural world. A lot of people who are serious about their poetry don’t want morals or lessons tacked on – at least not simple obvious ones. They want their poems to be difficult.

Rev. Morgenstern mentions Rainer Maria Rilke as an example of a better poet because she has to read Rilke’s poems

“many times before I dig out their deeper meanings, and when I hold one of those meanings in my hand I know it’s the first of many, that that poem will keep revealing more to me the more times I read it.”

My colleague has a point. I also read Rilke, and it is an experience of poetry at a rather different level. There is a pleasure, too, in plunging into difficulty, laboring through layers of complexity.

Rev. Morgenstern then goes on to say that the very failings of Mary Oliver’s poems make them excellent liturgy:

“In a worship service, just as the hymns must be fairly simple to sing, the readings have to convey their meaning the first time, to listeners who don’t have another chance to go back and read them again or hear them again . . . They have to be very accessible. . . . Oliver’s poems are good liturgy for the same reason they are mediocre poetry. They deliver a poignant thought or a morsel of good advice for living, they do it with graceful language, they offer up images the mind can easily hold, and they have very little in them to distract the listener with ‘Wait, I didn’t get that bit.’ They lead one with silken inexorability to a conclusion. That’s not what I look for in a poem, but it’s perfect for a worship service.”

Or, as others have said, Mary’s poems are prayers more than they are the high art that highbrow critics relish. And when making prayers, as Mary herself says,

“don’t try to make them elaborate. This isn’t a contest.”

I don’t think I would attempt a sermon on Rilke. But Mary Oliver conveys, with simplicity and beauty, the sort of message that our shared Sunday morning experience, at its best, is all about.
.
Mary’s questions are religious questions: What is holy? Who are we? What are we called to do with our lives? What is death, and how do we understand it when we turn our faces toward its inevitability?

“Tell me, what is it you plan to do with your one wild and precious life?”

she asks in “The Summer Day.” In “Spring,” she answers:

“There is only one question: How to love this world.”

In “In Blackwater Woods” the related answer is:

“To live in this world you must be able to do three things: To love what is mortal; To hold it against your bones knowing your own life depends on it; And when the time comes to let it go, to let it go.”

In “One or Two Things,” Mary’s god is the “god of dirt,” and god’s voice is the voice of dog and crow and frog. This is a god of here and now who “never once mentioned forever.”

Her poems describe communion – a raw and earthy and sensual communion with nature that calls us back from detached lives increasingly spent indoors staring at screens. Screens. “Screen” is one of those words that means its own opposite. To “screen” a movie, for instance, means to present it to view. But “screen” also means to block from view. Prophet Mary speaks to us of the need to have unscreened experiences. Amidst our lives of fragmented multitasking, she speaks of unifying attention.

In an essay in Winter Hours, Mary writes:

“Now I think there is only one subject worth my attention and that is the recognition of the spiritual side of the world and, within this recognition, the condition of my own spiritual state. I am not talking about having faith necessarily, although one hopes to. What I mean by spirituality is not theology, but attitude.”

Paying attention is Mary’s form of prayer within the realm of this god of dirt from whom we come and for whom we live. “Just pay attention,” she says.

“Then patch a few words together and don’t try to make them elaborate. This isn’t a contest but the doorway into thanks, and a silence in which another voice may speak.”

Every tree and blade of grass; every mammal, bird, reptile, amphibian, and fish; every insect and cephalopod; every rock and every breeze -- has a message for us. Praying means paying attention. In this Mary is echoing the Psalmist, for Psalm 19 says:

“The heavens are telling the glory of god; and the firmament proclaims his handiwork. Day to day pours forth speech, and night to night declares knowledge. There is no speech, nor are there words. Their voice is not heard, yet their voice goes out through all the earth, and their words to the end of the world.” (Ps 19: 1-4, NRSV)

The place of connection and wholeness is in the silence, beyond words. “The turtle,” as Mary says,

“doesn’t have a word for any of it—the silky water or the enormous blue morning, or the curious affair of his own body.”

And though we often miss – fail to notice -- the silent glory of this dirt-god’s realm, forgiveness consists in this:

“There is still time to let the last rose of the sunrise float down into my uplifted eyes.”

There is still time.

Mary says plainly,

“My work is loving the world.”

That is all our work. Our job is to love: ourselves, other people, other creatures, every moment of life in this dirt-god’s world. You do not have to be good, but you do have to take up this assignment of loving the world. In page after page, poem after poem, through her long career of writing in her 80 years of life, Mary Oliver models how to do the human job. May we join her in that work.

CHALICE EXTINGUISHING
“I tell you this to break your heart –
By which I mean only:
that it break open and never close again to the rest of the world.”

BENEDICTION
“Whoever you are, no matter how lonely, the world offers itself to your imagination, calls to you like the wild geese, harsh and exciting -- over and over announcing your place in the family of things.” Go in peace.

This Week's Prayer

“It doesn’t have to be the blue iris. It could be weeds in a vacant lot, or a few small stones. Just pay attention. Then patch a few words together – and don’t try to make them elaborate. This isn’t a contest but the doorway into thanks, and a silence in which another voice may speak.” (Mary Oliver, "Praying")

God of dirt, from which and for which we live:

Grow in us the faith to trust in your care even in the midst of pain. We are never alone, ever in your midst, and yet so often we seem astray and estranged.

We mourn this week and hold in our hearts:
The deaths of 15 from suicide bombers in Lahore, Pakistan, outside two Christian churches.
The destruction by ISIS of the 2000-year-old temple in Palmyra, Syria.
The chemical attack in Syria affecting dozens of civilians.
That continued use of rape as a weapon of war in many places throughout the world, where women are devalued and seen only as property
The extreme volatility of stock markets worldwide.
The continuing flood of refugees largely from Afghanistan, Nigeria, Eritrea and Syria struggling through hardship and danger to seek a new life in Western European countries.

Where our hearts are fearful and constricted, may we find courage and hope.
Where our minds are infected by anxiety, may we find peace and reassurance.
Where our vision can see no possibility, may we find imagination and resistance.
Where our spirits are daunted and distrustful, may we find connection and strength.

We celebrate:
The work of “Doctors Without Borders” whose members are treating the all victims of that chemical attack in Syria.
The firefighters laboring at risk against those wildfires – they have come from as far away as Australia and New Zealand.
The one surviving panda cub born at the National Zoo in Washington, D.C.
The diplomatic agreement between North and South Korea, which will result in the reunions of families separated by the Korean War.
The courage and faith of former U.S. President Jimmy Carter dealing with his diagnosis of advanced cancer.
The resilience and courage of the people of New Orleans, ten years after Hurricane Katrina.

God of dirt, grow in us the resolve and capacity to be agents of healing love and liberating justice.

Unconscious Bias and Moral Imagination

The Arc of the Moral Universe, part 3

Government policy and private lending institutions colluded quite intentionally in various ways to keeps black-looking folk concentrated in certain areas of town. Sociologist John McKnight in the 1960s coined the term "redlining" to refer to the practice of marking a red line on a map to delineate the area where banks would not invest. Our cities and towns to this day remain largely segregated along race -- or perceived-race -- lines. And various versions of redlining continue. Small A small business in a black neighborhood is less likely to receive a loan (even after accounting for business density, business size, industrial mix, neighborhood income, and the credit quality of local businesses), and race continues to affect the policies and practices of the insurance industry. (See Dan Immergluck, "Redlining Redux", Urban Affairs Review, 2002; and Gregory D. Squires, "Racial Profiling, Insurance Style: Insurance Redlining and the Uneven Development of Metropolitan Areas", Journal of Urban Affairs, 2003). Various forms of redlining help preserve housing segregation. As recently as 2009, loan officers at Wells Fargo were revealed to be "systematically singling out blacks in Baltimore and suburban Maryland for high-interest subprime mortgages." The practice "tipped hundreds of homeowners into foreclosure" (NY Times, 2009 Jun 6).

Predominantly black areas, deprived of legitimate opportunity, became higher crime areas, became areas where police were more often sent, because the white power structure sees those areas as dangerous and police serve the interests of protecting the whites from real or perceived danger. If your job is to control, subdue, and keep corralled any visibly-identifiable group of people, over time you will develop contempt for those people, so it’s no surprise that police are more likely to use deadly force against the black-looking.

The whiter a school or a neighborhood is, the more likely it is to be seen as “good.” That’s today.

We watch movies like “12 Years a Slave,” and are rightfully horrified, yet stories of the horrors of 19th-century slaveowners also function to reinforce the idea that racism is a conscious bias held by mean people. Today it’s an unconscious bias perpetuated unconsciously by people like most of us who see ourselves as nice people.

Researchers have developed a test called the Implicit Association Test – IAT. A set of images flashes by on the screen, and each screen has either a face or a word -- words like evil, happy, awful, peace. If the image is a face, the subject must identify it as rapidly as possible as either African American or European American. If it’s a word, the subject identifies its connotation as either good or bad. As the words and faces flash by, the subject finds it challenging to work as quickly as possible while making as few sorting errors as possible.

Here’s the crux. The test has two parts. During one part of the test the same keystroke used to signal a face is African American is also used to signal that a word is bad. During the other part of the test the same keystroke used to signal a face is African American is also used to signal a word is good. In the former case – when signaling that a face is African American is done with the same motion as signaling that a word’s meaning is bad – white test-takers sort with higher average speed and accuracy. That is, the brain more easily links those two, doesn’t have to work as hard as it does when “African American” and words with positive meanings require the same motor response.

“When negative words and black faces are paired together, you're a better, faster categorizer. Which suggests that racially biased messages from the culture around you have shaped the very wiring of your brain" (Mother Jones, 2014 Dec 1)

More than two million people have taken the online Implicit Association Test, and what we’ve founded is that the unconscious bias is unchanged by education level. People who didn’t finish high school average about the same level of bias as people with PhDs or MBAs. More schooling doesn’t generally change a person’s bias.

We do tend to be biased toward our own racial group, but whites much more so than blacks. The white bias toward whites measures at an average of .4. The black bias toward blacks measures at an average of less than .05 – which is essentially no bias at all.

Political orientation correlates with the level of bias. Those who identify politically as conservative reveal higher levels of unconscious bias than those who identify as liberal. But even political liberals have a bias measuring around .3.

Our brains were built to form prejudices. In our evolutionary heritage,

“Assuming that all mushrooms are poisonous, that all lions want to eat you, is a very effective way of coping with your surroundings. Forget being nuanced about nonpoisonous mushrooms and occasionally nonhungry lions—certitude keeps you safe.” (Mother Jones)

We are also built to be strongly tribal. Across the globe and thousands of different cultures, early human history was replete with tribes attacking other tribes. The ones that had greater tribal cohesion – loyalty to the in-group and hostility to all out-groups – survived better. And we are all descendants of the more successful tribes.

But what’s going on in the US is more than just the way evolution has wired our brains. In this country, our evolutionary wiring has combined with a unique and deep-rooted pattern of building a nation through the plunder and appropriation – and concomitant hatred -- of darker-looking bodies.

• Franklin Roosevelt was able to pass Social Security into law in 1935 only by specifically excluding farmworkers and domestics – jobs heavily occupied by blacks. The law never mentioned race, but because lawmakers could envision the beneficiaries as almost entirely white, they were willing to pass it. Conversely, when benefits do go to the darker-skinned, whites typically oppose the program. Thus, it seems likely that a significant part of white opposition to the Affordable Care Act is rooted in a visceral dislike of providing social services to blacks. (When the ACA was signed into law in 2010, Blacks and Hispanics stood to disproportionately benefit because they were disproportionately represented among the uninsured, and also tend to need more medical care. See Matthew Lynch, "Opposition to the ACA is Rooted in Bigotry, Huffington Post.)
• In 1988, Michael Dukakis campaign for president was sunk by Willie Horton advertisements – the specter of a black man released from prison on a Massachusetts furlough program was too powerful a negative association.
• And sociologist Douglas Massey has observed: “All that it would take to sink a new [public works] program would be some skillfully packaged footage of black men leaning on shovels smoking cigarettes” (cited by Ta-Nahisi Coates, Atlantic, 2014 Jun). We see white guys doing that and unconsciously figure they’re just taking a well-deserved break. We see black guys doing the same thing, and it’s just intolerable.

Every human has in-group bias, but in the rest of the world, it doesn’t look like it does in the US.

Can this be fixed? Evidence, facts, and reason can be useful for shaping conscious, cognitive ideas. But how do we change a bias that is unconscious? How do we rewire neural pathways to which we don't have conscious access? This is about you and me. I know that the temptation is strong to identify the perpetrators of our racist system -- people surely other than ourselves -- and seek to change them. It's also true that engaging in the public work of social change is valuable and necessary. But I'm saying we also have some internal work to do. Cornel West, speaking at the Unitarian Universalist General Assembly in June, told us:

"I've got a lot of vanilla brothers and sisters that walk with me and say, Brother West, Brother West, you know, I'm not a racist any longer. Grandma's got work to do, but I've transcended that. [LAUGHTER] And I say to them, I'm a Jesus-loving, free, black man, and I've tried to be so for 55 years, and I'm 62 now, and when I look in the depths of my soul I see white supremacy because I grew up in America. And if there's white supremacy in me, my hunch is you've got some work to do, too." (Ware Lecture, General Assembly 2015)

If we're going to have any chance of changing the system and changing other people's hearts and minds, we have to change ourselves. So, putting aside for now the anger we feel when we hear about terrible bigotry -- anger directed at other people, howsoever righteous our anger may be -- how do we begin to do the work of confronting our own unconscious biases?

“In a massive study, Brian Nosek of the University of Virginia and his colleagues tested 17 different proposed ways of reducing people's unconscious bias on the IAT.” (Mother Jones)

Most of them had no effect.

“The single best intervention involved putting [white] people into scenarios and mindsets in which a black person became their ally (or even saved their life) while white people were depicted as the bad guys. In this intervention, participants ‘read an evocative story told in second-person narrative in which a White man assaults the participant and a Black man rescues the participant.’ In other words, study subjects are induced to feel as if they have been personally helped or even saved by someone from a different race. Then they took the IAT—and showed 48 percent less bias than a control group.” (Mother Jones)

That’s what works: imaginative exercises, stories; stories that deliberately counteract the kinds of stories American culture tells us over and over; stories that expand and re-train our moral imagination.

If whites are to be free of this awful color line that slashes through our psyches – and which then ends up slashing through the bodies of our darker-skinned siblings -- we must first imagine it. Vividly, concretely, and repeatedly: imagine.

It's important to be aware of the ways that our society devalues black lives, and that's what I've spent most of this post (and the previous two) describing. But merely knowing about the oppression is not sufficient to truly shake the tacit assumption that, maybe, somehow, the oppressed don't all that much "deserve" to not be oppressed. For that, we need stories of heroism, virtue, and kindness. The tired yet popular "Magical Negro" trope (paradigm cases would include the films "The Green Mile," "The Legend of Bagger Vance," and "Bruce Almighty") may be tempting, but stories of realistic human characters are better. Let us, moreover, remember that it is not the responsibility of African Americans to provide whites with the healing narrative medicine we need to overcome unconscious bias. Rather, it's up to us to do the work of training not only our rational awareness but also our moral imaginations. It's up to us to find the novels, short stories, films, and plays that are already available. We need to not only have our sympathy, empathy, and compassion evoked, but also our admiration and gratitude.

I do not believe that the arc of the moral universe bends by itself. Sometimes it just doesn’t bend, or bends the wrong way. When it does bend toward justice, it does so because we bend it. And the arc of the moral universe bends in parallel with the arc of our moral imagination.

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This is part 3 of 3 of "The Arc of the Moral Universe"
See also
Part 1: Bending Toward Justice?
Part 2: A Powerful Perception

A Powerful Perception

The Arc of the Moral Universe, part 2

Race is such a powerful concept, yet it isn’t real. It’s not based on biology. There is no race chromosome in our DNA. (Sickle cell anemia is a hereditary blood disorder sometimes thought to be race specific. Actually, sickle cell is an adaptive response to malaria, so anyone with recent ancestry in malaria-stricken areas -- which includes Africa, the Mediterranean, India, and the Middle East -- is at greater risk of sickle cell.) People who are very dark skinned get assigned one racial category and people who are very pale skinned get assigned another, but there’s a huge area of ambiguity in between.

In 1929, if you were of Mexican birth or ancestry, you were white. The 1930 census changed Mexican birth or ancestry to nonwhite as part of limiting immigration. In 1942, with the US needing to expand its labor force during World War II, these people were switched back to being white.

More and more of us are less and less obvious – that is, not easily racially classifiable. Thus, more and more, a person's race is a matter of self-identification. 28 percent African heritage turns out to be the average threshold for identifying as black. There are individual differences, but on average, in this country, we find, someone with more than 28% African ancestry is more likely to identify as African American, and someone with less than 28% African ancestry is more likely not to identify as African American.

In our culture today, 28 percent just happens to be the average point at which a person comes to feel black. It’s not that that’s a rule. There are no formal rules. Sometimes siblings with the exact same parentage – same mother and same father – make opposite identifications.

Top: Rev. Danielle Di Bona.
Middle: Lucy and Maria Aylmer
Bottom: The Aylmer family

One of my colleague UU ministers is Rev. Danielle Di Bona. Danielle says she is biracial. Her mom was Native, and her dad was born in Italy. Danielle has a twin sister, who I haven’t met, who Danielle tells me has blue eyes, fair skin, curly hair. The sister identifies as white, while Danielle identifies as a bi-racial person of color. Danielle is a bi-racial person of color because she self-identifies as a bi-racial person of color. Her sister is white because she self-identifies as white.

The Aylmer twins have a similar story. Lucy and Maria Aylmer are sisters with the same father and the same mother. The dad identifies as white, the mom as half-Jamaican. Maria identifies as black while Lucy identifies as white.

There is no reality to race, but there certainly is a reality to perception of race. On the range between ivory Scandinavian and ebony sub-Saharan African, most of us are in between, and there are a growing number of people right around the visually indeterminate region -- that is, racial identity is not clear just from looking. For them, what they self-identify as may be the whole story. For others, there’s no escaping the perception of their race. As Adam Serwer put it:

"If you look black, you are black in America, regardless of ethnic background or how you identify. Defining himself as biracial did not prevent Tony Robinson from joining the long list of unarmed young black men gunned down by police." (Serwer, BuzzFeed)

Perception of race has been very powerful and often stunningly evil in American history. Between 1882 and 1968, there were a lot of lynchings in the South, and no state did more of that than Mississippi. Theodore Bilbo, elected Governor of Mississippi in 1915 and again in 1927, and US Senator in 1935, recognized that lynching was a tactic to suppress black voting in a state where blacks outnumbered whites. He said, “You and I know what’s the best way to keep the nigger from voting. You do it the night before the election.” (Ta-Nahesis Coates, "The Case for Reparations," Atlantic, 2014 Jun)

In 1934, Congress created the Federal Housing Authority. The FHA provided mortgage insurance, but only for high rated neighborhoods. The presence of a single African American made a neighborhood low rated. So while the law didn’t say, “No mortgage insurance for blacks,” the effect was the same. And private banks simply didn’t give uninsured mortgages to African Americans. A system of contract selling sprang up in which white speculators would buy a house cheap, double its price and sell it to a black family under contract terms in which the interest rates were high, the seller retained the deed until the house was fully paid for, no equity accrued, and if a single payment was missed, even if it would have been the last one, the buyer lost everything, the house and all money that had been invested in it.

“In Chicago and across the country, whites looking to achieve the American dream could rely on a legitimate credit system backed by the government. Blacks were herded in to the sight of unscrupulous lenders who took them for money and for sport.” (Coates, 2014 Jun)

Beryl Satter’s 2009 book, Family Properties reports one housing attorney saying:

“It was like people who like to go out and shoot lions in Africa. It was the same thrill. The thrill of the chase and the kill.”

Race may not be real, but the perception of it has engendered chilling evil. Not that the solution is to stop perceiving race. At this point, that would only be denying the legacy of plunder and violence against those perceived as black. That legacy, of course, continues.

In one study thousands of identical resumes were mailed to prospective employers: Identical except only for the name. A black sounding name – say, Daunte Williams instead of David Williams – was 50% less likely to be called back. Fifty percent.

Bilking and plundering African Americans for profit and sport continues. Black car buyers are charged $700 more on average than white car buyers of the same car. When driving that car, multiple studies show that black drivers are twice as likely to be pulled over.

When looking for a home, black clients looking to buy are shown 17.7% fewer houses for sale, and black renters learn about 11 percent fewer rental units.

Up until the recent move toward decriminalizing marijuana, penalties have been stiff. Blacks and whites used marijuana at similar rates, yet black people were four times more likely to be arrested for it.

The Anti-Drug Abuse Act of 1986 created much harsher penalties for possession of crack cocaine, used mostly by blacks, than for a quantity of powdered cocaine, used mostly by whites, that produced similar effects?

Overall, Blacks are incarcerated at nearly six times the rate of whites.

Doctors did not inform black patients as often as white ones about the option of an important heart catheterization procedure.

White legislators – in both political parties -- did not respond as frequently to constituents with black sounding names.

When Black men open-carried firearms as the Black Panthers did in the 1960s and 70s, gun control legislation passed, and when that perceived threat was gone and whites wanted to open carry, those controls were rolled back, and white people heavily armed in public are celebrated as patriotic guardians against government tyranny.

Meanwhile, government tyranny, in the form of its police officers, is a more realistic threat to African Americans. According to ProPublica analysis last October, a young black male is 21 times more likely to be shot by police than his white counterpart.

* * *
This is part 2 of 3 of "The Arc of the Moral Universe."
See also:
Part 1: Bending Toward Justice?
Part 3: Unconscious Bias and Moral Imagination

Bending Toward Justice?

The Arc of the Moral Universe, part 1

The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice. Stirring and hopeful words! Is it true?

Theodore Parker

Theodore Parker, born in 1810 in Massachusetts, became a prominent Unitarian minister and abolitionist. In a sermon delivered around 1850, titled “Of Justice and the Conscience,” Parker spoke against slavery, made the case for abolition, and expressed optimism that slavery would end. He said:

“Look at the facts of the world. You see a continual and progressive triumph of the right. I do not pretend to understand the moral universe, the arc is a long one, my eye reaches but little ways. I cannot calculate the curve and complete the figure by the experience of sight. I can divine it by conscience. But from what I see I am sure it bends towards justice.” (Parker, Ten Sermons of Religion, 1853, pp. 84-85.)

By 1918 a book of quotations attributed to Theodore Parker the more concise expression:

“The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice.”

Martin Luther King, Jr.

This is the version that Martin Luther King used. King first used it in a print article he wrote in 1958, where he put quotation marks around it, indicating his acknowledgment that the expression was already in circulation.

President Obama has, on a couple of occasions, employed the metaphor of history bending toward justice.

In the last year, I’ve heard a lot of references to the onward progressive march of history. From 2014 May until 2015 Feb, the number of states or DC recognizing same-sex marriage ballooned from 17 to 38 in less than 9 months. Then last June, the Supreme Court ruled that all states must recognize same-sex marriage. During this march to marriage equality, I heard often that the opponents were on the wrong side of history – that this progress was bound to happen and that those who opposed it would end up in the same historical dustbin with proponents of slavery, opponents of women’s suffrage, and the upholders of Jim Crow and segregation. My friends were saying this sort of thing, and while I certainly agreed with them that recognizing same-sex marriage was the right thing to do, I was uncomfortable with the argument that "history has ruled so get used to it." The call of justice is not a call to read the tea leaves and then jump on board history’s train. The call of justice is not to follow shifting popular attitudes, but to lead them, if we can -- with humility, never certain what history will do -- and in any case, lead lives of integrity, standing up for fairness and respect for all.

The arc of the moral universe is not merely a long one, it is not a smooth arc at all. It, in fact, bends every which way. It is well to remember:

• In 1920, a huge push for what had looked to a lot of people at the time like moral progress culminated in the prohibition of alcohol. The general consensus today is that that was not moral progress, but rather a mistake.
• More of us would say that what happened in 1972 with the Roe v. Wade decision actually was moral progress. But if that was a bending toward justice, we have been bending away from it ever since, as women’s reproductive freedom has endured curtailment after curtailment for the last 43 years.

The optimism of Theodore Parker and Martin Luther King has value. That optimism is a core part of our liberal faith. Another great Unitarian minister of the 19th-centry, Rev. William Channing Gannett, wrote the words of our hymn, “It Sounds Along the Ages.” The hymn's words declare that there is some kind of force at work in history that sounds throughout the ages, pushing humans to new stages of moral awakening. “It calls and, lo, new justice, it speaks and, lo, new truth.” (Singing the Living Tradition, #187). And when the Unitarian theologian James Luther Adams discerned what he called "The Five Smooth Stones of Liberal Religion," one of those "stones" is liberal religion's conviction that:

"the resources (divine and human) that are available for the achievement of meaningful change justify an attitude of ultimate optimism."

James Luther Adams

Adams also cautioned us repeatedly and at length to take seriously the capacity of human evil, which he witnessed as a visiting scholar in Germany during the 1930s as the Nazis were rising to power. So he adds:

"This view does not necessarily involve immediate optimism. In our century we have seen the rebarbarization of the masses, we have witnessed a widespread dissolution of values, and we have seen the appearance of great collective demonries. Progress is now seen not to take place through inheritance; each generation must anew win insight into the ambiguous nature of human existence and must give new relevance to moral and spiritual values. A realistic appraisal of our behavior, personal and institutional, and a life of continuing humility and renewal are demanded, for there are ever-present forces in us working for perversion and destruction." (James Luther Adams, "The Five Smooth Stones of Liberal Religion)

It’s interesting that both Theodore Parker and Martin Luther King spoke of the moral universe bending toward justice in the context of America’s treatment of people of color. Parker was speaking for abolition of slavery, and King for the abolition of Jim Crow segregation. It is matters of race that have particularly inspired our thinkers and leaders to hope for an arc of justice which, howsoever slowly, bends toward justice.

Ta-Nehisi Coates is not so sanguine. When Jon Stewart interviewed Coates, Stewart observed, "It's not as optimistic for you. You don't have that feeling that the arc of history may be long, but it bends toward justice." Coates replied, "I don't. I think it bends toward chaos." (Daily Show, 2015 Jul 23)

Ta-Nahisi Coates

In his recent "Letter to My Son," Ta-Nehisi Coates writes powerfully of the state of race relations in the US today:

"I write you in your 15th year. I am writing you because this was the year you saw Eric Garner choked to death for selling cigarettes; because you know now that Renisha McBride was shot for seeking help, that John Crawford was shot down for browsing in a department store. And you have seen men in uniform drive by and murder Tamir Rice, a 12-year-old child whom they were oath-bound to protect. And you know now, if you did not before, that the police departments of your country have been endowed with the authority to destroy your body. It does not matter if the destruction is the result of an unfortunate overreaction. It does not matter if it originates in a misunderstanding. It does not matter if the destruction springs from a foolish policy. Sell cigarettes without the proper authority and your body can be destroyed. Turn into a dark stairwell and your body can be destroyed. The destroyers will rarely be held accountable. Mostly they will receive pensions.
There is nothing uniquely evil in these destroyers or even in this moment. The destroyers are merely men enforcing the whims of our country, correctly interpreting its heritage and legacy. This legacy aspires to the shackling of black bodies. It is hard to face this. But all our phrasing—race relations, racial chasm, racial justice, racial profiling, white privilege, even white supremacy—serves to obscure that racism is a visceral experience, that it dislodges brains, blocks airways, rips muscle, extracts organs, cracks bones, breaks teeth. You must never look away from this. You must always remember that the sociology, the history, the economics, the graphs, the charts, the regressions all land, with great violence, upon the body. And should one live in such a body? What should be our aim beyond meager survival of constant, generational, ongoing battery and assault? I have asked this question all my life. I have sought the answer through my reading and writings, through the music of my youth, through arguments with your grandfather, with your mother. I have searched for answers in nationalist myth, in classrooms, out on the streets, and on other continents. The question is unanswerable, which is not to say futile. The greatest reward of this constant interrogation, of confrontation with the brutality of my country, is that it has freed me from ghosts and myths." (Atlantic, 2015 Jul)

* * *
This is part 1 of 3 of "The Arc of the Moral Universe"
See also:
Part 2: A Powerful Perception
Part 3: Unconscious Bias and Moral Imagination