NEVERTHELESS, SHE
PERSISTED
Rev. Kit Ketcham,
March 12, 2017
PUUF
I have never
thought of myself as a persister. I was
an adventurer, as you heard in the story I read to the kids about a moment of
adventure in my childhood. These were
mostly safe adventures, though I did have that setback with the Tale of the Girl who was Stuck on a
Clothesline Pole.
Then there
were other setbacks involving boys I liked and horses they fell off of,
or that I fell off of in front of them. Events in my life that
made me a bit hesitant to persist in that particular adventure.
I did love
reading about other adventurous girls. There
was Nancy Drew, for example. And Louisa
May Alcott was a favorite author of mine who wrote about Jo March, that
adventuress of the 19th century book Little Women. I
wanted to be like Jo March. At least up
until she got in trouble for some misdeed, because I was a good girl and didn’t
like getting in trouble. And I was a PK,
which meant I would let my Dad down.
But here I
am, almost 75 years old, and in the UU ministry, the fifth career in my
history, so I must have persisted at something!
When I look back at my life’s trajectory, I can see that each of those
first four careers was preparing me for ministry in my later years, but my
brand of persistence was just putting one foot in front of the other and going
from one interesting career to the next.
I started
out as a welfare caseworker in Klickitat and Skamania counties in the Gorge;
from there, it was off to Denver to be an American Baptist home missionary at a
Christian community center in the inner city.
At a meeting of the Denver Young
Democrats, I met a cute guy who was a Unitarian and after our marriage, I
earned teaching credentials and spent 25 years in public education, working
with junior high age kids, as a Spanish teacher and as a guidance counselor.
As I approached early retirement
age, however, I wondered what the heck I
would do with my retirement years. I was
sure burned out on public education. And
then came that moment at Jefferson Unitarian Church in Golden CO when our
minister turned to me from the pulpit after I’d delivered a brief homily about
the congregation’s recent ups and downs.
“Kit,” he said to me as I sat in
the front row of the sanctuary. “You
missed your calling; you ought to be a minister!” This was 1992 and I has just turned 50 years
old.
Enrolling at Iliff School of
Theology a few years later at age 53, I was one of the oldest students and one
of a handful of women. If I had tried
ministry as a career right out of college, I would have flamed out, not
persisted, gone on to find something tamer, easier, less serious, as many of my
Baptist college friends had done, unable to draw upon a treasure chest of life
experience to sustain their calling.
Recently Senator Mitch McConnell
told his colleague, Senator Elizabeth Warren essentially to “sit down and shut
up” when she began to read into the Senate record a letter from Coretta Scott
King. His exact words have become a social
media meme, and spread rapidly throughout pop culture as a warcry for the
women’s movement.
“She was warned, she was given an explanation,
and nevertheless, she persisted.” Women
all over the world have delighted in Mr. McConnell’s words and, like the
infamous “cat” hats, women have taken that expression and have run with it.
I got to thinking about all the
women in history who have been warned, explained to, and who, nevertheless,
persisted. There are countless stories
in history---many of them unwritten, only preserved through family legends. I’ll bet you know some of these women.
Perhaps they were your mothers or
grandmothers, your Scout leader or your neighbor. Your sister, your aunt, your teacher. Who do you count among the persistent women
of your life? I invite you to call out
their names! Let’s celebrate them!
(Adapted from the
website “Judaism 101”) This is the month that the Jews celebrate Purim, one of the most joyous holidays on the Jewish
calendar. It commemorates a time when the Jewish people living in Persia were
saved from extermination. It’s a scary
story and it’s the Biblical story of Esther, a woman who did what she knew was
dangerous and likely to result in her own death. But she did it anyway.
The heroes of the story are Esther, a beautiful young Jewish
woman living in Persia, and her cousin Mordecai, who raised her as if she were
his daughter.
Esther was taken to the house of Ahasuerus, King of Persia,
to become part of his harem. King Ahasuerus loved Esther more than his other
women and made Esther queen, but the king did not know that Esther was a Jew,
because Mordecai told her not to reveal her identity when she was taken to the
harem.
The villain of the story is Haman, an arrogant, egotistical
advisor to the king. Haman hated Mordecai because Mordecai refused to bow down
to Haman, so Haman plotted to destroy the Jewish people.
In a speech that is all too familiar to Jews, Haman told the
king, "There is a certain people scattered abroad and dispersed among the
peoples in all the provinces of your realm. Their laws are different from those
of every other people's, and they do not observe the king's laws; therefore it
is not befitting the king to tolerate them." The king gave the fate of the Jewish people
to Haman, to do as he pleased to them. Haman planned to exterminate all of the
Jews.
Mordecai persuaded Esther to speak to the king on behalf of
the Jewish people. This was a dangerous thing for Esther to do, because anyone
who came into the king's presence without being summoned could be put to death,
and she had not been summoned.
Esther fasted for three days to prepare herself, then went
into the king. He welcomed her. Later, she told him of Haman's plot against her
people. The Jewish people were saved, and Haman and his sons were hanged on the
gallows that had been prepared for Mordecai.
This legendary and important story in Jewish history begs a
vital question: what would have happened
if Esther had failed to petition the king?
How would history be different?
I ask myself that question every time I watch something like
“Defying the Nazis” or listen to a story like Esther’s. Or any of the millions of women who, over the
millennia past, took action, listened to the warnings and persisted. I ask myself “what would I have done? And
what would have happened had I not taken a stand or an action? Could I live with myself?”
The stories of women who persisted are often hidden,
depending on the culture they were part of.
Old Testament or Hebrew scriptures cite a number of women who dared to
buck convention and behave in ways that were not typical of women of the Middle
Eastern patriarchy:
The stories of some of the Biblical women’s deeds have
become legendary, in the way that truths often make the best story: Rahab, a prostitute according to the
scriptures, helped the Israelites conquer the city of Jericho; Judith, an
Israelite woman, killed an Assyrian
general who was bent on conquering the known world—by luring him into her tent
and beheading him; Miriam, the sister of Moses, who hid him in a floating
basket in the Egyptian bulrushes where an Egyptian princess found him and
rescued him; and the so-called prostitute Mary Magdalene, one of Jesus’
disciples, whose story has been invented and reinvented in a dozen ways by
those who were suspicious of her relationship to Jesus.
Over the intervening centuries since the birth of
Christianity out of Judaism, the patriarchal culture has succeeded in
downplaying the importance of women’s contributions to human life. Whether religious doctrine demanded it or
women’s biological attractiveness to men and the power of masculine strength
over the less-brawny female body were factors, nevertheless the stereotype
persisted, that women were less capable, less rational, dumber, weaker, you
name it.
And yet, women of every century have defied that definition,
found ways to circumvent the deep hostility some males have felt toward strong
women, a hostility that prevails today in many corners of American society.
A social
media group entitled “A Mighty Girl” has taken on the task of celebrating women
and girls who have done notable things, like Malala, who was targeted and shot
by the Taliban in Pakistan for advocating for girls’ schools, Sally Ride the
astronaut, and many lesser known “mighty girls”. They have celebrated hundreds of notable
women and girls in this way.
We UUs
have lots of female spiritual ancestors.
On one website the first entry chronologically is Anne Bradstreet, a
poet and writer and freethinker in the 1600’s.
A little
farther down the lengthy list of our religious foremothers is Margaret Fuller,
who was an originator of the Transcendentalist movement in literature.
There are Elizabeth
Cady Stanton, suffragist, organizer, co-author of The Women’s Bible. Maria
Mitchell, astronomer. Julia Ward Howe,
author of Battle Hymn of the Republic
and the promoter of Mother’s Day for Peace.
Florence Nightingale, nurse and mathematician, who made nursing a modern
profession. Susan B. Anthony, reformer
and suffragist, who appears on a US dollar coin. Clara Barton, founder of the American Red
Cross. Louisa May Alcott, author, poet,
best known for her book Little Women. And the Reverend Olympia Brown, first woman
ordained to the Universalist ministry, also a suffragist.
As I was
making this list, I realized I was not even half way down one page and had
already listed a dozen or so notable Unitarian or Universalist women over a course
of a few decades.
So let’s
time travel to the 20th century and consider Martha Sharp, wife of
Waitstill Sharp, Unitarian minister, who together with him and also separately,
made numerous voyages across the Atlantic and into the heart of Nazi territory,
arranging safe passage for victims of the 3rd Reich, providing visas
and money and finding jobs and housing for hundreds of refugees, working for
the Unitarian Service Committee.
Then there
are the women of Hidden Figures, the
movie which introduced us as a nation to women we’d never heard of but who
figured large in the development of the Space Age, women who were brilliant
mathematicians, engineers, and computer experts and yet consigned to back
rooms, bathrooms on the far side of the NASA campus, and social
indignities---because they were black.
You have
named other women who persisted in making important contributions to human
living---some women in your own families and neighborhoods, others more
publicly recognized as having broken gender barriers to succeed in previously
male-only fields, and women of all races and sexual orientations and abilities. We celebrate their influence on you.
And now I’d
like to digress…
Last
weekend I had a chance to sit down with the other organizers of the Astoria
Women’s March in January. We ranted
about the new administration for awhile and then turned to the topic of how
being part of that momentous event had affected us. I have been thinking about this myself ever
since the March in January.
Stepping
back and taking as long a view as I can, from the perspective of almost 50
years of activism, I see a structure, a framework to build on for the future, a
moral, values-infused, people-based framework.
My
generation---Baby Boomers and older---found our moral compass activated by Viet
Nam. We learned that protest works, that
it could be dangerous (remember Kent State), that it could be co-opted and
corrupted by outsiders (witness the damage sometimes caused by violent opportunists), and that the Viet Nam
issue was part of a systemic virus of racism, sexism, homophobia, and an
authoritarian fundamentalism that permeated American life.
We are
faced now with a crisis of moral conscience that will affect all of us if not
resisted and redirected. We of my
generation have seen the world change through technology, careless stewardship
of resources, casual destruction of ecosystems, and a greed for wealth and
power that has subsumed the moral character of the power elites.
We are
faced, in my generation, with this responsibility---that we have ourselves been
tempted into laxness about the prevailing winds of change; we have not
responded quickly enough to forestall the consequences of reckless habits, and
we now realize how serious the crisis has become.
We see
that it will affect our generation less than it will affect our children, our
grandchildren, and those children yet unborn.
But we
still have the capacity to make things change for our heirs and their children
and for the planet. We have been both
moral activists and reckless consumers.
We know how easy it is to succumb to consumerism.
We are
now, as elders, the foundation upon which our younger generations stand. We have done what we knew how to do, learning
from our own national crises. We have
not been perfect engineers as we created that foundation. It has weak spots; we have struggled with
racism and sexism, homophobia and fundamentalism ourselves.
But in the
process of struggle, we have learned to persist, we have learned to find hope
in small successes. We have fought
discouragement and losses. And here we
are today.
Today our
younger generations are fighting battles which have morphed somewhat. Racism exists in somewhat different forms
than it did in the 60’s; many of us now clearly recognize racism as systemic,
not always overt but covert, oppressing minorities by underground, unseen
methods.
The same
can be said for sexism, homophobia, and fundamentalist thinking: I hope we have been instrumental in teaching
our children through our mistakes with these oppressive issues.
Our
younger generations, born between 1965 and 2010 (known popularly as Generation
X, Generation Y (or Millennials), and Generation Z, are standing now on the
foundation we have tried to create, imperfect as it is.
What is
now our role in the struggle for justice, equity, and compassion, one of our
chief principles as UUs? What will we do
in this crisis? How will we persist?
As I think
about what I learned from my participation with others planning and carrying
out the Women’s March in Astoria, I realize that as an elder, I have more
influence than I expected. My
encouragement means something important to our young leaders coming up. My example must be honest and transparent.
Each
generation learns from the generation gone before. Our children learned from us; our
grandchildren learn from their parents and grandparents. What are we teaching them? What are our generational responsibilities?
As part of
the grassroots Indivisible North Coast organization, I watch our younger
leaders with their high energy and their deep commitment to make a difference as
they forge new pathways of American courage and passion.
Young
women are particularly influential in those leadership roles. We elders cannot rest, but our role has
changed. We are now the cheerleaders for
the moral athletes who are now on the playing field of democracy. We are the coaches, helping them learn from
our mistakes. We are those who listen to
their concerns, support them in their efforts to do what we could not.
Our role
now is to clear the obstacles from their path, as we can, by using our
influence, our stories, our understandings of life to combat the forces of
anti-democracy, the forces that would roll back the many opportunities that
progressivism has established.
We as a
generation of women and men in our 50’s and older can teach our young aspiring
leaders the value of strategic organizing, the strength of institutions such as
the Southern Poverty Law Center and the American Civil Liberties Union, the
wisdom of those who inspired us---the Jimmy Carters, the MLK”s, the artists and
freethinkers who illuminated our path.
We can help
them fend off the despair that inevitably creeps in from days and weeks of
exhaustion and frustration. For, as
Bernie Sanders recently said, “despair
is not an option” in these times.
In the
words of Abby Brockman, in her essay “Despair is not a Strategy”, she outlines
several principles of hope. Quickly let
me review:
Hope can
co-exist with other feelings. People
have power no matter how bad the situation looks. Our actions are not worthless, whether they
accomplish what we want or not. Success
does not always correlate with approval.
We don’t need to persuade every opponent for change to happen. Change is rarely straightforward. It’s always too soon to quit and too soon to
assume victory. Small actions
matter. We have changed the world
before, many times. Hope is a basis for
action. If you embody what you aspire
to, you have succeeded. Total victory is
not the goal. Do more before you give up
hope. Remember that our minds have a
Negativity Bias and fight it. We stand
on the shoulders of giants who have shown us the way. Let’s keep on keeping on. Let’s persist---together.
Let’s
pause for a time of silent reflection and prayer.
CLOSING HYMN:
#108 “My Life Flows on in Endless
Song”.
BENEDICTION:
Our worship service, our time of shaping worth together, is ended, but
our service to the world begins again as we leave this place. Let us go in peace, remembering our strengths
and our roles in this critical time in our nation. May we, as women and men who have faith in
our principles and in each other, strive to inspire and encourage each other in
this important work of democracy with justice and compassion. Amen, Shalom, Salaam, and Blessed Be.
