The Voice of the Past

When I was growing up in a Unitarian Universalist Church we had a Sunday school curriculum called Holidays and Holy Days for children younger than I was when my family found the Unitarian Church. It was a way of teaching elementary aged children about the celebrations of different religions from around the world through the celebrations of those religions sharing the holidays and holy days with the children. I do think that that's an apt name for the curriculum because holidays and holy days are two slightly different things. When I think about Holy Days, I think about Sukkot, which is the harvest festival in Judaism I believe that our children are building a Sukkot today to learn about this festival. Or Christmas and the Christian tradition and especially here in this church, the way we celebrate Christmas as a holy day with this sanctuary filled with candle light and the beautiful sounds of our choir singing. But a holiday doesn't have to be exactly that sacred. I don't have any special plans for tomorrow's holiday. For instance, if it's a good day, I'll sleep in in the morning, clean out the attic with my husband and see friends in the evening. In other words, just a day off;  no special sacred celebrations. But suppose we were taking tomorrow's holiday more seriously. What would we be celebrating and remembering?

The holiday is in honor of Christopher Columbus. It was established as a federal holiday in 1971. That's one person we could remember. But we could also remember the care of people who were effectively wiped off the face of the earth as a result of Columbus's landing on the island of Hispaniola and countless other American Indians who have been displaced second enslaved and murdered by colonizing Europeans. Both of these voices clamor for our attention. So whose voices will we hear? This is a live question right now. You may not care very much about Columbus Day one way or the other. But in American schools right now this question of how we teach history and whose voice we listen to, in that teaching is a very live question. Because history is being weaponized right now, in America's classrooms. There is a lot of anxiety that we need to teach kids the correct history and protect them from history. That might complicate their understanding of their own identity. This worry and anxiety that children need to learn the correct history misses the fact that history is never one thing. History is the story we weave out of the voices of the past. And the more we listen, the more voices we hear. Those diverse voices matter, because they help us understand the truth of who we are and where we came from. There are so many of them and they talk over each other in their effort to be heard. As a nation and as individuals we need to listen to the multitude of voices from the past. It is in listening and understanding that we know who we are and what kind of voice we want our own legacy to be. So the reason that we have Columbus Day is because of Italian American pride. I myself am about one quarter Italian. And I feel a lot of pride in that heritage, especially in the recipes handed down on that side of the family and the togetherness on that side of the family, which many families experienced but which we attribute to being Italian. Italian immigrants have sometimes had a hard road in America. President Harrison declared a one day observance of Columbus Day in 1892, after a mob in New Orleans killed 11 Italian immigrants because of their ethnic identity. And in the 1960s an Italian American activist named Mariano Lucca began to really lobby to make Columbus Day an annual holiday and President Johnson declared it an annual federal holiday to begin in 1971. So there's nothing against celebrating Italian American heritage, I'm all for it. I think that we could all have a giant dinner - that might be more appropriate instead of celebrating Christopher Columbus. But that is not the only thing to remember or be aware of - not the only voice to hear in our history as Americans. Just two years before that hateful killing of Italian Americans in New Orleans, the American Indian leader Sitting Bull was killed in what is now South Dakota. He had fought at the Battle of Little Bighorn, he had worked as an entertainer. But he left that entertainment job and came back to the United States from Canada and the Indian Agency thought that he might join an Indian civil rights movement, and just not because he had done that, but just because they were worried that he might. They went to his house to arrest him. And in resisting arrest, he was shot. I think there's a line that you can draw from that activism to the water protectors that we heard about in the story today. Yet one more reason that it's important to hear these stories to know where the foundations are of what we experienced today. One way to understand the voices of the past is to ask whose voice needs to be heard. Who do we need to hear of more now? One particular Italian American, or the struggles of American Indians to achieve and survive and thrive in today's America. American Indians suffer disproportionately from poverty and lack of employment. They struggle with violence against indigenous women and girls which is often ignored by authorities. Corporations continue to exploit natural resources on Indian land and there's a lack of health care in indigenous communities.

We must remember the past so that we can today build a nation for all people. Remember when we have been on the outside so that we welcome those who are on the outside now. Remember those nations who were here before our ancestors and who were displaced in that transition? Now for me, this is decisive. I need to hear and understand more Native Voices because those voices have been suppressed. And I have been taught so much about Christopher Columbus just from being a school child in America that his legacy will survive even if he loses his federal holiday. On the other hand, opportunities to hear those American Indian voices enrich my understanding of who I am, and what my identity as an American is.

I was privileged to see an exhibit of contemporary American Indian art this summer at The Field Museum in Chicago. And so for instance, there I got to hear the music of Frank Waln, a Lakota who man who combines traditional flute music and hip hop, and is one of the best known hip hop artists, American Indian hip hop artists, today. And I saw videos and examples of women passing on traditional basket weaving techniques, growing the reeds and grasses that they needed to make the baskets and then teaching new generations to make it and creating beautiful baskets out of these reeds. These are the voices that I need to hear from the past and amplify in my work. History is not something that only happens to nations and that we read about in books. History is happening all the time - happening to us in our personal lives. History collects itself in institutions, everything from a family to a textbook, to a church to a holiday. And it tends to be a loud voice that says we have always done it this way. This is the right way. This is the only way for us to know who we are and live according to our values. We need to decide which voices of the past who will honor and which we will let go. And to know this difference, to understand who we are, we need to hear all those voices of the past and trust that we'll survive the learning.

For those of you who don't know, I post a Facebook question on Thursday mornings, an open ended question that connects to the theme of the service and I invite reflections from anybody who comes across the question. That's a public question. So you don't even have to be my friend on Facebook. And then I take the answers I get and I weave them together into my call to worship on Sunday mornings. And so this week's question was “What's a piece of your family heritage that you're proud of?” And I got all those wonderful answers that we heard this morning about people who made their own way educationally and then helped younger siblings come along too, and women who raised their families after husbands had died. People who fought against bigotry. People who helped unionize their workplaces, people who help hold patents entire manufacturing and recipes that have been handed down through the generations and countering antisemitism in the workplace - wonderful stories. But every single one of us here has some story in our family history that we don't take that same pride in. This is a universal human experience. And sometimes that feels shameful to have those family secrets. But every family struggles with a heritage that they don't want to carry into the future. Alcoholism, abuse, bigotry, violence, hard times. Something I have seen as a pastor is that when there's a secret in a family - a secret that doesn't get told, doesn't get understood, doesn't get shared -it can be like a poorly set fracture in the body. It can change the shape of the whole family around it as members work to protect that secret. Families often experience a moment of upheaval and change at the time of a death and that is sometimes because in death is a time to tell a family secret, which can be painful, like re breaking the bones, but ultimately healing when it heals in a more whole way that supports the body. And then when it doesn't happen - when a family is unwilling to face that history, the pain just continues.

Many years ago, I did a memorial service for a man who had lived many years with addiction. But in the last six or eight years of his life had gotten sober. He died of a heart attack much too young, but he died a sober man who had overcome that challenge in his life and lived his life according to his values the way he wanted to. But his family was unwilling to tell the story of his addiction during his memorial service because they thought that his nephews were too young to hear that story. Now I can't make that judgment for them. But I imagine the lives of those nephews, who were preteens at the time, and I imagine them growing up. I imagine that they may have their own struggles with addiction, with understanding who they are. And I wish for that family that they had been able to tell that story to trust that those children were strong enough as people to hear that truth. To trust that the family was strong enough to hold that truth spoken aloud. That anxiety that we won't be okay if we hear the truth. That's some of the same anxiety that's behind the desire to only teach school children one version of history - that if those school children are white, they shouldn't learn anything that makes them feel bad for being white, so they can't handle it. Or as though being white is all that they are. And if their understanding of that ethnic and racial identity is complicated, it will undo them as people. We are strong as people. We can handle the truth. There are policymakers who would rather lie about our country's history than trust that children are resilient and can know more than one thing about their racial heritage. As individuals and as a nation we cannot be whole without knowing where we come from. What we find out maybe hard. School children may have to reckon with deeds done by ancestors who share their racial or ethnic identity. You yourself may have done this painful work of wrestling with your family skeletons. We may decide to honor tradition even if it's not pristine. We may decide to discard something we've always done even if it's enjoyable. By hearing all the voices of the past, we will decide what kind of people we want to be and what values we will live by because every single one of us will be an ancestor someday. An ancestor of children and our families or children in our communities whose lives we've touched. Our voices will be added to the course of the past. What kind of legacy do we want to leave? One Rabbi calls this our salvation, living our life so that when it is over, we have lived according to our values to know where it come from, so we know how to live now. May we leave legacies of liberation, mutual understanding, and peace. I love you all. Amen.