Pacific Currents - July/August 2008

SACRED CONVERSATION: Speaking the truth in love, in joy

by Rev. Dr. Mary Susan Gast, Conference Minister, July 14, 2008

“Here’s My offer,” God said, inaugurating a sacred conversation recorded in the 65th chapter of the book of Isaiah. “I’m willing to forget all our old troubles; gone; they “are [as of this moment] hidden from My sight.” [65: 16] “For I am about to create new heavens and a new earth; the former things shall not be remembered or come to mind. Instead be glad and rejoice forever in what I am creating, for I am about to create Jerusalem as a joy and its people as a delight.” [65: 17-18]

And here’s what I have in mind: This joy of a city, this delight of a people will spring up and “no more shall the sound of weeping be heard, nor the cry of distress” [v.19] the people “shall not…bear children for calamity,” [v.23] but “shall long enjoy the work of their hands….” [v. 22] “Before they call I will answer, while they are yet speaking I will hear. The wolf and the lamb shall feed together…They shall not hurt or destroy in all my holy mountain.” [vv. 24-25]

This is justice in the fullest, widest, most intimate of manifestations. No want, no exploitation. Plenty. Joy.

This May we were called as a church to sacred conversations on race and racism. At our Annual Meeting we set up a rubric for the conversations: Listening. Spending time together. Talking story. Across cultural canyons and racial divides. Beyond comfort zones. Despite fears. Risking offense. Hazarding indifference. Aware that there is a system of racism that is systematic and institutionalized, politically, economically, historically, descriptively, linguistically.

Whether or not those of us who are Caucasian requested white privilege, it comes to us like an unsolicited credit card that somehow we can’t revoke; no matter whether we have been granted the full credit limit; whether or not we have worked to dislodge the stone of bigotry and melt the ice of indifference from our hearts. We must in our sacred conversations look critically and creatively at the impersonal, automatic ways in which racism operates. We who are advantaged by the system cannot maintain an unholy innocence in the face of what is being done in our interest.

Yet, we are all assured, “Our conversations will be sacred if we pray for the grace and courage to speak the truth in love and to hear one another all the way through.” “Our conversations will be sacred if we trust in the Spirit of the living God to do a new thing in our midst…” [UCC Collegium] Like, say, creating Jerusalem a joy and its people a delight. And it is joy—unpredictable and unearnable as a baby’s smile—that can fuse disparate elements by its heat and warmth and tenderness into the wildest and most improbable of communities. This is transformation. By pyrolysis: through heat, warmth, and tenderness that does not burn us up.

Audre Lorde has written, “The sharing of joy, whether physical, emotional, psychic, or intellectual, forms a bridge between the sharers which can be the basis for understanding much of what is not shared between them, and lessens the threat of their difference.” Shared joy is capable of sustaining an environment where the genuinely preposterous can happen: where the lamb and the lion cease to be prey and predator in one another’s company, where the Cosmic Dream of abundance and blessing comes to all.

Let us keep up the sacred conversations so that our joy—and our Creator’s joy—may be full.

                                                                                                        ~ Mary Susan