On the evening a January 20, 2017, a group of students at the Graduate Theological Union in Berkeley, along with friends, took to the streets of Oakland bearing a coffin draped in an American flag. We shared the streets with protesters before our funeral procession diverted and headed up Telegraph for a Requiem for the American Dream. I delivered the following homily as part of that service.
It’s been a hell of a week.
On Monday I attended a memorial service for a co-worker whose life was cut tragically short. The extinguishing of her light is a great sorrow, though on Monday we chose to celebrate the blessing she had been and what light she had brought to our community.
Today’s funeral is of a very different tone, because for all the grief that we feel, for all that we have to let go of, this loss is a wake up call, particularly for liberal white people, of all the ways the systems that we have put our faith in fail to protect and uphold the values we claim to hold so dear. The truth is that these systems have been failing a lot of people for a long time. Call it what you will, but the capitalist white supremacist heteropatriarchy of this nation has been killing people on this continent for centuries. For those of us who strive for justice, who feel sick and afraid and aggrieved by today’s inauguration and everything it seems to stand for, the way forward demands that we listen to the voices of the most marginalized, we step back and offer them leadership rather than simply trying to help the misfortunate other. For white people in particular, now is the time to show our support for the resistance and resilience movements already begun by those for whom the veil of the American Dream had already died - if it had ever even lived. But as Malcolm X wisely observed, “this ‘system’ that the white man created...has done the American white man more harm than an invading army would do to him.” We have an opportunity for those of us who have some privileges, whether we are white or male or cis-gendered or wealthy or whatever form it might take, to recognize the ways in which the promises of privilege and power have been used against us, used to hold us in line and prevent us from truly connecting with ourselves and the world and people around us.
The dominant hegemonic narrative of American history speaks of constant progress, and certainly that idea has been used, by Martin Luther King and others, to help expand privileges and rights to those who had been denied. But the history of this nation is darker and more complicated than that. The election of Barack Obama was the achievement of a dream many believed impossible, but it in no way ushered in a post-racial age. Now, on the precipice of the age of Trump, we must turn our attention to the stories of resistance in which beauty and hope truly lie – even to those movements that seem to have failed and died. Cornel West speaks of the “tragicomic hope.” He writes: “The tragicomic is the ability to laugh and retain a sense of life’s joy — to preserve hope even while staring in the face of hate and hypocrisy — as against falling into the nihilism of paralyzing despair. This tragicomic hope is expressed in America most profoundly in the wrenchingly honest yet compassionate voices of the black freedom struggle; most poignantly in the painful eloquence of the blues; and most exuberantly in the improvisational virtuosity of jazz.” What can we resurrect from the ashes of movement past? What can we learn from their successes and failures? What do they teach us about the true meaning of America, a meaning that lies not in the occupant of the office of the President but in the soul of every person walking these streets? Here in Oakland in particular, in a building that I’m told once housed a bar frequented by Black Panthers, what can we do to build upon their Ten Point Program?
I’ve been feeling rather cynical about the American experiment, whether the expansion of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness is enough to bring ‘justice, equity, and compassion to human relations.’ But America is where we are – even on stolen land, it is the place and possibility that has brought us all together in this moment. And you all are beautiful. You, who are willing to show up and show your pain. You, who are willing to stand up and say that the rhetoric and actions that come from this man inaugurated today do not represent you. You, who are sick and tired of the harm being done in your name but know not the best way to prevent it from happening again or how to make amends for what has happened before. How can I not feel hope surrounded by all this love and goodness and dedication to countering oppressions? As my friend Isabel said earlier today, in a slightly different context, “Maybe we can all love each other.” Take care of yourselves, beautiful people.
As a farmer, a gardener, a lover of life, I find hope, too, in the soil, in the regenerative power of compost, in the natural processes that create life out of death again and again and again. The more time I spend with plants and animals, the more aware I become of the ecosystems I inhabit, the less despair I feel. We are a part of something bigger than ourselves, a world that will continue to offer us ways to take care of each other in the face of whatever the future may bring.
Today, let us bury empire. Let us bury fear. And let us work with all the life forms, visible and invisible, that share this land with us, to transform our shame and our pain and our anger and our tears into new opportunities for life and love and community.
I close with an excerpt from Langston Hughes’s poem, “Let American Be America Again,” which keeps coming back to me time and again. The whole poem is worth reading, but for now let me close with the last few verses:
O, let America be America again--
The land that never has been yet--
And yet must be--the land where every man is free.
The land that's mine--the poor man's, Indian's, Negro's, ME--
Who made America,
Whose sweat and blood, whose faith and pain,
Whose hand at the foundry, whose plow in the rain,
Must bring back our mighty dream again.
Sure, call me any ugly name you choose--
The steel of freedom does not stain.
From those who live like leeches on the people's lives,
We must take back our land again,
America!
O, yes,
I say it plain,
America never was America to me,
And yet I swear this oath--
America will be!
Out of the rack and ruin of our gangster death,
The rape and rot of graft, and stealth, and lies,
We, the people, must redeem
The land, the mines, the plants, the rivers.
The mountains and the endless plain--
All, all the stretch of these great green states--
And make America again!
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