Sermon for Big Girl Shoes

Sometimes when I'm trying to get dressed to go out I have mental breakdowns.  I wish I could say that statement was hyperbolic, but I can't.  The first time I broke down I had just finished my 7th grade year and had to pick out a cocktail dress to wear to the Bat Mitzvah of a boy I secretly loved; the most recent time was last night, in my 36th year of life.

I have a little social anxiety, an anxiety exacerbated by certain situations: when I'm the oldest of the group, or the weirdest of the group, or the most liberal of the group, or the heaviest of the group, or the only woman without children of the group, etc.  Sometimes I cry in my closet while trying on skinny jeans or sundresses.  Sometimes I just go silent in the car on the way to wherever I'm expected.  Sometimes a lump forms in my throat when I'm asked to shake hands with a stranger.  I'm not the only woman for whom the modern world feels difficult in these ways.

I always make it through--I credit my parents for "toughening me up," and, more importantly, for teaching me I'm not the center of a room and, therefore, not exempt from social etiquette or manners.  I fake it until I make it much of the time.

Anyway, last night I was beside myself for whatever reason.  Part of the problem stemmed from my dog, Max, who in the last few weeks has chewed to bits two pairs of my summer shoes, so I don't have much to choose from.  Another part of the problem is the end of the semester.  I haven't worked out in weeks, and my school's cafeteria keeps offering fried foods I love and my students keep asking for their stupid grade point averages.  So I dug through some old plastic bins of shoes until I found a pair that worked.  Michael Kors.  On major discount at a second-hand store.  High heeled clogs with metal studs in the black leather bands that bridge my feet.  So, so sexy.

I bought those shoes 7 years ago.  One night while I was living in New York City and dating a model who I liked more than he liked me, I wore the shoes to a local concert and then out afterward.  The heels made me so wobbly that while throwing a dart at a target in the dimmest of dive bars in the East Village, I tripped and fell flat on my face in front of everyone, including the male model.  My cousin pulled me aside and asked if I had other shoes I could put on before I tried to bike the ten blocks home to my rental in Greenwich Village. Luckily, I had flip flops.  Classy.  I like to think plastic flip-flops were urban chic at the time, ironic objects of the underground fashion scene in the Big Apple, but in reality they were just what a clueless, blister-worn Texan might have in her oversize purse.  Ugh.

But something was different with those shoes last night.  It was like I had opened an old journal and read back my own wise words to myself years after I'd written them down.  The heels I once had trouble balancing in felt better on my feet. I walk more slowly now--I saunter more than flit--so I can step heel to toe, heel to toe, and still appear poised.  I've grown up.

Then this morning my dog tried to chew my "big girl" shoes too.  I screamed at him: No!  Stop!  Give me those!  Those shoes matter to me.  They are a symbol of something and the something is this: at 28 years old I bought a pair of shoes that I could envision some version of myself wearing although I wasn't ready to wear them yet.

There's something magical in the idea that we might foresee our own bright future and reach for it even when we're far, far away from deserving it or being prepared for it.  I was like my own fairy godmother buying myself a glass slipper I knew I'd fit into someday, somehow, but not that night, not that night.

And, on a metaphorical level, if you're going to wear big girl shoes, you best be prepared for big girl consequences.  That's true in my social life as well as my writing life.  I mean, I might fall flat on my face.  I often do.  The readers of my blog or my published writing might prefer I wear practical, reassuring Mary Janes in some shade of beige or gray or even a respectable red.  I should be a good Christian girl if I want to write about God.  I really should.  There's just this small snafu.  I want to show up with spurs or spikes.  I want to be something people have to rub up against, something that scratches their skin.  I want them to feel...alive, even if bothered.  But that means I have to be ready for push-back.  I might upset people.  I might be turned away for a dress code violation.  They might not like me.

I think of Kim Addonizio's red dress: "I'll wear it like bones or skin/It'll be the goddamn dress they bury me in." Or I think of Stephen Dunn: "Insufficient the merely decent man."  Or I think of Elie Weisel: "The opposite of faith is not heresy, it's indifference.  We must always take sides."

I'm not here to make you comfortable, although the sweet, Southern girl in me would really like you to feel comfortable.  I wish iced tea and endearments could really heal the world.

They can't.  I can't always be nice and decent--not when God is the question at hand.  But I can walk down this street in a damn fine pair of high heeled shoes.

And I probably won't fall.

Amen.

Sermon Against Any One True God (Or, Sermon for Imagination)

Here's an expression I abhor: one true God.  Do you believe in the one true God?  One true God: a shibboleth of the evangelical converted, and, for me, my first clue to run like hell for heathen territory where at least the wine runs thick and the sins taste sweet.  

It's the certainty of the phrase that turns me off as well as its thinly veiled neurosis--it's not enough to say "one God" or "true God?"  We need two adjectives for good measure?

Hold on.  Rewind.  Let me start over and turn down the snark level a bit.  Let me start with a story.

This morning when I opened up my laptop I found a bright yellow "Stickie Note" on the desktop screen.  I never use "Stickie Notes," so I knew my husband had jotted down something he wanted to remember.  I'm a Gen X kid.  He's a Millenial baby.  Apparently, somewhere in the narrow space between our two generations, the younguns moved from real Sticky Notes to their technological offspring the "Stickie Note."  I didn't even know my computer possessed such a program.  His typed note read: God is an opening, not a closing, to the mystery.

"What is that? Who said that?" I asked later.

"You did," he said.  "I didn't want you to forget."

I forgot.  God is an opening, not a closing, to the mystery.  

Then I remembered.  Last week my husband and I sat talking about my discomfort with Protestant evangelicalism.  I kept reworking my words, trying to articulate what I feel viscerally first and intellectually second.  I just, I stumbled, I can't...why do they need to be so SURE?  To say they know what God is, what God wants, what the Bible means.  It lacks.....humility.  It lacks....imagination.  

I was thinking of the neuroscientist, David Eagleman, telling my students to "dethrone thyselves." Or I was thinking of Ferdinand de Saussure, "Nearly all institutions, it might be said, are based on signs, but these signs do not directly evoke things."

I don't feel anything when someone says one true God except suspicious.  Nothing is evoked for me at all, no image, no song.  I feel closest to believing in God when God eludes me, when God lives one step beyond my comprehension, or God cracks open a timeworn window and I must squint my eyes against even the thinnest sliver of unbounded light.

An opening.  A crack.  Quicksilver slant of light.  I buy Christian Wiman's collection of essays, "My Bright Abyss."  Even the juxtaposition in the title of the book seems to speak to my conundrum: how can we know God except to know God less and less?  Wiman writes

--so too is faith folded into change, is the mutable and messy process of our lives rather than any fixed, mental product.  Those who cling to the latter are inevitably left with nothing to hold on to, or left holding on to some nothing into which they have poured the best parts of themselves.  Omnipotent, eternal, omniscient--what in the world do these rotten words mean?

Even more rotten words: one true God.  Because if we can say "one true God" we can say "one true marriage" or "one true race" or "one true government" or "one true gender" or on, and on, and on like that forever.

Today I asked my students, "What is the purpose of a seminar discussion?"  Today was their last of the semester.  They answered quickly, and I cringed to hear my voice inside theirs: to leave the classroom with more questions than answers.

That's how I want my discussions and dialogues to always go--more questions, more questions, more.  That's how I want my students to live.  And I guess that's how I want my God too.   I want the comfort of incertitude, the solace of knowing I may, at the end of my life, disappear into mystery, into a voice that softly chastens you were wrong, that I may disappear into my own failures and errors, those shadowy places where my soul tried to point me during my earthly heartaches, petty and profound alike, that these darknesses in my life were like the underbelly of the sun, that I might need a divine imagination to turn the world completely over in order to see the bright backside.

Or in Wiman's words, Human imagination is not simply our means of reaching out to God but God's means of manifesting himself to us.  It follows that any notion of God that is static is--since it asserts singular knowledge of God and seeks to limit his being to that knowledge --blasphemous.  

Tell me you don't know and I'll follow you anywhere.

Amen.

Sermon for Barney

"I was talking to Barney the other day," I said to my students one Tuesday morning.

"Who's Barney?" they asked.

"Barney the Homeless Guy who lives in my neighborhood."

One of my students--an eternally nerve-ridden young man, an eager hand-raiser with noticeably pronated feet--opened his mouth a little.

"Um," he said.

I waited.

"You know the homeless guy's name?  Why?"

Why indeed.  Why do I know Barney's name?  I wish I could say I had the manners to ask him his name since I see him at least twice a week, but no, I can't take credit for any such appreciation for his dignity.  My friend and former roommate, a woman with more moral fortitude than me when it comes to strangers, befriended Barney a few years ago when she worked at the local coffee shop.

Barney scares people.  He usually works the corner where our neighborhood dead ends into the Interstate.  Unlike other homeless people, he doesn't sit with a cardboard sign or come at your windshield with a spray bottle and rag.  Barney storms right up to your driver-side window, his drug-pocked and sun-scraped face inches from the glass, and then turns his hands up in the air and squints his eyes as if he's saying, "Come on, man.  What's your f-cking problem?"  When the driver doesn't acknowledge his begging, he often throws down his arms and walks away shaking his head; he looks seriously pissed off.  Plus, he's got this shock of reddish hair that, unwashed, lifts up from his scalp like a Troll Doll.  If you didn't know him, you'd be terrified.  I've seen people roll into the U-turn lane at the last second to avoid dealing with him.

But at his core, Barney is harmless.  The last time I saw him, my husband rolled down the window to apologize that we didn't have any change on us, and Barney smiled and said, "No problem.  Have a nice day."  He really likes our dog.  He really likes dogs, period.  Dogs are more generous with their affection than humans, after all.

My student's question--You know his name?--has festered inside me this week,  my student's horror that I might be intimately acquainted with a person of ill-repute, even if said person's reputation comes from his housing status and not any really criminal behavior.

That student sits next to another student, a girl, who once argued in class that we should give homeless people Bible verses instead of money because, for one thing, they need Jesus more than money, and for another thing, they would use the money for untoward purposes anyway.  She didn't use the word untoward; she used the words "crack or something."

Let me offer a quick qualifier: my students are 13 or 14 years old and I'm not sure they need to ask people who scare them for their names.  I'm sure their parents have warned them about dangerous adults.  And, they're of the uber-privileged variety, my kiddos.  They can't and don't want to imagine that good people might fall on bad times.  They can't imagine about the homeless man, for example, who told a social worker I know that his wife died and he "just crawled inside a bottle and never came out."

Mostly, though, my students and many of their adult counterparts in neighborhoods all over this country have not suffered enough yet to know the cruelty of handing a hungry man a Bible verse instead of food or money, the sadistic condescension in thinking that they know what the homeless person will spend his money on or that they should have any opinion on the matter at all.

Kindness requires empathy, and empathy blooms out of the dark earth of suffering.  I'm thinking in particular of a poem by Naomi Shihab Nye, "Kindness":

Before you know what kindness really is
you must lose things,
feel the future dissolve in a moment
like salt in a weakened broth.
What you held in your hand,
what you counted and carefully saved,
all this must go so you know
how desolate the landscape can be
between the regions of kindness.
How you ride and ride
thinking the bus will never stop,
the passengers eating maize and chicken
will stare out the window forever.
Before you learn the tender gravity of kindness,
you must travel where the Indian in a white poncho
lies dead by the side of the road.
You must see how this could be you,
how he too was someone
who journeyed through the night with plans
and the simple breath that kept him alive.
Before you know kindness as the deepest thing inside,
you must know sorrow as the other deepest thing. 
You must wake up with sorrow.
You must speak to it till your voice
catches the thread of all sorrows
and you see the size of the cloth.
Then it is only kindness that makes sense anymore,
only kindness that ties your shoes
and sends you out into the day to mail letters and purchase bread,
only kindness that raises its head
from the crowd of the world to say
it is I you have been looking for,
and then goes with you everywhere
like a shadow or a friend.

You must see how this could be you.  Then it is only kindness that makes sense anymore.

Barney is scary, but he's our scary.  I mean, my neighborhood belongs to him as much as it belongs to me.  In fact, he arrived before I did.  I should know his name.  I should take care of him.  I should enact those Bible verses I carry inside me rather than handing them out as counterfeit grace.

I worry less about those afternoons when I recognize Barney under the highway's long shadow than about the day I stop seeing him there.  And I should.

Amen.

Sermon for Blues

I have a thing for blues. 

Long before I ever read Maggie Nelson’s incomparable book, Bluets, I was sure if someone could unlock my soul and paint its portrait, the outcome would be something like the middle panel of Rothko’s No. 61 Brown Blue Brown. 

Nelson writes that standing in front of an Yves Klein painting, she thought, “Too much.”  Despite her deep love affair with blue, ultramarine was too much, a kind of blinding that comes from seeing your own image reflected back at you with so much force. 

Not me.  I like ultramarine.  I love its delicious, cold-cock shock, like when the sun ricochets off reflective glass.   

And today, in Houston, I sit inside a circle of blue trees with their spinal cords painted electric blue.   You’d think paint might ruin the trees natural beauty, but instead, it’s like the painter saw them as they actually are instead of how them seem to be.  Touched by blue this way they look more like themselves. 

If I listed all the things I love that are blue—the North Atlantic sea, bluebonnets, veins, Byzantine frescoes, bruises, the skies above football stadiums, my brother’s birthstone, the eyes of the first boys I wanted, the earth from space, Linda Rondstadt’s voice singing Blue Bayou, my country’s coasts, the people I love most, iolite and lapis, and now this chapel of crepe myrtles in the middle of my city—I would never stop.

I’ve tried several times to write about a moment I experienced with blue.  It was seven years ago.  I was in the Natural Science museum in New York with my brother, in the butterfly room.  At the time, I was a little lost, heartsick and angsty, a woman without her skin.  I heard him gasp, my brother.

“Wait, Casey” he said and grabbed the back of my shirt.   “Wait.  Just watch.”

He pointed at a butterfly that perched atop a branch, it’s wings folded, closed.  Their tissue paper skin a dull, soupy brown.  He reached out his finger after a moment and lightly ran it down the butterfly’s underbelly.  It opened its wings, and I gasped too.

A quick one-two of blue, blue like nothing I’d seen before.  That color a whisper in our ear: where did you think you’d find me? 

Brown. Blue. Brown.

These are the moments that save us.  That a God might have my brother, a swimmer, who in water used to move through the blue with inhuman grace, like a creature with its heart aflutter, that a God might have my brother unlock it for me.  The Blue Morpho.  A sea of trees.    

A resting butterfly’s wings resemble nothing if not two palms pressed together in prayer.  And when they open—that flash of blue—if it’s not God then it’s at least a hint at why we created one.   They say you can tell a lot about a culture by the Gods its people invent.  And perhaps Voltaire was right.   Si Dieu n’existait pas, il faudrait l’inventer.   

Spirit-flutter, soul-burst blue.  I want to live and die inside you. 

Amen.  

Sermon for Dzhokhar Tsarnaev

On Friday as I worked my freshman students through poetry revisions and my sophomore students through heavy symbolism in literature, I felt a steady thrum in the back of my head.  At each break, I scanned the headlines.  Boston was on lockdown and a 19 year old boy on the loose.

Call me crazy, but while everyone else fretted about the city being terrorized, I felt most worried about Dzhokhar Tsarnaev.  A picture was forming from the snippets of information reporters puzzled together about the two brothers, and to me it started to become clear that Tamerlan Tsarnaev--the older brother--would emerge as the mastermind and spearhead of the bombing plot.  I felt scared for Dzhokhar, 19 and alone after watching police drill his brother with bullets, probably wounded, the gravity and horror of what he'd done finally settling in and nobody to help and nowhere to run.  

Call me crazy, but I wanted to hug him.

Each year when I teach my students Homer's Odyssey, we talk about types and anti-types.  In a lesson I stole from my father, we read about the D.C. Sniper--John Muhammed--and his "sidekick", the much younger Lee Boyd Malvo who together in the fall of 2002 embarked on a weeks-long killing spree targeting random citizens standing at gas stations or in parking lots.  They killed 13 people.  I lived in Washington, D.C. that fall.  I remember walking across a parking lot in suburban Virginia where I had traveled to buy furniture for my new efficiency apartment on Thomas Circle.  I remember feeling exposed and vulnerable--every white van in the parking lot glared at me, every engine sparking to life or car door slamming shut a signal of my impending death.  

Lee Boyd Malvo was only 17 years old during the murder spree.  He was fatherless, in a kind of identity crisis and exile after moving illegally from Antigua to Miami to be with his mother.  Both Malvo and Una, his mom, were caught by Border Control in Bellingham, Washington.  Separated from his mother, Malvo turned to Muhammed who he knew from when the older man had courted his mother back in Antigua.   Here was a father-figure, here a man to guide him into adulthood, here perhaps some solace after too much disorientation and uprootedness.  How easily John Muhammed must have indoctrinated his young protegee. 

Just last year, Lee Boyd Malvo--now 28--admitted publicly that John Muhammed had sexually abused him for years. 

In class I ask my students, "What if Telemachus had turned to a suitor for mentorship instead of Mentes?"  The lesson: young men need good mentors in the absence of fathers, mentors who are, like the character in Homer's epic, divine at their core.  

If Mentor is the type, John Muhammed and Tamerlan Tsarnaev are the anti-types. 

There are two ways to read the Odyssey: as a hero quest full of pomp and circumstance or as a cautionary tale about the ugly and long impact of war and exile.  It takes Odysseus ten years to get home to Ithaca after ten years at war in Troy.  He does not return a particularly kind or patient man.  He is a wounded soldier, a compromised and questionable leader skilled in the art of deception, and a man full of hubris and a desire for revenge, high-risk behavior his modus operandi.   But despite its title, the epic begins and ends with Telemachus--19 or so at the start of the poem and by the end, reunited with his father, Telemachus has gone from a pouty teenager, unsure of his name and lineage, to a man with a father to follow.  Called by his sense of kleos--patrilineal glory or renown--he follows Odysseus into brutality.   He slaughters hundreds of enemies, hangs handmaids by their braids and mutilates the body of a disrespectful goatherd.  The slaying of the suitors at the end of the epic is barbarous, unmerciful, and uncivil (my boy students love it, which frightens me), so horrific that Athena has to step in at the end of the story to ensure that civil war doesn't ensue.  

We can't draw too many parallels yet, but in Boston we have a 19 year old boy whose father is in Russia.  We have two sons born in Chechnya, into a place and time of war, uprooted from a country where war has been the norm for decades, where war dislocates and scatters family members who, unlike Odysseus, often never find their way to any real or even metaphorical homeland.  We know Tamerlan spent six months in Russia last year and returned to the U.S., perhaps, with the vengeful lust of Odysseus on the sea.  We know Dzhokhar idolized his older brother; we know that his brother was his only nearby relative, his only link to family and cultural identity.  

I'm not saying I don't feel just sick about the the numerous people who lost limbs and loved ones last Monday.  I am saying that the trauma of war is residual and pandemic.  The effects last even decades after the war and persist especially in an age of rising jihadist sentiment and real exile from both healthy avenues toward manhood and identity and from our native countries.   

Dr. Jonathan Shay, a psychiatrist known for his work with war veterans writes, "The fundamental theme of the Iliad and the Odyssey is the human side of war.  These are not classics because the professors say they're classics, but because they are so good at revealing us to ourselves."

And Simone Weil once called the Iliad the "purest and loveliest of mirrors."

Literature has something to tell us if we'd only listen.  We cannot, any of us, believe that wars end when the white flag goes up.  They never end. 

I'm not saying Dzhokhar Tsarnaev is an innocent victim anymore than Telemachus is innocent or Agamemnon is innocent or any combatant is innocent.   

I'm saying I wish Dzhokhar had someone other than his wounded, indoctrinated older brother.    I wish Lee Boyd Malvo had somebody other than John Muhammed.  I'm saying I wish these boys had a true Mentor.  I wish that for them, and for the world. 

Amen. 

Sermon for Silence

I don't have much to say today, and that's a blessing for all of us.  This past week I needed more than anything else the absence of words.  All those arbitrary signs for the unspeakable.  I wanted to turn everything off: obligations, cerebral acrobatics, the indignities of aging.  No laundry.  No appointments.    No toilet paper or Ibuprofen.  No carry-out bags.  No everyday horrors like the blank multiple choice line or a woman coveting her neighbor.  Just quiet.   Just silence.

So, I offer you this:

How To Be a Poet

by Wendell Berry

(to remind myself)

Make a place to sit down.
Sit down. Be quiet.
You must depend upon
affection, reading, knowledge,
skill—more of each
than you have—inspiration,
work, growing older, patience,
for patience joins time
to eternity. Any readers
who like your work,
doubt their judgment.

Breathe with unconditional breath
the unconditioned air.
Shun electric wire.
Communicate slowly. Live
a three-dimensioned life;
stay away from screens.
Stay away from anything
that obscures the place it is in.
There are no unsacred places;
there are only sacred places
and desecrated places.

Accept what comes from silence.
Make the best you can of it.
Of the little words that come
out of the silence, like prayers
prayed back to the one who prays,
make a poem that does not disturb
the silence from which it came.

And this:

an excerpt from "Into Great Silence", a 2005 documentary about Carthusian monks in the French Alps.  An entire film without dialogue, about men who have dedicated their lives to the absence of spoken word.  I thought it was one of the most beautiful things I'd ever seen.





There are no unsacred places; only sacred places and desecrated places.  Let me keep this one sacred.  Give me a week or so before I must speak.

Amen.

Sermon for My Dear Fellow Clergymen

My Dear Fellow Clergymen, begins Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.'s exquisite Letter from a Birmingham Jail.

My Dear Fellow Clergymen.

When we're studying persuasive rhetoric, I often ask my students to look at the first four words of Dr. King's essay, written as the title implies as he was locked up in a jail cell in Birmingham, Alabama in the the spring of 1963.  He wrote the letter as a response to one he received from a group of clergymen---pastors, priests, rabbis--urging him to wait for the democratic process to work on its own, to back off from his nonviolent protests of racial injustice, and to implore his followers and other activists to back off as well.

I tell my students his letter is the single most perfect example of persuasive writing in Western Literature, the culmination of all the author's spiritual and intellectual experience, the clearest articulation of his vocation and soul work.  This is my opinion, granted, but I say it to them as fact.  I tell them to look at the first four words.  Inevitably, they look at the first words of the letter--While confined here in--and not the greeting above them.

No, I say, look again.  The FIRST four words.

My Dear Fellow Clergymen.

I tell my students Dr. King has already employed a strategy of rhetorical argument.    Why doesn't he write, simply, Dear Clergymen?  Why does he include "My" and "Dear"?   Dr. King, from the get-go, establishes his authority.  In those first humble words he places himself at the table with his audience.  I am one of you, that greeting announces.  I am a man of God.  So are you.   We are equal.

It's brilliant.  Aristotle must have smiled slyly from his grave.

My students and I read the letter.  They struggle--the letter, so sophisticated in its language and rhetorical dexterity, is too high-level for them as sophomores.  I know it.  But I want to point them toward something they will understand, the emotional lynchpin around which Dr. King spins his ethos and logos: Paragraph 14.

The most lyrical paragraph of the essay, paragraph 14 centers around one long sentence that uses alliteration, the repetition at the beginning of each syntactical phrase of the words, "When you have seen."  I don't think Dr. King's slip into second person is accidental: he places his listener in the shoes of black people.   The paragraph reads:

We have waited for more than 340 years for our constitutional and God given rights. The nations of Asia and Africa are moving with jetlike speed toward gaining political independence, but we still creep at horse and buggy pace toward gaining a cup of coffee at a lunch counter. Perhaps it is easy for those who have never felt the stinging darts of segregation to say, "Wait." But when you have seen vicious mobs lynch your mothers and fathers at will and drown your sisters and brothers at whim; when you have seen hate filled policemen curse, kick and even kill your black brothers and sisters; when you see the vast majority of your twenty million Negro brothers smothering in an airtight cage of poverty in the midst of an affluent society; when you suddenly find your tongue twisted and your speech stammering as you seek to explain to your six year old daughter why she can't go to the public amusement park that has just been advertised on television, and see tears welling up in her eyes when she is told that Funtown is closed to colored children, and see ominous clouds of inferiority beginning to form in her little mental sky, and see her beginning to distort her personality by developing an unconscious bitterness toward white people; when you have to concoct an answer for a five year old son who is asking: "Daddy, why do white people treat colored people so mean?"; when you take a cross county drive and find it necessary to sleep night after night in the uncomfortable corners of your automobile because no motel will accept you; when you are humiliated day in and day out by nagging signs reading "white" and "colored"; when your first name becomes "nigger," your middle name becomes "boy" (however old you are) and your last name becomes "John," and your wife and mother are never given the respected title "Mrs."; when you are harried by day and haunted by night by the fact that you are a Negro, living constantly at tiptoe stance, never quite knowing what to expect next, and are plagued with inner fears and outer resentments; when you are forever fighting a degenerating sense of "nobodiness"--then you will understand why we find it difficult to wait. There comes a time when the cup of endurance runs over, and men are no longer willing to be plunged into the abyss of despair. I hope, sirs, you can understand our legitimate and unavoidable impatience. You express a great deal of anxiety over our willingness to break laws. This is certainly a legitimate concern. Since we so diligently urge people to obey the Supreme Court's decision of 1954 outlawing segregation in the public schools, at first glance it may seem rather paradoxical for us consciously to break laws. One may well ask: "How can you advocate breaking some laws and obeying others?" The answer lies in the fact that there are two types of laws: just and unjust. I would be the first to advocate obeying just laws. One has not only a legal but a moral responsibility to obey just laws. Conversely, one has a moral responsibility to disobey unjust laws. I would agree with St. Augustine that "an unjust law is no law at all."

When I read Paragraph 14 aloud to my students, a silence bears down on the room.  I have trouble keeping my voice stable.  I have trouble keeping my breath as I attempt to recite the sentences with the same urgency and speed with which he has written them.  Every time, my heart breaks a little.

What does Paragraph 14 have to do with anything now?

Well, I have been reticent about addressing the most recent media storm about gay rights, catalyzed by the Supreme Court's review of California's Proposition 8 and the Defense of Marriage Act.  I am not hesitant because I do not know, definitively, where I stand, but because so many knee-jerk and sub-intellectual reactions already exist in the digital universe.

This week the New York Times editorial board published an editorial piece admonishing Ruth Ginsberg for her comments that the Roe v. Wade decision that legalized abortion "moved too far, too fast."   I was so relieved.  As a woman first, and then as a supporter of gay rights.  I understand what she meant; I understand what other constitutional lawyers have been arguing about gay rights: let the democratic process unfold naturally, it's already leaning in favor of gay marriage, let the verdict fall state-by-state lest we spark a backlash.  Their position is a practical position, but, to me, it's an immoral position too.

In all the back and forth I couldn't help but think of Dr. King.  I know the details differ in these fights, as race differs from sexuality.  I know the powers need different truths spoken to them.  Still I couldn't help but think of Paragraph 14.   I have my own version.  When you have seen your friends cast from their families; when you have seen an otherwise loving mother say to her daughter, "You may come to Easter, but you may not bring HER"; when you have seen your own conservative grandmother offer acceptance to her gay daughter; when you have heard the epithets and catcalls of your gender's own persecution--bitch, pussy--spit at homosexuals on the street, when you have seen too and recognized what loves sees; when you have seen the singular beauty of the hanger hook line drawn up from a woman's ribcage, between her breasts, and around the sharp edges of her clavicles; when you have felt the sting of a man so unable to publicly love another man that he carves through women's hearts as though they wrote the Constitution; when you have seen, when you have seen, when you, when you, when you....

But Dr. King remains even in death a better writer than me.  And, unlike I pretend, he actually possessed a theological ordination.  He was a clergyman.

I hear his voice as I teach it.   This year, 50 years after he penned his masterpiece from behind cold metal bars in the city at the hot core of our country's wounds, clergymen everywhere should listen to his voice.

There comes a time when the cup of endurance runs over, and men are no longer willing to be plunged into the abyss of despair.  

Amen.