Can You Hear the People Sing?

My vacation has been so many amazing things! Time at the beach with Joel, Gabby and the grandbabies; visiting with family in Chicago; and taking in some of the beautiful art New York has to offer. While in Chicagoland, it was a raucous joy to attend the Morgan Park High School 50th Reunion for the Class of 1976. It was wonderful to see old-like-me classmates again, to laugh at how nerdy we were (especially the Advanced Placement Classes) and how little we’ve changed. The best part, I’m not going to lie, was dancing to the music that was the soundtrack of my teenaged life. Funkadelic’s (Flashlight), Marvin Gaye (Got to Give it Up), Earth Wind and Fire (Shining Star) and the Commodores (Brick House) got us sweating in our Sunday best. In the years I attended Morgan Park—1972-1976—we were a multicultural, multiethnic, wildly diverse group of people whose parents had saved up money to buy houses in our Southside neighborhood, and who valued putting their kids in a public school with folks of all races. With the Southern Freedom Movement and the Chicago race riots in our rear-view mirror, we loved each other, we struggled with each other, and we experimented with what it meant to be Young, Gifted and Black in the context of a multiethnic band of people trying to do better. Every classmate I spoke to said something like, “Morgan Park shaped my vision for what America can be.” That is the truth. I dream a world, y’all, in which peace guides the planet and love steers the stars.

Before we got on a plane to Chicago, I saw Cat’s The Jellicle Ball and Les Miserable IN ONE DAY, as each was closing. Oooooh. Decadence! I sat on the stage watching Cats, mesmerized by the costumes, choreography and singing. The actors were close enough to touch, and I swear Andre DeShields winked at me! (We presided together at the marriage of mutual friends Vincent Parham and Michael Dinwiddie (Rest in love, Michael!). Chile I was cheesin’ and cheerin’, hooting and hollering, and snapping my fan. I LOVED THIS SHOW! I’d seen it at NYPAC last year, but this was even more glorious. I’m so sad it closed!! I wonder can a Black and Queer show make it on Broadway now?

This lyric, since I first saw Cats on Broadway so many years ago, brings tears to my eyes:

Daylight
I must wait for the sunrise
I must think of a new life
And I mustn’t give in
When the dawn comes
Tonight will be a memory too
And a new day will begin

During a sad time in my life, while mourning a broken relationship, I would sing this verse repeatedly, feeling the hope in the dream (memory?) of a new day dawning. Oh, how I’m hoping and dreaming for a new day, family, a day in which we all flourish, no matter who we love or how we look.

And Les Miserable is one of my favorite shows of all time. This was music only at Radio City Music Hall. Off. The. Chain. I mean. Power. I sat in the audience thinking which songs could we sing in worship?

On my own, pretending he’s beside me…. but I know it’s only in my mind…. there is a castle on a cloud, I like to go there in my sleep…but the tigers come at night with their voices full of thunder…. a little fall of rain can hardly hurt me now…Do you hear the people sing….

This, this is the one that feels like an anthem for our time:

Do you hear the people sing?
Singing a song of angry men?
It is the music of a people
Who will not be slaves again
When the beating of your heart
Echoes the beating of the drums
There is a life about to start
When tomorrow comes!

My heart is beating fast as I write this. I can’t turn off my heart, even while on vacation. John and recently watched Fences, Denzel Washington’s film adaptation of the play by August Wilson, a story about the way a racist nation crippled the heart of a family patriarch living in the 1950’s, and therefore disabled his entire family; a story so true then and now, and wept uncontrollably. I re-read Michael Eric Dyson’s—Tears We Cannot Stop: A Sermon to White America that is the shocking truth about racism’s tenacious claim on all our lives. And I also revisited Traveling Mercies, by Anne Lamott, about ways faith and grace can heal us, and my tears won’t stop. Each time, leaking from my eyes, a dam opened. Shoulders shaking. Feeling the flow of sorrow and grief, the yearning for needed change, relief, a release.

I want to rewind the clock and that 14-year-old boy is not arrested while walking out of his own house. “I’m just a kid….I didn’t do anything…” and the cop admits he does not give a fukkk. A traffic stop gets an 18-year-old girl thrown to the ground and punched in the face. A five-year-old boy is detained in Texas…little girls impregnated while in detention. Babies violated while separated from their parents. Immigrants snatched off the streets; struggling families snatched from their support systems. The planet is in rebellion against the way we’ve soiled it; blueberries, tomatoes, lettuce—what is safe to eat?

And I can’t even write about the global suffering today; it’s too much.

I look at our nation, at our world, and I think, we can do better than this. We are better than this. We are better than the violence and vitriol spewed by our leaders in the public square, poison that rains down like acid from our leaders to the rest of us. We are better than bombing and beheading each other in the name of God; better than killing each other in the name of pro-life; better than maiming the souls of our LGBTQIA communities in the name of faith. We are better than the state sanctioned murder of Black people, and the insistence in the face of this terror that all lives matter, when Black lives clearly do not matter as much as White ones. We are better than the thousands dead in Gaza, Ukraine, Sudan and Congo. Aren’t we?

Aren’t we better than the kidnapping, raping and sex-trafficking of women and girls, in the name of war. We are better than terrorizing Muslim Americans and threatening to register them or ban them from our nation, which is also their nation. We are better than rising Anti-Semitism around the globe. We are better than American Indians on reservations, better than closing our borders to Mexicans, whose land we annexed, when we are a nation of immigrants. We are better than the abject poverty that imprisons too many Americans, and better than the profit we make from the prison industrial complex. We are better than sexism, better than xenophobia, better than the lie of white supremacy; we are better than all of this.

Aren’t we better than this?

God, please make us better than this. Make us good enough, caring enough, passionate enough to make sure all the children are safe, that they can go to school and learn. That there is clean water to drink, protective shelter to live in, healthcare for all of us. That every life is valued, no matter who they love, how they look or how they pray. That everyone has enough.

I rest, I visit family and friends and still, I weep. I pray. I write, shaping words for future sermons, maybe an article for this space. Sometimes I shake my fists and curse. My heart is so badly broken it aches.

And even during the heartache, I hope.

I hope because it is my strong conviction that you and I have everything we need to make it better. That there are enough of us ready to grieve together, work together, struggle together across our differences. That we are ready to lean in, to problem solve, to organize and act for a more just society. That though we have lost our way, we are resilient and we can find our way home to the stuff of our dreams. To the stuff of God’s dream of a healed and whole world. A fair world, a peaceful world.

When I was little, 7 or 8 years old, I had a recurring dream. I’d be walking around a mountain, passing through four seasons each time. Cold, frigid earth and tall evergreens bathed in falling snow like frosting on cake; green buds pushing stubbornly through thawing ground cover as warming creeks gurgle by; bright blue sky filled with summer sun painting swaths of light on meadows; oaks and maples shedding gold and crimson finery onto autumn soil. Repeatedly, round and up I would go. At the top, an enormous white mountain lion, giant golden-brown eyes holding my gaze. Though ferocious, I am unafraid. Each time, every time, he speaks. Waking, I am clear that when I understand what he is saying, I will know the secret to healing the world.

I believe in this dream, that the Lion had some words in his mouth that could heal me, heal us. I believe we can be healed. I have come to believe those words in the lion’s mouth are stories, and when they are told, we see ourselves in them and our hearts say, “O yes, I can feel that. I can hear that. I can do that.” You have those stories; I have those stories. They are held sacred in the writings of our religions, when people like you and me had experiences that made their hearts break, and in the broken space courage grew. Or they had experiences that made their hearts beat faster, and in the quickened heartbeat, they found love, or joy, or peace that supersized their compassion. And in compassion, they worked for justice.

The stories in our sacred books encourage and inspire us, they shape us. We become who we are in stories. Our own stories of survival, of resilience, of courage in the face of maddening oppression—these stories shape us, too. They are both sacred and sacramental, pointing to the incredible ability we have to fall, to get up, to heal our souls and the world. These stories are moments in a journey, moments when the Love-Power that I call God proves itself to be concrete. Moments when heartbreak teaches the most valuable lessons about the universe, about its kind and loving and brave people.

I have been working hard most of my life, training my ears to hear and my eyes to see evidence of what a partnership between humanity and the Love-Power I call God looks like. (If the word God is tough for you, please translate to Love, Compassion, or Higher Power.) I see it in the brave humans marching for voting rights on the Pettus Memorial Bridge in Selma or for economic justice on the Mall in Washington DC. The ways human beings were superhuman first responders in the aftermath of the terror attacks of 9/11, and when students declared the right to democracy in the Arab Spring. Hundreds of thousands marching for Black Lives Matter in Manhattan or gathered in Washington Square Park after an election, singing about freedom. When we see these moments, when we recognize the Presence is present in human contact, we feel a rush of surprise, of power and delight.

You know that I mean. You feel it, too. Sometimes in ordinary moments. At sunset, at sunrise. In the curve of an arm and a leap into the arms of another. In the unwavering glance of a four-month-old child, in laughter. When the rain comes and you share your umbrella with a stranger, when you are marching out there for justice with a bunch of other people, or serving meals to the poor. Maybe at a concert with phone-lights flickering in the dark listening to and loving the same sounds with strangers. When you read the truth written so profoundly, written by someone so different from you, that you recognize them as kin. When you are willing to stand up for that person, that marginalized vilified person because they are human, because you are human, and because you must.

Those are the moments; those are the in-breaking of God’s dream into our dreams. These are snatches of reality that point to the preferred reality, the way things can be. These moments insinuate themselves in our hearts, tapping out a message. “Yes, we can do this. Together, we really can.” And in them, in my life, I feel strongly that I hear God saying, “This is true, and I am right here with you,” in a voice that sounds like my own. These moments feel to me bathed in love, compassion, mercy and kindness. These moments point to a future in which justice is the norm, love is the ethic and compassion connects us to one another.

What I dream about, the hope I feel for the world—it comes from my experience. From my high school full of diversity and joy. I live in a community in the East Village of New York, that feels to me like heaven. I pastor a church of Black, White, Asian, Indigenous and Latino women, men and children who love each other, who challenge each other, who have the courage to call each other family, and who work together for Black Lives Matter, for a living wage and for economic justice, for the rights of our LGBTQIA family and for the rights of women and girls. We are gay, straight, bi and trans-gender. Some are wealthy, some are poor, most of us struggle to stay afloat in an expensive city. Muslims, Jews, Buddhists and Agnostics and Atheists come to our church for the music, for the community, for the chance to work for justice. We partner with anyone who shares our vision for a just world. My dreams are fueled by a reality that I experience daily.

My people are vulnerable and stunningly generous. They share heart-breaking, sometimes tragic and amazingly triumphant stories with me in my office, over coffee, in a bar over wine, and in the back of the sanctuary that anchor my hope, not only in the dream of God expressed in our holy books, but in the proof-text of their lives. These quirky, lovely, brilliant, resilient, struggling, earnest people, trying to live their lives the best way they can, relating to the God of their choosing, give me hope.

And not only them. I have close friends and colleagues around the nation—A leading Sikh activist and mom, who partners with me in the work of Revolutionary Love; a straight white man-- national best seller, who is my partner in working against racism; a Black clergyman who is forging a moral movement that will change the political landscape of America. A female rabbi in California and a Black male clergy in Chicago, who partner with me on how to use arts in service of justice; an openly gay episcopal bishop and a lesbian Black Buddhist sensei—these are my people. Every day, we have each other’s backs, and remind each other of the dream, and living it into life.

We think we can dream of a world together and make it be so, and we want you to join us. A world in which children and old people are cherished, and so is mother earth. One in which resources are shared, each human life and all of creation is valued, and everyone has enough. One in which the civil rights for which our people died are amplified, not reduced. One in which love, compassion and justice guide our interactions. This is our dream. This is my dream.

I think this dream starts with love, with compassion. With the unconditional regard for the unique particularity of a person, with feeling deeply with and for them. It starts with love of self, with compassion for the self. This is easier said than done. The world can be mean, and we are not taught to love ourselves. We are told that is selfish, narcissistic. But wow, without a healthy self-regard, I think we can’t love anyone else. When Rabbi Jesus says, “Love your neighbor as yourself, “that as is a big equal sign. I think we can’t love anyone else without that as a starting place.

Then, we must turn that loving gaze toward the other, toward our neighbors, the ones close-up and the ones around the globe. The strange neighbors and the ones from whom we are estranged. We can love them, have compassion for them, be tender toward them because they, like we, are human and capable of great acts of kindness and love. Of course, they, like we, are also capable of great acts of cowardice and anger. And they, like we, need to be loved and forgiven. This love of neighbor is not namby, pamby squishy love. It is risk-taking, truth-telling, love that stands up for the other. And, as bell hooks says, there can be no love without justice.

I think practicing love of our neighbor, whom we can see, touch and hug, with whom we can argue and wrestle leads us to a love of God, whom we can’t see--a wholly other who I believe is as present in us as breath, and as present around us as air. I believe God is everywhere. It is interesting that the word for Spirit in Hebrew and in Greek means wind, air and breath. We can’t see air but is there. We can’t see God, but God is there. I think we can’t love God without starting with ourselves, and we can’t say we love God and hate our neighbor. That’s what scripture says, and I think that is fact.

I dream a world in which you and I create a just society, in which freedom rises for all of us. I dream a global neighborhood filled with love such that when a child in Gaza or in inner city Chicago is hungry, our stomachs growl. We are called to empathy and engagement; to protest and persuasion; to sharing stories and organizing; to singing and potlucks; to changing legislation and lobbying to heal the world.

I feel like I have a memory down in my soul of a healed and whole world. Or was it a dream? What are you dreaming? As I dream, I hear these words from Les Miserables.

And remember, the truth that must be spoken: To love another person is to see the face of God.

Can you hear the people sing?