Are We There Yet?
Last June David and I thought we were going to mark our fortieth wedding anniversary
quietly with an evening out to dinner -- just the two of us. And so we did. However,
the next evening we were invited to dinner by son Geoff and Connie, his bride-to-be. We have a family tradition for stretching birthdays and other such celebrations
as long as possible, so we were delighted to consider dinner with a couple from the
next generation as an extension of our anniversary. We got to the restaurant, engaged
in some small talk while we were looking over the menu, and then Geoff said simply,
"There they are." And, indeed, there they were, the special surprise of the evening--
our other three offspring: Mark, whom we thought was working until closing late that
Saturday evening; Julia, who (we soon found out) had driven in the evening before and
would need to leave very early the next morning to be back in time for Sunday School
at the UU church in Massachusetts where she was Religious Education Director!; and
Stephen, whom we had thought was still in California, making his transition from graduate
studies at Stanford to the work world.
It was a special evening. Back at the house after dinner, the kids--well, they
always will be to us and moreover, they seemed like it that evening-- the kids got
to reminiscing. We heard stories we had heard before, and stories we had not
heard before. And, of course, some of the stories were about their particular memories
of special trips we had made in our big blue and white VW bus some two decades
and more ago. Short trips, long trips, even in between trips with our four youngsters (some or all of whom will always be remembered by at least one Religious Education
Director as the Unitarian mafia!) --those trips all seem to me to have been punctuated
by the phrase I have used for my sermon title this morning.
Later in June, when summer had officially arrived according to the calendar and vacation
was still on the horizon, we were driving across Pennsylvania and into Ohio with
our daughter, on our way to the General Assembly of the Unitarian Universalist Association in Indianapolis, Indiana, when a small voice from the back seat asked it again:
"Are we there yet?" It was Julie, trying to take some 25 years out of her voice.
Even so, for me that idiomatic question has taken on deeper significance than a
child's expression of impatience as subsequent experiences of the summer have called that
same query to mind so that it lurks there still as we enter the season of harvest
and dying back in the natural world, of renewed work and communal responsibility
in the province of human affairs. There is a sense in which individual experiences, unfolding
events, the culture in which I-- we-- have lived--all can be seen in terms of traveling
toward destinations new or different enough that, like children, now and again we need to ask with all the serious impatience we can muster, Are We There Yet?
I was born in the mid 30's (with no choice in the matter) to a young couple who had
little education and no material wealth. All they had to offer to me and the five
siblings who followed over the next 18 years was love and nurture, home and family,
church and school, laughter and music and hard work. There was ingrained in that setting
a faith, a hope for a future that would become gentler, better, safer. The world
beyond, however, was growing more threatening. I was five and a half when the United
States "entered" World War II. My grade school classes were large, our teachers all
female--some even young married
women. The War killed, destroyed, enriched, inspirited, maimed, ravaged, built up,
struck down, and cast many previous issues in a different light as, on occasion,
racism, sexism, religious intolerance, and ethnic bigotry paled in the light of cooperative effort to confound The Enemy. Then, finally it was over and the celebrating and
the good times and the let's-get-on-with-living began. At least that's how it looked
from a child'seye view. I'd been told this
was the war to end all wars--a hope that was hard to deny; and so, each time over
the years-- and even this summer of "96-- when the troops were called up, the gunboats
positioned, the missiles fired, I have found my self asking: Are we There Yet?
I went to school 10 miles below the Mason-Dixon Line, graduating from high school
in 1954, the year of the Brown Decision. African Americans in our small city lived
in a tightly constricted inner city ghetto in the neighborhood of the local jail.
So far as I know I never met anyone from that neighborhood though we shared the same hometown.
I confronted the shame of that during the Civil Rights Movement of the 1960's and
learned ever such a little, second hand, about the fear and paranoia that afflicts
African Americans in this country when we adopted our third son and came to recognize
the difficulties he faced--and faces-- because the half of his genetic heritage which
came from an African father determines how he is prejudged by the society we live
in. We had hoped to see a sea change in the issue of inter-human relations by the
time he became an adult. Tentatively there have been trickles of change in the right
direction. But sadly, I know the answer to Are We There Yet?
I always look forward to summer when there may be some more extended time for reading.
In addition to the fun stuff this year I bracketed the summer with two non-fiction
books which contain very important messages-- maps, if you will, for the journey
toward healing, wholing, enlarging the human spirit. The first, entitled REVIVING Ophelia,
subtitled, Saving the Selves of Adolescent Girls, by Mary Pipher, delineates the
pressures, dangers and dismissals that can, and often do, limit, threaten and crush
the lives and spirits of adolescent girls in our current culture. As she says:
While the world has changed a great deal in the last three decades, the developmental
needs of teenage girls have changed very little. I needed, and girls today need,
loving parents, decent values, useful information, friends, physical safety, freedom
to move about independently, respect for their own uniqueness and encouragement to
grow into productive adults.
Girls...who are the happiest, manage against great odds to stay true to themselves.
But all girls feel pain and con-fusion. None can easily master the painful and complicated
problems of this time. All are aware of the suffering of friends, of the pressure to be beautiful and of the dangers of being female. All are pressured to sacrifice
their wholeness in order to be loved. Like Ophelia, all are in danger of drowning.
(p. 73))
Dr. Pipher recognizes and delineates many of the growth-blocking social attitudes
and situations that especially affect teenage girls; and she models ways of helping,
especially for parents and teachers directly involved with them.
My summer's-end reading, again concerned with our culture's family values especially
involving our female offspring, was DUBIOUS CONCEPTIONS, the Politics of Teenage
Pregnancy by Kristin Luker. Professor Luker traces the changes in America's cultural
attitudes relative to sex, marriage and reproductivity from colonial times to the present.
She thus puts "Ophelia's" gender problems into clearer perspective, and she broadens
the picture beyond middle and upper class Ophelias to include the poor teenage unwed mothers and their children who have been targeted by the welfare reform measures
instituted this past summer. Tracing the evolution of our collective family values,
her historical and statistical studies put in stark relief the economics that undergird the racism, sexism and classism being pandered to in election-year rhetoric by both
major parties.
She notes:
...in the area of public policy, Americans have debated whether the ultimate goal
was to protect the family as a corporate entity or to protect the interests of children
born outside that entity. The childsaving movement that arose at the turn of the
century showed that Americans were unwilling to penalize children for the actions of their
parents, and as the governments took on a broader role in solving social problems,
citizens came to feel that the state should step in when parents were absent or inadequate. But by the mid-1920's legislators were already expressing concern that the
cost of maintaining illegitimate children was placing an undue burden on public coffers.
Over the years our public policies have included banning contraception, outlawing
abortion, and performing "eugenic"sterilizations on the "unfit" in order to counter
what Theodore Roosevelt in 1903 had termed "race suicide" referring to the "best,"
the "fit," in short: the more affluent, educated, and married strata of American society.
(Upper class women were shirking their maternal responsibilities!) Eventually sterilization
ceased, contraception and abortion became legal. In the wake of the War on Poverty, family planning was deemed by an Office of Economic Opportunity official,
"the single most cost-effective anti-poverty measure." (p. 59)
Then came the sexual revolution of the 1970's, and the adolescent, that no-longer
child, not-yet adult--a discrete developmental concept named in the first decade
of our century--adolescents, especially teenage mothers, became central to the continuing
conflict of social attitudes toward gender and family, sexuality and responsibility
for poor children. When the new conservatives came to power in the 1980's, chastity
replaced contraception as the preferred remedy and the campaign for rescinding public
funding for fertility reduction began in earnest.
American attitudes toward unwed motherhood have cycled from condemnation beginning
in the colonial period through compassion during eras of social reform, and back
now to condemnation. Unwed mothers are now sinners to be expelled from the community,
now helpless victims of male lust or products of failed families, now willful wantons
who exploit the benevolence of the community and government. Circling as well in
this cyclone of public welfare questions are the continuing problems of economics--it
remains a truism that the rich get rich and the poor get children: problems of gender--unwed
motherhood presupposes unwed fatherhood, of course, but ...; and problems of racism--poverty
still affects people of color disproportionately. Even so, one of the startling statements Professor Luker makes and backs up with pertinent statistics is:
Out-of-wedlock births are becoming more common around the globe. In Europe, the proportion
of babies born out of wedlock has doubled and tripled in the past twenty years.
Many people assume that this is because European welfare states support single mothers (and the poor overall) more generously than the U.S. government does...some people
believe that unwed mothers (especially teens) get pregnant and have a baby just to
get a welfare check, and that consequently it's not surprising that European countries have increasing rates. But all industrialized countries, including the United States,
are cutting back on welfare provision as a result of the tightening global economy,
and out-of-wedlock births have responded by increasing
. (p.8)
We have been married for forty years; we are pleased and proud of the accomplishments
of our children. I perform marriages and same sex unions because I honor the commitment
two people make to share life's "full range of experience" together. But I also am beginning to think that we need larger working concepts of family that can embrace
and nurture all our children. Are we there yet?
One more event on the journey that was the summer of '96 that made that question echo
in my mind. Perhaps it was a lighter event, perhaps it represents an equally profound
call for healing, wholing and enlarging the human spirit. Remember the flack that Hilary Rodham Clinton took for consulting a guru in order to elicit wisdom from one
of her dead White House predecessors? Well, when I heard that the "guru" was Jean
Houston, I knew what was going on because just about twenty years ago now David and
I took one of her marathon courses, sat at her feet, if you will, for ten days of lectures
and laughter, out-of-the ordinary exercises and first hand inner-directed experience.
I used some of that material with the Centering class I offered last spring. Well, I am sure that what Jean was doing was helping Hilary Clinton to access her own
inner wisdom by way of consulting it as if
she
were conversing with Eleanor Roosevelt who likely represents for the current First
Lady not only one who once held a similar position but also a Wise Elder.
The broad potential of human experience which Jean Houston recognizes and has studied
and devised methods of helping people to access includes using whimsy and fantasy
to focus the wisdom we often don't know we have gleaned. Her method reminds me of
"teaching" as outlined in The Prophet by Kahlil Gibran: none "can reveal to you aught
but that which already lies half asleep in the dawning of your knowledge." And so
the Teacher is one who "does not bid you enter the house of his [or, in this case,
her
] wisdom, but rather leads you to the threshold of your own mind."
These are indeed "interesting" times. Old maps don't contain the new configurations
of our journey into the future. And yet there is wisdom within us that not only
prompts us every now and then to ask Are we there yet? but also acknowledges our
need to push on toward the larger humanhood of which we are capable, to celebrate the milestones,
and to consult with wit and whimsy the source of the faith and hope that informs
our pilgrimage into the future.
The sermon in a Unitarian Universalist setting is never the last word
on any subject, but rather an invitation to further dialog.
You may want to read other visitors'
comments on Beverly A. Bumbaugh's "Are We There Yet?"
.
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Bill Griffeth
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