Getting Proximate
Reverend Janet Parsons
Gloucester Unitarian Universalist Church
May 12, 2019
“Be brave enough to start a conversation that matters.”
“Treasure curiosity more than certainty.” (from “Turning to One Another,” by Margaret J. Wheatley)
Bryan Stevenson is a public interest lawyer who has dedicated his career to obtaining justice for the poor and the incarcerated. He is the author of the New York Times bestseller Just Mercy, and founder of the Equal Justice Initiative in Alabama.
Bryan Stevenson is a person of color who was raised in rural Delaware. During his childhood, in the 1960’s, African Americans lived segregated lives, in ‘colored sections’ of small towns. Stevenson wrote, “I grew up in a country settlement where some people lived in tiny shacks; families without indoor plumbing had to use outhouses. We shared our outdoor play space with chickens and pigs.” (Just Mercy, Introduction.)
Stevenson wrote, “My grandmother was the daughter of people who were enslaved in Caroline County, Virginia… Her father talked to her all the time about growing up in slavery and how he learned to read and write but kept it a secret. He hid the things he knew – until Emancipation. The legacy of slavery shaped my grandmother and the way she raised her nine children. It influenced the way she talked to me, the way she constantly told me to ‘Keep close.’ ..You can’t understand most of the important things from a distance, Bryan. You have to get close,’ she told me all the time.”
As an intern during law school, Bryan Stevenson met a prisoner on death row for the first time. He was there to simply give the man the news that the non-profit organization he was interning with was working on the man’s case, and that no execution would take place within the year. This simple news, which Stevenson expected to be so disappointing to the prisoner, instead offered him tremendous hope. Until then, no one had been to see him or explain what was going on. The two men ended up talking for three hours, about life and family and music. Stevenson never forgot that afternoon of deep connection, forged in a tiny prison office.
We never know when we will be offered opportunities for deep connection. I remember my own discovery of the power of getting proximate, as Stevenson calls it, of meeting people up close and connecting face to face. After Hurricane Katrina in 2005, I joined groups of other volunteers that went to Louisiana to help people rebuild their houses. The first time I went to someone’s house, we pulled our rental van into the driveway, parking next to the family’s FEMA trailer. A woman burst out of the trailer and began sharing her story of surviving the flooding, right there in the driveway. “The connections begin right in the driveway,” I used to tell new volunteers. Be ready to listen. Be curious. Don’t worry about what to say – you won’t need to say anything. Just listen. The pouring out of stories, and the warm connections that resulted, took place everywhere: grocery stores, rental car offices, schools, churches.
My home church’s youth group went to Louisiana every February vacation for years. Once the youth held a meeting for parents to describe the work and the fundraising needed to enable them to go. A very practical parent stood up and asserted that it would be better to raise the money and just send it directly to New Orleans. “Wouldn’t the money do more good,” he asked, “then spending it on airfare and food for the youth?”
But luckily the youth had already learned the lesson that Bryan Stevenson’s grandmother tried to impart to him years ago: “You can’t understand most of the important things from a distance, Bryan. You have to get close.” The dad received no support.
On my relief trips I learned how much the city of New Orleans and the region meant to its residents, displaced as they were. I learned about family ties, three and four generations living in neighborhoods. And when I read op-ed pieces in the newspapers about how it would be best to just let New Orleans go, to not try to restore it, I knew that the author had never been there, and had no understanding of the intangible connections that were so important. You had to get close in order to understand.
We live in an interesting era. On the one hand, we have so many opportunities to connect, to get to know one another across oceans and continents in ways that were impossible for our ancestors. In some ways we respond to the possibilities with great curiosity – we travel, for example, to ever more exotic destinations. We access news from other countries and can learn more about their cultures. It’s easy to learn new languages – just download an app.
Because of science we learn more and more about human development. Great strides are being made in neurobiology, the study of the human brain. We are gaining insights into the spectrum of neurodiversity. We begin to look beyond the binary of gender. We learn more and more that we humans are not ‘one size fits all.’ And our response? Too often we don’t respond with curiosity, with openness, but with fear and anger. All this science, all this incredible knowledge that should make us more interested in each other, and people respond by trying to decide who should use which restrooms.
On the one hand we learn more and more about each other. On the other hand, we react by shutting down, shutting others out, rejecting information. As people get closer, we respond by trying to build walls, to reject people who make us feel less safe.
We used to live much more segregated lives. People from other countries seemed very far away. People of different religions and races lived typically in villages or segregated neighborhoods, where they did not interact much with one another.
The technology that is bringing us closer: air travel, the Internet, television, has gotten far ahead of the ability of many people to respond in healthy and loving and compassionate ways. Often people simply don’t have the kind of experience they need to absorb all the information available and to figure out how to respond to it. People react with fear, and try to create comfortable space for themselves by pushing away those they perceive as different. And as a result, it feels as though our human interactions have the potential both to get worse and to improve at the same time.
Today racism and xenophobia seem to be resurging. Of course they never left us, but in the past two years especially we have seen a disturbing increase in the number of hate-based crimes. We see with dismay the number of videos posted on social media featuring torrents of verbal abuse aimed at people of color trying to go about their daily lives. We see the incidents of people calling the police to report activities that should be accepted as completely normal: people having a barbecue in a public park, for example. People seem constantly suspicious and afraid of people they perceive as different.
And of course, we see over and over again the treatment of Central and South American people at our southern border, the migrants seeking asylum: children separated from families, people forced into temporary detention. The response to this human misery is to blame the migrants for seeking a better life, to create a narrative calling them criminals. Again, fear and suspicion.
Why do we find it so difficult to relate to people in different circumstances than our own? Why do we find them frightening?
For it is fear that drives so much of these negative responses: this impulse to build walls, to keep people out, to push people away from us. It is fear that keeps us from becoming proximate, as Bryan Stevenson calls it.
What could change that fearful response?
Our poem this morning suggested, “Ask what’s possible – not what’s wrong. Keep asking.”
Keep asking. In other words, learn to become curious about the lives of people different than ourselves. What is making migrants so desperate that they will risk their lives to try to enter the United States? Keep asking. What is the daily experience of African-American people like? What do they fear? “Be brave enough to start a conversation that matters.” What must it be like, to not be sure of your place, of your welcome, in your own country? In your own neighborhood? How must it feel, knowing that there are people who will never truly believe that you belong?
The willingness to be curious, to reach across barriers with genuine interest, is what can fix our brokenness. Something happens to us when we are able to remain curious. We are more receptive. We can relax. Instead of defensively watching for what we perceive as wrong, as different, as threatening, we can remain open to what is possible. Curiosity enables us to reach out across barriers, rather than to pull away and to shut down, to react defensively.
Earlier we saw how a conversation goes wrong when one person isn’t open to listening to another, isn’t curious about what is happening to another. We saw Jeremy try to get me to acknowledge that I had hurt him. But I remained closed, defensive, and refused to really listen to his pain, or to see him as a person with needs in that moment. I refused to get close, to get proximate, to allow myself to wonder how he was feeling. In refusing to wonder, I was unable to feel or to express any empathy.
We are at a critical point in our nation’s history. For many reasons we feel as though our cherished values are hanging by a thread, that our national life is eroding, that it becomes more and more difficult to reach across what divides us to find common ground. I think back to the days after 9/11, when we came together in our shared grief. I think back to the time right after Hurricane Katrina, when people all across the country were heading to New Orleans to try to help people whose lives had been upended. We met people in their driveways. We listened, we held hands, laughed and cried and prayed together. There was a silver lining in all that chaos and destruction, which was the rare opportunity for connection, the chance to see each other’s humanity. Those of us who got close enough to imagine ourselves in other’s shoes were able to empathize. Fourteen years later, it feels as though the connections that were being forged, the lessons we learned, have faded away.
The words of our responsive reading this morning, “Healing,” challenge us to feel empathy. To feel the scars on an ancestor’s back, to feel the shame and fear experienced by the author’s relatives. But before we can empathize, we must be willing to be curious.
Curiosity is what can save us. Curiosity is what can open us to empathy, which leads us to connection and genuine caring.
My friends, a few minutes ago I mentioned that our relationships had the potential to either get much better or to get worse. It’s up to us to decide which direction our relationships will take. Making a conscious decision to remain curious about each other is the key.
May you always be able to be curious about one another. May we all remember that it is our curiosity about one another that will help us to break down barriers between us and to help us find our way to empathy for one another.
“Remember,” the poet said, “You don’t fear people whose story you know.” May we all seek to hear the stories, and to be open to where the stories lead us.
Amen.
