Love Shack, Baby

Dr. Jacqui Lewis

Delivered at All Souls Church, Unitarian Universalist

Washington, D.C. October 18, 2009

One of my favorite stories in the Hebrew scriptures is when Moses is told by God to tell Pharaoh to let the people go. Nothing is worse than saying you have a message from God but you don’t know God’s name “Whom shall I say sent me?” he asks. The liberator says, I am who I am, or I will be who I will be. In other words, never mind my name—I just am.

Sister Ana Maria Risutto in her book, The Birth of the Living God, says even though she believes in the existence of a Holy other, people often create the god they believe in out of memory and experience. The living God, she says, is at least partly birthed out of our experience.

I believe that who we think God is, how we think about Spirit or The Source or The Holy One, is at least in part connected to how we feel about ourselves—about who we think we are.

No matter how we name God—Bhagwan or Ishvara (the Cosmic Controller) or Waheguru (the Wonderful Teacher bringing light to remove darkness), or Ek Onkar (the only one), or Adonai or Hashem (the Name)—I believe our search for God is directly linked to what we have discovered about ourselves.

Karen Armstrong helps us to understand that all of our words for God have to be seen as symbols, not names, and that any word falls short of describing what it symbolizes. That is true, but we need them nonetheless to grapple with the mystery of that which we yearn to know and do not understand.

The fictional Sug in Alice Walker’s the Color Purple tells Celie that the God she fears is the old white man she needs to get off her eyeball. She helps Celie re-vision God as the one who wants us to walk by the color purple and notice how beautiful it is; when describing God, Sug says, “it just wants to be loved.”

If I ask you to close your eyes and picture who or what God is, what do you see? How would you describe God? What is your image of God?

In John’s community in the Christian scriptures, there is this simple image that God is love. John writes, “God is love, and those who abide in love abide in God and God abides in them.”

The word abide comes from the old English bide which meant to submit to or endure; to reside in or to dwell in; to hold.

And in the Christian New Testament, the Greek word abide is meneo; it means to sojourn, to continue, to live in or to be HELD

How fascinating that the word abide means To Be HELD!

When I hear this text from John I hear two things: 1) When we live in love, we are HELD in God; and 2) When we love, God is HELD in us.

I want to talk for a bit about this last piece, how God abides in us—how we are the holding place for God. The writer is saying that God is love and we are God’s abode, God’s apartment, God’s condo, God’s dorm room, God’s house, God’s SRO. . . .God’s Love Shack!

Why does God choose to hang out, to live in us, to be HELD by us? Just because! Not because we are beautiful or smart or rich or perfect or fabulous or have worked hard or prayed hard —just because. We are God’s tent, God’s home. We are God’s LOVE Shack, Baby!!

And here is what really excites me, these scriptures from the Judeo Christian Tradition are not the only theologies that affirm that God is inside of us.

The Yogi’s chant an ancient Sanskrit Blessing; Om Namah Shivaya (pronounced as Aum Num-ha Shi-why) It means "I bow to Shiva;” the supreme reality, the inner Self. It is the name given to consciousness that dwells in all. The repetition of the name of God is equivalent to being merged in God’s very being.

Many Buddhists, Taoists and Hindus greet each other with Namaste, which literally means “I bow to you.” The concept is that the divine spark in me recognizes the divine spark in you.

I think that we human beings don’t fully know who we are. Most of us have a case of mistaken identity. If we really believed that God lives in us, God has taken residence up in EACH of us…If we really believed that we are ALL Love Shacks, if we really owned that every human being is a holding-place of the HOLY, that our bodies house God’s spirit, how would our lives look?

Think about it…

If we really believed all human flesh is a container for the Divine, how could we be cruel to anybody, blow up anybody, fight with anybody, destroy the souls of anybody if we think THEY house God? How could anyone stab 15-year-old Sakia Gunn to death, just because she was a lesbian or beat 49-year-old Jack Price to death because he was gay? If we really believed, all of us, that each of us was a Holding Place for God’s Love, how could a judge proudly claim to be friends with blacks, friends enough to let them use his bathroom, but not marry a biracial couple because he worries for their unborn children and that saying no is his prerogative? How could we even bear to hurt the feelings of the other if we thought that God would get God’s feelings hurt at the same time?

I say we don’t believe it—not nearly enough, not for long enough, for it to shape who we are and how we live.

And so we wander about, lost and lonely, frightened and false, angry and agitated, miserable and mad, depressed and dysfunctional, listless and lifeless. We sometimes despise our lives and projecting that onto the other can be a favorite sport.

We live life without balance. And most of our world religions understand this concept. Taoists call it imbalance, Buddhism calls it ignorance, Islam blames our misery on rebellion against God and the Judeo Christian tradition calls our lack of understanding of our oneness with God and with each other sin.

I wish we got it, but it seems we still don’t. If we got it then as one LA Times journalist notes, we would never have a conversation about the media—concocted fiction called post racial. He said America is decidedly not "post-racial." One need only observe the prosecution of the Duke University lacrosse team or the Jena Six, the debate about race-based affirmative action and the atrocity that was and is Hurricane Katrina to know that racial issues are still with us. The desire that the subject of race be set aside in the current "post-racial" political conversation shows that society is unwilling to openly face its worst fear: Not only could a black man ably lead this nation, but the mere fact of a black president would force both the majority and minority populations to reset our parameters for normality.”

Post-racial? Racism makes some folk (and this is not a UU problem—but believe it or not, some Christians are worried about the coming of the anti-Christ) study the speeches of our president and play them backward to find out if he, indeed, is that anti-Christ. Psychologist Robert Carter says race is the salient issue in these United States of America and I agree. Underneath poverty, economic disparity, poor school systems, high mortality rates, housing discrimination; poor diet; unequal access to health care—racism in America. Even though there is only one race, the human race, this culture has been SO raced for all of these centuries that racism is a blight on our land.

Race still matters. Sexual orientation matters. Gender matters. Class matters. Too many of us can’t wait to find reasons and ways to hate each other. To quote the cultural critic Marvin Gaye, “makes me wanna holler, throw up both my hands.”

I am so disappointed and disgusted that we do not look at the other and see there, the place where God lives.

I think our nation needs an extreme house makeover. We need to do some clean-up. There is some junk in our culture and in our selves that needs to go. Old ways of coping with fear, archaic attitudes that used to work and now do not. They need to go.

We don’t need to judge ourselves or shame on ourselves. It’s kind of like you have a furry, scary chartreuse chair you bought in 1971. Just look at that thing! You loved it when you bought it. You have some fond memories in that chair—you read a book in it, you had your first kiss with that guy in it. Look at it, love it, remember the fun with it, and then get rid of it. No guilt necessary, no shame necessary. Guilt and shame are these things from our ego that make us feel that as long as they are around, we don’t have to do anything. Instead of guilt and shame, let’s just observe the junk, appreciate it for what it is and toss it.

We need an extreme house makeover and this is how we do it.

First, we prepare by making room inside so we can see that God is indeed in there!

I have a friend named Lincoln. We grew up in the same neighborhood in Chicago. Lincoln is one of those really scary, frighteningly smart people. When he was in college he hit a rough spot, like an existential crisis at 18. He was miserable and went through a phase where he drank Vodka for water. He called me one day when I was in grad school. “I am either going to talk to you now or drive into the tree.” The vodka was an analgesic; his spirit was broken. His “house” had too much junk in it for him to look inside and recognize God living there. It took some time but he want to counseling, found a great place to worship in community, and threw away his fear and his sense that he was not worthy of being a Love Shack. He could then see in himself the goodness God sees.

Second, we pray.

Since God lives inside, we can’t redecorate without being in conversation. We can’t draw up remodeling plans without some give and take. We can read our Holy texts and get great suggestions, but in order to really know The Holy, we need to pray. And prayer is a conversation, not a list of demands. God wants so much to be in communication with us; sometimes our lives will heat us up so that we will start talking with God.

The woman who wrote the best selling book, “Eat, Love, Pray” is Elizabeth Gilbert. Liz’s marriage was falling apart and she was devastated. She had never prayed, never had a conversation with God. Sitting on the bathroom floor, weeping, feeling at the bottom, she spoke to God like the polite writer she is.

She introduced herself to God. “Hi, this is Liz. I have never done this before but I hope I have communicated my gratitude at least. Please, f you can just tell me what to do…tell me what to do.” She heard a voice—not Charlton Heston, not Whoopie Goldberg. She heard her voice, her own best, purest, unwounded voice. And that voice told her what she needed to hear…the voice said go back to bed. It sounded right and real to her. Her best inner, divine spark, God in the flesh, talking to her in her own voice. God just may do that, you know, speak in our own voice, so that…we RECOGNIZE it! So we are not startled out of our clothes, so we can believe it when we hear it.

If you were to take a moment now to be silent, to hear your own Godly self, that part of you where God resides, what would you hear that voice saying? I hope you would hear it say, “I love you so much. You do not have to do anything for me to love you. You are not the sum total of your mistakes nor are you the sum total of your successes. You are just mine and I love you!”

Third, We Participate.

We do not serve a puppeteer. We are on this planet to be something, to do something. I think it is to partner with the Holy—to become who God wants us to be—and so we move with God, we dance with God, we push and shove and tussle with God. God survives our anger and we survive our anger, too. In the turning and twisting we become who God wants us to be. And what I mean by “us” is not just our own special selves—I mean our community—I man all of humanity. We partner with God not just on our own behalf but on behalf of others. Dr. King once said, “An individual has not started living until he can rise above the narrow confines of his individualistic concerns to the broader concerns of all humanity.” So we stand in, we show up on the mall and march and picket and shout and we sign petitions and we blog and we twitter for justice for all of God’s people—all of the Love Shacks. We don’t stop until everyone has the right to marry, to live healthy lives, to be relieved of the pressure of being the best representative of their race (do you know how insulting that is to people of color when someone says, you are so wonderful, I don’t even think of you as Latina or Chinese or African American, as though color-blindness is some kind of gift.) When we get the love shack concept—we love the unique particularities of the other.

Finally, We Practice.

We need congregations like All Souls, like Glide in San Francisco, like Middle Church. We need places where we can practice being the whole community of the Holy. Where we can practice seeing each other as we truly are and loving folk just as they are—not trying to squint and pretend they are just like us. Dr. King talked about the interdependence of human kind—I can’t be fully who I am until you’re fully who you are. That is the project of our congregations—they are places of practicing the peace we hope for. When blacks and whites and Latinos and Latinas and Chinese and Hmong and Korean and Japanese and Africans and Afro Carribeans and poor and wealthy and . . . old and young can all hold hands and worship and celebrate and sing Free at Last at last free at last and mean it----this is the practice our congregations give us.

One day when he was little, John and I took Christian to the park to give his folks a break. He greeted us with Hi Auntie Jacqui and Auntie John. Although he got that wrong—two aunties are no shock for the children at Middle church. We need places for little boys like Christian to learn that Uncle Keith and Uncle Kevin are a happy couple and they are as much in love as Auntie Jacqui and Uncle John.

When we practice the beloved community, people move from being objects of scorn and derision to subjects of curiosity and care.

It is tough to stomp a subject to death. It is tough to stomp a love shack to death. I there had been more practice of our kind of congregation there would have been less lynchings, less cross burnings, less gay bashing, less misogyny—more love.

We need our multicultural, multiracial, multiethnic, multiclass, multi-sexual-orientation congregations to practice Shalom. We need to practice inside these walls so we can take that radical welcome to the streets.

Our congregations give me hope. An old Negro spiritual says, we’re not what we ought to be what we’re not what we used to be…We are not finished becoming, but we are on our way. When we get that we house the divine, when we get that this congregation is a house of houses of the divine, we need no longer fear rejection or hurt—and we need no longer reject or hurt the Other—the Holy lives there, hangs out in there, makes her dwelling place there. We need not collapse from our mistakes but rather get up and start over and forgive ourselves and forgive others as well. We can be generous in our grace, deliberate in our partnerships, purposeful in our politics, hopeful in our hearts as we stride toward freedom and don’t stop to rest until it comes.

You’re a love shack, baby! Those who live in love live in God and God lives in them. THAT is just the kind of stuff that can start a revolution—a love in that helps us to love out loud!!

Are you ready for that? I think we are; how about you?