The Veil
Good afternoon. And it is a good afternoon, isn’t it? I noticed that our services have been growing, and while I haven’t been checking the numbers online, I have seen more and more people filling out the space. It’s a good sign. Thank you all for being here. I know there are other places to be.
My topic today is the veil. If you leave here today and remember one thing, I hope that it is this - there are a thousand ways to lift the veil - it’s hard to help anyone, including yourself, until you do. I cannot discuss this topic authentically without describing myself, and without discussing the context of race and racism in America. Please let this serve as a trigger warning for those in our space sensitive to racialized violence and trauma.
I am going to discuss some of my family history. I will touch on the themes of generational and racial trauma. I am not talking not about a literal veil, but using a metaphor to describe ordinary reality. Stay with me now.
At the general assembly of our Unitarian universal denomination it is the custom for those who address the wider community in any capacity to describe themselves physically before they share their message. Well, I have heard criticism of the experience, and I certainly recognize that every bit of changes colors with the colors of the speaker, I want to invoke this tradition now because the way that I look deeply informs my message.
I am a tall, thick and stocky brownish male human with a few thick curls on my chin, the thick dark curls on top of my head are pulled up into a bun. I am occasionally almond colored, and occasionally copper. My range, however, goes from the deep walnut of my freckles and birthmarks to the cashew tones of my palms. In the colors of my skin I see blue, not only in my tattoos, but also in the blood that pumps us to the surface of my skin. I am veritable rainbow of color, wearing a dark blue and green plaid shirt with salmon pink pants. It is difficult to tell by looking what my background or heritage might be.
Keep me and this body in mind when I tell you, I had a strange feeling a couple of days ago when I woke up. It felt like a feeling somewhere in my throat, but it would move down to my shoulders, a warmth in my chest that settled slowly into my belly. It was a strange feeling you know.
That morning I also, I had a little headache, I suffer from chonic migraines, and my neck was sore from sleeping funny. I have a little pain in my right foot, it happens sometimes when I overuse it, some of you may remember the cane I walked with last year. I felt sore in my foot.
I felt these things, but, this other strange feeling in my throat and shoulders, and my belly felt stronger - it was almost as if those little aches and pains didn’t matter. I had this warmness I couldn’t really Identify, I had a hard time even trusting myself that I felt it. But I knew it because it felt good, really good. I felt clear. Present. What was it? You all have to believe me that I took a long time trying to figure it out, what was this warm calm I felt?
Eventually it came to me and some of you may not be so surprised to hear what it was. It was joy. Simple, pure, grounded, joy. It wasn’t an explosion of laughter, or a shout (where I’m from it’s called a grito - aoow!!) It wasn’t like that - it was slow and gentle. It wasn’t fuzzy, it was sharp and clear, but soft. I felt as if I could answer any question about me, and I would enjoy the sharing. I was transparent, unbothered. I was safe and present to what was going on around me.
I didn’t know it at first but when I knew it was joy, I could no longer not know that it was joy - like when you see a lump on an unmade bed, and it’s pillow shaped, and though you don’t see the pillow you know there’s a pillow under there - in the same way, I knew this feeling was a deeper kind of joy.
It’s not that I didn’t have anything on my mind - I’m sure you all can understand I have my worries too. Three kids a spouse and a dog, you know I’m always worried about something - I had plenty of worries of my mind, I was aware of that too. it’s not that. But again, it was like those worries didn’t so much matter. The feeling of warm calm, that sat right here (puts hand to chest), it was what I wished I had been feeling the whole time. It was like background joy.
What is that joy, church? Do you know the feeling? Not a big splash of dopamine, but like a warm pillow that you can swallow, and it just cradles your insides. It was a strange feeling.
That joy is totally alien to the anxiety that normally pushes me through my day - ok, gotta get rolling, gotta get my coffee, gotta get breakfast, gotta walk the dog, gotta get my stuff together, gotta get to work, gotta get this done, gotta send this out, gotta get uptown, downtown, across town, on and on…
No, this was more like a list of ‘don’t gotta’s’ - I don’t gotta think about that, I don’t gotta deal with you, I don’t gotta respond to that comment, I don’t gotta show them what I can do… It was the sort of happiness that feels solid and unchanging. I felt free. The feeling made me light on my toes, I almost wanted to dance. It was a buoyant, levitating joy.
Of course, that feeling didn’t last forever. Eventually, I noticed my worries took their place back at the front of my mind, and I felt no particular warmth in my body. I noticed in my foot and in my shoulders all my little quirks and pains took on their usual dull urgency. I noticed the heel of my feet returned to the ground. I was back to Earth. But even though the feeling came and went, I was hooked. I wanted that kind of joy again. I wanted to rest in it forever. I had to figure out what happened, and how to get it back. Have you ever felt like that?
WEB Dubois teaches us that that feeling is what it is like to be liberated - and that the reason I found that feeling so strange is that for most of my life, as a legacy of my african american heritage, I have lived with something called “double-consciousness.” This means I can’t simply be, or know myself simply as a person, but because of my social location as the descendant of slaves, I must always experience life through a lens that distorts not only what I see, but also who I think is doing the seeing. In his own words, from The Souls of Black Folk, DuBois writes, “... the Negro is a sort of seventh son, born with a veil, and gifted with second-sight in this American world,—a world which yields him no true self-consciousness, but only lets him see himself through the revelation of the other world. It is a peculiar sensation, this double-consciousness, this sense of always looking at one’s self through the eyes of others, of measuring one by the tape of a world that looks on in amused contempt and pity. One ever feels his two-ness,—an American, a Negro... two thoughts, two unreconciled strivings; two warring ideals in one dark body, whose dogged strength alone keeps it from being torn asunder. The history of the American Negro is the history of this strife, — this longing to attain self-conscious manhood, to merge his double self into a better and truer self.”
Part of why that feeling of warm joy was so strange is because usually when I wake up in the morning, it’s about 4:30am. And my body tells me urgently, it’s time to get up and handle business. It’s time to move, respond, consider. Is everything handled? What day is it today? It doesn’t matter whether I slept seven hours or two, my body it seems cannot tolerate a calm, cool, slow, gentle morning. This is what made that moment so strange to me - because years of generational trauma has taught me not to trust my sleep, but to be always prepared to wake and run at a moment’s notice.
We have a story in my family of origin, of my grandfathers home in Waterloo, Iowa, a small two-room shack with dirt floors. Five children, and the grownups took the only bedroom, so all of the children had to find pieces of furniture to sleep on, to keep them up off the ground. They couldn’t sleep on the ground because the mice and rats had no trouble comin and going through those dirt floors. My grandfather I think, never had a good full nights sleep in his life. The trauma of those dirt floors stayed with him, in his body, and he passed it on to his children, none of whom get a good nights sleep, who in turn passed it to the grandchildren. I don’t know how many of my twelve first cousins sleep in, but I know more than a few who don’t.
In my body, this racial trauma lives in me, and it finds me in my sleep. When I wake up in the morning, around 4:30, I’m not tired, or ready to curl back up. I can. But my body is on edge, alert, and prepared for anything. For me, that morning, the veil was lifted. I wasn’t looking at myself through the lens of my blackness, where the only person to protect me was myself. I could live as an integrated human, not led or guided or pushed by past events, not guided by intangible fear.
Church do you know about that feeling? I called it a deeper joy - it made even the little pains in my body feel, not even like bad things, but like part of the fabric of my beautiful life. Even my little foot pain, my little worries about walking the dog, felt suddenly, temporarily, extra-ordinary. They were ordinary things, but they felt extra - like the volume on life got turned up, not the distracting parts of life, but the part that are more, maybe, real.
Have you ever felt that way? Do you know that feeling, a deeper joy that makes even the most uncomfortable problems in life, the real difficulties seem less like difficulties and more like little puzzles in a game room? I’m told to come to my problems with joy and creativity, but sometimes I don’t know how to do that, and it seems too hard, but then there are other times, like this that I’m describing, this moment of extraordinary time, extraordinary experience, when I feel helped along by this deeper joy - in those moments, I wonder how else I ever expect to solve problems unless I see them for how small they are. Do you know what I’m talking about?
WEB Dubois uses the veil as a metaphor, but our conversation today is not a purely theoretical exercise. Make no mistake, The veil is very real, and it affects our lives whether we want it to or not. Don’t lose me now, if I were I better preacher I could say this part so that everyone understood me, but I’m doing my best. Forgive me, but I have to say the quiet part out loud. The veil doesn’t want to be seen or discussed, but it is a matter of life that you deal with in your life friends, that we deal with it in church, because even if you don’t catch every word, try to catch my message. Even if we don’t know how, we have to say the quiet parts out loud.
I am a black man, and Dubois is talking about black people, not only to white people, but to other black people, to offer language for their situation. You all who sit before me, or who join in online now or at a later time, some of you are black and might resonate with my words, and others are white and you might resonate, or feel discomfort. And others might be disconnected from American racialized trauma and have to translate my words into your cultural context.
Every person must contend with their veil, and every culture must contend with it’s veils. We lose sight of ourselves, we lost sight of what’s really important, and then we struggle to course-correct. It hard for us as people, to walk a straight path, and when we go astray, it can be easy to stay distracted. We begin to see ourselves as ordinary, and we recognize our part in the ordinary story of ordinary life. Ordinary, like normal, is an operative word in our culture. Ordinary is a tool of white supremacy. “Ordinary” and “normal” become euphamisms for the thing we’re not supposed to say out loud. The veil is itself ordinary, and calls everything we see through it’s distortion ordinary too.
The veil covers our whole faces, our eyes and ears and mouth and nose. The veil is convincing, and it is attractive. It divides us and separates us into units of loneliness, and distorts our vision so that we might never truly embrace each other, but instead just keep bumping into each other as we move through life. The veil can be lifted, in brief exhilarating moments of extraordinary life, moments that take our breath away and burn into our memories as the times we truly lived.
Church, I know you don’t need me to tell you about the times in life that the veil gets lifted. Art lifts the veil sometimes, a puppy on the street can lift the veil - a good song can lift the veil, or a surprise hug. Sometimes making animal noises in church can lift the veil for you, remind you what’s really important in life - and then boom, life is extra-ordinary, and you just can’t keep from smiling, or remember why you were so grumpy a moment ago.
And sometimes, the veil lets up. Fun and joy and connection break in uninvited sometimes, and it can teach us what we’re missing. It’s not wrong to just enjoy these moments, and it’s not wrong that sometimes we have to just feel it briefly and move on. Life is like that, we can’t expect to be always in a place of receptivity and transformation. We can’t live extraordinary life every moment of every day, can we?
Can we?
To be honest, I’m not so sure we can’t.
There is wisdom in accepting the waves of life, all our comings and goings and good fortune and bad fortune, dispassionately and calmly. This is not wrong. But a lifelong Unitarian Universalist who offered me some advice on preaching to this community told me, “a good UU sermon engages both the head and the heart.” I need both from you now, because the compassion we extend to each other cannot be in judgement of our shortcomings. But any thinking person can see, in this community and in our communities across this country, we simply cannot continue as we are. We cannot simply weather this coming storm as if it were someone elses problem. The veil tells us to mind our own business, when in fact the crumbling of our world right now is as much our business as anyone elses. This is not about accepting the good with the bad in a sort of spiritual self-imposed quarantine. It is about the messiness of trying to live life while protecting liberty.
Friends, as we name that which refuses to be named, and put our fingers on the veil, as we say the quiet parts out loud, and lift this veil from our eyes, that distorts us into normal ordinary thinking, let us see with clarity this moment in our different cultures and communities around the world. Nobody is winning. We are all losing, losing our selves, losing each other, losing all we have. Even those among us with wealth and security, power and influence are losing these things.
Around the world, violence and social unrest are spilling us out onto the ground. We are all over the world victims of populist movements and too-advanced weaponry. All over the world our planet is shrugging off the yoke of human development, buckling beneath our hubris. We are all over the world looking for our agency, our power, to stop what feels like an inevitable march toward death and destruction.
In this global moment, Who are we called to be in the church? What are we called to do, church? What is the difference between us and everybody else? Rev. Peggy has been talking a lot about the difference between a citizen and a consumer. I wonder how well we have been listening. Citizenship brings with responsibilities. I know how easy it is, how easy it has been for years, for me to shirk those responsibilities. But I cannot deny that I experience their compulsion. I am called, and if you don’t believe in the Holy Spirit, you might understand the feeling of being cold, drawn, either through feelings, or through the observation of circumstances in the world that cannot be unseen, yet so frequently remain unspoken.
If you leave here today and remember one thing, I hope that it is this - there are a thousand ways to lift the veil - it’s hard to help anyone, including yourself, until you do.
The veil is not a social theory, and though we are focusing on African American life and experience, the veil is not culturally specific. It is difficult to talk about because it is the thing we’re not supposed to talk about. We don’t talk about race, we don’t talk about poverty, we don’t talk about intimate partner violence, we don’t talk about the way those with mental difficulties or neurological differences are systematically culled from the population, we don’t talk about the mortality rates of prisoners or the death systems that eliminate unhoused people. We don’t talk about the slow quiet isolated deaths our elders endure because we have bad systems of care for them.
We don’t even talk about the people who care for us and our children and our sick and our elders on a daily basis, clean our toilets, and take out our trash and sort through our lazy unsorted recycling. David Letterman, on his television show entitled, My Next Guest Needs No Introduction, was interviewing Jay-Z, and in an attempt to build camaraderie around the task of fatherhood in the midst of a demanding career, invited Jay to share his thoughts. Jay’s words drifted to discussing the hired help that cleans up after the family and cooks for his children. “What’s the matter Dave,” he says, noticing Letterman’s visible discomfort. “Not supposed to talk about the staff?”
We churches like to call our spaces safe, and yet how easily we forget the labor required to create them. We can value accessibility, and yet we must step out from behind the veil if we are also to acknowledge the labor required to create it.
Do you see thei veil now? Our training has been intense and consistent, at least for those who grow up in this country. The two ways of seeing. Don’t talk about the veil.
I know that here at the Community Church of New York,we might know a thing or two about the veil. The more I learn about you church, the more I see that the community church of New York has a legacy of poking the bubble. We say the quiet parts out loud. Usually it seems to pop right here on 35th St. We uncover the root cause of illness in our society, and sometimes that illness is so deeply infected us that we have exised our own flesh and blood, trying to seek health and wellness, wholeness. It is our legacy to say the quiet part out loud. This is the place where we look for the bits and pieces that are hard to say other places, and we try to say them right here. Language is built upon and within the communities that speak it.
People building beloved community can lift the veil, but only if we do the hard part, and lift our own veils together. Just like you, I am just a person, and I have a body. This body is the same as yours, but different. My body colors my place. What I want to talk about today lives inside my body. I know this is not all there is. There is something more. You have all you need - our body can heal itself, our thoughts can heal themselves - we can change ourselves, change our communities, change the world.
And let me tell you, there has never been a time like this. When Rev. Jude speaks about history, and the present moment, I wonder if you were aware of the reverence that he brings. When he tells you from the pulpit about, where he has been, whom else he has served, whom else he knows in the work and what is happening around the country through his eyes, I wonder how deeply we are listening.
Deep listening is a specific technical term, and listening deeply is not passive or receptive. In order to recognize the felt experience of another, one is not emptying them. Self of their invited experience but fully embodying it. How do I feel, what is happening in my body? What am I doing here, what is that smell? No, I’m serious, because, we have to get here and be here fully. I’ll tell you why at the end.
To engage the practice of deep listening, it is almost better if the conversation partner is speaking a foreign language. There’s no veil that way. You connect to what it is they are saying, not the words, but how they are telling their story. It’s about how your body moves, and sympathizes. It’s about the breathing. Even just a deep breath can lift the veil.
If you leave here today and remember one thing, I hope that it is this - there are a thousand ways to lift the veil - it’s hard to help anyone, including yourself, until you do.
Two weeks ago, we cancelled church. It was a difficult decision, the ministers were in conversation the whole week about it.
Do we cancel church? Do we hold services even if we know most people are not going to be able to come? It was the day of the annual pride march, a day in which the entire island of Manhattan shuts down. Reason for not gathering many, and the opportunities to be together on that day seemed Fleeting.
On the Thursday before hand, the city shut down for an impromptu protest on the west side. On the east side, all I saw were block after block of gridlock traffic, drivers laying on their horns and shouting at each other, angry, pedestrians, sharing, gossip about what the protest was about. The next day, there was the impromptu Dyke March, and annual ritual in pride festivities that is unscheduled and therefore not mitigated by police. This time, I decided I wanted to see what all the fuss was about. I wanted to see if we really should hold church or not in the midst of this protest.
I was not prepared for what I found. They continued along fifth Avenue when I joined, and there were thousands of women and girls, and several men and boys, yelling, chanting, holding signs, beating drums, playing, music, laughing, shouting, dancing, kissing, playing hand games. There were children and adults of all ages. Together, the people shut down the city. Traffic stopped, and though I don’t know how many people were walking down Fifth Avenue, at one point near 28th Street I saw only bodies, people before me as far as the eye could see, people behind me as far as the eye could see, and more gathering, pouring onto the avenue from every side street.
In that moment, church, it happened to me again. The veil was lifted. I saw all people around me not for who they were in our culture, not for their demographic or for their power, but for their humanity. I felt a warm peace in my chest, a knowledge that who I was was not so important, and that the type of person I was mattered less than the fact that I’m just a person. I was filled with hope at the human condition, amazed at what social action can do to a city, but even more, at what social action can do to a soul - I was lifted in love. For me, I suddenly saw myself and the world with clear eyes, and I knew what it meant to love without limits and without understanding.
There are a thousand reasons for us not to have fun, not to live fully, not to be ourselves, not to say the quiet parts out loud. There are a thousand reasons for us to live under a veil, and to go through life bumping into others instead of living. But today, let’s try something else. Let’s have fun, and be full together. Say the quiet parts out loud. Let’s lift our veil, join in the dance, and make messy beloved community. Right now.
Friends, I am just a person, and I have a body. This body is the same as yours, but different. My body colors my place. I see things through my lens. In this body, through this body, I know this is not all there is. There is something more. Here in us, here between us, we have all we need - our body can heal itself, our thoughts can heal themselves - we can change ourselves, change our communities, change the world.
If you leave here today and remember one thing, I hope that it is this - there are a thousand ways to lift the veil - it’s hard to help anyone, including yourself, until you do.
