I am sure many of us smile a little smugly to hear William Ellery Channing’s call for a national literature. Here is the United States now, a hundred and seventy three years later, a leader in literature and learning in many fields. Books and magazines abound, and now the Internet is an additional means of disseminating information and knowledge and learning. All of varying quality, of course. How much of it would stand up to Dr. Channing’s standards of literature is arguable. 

I can remember my grandmother visiting one time when my sisters and I were teenagers. We must have all been at school, and she picked up a book that my sister Kathryn had left on a table beside the couch and began to read. But before long she went and found my mother and inquired, “why are you letting Kathy read this?” My mother, quite startled, responded, “I am raising my children the same way you raised us. I don’t censor their reading. They are encouraged to read anything they want, and, as you taught us, literary taste will develop.” I guess for a moment she felt quite self-satisfied with her answer, until my grandmother replied, “Yes, but when you were growing up, they didn’t print stuff like this!” [I wonder what the book was!] 

Even as literature proliferated during the decades and the centuries since Channing’s call, there were a lot of things that didn’t get printed, didn’t get published in the history of our nation. For better and for worse. As Dr. King said: “Not all of history is recorded in the books supplied to school children in Harlem or Birmingham.”[1]  

In 1830, when William Ellery Channing called for a national literature, the United States was still very young -- barely forty years old. The nation was still ambivalent and lacking in self-esteem about its place in the intellectual circles of the world – a world defined by Dr. Channing as the two sides of the Atlantic Ocean. My guess is that his idea of who constituted the “nation” was similarly constrained. Notice the language in his speech – “profound and original minds,” “superior minds” [twice] and “gifted men.” 

 Dr. Channing was a product of his time and social class, as we all are. Although he was intellectually opposed to the institution of slavery, he was slow to join the active abolitionist efforts that were picking up steam. Even as he gradually became more radical in his anti-slavery position, he was even slower to a realization that fine minds might reside in those who looked radically different from him. Five years after his speech calling for a national literature to be produced by “superior minds,” he attended an  anti-slavery convention where he heard an address by a black man. This is what he wrote afterwards: 

His complexion led me to think he was of pure African blood, and his diction, his countenance, his gestures, his thoughts, his whole bearing, must have convinced every hearer that the African is a man in the highest sense of that word. I felt that he was a partaker with me of that humanity for which I unceasingly thank my Creator. I felt on this occasion, as I perhaps never felt before, [emphasis added] what an amount of intellectual and moral energy is crushed, is lost to the human race, by slavery.”[2] 

Clearly Dr. Channing’s imagination when he made his call for a national literature five years before had not included superior minds dwelling within such a complexion.  

Today, at one level we cringe at such words, yet it is helpful to hear them because we can feel the beginning of Dr. Channing’s transformation. And what we see happening in schools even today tells us that such assumptions are still being made. 

Time passed, and literature abounded. But did it become a national literature? We have a hyphenated literature: White literature, African-American literature, women’s literature, Latino literature. Who is the nation? 

The Unitarian Universalist Association is struggling with its anti-racism work, called the Journey Toward Wholeness. In a recent publication, called Soul Work, developed to encourage congregations to initiate serious anti-racism work, theologian Dr. James Cone challenges Unitarian Universalists to make the distinction between personal prejudice and structural racism. As he says, “Dealing with people’s personal prejudices should not be the major concern. It is emotionally too exhausting and achieves very little in dismantling racism. . . the issue is always structural. While I may not get people to like me, it is important that the law prevent them from harming me on the basis of their prejudices.”[3] He goes on to speak about why whites do not talk about racism. Even white ministers – as a group responsible for leading and provoking folks toward a more just world. 

The difference between personal prejudice and structural racism is not a new concept, of course. Unfortunately, I fear that we do not do much work on either. But as I reflected on it in a theological and a spiritual context, I began to wonder if there might be a third way, perhaps an approach that can help prepare whites to both confront their/our personal prejudices and recognize and confront structural racism. Is there a step in this “soul work” that can operate on the spirit? Something that can prepare our minds to direct our bodies to act? 

This is where I want to lead us this morning. I want to guide us right into the hyphen. Unitarian Universalists tend to be a very mind-centered group (superior or otherwise), just like Dr. Channing. So I want to use the medium of our national literature. Literature, though, in the sense of scripture – those writings that emerge from the abundance – perhaps overabundance -- and become special and sacred because they push us deep toward new insights. Insights that transform us so that we might transform the world. Writings that might open our eyes to see and our ears to hear. Dr. King’s speeches and writings did this, particularly for those of us who remember his resounding voice. And there are plenty of others. 

            It can be hard to find your place inside the literature of a portion of the nation that writes from a different experience from your own. Isn’t it true that the easiest literature to accept and engage is that which immediately touches your own experience? Perhaps a character that you take on? One through whom you live vicariously for the duration of the book? Perhaps a phrase or verse or paragraph or image that captures a truth that has been just beyond your consciousness but the moment you read or hear it you say, “YES! That is truth!”  

It is harder to come to terms with your place in a literature that is grounded in the experience of somebody, or a group of somebodies, whose experience is profoundly different from your own.  But come to terms with it we must. We must come to terms with it because that is the purpose of having a broad and diverse literature. A broad and diverse literature moves our minds to new places. Opens our minds to fresh perspectives. Frees our eyes to see in new ways, our ears to hear different harmonies. A broad and diverse literature challenges us and provokes us to be dissatisfied, to seek new truths, and to work for change. 

I share with you today one example of my own journey into our national literature. 

            A few minutes ago we sang as a hymn a poem by James Weldon Johnson. This song became known in the early part of the 20th century as the “Negro National Anthem.” I first became aware that there even was such a thing when as a teenager I read I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings, by Maya Angelou. I was curious, but not curious enough to research it. It was twenty years before I first heard it, and several more before I paid close attention to the words, encountering Johnson’s poetry as important national literature. Important national literature for everyone, not just for African Americans.  

When I first read Johnson’s poem, my initial reaction was, “Well, I’m not really in there. The ‘we’ that is the voice of this poem isn’t my voice. It is not my story. It is the story of another people. Not ‘my people.’ It doesn’t have anything to do with me. Set to music it is a nice tune, has an uplifting feel to it – I really enjoy it. But it is not really for me.”  

            But then I decided to read it and engage with it as scripture. That kind of reading is an encounter that challenges. It is a profoundly spiritual experience. Not spiritual in the sense of easy, feel-good, and pleasurable. The gorgeous sunrise, the walk in the woods, the full moon and the star-lit nights. No, not that kind of spiritual. This is the other kind of spiritual – the kind that grabs me by the scruff of the neck and says, “you’d better wake up, pal. You’d better turn your eyes inside out and look again. You’ve got to see things totally differently.” A transformative spirituality, not a warm and fuzzy one.            

            So I kept reading. Over and over again I read Johnson’s poem, slowly and meditatively, the way one reads poetry and scripture. Taking it in and letting the words and images do their work at their own pace. 

            And from behind the words I began to see myself in there. It made me cringe. Rightly so. I felt shame. Rightly so. I felt guilt. Rightly so.  

I say rightly so because here is where I saw myself. I saw myself in the second verse: 

 “. . . . bitter the chastening rod, felt in the days when hope unborn had died.  . . . we have come, treading our path through the blood of the slaughtered . . ."  

            In the nation, among the peoples from out of whom this poem, this anthem emerged . . .   

. . . in the late nineteenth or early twentieth century when James Weldon Johnson wrote it . . .  

 . . . at a time when slavery was still a living memory  . . .   

I was the one who had wielded the rod. . .  

I was the one who had killed hope. . . 

I was the one who had done the slaughtering. . .  

In the imagery of a people with equal claim to this nation, I, as a white person, was the “Other.” The “stranger.” The one over whom victory was to be won. The one to be overcome. 

            There was the soul work. My work. The requirement that I overcome my assumption that I was not in that poem, and then to claim its message as mine, cringe as I might. It is through that cringing that I made a connection to something that I had previously met with indifference. I have begun to call it, in my own reflections, spiritual slavery – whites being enslaved to our perceived normativeness. And I place it right alongside personal prejudice and structural racism. And we must be freed from it. And we must do that work ourselves. 

            That kind of soul work, that new kind of connection, is precisely a spiritual connection because it makes a particular experience universal and transcends generations. I have never literally wielded a rod against another human being. I have never consciously and literally killed another person’s hope. I have never slaughtered anybody. Neither have African Americans singing that song today ever literally felt slavery’s chastening rod. But each of our particular lives is captured within a history that has long range consequences – consequences that affect the social fabric from generation to generation. 

Religions know this. Ancient Hebrew scriptures capture it when they speak of iniquity being visited on the third and fourth generations.  

Buddhism captures it in the doctrine of the interdependent chain of causation. As one colleague describes it, “this theological affirmation declares that no event, no encounter, no circumstance or occasion is disconnected from a great chain of causes that have led up to the present moment.” [4]   

Unitarian Universalism captures it in our seventh principle when we affirm and promote respect for the interdependent web of all existence of which we are a part. The web has many dimensions. It includes history. A history that has shaped our spirits. 

But then what are we to do? What are we to do after we have engaged with this initial spiritual work, this work of the mind through our national literature? This work of the mind that enters our bodies through our cringing?  

We are to do what Dr. King did. We are to engage with the dream through our real lives and our real actions.  

Dr. Channing said that a national literature is the expression of a nation’s mind in writing.  

Dr. King dreamed that this nation would express its founding principles in action.  

He knew that binding ideas up within the mind, behind our varying complexions, renders irrelevant all the understanding in the universe.  

He knew that limiting words to paper and books was inadequate at best, insulting at worst. 

We must speak up and speak out. 

We must go out.  

We must go out with courage.  

We must go out with a divine dissatisfaction, sweeping the stones from the paths, doing justly, loving mercy, and walking humbly, true to our God, true to our native land.