What powerful words on this Independence Day weekend. Let America be America again. Let it be the dream it used to be. Let America be America again. The land that never yet has been and yet must be. From the lips of a man for whom America never has been free - in a land that did not offer him the equality it proclaims for all - there he is, Langston Hughes, calling us forward. Out of the rack and ruin he calls us - the people - to remember the mighty dream - to redeem the plains, the fields, the cities and our nation - he calls us - the people - to build the America that can be, that must be - calling us to let America be America again.
What powerful words. Do not surrender the dream, he implores us. Do not hand over this nation to those who live like leeches on people's lives. Do not surrender the dream, even as we, too, find ourselves tangled in that ancient endless chain of profit, power, gain, of grab the land! Of Grab the gold! Of grab the ways of satisfying need! Even then, he begs us, do not surrender the dream - let America be America again.
In a time when many of us see and feel the dream of equality, of justice, of opportunity for all slipping away - in a time when our national commitment to the common good is quickly, dangerously eroding - in a time when the gap between rich and poor is growing exponentially, in a time when our country's emphasis lies in military confrontations and moral violations at home and abroad - in this time he tells us - hold on to the dream, do not surrender the dream. Let America be America again - the land that never yet has been and yet must be.
The tension is there, surely - the gap between our reality as a nation and the dream we were founded upon, the dream of equality and justice and opportunity that we still profess today. The gap was there when Langston Hughes wrote the poem just after the turn of the 20th century, and the gap is there now. A widening gap between our vision - our hopes and our dreams - and our present circumstances. In organizational terms, this gap is known as creative tension - and painful as it is, it also has the potential to be a powerful motivating force for change - if only we heed Langston Hughes' words and hold on to the dream.
Author and organizational change leader, Peter Senghe describes creative tension as a tension that arises when we juxtapose our vision with our current reality. By gazing simultaneously at what we want and the reality of where we are - he says, we realize the gap that almost inevitably exists between the two. This gap is the creative tension - it is the pull we feel when we hear Langston Hughes' words calling us to hold on to the dream - to let America be America again. This pull - this creative tension - exists not only in our national life, but in our personal lives as well.
As your minister, I spend much of my time meeting with families and individuals for pastoral care, and I'll tell you something that might seem obvious on the outside. People rarely ask to see me when things are going well. They come in, you come in, rather because you are in great pain. You come in because someone has died and you are struggling with loss and with the unfairness of life. You come in because your relationship with your child or your parent or your partner is falling apart. You come in because you are watching yourself behave in ways you do not like, because you are finding that you are not the person you long to be.
These good people who come to see me, people I love and trust and value, are living in moments of great pain, and almost universally, they come in to see me because they carry within them some vision of the person they would like to be, some vision of the life that they long to live - and they are finding that their reality falls far short of the vision they hold. It is a difficult gap to see, a difficult gap to hold, a difficult gap to resist turning away from. But there in their pain, in their discomfort, we talk with one another, and I inevitably utter the same words - this place of great pain, this place of clear vision, I say, is also a place of great hope - this is the place where everything can change.
It seems strange, I know, naive, maybe even cruel perhaps, in those moments of pain and discomfort -to utter those words, to even put out there the possibility that such pain could be a time of hope as well - but I have found in my own life, and I have certainly found in walking with others, that it is in those moments of pain and discomfort that we are most likely to become willing to listen, most willing to try something different, and ultimately, that we become most able to change.
The gap that people describe when they come in to my office - the gap many of us feel between the life we long to live and the life that we are actually living - this gap is a powerful thing to see and to know in ourselves. This gap is the creative tension in the situation - and this tension, I believe, is a force that can offer us energy and motivation as we work to bring our vision and our reality together. It is a tension that brings hope and the possibility of change to a time of painful realizations.
This creative tension that Senghe describes, though, like all tensions, ultimately seeks resolution - like a rubber band that longs to snap back when stretched, this creative tension, this gap between our vision and our reality - longs for resolution - and in our moments of discomfort this presents us with two possibilities. Either our vision can erode and lessen - thereby moving closer to our reality - or our reality can change, moving us closer to our vision. If our vision erodes - we lose a bit of ourselves, a bit of our potential as people, as families, as a nation. If, however, we hold our vision steady, keeping our hopes and dreams in front of us, we can use this creative tension to change our reality and live into the people and the nation we are called to be.
Holding our vision steady, though, is not always easy. It requires us to live with the emotional discomfort that creative tension evokes. The ability to live with some emotional discomfort as we realize the gap between our vision and our reality - and as we work toward lessening it - is essential if we are to live into the fullness of our potential. If we cannot live with the emotional discomfort that creative tension frequently evokes, naturally, we predispose ourselves to lowering our vision. If we cannot live with some pain, the gap between our vision and our reality may close - but it will do so only because we fail to heed the poet's demands and surrender the dream.
Writing dozens of years before Senghe, Unitarian theologian Henry Nelson Wieman expressed it this way. "Those who cannot endure suffering, he wrote, cannot endure the increase of human good. Refusal to take suffering is perhaps the chief obstacle to increase in the good of human existence." (The Source of Human Good, 65.) Let me say it again. "Refusal to take suffering is perhaps the chief obstacle to increase in the good of human existence."
Now I want to be careful here. I am not saying that all pain is good - and I am not saying that we should expose ourselves to unnecessary pain or even that suffering is our lot. I do not believe that suffering is redemptive, but I do believe that what we do with our suffering can be redemptive. What I am saying, and I want to be clear here - is that as we work toward achieving our goals - especially our lofty and challenging goals of living into our truest selves - of living into our potential as a nation - we will inevitably encounter pain and discomfort, setbacks and disillusionment - and if we abandon ourselves and our nation because of that pain and discomfort, because of setbacks and disillusionment, we will never become the people or the nation that we could be.
In our society, in most of our families and workplaces and relationships and even in our own bodies - we learn over and over again to avoid pain and discomfort and tension at all costs. We do our best to diminish conflict, to feel comfortable and content. But often, our dreams and our dissatisfactions poke through the veneer - and it is then, often, that we turn to our healers - to our doctors and therapists, our personal trainers and coaches and our religious leaders - we turn to them when we long to hear a counter-intuitive message - a message that demands that we hold our vision steady - that we not settle for less - that we put in the time and the effort that growth, that living into our vision requires. We turn to these teachers and healers to walk with us, reminding us of our strength and of our vision, encouraging us as we do the hard work of changing ourselves and our lives and ultimately our nation into the vision we hold dear.
Let America be America again. It is a lofty task, and it is not a task we can accomplish alone. Whether we are working, first, to heal and fulfill our own lives or whether we are working on the great and holy charge that Langston Hughes has given us - we cannot do it alone. We simply need one another. We need one another for companionship, for encouragement, for holding the vision steady when we falter as individuals. This journey of living into our truest selves, of living into our potential as individuals and as a nation, requires us to do things that most people don't want to do. It asks us to see ourselves and this world clearly. It asks us to admit our shortcomings and mistakes. It asks us to open our hearts and our minds to different opinions and perspectives - and most difficult of all, it asks us to be willing to change.
But amidst all of this difficulty, there is some very good news here. When we join in this journey to live into our truest selves, to build a nation worthy of its promises, we never do walk alone. We walk not only with one another, here, and with our families and friends, we walk also with all those who have made the journey before us - building on their successes, learning from their mistakes, taking comfort and courage by their example.
One such man whom I call upon in my own journey is our former president, Abraham Lincoln. This past year, Pulitzer Prize winning author, Doris Kearns Goodwin, published a book about Lincoln and his cabinet titled, A Team of Rivals: The Political Genius of Abraham Lincoln. Perhaps some of you were with me as she spoke at Susan B. Anthony's birthday party this year. In her book, Ms. Goodwin proposes that Lincoln's political genius - the genius that brought him into the white house as an outsider, the genius that allowed him to hold the country together during a time of civil war, the genius that prompted him to hold onto and achieve the dream of ending slavery - Goodwin proposes that the defining characteristic of this, Lincoln's political genius, was quite simply, his character - and in particular, the way his character displayed an extraordinary capacity for empathy - for being able to put himself in the place of others and experience what they were feeling.
As many of you know, Abraham Lincoln was born to humble circumstances, and he certainly knew the creative tension we spoke of earlier in his own life, holding out the vision of education and professional success against his birthright reality of poverty and ignorance. In holding his vision steady, through hard work and dedication Lincoln moved his personal reality closer to his vision. In his professional and political life, Lincoln knew creative tension as well, holding out a vision of a nation without slavery, a nation that offered equal opportunity to all against the reality of men owning men and hundreds of thousands of people living in poverty and ignorance they could not reasonably expect to overcome. Again, Lincoln held his vision steady, and in time, against nearly impossible odds, his reality moved closer to his vision and he became one of the most influential presidents in history.
In the race for the presidency, several men from Lincoln's own party ran against him. But after winning the race, Lincoln made the unprecedented decision to invite his rivals directly into his political family, as members of his cabinet. In doing so, Lincoln again welcomed in creative tension - this time recognizing the gap between his vision of people working together and the reality of jealousy and discord. He invited some of the most challenging men in his party into his inner circle - opening himself up to differences of opinion, to the jealousy and creativity - trusting in the greater vision that called him to live with the discomfort, to hold out and to hold onto the dream of America, as he allowed the tension present not only in his cabinet, but in the gaping chasm of a gap between the dream of his country and its reality - to pull them all forward, together, towards the vision they held.
In doing this, Lincoln displayed what Goodwin describes as an "extraordinary array of personal qualities that enabled him to form friendships with men who had previously opposed him; to repair injured feelings that, left untended, might have escalated into permanent hostility; to assume responsibility for the failures of subordinates; to share credit with ease, and to learn from mistakes...His success in dealing with the strong egos of the men in his cabinet, she writes, suggests that in the hands of a truly great politician the qualities we generally associate with decency and morality - kindness, sensitivity, compassion, honesty, and empathy - can also be impressive political resources." (A Team of Rivals, xvii)
It's a novel concept in this day and age, isn't it? That the kinds of qualities we generally associate with decency and morality - kindness, compassion, sensitivity, honesty, and empathy - can be impressive political resources as well.
These basic characteristics of decency and morality - honesty, empathy, compassion, kindness - these are the resources that allow us to speak truthfully with one another - to call each other back to the vision - to nudge and cajole one another onto the path again with humor and with compassion. And so I chose to walk with Lincoln on this spiritual journey, and I invite you to walk with us as well. Learning from him and from so many others to hold onto the vision, to hold it steady and not surrender the dream - to see ourselves and this world clearly, to admit mistakes, to open ourselves to different opinions and perspectives, to welcome the discomfort that comes with growth, with creativity, to begin at home, with ourselves, with our very character that we might cultivate peace in our hearts and accept the challenge of growth - as we the people build this nation that has yet to be, as we let America be America again.
May it be so, and Amen.
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