Sermon: “The Stranger in Our Midst: Four Encounters with Epilogue”
A Sermon by Charles Blustein Ortman, November 2, 2003
First Encounter:
Edward Hays wrote A Psalm for a Stranger in a Strange Land,
Stolen is my compass of comfort, my confident ground of the familiar and known. Without that compass, my heart fills with fear, jettisoning my peace of mind and heart and casting me adrift in a sea of strangeness. O God whose home is here and everywhere, …May my awareness of your ever present love make a homeland of what now for me is strange land.
She had just moved to town with her little daughter. The mother, Jessie, was 33 years old; the child, Noel, was four. Jessie was a professional woman. She came to town to be an educator, a special educator; The Director of Special Education. Education requires relationships and she hadn’t really made any yet, and so, I suppose, though she’d come to educate, much of her time was spent, in those early weeks and months, getting ready to educate, and adjusting to being a stranger.
It can be hard – maybe many of you know – being a stranger. Everything is new. Everyone is new. There’s a never a moment’s rest from all the newness. And sometimes comfort and confidence will shrink a bit, while we find our footing.
I met Jessie at a dinner party, Noel in tow. Noel mixed in with the other kids. It was no big deal for her. At four the whole world was still pretty new and that was reason enough for investigation, not intimidation. Not that Jessie was intimidated, she wasn’t. And she was up for exploration, too.
She had known herself in earlier circumstances, though. Jessie had grown up in a city, not New York or even Chicago. But she’d grown up in one of the cities along the Mississippi River. And now here she was in a little farm town, a long way from home, surrounded by dairy farmers and other small town people. She’d come to direct special education and what she found was that she was a stranger. She wanted to meet people, and wanted to like them, and wanted them to like her.
And there she was, at that big dining room table with all those farmers and everybody. I suppose she felt like they all had something in common that she didn’t have. She’d lost sight of whatever she really did have in common with them, and focused instead on what she didn’t. And she talked about it…a little too loud.
She told the farmers all about agriculture and the business plan that they should have for their farms. She told them about the best ways they ought to go about raising their crops and even practices they should use in their milking parlors. My friends sort of looked at each other and scratched their heads. They were patient with Jessie.
There were a few more episodes in which Jessie’s strangeness manifested itself in her trying to look like she might have something that could make others feel that they needed her. Little by little, though, that subsided and eventually Jessie became one of the crowd.
…May my awareness of your ever present love make a homeland of what now for me is strange land.
Second Encounter:
It was the heyday of the industry and the large computer conglomerate decided to take a chance and experiment with a group of young promising college graduates. A team of five members was chosen from among the most creative and productive of this year’s graduating class from the country’s leading technical institutes. The company wanted a dream team. Money was no object for salaries or for resources that would be made available to the team. Just maybe, this group would envision some new binary niche, here-to-for unimagined, that would result in an avalanche of must-have hardware and software.
The team was brought to company headquarters for a week of orientation. They talked with members of other teams, and toured the facilities. They listened to the hopes of the executives who had originally conceived of the idea of bringing them together. It was interesting to note the similarity of these pep talks to the words of the Scarecrow in the “Wizard of Oz.” Do you remember the scene where he’s gathered with Dorothy, Toto and the Tim Man up on the cliff looking down over the witch’s castle? And like the company executives, the Scarecrow announces, “I’ve got a plan how to get in there, and you’re going to lead us.” Not much of a plan really, but it sure held a lot of expectations.
The new team was worked hard through the week. There was a lot to learn so that when the time came when they would begin to do their creative work, they’d be well grounded in the culture of the corporation. The project managers also knew that they’d need to build good personal relationships, in order to promote a successful bonding. Their naturally competitive individual natures would have to be yoked together into a cooperative spirit.
So the team was encouraged to talk freely and to learn about each other in a series of unstructured and unsupervised sessions. Camaraderie began to develop quickly among the five team members. These more personal gatherings turned into enjoyable gab fests until on one occasion Bob asked, “So what about your love lives?” Rita could think of nothing she’d rather talk more about and launched into a history of her college loves and ended with her current flame. Everyone took their turn, not all so eager, but at least willing. That is everyone took their turn until the conversation finally worked its way around to Ned.
“I’m gay,” he said. “How much do you really want to know about my love life?”
There was silence at the table. None of them even knew what to think, except for Rita. Her Aunt Kay was a lesbian and she knew about the challenges and fears and assumptions that her aunt had to put up with. Rita had never really come to terms with who her aunt was. They’d never really talked much about it at home. She was the only one at the table who had any inclination of what Ned must have been going through and of what he had just risked. Rita sat there silently and said nothing. And so then there were two strangers sitting at the table wondering how they might ever fit into a creative scheme to design some kind of new world.
In the poem, “Wild Geese,” Mary Oliver wrote:
You do not have to be good. You do not have to walk on your knees For a hundred miles through the desert, repenting. You only have to let the soft animal of your body love what it loves.
Third Encounter:
Bradley is a 47 year old African American man who could pass for being somewhere in his early 30’s. He has his own business as a computer consultant and he’s a Lt. Colonel in the United States Army Reserves. Since September 11th his Army responsibilities have increased considerably. The Army has a great need these days for the services of individuals who have talents and abilities like Bradley.
A couple of weeks ago Bradley was driving from duty on one Army base in the South to another here in New Jersey. He was driving along with the flow of traffic on the NJ Turnpike at nearly 80 miles per hour, when he was singled out and pulled over by a NJ state trooper. The trooper approached the car from the passenger side. Looking in, he could see Bradley’s hat with its Lt. Colonel’s scrambled eggs on the visor lying on the seat next to him. And he could see his jacket, with its maple leaves on the shoulder bars, hanging in the back window. “Since September 11th,” Bradley explained to me the other day, “police feel more of a camaraderie with the military. When he saw my uniform and my rank, he decided to cut me a break. Instead of giving me a ticket for going 25 miles over the speed limit, which would have cost a couple hundred dollars and three points against my license, he gave me a $50.00 ticket for ‘obstructing traffic’ for driving in the third lane. It had no points. It didn’t matter that I was one of hundreds of cars doing the exact same thing. I know why I was pulled over and why I got any ticket at all. And I’ve learned not to disagree or to question these guys over the years because things can get very ugly very fast. I thanked him for his leniency and drove the rest of the way at 55 mph in the right hand lane.”
Althea Gibson was the first Black woman to play on the Ladies Professional Golf Tour, and the first to play in a major woman’s U.S. Tennis tournament. She went on to international dominance of women’s tennis for a decade in the 1950’s. Ms. Gibson, who died virtually penniless a month ago in East Orange, once wrote:
“No matter how liberal, how well accepted into the white community, no matter how popular or famous, no matter how unprejudiced a Negro may be, most of us have to wear some sort of mask outside of our own group.” No matter Althea Gibson’s talent, popularity and celebrity, no matter Bradley’s long and loyal service to his country, too many great and regular Americans remain strangers in their own land to this day.
Fourth Encounter:
Kate left her position on the high school faculty after several years of frustration and dissatisfaction. It was a constant struggle with both the administration and her colleagues. She didn’t understand how they could hold her in such low esteem.
She loved the children and she loved teaching mathematics. She was a good teacher, so why couldn’t the others see that and appreciate her.
She could see all along that her commitment was much greater than theirs. She could see that her command of her subject was superior, as well. What right did they have questioning her value as a teacher? And yet, it seemed they were doing just that all the time. She’d finally had enough and so she told them so, and then she quit. She didn’t need the aggravation. She needed to find a school where she could be on a faculty with at least a few kindred spirits. In not very much time, with great fortune, she found what seemed to be just the place. It was a school that obviously cared deeply about its students. Her fellow faculty members were, she was delighted to see, clearly as committed as she to helping their students achieve their very highest potential. She could sense that they appreciated the addition she would make to their program. They made her feel welcomed.
It was a great place to work, at least for a while. And then, little by little, things began to change. Some old familiar feelings were beginning to reappear. Kate didn’t really think that her attitude or dealings were falling short of the mark. But she began to notice, though she surely didn’t want to, that the other teachers really weren’t quite all that they’d seemed to be in the first place. Maybe it really wasn’t quite such a wonderful place, she thought. And little by little, she noticed that the others weren’t as appreciative of her many talents as she had originally sensed. And little by little the teacher’s lounge began to seem more and more an unfriendly place. And day by day it became harder and harder to drag herself to work. Eventually, she started to think that maybe it was time to move on again. Ann Marrow Lindbergh wrote in, Gift From the Sea, “When one is a stranger to oneself then one is a stranger from others, too. If one is out of touch with oneself, then one cannot touch others.” Kate had learned to feel – over and over – like a stranger in the company of others who didn’t see things quite as clearly as she. The stranger she had most failed to come to terms with though, was the one within herself.
Epilogue:
The German mystical poet Rilke wrote pleadingly about the strange and the unknown:
“I want to beg you as much as I can… to be patient towards all that is unsolved in your heart and to try to love the questions themselves.... Do not seek answers which cannot be given you because you would not be able to live them. And the point is to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps you will then gradually, without noticing it, live along some distant day into the answer… Take whatever comes with great trust, and if it only comes out of your own will, out of some need of your innermost being, take it upon yourself and hate nothing.”
I’m sure we’ve all had experiences of being and feeling like the stranger, when everything and everybody is new. Some of us sometimes might retreat and take things a little more passively. Some of us sometimes might come in a little louder and maybe more brash than we might imagine. I wonder if, at those times, we’re at all aware of how our compensations appear to others and of how much strangeness we might inadvertently add to our experience of being strangers. I’m sure we’ve all had experiences, when someone else was the identified stranger, when, by merely speaking up we could ease that other person’s discomfort. And I imagine that sometimes we respond faithfully to that call for action and that sometimes we do not. And I wonder, what might be the difference between those times when we act and the times when we don’t. And I have to imagine that the difference is not something outside of ourselves but something inside. And we’ve learned to see that something inside as being strange. Rather than owning the strangeness, we hide from ourselves and from others so that we won’t have to change the way that we think about ourselves or threaten the way we think others might think about us.
I’m sure we’ve all had far too many opportunities to recognize that we live in a homophobic and racist culture. We don’t want it to be that way, of course. Still, we know that it is. And in our deepest hearts some of us know that our comfortable and privileged lives are dependent on oppression and exclusion, and the making of strangers of others. We don’t want others to be oppressed, but do we really want to give up very much of what we’ve saved up for ourselves or our families, just so everyone might have the same opportunities? And so we sometimes let the other be a stranger to us, relegated to some distant roadside, struggling alone for their rights and their wellbeing. And that’s not the way we’d want it, but what can we do when we don’t even know the person? And if we are willing to think about it in an honest and maybe painful way, do we encounter something in ourselves that we’d rather not know? And then who really is the stranger? I have to imagine that we’ve all been blindsided, on occasion, by parts of ourselves – parts that we’ve denied, parts that we’ve kept at a distance, parts with which we’d just as soon remain strangers. And sometimes those parts are where we’ve covered up our shortcomings. And when we keep them covered up, we refuse to acknowledge them; we never learn their lessons and we repeat our mistakes over and over again.
There is something consistent in all of these encounters with the stranger; whether we are the stranger in a strange place looking to make ourselves feel more at home; whether we are a stranger to ourselves, hiding from what we don’t want to know; whether we are not the stranger but the potential welcomer, perhaps unsure of our capacity to welcome. There is a consistent theme that runs through all of these experiences and that is that they each contain a good measure of mystery and the unknown. They ask us to hold the unknown, to embrace the mystery. They ask us to grow and to live forward, expanding into a fuller life. They ask us to learn to be comfortable in our own skins so that we can help to ease the discomfort of others.
Mothers and fathers, for goodness sake, please don’t tell your children to never trust a stranger. If they follow those instructions, they’ll never be able to trust themselves either. Help them instead to learn to embrace the stranger in a way that’s safe for themselves and for the stranger. The good neighbor, the Good Samaritan, is the one who showed mercy who approaches and who cares for the complete stranger lying in the ditch by the side of the road. Ought we do any less?
For indeed, “We [each] could have been anyone who ceased walking millennia ago, or someone who will walk a thousand years after [we are] forgotten. All people see the same things… [And] what courage we have is a courage found in everyone.” (Kenneth Patton)
May we learn to be better students of the code that tells us to love our neighbors as ourselves. May we find that courage to embrace those shadowy strangers within so that we might be more hospitable to the ones outside ourselves. We are all human together. We are the stranger waiting to be welcomed; the welcomer waiting to be set free. With grace may we learn to be ever more ones who do the religious task of making a homeland out of what has been strange.
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