“ Occupying the Place Where We Live—this Season of Hanukkah”

© Rev. Susan Karlson

December 18, 2011

Unitarian Church of Staten Island

Rabbi Michael Lerner is a prolific writer and founder of Tikkun magazine. He wrote about powerful images from Christianity and Judaism at this time of year and how they are relevant to us now in Occupy Hanukkah and Christmas: “The symbolism of a homeless couple who give birth in a manger surrounded by animals because the more comfortable people have not been able to make room for them inside a roofed home is, like the candles lit on Hanukkah to celebrate the victory of the powerless over the powerful, a powerful reminder that both Judaism born of slaves in Egypt and Christianity born of a movement of the poor and powerless, were in their times the "Occupy" movement that confronted the powerful and those who served them.”

We are in trouble in this country and it’s not just the income inequality, the unemployment, the decimation of our schools, the erosion of workers rights, the industrialization of health care or the impasse on immigration. It’s much deeper than these “issues.”

When I saw the sign in front of Judson Memorial Church that read, “Occupy Wall Street isn’t just a jobs issue, or a bank issue, or a health care issue, or even an immigration issue. It’s a spiritual issue about what has happened to the United States”, I felt that “aha” of recognition, that little shiver down the spine that tells you that some profound truth has just gotten through the morass of synapses in the brain.

I was not among those who immediately took to the Occupy movement. At first I thought it too alienating, too demonizing of those in the upper 1% as if the wealthiest all are demagogues that we should distrust and despise. As much as I wanted to believe in a movement that would focus on what is broken and battered in this country, as much as I wanted to see this country’s young adults and allies find common cause as they have in countries throughout the Middle East since last spring, I didn’t see Occupy Wall Street as that movement.

To be honest, I think I started to come around when I saw the blog, “I am the 1%. I stand with the 99%”, a source for one of our readings this morning Then I heard about the Council of Elders (the leaders of my generation’s struggle for justice) who passed the torch to the Occupy movement. I learned of Occupy Faith, a broad-based interfaith group that stands in solidarity as allies, to sing, pray, serve, and lead worship for the Occupiers.

I get it. This is a non-violent movement that can focus our attention on what has gone so badly here at a deeper psycho-spiritual level. The critiques of Occupy Wall Street and our fledgling efforts with Occupy Staten Island, meeting at this church for about the past month, point out that people are not unified; they are split about what’s important. That sounds familiar—how do you come to consensus in any organization with fiercely independent people who are motivated to create change and are sometimes desperate to right the inequalities and the injustice so easily discernible all around us?

Talking about the idealism of Occupy Wall Street with a good friend, we agreed that it might be hard to resist the pull of complacency if we were to win the lottery and became part of the 1 %. Would we join the “We are the 1%. We stand with the 99%”? Would we live out our ideals? Would we sell out or give it all away?

I yearn for a world where compassion is at the core of our lives. Not the sappy, cotton candy compassion but the real challenging, gut wrenching Compassion that Karen Armstrong writes about in her book, Twelve Steps to A Compassionate Life . Her understanding coming from digging into the world’s religions, particularly Judaism, Christianity and Islam,is not bleeding heart liberalism. To have compassion is to understand what motivates us deep down, what inspires us to see beyond categories, class distinctions, racial divides, and all the thousands of ways we choose to segregate ourselves from others.

Compassion is about peering into an analysis of our own world-view while keeping an openness to explore those of others whose views may be quite contrary to our own. It’s a way to reach beyond where we are today to where we could be as a society if we saw an alternate vision. But it’s not easy or simple. Tikkun olam, healing the brokenness in the world, is a calling. It doesn’t just happen. And it starts within our own beating heart.

Rabbi Michael Lerner’s question intrigues me. He clarifies this assuredly “spiritual issue” when he writes, “Ask people how they imagine their society would be different if the original messages of Hanukkah or Christmas were being taken seriously today. Would the rabbis who said that the central command of Torah was to "love your neighbor as yourself" and "love the stranger," or would Jesus of Nazareth, our great Jewish teacher who Christians embraced as their messiah, be outraged at a society that celebrated these holidays but turned its back on the poor and the powerless?”

Hanukkah is based on the revolt of the Maccabees—a family who’d had enough!; enough constraints on their freedom to practice their religion; enough of a takeover of their Temple; enough of the Greco Syrian Empire meddling in their lives. So they revolted and against all odds, they won. They overthrew an Empire. But the Maccabees then became the powerful and the corrupt—the very characteristics and actions they deplored in the Greeks they took on themselves.

And that is always a possibility if respect, compassion, deep listening and open mindedness are thrown out; if we forget the spiritual issues at the root of our brokenness. So we come back to that central question—what is the place you occupy right now in your life? How goes it with your conscience, with the way you live your life? And with how you relate to the whole 100% traveling on this earth with you?

And what is the place you want to occupy this year? You may not go to Liberty Park. You may not attend any meetings here in the church that hosts Occupy Staten Island but we are all part of this spiritually broken nation. How will you occupy your life? How will you honor a new inclusive vision of a country with peace, justice, and freedom for all?

Earlier we sang in the Occupy spirit, that was present in the Jewish revolts, “Have we come this far always believing that justice would somehow prevail? And this is the burden and this is the promise and this is why we will not fail.”

Martin Luther King made famous the words of Unitarian minister, Theodore Parker, “the moral arc of the universe is long but it bends toward justice”—this is why we will not ultimately fail. May it be so.