The Dreams of Our Ancestors

By Tania  Márquez

 I am sorry to tell you that there is no place for despair in the hearts of the dream keepers. That when things are not easy, or when we come face to face with hatred or evil, we must show up with love, reaching out to each other to find the strength we need to defend our dreams.

The community of faith we hold today, has been in the works for centuries. A dream of a religious home that many of us walked into unknowingly perhaps. A religious congregation of liberal believers committed to the work of the prophetic church. Our presence here today is the evidence of that dream. We are the dreams of our ancestors.

Let me tell you what I mean by the word “Dream”. I am not using this word in the sense of the experiences we have when we sleep that we tend to regard as unreal nor am I using the word dream to describe an unattainable hope or fantasy. When I say dream, I am referring to the visions we have when we are able to imagine an alternative reality, when we are able to see possibilities, when we know that things can and should be different. In other words, I am using the word dream to refer to a vision of possibility and change.

Possibility and need for change against hatred is what Waitstill and Martha Sharp, a Unitarian Minister and his wife, saw when they were called to Europe to assist political dissidents and Jewish refugees fleeing Nazi occupation. They left their children behind, but grounded on their faith accomplished several dangerous missions that saved the lives of many.

A call of possibility and a need for change brought many clergy and lay people to Selma to join the protest marches to Montgomery when African-American citizens were not allowed to exercise their right to vote. Those gathered in Selma, held on to a dream that promised freedom and equality to all.

We are the prayers of our grandfathers, we are the dreams of our grandmothers.

When I say that we are the dreams of our ancestors, I am not only referring to the ancestors we can trace back in our lineage. I am also referring to those who by fighting for their dreams, by imagining that a different world was possible, paved the way for many of us.

American Novelist and scholar Ralph Ellison once wrote, “Some people are your relatives but others are your ancestors, and you choose the ones you want to have as ancestors. You create yourself out of those values.”

Out of whose values have you created yourself? Out of whose values have we, as a faith community, created ourselves?

When James Luther Adams, a Unitarian minister and professor at Harvard Divinity School, traveled to Germany in 1935 to study with some great Theologians, he was troubled by how the churches were not effectively opposing the Nazis. In the article “James Luther Adam’s examined Faith”, this reflection is quoted

“Let me put it autobiographically and say that in Nazi Germany I soon came to the question, «What is it in my preaching and my political action that would stop this?» . . . It is a liberal attitude to say that we keep ourselves informed and read the best papers on these matters, and perhaps join a voluntary association now and then. But to be involved with other people so that it costs and so that one exposes the evils of society . . . requires something like conversion, something more than an attitude. It requires a sense that there’s something wrong and I must be different from the way I have been.”

The Sharps and James Luther Adams are some of the people that have laid foundations, set paths, and created ways for us to live our faith boldly. Our Faiths has been made by the values they, and others, have set forth for us. These are ancestors we can claim and whose wisdom we can access to guide our own justice-seeking journeys.

“We are our grandmother’s prayers. We are our grandfather’s dreaming.”

They are the line of ancestors to which we belong. In many ways, we are their dreams. We are the dreams of our ancestors who had a vision of a nation where our right to vote would not be determined by our gender or the color of our skin. The dream of our ancestors who fought for survival and for whom our mere presence in this world on this day is a victory. The dream of love of our ancestors who knew that the color of our skins or ethnic backgrounds should not stop us from falling in love or from having access to education and fair wages. We are the dream of our ancestors who had a vision of a living and active faith that invites us into fellowship beyond creeds, that calls us to action beyond fear. We are the dreams of pioneer women in science and engineering, the dreams of activists and social justice seekers, the dreams of artists, singers, makers, risk-takers, dissidents, creators, lovers, and freedom-seekers.

The thing about the dreams our ancestors fought for in the past, and the dreams we fight for today is that they don’t just happen. We can’t just wish them and wait for them to be. In our commitment to our dreams we find that, we are the ones to do the work. We are the ones to put the pieces together and build create them. Though our ancestors have done some building of the dream, the work is not yet complete.

In the vision of the Beloved Community we hold, there’s no space for hatred. Some have glorified the Civil Rights era as a time of great change and great victories in this country and many have thought of the work as completed. We have learned about the horrors committed by humans in history and many think of them as part of the past and no longer a current issue.

However, if you have been keeping up with the news, you’d know that the public demonstrations of white supremacist groups in Charlottesville, Virginia tell us otherwise. That racism continues to be present in our day and time, and that it’s loud and has no intention of remaining hidden. That, for many among us, the dream of freedom and peace continues is not real yet, but indeed, just a dream.

But as I read many of the headlines yesterday, the words that kept jumping at me were “counter protesters” and “resistance”. There were a lot more people resisting than white supremacists, but that’s not what the media will tell us.

The political unrest and violent demonstrations in Kenya and in Venezuela, the abuse of the law, and the striping away of dignity and worth of certain lives. Are we paying attention?

James Luther Adams would ask “How are we different from what we have been after witnessing such wrongs?” How are we, as a community of Faith, paying attention and interpreting the signs of our time, the human behavior we are witnessing, and how are we going to mend our common ways?

In 1963, Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. shared his vision of a dream for our nation. A dream that was passed on to us, to all of us and that we must continue to hold and make true. That’s the prophetic work we’re called to do in defense of that dream.

Yesterday, in Charlottesville, the resisters, the counter protesters, the fighters showed us what sometimes takes to defend a dream. And every time we call out injustice, every time we become aware of the ways in which we have been complicit, every time we unveil the truth behind legislations and institutions that protect the few…we, too, are defending the dream.

Because we all have received the baton, and so we are all responsible for continuing the work; in our communities, in the places we move and interact with others. Every time we act on our values to heal the world, we begin weaving our dreams with the dreams of our ancestors. As we speak up and resist, we strengthen the web of justice. As we solidarize ourselves with those at the forefront, with those whose lives are directly affected by injustices, we let them know they’re not alone.

We are bridges, and builders, connectors, guardians, and dreamkeepers, we have been handed down wisdom from our ancestors that we must pass on to our children. We don’t pass that wisdom intact, but with something more. With traces of our own work, traces of our own dreaming.

Paul Tsongas, late senator from Massachussets said “We are a continuum. Just as we reach back to our ancestors for our fundamental values, so we, as guardians of that legacy, must reach ahead to our children and their children. And we do so with a sense of sacredness in that reaching.”

So, whose ancestors will you be? How has your being in the world today secured the dream someone will walk into in the future? How will you protect a dream of justice in the making?

Understanding our lives as a continuum, seeing our lives in relationship to those who came before us and those who are coming after us, is a reason for hope.

Events like yesterday’s, and the overwhelming loss of black and brown lives at the hands of those who are meant to protect them, can bring despair. It can be exhausting to feel like we are not doing enough, or that not enough people are paying attention, or that the wrongs in the world are far greater and more daunting, that we imagined.

But I am sorry to tell you that there is no place for despair in the hearts of the dream keepers. That when things are not easy, or when we come face to face with hatred or evil, we must show up with love, reaching out to each other to find the strength we need to defend our dreams.

That’s the conversion that must happen, that’s when we stop and know that we can’t be the same ones we have been.

So don’t despair, that won’t help anybody. But look for a way forward. And if all you can do is name the wrong, make sure you do so loud and clear. Make sure you call it by its name: racism, terrorism, evil. Make everyone hear you!

In the work of building the dream, sometimes we get to plant seeds, sometimes we get to pull weeds, and some rare times we get a little of the harvest.

As we go through life planting seeds, we must remember that flowers bloom in their own time, and their time may or may not be in our time. So we must trust that they will. We must trust that others will follow even when we can’t yet see their silhouettes on the horizon. We must continue weaving our dreams into the fabric of our human history. We must surrender our desire to know and see and trust that when our dreams escape from our lifetime, they will become the reality of those that come after us.

Showing up for justice and holding the visions of those who came before, is a way to honor them, and holding and fighting for our dreams is a way to sustain those yet to come.

You are already someone’s ancestor. Your way of being in the world touches lives and sends a ripple effect that will never be fully known to you. So, weave your visions into the fabric of life that’s been thousands of years in the making, into the web of life that extends beyond the temporality of our lives, because that, too, is sacred work.

Let me close with these words from our UUA president Rev. Susan Frederick-Gray who was present at the Charlottesville counter protest “As a people of faith, it is this overflowing, deep abiding love that must guide us to show up again and again for justice, for inclusion, for dignity and humanity.”

A dream of justice, inclusion, dignity, and humanity has been the prayer of our grandmothers. It has been the dream of many of our ancestors, and this is the dream we have been entrusted to continue building.