Belonging

Rev. Miller Hoffman
Temple Concord, Binghamton NY
June 11, 2021

I’ve been thinking about that Marge Piercy poem, The Low Road. It gets quoted a lot, maybe too much, not unlike that Margaret Mead business about a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens. I love it, though. I love it.

What can they do
to you? Whatever they want.
They can set you up, they can
bust you, they can break
your fingers, they can
burn your brain with electricity,
blur you with drugs till you
can’t walk, can’t remember, they can
take your child, wall up
your lover. They can do anything
you can’t stop them
from doing. How can you stop
them? Alone, you can fight,
you can refuse, you can
take what revenge you can
but they roll over you.

But two people fighting
back to back can cut through
a mob, a snake-dancing file
can break a cordon, an army
can meet an army.
Two people can keep each other
sane, can give support, conviction,
love, massage, hope, sex.
Three people are a delegation,
a committee, a wedge. With four
you can play bridge and start
an organization. With six
you can rent a whole house,
eat pie for dinner with no
seconds, and hold a fund raising party.
A dozen make a demonstration.
A hundred fill a hall.
A thousand have solidarity and your own newsletter;
ten thousand, power and your own paper;
a hundred thousand, your own media;
ten million, your own country.

It goes on one at a time,
it starts when you care
to act, it starts when you do
it again and they said no,
it starts when you say We
and know who you mean, and each
day you mean one more.

I’ve been thinking about the end of this pandemic, and about belonging. About how do we build community again, in all the ways that we mean that — taking in the strange time disconnections that we have, long days and short months, taking in our lost social skills and how the easy ways we were with each other have become more stilted and more awkward, taking in the levels to which we maybe don’t even realize we are holding our breath, tensing, carrying our tightness, our watchfulness. Taking in the new names of unarmed Black boys and men and barely armed Black teen girls whom we’ve added to our growing list of unarmed and barely armed Black friends and neighbors shot down, calling it justified, how our Black friends and neighbors are tracking the numbers of people shot down at the grocery store. Shot down on a jog in the street. Shot down on their own couch, in their own bed. Taking in, too, the list of Black and brown trans women we’ve suddenly stopped tracking this year, it seems, whom suddenly we’ve stopped talking about and being aware of, maybe because the media doesn’t or maybe we don’t have the bandwidth to hold onto all of this loss, all of the people we are losing, all of the tension and anxiety. And maybe some of our self-care strategies are about shutting it out. Or using some of those old algorithms based on those old biases. How do we regroup, and hold on to what we’ve learned and gained this hard year, and find back what we lost that we need, and stay present with the hard stuff that isn’t directly ours to try to share the burden of it with those in the direct line of fire? How do we re-build community after all this?

There’s a thing I do in my professional work with sexual abuse survivors, or as a chaplain with people at the hospital or their families who are struggling, and I ask what they’ve tried already that works. (And what doesn’t, so let’s not try that again. That was a disaster.) But what strategies had some success and that maybe as things started to even out we lost sight of? I’ve been thinking about this for myself, the stuff I know about, firsthand or firsthand from my people. You have stuff, too, that is your firsthand or your people firsthand stuff. What has worked? What can we use again from before?

I was in New York City on 9/11. That city is so tough, so jaded and has seen everything. You just can’t surprise it most days. And 9/11 rocked us. Scared us. And there was this change for a while. Not forever, you know, not even for long before we got our cool back, our nonchalance. But we laid off being angry, escalate-y, chest-thump-y for a minute and slowed down. Folks smiled more; it was so startling. It is so startling to be smiled at by a stranger. Folks locked eyes for a second instead of looking quickly away, and folks smiled more at strangers. Held doors for each other. Picked things up that people dropped on the street. That happened before and still does, don’t get me wrong. NYC’s heart is always soft somewhere, always beating somewhere. It was just more often those days, more often in more places for a while. With more strangers that folks didn’t know, had no reason to trust, who didn’t look like each other or have things in common. Except we all had this thing in common.

We all had that day in common. Most of us knew someone who was in those towers. Or we knew someone who knew someone. I lived out in Brooklyn, in Kensington, and I remember police were stationed at mosques, and I wondered whether they were there for “their” safety, or for “ours,” and I wondered who “we” were, and who is “they.” I remember people saying they “don’t feel safe any more” and I understood what they meant, because most of us shuddered a little when a plane passed overhead and lots of us, our heart flickered when the lights snapped off suddenly on the train. But, and this is an important but, I had friends who said, “I already didn’t feel safe before.” They already didn’t feel safe, and everyone else was getting a taste of what they had always felt, because they were queer Black women, or gay Black men, or genderqueer fat Latine self defense instructors, or soft butch dykes holding hands in Prospect Heights.

In 2003 when Ohio blew a fuse and the lights went off across the whole NE, so many of our bodies in NYC remembered, shuddered, tensed. We walked home again from Manhattan across some of the same bridges where the same trains weren’t running. Throughout Brooklyn, folks moved outside to play baseball and sit in the grass. Folks pulled the meat out of the warming freezers and cooked it up on sidewalk grills, set out tables and chairs in the streets and on the curbs and played Calypso Jazz from their speakers, or Arturo O’Farrill, and ate and danced on their blocks.

And what worked during those days and months of reconnecting after 9/11, for lots of us, was tapping into what we shared that day. Holding that awareness in our hands like a stone, turning it over, rubbing it against our own skin, looking at its edges. We became the woman in the Buddha’s parable who had gone from house to house looking for a family who had never lost a loved one, so that she could ask for a white mustard seed to raise up her dead son. And what she found instead, instead of a magic seed that returned everything back to “normal,” she found instead a community, she found herself surrounded by people who had grieved, who were grieving, whose open, wounded hearts could connect and find a home for hers. What worked after that Blackout in 2003 for so many people was generosity, easy openness. I walked through Brooklyn Heights and Prospect Heights and Prospect Park on a hot August afternoon, and watched businesses and families and shopkeeps just relax into what they were about to lose, and open it up and grill it up and share it – with a Red Stripe or a Presidente – with whoever they found on the sidewalk.

I don’t remember much about AIDS until after the cocktail, after ACT UP had splintered from GMHC, after our people – “our” people, yes? – had been decimated by a pandemic, by a president who did not care who died, did not call the disease by its name. But I knew Keith Haring, Sylvester, Nureyev, Freddie Mercury, and countless, countless others. I cried when sculpture artist Felix Gonzalez-Torres put 175 pounds of candy in a corner of the Brooklyn Museum and invited us to eat it and diminish the pile like the disease did to his lover, Ross. I cry still when I watch Angels in America and The Band Played On and A Normal Heart and the others. I know faith communities that held funerals every week, mourned and memorialized lovers and friends often without their bodies, which were taken in death by family that had spurned them in life, taken them and taken their property and cleaned them up and made them decent and left their lovers and their friends outside.

I know that what worked for a lot of us in those years and in the years after was the die-ins and protests and investing time and risking freedom – Marge Piercy, “What can they do to you? Whatever they want.” – risking freedom and safety, putting our bodies at risk for this thing we shared, for the body that we are only when you put us together. At Stonewall, Storme, or whoever it was who got the first key off that first police, didn’t just unlock her own cuffs and beat it home. She passed the key back. I don’t know what’s fact and what’s fiction about that day and week, except that Stonewall was a bar for losers, and most of those losers were Black, brown, and genderqueer, and were unarmed or armed with bottles and pennies and dog piles against the special Tactical Police Force. And I know that we didn’t beat it home.

What worked was staying and yelling and shutting down business as usual. What worked was making art and film and poetry. Dorothy Allison, Audre Lorde, James Baldwin, Lucille Clifton: “Come celebrate with me that every day something has tried to kill me, and has failed.” That poem by Marge Piercy: “Two people can keep each other sane, can give support, conviction, love, massage, hope, sex. Three people are a delegation, a committee, a wedge.”

Dolly Parton donated a million dollars to developing the vaccine, and then stood in line with everyone else for the shot. That worked. Biden has gotten Pfizer to make 500 million shots for poor countries at the reduced not-for-profit rate. That works. And some shmoe bakery in Texas with only three staff and every-order-counts lost customers because they made Pride cookies (what is up with homophobes and baked goods?), and normal, schmoe people in that small shmoe Texas town went and stood in line for days and bought out every last thing in that shop, placed orders, bought cookies and gave them away. How cool is that. That worked. I am a cold-hearted cynical nontheist person who doesn’t think much about June Pride anymore and swears, a lot, and that story make my eyes hurt a little, like when I chop onions. My god is in that story.

What works for you? What stories of survival do you have firsthand or do your people tell you stories of? What worked? What worked after sobriety, those little bites. One day. One day. Showing up.

I know we need patience, we need to to invite everyone. I know we need to take naps and have picnics and watch crap tv and check out so that we can check back in for ourselves and each other. I think we need to make art. To use humor. To be generous. To listen. I think we need to listen to people who are mad at us, who need something from us, who are telling us what we don’t even know that we don’t know. I think we need to listen to the people making us uncomfortable and get more experience being uncomfortable and get more practiced with sitting with that discomfort and listening.

I know that all of this is in our own best interest, whether for our own safety and satisfaction, for our own sense of being a good citizen or a good neighbor, or because we’re safer when more people are safer, we’re safer when more of the world is vaccinated. Sometimes we need to have a more selfish motive like that to get started, to get our momentum going. But eventually I think we can get to doing kind stuff for the same reasons we plant butterfly bushes or quit killing spiders, because it’s right for butterflies and spiders. And maybe that’s not just a self-serving instinct anyway but a budding realization that we are connected, deeply connected, that we inter-are, that there is not a spot where I stop and you start. That we are like that forest of seemingly-individual, distinct trees that have a completely interwoven root system and are in fact one giant living organism.

I do think we need to do it even, especially when it’s hard and uncomfortable, to keep plugging away every day, to remember that our friends cannot take breaks from racism, from anti-trans violence, knowing it can happen and keeps happening at any time, in the grocery store, at the park on a merry-go-round, walking home from the 7-11, on any Saturday, jogging down the street in the middle of the week in the middle of the day, in their own beds, on their own couches.

It goes on one at a time,
it starts when we care
to act, it starts when we do
it again and they said no,
it starts when we say We
and know who we mean, and each
day we mean one more.

Peace.