‘Ring the Bells That Still Can Ring’

By Emily Bruce
UUAC First Parish at Sherborn
June 7, 2020

Reading – ‘A Power Governments Cannot Suppress’ (excerpt) by Howard Zinn

To be hopeful in bad times is not just foolishly romantic. It is based on the fact that human history is a history not only of cruelty, but also of compassion, sacrifice, courage, kindness. What we choose to emphasize in this complex history will determine our lives. 

If we see only the worst, it destroys our capacity to do something. 

If we remember those times and places - and there are so many - where people have behaved magnificently, this gives us the energy to act, and at least the possibility of sending this spinning top of a world in a different direction. 
And if we do act, in however small a way, we don’t have to wait for some grand utopian future. The future is an infinite succession of presents, and to live now as we think human beings should live, in defiance of all that is bad around us, is itself a marvelous victory. 

Sermon – ‘Ring the Bells That Still Can Ring’

Good morning everyone. Thank you for gathering here today. Thank you for showing up for each other and for yourselves during this hard time of reckoning in our country. 

Gratitude and joy are hard topics right now. I feel it. I struggled with approaching this sermon topic. See, I decided weeks ago - before George Floyd’s death and the resulting protests that have gripped our nation - that this was going to be a service of celebration and joy for all of the things that Covid 19 cancelled – birthdays, anniversaries, graduations. Along with the ceremonies for our RE teachers, our bridgers, and our new members, I was going to lift up in celebration all of the milestones that we, as a community, have achieved despite the global pandemic. 

But I don’t feel like celebrating right now. I feel angry, guilty for my privilege, wanting to speak up but also inadequate, sad. Overwhelmed. Exhausted. I imagine I am not alone in naming some of these feelings.  

 But I was talking to a dear friend the other day – she and her fiancée are getting married in September and I am officiating their wedding. The day we were talking was the 100th day until the wedding date, and she wanted to post something on social media about it. She wanted to celebrate that in 100 days she was going to marry the love of her life. 

But, she told me that she had decided not to post anything. She said “I don’t feel like it’s appropriate to be happy about anything right now. The world is on fire and won’t it look selfish and insensitive to post about my wedding?”

I’ll admit that at first I thought she had a point. How dare she be happy on social media in the midst of so much protest and anger and pain? 

But then I stopped and thought “No.” Because thinking about her wedding, thinking about being there and getting to be the person who marries her and her fiancée, brings a big smile to my face. For a brief moment, it lifts me up. And it’s a lift I sorely need. 

I told her “No, post something. Celebrate this momentous event – it’s a big deal and it should be celebrated. Especially now, when everything feels like it’s burning down, your wedding reminds me that there are things to hope for.”

Ring the bells that still can ring. Some of you already know where that line comes from. My first Sunday here at UUAC, Nathan started his sermon, as he often does with (say it with me) “Forget your perfect offering, there is a crack in everything, that is how the light gets in.” 

The line right before that is “Ring the bells that still can ring.” When I heard Nathan, my first thought was “Oh! I love that song.” My second thought was “Wait! He forgot a line!”

So today that is my invitation to all of you. Ring the bells that still can ring. Find and grasp the joy and gratitude that life is offering you right now. Celebrate that which deserves celebration – everything from weddings and graduations to blooming flowers and baby birds in their nest. Ring the bells – all of them. 

Now, I say that not to discourage the calls for justice but to support them. I offer this message not as a distraction from the protests and the anger and the resistance, but as a means of sustaining that fight.  

This is a long road, friends. We have a lot of work ahead of us - especially those of us who are white. We need to be resilient. We need to pace ourselves so that we can see the long arc of the universe bending toward justice.  We are certainly in a moment right now, but systemic oppression is not a moment. It’s not an event. It’s a system built on decades of power and privilege. And those systems are not dismantled overnight. 

So I think we need to hold our grief and our rage in one hand, while we hold joy and gratitude in the other. It’s not an either/or – you don’t have to choose between them. In our reading, Howard Zinn said “human history is a history not only of cruelty, but also of compassion, sacrifice, courage and kindness.” We humans have an infinite capacity for weaving the complexities of life together: happiness and sorrow, anger and jubilation. 

Celebrating joy and feeling gratitude does not mean you are being selfish, it does not mean you are ignoring the pain of others, it does not mean that you are indifferent to suffering. 

Joy gives us fuel to keep going. Gratitude builds resilience, it fosters mental well-being, it can make us stronger and don’t we all need more strength right now to respond to the cries of our world?

Psychology professor Robert Emmons states that “In the face of demoralization, gratitude has the power to energize. In the face of brokenness, gratitude has the power to heal. In the face of despair, gratitude has the power to bring hope.”

And, I’ll add that gratitude reminds us that we belong to each other, that we belong to something bigger than ourselves. Our community is our place of belonging, this place holds us all during this hard time. And it is in this community, with each other, that we can find the strength to do the work of resistance, of understanding and undoing white privilege, and to reach for the beginnings of the healing that is so sorely needed in our world. 

Friends, my list of gratitude and joy is long. I am grateful for this community, for belonging to it. I am grateful for my family. I find joy in the birds that come to my feeder each morning. I find bliss in a daily nap, in cooking myself good food, in long talks with old friends. I am renewed by the solidarity I am witnessing in daily protests around the globe. And I love with my whole heart our faith, that has always stepped up to answer the call to justice. 

These are the bells that I can still ring. Friends, find your bells and ring them. I urge you to do so – they are waiting for you. Howard Zinn says “to live now as we think human beings should live, in defiance of all that is bad around us, is itself a marvelous victory.” If we want a world of justice and peace, let us not lose sight of the joy that is already available to us and the gratitude we can build upon. That is how we will make it down this long road together. Amen.