Sermon: Wake Up One Morning

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At the Republican debate in Detroit last month the candidates were discussing Flint – specifically, what to make of the coincidence that the thousands of children and adults whose drinking water was contaminated with lead were mostly black. Senator Marco Rubio was saying that it’s unfair to politicize the issue. He said, “I don’t think someone woke up one morning and said let’s figure out how to poison the water system to hurt someone.”

 

He’s absolutely right about that. Nobody did just wake up one morning and decide to hurt someone. Instead, someone, to save money, decided to unhook the city of Flint from its fresh water source, Lake Huron, and hook them up to the polluted Flint River. Someone else, to save money, decided to not treat the water with a chemical that would keep lead out of it. When the crisis began to come to light, someone ignored it, someone hid evidence, and someone tampered with lead tests, to save their own jobs. When people complained about the yellow, foul-tasting water someone advised them to boil it, which of course does nothing about lead. When General Motors complained that the water was corroding the car engines in their Flint plant, someone decided to switch them, and only them, back to Lake Huron water. Someone thought it was okay to let children drink water that corrodes engines.

 

No one woke up one morning and set out to hurt anyone. And yet hurt people they did. In phrasing it, “No one woke up one morning and…,” Senator Rubio (or anyone else who uses that kind of language) is diverting attention from the big picture. It suggests that if it wasn’t malice then the only other option is that it was just a series of innocent mistakes – garden-variety bureaucratic ineptitude. Sure, you have to fire them, but it didn’t mean anything. It could have happened anywhere. We know that that’s not true either. We all know that this simply would not have happened in a wealthy white community. And if it had begun to happen, it would have been fixed in a nanosecond. There is another explanation besides individual malicious intent and individual innocent incompetence. It’s called a systems explanation. In this case, systemic racism. Systemic classism. A systemic hyper-valuing of the financial bottom line and a devaluing of human lives. A systemic failure of moral courage. A systemic failure of compassion. It’s the system.

 

This is not to say that individuals are not responsible. Of course individuals in this situation acted stunningly unethically and they should be held accountable. But did this behavior spring spontaneously from some inherent defect in their hearts? Did they just “wake up one morning” like this? No. In our individualistic culture, we tend to focus on the “bad apples.” But we keep trying to throw out the bad apples and we find more and more and more. And it’s not because people are bad, or white people are bad or rich people are bad. But that the systems in which we all live are far more powerful than we know. They have a life of their own. They form us from the start in ways that we can’t even begin to fathom. And the most insidious thing about systems – the thing that has slowed our progress in so many dimensions of human life – is that they tend to be invisible to whoever is inside them.

 

The psychiatrist Dr. Murray Bowen back in the 1950’s came up with a way to think about this phenomenon to help his patients. He found that when a patient came to him with a problem – the kind that Freud might have called an individual “neurosis –” it was more often an expression of something in the patient’s family system – current family, family of origin or, often, both. He coined the term “family systems theory.” Dysfunction doesn’t belong to individuals but to the system as a whole. Someone feels burdened by doing all the work in the family, while someone else is feeling infantilized by not being given any responsibilities. Or someone is stuck in the role of the family “clown,” while someone else in the family is terrified of what might happen if the clown ever got serious. Dr. Bowen describes how each family system has a shape – family members have certain roles, those roles get replicated across generations. Most importantly the shape of a family system has a powerful inertia. It’s like memory foam. Even if a change would benefit every single one of its members, the system itself resists change.

 

If you’re unsure about this, think about your own family. Better yet, go home today and create a visual map of your family. Make it like a family tree that shows your whole extended family and your current relationships. Siblings, parents, in-laws, children, grandparents, even great-grandparents. But on this family map, called a genogram, you create symbols for people’s various roles and characteristics. Maybe people with depression are marked with a star, maybe wealthy alpha males are marked with a dollar sign. Draw lines between individuals showing their relationship – tension, love, competitiveness. Mark divorce, mark adoption, mark level of education. When you do this, patterns that emerge are really extraordinary. It doesn’t explain everything – no theory does – but it reveals a lot.

 

What are the points of pain in your life that feel intractable? Is it possible that they’re not just yours alone but that they somehow relate to your family system? What are the roles that you and others in your family play? Think about what happens when someone tries to step outside of their assigned role. Does one child have to be the “good child” all the time? Is another child the one with “all the problems?” Is someone the martyr? And someone the hero? Is some the sick one? Is someone the success story? You can go deep into these windy roads. But the key thing is, ask yourself – what happens when someone in the family tries to change?

 

The complexity of the layers of relationships in a family are dizzying. And that’s just one family. Imagine the complexity of the family system that is the city of Flint or the state of Michigan or the United States or the whole human family. Imagine a genogram of our whole species. Entire demographic groups have assigned roles in the system. And the roles interweave and overlap. I have assigned roles as a white person, different assigned roles as a woman, different assigned roles as a straight woman. And there is a powerful invisible force that pulls me toward fulfilling those roles so that everyone else can stay in position and the system doesn’t have to change. So, no, Senator Rubio, of course no one just wakes up one morning and decides to play their assigned role in the family. They just play it. Like they do every other morning. It’s the default. It’s just the way things are. If a family system resists change, imagine how hard it is to change a system that has been entrenched in the collective culture of millions of people over hundreds of years.

 

Hard, but not impossible. People are able to change systems, slowly, and sometimes quickly once we truly see them for what they are. As I said earlier, the great superpower that systems have is invisibility. People within them can’t see them. I don’t fully see how I’m shaped as a woman by patriarchy or shaped as a white person by racism. I see some of it, but certainly not all. Much of that systemic shaping, I just experience as “me.” It’s just the air that I breathe. It’s the water I drink. I can’t smell it. I can’t taste it. And so step one, I believe, in changing our systems, is to become able to see them, smell them, and taste them. When it happens, it’s a kind of spiritual awakening. Mini-enlightenments over and over again. We peel back layers of the onion of who we are, realizing layer after layer of what’s been infused into us by our families, our culture. We say, “That’s not me, that’s not me.”

 

The women’s movement of the 60’s and 70’s began with this kind of peeling back the onion. Women gathered in small groups called “consciousness raising groups” where they talked and talked and talked about this vague feeling that they had that things weren’t right. They had this strange discontent with housewife lives that were supposed to be perfect. They shared personal stories of oppression and came to realize that what they had thought of as personal and unique to their families was, in fact, systemic. It was part of the social and political systems in which they were all embedded. By 1973, 100,000 women were members of these consciousness-raising groups (for reference, that’s about how many Unitarian Universalists there are in this country now). It is said that these groups formed the basis of the women’s liberation movement. While we still have miles to go, we have made enormous progress since 1973, so much so that we are looking at a very real possibility of our first woman president. Such is the power of people coming together to try to decipher the edges of the invisible boxes in which we find ourselves.

 

Much as we might like to, we can’t just wake up one morning and change everything. But we can wake up one morning and decide to begin the process. We can commit to trying to see the systems of which we are a part. Maybe we start with our family. Haul the whole family in to therapy, dredge up all our issues and, by talking about it, try to expose the family system itself. Maybe we participate in anti-racism training – by approaching it with an open heart we will probably find all kinds of ways that we (white people and people of color) buy into myths of white superiority. Maybe we form consciousness-raising groups around our relationship to the earth, the ways that we live, and our separation from our source. Maybe we meditate or pray every day. Maybe we keep a Sabbath and once a week, try to disengage from our economic systems, our consumer systems, our technological systems – see what we see when we unplug from all that. Maybe we make genograms of all our systems and keep adding to them as we learn. As our systems get revealed, they have less power. They become more malleable.

 

We can wake up one morning and decide that as the fog starts to clear for us – as we start to see bits and pieces of the systems of which we are a part, we’re going to do everything we can to render them visible to others as well. Even to people – especially to people – who don’t want to see them. Show others what we can see. And keep showing them and keep showing them.

 

We can wake up one morning, as we did this morning, and decide to contribute our own flower to the system. Add ourselves to the mix in hopes that someone we don’t even know may benefit. We can make sure to use whatever power we may have in ways that are fair and compassionate. We can work to change laws, elect people of the highest integrity to public office, stand up against injustice when we see it. We can wake up one morning and say, “A Flint Michigan is never going to happen on my watch.” We can commit to building a world where there is clean water for all our children.