Drinking from Our Own Wells

Imade a fascinating discovery in Guadalajara, Mexico, about 30 years ago. At the time I was agraduate student at the University of Kansas. I needed to pass a couple of advanced courses in Spanish in order to fulfill my language requirement. I figured that I would get that out of the way in the summer session. What I didn’t realize is that all the university’s summer Spanish courses were taught in Guadalajara, not in Lawrence. I decided to go anyway. Off I went, taking the bus from Laredo to Guadalajara, figuring that I would find a place to live when I got there. I had three hundred dollars to last me for two months, so I needed to find something pretty cheap.

After a couple of days in an inexpensive pensión, I found a home that offered room and board to students. It was a simple, but large, home. I think there were eight students living there: three Americans and five Mexicans. It was only a couple of blocks from the university. The family took in student boarders as a way of supplementing their income.

It was in this home that I made my discovery. I discovered that I was far more Mexican than I had realized. Being a little slow about these things, it took me several weeks to make my discovery. It finally dawned on me that the two other American students, both of whom were graduate students in Spanish and spoke fluent Spanish, were often a little uncomfortable around the house. They sometimes did not pick up on humor; they sometimes didn’t pick up on the playful teasing that went on in the household; they didn’t understand how the male head of the household expected to be treated, nor what the appropriate mix of respect and informality was appropriate with the señora. I realized that I knew all of this, but that I had not known that I knew it. I knew what the gestures meant. I understood what a given tone of voice indicated. I understood the roles and the unwritten rules. The other Americans did not know. I found this very strange.

Then it hit me: the other Americans were in a foreign country, but I wasn’t. I realized that I had crossed a political border when I went to Guadalajara, but that I had not crossed a cultural border. I had grown up in a variation of this culture in San Antonio. Living with this family was like visiting relatives I had not met before. The family relationships and communication patterns were so much like dozens of families I had known growing up. Living in Guadalajara made me realize that although my Spanish had gotten rusty, this culture was deep inside me in ways I had never realized.

Think for a moment about your own past—where you were raised, people in your family, the religious group you were raised in. A few of you grew up speaking a different language. Most of you grew somewhere else. All of this past is part of you now. All of it is deep inside you. So many of us have had the powerful experience of revisiting where we grew up, or visiting a far off place where our parents or grandparents were raised and feeling a sense of connection.

We have probably all had the experience of being in a situation where we were instinctively comfortable. We felt somehow at home. We had an intuitive feeling that these were our people. It is as though we had been there before.

Well, in a sense we were there before. I’m not talking about anything supernatural. I’m talking about deep memories and cultural patterns that shape our character, mold our values, direct our attitudes, and form our emotional responses.

At their best, our early memories are like a deep well that brings us cool, clear, life giving water. We can draw on our past to get perspective, to draw strength, to feel part of something that transcends our lives. There is a wisdom there, a wisdom drawn from ages of learning life’s essential lessons.
Unfortunately, there is also another side. Sometimes the water in our wells is dirty and polluted. That dirty water does not give strength, does not enhance life. Rather than wisdom, it can contain prejudice that cut us off from others and foolish superstition that makes us afraid.

How do we draw upon the well of our deep past? And, once we have done so, how do we make sure we partake only of the water that brings wisdom and strength? How do we filter out, as it were, the impurities?

A couple of months ago I attended a small conference of Hispanic UU ministers held in Chicago. (It was a small conference because there are only a handful of us.) In fact, I took the title of this sermon, “Drinking from Our Own Wells,” from the title of that conference. One of the questions we asked ourselves was how our heritage affected our ministries. Preparing for the conference brought another little “aha” moment. I realized that my heritage colors my ministry in ways I had not thought about. I realize that my deep conviction about how essential a sense of community is, my concern about the excesses of individualism, about how important it is to have intergenerational gatherings, and about the vital importance of creating a feeling of hospitality, have deep cultural roots. The lifting up of community, of mixing of generations, of passion, of hospitality — all of these are values have deep roots in Latino culture. (I bet you didn’t realize that you are participating in stealth biculturalism!) In all seriousness, I believe that part of what makes this congregation so special, part of what gives it a feeling of warmth, has been our openness to passion, to community, our dedication to hospitality. I try to drink from that well, to let its wisdom guide me.

Each of us has such a well to draw from. Each of us carries within ourselves important values and sensibilities that we learned from our culture of origin.
Ah, but there is the side. Let’s not drown is a mixture of naivete or nostalgia. There is plenty of pollution in my well, too. My cultural heritage also includes an oppressive and hopelessly outdated machismo that, at its worst, degenerates into abuse of women and children. My heritage is also plagued by a homophobia second to none.

Your past has its own strengths and its own weaknesses. There are treasures in your past that need to be preserved and passed on. And there are aspects of your past that need to be left behind.

I think we face two challenges when we consider drinking from our own wells. The first is finding the well. The second is filtering the water.
Perhaps I should explain. Part of the problem for us is that the past is very much with us, yet it is often invisible to us. So many of us are cut off from parents and grandparents and extended family. So many of us were not born here. And almost no one in here today had great-grandparents who were born here. In much of the world this is not the case. In much of the world people live within a short walk of where their grandparents lived. The place where their grandparents worshipped is where they worship. Tradition is all around; it is visible, you can smell it and touch it and hear it. The well is near home.
For most of us the well is not near home. We need to make a special effort to touch base once in a while. Spending a little time with an old family photo album can bring back a rush of memory. Telling the family stories once in a while helps connect us. Staying in touch with relatives is important. Visiting special places where we or our family have roots can be deeply moving.

Once you and I get in contact with our past, our task is only partly complete. We have to separate what is precious from what is superfluous. How do we do that?

This is a profoundly spiritual task. In order to truly appropriate our past you and I need to be in touch with our deepest sense of what is good and what we hold sacred. What is it in our deep well of experience that gives life, that keeps us grounded while also opening new possibilities? What is it from our heritage that fosters compassion, harmony, and justice? What aspects of our heritage would we want to pass on to our children? Imagine trying to write down five or ten things you would most want to preserve. What would they be?

Just as important, how do we decide what to leave behind? Is there something in our past that may have served at one time, but that now would work to destroy what we hold sacred? For example, I think of the attitude toward the land that has shaped much of American history. The idea that we should use resources to build the nation may have served at one point. Continuing that attitude today threatens everyone’s future. I believe the ethos of rugged individualism served to foster self reliance and free people from traditional constraints. Yet too much individualism becomes a kind of disease, a narrow narcissism that loses touch with the needs of others and the importance of community.

Most of us face a special challenge when we try to draw wisdom and strength from the past: What do we do with our religious past? Most of us are people who have left a tradition we grew up with. Even if have not had the experience of leaving one tradition, we are faced with the decision of what to make of all the religious traditions that surround us: the Christian tradition, Jewish tradition, eastern practices like Buddhism, religious humanism, earth centered traditions and others.

When it comes to appropriating our religious past, I think the greatest danger is in throwing out much that was good—the proverbial baby with the bath water. When I think back to my own religious upbringing, there was much to leave behind. There was rigidity and theological conservatism that rejected too much of modern scientific knowledge. There was too much emphasis on guilt and self loathing. There was also a kind of self righteous arrogance—the notion that our particular denomination had a corner on the truth and everyone else was in error.

As I grew into young adulthood, it was easy to see these faults. I left that church because of its faults. I felt like I no longer belonged there. I know many of you have had similar experiences. The trap we can fall into is that we get stuck in a kind of adolescent rebellion. What was not as easy for me to see was the value of a caring community, the teaching of core values about compassion for others and about the importance of every single person. There was also a valuable sense of the importance of passionate commitment in life.

A wise person once commented that the key thing to understand about the past is that it is not past. The past is always with us, often with us unconsciously. Our families, our ethnicity, our cultures, our religious heritage, form our lives.
As people who seek to live lives that are meaningful, that are faithful to our ideals, lives that are religious in the best sense of the term, our challenge is to appropriate that past. We cannot be whole until we do.

But we need to use our heads and our hearts. We need to drink the life giving water from our own wells. And we need to realize that there are no wells without some impurities.

As we move forward in our lives, as we move forward in this new year, let us face our past. Let us decide, very carefully, what in that past is precious and life giving. This we must bring with us into the future and share it with others. And we must release, gently, lovingly, those parts of the past that no longer serve.

Let us drink deeply from our own wells. May all the wisdom of the past live in and through us as we move forward to live lives full of meaning, full of love, full of joy.

Amen.