Sermon by Rev. Daniel Gregoire
1/5/2020
On the Pulse of Morning
Maya Angelou (excerpted by Rev. Daniel Gregoire)
...Lift up your eyes
Upon this day breaking for you.
Give birth again
To the dream.
Women, children, men,
Take it into the palms of your hands,
Mold it into the shape of your most
Private need. Sculpt it into
The image of your most public self.
Lift up your hearts.
Each new hour holds new chances
For a new beginning.
Do not be wedded forever
To fear, yoked eternally
To brutishness.
The horizon leans forward,
Offering you space.
This is a moment, of communal beginnings, again we are setting the clocks and lighting the path we wish to walk going forward.
This is the very moment that Kwanzaa enters our cosmos, for those who might need it.
I want us to see this as an opportunity to look back, gather up what is precious and worth keeping from our own experiences in order to move forward into the new year with intention and intensity.
This is our opportunity!
This sermon is our message in a bottle that has come to this Kwanzaa Sunday morning; inscribed with the words of Maya Angelou and the printed image of the Sankofa bird.
We see the words:
...Lift up your eyes
Upon this day breaking for you.
Give birth again
To the dream.
Now, it should be stated that: I have long been ambivalent about Kwanzaa, and I often say, Kwanzaa comes at a time of the year already filled with holidays in the month of December.
It has never really been able to hold its own again the imperial juggernaut of Christmas and the convulsion of New Years Eve.
It is sandwiched in between all that glitter and glamour and tinsel (so much tinsel) , between December 26 and Janaury 2, it is hardly enough time and space to get the attention it rightfully deserves.
Even in my Afro-Caribbean neighborhood in East Flatbush and Crown Heights, in the very heart of the People’s Republic of Brooklyn, even there Kwanzaa struggled for attention when I was growing up.
Kwanzaa was received as alien and exotic, even among people well acquainted with the unusual, and well practiced in the unconventional.
I can remember my Grandmother Lauraine saying “What is this, Kwanzaa?” in her Haitian accented English, was if it were a thing she did not wish to catch, like a cold or the flu. But, despite her best efforts (I suppose), Kwanzaa had some traction there in Brooklyn.
I remember as a child my aunt Sabine, who could be described as “woke” to use the contemporary term for being conscious to the world, she would take me to huge Kwanzaa festivals at Medgar Evers College, a majority black school named after the civil rights martyr.
These annual celebrations took place in what might be described as intentionally pro-Black spaces, spaces that encouraged a zealous celebration of all things Black, which is to say: black people, black history, black intellectualism, black art and the black aesthetic.
These Kwanzaa festivals were heroic spectacles of self-determination, chosen families, political, economic and cultural revolutions. These spaces, swirled with a heady mix of feelings and emotion, joy and militancy, anticipation and impatience, love, acceptance, excitement and fun.
There was drumming and dancing, and so much tasty food. The experience of Kwanzaa, and it was an experience, emphasized health and well-being, specially naturopathic, vegan and vegetarian lifestyles, and most of all looking to the continent of Africa, for inspiration, both in present-day cultures and ancient civilizations.
The one thing I am not sure of, is whether these spaces would have necessarily been welcoming to openly LGBTQ people like myself, in the past, but I hope they are today.
But in every other respect these were radically inclusive and hospitable spaces, irresistibly African in a very postmodern way.
It was a mixing and matching to achieve an African feeling rather than a painstaking recreation. It was more Wakanda than Timbuktu. It was a reimaged space, a fantasy of old and new, and somethings invented just for the occasion, all of it appropriate to our setting in North America.
And, people would travel far and wide to come to these annual events.
Life and circumstance and distance has to a great extent consigned those extraordinary, revolutionary spaces to memories for me.
It’s been a very long time since I’ve come into a space quite like the Kwanzaa Festival at Medgar Evers College.
I’ve always felt it would be better to celebrate Kwanzaa in the summertime, August and September, we have celebrated it in Grafton during the late summer, to coincide with our harvest season in rural New England, and the start of the new School year for children, and the new program year for our church. Kwanzaa has been well received in Grafton as a new tradition in the summer months.
While, it is true that Kwanzaa’s principles are in effect year round, and should be practiced throughout the year, perhaps my decision to move the actual celebration might reflect my own Eurocentric worldview, which is just the kind of thing that Kwanzaa works to remedy.
Kwanzaa is an opportunity to adjust our focus.
The focus of Kwanzaa is an Afrocentric worldview and a Pan-African point of reference. And, perhaps it is right that it should assert itself in between the homogenizing and commoditizing Christmas and New Years Eve.
Kwanzaa says with all necessary defiance and assertiveness, I belong here!
Not at a more convenient time, but now. At the beginning, at the head of the table, a place for too long denied to the people of the African diaspora.
Kwanzaa invites those of us of the African diaspora to take a chance and reclaim our place of dignity and worth, by remembering our Africaness, which is to say, the distinctive gifts that we bring to the world.
All people bring gifts, and there is one race the human race, the differences we see in skin color, hair, shape of face are all recent adaptations to the environments humans called home. We are all African in essence.
But despite our common origin, full humanity has long been denied to black people, and this continues to this day with police brutality and hyper surveillance of black men in cities and elsewhere, a broken criminal justice system, that disproportionately jails black men,.
Our humanity, the dignity and worth of people of African descent, is undermined with an education and health system that consistently delivers poorer outcomes for black families.
To say nothing of the continued intervention in black majority countries, in Africa and the Caribbean by European, and North American powers intent on maintaining the status quo, often by undermining and removing democratically elected government leaders, to the detriment of cultures and economies. and the list goes on and on.
In this moment Kwanzaa comes to remind the people of the African diaspora, and all the world’s people, that Black people are agents and creators of their own past and futures.
And, Kwanzaa is the moment to begin to create that future, now at the start of something new for our community, the changing of the year.
The African American poet Maya Angelou wrote in On the Pulse of Morning
...Lift up your eyes
Upon this day breaking for you.
Give birth again
To the dream.
Women, children, men,
Take it into the palms of your hands,
Mold it into the shape of your most
Private need. Sculpt it into
The image of your most public self.
Lift up your hearts.
Each new hour holds new chances
For a new beginning.
Now is the moment for us to lift up our eyes! Maya Angelou says, and when we lift up our eyes I hope the light of Kwanzaa kinara, the lit candles in the holder might meet our eyes, and greet our gaze and in that moment we might be reminded of what matters.
Dr. Maulana Karenga, the creator of Kwanzaa, wrote that one of the five fundamental activities of Kwanzaa is the Commemoration of Past.
He wrote in the book titled Kwanzaa: A Celebration of Family, Community and Culture that Kwanzaa, this moment:
...Is a time of honoring the moral obligation to remember and praise those on whose shoulders we stand. ...It is the time to appreciate our role as heirs and custodians of a great legacy, and to honor that legacy by preserving and expanding it. (5)
Karenga wrote:
Each period leaves a legacy of challenge, struggle and achievement. We honor each by learning it and living it. And Kwanzaa is a focal point for this. (5)
We must remember the past in order to go forward, and I desperately want us I want us to see this as an opportunity to look back, gather up what is precious and worth keeping from our own experiences in order to move forward into the new year with intention and intensity.
Kwanzaa gives us this rare opportunity to do this now, by reclaiming our African past and future as people of the African diaspora.
And, if we are not of the African diaspora, that is to say, not directly subject to Transaltanic Slave Trade, we can ally ourselves to Kwanzaa by creating space for those of the African experience to connect more fully with our heritage in rich and meaningful ways.
Most of us in this room as not of the African diaspora, and this is a fact we don’t need to run away from. Kwanzaa invites everyone to appreciate the worth and dignity of black people, and that is not something that one has to be black to do. It is a chance for everyone to celebrate how the presence of African peoples makes the world a richer, a better place by acknowledging and the willing ourselves to discover the contributions of the African continent from before the dawn of civilization!
We can only do this, we can only go forward in this way by looking back to Africa for inspiration on Kwanzaa.
And when we look back to Africa, Africa offers us Sankofa a term of the Akan people of Ghana which means “Go back and fetch it”
Sankofa is often represented by a bird with its feet pointed forward and its head looking back, often the bird will have an egg or a jewel in its mouth.
The feet pointed opposite the head, represents going into the future. While the head pointed behind represents looking to the past.
And here’s what makes this symbol unique, the bird has gathered something precious from the past and it is carrying that thing forward, with it to the future!
According to Julia Stewart author of African Proverbs and Wisdom this symbol is associated with the proverb:
“Se wo were fi na wosankofa a yenkyi” which she translates as “It is not wrong to go back and for that which you have forgotten”
All of us have aspects of our past that has made us into the people we are today and we might want to overlook, or even try to forget, especially the more challenging aspects of our past, but I believe that the past remembers, so we must too.
And we must acknowledge those things and to begin to embrace them, in order to break the vicious circles and move forward virtuously.
Kwanzaa has been my Sankofa experience with my own coming back, to go forward. Where I could visit Brooklyn, as I did last week with my partner Kate, to explore the old places that have added so much depth, and meaning to my own life, in ways that are obvious, and not so obvious.
These are the places and the experiences that have made me the person I am today.
All of us have those places and experiences that the wisdom of Sankofa will guide us back too.
What are your places?
Where do you need to go back and fetch it? To move forward?
Our faith tradition also helps us to do the work of Sankofa. This second source of Unitarian Universalist inspiration is:
Words and deeds of prophetic people which challenge us to confront powers and structures of evil with justice, compassion, and the transforming power of love.
This source invites us into a faithful celebration of Kwanzaa, whether we are of the Pan-African experience or of other cultures, because we are guided by principles that encourage us to search for truth and meaning, and to seek out those stories and experiences that connect us more fully to our shared humanity.
Our source of inspiration can be learning more about the people of the African diaspora, the people invoked in our libations.
The practice of Sankofa gives us a chance to do just that...and Kwanzaa invites us to connect and reconnect with all things African that delights and inspires!
We do this so that we might be restored to wholeness as individuals, as families, as communities and as one human race.
We do this to undo generational trauma and hurts, to break the curse, start the healing and obtain the glory, here and now.
We are all yearning for wholeness, all of us, and Sankofa is one of the important ways that we will realize our potential to live together in peace.
This is our Sankofa moment!
Take it into the palms of your hands,
Mold it into the shape of your most
Private need. Sculpt it into
The image of your most public self.
Lift up your hearts.
Each new hour holds new chances
For a new beginning.
Let us remember the past in order to go forward, gather up what is precious and worth keeping from our own experiences in order to move forward into the new year with intention, purpose and zeal.
Happy Kwanzaa
And
Happy New Year!
1/5/2020
On the Pulse of Morning
Maya Angelou (excerpted by Rev. Daniel Gregoire)
...Lift up your eyes
Upon this day breaking for you.
Give birth again
To the dream.
Women, children, men,
Take it into the palms of your hands,
Mold it into the shape of your most
Private need. Sculpt it into
The image of your most public self.
Lift up your hearts.
Each new hour holds new chances
For a new beginning.
Do not be wedded forever
To fear, yoked eternally
To brutishness.
The horizon leans forward,
Offering you space.
This is a moment, of communal beginnings, again we are setting the clocks and lighting the path we wish to walk going forward.
This is the very moment that Kwanzaa enters our cosmos, for those who might need it.
I want us to see this as an opportunity to look back, gather up what is precious and worth keeping from our own experiences in order to move forward into the new year with intention and intensity.
This is our opportunity!
This sermon is our message in a bottle that has come to this Kwanzaa Sunday morning; inscribed with the words of Maya Angelou and the printed image of the Sankofa bird.
We see the words:
...Lift up your eyes
Upon this day breaking for you.
Give birth again
To the dream.
Now, it should be stated that: I have long been ambivalent about Kwanzaa, and I often say, Kwanzaa comes at a time of the year already filled with holidays in the month of December.
It has never really been able to hold its own again the imperial juggernaut of Christmas and the convulsion of New Years Eve.
It is sandwiched in between all that glitter and glamour and tinsel (so much tinsel) , between December 26 and Janaury 2, it is hardly enough time and space to get the attention it rightfully deserves.
Even in my Afro-Caribbean neighborhood in East Flatbush and Crown Heights, in the very heart of the People’s Republic of Brooklyn, even there Kwanzaa struggled for attention when I was growing up.
Kwanzaa was received as alien and exotic, even among people well acquainted with the unusual, and well practiced in the unconventional.
I can remember my Grandmother Lauraine saying “What is this, Kwanzaa?” in her Haitian accented English, was if it were a thing she did not wish to catch, like a cold or the flu. But, despite her best efforts (I suppose), Kwanzaa had some traction there in Brooklyn.
I remember as a child my aunt Sabine, who could be described as “woke” to use the contemporary term for being conscious to the world, she would take me to huge Kwanzaa festivals at Medgar Evers College, a majority black school named after the civil rights martyr.
These annual celebrations took place in what might be described as intentionally pro-Black spaces, spaces that encouraged a zealous celebration of all things Black, which is to say: black people, black history, black intellectualism, black art and the black aesthetic.
These Kwanzaa festivals were heroic spectacles of self-determination, chosen families, political, economic and cultural revolutions. These spaces, swirled with a heady mix of feelings and emotion, joy and militancy, anticipation and impatience, love, acceptance, excitement and fun.
There was drumming and dancing, and so much tasty food. The experience of Kwanzaa, and it was an experience, emphasized health and well-being, specially naturopathic, vegan and vegetarian lifestyles, and most of all looking to the continent of Africa, for inspiration, both in present-day cultures and ancient civilizations.
The one thing I am not sure of, is whether these spaces would have necessarily been welcoming to openly LGBTQ people like myself, in the past, but I hope they are today.
But in every other respect these were radically inclusive and hospitable spaces, irresistibly African in a very postmodern way.
It was a mixing and matching to achieve an African feeling rather than a painstaking recreation. It was more Wakanda than Timbuktu. It was a reimaged space, a fantasy of old and new, and somethings invented just for the occasion, all of it appropriate to our setting in North America.
And, people would travel far and wide to come to these annual events.
Life and circumstance and distance has to a great extent consigned those extraordinary, revolutionary spaces to memories for me.
It’s been a very long time since I’ve come into a space quite like the Kwanzaa Festival at Medgar Evers College.
I’ve always felt it would be better to celebrate Kwanzaa in the summertime, August and September, we have celebrated it in Grafton during the late summer, to coincide with our harvest season in rural New England, and the start of the new School year for children, and the new program year for our church. Kwanzaa has been well received in Grafton as a new tradition in the summer months.
While, it is true that Kwanzaa’s principles are in effect year round, and should be practiced throughout the year, perhaps my decision to move the actual celebration might reflect my own Eurocentric worldview, which is just the kind of thing that Kwanzaa works to remedy.
Kwanzaa is an opportunity to adjust our focus.
The focus of Kwanzaa is an Afrocentric worldview and a Pan-African point of reference. And, perhaps it is right that it should assert itself in between the homogenizing and commoditizing Christmas and New Years Eve.
Kwanzaa says with all necessary defiance and assertiveness, I belong here!
Not at a more convenient time, but now. At the beginning, at the head of the table, a place for too long denied to the people of the African diaspora.
Kwanzaa invites those of us of the African diaspora to take a chance and reclaim our place of dignity and worth, by remembering our Africaness, which is to say, the distinctive gifts that we bring to the world.
All people bring gifts, and there is one race the human race, the differences we see in skin color, hair, shape of face are all recent adaptations to the environments humans called home. We are all African in essence.
But despite our common origin, full humanity has long been denied to black people, and this continues to this day with police brutality and hyper surveillance of black men in cities and elsewhere, a broken criminal justice system, that disproportionately jails black men,.
Our humanity, the dignity and worth of people of African descent, is undermined with an education and health system that consistently delivers poorer outcomes for black families.
To say nothing of the continued intervention in black majority countries, in Africa and the Caribbean by European, and North American powers intent on maintaining the status quo, often by undermining and removing democratically elected government leaders, to the detriment of cultures and economies. and the list goes on and on.
In this moment Kwanzaa comes to remind the people of the African diaspora, and all the world’s people, that Black people are agents and creators of their own past and futures.
And, Kwanzaa is the moment to begin to create that future, now at the start of something new for our community, the changing of the year.
The African American poet Maya Angelou wrote in On the Pulse of Morning
...Lift up your eyes
Upon this day breaking for you.
Give birth again
To the dream.
Women, children, men,
Take it into the palms of your hands,
Mold it into the shape of your most
Private need. Sculpt it into
The image of your most public self.
Lift up your hearts.
Each new hour holds new chances
For a new beginning.
Now is the moment for us to lift up our eyes! Maya Angelou says, and when we lift up our eyes I hope the light of Kwanzaa kinara, the lit candles in the holder might meet our eyes, and greet our gaze and in that moment we might be reminded of what matters.
Dr. Maulana Karenga, the creator of Kwanzaa, wrote that one of the five fundamental activities of Kwanzaa is the Commemoration of Past.
He wrote in the book titled Kwanzaa: A Celebration of Family, Community and Culture that Kwanzaa, this moment:
...Is a time of honoring the moral obligation to remember and praise those on whose shoulders we stand. ...It is the time to appreciate our role as heirs and custodians of a great legacy, and to honor that legacy by preserving and expanding it. (5)
Karenga wrote:
Each period leaves a legacy of challenge, struggle and achievement. We honor each by learning it and living it. And Kwanzaa is a focal point for this. (5)
We must remember the past in order to go forward, and I desperately want us I want us to see this as an opportunity to look back, gather up what is precious and worth keeping from our own experiences in order to move forward into the new year with intention and intensity.
Kwanzaa gives us this rare opportunity to do this now, by reclaiming our African past and future as people of the African diaspora.
And, if we are not of the African diaspora, that is to say, not directly subject to Transaltanic Slave Trade, we can ally ourselves to Kwanzaa by creating space for those of the African experience to connect more fully with our heritage in rich and meaningful ways.
Most of us in this room as not of the African diaspora, and this is a fact we don’t need to run away from. Kwanzaa invites everyone to appreciate the worth and dignity of black people, and that is not something that one has to be black to do. It is a chance for everyone to celebrate how the presence of African peoples makes the world a richer, a better place by acknowledging and the willing ourselves to discover the contributions of the African continent from before the dawn of civilization!
We can only do this, we can only go forward in this way by looking back to Africa for inspiration on Kwanzaa.
And when we look back to Africa, Africa offers us Sankofa a term of the Akan people of Ghana which means “Go back and fetch it”
Sankofa is often represented by a bird with its feet pointed forward and its head looking back, often the bird will have an egg or a jewel in its mouth.
The feet pointed opposite the head, represents going into the future. While the head pointed behind represents looking to the past.
And here’s what makes this symbol unique, the bird has gathered something precious from the past and it is carrying that thing forward, with it to the future!
According to Julia Stewart author of African Proverbs and Wisdom this symbol is associated with the proverb:
“Se wo were fi na wosankofa a yenkyi” which she translates as “It is not wrong to go back and for that which you have forgotten”
All of us have aspects of our past that has made us into the people we are today and we might want to overlook, or even try to forget, especially the more challenging aspects of our past, but I believe that the past remembers, so we must too.
And we must acknowledge those things and to begin to embrace them, in order to break the vicious circles and move forward virtuously.
Kwanzaa has been my Sankofa experience with my own coming back, to go forward. Where I could visit Brooklyn, as I did last week with my partner Kate, to explore the old places that have added so much depth, and meaning to my own life, in ways that are obvious, and not so obvious.
These are the places and the experiences that have made me the person I am today.
All of us have those places and experiences that the wisdom of Sankofa will guide us back too.
What are your places?
Where do you need to go back and fetch it? To move forward?
Our faith tradition also helps us to do the work of Sankofa. This second source of Unitarian Universalist inspiration is:
Words and deeds of prophetic people which challenge us to confront powers and structures of evil with justice, compassion, and the transforming power of love.
This source invites us into a faithful celebration of Kwanzaa, whether we are of the Pan-African experience or of other cultures, because we are guided by principles that encourage us to search for truth and meaning, and to seek out those stories and experiences that connect us more fully to our shared humanity.
Our source of inspiration can be learning more about the people of the African diaspora, the people invoked in our libations.
The practice of Sankofa gives us a chance to do just that...and Kwanzaa invites us to connect and reconnect with all things African that delights and inspires!
We do this so that we might be restored to wholeness as individuals, as families, as communities and as one human race.
We do this to undo generational trauma and hurts, to break the curse, start the healing and obtain the glory, here and now.
We are all yearning for wholeness, all of us, and Sankofa is one of the important ways that we will realize our potential to live together in peace.
This is our Sankofa moment!
Take it into the palms of your hands,
Mold it into the shape of your most
Private need. Sculpt it into
The image of your most public self.
Lift up your hearts.
Each new hour holds new chances
For a new beginning.
Let us remember the past in order to go forward, gather up what is precious and worth keeping from our own experiences in order to move forward into the new year with intention, purpose and zeal.
Happy Kwanzaa
And
Happy New Year!