Cry Freedom

© 2010, Rev. Chris Holton Jablonski

Listen Now!

We are one.

Though you might not know it sometimes if you listen to the whispering thoughts in your head, the tired fears and worn out judgments which swirl around our brains.

We are one.

One with all those here in this room, one with all those who have walked this earth, one with the whole vast impossible miracle of existence.

We are one and we are strong.

This is the first Sunday in our month focused on the theme of Unity.

This year we will be exploring a different theme each month connected to our common spiritual quest. There will be talk of the theme in the newsletter with some suggested spiritual practices and reflections. Our Youth Group and Chalice Cirlces will be invited to explore the themes as well.

Leymah Gbowee knows something of the power of Unity.

She is one of the women of Liberia whose story is told in the movie, “Pray the Devil Back to Hell.”

As a result of a succession of shifts in government, the Liberia Leymah Gbowee knew was one of violence and horror. Young boys were forcibly conscripted into military service, stolen from their homes given guns and encouraged to wreak havoc. These young, frightened soldiers were fed brown brown, a mixture of cocaine and gunpowder, a toxic concoction which made these boys aggressive, angry and deadly.

One day in 1990 Gbowee and her mother were at one of the city's Lutheran churches, where 2,000 internally displaced persons were being sheltered. Gbowee recalled, "That morning soldiers came to the church and rounded up several persons and killed them. And one of the guys told us, 'You should not stay here tonight, because the group that's coming soon will be worse than us.'"

Thanks to that advice—a murderer's random act of kindness—Gbowee and her mother survived the slaughter that followed: more than 600 people cut down in a single night. "We went just two blocks away, and we could hear people screaming, crying, begging for help—an all-night massacre."

As the war continued, so did sustained campaigns of rape and mutilation. In 1996, when Gbowee's son was 3, her daughter 2, and she was five months pregnant, the fighting came so close to their home that she had to rush them all to safety, past checkpoints that fighters sometimes decorated, as she puts it, with "a fresh young head." They took shelter at her parents' three-bedroom home—along with some 50 other relatives and friends. Every morning the group came together to scrape out a meal from whatever they had. And one morning Gbowee's son told her, "I really am so hungry. I just need a piece of doughnut."

"Nuku," she said, using a pet name for her son Joshua Joseph, "I don't have a piece of doughnut to give you."

In that moment Gbowee realized that, thanks to this war, her children had lived in hunger their whole lives. She had become a social worker in 1994, and in 1998 she began counseling former child soldiers; finally, the damage done to all of Liberia's children was more than she could bear.¹

And so Gbowee went to the women of her congregation and started to get them organized. “Are you tired of War?” she asked them. “Are you tired of not being able to feed your children?”

One Sunday as she was speaking to a group of women, there was a Muslim security guard who was working at the church. She overheard the conversation and approached Leymah.

There were deep divisions between Christians and Muslims in Liberia, and suspicions and prejudices held in both directions. But they were united in common cause. The bullets that were flying killed all of their children equally. Their sons were taken from them with no regard for faith, and so the women decided to come together.

But they knew they would need some time to work through the false ideas they held about one another, so they held a weekend of workshops in which all the festering beliefs were brought to the light. People spoke truth freely, and cleared the air.

Their plan was simple. They wanted to pressure Charles Taylor, the brutal leader of Liberia to sit down for peace talks with the rebel warlords. But Taylor would not meet with them.

And so they decided to gather and sit. There was a huge fish market which had a big open field which Taylor had to pass every day on his way to work.

And so they gathered. Thousands of women gathered dressed in white. They sat and waited. Their powerful silent protest to the conditions which faced their nation began to draw the attention of Taylor, but he thought it would blow over.

But this was different. No men were allowed to join the protest, if one came, he was told to leave. As violent as Taylor and the rebel warlords were, an open attack on a group of defenseless women would be too much for the people to bear. There were mothers and grandmothers, women of every age, women who had faced so much, lost so much.

As their protest continued the women decided to put another kind of pressure on the men of Liberia. They decided to deny all their partners sex until there was a peace treaty.

In an interview Gbowee said, “As a man you were either guilty by commission or omission of the violence we faced as a people…And so the men started praying alongside us that peace would come so that they could know enjoyment once again.”

Finally Taylor agreed to meet with the women, and they gathered, hundreds of them all in white, and they officially delivered this message.

“The women of Liberia…are tired of war. We are tired of running. We are tired of begging for bulgur wheat. We are tired of our children being raped. We are now taking this stand to secure the future of our children because we believe, as custodians of society; tomorrow our children will ask us, 'Mama, what was your role during the crisis?"²

"We want peace, now," they said.

And so Taylor called together the leaders of the rebel warlords and members of his own administration for a special meeting to come to a peace treaty.

Gbowee and her supporters traveled to the site of the talks to be sure things progressed. But they did not.

Days into the talks, it was clear that nothing was happening.

One woman remembers, “My son was calling me and telling me they just dug a mass grave. They would put one hundred persons in it. And they were digging another one. He said the soldiers were surrounding us, we can’t get out of the houses. There was no way to find food. And I was thinking how will they feed my little baby?"³

As the leaders wasted time in posturing and preening, the people were in peril.

And so Gbowee forced her way into the building and, “Nearly 200 women looped arms in the close quarters of the corridor outside the "peace hall," where Taylor's representatives and the rebel warlords were meeting but getting nowhere. The women were blocking the men from leaving the room, and the generals stuck inside sent security forces to arrest Gbowee for obstructing justice.

Gbowee remembered, "And that term 'obstructing justice' was almost like when you take gas and pour it on an open flame. I said, 'Okay, I'm going to make it very, very easy for you to arrest me.' I took off my hair tie. They were looking at me, and I said, 'I'm going to strip naked.'"

Throughout West Africa, it's a powerful curse for a woman to strip naked in public—absolute bad luck, bad fortune. And to Gbowee, that's what the situation called for.⁴

All the women were prepared to strip naked there before the international media and shame the leaders who were locked in their stalemate as people died.

And so the men agreed to set to work in earnest, and two weeks later an agreement was struck.

And it was due to these women uniting, reaching out beyond their immediate circumstances, seeing the horrors which surrounded them, and not accepting that this was the way it had to be.

With their arms woven, together they became a force, a power to be recognized and respected. Alone each of them could be killed, starved into submission or despair, but together, they were strong.

In the wake of these women’s work, Liberia would go on to elect the first female head of state in all of Africa, Ellen Johnson-Sirleaf.

And the name of her political party, as if especially arranged for us this morning…the Unity Party.

Together, all things are possible.

Not only the toppling of regimes, the broad, sweeping social change we are called to bring about, called to be in our actions and our lives.

Our connectedness, our unity makes possible our own transformation as well.

In this electric and healing space between people, we can move and grow. We can finally realize, finally reconcile, finally wake up.

We can see that these troubles which weigh us down are not our own alone, but are part of the larger human story. That our pain is part of the pain of our neighbors, that we are one in the struggle.

* * *

Patricia Smith is a poet.

Years ago she came to a school in Miami to teach poetry to sixth graders.

As she got to know her class, she realized the depth and extent to which death had touched the lives of these children.

Almost all of them had experienced violence, almost all of them had lost loved ones. And together they told their stories, they connected.

In the class there was a young girl named Nicole, who had lost her mother to AIDS. She had never spoken to anyone at the school of her mother or her death. In her grief she had shut down part of herself, but there in the class, as the other stories of grief were shared, she opened. For the first time.

This is the poem Smith wrote for her students, “Building Nicole’s Mama”. She begins each of her readings with this poem, and says every time that it was written “ for the 6th grade class of Lillie C. Evans School, Liberty City, Miami”. She says this because twelve years ago they made her promise she would do so every time.

Something opened in Nicole in that warm soup of common grief, in that connection, in that love.

Something opened in Leymah Gbowee as she sat in solidarity, witness, outrage and hope, her vision growing with each woman in white who joined their struggle.

Here, now, there is poetry and power.

There is unity.

Here, now, a precious and unique moment bursting with grace.

You who have come with pain and burden, lay it down.

Know that you are loved.

You who have come hungry for holy work and purpose, put your hand to the plow, there is so much to be done.

And you who have come trembling without words, open, listen,

Taste connection.

And move and live and love where it leads you.

Amen.

¹ Conley, Kevin, "Rabble Rousers", December 2008 issue of O Magazine

² Conley, Kevin, "Rabble Rousers", December 2008 issue of O Magazine

³ PrayTheDevilBacktoHell.com, clips, "Liberia Is Their Home"

⁴ Conley, Kevin, "Rabble Rousers", December 2008 issue of O Magazine

⁵ Smith, Patricia, Teahouse of the Almighty, Coffee House Press, 2006