"In Memoriam - Robert Francis Kennedy"
We have come together on a day of national mourning in respect for one who gave his life while seeking even greater public service, one who spoke eloquently for and acted with determination for social change for the dispossessed, for all who have been robbed of personhood.
We are met to honor Robert Francis Kennedy.
And one may wonder how we are to do that after all that has happened, after nationally televised services. How does one deal with grief piled upon grief? Some would tell us, as some did after the death of Martin Luther King, Jr., that we should not hold memorial services, instead we should get out and do something. I do not agree that we should not hold memorial services. I do agree that we should do something, each as he is able, each as his own loves, convictions, abilities, and religion allows.
We should do both. We hold memorial services because we must have ways of handling feelings and bewilderment because we desire to keep order in our lives and in events because we have a need for more security when life begins to appear much more insecure. And, too, there are things to do to reassess what has been done to make sense out of madness, to stop the shock waves of violence rising out of emotional chaos or political fanaticism, or unkept promises.
The best way I know of this moment to memorialize Robert Kennedy is not to take a lot of time eulogizing him, that has been done. Rather, I shall speak out of thought and feeling as a personal reaction to his death, then speak at a little greater length of what seems to me to be happening in our country and of what we as religious people may see as a legitimate role for ourselves in times to come.
Politically, the people of this nation, indeed of this church, had mixed feelings about Senator Kennedy. I must admit that he, like Martin Luther King, stirred something deep and positive in my hopes for the future. If some say he was ambitious, I was ready to forgive that in the face of his brilliance and ready to believe it came from a dedication to service for the good.
Kennedy evoked love in many people, and, in some people, hate too, it is now very sad to say.
Hearing and seeing the first playbacks of panic and grief and terrible fury following the shooting, the frustration of helplessness, the weeping of his supporters, I, too, lost myself in grief and anguish, and other feelings flooded in to increase the pain. This latest violence, affecting the whole nation, was added to the sense of violence I have felt in other times and places in our land, most recently experienced in Cleveland.
Perhaps, some of you, like I, had to choke back the desire to rage against cruel and unfair loss. Robert Kennedy is gone and, I believe, truly a significant part of the world’s light went out with him.
Now, again, the learning must become serious and steady, the learning from what has been happening, the learning from human sacrifice, leaning how to save our national leaders from passions of zealots, learning how to change our laws so that we may keep a solid rule of law, and learning, most of all, that reconciliation is not out of date unless we allow it to become so.
Let me try to be very clear. I believe the time has come to love our nation more, not less, because it suffers internally and talk increases in danger of revolution on the one hand or decay on the other. I believe an individual act of violence like this that shocks us so deeply should cause us to think hard about the organized violence our government has increased and fails to control.
I believe that portions of our population, increasing portions are suffering confusion and angry emotions, that great groups of people now suffer a touchy group rage.
I do not, I repeat, I do not believe violence is the way to solve or resolve these confusions and emotions. And I do not believe violence is inevitable or that the whole nation is sick. As a church and religious people, it would seem most reasonable to me that we continue to work together, Black and white together, Jews and non-Jews together, Unitarians and all groups or persons, affluent and needy in relationships of cooperation. I believe that whites must, can and will learn to accept Blacks as social equals and that even if trouble comes before that day—political, racial or economical trouble—we will very much need in our community to build bridges from one part of the community to the other.
There is a kind of bright idealism and a lovely light in the eyes of youth today, in the actions of protest, in the anti-war movement, in the Black power movement, hope for full manhood and womanhood.
It is a lovely light, but it burns so brightly, it burns with such passion it may arouse violent counter feelings. It increases frustration when someone wants what he wants when he wants it and has been told he can have it but it does not come and he cannot have it, so today he is ready to take it, to use hostile acts immediately so or forms of mental violence in his methods of persuasion by running hard over the feelings of his companions, pouring blood on official records, taking over administration and administration buildings, holding people captive in the name of virtue.
Milton Eisenhower said, “Immorality and violence lead to an anarchy and dictatorship.” I hope the nation was listening. Some so-called peaceful means are no longer peaceful and the line between protest and incitement to violence appears to be drawn thinner with each passing week. This is not to say Senator Kennedy was killed because the nation more easily accepts violence. It is to say that examples of violence and violent deaths must cause us to examine this phenomena.
The leaders of the Steering Committee of the Black Caucus in our own denomination, for example, are reading people these days like Frantz Fanon, an Algerian who wrote The Wretched of the Earth, and Debray, who has written a book called Revolution in the Revolution about what happened in Cuba. I haven’t read the books yet; I have them on order.
These men apparently speak for a new humanism, for a caring humanity, for the overthrow of evils, and the undoing of colonial power and its wrongs.
With this I can agree, and with the need to undo the subjugation of people in our own nation who have been held down for so long now by racism and are regard still by too much of the population as unworthy of real equality. But Fanon and Debray, and now our Black Caucus leadership apparently, as well as some of our ministers of both races have come to see reconciliation between people as out of date (or temporarily so). Reconciliation, like integration, say, is simply one more way of preventing progress, one more way of holding a man down and making him think he is getting somewhere. The arguments are persuasive. Some even say, with Fanon, the answer is to be, must be, and ought to be violence. Though they may not want it personally, they believe it has to come. Only through violence, they believe, can real change be brought about. And some of us, myself included, have to say nonsense! People have to learn how to talk things out, not act them out in violence and destruction. Violence can come, though I do not believe it has to come. The more people say it is coming not matter what we say or do the more they actually help to bring it about.
Violence, more of it, does not have to come. I believe we must continue to do the things that prevent and control it. And, at the same time, strive for and urge our political leaders to bring about real change, sanity in the midst of insanity.
Today, not alone in politics but in religion, there are people who glorify hostility as a way to salvation. Come the resolution, all find their way to heaven. My own belief is that this kind of thinking leads the way to hell. It is the way that chops down two Kennedys and a King and an Evers, and so many innocents north and south, east and west.
The middle way will come back into its own. The middle way is not only an ancient and honorable religious way, it is where most Americans live—in the middle—and there is nothing wrong in that, not only nothing wrong, but it is necessary and desirable as usual in human history, as the place for reconciliation.
Extremists of the right and of the left are moving in on the middle to squeeze, to provoke, to upset, to overthrow, and people cannot and will not stand for it but so long.
The other day President Johnson said something, or repeated it, to the effect that violent methods and radical approaches hurt the cause of change, because they tend to bring on a reaction in millions of Americans who come up out of their passivity to demand the status quo even though change is very much needed.
Surely, we must learn from the violence in blood and in gesture that a counter movement will spring up to protect stability, to protect children, to protect democratic values. It is sad to think this protective movement may go too far in suppressing that which aroused it. Somehow that, too, must not be allowed to happen.
I believe we must keep communications open, make the channels ever wider between leadership, and those who follow, between government and the governed, between Black and white, between rich and poor and all between, and no matter how many Fanons and Debrays are expecting violence, refuse to be a part of it and take action for change non-violently.
Violence does not have to come, gun laws can be more sweeping, police powers can be used sensibly, and controls can be maintained while, at the same time, we can help the system evolve more rapidly in fair and humanistic directions.
We, in the church, will be needed, all of us who will keep communication open, those who will, despite everything, continue to work, black and white together, human beings across political lines, those who insist on treating individuals as individuals, those who keep their head when all around the place people are losing their heads. Religious people, Unitarian Universalist, will be needed.
Today, if we had had the picnic, it was the intention of the Social Justice Committee, with the approval of the Board, to ask all who wished to make a donation for the purpose of taking inner city children camping later this month. It is most appropriate that this appeal be made during a service in memory of Robert Kennedy, one with a vigorous love of the outdoors, but particularly because his own life was dedicated to improvement of conditions in the ghettos as well as to overcoming violence in America and in the world as much as possible.
If you wish to make a donation you may do so, or may write out a check, tax deductible, to the church and earmark it not as your regular pledge but for social justice and place it in the basket on the Social Justice tables after the service.
If we want to save ourselves, our children, our democracy, you and I will learn from the lives of the Kings and the Kennedys of our country that hate breeds hate and begins to infect those touched by it.
We will not assume that violence must come to Wilmington, rather, I hope, we will support change and support law and peace. We can work together to make this a worthy community. We can attempt to overcome distrust and hatred, each doing what he can do in his own way.
Piling one hostile attitude upon another, one hostility upon another, is not the road to salvation. We must not cave in. I can believe we want to give into higher motives than we have been aware of before. We must not fall into patterns of anger; rather, let us climb into ways of reconciliation and brotherhood.
Let us pray.
Eternal God, we return thanks for those who have lifted and lightened the burdens of the day and whose caring has brought light into even the dark moments of experience. We give thanks for those who have endowed the human spirit with greater purpose and confidence, and whose adventurous journeys have indicated to the rest of us some next steps to be taken.
We have been blessed with talent and inspiration in persons like the one we gather to honor today, Robert Francis Kennedy.
We look inside ourselves now to see what we learned from his life and what we may learn from his death.
We are grateful that we know personally, and can share with as individuals, persons of various races and backgrounds; particularly may we be thankful for that spirit of openness and sharing in this church which has brought together and merged into one caring community people of diverse backgrounds, of various childhood faiths, new Unitarian Universalists who, thankfully, continue to insist on believing in the potential for good in man.
For God’s sake, for our own sakes, let us learn control and teach control of hostile feelings and violent gestures before our brothers and sisters of other ways and persuasions and halt the alienation within our own movement, learn to love and reconcile so that we and what are holders for humanity shall not perish.
Now to all who see God, may God go with you
To all who embrace life, may life return your affection.
To all who seek a right path, may a way be found, and the courage to take it, step by step.
Amen.
