I had just started driving to class when I caught the tail end of an interview on the radio. All I heard was the interviewee’s last reflection:
“You know, I never knew, when I went to a church, would I be welcomed? I would have to prepare myself, and so I’d sit in the parking lot, and I’d say, God, give me an undefended heart1.”
This interview was with Karen Oliveto, the first openly gay bishop of the United Methodist Church. Even though I heard so little of what she had to say, it said so much to me.
I had asked myself that very question - “Would I be welcomed?” - so many times before in my life, but especially this last summer when I served as a chaplaincy intern. Would the patients I visited welcome me, the transgender person that I am, to care for them? At the root of my anxiety was a fear of uncertainty. How would patients receive me? More crucially, could I hold the immense pain they might share? Could we be present with one another? But even when I approached the door with wavering confidence, I always had a responsibility to walk through anyway.
Like Bishop Oliveto, I knew that small, crucial question of welcome was not one I could answer until I walked into a patient’s room. Armed with nothing but a floor-list and a notepad, I had no way of knowing what fears or anxieties I would encounter. What I longed for, then, was something to give me courage. Each morning before I began my day, I began praying and challenging myself to keep an undefended heart, that I could fully accept whatever pain people had to share with me that day. I needed to keep my heart open in this work.
Some weeks later, I called on a patient who would challenge me to keep my heart open and undefended. A nurse asked me to visit someone who wasn’t cooperating with her, and said he was being curt and dismissive. She suspected a recent diagnosis was bothering him, and that a visit from a chaplain might help him open up. So I knocked on his door, drew back the curtain, and went in. His room was dark, and I could barely make out that he was sitting up in bed. I told him who I was, and why his nurse asked me to check on him. He did not open up, at least not in the way his nurse or I might have hoped. Instead, with quiet rage, he told me how angry he was. Angry that staff weren’t transparent with him, angry that someone had asked me to check on him. And as he let these feelings out, I sat in the dark next to him, listening for the pain behind his anger.
As I got ready to go, he said, “I’m sorry I was so angry with you.”
And I said to him, “It’s OK to be angry here.”
I could not have imagined that outcome when I went in to sit down with this man. I also could not have experienced that outcome if I had let myself shut down, afraid of what he might say. If I had defended my heart from his hard feelings, I would not have been able to let him say what he needed to. We would have missed an opportunity to connect, heart to heart, in a genuine way.
This openness feels especially hard to maintain today, in this month, in this year. So many of us are feeling the weight of our world’s uncertainty right now. Many of us are scared for ourselves and our loved ones. Others of us are angry, disheartened, or numb. I would not be surprised to find out that some of you are feeling several of these things stacked up and weighing down on you, one on top of the other. Under so much stress, the desire to close ourselves off is real and understandable.
I am also struggling to keep my heart open this month when it would be much easier to shut down and become unavailable. Despite this, I also know that at this juncture, remaining open to others is one of the most certain and sustaining things I can do amid so much uncertainty. Keeping my heart open, even if some days it’s just by a crack, is a choice I make each day, and a practice I must keep returning to. I use the word practice here intentionally. While my experiences in seminary have given me some guiding insights, there is no magic wand or magic words to make this happen. Much of the work of keeping an undefended heart is persistence, returning to this caring work again and again, even when it’s hard. This practice is what I want to share with you today.
One resource that has strengthened this practice has been the writing on risk and despair by the Unitarian Universalist ethicist and theologian Sharon Welch. Despair, perhaps especially now, is something that may encourage us to keep our hearts closed. But in her book The Feminist Ethic of Risk, Welch helps us see despair for what it is. She observes that
“the temptation of cynicism and despair, once revolutionary fervor or youthful idealism is shaken by the intransigence of systems of oppression2,”
is worth special attention in the context of political action. She continues to observe that people used to political power and control may turn to despair when what we thought we could win over is actually too big and complex for us to control and overwhelm. When we find out that the actions we thought would overcome our struggles once and for all fall short, we feel as though we’ve run into a wall, and our response might be to slump to the floor in despair.
Instead, Welch encourages us to consider a different kind of responsible action. Rather than trying to overwhelm what is ultimately out of our control, she describes another way. Responsible action for Welch is whatever risk we can take that will give someone else enough room and resources to take another risk. And another, and another, and another. Taking responsible action means letting go of an ultimate solution we can imagine on our own. Instead, it means doing what we know and imagine will help one another achieve our common goals.
“The measure of an action’s worth is not,” Welch writes, “the willingness of someone to risk their life but the contribution such an action will make to the imagination and courage of the resisting community3.”
For those of us whose hearts are tender right now, keeping our hearts open, undefended, and listening might feel like the biggest risk we can take at the moment. Keeping ourselves open is a vulnerable practice, and vulnerability means encountering something that at least feels like risk in our bodies.
I can imagine the risk that Connie Simon may have felt in her body when she walked into her patient’s room in our reading4 this morning. I can feel the deep breath filling her lungs before walking in. I’ve taken that breath many times in uncertain conversations. If her heart was beating all the way up in her throat as she took a seat, I’ve felt that too. I doubt I am the only one here who has felt these things. And yet she went in, and sat down anyway. She left her heart’s defenses out in the hallway so she could be present with the aching person in the room.
Because of this relatively small risk, this person Simon companioned could open up. She could share her story, share her pain, and together they could find a solution to the patient’s immediate problem. But what strikes me about this story is where it ends. The patient doesn’t thank Simon for helping her file a report for the missing purse. The patient thanks her for the simple act of listening. An act that didn’t need graduate-level training, but presence and care. That is what she lifts up to us at the end.
What risks was this person able to take because someone listened to her? How did she continue to change her world, in big and small ways? Simon likely didn’t know how her patient’s life continued to unfold. We certainly won’t know here. But it’s clear that it meant something. If it did nothing else, it reminds us of how we are connected to one another, how we need one another for support.
Noticing this story and what Simon did, noticing it as an affirmation of our interdependence, can lead us to another source that can sustain this practice: our Unitarian Universalist values. We know that we depend on one another for support, and that the care we have to offer each other makes a difference. Welch’s ethic of risk, of responsible action, is also an affirmation of interdependence. It lays out a vision of action that asks us to imagine how our risks impact the other people in our world. It asks us to orient our actions to enable others to take their own action. It encourages us not to see ourselves as individuals putting our faith in decisive action beyond our own power, but to believe in and act on the power that exists between us. This may remind you of James Luther Adams’ words we heard a couple weeks ago. He observed that the most enduring and effective things in our world require “the power of organization and the organization of power5.” Responsible risk between us organizes the power between us.
You may find that these sources help ground and guide you. You may also be wondering, “Will this work?” “Is it worth it?” “Will these little things really help anyone, anything?” You may also hear another theme running through this sermon: begin by focusing on what you can control. I’ve already heard some of you orienting yourselves with this perspective. What we can control as individuals and groups varies widely by our resources and bandwidth. But finding ways to keep our hearts open is something that all of us can do for ourselves and one another. It may be the one thing you can find the bandwidth for.
I don’t share this practice with you to suggest that it is the end of what we do. I don’t believe that keeping our hearts open, crucial and transformative as that may be, will save our world on its own. I do present it as a starting place. While we can and should understand this as something in our control that can help other people, I think it has something else to offer us. This small risk, this small action, can open us and prepare us for bigger actions as well. Practicing this can exercise our minds, hearts, and spirits to consider what else is within our power to affect. In our reading, Simon realized there was something else she could do that would help the person she cared for, just by listening.
Being present and opening our hearts is also how we build and tend relationships, which connect us to power greater than our own as individuals. In my home state, there is a community action organization called AMOS - A Mid-Iowa Organizing Strategy. Much of its work begins with people listening to one another. They begin their work with “house meetings,” which are opportunities for people from the same neighborhoods to gather, share, and listen to the issues they are facing. This is how they determine what issues to pursue, and how. This is also how they build the critical mass necessary to pursue these issues. Building and tending to relationships is not the practice that finishes the work, but it is the practice that gets the work started and sustains it throughout.
I also do not share this practice with you to suggest that your undefended heart should have no boundaries, either. Each of us have different limits, and different amounts of what we can give of ourselves. We must get in touch with our limits, and keep getting to know them as they change. As we continue to learn our limits, we may find the capacity for more presence, more connection, and more action. Or we may find situations we can’t be present for. When I did my chaplaincy internship over the summer, I had to learn my limits and teach myself to slow down. As a class, we regularly reminded each other that we did not need to connect with every person on our floor every day. We reminded each other that we would need more time to reground ourselves after some conversations. The good work we do is quality work, not quantity work. If we are going to be in this for the long haul, we have to be as generous with ourselves as we are with one another.
As the winter holidays approach us, starting this coming week, these lessons may help you stay in your relationships for the long haul. Imagine the friends, the loved ones, the neighbors in your life. There may be someone you know who is dreading family conflict across differences of politics or personalities. You yourself may be dreading this. Imagine the support you can offer them with your attention. Now look around you. Imagine the care you can offer and receive from the people here, learning and practicing the same lessons you are. As you carry this message beyond these walls and into your wider lives, I invite you to consider these things. How will you keep your heart open and undefended? What risks will you take? What will you do to keep one another in it for the long haul?
1. Karen Oliveto & Robin Ridenour, ““We’re Going to Lead with Love.” A Lesbian Bishop Reflects on a Career of Service,” StoryCorps, June 6, 2024, https://storycorps.org/stories/were-going-to-lead-with-love-a-lesbian-bishop-reflects-on-a-career-of-service
2. Sharon Welch, A Feminist Ethic of Risk: Revised Edition (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2000), 40.
3. Ibid., 47.
4. Connie Simon, “Someone to Listen,” Braver/Wiser, Unitarian Universalist Association, November 8, 2017, https://www.uua.org/braverwiser/someone-listen
5. James Luther Adams, On Being Human Religiously, ed. Max L. Stackhouse (Boston: Beacon Press, 1976), 18.