03.04.07
Is This the World We Want?
The Kopanang Women’s Group helps women gain income-making skills while providing a supportive, nurturing environment.
Listen to Sister Sheila Flynn’s wonderful sermon, “Is This the World We Want?” Sister Sheila is Irish by birth and grew up in England. She spent time in Connecticut living with the Dominican Order. Now she is a part of the The Kopanang Women’s Group in South Africa, where she has spent the last seventeen years serving people devastated by HIV/AIDS. Because of the AIDS epidemic, the median life expectancy for a South African has dropped from 66 years of age in 2000 to 42 years of age today.
The stigma, silence, denial and discrimination surrounding AIDS in Africa means that, “Death by AIDS is a lingering, painful, and often lonely experience, short on dignity; inflicting grievous suffering on family members including young children,” says Sheila. She and her fellow sisters work to provide comfort and meaning to all who are making this difficult journey.
Her daily work with the life, death, and suffering of others is what makes her sermon so authoritative, authentic, and powerful. She encourages us to “Mind the Gap,” with the gap representing the forgotten space where the powerless and destitute suffer alone. “Justice demands that we take sides with the poor; those people who have slipped through the gap: the exploited, the voiceless,” she says. “And those very people demand that we challenge the economic and political structures that perpetuate bondage, domination and exclusion.”
She also confronts the rampant consumerism that defines our lives, harms the environment that we all depend on, and denigrates people. “We cannot refute the fact that we are living in a commodity jungle. Our society is a market in which everything is bought and sold. The labor market dominates and forms our conception of society, political politics, and personal relationships. Everything has a price and everything is for sale.”
“Is this the world we want?” she asks. “I believe that so much of our world is out of synch with what truly matters and sustains us.” Instead she seeks a world were love for one another is ubiquitous, and “our conscience is supreme.”
She recognizes the work we have to do, yet also realizes we must approach the challenge with love for ourselves, rather than guilt. “Guilt is a useless emotion,” she assures us. “My Irish mother would say, ‘Guilt is like a rocking chair, it gives you something to do, but it gets you nowhere.’”
She also cautions against being intimidated by our world’s problems: “Haunted by the magnitude of problems and our very finite limitations, it is too easy to succumb to a culture of paralysis; the problems are so big. But that perception can be used as an excuse. Or we can use it as a springboard for the immersion into life.” She encourages us to “traverse these hurdles, end our excuses, and engage ourselves in life itself” which she believes “is found at that locus of struggle and suffering.”
Listen to her stirring presentation. Her sermon is about 20 minutes long and was given at the First Unitarian Universalist Society of San Francisco on Nov. 26, 2006. Check out the UUSF’s sermon archive for additional sermons.
Feel free to comment on what you think of her sermon.
This text was written in 2007 by Freeman Wicklund of FreemanWicklund.org, and it may be freely reprinted or distributed in its entirety in any e-zine, e-mail, newsletter or blog as long as this sentence and Web link are included.