Martin Bryant

I had the opportunity, invited by a friend, to deliver a homily to a fairly conservative Lutheran congregation last summer. The church was right across the street from the local High School and had been recently shaken (as we all were) by the Columbine High School killings. I spoke in an informal "talk back" service. I'd like to adapt and extend some comments that I made at that time…

What is the disease that this is a symptom of? We hear terms like the disenfranchised, the loners, the isolated. Parents don't know what their kids are doing. Kids feel "left out" at school and even more estranged at home.

Several years ago, Hillary Clinton authored a book titled after an old African proverb "It takes a village to raise a child". The first lady had it only half right. It does take a village, but our cultural entities are mostly far too large to function as effective villages. Our nation, state, and city are now enormous and in their face we seem insignificant. Even our localities and schools and neighborhoods are made up of thousands and we seem almost unnoticed. My neighborhood has almost three thousand people in it. The closest high school has well over a thousand attending. It is hard to belong to things this large, it easy to "lose" people. No one in a real village is insignificant.

In my work, I travel a great deal. I remember several years ago traveling to a small town in Texas. In the lunchroom I overheard folks talking about a murder that took place within the last few days. No one knew the victim personally, although a few knew him by sight or reputation. The unfortunate one was of no great consequence in the town. The thing that struck me was that it was obvious that this was a very infrequent event in the community and the folks were concerned not just that such an awful crime happened so close and could happen to them, but that it happened to "one of theirs".

I couldn't help think, even in the face of that tragedy, that I envied people that had a small enough community to take notice of this loss. I couldn't help but think we should all live in a community where each loss and each birth are noticed and where people "belong". I couldn't help think but that we all, not just children, need a village.

I've also traveled to Saudi Arabia. In Saudi, Americans today huddle together in compounds of sixty to a couple of hundred homes. These walled communities provide them shelter from an environment, that is to say the least, culturally uncomfortable. But these compounds seem sometimes like throwbacks to the stateside suburbia of an earlier age and many ex-patriots love the community they have. People mostly walk from house to house (women can't legally drive) and very frequently neighbors appear knocking at the back door, or cracking it a little and calling in "is anyone home?"

These "villagers" depend on each other in many ways. They get their very culture, not from TV, but from each other, not unlike pioneers on the frontier, or the "villages" created in America's largest cities by turn-of-the century immigrants.

As our neighborhoods become larger, nuclear families smaller, and extended families are scattered across the country and across relationships made more complex by divorce and new family structures, the social world of our youth is increasingly bounded by their school. In our ever larger public schools, we begin very early to separate children by age. Should we be surprised that by the time a young person is a teenager they cannot relate well except to people of their own age? Should we be surprised at the power of peer pressure, and of peer exclusion?

It is ironic that we often measure our dedication to our youth in terms of the modernity and size of our schools. These larger campuses may actually contribute to the isolation of our youth, who might be better served by smaller, more intimate schools. Some charter schools and public schools are even experimenting with schools which resemble a one room school house. We struggle to humanize our large schools, for we fear if they become too institutionalized, they may become little more than "youth reservations".

In the days when we lived in villages, the social and working lives of children were not just central, but necessary to the community. The one room school house did not even meet when children's hands were needed for the harvest. The "work of children" was not separated from the village and work of the village was similarly tied up in the children.

In the village, birth and death are part of community life. Both would often happen at home, with family members, including children, in attendance. Although attitudes are opening up today about birth, too often birth and death are isolated in a hospital or nursing home, away from the community.

Many children and adults have no personal knowledge of birth or death. This is especially tragic because it leaves these potentially impressionable youth to take their opinions about death from the TV, cinema, and video game, and not from the bedside and graveside. It leaves young people to decide about sex without seeing the powerfully spiritual, life altering, and physically traumatic consequences.

In a large suburban community, attached to one of America's largest metropolitan areas by so many freeways it can be hard to find a village. The highways keep us in our cars, the tv shows can keep us in our homes, the suspicion and fear can keep us in ourselves.

Here, in this room, is your village.

We UUs sometimes get the idea that some of the other churches are too different than we. We may even start to think of them as "them". However, I'd like you to reflect on the great good that any house of worship provides. For it's "flock", it is a village. Many of us find ourselves in church several times a week; but for many if only for an hour, once a week, it is a place where:

• we treat people decently and are treated decently
• we are generous and witness generosity
• we refrain from thinking about our jobs and pocketbooks and busy schedules and replace those thoughts with some deeper, rarer thoughts
• we can bring our troubles to find solace, or leave them behind and find respite
• we celebrate each birth and mourn each passing, and we recognize these events with ceremony.
• we communicate with people through the handshake, hug, or hand on the shoulder and not through e-mail, phone recorder tag, or cell phones.
• we seem to be far, or at least distanced, from the world of "Baywatch" and "Mortal Kombat", the world of intense consumerism and intense electronic connectivity
• we find a place where young people estranged from their extended families can meet older people and where older people distanced from their extended families can meet younger people
• we can read something considered gently by millions of people for hundreds or perhaps thousands of years
• we can sing with other people. What a powerfully spiritual thing that is
• We find our village.

This weekend many of our neighbors are attending Synagogues and Mosques and temples and Friend's Meeting Houses and Churches, and though a few of them may hear messages that seem to us at least misguided, perhaps even hurtful, on the whole, I believe they will be better off for their visit. And so will we.

I’d like to close with a new African proverb - the words of Desmond Tutu - which eloquently clarifies why "belonging" is so important and why it does take a village, for all of us - he writes: