Our actions today are creating the future. What are we finding intolerable today that we want to make sure to change? What is bringing us joy today that we want to continue? Pauli Murray understood these deep connections between past, present, and future.
Forty-two years ago, today, May 14, 1978, the Rev. Dr. Pauli Murray was in Durham at St. Philip’s Episcopal Church. It was Mother’s Day and she was offering her first sermon as an ordained priest. And St. Philip’s was so appropriate for this occasion because it was the church her grandmother, aunts and mother attended before she was born.
The sermon started and ended with stories about the gifts of the impactful women in Pauli’s life: Grandmother Cornelia’s prophecy and a candid tongue, Aunt Pauline’s teaching, Mother Agnes’s work as a healer, Eleanor Roosevelt’s generosity and compassion, Aunt Sally’s laughter, and fellow Durhamite Susie A. Elliott’s (dean of women at Howard when Pauli was a law student) gift of graciousness and living creatively.
These gifts of the holy spirit are, Pauli surmised, the resources we need to call upon to “ share [our] different experiences, to help others enter into our own joys and sorrows, to feel as we feel, suffer as we suffer, and rejoice—to hear one another speaking in our own language. ” For Pauli Murray, hearing one another, seeing ourselves in another’s experience was the crucial step toward healing our society and ourselves.
For Pauli Murray, this healing, in her words, reconciliation, “cannot come without a simultaneous transformation of our society into a caring, humane society . . .” She invoked this vision for the future as a time “ where people are not just numbers in a computer; where human services are not tainted with the idolatrous notion of profit, power and privilege; where the elderly are seen as repositories of our collective wisdom and not as inconveniences to be endured; where children are given responsibility and expected to pull their weight in family and social undertakings; where waste becomes as socially undesirable as theft; and where it is the national ethos that human beings are our most important resource, that spiritual and physical energy is as important as energy from coal and oil.” *
The clarity of vision for a just tomorrow is one of Pauli Murray’s gifts to us. What are the gifts you bring to this work? How are your actions creating our future?
*Rev. Dr. Pauli Murray, “Gifts of the Holy Spirit to Women I Have Known” Sermon given May 14, 1978 at St. Philip's Episcopal Church in Durham. Pauli Murray Papers, Box 64, folder 1095, Schlesinger Library, Harvard