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"All God's Children — Count No One Out"
Some twenty years ago I had the extraordinary good fortune to take with me on a trip to Hawaii my beloved mother and father. They were farmers in Illinois and were about to celebrate their 55th Wedding Anniversary — 55 years of loving one another. I had been asked by an organization called The Young Presidents Organization to give a talk and run a seminar there for them and I convinced Mother and Dad to go with me. We had an almost idyllic time — a lot of time to spend together. And adult children all too seldom have that with their aged parents.

But we also took time out to socialize with what my mother used to call “my fancy friends,” those Young Presidents. When I got back to New York some time later, I was walking up a street (I think it was Madison Avenue), and I ran into one of those Young Presidents who had been a participant in that conference. He just couldn’t wait to talk to me about my father, telling me how wonderful he was. And I congratulated the young man for his good taste.

But then he wanted to share with me a conversation he had with Dad. He reported that he had celebrated with my father his good fortune and how proud he must be of me. But then he was puzzled by my father’s rejoinder. He said, “You’d never believe, Jacqueline, what he said to me.”

I said, “I think I can guess. I can even predict — he said something like, ‘and you ought to meet my other two girls.’”

That young tycoon looked at me in incredulity and he said, “How did you know? Did he tell you?”

And I said, “No, he didn’t tell me about that conversation but my father and my mother in everything they ever did around us and for us communicated that in our family there could never be a No. 1, a No. 2, and a No. 3 daughter. There were only three No. 1's. Each one loved specially. Each one the one true child. Each one regarded for herself and dealt with as herself. That was a lesson that was very important for me to learn and that I will carry with me to and through my grave. My mother and dad, like most good parents, taught me what brotherhood and sisterhood was all about.”

I think we all learn that in the womb of an intimate nuclear family. And, if we’re lucky in some way, as was I, also to be a member of an extended family, we learn it on a broader base. Believe it or not, I was the 52nd of 54 grandchildren in an Irish-American tribe. In some ways I owed the world’s negative population.

But I learned through my uncles and aunts and my cousins how to spread out that love and that regard, how to recognize that each one of us was different, each one of us was blessed, but for no one of us was dignity based on the lesser dignity, much less the indignity of any of the others.

What we need to do is to learn that lesson, to practice that lesson, to savor that lesson in the extended family of these United States, and somehow to learn it for the world community.

Some two hundred years ago our founding fathers, and they were, at least by the history books, mostly fathers, went out to establish that lesson for our country. Never before in the history of the known world, certainly not in the western world, had a nation been founded with a commitment to de facto pluralism. But those founding fathers somehow had the vision, I think the prophetic vision, to write into the Constitution and the Bill of Rights the kinds of guarantees that we would indeed, over time, be one nation indivisible with liberty and justice for all.

Now you and I both know that those founding fathers, some of whom forged those very words, had slaves in their back yards, and didn’t give the franchise or think of giving the franchise to women. It was almost 150 years later, early in this century, that their descendants took that prophetic dream a bit further and gave the franchise to me and mine. But they wrote the words right. And for that we have to be extremely grateful and extremely challenged.

In 1927 some extraordinary Americans: Charles Evans Hughes, Jane Addams, David deSola Pool, Teddy Roosevelt, and others of that stature got together in New York City in a conference. They were to launch the organization which I now head: The National Conference of Christians and Jews. Their pre-planning conference was reported on the front page of The New York Times. And that article started a group quote that came out of that conference. Listen to that quote very carefully. They said, “The intergroup problems of this nation rise like a spector in the path of democracy and dare her to come on.” Once more, “The intergroup problems of this nation (1927) rise like a spector in the path of democracy and dare her to come on.”

Those prophetic founders of the organization I now head pledged themselves to make the words of the Constitution and the Bill of Rights ring ever truer. And so they said, “Though we are Jews and Christians with a hoary agency of yet unsettled problems still to be taken care of between us, we are not only Jews and Christians, we are Irish, and Italians, and Poles. We are rich and poor. We are black and white.” In 1927 they said, “There is a great need for color-harmonizing in American life.”

In another part of that reported conference, they talked about Hindus, not yet about Muslims. But they, in their religious commitment, saw that unless this nation respected and was nurtured by people of faith, however different those faiths might be, this nation would never live up to her prophetic founding to her prophetic dream of one nation indivisible with liberty and justice for all.

When they wrote their beginning platform, those founders of NCCJ, I was a baby on that farm in Illinois. A few years later in parochial school and on through high school in Sterling and Rock Falls, Illinois, I was nurtured by my great faith tradition. But there were holes and errors and even evils to that faith tradition, as there always are in faith traditions. One of my favorite authors is the French prose poet, Charles Peguy. He wrote a beautiful set of prose poems encased in a little book called God Speaks in which he takes on the voice of God. In one of my favorites, Peguy says, “God’s way is to take man’s way with men, and that’s the glory and the scandal, both.”

The scandal that had been left in my great faith tradition was, ironically, almost cynically, embedded in the scripture of the high holy days — our Good Friday of Holy Week just before the Easter. And as all too many of you in the audience will recall with me — out of this throat and out of many of your throats must have come the words, “the perfidious Jews.” It is almost impossible for me at this juncture of my life to admit, to recognize, to realize that this throat said those words in the highest of my holy days. And if there is a hereafter and a highly personal one, and I trust and believe there is, one of the people that I will race you to get to his lap, is my great Holy Father, John XXIII, who when he was Pope of Rome, exercised the power he then had to exorcise that devil forever from my liturgy. And he struck the words from that liturgy forever.

The exegesis, the great scholars of the Old and the New Testaments today, all tell us that the words themselves did not even enter the Christian gospel until about 100 years after the birth of Christ. And if one did not recognize the terrible, criminal mischief, the problems that came into our society over these twenty centuries because of the intrusion of those words, one would say that the fight that created those words between the followers of Matthew and the local rabbis was nothing new.

But it is that kind of scandal, that kind of limitation of human beings, thinking they are hearing the word of God, that in the end, in my judgment blasphemes the God.

Those days, those words, those times are not yet gone, and I would be foolish and you would be foolish if we thought we would live to see them ever gone. Today on the streets of Chicago and Cicero, indeed in so many midwestern cities, we still have neo-Nazis, we have Tony Alamo, we have the Aryan brotherhood, where people in the name of God teach others, in their direct words, “to hate in the name of the Lord.” And go on to tell those who listen to them and are ensnared by them, that “God has spoken to us — not to Negroes, not to other people, not to those anti-Christ Jews.”

And there are those in this country who have so little sense of self that they must see their dignity on the lesser dignity and the indignity of others.

That was not the prophetic dream of the founding fathers. That was not the prophetic dream of the founders of my organization. That can never be the prophetic dream of those of us who call ourselves and each other “the children of God.” That is alive and ill on too many fronts in our world today. Look only with me at Northern Ireland, a source of enormous pain to me, an Irish-American woman, where in the name of God brothers are fighting brothers, sisters are killing sisters, little children are taught to hate each other because God spoke to their parents in different ways through different testaments at different times.

Look at modern Iran where Khomeini is, I believe, distorting another great faith tradition, Islam, by calling people together to be martyrs as well as killers in the name of God; convinced that unless all of God’s children have heard the same word and are devoted to the same word, they do not worship God. Rather, I believe, as Martin Marty, the great Chicago theologian has said, “.... God cannot be God unless he is big enough for all our Gods.”

The brotherhood-sisterhood theme for the NCCJ for 1985 is “America is Many — Count Me In.” We are celebrating the coming centennial of the Statue of Liberty, reminding ourselves and all of you that we are a nation of immigrants. In fact, we are all from a rich immigrant tradition, recognizing that we must be counted in, that we have a right to be counted in, that none of us should be shut out of the marbles game, much less out of the decision making of this great democracy or her opportunities.

But “count me in” has a double entendre. The second entendre rings back to 1960 when the young John Kennedy stood at his podium and accepted the presidency of the United States, and said to a young generation of Americans, “Think not only what your country can do for you, but think what you can do for your country.”

And so the NCCJ brotherhood-sisterhood theme is saying to all Americans, “When you are called upon to shoulder the load, when you are called upon to solve our tough problems, when you have to face the ambiguities of the political decision making in this great democracy, stand up and say, ‘Count me in,’ and shoulder your responsibility.”

I have chosen to make my remarks center around a different aspect, a little modality change in that theme. I am saying “We’re all God’s children. Count no one out.”

Religious people, more than any other persons, ought to recognize brotherhood and sisterhood, ought to understand, indeed as my mother and dad so richly understood, that the parent of us all must see us all as persons and as peoples — as No. 1, must see each of us as a chosen person and a chosen people, must see each of us as a true believer, trying in our limited way in time and space to understand the Godhead, to reverence the Godhead, and to use the grace of the Godhead to grace one another.

The scriptural passage which I asked to be read to you tonight (I Corinthians 12:4-11) was chosen because of that conviction of mine. True, it comes from the New Testament and the words I chose come just before the description of the mystical body of Christ. The words said, “Now there are a variety of gifts but the same spirit, and there are varieties of service but the same Lord, and there are varieties of working, but it is the same God who inspires them all in every one. All these are inspired by one and the same spirit who apportions to each one individually as he wills.”

St. Paul was talking about the mystical body of Christ, but let me go back to my beginning where I suggested that it is the intimate family that gives us our models for the extended family, and here Paul was talking about the extended family of Christianity. But it is the extended tribal family of our own blood and our own roots that ought to be the laboratory, the novitiate, the preparing place, the launching pad for our dealing with the most extended family of all, and that is the world community.

The world community today is a family which has been de facto brought together by the great medium with which I am now communicating with you and by the modern airplane and the satellite. That community will learn to understand each other if each member of that community celebrates his or her own personhood and peoplehood.

Let me suggest with you that you share with me tonight a meditation I have been holding with myself for some twenty years, a meditation that I intend and expect to hold with myself to, and I surely hope, through my grave. If there is a person, a presence, a spirit we call God, and I deeply believe there is, then that person, that spirit, whether we call him, her, it “Yahweh, Allah, the Triune God, or Emerson Transcendentalism, or something between or among them all,” that spirit is indeed the common parent of us all.

Do you in your deepest spiritual self believe that that common parent could ever have meant his words, testaments, scriptures, to have divided us from one another, to hate one another, to perpetrate pogroms and religious lores, and witchcraft trials and burnings at the stake in his name? That seems to me to be the ultimate blasphemy.

Every one of our great traditions says that God is beyond all understanding. Every one of them says in some way, in some words, that unless we love our neighbor whom we see, how can we say that we love God whom we do not see. And yet we know the history that lies back there over centuries where in his name people have done terrible, terrible tragedies and evils to one another.

And that kind of thing still goes on in this city, in this state, in this country, and in the world community. How do we move away from that? I tell you how I travel. I go back to my primary model for the parent and that primary model are those two exquisite persons, those Irish-American Roman Catholics, Ed and Florence Grennan, who lie in those graves one hundred miles from here. And I know, if I know nothing else in the world, that if I were ever knowingly to use the words, the ideas, the messages that they communicated to me in word and deed, to do ill to those other two sisters, to look down on those other two sisters, to lack respect for the extended tribal family and for those other two sisters, to lack respect for the extended tribal family and for those neighbors of different kinds of faith traditions around us, my dad (God bless him) would find some way to rise up out of that grave and call me unblessed.

And I suggest to you tonight that unless we realize that we are all God’s children — Jews, Christians, Protestants, Catholics, Hindus, Muslims, and all the others — unless we realize that, I think God one day will look us square in the face and call us unblessed.

Rather, let us celebrate that we are all God’s children. Let us count each other in.     

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