Crossing Bridges

August 25, 2024—Rev. Rita Capezzi

As Will said earlier, I crossed the Peace Bridge to be here today. After that, I crossed the Garden City Skyway. And then I crossed the Burlington Bridge. And uncounted highway overpasses crossing dozens of small creeks—18-mile Creek, 16-mile Creek, 15 mile Creek—so very many until I reached the highway overpass crossing the Credit River, signaling the ending of this morning’s journey. How long would it take me to arrive without the bridges? Is it even possible, short of returning to 1812 and fording the waterways by ferry or by horse?

Bridges, however, bridges are something more than physical structures. Bridges bring one side of the river together with the other side. Bridges bring differences into relationship. Bridges require our active participation in creating relationship. Bridges are what create relationship.

How beautiful, how sacred, when love is the ever-present bridge, when love is companioned with all of our bridge-crossing. Love, as Rumi said, the bridge between you and us and everything.

Some of you know that I was born in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, a city full of bridges. Pittsburgh sits at the convergence of the Monongahela and the Allegheny Rivers, a confluence which creates the Ohio River. There’s a lot of water there, and you need a lot of bridges to get across all of it. The city sports elegant bridges and utilitarian bridges and a set of triple bridges, all three painted a bright yellow. At one time, we even had a “Bridge to Nowhere,” a highway connector unfinished for decades that became a running joke about government waste and ineffectiveness.

As a child, I lived on one bank of the Allegheny River. And there were neighborhoods I never ventured into. This was not because they were considered “bad” or off limits. Rather, it was because you had to cross a bridge to get to them! Bridges made some places seem too distant, too much trouble, too far away. How strange, since bridges are intended to join a separation, to provide a crossing to the other side of one thing or another. And it is often stories from the other side of the bridge that link us together common stories, but also those that show that as different as we may be, our stories and our story-telling drawing us together.

Brazilian novelist Paulo Coelho wrote: “Even if my neighbor doesn’t understand my religion or understand my politics, he can understand my story. If he can understand my story, then he’s never too far from me. It is always within my power to build a bridge. There is always a chance for reconciliation, a chance that one day he and I will sit around a table together and put an end to our history of clashes. And on this day, he will tell me his story and I will tell him mine.”

There is a story in my family about a bridge. The story goes like this: My father’s parents courted on a bridge that crossed the Monongahela River. It was the Birmingham Bridge. At that time, the bridge linked the Italian neighborhood on one bank with the Irish neighborhood on the other. The bridge linked the neighborhoods, yet my young grandparents weren’t supposed to cross it. They were not supposed to meet, and certainly not for romance.

In those days, neither the new Irish immigrants nor the new Italian immigrants wanted their children to love each other, certainly not marry each other.

Both groups struggled to become “American.” The Irish had to give up their accented English or the Gaelic to blend in. The Italians had to give up their dialects, but that darker skin color thwarted their efforts for several generations. Yet I would not be standing here with you today if Rita McDermott and Charley Capezzi had listened to their elders and stayed away from each other. We cross bridges because there is something on the other side that we need, something we simply can’t do without.

My father’s parents made their grand romantic gesture on the Birmingham Bridge, but real life is not a sweet romance. My grandparents did not have an easy time of it, having upset both their families so. Yet something drew them together and kept them together over long lives. Though they were often at odds, they died within six weeks of each other. I guess they could not live without each other. Their courting on the bridge was more than mere flirtation. Each’s interest in the other’s ethnic and cultural background somehow drew them together. The ways of life on one side of the river had something powerful to offer the other. A new perspective, perhaps. A new story.

Sometimes the wisdom of the family, the wisdom of the clan, holds back enlarging possibilities. There is strength and beauty, knowledge and history in any of our clans.

And our own groups can also be limiting. Like-mindedness can become an echo chamber, after all, closing us off from new possibilities, just across the bridge. Still, there is a risk of harm when you cross from one side of the river to the other, from one group or identity to another. But when there is true love, there is a possibility for connection and larger vision about our shared reality. For what is love, after all, but a desire for, a yearning toward new perspective and new insight upon this interdependent web holding us all. What is love, after all, but a fundamental and true notion of this greater, more vital web of relationship of which we are all a part, and not ever apart from.

The current Dalai Lama reminds us that “Love and compassion are necessities, not luxuries. Without them humanity cannot survive.” I think we all understand something of our own individual need for love. When we are frightened, we want reassurance, we yearn for compassion. When we are angry and thoughtless, we need understanding. When we are troubled or lonely, we long to be assured that we are loved. We all need to be loved in order to thrive, to become our best selves. We need love in order to survive what is harsh and bitter, mean-spirited and violent about the society that we inhabit. We need to be loved in order to combat the evil that would try to convince us that we are not worthy, that our humanity is not to be acknowledged or respected. We need another person to reach out to us, to bridge the distance, with love. And what is love but the effort to connect, tell our stories and be heard, to seek someone’s perspective as valid, meaningful, sacred.

Love is an act of spiritual bridge-crossing. We all walk that aerial bridge, often over troubled waters. May we learn to walk it in compassion for each other.

I’ve served this Congregation for a year now, and we have crossed a few bridges together. Getting to know one another. Getting to trust one another enough to acknowledge that there were bridges within the Congregation in need of some maintenance covenants to renew, hurts to recognize and to remedy, a need for more robust welcome and inclusion for all. We crossed these bridges, and do you know what happened? We learned. We survived the crossing, difficult as some of it was, and we are a stronger congregation for it. We don’t need to be afraid to look around and face the fact that there are a few more bridges that need some attention, a few more stories to tell about how this congregation creates vital active spiritual community. As a community we will write the story of how we lean into covenant, how we address limitations of finances, how we search for a new minister, crossing each bridge, together, as we come to it.

In this Congregation, I have seen the enthusiasm, the force of commitment brought to building bridges, to healing a broken world, to creating relationship with the various communities of Mississauga.

I have witnessed with joy our specific efforts to be a bridge to local indigenous communities, to the larger 2SLGBTQIA+ community. To share our resources and our stories, to learn and to listen. As we heard earlier in Rev. Naomi’s words, “These are the kinds of face-to-face greetings that initiate relationships, that open our hearts and act as a bridge of connection from one person to the next.” And I believe, with all my heart, that equality and mutuality must be the basis for our acts of humanity, all acts to help one another. We must feel the strength in those we seek to support, feel our own weakness as we seek to serve those with needs different than our own, those with stories and life experiences different from our own. Because there is another kind of storytelling “that goes on in our larger society that burns bridges, locks down relationships, and keeps us from living our promises to each other. We know these words.” These are words denying inherent dignity. May we all in this Congregation cross bridges of difference together, move together to bridge differences with love, move together to build bridges strong for the work of justice in the world.

We must build, we must act, because what I see and know with my own heart is that feeling the wrongs of the world is not enough. We need our heads and our hands, too. Our hearts feel love, and love, moved to action when united with our principles, becomes the seeking of justice. It’s doing, it’s acting on the feelings of our hearts, that matters. Lesbian feminist theologian Carter Heyward calls us into commitment and action on the feelings of our hearts. She writes:

For this reason, loving involves commitment. We are not automatic lovers of self, others, world, or God. Love does not just happen. We are not love machines, puppets on the strings of a deity called ‘love.’ Love is a choice — not simply, or necessarily, a rational choice, but rather a willingness to be present to others without pretense or guile. Love is a conversion to humanity — a willingness to participate with others in the healing of a broken world and broken lives.

There is a truth greater than bridges to nowhere, crossings that lead to chaos, brutality, and scorn. There is a truth greater than the pain and suffering we now witness in the unjustifiable criminalization of black and brown bodies, of non-binary people, of the LGBTQ community. And we bring this truth into reality when we dare to answer the call of love, to act in love in all the ways we each can. The truth is that when we answer the call of love, we take the risk of placing our own perspectives alongside those who experience the world differently and see both as valid and real. When we understand with our minds and feel in our hearts and live through action the notion that love is the bridge to everything, then we can truly worship and praise. We can truly bring peace to ourselves and all our siblings and cousins with whom we share this web, this aerial bridge of connection. When we move together in the light of God, when we answer the call of hope, peace, life, and love.

And so, friends, what bridges might you cross today, today in this Great Hall or out in greater Mississauga? What bridges might you cross in the coming weeks? What new relationship might you risk, when you remember that love is the bridge that connects you to everything? Take those risks, share your story and listen to the stories of others, fostering the connection that makes your life fuller in its goodness. “We are all blessings to this world. Our work is to build bridges of connection, finding and naming and affirming those blessings we are, so that we might nurture all our spirits and thus heal our world.” May it be so.