tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-74802079992940072432024-03-18T17:38:05.452-04:00The Liberal PulpitSermons, Prayers, and Reflections from <a href="https://ucdsm.org">First Unitarian Church</a>, Des Moines, IA (2023 - ) and <a href="https://cucwp.org">Community Unitarian Universalist Congregation</a>, White Plains, NY (2013-2023)Rev. Meredith Garmonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09600609816550758194noreply@blogger.comBlogger913125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7480207999294007243.post-64066903688749916412024-03-18T15:30:00.010-04:002024-03-18T17:37:33.915-04:00The Ontological, The Semantic, and the Tribal<i>Stephen Colbert Interview with Paul Simon, The Late Show, Thu Mar 24, 2024:
</i><blockquote><i><u>SC:</u> Are you yourself a man of faith?<br />
<u>PS:</u> I would say, yes. Well, let me put it another way. I think we’re in an unbelievable paradise on Earth and life is so mysterious a mystery. In the rest of our galaxy there’s really no other life. We don’t know what’s going on. So, life is incredible. So, I think, what a great job you did, God, with this planet. Excellent. And the universe. Paul Simon, hat’s off to you, God. Fantastic universe!<br />
<u>SC:</u> So your faith is an act of gratitude.<br />
<u>PS:</u> An act of gratitude. But then I think, if the explanation for our creation is not “there was a creator,” but there is another explanation, I am no less grateful, and I’m no less in awe of everything. It’s not going to change my morality. I’m not going to think bad is good now, and good is bad, because I feel when it’s good and I feel when I do bad. So, in the two choices between: Is there a creator, or is there another explanation, I like the creator story. That’s where I am with that. You?<br />
<u>SC:</u> I was convicted of my atheism for many years, and then I was overwhelmed by an enormous sense of gratitude for the world. [What you said] resonates for me because this enormous heartbreaking gratitude – even for heartbreaking things -- because the world is beautiful but the beauty isn’t always happy things. Joy is greater than happiness, and happiness is not the ultimate goal. Sublime is the goal. So that feeling that even comes in grief – grief with you is an act of love, so we can both be sad and yet there is joy there because of our ability to share our love in that moment and heal and care for each other – that feeling, that even in that there can be something beautiful, led me to an enormous, overwhelming, uncontainable sense of gratitude, and it had to go someplace, and that led me back to my relationship with what I now call my God.<br />
<u>PS:</u> Yeah. I understand completely</i>.</blockquote>
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This is a sermon about the Unitarian Universalist fourth source. The living tradition we share draws on many sources, of which we enumerate six, and the fourth one is: <blockquote>“Jewish and Christian teachings that call us to respond to God’s love by loving our neighbor as ourselves.” (see all six <a href="https://www.uua.org/beliefs/what-we-believe/sources">HERE</a>)</blockquote>
This is also a Muslim teaching. So in the midst of Ramadan, with Easter and Passover approaching, I wanted to look at this.<br /><br />
God is a bit of a contentious topic among Unitarian Universalists. Some of us resist any use of the word or concept. For others of us, some conception of God is a touchstone for making sense of life – for discerning meaning and hope amidst this confused mix of beauty and tragedy we call life.<br /><br />
Last week I told you about a tussle in Unitarian History that started in 1865 and lasted about 30 years. We have always rejected having a creed. And then some Unitarians were like: “I love being creedless. By the way, I’m not a Christian.”<br /><br />
And other Unitarians were like: “When we said we were creedless, we kinda meant that everyone was free to work out for themselves the specific details of their relationship to Jesus. We never imagined anyone would go so far as to not be Christian at all.”<br /><br />
Then the first group, called the radicals, was like: “Well, we’re going that far.”<br /><br />
And the other group, called the conservatives, was like: “OK, but you’re not a Unitarian.”<br /><br />
And the radicals were like: “But I am a Unitarian. Unitarians are my peeps. I love our churches – the sermons, the hymns, the choir, the classes and study groups, and those dinners that we are just now beginning to call ‘Pot Luck.’”<br /><br />
Finally, after about 30 years, the conservatives were like: “yeah, all right, fine.”<br /><br />
That was round 1 – which sets us up this week to hear about round 2. About 20 years went by and in the middle of the 19-teens, we started up the whole cycle again – only this time, instead of being about nonChristians, it was about nontheists. Some Unitarians were like: “Still love being creedless. By the way, I don’t believe in God.”<br /><br />
And other Unitarians were like: "When we agreed that Unitarians didn’t have to be Christians, we never imagined anyone would go so far as to not be theist at all.”<br /><br />
Then the first group, called the humanists, was like: “Well, we’re going that far.”<br /><br />
Again, it was our more Western congregations at the forefront, but “Western” by now was a bit further west than Pittsburgh. The Unitarian Humanist movement got its start right here in Des Moines, when this congregation hosted the 1917 annual meeting of the Western Unitarian Conference. That’s where this congregation’s minister, Rev. Curtis Reese, met the Minneapolis minister, Rev. John Dietrich. Reese and Dietrich got to talking and discovered that each had been working on the idea of religion without God – which they would decide to call humanism.<br /><br />
Just as a couple generations before, there were attempts to adopt a statement that would rule out these nontraditionalists. The controversy was heated, but no statement was ever passed, and the furor eventually petered out. What was ultimately persuasive was not any argument in a Unitarian periodical or from a Unitarian pulpit, but the simple fact that humanists and theists really could sit side by side in our pews and committee meetings, stand side by side in social action projects. And at our potluck dinners, the green jello salad, wobbled the same and tasted the same whether brought by a humanist or a theist.<br /><br />
We are a people that have learned – yet must periodically re-learn – that "We need not think alike to love alike." And: "people with different beliefs can come together in one faith."<br /><br /><div class="separator" style="clear: both;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj25zxt7oydTFLR9gTnqP5ipji8f_9HsodoqnM524aQ3sCZwqGaOMFd7sLyQmjcYTe8ca6uzRyO5x-b1nmdSiSPImh_0mbkPIFmBsfzO4HpYIOdEG5WMik8KHiYAS1CQy_bpHxeIv56Rgh0TKNlqibmaCXl1YaQnMYlZeGAzSZ0DFthf94yTR4HorPE/s1080/Screenshot%202024-03-18%20132530.png" style="clear: right; display: block; float: right; padding: 1em 0px; text-align: center;"><img alt="" border="0" data-original-height="1080" data-original-width="1080" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj25zxt7oydTFLR9gTnqP5ipji8f_9HsodoqnM524aQ3sCZwqGaOMFd7sLyQmjcYTe8ca6uzRyO5x-b1nmdSiSPImh_0mbkPIFmBsfzO4HpYIOdEG5WMik8KHiYAS1CQy_bpHxeIv56Rgh0TKNlqibmaCXl1YaQnMYlZeGAzSZ0DFthf94yTR4HorPE/s200/Screenshot%202024-03-18%20132530.png" width="200" /></a><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhPj7UmkfBFizQ9tTPxyBcydzGXj-719ln0NAY7LN-wCukztdoy5w_8lyVz_Cu9zZsbx-sBOaUDWvFE-Ugh7XESIAc3mIvsoARozZFgdbWr9bTpykOCMWf4Nc7MI2cULcOruFAAlX7WmgKRQMOcrRdXD4bHTqeEXnZU95Oym-C7IIMiKvBh3X7iaLGn/s1080/Screenshot%202024-03-18%20134343.png" style="clear: right; 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display: block; float: right; padding: 1em 0px; text-align: center;"><img alt="" border="0" data-original-height="499" data-original-width="499" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgNrxK-lE_jvzsDb-SbiHGMM_Mle4wojF4Xm20hp0Tv6rA0r9kcVV0EQwuvz532Xp9Mzd6DV7VvLv7phq56cvBEg9RzudWVs_NkkISb99cGATjiSolkvVBv28OKyyKddlBIutNsDQU8j60DYkrnG5AMhIJ8ER_V8cBdcULHqVs5bhA8rHxwiLAvtEvU/s200/Screenshot%202024-03-18%20141228.png" width="200" /></a><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhb214LCwVQ4smE-odYaH4-uzMZmcJjeH_1Tt8k6FGLgn0gEEGbsl0zyaITYouBma-nG65N2PfzjXF24qs8lOSSYvVIBleYIa81WxUIqZh1i472Bbcvs2LR3GVQdbKAoGgikq50SlaujZjD2g6lJCHTMCWMvVbk0uLUc9eJ2DiRvEHxc7QWKDAtorr1/s1050/Screenshot%202024-03-18%20134912.png" style="clear: right; display: block; float: right; padding: 1em 0px; text-align: center;"><img alt="" border="0" data-original-height="1050" data-original-width="1050" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhb214LCwVQ4smE-odYaH4-uzMZmcJjeH_1Tt8k6FGLgn0gEEGbsl0zyaITYouBma-nG65N2PfzjXF24qs8lOSSYvVIBleYIa81WxUIqZh1i472Bbcvs2LR3GVQdbKAoGgikq50SlaujZjD2g6lJCHTMCWMvVbk0uLUc9eJ2DiRvEHxc7QWKDAtorr1/s200/Screenshot%202024-03-18%20134912.png" width="200" /></a><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjl5nEN9KSOr4h14X8CbZ-FMzfMnWtgsVb1FnEtmsMv1_t2etmzSuYGUXY2i0AO6KdCWewezRll-CN9Ynan5W8TmHWsE3R5CZ5NFwNLc9gv5ER9PepcCZuwrWZFmyX3zZb_vJ9Dh8fX9Z7tgXT2TTEyRJLB6Lskq26u6RKE4wLtpOXjQSUQg1nOg_jH/s1080/Screenshot%202024-03-18%20141338.png" style="clear: right; display: block; float: right; padding: 1em 0px; text-align: center;"><img alt="" border="0" data-original-height="1080" data-original-width="1080" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjl5nEN9KSOr4h14X8CbZ-FMzfMnWtgsVb1FnEtmsMv1_t2etmzSuYGUXY2i0AO6KdCWewezRll-CN9Ynan5W8TmHWsE3R5CZ5NFwNLc9gv5ER9PepcCZuwrWZFmyX3zZb_vJ9Dh8fX9Z7tgXT2TTEyRJLB6Lskq26u6RKE4wLtpOXjQSUQg1nOg_jH/s200/Screenshot%202024-03-18%20141338.png" width="200" /></a><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjfGjGFB-Cwj3nY3y2GVuUBHoHAEnAt5SX3SrlGqZn-48DFTb7S8gzCeLeDJVC_lboFyl_u-Gbw6xJqzt_08n6lKptcdT8DMVMC4_EJ7_kRdmm3QnRVRN6mp80GAvoZEgsHmO-c6R1jwB2do2nB9lAa4ZR3lh1_u4UhmOTmltxOvG5G-x1Iyli2ArDm/s767/Screenshot%202024-03-18%20141102.png" style="clear: right; display: block; float: right; padding: 1em 0px; text-align: center;"><img alt="" border="0" data-original-height="767" data-original-width="767" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjfGjGFB-Cwj3nY3y2GVuUBHoHAEnAt5SX3SrlGqZn-48DFTb7S8gzCeLeDJVC_lboFyl_u-Gbw6xJqzt_08n6lKptcdT8DMVMC4_EJ7_kRdmm3QnRVRN6mp80GAvoZEgsHmO-c6R1jwB2do2nB9lAa4ZR3lh1_u4UhmOTmltxOvG5G-x1Iyli2ArDm/s200/Screenshot%202024-03-18%20141102.png" width="200" /></a><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiCe9V6XdXFxfOcoBu-0KPZE65Jl7agY-gfkqS5rc5hRHg05EPknEftkq9p2yc_5XqS_1GYkW8upj92gBgbxR2R6L4X2dz2wM4aLaRfm_JvgN2ZxXf2wmxcXUvKn2XSSJkKg1jm7Bu_2enBeY8h0R7hyVlWqE2MpZ8ENRNzGHh_Hz246hgXqP9uFgg-/s1042/Screenshot%202024-03-18%20143930.png" style="clear: right; display: block; float: right; padding: 1em 0px; text-align: center;"><img alt="" border="0" data-original-height="1042" data-original-width="1042" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiCe9V6XdXFxfOcoBu-0KPZE65Jl7agY-gfkqS5rc5hRHg05EPknEftkq9p2yc_5XqS_1GYkW8upj92gBgbxR2R6L4X2dz2wM4aLaRfm_JvgN2ZxXf2wmxcXUvKn2XSSJkKg1jm7Bu_2enBeY8h0R7hyVlWqE2MpZ8ENRNzGHh_Hz246hgXqP9uFgg-/s200/Screenshot%202024-03-18%20143930.png" width="200" /></a></div>With that background, I want today to look at the ongoing status of the difference between our "theists" and our "atheists." What sort of difference is it? The disagreement sometimes seems to be ontological: that is, the parties advance competing claims about the nature of reality and what reality does and does not include. Sometimes the disagreement seems to be semantic: that is, the parties advance competing claims about what words do, or may, mean. Mostly, though, it seems to me that this issue is neither ontological nor even semantic. It’s tribal. The parties affirm the existence or nonexistence of God in order to signal their identity and group loyalty. I think it’s important for us to notice that.<br /><br />
When tribal identity is at stake we become rigid, inflexible, dogmatic about "speaking correctly" -- and this is just as true for those who call themselves "atheists" as for those who call themselves "theists." When our tribal loyalty is not at stake, almost all of us, are flexible, creative, open, and charitable in the ways we use and respond to nonstandard language. The question then arises: What's more important, defending our tribal identity or connecting with other people where they are?<br /><br />
Let me illustrate. Some years ago, I was well into adulthood and my own children were teenagers, and we were all gathered with my parents for Thanksgiving. My Mom regaled the table with a story from my childhood, of which I had no recollection of either the events in the story or of ever having heard the story before. Mom said that once, when I was about five years old, we visited some fair or carnival where I saw helium balloons for the first time. I pondered this amazing thing, and asked: “Mom, why do they go up?”<br /><br />
Mom, rational scientist physics professor that she was, answered me, “Why wouldn’t they go up?”<br /><br />
“Things go down,” I said.<br /><br />
“Uh-huh,” said Mom. “Why do they go down?”<br /><br />
“Because of gravity,” I said.<br /><br />
“Ah,” she said. “Well, the balloons go up because of levity.”<br /><br />
And this satisfied me.<br /><br />
When, years later, I heard this story at the Thanksgiving table I did NOT think, “Egad, my mother lied to me!” After all, why not call it levity? She might have tried explaining that helium is less dense than air, which means it has more mass for a given volume, and that gravitational attraction is proportional to mass, so gravity’s pull on the air is stronger than on helium, pulling the air down, which pushes the less-dense helium upward. Mom knew I wasn’t ready to follow such an explanation – so she gave me this word, “levity” as a sort of placeholder. With wisdom and quick wit, she used language to connect with me where I was, rather than to leave me behind. I delight in this family story -- not because Mom’s answer was false, but because it is, really, true. I love knowing again what apparently I was first taught at age five but forgot: There is a force called levity that makes things rise.<br /><br />
People have different stories to make sense of our world. Some stories about reality feature a creative force that is person-like in that it knows and it wants. Other stories tell of a creative force that kind of has knowledge and desires – in a rather metaphorical sense. Still other stories depict the forces of the universe creating and destroying utterly without anything that could be compared to knowledge, intentionality, or purpose, even metaphorically speaking. Besides different opinions of what does or does not exist out there (the ontological questions), we have different viewpoints for how words may reasonably be used (the semantic questions).<br /><br />
In my experience and study, the core uses of the word ‘God,’ I would argue, are to point to any or all of the following:
community-forming power;
<ul><li>love;</li>
<li>the greatest source of beauty, mystery, or creativity;</li>
<li>the widest or deepest inspiration to gratitude, humility, wonder, and awe; </li>
<li>origin;</li>
<li>any ultimate context and basis for meaning, value, ethics, or commitment;</li>
<li>the widest reality to which our loyalty is owed; </li>
<li>the cosmos.</li></ul>
My semantic argument is that these are the most important meanings -- the essence, if you will -- to which people, regardless of their religious persuasion, have pretty-much-always been referring when they said ‘God.’ Many who speak that word would also include "person-like creator." But many would not, so I regard "person-like creator" as nonessential.<br /><br />
That’s my semantic claim. Others disagree with me about that. They counter-claim that the word ‘God’ unavoidably implies a person-like creator.<br /><br />
Four weeks ago, if you remember, in a sermon about Blessing, I said that theology is a kind of poetry. It’s not a kind of science or natural history. As poetry-making and poetry-hearing beings we need to use words creatively, to sometimes treat a peripheral association as a central meaning and ignore the meaning that had often previously been central. I hope that we can get increasingly good at honoring each other’s different experiences of what’s real (different ontological positions) – and that we can also get increasingly good at honoring different semantic positions and different styles of poetry and metaphor.<br /><br />
That has sometimes been hard for us. Why? Here’s why: tribalism. There is an awful lot of religion that is neither about a sense of what’s out there, nor is about a sense of the proper use of words. It’s just about: "Whose team are you on?" Tribal loyalties get in the way of honoring and respecting different experiences about what is real, and different poetic inclinations for choosing words. We have a hard time simply accepting our differences when those differences symbolize what team one is on – and when team membership requires being opposed to certain other teams.<br /><br />
We do need our tribes. After all, another word for “tribe” is “community” – and we need community. And loyalty to our group is, by and large, a virtue. A healthy community, though, will affirm and support some ethics and values beyond tribe loyalty, and will facilitate and help integrate one's transcendent experiences of interconnection and peace. An unhealthy community gives most of its energy to nursing a shared sense of who the enemy is.<br /><br />
Where there are no tribal loyalties at play, we humans are generally pretty flexible about adjusting our understandings of words. For example, one of my former in-laws referred to her refrigerator as "the Frigidaire." She would say, for example, “There’s cake in the Frigidaire.” A glance at the manufacturer’s label revealed that her refrigerator was actually made by Amana. But even at my most churlish, teen-aged self, I was not inclined to say, “No, it’s not in the Frigidaire, it’s in the refrigerator, which happens to be an Amana.” Would you say that? Me neither. (Especially not when there's cake being offered!)<br /><br />
We simply adjust to different ways of using words. If Longfellow's "Song of Hiawatha” wants to call Lake Superior “Gitche Gumee,” we let him. Or consider Lewis Carroll's poem, “Jabberwocky.”
<blockquote>"‘Twas brillig and the slithy toves<br />
did gyre and gimble in the wabe,<br />
all mimsy were the borogoves,<br />
and ye mome raths outgrabe.”</blockquote>
Many of the words are made-up. You can call the poem “nonsense,” but it isn't meaningless. The sound and rhythm and context they create for each other invite us into a world of imagination, and most of us can go with that. Tribalism, however, makes it difficult to extend the same flexibility and charity to language about God.<br /><br />
To illustrate how attitudes about “God” work, consider the ways that some of us find our genial adaptability stiffening dogmatically when it comes to grammar. I, for example, occasionally find myself wrestling with my own grammar dogmatism. I am sensitive to the differences between “lie” and “lay” and between "disinterested" and "uninterested," and I am capable of wishing that other people were, too. Where does this come from? It’s about my own tribal -- and class -- loyalties. It would seem a betrayal of my grandmothers, parents, and beloved English teachers if I were to allow myself to relax the guard against the barbarians at the gate dangling modifiers and saying “less” when they mean “fewer.”<br /><br />
Those adults we admire were the upholders of our class identity. The adults who sought to instill in me good grammar were teaching me to be faithful to my socio-economic class. The hidden message of prescriptive grammar instruction is: Don’t sound like <i>those</i> people – the lower classes. Grammar will be emotionally important to me precisely to the degree that my class identification is emotionally important to me.<br /><br />
So there’s the question: Do I want to go for separation, or for connection? We face linguistic choices – whether to say “ain’t,” or to call a rising balloon “levity,” or use the word “God.” As you make those choices, do you want to go for separation, or for connection?<br /><br />
For me, I don’t want to be a Grammar Nazi. I’m trying – though sometimes not succeeding – to not be. Connection is more important than separation. If I truly don’t know what you mean, I can ask. It’s not like speakers of upper-class English are really, on average, any clearer.<br /><br />
Neither am I going to be a Nazi about the word “God.” If that word allows for connecting with other people around the shared meanings of community-forming power; love; the greatest source of beauty, mystery, or creativity; the widest or deepest inspiration to gratitude, humility, wonder, and awe; origin; any ultimate context and basis for meaning, value, ethics, or commitment; the widest reality to which our loyalty is owed; the cosmos -- then I’ve decided that connecting with others is more important than separating from them based on the fact that I conceive of God’s knowing or desiring more metaphorically than they do. Connecting is more important than separating.<br /><br />
When loyalty isn’t at play, as when reading Lewis Carroll’s "Jabberwocky," it’s relatively easy to practice the gentle arts of flexibility and charity. I’ve come to understand that whether or not I want to insist that “God” necessarily must imply an entity with awareness and intentions is mostly about my tribal loyalty, just as my grammar pet peeves are.<br /><br />
Can we Unitarian Universalists engage in a process we identify as discerning what God is calling us to do? Can we have conversations about the question, "How do we serve God?" Yes, we can. In talking about serving God, we would be talking about serving life, and good, and the flourishing of all beings, while also reminding ourselves of the finitude and corrigibility of our own conceptions of life, good, and flourishing – which is just what I think Jews, Christians, Muslims, and Hindus are talking about when they speak of serving God.<br /><br />
When we say, as we do in the fourth source of the living tradition we share, that we are called "to respond to God’s love by loving our neighbor as our selves," we are saying that the moments when we have felt the greatest belonging and connection inspire us to want to help our neighbors also feel connected and know they belong – which is what I think it truly means to respond to God’s love, whether or not God is conceived of as a person-like entity, and regardless of how metaphorical that conception is.<br /><br />
If I have a chance to connect with you, whoever you are, then connecting with you is usually more important than separating myself from you. If you and I have each felt mystery, wonder, and beauty come together with peace, compassion, and the softening of ego defenses -- if we have opened our hearts to love -- then we have a shared commonality that transcends both your dogmatic opinions about God and my dogmatic opinions about how wrong your dogmatic opinions are. That shared commonality in the moment matters more than my urge to insist on asserting my tribal identity.<br /><br />
It turns out that I can still oppose mandatory school prayer, support mandatory inclusion of evolution, favor reproductive rights, legal recognition of same-sex marriage, abolition of the death penalty, and public programs to take care of all our people -- and talk about God. I can talk about the impetus of the universe as God’s call for us to improve our understanding, respect our differences, serve life and freedom, and share God’s “preferential option for the poor.” Willing to employ "God talk" judiciously, I can be more effective than I ever could by a fastidious refusal to invoke the one word that, more clearly than any other, conveys a sense of spacious mystery tugging us toward the better angels of our nature.<br /><br />
Moreover, I find my wholeness and healing growing the more I perform the imaginative exercise of pretending that the world might be whispering to me, calling, inviting me to love if I but listen. Listen: it is God’s love calling me to respond by loving myself and my neighbor as my self. It is God’s love lifting me up -- as levity lifts a child's balloon.<br /><br />
May it be so for all of us.Rev. Meredith Garmonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09600609816550758194noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7480207999294007243.post-65165564786583274492024-02-25T13:50:00.215-05:002024-03-18T13:12:59.533-04:00Believing, Really Believing, and Talking to Your Car<blockquote><i>On the Muslim calendar, </i>Lailat Al Bara’a<i> began at sundown yesterday (on Sat Feb 24). For Sunnis, on this night Allah decides the fate of all people living on Earth for the coming year. For Shiites, the day is the future birthday Al Imam al-Mahdi, who will be the twelfth and last Imam of Shia. Here in Iowa, even nonMuslims are familiar with celebrating future birthdays, as March 22 is the future birthday in Riverside, Iowa of James T. Kirk, captain of the Starship Enterprise.</i></blockquote>
I’m interested in what we believe. In particular, I’m interested in those things that we believe but don’t really believe – the things we pretend to believe. And why we do that. For example, we personify inanimate objects – and that’s a pretend belief. Do you talk to your car? (“Come on, start.” Or: “Please, please make it to the gas station.”)<br><br>
St. Francis of Assisi talked to "Brother Sun," and "Sister Moon" -- to "Brother Wind," "Sister water," "Brother Fire," and "Sister Earth." He was liable to talk to any creature he encountered, calling it a sibling. If Francis had had a car, I imagine he would have talked to it, too. Simon and Garfunkel, feeling groovy, sing, “Hello, lamppost. Whatcha knowin'?"<br><br>
We don’t really believe our cars, or the Sun, or lampposts, hear us, or understand, or in any way care about whatever we may be saying. A lot of us know our cars don't hear or care, yet we talk to our cars anyway. I do.Some of us even name our cars. LoraKim's and my car is named Merope -- because she’s a Subaru, and Subaru is the Japanese name for the constellation that we, and the Greeks, call the Pleiades, and the Pleiades, in Greek mythology are the seven sisters, daughters of Pleione and the Titan Atlas. Merope is one of those sisters, and I picked that name because Merope is the only sister who married a mortal. The mortal she married was Sisyphus, which would make LoraKim and me, collectively, Sisyphus -- which, yeah, I kinda resonate with -- some days more than others. So there’s this little story I have – a story to participate in -- which enriches my experience of the particular automobile to which I have the key.<br><br>
It also connects me to a little bit of family history. Y’see, my Dad used to speak fondly of a Nash Rambler they had back around the time I was born and was too little to remember. There’s a black-and-white photo in the family album of my young parents standing beside that car. Her name, they told me, was Terpsichore – also a figure from Greek mythology: the muse of dance.
It makes me smile to look at that old photo. It makes me laugh to think of that hulking Nash Rambler as the muse of dance.<br><br>
And today, I have Merope, and I do talk to her. When I enter the garage to drive to church, I say “Good morning, Merope.” I might add, “How are you today?” She responds, as things do, by silently shining. Upon returning home, I get out of the car and walk around, pat her on the hood and say, “Thank you, Merope. Good car.” Many people talk to their pets this way – “good dog” – which might seem less crazy that saying “good car” to a metal mechanism. <br><br>
When we do talk to nonliving things, it’s more often in frustration. One evening as a boy, I was on the periphery of the kitchen as my mother, a physics professor, struggled to open a jar. “Come on,” she said to the jar, “what’s the matter with you?” as her white-knuckled hands strained to twist the lid. My father entered just in time to hear this. He turned to me and said, “Son, it takes a physicist to believe in the perversity of inanimate objects.”<br><br>
There is an actual thing called resistentialism – the idea that objects deliberately resist human intentions. Wikipedia says that resistentialism <blockquote>“is a jocular theory to describe ‘seemingly spiteful behavior manifested by inanimate objects,’ where objects that cause problems (like lost keys or a runaway bouncy ball) are said to exhibit a high degree of malice toward humans.
The theory posits a war being fought between humans and inanimate objects, and all the little annoyances that objects cause throughout the day are battles between the two.”</blockquote>
There are times when this is an attractive theory. We apparently like to project on objects an imagined hostility toward us. On the other hand, we like to project on our pets various positive feelings toward which we sympathize.<br><br>
The line between what we really believe and what we pretend we believe can get fuzzy. I don’t really believe my car can hear me, or understand me, yet I consciously decide to talk to her – and pronoun her -- as if she could. Sometimes some of us talk to the universe in general as if it could hear us – and, after all, isn’t that what prayer is: consciously deciding to talk to the universe in general as if it could hear and understand us? Prayer is good for us – it helps orient us the way we want to be oriented. It draws on the part of the brain that we use for relating to other people – that constructs an understanding of other people as person-like: as having agency, as having beliefs and desires. <br><br>
To address our car – or reality-as-a-whole -- as person-like – puts us into a story that enriches the relationship, that makes it more meaningful. If you have one of those smart speakers in your home, you can say, “Alexa, what’s the weather?” or “Alexa, play NPR.”
(For those of you listening at home, my apologies if I just activated your Alexa.) You can say mean things to your Alexa, and it won’t have any affect at all how she performs with your next request. Or you can be nice, and say, “Alexa, thank you,” and she’ll say, “you’re so very welcome” – and that won’t have any effect on how she performs on your next request either. But it has an effect on you.<br><br>
The practice of being nice to things around you is a practice, and it shapes you, whether the inanimate things care or not – just as prayer is a practice, and it shapes you, whether the universe-as-a-whole hears or cares or not. Pretending they are person-like helps reinforce habits for how you treat actual people. <br><br>
You don’t really believe that Alexa, or your car, is a person, but it’s good practice to pretend she is and be nice to her. On the other hand, believing in the perversity of inanimate objects – as Dad gently suggested to Mom – maybe isn’t a belief, or even a pretend belief, you want. Resistentialism is maybe not good practice because it trains you to see more perversity everywhere, including in your fellow humans. As the twig is bent, so grows the tree – and the tree of you is always growing.<br><br>
Certainly, it’s good practice to treat your dog as person-like – as having beliefs and desires entitled to a certain degree of concern and respect. It may be the case that your dog's person-like-ness is another pretend belief -- that dogs don't really have the feelings we attribute to them. But keep in mind that you and I might also not REALLY have the feelings we attribute to each other either. It's unclear how much of a distinction to draw between human and canine emotional lives. We might not even REALLY have the feelings we attribute to ourselves.<br><br>
Which of our emotions are "real" -- as in, objective facts of biology -- and which are social constructions (interpretations we learn and could have learned very differently)?<br><br>
Psychology professor Lisa Feldman Barrett argues that emotions are mostly socially constructed. There are, she says, two biological continua that are "real." There's the pleasant to unpleasant continuum, and there's the high arousal to low arousal continuum. For low arousal and pleasant, think of blissful calm. For high arousal and pleasant, think of something really fun and exciting. For high arousal and unpleasant, think of being very scared or anxious. For low arousal and unpleasant, think of being bored or lethargic. As far as what's "real" biology in our emotional lives, that's it.<br><br>
That's all there is: just the pleasant-unpleasant continuum and the high-low arousal continuum. Everything else emotional -- joy, love, anger, fear, sadness, shame, ennui, schadenfreude, and on and on -- is socially constructed interpretation of our biology.<br><br>
There is no neurological state or condition of the brain that all and only angry people have. We have to learn how to read each other's feelings, and read our own feelings, just as we learn to read marks on a page as words of our language – and in both cases that’s a process of constructing meaning. Indeed, if you don’t know at least one certain word of French, you won’t be able to detect ennui in yourself or others – and until you learn the German words schadenfreude or weltschmerz then you can’t have those feelings, because the feelings aren’t a biological reality, they’re a social construct, constructed with our language.<br><br>
In her chapter, “Is a Growling Dog Angry?” Lisa Feldman Barrett says that the growling dog isn’t angry in the sense of the dog itself constructing “anger” from its experience. Anger is an interpretation, and dogs don't interpret that way. That is: to be angry requires speaking English or some language with a word that translates as "angry." Since dogs don't speak such a language, then, in that sense, the growling dog isn't angry. On the other hand, we humans do interpret ourselves and others with the concept, "anger" -- and it's reasonable that we should interpret dogs that way, too. In THAT sense, yes, the growling dog IS angry. <br><br>
We include dogs in our social reality when it comes to some emotions – and we should. "Reality," said Phillip K. Dick, “is that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn't go away.” But we need to distinguish between a single individual not believing in something and a whole society not believing in something. Physical reality is that which doesn't go away even if everybody stops believing in it. Social reality is that which doesn't go away if you, alone and by yourself, stop believing in it, but does go away if everybody stops believing in it.<br><br>
Anger -- in dogs or in humans -- isn't physically real. If no one believed in anger, it wouldn’t exist. Money isn't physically real either. There are coins, and paper currency, and, these days, electrons in bank computers, but none of that has value, none of it constitutes money, unless humans believe it does. If no one believed in money, it wouldn't exist. So, at one level, anger and money are pretend beliefs. <br><br>
But anger and money are both socially very real. If you alone, by yourself, were somehow able to stop believing in anger or in money, they would not go away. So, at another level, believing in them isn’t merely a pretend belief.<br><br>
We do like to pretend. I remember as a teenager spending a rather thrilling afternoon with friends pouring over Beatles lyrics and album covers looking for clues that Paul was dead. According to the theory, Paul McCartney died in a car crash in November 1966 and was secretly replaced by a look-alike. Clue-hunting proved infectious, and became an international phenomenon. It was kind of exciting to see a clue. "Oh, look, this picture from the Magical Mystery Tour album: they’re all in white tuxedos, with roses on the lapels.
The other three have red roses, but Paul’s rose is black. Ah!" And: "Doesn’t the cover of the Abbey Road album, with them walking across the street, look like a funeral procession?" It was fun how weird it was.<br><br>
There’s a basic rule for this sort of game that is better known as a rule for improvisational theatre: never argue against what another character makes up. Accept whatever they say and build on it. The rule makes improv comedy more fun – and it also makes conspiracy-theory building more fun. Without ever saying out loud or acknowledging the “Yes, and…” rule, that’s exactly the rule I was following that afternoon I got all caught up in the “Paul is Dead” game. If someone were to say, "See, Paul is barefoot in this picture, and that's a sign of mourning," I would never have been such a killjoy as to reply, "Yes, in Judaism, mourners take off their shoes when they're indoors. But (1) the Beatles aren't Jewish; (2) in this picture, they are outdoors; and, anyway, (3) wouldn't it be the other three Beatles who would be mourning?" Caught up in the game, I couldn't have entertained such a reply.<br><br>
Nevertheless, even in the midst of it, some part of me knew it was a game – just as people all caught up in a role-playing game like “Dungeons and Dragons” still know it’s a game. For some people, though, the fun of pretend belief starts to blur over into real belief. It stops being a game. I imagine that’s how the QAnon conspiracies work.<br><br>
It’s fun to join in with others in cooking up wacky interpretations of “clues.” It’s a way to connect with others, to be creative and collaborative together – following the rule of, “Accept whatever the other players add, and build on it further.” In the case of the Paul is Dead rumor, the whole thing mostly served to spur album sales, though it became a little annoying for Paul and the other Beatles. In the case of QAnon, it does more harm.<br><br>
Even with QAnon, some amount of the belief in it is people pretending to believe it rather than really believing it. As Steven Pinker writes in his book, <i>Rationality</i>:
<blockquote>“Millions of people endorsed the rumor that Hillary Clinton ran a child sex trafficking ring out of the basement of the Comet Ping Pong pizzeria in Washington, [but] virtually none took steps commensurate with such an atrocity, such as calling the police. The righteous response of one of them was to leave a one-star review on Google. It’s hardly the response most of us would have if we literally thought that children were being raped in the basement.”</blockquote>
Well: Until one person, Edgar Welch, took the belief seriously and burst into the pizzeria with his gun blazing. He apparently really thought he was rescuing children. “The millions of others," Pinker concludes, "must have believed the rumor in a very different sense of ‘believe.’”<br><br>Pinker notes that:
<blockquote>"[Hugo] Mercier also points out that impassioned believers in vast nefarious conspiracies, like the 9/11 Truthers and the chemtrail theorists (who hold that the water-vapor contrails left by jetliners are chemicals dispensed in a secret government program to drug the population), publish their manifestos and hold their meetings in the open, despite their belief in a brutally effective plot by an omnipotent regime to suppress brave truth-tellers like them. It’s not a strategy you see from dissidents in undeniably repressive regimes like North Korea or Saudi Arabia.” (<i>Rationality</i> 299)</blockquote>
Many of these people are very seriously pretending to believe the conspiracy – still, for all their seriousness, pretending. Pinker says there’s a zone of the physical objects around us, and the people we deal with face to face. There’s a set of rules and norms that governs these interactions.
<blockquote>“The other zone is the world beyond immediate experience: the distant past, the unknowable future, faraway peoples and places, remote corridors of power, the microscopic, the cosmic, the counter-factual, the metaphysical. People may entertain notions about what happens in these zones, but they have no way of finding out, and anyway it makes no discernible difference to their lives.
Beliefs in these zones are narrative, which may be entertaining [like the future birthday of Captain Kirk] or inspiring or morally edifying [like the future birthday of Al Imam Al-Mahdi]. Whether they are literally ‘true’ or ‘false’ is the wrong question. The function of these beliefs is to construct a social reality that binds the tribe or sect and gives it a moral purpose.” (<i>Rationality</i> 300)</blockquote>
The conspiracy theory behind anti-semitism has been growing and morphing and poisoning minds for centuries. It’s hard to imagine it was ever any fun, but the way it evolves suggests the application of the “Yes, and…” rule to bizarre interpretations of fabricated “clues.” Such conspiracy theorizing does function “to construct a social reality that binds the tribe or sect and give it a moral purpose.”<br><br>
Evil doesn’t start as evil. It starts in a very human, necessary function. We need to make sense of our world – to have a story to participate in that lends meaning to our lives. Sometimes the stories turn toxic. We need to have our stories – but what can be done about the toxic ones? <br><br>
Of course, the obvious: stand up for the truth. Be willing to violate the rule of improv, and say “no” rather than accepting and building on the other person’s craziness. Adhere to good standards of credibility. Don’t leap to conclusions beyond what the evidence supports. Cite your sources and ask others to cite theirs. Be skeptical. Be ready to change your mind. We need a lot more observance of all those guidelines.<br><br>
I have one other suggestion not so obvious. Take an improv class -- and encourage the teaching of improv in our schools. I suggest this because improv actors know that they are acting, and we need to get better as a society at drawing the distinction between when we’re really believing and when we’re pretending to believe. We don't need to stop all pretend-believing -- as if we could. We don’t need to stop having money, and constructing subtly-differentiated emotions. We don't need to stop playing board games with story lines or talking to our cars and pets -- or "Brother Sun" or lampposts. Much of that is helpful, or good for us and good practice. <br><br>
We just need to be able to step back sometimes and recognize that we are, in fact, playing make-believe.<br><br>
Also: improv is hugely fun, and we could all use more fun. We need to have fun with this weird thing we’re all saddled with – and blessed with -- called being human. <br><br>
May it be so. Amen.Rev. Meredith Garmonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09600609816550758194noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7480207999294007243.post-14629522684609763442024-02-18T18:18:00.002-05:002024-02-28T12:54:43.177-05:00BlessingA guy gets a Lamborghini. He goes to a priest and asks, could you say a blessing for my Lamborghini. The priest says, I guess so, but what is a Lamborghini? The guy says never mind.<br><br>
He goes to a methodist minister and asks could you say a blessing for my Lamborghini. The methodist clergy says, I suppose, but what is a Lamborghini? The guy says never mind.<br><br>
He goes to a Unitarian minister. Could you say a blessing for my Lamborghini. The Unitarian minister says, I don’t know, what’s a blessing?<br><br>
It’s an old joke. Certainly, we do know what a blessing is, and particularly our clergy are prepared to say blessings. The joke pokes fun at us for our comparative theological illiteracy, and maybe there’s something to that. We can sometimes be so proud of our rejection of supernatural claptrap that we neglect helpful resources. And, indeed, where religious claims are seen as contending with scientific conclusions, I’m siding with science every time. But I don’t think theology, properly understood, does contend with science.<br><br>
<div class="separator" style="clear: both;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEga8I-UHTYc0o2_qnbmYwEXDzhVI516YsfU9KiV3y6PoVAwjGwZGhFdz29i1i0i_OxrZHfalsApuBOT6uxghbf0TxNpbohGINiQsfS3LAnuQ964ZnyqxxL9EJ1ph95qfXveJoisWn7_kTevQdYLFrYu6Cgbm5ehfl_DN9T6vAmp4iZIcT-5Tp6n7WVo/s984/OS20240218.jpg" style="display: block; padding: 1em 0; text-align: center; clear: right; float: right;"><img alt="" border="0" width="320" data-original-height="647" data-original-width="984" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEga8I-UHTYc0o2_qnbmYwEXDzhVI516YsfU9KiV3y6PoVAwjGwZGhFdz29i1i0i_OxrZHfalsApuBOT6uxghbf0TxNpbohGINiQsfS3LAnuQ964ZnyqxxL9EJ1ph95qfXveJoisWn7_kTevQdYLFrYu6Cgbm5ehfl_DN9T6vAmp4iZIcT-5Tp6n7WVo/s320/OS20240218.jpg"/></a></div>Theology is a kind of poetry. This being human calls us to appreciate both science and poetry, and to understand that if the poet seems to describe, say, light in a way that contradicts light as that which, when squared and multiplied by mass is equal to energy, there’s not a real contradiction – they’re just using words for different purposes. If the poet speaks of defying gravity, and the scientist tells us that gravity can never be defied, we understand that they’re engaged in using words for different purposes – and that being human means sharing in both scientific and poetic purposes.<br><br>
Science is literal-minded and mathematical and its purpose is to predict what the world will do, while poetry, including theology, opens up to us creative possibilities for meaning-making – less for predicting the world and more for befriending it. Once you recognize that a given utterance is poetry – including the prose-poetry that is theology – then you can see it not as supernatural claptrap, but as a metaphor.<br><br>
Unitarians have been rejecting traditional Protestant claims since our inception, starting with the trinity and moving eventually to theism itself and everything that went with it, and for much of that time we have also been at work developing ways to reclaim those concepts. With that in mind, today let us see how we can understand blessing. What does it mean for something to be a blessing? What are we doing when we bless something?<br><br>
People sometimes ask God to bless something. We bless each other. We bless food. We bless objects – buildings, boats, Lamborghinis.
We count our blessings, and we count on our blessings. I think it helps, in understanding this conceptual resource for living in this world, to think of blessing as being about place. It's about being situated, being located, being in the context that fits. Thus, blessing is about belonging – being where you belong. (In today's story, we heard that "'bless you' means we love you and we wish for you always to be safe.” They were evoking the feeling of belonging.)<br><br>
Mary Oliver’s poem, “Wild Geese,” concludes with these lines: <blockquote>“Whoever you are, no matter how lonely, the world offers itself to your imagination,<br>
Calls to you like the wild geese, harsh and exciting,<br>
Over and over announcing your place in the family of things.”</blockquote>
Blessing is all about knowing and affirming our place in the family of things. By announcing our place, those wild geese are giving us their harsh and exciting blessing.<br><br>
Divergent faith traditions suggest a common idea in blessing of interconnectedness, of partaking in the significance of a larger whole through relationships of meaning and care. When I was serving as a hospital chaplain, and was sometimes assigned intensive care patients who were unconscious and unresponsive, I would put my hand on a shoulder and say a minute or two’s worth of words of blessing. Maybe they could hear them. Maybe at some unconscious level, some of the patients stepped toward realization of their place, of their belongingness, within the vast web of relationship. I know that through those experiences I stepped toward such realization. I had a very strong sense of being in place – right there, and through “right there” to everywhere else also. And if we are as interconnected as it felt at that moment, then anyone’s realization of that connection is everyone’s.<br><br>
Blessing affirms situatedness within a relationship of worth. To bless is to affirm the place of ourselves and something or someone else within the order of things.<br><br>
In the Jewish tradition, the Talmud teaches saying 100 blessings a day over any little thing: a piece of fruit, a cup of tea, a sandwich. "Blessed are you, Yahweh, our God, Source of Life, who creates the fruit of the tree,” or “by whose word all comes into being,” or “who brings forth bread from the earth.” In this context, to bless the item is to say that God is blessed – and to acknowledge the source from which the item comes. So the sense in which we say some object is a blessing, meaning that it’s a good thing, nice to have, is derivative from a practice of asserting that God is blessed. <br><br>
The object or event is a gift we have received for which acknowledgement of an ultimate source is appropriate, and in that acknowledgement, “blessedness” belongs to that source itself. Saying an object is blessed or a blessing is shorthand for saying it comes from a blessed – that is, divine or ultimate – source.<br><br>
The Talmud goes on to teach that
<blockquote>“whoever has enjoyment of something from this world without saying a blessing, it is as if she or he had improper enjoyment of the thing – as if she or he has robbed the Holy One and the community."</blockquote>
Robbed. Receiving without blessing – without acknowledging source – is like stealing – robbing from the Holy One and the community. That's what the Talmud says.<br><br>
There is so much that is granted, and we take it. If we take it, and it is granted, how do we not “take it for granted”? It’s a simple matter to pause and acknowledge the source – of the food you’re going to eat, of the house that shelters you, of the friendships that soothe and enrich, of the great green earth, clear air, and quenching water.<br><br>
There’s a Roy Zimmerman song with the lyrics:
<blockquote>Everybody loves,<br>
Everybody hurts,<br>
Everybody has a touch Weltschmerz.<br>
Everybody laughs,<br>
Everybody sneezes,<br>
Everybody bright and everybody breezes,<br>
Everybody, everybody, everybody is everybody else.</blockquote>
Indeed, Roy, everything is everything else. Acknowledging the source means recognizing that the thing comes from, is produced by, all of reality. It means seeing the thing in the light of its place – its belonging – in the web of interconnection. In the Talmud, the broader whole is recognized in saying Yahweh is blessed. But whether you say “Yahweh” or “Universe,” you are affirming your and the blessing's placement – situatedness -- within a relationship – a relationship of worth, of meaning, of community, of nurturance and care. If you were to follow the Talmud’s recommendation of deliberately, consciously doing that 100 times a day, what would that do to you?<br><br>
Blessing is about place -- your place within the interdependent web. Rabbi Toba Spitzer writes:
<blockquote>“Saying a blessing is an opportunity for a particular kind of awareness. If I were really to think about all that it has taken to bring a plate of vegetables to my table – all the natural elements of sun and earth and rain, and all the human elements of planting and harvesting and transporting and selling, as well as the Godly power that underlies the whole process – I would feel a profound connection every time I sat down to eat. I would have a better realization of the myriad ways that my life is intertwined with people all over this planet.”</blockquote>
Those are words that might also have been written from other faith perspectives. I’m especially reminded of Buddhist writings – Thich Nhat Hanh, in particular, who emphasizes mindfulness of interconnection. The mealtime blessing in Thich Nhat Hanh centers and retreats begins by noting:
<blockquote>“This food is the gift of the entire universe: the earth, the sky, and much hard work.”</blockquote>
Taking a moment to say that your meal is the gift of the entire universe, the earth, the sky, and much hard work, calls attention – awareness – to the vast complex to which we are linked through receiving its gifts. The practice of blessing gifts such as food wears different guises in different faith traditions, but the universal need that such blessing addresses is acknowledgment, gratitude, interconnection, relationship. <br><br>
Blessing affirms and reinforces our sense of place within an interconnected network – a web of mutual care, a web that looks, if only we can attentively see it, like beloved community itself. Through blessing we help ourselves and one another see that web, realize the beloved community – to become aware of the beloved community is also at the same time to make it real.<br><br>
In traditional Catholicism only a priest could issue an official blessing. Our democratic sentiments rebel against the idea. Still, I can see how in some ways it helped lend solemnity to the occasion. It signified that this blessing stuff was serious business. In the space of that solemnity, those present might more easily find their way to the awareness of interconnection and place.<br><br>
Moreover, this human need to know our place, to feel ourselves enmeshed and held in relationships of support that ultimately include all of reality is not just a need that we have as individuals. We also have that need as faith communities – congregations of ten or of ten thousand -- to know and feel our faith community’s place within the broader network of all that is – a network that includes or emanates from – or constitutes – God. A medieval Catholic priest pronouncing a blessing upon the newly constructed village church may not have conceived of what he was doing in such terms of affirming and realizing situatedness within the interconnected web of all existence – but I think that, functionally, that was exactly what he was doing whether he knew it or not. He was helping situate his community within the vaster whole.<br><br>
Turning from the Judeo-Christian tradition, a Buddhist practice is metta, generally translated as lovingkindness meditation. It looks a lot like what we would recognize as blessing. Typically, the way metta is done is that we sit in meditation and say some words of lovingkindness, first to ourselves, then others. Here’s an example:
<blockquote>“May I be safe from harm.<br>
May I have a calm, clear mind, and a peaceful, loving heart.<br>
May I be physically strong, healthy, and vital.<br>
May I experience joy and love, wonder and wisdom in this life just as it is.”</blockquote>
And then we repeat those words replacing “I” with the names of loved ones, with the name of groups we identify with, with enemies or "difficult people" in our life, and finally, “all beings.” Buddhist literature says:
<blockquote>“Metta cultivates our ability to connect with and care in a rare unconditional way, for ourselves and others. Our hearts' capacity for patience, acceptance, compassion and forgiveness becomes boundless. With an inner and outer environment of safety our hearts and minds can open fearlessly. The result of this practice is an ever deepening stillness, from which the truth of life can be recognized clearly. It is a bodhisattva practice for blessing the world.”</blockquote>
Interconnection is the overriding reality, the “truth of life” to which, through mindfulness, “our hearts and minds can open fearlessly.” <br><br>
We are here to be with each other. Yet our modern condition is rife with isolation, loneliness, alienation. The supposed liberations of individualism leave us uprooted. We need social identities in order to act effectively. Efficacy comes from knowing who you are, having a firm identity, and that comes from embeddedness in a rich social fabric. Other people, noted Ralph Waldo Emerson, “are lenses through which we read our own minds.” <br><br>
Without a strong network around us, we never know our own mind. Without rootedness in social soil, there’s no belongingness and no sense of who one is -- no ground from which one can live daringly.<br><br>
Marcia Pally’s book, <i>Commonwealth and Covenant</i>, offers the phrase, “separability amid situatedness.” This is the capacity to be unique, to create, explore, innovate, experiment with new ways of thinking and living – while also being situated — embedded in loving families and enveloping communities. She writes:
<blockquote>“Though we are all unique individuals, we become our singular selves through our relations and responsibilities to the people and environments around us. But overemphasis on 'separability' — individualism run amok — results in greed, adversarial and deceitful political discourse and chicanery, resource grabbing, broken relationships, and anomie.”</blockquote>
Blessing is about place. When a person, object, or event blesses you, when you bless someone or something, there’s a relationship. Blesser, blessee, and blessing situate each other, locate one another, and place us within a context of belonging and value. It is both cause and effect of healthy cultural infrastructure within which we can thrive.<br><br>
Creating situatedness – the blessing of each other by each other – requires, as Marcia Pally recognizes and as our Unitarian Universalist covenantal faith tradition has long embodied, covenant rather than contract. When two isolated individuals make a deal, they express it as a contract. When we are situated within something, we have a covenant. A contract protects interests. A covenant protects relationships.<br><br>
David Brooks writes:
<blockquote>“A covenant exists between people who understand they are part of one another. It involves a vow to serve the relationship that is sealed by love: Where you go, I will go. Where you stay, I will stay. Your people shall be my people. People in a contract provide one another services, but people in a covenant delight in offering gifts.”</blockquote>
And New Jersey Senator Cory Booker said: <blockquote>“we have to be a nation that aspires for love, which recognizes that you have worth and dignity and I need you. You are part of my whole, part of the promise of this country.” </blockquote>
That’s what it means to be situated in a shared collective life. That love, that recognition of worth and dignity and our interdependence, locates and grounds us, makes it possible for each of us to be blesser, blessee, and blessing. Without that, there is no “together.” <br><br>
Be a blessing to the world. Knowing that you can’t do that alone – knowing, as you do now – that blessing the world requires attending to relationship, nurturing the situatedness that makes separability meaningful, then may you realize that other possibility, waiting – that possibility whose name is “together.” Your presence is a blessing to this community. It’s a help and a boon to us, and it reminds us of our place in the family of things – our place in community and as community. We come together to bring our blessings – the blessings of ourselves, that make this community what it is, and the blessings of our resources, that sustain this community.<br><br>
We receive blessings from community, and the biggest blessing we receive is that here we are a blessing to others. Blessed be. Blessed be indeed.
Rev. Meredith Garmonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09600609816550758194noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7480207999294007243.post-29184888826785696882024-02-11T10:42:00.001-05:002024-02-13T12:22:26.123-05:00Merit<div class="separator" style="clear: both;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhZ9itWOCEabw4oD0YL73DokP-kpyQvn112kTSzwsl7WPZ332tGEOdzFbgsfYYGgGKfzTnre-G6A1j1Py_LuOy1neS5U203OQAotqxspeO3SL6zqAV6b1bsm-ap9quDR3EmMMvEWeD-W80HRbnYTA08myis1BI_jIZgwLDSjwyO-ysXDm2gurKHalJL/s923/OS20240211.jpg" style="display: block; padding: 1em 0; text-align: center; clear: right; float: right;"><img alt="" border="0" width="320" data-original-height="923" data-original-width="923" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhZ9itWOCEabw4oD0YL73DokP-kpyQvn112kTSzwsl7WPZ332tGEOdzFbgsfYYGgGKfzTnre-G6A1j1Py_LuOy1neS5U203OQAotqxspeO3SL6zqAV6b1bsm-ap9quDR3EmMMvEWeD-W80HRbnYTA08myis1BI_jIZgwLDSjwyO-ysXDm2gurKHalJL/s320/OS20240211.jpg"/></a></div>READING/REFLECTION<br><br>
The idea that the universe is a vast moral mechanism, mechanically rewarding virtue and punishing vice, has often felt appealing. According to the mechanically moral universe theory, if virtue goes in, reward comes out; wickedness in, punishment out; as if the universe were a great moral machine, a cosmic meritocracy.<br><br>
We humans have, throughout our history, and probably before, been very attracted to this idea that if something bad happens to us, we must have done something to deserve it. And if something good happens to us, we must have done something to deserve that, too. Well, sometimes we have. Many times, it’s just dumb luck – good luck or bad.<br><br>
Wisdom from the Hebrew Bible has for thousands of years reminded readers that life is not all about getting what one deserves. First, from the book of Ecclesiastes, chapter 9, verse 11:
<blockquote>“Again I saw that under the sun the race is not to the swift, nor the battle to the strong, nor bread to the wise, nor riches to the intelligent, nor favor to the skillful; but time and chance happen to them all.”</blockquote>
Second, the Book of Job. Here is Michael Sandel’s exposition.
<blockquote>“A just and righteous man, Job is subjected to unspeakable pain and suffering, including the death of his sons and daughters in a storm. Ever faithful to God, Job cannot fathom why such suffering has been visited upon him.... As Job mourns the loss of his family, his friends (if one can call them friends) insist that he must have committed some egregious sin, and they press Job to imagine what that sin might be. This is an early example of the tyranny of merit. Armed with the assumption that suffering signifies sin, Job’s friends cruelly compound his pain by claiming that, in virtue of some transgression or other, Job must be to blame for the death of his sons and daughters. Although he knows he is innocent, Job shares his companions’ theology of merit, and so cries out to God asking why he, a righteous man, is being made to suffer. When God finally speaks to Job, he rejects the cruel logic of blaming the victim. He does so by renouncing the meritocratic assumption that Job and his companions share. Not everything that happens is a reward or a punishment for human behavior, God proclaims from the whirlwind. Not all rain is for the sake of watering the crops of the righteous, nor is every drought for the sake of punishing the wicked.... God confirms Job’s righteousness but chastises him for presuming to grasp the moral logic of God’s rule. This represents a radical departure from the theology of merit.... In renouncing the idea that he presides over a cosmic meritocracy, God asserts his unbounded power and teaches Job a lesson in humility. Faith in God means accepting the grandeur and the mystery of creation, not expecting God to dispense rewards and punishments based on what each person merits or deserves.” (<i>The Tyranny of Merit</i> 36)</blockquote>
SERMON, part 1<br><br>
I submit to you that two words name a large part of the richness and goodness of life: grace and solidarity.<br><br>
Grace: the freely given, unmerited gifts you did not earn and do not deserve.
Like being alive.
Like being more or less healthy – healthy enough and pain-free enough to be able to be here – or listening online right now.
Like air, and the feel of breath in your lungs.
Like sunlight, rain, trees, the beauty of the seasons: autumn leaves, winter snow, spring, summer.
You didn’t earn those things.
You’ve done nothing to deserve them.
They are free gifts – grace.
You might not notice them.
But a life of richness and depth is one that is constantly seeing grace everywhere – the beauty all around us.<br><br>
And: solidarity.
We’re not in it just for ourselves.
We’re in this together.
We are here for each other – what else?
Comradery, companionship, neighborliness, friendship – all the different ways we are in relationship, all the different forms that love takes – this is the goodness of life.<br><br>
If grace and solidarity name a large part of what makes life good, then it behooves us to attend to whatever undermines the place in our lives of grace and solidarity.
These days, the growing overemphasis on merit, on deservingness, undermines the place in our lives of grace and solidarity.<br><br>
Merit is generally conceived as the product of two factors, called (1) ability or talent or capability, and (2) hard work or effort or motivation. We use merit, as best we can assess it, to determine who gets into the top schools, and who gets the high-paying, high-status jobs.
There’s a lot of competition for school admissions and for jobs.<br><br>
Now: there will always be a place for competition.
I’m not going to stand here on Super Bowl Sunday and say we should, or ever could, abolish competition and the rewards of victory.<br><br>
But the winners have been over-rewarded, and the losers way over-deprived, and we need to lower the stakes for that part of life that is a meritocratic contest.
We just need to lower the stakes of the merit contests because as those stakes have been growing, they’ve been crowding out grace from our lives -- crowding out solidarity.<br><br>
Last week I talked about Distributive Justice – how, since 1980, we’ve been distributing more and more of the wealth to fewer and fewer of the richer and richer, and that’s unjust.
A more just distribution, a greater income equality, is essential to social health, for our flourishing as a people.
Today I want to add to the picture Contributive Justice – the justice of everyone being able to meaningfully contribute to our city, our state, our nation, our world.
Those who have been deemed not to have the merit to get into the good schools – or, indeed, those who maybe don’t want to go to college – need jobs they can feel contribute to something more meaningful than a paycheck.
Michael Sandel, in <i>The Tyranny of Merit</i>, says of the meritocratic ethic:
<blockquote>“Among the winners, it generates hubris; among the losers, humiliation and resentment.
These moral sentiments are at the heart of the populist uprising against elites.
More than a protest against immigrants and outsourcing, the populist complaint is about the tyranny of merit.
And the complaint is justified.
The relentless emphasis on creating a fair meritocracy, in which social positions reflect effort and talent, has a corrosive effect on the way we interpret our success (or the lack of it).”</blockquote>
The meritocratic ethic produces a
<blockquote>“smug conviction of those who land on top that they deserve their fate, and that those on the bottom deserve theirs, too.” (25) </blockquote>
For those on the bottom, the meritocratic ethic means either frustration or humiliation and despair.
Either they believe that the system fails to recognize their merit and denies them opportunities to use it – or, perhaps worse, they accept that meritocratic sorting has been more-or-less fair, and they just aren’t good enough to have earned any better than they got.<br><br>
The grip of the meritocratic ethic has been growing through the post-World War II era. <br><br>
The word “meritocracy” was coined by British sociologist Michael Young in this 1958 book, <i>The Rise of the Meritocracy</i>. Young described meritocracy as a dystopia.
When he wrote in 1958, the British class system had been breaking down for some time.
The old aristocracy had been giving way to a system of educational and professional advancement based on merit.
In many ways, this was a good thing.
Gifted children of the working class could develop their talents and escape from a life of manual labor. But the old system at least had the weird advantage that everybody knew it was unfair.
Neither the Lords nor the working class believed they deserved their status – which tempered the arrogance of the upper-class and precluded despair for the laborers.
The working class knew their situation wasn’t their own fault.<br><br>
Michael Young wrote his book from an imagined position in the year 2033 -- projecting out 75 years, 3 generations -- into the future from 1958. That’s how long he figured it would take for meritocracy to lead to a mass revolt.
He wrote, describing conditions in the 2033 of his imagination:
<blockquote>“Now that people are classified by ability, the gap between the classes has inevitably become wider.
The upper classes are no longer weakened by self-doubt and self-criticism.
Today the eminent know that success is just reward for their own capacity, for their own efforts, and for their own undeniable achievement.
They deserve to belong to a superior class.
They know, too, that not only are they of higher caliber to start with, but that a first-class education has been built upon their native gifts.” (<i>The Rise of the Meritocracy</i> 106)</blockquote>
Meanwhile the losers in the meritocracy are resentful at the arrogance of the winners while also humiliated with the knowledge that they have no one to blame but themselves.
<blockquote>“Today, all persons, however humble, know they have had every chance....
Are they not bound to recognize that they have an inferior status – not as in the past because they were denied opportunity; but because they ARE inferior?
For the first time in human history, the inferior man has no ready buttress for his self-regard.” (108-9)</blockquote>
Michael Young’s tale from 1958 predicted that the less-educated classes would then rise up in a populist revolt against the meritocratic elites.
We can now say that the revolt that Young predicted came 17 years ahead of schedule, in 2016, when Britain voted for Brexit and America voted for Trump.<br><br>
While Democratic candidates, and many Republicans were intoning that everybody ought to be able to go as far as their talent and hard work could take them, and therefore we must level the playing field, Trump has never said that. His fans know that the meritocratic game casts them as the losers, that their work no longer has much dignity, or even affords much of a living any longer. Their feelings of both humiliation and resentment have proven potent.<br><br>
If the game being played on the field is one that inherently has winners and losers, then leveling the playing field does nothing to revitalize civic life, does nothing to foster a sense that we’re all in this together, does nothing to shore up solidarity. Indeed, the more level the playing feeling, the more the winners may feel justified in their arrogance, and the greater the humiliation of the losers.<br><br>
Sandel brings us back to grace and solidarity. He writes:
<blockquote>“a perfect meritocracy banishes all sense of gift or grace.
It diminishes our capacity to see ourselves as sharing a common fate.
It leaves little room for the solidarity that can arise when we reflect on the contingency of our talents and fortunes.
This is what makes merit a kind of tyranny, or unjust rule.” (<i>The Tyranny of Merit</i> 25)</blockquote>
We’ll always have some competitions, and we’ll want to make those playing fields level and fair, but when we make the levelness of the playing field the only concern, we forget that public life isn’t entirely about the competition.
It’s also about recognizing that we’re in this together. It's about contributive as well as distributive justice. It’s about standing as equals with each other as neighbors, engaged in the work of citizenship (whether we are legal citizens or not). It’s not all about standing as competitors.<br><br>
SERMON, part 2<br><br>
As meritocracy has grown increasingly emphasized, the greater our inequalities of income and wealth have grown.
Or maybe it’s the other way around: as our inequality has shot up since 1980, we’ve responded by rationalizing it with an increasingly dominant rhetoric of merit.
Either way, the rise of emphasis on merit and the rise of inequality correlate.<br><br>
Earlier, I mentioned contributive justice.
Distributive justice is needed for fairer, fuller access to the fruits of economic growth and a reduction in inequality.
Contributive justice is also needed: the opportunity to contribute meaningfully to others.
It’s contributive justice that fosters the sense that we’re in this together. Human beings require the social recognition and esteem that goes with producing what others need and value.
An adequate wage is part of that.
It’s hard to feel your society really values your work if they won’t pay you much for it.
But the point isn’t just distributing income and wealth.
It’s that people should get a good income because they’re doing work that really matters to other people.
The distributive justice and the contributive justice need to go hand in hand.
As Sandel writes,
<blockquote>“The fundamental human need is to be needed by those with whom we share a common life.
The dignity of work consists in exercising our abilities to answer such needs.” (<i>The Tyranny of Merit</i> 212)</blockquote><div class="separator" style="clear: both;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEgXorO40I-3F8rcsBU1fvMxsXESpqTtTmB7MFYDMME_I2SDiQtlSx6RDg7BdDHVdHtUkN47Bll42wwXvhkO7TgTip0-iq59NLNYOrG0AeLnfHLR14yuqujgh86Kbcm7IxJw_GzWUyMKok6QNOOyyqT4uA0sschgrDoWKQDyi9FWhJwn0bdEqYjCKA=s3072" style="clear: right; display: block; float: right; padding: 1em 0px; text-align: center;"><img alt="" border="0" data-original-height="3072" data-original-width="3072" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEgXorO40I-3F8rcsBU1fvMxsXESpqTtTmB7MFYDMME_I2SDiQtlSx6RDg7BdDHVdHtUkN47Bll42wwXvhkO7TgTip0-iq59NLNYOrG0AeLnfHLR14yuqujgh86Kbcm7IxJw_GzWUyMKok6QNOOyyqT4uA0sschgrDoWKQDyi9FWhJwn0bdEqYjCKA=s200" width="200" /></a></div>
Robert F. Kennedy understood this.
Campaigning in 1968, he said,
<blockquote>“Fellowship, community, shared patriotism – these essential values of our civilization do not come from just buying and consuming goods together.”</blockquote>
They come from
<blockquote>“dignified employment at decent pay, the kind of employment that lets a man say to his community, to his family, to his country, and most important, to himself, ‘I helped to build this country.
I am a participant in its great public ventures.’” (<i>RFK: Collected Speeches</i> 385-86)</blockquote>
Politicians don't much talk that way anymore.<br><br>
Meritocracy puts competition at the center of public life, instead of putting our shared civic enterprises at the center. Meritocracy also puts that competition at the center of our individual sense of who we are. Meritocracy defines us – to each other and to ourselves -- by what we deserve, what we earn.
It teaches us relative disregard for all the range of life that isn’t marketable.<br><br>
It may help to look more closely at the two factors that make up merit, or deservingness: talent, ability, natural gifts on the one hand and effort, hard work, training on the other. <br><br>
First, let us ask: from where did the talent come?
Some of it came from genes – that’s luck.
Some of it came from childhood experiences.
But growing up in the right sort of environment to bring out a given ability is not something the individual made happen.
That’s also luck.<br><br>
The other factor – effort, hard work, motivation, training -- isn’t always possible to separate from native talent.
But whether you have the opportunities for training, have good coaches available, and training facilities, have encouraging people around you, and an environment that yields enough reward for hard work early on so that it develops as a habit – that’s all luck.
There may also be a genetic component in predisposing some people to focused work and delayed gratification, and, if so, that would also be luck.<br><br>
If you’re lucky enough to find yourself motivated, and lucky enough to find yourself talented, then you’ll be said to have merit.
The supposed distinction between unearned luck and earned deservingness collapses under scrutiny – so merit is always a pretense.<br><br>
There are certain spheres of life where the pretense is necessary.
When it’s time to ask the boss for a raise, you go in and make the case for how you deserve it.
But later, when you're back home, in a moment of calm reflection where you can step back from your work life and can view it in your spiritual, holistic capacity, then you can appreciate that, really, there is no deserving.
It’s all grace.
You just happened to have some skills – including the skill called “motivation” – and you just happened to live in a world with market demand for your particular skills – and just happened to have the boss and the company that you do.
All luck. All grace.<br><br>
Now: Can you hold on to that spiritual truth even as you return again to the sphere of markets and work?
It’s like the capacity to play a game -- parcheesi or gin rummy or chess -- while at the same time knowing that you’re just playing a game.
Or like the capacity to watch an engrossing movie, while a part of you retains the consciousness that what you’re looking at is just lights on a screen.
In the case of games and movies, it's pretty easy.
In the case of merit, it takes a special spiritual maturity to resist the tendency to convince ourselves that we somehow deserve our luck.
As Max Weber observed back in 1915:
<blockquote>“the fortunate person is seldom satisfied with the fact of being fortunate.
Beyond this, he needs to know that he has a right to his good fortune.
He wants to be convinced that he ‘deserves’ it, and above all, that he deserves it in comparison with others.
He wishes to be allowed the belief that the less fortunate also merely experience their due.
Good fortune thus wants to be 'legitimate' fortune.” ("The Social Psychology of the World Religions" [1915])</blockquote>
To be able to hold before you unwaveringly the insight that your good fortune really is just good fortune -- really is utterly undeserved -- to never forget that for a moment -- even when you’re in the middle of an intense round of the game called, “demanding what you deserve,” – that is a difficult spiritual challenge. I regularly bring myself back to this awareness that it’s all grace, that none of it is deserved or earned, but that bit about “never forget for a moment” is beyond me. I do regularly bring myself back to remembering, but that’s because I do regularly forget.<br><br>
This might be your first glimpse of seeing through the illusion of merit – the first time it came to your notice that the distinction between deserving and lucky is illusory. If so, I urge you to hold on to that. Don’t let it slip away. Rest in that new way of seeing, and imagine what it might be like to live that way – with awareness that merit is a fiction, a game you are sometimes called upon to play, but which you recognize isn’t real.<br><br>
If you imagine holding that awareness in your mind, what difference would that make for your life?
For one thing, if you’re sharply aware that it’s all luck, then you’ll be less caught by surprise when the luck changes.
Market shifts can make your particular skills no longer in demand.
A sudden accident or disease can make your body no longer able to play the violin, or hold a scalpel steady – or can make your mind less able to concentrate.
In the vagaries of fortune, if you’ve thoroughly grasped that your success is not deserved, then you’ll be prepared to see your failure, when it comes, isn’t deserved either.<br><br>
And something else.
Not only do you not deserve your failure, but you’ll more clearly see that other people don’t deserve theirs.
Under the meritocratic ethic, my success is my own doing, so other people’s failure must be their fault.
Meritocracy thus corrodes commonality.
It traps me within the delusion that we aren’t in the same boat.
Meritocracy says that I built my boat, and you built your boat, so there’s no particular reason I need to be concerned if yours is sinking.
But if I see my situation as wholly an undeserved grace, then I can imagine a new and harsher grace that might put me in someone else’s shoes.
(Ram Dass, after the stroke that left him wheelchair-bound, called it 'fierce grace.')
And if I can have that clarity, then my life turns in a different direction, turns toward a different task.
My task is not to out-compete others for the prizes of success and status.
Nor is it to facilitate my children in out-competing others.
My interest shifts from the prizes available only to the winners to restoring the dignity of all work.<br><br>
There is a possible world in which everyone, whatever their talents and training, can meaningfully contribute their work to our shared public enterprise, and meaningfully contribute their voice to democratic deliberation that forms that enterprise.
It will be no easy thing to get there from here.
It will take, at best, several generations to reverse the effects of the last several generations.<br><br>
Meanwhile, here in the microcosm of a congregation, we practice.
Week in and week out, we embody a communal life without meritocracy, where we stand together on ground of equality, where everyone can meaningfully contribute to our shared enterprise, where we learn together an ever-deepening appreciation of grace and our inherent solidarity. Week in and week out, we are demonstrating to the world a better way.
Rev. Meredith Garmonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09600609816550758194noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7480207999294007243.post-91812989443960172232024-02-04T14:34:00.007-05:002024-02-05T16:22:05.962-05:00The Spiritual Impact of Inequality<div class="separator" style="clear: both;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjUBvB7AzupfD7bLwVJlxRXLR5zP44XWWkykzDqcKLr9QG0kt3-Pm5f5i4HeyxeliWW66tOgqQnMC6yGdqPWOEKf70wx_gzyURGiwsBNAUQ8Rz9tWfHXb67upALZAarVJ1OD0v5uZJvR7J8vEEl4qPKLHXmlar-Kp0ink6KiQDqMNVPGfsmGFAbZxle/s988/OS20240204.png" style="clear: right; display: block; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em; padding: 1em 0px; text-align: center;"><img alt="" border="0" data-original-height="871" data-original-width="988" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjUBvB7AzupfD7bLwVJlxRXLR5zP44XWWkykzDqcKLr9QG0kt3-Pm5f5i4HeyxeliWW66tOgqQnMC6yGdqPWOEKf70wx_gzyURGiwsBNAUQ8Rz9tWfHXb67upALZAarVJ1OD0v5uZJvR7J8vEEl4qPKLHXmlar-Kp0ink6KiQDqMNVPGfsmGFAbZxle/s320/OS20240204.png" width="320" /></a></div>Words of Rev. Mark Morrison-Reed, from the back of our hymnal:
<blockquote>"The central task of the religious community is to unveil the bonds that bind each to all. There is a connectedness, a relationship discovered amid the particulars of our own lives and the lives of others. Once felt, it inspires us to act for justice. It is the church that assures us that we are not struggling for justice on our own, but as members of a larger community. The religious community is essential, for alone our vision is too narrow to see all that must be seen, and our strength too limited to do all that must be done. Together, our vision widens and our strength is renewed."</blockquote>
So let us unveil those bonds that do connect us – and together let our vision widen and our strength be renewed. We live in a time of great polarization – and the political polarization is itself an outcome of the income and wealth inequality.<br /><br />
On November 2, 1980, my daughter Morgen was born. She was born into a country that certainly had poverty, but did not see the sort of wealth disparities we have now. Two days after she was born there was the 1980 presidential election, and Ronald Reagan won it. Morgen turned 43 last November, and over the course of her life so far there’s been a massive transfer of wealth to the wealthy.<br /><br />
In 1979, the poorer half earned 20% of the nation’s pre-tax income. By 2014, just 13%. If the US had the same income distribution it had in 1979, each family in the bottom 80% of the income distribution would have $11,000 more per year in income.<br /><br />
From 1947 to 1979, we all grew. In those 32 years:
<ul><li>For the bottom 20%, income rose 116%.</li>
<li>For the second quintile, income rose 100%.</li>
<li>For the middle quintile, income rose 111%</li>
<li>For the fourth quintile, income rose 114%.</li>
<li>For the top 20%, income rose 99%.</li></ul>
So: all quintiles rose a comparable amount – but the bottom 20%, by a small margin, grew most of all. And the top top 20%, by a small margin, grew least of all. That was during the 32 years from 1947 to 1979. But from 1979 to 2007, it was a completely different story. In those 28 years:
<ul><li>For the bottom 20%, income rose 15%.</li>
<li>For the second quintile, income rose 22%.</li>
<li>For the middle quintile, income rose 23%.</li>
<li>For the fourth quintile, income rose 33%.</li>
<li>For the top 20%, income rose 95%.</li></ul>
In 1980, the richest one percent of people got eight percent of the income -- which means they were getting eight times the mean income. Eight times the mean income would seem to be plenty. Who could want more than that? Surely that’s more than enough. But in 2011, the richest one percent brought home 20 percent of all income -- 20 times the mean.
<blockquote>"During the 1950s and 60s, CEOs of major American companies took home about 25 to 30 times the wages of the typical worker. In 1980, the big-company CEO took home roughly 40 times. By 1990 it was 100 times. By 2007, CEO pay packages had ballooned to about 350 times what the typical worker earned.” (Robert Reich, Forward to Wilkinson and Pickett, <i>The Spirit Level: Why Greater Equality Makes Societies Stronger</i>.)</blockquote>
Modern life is tough. Living the way we do is hard on people: anxiety, depression, unsure friendship, consumerism, lack of community. Not all of that would go away if suddenly, magically tomorrow all income and wealth distribution were at 1979 proportions again. Now, I need to say that I’m always suspicious of any scenario invoked with “if suddenly, magically tomorrow” – because there are no magic wands, and HOW we get somewhere is always going to be a huge part of what it means to be there. So what would it take? It would take some massive programs to create more jobs, bills to ensure that they paid well, lots of aid and assistance, like what we saw during the pandemic, only more – and to pay for it all, a progressive income tax of the likes we had in this country in the 1950s.<br /><br />
The top marginal tax rate is now 37% It’s been in the 30s – or even briefly as low as 28% -- ever since the Reagan administration. But back during the top marginal tax rate was 92% -- then in came down to 91% and stayed there through 1963. In 1963, for a single filer, any income above $200,000 was taxed at a 91% rate. That was 60 years ago, and general cost of living then was about a tenth of what it is today, so $200,000 then was about equivalent to $2 million now. Imagine taxing all income above $2 million at 91%. What’s actually much harder to imagine is our congress approving such a change. It would take a huge and drastic popular movement that voted into office very different representatives than we have now. The building of that movement would involve substantial attitude shifts in a lot of people. It would take a moral awakening of mass numbers of people to really care about the well-being of everyone. And if THAT happened, we’d already be in a very different world, quite apart from the effects of the legislation we would then be able to pass.
Just living in a world where most people really cared about the well-being of all people would itself go a long way to easing the anomies of modern life: anxiety, depression, unsure friendship, consumerism, lack of community.<br /><br />
The state of huge disparities of income – and the even huger disparities of wealth – make everything that’s tough about modern life is worse. What may be an even bigger factor is the practical political reality that we live in a country that allowed this to happen, that has been voting into office the leaders that made it happen ever since my daughter was born. We live in a country that is largely unmotivated to rectify it. I, for one, veer between anger and sadness at this reality.<br /><br />
There are a lot of different ways to measure inequality: the top X percent versus the bottom Y percent. But any X or Y we might choose reveals about the same trends, and about the same differences between nations. One common metric, which I will highlight because the UN uses it, is the ratio of the income at the 80th percentile to the income that’s at the 20th percentile. This 80th to 20th ratio is, in the US, as of 2022, at 8.6. It’s been running at about that for over a decade, though during the pandemic we had a temporary drop down to 7.1. Canada, Japan, and most of Europe are below 5. When this 80th percentile to 20th percentile ratio is less than 5, then we find a society generally maintaining some shared assumptions about wealth and about each other. Roughly, when that ratio is about 5 or less, the attitude of the populace will resemble something like this:
<blockquote>“If there are somewhat wealthier folks among us, that’s OK. I can accept that some people are luckier, or more skillful at work that society prizes, or they’re more driven to work hard, and they end up wealthier. That’s fine – and as it should be. The relatively wealthy serve as a reminder to me of what good schooling and hard work and a little luck might make available to my children. If the town doctor has a big house on a hill, that’s OK – ze’s smart and had a lot of training, and ze’s using that to help us when we get sick, so more power to zir. Maybe my kid can get a scholarship and be a doctor.”</blockquote>
That kind of thinking was still pretty much the largely-unspoken norm on the day 43 years ago when I first held my newborn daughter in my arms. But that attitude loses purchase, begins to slip away, if the rich-poor gap grows too large. That outlook that prevailed through my growing up and my parents lives up until 1980, has now come to seem quaint -- an echo of a bygone time. Few, it seems, think like that anymore.<br /><br />
Things changed during the time of my daughter’s growing up. The two key features of the old outlook were:
<ol><li>the higher levels of wealth were attainable by those who weren't already rich; and </li>
<li>those who had wealth deserved it. </li></ol>
These two features are connected, for when upper-class wealth seems attainable – when the perception of most people is that anyone with the right combination of talent, drive, and luck can become upper-class – then those who do make it to society’s top wealth echelons are presumed to deserve it. But when the gap becomes as enormous as it has in the US, the folks at the bottom and middle can no longer see the wealth of the ones at the top as either attainable or deserved.<br /><br />
By the time my little girl was graduating from college in 2002, the world she was commencing into had become profoundly different from the one she was born into. The country had become a place where we could no longer feel we were all in this together.<br /><br />
Now, I know that the idea that there once was, up until 1980, a halcyon time of general social solidarity overlooks the deep racism that has divided our country throughout its history. I know that, given the horrors of Jim Crow segregation, gauzy nostalgic impressions of togetherness are delusional. Even so, whites could see rich whites as attainable, and blacks could see wealthier blacks as attainable. But in this century, even that has fallen apart.<br /><br />
There is an argument that we should be concerned with poverty, but not with inequality. It’s our business as a society to make sure that everybody has enough, this argument goes, but not our business how much more than enough the rich have. Here’s the thing, though.
What we want is to care and be cared for. We want, and need, to be in relations of mutual care. And when that need is not met, it makes anxiety, depression, and social alienation more likely. Societally, when inequality becomes great, we lose the sense of community, lose the sense that we’re all in this together.<br /><br />
Researchers into “social health” typically measure it as an amalgam of ten factors. The lower the rates of:
<ul><li>homicides</li>
<li>obesity</li>
<li>teenage births</li>
<li>infant mortality</li>
<li>imprisonment rates</li>
<li>mental illness (including drug and alcohol addiction),</li></ul>
and the higher the:
<ul><li>life expectancy</li>
<li>children’s educational performance</li>
<li>social mobility</li>
<li>level of trust</li></ul>
then the higher a nation's social health.<br /><br />
Using this definition of social health, researchers have then found that a country’s wealth does not correlate with its social health. A country may be rich, medium, poor, or extremely poor (less than $10,000 per person per year). Except in extremely poor nations, more wealth has no effect on social health. Equality, however, does correlate with social health. Countries with high inequality, whether rich or poor, have low social health. Countries with low inequality, whether rich or poor, have high social health. The US is quite wealthy, but on the measure of social health we’re doing worse than most countries that have only half that much per-person income. After meeting a certain minimum, more wealth doesn’t do us any good. Equality does. In statisticians' terms, the mean income, as long as it’s above $10,000, doesn’t matter. It’s the standard deviation that matters.<br /><br />
Social health means a better quality of life for all of us. Richard Wilkinson and Kate Pickett write in their book: <i>The Spirit Level: Why Greater Equality Makes Societies Stronger</i>
<blockquote>“The evidence shows that reducing inequality is the best way of improving the quality of the social environment, and so the real quality of life, for all of us . . . this includes the better off.” </blockquote>
A relatively equal society – where the ratio of the 80th percentile to the 20th percentile is less than 5 -- can sustain a shared understanding among its members. But if, as in the U.S., that ratio is close to 9, there’s a disconnect. We lose the shared understanding of the legitimacy of things. The wealthy are beyond attainability, and beyond any credible story of deservingness. We lose the sense that we’re in this together. The wealthy become “them.” And "they" don’t care about "us" -- so we don’t care about them. Anomie and division set in; anger and alienation become the social mood. Sensing the resentment of most of society, the wealthy, in turn, retreat behind gated communities, which further increases the disconnect.<br /><br />
We begin to believe the game is rigged; we don’t have a chance. When we believe that, we become more likely to behave in ways that make that a self-fulfilling prophecy. Rich and poor alike feel the division, the disconnect. The result is that phenomenon I mentioned: everything that’s tough about modern life is exacerbated. Higher levels of depression, higher levels of consuming things that aren’t good for us: from drugs to alcohol to junk food to mindless TV shows to mindless consumer products.
As I wrote in my column in this month’s issue of <i>Connecting</i>: When you compare nation to nation, there’s no correlation between wealth and life expectancy or mortality. No correlation. Rich countries have about the same life expectancies and mortality rates as relatively poor countries, until you get into the really poor end of the spectrum. As long as a nation has per-person income above about $10,000 a year, further increases do nothing to increase life expectancy. That’s the nation-to-nation comparison.<br /><br />
But when we do a zip-code-to-zip-code comparison, we get a different picture. The poorer zip codes have higher mortality than the richer zip codes. If you took several of the poorest zip codes, created a new island in the Pacific, put them all there, maintained their per-person incomes as they were, made a new island nation of them, they’d have decreased mortality. They’d be fine. But because they live near the wealthier areas, they perceive that difference. They see all around them the inescapable fact that they live in a society that is set up to work for others, but not for them. They are reminded daily that they are not in a society of mutual care.
And THAT wears them down much more than relative material deprivation.<br /><br />
Wilkinson and Pickett write:
<blockquote>“At the pinnacle of human material and technical achievement, we find ourselves anxiety-ridden, prone to depression, worried about how others see us, unsure of our friendships, driven to consume, and with little or no community life.”</blockquote>
Wilkinson and Pickett go on to note:
<blockquote>“The unease we feel about the loss of social values and the way we are drawn into the pursuit of material gain is often experienced as if it were a purely private ambivalence which cuts us off from others....As voters, we have lost sight of any collective belief that society could be different. Instead of a better society, the only thing almost everyone strives for is to better their own position – as individuals – within the existing society.”</blockquote>
A complex web of interrelated factors has brought us to this pass, and growing income inequality is a key node within that web. It fosters the sense of divide. If we’re going to get back to a sense of common good – where political differences are differences of strategy for promoting general welfare rather than the drawing of enemy lines to delineate who must be defeated – then it will be necessary to reduce income inequality.<br /><br />
Equality has benefits that show up all over. They show up, for example, on baseball teams.
<i>“A well-controlled study of over 1,600 players in 29 teams over a nine-year period found that major league baseball teams with smaller income differences among players do significantly better than the more unequal teams.” (Wilkinson and Picket, <i>The Spirit Level: Why Greater Equality Makes Societies Stronger</i>, 237).</i>
When people feel like they stand on equal footing with their neighbors or teammates, there’s a cohesion that lifts spirits, heals wounds, and improves performance.<br /><br />
Unitarian Universalists care about our world. And it’s clear now that <blockquote>“further improvements in the quality of life no longer depend on further economic growth. The issue is now community and how we relate to each other.” (Wilkinson, Pickett)</blockquote>
The issue is building a world in which most of us care about the well-being of all of us. The issue is not only at the economic level but at the spirit level. The wound is to our spirits, yet, wounded as they are, the resolve to heal must also come from our spirits.<br /><br />
“The religious community is essential,” as Rev. Mark Morrison-Reed said, “for alone our vision is too narrow to see all that must be seen, and our strength too limited to do all that must be done. Together, our vision widens and our strength is renewed."<br /><br />
May it be so. Amen.
Rev. Meredith Garmonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09600609816550758194noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7480207999294007243.post-52363991634364197632024-01-28T09:48:00.221-05:002024-01-29T12:06:08.143-05:00Liberty, Justice, and Sexual Ethics<div class="separator" style="clear: both;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiCbujSev50fTPHiM6ndXArZhknRCSB83tUGKI07LrSLaw8zaOEZeDx06WLu5XsKqPDxccmr0nZs7FI68QxZK1iZwppYxlDI4zGumiIjJVQQ0JIInPXt8X4SFMKN7sdxzcVEvuWQTqOt7cPmN9G7yq1d_Ld6u82fM4Zg0JFyZMoMaDo1HmCpYbWSaWI/s659/OS20240128.png" style="display: block; padding: 1em 0; text-align: center; clear: right; float: right;"><img alt="" border="0" height="320" data-original-height="659" data-original-width="563" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiCbujSev50fTPHiM6ndXArZhknRCSB83tUGKI07LrSLaw8zaOEZeDx06WLu5XsKqPDxccmr0nZs7FI68QxZK1iZwppYxlDI4zGumiIjJVQQ0JIInPXt8X4SFMKN7sdxzcVEvuWQTqOt7cPmN9G7yq1d_Ld6u82fM4Zg0JFyZMoMaDo1HmCpYbWSaWI/s320/OS20240128.png"/></a></div>Last week, I talked about Queer Theory and how plastic and socially constructed sexuality is. Today I want to follow up by reflecting how ethics interacts with all of that.<br><br>
In my lifetime, the acceptance and understanding of LGBTQ people has changed a lot. There’s been dramatic expansion of sexual liberty. Yes, there’s still fear and hatred. As of last spring, there were “more than 400 proposed bills in states across the U.S. that aim to restrict the rights, freedom and fair treatment of LGBTQ people.” Liberty can be frightening -- and what we're seeing is the backlash against the dramatic expansion of sexual liberty. What might help address the fears is to understand that universal acceptance of LGBTQ people would not mean anything goes, would not mean there were no longer any standards of sexual ethics. But the principles of sexual ethics that serve us now are different from those in the past.<br><br>
The ways that we love – with whom and how we express love – are so intensely personal and private, yet societies have always sought to regulate, to channel, the energies of romantic attraction because those energies can be destructive: violent, abusive. Human libidos can disrupt social harmony. Love should be personal and private, yet we need guidelines to define and protect that space because the drives that can express in love can also express in ways that harm and are socially disruptive.<br><br>
Liberty is a tremendous good – and at the same time society has an interest in fostering stable relationships. Free ranging sexual energies – like the stereotype from earlier generations of sailors on shore leave, looking for a good time and getting into fights – can be harmful. A whole society of everyone acting like that would be miserable and unsustainable.<br><br>
Love needs liberty, yet it also needs justice. Cornel West, speaking about general social justice, said that justice is what love looks like in public. We can add that romantic love needs to be what justice looks like in private.<br><br>
In the world into which I was born – the world of the 1950s – the prevailing attitude was that sexuality be channeled through recognizable forms of courtship and into heterosexual marriage. Sexual ethics used to be simply: Only within marriage. And marriage was understood as a set of five tightly-linked features:
<ul><li>creation of a household of two adults;</li>
<li>sexual exclusivity to within that household;</li>
<li>production of babies;</li>
<li>raising of the children; and</li>
<li>perpetuation of the parents’ genetic lines.</li></ul>
That was the package deal. And, naturally, the two adults had to consist of one woman and one man because that was what producing babies required. Being married implied all five of those things -- most of the time: a two-adult household, sexual exclusivity, making babies, raising them, passing on genes. If, every once in a while, an infertile man or woman got married, or a couple past child-bearing age, that was OK. As long as that was the exception to the rule, the basic model (that those five went together), remained intact.<br><br>
The sexual ethic, then, was to support the package deal, to uphold the idea that any one of those five parts ought to imply all of the other four as well. So the ethic of the time declared: don’t make babies outside a two-adult, sexually exclusive household – but do enter into two-adult exclusive households, and, once there, do make and raise children. Those were the norms. Thus, the sexual ethic included such principles as no premarital sex, no extramarital sex, and no sex that wasn’t the kind that procreates.<br><br>
Over the course of my lifetime, those previously inextricable features of marriage came apart -- and with that dissolution the old sexual ethic has faded. The arrival of reliable birth control was a huge change, and that’s been within my lifetime. The year I was born, 1959, was also the year the pharmaceutical company Searle sought FDA approval for the birth control pill. I was a toddler when The Pill came on the market, and of course had no idea what that was all about or how it would change things. Reliable birth control meant that otherwise fertile opposite-sex couples could, as they chose, form a household together without producing or raising babies.<br><br>
At the same time, various other social forces have brought about a rise in out-of-wedlock births and single-parent families resulting from producing and raising children without two adults making a household together.<br><br>
You can have marriage without sex, and sex without marriage (which has always been fairly common but in recent decades has lost much of the stigma it used to have). You can have sex without babies and babies without sex – the former through the aforementioned new technology of birth control, and the latter through new technologies of artificial insemination and surrogate motherhood. Through adoption, you can propagate your genes without raising the children, and raise children without propagating your genes. The package deal has come undone. And with its undoing, the sexual ethic that supported that package deal no longer compels.<br><br>
Yet sexuality remains, as much as ever, a powerful force that can bring us into our wholeness -- or break us into little pieces. As much as ever, we need a way to say what’s OK and what isn’t when it comes to romance, and sex, and coupling.<br><br>
Things that weren’t regarded as OK in the 1950s have become OK. At the same time things that used to be OK, or at least fuzzy, have become more clearly not OK. The change is illustrated by how we see a certain iconic photo taken in 1945. Amid the celebrations in America of Victory in Japan, the photo shows a US Navy sailor, in Times Square New York, embracing and kissing a total stranger, who appears to be nurse (she was actually a dental hygienist). At the time, the image was seen as a delightful expression of the ebullient celebration. What was seen then as simple joyful jubilation, we now see as sexual assault, normalized. In the 1940s, consent was not so strong a part of our sexual ethics as it is today. Along with some things becoming OK that didn’t used to be, other things have become not OK that did used to be – as our sexuality has morphed in the wake of the coming apart of the five-part package deal that used to be the meaning of marriage.<br><br>
Our private relationships and our public relationships foster each other. In both cases, it’s about treating people in ways that respect and honor them to facilitate their flourishing and our own. This requires understanding, and it requires compassion, and those are skills that Unitarian Universalist congregations exist to help develop. Whether the issue is hate or the issue is love, the need is justice -- respecting and honoring personhood; flourishing by helping each other flourish; liberation from domination.<br><br>
Our bodies are themselves unique vehicles of potential liberation and fulfillment. They are integral parts of our identity. When our bodies love, the first awakening of love may not be a matter of choice. It comes upon us unbidden. We “fall into” love. Yet love can be directed by choice. Even in the beginning, we can influence our loves by, as Sister Margaret Farley writes:
<blockquote>“choosing to pay attention to certain realities or not, putting ourselves in a position to discover lovableness...,choosing to believe (even if we do not yet 'see,'...) in the value of persons or of anything in creation....We can identify with our loves and freely ratify them....We can also repudiate, or defer, some of our loves by choosing not to identify with them.” (Farley, <i>Just Love</i>)</blockquote>
Where there is choice, there is space for ethical reflection. How shall our liberty embrace justice?<br><br>
Justice means equal respect. Yet the concrete meaning of respect must be tailored to cultural differences and to individual differences. Justice is a social concern, including romantic and sexual justice -- and sometimes it is a highly contentious social concern, as we saw, for example, in Supreme Court nomination hearings for Clarence Thomas in 1991 and for Brett Kavanaugh in 2018.<br><br>
We all have a role to play in creating a favorable social context for personal integrity, freedom, flourishing – and thus for individuals to choose love that is true and also based in justice. We all have a role to play in working out sexual ethical norms. Ethics isn’t law. Ethics is a field of philosophy: a discourse in which we try to tease out from the contradictory mish-mash of culture which parts are worth trying to uphold more consistently. Its usefulness is not in settling questions, but in providing us with some tools and some angles of approach to help us think through the questions for ourselves.<br><br>
A Catholic Nun, of all people, has done thoughtful and helpful work in articulating sexual ethics in this context where the old sexual ethic recognizably does not serve us. Sister of Mercy Margaret Farley was Professor of Christian Ethics and Yale Divinity School. Her book, <i>Just Love</i>, was denounced by the Holy See for moral views which opposed the teachings of the Catholic Church, so it's got that to recommend it. I think Sister Margaret Farley has put her finger on some excellent considerations as we wrestle with what justice requires in our intimate relationships, so let us look into the principles she offers.<br><br>
First: Do No Unjust Harm.<br><br>
Harm can take many forms: “physical, psychological, spiritual, relational. It can also take the form of failure to support, to assist, to care for, to honor.” In love and its sexual expression, we are uniquely tender and vulnerable -- so acute attention to the risks of harm is called for.<br><br>
Sexual expression is highly variable, and just because something is repulsive to you or me doesn’t make it wrong. Pain may be a part of sexual expression, and for some folks it may be particularly central. Bodily damage may part of that. Sexuality-related cosmetic surgeries also constitute bodily damage. So we can’t simply say, "Do No Harm." What we can say is do no <i>unjust</i> harm. That’s the overall guideline, the overall ethic, the first rule. The other points are for clarifying what "unjust" is.<br><br>
Second: Free Consent.<br><br>
Justice requires autonomy, and without free consent, there is no autonomy. Consent seems such an obvious principle that it’s remarkable how much the emphasis on consent has grown in recent years. And it’s worth remembering that there has been resistance. It wasn’t that long ago – it was in 2010 – that fraternity members at Yale University gathered outside the campus Women’s Center to chant, “No means yes.”<br><br>
Seduction or manipulation of persons who have limited capacity for choice because of immaturity, special dependency, or loss of ordinary power violates free consent.<br><br>
But seduction is complicated. It’s certainly not wrong to try to make yourself attractive to a prospective mate. It’s not wrong to lower the lights, put candles on the table, and Barry White on the stereo. Promise-keeping and truth-telling are aspects of honoring free consent, since betrayal and deception limit the free choice of the other person. If promise-keeping and truth-telling are honored -- and neither party has "limited capacity for choice because of immaturity, special dependency, or loss of ordinary power" -- then I'd say we're in the realm of wholesome courtship rather than ethically problematic seduction.<br><br>
If alcohol is going to be involved, then the consent should be clear at some point before inebriation, but does ethics require it to be clear before the first glass of wine? It starts to get a bit fuzzy. Certainly, the clearer the consent, and the more clear-minded the judgment of both parties when they consent, the better.<br><br>
At the same time, one of the wonderful things about love is that it isn't coldly, rationally clear-minded. Moreover, we may be of partly divided mind when it comes to romance. Part of you may be ready to jump in, while part of you is not so sure. Yes, as we teach our children, you’re the boss of your body, but this boss is sometimes a divided internal parliament. To address these difficulties, it may help to look to the "free" part of "free consent." However swept up in nonrational feelings we may be, and however internally divided we may feel, where our liberty is not compromised, we are on solid ground. "Limited capacity for choice" means limited liberty, whether it is "because of immaturity, special dependency, or loss of ordinary power" (including loss of ordinary power from inebriation). Those conditions don't feel free. Exhilarating emotion, on the other hand, even if not rational, feels free -- indeed, it may feel very freeing.<br><br>
Fortunately, the "consent" requirement gets some help from further guidelines like mutuality, equality, and commitment.<br><br>
Third: Mutuality.<br><br>
Ethical sexual expression involves mutual participation. What we’re talking about here are the old ideas of “the male as active and the female as passive, the woman as receptacle and the man as fulfiller.” That’s a violation of the mutuality principle. True relationship entails a context recognizing each partner’s activity and each partner’s receptivity -- each partner’s giving and each partner's receiving. Mutuality need not be perfect, but it does need to be present in some degree. “Two liberties meet, two bodies meet, two hearts come together” – and if they aren’t both putting heart and self into the encounter – if either partner is overwhelmingly passive, hardly participating, it isn’t mutual.<br><br>
Fourth: Equality.<br><br>
Justice in love means that the partners bring roughly equal levels of power and autonomy to the relationship. Inequalities of power may come from differences in social and economic status, or differences in age and maturity. Teachers and their students have an inherent power inequality, as do counselors and their clients, ministers and their parishioners. It’s not that such inequalities shouldn’t exist, just that they shouldn’t exist in a romantic relationship.<br><br>
The principle of equality also “rules out treating a partner as property, a commodity, or an element in market exchange.” Thus prostitution is unethical on grounds of violating equality. Ethical sexuality may include all manner of role-playing, but if a partner is an actual element in a market exchange, that’s not playing a role. It’s an inherent inequality. Any overlap of the sphere of paying people for goods and services and the sphere of sexual relationship, any blurring of those spheres, compromises our flourishing.<br><br>
Equality, like mutuality, is rarely perfect. The ethical concern is that the power be balanced enough, as Farley puts it: “for each to appreciate the uniqueness and difference of the other, and for each to respect one another as ends in themselves” – and not a means only.<br><br>
Fifth: Commitment.<br><br>
The important consideration is that any sexual encounter be entered into with an openness to the possibility that it may lead to long-term relationship. If it turns out to be a one-night stand, that, in itself, is not an ethical violation, as long as it was entered into with openness to the possibility that it become something more. As Sister Margaret Farley writes:
<blockquote>“Sexuality is of such importance in human life that it needs to be nurtured, sustained, as well as disciplined, channeled, controlled....Brief encounters...cannot mediate the kind of union -- of knowing and being known, loving and being loved -- for which human relationality offers the potential.”</blockquote>
The rhetoric of commitment can get overblown, and it is worth remembering that “particular forms of commitment are themselves only means, not ends.” Nevertheless, as Sister Farley reflects:
<blockquote>“Given all the caution learned from contemporary experience, we may still hope that our freedom is sufficiently powerful to gather up our love and give it a future; that thereby our sexual desire can be nurtured into a tenderness that has not forgotten passion. We may still believe that to try to use our freedom in this way is to be faithful to the love that arises in us or even the yearning that rises from us.”</blockquote>
Thank you, Sister.<br><br>
Sixth: Fruitfulness.<br><br>
The ethical sexual relationship bears fruit. Traditionally, this has meant procreation, but there is a deeper underlying principle of fruitfulness: that the relationship must not close in on itself. The sexual encounter occurs behind closed doors, but not in a social vacuum. Love brings new life to those who love, and that new life is to be brought outward to the nourishing of other relationships. A relationship of both love and justice strengthens the partners, and encourages them in their work in the world. Thus is the romantic love fruitful because it serves the good of all.<br><br>
Finally, we should note that sexual ethics includes obligations that everyone in a society bears to affirm for its members as sexual beings. There are claims of respect that all of us are called to honor – respect for the many forms that human sexuality may take:
<blockquote>“single or married, gay or straight, bisexual or ambiguously gendered, old or young, abled or challenged in the ordinary forms of sexual expression, they have claims to respect from...the wider society.”</blockquote>
Justice in love requires not only that we bring certain principles to our own romantic and intimate relationships, but that we participate in making a society that honors and respects romantic and intimate relationships.<br><br>
The principles of justice do not stop at the bedroom door. In fact, they go through that door in both directions: entering to inform the sexual encounter, and, strengthened and affirmed there, exiting to inform all our relations.<br><br>
Justice, as Cornel West said, is what love looks like in public. Recognizing, however, that love can take corrupted forms – can be manipulative, domineering, and abusive -- we do need to add that love must look like justice in private.<br><br>
May it be so. Amen.Rev. Meredith Garmonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09600609816550758194noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7480207999294007243.post-61419231070144620642024-01-21T13:28:00.000-05:002024-02-05T14:34:29.834-05:00Queer TheoryOur theme of the month is Pluralism. Two weeks ago I mentioned the Developmental Model of Intercultural Sensitivity to help us think about how we might move beyond our tendency to minimize cultural difference, better appreciate how deep culture goes, and open ourselves to learning how to better adapt to different cultural contexts. Last week, in our Zoom service, we did some history as a subversive activity, looking at how the white landowners in the 17th century invented the American tradition of racism, and how that legacy affects and infects everything.<br><br>
Understanding these matters helps us live out and live into our value, pluralism. It’s a value that Unitarian Universalists are considering codifying in our Association’s bylaws, with language that says:
<blockquote>“We celebrate that we are all sacred beings, diverse in culture, experience, and theology. We covenant to learn from one another in our free and responsible search for truth and meaning. We embrace our differences and commonalities with Love, curiosity, and respect.”</blockquote>
Today, we turn to pluralism of sexual orientations and gender identity.<br><br>
In our free and responsible search for truth and meaning, we always confront two huge mysteries: ourselves, and other people. Whatever your sexual orientation or gender identity, just because you are or have that orientation and that identity, doesn’t mean you understand it. We remain mysteries to ourselves. And other people are also mysteries to us. We can’t clear up these mysteries, but we can help them seem manageable – we can acquire some helpful conceptual tools. So I propose today to lead you on a journey – a tour through a landscape of ideas and concepts. Our starting point is that last sentence from our description of Pluralism: “We embrace our differences and commonalities with Love, curiosity, and respect.” That’s our starting point. It’s also our ending point. What we will find is that we are led back to where we started – our covenant to “embrace our differences and commonalities with Love, curiosity, and respect.”<br><br>
T.S. Eliot said:
<blockquote>“We shall not cease from exploration<br>
And the end of all our exploring<br>
Will be to arrive where we started<br>
And know the place for the first time.”</blockquote>
And that’s what this exploration will be. We’ll arrive where we started – only, we might know the place a bit better.<br><br>
Concept Number One: Ignore It – Or Try To.<br><br>
According to this concept, the thing to do with sexuality that may be different from your own is ignore it. What consenting people do in private is irrelevant – it has nothing to do with our shared life. Don’t ask, don’t tell. Since sexual orientation has nothing to do with character, reliability, competence, trustworthiness – has nothing to do with whether a person has inherent worth and dignity, it should just be ignored. Let’s dispense with labels like lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer and treat all people as just people. <br><br>
In race relations, this attitude was called being – or trying to be – color-blind. Similarly, we might be, or try to be, sexual orientation blind, or gender identity blind. But then we get to:<br><br>
Concept Number Two: Honoring Identity<br><br>
The problem with concept number one is that people want to be seen and honored, acknowledged and respected for all of who they are. During the four years in the early 90s that I was a professor of philosophy at Fisk University – a school with a predominantly African American student body – I saw every day how important African American identity was to my students. Certainly, they wanted to be respected – and they wanted to be respected AS African American -- respected as what they were. They didn’t want white people pretending to be unable to see color.<br><br>
We like to be recognized for who we are. We don’t want our identity to be socially erased. We want to be proud of who we are, not told that a key part of our experience is meaningless. Similarly, many LGBTQ folk want to be recognized and accepted for all of who they are.<br><br>
We are all entitled to equal concern and respect. But we don’t have to pretend that we’re all the same. We want to be recognized for who we are.<br><br>
Color-blindness, or gender-blindness, or sexual-orientation-blindness, tries, with varying degrees of earnestness, to pretend that we are all the same. This pretense has the effect of projecting the majority’s norms. That’s how color-, gender-, or sexual-orientation-"blindness" plays out. Pretending that there’s no difference between black and white is basically tantamount to pretending that we are all white. Color-blindness allows the norms and assumptions of white culture to hold unchallenged sway. In the same way, sexual-orientation-blindness amounts to projecting heteronormativity. <br><br>
Now we start getting into areas that are going to be for many of us a bit more challenging. You see, while many in the LGBTQ community worked hard for recognition of same-sex marriage, not all LGBQ folk have unalloyed enthusiasm for the spread of acceptance of same-sex marriage. Marriage itself is heteronormative, they point out. Marriage takes the heterosexual model as the norm: you have one partner, you live together and run a household together, for life – or at least starting out with the intention that it be for life. But maybe that model should be challenged rather than pursued. Some queer theorists criticize the traditional family as a deeply problematic institution that ought to challenged and called into question.<br><br>
Concept Number Three: Identity -- and Everything -- Are Shifting Cultural Constructs<br><br>
Some queer theorists also challenge the very idea of identity. Concept one was, "let’s ignore it." Concept two was, "let’s recognize identity as a way to respect who a person is." Now we get to concept three: identity is a problematic notion.<br><br>
Starting with gender, let us acknowledge that the clear black-and-white categories “male” and “female” aren’t really so clear. Some people are born intersex, where the biological sex cannot be clearly classified as either male or female. The practice of forcibly resolving the ambiguity, forcing the child into one box or the other, sometimes using surgery to help resolve the ambiguity on one side or the other, has been harmful and traumatic. <br><br>
Let us learn to accept ambiguity. In fact, suggest some queer theorists, more gender ambiguity might be good for us all. We might all dress and style ourselves in ways designed to make it harder instead of easier for others to categorize our gender at a glance. I remember years ago if I saw someone – like, at the mall -- and I couldn’t immediately tell if they were a woman or a man, I wanted to know, and I’d keep stealing glances to see if I could ascertain the person’s gender. I’ve learned to be more comfortable with not needing to know.<br><br>
Sexuality is culturally constructed – and culture is constantly shifting. Cultural studies professor Nikki Sullivan writes in A Critical Introduction to Queer Theory (2003):
<blockquote>“Sexuality is not natural, but rather, is discursively constructed. Moreover, sexuality…is constructed, experienced, and understood in culturally and historically specific ways. Thus, we could say that there can be no true or correct account of heterosexuality, of homosexuality, of bisexuality....Contemporary views of particular relationships and practices are not necessarily any more enlightened or any less symptomatic of the times than those held by previous generations.” (1)</blockquote>
Queer theorist David Halperin describes three very different cultures in which sexual contact between older men and boys has been acceptable: the ancient Greeks, some Native American tribes, and New Guinea tribesmen. He asks: Is this the same sexuality? Such contact has some superficial similarities, including acceptability, in all three cultures, yet the social contexts and meanings of that contact was so varied, the cultural understanding of what was going on so diverse, that we can’t call it the same sexuality.<br><br>
The brilliant French philosopher and social theorist Michel Foucault, pioneered new ways to think about and understand ourselves. Foucault is a founding figure for a number of kinds of study, including queer theory. His three volume <i>History of Sexuality<i></i></i> revealed how sexuality has been culturally constructed in Western civilization. In Britain, and much of Europe, prior to the 1880s, Foucault points out, “sodomy” meant any form of sexuality that did not have procreation as its aim. Using birth control counted as sodomy – and penalties against sodomy were severe.<br><br>
Analysis of the time reveals that the laws were directed against acts, not against a particular type of person. There was no understanding of sexual orientation as an identity – any more than we have an understanding of adulterer as an identity -- or, say, “person who parks in a no parking zone.”<br><br>
It wasn’t until the later 1800s that <blockquote>“particular acts came to be seen as an expression of an individual’s psyche, or as evidence of inclinations of a certain type of subject.” (Sullivan 3)</blockquote>
Certain forms of sexuality moved from being seen as horrible acts to which anyone might succumb, to being seen as the expression of a particular type of person. As Sigmund Freud expressed and magnified the new way of thinking, sex was at the root of everything about us. Thus, “the homosexual” became a personage – a life form, characterized as a certain type of degenerate whose entire character, everything about him, was corrupted by his sexuality.<br><br>
Such a viewpoint hardly seems to us like progress. Yet, as traumatic and disastrous as that cultural phase was for many, it paved the way for our later attitudes. Once we saw sexual orientation as an identity – subject to treatment rather than to criminal or moral judgment -- the ground was laid for the next step. Only then could culture move to seeing that identity as not harming anyone else. <br><br>
From there to: not harming themselves either. And then: to being tolerated, to being accepted, to being welcomed, to being celebrated as a worthy and beautiful part of the diverse spectrum of human expression. That’s a huge change – a series of huge changes – all within the last 130 years or so.<br><br>
The field of queer theory, then, examining the vastly different ways that sexuality manifests and is understood in different cultures and times, raises for us the possibility that our cultural changes in the last 130 years might not be a matter of finally seeing the truth that has been there all along. Rather, they might be a matter of the contingent, accidental evolution of concepts – evolving in ways outside of anyone’s explicit control or intention, yet not dictated by something called "objective reality" either.<br><br>
The evolution metaphor here is apt. In species evolution, the objective environment establishes conditions in which many species will fail – will never appear or will quickly die out – yet the objective environment does not guide and direct evolution toward one true species. Rather, the objective environment is one in which increasingly diverse species emerge and find ways to be successful. By analogy, we might say that the reality of our biology establishes conditions in which some concepts of sexuality would never appear or would quickly die out – yet biological reality does not guide or direct our understanding toward the one truth. Rather, the array of possible ways of thinking about sexuality, while constrained by facts of biology, remains as infinite as the array of possible species.<br><br>
(Are you having a hard time wrapping your mind around how it can be constrained, yet still infinite? Look, suppose I tell you to pick a number. Then I say it has to be a prime number. Your choice is now constrained: the number has to be a whole number, a positive integer, and prime. But there are an infinite number of prime numbers. So: constrained, and still infinite.)<br><br>
Biology gives us some constraints – but the possibilities for cultural constructions of what to do with those constraints are infinite.<br><br>
OK. Where are we? Let’s review. First level: forget about labels, categories. Just love people. Second level: it’s not so simple.
People want to be recognized and respected for who they are. We have an identity as a man or a woman – or as nonbinary. We have an identity as a person of color, or not. And we have an identity as lesbian, gay, bisexual, or straight. My identity in these areas is not relevant to my rights, not relevant to whether or not I may be oppressed or discriminated against, not relevant to my claim to equal concern and respect. My identity IS relevant to my sense of who I am, and I want my society to recognize and honor and respect who I am. A "don’t ask, don’t tell" policy requires me to hide who I am. (Actually, it doesn’t require straight white men like me to hide who we are because under white heteronormativity my particular identity happens to be the one that is assumed rather than hidden – which is why recognizing and respecting alternative identities matters.)<br><br>
Then comes a third level: the notion of identity itself is challenged. Not only are the categories fuzzy and unreliable, with people falling along continua rather than into one neat box or another, but the continua themselves are contingent social constructs subject to deconstruction and reconstruction into something different. Sexuality is plastic, and the ways we make meaning of it are even more plastic. Which brings us to:<br><br>
Making Peace With Ambiguity<br><br>
It’s confusing, it’s changing, we can’t really get a handle on the right way to think about it – because any way to think about it is one more temporary product of culture and language and power. No matter how enlightened our attitudes may be, no matter how up we are on LGBTQ literature, the latest books on gender and transgender biology, psychology, and experience – no matter how conversant we are in heteronormative critique – it’ll all be different in 50 years, if not sooner. And your currently enlightened attitude will seem to people then benighted.<br><br>
Queer theory helps us let go of our assumptions and not replace them with new ones. Queer theory itself is not so much a "theory," as an understanding that no theory can be the one right theory. Queer theory helps us resist the temptation to resolve ambiguity, for in that space of ambiguity, we come back to where we started: simply embracing our differences and commonalities with Love, curiosity, and respect.<br><br>
Tell me what’s important to you. It might be your sexual identity, your gender identity, your racial identity, or it might not be.
Tell, or don’t tell. It's up to you. And I might ask, or not ask – though keeping up, amid the constantly shifting cultural landscape, with what questions are inappropriate is part of the ongoing task. If I do ask, you can answer, or not answer, or say it’s not important to you, or tell me that you really just don’t know. This is how “We embrace our differences and commonalities with Love, curiosity, and respect.” It requires the courage to stand in ambiguity and shine a warm embracing light. There may once have been good reasons for wanting to resolve the ambiguities of sex and sexuality. It may have even felt unbearable "not to know" -- and know instantly -- who was and who was not "automatically" in the category of potential mates for reproduction. With a little practice, though, we can be comfortable not knowing.<br><br>
Our journey through queer theory has led us back to “arrive where we started, and know the place for the first time.” What we know about this place now is just how indefinite and undefined everything is. Embracing our differences and commonalities with Love, curiosity, and respect requires neither a rejection of, nor an insistence on, any notion of identity. What it does require is courage: the courage to take each ambiguous moment as it is; the courage to love each ambiguous person, however he or she or ze presents.<br><br>
May it be so. Amen.
Rev. Meredith Garmonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09600609816550758194noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7480207999294007243.post-76743520598014155922024-01-14T14:06:00.001-05:002024-01-16T14:07:14.084-05:00Seeing RaceOn this Martin Luther King Day weekend, as we celebrate what would have been Dr. King’s 95th birthday, race-based distrust, prejudice, and bigotry continues to bedevil and rive our nation. Our world, too – but I must say especially our nation. <br><br>
The first balm for the wounds of division is truth. The bandages of programs, the splints of institutions, and the sutures of social justice will all fail without the salve of truth: the awareness of what is so, shared knowledge of how things are. Let us begin with the truth about our history, for that will help us understand why racial harmony is so particularly difficult for this country. Some of us know the history in, at least, the broad outline that I will recount – but perhaps not all of us do. In these times when simply teaching African American history is being banned and restricted in some states, simply to tell this history is a subversive act. Come, let us be subversive together.<br><br>
America did not invent prejudice, or discrimination against people that, in any physical way including skin color, looked different. Indeed, as I mentioned last week, anxiety about people who are different appears to be an innate condition in a certain percent of the population, and it can certainly be a learned condition in many more. What America did invent was the modern conception of race, and the racism based upon that conception.<br><br>
The word “race” used to mean any other group of people. If you lived in northern France, the people a couple hundred miles south of you were a southerly race. Protestants referred to the Catholic race, and vice-versa. Nobles spoke of the peasant race. The emergence of the modern sense of race was a deliberate device of the wealthy landowners in the colonies in the 1600s. They invented racism as we know it in order to co-opt the poor whites into helping sustain slavery.<br><br>
The first enslaved Africans on soil that became the US were brought along with Spanish exploring expeditions. They came and went from what is now the US starting in 1526. The first Africans held in slavery by settler colonialists in the English colonies were brought to Jamestown, Virginia in 1619 – one year before the Mayflower. They were brought on a ship called (ironically? aptly?) <i>The White Lion</i>.<br><br>
By the middle and late 1600s, much of the manual agricultural labor of the colonies was being done by what we would now call white indentured servants. England’s anti-poverty program of the time was to make poverty a crime punishable by deportation to America essentially as slave, but with the provision for earning one’s freedom after 10 or 20 or sometimes as much as 30 years of labor. From what we can tell, when enslaved people from Africa appeared to work beside them in the field, the darker skin color aroused no particular animosity. Whether you had paler skin or darker skin, you were kept in separate quarters, supervised by an overseer, whipped as a means of “correction,” often underfed and underclothed, and stereotyped as vile and brutish and subhuman. The two groups, both despised objects of the contempt of the bourgeoisie, saw each other as sharing the same predicament. As historian Edmund Morgan notes:
<blockquote>“It was common, for example, for servants and slaves to run away together, steal hogs together, get drunk together.
It was not uncommon for them to make love together.” (<i>American Slavery, American Freedom: The Ordeal of Colonial Virginia</i>, 1975, p. 327)</blockquote>
And sometimes European servants combined with enslaved Africans to rebel against the ruling elite.<br><br>
In Colonial America of the 1600s, the main difference between indentured servants and enslaved ones was in the economics for the landowners. The workers that came from Africa cost more, but they paid off in the long run because the landowner didn’t have to release them after a certain period of time – and because any children of an enslaved woman were also enslaved. For that reason, the slave demand brought a steady increase through the 1600s in the population of enslaved African.<br><br>
As time went by, the trend of increased numbers of African slaves combined with more and more of the indentured serving out their time and more and more European-born poor freedmen in the population. Only then did the landowners begin to draw the sort of race line that today is so familiar to us. They did it as a strategy against rebellion.<br><br>
The freedmen were persons without house or land, rankled by unfair taxes, the greed of legislators who then, as now, were in the pockets of the wealthy, and land use regulations that made it very difficult for them to ever own land. Freedmen with “disappointed hopes” and enslaved people of “desperate hope” were joining forces to mount ever more virulent rebellions (Thandeka, <i>Learning to Be White</i>, p. 45). The landowners strategy was to invent American racism as we know it. Whereas previously the big divide was between the vile rabble over there and the landowners over here, the new way of grouping people encouraged the European-born part of the rabble to think of themselves as “white” – as sharing something crucial with the landowners which the African-born did not. Thus the freedmen were co-opted into betraying their own economic self-interest to support the landowners’ interests with which they identified by virtue of their shared whiteness.<br><br>
It was a brilliant divide-and-keep-conquered strategy “to separate dangerous free whites from dangerous slave blacks by a screen of racial contempt” (Edmund Morgan, <i>American Slavery, American Freedom: The Ordeal of Colonial Virginia</i>, 1975, p. 327). The trick was accomplished by such means as passing new laws offering some protections to whites even while still indentured. As of 1705 in Virginia, any enslaved person of African descent could be given 30 lashes on the bare back, but it was forbidden to whip a Christian white servant naked. The whipping happened, but the extra indignity did not – which helped the indentured begin to learn to be white, to identify with their oppressors against the even more oppressed.<br><br>
That same year, 1705, horses, cattle, and hogs were confiscated from enslaved people and sold to benefit poor whites. Any white was given the right to whip a black servant. Land owners were urged to bar the people they enslaved from learning the skills of a trade in order to preserve that work for white artisans. In ways subtle and obvious, a dignity based on whiteness alone was created where nothing of the sort had been imagined 50 years before.
<blockquote>“The gap between the wealthy and poor widened as a result of slave productivity. Thus the sense that poor whites now shared status and dignity with their social betters was largely illusory.” (Thandeka, p. 47)</blockquote>
But that illusion was powerful. Being white meant despising blacks, which afforded this illusory dignity that kept poor whites from agitating for economic reform on their own behalf and instead adopting attitudes and behavior to assist the landowners in keeping the blacks down. <br><br>
We carry that legacy today. Many of the whites among us, if we think back, would be able to tell a story of how we learned to be white. For me, it was on the school bus when I was in first-grade. A big third-grader, sophisticated and worldly-wise in my six-year-old eyes, asked me if I liked President Johnson. I shrugged. He said he didn’t like Johnson ‘cause he lets – and here he used the N word – go to our school. The look of contempt upon his face made me feel such a relief to not be the object of that contempt. <br><br>
I learned to be white on that day. I was whited by a system invented in this country two and a half centuries before by landowners who wanted to suppress rebellion, a system that took on a life of its own and long outlived its original purpose. <br><br>
If you are white, when did you learn that? If you are not, when was your earliest significant lesson about what your race was, and what it meant? We are all wounded by the race line that slashes across our psyches, whatever side of that line we may think we’re on.<br><br>
Once the race line has been established, there’s a projection that occurs. Learning to be white means learning to project upon darker-skinned people everything in the white person that feels low, vile, or shameful. A constant, nagging sense of unworthiness is part of the deal. <i>Here, you get to be white, like the rich folks, but you can’t help noticing that you’re still poor, so maybe you’re not really worthy of your whiteness.</i> The more whites were made to feel unworthy, the more they projected unworthy qualities on the group they were allowed to, and told to, despise. The more whites internalized that message, “You’re white, so if you just work hard enough, you’re bound to be OK,” the more they projected upon blacks the laziness they feared in themselves.<br><br>
White racism against blacks is always a version of self-disgust adopted in a desperate attempt to hold onto worth and dignity in the face of exclusion from the upper classes. This begins to explain a few mysteries.
Martin Luther King brought his war on slums to Chicago for his 1966 campaign for open housing. He encountered greater hostility in Chicago than he had ever seen in Atlanta, growing up, or in Montgomery, leading the bus boycott, or anywhere. Rocks and bricks were thrown. As King marched, someone hurled a stone. It struck King on the head. Stunned, he fell to one knee for several seconds. As he rose, aides and bodyguards surrounded him to protect him from the rocks, bottles and firecrackers that rained down on the demonstrators. King was one of 30 people who were injured. The disturbance resulted in 40 arrests. <br><br>
He later explained why he put himself at risk: "I have to do this--to expose myself--to bring this hate into the open." He had done that before, but Chicago was different. "I have seen many demonstrations in the South, but I have never seen anything so hostile and so hateful as I've seen here today," he said (Chicago Tribune).<br><br>
What could account for this intensity of hostility from whites whose every economically-visible interest was unthreatened? Why were the lower and middle-class whites more virulently racist than the upper-class whose interests were more directly challenged? Because if worth and dignity didn’t come from whiteness, they just weren’t sure where it could come from.<br><br>
Over and over, a substantial portion of white lower and middle-class voters vote against their own self-interest and in favor of wealthy interests. Why? Because learning to distance oneself from the interests blacks would have – even if, in reality, one shared those interests – was part of learning to be white. "White" has meant identifying with the wealthy, identifying with a shared paleness over and against shared economic needs.<br><br>
Why is the US unable to enact a fairer, much more effective, and even cheaper health-care system – a single-payer government National Health Insurance – while Europe and Canada and Japan have this eminently sensible system? It's because the US's specific heritage of racism taught us to identify with the wealthy, and the wealthy don't need national health insurance.<br><br>
Why is the US unable to provide adequate public schooling, affordable housing for all, and progressive taxation? It's because the US's specific heritage of racism taught us to identify with the wealthy, and the wealthy send their kids to private schools, aren't at risk of homelessness, and don't want to be progressively taxed.<br><br>
Why is it that when Black men open-carried firearms as the Black Panthers did in the 1960s and 70s, gun control legislation passed, and when that perceived threat was gone and whites wanted to open carry, those controls were rolled back, and white people heavily armed in public are celebrated as patriotic and freedom loving? Why is it that the Anti-Drug Abuse Act of 1986 created much harsher penalties for possession of crack cocaine, used mostly by blacks, than for a quantity of powdered cocaine, used mostly by whites, that produced similar effects? It’s because the national psyche has developed the longstanding habit of projecting upon dark skin color everything it is scared of, and is unconsciously convinced that black people doing a dangerous activity is much, much more dangerous than white people doing the same thing. <br><br>
Why is it that the percentage of African Americans who are incarcerated is nearly five times higher than the percentage of European Americans who are? Why is it that otherwise identical resumes yield a 50 percent greater chance of being invited for an interview if the applicant’s name is stereotypically white than if the name is stereotypically black? Why is it that black renters learn about 11 percent fewer rental units and black homebuyers are shown about one-fifth fewer homes? Why is it that blacks and whites use illegal drugs at the same rate, but a 2016 study found African Americans are arrested on drug charges at a nearly three times higher rate? Why is it that from 2010 to 2012, according to a study analyzing data of that period, a young black male, age 15 to 19, was 21 times more likely to be shot by police than his white counterpart? Well, we know why.<br><br>
And what is the Unitarian Universalist history, along with the race history in this country? We should know, too, how our Unitarian Universalist story intertwines with the American story, because we need to know what we inherit if we are to know who we are.<br><br>
Unitarian Universalists have struggled with the legacy of racism created in Colonial America as a way to co-opt indentured servants and minimize rebellion. On one hand, yes, Unitarians were among the leaders in the movement for abolition of slavery. Unitarian minister Joseph Priestly, then in England, preached a sermon denouncing the slave trade as early as 1788, and continued to preach against it after coming to America. Unitarian minister Rev. Charles Follen was a leading abolitionist in the 1830s. (This, by the way, is the same Rev. Charles Follen that I mentioned in the Christmas Eve service as having brought the Christmas tree tradition to America.)<br><br>
On the other hand, monied interests in the North supported the slavery in the South – and Unitarians have been well-represented among monied interests. So Rev. Follen’s abolitionism led to his dismissal from the New York City congregation now called All Soul’s Unitarian. When Follen died in 1840, pro-slavery members of William Ellery Channing’s Boston congregation refused Channing’s request to host a memorial service for Follen.<br><br>
In 1836, Rev. William Henry Furness, minister of First Unitarian Church of Philadelphia preached an abolitionist sermon to his congregation. Reverend Furness had begun serving that congregation when he was 22-years-old, and had been serving it for 12 years the day he stepped into their pulpit to preach abolition. He knew it would be divisive. One of his most prominent members held 300 people enslaved. Furness’s stance split the congregation in half. Membership plummeted. Furness thereafter had armed guards at his side as he preached. Later, Unitarian minister Theodore Parker encountered considerable controversy when he also began speaking against slavery and became a leading figure in the abolition movement. Parker took to keeping a pistol in his pulpit for his protection.<br><br>
Many Unitarians – clergy and layfolk – committed their lives and fortunes to the cause of abolition. Yes, Unitarians were rancorously divided over the issue of slavery. Yet we were at least divided: while some other churches of the time were unified in support of slavery, many Unitarians were leading this denomination and this country toward a new moral awareness. We can be proud of that -- a little.<br><br>
A century later, many of us were likewise in the forefront of the civil rights movement. Among the 30,000 who marched with Dr. King in Selma in 1965 were
<blockquote>“about 500 UU lay people and about 250 UU ministers. The ministers who went to Selma represented a quarter to a third of all UU ministers in full fellowship. Add to that the dozens who spent time with the Mississippi Summer Project, the Delta Ministry Project, and other efforts in the South afterward; those who led their communities’ response; and the dozen ministers who participated in the UU presence in Selma through the summer of 1965. It isn’t a stretch to estimate that half of the 710 UU ministers in full fellowship were actively engaged in this struggle.” (Rev. Mark Morrison-Reed, “Selma’s Challenge,” <i>UUWorld</i>, 2014 Winter)</blockquote>
We can be proud of that, too. Yet let us also grieve that our moral awareness was not greater sooner. <br><br>
In the 1920s the first two African American Unitarian ministers, Rev. Ethelred Brown and Rev. Lewis McGee both encountered continual discouragement and resistance from the denominational leaders at the time who saw no place for a black man in the pulpits of their predominantly white congregations. <br><br>
In 1968, the year of Martin Luther King’s assassination, and just three years after so many UUs had transformative experiences in Selma, our General Assembly was torn apart over race issues.<br><br>
And so, another half century on, Unitarian Universalists, and America generally, today continue our stumbling struggle to heal the hobbling wounds imposed on us by 17th-century wealthy landowners. As we celebrate the birthday of the Reverend Doctor Martin Luther King, junior, may we renew our commitment to find a path toward healing. Knowing that a better future requires an honest acknowledging of our past, and that history itself is a subversive activity, may we attend to our histories that we not perpetuate the worst in them. That would be the birthday present that is due to the memory of Martin Luther King – and that is due to all of us. May it be so.
Rev. Meredith Garmonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09600609816550758194noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7480207999294007243.post-9114441714566905762024-01-07T13:50:00.301-05:002024-01-23T15:10:05.878-05:00Opening to PluralismHappy New Year! What are the chances of that? I mean, what are your prospects for 2024 being happier – or, if last year was great for you, as happy - as 2023? I am mindful that there will be health challenges for some of us in the year ahead. And health challenges come, eventually, for all of us including, eventually, inevitably, the one we will not surmount. Connected to our physical health, there is the matter of our social and spiritual health. Put simply: We need each other. We need community. We need our peeps. A happy new year means a connected new year, a caring new year. A joyous new year means a loving new year. And a more liberated new year means steps taken not just toward your individual liberation but toward collective liberation. <br><br>
Natural selection made us into hyper-social beings. Not merely social, like other apes are, like wolves and elephants and dolphins are, but able to connect our brains and see through each other's eyes at a level beyond any other species. I've mentioned before, no single human knows everything necessary to build a cathedral, or an aircraft - yet we can build them because we can connect our brains in shared enterprises. That's an amazing and beautiful thing. We were built to do that, and to want to do that, and to need to do that.<br><br>
Natural selection also made us highly competitive at the group level. One key reason that bonding with each other has been so
important to our species' survival is simply that it allows us to care for each other and carry out cooperative ventures that benefit all of us. But another key reason is that by bonding together we can fight better against that tribe on the other side of the hill. <br><br>
Throughout our history as a species, the cozy warm feeling of US has been inextricably intertwined with hostility to THEM. Early human and proto-human groups didn't merely band together, they banded together AGAINST other groups. If they hadn't, they wouldn't have survived to pass on their genes to us. We are a deeply cooperative AND a deeply competitive species - cooperative within our group, so that we can better compete with other groups. <br><br>
The trick is to expand our circle, to train ourselves, in this complex multicultural, multi-ethnic world we live in, to comprehend more and more difference as nevertheless part of US rather than indicative of THEM. Fortunately, this expand-the-circle impulse is also embedded in the human history we inherit.<br><br>
If there were only two groups - us and them - that would be fairly straightforward and stable. But from the dawn of humanity, there have been multiple groups. So then our earliest ancestors started seeing if they could work out ways to be more cooperative with group B, so that together they could outcompete group C. So along with a very strong tendency to bond with our in-group and compete with out-groups, we are built also with a somewhat more cautious readiness to welcome the stranger; to appreciate, not merely be suspicious of, difference; to want to expand our circle.<br><br>
This openness to pluralism is, among humans, a variable trait. Some of us are more open to difference and others more interested in protecting the given US. Unitarian Universalists tend toward the appreciation of diversity side of the spectrum. We tend to score high on openness to difference. Some of our fellow humans are instead wired to feel a need to establish and defend some collective order of
oneness and sameness. Difference scares them. <br><br>
The work of Australian political scientist Karen Stenner helps us understand this. Stenner argues that underlying racism, sexism, classism, homophobia, and xenophobia is something more fundamental: difference-ism. The various forms of harmful prejudice are all variations of a basic anxiety about difference, an anxiety that produces, in Stenner's words, "a fundamental and overwhelming desire to establish and defend some collective order of oneness and sameness." <br><br>
Another term for this is: authoritarian personality – because these folks see authoritarian structures as the best way to keep us safe from those different people who are, in a recently exhumed turn-of-phrase, “poisoning the blood of our country."
In one of Stenner's studies, people scoring high for authoritarian personality <blockquote>"were told that NASA had verified the existence of alien life -- beings 'very different from us in ways we are not yet even able to imagine.' After being told that, the measured racial intolerance of authoritarian subjects decreased by half.” </blockquote>
In other words, they are afraid of whatever is most different. If there are space aliens out there, then suddenly all humans are "us" because the authoritarian personality's animosity focuses on whatever is the most different. Stenner writes: "black people look more like 'us' than 'them' when there are green people afoot."
<blockquote>"Under these conditions, the authoritarians didn't only become kinder to black people, Stenner noted; they also became more merciful to criminals that is, less inclined to want a crackdown on perceived moral deviance." (Friedersdorf, Atlantic Monthly) </blockquote>
Stenner's book, <i>The Authoritarian Dynamic</i>, concludes that not everyone can learn to respect and value difference. She writes: <blockquote>"All the available evidence indicates that exposure to difference, talking about difference, and applauding difference...are the surest way to aggravate those who are innately intolerant, and to guarantee the expression of their predispositions in manifestly
intolerant attitudes and behaviors."</blockquote>
Journalist Conor Friedersdorf estimates that, "perhaps 15 percent of humans are psychologically ill-suited to dealing with difference." He doesn't indicate where that 15 percent figure comes from; it seems to be his impressionistic guess. As a rough, ball-park estimate, maybe that's about right. Whatever the number might be, we're never going to “fix” every individual - never going to train our way to universal understanding and embrace of diversity, equity, and inclusion goals. And that's OK, because pluralistic inclusion has to also have a place those who don't like difference. We just need systems that neutralize the authoritarian personalities from inflicting their phobias on others.<br><br>
It's a point increasingly recognized. Lily Zheng, a Diversity, Equity, Inclusion strategy consultant, for instance, said: <blockquote>"We should design organizations that are equitable and inclusive whether or not every single person inside those organization is inclined the same way.” </blockquote>
That's something to keep in mind as this congregation considers how we might move toward greater inclusion and pluralism. If, as Friedersdorf conjectured, "perhaps 15 percent of humans are psychologically ill-suited to dealing with difference" - the percentage of Unitarian Universalists who are is lower than that, but it isn't zero.<br><br>
A happy new year means a connected new year, a caring new year. But there is variability among us not only in how much difference we are comfortable including in that circle of care, but also variability in how much difference we ever could learn to be comfortable including. Still, pluralism is our overarching value, as a Unitarian Universalist congregation. It is our Unitarian Universalist covenant, as the proposed language for revising the UUA bylaws expresses, that: <blockquote>"We celebrate that we are all sacred beings, diverse in culture, experience, and theology. We covenant to learn from one another in our free and responsible search for truth and meaning. We embrace our differences and commonalities with Love, curiosity, and respect." </blockquote>
Our watchword shall be: everybody belongs. And everybody belongs here.
We know that there are other churches, other faith communities, out there, and that some people will prefer those, but we are determined that we would welcome any of them, whatever their culture or beliefs, and that our welcoming pluralism be so conspicuous that is widely known that we would welcome them, and that any who do walk through these doors will quickly perceive that they belong and are appreciated – even those who aren't quite able to appreciate difference as much our congregation as a whole does. <br><br>
So our task in this new year - as in every new year - is twofold:
(1) to cultivate our capacity to embrace and appreciate ever greater difference - And,
(2) given that this capacity itself is and will be variable among us, to seek ways to better ensure that our congregation as a whole is equitable and inclusive anyway. <br><br>
And a more liberated new year means steps taken not just toward your individual liberation but toward collective liberation. Freedom is relational. It really is true that none of us is free until all of us are free, for freedom, to whatever extent it is achieved, is a collective achievement. The master is as enslaved as the slave, even if not subject to the physical abuses, and that does matter.<br><br>
We are all in this together, and what we do to another we do to ourselves. Because freedom is relational; because every interaction we have with every other person can function to restrict ourselves and them or it can help liberate us and them; because we all have some kind of power, and we can use it against itself to diminish itself, or we can use it to nourish and expand shared power, what we call power-with rather than power-over; because power-over is always at the same time powerlessness-under; because freedom is for most of us the half-won, half-discovered blessing, and we need each other to proclaim the further emancipation - we have work to do.<br><br>
Because faith without works is dead; because it will not do to simply say, "go in peace, keep warm and eat your fill," go, be emancipated; because we need each other to reach the promised land; because the kingdom of god is within us, yes, but equally it is between us and among us, we have work to do.<br><br>
Because otherwise identical resumes today yield a 50 percent greater chance of being invited for an interview if the applicant's name is stereotypically white than if the name is stereotypically black; because black renters learn about 11 percent fewer rental
units and black homebuyers are shown about one-fifth fewer homes; because blacks and whites use illegal drugs at the same rate, but African Americans are arrested on drug charges at a three times higher rate; because 14 percent of nonhispanic white children are
growing up in poverty while 40 percent of African American children are - we have work to do.<br><br>
Unitarian Universalists have been struggling with how to do the work of dismantling racism for as long as I can remember. We have been noticing that our congregations usually look a lot whiter than their surrounding communities and have been trying to figure out what to do about that for as long as I can remember. I've been occasionally participating in Unitarian Universalist
efforts at anti-racism, anti-oppression, and multi-culturalism efforts, workshops, programs and readings for thirty years, and, sadly, haven't seen much progress.<br><br>
I was given a new hope for the possibility of congregational anti-racism work about 10 years ago by the Developmental Model of Intercultural Sensitivity - DMIS. It's an approach that doesn't call anyone a racist. It's not really about unconscious prejudices so much. It deftly bypasses any temptation to detour into squabbles about such things as whether members of oppressed minorities can be racist themselves or whether "racism” only applies to certain members of the privileged majority. It gives us a way to talk about important issues of cultural difference without bringing up the word “racism” at all. I think we do need to confront actual racism, recognize it and call it what it is, but we can work our way to that point more effectively with a stronger foundation - which it
seems to me the DMIS (Developmental Model of Intercultural Sensitivity) provides. <br><br>
It's a developmental model – that is, it says that people develop through stages - like Piaget's stages of cognitive development of children, Kohlberg's stages of moral development, or James Fowler's stages of faith development. The model was created by Milton Bennet and Mitch Hammer - who had been going to anti-racism trainings and noticing just what I had been noticing: that about a third
of the white people were annoyed rather than enlightened. They began to wonder why. Why do some people react this way and other people react a different way? Perhaps they're at different stages in their development! Perhaps every stage is an important, helpful, and adaptive response to certain conditions - it has values which we can recognize. <br><br>
It's true that whatever is identified as a later stage of development will unavoidably seem to be judged "better," but Unitarian Universalists with our third principle ought to be able to handle this. Our third principle says we affirm and promote acceptance of
one another and encouragement to spiritual growth. Notice the two aspects at work here: Acceptance of one another - exactly where they are and who they are -- while at the same time encouragement to growth, encouragement to grow into something other than what
they are now. Is this a contradiction? Can we truly be accepting people just the way they are if we're also encouraging them to change, to grow? If you've ever been a parent or ever had a moderately loving and effective parent - then you know this is no contradiction. We love our children for just what they are - while also encouraging their growth and development because a growing, changing being IS what they are, and that process of development benefits from guidance. <br><br>
Many of us carry that same approach into our relationships with peers, with friends. We accept them for what they are, while also, when the time is right, call them on their stuff, offer them guidance, encourage their growth, as they do for us. So I'm hopeful about the prospects for UUs to work together to guide ourselves to greater levels of intercultural sensitivity – while also understanding, welcoming, and appreciating those who may happen to be at an earlier stage. <br><br>
Development of intercultural sensitivity happens in stages. There are five stages, which I will briefly describe. There is more detail in this month's Pluralism issue of "Connecting" - and still more detail available on the internet - just search DMIS. <br><br>
Stage 1: Denial. <br><br>
There is a lack of awareness of diversity. It's not possible for adult members of minorities to be entirely unaware of diversity, but some members of a majority can exist within a bubble such that they rarely encounter a cultural difference. <br><br>
Stage 2: Sometimes called Polarization, sometimes called Defense. <br><br>
This comes in two versions, and both versions involve an "us" vs. "them” mindset. The first version is straight defense. We bunker in, defensively protecting "us" and demonizing "them" - those who are different.<br><br>
The second version is reversal. This is where one romanticizes and privileges a culture other than one's own. In reversed polarization, one privileges “them” while demonizing "us." But it's still polarization of good culture and bad culture. <br><br>
Stage 3: Minimization. <br><br>
This is kind of a return in the direction of denial except that people at this stage do recognize cultural differences, but they downplay their importance. Cultural differences are all seen as superficial because deep down we're all the same. Minimization over-emphasizes commonality. <br><br>
Stage 4: Acceptance. <br><br>
We might also call it openness and curiosity. At this stage there is an understanding the cultural differences are real and profoundly meaningful. This much was also understood at the Polarization stage, but whereas polarization involved demonizing one side or the other of that difference, the acceptance stage involves curiosity and openness about differences. Difference is recognized as important, but difference is explored without judgment or evaluation. <br><br>
Stage 5: Adaptation, also known as intercultural competence. <br><br>
Intercultural competence is the ability to shift cultural perspective and adapt behavior to fit with the other person's culture, recognizing both the similarities and differences of their culture with yours. It's not assimilation. Assimilation is a permanent change from your original culture to a new culture. Adaptation, intercultural competence, involves the ability to make temporary shifts into a different culture in order to be more effective in a particular situation.<br><br>
At what stage do you think you are? Most Unitarian Universalists are in the middle: at the minimization stage. We love to say people are basically the same - minimizing the powerful difference that culture makes. And there are commonalities. Yet let us not diminish real difference.<br><br>
The path of liberation leads ultimately beyond minimization to acceptance and adaptation -- and many of us, if not all, can joyously take that path. May it be so. Amen.Rev. Meredith Garmonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09600609816550758194noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7480207999294007243.post-59248439729474176382023-12-10T16:08:00.014-05:002023-12-11T15:05:12.921-05:00Receptivity<div style="text-align: center;">I.</div><br />
We are reflecting, this month, on the theme: transformation. Last week, I talked about having a vow to guide your life – discerning what is your calling, and pursuing it. Now, a vow is not a goal. The goal question is: where do you want to end up? The vow question is: what direction do you want to be headed – who knows where you’ll end up. A goal is either achieved, or it isn’t, at least not yet. A vow is how you want to live. It’s about the journey, while a goal is about a particular destination. <br /><br />
Living by vow is about being oriented in a certain way every day, whether you actually accomplish anything or not. It is about what you’ve decided to dedicate yourself to trying to accomplish, not about whether or not accomplishment happens. You put yourself out there, give to the world what you got, and it’s up to the world to decide what to make of it. That part isn’t in your control. It was Mahatma Gandhi who said,<blockquote>“Satisfaction lies in the effort, not in the attainment. Full effort is full victory.”</blockquote>Vow is about what direction you’re going to point your efforts. We don’t know how our intentions will transform us – just that a great vow does indeed tend to transform.<br /><br />
Today, though, we’re going to look at the other side. If vow is about looking within to discern who you are and what you are on this Earth to be, receptivity is about listening without – hearing and seeing what the world happens to be offering. If vow is about intention, receptivity is about dropping our intentions and simply receiving what is given.<br /><br />
There’s the part of life where you decide what game you’re going to play, and then there’s the part where you play the game decided upon by others, or the world, or fate, or God, or history, or something beyond your control or even influence. There’s the task of discerning your unique calling, rather than living aimlessly, without purpose, unclear on who you are, and then there’s the task of playing the hand you’re dealt, rather than fuming about your bad luck. Last week we looked at the first task. Today we look at the second.<br /><br />
Here, we might take a lesson from the principles of improv – improvisational theatre. In improvisational acting, you always say ‘yes’ to whatever reality the other actors present. If your fellow actor says, “There are alien flying saucers landing over there,” you don’t say, “Oh, no, that’s just a trick of sunlight off the clouds.” Never deny the reality that the other actor is bringing to the scene. Go with it.<br /><br />
You might go for humor and say, “Oh, my god. They’re going to want me to take them to my leader, and my leader is at the cleaners.” Or you might build the tension by saying, “I’ll get my pistol.” Or, alternatively, going in a very different direction, you might say, “Yes. I summoned them.” Or something else that accepts the reality presented and builds on it – in one direction or another.<br /><br />
Whatever weirdness presents, go with it. Rule number 1 of improv is: say yes – figuratively and sometimes maybe literally. Receptivity is saying yes to our reality and your reality. As psychologist Rick Hanson points out:
<blockquote>“Real life is like improv: the script's always changing and saying yes keeps you in the flow, pulls for creativity, and makes it more fun.”</blockquote>He offers this little exercise:<blockquote>"Try saying no out loud or in your mind. How's that feel? Then say yes. Which one feels better, opens your heart more, and draws you more into the world?"</blockquote>Saying yes signals – and triggers – your receptivity to what is.<br /><br />
Sure, there are times when you need to say no – when you need to be clear about who you are, affirm your boundaries, decline to go along with something with which you aren’t comfortable, and refrain from promising what you won’t be able to deliver, or don’t want to. You definitely need those no’s.<br /><br />
Even so. Be on the look-out for ways that you can say yes to what life offers.<br><br>
At the most basic level, receptivity means just recognizing reality as reality. Don’t be in denial. Being in denial is one of those things that we see so readily in other people, but find it very hard to spot in ourselves. I think my brother-in-law is in denial about climate change. He thinks I’m in denial about the Deep State.<br /><br />
It helps to have a diverse circle of trusted friends who can tell you if you’re being in denial. It also helps to cultivate the habit of being skeptical of the truth of anything that you want to be true. If you want it to be true, double-check the evidence with a critical eye before you believe that it is true.<br /><br />
One form of being in denial is to push unpleasant facts out of your mind. We say, “I don’t want to think about that – that’s depressing.” Reality is never depressing. In fact, depression – the sort of depression that’s at issue – comes from the efforts of denial. The energies spent on turning away from reality is what leaves us drained and sad – which we notice when those energies fail and reality breaks through.<br /><br /><div style="text-align: center;">II.</div><br />
The project of growing spiritually is a project of receptivity to inconvenient truths – a project of cultivating the habit of mindful awareness of suffering: your own and other people’s. This was so important that Siddhartha Gotama – the Buddha – declared it to be the first noble truth: life is dukkha – meaning painful disappointment.<br /><br />
He delineated Four Noble Truths in the <i>Dhammacakkappavattana Sutta</i> – a sutta which is traditionally held to be the Buddha’s first talk after his enlightenment. That sutta says that dukkha is birth, old age, sickness, and death, not getting what we want and getting what we don’t want. Notice that fact, Buddha is saying. Open yourself to receive this important truth: painful disappointment happens.<br /><br />
Just being present to this fact, strangely, makes it less painful. As Joan Tollifson said in our opening invocation:
<blockquote>“Awareness is its own action. We don’t need to analyze it or impose changes based on our ideas of what should be happening. Just being awake to the present moment, as it is, and seeing clearly what is happening: this is transformative.”</blockquote>Just being receptive to reality is transformative.<br /><br />
Buddhism’s four noble truths, on the standard interpretation, are:
<ol><li>Dukkha, painful disappointment, happens.</li>
<li>There is a cause of dukkha, which is clinging.</li>
<li>There is a solution.</li>
<li>That solution is the eightfold path.</li></ol>
I am among those who think that standard interpretation is a misinterpretation of the <i>Dhammacakkappavattana Sutta</i>. The crux of the matter is on that second noble truth. I think the Buddha was not saying there is a CAUSE of dukkha. He was saying there is an EFFECT of dukkha.<br /><br />
The key phrase in the original is <i>dukkha samudaya</i>. <i>Samudaya</i> means “arising.” So we have this ambiguity. This text says “dukkha arising.” Does that mean arising OF dukkha -- or what arises FROM dukkha? It is ambiguous, which opens the door for the standard interpretation, but I am persuaded by those writers (David Brazier, <i>The Feeling Buddha</i>, and Stephen Batchelor, <i>After Buddhism</i>) who argue that this term, <i>dukkha samudaya</i>, refers to what arises when we experience life’s disappointments. What arises is reactivity: resistance, denial. <i>“This shouldn’t be happening to me.”</i><br /><br />
There is no spiritual path or practice or discipline that will put an end to dukkha. Old age, sickness, and death are unavoidable, no matter how devotedly you adhere to Buddha's eightfold path, or to any spiritual path. Not getting what we want and getting what we don’t want: also unavoidable. There’s no escape from these. What there IS the possibility of escape from is the reactivity to those disappointments: the resistance, the denial, the tendency of the mind to fixate on <i>“it should not be”</i> rather than on simply, <i>“it is.”</i><br /><br />
This means that when we get to Noble Truths 3 and 4 -- "there is a solution" and "that solution is the eightfold path" -- the solution Buddha is talking about isn't the solution to dukkha. Again: there is no cure for old age, sickness, and death. Rather, he's talking about the solution to the extra suffering caused by our reactivity, resistance, and denial. The eightfold path doesn't free us from dukkha, but it is a guide for accepting and making peace with those facts of life that we don't like.<br><br>
So I particularly appreciate the scholar Stephen Batchelor’s re-casting of the so-called “four noble truths” as the four tasks:
<ol><li>Comprehend suffering. Really wrap your mind around that reality.</li>
<li>Let go of arising – that is, let go of the reactivity that arises from the painful disappointments.</li>
<li>Behold the ceasing – that is, notice what it feels like during those times when you aren’t reactive.</li>
<li>Cultivate the path.</li></ol><div style="text-align: center;">III.</div><br />
So, saying yes to some part of life you don’t like doesn’t mean making yourself like it. Saying yes to sickness, old age, and death doesn’t mean you’ll like those things.
<blockquote>“You can say yes to pain, to sorrow, to the things that aren't going well for you or others. Your yes means that you accept the facts as they are, that you are not resisting them emotionally even if you are trying with all your might to change them.
This will usually bring some peace -- and will help any actions you take be more effective.” (Rick Hanson, <i>Just One Thing</i>)</blockquote>
Here’s how Rick Hanson suggests cultivating the spirit of saying yes to all of life, even the hard parts. Start off by saying yes to something you like. That should be easy. From there, next say yes to something neutral. Something like a wall painted a color that you neither like nor dislike. Think of a food that you neither like nor dislike. Say yes to that. Also not too hard.
<blockquote>“Then say yes to something you don't like. Can you do that, too? As you do this, try to feel a sense that you are okay, fundamentally, even though what you dislike exists. Also try to feel some acceptance in your yes, some surrender to the facts as they are, whether you like them or not.<br /><br />
Try saying yes to more things that are not your preference. You're not saying yes that you approve of them, but – for example –
yes it's raining at my picnic, yes people are poor and hungry across the planet, yes my career has stalled, yes I miscarried,
yes my dear friend has cancer. Yes that's the way it is. Yes to being in traffic. Yes to the job you have. Yes to the body you have.<br /><br />
Yes to the twists and turns in your life so far: large and small; good, bad, and indifferent; past, present, and future. Yes to the younger sibling whose birth toppled you from your throne. Yes to your parents' work and your family circumstances. Yes to your choices after leaving home. Yes to what you had for breakfast. Yes to moving someplace new. Yes to the person you are sleeping with -- or yes to not sleeping with anyone. Yes to having children -- or to not having them.<br /><br />
Say yes to what arises in the mind. Yes to feelings, sensations, thoughts, images, memories, desires. Yes even to things that need to be restrained -- such as an angry impulse to hit something, undeserved self-criticism, or an addiction."</blockquote>
You still restrain those things, but you say yes to the fact that the urge has arisen.
<blockquote>"Say yes to <i>all</i> the parts of the people in your life. Yes to the love in your parents and also yes to the parts that bothered you. Yes to a friend's flakiness amidst her good humor and patience, yes to another friend's sincerity amidst her irritability and criticalness. Yes to every bit of a child, a relative, a distant acquaintance, an adversary."</blockquote>
Yes to my brother-in-law being in denial about climate change. Yes to his insistence that I’m in denial about the Deep State.
<blockquote>"And yes to different parts of yourself -- whatever they are. Not picking and choosing right now, but saying yes -- YES -- to whatever is inside you.<br /><br />
Play with different tones of yes (out loud or in your mind) related to different things -- including the ones you don't like -- and see how this feels. Try a cautious yes, as well as a yes that is confident, soft, rueful, or enthusiastic.<br /><br />
Feel your yes in your body. To adapt a method from Thich Nhat Hanh: Breathing in, feel something positive; breathing out, say yes. Breathe in energy, breathe out yes. Breathe in calm, breathe out yes.<br /><br />
Say yes to your needs. Yes to the need for more time to yourself, more exercise, more love, fewer sweets, and less anger. Try saying no to these needs in your mind or out loud, and see how that feels. And then say yes to them again.<br /><br />
Say yes to actions. To this kiss, this lovemaking, this reaching for the salt, this brushing of teeth, this last good-bye to someone you love.<br /><br />
Notice your nos. And then see what happens if you say yes to some of the things you've previously said no to.<br /><br />
Say yes to being alive. Yes to life. Yes to your own life. Yes to each year, each day. Yes to each minute.<br /><br />
Imagine that life is whispering yes. Yes to all beings, and yes to you. Everything you've said yes to is saying yes to you.
Even the things you've said no to are saying yes to you!<br /><br />
Each breath, each heartbeat, each surge across a synapse: each one says yes. Yes, all yes, all saying yes.<br /><br />
<i>Yes.</i>"</blockquote><div style="text-align: center;">IV.</div><br />
Here’s my story about saying yes.<br /><br />
It was the summer of 2004 – coming up on 20 years ago. LoraKim and I were in living in El Paso, Texas. LoraKim was finishing her second year as minister to our El Paso congregation. I had finished my ministerial internship up the road in Albuquerque, and had just been admitted to Unitarian Universalist ministerial fellowship. We had asked the El Paso congregation to make us their half-time-each co-ministers, and they had agreed.<br /><br />
LoraKim received a communication from Southwest Key – which calls itself an immigrant children’s shelter, but which functionally, is a detention facility for undocumented minors. In 2004, in El Paso, there on the Mexican border, undocumented minors from Mexico were sent back over the bridge, but minors from countries further south required more details to be arranged to work out where and to whom to send them back. As that is all being worked out, the children have to be interned somewhere, and that is why Southwest Key exists.
Southwest Key was looking for a minister willing to volunteer to lead very general, ecumenical religious services, in Spanish, for the minors there.<br /><br />
Unitarians are particularly good at ecumenical and interfaith, and LoraKim was fluent in Spanish, so she said yes to Southwest Key. She wanted someone to play a little guitar for part of the service she planned, so she asked me to come along to do that. And I said yes. This was not any part of our plan, our intention. The offer came completely out of the blue, and we said yes.<br /><br />
So we went, we put on the service. For two or three Wednesday afternoons in July 2004, we were out at the El Paso Southwest Key facility giving what spiritual encouragement we could there to the young inmates. At one of those, a skinny 17-year-old came up to us after the service. He said his name was Yency Contreras. He was from Honduras. He asked if we would sponsor him.<br /><br />
We didn’t know what that would mean. But we went home and we started making some phone calls to look into it. We hadn’t made very many calls before Southwest Key called us and said, “you’ve been making inquiries into sponsoring one of our youths, so you can’t come back here any more.”<br /><br />
Still, the wheels were turning. A nonprofit called Las Americas connected with us, guiding us through the processes and procedures, and what forms to file with whom. We would need to go to court – family court rather than immigration court because Yency was a minor. Las Americas hooked us up with a pro bono lawyer for that.<br /><br />
It took a couple months. Then, in early October 2004 we drove to Southwest Key with papers in hand, this time to receive rather than to give. Yency was released into our custody. The court said we were his "managing conservators," which meant we were his functional parents as long as he was in the US and his biological parents were not. And as long as he was a minor – which, in less than 5 months, he would no longer be.<br /><br />
We kinda figured that, released from Southwest Key, Yency would bolt. We’d wake up the next morning and he would be gone. Instead, the next morning came and there he was: calling us mom and dad and asking about breakfast – in Spanish.<br /><br />
We enrolled him in the local high school. His 18th birthday came and went, and there he still was – slowly getting better at English, cracking jokes, and arguing with us about religion. The El Paso Times sent a reporter out to do a story about two Anglo Unitarian ministers and their evangelical Hispanic teenager – who wanted to be a police officer.<br />
<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiuO99IlCI3In2ap85WD1kmyVR5tT1UrLGvSxPtAPnh9yMnAFf3NU3nfaaBC7gGP6hRrdqR8LUZygBknErhyF_fDNBbN-8u_c6PistbGiYO-BPRXjTh7tg_RfPaT6KY44RJKYjVlmFP1tcyb_NWHgXc0qlfI8AqWvNF8bBDfQCc-uegaVu-pTez1w7G/s689/2018-06-14.png" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="683" data-original-width="689" height="317" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiuO99IlCI3In2ap85WD1kmyVR5tT1UrLGvSxPtAPnh9yMnAFf3NU3nfaaBC7gGP6hRrdqR8LUZygBknErhyF_fDNBbN-8u_c6PistbGiYO-BPRXjTh7tg_RfPaT6KY44RJKYjVlmFP1tcyb_NWHgXc0qlfI8AqWvNF8bBDfQCc-uegaVu-pTez1w7G/s320/2018-06-14.png" width="320" /></a></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">The picture that ran with <i>El Paso Times</i> article, 2005 May 9</td></tr></tbody></table><br />
In 2006, LoraKim and I accepted the call of the Unitarian Universalist Fellowship of Gainesville, Florida to serve as their co-ministers. Yency came to Florida with us. It took him six tries at the GED exam before he could get past the math section, but he kept at it, and he finally did. Thereupon he enrolled in the local community college.<br /><br />
In fall of 2011, the three of us drove to Jacksonville for his naturalization service as he became a proud US citizen. He finished the two-year degree at the community college, and, in 2012, moved to Orlando to attend the University of Central Florida, returning home on occasional weekends and the holidays.<br />
<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjTBhk9EhvUEqc7FZjiZLzhZUYwx2f72mASL2Nqvca0dRI41W4F5HsyVyvl45CZDnF8moMO5rVrRkhdH2fxO6BvHI0DgV0z-3Y8QKQ2-_NkPoYytdJwzbswICaHqZVhQ3iU1jOBrtYGvdJHLN80URx68Sq6-BQCQuGqy6mSNSsH1_1IOsnkXJmRuAON/s640/2012%20Gainesville%20Yency%20and%20Me.jpg" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="640" data-original-width="640" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjTBhk9EhvUEqc7FZjiZLzhZUYwx2f72mASL2Nqvca0dRI41W4F5HsyVyvl45CZDnF8moMO5rVrRkhdH2fxO6BvHI0DgV0z-3Y8QKQ2-_NkPoYytdJwzbswICaHqZVhQ3iU1jOBrtYGvdJHLN80URx68Sq6-BQCQuGqy6mSNSsH1_1IOsnkXJmRuAON/s320/2012%20Gainesville%20Yency%20and%20Me.jpg" width="320" /></a></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Boys in the Hood. Me and Yency in 2012.</td></tr></tbody></table><br />In 2013, LoraKim and I moved to New York. In December 2014, we flew down to Orlando for Yency’s graduation, with a degree in criminal justice. He moved to Charlotte, North Carolina. He had cousins there and he’d heard encouraging things from the Charlotte police department.<br /><br />
He met a young woman. In January 2016, LoraKim and I co-officiated their wedding. Yency and Evelin now have two daughters – they are our granddaughters.<br />
<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjN68gIrcD909Y0rjVCop-gNwLIhrtBsYhyg_FbxqsZUNSmIPCTxslG7ag76N-5rdTnMOFvFCKwjj_a5-r49-hht-G4iGeoqESeCixkB4y75u7OF37k2o-Jcwxcw3n11B_h11nN2ygsNEm2fFCTX6F6GCWAGSbih6qoCmsoN_8vHH_slUYl8j1t6yfm/s800/contreras_yency800.jpg" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="689" data-original-width="800" height="276" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjN68gIrcD909Y0rjVCop-gNwLIhrtBsYhyg_FbxqsZUNSmIPCTxslG7ag76N-5rdTnMOFvFCKwjj_a5-r49-hht-G4iGeoqESeCixkB4y75u7OF37k2o-Jcwxcw3n11B_h11nN2ygsNEm2fFCTX6F6GCWAGSbih6qoCmsoN_8vHH_slUYl8j1t6yfm/s320/contreras_yency800.jpg" width="320" /></a></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Officer Contreras, 2017</td></tr></tbody></table><br />Yency’s now in his 8th year as a Charlotte police officer. We get out to see them sometimes – and they came up to New York to visit us there sometimes. He calls us every couple weeks to chat – or we call him. His place in our lives has been transformative.<br /><br />
When LoraKim and I married, we’d decided we weren’t going to have kids, and hadn’t given it a thought. Back in 2004, adopting a teenager was no part of our plan – no part of our intention, no part of our great vow for how we were out to serve the world.<br /><br />
But then this kid at Southwest Key asked. And we said yes.<br /><br />
Amen.Rev. Meredith Garmonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09600609816550758194noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7480207999294007243.post-47429488071998649632023-12-03T13:10:00.002-05:002023-12-13T16:06:19.743-05:00What's Your Great Vow?I.<br><br>
Transformation is our theme for December. Change, of course, is inevitable. We can’t help but change.<br><br>
The first task is to accept this – don’t try to fight change, and when it comes, as it is continually coming, let go of that impulse to pine for the good old days. Embrace change – that’s the first spiritual task in the category "transformation."<br><br>
But transformation suggests something a little more than the random – or seemingly-random – vicissitudes of change. Transformation – in the sense of a spiritual orientation – suggests a certain intentionality. There’s changing by accident – and then there’s changing on purpose, and transformation should have some purpose driving it. That's the second task: to have a purpose and to transform yourself in accordance with that purpose.
Immediately, there's a caveat. You do want some purpose, but not too much. There needs to be some intentionality, but not too much intentionality. Remember that your purpose comes out of who you are now. As you re-make yourself, leave room for new purposes to emerge. Don’t try to control the process beyond a very gentle guidance.<br><br>
It’s like parenting yourself. A good parent knows, as Kahlil Gibran said:
<blockquote>“Your children are not your children.<br>
They are the sons and daughters of Life’s longing for itself.<br>
They come through you but not from you,<br>
And though they are with you yet they belong not to you.<br>
You may give them your love but not your thoughts,<br>
For they have their own thoughts.<br>
You may house their bodies but not their souls,<br>
For their souls dwell in the house of tomorrow, which you cannot visit, not even in your dreams.<br>
You may strive to be like them, but seek not to make them like you.<br>
For life goes not backward nor tarries with yesterday.<br>
You are the bows from which your children as living arrows are sent forth.”<blockquote></blockquote></blockquote>
Take the same approach to yourself – for you, too, are a child of life’s longing for itself. What you transform into comes through you but not from you.<br><br>
Parenting a child or parenting yourself, either way, you offer gentle guidance, not control – you protect safety – make a safe space in which your child or yourself can become what life means for them, or you, to be.<br><br>
This idea of control is worth looking into in some detail. The Stoic philosophers emphasize not worrying about what isn’t in your control. And that is such an important wisdom – to let go of concern for what isn’t in your control.<br><br>
But what IS in your control? There is a further wisdom that recognizes that ANY perception of control is ultimately an illusion. Your thoughts? Nope. Your thoughts are not in your control. Try sitting very still and very quiet, lowering your eyelids so they are almost but not quite shut, gazing downward at a 45-degree angle and bringing all your awareness to something in the present – noticing the minute details of the sensations of breathing in and breathing out, say. You will soon notice that a thought will intrude. The mind will wander off from the assignment you have given it. "I need to do my laundry soon.... So-and-so was curt with me; what was that about?... Perhaps I’ll start a garden.... What’s playing at the theatres?...What’s for lunch?..."<br><br>
You didn’t ask for those thoughts, you didn’t choose them. They just popped up. And if your thoughts aren’t in your control, then can the actions that flow from thoughts be? They certainly seem to be in our control, and it's important that they seem to be. The illusion is a necessary one – but it is an illusion nonetheless.<br><br>
Spiritual deepening involves gradually seeing through the illusion of control. Sages in many times and places have recognized that we are not in control. Recently, scientific methods have confirmed it. Benjamin Libet’s experiments in the mid-1980s showed that the motor signal is headed to the muscle several hundred milliseconds before we become conscious of it. We have already begun the action before the apparatus of conscious decision-making comes on line.<br><br>
For most of day-to-day life, consciousness isn’t deciding what to do. Consciousness’s job is to come along after the fact, notice what we’re doing, and make up a story about how what we’re doing is what we meant to do. All day long, it’s going: "I meant to do that. Oh, yeah, I meant to do that, too." But the meaning-to-do-it trails the beginning of doing it. Our brains create a running commentary on whatever we are doing, even though the interpreter module has no access to the real causes or motives of our behavior.<br><br>
In Michael Gazzaniga’s experiments, he flashed the word "walk" in a part of the visual field that would be seen by only the right hemisphere. It’s the left hemisphere that processes language consciously, so subjects were not conscious of seeing the word. Yet many of them would stand and walk away. When asked why they were getting up, subjects had no problem giving a reason. "I’m going to get something to drink," they might say. Our inner interpreter module is good at making up explanations, but not at knowing it has done so.<br><br>
My language centers and neocortex notice my behavior, and they make up a story about this character named “Meredith” who is heroic, yet with certain endearing foibles. At each moment of the day this “Meredith” can be found deliberately and intentionally acting. Whatever it is ze’s doing is a reasonable part of zir pursuit of reasonable purposes. This is an after-the-fact story. The behavior came first, we now know. <br><br>
And people of great spiritual awareness have recognized long before Libet or Gazzaniga came along that this story of the self was a fabrication. With spiritual development and seeing through the illusion of control comes an increased appreciation of grace (the wonder, beauty, and abundance that cannot be earned or deserved), decreased worry and anxiety from trying to control outcomes, decreased attachment to the ego's story about either "accomplishments" or "failures," a decreased interest in blaming self or others.
Why would our brains be built to generate this illusion of control? <br><br>
One plausible suggestion, offered by Janet Kwasniak, is that <blockquote>“the conscious feeling of intent is simply a marker indicating that we own the action.... This marker is very important so that our episodic memory shows whether actions were 'ours' or just happened.” (Janet Kwasniak)</blockquote>
The memory of an event that came from me influences my neurons for the future -- we do learn from our actions and their results. If I get a pain from something I did, my neural wiring makes me less likely to do that again. But if the pain “just happened” – if it was apparently not a result of some particular behavior of mine -- the effects on my wiring are different. What we call “volition” is not a generator of behavior but only a perception that a behavior is ours. The illusion that intentions precede and determine action, then, is a by-product of the way the brain learns from experience.<br><br>
We are not in control. And yet. And yet, and yet, and yet. Intentions matter. It matters that we set an intention for what we’re going to do today, or this week, or with this one precious life.<br><br>
There’s a distinction to be made between the after-the-fact rationalizations of our impulses of the moment, versus the large over-arching story of the purpose of lives. Both, it would seem, are fabricated stories, but the over-arching story has the power to feed-back down into those subconscious places that generate particular behaviors.<br><br>
In other words, conscious brain has no idea what’s going on in the subconscious, so conscious brain just makes up a story. Yet, the subconscious is listening to that story – and starts taking it into account. It listens with a skeptical ear at first, but if the story is referenced repeatedly, the subconscious wiring adjusts. Say one time you did a favor for someone. Maybe you did it for purely self-interested reasons. But you happen to have been asked why you did it, and you fabricated a story – not from any intent to deceive, but because it’s the job of conscious brain to invent rationalizations – and say your story was that you care about the well-being of others. Sub-conscious brain was listening to that story. It was not entirely sure whether to believe what it heard, but it made a note – a sort of little, “huh!” But if it so happens that you have other occasions to tell that story about yourself, then the story gets reinforced a little more. What began, as all our explanations of our behavior do, as an after-the-fact rationalization, can eventually become an actual driving force.<br><br>
And that leads us to the question for today: What is your great vow?<br><br>
II.<br><br>
What is the promise your life makes to life itself? It’s just a story, sure, but it’s a story that can be potent.<br><br>
I had a six month sabbatical back at the end of 2019 and beginning of 2020 – the six months immediately prior to the beginning of the pandemic, as it turned out. I spent the sabbatical in residence at a Monastery in Clatskanie, Oregon. It was called "Great Vow Zen Monastery." When we weren’t meditating, or doing the work to maintain the place, there were occasional group classes and workshops.
As its name implies, Great Vow Zen Monastery facilitates reflection about the vows in our lives – the over-arching stories of our commitments and values that come to be our guiding forces.<br><br>
We can have a vow of the moment – like vowing to get dinner on the table – but the underlying vow is what you get to if you keep asking, “why?” To adapt an example from the book, The Vow-Powered Life, by Jan Chozen Bays, who is the abbott of Great Vow Zen Monestery – suppose a youth vows to become the highest scoring player on her basketball team. If she happens to be asked, or ask herself, a series of why questions, there are various directions she might go. She might want to impress a certain prospective mate she has her eye on. Why? There are again various possible answers. Perhaps, "Because I eventually want to have a long, happy marriage like my grandparents had." Why? "Because I want a deep and lasting connection to another human being." Why? "To learn to love other people genuinely, and also myself." And this is where the why questions stop. We recognize implicitly that we have reached an ultimate.<br><br>
The series of why questions might have taken us down a very different path to a different ultimate. She might instead have said that she wanted to become her team’s top scorer in order to get a scholarship to college, that would otherwise be unaffordable. Why does she want to go to college? She might say “to get a good job,” or she might say “to learn about international politics” and those would each lead to a different ultimate.<br><br>
Whatever it might be, when you get to that ultimate that puts a stop to further why questions, that’s your great vow. When our young basketball player first formed her determination to be her team’s top scorer, there were almost certainly a variety of different urges at work. As my father once said to me: “Son, nobody every did anything for only one reason.”<br><br>
If subjected to the pressure of why questions, she’ll select rationales that sound good at the time. Yet the subconscious is listening to what the conscious brain makes up, and if the story is one that she sticks to, it will gradually become a true guide.<br><br>
The great vow is your personal mission. Most of us are used to mission statements for institutions -- companies, congregations.
But do you have a mission statement for your life? If you do, you have articulated your Great Vow.<br><br>
If we are never pressed for ultimate purpose, then we can spend our lives pulled this way and that by forces of the moment. So it’s important to pursue that series of why questions, get down to an ultimate that feels right, and stick to it. Keep repeating it – especially as an explanation for something you are doing, to strengthen the link between your words and your action. Each time you sincerely say it, you reinforce your orientation toward realizing that world that you dream.<br><br>
As you think about how you would articulate your Great Vow, it’ll be helpful to reflect on your sources of vow. There are three sources: inherited, reactive, and inspired.<br><br>
What is your inherited vow? As you were growing up, what were you given to understand by your parents or primary caretakers was the primary function of a life? They may never have articulated it to you, but if you had to now articulate what your parents’ great vows were, what were they?<br><br>
My parents were both professors, as I’ve mentioned. Mom’s field was chemistry and Dad’s was English. In the early years of my life, they were grad students, then they settled into teaching positions. So my inherited vow from both of them was: One, learn stuff.
Two, teach it to others. These vows made sense to me, and they guided me through young adulthood as I became a professor myself. <br><br>
You might, however, have reached age 18 feeling that your parents showed you more about how you wanted NOT to be than how to be. So that leads to the second possibly important source for your vow: reactive vows. As Jan Chozen Bays explains:
<blockquote>“Reactive vows can ricochet through many generations. For example, a child raised by a military father who is precise, strict, authoritarian, and conservative may become a hippie. The hippie’s child, tired of dirty clothes, living out of a van, and not having predictable meals, may decide to become an accountant who lives in the same house for forty years and hoards food, toilet paper, and paperclips. The accountant’s child becomes a rock musician perpetually on tour; the musician’s child, a buttoned-up stockbroker; and so on.” (Bays 36)</blockquote>
Alternatively, reactive vows can be a response to a situation faced while growing up.
<blockquote>“People who become physicians often have had an experience with illness or death in their early years, either in themselves or their family. Their choice of profession may be due to an unconscious desire to gain control over the helplessness and vulnerability they felt as they faced sickness and death at an age when they had no defenses or coping skills. Incidentally, many lawyers seem to be impelled into law after an early experience of injustice” (Bays 12).</blockquote>
A reactive source of vows is not a bad thing. It COULD be over-reactive, but it might be just-right reactive.<br><br>
What makes it reactive is that’s it’s driven by a desire to avoid something – avoid being like your parents, or avoid a kind of experience, such as sickness or injustice.<br><br>
A third, and the last vow source I’ll mention, is inspired vows. We pick up inspired vows – often in adolescence or early adulthood – when we learn about someone we admire. We aspire to be like them. Martin Luther King Jr’s vow of nonviolence came from an inspired vow – inspired by the life and work of Mahatma Gandhi. Athletes often draw inspiration from a particular athlete they admire. <br><br>
Who are your heroes? So these are three sources of vow to reflect upon: the inherited, the reactive, and the inspired. Ultimately, though, <blockquote>“You cannot discover your vows by thinking. Your vow lies within you” (Bays 5)</blockquote>
To bring it out, to consciously articulate and thereby strengthen it as the orientation of your life, it helps to explore those three questions:
<ol><li>What did you learn from parents or primary caretakers about what life is for? What are your inherited vows?</li>
<li>What negative lessons did you learn – lessons about what you wanted to avoid if at all possible? What are your reactive vows?</li>
<li>Who are your heroes? What are your inspired vows?</li></ol>
So here’s what I’m asking you to do – do this today – when you get home this afternoon, before you forget. Write down your answers about your inherited vows, reactive vows, and inspired vows.<br><br>
Then sleep on it.<br><br>
Some time tomorrow, please look again at what you wrote – what you put down about your three sources – inherited, reactive, and inspired. And then, in that light, draft your Great Vow.<br><br>
You can share your Great Vow with others – I would love to hear what you discern – or you may prefer to keep it to yourself. But let it transform you into who you are.<br><br>
Amen.Rev. Meredith Garmonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09600609816550758194noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7480207999294007243.post-16226660617289756902023-11-19T16:40:00.009-05:002023-11-21T10:42:51.844-05:00The Thanksgiving Story, As AmendedREADING<br><br>
From Isabell Call, “Thanksgrieving"
<blockquote>Although both Native American and Europeans had feasts expressing gratitude during harvest time, the Europeans who arrived on this continent were incredibly destructive to Native American communities. The Wampanoag man often celebrated as a friend of the pilgrims, Tisquantum, spoke English because traders had enslaved him and forcibly taken him to England. When he finally escaped and made his way back home, his community had all died from smallpox his captors had left behind. He was friendly to the pilgrims who moved into the land of his people because none of his own people were left. He was able to find work with the pilgrims as a translator and helped them negotiate treaties. But as we know, treaties between European settlers and the indigenous residents of America have not been honored by the new arrivals. <br><br>
And although there's some evidence of a shared meal between Europeans and Wampanoag people in 1621, the holiday may actually have started a few decades later, in May 1637, when English and Dutch mercenaries attacked the Pequot Tribe. They killed over 700 people, and the next day the governor of the Massachusetts Bay Colony declared a day of Thanksgiving in celebration.<br><br>
Since then, various governors and presidents called for days of Thanksgiving to commemorate various events, but it didn't get formalized into an annual holiday until Abraham Lincoln chose a Thursday in November in 1863 to celebrate Civil War victories.<br><br>
The 400-year-old story we've heard about harmony between people of different backgrounds just isn't true. The United American Indians of New England have commemorated a National Day of Mourning every fourth Thursday in November since 1970. They write:
<blockquote>"Thanksgiving day is a reminder of the genocide of millions of Native people, the theft of Native lands, and the relentless assault on Native culture. Participants in National Day of Mourning honor Native ancestors and the struggles of Native peoples to survive today. It is a day of remembrance and spiritual connection as well as a protest of the racism and oppression which Native Americans continue to experience.”</blockquote>We celebrate Thanksgiving because gratitude is essential to human life. But grief is essential for healing our history of violence. It's really hard to be thankful and sorrowful at the same time. But this is life: sometimes, joy and sorrow come together.</blockquote>
REFLECTION: STORIES<br><br>
Religion is stories, and music, enacted in ritual. Our ancestors gathered around campfires. There would be drumming and dancing, chanting or singing. And there would be story-telling. The stories helped them make sense of themselves. The stories told the people’s history. They would tell of how the world came to be, and how the plants and animals came to be, and how they themselves, the people, came to be. They didn’t know how the world, and life, came to be so they guessed, using imagination to fashion a tale that seemed to them credible.<br><br>
We do the same thing today. Long ago, people attended to the stories of the wise ones in long cloaks called shamans. Today we attend to the stories of the wise ones in white coats called astrophysicists. Our story today is that there was a singularity 14 billion years ago that expanded into the universe as we know it. Our story today is continually revised by the results of experiments that we designed for the purpose of learning things that would compel us to revise our story.<br><br>
The astrophysicists’ story has a lot more math in it than the shamans’ story of old. But our story, like the ones our first story-telling ancestors told, has, at its heart, mystery. We don’t know what made the singularity happen, and our early ancestors didn’t know what force had brought forth the soil, mountains, rivers, sun, moon, stars, plants, animals – and themselves. It all began in mystery. The old stories and the new story alike begin in mystery.<br><br>
And then it unfolded. When the unfolding involved something that didn’t seem to fit what people could do, what animals or plants could do, what earth or sky or wind or fire or water could do, the story-teller brought another character into the story – with an agency that could do what otherwise seemed un-do-able. We might translate the name of that character as spirit, or Great Spirit. It was something mysterious, and there were a lot of very different stories about it, but what the stories had in common was: the great and mysterious agent knew things and wanted things. It had knowledge and desires and intentions. How else could mountains, or people, come to be, except through the intention of some creative force? (It turns out, there is an answer to that question. But it’s an answer with a lot of math in it.)<br><br>
The stories and the music and the dance were done in a ritualized way – or were done together with ritual. These were ways, maybe, our ancestors sought to influence the mystery that had powers, knowledge, and desires. They were ways to help them feel connected to this mystery with powers and intentions. It helped them be at peace with the mystery they could not control or influence.<br><br>
We continue today to gather – have music, a little ritual, and tell stories about where we come from, to help us know who we are. Different religions have different stories, different rituals, different moral codes, and play different music. They aren’t so much different paths all headed up the same mountain as different paths headed up different mountains. But they are all religions – which means they have stories, music, and ritual to convey a sense of who we are, what is our place in the family of things, what is ours to do, what we are here to try to be.<br><br>
Who are we? Where do we come from? And why do we share in practices of Thanksgiving? Therefore, we will today retell the ritual story of Thanksgiving. It is that time of year, so let that story be today re-told. But we Unitarians are not only a story-telling people, as all people are. We are also a story-revising people, continually updating our story in light of new evidence, new understandings, and new sensibilities. Our openness to new evidence and readiness to revise is a distinguishing characteristic of our liberal faith.<br><br>
So when we re-tell again the Thanksgiving story, we will be considering amendments as we go. You will have the chance to vote on those amendments by raising your voting card like we do at General Assembly – your voting card is your Order of Service.<br><br>
PLENARY<br><br>
BIRCH: <i>[gavels]</i> I call this story telling session to order. Story teller, you may proceed.<br><br>
MEREDITH: Our story. The Pilgrims were not the first people to land on the shores of New England. The area was first discovered in 1524 by Giovanni de Verrazzano, who explored the Atlantic Coast from Florida to New Brunswick.<br><br>
<i>[Delegate 1 raises hand, comes to microphone]</i><br><br>
BIRCH: The chair recognizes the delegate from Norwalk.<br><br>
DELEGATE 1: Mx. Chair, I move to amend. Giovanni de Verrazzano did not discover New England. There were people already here. Say instead, “Verrazzano was the first European to explore the Atantic Coast of what is now called North America.”<br><br>
BIRCH: Those in favor of incorporating the amendment, raise your Order of Service.... The amendment is incorporated.<br><br>
<i>[Delegate 1 sits]</i><br><br>
MEREDITH: Let’s back up further, then, and say who did discover this land. This region we call North America was discovered by peoples who came over the Bering land bridge about 16 thousand years ago. They split into branches and spread across the continent. These were the discoverers of our land.
<i>[Delegate 2 raises hand, comes to microphone]</i><br><br>
BIRCH: The chair recognizes the delegate from the south side.<br><br>
DELEGATE 2: Mx. Chair, move to amend. These people did not discover this region either. There were animals already here. I might mention in particular the Carolina Parakeet, extinct since 1918. I’d nominate them for discoverers of our region.<br><br>
BIRCH: Perhaps we should remove the word “discover” altogether?<br><br>
DELEGATE 2: Yes, that’s the amendment I propose.<br><br>
BIRCH: All in favor of striking the word discover, raise your Order of Service.... The amendment is incorporated.<br><br>
<i>[Delegate 2 sits]</i><br><br>
MEREDITH: As they split into branches and spread across the continent, one of the branches, about 14 or 15 thousand years ago, became the first humans to inhabit the area we call Massachusetts. Then in 1524, Giovanni de Verrazzano explored this area. John Cabot and Jacques Cartier also charted in the vicinity. In 1609, Henry Hudson made his way up what we call the Hudson River. These explorers sometimes captured and enslaved natives – and they brought diseases. Europeans had developed immunity to these diseases, but the natives had not. The Wampanoag, for instance, in 1600 numbered 50,000 to 100,000, occupying 69 villages scattered throughout the region that is now southeastern Massachusetts and eastern Rhode Island. The plague from Europe killed up to two-thirds of them. Many also were captured and sold as slaves.<br><br>
In 1614, a Wampanoag boy named Tisquantum was abducted from his village, Patuxet. Tisquantum was sold as a slave in Spain, then escaped to England. After several years, Tisquantum was able to get back to Turtle Island (what we call North America). When he returned to his village, he discovered there were no other surviving Patuxet -- the rest were either killed in battle or died of disease brought from Europe.<br><br>
In 1620, the Mayflower landed at Plymouth rock bringing 102 Pilgrims.<br><br>
<i>[Delegate 3 raises hand, comes to microphone]</i><br><br>
BIRCH: The chair recognizes the delegate from Clive.<br><br>
DELEGATE 3: Mx. Chair, point of factual clarification. Did these people call themselves “Pilgrims”?<br><br>
BIRCH: Fact checker?<br><br>
ELLIOTT: They did not. Not until the 20th-century did “Pilgrim” come to refer to the people who came over on the Mayflower. They called themselves “Saints”.<br><br>
DELEGATE 3: It’s disrespectful to them to call them something they didn’t call themselves. I move we call them Saints.<br><br>
<i>[Delegate 4 raises hand, comes to microphone and nudges aside delegate 3]</i><br><br>
BIRCH: The chair recognizes the delegate from Beaverdale.<br><br>
DELEGATE 4: Mx. Chair, I oppose this amendment. It may be disrespectful to them to call them Pilgrims, but it’s disrespectful to us to call them “saints” – because we’re pretty sure they weren’t.<br><br>
BIRCH: Fact checker, was there some other name?<br><br>
ELLIOTT: They were Puritans.<br><br>
BIRCH: Will the delegate accept an amendment to the amendment, to call them Puritans.<br><br>
DELEGATE 3: I will.<br><br>
<i>[Delegates 3 and 4 sit]</i><br><br>
BIRCH: The amendment is to call the people on the Mayflower “Puritans.” All in favor, raise your Order of Service.... The amendment is incorporated.<br><br>
MEREDITH: These . . . Puritans settled in an area that was once Patuxet, the Wampanoag village abandoned because of the plague. The English did not see any Wampanoag that first winter at all. They only caught a rare glimpse of a fleeting shadow of the land's inhabitants until March 1621 when Samoset, a Monhegan from Maine, came to the village. The next day, Samoset returned with Tisquantum.<br><br>
Tisquantum had learned English during his abduction, so he could talk to the settlers and serve as a translator. Tisquantum showed them how to plant corn, fish and gather berries and nuts. The crop seeds the colonists had brought with them failed, so without the help of Tisquantum – also called Squanto -- there probably wouldn’t have been a harvest to celebrate that fall.<br><br>
<i>[Delegate 5 raises hand, comes to microphone]</i><br><br>
BIRCH: The chair recognizes the delegate from Polk City.<br><br>
DELEGATE 5: Mx. Chair, I move to include what the Puritans wore.<br><br>
BIRCH: Which was?<br><br>
DELEGATE 5: Beats me. I was wanting to find out!<br><br>
BIRCH: Fact checker?<br><br>
ELLIOTT: The Puritan colonists did not wear black, large hats with buckles on them, nor buckled shoes. The 19th-century artists who painted them that way did so because they associated black clothing and buckles with being old-fashioned. Actually, their attire was bright and cheerful.<br><br>
DELEGATE 5: I move to include that information in the record.<br><br>
BIRCH: All in favor, raise your Order of Service.... The information is incorporated. Pick up from there.<br><br>
<i>[Delegate 5 sits]</i><br><br>
MEREDITH: The harvest celebration of 1621 was not a solemn religious observance. It was a three-day festival that included drinking, gambling, athletic games, and even shooting practice with English muskets -- a not-so-subtle way to warn the indigenous peoples that these colonists could shoot them. The Wampanoag chief, Massasoit, and 90 warriors made their way to the settlement in response to the sounds of the gunfire. They thought the colonists were under attack, so they came prepared for battle to help defend the colonists. The Wampanoag were probably not invited, and the settlers were probably rather nervous having them around.<br><br>
<i>[Delegate 6 raises hand, comes to microphone]</i><br><br>
BIRCH: The chair recognizes the delegate from West Des Moines.<br><br>
DELEGATE 6: We’ve heard what the Puritans wore. What did the Wampanoag wear?<br><br>
MEREDITH: They were not wearing what is often pictured: woven blankets on their shoulders and large, feathered headdresses. They wore breechcloth with leggings -- and perhaps one or two feathers in their hair in the back.<br><br>
DELEGATE 6: How long did the Wampanoag stay?<br><br>
MEREDITH: The Wampanoag stayed for three days, during the course of which they contributed a large portion – perhaps most – of the food.<br><br>
DELEGATE 6: Was the 1621 harvest celebration in November?<br><br>
MEREDITH: November would have been much too late. It was some time between late September and the middle of October.<br><br>
DELEGATE 6: So the first Thanksgiving, then, was in September or October?<br><br>
MEREDITH: The colonists celebrating in 1621 did not call their event "Thanksgiving." For them, “thanksgiving” was a day of fasting – and this was a feast -- the opposite of a Puritan thanksgiving observance. Calling any event involving white settlers in North America "the first Thanksgiving" overlooks the fact that, for thousands of years before Europeans arrived, Indigenous people throughout Turtle Island (North America) celebrated seasons of Thanksgiving. "Thanksgiving" is a very ancient concept to the first nations of this continent. The 1621 celebration was a one-off that was not repeated -- and, in any case, wasn't thought of as a "Thanksgiving."<br><br>
DELEGATE 6: Last question: What is the source of the misinformation we have about the 1621 harvest celebration?<br><br>
<i>[Delebate 6 sits]</i><br><br>
MEREDITH: Uh . . . Fact checker?<br><br>
ELLIOTT: Everything we know about that 1621 feast came from a description in one letter by colonist Edward Winslow. That letter was lost for 200 years. After it was rediscovered, a Boston publisher, Alexander Young, in 1841 printed up the brief account of the feast. Young dubbed the episode “The First Thanksgiving.” White Americans, craving a romanticized story of their past, latched on to it. And that’s the story of how we got the story.<br><br>
BIRCH: Thank you. Story-teller, please resume.<br><br>
MEREDITH: The first European-recognized Thanksgiving came in 1637, when Governor Winthrop of the Massachusetts Bay Colony proclaimed a Day of Thanksgiving. The proclamation focused on giving thanks for the return of the colony's men who had traveled to what is now Mystic, Connecticut where they had gone to join in battle. The thanks that was foremost in Winthrop’s proclamation was thanks for their “great victory”. The roots of the American Thanksgiving holiday are a celebration of a massacre of hundreds of Native people.<br><br>
It grew into a general celebration of genocide. For example, a Proclamation of Thanksgiving in 1676 thanks god that the "heathen natives" had been almost entirely wiped out in Massachusetts and nearby. Thanksgiving proclamations a century later continue to be connected with war. In the midst of the Revolutionary War, the Continental Congress issued Thanksgiving Proclamations each year from 1777 to 1784. Thus was the way paved for Abraham Lincoln, in the midst of the Civil War, to make Thanksgiving a US National Holiday. Lincoln set the US National Holiday of Thanksgiving as the last Thursday of November.<br><br>
<i>[Delegate 7 raises hand, comes to microphone]</i><br><br>
BIRCH: The chair recognizes the delegate from Johnston.<br><br>
DELEGATE 7: Mx. Chair, I move to include how the holiday moved from the last Thursday of November to the fourth Thursday of November.<br><br>
BIRCH: Would the Assembly like to hear how the holiday moved from the last Thursday to the fourth Thursday? All in favor, raise your Order of Service.... Opposed?... The motion carries, so tell us.<br><br>
<i>[Delegate 7 sits]</i><br><br>
MEREDITH: Five times out of seven, the fourth Thursday in November IS the last Thursday. The other two times – like this year – November has five Thursdays, and then the fourth one is not the last one. The holiday moved from the last Thursday to the fourth Thursday in 1941. Franklin Roosevelt made the change because November 1941 had five Thursdays, and by moving the holiday up a week he gave merchants a longer Christmas shopping season every year with five Thursdays in November.<br><br>
<i>[Delegate 8 raises hand, comes to microphone]</i><br><br>
BIRCH: The Chair recognizes the delegate from Waterbury.<br><br>
DELEGATE 8: Mx. Chair, I move the following resolution. Resolved: That those present at this worship service of First Unitarian Church of Des Moines give thanks for all the good in our lives and all the blessings we enjoy; that we remember also the pain and loss of the Indigenous people; and that our list of gratitudes include thanks that we have the capacity to face the truths of the past, to learn from them to love others better, and love the rich diversity of humanity and of life.<br><br>
<i>[Delegate 8 hands the motion up to Birch, then sits]</i><br><br>BIRCH: The motion is: <i>[Birch repeats the motion.]</i><br><br>Resolutions require a second. Is there a second? <i>[Waits for a second]</i> All in favor of the motion raise your Order of Service.... Opposed?... The motion carries. Seeing no one else at the microphone -- and there being no further business -- this story-telling session stands adjourned until it’s time to review our Christmas Story. <i>[Gavels]</i><br><br>
REFLECTION: GRATITUDE AND COMPASSION<br><br>
Sometimes you feel happy. Sometimes you feel sad. Those are opposite feelings, and life brings them both, though usually not at the same time. Usually being happy means not beings sad, and being sad means not being happy.<br><br>
How about these two: being grateful and remembering suffering? These are not even opposites at all. They are the natural extensions of each other.<br><br>
There is much to be grateful for. Air! Take a breath, and be thankful for air! Thank you air. And we have trees and sunshine to be grateful for – the beauty of this world. We have cardinals and nuthatches and chipmunks. Thank you, trees! Thank you, sunshine! Thank you, cardinals and nuthatches and chipmunks!<br><br>
Gratitude chases out loneliness. You can’t be lonely when you’re feeling thankful – because as soon as you say, “thank you,” you have company, companions, friends. The air, trees, sunshine, birdies and wee beasties: your company.<br><br>
Compassion also chases out loneliness. Caring about other people, caring about whether they suffer are treated unfairly, also chases out loneliness. Compassion brings other people into our lives, even if only in our imagination. We have company. Thankfulness recognizes the companionship that is all around us.<br><br>
Compassion reaches out to extend our companionship outward. For as the world is our good company, it makes us want to be good company for the world. So gratitude and compassion – thankfulness and remembering suffering and unfairness – are not opposites. They naturally go together, for they are both about: having company in our life.<br><br>
We are not alone. We have the companionship of everything that we are grateful for and everything we have compassion for.<br><br>
When I was a kid, the extended family and always a few unrelated guests gatherered around the table for Thanksgiving dinner each year. My Mom found a recipe for oyster stew one year early on, and liked it so much she made it every year thereafter, so, I know it’s weird, but in my mind, Thanksgiving is associated with oyster stew. Thank you, Oysters. Thank you, Mom.<br><br>
And we’d go around the table and talk about what we were thankful for. I don’t remember if it ever came up at the Thanksgiving tables where I was, but it seemed a common thing around Thanksgiving to talk about being grateful for how well we’re doing when others are doing so much worse. That seems weird to me. I suppose the point is to remind us not to take our blessings for granted, and that’s a good point, but the even better point is to be reminded that none of us are free until all of us are free. As long as there are others doing worse, then we’re doing worse. As long as any being isn’t treated fairly, none of us has the blessing of living in a world where everyone is treated fairly.<br><br>
We have the great good fortune to be able to care. The greatest blessing is to have the capacity for compassion. As Isabell Call said in the opening reading:<blockquote>“We celebrate Thanksgiving because gratitude is essential to human life. But grief is essential for healing our history of violence. It's really hard to be thankful and sorrowful at the same time. But this is life: sometimes, joy and sorrow come together.”</blockquote>Actually, I would say, if you’re paying attention, joy and sorrow always come together. When we seem to be having only joy, or only sorrow, it’s because we’re not paying attention to the other. Noticed or not, grounds for each is always right where we are standing.<br><br>
Joy and sorrow manifest as gratitude and compassion. Gratitude and compassion are dishes best served together. May you find them both amply supplied at your Thanksgiving table.<br>
AMEN.Rev. Meredith Garmonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09600609816550758194noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7480207999294007243.post-54472398418557028442023-11-12T16:07:00.279-05:002023-11-14T08:29:18.554-05:00TrustInterdependence is our theme for November, and trust is what allows our interdependence to best function and flourish.<br><br>
Trust. Sissela Bok says:<blockquote>“Whatever matters to human beings, trust is the atmosphere in which it thrives.”</blockquote>Whatever matters, trust is the atmosphere in which it thrives. How is that atmosphere in your life? How is it in our congregation? Maybe it could be better.<br><br>
In the 1992 Disney cartoon movie, Aladdin, there are two moments when Aladdin holds out his hand to Jasmine and asks her, “Do you trust me?” The first time, Aladdin is a street urchin, and Jasmine’s in disguise as a commoner. The second time, he’s in disguise as a prince and she’s in her element as a princess in the palace. Would you trust him?<br><br>
Neither time does she have any reason to trust him. But both times she says yes – and takes his hand. It’s a risk. She might get let down, hurt – maybe killed if she falls off that magic carpet when it takes a swerve. She takes the risk. Why? We don’t know. I don’t think she knows.<br><br>
Jasmine’s world has been trustworthy enough that she feels she can trust a stranger – take that leap. And because she can trust, what opens up for her and Aladdin is, well: “a whole new world . . .”<br><br>
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It’s important to note that Jasmine’s trust is not a virtue she has. If we said it were, then we’d have to say that if she’d said “no,” she’d be lacking some virtue. But no: if she’d said, “No, I don’t trust you, I am not taking your hand,” there’d be no basis for finding any fault. Jasmine’s trust is not a virtue of Jasmine, but it is a virtue of the conditions in which she grew up that those conditions have taught her that trusting strangers is a risk she can sometimes take. The conditions of her upbringing also taught her that she can trust herself in new situations. As the saying goes: “A bird sitting on a tree is never afraid of the branch breaking, because her trust is not in the branch but in her own wings.” Because of that combination of trust in herself and just-high-enough willingness to trust strangers, she answers yes. She takes his hand; takes the leap.<br><br>
Trust is a virtue of social systems, not of individuals. So we need to think about trust in a different way than we think about trustworthiness. Trustworthiness IS a virtue of individuals. It’s your responsibility to be trustworthy, but it’s not your responsibility to trust. Trust may come to you as a grace, but don’t force it. If you don’t trust some situation, then trust your mistrust and back away.<br><br>
At the same time, I want to urge today, that, after you have backed away, and you’re in a space that feels safe, interrogate that experience. Was that a situation where maybe daring the risk of trust would have been worth it? Maybe it was and maybe it wasn’t. It's good to reflect on the question.<br><br>
Trust, in any case, is a collective rather than an individual virtue. Trust is built – if it is built -- collectively. Our individual task is to discern how we can contribute our part to collectively building it – not take foolish outsize risks in clearly untrustworthy situations. David Brooks gives this example:<blockquote>“In a restaurant I trust you to serve untainted fish and you trust me not to skip out on the bill. Social trust is a generalized faith in the people of your community” (<a href="https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2020/10/collapsing-levels-trust-are-devastating-america/616581/" target="_blank">Brooks, "America is Having a Moral Convulsion," <i>Atlantic</i>, 2020 Oct 5</a>)</blockquote>
It’s trusting that most people will do what they ought to do most of the time. Not everybody. Maybe not anybody all the time. But most people, most of the time. Some level of shared norms – general agreement on what counts as “what one ought to do” – is necessary. <blockquote>“If two lanes of traffic are merging into one, the drivers in each lane are supposed to take turns. If [one] butts in line, [others] honk indignantly. [They] want to enforce the small fairness rules that make our society function smoothly" (Brooks)</blockquote>
Francis Fukayama’s 1995 book, <i>Trust</i>, coined the phrase "spontaneous sociability." He said that where social trust is high, spontaneous sociability increases. We can spend less time and energy checking each other out, looking for signs of untrustworthiness – less time and energy guarding and protecting ourselves from being swindled – and can much more efficiently move into cooperating and helping each other out. Spontaneous sociability means that people are “able to organize more quickly, initiate action, and sacrifice for the common good.”<br><br>
Increased trustworthiness, the individual virtue, helps. When more people have the virtue of being worthy of trust, that facilitates trusting. But that’s not enough. Social trust has been falling precipitously in this country, and it’s not clear that the institutions that are less trusted are any less trustworthy than ever.<br><br>
Scammers prey on the elderly. Why is that? We tend to suppose, well, the elderly don’t think as clearly and can’t follow how they’re being scammed. That’s sometimes a factor. Another factor, though, is that those who are now our older citizens come from a generation that was much more trusting – a generation whose trust allowed them to accomplish together such things that they are called the greatest generation.<blockquote>“In 1964, 77 percent of Americans said they trusted the federal government to do the right thing most or all of the time.” </blockquote>
Then came Vietnam, and Watergate, which certainly undermined trust in government. And Reaganomics -- not just economic policies that said government isn’t here for you unless you’re rich, but a stream of rhetoric that said government is the problem. You may remember Reagan had that line: "The nine most terrifying words in the English language are: I'm from the Government, and I'm here to help." That one line may have done more harm than his policies. Many people trusted that their government actually could do a lot of very helpful things – which is to say, they trusted their neighbors to be able to work together collectively through elected officials for the common good (which is what trust in government is). Reagan turned that trust into the butt of a joke.
<blockquote>“By 1994, only one in five Americans said they trusted government to do the right thing.” </blockquote>In 30 years, then -- from 1964 to 1994 -- trust in the government to do the right thing fell from 77 percent to 20 percent.<br><br>
Even so, when phrased as a question of trust in the political competence of their fellow citizens, most people still affirmed that -- for a while. In 1997, 64 percent of Americans had a great or good deal of trust in the political competence of their fellow citizens. “Then came the Iraq War and the financial crisis and the election of Donald Trump.” Today only a third of Americans say they trust in the political competence of their fellow citizens.<br><br>
The distrust turned explosive.
<blockquote>“Explosive distrust is not just an absence of trust or a sense of detached alienation—it is an aggressive animosity and an urge to destroy. Explosive distrust is the belief that those who disagree with you are not just wrong but illegitimate” (Brooks)</blockquote>
It’s not that way everywhere. In Denmark and the Netherlands, trust has been growing. In Denmark, “about 75 percent say the people around them are trustworthy.” In the Netherlands, “two-thirds say so.” <br><br>
In the US, on the other hand, in 2014, only 30 percent of Americans agreed that “most people can be trusted.” That’s the lowest number since the survey started asking the question in 1972. It becomes a vicious downward spiral: when we don’t trust each other, we don’t form or sustain networks that we can trust, and then trust falls further. When people believe they can’t trust others, that others aren’t trustworthy, they become less trustworthy themselves.<br><br>
So our younger people, growing up under conditions of mistrust, have more mistrust.
<ul><li>Percent of Baby Boomers (born between 1946 and 1964) who agree "most people can be trusted": 40</li>
<li>Percent of Generation X (born between 1965 and 1980) who agree "most people can be trusted": 31</li>
<li>Percent of Millennials (born between 1981 and 1996) who agree "most people can be trusted": 19</li></ul>
We need to acknowledge that sometimes, in some ways, American social trust has been intermixed with delusion.
<blockquote>“Only 35 percent of young people, versus 67 percent of old people, believe that Americans respect the rights of people who are not like them. Fewer than a third of Millennials say America is the greatest country in the world, compared to 64 percent of members of the Silent Generation.” (Brooks)</blockquote> Believing the US to be the greatest country in the world has always required highly selective measures of greatness – and on many measures we’ve been falling further and further behind. And the gap between how highly Americans thought of themselves for respecting the rights of people not like them, and how much they actually did respect those rights is only recently beginning to narrow. So, good for the younger generations for increasingly disavowing those delusions of grandeur.<br><br>
Yes, it seems to be the case that those delusions did foster social trust. But delusions inevitably collapse. Sustainable, nondelusive social trust is possible, and maybe we’ll get there. In the meantime, it’s helpful to name the condition we’re currently in – name the water that, like a fish, we might not notice because we’re immersed in it.<br><br>
What we’re in the middle of right now doesn’t have to stay that way. Our country was once a place of trust – and might be again. But as I was saying, it’s not up to you to try to make yourself a more trusting person. That might not be a good idea. If you get an email from a Prince of Nigeria asking for your help transferring some funds – or an email purporting to be from me asking for Apple Gift cards – don’t trust it. Making ourselves more trusting in a world that is often untrustworthy is not the issue.<br><br>
What we can do is be on the lookout for opportunities to relate to others in ways that grow trust, and to do that, we have to know how that happens. What grows trust between two people? What grows trust among members of a group, or within a congregation?<br><br>
I turn here to Brene Brown, who wonderfully combines a scientist’s respect and quest for data with a heart-centered gift for understanding it. She says Trust is built in very small moments. When people talked about trust in the research, they said things like, “Yeah, I really trust my boss. She even asked me how my mom's chemotherapy was going.” Or, “I trust my neighbor because if something's going on with my kid, it doesn't matter what she's doing, she'll come over and help me figure it out.”<br><br>
One of the top things Brown found as a small thing that engenders trust: attending funerals. Someone shows up at your sister’s memorial service, it really adds to your sense of trust in them, that they care for you.<br><br>
Another big factor: asking for help when you need it. Trust emerges between and among people through the accumulation of little things done for each other. Looking over the data, Brene Brown discerned seven factors that develop trust. Don’t try to make yourself trust people or situations that are untrustworthy -- but do be on the look-out for these factors. Be attentive to the emergence of where a higher level of trust might be warranted. <br><br>
<div class="separator" style="clear: both;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhl5K_PECUQEnL510km_pK7s5ZdfsUvAKb-lGs9jKBMqPaMYHeJq-sZwMk65drTiXsUpAkTMBje2F_G318wD-agtBGewx4MkJCOPsNjRDqC-nKfxQKI9CKPqAj-4d4qfNVcx6krnzmPjdu3K-j301Y17ZOxMBzFg_P4Ok4DYm4cla39-CmbORs-ILMx/s1920/OS20231112.jpeg" style="display: block; padding: 1em 0; text-align: center; clear: right; float: right;"><img alt="" border="0" width="400" data-original-height="1080" data-original-width="1920" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhl5K_PECUQEnL510km_pK7s5ZdfsUvAKb-lGs9jKBMqPaMYHeJq-sZwMk65drTiXsUpAkTMBje2F_G318wD-agtBGewx4MkJCOPsNjRDqC-nKfxQKI9CKPqAj-4d4qfNVcx6krnzmPjdu3K-j301Y17ZOxMBzFg_P4Ok4DYm4cla39-CmbORs-ILMx/s400/OS20231112.jpeg"/></a></div>Brown arranged the seven into an acronym that spells: BRAVING. When we trust, we are braving connection with someone.<br><br>
<b>B, boundaries.</b> Healthy boundaries define who we are in relation to others. They also help us to know what the extents and limits are with others. Personal boundaries are how we teach people who we are and how we would like to be handled in relationships. Boundaries help you to say, “This is who I am.” Be explicitly pro-active about what you’re not comfortable with, and what your needs and commitments are. If you’re not clear about who you are, I can’t trust you. I trust you if you are clear about your boundaries and you hold them, and you're clear about my boundaries and you respect them. There is no trust without boundaries.<br><br>
<b>R, reliability.</b> I can only trust you if you do what you say you're going to do -- over and over and over again. In our working lives, reliability means that we have to be very clear on our limitations so we don't take on so much that we come up short and don't deliver on our commitments. In our personal life, it means the same thing. The key part to keeping commitments is not committing more than we can keep.<br><br>
<b>A, accountability.</b> I can only trust you if, when you make a mistake, you are willing to own it, apologize for it, and make amends. I can only trust you if when I make a mistake, I am allowed to own it, apologize, and make amends. <br><br>
Next is keeping confidences – but since she needs a word that starts with V, she calls it the vault.<br><br>
<b>V, the vault.</b> What I share with you, you will hold in confidence. What you share with me, I will hold in confidence. It goes in the vault, and it’s sealed from public view. And it’s not just whether you hold my confidences. If you gossip with me about someone else -- share with me a story that isn’t yours to tell – then my trust in you is diminished. The Vault means you respect my story, and a key way that I come to believe you will respect my story is that I see you respecting other people’s stories.<br><br>
<b>I, integrity.</b> I cannot trust you and be in a trusting relationship with you if you do not act from a place of integrity -- and encourage me to do the same. Integrity has three pieces: choosing courage over comfort; choosing what's right over what's fun, fast, or easy; and practicing your values, not just professing your values.<br><br>
<b>N, nonjudgment.</b> I can fall apart, ask for help, and be in struggle without being judged by you. And you can fall apart, and be in struggle, and ask for help without being judged by me.<br><br>
Under some conditions, helping people can actually lower trust. That can happen if we feel that the help is coming from someone who’s judging us for not being able to work it out ourselves, judging us for needing their help. If you’re the helper, you can offer reassurances: “Oh, this happens to me all the time.”
“There’s no way you could’ve known how to do that.” “Wow, it’s great that you got this far on your own.” “I’m impressed.” But there’s still that little edge of suspicion that your assessment of the person’s competence might have slid just a hair. The only way to really remove that hint of judgment from helping someone is for you to take turns asking them for their help. Only then are the vestiges wiped away of the thought that competence is a ground where we’re competing with each other to see who has more of it – which is not a ground of trust. Whether I’m conscious of it or not, if I think less of myself for needing help, then when I offer help to someone, I think less of them too. You cannot judge yourself for needing help but not judge others for needing your help. Real trust doesn't exist unless help is reciprocal because only when it’s reciprocal is it free of judgment.<br><br>
<b>G, generosity.</b> Here we’re talking about interpretive charity – charitably interpreting what the other person says. Trust requires that we evince a generosity of spirit in how we understand and interpret each other. Our relationship is only a trusting relationship if you can assume the most generous thing about my words, intentions, and behaviors, and then check in with me.<br><br>
Arriving at the most charitable possible interpretation of someone else’s words and actions often takes practice and imagination. "Assume best intentions" is a wonderful slogan. I’ve noticed, though, that its usefulness is limited if our imagination is limited. If the only two interpretations you can imagine are “they are evil” or “they’re stupid” – you may have a hard time deciding which one is the more generous explanation. <br><br>
When you’re hurt and betrayed, your imaginative capacity shrinks. At those times all you can do is just say you don’t know why they did that. You just don’t know. As you heal a bit, get a little distance from the wound, your creative empathetic imagination can start to do a better job of imagining a more generous interpretation.<br><br>
This BRAVING acronym works with self-trust, too. If braving relationships with other people is braving connection, self-trust is braving self-love. We can't ask people to give to us something that we do not believe we're worthy of receiving. An African proverb says, Beware the naked man offering you his shirt. And you will know you're worthy of receiving trust when you trust yourself above everyone else.<br><br>
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These are Brene Brown’s tools for interpersonal trust. To do our part in rebuilding social trust, we take those tools and join organizations, using those tools of trustbuilding in the development of clubs, associations – and congregations. That you are a member of a congregation – in these times when increasing numbers of people aren’t – already puts you at the forefront of builders and nurturers of social trust. <br><br>
As David Brooks writes: <blockquote>“Whether we emerge from this transition stronger depends on our ability, from the bottom up and the top down, to build organizations targeted at our many problems. If history is any guide, this will be the work not of months, but of one or two decades.”</blockquote>Amen.
Rev. Meredith Garmonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09600609816550758194noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7480207999294007243.post-44609503009830152012023-11-05T15:11:00.064-05:002023-11-21T15:35:59.172-05:00InterdependenceIt’s November – the month of elections, and of Thanksgiving – and Veterans Day, which used to be called Armistice Day. Leaves fill up the yards. Sweater weather segues into parka weather. And our theme of the month this November is Interdependence.<br><br>
You might be thinking: What kind of theme is that? It’s like saying our theme was bipedalism. Yes, we humans walk on two legs – as do birds – so what? How is that a spiritual value to explore, to cultivate, to unpeel layers of meaning of? In the same way you might say yes, we are interdependent. If you use money, you can’t make it yourself – that would be counterfeiting. So we are necessarily dependent on customers or clients or an employer. And if you went off into the woods to live by yourself surviving on nuts and berries, you’re still dependent on Earth and sky and plants to provide nuts and berries. Besides, that’s a miserable way to live. So, yes, we are interdependent. But how is that relevant to the spiritual path?<br><br>
Let’s look into how this interdependence works and let’s just see what we discover about spirituality, shall we? We are made to need each other, to rely on each other. We are a social species. We aren’t the only social species. The list of species that are highly interactive with their own kind to the point of having a recognizable society and whose psychological well-being is associated with social interactions is a long list. According to the Animalia web site, 2,826 species have so far been identified as social species. These include: wolves, lions, raccoons, rodents, sheep, horses -- chickens, ravens, pigeons, and many other bird species – whales and dolphins – otters and beavers. Even a number of reptiles are counted as social species.<br><br>
Some social species, however, take their sociality to a much higher level. These are called <i>eusocial</i>. The eusocial species have cooperative brood care (including care of offspring from other individuals), overlapping generations within a colony of adults, and a division of labor into reproductive and non-reproductive groups. Eusocial species include ants, bees, termites, wasps, some shrimp species, the naked mole-rat – and -- some biologists argue -- humans.<br><br>
Perhaps the better term for characterizing homo sapiens would be hypersocial. Not only are we fantastically cooperative – which ants, bees, and naked mole-rats also are – but our ability to imagine ourselves into each other’s heads is amazing. Your brain is not only looking out for you, but it is also simultaneously running a sub-routine mimicking how the brains of people around you are looking out for themselves – including, mimicking the part of <i>their</i> brain that’s running an analogous sub-routine to mimic <i>your</i> brain. You see me – and you see me seeing you – and you see me seeing you seeing me.<br><br>
And yes, we often make mistakes when we imagine how the world looks through another person’s eyes, and we do need to be humble about claims to know what someone else is going through – but the amazing fact is, we kinda <i>do</i> know what others are going through. We inevitably miss some of the details that may be quite important to the other person, but it’s actually astonishing that human brains can get the basic gist of what it’s like for other people in completely different circumstances.Sometimes someone else might know me even better than I know myself.<br><br>
How did evolution produce brains that can read other brains so well? Our brains – like all vertebrate brains – are built to do three things: find food, avoid becoming food, and find a mate. That’s their purpose. Keep us alive long enough to reproduce – and maybe also stick around to help our offspring do likewise. Each species has its own unique set of abilities that dictate its strategy for reproducing itself and there are a gazillion different workable strategies – and, of course, a gazillion squared strategies that don’t work.<br><br>
It’s a very challenging problem for genes to make an animal that can stay alive long enough to reproduce, and most of its experiments end up failing. Still, there are over 2 million known animal species currently extant, and about 380,000 known plant species, not to mention the fungi, protista, and monera – and, while some of them are endangered, many of them are doing fine – and they’re doing fine without the ability to imagine what’s going on in each other’s heads with anywhere near the level of detail that humans can. It’s kind of amazing that a species that can do what we do could ever have emerged.<br><br>
The earth has had five mass extinctions:
<ul><li>440 million years ago,</li>
<li>365 million years ago, </li>
<li>250 million years ago, </li>
<li>210 million years ago, and, most recently, </li>
<li>65 million years ago.</li></ul>
Six times life has covered the globe with ecosystems full of species, and five times mass extinctions wiped out between 70 and 95% of all Earth’s extant species. In the wake of each mass extinction, very different new species popped up, and all those millions of species, over the 2 billion years life has been on earth, emerged and lived out the arc of their extancy being reasonably good for their time at keeping themselves alive to reproduce – and every one of those millions of species except a handful in the genus homo, of which just one species survives today, did so without needing more than a rudimentary ability to imagine themselves in each other’s heads.<br><br>
Through this super-power, at some point in about the last million years, our ancestors developed shared intentionality – that is, the ability to share mental representations of a task so that multiple people can work on it. Take something as seemingly simple as one person pulling down a tree branch so that another person can pluck the fruit, and then both of them can share the meal. That’s a simple example of shared intentionality. Chimps don’t do this. Chimps are highly intelligent and highly social: they have hierarchical leadership structures, they monitor their status within the group, they bargain, they do favors for one another, expecting and usually receiving reciprocation later – yet even a simple case of shared intentionality seems to be beyond them.<br><br>
We humans are profound collaborators, connecting our brains together to solve problems that single brains can’t. We distribute the cognitive tasks. No individual knows everything it takes to build a cathedral, or an aircraft. <br><br>
Our species success comes not from our individual smarts but from our unparalleled ability to think in groups – to make bigger brains by interlinking our individual brains. Our great glory is how well we rely on each other’s expertise.<br><br>
So even if you could be independent – by yourself in the woods surviving on nuts and berries – that would be a miserable way for a homo sapiens to live and no sane human manages it for very long. We aren’t made to be that way. We are made to be dependent – not just on the earth and its provision of food and air – but on each other. Now that we understand that about each other, what shall we do with that understanding?<br><br>
The first thing to notice is that interdependence feels good and is good for us. It feels great to be on a team working together, contributing our part to a whole greater than the sum of its parts.<br><br>
We have this amazing capacity for interlinking our brains, for cooperating and collaborating, for shared intentionality, but we don’t always have it fully activated, and we don’t always notice the ways that it is engaged. The fact about what sort of species we are becomes a path of our spiritual growth when we commit ourselves to cultivating mindful awareness of connection, interrelationship, and mutual reliance. We can more consciously notice our interdependence with each other in our hypersociality, and also more consciously notice the interdependence of all life on our planet.<br><br>
As Unitarian Universalists, this is our faith path. Our denomination’s current statement of purpose, adopted 40 years ago, describes our covenant in seven principles, the seventh of which is “respect for the interdependent web of all existence of which we are a part.” The proposed new statement of purpose includes interdependence as one of seven values of which love is the central one. It says:
<blockquote>“We honor the interdependent web of all existence. We covenant to cherish Earth and all beings by creating and nurturing relationships of care and respect. With humility and reverence, we acknowledge our place in the great web of life, and we work to repair harm and damaged relationships.”</blockquote>
To understand who we are is the central mission of the spiritual quest, and who we are is each other. To commit to live in the unwavering awareness that the self, what I am, is the whole Earth, the whole universe – that’s the spiritual path. To commit to live in the unwavering awareness that anyone’s suffering is mine – and also that anyone’s act of violence, anyone’s cruelty, anyone’s evil is also my very own – that’s the spiritual path.<br><br>
The Vietnamese monk, Thich Nhat Hanh, put it this way in his poem, “Please Call Me by My True Names.”
<blockquote>“Don’t say that I will depart tomorrow —<br>
even today I am still arriving.<br>
Look deeply: every second I am arriving<br>
to be a bud on a Spring branch,<br>
to be a tiny bird, with still-fragile wings,<br>
learning to sing in my new nest,<br>
to be a caterpillar in the heart of a flower,<br>
to be a jewel hiding itself in a stone.<br>
I still arrive, in order to laugh and to cry,<br>
to fear and to hope.<br>
The rhythm of my heart is the birth and death<br>
of all that is alive.<br>
I am the mayfly metamorphosing<br>
on the surface of the river.<br>
And I am the bird<br>
that swoops down to swallow the mayfly.<br>
I am the frog swimming happily<br>
in the clear water of a pond.<br>
And I am the grass-snake<br>
that silently feeds itself on the frog.<br>
I am the child in Uganda, all skin and bones,<br>
my legs as thin as bamboo sticks.<br>
And I am the arms merchant,<br>
selling deadly weapons to Uganda.<br>
I am the twelve-year-old girl,<br>
refugee on a small boat,<br>
who throws herself into the ocean<br>
after being raped by a sea pirate.<br>
And I am the pirate,<br>
my heart not yet capable<br>
of seeing and loving.<br>
I am a member of the politburo,<br>
with plenty of power in my hands.<br>
And I am the man who has to pay<br>
his “debt of blood” to my people<br>
dying slowly in a forced-labor camp.<br>
My joy is like Spring, so warm<br>
it makes flowers bloom all over the Earth.<br>
My pain is like a river of tears,<br>
so vast it fills the four oceans.<br>
Please call me by my true names,<br>
so I can hear all my cries and my laughter at once,<br>
so I can see that my joy and pain are one.<br>
Please call me by my true names,<br>
so I can wake up,<br>
and so the door of my heart<br>
can be left open,<br>
the door of compassion.”</blockquote>
This awareness is ultimately what spirituality is. It’s why I, materialist that I am, use the word spiritual: because this awareness of interbeing is not intellectual, not cognitive, though it includes and draws upon intellection and cognition. Nor is this awareness emotional, though it includes and draws upon emotions. There is something not reducible to head or heart and that is, in short, awareness of interbeing – or, even shorter, spirituality.<br><br>
WORLD AS BATTLEFIELD<br><br>
We haven’t always seen, and don’t always see, awareness of interbeing as the primary spiritual task. Sometimes the world feels more like a battlefield, or a proving ground than like our very selves. Joanna Macy describes the “world as battlefield” paradigm that some people explicitly embrace and that sometimes sneaks into the thought patterns of all of us. In this paradigm, good and evil are pitted against each other, and we are on this earth to fight on the good side against the evil side. The world is our battlefield.<br><br>
This is the worldview of George Lucas’ Star Wars movies -- the forces of light battle the forces of darkness. It’s not clear, in the universe of those movies, what’s so bad about the Empire, or why life for beings throughout the galaxy would be any better if Luke Skywalker and the rebels were to prevail, but we’re told Luke is the good guy, that Darth Vader has turned to the dark side of the force, so we cheer for Luke.<br><br>
People for whom some “world as battlefield” story is the context for making meaning of their lives, will be oriented toward “courage, summoning up the blood, using the fiery energies of anger, aversion, and militancy.” The “world as battlefield” paradigm is good for building confidence. It’s a story that reassures you that you are on the right side, and your side will eventually win. Even if you don’t really believe this paradigm, it’s fun to indulge it sometimes, which is why so many people, including me, have flocked to Star Wars movies.<br><br>
A variation on the “world as battlefield” paradigm is the “world as proving ground” paradigm. The “world as proving ground” paradigm views the world as a kind of moral gymnasium for showing your strength and virtue at the snares and temptations of the world. We are here on this Earth so that the mettle of our immortal soul may be tested prior to admittance to some other realm. That’s only a slight variation on the “world as battlefield.”<br><br>
WORLD AS TRAP<br><br>
The second paradigm is the “World as Trap.” As Joanna Macy describes this one, our spiritual objective “is not to engage in struggle and vanquish a foe, but to disentangle ourselves and escape from this messy world . . . to extricate ourselves and ascend to a higher, supra-phenomenal plane.” Not in some future life, but in this life, the objective is to escape the trap, to live with contempt for the material plane, prizing only the rarefied life of mind and spirit, aloof from the world of strife and desire. <br><br>
This “world as trap” paradigm engenders a love-hate relationship with matter – for aversion inflames craving, and the craving inflames aversion. Wherever we see people vigorously denouncing something and then being caught at doing that very thing – whether it’s extramarital relationships, or eating fatty foods – we are seeing the playing out of a love-hate relationship that comes from seeing the world as a trap.<br><br>
I have seen people be attracted to Buddhism out of a feeling that the world is a trap, and a hope meditation will take them to a place removed from worldly entanglements. I tell them that the Buddha taught detachment from ego, not detachment from the world. And that even with ego, he taught being present to it, seeing it clearly for what it is, not suppressing it or ignoring it.<br><br>
For people who see the world as a trap, social justice may still be a concern, but their approach is to get themselves detached and then help others detach -- escape the trap of the material world.<br><br>
WORLD AS LOVER<br><br>
A third paradigm Macy describes is “The World as Lover.” This view beholds the world as an intimate and gratifying partner. With training, one can see in every experience something of the beauty and sweetness of primal erotic play. Since lovers are impelled toward union and oneness, this view can then segue into the final paradigm: “world as self.”<br><br>
WORLD AS SELF<br><br>
In the Western tradition there is more talk of merging self with God rather than with the world, but the import is about the same. When Hildegard of Bingen experienced unity with the divine, she gave the experience words like Thich Nhat Hanh’s. She wrote:<blockquote>“I am the breeze that nurtures all things green....I am the rain coming from the dew that causes the grasses to laugh with the joy of life.”</blockquote>
In riding a bicycle or driving a car we can quickly come to feel the vehicle as an extension of our own bodies. In the same way, the whole world is an extension of your own body. Yes, sometimes it does things you don’t want it to and can’t control, but the same is true of your joints and organs (increasingly so as the years go by). Truly, everything in the world is your joints and organs, sinews and bones, glands, skin, and hair. And brain and mind.<br><br>
These paradigms – world as battlefield, proving ground, trap, lover, or self – are ways to answer the crucial question: “In the face of what is happening, how do we avoid feeling overwhelmed and just giving up?” How do we not give up our responsibility, not simply succumb to the many diversions and distractions of our disjointed, frenetic, consumer society? Each paradigm provides an answer. I think most of us are attracted to numbers 3 and 4 – world as lover and world as self. But most of us probably waffle a bit. Sometimes the world does seem like a battle-ground or proving ground: everything is a test, and I am constantly being judged – sometimes well, sometimes poorly.<br><br>
The simple act of identifying “world as lover” as a world-view helps me feel the joy of that view, helps me live into it more consistently. Identifying “world as self” as a world-view helps me stay in it. As Joanna Macy says, <blockquote>“We are our world knowing itself. We can relinquish our separateness. We can come home again – and participate in our world in a richer, more responsible and poignantly beautiful way than before in our infancy.”</blockquote>
May it be so.<br><br>
Amen.
Rev. Meredith Garmonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09600609816550758194noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7480207999294007243.post-77127990325415857052023-10-29T15:03:00.183-04:002023-11-22T15:31:43.122-05:00What Is Growing Spiritually?<blockquote>This is It<br />
and I am It<br />
and You are It<br />
and so is That<br />
and He is It<br />
and She is It<br />
and It is It<br />
and That is That.<br /><br />
O, it is This<br />
and it is Thus<br />
and it is Them<br />
and it is Us<br />|
and it is Now<br />
and Here It is<br />
and Here We are --<br />
So: This is It</blockquote><div style="text-align: center;">--James Broughton</div><br />
We return, today, to the first prong of our congregation’s mission: Grow ethically and spiritually.<br /><br />
Five weeks ago, on Sep 24, I addressed growing ethically. I said then that there is teachable cognitive knowledge that is a big part of ethics. Learning propositional knowledge is an important chunk of growing ethically. You can take a class or read a book. That’s not all there is to it. Ethical growth also requires habit formation – the forming of the habits to behave at a higher and higher ethical level – and having the cognitive propositional knowledge doesn’t mean you’ll have the habit of reminding yourself of that knowledge at the moments when you need it. Still, cognitive learning of propositional knowledge is a crucial part of ethical growth. To treat people well we have to know about their situation, what harms them and what benefits them, and they can’t always simply tell you. So: some study is called for if we are to grow ethically.<br /><br />
To grow spiritually, on the other hand, well, it’s a rather different kind of study. To illustrate, let me back up and use this opportunity to tell you some of my journey. I’m the first-born child of rationalist humanist academic parents. I grew up and went into the family business: being a rationalist humanist academic. Mom was a physics professor, and later in her career a chemistry professor. Dad was an English professor – who specialized in 18th century British Literature – the Age of Reason. Thus I grew through childhood imbued with the implicit sense that the reason for being alive and on this planet was to do two things: Learn stuff, and teach it to others.<br /><br />
I was in fourth grade in a small town in Georgia when I first heard the word “atheist” – and asked what it meant. Shortly afterward, I decided I was one. This was a scandal to my classmates. The scandal rather settled down after a week or so, but from then on through high school I was “the class atheist.” Even so, apart from a few kids who were hostile, and a few others who undertook to try to save me, my classmates by and large politely ignored our differences of theological opinion. If there was a disconnect between us because of religion, looking back, I’d say the distance-making, the wall-building, came more from me than from them. As a child and teenager, my sad heart hardened and chose contempt as its protective strategy.<br /><br />
I was not the sort of atheist that went for “spirituality” – did not use that word for my experiences. Nor did I think in terms of sacred, divine, transcendent. Wasn’t so keen on awe, mystery, or wonder either. <br /><br />
But then life happened -- as it tends to do. And even though I was learning more and more cognitive knowledge, and was working as a teacher to tell others about it, life and I didn’t always seem to fit together very well. I sensed that somehow more joy was possible – more peace – a greater belonging.<br /><br />
Life has such tragedy in it. Loved ones die. Wars kill thousands. Millions, sometimes. People behave cruelly to each other – whether it’s petty street thugs or corporate CEO thugs.<br /><br />
And life also has such beauty in it. The birth of a child, a flower in springtime, an act of kindness, my beloved’s kiss. The tragedy and the beauty were more than my academic fields of study could comprehend.<br /><br />
The development of spiritual virtues – loving all of life, even the hard parts; equanimity, compassion – may be entirely a matter of getting our neurons wired a certain way, but the circuitry of spirituality draws on but is different from purely cognitive intelligence – draws on but is different from the emotional circuitry. <br /><br />
Native disposition – genetics – accounts for some of a person’s spiritual virtue. Can you cultivate the spiritual virtues beyond your native disposition? Maybe. Sort of.<br /><br />
The term spirituality encompasses transcendent love, inner peace, “all-right-ness,” acceptance, awe, beauty, wonder, humility, gratitude, a freshness of experience; a feeling of plenitude, abundance, and deep simplicity of all things; “the oceanic feeling,” Sigmund Freud spoke of, calling it “a sense of indissoluble union with the great All, and of belonging to the universal.” In moments of heightened spiritual experience, the gap between self and world vanishes. The normal experience of time leaves us, and each moment has a quality of the eternal in it. <br /><br />
Symptoms of developing spirituality include: increased tendency to let things happen rather than make them happen; more frequent attacks of smiling from the heart; more frequent feelings of being connected with others and nature; more frequent episodes of overwhelming appreciation; decisions flow more from intention or spontaneity and less from fears based on past experience; greater ability to enjoy each moment; decreased worrying; decreased interest in conflict, in interpreting the actions of others, in judging others, and in judging self; increased nonjudgmental curiosity; increased capacity to love without expecting anything in return; increased receptivity to kindness offered and increased interest in extending kindness to others.<br /><br />
By orienting toward the elevated – whether in compassion, ethics, art, or experience of divine presence – we transcend the ego defense mechanisms by which most of us spend our lives governed. Psychologist Robert Cloninger and his team at the Center for Well-Being of the Department of Psychiatry of the School of Medicine of Washington University in St. Louis sought a way to define spirituality more definitely, empirically, and measurably. Their 240-item questionnaire called the "Temperament and Character Inventory,” includes spirituality (they call it self-transcendence), as one of the dimensions of character. As Cloninger measures it, spirituality is the sum of three subscales: self-forgetfulness; transpersonal identification; and acceptance.<br /><br />
First, self-forgetfulness. This is the proclivity for becoming so immersed in an activity that the boundary between self and other seems to fall away. Whether the activity is sports, painting, playing a musical instrument, we might sometimes lose ourselves in it, and the sense of being a separate independent self takes a vacation.<br /><br />
Second, transpersonal identification. This is recognizing oneself in others -- and others in oneself. If you have ever found yourself looking at another person -- or another being -- with a feeling that you are that other, their body embodies you -- or if you have looked at yourself with a sense that your being embodies others -- then you have experienced transpersonal identification. Spirituality involves connecting with the world's suffering and apprehending that suffering as our very own. Transpersonal identification goes beyond "there but for the grace of God go I.” It's not that grace saves you from the unfortunate circumstances others endure. Nothing saves you because, in fact, you are not saved from those circumstances. If anyone is hungry, then you are hungry, for the hungry are you. That's transpersonal identification.<br /><br />
Third, acceptance. This is the ability to accept and affirm reality just as it is, even the hard parts, even the painful and tragic parts. Spiritually mature people are in touch with the suffering of the world, yet also and simultaneously feel joy in that connection. "Acceptance" does not mean complacency about oppression, injustice and harm. Indeed, the spiritually mature are also often the most active and the most effective in working for peace and social justice. They are energized to sustain that work because they can accept reality just as it is, even as they also work to change it. Because they are not attached to results of their work, they avoid debilitating disappointment and burn-out and are able to maintain the work for justice cheerfully. Because they find joy in each present moment, they avoid recrimination and blame. They see that blame merely recapitulates the very reactivity that is at the root of oppression.<br /><br />
Add together your scores for self-forgetfulness, transpersonal identification, and acceptance. The sum is your spirituality score. Here's the thing, though. It's not a matter of will – not a matter of volition. Spirituality is not volitional. It's not a matter of weighing the pros and cons and making a decision. You can't decide to be more spiritual or more spiritually mature. If you are low in spirituality -- that is, as Cloninger finds, you are practical, self-conscious, materialistic, controlling, characterized by rational objectivity and material success -- you can't wake up one morning and decide you are no longer going to be that way. It's who you are, and your own rational objectivity will very sensibly point out to you that you don't even know what it would mean to not be that way.<br /><br />
What you can decide, what is a matter of will and volition, is whether to take up a certain kind of discipline called a spiritual practice -- and just see where it takes you. Spirituality is not volitional, but taking up a spiritual practice is. What, you may ask, is a spiritual practice?<br /><br />
I know that these days all kinds of things get called a spiritual practice. But let's differentiate spiritual practice from just something you do. Quilting, piano-playing, or hiking might or might not qualify as spiritual practice – that is, might or might not tend to produce the symptoms of developing spirituality. An activity is more likely to work as spiritual practice if you seriously treat it as one.<br /><br />
First, treating a practice as a spiritual practice means engaging the activity with mindfulness -- focusing on the activity as you do it, with sharp awareness of each present moment.<br /><br />
Second, treating a practice as a spiritual practice means engaging the activity with intention of thereby cultivating spiritual development – reflecting as you do the activity (or just before and just after) on your intention to manifest those symptoms of spiritual development in your life.<br /><br />
Third, treating a practice as a spiritual practice means sometimes engaging the activity with a group that gathers expressly to do the activity in a way that cultivates spirituality – sharing each others’ spiritual reflections before, during, or after doing the activity together.<br /><br />
Fourth -- and most of all -- it requires establishing a foundation of spiritual openness.
There are three basic daily practices for everyone that over time develop a foundation upon which some other practice can grow into a real spiritual practice.<br />
(a) Silence. 15 minutes a day being still and quiet, just bringing attention to your own amazing breathing.<br />
(b) Journaling. 15 minutes a day writing about your gratitudes, your highest hopes and your experiences of awe.<br />
(c) Study. 15 minutes a day reading “wisdom literature” – the essays of Pema Chodron or Thomas Merton, the poems of Rumi or Mary Oliver, the Dao de Jing, the Bible’s book of Psalms – just to mention a very few examples of wisdom literature.<br /><br />
With these three daily practices building your foundation of spiritual awareness, then gardening, yoga, or throwing pottery are much better positioned to truly be spiritual practices for you.<br /><br />
Suppose you got serious about maintaining a spiritual discipline. You engage your practice daily; you do it mindfully, you do it with intention to cultivate compassion, connection, nonjudgmental curiosity -- self-forgetfulness, transpersonal identification, and acceptance; you get together regularly with a group that helps you maintain and explore the spiritual focus of your practice, and you develop your base with daily silence, journaling, and study. What then? What will happen? If you do everything to ensure that your practice is a true, bona fide spiritual practice, and you do that spiritual practice long enough – every day for a year, or 10 years, or 30 years – will you then exude equanimity and compassion while unperturbable calm inner peace and beauty continuously manifests as you gracefully, lovingly flow through your life? <br /><br />
Maybe. I offer no guarantees. Spirituality, as I mentioned, is not a matter of will. Strong muscles aren’t either. That is, you can’t just decide to bench press 500 pounds, and then go do it. But at least with muscles, there’s a fairly predictable timeline by which exercise increases strength. If you have a normal and healthy physiology, and you adopt a regimen of exercise, and stick to it, then you will get stronger. There’s a smooth curve by which you’ll progress toward the limit to which that regimen can take you.<br /><br />
Spiritual strengthening doesn’t go like that. It’s not a reliable product of putting in the time doing the exercise. The spirit has its own schedule. Committed serious spiritual practitioners can go for years when their practice just seems void and useless. Then they can hit a patch where they actually seem to be regressing. They’re acting as cranky, unkind, disconnected -- as withdrawn, on the one hand, or as controlling, on the other – as they ever had before they started any spiritual practice. There is no smooth curve of progress.<br /><br />
I started my primary spiritual practice for the worst reason: because an authority told me to. Twenty-two years ago I was in Chicago trying to pass muster to become a minister, trying to prove I was good enough. I had just finished my first year of divinity school, and I was meeting with the Midwest regional subcommittee on candidacy. <br /><br />
"Do you have a spiritual practice?" the committee asked me.<br /><br />
Before starting seminary, I had spent two years as the congregational facilitator and preacher for the Unitarian Universalist Fellowship of Clarksville, Tennessee. Before that, I'd served as a president of our Fellowship in Waco, Texas, as Vice President of our church in Charlottesville, Virginia and had worked as the church secretary for a year at our Nashville, Tennessee church. But did I have a spiritual practice?<br /><br />
I was a born-and-raised Unitarian Universalist. I had a Ph.D. I'd been a university professor of philosophy for four years. I could debate about metaphysics, metaethics, metatheology, poststructuralism, postindustrialism, and postmodernism.
If it was meta-, or post-, I was <i>there</i>. But did I have a spiritual practice?<br /><br />
Well, no, I didn't. “Get a spiritual practice,” the committee told me.<br /><br />
It is contradictory to take up a path of self-acceptance and trusting in my own inner wisdom because an outside authority told me to. Yet that’s what I did. It is contradictory to judge myself for judging myself too much. Yet that’s what I did, and still do, albeit somewhat more gently. Usually. <br /><br />
I’ve now had a chance to talk with a number of people on a path of serious spiritual practice. All of us, or so it seems, began, as I did, in some form of contradiction. We felt broken, wrong, inadequate, and we thought spiritual practice would fix us. <br /><br />
But spiritual practice isn’t about fixing anything – which is why there’s no smooth curve toward becoming fixed. Spiritual awakening is about realizing that we aren’t broke and don’t need fixing. We aren’t broken and from the beginning never have been. (Earlier, I listed some symptoms of developing spirituality -- increased this and decreased that -- and I mentioned Cloninger's measures of spirituality: self-forgetfulness, transpersonal identification, and acceptance. Do not, however, imagine that these are the goals of spiritual practice. Any practice that has a goal is not a spiritual practice. Yes, there is a role to play for intending to cultivate those qualities -- but it is a rather small role, and attempting to measure progress toward such qualities is delusion. A spiritual practice will tend -- naturally, on its own, but irregularly and unpredictably -- to bring fuller recognition that we are not broken, that we are whole and perfect just as we are and always have been; and fuller recognition of our intrinsic wholeness will tend -- naturally, on its own, but irregularly and unpredictably -- to bring the symptoms of developing spirituality.)<br /><br />
It’s hard to really believe that we are not broken and don't need fixing. Our culture constantly tells us we aren’t good enough, get better, buy this product, this treatment, this school, this exercise, this method. Spirituality is about remembering the fact of abundance in the midst of the daily barrage of messages of scarcity. Will recognition of abundance happen if you do the practice? I can tell you there will be more ups and downs than the stock market. But over the long haul? Probably, yes.<br /><br />
If you love just doing the practice, and you do it just because it is who you are, and not with any idea that you’re gaining something from it – if judgment about gain and loss, progress and regress, falls away and there’s just you, loving who you are and loving the way you, and the whole universe, manifest in and through your practice, then, yes. The fact of abundance will be clearer to you.<br /><br />
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We are doomed, and our time here is short, but we can make it a celebration. You may recognize the picture above. It’s from the 1964 film “Dr. Strangelove.” At the end of that film, a bomber plane is set to release its nuclear payload, which will set off a nuclear conflagration to end civilization. But the release mechanism jams. Slim Pickens climbs down into the bomb-bay to fix the jam. He succeeds, and the bomb is released -- while he’s still sitting on it. In the film’s most memorable shot, Slim Pickens is waving his cowboy hat and whooping as he rides the bomb down to his – and what will ultimately be the planet’s – destruction.<br><br>
“Woooo-hoooo!”<br><br>
Maybe that’s what spirituality looks like. He does seem to be living in the moment.<br><br>
That was such a striking shot when I first saw it because I knew if I were falling out of the sky riding on a nuclear bomb, I’d be freaked out in fear and despair: “My god, my god, my god, I’ve only got maybe one minute to live.”<br><br>
But look at what Slim Pickens’ character is doing with his minute! Woooo-hooooo.<br><br>
All of us are riding that bomb. Our time is so short before life blows up on us. There’s something very pure about this – just one chance at every minute. At every moment: This is it.Rev. Meredith Garmonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09600609816550758194noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7480207999294007243.post-31834230089150311922023-10-22T15:42:00.207-04:002023-11-21T16:13:29.819-05:00Not Such a Bad SpeciesREADING: <i>LORD OF THE FLIES</i> SUMMARY<br><br>
In William Golding’s 1954 novel, <i>The Lord of the Flies</i>, a plane goes down near a deserted island in the Pacific. “The only survivors are some British schoolboys, who can’t believe their good fortune. It’s as if they’ve just crash-landed in one of their adventure books. Nothing but beach, shells, and water for miles. And better yet: no grown-ups. On the very first day, the boys institute a democracy of sorts.<br><br>
One boy – Ralph – is elected to be the group’s leader. Athletic, charismatic, and handsome, he’s the golden boy of the bunch.
Ralph’s game plan is simple:<br>
1). Have fun. <br>
2). Survive. <br>
3). Make smoke signals for passing ships.<br><br>
Number one is a success. The others? Not so much. Most of the boys are more interested in feasting and frolicking than in tending the fire. Jack, the redhead, develops a passion for hunting pigs and as time progresses, he and his friends grow increasingly reckless. When a ship does finally pass in the distance, they’ve abandoned their post at the fire.<br><br>
‘You’re breaking the rules!’ Ralph accuses angrily.<br>
Jack shrugs. ‘Who cares?’<br>
‘The rules are the only thing we’ve got!’<br><br>
When night falls, the boys are gripped by terror, fearful of the beast they believe is lurking on the island. In reality, the only beast is inside them. <br><br>
Before long, they’ve begun painting their faces and casting off their clothes. And they develop overpowering urges – to pinch, to kick, to bite.<br><br>
Of all the boys, only one manages to keep a cool head. Piggy, as the others call him because he’s pudgier than the rest, has asthma, wears glasses, and can’t swim. Piggy is the voice of reason, to which nobody listens. ‘What are we?’ he wonders mournfully....‘Savages?’<br><br>
Weeks pass. Then, one day, a British naval officer comes ashore. The island is now a smoldering wasteland. Three of the children, including Piggy, are dead. ‘I should have thought,’ the officer reproaches them, ‘that a pack of British boys would have been able to put up a better show than that.’ <br><br>
Ralph, the leader of the once proper and well-behaved band of boys, bursts into tears.” Golding writes: “Ralph wept for the end of innocence, the darkness of man’s heart.”<br><br>
SERMON<br><br>
William Golding lied to you. He did. He lied to us. It may seem strange to say that a work of fiction is a lie, but just as truth may be conveyed in the guise of fiction, so may falsehood. Golding’s 1954 novel, <i>The Lord of the Flies</i>, purveyed a lie.<br><br>
<i>The Lord of the Flies</i> has sold tens of millions of copies and been translated into more than thirty languages and hailed as one of the classics of the twentieth century. Every year more high schoolers are assigned to read the book. The story is meant to illustrate, as Golding wrote in his letter to his publisher, that “even if we start with a clean slate, our nature compels us to make a muck of it....Man produces evil as a bee produces honey” (qtd in Bregman, p. 23).<br><br>
That’s the lie. We aren’t such a bad species. The book was written for a readership reeling from the atrocities of World War II and asking themselves how Auschwitz could have happened. The idea that’s there’s a Nazi hiding in each of us just waiting for the chance to come out was grim, but at least it seemed to make sense of the events that had happened.
William Golding was an unhappy man: an alcoholic, prone to depression – a man unable to take the trouble to spell acquaintances’ names correctly. Biologist and primatologist Frans de Waal said, “there is no shred of evidence that this is what children left to their own devices will do.” And Frans de Waal had not then heard about the real case of shipwrecked boys on a deserted island.<br><br>
It turns out there is such a story. And while millions have read William Golding’s fable, almost no one knew about the true story until more than 50 years after it happened when Rutger Bregman, researching his book that came out in Dutch in 2019, dug it up and tracked down the now-elderly survivors.<br><br>
In June 1965, Luke, Sione, Fatai, Kolo, Tevita, and Mano -- six boys, ages 13 to 16, all pupils at St. Andrew’s, a strict Anglican boarding school on the South Pacific island of Tonga -- were bored. They longed for adventure instead of school assignments. They came up with a plan to escape to Fiji, some 800 kilometers away. Or maybe all the way to New Zealand. The boys stole a 7.3-meter boat from a fisherman they all disliked. They brought two sacks of bananas, a few coconuts and a small gas burner – and that was pretty much it. No map. No compass.<br><br>
The first night a bit of weather came up. They hoisted the sail, which the wind promptly tore to shreds. Then the rudder broke. For eight days they drifted – without water other than what rainwater they could collect in the coconut shells – which they shared equally, each taking a sip in the morning and another in the evening.<br><br>
On the eighth day: a miracle. They spotted a small island – a hulking mass of rock, jutting up more than 300 meters out of the ocean. The boys had stumbled upon Ata, an uninhabited island 450 acres in size. A New York Times article reported in 2021 that Ata <blockquote>“had once been home to about 350 people, but in 1863 a British slave trader kidnapped about 150 of them, and the Tongan king relocated the rest to another island, where they would be protected.” (NYTimes, 2021 Apr 22)</blockquote>
By the time our lads from Tonga landed there, the island had been deserted for over 100 years – and today it is considered uninhabitable.
<blockquote>“At first the boys lived off raw fish, coconuts, and birds’ eggs. After about three months, they found the ruins of a village, and their fortunes improved — amid the rubble they discovered a machete, domesticated taro plants and a flock of chickens descended from the ones left behind by the previous inhabitants.” (NYTimes, 2021 Apr 22)</blockquote>
For 15 months the boys were on that island – a year and a quarter – before they caught the attention of a passing fishing trawler. <br><br>
The captain that rescued them wrote that,
<blockquote>“By the time we arrived, the boys had set up a small commune with food garden, hollowed-out tree trunks to store rainwater, a gymnasium with curious weights, a badminton court, chicken pens and a permanent fire, all from handiwork, an old knife blade and much determination.” (qtd in Bregman, p. 32)</blockquote>
Fatai, <blockquote>“after countless failed attempts, managed to produce a spark using two sticks. While the boys in the make-believe <i>Lord of the Flies</i> come to blows over the fire, those in the real-life Lord of the Flies tended their flame so it never went out, for more than a year. The kids agreed to work in teams of two, drawing up a strict roster for garden, kitchen and guard duty. Sometimes they quarreled, but whenever that happened they solved it by imposing a time-out. The squabblers would go to opposite ends of the island to cool their tempers, and ‘after four hours or so,’ Mano later remembered, ‘we’d bring them back together. Then we’d say, “OK, now apologize." That’s how we stayed friends.' Their days began and ended with song and prayer. Kolo fashioned a makeshift guitar from a piece of driftwood, half a coconut shell and six steel wires salvaged from their wrecked boat, and played it to help lift their spirits.” (Bregman, p. 33)</blockquote>
One day, Fatai slipped and fell off a cliff <blockquote>“and broke his leg. The other boys picked their way down after him and then helped him back up to the top. They set his leg using sticks and leaves." (Bregman, p. 33)</blockquote>
The leg healed perfectly. Says Rutger Bregman: “The real Lord of the Flies is a story about friendship, and cooperation, and human resilience.”<br><br>
In the delayed discovery of this story, the New York Times wrote:
<blockquote>“The six boys flourished in their spontaneous community, suggesting that cooperation, not conflict, is an integral feature of human nature” (NYTimes, 2021 Apr 22)</blockquote>
William Golding lied to us. So why has his novel seemed to so many to be realistic? Let's take a look at why we are so ready to believe the worst about ourselves.<br><br>
In World War II, German planes dropped 80,000 bombs on London alone. Forty thousand people in the UK killed -- a million buildings damaged or destroyed. Germany’s war planners were sure this would break the British will to resist – that there would be general social collapse. The British famously kept calm and carried on.<br><br>
As the tide of war turned, the Allies, refusing to learn from the British experience planned a similar civilian bombing campaign against Germany. They, too, fell into the delusion that this would break their enemy’s will to resist. Terrible idea. Crisis brings out not the worst in people but the best. Analyses after the war indicated that Allied bombing <blockquote>“strengthened the German wartime economy, thereby prolonging the war. Between 1940 and 1944, they found that German tank production had multiplied by a factor of nine, and of fighter jets by a factor of fourteen." (Bregman, p. xvii</blockquote>
The bombs boosted solidarity -- and thereby efficiency.<br><br>
Humans are made to pull together and help each other out. The movie, "Titanic," shows people blinded by panic – except for the string quartet. But the movie was not accurate about that. “In fact, the evacuation was quite orderly” (Bregman).
<blockquote>“Or take the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks. As the Twin Towers burned, thousands of people descended the stairs calmly, even though they knew their lives were in danger. They stepped aside for firefighters and the injured.” (Bregman)</blockquote>
Most people, most of the time, are basically decent. Maybe the worst thing about us is what a hard time we have believing that. So why do we have such a hard time believing the truth that we are basically decent, that we care for others, and are, when circumstances require, ready to do enact our caring with considerable courage.<br><br>
One factor for why it’s hard for us to believe in one-another’s basic virtue is this: The way we got to be such a cooperative species was by carefully monitoring noncooperation when it pops up. Cooperative, pro-social behavior doesn’t grab our attention much. Our brains are wired to focus on anti-social behavior – so that we can bring social forces to bear to bring the offender back in line.<br><br>
It’s like our attraction to sugar, which was functional when sugar was scarce and we needed a preference for the riper fruit. Now that we can mass produce sugar, our sweet toothes are killing us. Focus on anti-social behavior was a brilliant adaptation when it was a rare thing to see anti-social behavior. But now that we have mass media inundating us with stories of people doing bad things – which the media does because people doing normal, ordinary, everyday good things isn’t very interesting. It doesn't sell newspapers or attract eyeballs or grab the attention of brains wired to attend to misbehavior. Functional, normally cooperative people are boring to watch – which is rule number one of any producer of a reality TV show. (Hence my prayer and blessing for you all is: may your life be one that, if it were a reality TV show, it would have terrible ratings.)<br><br>
We got to be highly cooperative, hyper-social animals by paying attention to rare uncooperative actions. But then we developed media that overloads us with stories that we’re wired to pay attention to. Thus, we end up with the misimpression that people are usually only out for their own narrow self-interests – that people are no darn good. As Rutger Bregman says:<blockquote>“Even after the researchers presented their subjects with hard data about strangers returning lost wallets, or the fact that the vast majority of the population doesn’t cheat or steal, most subjects did not view humanity in a more positive light.” (11)</blockquote>
In particular, Bregman notes,
<blockquote>“Catastrophes bring out the best in people. I know of no other sociological finding that’s backed by so much solid evidence that’s so blithely ignored. The picture we’re fed by the media is consistently the opposite of what happens when disaster strikes.”</blockquote>
That’s one factor in why William Golding’s novel seemed to so many to be realistic. A second factor is this. Power tends to corrupt. Lord Acton was right about that one. We are basically decent, but power does tend to corrupt us.<br><br>
It starts in little ways, mild yet telling. In one study, subjects were put in teams of three and given a task to do together. The researchers would randomly pick one of the three and say, “you be the leader.” As the team of three went about their task, the researchers brought them a snack – a plate of 5 cookies. Five cookies for 3 people. One of the cookies would typically be left on the plate, as per etiquette that inhibits taking the last one. That leaves 4 cookies for 3 people. They all get one – and then one of them takes a second. What the study found is that it was almost always the person randomly selected the designated leader who took that second cookie.<br><br>
In another study, subjects were assigned a car and told to drive it around the block. Some subjects were randomly assigned a beat-up Mitsubishi or Ford Pinto – while others were assigned to drive a high-end late-model BMW or Mercedes. As they approached a crosswalk, a pedestrian would step off the curb. All the drivers of the clunker cars stopped and let the pedestrian go by. The drivers of the fancy cars, however, 45 percent of the time failed to stop for the pedestrian.<br><br>
Psychologist Dacher Keltner calls it Acquired Sociopathy. Even a tiny bit of power, and we feel like taking that extra cookie.
Why are we like that? At heart, we’re such team players that we adapt to the role we find ourselves in – even adopting some traits unconsciously. If you’re assigned the role of an Important Person, you’ll act like an Important Person -- and Important People don’t have time to wait for pedestrians. We’re funny that way. We are not such a bad species – but we are funny.<br><br>
People often rise to power by being very friendly, attentive, warm, caring, and helpful. Then they get into power, and it’s like brain damage.
<blockquote>"It transpires that people in power display the same tendencies. They literally act like someone with brain damage. Not only are they more impulsive, self-centered, reckless, arrogant and rude, they are more likely to cheat on their spouses, are less attentive to other people and less interested in others’ perspectives. They’re also more shameless, often failing to manifest that one facial phenomenon that makes human beings unique among primates. They don’t blush.” (Bregman, p. 227</blockquote>
Neurological brain scans find that <blockquote>“a sense of power disrupts what is known as mirroring, a mental process which plays a key role in empathy. Ordinarily, we mirror all the time. Someone else laughs, you laugh, too; someone yawns, so do you. But powerful individuals mirror much less. It is almost as if they no longer feel connected to their fellow human beings.
As if they’ve come unplugged.” (Bregman, p. 227)</blockquote>If we are conscious of this tendency, we can counteract it. Many of us have had experience with that boss who was the exception to this tendency – who remained thoughtful and considerate of others even after ascending to power. So it can be counteracted. When it isn’t counteracted, those suffering from acquired sociopathy assume that others are as self-centered and uncooperative as they have become. Having come unplugged, they forget how cooperative and decent most people are.
<blockquote>“The dynamic during disasters is almost always the same: adversity strikes and there’s a wave of spontaneous cooperation in response – then the authorities panic and unleash a second disaster.” (Bregman, p. 6)</blockquote>
Emergency responders don’t respond, believing there’s too much chaos to go in – or armed authorities open fire on peaceful people.<br><br>
Rebecca Solnit wrote about the aftermath of the 2005 Hurricane Katrina in New Orleans. She wrote: <blockquote>“My own impression is that elite panic comes from powerful people who see all humanity in their own image" (A Paradise Built in Hell, 2009, p. 131.)</blockquote>
Bregman adds:<blockquote>“Dictators and despots, governors and generals – they all too often resort to brute force to prevent scenarios that exist only in their own heads, on the assumption that the average Joe is ruled by self-interest, just like them.” (p. 7)</blockquote>
People in power tend to purvey the idea that <i>The Lord of the Flies</i> is realistic. Between our sweet tooth for bad news and the projected acquired sociopathy of the powerful, we’re apt to be convinced we’re a terrible species. As filmmaker Richard Curtis observed:
<blockquote>“If you make a film about a man kidnapping a woman and chaining her to a radiator for five years – something that has happened probably once in history – it’s called searingly realistic analysis of society. If I make a film like 'Love Actually,' which is about people falling in love, and there are about a million people falling in love in Britain today, it’s called a sentimental presentation of an unrealistic world.”</blockquote>
Sentimental? I suppose you could say so. But unrealistic? Not at all.<br><br>
So I will leave you, then, with Hugh Grant’s voiceover words at the opening of Curtis’ film, 'Love Actually':
<blockquote>“Whenever I get gloomy with the state of the world, I think about the arrivals gate at Heathrow Airport. General opinion's starting to make out that we live in a world of hatred and greed, but I don't see that. It seems to me that love is everywhere. Often it's not particularly dignified or newsworthy, but it's always there – fathers and sons, mothers and daughters, husbands and wives, boyfriends, girlfriends, old friends. When the planes hit the Twin Towers, as far as I know none of the phone calls from the people on board were messages of hate or revenge – they were all messages of love. If you look for it, I've got a sneaky feeling you'll find that love actually is all around.”</blockquote>
Not such a bad species.<br><br>
Amen.
Rev. Meredith Garmonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09600609816550758194noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7480207999294007243.post-13871450007386146022023-10-15T12:06:00.228-04:002023-11-04T13:00:19.329-04:00Justice v. MercyJustice is our theme of the month for October. So what is it? What is justice?<br><br>
We are a hodge-podge of concepts bouncing off each other in patterns that grow into habits of thought. We are also bodies, and bodily needs, and emotions, and emotional triggers, and reactivity, and ego defense mechanisms elaborate and complex. We are all of that. But if your body is, for a moment, reasonably well taken care of – it is fed and rested, reasonably healthy and pain free – and if conditions are such as to be conducive to being calm and reflective, not consumed by any particular desire, safe, without threat to your well-being or reputation, THEN what’s left of you is a hodge podge of concepts bouncing off each other in patterns that have formed into habits of thought.<br><br>
And those concepts that we carry around – those concepts that constitute us when we we’re healthy, safe, and calmly reflective – those concepts aren’t always all that consistent, and when this is exposed, we experience cognitive dissonance. Still, we might spend a lifetime happily bouncing around among our concepts along greased grooves oblivious to tensions between them unless some moral dilemma arises. We might not notice, for instance, that mercy is unjust.<br><br>
Mercy seems so benevolent, so kind – and justice seems like a good thing, too. Could two good things be at odds with each other? These concepts that we carry around – that make up our thought patterns – become part of us bringing with them a history, and those associations are still with them. Justice, going back to classical times, has to do with people getting what they are due. On the one hand, you are a just person if you give to others what they are due. On the other hand, you have a basis to ask for justice from others if you don’t believe you are getting what you are due.<br><br>
How do we determine what is due? There’s been a lot of variability in that through history, from culture to culture, and even from one individual to another within the same time and culture, or, for that matter within the same individual from one day to the next. The guideline we have, also going back to classical times, is “treat like cases alike.” Nothing can happen among people that doesn’t have some similarities to something previous that happened. If you can describe an incident with words, those words have meaning because of prior experience with them. Those meanings come with feelings, however vague, and the feelings are either good or bad, however slightly – and that is the ground from which our moral reasoning begins and our moral attitudes take shape.<br><br>
We look for the principles that were followed in other cases, and we try to apply those principles to the case at hand. Treat like cases alike. In fact, this basic principle of fairness is common to humans through every culture and time. We find this sense of fairness not only in homo sapiens, but in hominids – which includes humans, chimpanzees, bonobos, gorillas, and orangutans – and not only hominids, but simians, which includes all of the above plus gibbons and monkeys. (Good to know our place in the family of things.)<br><br>
Simians have been around 60 million years, while the particular simian, homo sapiens, has been on this planet less than 300,000 years. In one study, two capuchin monkeys were in adjacent plexiglass containers. They could see each other. They’d been trained to perform a simple task for which they get a bit of food as reward. They reach through a hole, hand the human a rock – that’s the task -- and the human will take it, and hand them back a bit of food. At first, the food is a piece of cucumber.
Cucumber is OK. The monkeys will take the cucumber and eat it. Monkeys will keep performing the task and happily enjoying their cucumber 30 or more times -- it’s hard to get full on cucumber.<br><br>
But remember, the monkeys can see each other. If, after a couple rounds of doing the task, and getting cucumber, monkey A sees monkey B get a grape in exchange for performing the task, monkey A notices. Monkey A apparently thinks, “Great, now we’re getting grapes.” For a capuchin monkey, a bit of cucumber is OK, but a grape is <i>delicioso</i>. So if monkey A hands the human a rock and gets back only another bit of cucumber, there’s going to be some protest about that. They don't speak English, but it's clear what the content of the protest is: "That’s not fair! He got a grape! Where’s my grape?" The slighted monkey will become agitated and howl. You can watch this on Youtube.<br><br>
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You’ll see that the monkey takes that bit of cucumber and throws it back at the human. The cucumber which a minute before had been perfectly acceptable is now despised. Similar experiments have been tried with dogs and some bird species, and they found similar results.<br><br>
Treat like cases alike – a very deep principle. If I do the same task as someone else, and there’s payment for it, I want the same payment. The need to be treated fairly is a deep need. We can calmly accept deprivation if others are, too.<br><br>
So: justice. Giving people what they are due and treating like cases alike. “What is due” might be a better shake. When we talk about justice to racial groups, or women, or to workers, or to the poor, we’re talking about treating them better. But “what is due” might be punishment. If someone has done wrong, we want them punished.<br><br>
I’ve noticed some shift in recent years toward avoiding the word punishment. When people object to police abuse, for instance, they rarely say, “Abusive officers should be punished.” The preferred language seems to be, “Abusive officers should be held accountable.” Accountability could take the form of punishment – and that’s the form that usually seems to be implied -- but I do appreciate leaving the door open for a nonpunitive form of accountability. The movement for restorative justice is all about accountability and restoring relationships but without jail or prison or heavy fines.<br><br>
Still, some cases arise that reveal that a felt need to punish goes deep in, at least, us humans. The case of George Tyndall was a reminder of that this week. George Tyndall was a former gynecologist at USC, accused of sexual misconduct toward a generation of women students at USC. The University paid a $1.1 billion dollar settlement – the largest in higher education history, and Tyndall was set to stand trial “on sex crimes stemming from his treatment of 16 former patients, a subset of hundreds of women who had accused him of inappropriate touching, harassment and other misconduct during a tenure at the campus health clinic that stretched from the late 1980s to 2016.” Then George Tyndall – out on bail – died in his home of natural causes on Oct 4, a little more than a week ago.<br><br>
This was profoundly unsatisfying for some of his victims. Many of his accusers felt that his death allowed him to avoid justice. They didn’t want Tyndall dead, they wanted him punished. Even if some of them might have wanted the death penalty for him – and I don’t know that any of them did, but if they had – what they would be wanting would be death <i>as punishment</i>, not death from natural causes, which is what the coroner reported, and which felt like cheating his way out of the punishment that would have represented justice. The felt need for punishment runs deep.<br><br>
What makes punishment punishment and not simply a mishap, or natural causes, is that it’s deliberately inflicted by the agents of social order for the sake of social order. In the family, those agents are the parents, who might punish a child for the sake of family social order and mores. In the state, those agents are called our justice system. In practice, of course, our penal system today does more damage to social order than it does good, but the ideal, that wrongdoing should be punished – that is, that the perpetrator should endure unpleasant consequences inflicted by an authority. The authority, whether human or divine, must be seen as having responsibility for protecting our collective well-being. That idea of punishment from an authority is deeply a part of us. <br><br>
Determining what punishment is due involves an evolving system trying to treat like cases alike. Relevantly similar crimes, we feel, should get relevantly similar punishment. Of course, there’s slippage around the notion of “relevantly similar” – if two men, in two separate incidents, have each stolen a loaf of bread, and one of them is starving and trying to feed a family that is starving, while the other is reasonably well-fed and had the money to buy the bread, but just didn’t want to, many of us would call that a morally relevant difference. Javert, in Victor Hugo’s <i>Les Miserables</i>, didn’t think it was morally relevant, and Javert pursues Jean Valjean accordingly.<br><br>
So that’s a sketch of some of the ways our concept of justice bounces around in our thought patterns. What, then, about mercy? Do we say that Jean Valjean should get mercy, even though he did steal that bread? Or do we say, forget mercy, our principles of justice themselves should be adjusted? We should understand that justice itself takes into account extenuating circumstances. Do we need a concept of mercy at all?<br><br>
Justice may call for punishment, but mercy would let you off the hook. That’s the situation that Shakespeare presents to us in “The Merchant of Venice.”
Antonio borrows money from Shylock, and offers a pound of his flesh closest his heart as guarantee of a loan. OK, that's very weird, and probably wouldn't be found legally binding even in a renaissance court, but let us allow Shakespeare his conceit. When the loan is not repaid, Shylock claims his pound of flesh. Portia then tells Shylock he must be merciful. Shylock retorts,
“On what compulsion must I? Tell me that.” Portia famously replies:
<blockquote>“The quality of mercy is not strained;<br>
It droppeth as the gentle rain from heaven<br>
Upon the place beneath. It is twice blest;<br>
It blesseth him that gives and him that takes:<br>
'T is mightiest in the mightiest; it becomes<br>
The throned monarch better than his crown:<br>
His sceptre shows the force of temporal power,<br>
The attribute to awe and majesty,<br>
Wherein doth sit the dread and fear of kings;<br>
But mercy is above this sceptred sway;<br>
It is enthronèd in the hearts of kings,<br>
It is an attribute to God himself;<br>
And earthly power doth then show likest God's<br>
When mercy seasons justice. Therefore, Jew,<br>
Though justice be thy plea, consider this,<br>
That, in the course of justice, none of us<br>
Should see salvation: we do pray for mercy;<br>
And that same prayer doth teach us all to render<br>
The deeds of mercy. I have spoke thus much<br>
To mitigate the justice of thy plea;<br>
Which if thou follow, this strict court of Venice<br>
Must needs give sentence 'gainst the merchant there.”</blockquote>
Portia says the quality of mercy is “not strained” -- meaning that it is “not constrained,” that is, we cannot be constrained to be merciful. Mercy can’t be compelled. If it’s compelled, it isn’t mercy. Shylock's question was, “On what compulsion must I be merciful?” Portia's answer is that there's no compulsion. It's not about compulsion. Justice is about compulsion: there are principles of fairness that rightfully <i>do</i> constrain our behavior, but mercy doesn’t work that way. Mercy just happens, the way gentle rain falls on the ground. And when it does, it blesses both giver and receiver.<br><br>
So: Mercy is what we call it when we are spared from what we deserve. A few lines later, Portia makes the point: “in the course of justice none of us should see salvation.” Wait. What? None? OK, I think I see our problem here. <br><br>
If justice is understood as that which, strictly adhered to, condemns us all, then we need a new idea of justice. Alas, the idea that we all deserve damnation is our Western heritage. Theologians and priests for centuries emphasized what sinners we are. They gave us a picture of ourselves as fundamentally corrupt at our core. Every one of us is so profoundly, inherently sinful, that if we got what we deserved, we’d all be thrown to the worst punishment we can imagine. So mercy enters the picture. No one is good enough to deserve going to heaven on their own merits, but some people get in just because of God’s benevolent mercy.<br><br>
The Church has generally avoided stating precisely how many would receive this grace. (The Jehovah’s Witnesses are an exception. They teach that exactly 144,000 faithful Christians will go to heaven to rule with Christ in the Kingdom of God.) Mostly, only a rough sense of the proportions was indicated. In John Calvin’s theology, for instance, it seems like very few. I get the impression from Calvin that he imagines maybe something around 2 percent of all Christian believers (and no one who isn't a Christian believer) will get to heaven. Our forebears, the Universalists, taught that God’s benevolent mercy extends to all -- every person will go to heaven. We get our name, Universalists, from this doctrine of universal salvation. But even the Universalists, for the most part, didn’t think people deserved it, or had earned it. Justice would condemn, but God’s mercy saves. On that point, the Calvinists and the Universalists agreed -- they merely disagreed on how many of us God’s mercy saves.<br><br>
Through the 20th century, Unitarians and Universalists slowly shed the sense that sin – inner corruption – was humanity’s essential and most salient feature. Instead, we began to see human suffering in terms of disconnection: the deprivation (in the lower classes) and alienation (in any class) that accompanies uprootedness from healthy community of care, respect, meaning, and opportunity.<br><br>
We stand, as ever, in need of justice – but not justice in the course of which none of us should see salvation, but justice as the construction of fairness in the face of oppressions that undermine community, justice as healing the wounds of separation, justice as the restoration of belonging. If we have real justice in this way – then we could do without mercy.<br><br>
Mercy, like justice, has historically had a variety of meanings. Sometimes mercy is used to mean compassion and kindness – and we can certainly use that. Our hearts long for compassion, kindness, caring – but to give it and receive it. But Mercy, taken as a decision to deviate from the requirements of justice, perhaps we could do without.<br><br>
Justice is principled: it follows principles. If there are rules governing the case at hand, justice follows the rules, and if there are no clear rules, justice weighs the principles. Mercy, however, flouts all rules and principles. Mercy is necessarily unprincipled. Principles define justice, and mercy is deviation from justice and its principles.<br><br>
We might, indeed, think that our principles of justice need to be more compassionate, less draconian, but as long as they are principles – that is, they apply to all like cases – then they are matters of deciding what justice is, not matters of deciding when to forego justice for the sake of something called mercy. If a judge is merciful to one convicted defendant but not others, that’s not fair. And if the judge is “merciful” to all of them, then that’s not mercy – it’s just that judge’s rules of procedure.<br><br>
Too much mercy and there’s no enforcement of justice at all. If contracts are never enforced, no one will enter into contracts – including ultimately, the social contract – and society falls apart. If our children – or we ourselves -- were always spared any unpleasant consequences of their actions, they won’t learn – or we won’t maintain -- the skills and habits of responsibility.<br><br>
In a lesser known Shakespeare play, <i>Timon of Athens</i>, a character makes a direct rebuttal of Portia. “Nothing emboldens sin so much as mercy,” the character says.<br><br>
Mercy is utterly capricious – and we should be suspicious of it not just because it is abstractly unjust but because caprice tends to favor the already privileged. In our schools, for instance, black students are more likely than white students to be referred for disciplinary action for subjective infractions such as disruption or defiance. Across the board, black students tend to experience harsher disciplinary measures at higher rates than their peers in public schools in the United States.
Black students are 4 times more likely to experience suspension than their White peers.As mercy overrides the principles that would apply to everyone, what determines when mercy is extended? When the principles which constitute justice are overthrown, what’s left are our implicit, unspoken biases, including implicit racial biases.<br><br>
Now, before I conclude that we ought to just dispense with the very idea of mercy, that what we need is greater clarity on principles of justice, and that we should then simply live by those principles, I want to acknowledge what I find to be a fairly compelling case for sometimes, indeed, tossing out rules and principles and reasons. Back in 1985, California writer Anne Herbert, wrote an article for <i>The Whole Earth Review</i> titled, “Random Kindness and Senseless Acts of Beauty.” The phrase caught on. You have probably heard it. Herbert's phrase cleverly turned on its head a phrase we had all heard too much in the news: random violence and senseless acts of brutality. What a lovely thing to instead practice random kindness and senseless acts of beauty! Herbert writes in her original 1985 article:
<blockquote>“Anything you think there should be more of, do it randomly. Don’t await a reason. It will make itself be more, senselessly. Scrawl it on the wall: RANDOM KINDNESS AND SENSELESS ACTS OF BEAUTY. I used to have fantasies of positive vandalism. Breaking into the school and painting a dirty room bright colors overnight. Fixing broken glass in people’s houses while they’re gone. Leaving full meals on tables in the struggling part of town.”</blockquote>
That really does sound lovely. What makes that kind of random kindness different from mercy’s capriciousness is that mercy is something bestowed by someone in a position of power – whether divine or human: school authorities deciding whether to suspend a student; the criminal court judge pronouncing sentence upon the convicted; a soldier victorious in battle might or might not show mercy to the vanquished; a person of wealth who controls resources that can make or break another’s livelihood may choose to be merciful.<br><br>
Another way of saying that mercy is uncompelled and unconstrained is to say the option of mercy arises from being in a position of power over someone else. Take away the power relation and instead of mercy, it’s a random kindness – and possibly also a senseless act of beauty.<br><br>
So that’s the conclusion I leave you with today. My argument is that compassion and kindness – caring and love – are the greatest forces and the highest achievements humanity can strive for. But if we get justice right, then we will have no need for a concept of mercy that is in any way distinct from compassion and kindness.<br><br>
And: if you’re not in a position of exercising power over, then some randomness, some caprice, just following the whims of impulses to kindness, can also be a beautiful thing – blessing indeed the one that gives and the one receives.Rev. Meredith Garmonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09600609816550758194noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7480207999294007243.post-32884024653940973982023-10-01T13:53:00.002-04:002023-10-03T19:13:53.322-04:00Justice<div class="separator" style="clear: both;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj-UP_O1VtOGF9LKWoWnbqVZqMpRlZBjjs-KBoUNH8BjLf_lx_vDtDD6H5PJ52VilkLmlRQvMpApSqp-vi2e0cHrbYaeQvajQBNGGW0sYQ_lit0_u4kGIucjg03OLr3lREABP1WZVm5X9bNmWz4qU1kctlYWw_DAQUybrxAs1dXKPoNReGBRlH-LTA7/s1286/LP23.10.01.jpg" style="clear: right; display: block; float: right; text-align: center;"><img alt="" border="0" data-original-height="1286" data-original-width="1256" height="200" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj-UP_O1VtOGF9LKWoWnbqVZqMpRlZBjjs-KBoUNH8BjLf_lx_vDtDD6H5PJ52VilkLmlRQvMpApSqp-vi2e0cHrbYaeQvajQBNGGW0sYQ_lit0_u4kGIucjg03OLr3lREABP1WZVm5X9bNmWz4qU1kctlYWw_DAQUybrxAs1dXKPoNReGBRlH-LTA7/s200/LP23.10.01.jpg" /></a></div>Our national Unitarian Universalist Association is considering a new articulation of Unitarian Universalist values – as some of you have heard. The new version is graphically represented as a six-petaled flower, with love at the center surrounded by six petals: justice, interdependence, transformation, pluralism, equity and generosity.
Our theme for this month is justice. In subsequent months, our themes will explore the other petals, and finally, love, at the center of it all, holding it all together.<br><br>
The fact that Justice and Equity are both among our values means that we see them as different. When we say justice is one of our Unitarian Universalist shared values, we mean:<blockquote>“We work to be diverse multicultural Beloved Communities where all thrive. We covenant to dismantle racism and all forms of systemic oppression. We support the use of inclusive democratic processes to make decisions.”</blockquote>
And when we say Equity is one of our shared values, we mean:
<blockquote>“We declare that every person has the right to flourish with inherent dignity and worthiness. We covenant to use our time, wisdom, attention, and money to build and sustain fully accessible and inclusive communities.”</blockquote>So there’s some overlap there. Both justice and equity are about inclusive community. Justice calls for a community where all thrive, while equity calls for a right to flourish – basically the same thing.<br><br>
Dismantling racism and all forms of systemic oppression, as the Justice petal calls for, and every person flourishing with inherent dignity and worthiness, as the Equity petal calls for, are pretty much the necessary and sufficient conditions for each other. Still: we might not notice that each implies the other, so it’s good to be explicit about both dismantling racism and providing for everyone to flourish with inherent dignity and worthiness.<br><br>
What Justice emphasizes, however, that equity doesn’t, is the idea of Beloved Community, and the explicit attention to systemic oppression. So let’s look at that.<br><br>
<b>Beloved Community</b><br><br>
What is this idea of Beloved Community?<br><br>
Our story begins with Josiah Royce (1855-1916). Royce coined the phrase, “Beloved Community,” and what he meant by it is not quite what you might initially think of when you hear “Beloved Community.” Royce was among the first to bring sustained philosophical attention to what community is and how it functions.<br><br>
Royce argued communities are logically prior to individuals. That is: the usual idea is that individuals are prior, that individuals come first, and then they get together and form a community. But Royce said that gets it backward. Community relationships create individuals. We are formed as the individuals we are by being nurtured by a community into a place within that community, and our identity comes from that place. Individuals don’t make a community; communities make individuals.<br><br>
Our Unitarian Universalist congregations are sometimes described as being, or aiming to be, communities of memory and hope. It is from Josiah Royce that we get these ideas of communities of memory and hope. A community of memory is one in which the members have a shared story about their past, and a community of hope is one in which the members share an aspiration going forward.<br><br>
Royce wrote, “There is only one way to be an ethical individual.” Only one. He said: <blockquote>“That is to choose your cause, and then to serve it, as the Samurai his feudal chief, as the ideal knight of romantic story his lady.”</blockquote>But the cause we serve is itself a product of some community or other. The community is logically prior to the individual, remember, so it is communities who bring individuals into existence and, in the process, lay before them causes to which these individuals the community has created may choose to be loyal. So Royce said:<blockquote>“My life means nothing, either theoretically or practically, unless I am a member of a community.”</blockquote>To go further and be an ethical individual entails choosing a cause your community defines and places before you, and being loyal to that.<br><br>
Royce then said that beyond all actual communities there is an ideal community – a community not realized but imaginable. This imaginary ideal community may nevertheless powerfully guide us. The ideal that Royce asks us to imagine is a community of those who are loyal to truth and reality and loyalty itself. It is this imaginary ideal community that Royce called, “Beloved Community.”<br><br>
As I was reading about Josiah Royce’s philosophy this week, I was reminded of the psychiatrist M. Scott Peck’s words in his 1978 book, <i>The Road Less Travelled</i>. “Mental health,” Peck said, “is an ongoing process of dedication to reality at all costs.” Following Peck, I think of spiritual development, spiritual maturation, in those terms: an ongoing process of dedication to reality at all costs. In other words, the project of growing spiritually -- or of mental health -- is a matter of vigilant attention to all the ways we fool ourselves, all the myriad tricks of our egos. It is to be constantly searching ourselves for the arising of self-deception, continuously questioning whether we are perceiving reality through the distorting lens of mere self-interest.<br><br>
We can never rid ourselves entirely of a proclivity to self-deception, but we can get better at catching such delusions sooner and releasing them once we spot them. That’s the “ongoing process of dedication to reality at all costs.” Scott Peck calls that mental health. We might call it spiritual growth. We might also call it love – because to see through the ego’s defense mechanisms to a reality of flowing interconnection where everything is everything else – to see that there are no permanent distinct things but only things temporarily appearing distinguishable – this is to participate in the Universal love that holds us always, that has never broken faith with us and never will.<br><br>
When there is a community of people all together dedicated to reality, to truth, at all costs – no matter how inconvenient, no matter our self-interests – then you have a community participating in that Universal Love. So Royce called it Beloved Community. This imaginary ideal is, as I said, not quite what you might initially think of when you hear “Beloved Community.”<br><br>
<b>MLK</b><br><br>
Martin Luther King, Jr’s theology studies – at Morehouse, at Crozer Theological Seminary in Pennsylvania and at Boston University, where he earned his PhD – included substantial philosophy study, including of Josiah Royce. King appropriated Royce’s “Beloved Community” and specifically tied it to his campaign for nonviolent social change. King wrote in 1957: <blockquote>“The nonviolent resister must often express his protest through noncooperation or boycotts, but noncooperation and boycotts are not ends themselves; they are merely means to awaken a sense of moral shame in the opponent. The end is redemption and reconciliation. The aftermath of nonviolence is the creation of the beloved community, while the aftermath of violence is tragic bitterness.”</blockquote>
He added: <blockquote>“Love is creative and redemptive. Love builds up and unites; hate tears down and destroys. The aftermath of the ‘fight with fire’ method is bitterness and chaos, the aftermath of the love method is reconciliation and creation of the beloved community. Physical force can repress, restrain, coerce, destroy, but it cannot create and organize anything permanent; only love can do that. Yes, love — which means understanding, creative, redemptive goodwill, even for one’s enemies — is the solution to the race problem.”</blockquote>
Throughout his career, King emphasized not winning, not ending segregation by defeating segregationists. He emphasized, instead, reconciling with segregationists, and he identified beloved community with this condition of reconciliation. For King, Beloved Community was the name of the end goal of all positive social change. In his “Sermon on Gandhi,” he wrote:
<blockquote>“The aftermath of nonviolence is the creation of the beloved community, so that when the battle is over, a new relationship comes into being between the oppressed and the oppressor....The way of acquiescence leads to moral and spiritual suicide. The way of violence leads to bitterness in the survivors and brutality in the destroyers. But the way of nonviolence leads to redemption and the creation of the beloved community.”</blockquote>
<b>What Does All This Mean for What Justice Requires of Us Today?</b><br><br>
So here we are, in the Fall of 2023, here today to reflect on what justice is, what justice requires of us. And what we’re seeing is that what justice requires of us is love. The language in our national association’s new bylaws, as proposed, puts beloved community at the center of its conception of justice.<br><br>
Beloved community is conceived with some different emphases by Josiah Royce, who originated the term, and by Martin Luther King, who brought it to his social justice activism. For Royce, it’s more about participating in universal love as manifested and realized in and through participation in an imaginary ideal community committed to truth, to reality at all costs. For King, it’s more about directly living by the injunction in the Gospel of Matthew to Love your Enemies.<br><br>
Justice is about beloved community and beloved community is about love. Cornel West says that justice is what love looks like in public. Or we might say love is what justice looks like – or simply, as Zen master and African American woman Angel Kyodo Williams writes in <i>Radical Dharma</i>: “Love and Justice are not two.”<br><br>
We live in polarized times – in some ways even more polarized now than in the Civil Rights Era of the 50s and 60s. And what justice requires of us in these times, just as in any time, is love. In these times – when almost half of our country consists of people who deny women autonomy of their bodies, who glorify guns and facilitate the ongoing carnage of 30,000 gun deaths a year, who are persecuting LGBTQ folk, whose embrace of white supremacy is all but explicit, who deny climate change and obstruct any efforts to reduce carbon emissions, who are undermining democracy on every front, embracing authoritarianism, and taking to cruelty not as an unfortunate means but delighting in it as a sufficient end in itself – in the face of all this, what must we do for justice? What we must do is love.<br><br>
Since Martin Luther King, Jr. did so much to advance the concept of beloved community, and since beloved community is so central to our Unitarian Universalist conception of justice, let’s look more closely at how King explained Jesus’ injunction to love your enemies.<br><br>
In a 1957 sermon called “Loving Your Enemies,” King speaks the passage that has become one of the best-known King quotations. I will quote more than is usually quoted, to give you a little more context:
<blockquote>“Let us move now from the practical how to the theoretical why. Why should we love our enemies? The first reason is fairly obvious. Returning hate for hate multiplies hate, adding deeper darkness to a night already devoid of stars. Darkness cannot drive out darkness; only light can do that. Hate cannot drive out hate; only love can do that. Hate multiplies hate, violence multiplies violence, and toughness multiplies toughness in a descending spiral of destruction.”</blockquote>
Only love can drive out hate. Only love. King goes on to speak of the damage that hating does to the one who hates. He says:
<blockquote>“Another reason we must love our enemies is that hate scars the soul and distorts the personality. It certainly harms the hated – and is just as injurious to the person who hates. Like an unchecked cancer, hate corrodes the personality and eats away its vital unity....Psychiatrists report that many of the strange things that happen in the subconscious, many of our inner conflicts, are rooted in hate. They say, ‘Love or perish.’ Modern psychology recognizes what Jesus taught centuries ago: hate divides the personality -- and love, in an amazing and inexorable way, unites it.”</blockquote>King then adds:
<blockquote>“A third reason we should love our enemies is that love is the only force capable of transforming an enemy into a friend. We never get rid of an enemy by meeting hate with hate. We get rid of an enemy by getting rid of enmity. By its very nature, hate destroys and tears down; by its very nature, love creates and builds up. Love transforms with redemptive power.”</blockquote>So far, what King has said seems anodyne. We have heard it many times. For most of us, grasping King’s point so far does not seem a difficult challenge. But when he says it means loving even the white racists and violent segregationists, it gets a bit more challenging.<br><br>
King cites the example of Abraham Lincoln, who appointed some of even his bitterest critics and enemies to his cabinet. King then says:
<blockquote>“It was this same attitude that made it possible for Lincoln to speak a kind word about the South during the Civil War when feeling was most bitter. Asked by a shocked bystander how he could do this, Lincoln said, ‘Madam, do I not destroy my enemies when I make them my friends?’ This is the power of redemptive love.”</blockquote>For King, what it comes down to most fundamentally is:<blockquote>“We are called to this difficult task in order to realize a unique relationship with God....We must love our enemies, because only by loving them can we know God and experience the beauty of his holiness.”</blockquote>We might prefer to say that only by loving them can we be whole.<br><br>
Anytime you hate, any time you reject, any time you simply cannot accept another person, that person represents a part of you that you are seeking to excise. Our own wholeness requires that we accept all parts of our ourselves, accept all of who we are.<br><br>
Nowadays we don’t like to use the word “enemies.” I don’t know if I’ve ever in my life identified someone as an enemy, except maybe in a facetious reference to my opponent in some game we were playing. Even our military now prefers to say, “hostiles.” And, yeah, maybe you can’t, or wouldn’t, identify anyone as an enemy, but you can think of times when someone was hostile toward you. You may have been hostile back.<br><br>
There are people who you find difficult. And I’m suggesting to you that what you don’t like about them is a reflection of a part of yourself that you don’t like. Accept them, welcome them, love them. For only then can you accept, welcome, and love all of who you are. Even a certain former president is manifesting parts that are in all of us, and any part of ourselves that we try to excise and exile simply goes subterranean and becomes more powerful. But what we accept, welcome, and love can play its useful role and stay in its place. Only when an inner voice is heard and respectfully acknowledged will it, in turn, acknowledge and be willing to bow to your other and countervailing voices. Only love -- inward and outward not distinguished -- brings us into our wholeness.<br><br>
Accepting, welcoming, and loving does not mean complacency or quiescence in the face of harm. It does not mean complicity with injustice. Dr. King’s “Loving Your Enemies” sermon made this point -- a point he reiterated many times in his career. He said:
<blockquote>“This does not mean that we abandon our righteous efforts. With every ounce of our energy we must continue to rid this nation of the incubus of segregation. But we shall not in the process relinquish our privilege and our obligation to love.
While abhorring segregation, we shall love the segregationist. This is the only way to create the beloved community. To our most bitter opponents we say: 'We shall match your capacity to inflict suffering by our capacity to endure suffering. We shall meet your physical force with soul force. Do to us what you will, and we shall continue to love you. We cannot in all good conscience obey your unjust laws, because noncooperation with evil is as much a moral obligation as is cooperation with good. Throw us in jail, and we shall still love you. Bomb our homes and threaten our children, and we shall still love you. Send your hooded perpetrators of violence into our community at the midnight hour and beat us and leave us half dead, and we shall still love you....One day we shall win freedom, but not only for ourselves. We shall so appeal to your heart and conscience that we shall win you in the process, and our victory will be a double victory.'"</blockquote>
The victory to which King refers is not a once-and-done conquest, but an unfolding victory the earning of which is never completed. Under his leadership, the victory unfolded some. May we, with our lives, unfold further the double victory in which our opponents will be as victorious as we ourselves. For love and justice are not two. Rev. Meredith Garmonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09600609816550758194noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7480207999294007243.post-81606464178082973112023-09-24T13:32:00.009-04:002023-09-26T12:02:05.637-04:00What Is Growing Ethically?I.<br><br>
How do we grow ethically? “With a bit of muddle and some hard testing,” as Louise said.<br><br>
Our mission here in this church is not a “mission accomplished” kind of mission. The job is never completed. For the second and third ones – serving justly and loving radically – it’s conceivable that we might reach a plateau. I rather suspect that we haven’t, but it’s conceivable that we could. And then our job would be just to keep on serving justly and loving radically. When it comes to growing, though, there’s no plateau. If your growth plateaus, you’re not growing anymore.<br><br>
Our mission directs us to, no matter what level of ethical or spiritual development we might have reached, keep on growing still further. Forever. When it comes to ethical and spiritual development, our mission does not allow any status to stay quo.<br><br>
I’ll talk about spiritual growth on other Sundays. Today, let’s reflect on ethical growth. Philosopher Iris Murdoch has written: “Nothing in life is of any value except the attempt to be virtuous.” It just so happens that before going into ministry, I was a philosophy professor and taught our department’s ethics course every year. So you might think I’d have something to say on the subject of ethics. And you’d be right.<br><br>
First, I want to congratulate you for recognizing the importance of the ethical and enshrining it in your mission. Too often we have seen religious bodies imagine that spiritual growth was all they needed. As vital as it is to develop the resources for making meaning of this life and this world, and to experience regularly awe and wonder and the oneness of all things, this is not sufficient.<br><br>
People who show up at a Zen practice group – even more than your average Unitarian Universalist – are likely to be looking for a particular wow spiritual experience. A newcomer is likely to show up wanting to become “enlightened.” If they stick around and keep coming back, they will sooner or later hear me tell them, “You are already enlightened.” And, “whatever conception of enlightenment you may have, it’s not like that....Nor is it otherwise.” And, “The practice IS the enlightenment.” From time to time I’ll even say, “enlightenment is delusion.”<br><br>
Sometimes in my talks to Zen groups the topic of the ethical transgressions of certain famous Zen masters comes up. Certain Zen masters have been abusive. Some committed sexual misconduct or other abuses of power, or skimmed from the financial resources of the temple or zen center they served, or were alcoholics. How could enlightened masters act that way? One answer might be to say, “they just weren’t very enlightened after all.” I don’t think that’s it.<br><br>
Look, spiritual enlightenment doesn’t guarantee ethical awareness. Satori isn’t going to make you able to play the oboe if you don’t already have that skill. If you are a skilled musician, you might be able to more readily slip into “the zone” when performing, but, no, spiritual development won’t impart the basic skills if you don’t have them. Nirvana doesn’t improve your math skills. And: awakening to the vast oneness and emptiness of all things isn’t by itself going to clue you in to just how much devastation your peccadilloes can wreak upon a community that trusted you.<br><br>
If you want to master the oboe, you have to learn and train at the oboe. Meditating is good for a number of things – that’s not one of them. To learn calculus, you need a calculus teacher – or appropriate book or series of internet videos. Spiritual teachers or books or internet videos will not improve your ability to solve calculus problems.<br><br>
Ethical growth requires cognitive learning that is distinct from spiritual maturity. It’s not just a matter of being good, or kindhearted -- or even enlightened. It takes study to find out what the effects of actions and words are likely to be.<br><br>
Some of you may remember the 1960s – though the saying goes that if you remember the 60s you weren’t really a part of them. In the 60s, a number of Unitarian Universalists – including some of our ministers, were what was then thought of as “freewheeling” when it came to sexual conduct. Our movement learned some hard empirical lessons about just how harmful that can be. All we knew then was that the sexual ethic of the puritans didn’t work for us, so we were experimenting with alternatives – and some of those experiments were disastrous. Looking back at that time we are now in the position to say that behavior was unethical even though the perpetrators might not have had any way to know any better.<br><br>
We know better now: we have evolved some standards of what is inappropriate, when back in the 1960s even to invoke the word “appropriate” -- or its cognates, “propriety” and “proper” – was commonly scorned as unliberated. Of course, inappropriate conduct still happens sometimes – but we have better tools for at least naming it when it does.<br><br>
When I think about what I knew when I was 25 – and what American culture understood in the 1960s – if I’d been a young minister at that time, oh, man, I hate to think what I might have done – what neither I nor our churches at that time had the brakes to put on to prevent what we hadn’t even learned yet to call abuse. I am so glad that by the time I started seminary in the last year of the 20th century they were teaching us about power dynamics, and what constitutes abuse of that power.<br><br>
My point is that that was something I had to learn – cognitively learn. There were teachers and I was taught – rather like grammar. Ethics and grammar are alike in that we pick up the basics -- usually -- in the process of being socialized and learning how to talk, but the finer points have to be more formally and intentionally taught. Interestingly, the way both grammar and ethics are taught is by identifying mistakes. Grammar mistakes generally don’t hurt anyone, so, outside of classroom contexts, it’s rude to point them out – but with ethical mistakes the stakes are higher.<br><br>
We’ve done a lot of learning about boundaries in the last few decades – how to respect autonomy while also making space for joyful connection. Just to learn this vocabulary – to be able to converse and think with concepts like boundary, and autonomy represents ethical growth.<br><br>
We’ve done a lot of learning about privilege – and about the way White Supremacy culture infects so many ways of thinking. That’s ethical growth – and we certainly have further to go. Our words and actions have effects on other people that can be entirely independent of what we thought they meant, what we wanted them to mean, what we intended them to mean. Finding out what our words and actions might be conveying to others – what impact we might be having – takes some study -- some reading, some conversations, some listening. It’s a matter of learning. Finding out what environmental damage our consumer choices might be doing is a matter of learning.<br><br>
II.<br><br>
Understanding all the effects of our actions can be a daunting task. This was illustrated in the TV sitcom “The Good Place” – a comedy about moral philosophy. The premise is that throughout life, people get points for doing good things, and lose points for doing bad things. Celestial beings in another dimension are keeping track of every human being’s point total. When you die, if you have enough points you go to the Good Place. If you don’t, you go to the bad place.<br><br>
One of those celestial beings – Michael, played by Ted Danson -- has taken a particular interest in the four main character humans of the show, and is trying to get them into the Good Place – but no matter how many times he manages to get them sent back to Earth to try to be better, they can’t seem to get enough points.<br><br>
In season 3, episode 10, which first aired in fall 2018, Michael makes the discovery that, in fact, no one has gotten into the good place for 521 years. For more than five centuries every single person has, upon dying, been sent to the bad place. At first, Michael thinks the demons who run the bad place have been tampering with the system, denying people their points to keep them from getting into the Good Place. But then he realizes that the ethical challenges people face in the modern world have gotten more complicated.<br><br>
In a key scene, he’s looking through past records of human actions and the points that were garnered. He reads out two examples for comparison:
<blockquote>“In 1534, Douglas Wynegarr of Hawkhurst, England gave his grandmother roses for her birthday. He picked them himself, walked them over to her. She was happy. Boom. 145 points. Now . . . yeah, here we go. In 2009, Doug Ewing of Scaggsville, Maryland, also gave his grandmother a dozen roses, but he lost four points. Why? Because he ordered roses using a cell phone that was made in a sweatshop. The flowers were grown with toxic pesticides, picked by exploited migrant workers, delivered from thousands of miles away, which created a massive carbon footprint, and his money went to a billionaire racist CEO, who sends his female employees pictures of his genitals. Whoo! </blockquote>
Another character, Tahani, observes, “That Is a very odd thing to cheer.” But Michael explains: <blockquote>“Don’t you understand? The Bad Place isn’t tampering with points. They don’t have to. Because every day the world gets a little more complicated, and being a good person gets a little harder. Gather the others. We have a lot to do.”</blockquote>
And off they go.<br><br>
So. Yes, we today need to think about the ethics of buying products manufactured in sweatshops. We need to think about whether our consumer choices are facilitating toxic pesticide use, migrant worker exploitation – and more: resource depletion, habitat destruction, species extinction, pollutants of air, of water, of soil. We need to think about our carbon footprint – and whether we’re tacitly condoning billionaire, racist, sexual-harassing CEOs.<br><br>
Douglas Wynnegarr of Hawkhurst, England in 1534 didn’t have to think about any of those things. But is it really any harder to be a good 21st-century person than it was to be a good 16th-century person? Look, forget about the points – the whole concept of getting points is a silly TV conceit, and it’s funny, but it has nothing to do with trying to live a life being the best person you can. On the one hand, sure, we do have a lot to pay attention to that people in the Medieval and Renaissance periods didn’t. But they didn’t have any way to think about those things. The facts of life were different, and the knowledge about those facts was different. Yet then, as now, ethical behavior demands taking into account the effects of our actions – which entails the due diligence to find out what we can about what those effects may be.<br><br>
If we, today, are called upon to consider our effects on the environment and on systems of oppression, we also have the resources to do so – sources of knowledge and understanding unavailable in previous centuries. The challenge Maya Angelou articulated was the same then as it is now: “Do the best you can until you know better. Then when you know better, do better.”<br><br>
Ted Danson’s character Michael humorously recapped some of the new ethical challenges in our age – but every age has had the task to work as best they could on how to be a good person. We have chronicles of how past ages did that work, going back to Greeks of ancient Athens and the Israelites of ancient Jerusalem.<br><br>
Importantly, we need each other to do that. We have to cultivate the institutions that teach us to think about and reasonably pursue a good life – "good" both in the sense of virtuous and in the sense of truly fulfilling and joyous.<br><br>
In this regard, there has been a shift. The relevant shift is not in the last 500 years, but in the last 20 – and that’s what I want to talk about in the last part.<br><br>
III.<br><br>
David Brooks recently pondered:
<blockquote>“Why have Americans become so mean? I was recently talking with a restaurant owner who said that he has to eject a customer from his restaurant for rude or cruel behavior once a week—something that never used to happen. A head nurse at a hospital told me that many on her staff are leaving the profession because patients have become so abusive. At the far extreme of meanness, hate crimes rose in 2020 to their highest level in 12 years.” (<a href="https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2023/09/us-culture-moral-education-formation/674765/">"How America Got Mean," <i>Atlantic</i>, 2023 Sep</a>)</blockquote>Gun sales are up. Social trust is way down.<blockquote>“In 2000, two-thirds of American households gave to charity; in 2018, fewer than half did. The words that define our age reek of menace: <i>conspiracy, polarization, mass shootings, trauma, safe spaces.</i>”</blockquote>The factors that are making us mean are, of course, also making us sad. Deaths of despair – that is, deaths from suicide or substance addiction – are rising. In 1990, according to the General Social Survey, 8 percent of Americans rated their happiness at the lowest level. Thirty-two years later, in 2022, Americans rating their happiness at the lowest level was up from 8 percent to 20 percent.<br><br>
What are these factors making us mean and sad? There are a number of inter-relating factors. Social media is making us crazy. We’re more isolated -- participate less in community organizations -- and that makes us crazy. We’re becoming a more racially diverse country, and the challenge to come to grips with that has millions of white Americans in a panic. Ever since Ronald Reagan’s election in 1980, economic inequality has been growing and growing, leaving people increasingly afraid, alienated, and pessimistic. There are a lot of inter-relating factors.<br><br>
To address them, we need each other, and to cultivate the institutions that teach us to think about and reasonably pursue a good life – how to be moral. Brooks writes: <blockquote>“In a healthy society, a web of institutions—families, schools, religious groups, community organizations, and workplaces—helps form people into kind and responsible citizens, the sort of people who show up for one another. We live in a society that’s terrible at moral formation. . . . A culture that leaves people morally naked and alone leaves them without the skills to be decent to one another. . . . If you put people in a moral vacuum, they will seek to fill it with the closest thing at hand. Over the past several years, people have sought to fill the moral vacuum with politics and tribalism. American society has become hyper-politicized.”</blockquote> It’s not that we don’t yearn for moral purpose and meaning. It’s just that too many of us don’t know how. <br><br>
The yearning is reflected in the popularity of some TV shows. “The Good Place” was about what we owe to each other, and how we can learn to be good. And when it finished its run, there was "Ted Lasso" – the most watched show on Apple TV+. Jason Sudeikis’ character, Ted Lasso, an American coaching soccer in England, articulated a two-sentence description of moral formation.
He said: <blockquote>“For me, success is not about the wins and losses. It’s about helping these young fellas be the best versions of themselves on and off the field.”</blockquote>Ted Lasso is <blockquote>“an earnest, cheerful, and transparently kind man who enters a world that has grown cynical, amoral, and manipulative, and, episode after episode, even through his own troubles, he offers the people around him opportunities to grow more gracious, to confront their vulnerabilities and fears, and to treat one another more gently and wisely.” (Brooks)</blockquote>
So, that’s great – and it is the lesson that we long for – but a couple TV shows are not enough. We need our schools and our leaders to put questions of how to be a good person, how to live a good life – not just a materialistic, consumerist life – at the center. And there are areas of ethical growth aside from TV shows: the growth I was mentioning earlier, growth in our understanding of how power dynamics can be abused, how to recognize where white supremacy culture is manifesting, where patriarchy is manifesting, why carbon footprints matter. All that represents real ethical growth.<br><br>
To pull through this period – to more widely share the ethical growth now available -- there will need to be more places like this one: congregations that, week in and week out, affirm that we – individually and collectively – are called to grow ethically, to become better than we were: more kind, less arrogant; more respectful, less entitled; more curious, less judgmental. That’s what ethical growth is, and may it be our path.<br><br>
Amen.
Rev. Meredith Garmonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09600609816550758194noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7480207999294007243.post-7432585071874947772023-09-18T12:32:00.008-04:002023-09-19T11:48:52.695-04:00Being a People of CovenantI.<br><br>
<i>Imagine a religion where people of different beliefs worship as one faith.</i> Back in the aughts, a Unitarian Universalist ad campaign promoted this slogan. "Imagine a religion where people of different beliefs worship as one faith." How could that be? One faith – one religion – many beliefs?<br /><br />
That’s possible because religion isn’t really about belief. So when I’m asked, "What do Unitarian Universalists believe?" I usually answer: What Unitarian Universalists believe is that your religion isn’t about what you believe.<br /><br />
So what is religion about? I’m so glad you asked. Three things. One, it’s about how you live – that is, the ethics and values that guide your life. Two, it’s about community – the people you come together with to share in rituals that affirm your community bond. Three, it’s about a certain kind of experience – the experiences we call religious experience, or spiritual experience: moments of transcendence and awe, of apprehending the beauty, wonder, and oneness of all things.<br /><br />
Those are three rather different things. Yet a faith institution exists to weave them together so that each one supports and reinforces the other two. The ethics and values that guide your life facilitate your community belonging, and prepare you to be open to transcendent experience. Your faith community helps reinforce certain ethics and values, and also helps lay the ground for you to have transcendent experiences. Transcendent experiences expose you to a oneness that awakens compassion, which becomes part of your ethics and values, and also draws you closer to your community. In faith community, each strand of the braid is shaped and directed so that it can reinforce the other two.<br /><br />
The idea that religion is about believing goes back to St. Paul. When Paul invented the religion known as Christianity, his big innovation was to make believing central. When Islam came along 6 centuries later, it followed Paul’s model, so Islam is also belief-centric. But the other world religions are not belief-centric. The Asian religions have teachings, but if you happen to not accept a few of them, that’s fine. What makes a person Jewish isn’t what they believe, but what they practice and that they have a shared history and understanding of themselves as under the laws.<br /><br />
From our roots in Christianity, Unitarian Universalism has traveled a long road back from belief-centric religion, and it was a road of understanding ourselves more and more as being people of covenant – not creed, which is to say, not belief.<br /><br />
A key step on that road was the Cambridge Platform. I’d like you to know about the Cambridge Platform if you don’t. The Puritans who founded the Plymouth colony in 1620 and the Massachusetts Bay colony in 1630, proceeded to adopt in 1648, the Cambridge Platform. These Puritans didn’t have a strong political tradition other than the sense of being bound in covenant. At first, they felt need for neither a creed nor a specific structure of church governance – after all, they were God’s people bound together by covenant, and that was enough.<br /><br />
We today don’t agree with those Puritans on much. But we are their descendants. Two hundred years after the Plymouth landing – or, invasion – the Unitarian denomination formed consisting of New England congregations that split from their Congregationalist Puritan past. We’ve left behind the focus on sin, the doctrine of total depravity, and of predestination. We’ve sought – and still seek – to correct the way covenant was used to dismiss, disrespect, and oppress people, such as indigenous peoples, deemed not to be in the covenant.<br /><br />
One thing that we’ve kept from our Puritan forebears is this sense of being a people of Covenant. We are not bound together by creed. Unitarians today aren’t even bound together, as the Puritans were, by a common scripture: the 66 canonical books of the Protestant Bible. We are noncreedal and noncanonical. We are bound by covenant – by our promise to each other to walk together on this long, strange journey called life, to have each other’s backs – to care for one another. Covenant.<br /><br />
By 1648, a generation after the Plymouth colony began, the Puritans, facing criticism from Presbyterians for not having a polity, decided that, after all, they did would adopt a polity. They didn’t want Episcopal Polity – rule by the bishops – which is what the Church of England had. They didn’t want Presbyterian Polity – governance by groups of elders called Presbyters – which is what, back in England, the dissenting churches (dissenting, that is, from the Church of England). The Puritans would also have been aware of the Catholic church’s structure of governance, and that was definitely out of the question for them.<br /><br />
They decided, in 1648, to create a polity that was none of the above. It would be a new polity, one based on covenant. They called it Congregational polity, and The Cambridge Platform of 1648 spelled out what this “Congregational Polity” meant. The Platform laid out a basic form for congregations to have: a role for pastors, for teachers, and for ruling elders who oversaw church administration. As the name "Congregational Polity" implies, the Cambridge Platform gave each congregation the fundamental authority for their own operations. A congregation did have some responsibilities to other congregations; the Cambridge Platform identified six:
<ul><li>take thought for each other's welfare;</li>
<li>consult and advise each other;</li>
<li>admonish congregations that erred;</li>
<li>allow members of one church to receive communion in other churches;</li>
<li>send letters of recommendation when a member goes to a new church; and</li>
<li>financially assist poor churches.</li></ul>
Beyond these, each congregation was autonomous.<br /><br />
The Cambridge Platform of 1648 is the foundational document of Congregational Polity – the polity we still follow today. Along with our free search for truth and meaning comes free self-governance. We make our own bylaws, elect our own board, hire our own staff, call our own minister, buy and own and maintain our own building and grounds. It is up to us alone to fund the maintenance of our home, the programs, the ministry, through which we nurture our spirits and help heal our world.<br><br>
Critics of congregational polity call it a type of religious anarchism – and there’s some truth to that. Still, we share our congregational polity with a number of other denominations. The United Church of Christ – formerly known as the Congregationalist Church – also descends from those New England Puritan churches – namely, the ones that didn’t break away to become Unitarian -- so the UCC also has congregational polity. Baptists and various forms of nondominational Christianity have congregational polity, as do Quakers, Disciples of Christ, most Jewish synagogues, many Sikh Gurdwaras, and most Islamic mosques in the US.<br><br>
Some of these are also officially creedless, though they all have a shared scripture. Unitarian Universalists are, to the best of my knowledge, alone in being held together neither by the authority of a creed, nor by the authority of a common scripture, nor under the authority of a bishop, synod, diocese, presbytery, or conciliarity.<br><br>
Which raises the question: What does hold us together? Sometimes, sadly, the answer is: nothing, and we come apart. Congregations acrimoniously split, or dissolve. When we are held together, the name for our sticking by each other is covenant.<br><br>
Another covenant that may be more familiar is the marriage covenant. That’s also a promise to stick together, to share each other’s lives and provide mutual support. The words of the vow can be highly variable, but at base it comes down to promising to stick together, to share each other’s lives and provide mutual support. It is a committing of our lives that is ultimately beyond what any set of words can capture, whether those words are the vows spoken at a marriage ceremony or the words of a congregation’s covenant.<br><br>
Yes, you can make a promise without signing a piece of paper – whether that paper is a marriage certificate or our membership book. You don’t have to sign anything to make a promise. It’s just that signing makes the promise public, makes the relationship public. Signing that paper tells the world that you have entered into a sacred relationship – with a spouse, in one case -- with a congregation, in the other.<br><br>
II.<br><br>
Our greatest 20th century Unitarian theologian, James Luther Adams, understood “God” to be “community forming power.” That power which comes into existence when human beings gather in a group and which allows that group to form itself into a community – that’s what James Luther Adams called God. So Adams did a great deal of thinking and writing about Voluntary Associations – about the Covenants that are the community-forming power.<br><br>
The Unitarian Universalist Association’s Commission on Appraisal issues a report every four years, and their 2021 report was called, “Unlocking the Power of Covenant.” The Commission observes that: “We are the promises we make and the vows we break.” A Covenant, it says, “is a mutual sacred promise between individuals or groups, to stay in relationship, care about each other, and work together in good faith.” The Commission goes on to say:<blockquote>“No single concept is more central to our faith understanding than being in covenant. It is at the core of our identity. It is how we try to build and sustain the Beloved Community. It is the foundation of our governance structures at all levels.”</blockquote>Ultimately the covenant is beyond language, beyond what words can say. It is the embodied commitment to keep on being together in love. Married couples may have long forgotten the exact words of the vow they spoke on their wedding day, yet, as long as they remain married and together they are embodying their covenant in their way of being together.<br><br>
The ultimate covenant is beyond words but is embodied in our way of being together, expressed in our patterns of interaction.
Still, attempting to put the wordless into words can be helpful. Giving it some words, inevitably imperfect and needing regular revision, but still some words to express our commitment to each other – that can provide guidance about how we shall be together.<br><br>
For congregations, covenants come in two main forms: aspirational covenants and behavioral covenants. Behavioral covenants delineate the behaviors we promise to follow or avoid. Because behavior is publicly observable, we can notice when someone has broken covenant, and encourage zir back in to the right relationship that our covenant says we promise to uphold.<br><br>
It’s a reality of being a people of covenant that we sometimes do break covenant. And that reality means that being a people of covenant also entails being a people of forgiveness, recognizing that we stray and calling each back, over and over, every time we do. The life of covenant turns out to be less about staying and more about returning – over and over and over again.<br><br>
Rev. David Pyle was with us this weekend for a startup workshop that some of you were here for. Rev. Pyle has had some Zen training, as have I, and he referenced the basic teaching for Zen meditation. Focus on your breath. We usually suggest first-timers count their breaths, 1 to 10, then start over at one. Or just bring all your attention to the breath coming in, and going out. Your mind will wander off. It will start thinking about one darn thing or another. That’s OK. That’s what minds do. The mind secretes thoughts the way the liver secretes bile. The practice is, as soon as you notice you’ve wandered off, bring your attention back to the breath.<br><br>
The practice is the coming back. The point of a 25-minute meditation sit is not to be so concentrated that you stay focused on the breath the whole time. The point is to spend that time coming back over and over: noticing a thought, letting it go, returning to the breath. Returning to the breath is the practice.<br><br>
And as Rev. Pyle pointed out, coming back is also the point of the practice of covenant: to return over and over to mindfulness of the promises that define who you are. Our aspirational covenant is our mission: to grow ethically and spiritually, serve justly, and love radically. This is not behaviorally defined. There’s no stipulation as to what behaviors constitute growing ethically and spiritually, serving justly, and loving radically. So we can’t judge whether someone else is out of covenant.<br><br>
Certain behaviors might cause us to inquire gently whether you are keeping the aspiration in mind, but, ultimately, only you can decide if you are keeping the covenant to grow, serve, and love – and only you can assess how well or poorly you are growing, serving, and loving. You haven’t broken the covenant unless you’ve stopped trying, stopped aspiring to grow, to serve, and to love – stopped bringing your mind back to this covenant every time you notice you’ve drifted off from it.<br><br>
Behavioral covenants do stipulate some behaviors. Because behaviors are observable, behavioral covenant allows us to go the further step of holding each other accountable. We have a team at work on developing a behavioral covenant for this congregation.<br><br>
Covenants make us. They spell out who we are. When I don’t know who “us” is, then I don’t know who “me” is. By becoming more conscious of our covenants – spoken and unspoken – we can live into them more fully, and become who we are with greater awareness and greater intentionality.<br><br>
Marcia Pally’s 2016 book, <i>Commonwealth and Covenant</i>, recognizes that we need both situatedness and separability.
We need to be situated — embedded in functional and caring families, and thick communities that define our values and our selves: villages of ordinariness in which you can be your plain old ordinary self without the constant expectation to prove yourself.<br><br>
We also need separability. We need to have the freedom and the support “to go off and create and explore and experiment with new ways of thinking and living.”<br><br>
What creates situatedness, notes Pally, is covenant. A contract protects interests, she says, but a covenant protects relationships.<blockquote>“A covenant exists between people who understand they are part of one another. It involves a vow to serve the relationship that is sealed by love.”</blockquote>Contracts stipulate an exchange of goods or services, but people in a covenant delight in offering their gifts.<br><br>
We are here to offer each other what gifts we can – to hold open the space of grace. It’s about seeing the goodness and dignity, and the failings and foibles or one another, and still loving each other.<br><br>
I was once leading a Zen group that met weekly in the 2nd and 3rd grade classroom. Every week we Zen practitioners would gather in this room, and there on the wall, handwritten with marker on newsprint was the class covenant. It showed all the signs of a process in which grownups were drawing the language out of the out of 7- and 8-year-olds so that it would really be the kids’ own covenant. It said things like: “One: Listen and don’t speak when someone is holding the speaking stone.” There was: “Three: Pick up after each other and ourselves – don’t litter.” Notice: pick up after each other, not just after ourselves. The last one was: “11. Come together with a calm and open mind.” Nice. My favorite one, though, was number two: “Be kind to others even when they are not your friend.” Even our kids grasp the gist of the point that being a people of covenant means seeing the goodness and dignity, and the failings and foibles or one another, and still loving each other.<br><br>
It’s about giving of ourselves, and being called together into a different way of being in the world. I have been held and held together in covenant with Unitarian Universalists my whole life – and now I am held in covenant with you. It is such a wonder. Thank you so much.<br><br>
Amen.
Rev. Meredith Garmonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09600609816550758194noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7480207999294007243.post-58654174052027480952023-09-11T21:13:00.010-04:002023-09-13T15:17:23.945-04:00Meet the New Boss, Same as the Old Boss"Meet the new boss, same as the old boss." It's a line from a song by The Who. Some of you may be thinking, “Just who does this new guy think he is?” – so I hasten to clarify: I’m not the boss. But let me also clarify: you aren’t either. So who’s the boss? Who or what is the ultimate authority around here?<br><br>
In the traditional Christian churches, the answer to that question is God. Whether such an entity be imaginary or not, this has at least the salutary effect of directing the congregation’s allegiance to something worthier – or imagined as worthier -- than ego, whether individual ego or collective ego. It can be helpful to imagine.<br><br>
For Unitarian Universalists, however, the ultimate authority – that to which our allegiance is directed – worthier even than the goodness of community and togetherness – is: our mission. At this church, that’s: "Grow ethically and spiritually; serve justly; love radically." That’s the boss. That’s the sheriff in these parts.<br><br>
So when I say “new boss, same as the old boss,” it is literally the same. This mission is exactly the same as it was last year and the year before that. Not a word is changed. And when I say “meet this new boss” I mean that as our church year begins together, let us begin it by reintroducing, by reacquainting ourselves with this boss whom we are here to serve. Though the same as it has been, yet let it be for us new. Let it be freshly compelling. Let it be rejuvenated, sparkling and shining as washed by the waters of our coming together.<br><br>
At the year’s beginning, let us take stock. How are we doing? It is our covenant, our promise, our mission, our vow: to grow ethically and spiritually, to serve justly, to love radically. Have we been? Have we been growing ethically? Growing spiritually? Serving justly? Loving radically?<br><br>
However well or poorly you would say we have been fulfilling our mission, the question before us today, as it is every day, is how shall we fulfill it now? What shall we do with this day, this week, this year to grow ethically, grow spiritually, serve justly, and love radically? What is the work that your spirit longs to take up to grow, to serve, to love? What spiritual muscle toning exercises do you need?<br><br>
This church is your spiritual gym for doing those exercises, strengthening the meaning, purpose, and wholeness of your life. My colleague Rev. Victoria Weinstein has written:<blockquote>“If I go to the gym and people are sprawled out napping on the floor of the aerobics studio, I will think the gym management is not just remiss, but nuts. It’s no different in church. We’re all there for heart strengthening of a different kind. Leaders should be empowered to be able to say: 'Get off the aerobics floor, please. You can nap at home.' This isn’t about not loving people. It’s about being clear what congregational life is for. Napping on the floor of the aerobics studio is not part of our mission, so we won’t be addressing your complaints about the pillows.”</blockquote>
As we ingather for the 2023-24 year ahead, we come together to do the work of growing, serving, and loving. We are here to serve the mission, which includes serving others. You’re not here to serve me, and I’m not here to serve you – except insofar as doing so serves our mission. And I want to urge you to keep in mind that, actually, the staff is not here to serve you either, nor is your board. When it comes to our board, yes, your votes elected them, but you elected them to serve the mission, not you. When it comes to the staff, yes, your contributions provide their wages, but please understand that you’re paying them, too, to serve the mission, not you. So, as Rev. Weinstein put it, we won’t be addressing complaints about the pillows -- or anything else that isn’t about this church growing, serving, and loving. Eyes on the prize, good people. Eyes on the prize.<br><br>
Tall order, but that is the mission we shoulder -- nothing less. To say that a church is a spiritual gym is not to forget that the church is also a spiritual infirmary. There are times in life when we come to church sick at heart, soul weary, broken-spirited. Before we can think about the exercises and disciplines which cultivate and strengthen our wisdom, compassion, and equanimity, we just need to be cared for. We need replenishing rest. We need salve for our woundedness, for indeed salve is the root of salvation, with which our religious forbears were particularly concerned. Yes, the church has that pastoral function in addition to its prophetic task to serve justice.<br><br>
Thus the church’s role, as the saying goes, is to comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable. This is not a matter of dividing people into two groups – as if the usher at the door of this auditorium sanctuary were to ask as you came in, “are you feeling more comfortable or more afflicted this morning? Comfortable on the right, afflicted on the left.” Our morning service could then direct toward the afflicted side what balm in Gilead we have – empathy and sympathy for your troubles, assurances of our help, our loving presence. Then when we talk about the injustices of the world -- the needs of the poor, the exploited, the downtrodden, the excluded – we’ll be looking at you, comfortable side. The gist of the message to one side would be “oh, you poor baby,” and to the other side it would be, “get off your butt.” <br><br>
It doesn’t work like that. The truth is each of us is simultaneously afflicted with burdens while also comfortably complacent. And the messages for your comfortability are the same messages as for your affliction:<br><br>
Number one, this too shall pass – grief and loss comes for all of us, and so does healing and wholeness. Whatever is comfortable in your life will pass – as will whatever afflicts.<br><br>
Number two, service to others according to whatever capacity we have is the remedy either way. Compassionate service lifts us out of complacency and equally well lifts us out of despair.<br><br>
A third message that Sunday services in this space will sometimes emphasize is: life and the world are beautiful, fundamentally mysterious, transcendent, and if we pay attention they will evoke deep wonder and awe. Awe is not comfortable. It pulls us from the narrowness of complacency while it also eases our grief and fills us with the vastness that makes our sadness small.<br><br>
In all of these ways, comforting the afflicted and afflicting the comfortable turn out to be the same thing. So each one of us needs the gym and the infirmary at the same time. What would that be like? Well, it would be kind of like physical therapy, wouldn’t it? Physical therapy is equal parts hospital and gym -- equal parts care for your wound and pushing you to do the exercises anyway, because that’s how you strengthen and heal.<br><br>
By analogy, we are in the spiritual therapy business – pushing your spirit to stretch and strengthen because that is how you heal from the wounds and the grief that your spirit bears – and how you help heal our world.<br><br>
There are two things to notice, to simultaneously bear in mind, about our mission. One is that we are doing it. We are carrying out this mission – we do grow and are growing, we do serve and are serving, we do love and are loving. The mission is simply descriptive of what we do here.<br><br>
Yet simultaneously we notice that we haven’t yet grown, served, and loved in all the ways that we are coming to be able to. The mission calls us forward to ever newer heights. It is not merely descriptive but also prescriptive. We celebrate what we are – and what we yet may be. We celebrate both our being and our becoming.<br><br>
Let me say a little bit about each of these three. First: "Grow ethically and spiritually." Notice it says “and.” Not “or.”
Our mission is both: to grow ethically and to grow spiritually.<br><br>
Grow ethically. That is: develop clarity about the principles you live by, clarity in our understanding of what it means to be a good person. Growing ethically involves deepening integrity and cultivating virtues. The classic list of virtues is Aristotle’s 12: courage, temperance, liberality, magnificence, magnanimity, patience, truthfulness, good humor, friendliness, shame, justice, and prudence. Each of those takes unpacking, and today I’m just giving you names. Cultivating virtues is growing ethically.<br><br>
Grow spiritually. Here the emphasis is on meaning and belonging – big picture meaning: what does life, your life, mean? The fundamental spiritual malady is the condition of feeling that it’s all meaningless -- and that one doesn't belong. Whatever words you might come up with to answer that question, the crux of the matter is whether those words feel sufficient and satisfactory. The words I use as reminders to evoke my sense of meaning and belonging might not feel sufficient and satisfactory to anyone else – so the words are only tags for meaning and belonging of your life that is beyond all language. <br><br>
While growing ethically entails cultivating all the virtues, growing spiritually entails two that Aristotle didn’t mention: equanimity, an inner peace even in the midst of turmoil – and compassion, a readiness for presence to suffering.
Those are what we may call the spiritual virtues: equanimity and compassion.<br><br>
This year, in the service of our mission to grow ethically and spiritually, we are launching Connection Circles. In a small group, you’ll have the chance to explore some of the key themes for growing our ethical and spiritual understanding -- significant issues on which religions at their best have always guided people to greater insight -- issues such as this year’s monthly themes:<br>
Covenant<br>
Justice<br>
Interdependence<br>
Transformation<br>
Pluralism<br>
Equity<br>
Generosity<br>
Love<br>
Courage<br>
and Hope.<br><br>
Our Connection Circles are for exploring together, and spiritually growing and deepening, each in our own way. They meet once a month, Sep through Jun. You won't want to miss a single one. However, even if you miss most of your group’s meetings, you'll still find it valuable to attend occasionally. Signing up does not commit you to attend -- we just need to know which group you'll go to when you do have a chance to go.<br><br>
I have been so impressed to experience the wisdom and the connection – the love, laughter, and insight – that Unitarian Universalists can offer each other when give ourselves permission and the structure for doing that. We have a whole lot more we can learn from each other than anything weekly sermons alone can convey. So I’m asking every member to sign up for a connection circle. You can sign up on line if you haven’t yet.<br><br>
When you signed the membership book, you committed yourself to this church’s mission, you committed to growing ethically and spiritually and helping others grow. Our connection circles are vitals ways to do that. Friends, and visitors are also welcome to sign up.<br><br>
The second prong of this church’s mission – our mission – is to serve justly. And here I draw your attention to our social justice work. We have a number of Faith in Action options. Freestore, the Iowa Trans Mutual Aid Fund are the special focus this year. We also do Compassion and Choices, Green Sanctuary, Family Promise, Immigration Justice, Legislative Action, LGBTQ Justice.<br><br>
Serve justly. That’s our commitment as the people of First Unitarian Church Des Moines. It’s what we’re here for – to serve justice through taking part of your church’s social justice work.<br><br>
And the third part: love radically. Love. Radically – all the way to the root. To be radical requires being unconditional. Loving radically is unconditional solidarity with all people, with all animals, with all life – indeed, even with nonlife: rocks and rivers, air and sky, sun, moon, and stars.<br><br>
For this one I don’t have particular church programs to point you to. Rather, radical love is the spirit to bring to everything you do through the church, and through your life.<br><br>
The world needs our Unitarian Universalist voice at the table. It needs our caring hands reaching out in compassion. Let us be ingathered, for a new year stretches before us. Let us flow together, roll on together as a mighty river, and, in the words of the prophet Amos, “let justice roll down like waters, and righteousness like an ever-flowing stream.”Rev. Meredith Garmonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09600609816550758194noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7480207999294007243.post-15528112982581940162023-07-02T21:14:00.219-04:002023-07-09T03:31:32.692-04:00Where Do We Come From?<blockquote>“It was once assumed that the rise of urban life marked some kind of historical turnstile, whereby everyone who passed through had to permanently surrender their basic freedoms and submit to the rule of faceless administrators, stern priests, paternalistic kings or warrior-politicians – simply to avert chaos (or cognitive overload)....The overall effect is to portray the violence and inequalities of modern society as somehow arising naturally from structures of rational management and paternalistic care: structures designed for human populations who, we are asked to believe, became suddenly incapable of organizing themselves once their numbers expanded above a certain threshold. Not only do such views lack a sound basis in human psychology. They are also difficult to reconcile with archeological evidence of how cities actual began in many parts of the world: as civic experiments on a grand scale, which frequently lacked the expected features of administrative hierarchy and authoritarian rule....What happens if we accord significance to the 5,000 years in which cereal [grain] domestication did not lead to the emergence of pampered aristocracies, standing armies or debt peonage, rather than just the 5,000 in which it did?...<br />
Perhaps if our species does endure, and we one day look backwards from this as yet unknowable future, aspects of the remote past that now seem like anomalies – say, bureaucracies that work on a community scale; cities governed by neighborhood councils; systems of government where women hold a preponderance of formal positions; or forms of land management based on care-taking rather than ownership and extraction – will seem like the really significant breakthroughs, and great stone pyramids or statues more like historical curiosities. What if we were to take that approach now and look at, say, Minoan Crete or Hopewell not as random bumps on a road that leads inexorably to states and empires, but as alternative possibilities: roads not taken?... <br />
In some ways, such a perspective might seem even more tragic than our standard narrative of civilization as the inevitable fall from grace. It means we could have been living under radically different conceptions of what human society is actually about. It means that mass enslavement, genocide, prison camps, even patriarchy or regimes of wage labor never had to happen. But on the other hand it also suggests that, even now, the possibilities for human intervention are far greater than we’re inclined to think.” (David Graeber and David Wengrow, <i>The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity</i>)</blockquote>What is our story? What I want to say today is that what the evidence is now showing about the 200,000 years homo sapiens have existed on the planet is that nothing about the predicament of modernity is inevitable, nor need we be stuck with it. We can design new ways, and live into them. It’s what we have in fact been doing since the beginning of us.<br /><br />
It’s a central function of our religion to tell us a story of where we came from. Genesis, the first book of the Torah and of what Christians call the Old Testament, begins with a story of where we come from. If you grew up in America, Europe, or anywhere under the cultural influence of Judaism, Christianity, or Islam, then that story is a part of you. And you’ll notice it has a certain ethic built into it: after each stage of creation, the story tells us, “God saw that it was good.”<br /><br />
The repeated moral of that story is that creation is good. And the proper response to this goodness, for all animals, human and otherwise, is to be fruitful and multiply. Creation exists to create more of itself, for creation is good.<br /><br />
From the Greek, and Roman, and Norse myths, to the stories told by original peoples of the Americas, of Africa, Australia, Asia, humans have told each other origin stories. We tend to call them myths if they are not our story, but either way, there are these stories that tell us where we came from and, thus, what we are. So, again, what is our story – the Unitarian Universalist story?<br /><br />
Two things: one, the UU story is plural, and, two, the UU story is changing. We have lots of stories. The Genesis story is one of our stories, and its allegorical and poetic resonances affirm for us that creation is good and creating is good. Maybe the Greek myths also resonate with us in these poetic or allegorical ways. Or maybe we cherish certain Native American origin stories.<br /><br />
Aside from our poetical and allegorical narratives, we Unitarian Universalist also have available to us the evidence-based stories – the stories of physics and archeology that tell us about how our universe emerged and how human society formed and evolved. The thing about evidence-based stories is that they keep changing as the evidence changes -- as we make new discoveries, and adopt different interpretations of old discoveries. So to ask what is our story is to ask what is our story <i>now</i>.<br /><br />
This is a pretty radically different way of being religious. Hundreds of generations of Jews, Christians, and Muslims learned the Genesis story as children, and they lived their lives and died with that as their only human origin story. But Unitarians and, to a lesser extent, Universalists, were early adopters of the very different Darwinian story. Darwin amassed a huge amount of evidence, and we are a people who tend to respect the evidence.<br /><br />
Certain aspects of that story have changed just in my adult life. And it is those changes – the emerging evidence-based part of the story – that I will talk about today. I will talk about what I have experienced as three phases of the story about agriculture.<br /><br />
Phase 1, with which I entered young adulthood, was a story of the agricultural revolution as a dramatic break from our primitive past as foragers: a brilliant innovation which set us on the way to all the wonders of the modern world we enjoy today. About 12 thousand years ago, the basic story goes, our hunter-gatherer ancestors domesticated grain crops. We settled down, started forming cities, had some surplus, which allowed for people to specialize and develop expertise, which fueled innovation, and we were off to the races. And it was good. Human ingenuity produced this progress and hoorah for that.<br /><br />
That was the story that I had – gosh, even as recently as 10 years ago. When I started as your minister, that was the story I had.<br /><br />
Then, phase 2: I started learning about the evidence for a different story – that the agricultural revolution led to standing armies, so that wars, which had been small-scale skirmishes between bands, were now massive-scale slaughter. In 2017 I read in a New Yorker article by John Lanchester about one side effect of grain agriculture. Drawing on a book by James Scott, Lanchester explained:
<blockquote>“Grain, unlike other crops, is easy to tax. Some crops (potatoes, sweet potatoes, cassava) are buried and so can be hidden from the tax collector, and, even if discovered, they must be dug up individually and laboriously. Other crops (notably, legumes) ripen at different intervals, or yield harvests throughout a growing season rather than along a fixed trajectory of unripe to ripe—in other words, the taxman can’t come once and get his proper due. Only grains are, in Scott’s words, “visible, divisible, assessable, storable, transportable, and ‘rationable.’ ”</blockquote>So grains led to taxation, which led to standing armies, and the powerful getting more powerful on the backs of the laborers. Hunter gatherers didn’t have to put up with that. Also foragers had a lot more leisure time, without the constant arduous toil of the agricultural laborer.<br /><br />
Yuval Harari writes in <i>Sapiens</i>:
<blockquote>“Rather than heralding a new era of easy living, the Agricultural Revolution left farmers with lives generally more difficult and less satisfying than those of foragers. Hunter-gatherers spent their time in more stimulating and varied ways, and were less in danger of starvation and disease. The agricultural Revolution certainly enlarged the sum total of food at the disposal of human kind, but the extra food did not translate into a better diet or more leisure. Rather, it translated into population explosions and pampered elites. The average farmer worked harder than the average forager, and got a worse diet in return. The Agricultural Revolution was history’s biggest fraud.”</blockquote>Here Harari is harkening back to Jared Diamond, best known for his book, <i>Guns, Germs and Steel</i>. Diamond says agriculture was the “Worst mistake in the history of the human race.”<br /><br />
Why would we make such a mistake? Harari explains:
<blockquote>“The change proceeded by stages, each of which involved just a small alteration in daily life. …
Whenever they decided to do a bit of extra work – say, to hoe the fields instead of scattering seeds on the surface – people thought, ‘Yes, we will have to work harder. But the harvest will be so bountiful! We won’t have to worry any more about lean years. Our children will never go to sleep hungry.’ It made sense. If you worked harder, you would have a better life. That was the plan.... But people did not foresee that the number of children would increase, meaning that the extra wheat would have to be shared between more children. Neither did the early farmers understand that feeding children with more porridge and less breast milk would weaken their immune system, and that permanent settlements would be hotbeds for infectious diseases. They did not foresee that by increasing their dependence on a single source of food, they were actually exposing themselves even more to the depredations of drought. Nor did the farmers foresee that in good years their bulging granaries would tempt thieves and enemies, compelling them to start building walls and doing guard duty. Then why didn’t humans abandon farming when the plan backfired? Partly because it took generations for the small changes to accumulate and transform society and, by then, nobody remembered that they had ever lived differently. And partly because population growth burned humanity’s boats. If the adoption of ploughing increased a villages population from a hundred to 100, which ten people would have volunteered to starve so that the others could go back to the good old times? There was no going back. The trap snapped shut.”</blockquote>Some writers have stressed the separation from nature and the psychic damage wrought upon our species by the transition from foraging to agriculture. Chellis Glendinning wrote in <i>My Name is Chellis and I’m in Recovery from Western Civilization</i>:<blockquote>“The small-scale, nomadic life that had endured through more than a million years and thirty-five thousand generations was irreparably altered. The human relationship with the natural world was gradually changed from one of respect for and participation in its elliptical wholeness to one of detachment, management, control, and finally domination. The social, cultural, and ecological foundations that had previously served the development of a healthy primal matrix were undermined, and the human psyche came to develop and maintain itself in a state of chronic traumatic stress.”</blockquote>It's the Genesis story all over again, isn’t it? – only with the twist that we didn’t get kicked out of Eden for eating a fruit. We kicked ourselves out by growing grain.<br /><br />
John Lanchester, Jared Diamond, James Scott, Yuval Harari, and Chellis Glendinning are all people whose work I’ve learned about in the last 10 years – and they have made scattered appearances in sermons I gave from the CUUC pulpit. Both the phase 1 story and the phase 2 story center on something called an agricultural revolution and they both have an air of inevitability about them. The phase 1 story tells of inevitable onward and upward progress of homo sapiens. The phase 2 story depicts our species unable to avoid the tragedy of agriculture.<br /><br />
I was also, along the way, picking up some hints that things might not have been so inevitable. There have, throughout, been people and peoples who somehow managed to avoid getting suckered. In a sermon four years ago, I preached about the importance of community – of having a tribe. I drew on Sebastian Junger’s book, <i>Tribe: On Homecoming and Belonging</i>. Junger’s point is that we need community, and that modern life isn’t well set up for what we humans most need. On the one hand, Junger underscored for me my emerging understanding that the path from agriculture to urbanization to, eventually, industrialization was all a bad turn. But on the other hand, maybe it wasn’t inevitable. In that sermon I said:<br /><br />
In the 1700s, the European colonists and Native Americans were never far from each other. The colonists, we know, were commercial and industrious. The indigenous peoples were communal and tribal. Colonial society was wealthier, more advanced. The Europeans had more stuff, more powerful tools, could do more things, and they were always working on getting still more. They were making "progress" happen. Yet something weird was happening. From time to time a European would “go native” – defect from white society and go live with a native tribe. This never happened the other way around. Not that our European ancestors were terribly welcoming overall, but there were some attempts, say, to welcome Indian children into colonist towns and homes. They never wanted to stay. In 1753, Benjamin Franklin wrote: <blockquote>“When an Indian child has been brought up among us, taught our language and habituated to our customs, yet if he goes to see his relations and make one Indian ramble with them, there is no persuading him ever to return.”</blockquote> On Tuesday we’ll be observing the anniversary of the date in 1776 when American colonists declared independence from Britain.Six years later, in 1782, Hector de Crèvecoeur described the people who were making much more radical declarations of independence – independence from European ways of life. Crevecoeur wrote, “Thousands of Europeans are Indians, and we have no examples of even one of those aborigines having from choice become European.”<br /><br />
Tribal life was 95 percent of human history, and it meets the needs we evolved to have. Our hunter-gatherer ancestors, said Junger,
<blockquote>“would have practiced extremely close and involved child care. And they would have done almost everything in the company of others. They would have almost never been alone.”</blockquote>Almost never alone. We traded that for more individual autonomy and choice and privacy, for being left alone – being left... alone.<br /><br />
The legacy of the agricultural revolution – hierarchy, inequality, plagues (because now we were packing ourselves into cities), famines (because we had larger populations but sometimes the crops failed or were terribly mismanaged), arduous toil for most people, until finally the industrial revolution replaced back-breaking labor with isolation and alienation and loneliness – well, maybe that whole deal wasn’t so inevitable if peoples of the Americas and other forager cultures scattered around the globe had avoided the trap well into modernity.<br /><br />
Through that crack, that maybe the whole thing wasn’t inevitable, comes phase 3 of the evidence-based story of where we come from. As more and more evidence has come to light, it turns out that it’s a lot more complicated than either of the first two fairly simple stories, either the triumphant or the tragic. Archeologists and anthropologists are starting to tell us – as anthropologist David Graeber and archeologist David Wengrow say in their 2021 book, <i>The Dawn of Everything</i>: “The course of human history may be less set in stone, and more full of playful possibilities, than we tend to assume.”<br /><br />
We now see a lot more diversity of human culture – and a lot of pretty thoughtful reflection and intentionality about how they wanted to live. We know of peoples who went a little bit agricultural – who had gardens but didn’t go full-in on grain dependence – and who lived that way for thousands of years. We know of peoples who did develop intensive grain agriculture, and then rejected it and went back to a mixed system of some gardening and some foraging. We don’t have to get sucked in by our own technology, whether that technology is grain agriculture or smart phones.<br /><br />
In fact, in the dawning light of evidence, the very idea of an agricultural revolution starts to get fuzzier and fuzzier until finally disappearing into the complexity of different ways that different cultures have at different times approached the cultivation of plants. Per Graeber and Wengrow, there was no agricultural revolution. Yes, some peoples did gradually come to increasingly depend on grain agriculture, but even those that did, slowly got there over about 3,000 years. They write:
<blockquote>“In the Fertile Crescent of the Middle East, long regarded as the cradle of the ‘Agricultural Revolution’, there was in fact no ‘switch’ from Paleolithic forager to Neolithic farmer. The transition from living mainly on wild resources to a life based on food production took something in the order of 3,000 years.”</blockquote>A 3,000-year unfolding is not accurately called a “revolution.”<br /><br />
Nor does agriculture mean the inevitable rise of hierarchy and inequality. Graeber and Wengrow continue: <blockquote>“And while agriculture allowed for the possibility of more unequal concentrations of wealth, in most cases this only began to happen millennia after its inception. In the centuries between, people were effectively trying farming on for size, ‘play farming’ if you will, switching between modes of production, much as they switched their social structures back and forth.” (248)</blockquote>
Nor does the rise of cities mean that we had to have a ruling class and structures of authority to keep such large collections of people in line and more-or-less coordinated. Graeber and Wengrow write:<blockquote>“Contemporary archeology shows, among other things, that surprisingly few of these early cities contain signs of authoritarian rule. It also shows that their ecology was far more diverse than once believed: cities do not necessarily depend on a rural hinterland in which serfs or peasants engage in back-breaking labor, hauling cartloads of grain for consumption by urban dwellers.”</blockquote>The shape of any given human society has a lot less to do with universal forces of economics, ecology, or evolution, and a lot more to do with human beings discussing, deliberating, and imagining together. The way we live is not dictated by material conditions, but created through our collective invention. Graeber and Wengrow note that “humans were only fully self-conscious when arguing with one another, trying to sway each other’s views.” When we’re thinking something through, we have an inner dialog. Through dialogs within ourselves and with other people, we work out who we are and our place.<br /><br />
Humans have been creatively and pretty intentionally working out their social and political arrangements in diverse ways for as long as there have been humans. There are a lot of details here that I can’t go into – and that’s the point: the story is vast and sprawling and complicated and highly, highly various. No simple story can do justice to the evidence. What that means is that nothing about the predicament of modernity is inevitable, nor need we be stuck with it. We can design new ways, and live into them. It’s what we have in fact been doing since the beginning of us.<br /><br />
Amen.
Rev. Meredith Garmonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09600609816550758194noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7480207999294007243.post-11152696949121286372023-06-18T08:20:00.044-04:002023-06-28T08:01:20.816-04:00Prayer Jun 18Dear world of all color -- the yellows and reds of blossoms, the bountiful green of plant life in June in our hemisphere, the blue sky and orange sunset, the ultraviolet that we humans cannot see but many birds and some mammals can, and the infrared that some other animals can sense – and all the beiges, tans, olives, pinks, browns, ebonies, bisques and alabasters of human skin -- dear world of colorful people, colorful languages, colorful cultures, colorful beings:<br><br>
We breathe in to breathe in a new day. We hear birds singing, and see the squirrels frisk and chatter. We are swimming in mystery; floating in beauty – even as we also bear the burdens of pain, of loss, grief, and tragedy.<br><br>
As the water recedes in Lake Powell, the second-largest US reservoir, we know the water shortage is impinging on many lives even as the falling water level reveals a beauty of deep red-rock canyons and other-worldly arches. Beauty and tragedy forever blend and mesh.<br><br>
Our hearts go out to people of the Philippines where the Mount Mayon volcano has made nearly 13,000 evacuated their homes. Our hearts go out to persecuted religious minorities throughout the world. In Pakistan more than 50 non Muslims are currently incarcerated, some facing execution under the countries Blasphemy Laws. Elsewhere, it is Muslims who face suspicion, hostility, or worse.<br><br>
May we remember that we all belong to one another. May we be advocates of the powerful truth of inclusive love – and may we thus enhance the color of the world.<br><br>
Our hearts go out to the four Indigenous children who survived 40 days in the Amazon jungle in Colombia after their plane crashed, and to the military and Indigenous communities who worked jointly to find them.<br><br>
Our hearts rise in hope as we learn that Australia has taken the step of making consent education mandatory in all schools from Kindergarten to High School. We are grateful for the work of Chanel Contos who started the campaign for public schools to teach the need that sexual relations have affirmative consent. May we all embrace the variety of colors that permeate our world, and may no one be embraced against their will.<br><br>
May we see one another with loving eyes and an open heart.<br><br>
Our hearts go out to the migrants drowned Wednesday when an overloaded boat capsized in open Mediterranean waters off Greece. Hundreds are dead or feared dead as about 750 people were believed to be on the boat.<br><br>
Our hearts are troubled by the news that Russian nuclear weapons have been moved to Belarus – and that the United States has sent a nuclear-powered guided-missile submarine to South Korea in a show of force.<br><br>
May our hopes for peace and justice give us courage to make it so. May we delight always in what is good, confront what is cruel, and heal what is broken.
Amen.
Rev. Meredith Garmonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09600609816550758194noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7480207999294007243.post-25262257986535298122023-06-09T14:16:00.005-04:002023-09-11T21:15:00.056-04:00Shadow<blockquote><i>"All those qualities, capacities and tendencies which do not harmonize with the collective values – everything that shuns the light of public opinion, in fact – now come together to form the shadow, that dark region of the personality which is unknown and unrecognized by the ego."</i> --Carl Jung</blockquote>
<blockquote><i>"Everyone carries a shadow, and the less it is embodied in the individual’s conscious life, the blacker and denser it is.
At all counts, it forms an unconscious snag, thwarting our most well-meant intentions.”</i> --Carl Jung</blockquote>
“This day our days are diminished by one” a line from a Zen gatha reminds us. The time is precious: every moment of it. In particular, our time together grows short. I’ll be officially your minister until July 31, though I’ll be on vacation for the last part of July. I am planning to be in the pulpit for two summer services on July 2 and July 9. Next week is RE Sunday, the week after that is a Juneteenth service being organized by Jeff Tomlinson and Joe Majsak, and the week after that we’ll be streaming the General Assembly service. So this is my last regular-church-year sermon.<br><br>
As I come to the end of the time I have been honored to occupy your pulpit, I want to return to an idea I shared with you the very first time I preached here. It was April 28, 2013, and I was not then your minister. I was a candidate to become your minister, pending a congregational vote that would happen a week later.<br><br>
During times of ministerial transition, there are various currents going through the congregation – and when a candidate actually shows up, there’s a current of sentiment, “this one will do.” And then there’s a different current: one of skepticism. This is all normal and natural. During candidating week, the candidate knows that, behind the scenes, out of hearing, these currents are playing out in conversations. The skeptics will be saying, “he seems brusque” – or “she’s a little smarmy” – or, “there seems to a tendency to impulsivity,” – or “I wish they could be more spontaneous.” And the folks in the “this one will do” camp, say, “look, nobody’s perfect.”<br><br>
As I stepped into the pulpit on that late April day over 10 years ago, I knew those conversations would inevitably already be rippling through the congregation, just based on the advance circulation of my resume. And I knew they would be going on for the next week before the vote – just as I know now that similar conversations will be going on next year as this congregation again considers a candidate for its ministry.<br><br>
What I wanted to do on that first candidating Sunday 10 years ago, and what I want to do again now, is urge a re-framing of that conversation. Please understand that it isn’t about nobody being perfect. Begin from the understanding that we are all, actually, in fact, perfect. <i>In this institution for grounding and growing our spirits, we need to be coming from that awareness: that we are whole, perfect, and complete just as we are.</i><br><br>
Yes, we all have our shadow. And, yes, some care must be taken to discern who to call into any vocation because, no, not everyone is cut out for every calling. But that doesn’t mean we aren’t all perfect. It means that the shadow is part of the perfection. It also means that discernment of calling takes a community – that even though we are perfect, we cannot, by ourselves, hear our own calling. We need others to help us hear what we are most called to, and sometimes that help comes in the form of being turned down for a position that we really wanted.<br><br>
The work of your search committee for the next year to select a candidate to be the next settled minister to stand here behind this Spirit of Truth is the work of holy discernment. And your task next spring when another candidating week culminates in a congregational vote on whether to call: that is also a task of holy discernment. But I think it matters that you enter that holy discernment with the understanding that everyone is perfect – rather than that no one is.<br><br>
The shadow side we all have isn’t just some unfortunate flaw that we wish could be fixed without damaging the gift. The shadow IS the gift, or, at least, is the enabling condition that makes the gift possible. What we can’t do is what makes possible what we can do. If there were no shadow, there would be no gift. What we aren't and don't makes possible what we are and do. I wanted us to know that about the ministerial candidate this congregation was considering in 2013, and I want to re-emphasize the point as you prepare to consider a ministerial candidate in 2024.<br><br>
<div class="separator" style="clear: both;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgJSo5ZV8YMe5KvWysMynvWt4PRzCZSarLFxhXVz30-qwej2DLohL0rkyasUDF2IIqaXpyHhayLkbweWatR7XRbfnovgQp_vpGhp2fZhJbSSdmvJ5S1Ioj6BYgNfXL2sAyoENfIv9Ive2J2x4HVhq4DF-T6uX-bb06Qe-RK2lr7zLc6sN60r_eG5WA/s878/Scott_ClintonLee.png" style="display: block; padding: 1em 0; text-align: center; clear: right; float: right;"><img alt="" border="0" width="200" data-original-height="878" data-original-width="878" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgJSo5ZV8YMe5KvWysMynvWt4PRzCZSarLFxhXVz30-qwej2DLohL0rkyasUDF2IIqaXpyHhayLkbweWatR7XRbfnovgQp_vpGhp2fZhJbSSdmvJ5S1Ioj6BYgNfXL2sAyoENfIv9Ive2J2x4HVhq4DF-T6uX-bb06Qe-RK2lr7zLc6sN60r_eG5WA/s200/Scott_ClintonLee.png"/></a></div>And, of course, it’s not just about ministers. It’s a way to understand each other, and understand ourselves: our shadow is our gift. To illustrate this, 10 years ago I related a parable from the great Universalist minister, Rev. Clinton Lee Scott, and I now share it with you again:
<blockquote>"Now it came to pass that while the elder in Israel tarried in Babylon, a message came to him from a distant city saying, 'Come thou and counsel with us. Help us to search out a priest for the one that has served us has gone mad.'<br>
And the elder in Israel arose and journeyed to that distant city. And when the men of affairs were assembled, the elder spake unto them saying, 'What manner of man seeketh thee to be your new priest?'<br>
And they answered and said unto him, 'We seek a young man yet with the wisdom of gray hairs. One that speaketh his mind freely yet giveth offense to no one. That draweth the multitude to the temple on the Sabbath but will not be displeased when we ourselves are absent. We desire one who has a gay mood yet is of sober mind. That seeketh out dark sayings and prophecies yet speaketh not over our heads. That filleth the temple, buildeth it up, yet defileth not the sanctuary with a Motley assortment of strangers. We seeketh one that puts the instruction of the young first but requireth not that we become teachers. That causeth the treasury to prosper yet asketh not that we give more of our substance. Verily we seek a prophet that will be unto us a leader but will not seek to change us, for we like not to be disturbed.'" </blockquote>
You get the point. It’s not about, “well, no one’s perfect.” Rather, what it’s about is: no one simultaneously exhibits contradictory qualities. If your gift is the wisdom of experience, it’s not a fault to not have youthful exuberance. If your gift is youthful exuberance, it’s not a fault to not have the wisdom of experience. If your gift is speaking your mind freely, it is not a fault that you occasionally give offense. If your gift is diplomacy, it’s not a fault that you don’t speak your mind freely.
If your gift is being tall enough to dunk a basketball, it’s not a fault that your aren’t small enough to be comfortable in the back seat of subcompact car. Not a fault – but we might say it’s the shadow side of your gift. It’s the thing that you aren’t and don’t that makes possible what you are and do.<br><br>
So the shadow is not some unfortunate, if forgivable, shortcoming. The shadow, to repeat, is the necessary enabling condition of the gift.<br><br>
Now let’s go a little further with that. The shadow is not merely what makes the gift possible, but actually is the gift itself. Our broken-ness is itself the very thing that is our strength. That’s the paradoxical truth: the weakness is the strength.<br><br>
<div class="separator" style="clear: both;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEimHKEo3TJuRiH3rTiDP8OIOG8pQW9Xxbn3Nl3ZQIFkajkkCg4scGgjsN0iE5HCHDDxQQLUqsLOxD_7NQc4AcYY2neCmSwuYS_iGB88mnST0uhmtXPDUwcfyO-diGbZrBM95pKqnPn0zyzoV09Ymvhi570d5OUC2Jo4PCJUAfm8P5IhZyIzEhQp8vY/s1230/Remen_RN.png" style="display: block; padding: 1em 0; text-align: center; clear: right; float: right;"><img alt="" border="0" width="200" data-original-height="1230" data-original-width="1230" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEimHKEo3TJuRiH3rTiDP8OIOG8pQW9Xxbn3Nl3ZQIFkajkkCg4scGgjsN0iE5HCHDDxQQLUqsLOxD_7NQc4AcYY2neCmSwuYS_iGB88mnST0uhmtXPDUwcfyO-diGbZrBM95pKqnPn0zyzoV09Ymvhi570d5OUC2Jo4PCJUAfm8P5IhZyIzEhQp8vY/s200/Remen_RN.png"/></a></div>Last night [Sat Jun 3], here in this sanctuary I was so honored and touched by this congregation’s appreciation of our time together.
If you weren’t there, the festivities included a version of Bingo, with squares to fill in that were all references to some aspect of our time together in the last 10 years. One of the squares on some of the bingo cards was: “Broken vase – first sermon.”
And, indeed, in that sermon on April 28, 2013, I did relate a story, from a book by Rachel Naomi Remen, that used the metaphor of the broken vase.<br><br>
It was a story of a young man, 24-years-old, whose leg had to be removed at the hip to save him from bone cancer. He was angry and bitter. It seemed so deeply unfair that he had suffered this terrible loss so early in life. Over the course of more than two years, slowly, he began to shift, to look beyond himself, to reach out to others who had suffered severe physical losses, to make visits. On one visit, he was in running shorts, and his artificial leg showed as he entered the hospital room of a young woman who had lost both her breasts to cancer. She was so depressed that she would not even look at him. The nurses had left a radio playing, so, to get her attention, he unstrapped his leg, and began dancing around the room on one leg, snapping his fingers to the music. She looked at him in amazement, and then burst out laughing and said, 'Man, if you can dance, I can sing.'” <br><br>
<div class="separator" style="clear: both;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi5v3WpHdQnGoNcKBm_j-xN8muDoFXffkCFd702ZF7_-_HLGJot6J7zGgSPFOVObmJH7f6K6lELE2aQ-KJZYR8qZWjVTmviqUxczKOt8Y9X1eIvPc6OZ8CioXhZsUccUOQmaDOU_XmlgNZGeEqZaqDdhd-WqSxFFUIS5FbyRcI13kZnA6ndnbOHnFw/s1007/2023-06-05.png" style="display: block; padding: 1em 0; text-align: center; clear: right; float: right;"><img alt="" border="0" width="200" data-original-height="1007" data-original-width="1007" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi5v3WpHdQnGoNcKBm_j-xN8muDoFXffkCFd702ZF7_-_HLGJot6J7zGgSPFOVObmJH7f6K6lELE2aQ-KJZYR8qZWjVTmviqUxczKOt8Y9X1eIvPc6OZ8CioXhZsUccUOQmaDOU_XmlgNZGeEqZaqDdhd-WqSxFFUIS5FbyRcI13kZnA6ndnbOHnFw/s200/2023-06-05.png"/></a></div>That man’s broken-ness was now his gift. Later, as the man was meeting with Dr. Remen, they were reviewing their two years of work together. She showed him a drawing that he had made early on when she had invited him to draw a picture that represented his body. He had drawn a picture of a vase, and running through the vase was a deep black crack. This was his image of his body -- and he had taken a black crayon and had drawn the crack over and over again, grinding his teach with rage with each stroke. It seemed to him that this vase could never function as a vase again -- could never hold water. Now, a couple years later, he looked at that picture and said, ‘Oh, this one isn’t finished.’ So Dr. Remen extended a box of crayons and “said ‘Why don’t you finish it?’ He picked a yellow crayon and putting his finger on the crack, he said, ‘You see, here – where it is broken – this is where the light comes through.
And with the yellow crayon he drew light streaming through the crack in his body. (Remen)<br><br>
That man’s one-leggedness became the way that he was able to shine in this world. The broken-ness is the gift.<br><br>
<div class="separator" style="clear: both;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiR9aGGzKLWXcsD7d97LxGtLT5zA3NmqamE5Mj2B6Da0d6G9edMyr_y2bFDs-1XTFL6KxsNuMU0eAwcjUsD2uUj3G_87B2wa6CsoDM4CsMp40Hj3I8IyNzSlNflXXRWe0G6hZUdabEYmJSOnBYTNBJrTD3lZw2AlWUxf8jbreHTwC7Tc_gHzFC5Tck/s1266/Cohen_Leonard.png" style="display: block; padding: 1em 0; text-align: center; clear: right; float: right;"><img alt="" border="0" width="200" data-original-height="1266" data-original-width="1266" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiR9aGGzKLWXcsD7d97LxGtLT5zA3NmqamE5Mj2B6Da0d6G9edMyr_y2bFDs-1XTFL6KxsNuMU0eAwcjUsD2uUj3G_87B2wa6CsoDM4CsMp40Hj3I8IyNzSlNflXXRWe0G6hZUdabEYmJSOnBYTNBJrTD3lZw2AlWUxf8jbreHTwC7Tc_gHzFC5Tck/s200/Cohen_Leonard.png"/></a></div>Leonard Cohen’s song, “Anthem” reverses the direction of the light. He sang, <blockquote>“There is a crack, a crack in everything.<br>That’s how the light gets in.”</blockquote> So is the light getting in, or is it shining out? Both. Through our brokenness, the light of the world can get in, and also, through that same crack, the light from our souls shines out.<br><br>
There’s a verse in Tolkien’s <i>Lord of the Rings</i>, that says:
<blockquote>“From the ashes a fire shall be woken,<br>
a light from the shadows shall spring.”</blockquote>
From the shadow: from the dark recesses, from maybe the parts of you that you think of as flaws, that you don’t like about yourself, the parts that are wrong. It may be from or through those very parts that the light comes forth.<br><br>
According the <i>Gospel of Thomas</i>, Jesus said, <blockquote>“If you bring forth what is within you, what you bring forth will save you.<br>
If you do not bring forth what is within you, what you do not bring forth will destroy you.”</blockquote>
Within you, tucked away in that inner dark, is the shadow of the you that you present to the world. The shadow is a little wild, a little crazy. The shadow doesn’t fit with the goals and purposes you have laid out for yourself.<br><br>
<div class="separator" style="clear: both;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhuXyDQAr9tsUOMPw2tGpqCjf3UMIgIpgtM3LSgwPiRrMxlpZns7s4J0EGzVcCrv8D7afM3VI_NSgIWlcs5n-weJ6W5IBwbe7ZEYbkn-aL6dvF4oRF9U0rXsJePD8qjhhhaszGPZxYJZE6wQ66-asbBxiTNaSKlXvR6gpRIqb0szlNP1FwRdR7GpS0/s1080/Jung_Carl02.png" style="display: block; padding: 1em 0; text-align: center; clear: right; float: right;"><img alt="" border="0" width="200" data-original-height="1080" data-original-width="1080" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhuXyDQAr9tsUOMPw2tGpqCjf3UMIgIpgtM3LSgwPiRrMxlpZns7s4J0EGzVcCrv8D7afM3VI_NSgIWlcs5n-weJ6W5IBwbe7ZEYbkn-aL6dvF4oRF9U0rXsJePD8qjhhhaszGPZxYJZE6wQ66-asbBxiTNaSKlXvR6gpRIqb0szlNP1FwRdR7GpS0/s200/Jung_Carl02.png"/></a></div>The shadow makes us uncomfortable with ourselves. But that shadow has a light to shine. As Carl Jung said, “to confront a person with his shadow is to show him his own light.” If you bring forth what is within you – bring forth your shadow – then what you bring forth will save you, said Jesus, per the Gospel of Thomas.<br><br>
Maybe you don’t bring it forth in the midst of your work-a-day life. Maybe the professionalism you have carefully cultivated to serve you well is appropriate for large parts of your life. But there needs to be somewhere -- some aspect of your life -- where the shadow can be acknowledged and welcomed as a part of your wholeness – your perfect, complete wholeness. “If you don’t bring forth what is within you, what you don’t bring forth will destroy you,” said Jesus.<br><br>
If it isn’t brought into consciousness, it will operate unconsciously – and the return of the repressed will not be pretty. Writes Jo Farrow:
<blockquote>“If we cannot bear to bring our unacknowledged fears or feeling into the light of consciousness, we shall continue to need ‘enemies’ onto which we can off-load the suppressed self-hate or fear of being overwhelmed which is simmering below the surface of our lives.”</blockquote>
The shadow might be the part of you that you learned in childhood to tuck away as you adapted to parental expectations. Or, as with the young man who lost his leg, it might be a limitation suddenly and surprisingly imposed. Either way, it’s something about yourself that you don’t like. It’s the demons you haven’t yet learned to embrace.<br><br>
Returning to Rachel Naomi Remen, she writes:
<blockquote>“Wounding and healing are not opposites. They're part of the same thing. It is our wounds that enable us to be compassionate with the wounds of others. It is our limitations that make us kind to the limitations of other people. It is our loneliness that helps us to find other people or to even know they're alone with an illness. I think I have served people perfectly with parts of myself I used to be ashamed of.”</blockquote>We are perfect, just as we are. But we have a hard time believing that we are. Failure weighs on us. We failed – or something failed. Our bodies failed, our relationship failed, our job failed, our brain failed. There was a failure of something in ourselves or in our world to be what we were so sure it should be, was supposed to be. Brokenness, the blessing of our affliction, arrives as failure, arrives as the breaking of our "should."<br><br>
Somewhere in growing up our lives became as a vase, shellacked with “should” until opaque. And the light within us does not shine out until something breaks us. Some very important “should” fails, and we crack. We break open. And a little more of our perfection hatches. It was always there – we were always perfect – but a bit more of our perfection gets brought forth and shines out.<br><br>
If I hadn’t been cracked, if I hadn’t failed, if things had gone as I was once so sure they “should,” I might still be teaching philosophy, still living in my head, still assessing everything other people said as either something I agreed with or something I had an argument against, rarely simply present to the beauty and fascination of another person – concerned only with whether they were right, rather than with where they were coming from.<br><br>
I’d have been perfect then, too, but I wouldn’t have known it – and I wouldn’t have known perfect you and this perfect congregation.<br><br>
I still don’t entirely believe that I’m perfect, but I try every day to honor the part of me that does know that all of me, and all of you, are perfect, whole, and complete just as you are.<br><br>
Amen.<br><br>
BENEDICTION<br><br>
You cannot defeat darkness by running from it, nor can you conquer your inner demons by hiding them from the world. Bring forth what is within you, and be saved and saving. There is always more that is waiting to see the light – waiting to <i>become</i> the light. Go in peace.
Rev. Meredith Garmonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09600609816550758194noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7480207999294007243.post-13201730789731308562023-06-03T15:01:00.029-04:002023-07-08T15:23:18.347-04:00UU Minute #121<b>People With Different Beliefs</b><br><br>
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Let’s recap: as the civil war ended in 1865, Unitarianism, which had been stagnant for decades, got a boost from holding its first ever national convention. Almost immediately, a conflict broke out when delegates adopted a constitution, the preamble of which expressed a creed.<br><br>
In response, the Free Religious Association formed to fight against creeds, and, almost 30 years later, the 1894 Saratoga Compromise did remove the creedal language.<br><br>
Then in the late 19-teens and 1920s, Humanism emerged, led by Unitarian ministers John Dietrich and Curtis Reese, and the Humanist-Theist Controversy ensued, with renewed efforts from the theists to adopt a Unitarian creed.<br><br>
The 1933 Humanist Manifesto, coming in the midst of the depression, affirmed a new hope.<br><br>
By the 1930s, the theists were no longer lobbying for a theist creed, and by the end of the 1930s, the humanist-theist controversy had petered out. Most Unitarians had come to see that the once-heated conflict should be regarded as history.<br><br>
The issue continued to be discussed, more or less calmly, as we continued to process it. A very widely distributed pamphlet first published in 1954 was titled, “Why the Humanism-Theism Controversy is Out of Date.”<br><br>
What was ultimately so persuasive was not any argument in a Unitarian periodical or from a Unitarian pulpit, but the simple fact that humanists and theists really could sit side by side in our pews and committee meetings, stand side by side in social action projects. Our denomination had learned again what we periodically must re-learn: "We need not think alike to love alike." And: "people with different beliefs can come together in one faith."<br><br>
<div style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://www.liberalpulpit.org/p/uu-minute.html">UU Minute TABLE OF CONTENTS</a></div>
Rev. Meredith Garmonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09600609816550758194noreply@blogger.com0