Called Into Darkness

Liberal Entitlement, part 2

You are called, dear reader. You, and everyone you know, have been called to live into this period of darkness, of danger, for our people, our society, our planet. Whether any of us will live through this period of darkness, I cannot say, but we have been called to be here now, to live into this time. It is for us to make what light we can against this darkness. This calling comes late in some of our lives, early in others, and in the middle of others. Wherever you are in the arc of your life, you are at this point now, facing this challenge.

On the plus side, you have resources. You are probably pretty smart, judging from what I know of the readership of this blog. And probably resilient. When you have to be, you can be very determined. And now you have to be.

None of us asked for this assignment – nor have we the option of refusing it. We’ve been training for it all our short, medium, or long lives.

Also on the plus side, you are not alone. Unitarian Universalists and others of good will are ready to stand with you. Are we enough? We are always enough to shine the light that we can shine.

Whether or not you think you’re ready, you’re ready. You stand now upon this stage, called to play the part that only you can play. The darkness has been with us for some time. That we haven’t known it constitutes our predicament.

One member of my congregation emailed me on the morning of Wed Nov 9 to say she

“woke sad and stunned by the election results. Why don't so many in our country think and feel like we do?”

Another added that he and his spouse

“went to sleep last night feeling worried and baffled, and woke up this morning in much the same state....We wondered whether our sense of liberal entitlement blinded us to who is really in need and hurting in this country. [Have we been] quick to dismiss concerns of people who don't think like we do (or who we don't think think like we do)? Is there a danger that in our insistence on inclusiveness we get blinded to those we don't realize we are excluding? And of course, we wonder where we go from here? How do we pick up the pieces and feel positive about the work we are all trying to see done? How do we pick ourselves up spiritually and reconcile what happened in the election -- not only in the results but the way we were all swept into the fervor and divisiveness?”

Those are questions a lot of us have.

Before I try to address any of that, I need to remind – well, myself – of something I’ve said before: Don’t believe what you think. Whatever story we have about what’s going on in the social and political world is just a story. You can take it provisionally and use it and temporarily let it guide you, but don’t believe it. No story can ever be complete. With that caveat, I offer you this story, in the hope that it offers a little bit of sense to what seems to make no sense.

From cognitive scientist George Lakoff, who I first read some 15 years ago, I learned that there’s an authoritarian paradigm and a nurturant paradigm.

The Authoritarian Paradigm

The authoritarian paradigm puts the emphasis on fighting evil. It sees life as difficult and the world as fundamentally dangerous. Survival requires strength and discipline to confront dangers and evils from competitors and within the human soul. It requires a clear and strict sense of right and wrong with a minimum acknowledgment of moral gray areas. Evil must be attacked and destroyed. Respect for authority is crucial in the fight against evil. Obedience to authority is part of maintaining the strict sense of right and wrong we need to navigate life’s difficulties, resist evil, and maintain the social and natural order. Systems of reward and punishment -- rewarding the self-disciplined, responsible pursuit of self-interest and punishing for those who undermine authority or lack self-discipline – are crucial to maintain authority and order. People come in two kinds: the mature, self-disciplined, self-reliant ones who should not be meddled with, and the whining, undisciplined, dependent ones who should never be coddled.

The Nurturant Paradigm

The nurturant paradigm puts the emphasis on nurturing good. It sees life as centered on loving interactions, caring and being cared for, deriving meaning from connection and care. A fulfilling life is a nurturant life, a life of empathy, of imaginative capacity to put ourselves in others shoes to more effectively caringly respond to their needs. Life is for self-development, realizing our unique potential, understanding our own self-development as intertwined with the development of others. The value of self-discipline and self-reliance lies in helping us contribute more to society, in realizing and developing self, and in finding joy – not merely as defenses against evil. And that self-discipline is fostered better through relationships of care and respect than through systems of reward and punishment. There is a legitimate role for authority, but authority arises less from a hierarchy for enforcing black-and-white morality with reward and punishment, and more from developed skill as a nurturer. The paradigm of authority is a kindly teacher, aimed at others’ development, rather than military dictator aimed at vanquishing threats. Legitimate authority emerges from relationships of accountability, for this facilitates dialog and individual critical thinking – as opposed to the authoritarian paradigm, in which authority comes from being strong and righteous, and accountability to morally weaker carping characters is unproductive and wearisome.

How the Paradigms Underlie Political and Child-Rearing Philosophies

Most of us have both paradigms, and we tend to go back and forth between them. Almost all of us can be authoritarian when decisive leadership is called for, and almost all of us have an ability to facilitate the growth and learning of others. It's a question of relative dominance. If the nurturant paradigm is relatively more dominant in your thinking, you'll tend to support political issues identified as "liberal." If the authoritarian paradigm is relatively more dominant, you'll tend to support political issues identified as "conservative."

Our attitudes about child-rearing parallel our political attitudes. The assumptions about how parents parent generally match our assumptions about how governments govern. Thus, researchers have found that the best way to tease out an authoritarian paradigm is by asking questions about child-rearing. Matthew MacWilliams has isolated just four questions that powerfully predict an authoritarian or nurturant outlook on child-rearing and on politics.

Is it more important for a child to be:

• respectful or independent?
• obedient or self-reliant?
• well-behaved or considerate?
• well-mannered or curious?

The former in each pair indicates an authoritarian orientation. Generally, we’d like our children to exemplify both qualities of each pair. The authoritarian paradigm sees independence and self-reliance as flowing from respect and obedience, so learning to be respectful and obedient is the priority. The nurturant paradigm sees being well-behaved as flowing from being considerate, so learning to be considerate is the priority.

For the last year, I’ve been somewhat obsessively reading lots of articles in newspapers, magazines, and online analyzing this campaign. Most of them weren’t very memorable, but one of the ones that stuck with me came out last January by Matthew MacWilliams.

What MacWilliams’ research was finding, he reported, was that these four questions predicted Trump support better than any other factor – better than age, gender, education, or income class. Trump himself isn’t respectful, obedient, well-behaved, or well-mannered, but he certainly wants to be shown orderly respect and obedience, so supporters saw in him a strong man who would enforce the needed qualities on an unruly populace. The felt need for an authoritarian approach – encouraged by every action movie and a lot of the news narratives – occurs in women as well as men, which perhaps helps us understand how 42 percent of women could have voted for Trump.

There are a lot of lenses available for looking at what happened on Tue Nov 8. This one might be worth keeping in mind: The authoritarian need has been on the rise, encouraged by frustrations and a changing world. Trump appealed to the authoritarian need.

* * *
This is part 2 of 4 of "Liberal Entitlement"
See also:
Part 1: Election Prayer
Part 3: The Problem with Anti-Politics
Part 4: Join the Rebel Alliance

Election Prayer

Liberal Entitlement, part 1

I went to pray on Tuesday morning.
I went to join the people, my neighbors, at the precinct to worship together.
The electoral priest gave me a paper ballot wafer.
This is my body politic.
And handed me a pen – a small container of ink.
This is my blood.
I offered up my prayer, expressed the yearning of my heart.
As prayer does, it connected me to -- made me a part of -- something much bigger than myself.
Within a day, the Goddess answered my prayer, and the answer was:

"No. You’re not ready yet for that. I know you thought you were -- but you have more work to do – you and your neighbors -- more lessons to learn, more bridges to build. More compassion to share. You must love more widely and more fiercely and organize more energetically and more effectively."

I come to pray on this Sunday morning.
I come to join my people at our congregation to worship together:
To share our prayer -- express the yearning of our hearts.

May we be made ready. May we find the strength and resolve to do the work, learn the lessons, and build the bridges. We ask for the courage to love more fiercely, brightly, and constantly than we ever have before -- and for the energy to organize the effective forms of public love, which is justice.

AMEN

* * *
This is part 1 of 4 of "Liberal Entitlement"
See also
Part 2: Called Into Darkness
Part 3: The Problem with Anti-Politics
Part 4: Join the Rebel Alliance

What To Do About Confirmation Bias

Tribe, part 3

Our ancestors may have needed confirmation bias. Without that mechanism for fostering group agreement, maybe our ancestors would not have survived. Today, however, we have the resources to live together without intertribal hate and violence. The biggest obstacle remaining is the way our own brains are built.

Today, across the news and social media, we see tribal loyalties trump any serious attempt at objectivity. "Objectivity" might not be the right word -- I don’t know if there’s really such a thing as objectivity. So let me put it this way: re-confirming the bias of one’s own group is much more motivating for a lot of people than trying hard to see another’s point of view.

The demonstrators against police violence have a strong confirmation bias for seeing things one way. Police officers have a strong confirmation bias for seeing things another way. And so the tribal lines are drawn, and getting past them is not going to be easy. That’s the dark side of tribes.

We’ve built a society of disconnection. Our veneration of privacy and autonomy were very helpful for some things, but left us with work that often lacks meaning and relationships that are disposable. In the absence of healthy tribal connection, we take refuge in less healthy tribal forms -- for some kind of tribe is a human need. Without the kind of ongoing connection with our neighbors that now comes out only when we respond to disasters, we have sought more insular, vicious tribes.

For our ancestors, reaching agreement was more important than whether the conclusion was data-based, but for tribes today coalescing around political candidates, that kind of selective attention ignoring large parts of reality may be disastrous. For the members of police communities and the members of protest communities, inability to see the other with empathy will make the conflict intractable and never-ending.

We have to start with ourselves – knowing that each one of our brains was built for powerful confirmation bias that takes work to manage – manage, not eliminate.

#1. Don't believe what you think.

You were made to have confirmation bias, and to think that your own beliefs are true. Even suggestions you don't believe have a way of directing your attention and action to seek their confirmation. Now that you know this, you can partially counter it just by noticing it at work.
When you notice it, say to yourself: "There goes my brain just wanting to confirm. I can't entirely stop it from doing that, but I can deliberately withhold cognitive assent from what it finds."

If you’re a fan of a sports team, then sports might be a handy place for you to start practicing. Notice how you think the world is a better place if your team wins. Righteousness has prevailed, right? Notice how you can't really believe that -- but you cheer for your team anyway, just because it's fun. Can you consciously bring the same attitude to other things that you think?

#2. Cultivate negative capability.

"Negative capability" was John Keats' term for "capable of being in uncertainties, mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason." Work on being comfortable not knowing. As the Korean Zen master Seung Sahn often repeated: "Only don't know." Cultivate awe and wonder and mystery -- which depend on the absence of a satisfying story/explanation. In fact, refuse, to the extent you can, to let any story/explanation satisfy.

#3. Cultivate play.

Use play to switch around your images and metaphors. Your brain is built to latch onto stories, images, metaphors. You can't help that, but you can loosen the grip of any one story by playing around with other stories. People who expose themselves to a great multiplicity of stories – whether through traveling, reading novels, or cultivating diverse friends -- are less in the grip any one bias.

#4. Plunge in.

This one may seem counter-intuitive since it amounts to heightening your bias. There is, however, something true about every bias. Plunge in and see what you can learn about yourself from stories woven from random events. The lines on your hand, the Tarot cards that happen to come up, your zodiac sign -- explore what meaning can be made out of such coincidences. So you might actually try paying a visit to a palm reader, or Tarot psychic, or astrologer, and let them tell you the detailed story they make up.

You actually will learn something about yourself. Even if it isn't any more true of you than it would be for anyone else, it's still got some truth for you. It brings attention to an aspect of yourself. You can then better notice when that aspect is asserting itself. When you notice, you can then decide whether that's really the aspect that you want at the fore just then. The metaphors, images, or stories that most insidiously influence us are the ones that operate largely unconsciously. Fleshing out the details helps us be more conscious of them.

These four suggestions are all individual work. What we need is communal work. We need tribal connection not just with our self-selected tribe. We need tribal connection with all the people we see and interact with on a daily basis.

If we don’t figure out a way to come together as if a disaster has struck, then we will be coming together because a disaster has struck.

* * *
This is part 3 of 3 of "Tribe"
See also
Part 1: Left Alone
Part 2: Why Humans Reason

Why Humans Reason

Tribe, part 2

When we don't have strong connection to others in our tribe, it's bad for us. At the same time, there’s a dark side to our inherent tribalism. To unpack, a bit, the risks and the downside of our tribal need, I want to call attention to a curious feature of human reasoning: confirmation bias.

We all have a “tendency to search for, interpret, favor, and recall information in a way that confirms [our] preexisting beliefs or hypotheses” (Wikipedia). Thucydides observed, some 400 years BCE, that

"it is a habit of mankind to entrust to careless hope what they long for, and to use sovereign reason to thrust aside what they do not fancy."

Dante's Divine Comedy notes,

"opinion—hasty—often can incline to the wrong side, and then affection for one's own opinion binds, confines the mind."

Thomas Jefferson said,

"The moment a person forms a theory, his imagination sees in every object only the traits which favor that theory.”

We look for – and we see everywhere – support for our own theories.

And it goes even deeper than that. We tend to start noticing support for mere suggestions! Suppose your friend mentions that a mutual friend was born in middle-third of summer, which makes her a Leo. He mentions this by way of categorizing some tendency of hers. Or suppose he mentions that she was born in 1959, which was the year of the Pig, and uses this as a meaningful category for describing some aspect of the type of person she is. Even if you are quite sure that you believe in neither the Babylonian nor the Chinese form of the zodiac, the mere suggestion creates an unconscious filter at least temporarily increasing your attention to the person's lion-like or pig-like qualities.

A cousin of confirmation bias is the behavioral confirmation effect – also known as the self-fulfilling prophecy. What you think will happen influences how you act, and your action makes it happen. Typically you don’t notice the role that your own behavior had in making the result happen.

I mention all this because I want to raise this question: Why do we have confirmation bias? Why is there a behavioral confirmation effect? Whenever we reason – that is, whenever we advance a claim and seek to support it with evidence – we’re likely to be under the sway of confirmation bias. Why is that?

If the evolutionary function of reasoning – supporting claims with evidence – were to better discern the truth, or to make better decisions – then natural selection would have weeded out confirmation bias and the behavioral confirmation effect a long time ago. In fact, they never would have arisen. This tells us that the evolutionary function of reason is NOT to discern truth or to arrive at better decisions.

So what is the evolutionary function of human reason? Scholars Hugo Mercier and Dan Sperber argue that the function of human reason is in order for us to persuade one another. That is, in human evolutionary history, it is typically valuable for a group to agree on its viewpoints and theories. It is typically less valuable that those viewpoints and theories be true, or correspond to reality. As long as the decision-making isn't terrible but only a little bit less than optimal, then group agreement is more valuable than a marginal increase in good decision-making.

We are deeply social animals, and having a shared view of things helps us like each other and get along. Very often that’s more important than whether the shared view of things is true. If the objective is to produce conclusions supported by the most careful examination of the widest possible range of evidence, then confirmation bias is a significant obstacle. But if the objective is to produce conclusions that the group collectively endorses, then confirmation bias is quite handy: it keeps us focused on the evidence we can point out to each other to reinforce our consensus and bring lagging skeptics on board.

We evolved not only in a context of dependency on others within our tribe, but also in a context of recurring conflict with other tribes. In other words, we really needed to get along with our own people and also really needed to be able to fight against outsiders. Tribal survival depended on being able to defend our stuff (our turf, our food, our males' access to our reproductive-age females), and, when times got tough, survival sometimes depended on being able to conquer a neighboring tribe and take their stuff.

Shared viewpoints would have been doubly useful. First, shared viewpoints functioned to strengthen the bonds within our tribe. Second, shared viewpoints also functioned to facilitate a useful hatred of neighboring tribes who had different viewpoints. We needed to have viewpoints that were OURS – that were a product of tribal conversation – and we also needed those viewpoints to NOT be terribly closely determined by reality -- because then the other tribe would arrive at the same conclusion, and we wouldn't be able to hate them for their corrupt beliefs. Confirmation bias suits the need with amazing efficacy.

* * *
This is part 2 of 3 of "Tribe"
See also
Part 1: Left Alone
Part 3: What To Do About Confirmation Bias

Left Alone

Tribe, part 1

When you’re married to someone who likes disaster movies, then you end up watching a lot of disaster movies. The appeal of disaster movies is the appeal of actual disasters: we get to all get along. We become united – and by something clearly important. When 9-11 happened, when Superstorm Sandy hit, New Yorkers pulled together. Whenever a flood or a tornado or a tidal wave hits a community, you hear the same story: how nice it was that we were all working together. And we needed each other.

If you’ve ever caught yourself secretly hoping for a disaster just because it would be something significant and real, well, you’re not the only one. So much of our lives seem insignificant and unreal because we don't have to work together with others to deal with threats to the tribe’s very survival: coming together to care for each other in a way that feels real, solving problems that feels real, addressing threats that are real. When we’re not doing that for a short period of time it feels like a welcome respite. When we’re not doing that ever, it’s hard for life to feel real for a social species like homo sapiens.

Millions of years of evolution selected out just the traits that were oriented to being social, caring for and protecting the tribe. Sebastian Junger wrote a book called, Tribe. He says:

“Humans don’t mind hardship, in fact they thrive on it. What they mind is not feeling necessary. Modern society has perfected the art of making people not feel necessary.”

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:

“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.”

Through the colonial period, there were, the history books tell us, occasional wars and skirmishes between the settlers and the First Nations. With war comes prisoner taking. What probably wasn’t mentioned in your school history text is that the Europeans taken prisoner by the Americans often came to prefer life with their captors. When released, they would sometimes ask to stay. When colonists rescued them, they would escape and hide from their rescuers. This made prisoner swap agreements rather awkward. To honor their side of the swap, the natives had to forcibly return colonists, and still some colonists refused to go.

“In one case, the Shawanese Indians were compelled to tie up some European women in order to ship them back. After they were returned, the women escaped the colonial towns and ran back to the Indians.” (David Brooks, NYTimes, 2016 Aug 9)

In 1782, six years after the colonists had declared their independence from Britain, Hector de Crèvecoeur wrote,

“Thousands of Europeans are Indians, and we have no examples of even one of those aborigines having from choice become European.”

What’s going on? Is our cultural tradition, so good at domination and progress and doing more and getting more, foregoing what really gives people fulfilling lives?

I understand that evolution has reasons for making us the sort of beings that aren’t ecstatically or contentedly happy all the time. A certain dissatisfaction with things as they are is a necessary motivator to stir us from complacency. But did Western culture take that drive way, way too far?

I know there’s a tendency to romanticize tribal peoples. Tribes did war with each other. Life was often difficult. They were not, by and large, what we would call environmentalists – they, too, deforested and overhunted, and gave little thought to sustainability. But still Sebastian Junger’s description haunts me. These sentences don’t sound like romanticizing:

“They 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.”

Almost never alone. We traded that for more individual autonomy and choice and privacy, for being left alone – being left . . . alone. Was it a good trade? We gained wealth. We lost our strong tribal connectedness. We pay the price in that loss and in higher rates of depression. The World Health Organization reports that people in wealthy countries suffer depression at up to eight times the rate of people in poor countries.

The millennial generation – people who are now between about 15 and 35 years old – may be in some ways choosing community over autonomy more so than previous generations. Millienials are more likely to turn the office into a source of friendships, meaning and social occasions, with less professional distance. Some millenials are trying to reclaim neighborhood hospitality – not as an accidental product of necessity, as it was 100 years ago – but as an intentional choice that requires effort. That feels like a good thing. Humans are built to live tribally. We need our tribe. When we don't have one, it's bad for us.

* * *
This is part 1 of 3 of "Tribe"
See also
Part 2: Why Humans Reason
Part 3: What To Do About Confirmation Bias

More Than Words Can Say

Covenant, part 3

A contract, whether oral or written, consists of words. There may be disputes about the meaning of those words, but the words are the contract. Covenant is different. Covenant is ultimately beyond words.

Yes, we generally do make attempts to articulate the covenant in words, but the words aren’t the covenant. A poem can articulate the love the poet feels for the beloved, but the poem isn’t the love. The covenantal reality is much more than what can be spoken. A marriage covenant, for example, can never be wholly and fully expressed by the vows made at the wedding, no matter how carefully or extensively those vows might be crafted. The promise is more than what can be said.

Love rings the bells of wanted birth and wedding day --
Love guides the hands that promise more than words can say. (Brain Wren, "Love Makes a Bridge")

This is not to say that articulating vows is unimportant.The words matter – but they matter not because they capture and constitute the whole promise, but because they serve to point to the promise that is deeper and wider than words can say.

As a people of covenant, we cannot grasp all that this covenant means – we can only live it. We cannot articulate all that our commitment to each other means – but can articulate a few aspects that will help us stay pointed in the direction of being the people we want to be: we promise to affirm and promote the inherent worth and dignity of every person, or being, to respect the interdependent web of existence of which we are a part, to nurture each other in our spiritual journeys and engage in service. The words are merely the tip of the iceberg of the covenant as it is lived.

The great Unitarian theologian James Luther Adams speaks of the community-forming power – this mysterious thing that, like God promising Abraham, lifts us out of our separate, small lives and forms us into community, a great nation. Covenant is the name of that mystery, that community-forming power, the promise and commitment to be together, bear witness to one another, to be for each other what we cannot be alone. As Annie Dillard says,

“Together we notice not only each mountain shadow and each stone on the beach but we notice each other's beautiful face and complex nature so that creation need not play to an empty house.”

We are surrounded by a culture that emphasizes individualism, heroic separation. The covenantal theology that Unitarian Universalism has inherited and shaped in its own way teaches that there is another way.

Our flourishing lies in the promises we make to and with each other. That flourishing happens through the keeping of those promises, and maybe even more it happens through the repairing of the promises when they are broken. For under-girding our covenantal promises to each other is the covenantal promise to the promise of covenant itself – our promise to do the work of re-connecting when we find ourselves divided. We forgive ourselves and each other and begin again in love. When we think someone isn’t doing enough, when we find someone annoying, when we think someone isn’t listening to us, is doing things wrong, in that very moment: forgive ourselves and each other and begin again in love.

That’s the covenant, and the covenantal tradition of which we are today the latest manifestation. Of course we try to keep our promises, and often we do. But it’s when we don’t that we confront the task of repair, of beginning again in love, and that’s when our lives meet the holy. As Rev. Gretchen Haley writes:

“Let me tell you right now, sometime in the next year, maybe in the next few minutes, the people you most believe in and care about are going to disappoint you. Your church is going to disappoint you. This world is surely going to disappoint you. Like, all the time. We all are walking wounded and weary from the way this world can – and does – break our hearts. And what our faith asks of us, what our faith imagines for us, is that somehow, right at that moment when our hearts break, we will find our way to see through that heartbreak. We will stay put – not close off, not run away, not hurt back – but keep on being in relationship, doing what we can to repair the world and each other, keep on opening our hearts with greater love. And, right then, our covenantal faith says, we are most whole and most at home.”

We are promise-making, promise-keeping, promise-breaking, and promise-repairing animals. And here we are. A group of people who happen to be in a room together looking for meaning and belonging -- the most recent embodiment of a tradition that shows us how to do that. For we are a covenantal people -- and our lives do not play to an empty house.

* * *
This is part 3 of 3 of "Covenant"
See also
Part 1: The Covenantal Tradition
Part 2: What Makes a People

What Makes a People

Covenant, part 2

When this tradition of ours reached a branching point, and one of the branches called itself Christian, these new Christians characterized themselves as recognizing a "New Covenant." At the last supper, Jesus says, “this cup that is poured out for you is the new covenant in my blood.” There’s a promise. Those who promise to dedicate their lives to the new community and its teachings are promised “life everlasting” – which essentially means meaning and connection – a realization of the you that is more than the set of your ego defense mechanisms.

Some centuries more go by, and the Protestants split off from the other Christians. Then the Unitarians and Universalists became distinct branches of Protestantism, and our branches gradually dropped the expectation that members were Christian. Each of the many branches of Western religion has evolved in its own way, but we all have this covenantal tradition in our roots.

The key insight articulated in the stories that took form among Hebrew slaves in Babylonian captivity is with us still: Our relationship to each other, to our world, is constituted by promises, by agreement.

The word covenant also appears in some legal contexts. In legal contexts a covenant is "a type of contract in which the covenantor makes a promise to a covenantee to do or not do some action.” In real estate law, “covenant” refers to conditions tied to the use of land. That’s not what I'm talking about – although a real estate covenant does relate to how we use the ground on which we come together – so there is a metaphorical connection.

The origin of the word covenant means both “to agree” and “to meet.” You see that in the similarity with the word “convene.” A covenant is the ground of agreement on which we meet, the agreement that makes convening possible. It’s the agreement that makes us a people, instead of isolated individuals. Covenant is what brings us together; it convenes us.

A contract stipulates conditions that can be objectively determined to be violated or not. If the terms are violated, then there’s recourse or remedy: you can go to court to have the contract enforced, or there are terms in the contract itself that apply if one party fails to do their part. Covenant doesn’t work like that at all. Unlike a contract, a covenant doesn't generally stipulate conditions that can be objectively determined to be violated or not, and, even when its conditions are clearly violated, covenants are unenforceable and afford no remedy or recourse.

The function of a covenant is not to work the way a legal contract works. The function of a covenant is to remind us of our shared aspiration for how we'd like to be together. Covenants express the sort of general principles that we honor and uphold yet also sometimes fail to honor and uphold.

The content of the covenant that convenes Unitarian Universalists, and that, before 1961, convened Unitarians and Universalists, has been articulated in various ways through the years and centuries. In the mid-1980s, we articulated it in the words of our seven principles:

“We, the member congregations of the Unitarian Universalist Association, covenant to affirm and promote

• the inherent worth and dignity of every person;
• justice, equity and compassion in human relations;
• acceptance of one another and encouragement to spiritual growth;
• a free and responsible search for truth and meaning;
• the right of conscience and the use of democratic process;
• the goal of world community with peace liberty, and justice for all;
• respect for the interdependent web of existence of which we are a part.”

In addition, Community UU, White Plains, is also convened by our agreement that we gather on behalf of our mission

“to nurture each other in our spiritual journeys;
foster compassion and understanding within and beyond our community; and
engage in service to transform ourselves and our world.”

The shared agreement to embody these words convenes this congregation – it is part of how the covenant is articulated. References to the covenant are invitations for each of us to reflect on how we might better follow its principles. Judging others on how well they're following the covenant is not how it works. Rather, the terms of the covenant are a promise that we each individually make to ourselves -- but within a context of knowing that all the others in the group are also making that promise to themselves.

The stories of our tradition speak of the covenant with God – which is a way of evoking the commonality of a shared higher self with which we commit ourselves in promise. Instead of triggering specified consequences after which it is then null, as a contract would, each breaking of the promise is the occasion of recommitting to the covenant's ideals.

There’s a hymn that we sing here with words by Rumi:

Come, come whoever you are,
Wonderer, worshiper, lover of leaving,
Ours is no caravan of despair,
Come yet again come.

But our hymn leaves out one line of the original Rumi poem:

“Come, even if you have broken your vows a thousand times.
Come, yet again, come.”

With a contract, if you don’t live up to your side, I don’t have to live up to my side either. With a covenant, breaking it doesn’t weaken the power the covenant has. However much or often we may fail – and we all sometimes fail at our covenants – the covenant calls us back to try again to live up to and live by our promise – for the promise convenes us, makes us a people, and constitutes our promised land.

Come, yet again, come.

* * *
This is part 2 of 3 of "Covenant."
See also
Part 1: The Covenantal Tradition
Part 3: More Than Words Can Say