Dharma Blossoms

The Rev. Lynn Ungar writes these words for Flower Communion:

What a gathering — the purple
tongues of iris licking out
at spikes of lupine, the orange
crepe skirts of poppies lifting
over buttercup and daisy.
Who can be grim
in the face of such abundance?
There is nothing to compare,
no need for beauty to compete.
The voluptuous rhododendron
and the plain grass
are equally filled with themselves,
equally declare the miracles
of color and form.
This is what community looks like —
this vibrant jostle, stem by stem
declaring the marvelous joining.
This is the face of communion,
the incarnation once more
gracefully resurrected from winter.
Hold these things together
in your sight—purple, crimson,
magenta, blue. You will
be feasting on this long after
the flowers are gone.

This year our Flower Communion, as it often does in this congregation, coincides with the Memorial Day Weekend. We are also, as we usually don’t do, observing Vesak – so, along with our flowers, I will talk today about the flowering of the dharma – dharma blossoms.

The Buddhist festival Vesak was last Thursday (Thu May 23, 2024) – on the day of the full moon. Buddhist festivals go back for centuries, but they have been local and highly variable from place to place. The first conference of the newly-formed World Fellowship of Buddhists was held in 1950, in Sri Lanka. With representatives from 27 countries, the conference decided that Buddha’s birthday would be celebrated on the full-moon day in May. We don’t know the actual birthday of Siddhartha Gotama, the person who would become known variously as Shakyamuni, Tathagata, Bhagavan, and Buddha. For that matter, we don’t know the actual birthday of Jesus either. The early Christian church celebrated Jesus' birthday in April for a while, then in June, before settling on a date that would allow for co-opting pagan yule celebrations.

The very word “Buddhism” was coined by Western scholars in the nineteenth century. The word "Buddha" is an ancient word, meaning "awake one" -- or perhaps, in contemporary parlance, "woke" -- but neither "Buddhism" nor "Buddhist" have an equivalent in Pali, Sanskrit, Chinese, or Tibetan – the languages in which were written the literature that Westerners called “Buddhist.” That literature propounds dharma: the teachings, the way, the truth, the law, reality.

Once Westerners had made clear to these followers of the dharma that what they were was something called Buddhists, they digested that for a while and then started adapting and adopting some of the institutional denominational forms of the Westerners, including forming this World Fellowship of Buddhists in 1950.

I’m a Zen student and practitioner, and a founder and leader of Zen centers for over 20 years. In El Paso, I started and for four years led the Border Zen Center. In Gainesville, Florida, I started and for seven years led the Dancing Crane Zen Center. In White Plains, New York, I started and for ten years led the Boundless Way Zen Center of Westchester. When I moved here to Iowa not quite a year ago I did not establish a Zen center, so for the first time since 2002, I’m not leading a zen group. I expect I will again, eventually, lead a group, but for now, I’m enjoying having a couple years of sabbatical from that – practicing and studying on my own at home and sitting in as a visitor when I can with the Des Moines Zen Center, and occasionally dropping in on our own Awakening Hearts Sangha which meets via Zoom only on Monday evenings.

Zen is the Japanese word which comes from the Chinese word Chan, which comes from the Sanskrit word dhyana, which means meditation. Zen Buddhism is Buddhism in which the primary practice is to sit down and shut up. Don’t concentrate on anything in particular, and don’t try to stifle thinking – just notice what thoughts do come up, and let go of them. Instead of riding on a train of thought from station to station, as the mind tends to like to do, when you notice, “oh, I’m thinking about . . . whatever” . . . release the thought.

It’s never long before another one comes along. Where did it come from? Beyond the general fact that it came from your 100 billion neurons trying to take care of you, there’s no telling where it came from. Just notice that that thought has arisen, and release it rather than jumping on for the ride. Why would you do this?

In my years of leading Zen groups, I’ve greeted many newcomers, and guided them in getting started on the path. People show up at a Zen Center because they think something is wrong with them, their life is broken in some way, and they have somewhere heard something that leads them to suppose that this practice might fix them. What they begin to see, if they’ll sit down and shut up for 20 or 30 minutes once or twice a day, most days, is that they aren’t broke, never have been, and don’t need fixing. We have a hard time believing that, so, those of us who keep at it do so in order to keep re-learning, re-remembering that we are, in fact, whole and perfect exactly as we are.

Strangely, this does end up easing our suffering.

If you take a story about a creator of the universe who is also a law-giver and whomp it up into a religion – that is, add priests with distinctive robes esoteric knowledge that took years of study, which means designating scripture for them to study, and also add special buildings called temples where formalized rituals are enacted, well, you get something rather like Judaism. If you then add to that an eschatology – a story about end times and a second coming – and whomp it up into a religion with priests, scripture, temples, and rituals, you get something like Christianity. But if you take a therapy – a set of practices and treatments for helping people suffer less – and whomp it up into a religion -- adding priests, temples, and so forth – then that’s basically how Buddhism formed.

It’s possible to peel back the religious womping, for those who want it peeled back. Mindfulness based stress reduction, for instance, is the dharma – it’s the teachings and practices of what Westerners dubbed “Buddhism” – but without priests or temples, and with selected scripture re-written in modern language without attribution to its ancient sources -- and without calling itself “Buddhism” because that word, though invented scarcely 200 years ago, is understood to denote a religion.

Indeed, mindfulness and meditation and the insights of the dharma afford spiritual deepening available to anyone of any religion. Christians, Jews, Moslems, Hindus, and atheists and quite a number of Unitarians have all found their religious experience and awareness expanded through sitting down and shutting up, cultivating mindfulness, and reading and talking about dharma teachings. You don’t have to change your religion in order to take up Zen practice and gain the insights of 1500 years of Zen masters. Some Zen practitioners adopt Zen as their religion, others don’t. Those who do find in Zen a complete religion of practice, teachings, experience, and community. Zen – and, indeed, the Buddhist tradition generally -- is available to people of any, or no, religion, as a practice of wisdom, compassion, living in the present moment, and realizing your true self.

So what teachings can I pick out to lift up for you today? The Awakening Heart Sangha has shared with us two helpful teachings from the Mahayana Sutra, "The Eight Realizations of Great Beings" (Taisho Number 779). (It's a short sutra -- 597 words in Thich Nhat Hanh's English translation. Read it HERE.) The members of Awakening Heart Sangha highlighted two of the eight realizations: that excessive desires cause suffering, and that the mind’s tendency to never feel fulfilled, to insatiably, constantly strive for more can make problems for us. To build on that excellent beginning, or to provide some further grounding for it, let’s look at the customary starting point of Buddha dharma, and that is what is called the four noble truths, as laid out in the Dhammacakkappavattana Sutta ("The Setting in Motion of the Wheel of the Dharma Sutra"). Tradition has it that this was the Buddha’s first talk after he had his great awakening.

The first of the four noble truths, as laid out in the Dhammacakkappavattana Sutta is: Life involves dukkha. Dukkha is generally translated as suffering, or stress, or dissatisfaction. The original reference is to a wheel where the hub, to spot where the axel goes into the wheel, is off center. Imagine you’re riding in a cart where the axel isn’t centered on the wheel. It’s going to be a bumpy ride. So life involves dukkha means life is a bumpy ride.

What Buddha actually says in the Dhammacakkappavattana Sutta is this, as Stephen Batchelor translates:

“This is dukkha: birth is dukkha, aging is dukkha, sickness is dukkha, death is dukkha, encountering what is not dear is dukkha, separation from what is dear is dukkha, not getting what one wants is dukkha.”

But are those things actually suffering? Or can we learn to bear them with equanimity? To answer that question, we turn to another sutra – the Sallatha Sutta -- the two arrows sutra. It says:

“Monks, when the uninstructed worldling is being contacted by a painful feeling, he sorrows, grieves, and laments; he weeps beating his breast and becomes distraught. He feels two feelings – a bodily one and a mental one. Suppose they were to strike a person with an arrow, and then they would strike that person immediately afterwards with a second arrow, so that the person would feel a feeling caused by two arrows. So too, when the uninstructed worldling is being contacted by a painful feeling he feels two feelings – a bodily one and a mental one....

Monks, when the instructed noble disciple is contacted by a painful feeling, he does not sorrow, grieve, or lament; he does not weep beating his breast and become distraught. He feels one feeling – a bodily one, not a mental one. Suppose they were to strike a person with an arrow, but they would not strike that person immediately afterwards with a second arrow, so that the person would feel a feeling caused by one arrow only. So too, when the instructed noble disciple is contacted by a painful feeling he feels one feeling – a bodily one, not a mental one.”

The key teaching here is that our suffering arises not just from what happens to us – that’s the first arrow – but from our reactions and interpretations of those events. An untrained mind amplifies and proliferates the suffering – which amounts to getting struck by a second arrow. It’s our nonacceptance – “I don’t want this! I don’t want this! I don’t want this! This shouldn’t be happening!” -- that makes the suffering much worse, like being hit with a second arrow after the first.

The first arrow cannot be avoided. Life is going to pierce us from time to time. The practice however teaches us how to dodge that second arrow of our reactivity. Notice that dukkha is the first arrow. Recall what the Dhammacakkappavattana Sutta said: “Birth is dukkha, aging is dukkha, sickness is dukkha, death is dukkha, encountering what is not dear is dukkha, separation from what is dear is dukkha, not getting what one wants is dukkha.” There is no avoiding any of that. We can learn to receive these arrows with equanimity rather than with reactivity and thereby avoid the second arrow.

Dukkha is the first arrow; it’s unavoidable. Reactivity is the second arrow; it’s avoidable.

There’s a passage from the Upajjhathana Sutta that is regularly recited at many Buddhist and Zen centers under the title: “The Five Remembrances”:

“I am of the nature to grow old. There is no way to escape growing old.
I am of the nature to have ill health. There is no way to escape having ill health.
I am of the nature to die. There is no way to escape death.
All that is dear to me and everyone I love are of the nature of change. There is no way to escape being separated from them.
My deeds are my closes companions. I am the beneficiary of my deeds. My deeds are the ground on which I stand.”

Those are the five remembrances. And the first three are: old age, sickness, and death are unavoidable. You’ll remember that those are things explicitly identified as dukkha. “Aging is dukkha; sickness is dukkha; death is dukkha.” Those are things that there is no escaping.

First noble truth: life involves dukkha. Second noble truth: the arising of craving. Quoting Stephen Batchelor’s translation, this is the second noble truth:

“This is the arising: it is craving, which is repetitive, wallows in attachment and greed, obsessively indulges in this and that – craving for stimulation, craving for existence, craving for non-existence.”

This is often interpreted as saying craving causes the dukkha, but I don’t think that’s right. Craving is our reaction to the fact of dukkha. Birth, aging, sickness and death aren’t caused by craving. But birth, aging, sickness, and death cause us to react against them, to crave that dukkha go away. The text is not saying that craving causes dukkha; it's saying the dukkha causes craving.

The first noble truth tells us about the first arrow: that’s dukkha. The second noble truth tells us about the second arrow that follows after the first: our reactive craving. Remember: the first arrow is unavoidable; the second arrow is avoidable. Which takes us to the third noble truth: the ceasing.

“This is the ceasing: the traceless fading away and ceasing of that craving, the letting go and abandoning of it, freedom and independence from it.” (Dhammacakkappavattana Sutta, trans. Stephen Batchelor)

We all have times when we’re calm, relaxed, all our needs are met, and we aren’t reactive. The training, the practice, is learning to be that way more of the time – to dwell more continuously in the ceasing.

So the fourth noble truth, then, is the eightfold path for training ourselves in equanimity, acceptance, the ceasing of reactivity, the avoiding of that second arrow. Stephen Batchelor’s translation reads:

“And this is the path: the path with eight branches – complete vision, complete thought, complete speech, complete action, complete livelihood, complete effort, complete mindfulness, complete concentration.”

What I’ve been saying is illustrated by a parable from the Buddhist tradition.

The Buddha is traveling around giving talks. One day after his talk, a farmer comes to visit him. The farmer says, “I attended your public talk. It was beautiful; I was moved. Please help me with my problems.”
And the farmer started listing his problems: some of his cows got diseases; the grain market wasn’t consistent; fertilizer prices kept going up; his spouse was sometimes contrary; his children wouldn’t do what he told them; the neighbor’s dog was harassing his chickens.
Finally, the Buddha interrupted him and said, “You have 83 problems.”
This gave the farmer pause, and he said, “I hadn’t counted them, but that sounds about right.”
The Buddha said, “I can’t help you with any of them.”
The farmer was incredulous and angry. "You’re this great, renowned spiritual teacher, and you can’t help me with any of my problems? What good are you?”
Buddha said, “You will always have 83 problems. Sometimes you can solve one of them, or it goes away by itself, but another one pops up to replace it. Always 83. However, perhaps I can help with the 84th problem.”
The farmer said, “What’s the 84th problem?”
The Buddha said, “You think you should have no problems.”

Life IS problems. Call them “challenges” if you like, but problems they are: one after another, and always about 83. Another name for these problems is: life. We’ll always have them – approximately 83 of them, according to the Buddha. But if we crack the 84th problem, then we accept that our problems belong -- they come from being the sort of animal we were made to be. If we meet the problems with open hearts, and love them -- if we are curious about the problems instead of resentful of their presence, interested in where they came from and where they are inviting us to go -- then the problems are not the obstacles we took them to be. They are not the obstacle -- they are the path.

Courageous Facing

We face the fact that we are, we exist. Here we are: animals, vertebrates, mammals, apes that we are.

I spoke two weeks ago about Paul Tillich’s 1952 book, The Courage to Be. The courage to be is the courage to face existence, to affirm our own being in spite of those elements of our existence which conflict with our essential self-affirmation. To face being, however, also means facing nonbeing.

There is what feels like the little non-being: which is that we change. Birch spoke last week about the courage to change – to face change. We may choose change: decide to go to school, or go back to school, or switch careers, move to another city, move in with your love interest – or move out from who had been your love interest – join the army or join a commune. Big decisions. Then there are changes we don’t choose: a tornado blows down your house, you win the lottery, the stock market crashes, your love interest leaves you, you’re offered a big promotion out of the blue, or your neighbors decide to elect fascists.

Whether it’s the change you choose or don’t choose, you face the fact of change and of adapting yourself to the new reality. Change is a confrontation with nonbeing: what was, is no longer; what wasn’t, now is. Becoming is the interplay of being and nonbeing. Life changes – even big changes – feel like the little non-being compared to the end of life – the big non-being, or so it seems.

Unitarian minister Rev. Forrest Church spoke often of these twin truths to courageously face: that we are alive now and we will die. He wrote: “Death is central to my definition of religion: religion is our human response to the dual reality of being alive and having to die.” When Dan Cryer wrote a book of the Spiritual Odyssey of Forrest Church, he titled it: “Being alive and having to die.” Our religion, indicates Rev. Church, consists of our response to these two truths, the meaning we make of life on the one hand and of death on the other. It is how we courageously face being and non-being.

To explore this, we begin with the story we heard this morning, “I am Courage” (by Susan Verde). Faith read the lines:

“When my mind tells me ‘I can’t,’ I look inside myself and find the strength that lives deep down, and I tell my mind, ‘Yes, I can.’”

Sure, positive self-talk can sometimes bolster confidence and resilience, helping you take action, persist in the face of obstacles, and seek solutions. You’ve probably also learned along the way that it’s a good thing to know your limitations, that prudence sometimes dictates that you cut your losses; abandon an enterprise rather than continue to pour time and energy into something that’s not worth it. But how do we know when to persevere and when to cut bait?

The problem is, the voice of prudence may get misappropriated by a self-defeatist skeptical voice, and when you self-talk, “yes, I can,” your inner skeptic has some ammo for saying, “You sure about that? Maybe you can’t.”

I do not have – I don’t think anybody could have – an across the board, all-purpose answer to the question of when to push on and when to switch to something more likely to be rewarding. Nor should there be any sweeping general answer. Different people will have different proclivities for persevering versus trying something new – and it’s a good thing that we have that diversity. The same person will, in different types of activities, or at different times in their life with the same activity, persist more or persist less – and that variability is a good thing, too.

But I do have a twist to propose for the self-talk, something to help a little bit to guard against the possibility that a defeatist voice may be prematurely masquerading as the voice of prudence. It’s a point I share with you that I heard at a dharma talk during the six months I was in residence at Great Vow Zen Monastery in Oregon during 2019-2020. A day at Great Vow Zen Monastery, for the monastics and the residents there, often involved a total of a few hours of meditation in half-hour increments, and the rest of the day we carried out work assignments – in the garden or in the kitchen, or cleaning or fixing something. But for a 7-10-day stretch out of every month, we had sesshin. During sesshin, the meditation (or sitting in meditation posture, sometimes changing sutras or listenting to a dharma talk) bumps up to 10 hours a day. After about the second day, it can feel grueling. Knees hurt, back hurts – mind wanders – and what it’s apt to wander to is, “I can’t do this.”

One of the monks there, Soten Lynch, gave the dharma talk one day during a sesshin, and he addressed the “I can’t” voice. I happened to end up with the text of his talk, so I can quote Soten. He said:

“When the present moment is so appalling that you need to quit, that you need to die, that the thought of continuing is absolutely terrifying – when it’s crystal clear that continuing is not an option, when you have lost all ability to remain present, when hearing a teacher say ‘Be alert. Be alert. Return,’ is really [effing] agitating --the way out of ‘I can’t’ is not ‘I can.’ ‘I can’ is a useless, patronizing self-pat-on-the-back. The way out of ‘I can’t’ is ‘I am.’ The way out of ‘I can’t’ is awareness of the fact that I am doing exactly what it is that I am telling myself I cannot do. What you think you can't do, you are doing. You think you cannot handle this life? You are living. And if you stay put and if you continue and let the sangha hold you -- be it this sangha or the universe itself -- a willingness to experience what you're already experiencing can arise.”

That’s what Soten said. So when your mind says you can’t, well, you can try telling your mind that you can – and sometimes, maybe, that’ll be enough. Your inner skeptic, however, may have it’s doubts. “Can you?” it’ll say. “Where’s the evidence for that?”

But if, instead, you tell your mind, “I’ve gotten this far,” there’s solid evidence that indeed you have. The answer to, “I can’t” isn’t “yes, I can.” It’s “I am” -- “I am” in the sense Soten explicitly indicated of “I am doing the very thing that an inner voice is saying I can’t,” and also “I am” in wider sense “I exist.”

It’s that courage to be that answers the “I can’t” voice. When the mind says, “I can’t,” first, notice that you are. The universe has brought you forth – by accident, by fate, by cosmic design, doesn’t matter. (I lean toward “highly unlikely fluke,” myself, but however it happened, it happened. Here you are.) Courageously facing the fact of existence – which we do by simply, wholly, bringing awareness to our being – is enough. At least for today, our being persists – so, at least for today, we may persist in the projects to which we have set our being.

Our projects of becoming, though, are always projects of nonbeing as well as being. They are the projects of change and thus of the death of the person you used to be. How we face change (chosen and not) is integral to how we face our ultimate bodily death.

Here’s a story. Something happened to me in 2006 on my 47th birthday. When these markers of another year of life gone by come around, like many people, I reflect, take stock, review the time passed, and what might be left. That particular year, I was a half-time minister in El Paso, Texas and also half-time 300 miles away at our congregation in Midland, Texas. My thoughts that day were not particularly dark or depressed. I was sitting in the minister’s office of the Unitarian Universalist Church of Midland on a Thursday mid-morning running over the inventory of 47 years gone by: I spent a lot of years going to school, getting degrees. Had a couple kids. Had some years as a philosophy professor. Divorced, remarried. I’d started practicing Zen almost 5 years before at age 42. Was coming to the end of my second year as a Unitarian Universalist minister. What did any of that, or all of it, mean?

Soon my life would all be over. What did that mean?

Right about then, I don’t know why, something inside me clicked. Something let go, and I had the sensation of a weight falling off me. “I’m going to die,” in that moment felt like such good news. Not that this was actually news -- but that it was a good thing felt like news. What a relief that I won’t live forever! I’m not responsible for eternity. I don’t have to get it figured out. No matter how hard I might try, I can’t succeed at immortality. Life is just a little ffft. I might live another day, I might live another 47 years and reach age 94. That doesn’t matter -- it really doesn’t. Either way, it’s still a little ffft.

As I was growing up, whenever the inevitability of death came up, my parents used to say, “No time soon, we hope.” Now, I’ll grant you that if your spouse has been putting off going to the doctor, and you mention this, and he shrugs and says we’re all going to die anyway, it’s perfectly reasonable to say, “Honey, let’s not let that be any time soon.” Sure. Why not take reasonable precautions? Take reasonable precautions and at the same time, there’s an entirely other awareness that can be present, even in the midst of taking reasonable precautions. That’s the awareness that hit me on my 47th birthday.

It was suddenly so clear to me that “no time soon, we hope,” was beside the point. Whether life lasts a minute more or 50 years more, it’s still a little ffft. So relax. There’s nothing I can do about this – thank god, or else I’d have to deal with the temptation to do it. There’s no way out.

As I looked around that minister’s office, the objects around me had a sharpness they hadn’t had before, a kind of poignant yet majestic quality. All of them were as temporary as I was, and they seemed so beautifully self-sufficient being just what they were just at that moment. Understanding the fact of death – not just cognitively knowing it, but living with that continual awareness, makes life ineluctably, ineffably sweet. This runaway train is headed for the cliff, and there’s no way to stop it. It made me love the scenery on the ride.

The ecstatic quality of that moment passed. But I have carried with me for the last 18 years now an abiding gratitude for my mortality. We are not given tomorrow, and that makes having today such a joy, such a delightful, beautiful joy. The more we hold awareness of our own death always in mind, the more life feels sweet and vibrant and real. The more life feels . . . alive.

Something happened in my neurons, no doubt, and what happened changed my life. It was a break from my past patterns where death was something I didn’t want to think about, something I distracted myself away from paying attention to. It’s not that I had been afraid of death. I wasn’t afraid of it – how could I be afraid of it when I rarely thought about it all? Now I have the awareness of death as my constant companion.

What I realized on that day, others have also realized, as I have since discovered. Native American novelist Louise Erdrich writes:

“Your life feels different on you, once you greet death and understand your heart's position. You wear your life like a garment from the mission bundle sale ever after—lightly because you realize you never paid nothing for it, cherishing because you know you won't ever come by such a bargain again.”

And the Scottish novelist Dame Muriel Spark wrote:

“If I had to live my life over again I should form the habit of nightly composing myself to thoughts of death. I would practice, as it were, the remembrance of death. There is no other practice which so intensifies life. Death, when it approaches, ought not to take one by surprise. It should be part of the full expectancy of life. Without an ever-present sense of death, life is insipid.”

Sixteenth-century French essayist Michel de Montaigne wrote

“Let us deprive death of its strangeness. Let us frequent it; let us get used to it; Let us have nothing more often in mind than death... We do not know where death awaits us: so let us wait for it everywhere. To practice death is to practice freedom.”

German philosopher Martin Heidegger wrote:

“If I take death into my life, acknowledge it, and face it squarely, I will free myself from the anxiety of death and the pettiness of life - and only then will I be free to become myself.”

Does that make sense to you? If I’d read that when I was 42, it would have been a bit murky. Ever since 47, it has made perfect sense. Of COURSE to practice death is to practice freedom.

We all know that all things are temporary, right? But we often don’t act like we know it. We keep going after achievements and acquisitions as if we thought they and we were permanent. We go after that job, or that promotion, or that partner, or that house, and we know, if we stop to think about it, that these things are temporary. Thing is, we don’t much stop to think about it. So we live as if we thought that getting them would be some kind of permanent fix.

As Larry Rosenberg says:

“We know in our heads that we will die, but we have to know it in our hearts. We have to let this fact penetrate our bones. Then we will know how to live. To do that, we need to be able to look at the fact of death with steadiness. We can’t just glance at it casually.”

Then we will know how to live. And when we have grasped that, certain other truths come into view.

For one: My thoughts are not me. I don’t choose them: my thoughts are just something that happens to me, like the weather. The story I have about myself – the narrative the mind creates of a hero – me – nobly sallying forth like Don Quixote to do good things, encounter obstacles, and heroically surmount them, is just a fabricated story – not particularly true or even particularly interesting. The mind creates an illusory self to be the hero of its story, but all of it is in constant flux – no part of it is permanent, and the line between self and non-self is very blurry.

What you are, is not that story your mind continuously fabricates -- the story with you as the hero. What you are is . . . well, everything. The courage to be, then, is ultimately a property of the universe as a whole.

A young Canadian, age 22, was a soldier in World War II. He was captured by the Nazis in Denmark, charged with smuggling arms, and sentenced to death. On the evening before his execution he wrote his final letter. He wrote to his mother:

“I know you are a courageous woman and you will bear this [news of my pending execution], but, hear me, it is not enough to bear it. You must understand it. I am an insignificant thing, and my person will soon be forgotten, but the thought, the life, the inspiration that filled me will live on. You will meet them everywhere – in the trees at springtime, in people who cross your path, in a loving little smile.”

That young man saw that the real him was everything: trees, people, smiles -- and also weeds, mud, mosquitoes, and tears -- the whole catastrophe.

Death means that one brain stops fabricating a story about itself. The true you, isn’t that story and isn’t limited to that one brain. The true you is "mountains and rivers and the great wide earth, the sun, and the moon, and the stars" (Dogen) -- and everything.

Another truth that comes into view concerns the future. I am, like many of us, curious about the future. What new technologies will come along? Will we end war, end hunger, establish justice, insure domestic tranquility, and secure the Blessings of Liberty? Or will we descend into authoritarianism for a thousand years? What new artistic creations will come? I have wanted to live a long life just to see as much of that as I could. I wanted to be there when the future came.

But now I understand that I will be. I will be there when any future comes, because if anyone’s there, then that’s me.

And it’s also you. And the courage to face eternity condenses into the courage to face just this moment, to bring all our awareness right here, on what is, exactly as it is. Amen.

Courage

Courage.

Some of you might remember that newscaster Dan Rather, back in 1986, took to signing off the CBS Evening News by looking into the camera and saying, “Courage.”

“Dan Rather reporting from New York. Courage. Good night.”

He only used that sign off for one week – five days – and it stirred some controversy and puzzlement. “Was Rather advising viewers to grow a backbone? Was he dismayed at the state of affairs?” (Jake Rossen) – telling us to hang in there through such tough times as he had just been reporting on?

As we take up courage as our theme to explore for the month for May, we confront related questions. What, really, is the point of extolling this supposed virtue called “courage”? In the military context, the carrot and stick combination of praise for courageous action and condemnation of cowardly action does, I guess, make for an effective rhetoric for motivating soldiers in battle. But any active duty military personnel who might be among us not withstanding, do we civilians find the twin concepts of courage and cowardice playing much of a role in our day-to-day lives? Do you use those words when you are giving yourself a talking to? Do they show up on job evaluations that you get, or give?

To talk about courage we have to talk about fear – and if we’re going to find a truly meaningful use for the notion of courage it will grow out of how we understand fear. Courage, as every writer on the subject reminds us at the outset, is not an absence of fear. Courage is what we call it when, in a fearful situation, the fear is managed in a particularly skillful or admirable way.

Animals – humans and otherwise – are built to have fear. The main function of fear and anxiety is to act as a signal of danger, threat, or motivational conflict, and to trigger appropriate adaptive responses. Fear is very valuable. We couldn’t survive without fear. We animals need mechanisms that grab our attention and steer us away from danger.

Even those species with highly sophisticated reasoning processes still need systems of fear reaction because they’re quicker and sometimes time is of the essence. You’ve got head – reason – going on in the cerebral cortex and frontal lobe, and you’ve got gut – feelings and intuitions (which are also primarily processes in the brain, but we use "gut" as a metaphor for those brain systems that might feel as though they're based in our guts -- just as we use "heart" as a metaphor for those brain processes that generate and regulate our feelings of loving connection.) If you want reasoning, Head is gonna have to stop and think: maybe jot down some notes, talk it over with others. That’s how we reason. But if you need a snap judgment, Gut is there for you.

Gut doesn’t worry with having to explain itself – often you can’t explain your hunches, your intuitions. Your Gut, operating below the radar of consciousness, checks for the most readily available examples it can find in the brain’s storage. If an alley looks a certain way, you’ll feel uneasy about walking down it because Gut has grabbed a quickly accessible memory of something you saw in a movie in which someone walked down an alley like this and got attacked. Gut can’t even tell the difference between your first-hand experience and some one else’s stories. Gut believes the examples that are most readily at hand.

Head is gonna want to look at the statistics – the odds of this or that outcome. Statistics completely fail to hold Gut’s attention. Gut believes the examples that are most readily at hand. One or two lurid stories suffice for Gut.

On the other hand, animals, humans and otherwise, also have drives that sometimes override fear and self-preservation – which might be called the biological basis of courage, or might simply be called courage itself. Theologian Paul Tillich, in his 1952 book, The Courage to Be, put it this way:

“the balance between fear and courage is well developed in the animal realm. Animals are warned by fear, but under special conditions they disregard their fear and risk pain and annihilation for the sake of those who are a part of their own self-affirmation, e.g., their descendants or their flock.”

I’ll be coming back to Tillich later.

I originally selected a picture of Bert Lahr as the Cowardly Lion from the film, The Wizard of Oz, to be on the cover of today’s Order of Service about Courage. Tracy told me we really couldn’t use that because those images are copyrighted. She directed me to a site of public domain photos. I picked a macaw, and texted LoraKim, who is down in Guyana this week organizing parrot conservation, to tell her we were going to have a macaw on our Order of Service. She texted back:

“They are very brave. They risk their lives for their chicks, though not always.”

I texted back,

“Not to mention how brave it is to show up in public wearing those colors.”

Anyway. That bit about “not always,” is important. Evolution built us to have competing drives. We have drives for self-preservation, and these manifest as fear. We also have competing drives to set aside self-preservation and fear for the sake of our children, or our tribe. That’s evolution’s strategy: give us these competing drives, and let us work out the balance: sometimes risking our life for the sake of the chicks -- and sometimes not.

Which drive will prevail in a given circumstance is partly determined by prior experience with similar circumstances. If a similar threat has been successfully chased off in the past, we’re more likely to try to face it down. And it’s partly determined by genetic variations. Some people, and some macaws, are born with a little less or a little more inclination toward personal safety – or little less or a little more proclivity to sacrifice for the sake of offspring or tribe. It’s good to have this variability because the world is constantly changing and sometimes a little bit stronger self-preservation is the best way to get your genes passed on, and sometimes a little bit stronger protectiveness of children, or of tribe, is the best way.

Then somewhere along the growth of the evolution tree, the human twig off of the primate branch developed symbolic language, and we started using words to influence that balance between self-preservation – which we became apt to condemn as cowardly – and willingness to endure personal danger -- which we might praise as courageous, though sometimes we condemn it as rash or foolhardy. The Wizard of Oz’s cowardly lion wants the wizard to give him courage because he wants to face challenges that come his way, and also wants to command respect and admiration. He represents, of course, a certain type of human – and humans, through our symbolic language, are such a hyper-social species that we really want respect and admiration. But we also just want to be safe – hence the lion’s conundrum.

But just as our words can egg us on to be courageous, the reality we collectively weave with language can also magnify our fears. On the one hand, for instance, we have language describing the sources of the living tradition we Unitarian Universalists share. One of those sources is: “Words and deeds of prophetic people challenge us to confront powers and structures of evil with justice, compassion and the transforming power of love.”

When we talk about the prophets, when we speak of our prophetic mission, or our prophetic voice to the world, we are drawing upon a tradition that goes back to the ancient Hebrew prophets -- figures like Jeremiah, Ezekiel, Isaiah, Amos, Hosea. We’re thinking about how these figures spoke as the social critics of their time. Standing outside the structures of power, they called the ruling regime to task for failing to live up to its principles, for breaking the covenant. Sometimes they predicted what the consequences would be for having strayed from the right path. Thus the popular understanding of prophecy as predicting the future is not entirely without basis. But the core of what made them prophets was speaking truth to power, the call for social justice -- not predicting the future. When we Unitarian Universalists today call upon this tradition of prophets, we mean to honor the voices for social justice, those who call us all to courage: the courage to stand up to oppression and harm, the courage to witness to and embody the transforming power of love.

The prophets of old, ventured into predictions of the future, and, yes, they used fear. They warned the people of Israel that their corrupt religion and disregard for the poor would result in destruction of the nation. They called for Israel to repent or face a fearful judgment of wrath. So, usually, it’s not a simple matter of fear versus courage. The prophets used fear of one thing in their effort to evoke courage in facing a different fear: the insecurity that the powerful feared if they allowed there to be justice. Today we speak out against harm to our environment, to our eco-systems, to our climate, to our planet, invoking modern-day predictions of doom and destruction. We do so in the hope of spurring the courage to leave behind the comforts of our high consumption lifestyles.

Once we had symbolic language, we could conjure up imagined scenarios for each other, and the potential disasters grab our attention a lot more than potential benefits. So the balance or tension that evolution built into animals got thrown off in the animal with symbolic language. We talk ourselves into quite the dither of fear. We are awash in scared people earnestly talking others into being scared.

After the 9-11 attacks in 2001, fear of airplanes went up, as you might imagine. Analyzing patterns of car use and airplane travel after 9-11 shows that there was a shift from airplanes to cars that lasted about one year. It took a year for the fear of airplanes to die down, return to normal levels, and in the meantime, people were putting in more miles by car. The thing is, airplane travel is safer. As automobile travel went up, so did traffic fatalities. Gerd Gegerenzer analyzed the numbers, and was able to deduce that the extra car travel in the year after 9-11 killed 1,595 people. That is, the number of Americans killed in car crashes as a direct result of the switch from planes to cars was just shy of 1600. Those were people who would not have died if the ratio of plane travel to car travel had stayed the same as it was the years preceding 9-11. The actual collapse of the twin towers killed less than 3,000 people. The increased fear of airplanes over the next year killed over half again that many.

Things that spook us include, in no particular order:
tornadoes
internet stalkers
crystal meth
avian flu
genetically modified organisms
contaminated food
contaminated water
contaminated air
climate change
carcinogens
clowns
breast implants
the obesity epidemic
pesticides
the next viral pandemic that will be much worse than the last one,
Ebola
West Nile virus
mad cow disease
flesh-eating diseases
alien invasion (the international kind)
alien invasion (the interplanetary kind)
spiders
road rage
pedophiles lurking in parks and internet chat rooms
spontaneous combustion
Satanic cults
heroin
herpes
hitchhikers
computer hackers
identity thieves
genetically enhanced bioweapons
self-replicating nanotechnology that turns everything into “gray goo”
AI robots that decide humans are unnecessary
weird experiments in physics that could create a black hole destroying the planet
and sharks.

There seems to be an awful lot to be scared of. It is the slogan of our times: “Be afraid. Be very afraid.” At home, children are forbidden from playing alone outdoors, as all generations did before, because their parents are convinced every bush hides a pervert.” As it happens, as Daniel Gardner points out in The Science of Fear: Why We Fear the Things We Shouldn’t – and Put Ourselves in Greater Danger:

“Obesity, diabetes, and the other health problems caused in part by too much time sitting inside are a lot more dangerous than the specters haunting parental imaginations.”

We overestimate the risk from things that make the evening news, and underestimate the risk from things that don’t. Murder, terrorism, airplanes flying into buildings, fire, flood – and sharks – seize our fearful imaginations. Risks like diabetes, asthma, and heart disease – and auto accidents -- are much greater but they’re boring. Maybe it’s time for the word courage to take a bigger place when giving yourself a talking to. As Noam Shpancer says, “Fear is an important consultant, but a lousy boss.”

As you set out to cultivate courage, the first step, I suggest, is to notice that, like the lion in The Wizard of Oz, you’ve always had it. The lion was quite brave in the scenes of taking on the wicked witch – and in the book, though it isn’t in the movie, there’s a scene where Dorothy and the companions encounter creatures that are half-tiger, half-bear, called Kalidahs. The lion initially cowers in fear, but then summons his courage, leaps forward, lets out a mighty roar, and the Kalidahs scatter in fear. Later, the wizard recognizes that people called heros haven’t got any more courage than the lion has, "but they do have one thing you haven’t got: a medal." So the wizard gives the lion a medal to symbolize his courage, and serve as a reminder that though fear may sometimes well up in him, he is courageous.

Following that model, it might be helpful to designate some object or trinket to serve for you like a medal for your conspicuous bravery -- a token reminder and symbol that you are courageous.

As a further way to hold in mind and heart that you are already courageous, call to mind the substantial courage you exhibit in daring to exist. You got a lot of nerve! Showing up, on this planet, morning after morning – there you are. The audacity! This is the courage Paul Tillich elucidated in The Courage to Be. Tillich says:

“The courage to be is the ethical act in which [we] affirm [our] own being in spite of those elements of [our] existence which conflict with [our] essential self-affirmation.”

We saw that term, "self-affirmation," earlier, when I cited Tillich observing that animals, human and otherwise,

“are warned by fear, but under special conditions they disregard their fear and risk pain and annihilation for the sake of those who are a part of their own self-affirmation, e.g., their descendants or their flock.”

To be as the beings we are, to affirm ourselves, is itself the ground of our care of offspring and flock or tribe. To be – to affirm that we are – like Ilsa in Frozen singing “here I stand, and here I stay. Let the storm rage on” -- is an act of courage.

The courage to be, for Tillich, has two aspects. There is the courage to be as a part – the courage to bring your being to participate in a larger being with others. Then there is the courage to be as oneself – a unique individual and an end unto yourself, not a means toward any group goal.

We face anxiety: anxiety about dying and the unpredictability of fate and fortune; moral anxiety about guilt and condemnation, and spiritual anxiety of emptiness and meaninglessness. These anxieties conflict with our self-affirmation, so to affirm who we are in the face of these anxieties, to affirm our being in spite of existential anxiety, that’s the courage to be. We enact this courage in those two ways: by participating in a larger whole that helps sustain our own existence and others, and by individuating as worthy in ourselves – balancing between extremes of too much collectivism and too much individualism.

I was intrigued to see that, while courageous and brave are nearly perfect synonyms, they come from wildly different etymological origins, which, over centuries, converged. “Courage” comes from heart, as the seat of emotions, as in the French word for heart, coeur, the Spanish corazon; Italian cuore. From “heart,” referring to one’s spirit, temperament, or frame of mind, it came to mean valor, or the quality that allows for meeting dangers and troubles without being controlled by fear. So when Dan Rather said, “courage,” he could have said “take heart,” and conveyed about the same idea.

Brave, however, started from the Latin pravus, meaning “crooked, depraved,” became the medieval Latin bravus, meaning “cutthroat, villain” which then evolved to mean “wild, savage.” From there, wild and savage were more and more closely associated with meeting dangers and troubles without being hindered by fear until it meant about the same thing as courageous.

These roots nicely parallel Tillich’s two aspects of courage: the courage to be as a part of collective projects and the courage to be as oneself. "Courage," from heart, as the symbol of love, connects us to others so that we can face dangers for the sake of our joint enterprises. "Bravery," in its origins, points to the strength to affirm your wild, untamed, nonconformist uniqueness.

On the one hand, fear can make me so self-protective I do not hear the call to love, to connect with others, to help them in shared difficulties. On the other hand, fear can make me seek the safety of conformity, going along to get along, not hearing the call to bring forth what I alone can.

Against all fears or anxieties about impending death, the unpredictability of fortune and misfortune, about our feelings of guilt, of having been or possibly being condemned by others, or by oneself, and the spiritual anxiety of emptiness and meaninglessness – against all those fears – the courage to be is the inner voice affirming that you are and what you are. On the ground of that courage we find the courage to face forthrightly all the other fears conjured by Gut or Head.

Meredith Garmon reporting from Des Moines. Courage. Amen.

Passover Lessons

Exodus, Chapter 12, verses 21–34:

Then Moses called all the elders of Israel and said to them: “Go, select lambs for your families, and slaughter the Passover lamb. Take a bunch of hyssop, dip it in the blood that is in the basin, and touch the lintel and the two doorposts with the blood in the basin. None of you shall go outside the door of your house until morning. For the Lord will pass through to strike down the Egyptians; when he sees the blood on the lintel and on the two doorposts, the Lord will pass over that door and will not allow the destroyer to enter your houses to strike you down. You shall observe this rite as a perpetual ordinance for you and your children. When you come to the land that the Lord will give you, as he has promised, you shall keep this observance. And when your children ask you: ‘What do you mean by this observance?’ You shall say: ‘It is the Passover sacrifice to the Lord, for he passed over the houses of the Israelites in Egypt, when he struck down the Egyptians but spared our houses.’”

And the people bowed down and worshiped. The Israelites went and did just as the Lord had commanded Moses and Aaron. At midnight the Lord struck down all the firstborn in the land of Egypt, from the firstborn of Pharaoh who sat on his throne to the firstborn of the prisoner who was in the dungeon, and all the firstborn of the livestock. Pharaoh arose in the night, he and all his officials and all the Egyptians. And there was a loud cry in Egypt, for there was not a house without someone dead. Then he [Pharaoh] summoned Moses and Aaron in the night and said: “Rise up, go away from my people, both you and the Israelites! Go, worship the Lord, as you said. Take your flocks and your herds, as you said, and be gone. And bring a blessing on me too!”

The Egyptians urged the people to hasten their departure from the land, for they said: “We shall all be dead.” So the people took their dough before it was leavened, with their kneading bowls wrapped up in their cloaks on their shoulders.

The Jewish holy week of Passover began at sundown on Mon Apr 22. The celebration of freedom continues eight days, through the evening of Tue Apr 30. The first two days and the last two days are full-fledged holidays: the middle four days are semi-festive. The first two days commemorate the 10th of the 10 plagues on Egypt. In that final plague, the mystery-beyond-naming killed all the firstborn of Egypt, but passed over the Israelites: hence Passover.

At this, Pharaoh released the Israelites from bondage. They immediately fled. They took their dough before it was leavened. They did not wait for the bread to rise. Pharaoh changed his mind and went chasing after them. A week later came the episode of the parting of the Red Sea, commemorated the last two days of Passover.

This is not history. Scholars put the setting at about 1300 BCE, but historically, it never happened. But that is not the point – because it’s not about ancient Israelites. It’s about you -- and us -- and about freedom – yours and ours -- right here and now. It is a narrative metaphor for us, as it has been to peoples through millennia.

"Bring out the festal bread and sing songs of freedom." Celebrate and reflect on the blessing of freedom. In parts of the world, full-scale slavery is still going on. If you're here today – or listening online -- then chances are that you are not enslaved in that full-scale way and never have been. Even so, I would guess that there has been a metaphorical land of Egypt in your past in which you were bound and from which you now are free.

"Bring out the festal bread, and sing songs of freedom." Yet freedom is the half-won blessing. Modern pharaohs live unchallenged. Chains still there are to break, metal or subtle-made. Resentments, small or large, bind us. A further Exodus awaits us still. And further truth, bright as a burning bush, cries to become known. We (we who are not under an unrelenting grind of oppression, nor consumed wholly with mere survival) stand somewhere in the middle between full-scale slavery and full-scale liberation. We have broken out of some fetters – but other fetters, or perhaps reconstituted versions of the old ones, have clamped onto us.

The next step in the work of freedom lies before us. So bring out the festal bread and sing songs of freedom.

Did you hear about the guy who was addicted to brake fluid? He said he could stop any time he wanted....

We all have our addictions. Whether it’s full-blown alcoholism or drug addiction or something we think of as milder, the key feature of addiction is that disconnect between what we want ourselves to do and what we’re able to actually do.

Passover is a time for celebrating the blessings of our freedom and also reflecting on what greater liberation would be. Pharaoh has many forms of bondage – addictions to video games or shopping or work. We can be addicted to anger or to blaming judgment.

What Pharaoh holds you in bondage in Egypt? Freedom is ever the half-won blessing. Its unfinished work lies before us. As they say in the recovery community: you can be consumed by your addiction -- or you can be recovering. Recovering – but never recovered.

It is rare indeed for a human to attain complete freedom. New chains appear. Old chains return. And their constraints are often so comfortable, for a while. It’s no easy thing to commit to a path of freedom, of liberation.

Here are four questions:

1. Can you make a decisive break with a big part of your past?
2. Can you endure the sacrifices this will mean?
3. What about the effects this will have on others?
4. Are there others who can go with you on this journey, who can walk with you on the path to liberation?

The Passover story is a narrative for wrestling with each of these questions. As I said, it’s about you.

First, can you make the decisive break? This is the "not waiting for the bread to rise" part. Even under the worst of conditions, there is some leavening in the loaf. What, give that up? Our addictions and our judgmentalism offer us creature comforts that are like a nice, hot yeasty loaf. What harm could it do to let one more batch of dough rise? Is it really necessary for the sake of freedom that we make do with the blandest unsalted crackers?

Sometimes, yes. It is. At some point we have to say: no more delays, no more putting it off. That’s going to mean something that was in the pipeline has to be abandoned. The bread won’t have a chance to rise. Is that a reason to stay in bondage?

It’s those little rationalizations that keep us stuck, isn’t it? Can you make the decisive break?

Second question: can you endure the sacrifices? Unleavened bread is nothing compared to hardships and trials on the path to freedom. It’s scary out there. The status quo has fierce armies to enforce its way. Days after leaving Egypt, the Israelites see Pharaoh’s army advancing on them. They cry out to Moses – Exodus, chapter 14:

“Was it because there were no graves in Egypt that you have taken us away to die in the wilderness? What have you done to us, bringing us out of Egypt? Is this not the very thing we told you in Egypt, ‘Let us alone and let us serve the Egyptians’? For it would have been better for us to serve the Egyptians than to die in the wilderness.”

Powerful resources are arrayed against you to enforce the old way. And you don’t have the resources you need to support the new way. A few weeks after leaving Egypt, the people moan again to Moses – Exodus, chapter 16:

“If only we had died by the hand of the Lord in the land of Egypt, when we sat by the fleshpots and ate our fill of bread; for you have brought us out into this wilderness to kill this whole assembly with hunger.”

The path to freedom is risky and uncertain. Can you endure the sacrifices?

Third question: what about the effects this will have on others? Are you just being selfish thinking about your own freedom? In the Passover story, the Israelite quest for freedom involves an enormous slaughter of Egyptians.

The rituals -- the paschal lamb, the unleavened bread, the consecration of the firstborn -- probably predate the story and the story probably took shape around pre-existing rituals. The rituals account for the story more than the story accounts for the rituals. It is impossible to know, writes the scholar Carol Meyers,

“how much of the narrative draws upon authentic experience and how much of it developed over time in relation to existing customs.”

Whatever it’s source, we have this problematic story. Meyers continues:

“The intentional destruction of innocent life in God’s slaying of the firstborn has long troubled readers of this narrative. What kind of deity was it, whose deed could benefit one group at such expense of others? Already in the early postbiblical period, rabbinic commentators sought ways to rationalize such a horrific act.”

The Israelites path to freedom came at the cost of this tragic slaughter of Egyptian firstborns. Is it worth it? What is the cost to others of your freedom? Should the Israelites feel responsible for this tragedy to the Egyptians?

It’s true that liberation leads to compassion. The chains that hold you back, more than anything, limit your ability to be present and caring to others. But might it not be better to try to work with the chains you’ve got, dragging them with you though they hamper and slow you?

Put yourself in the Israelites’ position. You hear that a plague is coming, and to protect yourself, you put lamb’s blood on your doorway. Should you also be protecting your neighbors?

Pharaoh got the same warning you did. In fact, he got 9 previous warnings in the form of the first nine plagues: Water was turned to blood, there was a plague of frogs, then one of lice, then flies, then livestock pestilence, a plague of boils, of hail, of locusts, and of darkness. He got the warnings, but he hardened his heart. Actually, Exodus says repeatedly that God hardened Pharoah’s heart – so is it Pharoah’s fault?

Let’s say you did tell your Egyptian neighbors to put lamb’s blood on their doorway, and they just wouldn’t do it. Now they’ve lost their child, and their grief is overwhelming. “There was not a house without someone dead.” Exodus says. What kind of God would do that? What kind of world would do that?

Our world contains such enormous grief, it is more than you or I can fix. Your path to freedom occurs in the context of others' pain and loss, but your freedom is not the cause of their loss.

Perhaps the Israelites’ hearts went out to their neighbors. Maybe they asked, how can we help? They were told to just leave – which happened to be what they’d always wanted. If there is a path to liberation for you – going back to school, quitting your job, changing the way you eat, changing your daily routine to include journaling, study, and meditation – and you hesitate because of the effect this might have on the people around you – you might just ask them. They might tell you, as the Egyptians told the Hebrews, just go. Do it.

What about the effects your liberation would have on others? A story about an activist I’ll call Gloria illustrates one way this question can play out. I met Gloria a number of years ago, back in the aughts. Gloria worked for good, for policy changes that would increase fairness and reduce suffering. Gloria had anger that took her straight to blaming and condemnation. "Those people in that other party are evil, corrupt, willfully blind," she said. "Some of that party’s supporters are simply dupes – who are duped by the evil and corrupt others." Her anger and judgmentalism were her bondage. It was hard for her to give that up, to be free of those chains, because she saw them as integral to helping the people she wanted to help. So there’s that question: how would your liberation affect those you care about? Sometimes we stay in the chains because we think we need them to be of service.

Gloria was venting with me one day, and I remembered: it is often the case that anger outward is a projection of anger inward, that negative self-judgments manifest as negative other-judgments. As the saying goes: When I point the finger at someone else, there are three pointing back at me. Gloria said, "Those people have no respect for other people." So I asked, "Have there been times when you didn’t respect others as much as you wish you had?"

Yes, there had indeed been times. Personal stories of regret and shame began pouring out. We’d made the shift from other-blame to self-blame – a step, maybe, but not a final destination. The path ahead, to self-forgiveness and self-compassion and thence to compassionate understanding of others, including one’s political opponents, would not be easy. That liberating path would make Gloria a more effective activist – and certainly one who enjoys life more.

She assumed she needed her chains of anger and judgment to serve the causes she cares about. The truth is that freeing ourselves allows us to more lovingly and more effectively care about others.

Fourth question: Are there others who can go with you on this journey, who can walk with you on the path to liberation? Here, too, is a lesson of the Passover story: Not one Hebrew ever walked out of Egypt alone. Nor could any have survived the wilderness alone. Freedom is a collective enterprise. We need each other to be free. Yes, there is necessary work only you can do. You, individually, have to decide it can’t wait any longer, can’t wait for whatever batch of dough you’re in the middle of to rise. You, individually, must choose the uncomfortable path.

Once you do, though, you don’t have to face it alone. There is other necessary work only we can do -- together. That’s what a liberal faith community is for: "liberal," as in "liberty," as in "freedom." Liberal faith community offers support – maybe some guidance, maybe some insight, maybe some affirmation and encouragement – as we wander in wilderness trying together to make our way to the freedom that is our birthright.

You aren't responsible for everything -- sometimes you have to let go and let others manage on their own -- but we are responsible for care and connection to one another.

Walking a labyrinth might be way you can bodily enact and reflect upon your path to and of freedom. Some years ago I was asked to lead a labyrinth walk for about 50 people in rehab to recover from substance abuse. These were people wrestling with demons that I can only imagine. Somehow, summoning courage that they wouldn’t have known they had, they made a break with their past lives, a sudden and dramatic exit from the comforts of slavery to their addiction. They now faced the slow part – the rest of their lives, really – the wilderness to traverse, a new life of freedom to build. We gathered by the outdoor labyrinth.

A labyrinth is not a maze; it has only one path. Its lesson is let go of your need to control, trust the path, keep going. One foot in front of the other. You must go into your center – wind your way in. You must find what is there. And: you cannot stay there. You must return out to the world, bringing the true self you have found. As the Gospel of Thomas says:

“If you bring forth what is within you, what you bring forth will save you.
If you do not bring forth what is within you, what you do not bring forth will destroy you.”

This was a group that knew a lot about what will destroy them.

Freedom is our half-won blessing. The first half is straightforward and negative (in a good way): no slavery, no masters or overlords, no chains. The second half is paradoxical. We arrive at liberation by accepting the constraints of discipline, by surrendering. By letting go and giving up, we gain. The first half involves being able to do what you want. But then you can become enslaved to your own impulsive wants. So the second half involves liberating the true self from the bondage of the desiring self.

The labyrinth is an exercise in freeing the true self by accepting the dictates of a prescribed path. When you walk a labyrinth, you wind around and around and end up at the center. Then take the path in reverse to go back out. Both journeys, the in and the out, are circuitous and terribly inefficient. The labyrinth’s lesson is that path and destination are intertwined, they define each other. The destination isn’t the destination unless it is reached by the needful path. Like Hebrews in the wilderness, you go around and around – often winding further from your destination rather than closer.

I instructed the group to notice the rhythm of their breathing, and synchronize their steps with their breaths. It helps the mind quiet, so the path can take over. Then I stood by the entrance with my watch, and sent them in one at a time, at five-second intervals. The first ones in reached the center, hung out there a while, and started back while others were still heading in. This, too, is a lesson: we encounter people who are heading in an opposite direction from us, who we could bump heads with, who might seem to be heading in a wrong direction, but there is only one path. We go in and we go out, and if you are in a going-out phase and pass by someone in a going-in phase, rest assured your positions will soon be reversed. Practice the gentle grace of letting others by. And notice that, doing this, you may have to take one step off your path. Others can knock you off your path, but never very far, and you can step back on.

Afterwards we retreated to an indoors space to debrief about the experience. I heard from them how they valued the experience, how they took to its lessons – though some acknowledged they had been skeptical and dubious. Some spoke of how, yes, their need to control had to be tamed, and how good that felt. They spoke of how the path was not always clear – the layer of leaves has gotten thick – but they let themselves trust the person in front of them, and how good it felt to trust and follow – to not be alone on this path. We all have our addictions. And we’re sometimes judgmental of others, of ourselves.

Before us is a path of freedom from those constraints. It may take some discerning to see it. Once you do: Take it. Go. You are not alone. There are others on the path waiting for you join them. Go. Don’t wait for the bread to rise.

Earth Day

The first Earth Day was 1970 April 22 -- 54 years ago. The Earth that we were trying to preserve on that first Earth Day, we failed to preserve. Our planet today is not the Earth of two generations ago. Atmospheric carbon dioxide levels hovered around 275 ppm for all of human history up until 200 years ago. On the first Earth Day in 1970, C02 had reaced 325 ppm but back then most of us were blithely, blissfully oblivious to what rising C02 would mean. In 1988, we reached the 350 ppm safety-line. At 350 ppm of carbon dioxide, the planet survives. If we get above 350 for very long, or if we get very far above 350, then we will trigger tipping points and irreversible impacts. The journal Nature said that above 350

"we threaten the ecological life-support systems that have developed in the late Quaternary environment, and severely challenge the viability of contemporary human societies,"

Yet we've been above 350 for 36 years now, and as of May 2022 the global average concentration of C02 in the atmosphere was 421 ppm, and we are still adding about two more parts per million every year. In fact, scientist Kevin Anderson projects that even if rich countries adopt draconian emissions reductions within a decade, it is improbable that we will be able to stop short of 650 ppm of C02.

Our planet is already not what it was 54 years ago. What I would like to do today is take a look at a theory out there that it is the nature of intelligent life to destroy itself and how climate change might seem to fit that theory. I will, however, be taking the chance to note that reality is never depressing. I'll mention some practical features of how we will live on this Earth that is already not the one many of us were born on. And I'll point to the spirituality - particularly the Ecospirituality, the connectedness to the sacredness of the Earth - that we need for this new Earth. I'll conclude that maybe the nature of intelligent life is not to destroy itself, but more often to work its way to the emergence of a peaceful, sustainable way of life in which the beings delight in the home they have.

The theory that it is the nature of intelligent life to destroy itself emerged as one possible response to the Fermi paradox. And what is the Fermi paradox?

The brilliant Italian physicist Enrico Fermi, born 1901 , reasoned as follows:

• Our Sun is a young star. There are billions of stars in the galaxy that are billions of years older.
• There is a high probability that some of these stars have Earth-like planets which, if the Earth is typical, may develop intelligent life.
• These older stars with Earth-like planets would be way ahead of us in developing interstellar travel.
• At any practical pace of interstellar travel, the galaxy can be completely colonized in a few tens of millions of years.
• Given billions of stars that have billions of years of head start on us, a few tens of millions of years is nothing.

It follows, concluded Fermi, that the Earth should already have been colonized, or at least visited. But Fermi did not think there was any convincing evidence that we had been. Moreover, not only have we not been visited, we haven't even spotted a sign of intelligence elsewhere in our galaxy. Hence Fermi's question: "Where is everybody?" This question has come to be known as the Fermi paradox.

One theory that has been proposed as an explanation of why we haven't encountered or seen other intelligent life is that it is the nature of intelligent life to destroy itself. The theory is that, on any planet that evolved species that developed civilization and then technological civilization, those species will "usually or invariably destroy themselves before or shortly after developing radio or space flight technology. Possible means of annihilation include nuclear war, biological warfare or accidental contamination, climate change." It's a conjecture some scientists have offered - just one of many possible answers to the Fermi paradox.

Is it inherent in the way that intelligence emerges that a species will arrive at enough intelligence to be able to destroy itself before it arrives at enough intelligence not to? Yes, intelligence emerges in response to competition for scarce resources. As long as resources are plentiful, species don't need to outsmart other species, and all species remain comparative simpletons. So, yes, wherever intelligence emerges, it necessarily comes with the aggressive competitive drives that spurred that intelligence to develop in the first place.

When that ancient competitive aggression and drive to consume resources, extend longevity, and reproduce suddenly becomes paired with powerful new technology: boom. That "boom" need not mean that the civilization entirely self-destructs, only that it becomes once again nontechnological.

According to this conjecture, this has already happened on billions of other planets and is now happening here. The result of that rising C02 is that the top 10 hottest years ever recorded have all been after 2000. An average temperature increase of 1.1 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial temperatures has already happened. The increase is expected to reach 1.5 degrees Celsius by 2040, according to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. We are on track to reach 2.7 degrees Celsius hotter by the end of the century even if current pledges from governments around the world to decrease emissions by 2030 are met.

In the 20 years, 1980 to 2000, the number of distinct weather-related disasters affecting the United States and doing at least a billion dollars of damage averaged 4.75 per year. In the 20 years, 2004 to 2024, the number of distinct weather-related disasters affecting the United States and doing at least a billion dollars of damage averaged 13.35 per year. That's 2.8 times more billion-dollar weather-related disasters that in the 20 years from 1980 to 2000. This is from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, and their cost estimates for weatherrelated disasters are adjusted for inflation, so it's a true increase of almost 3 times more major disasters per year.

Is this intelligent life destroying itself? Three and a half billion people live in places particularly vulnerable to climate change. By 2100, 50-75% of the world population will see periods of "life-threatening climatic conditions" - mainly heat and rainfall. Food insecurity and water shortage will lead to humanitarian crises, conflict and displacement, with heaviest impact in parts of Africa, Asia, Central and South America, small islands and the Arctic. 350.org, summarizes:

"Glaciers everywhere are melting and disappearing fast, threatening the primary source of clean water for millions of people. Mosquitoes, who like a warmer world, are spreading into lots of new places, and bringing malaria and dengue fever with them. Drought is becoming much more common, making food harder to grow in many places. Sea levels have begun to rise, and scientists warn that they could go up as much as several meters this century. If that happens, many of the world's cities, island nations, and farmland will be underwater. Meanwhile, the oceans are growing more acidic because of the C02 they are absorbing, which makes it harder for animals like corals and clams to build their shells and exoskeletons."

When we speak of climate change and the long list of planetary damages it wreaks, it's common to invoke grandchildren. "Preserve the planet for the sake of our grandchildren," we say. Or, "Let's not let our grandchildren have to deal with the problem with which we should be dealing." But the Earth of the first Earth Day is already gone. As Bill McKibben says:

"Forget the grandkids. It turns out this was a problem for our parents." (16)

At this point, maybe you're thinking: "Oh, such gloom and doom! It's depressing. It's stressful. Tell me something uplifting and inspiring, not this litany of disaster scenarios." I'm going to tell you the truth as best I can discern it. And here's a truth that I think happens to also be inspiring: Reality is never depressing.

Being in denial, being out of touch with reality, pushing it out of consciousness, so that it has to sneak around, come at you from behind, and crawl up your back (for reality eventually finds a way to get through to us), that's the source of depression. Struggling to resist irresistible reality - that's what triggers depression and stress. Reality is never depressing. Paying attention to reality is the antidote of depression. Mindful attention to exactly "what is" is a practice of cultivating joy, Even if "what is" is pain. Literally. For example, if you've got a throbbing knee pain or headache, bring all your attention to the pain itself, minutely noticing every detail of its sensation. This doesn't make the pain go away, but it does make the pain bother you Less, for as long as you sustain attention. Reality presents us with challenges, and those challenges become depressing or stressful problems only when we want to push them away, push them out of mind. Instead, engage, and connect.

The good news is: you and I are going to die. (This may not be news, though you might not have thought of it as good.) That's great news because it means we don't have to figure out how to live forever - get everything solved, all threats removed, so that we can then relax into our immortality. We don't have that responsibility. We only have this short time a day, a year, a few decades and all we have to do is show up for just a few decades, just this decade, this year, this day. That's all.

Hallelujah, we do not bear the burden of eternity. Knowing I am blessed with an ironclad exit strategy, knowing the divine takes form only temporarily in the body and set of ego defenses called "me," I am liberated. My task is no more than to manifest this transience that I am. My task is no more than that - and also no less. We are, each of us, called upon only to manifest and in our manifesting engage with the challenges that happen to arise for the few years we happen to be here.

Not denying the reality we face, nor retreating into some survivalist bunker, ours is the path of open-eyed and open-eared awareness, and the path of connection to both nature and neighbor. We shall choose neither despair nor defense, but new community.

On this 55th Earth Day, the Earth we celebrate is not the Earth of 1970 - but it still has technological civilization. Intelligent life has not destroyed itself yet, and maybe won't. Our odds get better the more of us have the courage to face reality exactly as it is - and this courage comes from spiritual discipline. This courage IS a spiritual discipline.

Our capacity to hold our world in love, whatever may come is developed in spiritual practice and in spiritual community. Where love is, fear and sadness are not.

Because of climbing C02 level, and the consequent climate change, the Earth of our ancestors and of our youth is gone. We now face the prospect of developing community on a new Earth. Our new Earth will rely more on local food, and on farming that doesn't use huge quantities of fossil fuel for its fertilizers, its pesticides, its machinery, or its product transportation.

Food will cost more. For many years now food, by historical standards, has been ridiculously cheap, partly because of agriculture subsidies and fossil fuel industry subsidies (which also subsidize the type of agriculture that intensively relies on fossil fuels). Even so, rising food prices will be a hardship for some, so food aid programs will need expanding. Our new Earth will rely more on locally-produced energy - solar panels and solar water heating on your own house, and windmills in your yard because transmission across power lines loses efficiency over many miles. We'll also use the internet and Zoom instead of flying and driving places -- a move that has already begun.

To sustain us in our new Earth we need the very thing that sustained many of us on the old Earth: a spirituality of connectedness with this earth, of reclaiming a way of living lightly, carefully, gracefully on this delicate home, rituals and practices and ways of thinking that nurture attention, and calm delight in the simple beauties of life. Ecospirituality -- which "means that our experience of the divine comes through the natural world." (Jeanne Mackey) — will sustain us, individually and collectively. As Steven Rockefeller writes:

"Our environmental problems will not be fully addressed until we come to terms with the moral and spiritual dimensions of these problems, and we will not find ourselves religiously until we fully address our environmental problems."

Emerging Ecospirituality recognizes not merely that we have a religious obligation to protect ecosystems, reduce consumption, and in general be responsible stewards of our environment, but that nature itself is sacred, has intrinsic value, and is due reverent care — not simply because it is God's creation and God tells us to, but because nature tells us to, and nature has that authority based on being sacred in itself.

Connecting to the sacredness of the earth is what saves us. Wanting stuff makes us stressed, and being stressed makes it harder to step back from our desires for a larger perspective. So what I'm talking about really is not impending grim necessity - but emerging wholeness, joy, and delight. We may make for ourselves a materially sparer and spiritually fuller life on our tough little planet.

Getting there won't be easy. It takes being focused and intentional, and it takes a lot of us paying attention together.

When Hildegard of Bingen (1098-1179) experienced unity with the divine, she gave the experience these words:

"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."

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. Says Joanna Macy:

"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."

We have, of course, no idea how things may have gone on other planets. If thousands or even millions of other civilizations have arisen in our galaxy, the reason we haven't heard from any of them, though, would seem maybe NOT that they destroyed themselves. It seems at least as likely the reason we haven't heard from them is that they haven't needed to go colonizing for more resources. The nature of intelligent life just might be not to destroy itself, but, more often, to work its way to the emergence of a peaceful, sustainable way of life in which the beings delight in the home they have.

Perhaps the galaxy is full of technological civilizations that found their way into the joy of living together with smallness of resource consumption and smallness of carbon footprint upon their planet. Perhaps Earth will be next.

Love and Ethics

Love and Ethics. That touches on two of the three prongs of our mission – what we’re here for. We’re here to grow ethically – as well as spiritually – and we’re here to love radically: ethics and love. I want to explore today the overlap: how do ethics and love relate to each other?

I learned at a young age from the Gospel of John – Lennon – that “all you need is love.” Is that true? The Beatles sang it, but, then, they also sang, “I am the walrus,” “nothing is real,” “happiness is a warm gun,” and “we all live in a yellow submarine” – so maybe not everything they sang is true.

Yes, certainly, in addition to love, we need things like air, food, water, shelter – but looking just at the ethical realm: to be a good person, to be a moral, ethical person, is love all we need? Is love all you need as your guide for how to act? I’m going to say, actually, yes. Love – including attentive care to be as effectively compassionate as we can be – IS all we need.

The counter viewpoint, generally accepted, is that to act rightly in the world, it is necessary to have moral principles. However, what I’m suggesting to you today is: never mind principles. Just love. Love is the only law, as sources as disparate as Ziggy Marley and Nisargadatta Maharaj have said. Making the case against principles may be a bit of a heavy lift. Let us jump in and see what can be carried.

We all face ethical decisions: Do I speak up, or remain quiet? When is it time to put Mom in a nursing home – or time to "let go" of a child? Am I prioritizing my time in a way that most benefits myself and others in the long run? Is the comfort I get from bumping up the thermostat a couple degrees, or the enjoyment of eating meat worth the damage to the planet? Does it really matter if my coffee is or isn’t fair trade, or if my shirt was or wasn’t made in a sweat shop, or if some product was or wasn’t tested on animals? Whenever you choose to do, or not do, anything, there’s the question of whether that choice is the right one.

The great ethical traditions have defended ethical principles. Immanuel Kant propounded the principle: so act that the maxim of your action may be willed a universal law for all. In other words, before you do something, ask yourself, what if everybody did that? Kant’s ethics also tell us to treat others never as a means only, but as ends in themselves.

The utilitarians argued that, instead, the only test of the goodness of an action is the goodness of its results. Their ethical principle is: so act to maximize the total happiness, or the total benefit, to all beings.

The third great ethical school is virtue ethics – which is rooted in Aristotle. This school of ethics says that to be a good person you cultivate virtues such as courage (which we’ll be looking at next month since courage is our the theme of the month for May), and justice (i.e., treating people fairly), and temperance and prudence. These are philosophical approaches to ethics, and I will say, as a former philosophy professor, philosophers are, occasionally, worth paying attention to.

Your brain, like mine, is a mish-mash of competing, contradictory ideas, concepts, values, beliefs. Cognitive dissonance sometimes surfaces, but whenever we can keep it out of mind, we do. Becoming conscious of cognitive dissonance feels icky -- to be avoided if possible. But a philosopher is somebody who goes looking for dissonance. Philosophers concoct all manner of bizarre, unrealistic hypothetical examples just for the purpose of inducing dissonance.

Example: Suppose either 5 people had to die or 1 person had to die. Which would be better? Clearly, it would be better for 1 person to die than for 5, right? OK, so suppose you have five people who are dying of different organ failures. One of them needs a heart transplant, another needs a liver transplant, another needs two kidneys, another needs lungs, and another needs pancreas and intestines. Would it be OK to kill one healthy person, harvest his organs and distribute them among the five? No! But wait -- better one person die than five.

See? The philosopher’s job is to induce cognitive dissonance -- which is uncomfortable. As we confront the issue of how we live our lives, we like to think we have moral principles that guide us. We imagine ourselves to be principled people. We would hate to be accused of being unprincipled. To live by principle seems an admirable thing. Moral principles keep you on the righteous straight and narrow irrespective of how you might feel about it.

Principles don’t depend on your emotions. You don’t have to love your neighbor to know you shouldn’t steal from her.

But on the other hand, if you do love your neighbor, maybe you don’t need principles. Philosopher Jonathan Dancy is a champion of an approach to ethics called "moral particularism." Dancy argues that ethics isn’t really about having principles and following them. Here's the opening paragraph of Dancy's article about moral particularism in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy.

“Moral Particularism, at its most trenchant, is the claim that there are no defensible moral principles, that moral thought does not consist in the application of moral principles to cases, and that the morally perfect person should not be conceived as the person of principle. There are more cautious versions, however. The strongest defensible version, perhaps, holds that though there may be some moral principles, still the rationality of moral thought and judgment in no way depends on a suitable provision of such things; and the perfectly moral judge would need far more than a grasp on an appropriate range of principles and the ability to apply them. Moral principles are at best crutches that a morally sensitive person would not require, and indeed the use of such crutches might even lead us into moral error.”

Jonathan Dancy and moral particularism were featured on an episode of the NBC comedy, “The Good Place” a few years ago. “The Good Place” is about four people in the afterlife who are trying to become better people by studying ethics. They want to deserve to be the “the good place” – and their strategy is to study ethics. It’s hilarious. They talk about Kant, Sartre, utilitarianism, Kierkegaard, John Rawls. They mention names and ideas of people you’d have to be a total philosophy nerd to have ever heard of: Philippa Foot, Tim Scanlon – as well as this Jonathan Dancy. They talk about the scenario I mentioned of killing one person to save five. The cognitive dissonance that drives philosophy turns out to be more tolerable when it’s also funny.

I do love the concept here, though the evidence, unfortunately, does not support the idea that studying ethics – moral philosophy – has much real connection to being a better person. Studies of actual ethics professors show that they are not more likely to be courteous, more likely to vote, more likely to give to charities, more likely to be vegetarian, or less likely to slip into conferences without paying the conference dues than any other academic. In fact, a survey of which books go missing from academic libraries shows that ethics books go missing more than other philosophy books matched in age and popularity. So studying ethics may not help you be more ethical.

Still, perhaps a life of learning in any field is apt to make us better people. Indeed, most of us feel that learning is, in itself, a component of a good life. The characters in "The Good Place," seeking to become better people, might just as well have taken up the study of economics or chemistry. They happen to have chosen moral philosophy, and I guess that might work as well anything would. Just trying to learn IS becoming better.

The show's protagonists do confront moral dilemmas, and it's nice to see sitcom characters employing the vocabulary of moral philosophy as they wrestle with what to do. As one reviewer wrote, "The Good Place stands out for dramatizing actual ethics classes onscreen, without watering down the concepts being described."

The show ran for four seasons, and by the second season Chidi, who was an ethics professor in life, has settled into the role of serving as the ethics tutor for the other three: Eleanor, Tahani, and Jason. Also, Chidi and Eleanor have an on-again off-again romantic relationship going. In the 11th episode of the 2nd season, Chidi declares himself a Kantian. Chidi has talked about Kant, more or less sympathetically, in many of the episodes, but without committing himself unequivocally. Now our heroes are trying to get to “The Judge” who they hope will rule favorably on their case. To get there, they have to go to The Bad Place and make their way through a room full of demons who are having what is, essentially, a cocktail party. Our heroes must impersonate demons in order to make it through this demon party. They must hide their true identities. They will need to lie. Chidi says:

CHIDI: I hate this. I hate lying. It’s not permissible. I can’t do this.... Kant says that lying is always wrong, and I follow that maxim....Principles aren’t principles when you pick and choose when you’re going to follow them. ("The Good Place," Season 2, episode 11)

Later on, when our heroes have arrived at the cocktail party in Hell and are trying to last it out without being discovered, Chidi manages to pull Eleanor aside for a moment of private conversation.

CHIDI: Those bro demons over there think I’m some kind of great torturer. They want my advice on how to torture some one. Help me.

ELEANOR: You know the answer, dude. Lie your ass off.

CHIDI: No! Lies have consequences. I will have contributed to someone’s eternal torture because I disobeyed a basic Kantian principle. I’m going to be sick, and I don’t want to go back to the bathroom because they put mirrors in the toilet, and that makes you really confront what you’re doing!

ELEANOR: OK, OK. Sit down. [They sit.] Take a breath. Rub your lucky bookmark. Hear me out. What if lying is ethical in this situation? What if certain actions aren’t universally good or bad? Like Jonathan Dancy says.

CHIDI: Jonathan Dancy? Are you talking about moral particularism? We never even covered that. You read on your own?

ELEANOR: You think just because I’m a straight hottie, I can’t read philosophy for fun? Look. Moral particularism says there are no fixed rules that work in every situation. Like, let’s say you promised your friend you’d go to the movies. But then your mom suddenly gets rushed to the ER. Your boy Kant would say never break a promise. Go see “Chronicles of Riddick.” Doesn’t matter if your mom gets lonely and steels a bucket of Vicodin from the nurse’s closet.

CHIDI: Real example?

ELEANOR: Yep! But, a moral particularist like me – I’m one now – I just decided – would say there’s no absolute rule. You have to choose your actions based on the particular situation and right now we are in a pretty bonkers situation.

CHIDI: I don’t think I can change what I believe just like that!

ELEANOR: And I didn’t think I would ever be at a cocktail party in literal Hell, lecturing my teacher-slash-ex-lover about moral particularism, but life throws you curveballs, bro!

And life does throw us curveballs. We get that there’s something noble about the principled stand – that, as Chidi says, “principles aren’t principles when you pick and choose when you’re going to follow them.” But Immanuel Kant was just wrong. Moral principles cannot be absolute. Generally, lying and breaking promises are wrong – the moral ideal is to avoid those as much as possible. But if you’re a gentile homeowner in Holland in the early 1940s, and you have a family of Jews hiding in your attic, when Nazi stormtroopers come around asking questions, it’s time to lie. And, as in Eleanor’s example, when your Mom has just been rushed to the ER, it’s time to break your promise to see a movie with a friend at that time.

Sometimes principles conflict with each other – the principle of protecting life or supporting one’s mother in her time of need might conflict with the principles of not lying and not breaking promises. Conflicting principles can’t both be absolute.

Could the principles be ranked in order of importance so that only one principle, ranked at the top, is truly absolute? If that one is satisfied, then you move to the second, and if that is satisfied, on down to the third, and so on. When principles conflict, you follow the one that is higher ranked.

The problem with this approach is that it supposes that satisfying a principle is all-or-nothing. But principles tend to be variably satisfiable. There’s a difference between being saying something slightly misleading and telling a bald-faced whopper. We might protect life a little bit, or we might protect it a lot. So if a given action would violate the top-ranked principle a little bit, but not doing that action would violate the second-ranked principle a lot, then maybe it’s the second principle that should govern in that case. Once we admit that possibility, then it’s useless to try rank-ordering the principles.

Can we have principles without making them absolute or rank-ordering them? Some philosophers take this approach, seeing moral principles as contributory rather than absolute. For example, in deciding what to say, contributory principles might be “Is it true?” “Is it necessary?” and “Is it kind?” One might take the position that any two of the three is sufficient. If it is necessary and kind, then it need not be true. If it is necessary and true, then it need not be kind. If it is kind and true, then it need not be necessary. Each of the principles contributes, but none is absolute, and they aren’t ranked.

The moral task is to balance the contributions of various principles that apply to the given situation. At this point, are they really principles? Chidi says, “Principles aren’t principles when you pick and choose when you’re going to follow them.” But is "pick and choose" any different from "balance the contributions of various principles"?

“Pick and choose” sounds capricious. And now I think we’re getting to what’s really at stake. We don’t like to think of ourselves as unprincipled because we think of “unprincipled” as capricious or self-serving or both. Love is the answer to both those. Love manifests as care for others, and a steady commitment to care.

Caprice is what happens when we haven’t found our way to, or have lost our way from, our commitments of care. Self-serving is being negligent about appropriate care of others’ concerns and needs – it’s a failure of love. What we mostly do, and that love attunes us to do better, is take in the details of the situation.

Various details provide reasons for doing this or that. When those details are seen in the light of love -- including love for ourselves – then we are guided to respond in compassion and care.

Every situation is full of reasons – that is, details relevant for discerning how to respond. We need to attend to reasons, but Jonathan Dancy’s moral particularism says we don’t need principles.

What we know about human behavior is that by and large, in fact, we don’t follow principles. Nor does talking about principles and declaring allegiance to them, studies find, make people act better. It doesn’t stiffen up waning resolve – just as studying ethics doesn’t make people more ethical. As Dancy, writes:

“There is only one real way to stop oneself distorting things in one’s own favor, and that is to look again, as hard as one can, at the reasons present in the case, and see if really one is so different from others that what would be required of them is not required of oneself. This method is not infallible, I know; but then neither was the appeal to principle.”

Look again, as hard as one can, at the reasons present in the case. Pay attention. Notice. But what is the energy that we need for attending to the details of what is going on? We will be able to attend just so far as we care, so far as we love – love this life, love this world, love each other, our fellow travelers.

Love is the fuel of caring attention, and it is caring attention, not moral principles, that guides us in discerning what to do. As we love more, we pay attention more, notice more, and thus more fuller respond – bringing more of who we are to more of what the world needs.

All you need is love. Our four protagonists in "The Good Place," trying to become better people by studying ethics, do gradually become better people – but, you will notice if you see, or have seen, the show – they become better people through their commitment to each other, through their burgeoning capacity to love.

All you need is love. All you need is love indeed.