Mom, He Started it!

Rev. Meg Barnhouse
September 25, 2016
First UU Church of Austin
4700 Grover Ave., Austin, TX 78756
www.austinuu.org

The second UU principle is that we affirm and promote justice, equity and compassion in human relations. How can you get wise enough to balance justice and compassion?

Most of you know I have two sons, now in their twenties, and, although they are friends now, they bickered when they were young. My mission as a mother was to reach them to be useful citizens and good company. I asked myself “What happens in our culture when people fight? They get fined or jailed for disturbing the peace.” So we had jail (time out) and fines (losing money.) They didn’t have any money to lose, at first, but I fixed that by giving them a bag of nickels at the beginning of the week. When they would fight or whine, I would say “Please stop that. If you don’t, you’re each going to owe me a nickel.” Whatever money they had left at the end of the week, they could keep. Why did I fine both of them? “He started it” didn’t work because I didn’t have time to have court every time. Some kids can start something very subtly, and the less subtle one always gets in trouble. Sometimes if they were fighting over a toy, I would give the toy a time out for starting a fight. Fairness is a blurry and elusive goal.

This morning I’m talking about the second of our seven UU principles, We covenant to affirm and promote justice, equity and compassion in human relations.”

Our principles name the values we covenant together to affirm and promote. “Covenant” means to promise. By signing the membership book of this church you are promising to affirm, which means to say out loud that you agree with, and promote, which means to say it in public to people who might argue with you. The easy part is that most of our principles are so mildly stated and general that most people would say they agree with them. The harder part is actually walking the path they lay out for us on a daily, personal basis. The first principle we talked about was that we affirm and promote the inherent worth and dignity of every person. That one is hard for some folks who want to believe that some humans are worth less than others.

If you were to write this second principle for a child, you might say “We should be kind and things should be fair.” Justice is making things right and fair. You get what you deserve. Your actions have consequences. You open something, you close it. You pick something up, you have to put it back in its place. You dirty something, you clean it up again. You do the crime, you do the time. We covenant together to promote this value.

Equity is wanting justice for everybody equally. We agree that things should be right and fair for everyone. Male, female (or in between) should have the same rules; all shades of skin color, gay, straight (or in between,) Spanish speaking or Asian, moneyed or poor. Actions should have consequences. People shouldn’t get away with bad behavior. Some shouldn’t be able to dirty everything while others clean up. Our upcoming pledge drive is when we remind one another that the many shouldn’t count on a few people to keep this congregation financially strong and about to act out its mission more and more.

Often, though, someone else does help you: cleans up after you, gives you money, helps you more than you deserve. Sometimes your consequences are mitigated by someone understanding your circumstances. Someone makes the church part if their legacy so we get to have a justice fund and begin to provide breakfast tacos to the people who come to the first service. It’s often a wonderful thing when that happens.

Compassion adds some grace so that sometimes you give more than a person deserves. Or you can get more than you deserve. Why isn’t the world fairer, then? Why is there so much pain, hatred and misery? Often it’s because there is an imbalance among justice, equity and compassion.

How do we walk the path of justice, equity and compassion? You know I advocate adding the words “beginning in our homes and congregations” to the end of each principle, so lets talk about that.

I wrestle with this principle because, in my life, justice, equity and compassion fight with each other. Say I have a situation where someone has hurt me. Justice demands that the hurt be paid for somehow. Equity demands that if I hurt you, I have to pay too. The same rules apply to both of us. I would rather forgive you and have you forgive me. That’s where compassion comes in, I think. Should compassion overpower justice, though? Would it be a better world if we were sweet and understanding about where people are coming from when they create havoc and destruction? Can you be compassionate and still carry through with just punishment?

Here it is in the context of raising children. As I said at the beginning, I think a parent’s job is to prepare children to live in the world out there. In our culture we pay for things in money, labor and time. If one of my children made a mistake that costs me forty minutes, maybe driving something he forgot over to him at school, he owed me forty minutes of his time on some project where I have need. When they were small, if they didn’t obey by the time I counted to three, they owed me a nickel of their allowance. That feels like justice. On the other hand, I have compassion with the boy who made the mistake. I know I made mistakes like that. I understand not obeying. You get busy, you want to do what you want to do. I feel like that too, and I’m not the world’s most obedient person, so they came by that honestly. On the other hand, I know if my mom had made me pay for forgetting with time I might have learned at an earlier age to be more organized. If I allowed my children to ignore me when they were small, they would not have had as much chance to grow up into people I want to spend time with. Too much compassion, too much understanding of how someone got to where they were doing things wrong — it makes you weak on justice. That deprives the person who is behaving incorrectly of the consequences that lead to learning, and that’s mean to everyone else. There has to be a balance between steel-cold justice and mushy-gushy compassion. The Buddhist teachers talk about “idiot compassion,” a term attributed to Trungpa Rinpoche. Pema Chodron expands on this, writing “It is the general tendency to give people what they want because you can’t bear to see them suffering….” You’re doing it for yourself, to avoid discomfort.

To our urge for justice, we might quote Mahatma Ghandi, “If we choose an eye for an eye, we will all soon be blind.” To our rush of compassion, we quote Malcolm X, “We sometimes must kill the one who is evil in order to save the many who are innocent.” My father used to quote what he claimed was a Chinese proverb: “Mercy to the tiger is cruelty to the lamb.”

We wrestle with this in our church community on a small scale in our relations with one another. If one of us behaves inappropriately, how much do we have compassion and say “Well, I know that person, and I know why she is acting obnoxious or why he is hard to talk to or why this one has bad manners or no tact or why that one can’t shut up.” Knowing the person, knowing why, that helps us have compassion. On the other hand, it makes the person never get confronted with bad behavior. That, in turn, makes it hard on the people around them. In fact, I think a belief in another’s worth and dignity makes it important for me not to dismiss that person or give up on them. We shouldn’t give in to a temptation to say, “Don’t bother with them, they can’t change..” “Love” is the one word some use to sum up this principle. Love includes compassion, and it also includes justice. When you love, you want the person to be better. You want them to face themselves. You want to challenge them, to say your piece, you want to encourage them to remember their community. Of course, that kind of challenge has to be done rarely, with fear and trembling, only after you have looked at yourself, faced yourself, and done your best to ensure that your behavior and attitudes are correct.

The Covenant of Healthy Relations you all voted on seeks to flesh this out, it presents what this might look like. You can find it on a big rolling board in the fellowship hall.

“Justice, equity and compassion.” If it feels too vague, as you walk this UU spiritual path, make it more specific. “Justice, equity and compassion.” At the grocery store. “Justice, equity and compassion.” At the gym. “Justice, equity and compassion.” At work. “Justice, equity and compassion.” In our living rooms. It’s really difficult. Let’s see if we can aspire to it. Some justice was moved forward yesterday as the National Museum of African American History and Culture. Sometimes justice involves the experience of finally being heard and seen, finally having your story told. Bells rang out across the nation, echoing the bell from the First Baptist Church of Williamsburg, VA. You have downloaded bell sounds, so let’s celebrate that moment here in Austin with the ringing of our own bells.

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