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© Davidson Loehr

 December 2, 2007

 First UU Church of Austin

 4700 Grover Ave., Austin, TX 78756

 www.austinuu.org

Listen to the sermon by clicking the play button.

PRAYER:

Let us listen to some words of Jesus and see if we can hear within them the voice of a life-giving spirit. What good does it do you, he asked, if you gain the whole world and lose your soul?

Our soul. Our center. That place inside where we need to feel the presence of a life lived with integrity and courage, in the service of high ideals that bless the lives of ourselves and others.

That’s also what Jesus thought of as the narrow path that few would ever want to take, because it isn’t very attractive or seductive. Yet it asks us, as these words from Jesus ask us, to measure our lives in a different currency than the world fawns over. The currency that matters is how we respond to the sacred worth of ourselves and others – whether we try to develop these gifts life has offered.

The reward, Jesus thought, is the deep feeling that we are serving life, and life is returning the favor. The other meaning is that if we can not find that inner feeling of worth, we may not be serving the right gods at all,

Surely these things are right – not because Jesus said them, but because they resonate at such deep levels within people in all times and places.

Let us listen to the words that tell us life is to be honored and empowered, and that our reward for serving life in this way is that we will grow a soul that offers us comfort and love that can not be taken away.

Just this could transform our lives – just this. Amen.

SERMON: Mother Teresa, Revisited

This is the story of a woman who wanted to serve God by helping people. She did it, felt the presence of God, and was happy. But then something odd and I think tragic happened. She answered a new call, which took her in a different direction. She followed this new call for 49 years, becoming one of the most famous women in the world, raising hundreds of millions of dollars, winning a Nobel Prize and the adoration of nearly the whole world. But she lost her soul in doing it, because she was no longer serving a God who could make her or anyone else whole. That’s my understanding of what happened to this sainted woman, after reading the controversial and disturbing new book called Mother Teresa: Come Be My Light, just published a few months ago, and containing for the first time some of her private writings.

In a way, her story strengthens my own faith, though not in a way of which she would have approved. So this is an odd sort of sermon. Part biography, part very dark confession by Mother Teresa, and then my own theological assessment of what happened to her, what it meant for the world, and what it might mean for us. She’s such a famous saintly figure, I don’t expect we’ll all agree on this.

Agnes Gonxha Bojaxhiu (Agnes Gon’-cha Bo’-ja-tswee) (August 26, 1910 – September 5, 1997) was an Albanian Roman Catholic nun. She first felt a call to work with the poor when she was 12. She became a nun and moved to Loreto, India at 18 (p. 14). She taught in the school at Loreto for eighteen years, was much admired, very satisfied and feeling the presence of God, just like it’s supposed to work.

In 1946 she had what she experienced as direct mystical communication from Christ, telling her to start a mission of charity working with the poorest of the poor. She mostly referred to these communications as the “Voice” until her superiors recoiled from the thought that she might be hearing voices. But she thought she had heard the voice of Christ.

She said she tried to talk Jesus out of this new calling, but he said, “I want Indian Missionary Sisters of Charity – who would be my fire of love amongst the very poor – the sick – the dying – the little street children – The poor I want you to bring to me – and the Sisters that would offer their lives as victims of my love – would bring these souls to Me” (p. 49). That odd idea of being a victim of Jesus’ love would become one of the deepest facets of her life and work.

It took two years to get approval from Rome, and in 1948 she began work in Calcutta with her new Missionaries of Charity. She would work with them for the next 49 years, building this into a worldwide phenomen with over 4,500 nuns working in more than 130 countries.

Few people have ever understood just what the purpose of her work really was. From the start, it was a proselytizing mission to win souls for Jesus, so more poor people could go to heaven – and to serve the Catholic Church. Her theology was among the most reactionary in the Catholic Church, absolutely against any ideas of women’s rights or social and economic reform.

She was not setting up places to provide good medical care or pain relief for suffering and dying people, and would sometimes tell people that the more they suffered, the closer they were to Jesus. She believed this as deeply as she believed anything. She wanted herself and her nuns to provide them with care and love as they were dying, and her biases come through some of the stories she told. See how these three excerpts strike you:

“We picked up [a man] from the drain, half eaten with worms, and we brought him to the home: “I have lived like an animal in the street, but I am going to die like an angel, loved and cared for.” And it was so wonderful to see the greatness of that man who could speak like that, who could die like that without blaming anybody, without cursing anybody, without comparing anything. Like an angel.” (p. 292)

“The poor are bitter and suffering because they have not got the happiness that poverty should bring if borne for Christ”.” (p. 92)

“The work for AIDS keeps growing fruitfully. No one has died without Jesus. – In New York already over 50 have died a beautiful death.” (p. 309)

She seemed either oblivious or indifferent to politics, economics, or any of the causes of poverty – certainly including overpopulation and the disempowerment of women.

She had a genius for organizing and also, as she became a celebrity, for attracting big money. No one knows how much. She didn’t keep it in India, which requires detailed identification of charity funds. One former worker in her New York office said the New York account alone contained about $50 million. (from interview with Christopher Hitchens by Matt Cherry in Free Inquiry magazine, Volume 16, Number 4)

The money did not go toward buying good medical equipment or training: her centers looked as impoverished at the end of her life as they had before all the hundreds of millions of dollars were received. It seems that the money was simply spent to start more of these Missionaries of Charity centers all over the world. Numerous medical journals reported on the primitive condition of these centers, the fact that hypodermic needles were washed out in cold water and reused, that pain medication was not given to suffering people, and that these were simply places for people to die, but not to be healed. She told her nuns that these poor existed so she and the nuns could earn credits with God.

Along the way, she also attracted some rich but sleazy people who wanted to buy her public endorsement in return for donations to her mission, and she seemed eager to oblige. After donations from the Duvalier family – Duvalier was the brutal dictator of Haiti – she spoke publicly about how much the Duvaliers loved the poor. After Charles Keating gave her more than a million dollars of the money he had stolen from his investors in the Lincoln Savings and Loan swindle, she wrote to the prosecutor’s office praising his love of the poor, saying she could not believe he could have done anything wrong, asking for forgiveness for him. Then the story took an interesting turn.

The deputy District Attorney of Los Angeles County answered her, explaining the process by which Keating had cheated huge numbers of poor people out of their life savings, and then pointed out that in their audits they discovered that quite a lot of the money he had stolen he’d given to Mother Teresa. He said, now that you know the money was stolen, when are you going to give it back? She never answered. (from interview with Christopher Hitchens by Danny Postel, 9-15-98)

She and Princess Diana formed a well-publicized relationship, and after Diana and Prince Charles divorced, she was asked about Princess Di’s divorce. She said, yes, they’re divorced and it’s very sad but I think it’s all for the best; the marriage was not working, no one was happy and I’m sure it’s better that they separate.

But two months earlier, Mother Teresa had been campaigning in Ireland to pressure voters into keeping their constitutional ban on divorce. The Irish Catholic church threatened to refuse to remarry divorced women. There were no exceptions to be allowed: it didn’t matter if you had been married to an alcoholic who beat you and sexually assaulted your children, you were not going to get a second chance in this world or the next. And that is the position that Mother Teresa supported. (from interview with Christopher Hitchens by Matt Cherry in Free Inquiry magazine, Volume 16, Number 4)

When the Union Carbide corporation flew her to Bhopal, India after the accident in their chemical plant there killed thousands of people, she was asked by the media for a comment on this tragedy, and she kept saying “Just, forgive, forgive.” So under her values, it was O.K. to forgive Union Carbide for its deadly negligence, to forgive the Duvaliers for the brutality and murder of their Haitian dictatorship, and Charles Keating for stealing the life savings of thousands upon thousands of poor people. But for a woman married to an alcoholic child abuser in Ireland who has ten children and no one to look after her, there is no forgiveness in this life or the next one. But there is forgiveness for Princess Diana. (from Matt Cherry’s interview with Christopher Hitchens in Free Inquiry magazine, Volume 16, Number 4.) She worked with the poor and forgotten, but her special dispensations seemed only to be for the rich and famous.

You can see why someone like Christopher Hitchens would attack her in print as a fanatic, a fundamentalist and a fraud, charges he made in his 1997 book about her. He said that what she loved was not the poor, but poverty. Poverty kept providing her with poor people to let her nuns earn credits with God, tending to them without doing anything to improve their lot.

Some of you probably have your own opinions of whether what she did was good or bad. But I want to consider it from a theological perspective, which seems to me the most interesting way to look at this simple yet complex religious woman’s life.

Theologians say that the quality of the gods or ideals we serve has a lot to do with the quality and depth of satisfaction we can find in life. A first century Christian theologian once attacked the pagan worship of statues of gods, saying they were all made of wood, and “we become what we worship.” I’ve always thought there was a lot of insight in that statement that we become what we worship. Other theologians say that only real gods – really high and life-giving ideals, in other words – can make you feel whole and fulfilled, and that serving lesser ideals – or idols – will drain your soul until you are empty inside. For theology to have any relevance at all to real life, what we serve has to make a qualitative difference in your sense of satisfaction and happiness in life – meaning that what you serve will catch up with you: a variation on the ancient Greek saying that “Character is destiny.”

In some ways – and perhaps this will sound unkind – Mother Teresa comes as close as anyone I’ve read to Oscar Wilde’s story about the portrait of Dorian Gray. You’ll remember this was the man who lived a destructive life, yet always looked young and happy. But up in his attic was a portrait of him that showed the progressive degradation of his soul. Mother Teresa’s “portrait” was inside her soul rather than in her attic, revealed for the first time in the recent publication of her private writings (Mother Teresa: Come Be My Light, 2007) but – well, I’d rather read you some of her confessions so you can hear for yourself. I’ll warn you that this is pretty sad and dark stuff – and for most who hear it, probably very surprising.

In 1953 she began sharing the description of her inner darkness with her spiritual advisor, then later with several other priests over the next forty years. These quotations are taken from letters to several of the priests. I should add that for several decades, she repeatedly begged these priests to destroy all her letters to them. As far as I can tell, they all kept them, and allowed them to be published in this book, saying the letters showed the very human struggles she endured. It strikes me as an immense violation of confidentiality, though I can’t get too righteous about this because I’m glad people have a chance to read them. Here are some of the things she wrote to her spiritual mentors and confessors:

“there is such terrible darkness within me, as if everything was dead. It has been like this more or less from the time I started “the work” [with the Missionaries of Charity]” (p. 149).

“Pray for me – for within me everything is icy cold. It is only that blind faith that carries me through for in reality to me all is darkness” (p. 163).

“There is so much contradiction in my soul. Such deep longing for God – so deep that it is painful – a suffering continual – and yet [I’m] not wanted by God. Pray for me please that I keep smiling at Him in spite of everything” (pp. 169-170).

“If you only knew what goes on within my heart. Sometimes the pain is so great that I feel as if everything will break. [My] smile is a big cloak which covers a multitude of pains” (p. 176).

At one point, her spiritual director suggested she write a letter to God. She did, and then shared it with him. (Father Picachy, 3 July 1959) In it, she said: “Lord, my God, who am I that You should forsake me? The child of your love – and now become as the most hated one – the one You have thrown away as unwanted – unloved. I call, I cling, I want – and there is no One to answer – no One on whom I can cling – no, No One. Alone. The darkness is so dark – and I am alone. Unwanted, forsaken. The loneliness of the heart that wants love is unbearable. Where is my faith? – even deep down, right in, there is nothing but emptiness & darkness. So many unanswered questions live within me – I am afraid to uncover them – because of the blasphemy. If there [is a] God, — please forgive me. When I try to raise my thoughts to Heaven – there is such convicting emptiness that those very thoughts return like sharp knives & hurt my very soul. I am told God loves me – and yet the reality of darkness & coldness & emptiness is so great that nothing touches my soul” (p. 187).

“They say people in hell suffer eternal pain because of the loss of God – [that] they would go through all that suffering if they had just a little hope of possessing God. In my soul I feel just that terrible pain of loss – of God not wanting me – of God not being God – of God not really existing” (p. 192).

“Now Father – since 1949 or 1950 [I have had] this terrible sense of loss – this untold darkness – this loneliness – this continual longing for God – which gives me that pain deep down in my heart”. There is no God in me. When the pain of longing is so great – I just long & long for God – and then it is that I feel – He does not want me – He is not there. Heaven, souls – why these are just words – which mean nothing to me. My very life seems so contradictory. I help souls – to go where? Why all this? God does not want me. Sometimes I just hear my own heart cry out – “My God” and nothing else comes” (p. 210).

“People say they are drawn closer to God seeing my strong faith. Is this not deceiving people? Every time I have wanted to tell the truth – “that I have no faith” (p. 238).

She came to see her suffering as a sharing in Christ’s redemptive suffering (p. 215). This was her solution: suffering, being a victim of God’s love, is what brings you closest to Jesus. No wonder she wouldn’t give pain-killers to her suffering and dying people.

At one point she wrote that the physical situation of the poorest of the poor – left in the streets unwanted, unloved unclaimed – was the true picture of her own spiritual life (p. 232).

That’s enough of a sketch to get a feel for this simple yet complex woman. She had immense dedication, energy, skill and stamina, this modern saint who became the most famous woman in the world. Yet all the while she carried within her a soul like the portrait of Dorain Gray. Her suffering and desolate soul needed to hear the one thing she could or would not hear. That was the Voice that said God was no longer present within her because since starting the Missionaries of Charity, she had stopped serving a God of love and healthy empowerment. It was simpler when she had served as a teacher, because education empowers people, and can lead them toward more possibilities and fullness in life. But to work as a missionary in the service of an extremely conservative and reactionary theology is to reduce people’s horizons, rather than enlarging them.

She fought vigorously against the only thing proven to help reduce overpopulation and its resulting suffering: the education and empowerment of women, to give them options beyond remaining the victims of uncontrolled breeding and the victims of those who see that as their God-given role. Uneducated, powerless women and the awful results of overpopulation became the victims of the god Mother Teresa served for the last fifty years of her life.

Mother Teresa wanted to bring people to Jesus, and in an ironic way, she brought me to Jesus, too – to his asking what good it would do if you gained the whole world and lost your soul. Christopher Hitchens wrote that she did far more harm than good, and that many more people suffered because of her work. I think it came not from a bad heart, but from very bad theology, and a nearly perverse willingness to work with the poorest of the poor while pandering to the worst of the wealthy, to fund the pyramid scheme of starting more and more missions of charity, which loved to hug the poor – as she wished for half a century that God would hug her – but never by empowering them, nor by providing decent medical care or social and political intervention on their behalf, to improve their lot in life. Instead, she told them to find Jesus and love their suffering.

But it matters a lot which concepts of “Jesus” and “God” we serve. After 1948, she served the wrong Jesus and the wrong God, and paid for it through 49 years of deep inner pain, suffering and loneliness. I see her tormenting inner voices as the voices of conscience trying to tell her she was not on a path that was bringing her life.

So what did it profit her to gain a whole world and lose her soul? She made the lot of the poor far worse by popularizing an adoration of their suffering rather than working to change the structures that continued to cause it, so that the numbers of the poor and desperate might be reduced rather than merely fawned over.

As that first century theologian said, she became what she worshiped, and inside the outward saintly face of Mother Teresa, the Saint of Calcutta, was the portrait of a lonely, unloved and tormented Albanian woman named Agnes Gonxha Bojaxhui (Gon-cha Bo-ja-tswee), abandoned by the God of life who had once loved and comforted her during the first twenty years of her career, when she was educating and empowering people rather than using them as part of the landscape to impress a God who tried to tell her for half a century that he wanted them raised up, not patronized.

I feel sorrow for the deep emptiness of this woman named Agnes, and for the plight of the ever-growing poor – a plight I think she made worse. My hope and prayer is that she might become a lesson after all, of the terrible cost of serving gods not worth serving, and the call to return to the service of life, health and empowerment of all the sons and daughters of Life’s longing for itself. In a terribly ironic way, her life demonstrates, more than any life I know of, that you can’t fool God. You can’t serve shallow aims and find deep fulfillment. Jesus was right: we gain nothing of real value when we lose our soul, lose the sense that we are serving life, health and an empowering love.

That’s not what Mother Teresa said, but it seems to be the message her life taught, both to her and to us. If we can hear that message she could not hear, perhaps we can find the blessings she could not find. At least, that is what I hope and believe, for all.

——————

All page numbers in parentheses are from the book Mother Teresa: Come Be My Light, Edited and with Commentary by Brian Kolodiejchuk, M.C. (Doubleday, 2007)

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

© Davidson Loehr

 November 25, 2007

 First UU Church of Austin

 4700 Grover Ave., Austin, TX 78756

 www.austinuu.org

Listen to the sermon by clicking the play button.

Prayer:

We gather here both sincere and flawed. We are interconnected with much of what is good in the world, but also – more than we are comfortable knowing – with what is evil.

Is it really possible that as a nation we have so much more than others without having somehow taken it from them? It felt so much better to believe that we are pure, and the world’s riches flowed naturally to us as rewards for our great purity. Yet we do know better.

We gather here as good people, but not perfect people. We gather not to seek a false purity but a more informed, more nuanced kind of wholeness. For even if we are as poets have said dust of the earth, within the dust there are motes rising to the light – and they too are part of us.

Let us seek grown-up blessings for the dust of our bodies, for it is the dust of Mother Earth, made of stardust. And let us seek the blessings of the “motes rising,” those small but sacred signs of the spirit within us that can be both aware and awake.

For this very human combination of imperfect lives and hopeful, rising spirits, we give thanks, and ask for the blessings of life that flow to all who seek them in honesty and humility.

Amen.

SERMON: Feeling Blue About Feeling Guilty

I’ve spent a few weeks reflecting on some insights from the author John Perkins, one of my current favorite authors. He’s writing about the dark underside of our American imperialism, how empires work, about the slavery always involved somewhere when those in an empire are living much better than those whose labor supports their life style.

In 2004, he wrote the best selller Confessions of an Economic Hit Man, later brought twelve other writers together to write A Game as Old as Empire, and this year wrote The Secret History of the American Empire.

Empire is not about control for its own sake; it is about exploitation of foreign lands and peoples for the benefit of at least the more privileged in the country that controls the economies of others (GOE, p. 17). This is also what I’ve been calling chimpanzee politics: the pursuit of power and privilege for selfish interests.

Slavery may sound like a quaint notion from the 19th century, but it is always part of empires, and our global empire enslaves more people than the Romans and all the other colonial powers before us (EHM, p. 205). we’re Number One.

These are important things for us to know. But as I was putting together this picture of the nature and the cost of our American Way of Life, something else started bothering me, which took me down a very different path.

So I want to start by sketching the dark side of our imperialism, but then take you down the second path, too. The two paths form a dilemma that was expressed by the author E.B. White, when he said, “I arise in the morning torn between a desire to save the world and a desire to savor the world. This makes it hard to plan the day.” It also makes it hard to plan a sermon.

We now have the first truly global empire in history. Most of us aren’t terribly aware of this; but those exploited by it are, and many of them suffer from extreme poverty. On average, twenty-four thousand people die of hunger and hunger-related diseases every day. More than half the planet’s population lives on less than two dollars a day. For us to live comfortable lives, millions must pay a very high price (SH, p. 6).

How have we established our empire? One answer is, through sheer military force. We have military bases in more than a hundred countries, and almost without exception they are not there for national defense. But more importantly, we establish our empire through economic policies that let us control other nations. One measure of this, which I found very clear and helpful, is about the difference between using tariffs to protect your industries, versus using “free trade” to break down and control the economies of other countries.

Our own economy developed behind some of the highest tariff walls in the world. President Ulysses S. Grant reportedly said in the 1870s “within 200 years, when America has gotten out of protection all that it can offer, it too will adopt free trade.” It only took another eighty years, but US tariff rates were not significantly reduced until after WWII. Since then, the most successful developing countries besides ours have been Japan, China, Korea, and Taiwan, which have prohibited the import of any goods that would compete with any of their most important industries. That’s also how we developed our own strong economy. Now under the mantra of “free trade,” the First World has kicked away the ladder, prohibiting Third World countries from using the only economic development strategy proven to work: the strategy of protectionism and tariffs (GOE, p. 21). “Free trade” is neither sacred nor wise; it’s a devastating weapon the strong use to enslave the weak.

Ghana, for example, was forced by the IMF to abolish tariffs on food imports in 2002. The result was a flood of imported food from European Union countries that destroyed the livelihoods of local farmers. It seems that the IMF’s economic hit men “forgot” to ensure that the EU abolish its own massive agricultural subsidies. As a result, frozen chicken parts imported from the EU cost a third of those locally produced. (GOE, p. 22)

Zambia was forced by the IMF to abolish tariffs on imported clothing, which had protected a small local industry of some 140 firms. The country was then flooded with imports of cheap secondhand clothing that drove all but 8 firms out of business. Even if Zambia’s clothing producers had been large enough to engage in international trade, they would have faced tariffs preventing them from exporting to EU and other developed countries. And while countries like Zambia are supposed to devote themselves to free trade, First World countries subsidize their exporters through export credit agencies – often with disastrous results for the environment and economies of the Third World. (GOE, p. 22)

The IMF’s structural adjustment program in Peru slashed tariffs on corn in the early 1990s, and corn from the US – whose farmers are subsidized at a rate of $40 billion a year – flooded the country. Many of Peru’s farmers were unable to compete, and so turned to growing coca for cocaine production instead. (GOE, p. 22)

Many IMF programs have required sharp cuts in health and education spending, making it harder to improve the quality and capabilities of work forces with low levels of literacy and few technological skills. In some countries, such as Ghana, the percentage of school-age children who are actually attending school is falling because of IMF-imposed budget cuts. (GOE, p. 22)

John Perkins describes Ecuador – a country in which he helped cause this harm – as typical of countries around the world that we have brought under our control. For every $100 of crude oil taken out of the Ecuadorian rain forests, the oil companies receive $75. Of the remaining $25, three-quarters must go to paying off the foreign debt. Most of the remaining six dollars and change covers military and other government expenses – which leaves about $2.50 for health, education, and programs aimed at helping the poor. So out of every $100 worth of oil taken from the Amazon, less than $3 goes to the people who need the money most, those whose lives have been so adversely impacted by the dams, the drilling, and the pipelines, and who are dying from lack of edible food and potable water (SH, pp. xx). Two weeks ago, I talked of how we lure Third World countries into great debt as a tactic for controlling them.

The cost of servicing Third World debt is greater than all Third World spending on health or education and nearly two times the amount those countries receive each year in foreign aid. Despite current lip service to forgiving it, Third World debt grows every year, currently approaching $3 trillion. It is one of our most effective weapons against countries that have resources or locations that we want to disempower and control.

Why don’t we read about these things? The tactics are brutal, but They’re simple and clear – why don’t we read about this? Perhaps it’s partly because the US was ranked #53 on the World Press Freedom list in 2006 (compared to #17 in 2002) and has been severely criticized by Reporters Without Borders and other non-governmental organizations for jailing and intimidating journalists (EHM, xviii). Using fear to silence criticism is another hallmark of both empires and slavery.

Number 53! Fifty-two countries with greater freedom of the press than we have? This is not the America of our myths, the one so dear to our hearts, is it?

Where else can you see the kind of slavery that supports our lifestyle? You can look at Mexican workers living in shantytowns just south of our border, or Asian children practically chained to their work stations, working 12-hour days, six or seven days a week to make our sweat shirts, tennis shoes, Gap jeans and other cool clothes. You can multiply these stories a hundredfold, but they are all forms of slavery, of people being coerced to work in desperate situations in order to keep us supplied with our way of life. Meanwhile, about 8,760,000 children a year are starving to death (24,000 a day x 365), with millions more dying of treatable diseases because they can’t get treatment. Some of those people may have made the clothes we’re wearing right now.

Where else can you look? Columnist Bob Herbert wrote a disturbing piece a few weeks ago in the NY Times, on the slave trade that is alive and well in the U.S. – the sex slave trade.

He says that over 18,000 foreign nationals are believed to be trafficked into the U.S. each year. According to the State Department, 80 percent of them are women and children, an overwhelming majority of whom are used for sexual purposes. (Bob Herbert, “Today’s Hidden Slave Trade,” 27 October 2007, The NY Times op-ed page).

If you don’t think we have this in Austin, leaf through the Yellow Pages in the Austin phone book as I did this week. Look under “Escorts,” and see if you aren’t a little stunned at the number of listings for 24/7 services. See how many of them advertise international women from all countries, and imagine how many of those women are forced into that work.

But most of our slave traders aren’t involved in the sex trade. They just recruit desperate people and build a factory to produce the jackets, blue jeans, tennis shoes, automobile parts, computer components, and thousands of other items they can sell here, there and everywhere (EHM, p. 181). We get cheap prices; they get lives that are nasty, brutish and short.

There really is a lot of suffering, a lot of injustice. we’re not likely ever to do anything about it if we don’t even know about it. I”m not even sure what we can do if we do know about it. And there are hundreds more dark stories like these, as many of you know.

Now here’s my problem: the more of these stories I read, the more depressed I got, and the less I wanted to read any more of them. Did I need to read them all? Was I insensitive if I got sick of feeling depressed? In order to be a caring person, must I be miserable?

Then an insight hit me when I read this week that the United Nations now says that Somalia is the worst humanitarian crisis in Africa, not Darfur. I thought, “My God, have we been hopelessly depressed over the wrong one? Is there a prize for being hopelessly depressed over the right one?”

I have a colleague who really seems to believe that as long as there is injustice anywhere, we should never be happy; we should starve with the hungry, suffer with the suffering, and the rest of it. He’s believed it and lived it for the thirty years I’ve known him, sometimes showing a lot of personal courage – I don’t think He’s going to change.

I know good committed people like this. Their passion is sincere. But this is a philosophy that wants us to believe that as long as one person is suffering, none of us should be happy – as though our being miserable somehow helps the world, or has a positive moral value.

This is like one of my favorite strange stories from religion, a story about the Jains. Jainism is an ancient religion derived from Hinduism, with over ten million followers today. One of their key teachings is their insistence on the sacredness of all life, from humans to bugs and even smaller.

This is a belief that can lead to some very odd behavior, like wearing surgical masks around during the day so they won’t inhale any microscopic organisms. My favorites are the stories of Jains who will carry a mattress infested with bedbugs around the city. Rather than killing the bugs, they want to feed them. Bedbugs feed on our bodies when we lie in bed, so these Jains support themselves by going around yelling, “Who will feed the bugs? Who will feed the bugs?” When someone gives them some money, one of them will lie down on the mattress and let the bugs feed on him. Who will feed the bugs? Who will support my belief that the world needs me to suffer?

If you believe we are morally bound to be miserable as long as there is injustice, you can never stop suffering. So many bugs, so little time! So much suffering, misery, war and injustice to get upset about. How could it ever end? But I think the Jains have missed the point.

Our job is not to suffer, but to live. Don’t feed the bugs. Don’t look for reasons to be miserable just because there is so much misery in the world. The theologian Howard Thurman was right when he said, “Don’t ask what the world needs. Ask what makes you come alive, and go do it. Because what the world needs are people who have come alive!”

So we’re back to that dilemma: Do we spend our days trying to save the world, or savor it?

This is the dilemma that brings to mind a wise statement made by the historian Will Durant some years ago. He had written his massive dozen-volume history of pretty much the whole world as his life’s work. Then he wrote a 100-page summary of those big volumes, The Lessons of History. And finally, in an interview, he was asked if he could sum it all up in half an hour.

He did it in less than a minute, this way: “Civilization is a river with banks. The river is sometimes filled with blood from people killing, stealing, shouting, and doing the things historians usually record, while on the banks, unnoticed, people build homes, make love, raise children, sing songs, write poetry, and even whittle statues. The story of civilization is the story of what happened on the banks. Historians are pessimists because they ignore the banks for the river.”

That river always runs through life, carrying not only the unjust and evil, but also the benefits of the unjust and evil, the good things they bring us. The river has ships that bring us goods from sweatshops where people work in conditions of virtual slavery to support our way of life without making us pay a fair price for it. There are things in that river to which we are addicted.

Because we’re the empire, we’re complicit in most of the major evil in the world. We can’t be pure, ever. And there is no way we can stop being complicit in this, just as Jains kill thousands or millions of micro-organisms every day – just by living, inhaling them, or having them destroyed inside by their body’s T-cells. No one is pure; we’re interconnected with everything, the good and the bad. And that isn’t a “problem” to be solved; it’s the human condition.

This was brought home to me in a wonderful way during a worship service about a decade ago. An activist man in the church seemed absolutely to believe that as long as there is injustice anywhere, we cannot rest, and his Sunday announcements were tedious for almost everyone but him. One Sunday he was on a rant about the destruction of the rain forests – how some large corporations are cutting them down for lumber or to make grazing pastures for cattle, what a crime this is against Mother Earth, and how all decent people must be outraged.

After getting worked up and trying to guilt-induce the entire congregation – something that almost never works – he said that well, those who really care about the earth can join him and his group for a meeting after church. Then he said, “We’ll meet at the Burger King.” He seemed not to know that Burger King was one of those corporations that had cut thousands of acres of rainforest to make pastures where they grazed the cattle that produced the hamburger he was going to be eating. we’re complicit. we’re interconnected. You can’t get away from it. If you can only be happy when You’re not complicit in evil, You’re doomed.

We have these two paths: living in the river or living on the banks. Deciding to save the world or deciding to savor it. And it does make it hard to plan a day!

So what do we do? I don’t think we’ll agree on this.

Should we honor the tried and proven tactics of willful ignorance & denial? They’ve worked wonders for many centuries. “Don’t tell me, I”m happier not knowing how the world really works? I also don’t want to know how politics works or sausage is made.”

Should we suffer, feed the bugs, and bank on some kind of salvation by purity? That’s a bus stop at which no buses stop.

One solution is to act locally in simple ways that don’t drain our life force, but which strengthen it. Last week I challenged you to write letters to the editor about the nearly burlesque bad behavior of the leaders of the Hyde Park Baptist Church, in refusing at the last minute to allow the 23rd annual Austin Area Interreligious Ministries Thanksgiving service to take place in a gymnasium they owned, because it involved non-Christians – particularly, Muslims. “Interreligious” doesn’t seem to be a word in the vocabulary of that church’s leaders. I don’t like to ask you to do things I”m not willing to do, so I wrote a Viewpoint piece on it, which the paper printed yesterday. I don’t know how many of you wrote letters, but this is something that we can do. we’re this well-educated bunch of liberals, and one thing we owe the larger community is our voice in trying to help others see a nuanced responsible moral path more clearly. It is also empowering for us. And writing some of these pieces can be a lot of fun. Let’s take care of ourselves and our gifts first, then feed the world with the overflow of our gifts.

Of course, this isn’t new advice. You’ve all heard this wisdom before, if you’ve flown commercial airlines. When They’re giving you the pre-flight instructions on the oxygen mask, they say that in the event of an emergency, put your own mask on first, and then help others. Give oxygen to yourself first, or you may not be able to help anyone else. It’s the same rule in life.

Your job is to live more fully, not to suffer, not to feed the bugs. Ask what makes you come alive, and go do it. For the world needs people who have come alive. Then, from your own fullness, let it spill over. If you have joy, spread it. If you have extra money, help out. Just finding those organizations with people devoting their lives to improving the lot of the less fortunate is a noble thing to do. They are living much closer to the river than most of us are who just read, talk and write about it. we’re not doing the work, they are. But they can’t do it without financial support, and it isn’t wimping out to write a check. Twenty-four weeks a year, we split our collection plate with different non-profit organizations doing just this – and I hope we can move toward sharing every week’s collection. This isn’t feeding the bugs, it’s feeding the de-buggers.

Supporting the efforts of those who live and work much closer to the river than we do or would want to is one way we can live on the banks while remaining creatively aware of the greater suffering that must be attended to by people who can do that day in and day out without – I hope – losing their own joy in life.

And yet it isn’t this simple. Just the act of acknowledging our complicity in the world’s largest and most rapacious empire changes who we are. Our complicity in the world’s major evils of slavery runs deep. We show it at Wal-Mart, Sears, and at exclusive shops – many of which are now reportedly getting their name brands made in China. We show our complicity in our technological gadgets, our cars, everywhere. We wear our complicity in our clothing; we drive it, use it in laptops and cell phones. We are dipped in complicity with the evils of our American empire, all the way down.

So what now? Where from here? I don’t have that answer, but I know how I must begin, and I invite you back into the attitude of prayer with which we began:

We gather here both sincere and flawed. We are interconnected with much of what is good in the world, and also with what is evil.

We gather here as good people, but not perfect people. We gather not to seek a false purity but a more informed, more nuanced kind of wholeness. For even if we are as poets have said dust of the earth, within the dust there are motes rising to the light – and they too are part of us.

Let us seek grown-up blessings for the dust of our bodies, for it is the dust of Mother Earth, made of stardust. And let us seek the blessings of the “motes rising,” those small but sacred signs of the spirit within us that can be both aware and awake.

For this very human combination of imperfect lives and hopeful, rising spirits, we give thanks, and ask for the blessings of life that flow to all who seek them in honesty and humility.

Amen.

—————-

(NOTE: I’ve used three of John Perkins’ books for this sermon: Confessions of an Economic Hit Man, A Game as Old as Empire, and The Secret History of the American Empire. To make the references shorter, I’ve abbreviated them as EHM, GOE, and SH.)

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© Davidson Loehr

28 October 2007

First UU Church of Austin

4700 Grover Ave., Austin, TX 78756

www.austinuu.org

Listen to the sermon by clicking the play button below.

PRAYER:

Let us seek to overcome evil. Evil isn’t as powerful as it seems. Both the evil around us and the evil within us don’t get their force from a moral power, but from an unholy hunger, using us for its own selfish ends.

Let us remember that we can overpower most evil by staying grounded in life, in love, and in an unshakable sense of our own sacred worth. For we are children of the universe, the sons and daughters of Life’s longing for itself, the sons and daughters of God. Living out of that identity is living in the light, and evil hates the light.

Let us not be tricked into feeling unworthy of the great gift of life and love that connect us with our core and the core of all other living things.

One of evil’s worst tricks is making us doubt our own worth. So let us never forget that we are as worthy as everyone else, that we are beloved of this place, and beloved by God, by all the gods of life, truth and light. Let us remember this, remember this.

Amen.

SERMON: Vampires and Goblins and Demons, Oh My!

It’s Halloween and I want to talk about vampires. Not those unimaginative literalist suckers who just want to drink blood. I mean the far more numerous, and far more dangerous kind known as psychic vampires, who can suck the life out of you.

These people, in their more extreme forms, are also called sociopaths by psychologists. They’re people who can do immense psychological and sometimes physical harm to others without ever feeling any guilt, which is what makes them so dangerous. We need to recognize them, and know how to protect ourselves from the psychic vampires both around us and also within us. For while only a few have a truly sociopathic character, we can all slip into this behavior, and it never serves us or others well.

It’s about the lack of a conscience, the lack of a capacity for feeling guilty when we demean or harm someone, and that’s a bad thing. The very first personality disorder recognized by psychiatry – that means a permanent, untreatable character disorder – was guiltlessness (The Sociopath Next Door, p. 6)

Sociopaths are now estimated to be 4% of our U.S. population. That’s one in twenty-five people, an incredibly high number. It means that within the roughly 2.5 million people here in and around Travis Country, there are about 100,000 sociopaths. Or that right here in this church of about 600 voting members and over 900 in the whole community, there would be two or three dozen here. Well actually, there aren’t any here. We have these invisible filters across all the doors, so that only completely pure and selfless people can get in. Good thing, too – or this church would just be a representative cross-section of the world around us”.. These people are dangerous, but they are not rare.

Not all life-draining vampires are sociopaths, though all are destructive. They’re dangerous because these are extreme, sometimes unalterable, forms of selfishness. And selfishness is the cardinal sin of every religion in the world of which I”m aware. You really don’t matter to them, except as you serve them and do it their way. Your wishes, needs, spirit, soul – they don’t matter. You’re a piece in a game they have played – played perhaps all of their lives. And if they’ve played it all their lives, You’re not going to change them.

Stories of psychic vampires go back into our prehistory, probably six thousand years and more. So people who live by draining the life out of others have existed in all cultures throughout history. They can be immensely charismatic and seductive, and we seem fascinated by them in that disguise.

As part of my homework for this sermon, besides reading or re-reading two books, I watched seven movies about this character. One was George Cukor’s 1944 classic “Gaslight” about a pure sociopathic character (an excellent and powerful movie in which a young Ingrid Bergman won her first Academy Award for Best Actress and Charles Boyer played her sociopathic husband chillingly).

The other six were all vampire movies. As far as I know, there have only been six well-known vampire movies in the past 85 years. In two of them, both named “Nosferatu,” the monster is presented without any charm at all: just grotesque, hungry evil. Not surprisingly, both these movies, in 1922 and 1979, were commercial failures. We like to see our evil sugar-coated. (If you want to see one of these, I think the 1922 silent film is the better one.)

The four commercially successful films were the four in which the vampire is very charming and seductive. These include Bela Lugosi’s 1931 film “Dracula”, the 1979 version where Frank Langella plays a wonderfully seductive Dracula, and Francis Ford Coppola’s 1992 version called “Bram Stoker’s Dracula,” where charisma and seduction are everywhere. The most recent one, the 1994 movie “Interview with the Vampire,” carries sexy charisma to the extreme of casting Tom Cruise, Brad Pitt and Antonio Bandera as the male vampires, and an 11-year-old Kirsten Dunst is cast as a beguiling child vampire who will say “I”m hungry, and the city awaits.” Yes, children can be vampires too, from very early ages. It can start early in life, and is found in all professions including psychotherapy, ministry, law enforcement, teaching and parenting; they walk among us and look like us.

If you’re interested in this, I’d recommend the 2005 book The Sociopath Next Door: The Ruthless Versus the Rest of Us, by psychologist Martha Stout, and Unholy Hungers: Encountering the Psychic Vampire in Ourselves & Others, by Barbara E. Hort (1996).

We now have quite a bit of empirical data on sociopaths. By inserting a series of questions to measure along the Psychopathic Deviate Scale into the Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory (MMPI – it’s Scale 4 in the MMPI), psychologists have collected data from hundreds of thousands of people. That’s where the data come from that say about 4% of our society are sociopaths.

The author relates stories of an eight-year-old son of very wealthy parents who used to blow up frogs for sport – I don’t know whether this was meant as a reference to George W. Bush, who did the same thing, or is just an innocent coincidence. She also told the story of a psychologist who used her power to do great psychological harm to patients who seemed too smart or too pretty – and got away with it for over a decade. Both these authors, psychologists themselves, make a point of warning that there are many sociopaths acting as psychotherapists.

When you suddenly realize that someone in your life is sociopathic, it can be a terrible jolt. The scene that comes to mind for me about this comes from another movie that I saw when I was fourteen: the original version of “Invasion of the Body-Snatchers.” It was the most powerful movie of my teen years, and for me even then, it was a movie about the difference between “real” and “unreal” people. The scene that stuck with me – one of the most frightening scenes I’ve ever seen in a movie – comes when the couple (who know of this alien scheme for body-snatchers taking over the earth) are walking down the sidewalk with, I think, one of their uncles, or at least a friend who has known them all their lives. They’re trying to convince him of this unlikely story, and he looks understandably unconvinced. Then as they’re talking, you hear off-camera the sound of a car’s screeching tires, a “thump” and the cry of a dog, and you realize that a car has just killed a dog a few feet to the right. The couple turn immediately to look. But their friend just keeps walking straight ahead, unaffected. That’s when I understood the difference between what I would call “real” and “unreal” people, and it was chilling.

These vampires or sociopaths are people for whom the life force – or even the life – of others simply does not matter. It’s about control, persuasion, winning, manipulating, and the game never ends until they are stopped. And in all the mythic lore, there are no stories of vampires ever committing suicide. Once they start feeding, they will continue until they’re stopped.

Why do they do it? It looks like it may be about half genetic and half cultural.

The Texas Adoption Project (which followed adopted children for 35 years) reports that, where scores on the Psychopathic Deviate scale are concerned, individuals resemble their birth mothers, whom they have never met, much more than they do the adoptive parents who raised them (The Sociopath Next Door, p. 123). So a person’s tendency to possess certain sociopathic characteristics is partially born in the blood, perhaps as much as 50% (The Sociopath Next Door, pp. 123-4).

Where does the other half or more come from? It’s curious. There are no data linking sociopathy with childhood abuse or attachment disorders. (The Sociopath Next Door, p. 134) But it does look like our culture helps create sociopaths.

In America, the guiltless manipulation of other people blends in with social expectations a lot more than it would in Asian countries, for instance. Asian nations have traditionally taught that we are interconnected, and that we owe something to others, both through their religions of Confucianism, Buddhism and Taoism, and through their secular cultures. And in Asian nations, the percentage of sociopaths are between .04% and .13%, or one-thirtieth to one-one-hundredth of ours (The Sociopath Next Door, p. 136). That’s a big difference, and a frightening one. A growing number of our citizens” bodies and souls are being claimed by the body-snatchers.

A lot of charismatic leaders are such vampires, and they’re easy to spot, though people don’t seem to spot them until it’s too late. You have a charismatic vampire any time a leader or teacher sets himself up to be a conduit of wisdom, truth, or divinity that is not directly available to lesser mortals – like us. This applies to religious or political leaders, for instance, who believe God has spoken directly to them – but not to those who disagree with them (Unholy Hungers, p. 52).

Most of the vampires that we meet, though, aren’t this dramatic or large. They’re kind of ordinary, though psychologists who work with their victims will tell you they do immense and lifelong harm. I knew a young woman who was a very bright girl, brighter than her sociopathic boyfriend. When she graduated from college at the top of her class, her C-average boyfriend said, “Well, Sweetie, it’s a good thing that you’re pretty smart, because you’ll never be very pretty.” That’s a vampire, sucking the life out of his own girlfriend. When I heard this story, I wished it had ended with her telling him, “Look, Bucky Beaver, beauty is only skin deep – like you!” But it didn’t end that way. His remark took life from her, that she didn’t get back for many years.

Then there are the more passive-aggressive vampires – probably my least favorite type – who make others serve their desires by hanging around like bats, poisoning the air, making the place toxic until people finally decide to give in so they can have some peace. These people aren’t just passive-aggressive selfish pests; they are vampires, because they don’t care at all – or even notice – the wishes, needs or values of anyone else. Others exist only to serve their wishes. This has to begin sounding more familiar, doesn’t it? They’re just not rare.

Some of these vampires, goblins and demons do it through outright power and charisma. Others do it through evoking pity, which makes people let them get away with murder. Pitying someone can blind us to the fact that they use that pity to paralyze us while they behave badly again and again. Pity is like the anesthetic that lets the operation happen.

One author says that the combination of consistently bad, selfish or demeaning behavior with frequent plays for your pity is as close to a warning mark on a sociopath’s forehead as you will ever be given (The Sociopath Next Door, p. 109).

The best-known example is the battering husband who sits at the table crying, head in hands after beating her again, apologizing, saying it will never happen again. But it will (The Sociopath Next Door, p. 108).

The pity play is used to wipe the slate clean so they can begin the cycle of hurting and repenting again. The crocodile tears come not from deep feeling but from a deep kind of scheming.

How do you spot Vampires? What can you do?

The clearest way to know that you have been in the presence of a vampire or a sociopath is a feeling of shameful insufficiency. We should look around for a psychic vampire whenever we feel that we are somehow flawed – not because of what we”ve done, but because of who we inherently are (or are not). We feel we are not good enough, or thin or smart or sexy enough: “Well, Sweetie, it’s a good thing you’re pretty smart because you’ll never be very pretty.” (Unholy Hungers, p. 15) Whenever we experience this feeling of shameful insufficiency, we have probably been the victim of a psychic vampire (Unholy Hungers, p. 16). They can be parents, relatives, friends, teachers, ministers, psychotherapists, spouses, children – anyone.

For a long time, I’ve had a mental image of a sociopath that has helped me understand them, and might be useful to you. I learned it from a psychologist I knew when I was 21. We were talking about a very pretty woman we both knew who was a striking example of this style – very quick, witty, seductive, and manipulative. At one point, I said, “You’re a psychologist. Can’t you people fix her?” He said, “You have the wrong picture. You’re picturing people like this as a very nice house which has a big gap in its foundation, and you wonder if the gap can’t just be bricked up. But no. Instead, imagine a building – several stories tall – that is very strong and attractive, with a foundation that goes fairly deep, but which is built at a twenty-degree angle. It’s stronger than most of the buildings around it, but dangerous for anyone who runs into it the wrong way.”

So you have probably been around a psychic vampire or sociopath if you leave feeling deeply unworthy, insufficient, flawed. Or if they have this cycle of demeaning or vicious behavior, followed by dramatic apologies that let you feel sorry for them so they can begin the cycle again – which they will. Or if They’re the passive kind that hang around like bats, making the psychic atmosphere toxic until they get their way.

Now the question that’s in every vampire movie: how do you kill a vampire? Understand I am not talking about physically killing something or someone – just ending their ability to drain your life and the life of others. And I don’t just mean other people who are vampires. We can also fall into this drive for power over others at all costs.

One psychiatrist I’ve read has said, “I am convinced that we enter the world seeking love, and when we don’t find love, we settle for power.” (Jean Shinoda Bolen, quoted in Unholy Hungers, p. 17).

That seems right to me too. So killing an inner vampire means we need to go back to the moment when we couldn’t find love and settled for exploitation (Unholy Hungers, pp. 215-216).

The vampire myths are helpful in telling us how to kill psychic vampires. They say that the most desirable woods from which to fashion the stake to kill a vampire are hawthorn and ash. Hawthorn blooms early in the spring, and its bloom signals the beginning of spring’s rebirth from winter’s death – a regenerative moment that would be odious to a vampire. Ash is the wood of Yggdrasil, the tree of Norse mythology from which all life was created (Unholy Hungers, p. 60). So the enemy of the destroyer of life is life itself, renewed and refocused around a living center inside of us.

And that brings us back to church.

This is where honest religion can help, because its job is to help us find and reconnect with healthy life, to be filled by it. And religion is part of almost all the vampire stories, where they say a cross or a consecrated wafer is something vampires can’t stand. The reason the cross and the consecrated host worked against vampires was because those were seen as the symbols of the sacred. But the most recent vampire movies (since 1979) make it clear that these things don’t really have any power.

In “Interview with the Vampire” they acknowledge that those are myths made up by Bram Stoker a century ago. That’s really a measure of religion’s loss of respect over the past fifty years or so. But what’s right about this is that when we are connected to what is holy and gives us life, or when we are serving our calling, doing what we are meant to do, we are nearly immune to the power of a vampire because he or she has nothing important to offer us: we already have life, which is what they don’t have. The myths call vampires “the undead,” but they’re also “the non-living.”

So: do the sociopaths win? Is life really stacked in favor of those who can take advantage of it? Are the rest of us – as sociopaths believe – just fools for valuing feelings and love, which make us so easy for them to take advantage of? Do they win? No, they don’t win. Martha Stout, the author of The Sociopath Next Door, sums it up in a way worth repeating:

“One study found 75% of sociopaths were dependent on alcohol, and 50% on other drugs, to dilute the boredom (The Sociopath Next Door, p. 187).”Sociopaths cannot love, by definition they do hot have higher values, and they almost never feel comfortable in their own skins. They are loveless, amoral, and chronically bored, even the few who become rich and powerful (The Sociopath Next Door, p. 188).”A person without conscience, even a smart one, tends to be a shortsighted and surprisingly naive individual who eventually expires of boredom, financial ruin, or a bullet (The Sociopath Next Door, p. 191).”At the other extreme, interviewers talked with 23 people with super-conscience and selflessness and found they shared three traits.

(1) “certainty,” about what is right and what they must do;

(2) “positivity”, an optimistic outlook;

(3) “unity of self and moral goals.” integrating their moral stance with their concept of their own identity, and the perceived sameness of their moral and personal goals (The Sociopath Next Door, p. 194).

“So my best psychological advice is, do not wish to have less conscience. Wish for more (The Sociopath Next Door, p. 195). “Conscience is the still small voice that has been trying since the infancy of our species to tell us that we are evolutionarily, emotionally, and spiritually One, and that if we seek peace and happiness, we must behave that way (The Sociopath Next Door, p. 216).

“If we can connect with our life force – our psychological immune system – we are far more invulnerable to psychic predators because what they offer is trumped by the life we have within us. Some of you have experienced this when you were in a toxic relationship and finally came to your senses or stood up to one of these predators. It takes some courage and heroism to defeat a vampire, but not the action-hero kind. Even the vampire myths say it’s feminine energy that destroys a vampire.

There’s a great story Martha Stout tells about this. There was a bully on a bus of middle-schoolers who was sitting next to a retarded boy, picking on him, making fun of him – something he had done often. But this day, there was a young girl sitting in the seat behind him. She leaned forward and said, “That’s mean. Quit it!” He sneered at her and called her some names, but she held her ground and he got up and moved.

Confronting a predator is like exposing them to the sunlight, and vampires hate sunlight. Why, as we grow up, do we so often lose the courage to confront the predators in our lives, our relationships, our institutions, our government? The people who habitually put others down and demean people or whole classes of people – why do we lose the courage to stand up and say, “That’s mean. Quit it!” To say it and mean it and not back down? (The Sociopath Next Door, p. 98)

Here was a girl on the school bus who knew she was worth something, that her friend was worth something, and she wouldn’t let a big bully pretend otherwise.

And humor has a lot of power to dispel the vampire’s strength – because it’s hard to be intimidated when you’re laughing (“Look, Bucky Beaver”.) And there is something tragicomic about a person trying to live in a non-human way; they would have to be, and live among, an entirely different species of Snatched Bodies for it to work.

If we can remember a few basic facts, we can be protected from vampires. First, when you identify a psychic vampire or sociopath, get them out of your emotional life immediately. You may still have to work with them or see them at family or professional gatherings. But never again give them any emotional opening, because they will use it only to manipulate you, and you are not likely ever to beat them at this game they play so well.

Just remember that you are a child of the universe, a child of God, and that it really doesn’t get any better than that. You are not inadequate, not broken, not in need of someone else’s special redemption. You are loved. And love, fired full bore, will blow away the nastiest vampire, like a blast of sunlight.

It’s not too hard to make most monsters vanish. Sunlight kills mildew, and it does a good job on our demons and goblins too. But first, it takes being aware of them, and it takes the courage to confront them, like saying “That’s mean. Quit it!”

In the movie “The Wizard of Oz,” the monster is dissolved in an unusual way. The wicked witch of the West is finally destroyed when a determined girl throws water on her, and she melts. It must never have rained in the land of Oz, though I don’t think it was the water that did it. I think the water was just stage business. What dissolved the witch was a girl having the courage to confront her face to face, without blinking or backing down. It took a girl who was not afraid. The trick looks like magic, but it isn’t magic.

Ambrose Bierce, in his Devil’s Dictionary, defines a ghost as “The outward and visible sign of an inward fear.” One lesson of Halloween is that most of our ghosts are outward and visible signs of our inward fears. Other lessons of Halloween are that ghosts vanish when enough light is shined upon them, and that fears, once faced, can be transformed into possibilities. On second thought, maybe that’s magic after all.

Happy Halloween, precious people.

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© Davidson Loehr

14 October 2007

First UU Church of Austin

4700 Grover Ave., Austin, TX 78756

www.austinuu.org

Listen to the sermon by clicking the play button below.

PRAYER:

Let us give thanks for the beliefs that can unite people rather than dividing them.

Almost everywhere religion shouts today, its shouts fan the flames of exclusion, bigotry, hatred and violence. The hateful actions drown out the pious talk.

We shudder as we hear the shouts of self-righteous judgment and see the actions of bigotry, and our hearts shiver. Let us go inside our own minds and hearts for the more hopeful and peaceful messages we carry there.

Let us give thanks for beliefs and actions that can make us more whole, and let us be grateful that those beliefs have such deep roots into our very own souls. These are the “still, small voices” that can still offer us comfort and courage. Here are some of the timeless and universal words that come from that place. These were adapted from the prayer of St. Francis of Assisi, but our own hearts could have written them, if we but had his poetic gifts:

Lord of life and love, or all that is holy and good,

make me an instrument of your peace

Where there is hatred sow love

Where there is injury pardon

Where there is doubt give faith

Where despair give hope

Where there is darkness shed light

Where there is sadness, joy

Let me not look for help so much as to help

To be understood as to understand

To be loved as to LOVE

For it is in giving that we receive

In pardoning that we are pardoned

And in dying to small ways, we are born into greater ways:

The paths of peace, hope and love.

Let us give thanks that the words find such a natural home deep within our own souls, so that we may have them with us always. Amen.

SERMON: Religion – Bad and Good

You know, we meet here in this liberal church, along with about 1/10th of one percent of Austin’s population, and we can do honest religion, can talk about high ideals like character, can attack selfish behavior as the cardinal sin of all great religions. We can insist that all beliefs should be open to questioning, because honest religion is one of the highest callings we can have. It’s one of the best hopes we have of evolving beyond the “chimpanzee politics” of power that is sought for selfish ends, and the rest of it. And it’s all true.

But it can also be pretty naive. Because outside the walls of this place, across our country and around the world, what the vast majority of people associate with the word “religion” has been and continues to be responsible for immense harm to millions upon millions of humans and other species. And if we just do our liberal thing and remain silent about the horrific abuses of religion, we become silent accomplices to the things done in the name of religion and its gods the world over.

While the worst forms of religion have owned the news headlines for the past several years, some new authors have arisen to attack the very idea of religion as a dishonest and evil thing. And at least five of these books have become best-sellers, read and discussed by millions of people. I can’t think of another time when so many books attacking the very idea of religion became best-sellers.

These authors are Richard Dawkins (The God Delusion), Daniel Dennett (Breaking the Spell), Sam Harris (The End of Faith and Letter to a Christian Nation) and Christopher Hitchens (God is not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything). This morning, I want to share some of their criticisms with you, because I think they are mostly very good criticisms. And even if you find some of them disillusioning, honest religion has always claimed that it’s better to be disillusioned than to be illusioned, because the worst kind of faithlessness is the fear that the truth will be bad.

There’s another reason for taking these angry critics seriously. These are the voices of some of our modern prophets, doing what prophets have always done. They come in from outside the polite little games of religion, saying, “This is nonsense! You people are hypocrites! You claim to serve high ideals, but You’re not! And we come to criticize your silly religions in the name of those higher ideals sacred to us and which, we insist, should also be sacred to you!” These are bright men whose values and beliefs are very close to those of most of us here. We ignore good angry critics at our peril – especially when so much of what they say is clearly right.

As Sam Harris says, “That so much of [human suffering] can be directly attributed to religion – to religious hatreds, wars, taboos, and religious diversions of scarce resources – is what makes the honest criticism of religious faith a moral and intellectual necessity.” (Harris, Letter to a Christian Nation, p. 57) I agree with him there.

All these authors are angry about the harm done by the kind of religion that gets all the headlines, and about the moderate and liberal religious spokespeople who stand silently by, acting pious.

Richard Dawkins ridicules the Islamic reactions to the 12 cartoonists whose anti-Islam cartoons appeared in Danish papers with banners including “Slay those who insult Islam,” and “Behead those who say Islam is a violent religion.” (Dawkins, p. 25) Let’s be honest: carrying a banner that says, “Behead those who say Islam is a violent religion” is both absurd and obscene. And for the record, it does not do any honor to Allah.

Another author lists a few examples of the warring due directly to religion today: The fighting that has plagued Palestine, the Balkans, Northern Ireland, Kashmir, Sudan, Niberia, Ethiopia and Eritrea, the Ivory Coast, Sri Lanka, Philippines, Iran and Iraq are merely a few recent cases. (Harris, pp. 81-82)

Another says Northern Ireland’s problems would probably disappear in a generation if religiously segregated schooling were abolished. (Hitchens, p. 261) And in Ireland alone, it is now estimated that the unmolested children of religious schools were very probably the minority. (Hitchens, p. 51) For far too many priests, the culture of systemic child abuse became the eighth sacrament. It is inexcusable for people in religion not to speak out about it under some misguided sense of banal sweetness.

The angriest of these books is the one by Christopher Hitchens (God is not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything). While he can be a brilliant bully, he has traveled and lived all over the world, done very impressive research, and seems as well-informed as he is angry.

He notes that both Protestantism and Catholicism – though mostly Catholicism – have been eager allies of fascism. Benito Mussolini had barely seized power in Italy before the Vatican made an official treaty with him, known as the Lateran Pact of 1929. (Hitchens, p. 235)

And the very first diplomatic accord undertaken by Hitler’s government was a treaty with the Vatican. In return for the concession of some privileges to the church, the Holy See ordered Catholics to abstain from any political activity on any subject. At the first meeting of his cabinet after this capitulation was signed, Hitler announced that these new circumstances would be “especially significant in the struggle against [Jews].”

German Protestants followed suit by publishing their own accommodation with the fuhrer, and establishing what became known as the German Christian Church to support the Nazis. None of the Protestant churches, however, went as far as the Catholic hierarchy did in ordering an annual celebration for Hitler’s birthday on April 20th. On this date, on papal instructions, the cardinal of Berlin regularly transmitted “warmest congratulations to the fuhrer in the name of the bishops and dioceses in Germany,” these congratulations were to be accompanied by “the fervent prayers which the Catholics of Germany are sending to heaven on their altars.” The order was obeyed, and faithfully carried out. (Hitchens, p. 239). These were immoral and ungodly acts of institutional cowardice, and you need to expect those of us in the religion racket to speak up, to police our own discipline.

The Catholic Church was equally involved in Franco’s bloody dictatorship in Spain – and is now paying for it, as the Spanish government is cutting funding to the church, permitting gay marriages, and saying publicly that it will establish a secular Spain. Throughout Europe, organized religion has largely died out since WWII, perhaps from a widespread reaction against the sins of the churches when they were offered political power.

Perhaps Voltaire got it right long ago, when he said, “Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities,” for the atrocities do seem to grow directly from the absurdities.

Short of the big-screen drama of war and fascism, religion can be linked to other forms of deep and lasting harm. In 2005, a survey was conducted in thirty-four countries measuring the percentage of adults who accept evolution. The United States ranked thirty-third, just above Turkey. Meanwhile, high school students in the United States test below those of every European and Asian nation in their understanding of science and math. These data seem unequivocal: we are building a civilization of ignorance that will disadvantage our children, and it looks like it is linked to the influence of religion. (Harris, p. 70)

Besides cataloging some of the physical harm done by religions, all these authors also attack the teachings of the religions as ignorant, hateful, and destructive of both human character and human society. They could have in mind, as an example, the creationist teaching that Noah had a pet brontosaurus. Daniel Dennett offered a very interesting metaphor for understanding how ideas – at least bad ideas – work.

You watch an ant in a meadow, he says, laboriously climbing up a blade of grass, higher and higher until it falls, then climbs again, and again, like Sisyphus rolling his rock, always striving to reach the top. Why is the ant doing this? What benefit is it seeking for itself in this strenuous and unlikely activity? Wrong question, as it turns out. No biological benefit accrues to the ant”. Its brain has been commandeered by a tiny parasite, a lancet fluke (Dicrocelium dendriticum) that needs to get itself into the stomach of a sheep or a cow in order to complete its reproductive cycle. This little brain worm is driving the ant into a position to benefit its progeny, not the ant’s.

This is not an isolated phenomenon. Similarly manipulative parasites infect fish, and mice, among other species. These hitchhikers cause their hosts to behave in unlikely – even suicidal – ways, all for the benefit of the guest, not the host. Daniel Dennet asks whether anything like this ever happens with humans, and of course it does. (Dennett, pp. 3-4) What He’s saying is that ideas work like these parasites in humans, driving us to serve the ideas – the ideologies – even at our own expense. And He’s saying that many of the ideas taught by the world’s religions are among the worst offenders, doing the most harm.

One famous religious teaching is that intercessory prayer works. Dr. Herbert Benson (author of the best-seller The Relaxation Response in 1976), a cardiologist at the Mind/Body Medical Institute near Boston, headed a $2.4 million Templeton-funded study on intercessory prayer. (The Templeton outfit, generally not respected by scientists, tries to save face for supernatural interpretations of religion.) They monitored 1,802 patients at six hospitals, all of whom received coronary bypass surgery. The patients were divided into three groups. Group 1 received prayers and didn’t know it. Group 2 (the control group) received no prayers and didn’t know it. Group 3 received prayers and did know it. (Dennett, p. 63)

The results, reported in the American Heart Journal of April 2006, were clear-cut. There was no difference between those patients who were prayed for and those who were not. There was a difference between those who knew they had been prayed for and those who did not know one way or the other, but it went in the wrong direction. Those who knew they had been the beneficiaries of prayer suffered significantly more complications than those who did not. (Dennett, p. 63)

This may sound counter-intuitive, but talk to any hospital chaplain about the number of times a patient reacts to their visit by saying something like “Oh God, I didn’t know I was so bad off they”d send a chaplain!”

All these authors ridicule the idea that the Bible is a perfect guide to morality. While good-hearted people can always find good-hearted teachings, the other kind also abound. If children get out of line, we are to beat them with a rod (Proverbs 13:24, 20:30, and 23:13-14). If they talk back to us, we should kill them (Exodus 21:15, Leviticus 20:9, Deuteronomy 21:18-21, Mark 7:9-13, and Matthew 15:4-7). We must also stone people to death for heresy, adultery, homosexuality, working on the Sabbath, worshipping graven images, practicing sorcery, and a wide variety of other imaginary crimes. (Harris, p.

And Christopher Hitchens asks about what the Ten Commandments do not say. Is it too modern, he asks, to notice that there is nothing about the protection of children from cruelty, nothing about rape, nothing about slavery, and nothing about genocide? Or that some of these very offenses are about to be positively recommended? (100) Is that too modern a criticism?

He says that as far as he is aware, in every country in the world today where slavery is still practiced, the justification of it is derived from the Koran. (Hitchens, p. 181) If this is true, this should not be the first time we’re hearing it. Religious spokespeople and the media should have covered this long ago. Maybe some of you will tell me that they have, but I”m not aware of it. Why should anyone believe religions have any good honest advice for living, if we haven’t the decency to point out the honestly bad advice they also contain?

What is new and different about these critiques is that they are also angry at moderate and liberal religions for their complicity in the harm and bad teachings done in the name of religion.

Sam Harris says that even the most progressive faiths lend tacit support to the religious divisions in our world. (Harris, p. ix)

And Richard Dawkins says even mild and moderate religion helps to provide the climate of faith in which religious extremism flourishes. (Dawkins, p. 303)

And there is indeed longstanding and widespread complicity with the worst religious teachings, among those who should know better. It isn’t just those we might consider fundamentalist crazies who support hateful and murderous teachings. St. Augustine thought heretics should be tortured; St. Thomas Aquinas thought they should be killed. Martin Luther and John Calvin both advocated the wholesale murder of heretics, Jews, and witches. (Harris, p. 12) If this is Christian love, nobody needs it.

When the author Salman Rushdie was given a death sentence by the Ayatollah Khomeini, who disliked some of his views on the Koran, the key religious leaders of the world did not condemn Khomeini’s order of murder. Instead, they said the main problem raised by publication of The Satanic Verses was not murder by mercenaries, but blasphemy. These included the Vatican, the archbishop of Canterbury, and the chief Sephardic rabbi of Israel, as well as the cardinal archbishop of New York and many other lesser religious figures. (Hitchens, p. 30) Let’s be clear: the problem was not blasphemy; it was the psychopathic order by a charismatic religious leader to murder someone who disagreed with his religious beliefs. If moderates and liberals want to be regarded as moral and courageous people, why didn’t they speak out? Many secular people did, but very few religious leaders.

More recently, in the wake of the Asian tsunami, liberals and moderates admonished one another to look for God “not in the power that moved the wave, but in the human response to the wave.” I remember reading some of these things, and imagine you did too. On a day when over one hundred thousand children were torn from their mothers” arms and drowned, there is something very smarmy about moderate or liberal theologians pretending to find God in the actions taken by caring people in response to a destructive act of nature. It is trying to save face for their God, but more importantly it is trying to save face for themselves and their profession, pretending they are really still about something real and important that affects the world. (Harris, p. 48) I agree with the critics who find this abominable.

In the face of this kind of horrid thinking, as Sam Harris says, atheism is nothing more than the noises reasonable people make in the presence of bad religious beliefs. (Harris, p. 51)

All of these authors think religion should be ended as an unredeemable kind of evil. I don’t agree with them, even if such a thing were possible. But much of the developed world has nearly done away with religion. Norway, Iceland, Australia, Canada, Sweden, Switzerland, Belgium, Japan, the Netherlands, Denmark, and the United Kingdom are among the least religious societies on earth. According to the United Nations” Human Development Report (2005), they are also the healthiest, as indicated by life expectancy, adult literacy, per capita income, educational attainment, gender equality, homicide rate, and infant mortality. (Harris, p. 43)

On the other end, the fifty nations now ranked lowest in terms of the United Nations” human development index are all quite religious. (Harris, p. 44)

Countries with high levels of atheism, these atheists point out, are also the most charitable both in terms of the percentage of their wealth they devote to social welfare programs and the percentage they give in aid to the developing world. Or consider the ratio of salaries paid to top-tier CEOs and those paid to the same firms” average employees in godless countries: in Britain it is 24:1; in France, 15:1; in Sweden, 13:1; in the United States, where 80 percent of the population say they expect to be called before God on Judgment Day, it is 475:1. Jesus is credited with saying it will be easier for a camel to get through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter heaven. Apparently, in the fantasies of many American Christians, come Judgment Day there are going to be huge herds of camels galloping through the eyes of needles. (Harris, p. 46)

I agree with all these critics that one of the greatest challenges facing civilization in the twenty-first century is for human beings to learn to speak about our deepest personal concerns – about ethics, spiritual experience, and human suffering – in ways that are not flagrantly irrational. (Harris, p. 87)

I wonder how many of you here agree with the general thrust of these critiques of religion? (About 80-90% of hands went up.)

So do I. Where I disagree with these men is in the matter of the definition of religion, though it isn’t a terribly big quibble. Some of them won’t consider Buddhism or Confucianism as religions because they have no official supernatural gods. And they wouldn’t consider what we do here to be religion either, though I think they”d like it. They don’t want to call anything done in churches that is honest or healthy religion, though some will call it spirituality or philosophy. I call it honest religion, but don’t really care what it’s called, as long as it can be called forth. And I think healthy beliefs are really far more widespread than these authors think, or than polls show.

There are tens of millions of people in this country who don’t believe a tenth of the official dogmas of organized religions, but who do believe in the basic decencies upon which we depend for a civilization. There are tens of thousands of people who believe the same generic things we do, right here in Austin. And these healthy generic beliefs we share also have a lot more healthy and fun humor to them – official religions are horribly humorless. So let me quote from a few people who have spoken from this more wise and witty center, and see if you don’t feel a bit closer to them.

One of my favorite wise quotes about religious belief is from H.L. Mencken, who said: “We must respect the other fellow’s religion, but only in the sense and to the extent that we respect his theory that his wife is beautiful and his children are smart.” (Dawkins, p. 27) In other words, we must respect other people’s religious opinions, but only in the sense and to the extent that we respect their opinions about art, music, politics or football. What matter most are their actions, not their words.

And on the subject of death, since the fear of death seems to drive so many religions, I like Mark Twain, who said: “I do not fear death. I had been dead for billions and billions of years before I was born, and had not suffered the slightest inconvenience from it.” (Dawkins, p. 354)

And a very sweet thought from Emily Dickenson, who said, “That it will never come again is what makes life so sweet.” (Dawkins, p. 361)

When these critical prophets talk about what they believe rather than what They’re so angry about, it’s easy to feel close to them. Here’s Christopher Hitchens, speaking for all who, like him, reject religion: Our belief is not a belief. Our principles are not a faith. We do not rely solely upon science and reason, because these are necessary rather than sufficient factors, but we distrust anything that contradicts science or outrages reason. We may differ on many things, but what we respect is free inquiry, openmindedness, and the pursuit of ideas for their own sake. (Hitchens, p. 5)

We believe with certainty that an ethical life can be lived without religion. And we know for a fact that the corollary holds true – that religion has caused innumerable people not just to conduct themselves no better than others, but to award themselves permission to behave in ways that would make a brothel-keeper or an ethnic cleanser raise an eyebrow. (Hitchens, pp. 5-6)

There are tens of millions of Americans and tens of thousands right here in Austin who would resonate with these sentiments far, far more than with the hateful rantings of an Ann Coulter or Rev. Hagee in San Antonio who wants a Christian holy war to begin with our nuking Iran.

I would love to have all four of these critics in church here, where I could preach to them, invite them into an attitude of prayer, and try to sell them on reclaiming the possibility of honest religion, even while you and I would probably join them in rejecting the many varieties of bad and dishonest religion that most people of good heart and good will would also reject. And I think those four authors would like it here. They might even find a certain kind of good and healthy spirit move within them – and I think they”d like that, too. Honest religion is one of our best hopes for a more humane future.

Bad religion really is a mean and dangerous thing, and we need to say so when the occasion invites it. But honest religion – and it can’t be liberal without being honest – is equally a blessing to theists, polytheists and atheists, because it honors our heart without insulting our head, and knows that while we are indeed a mixture of good and evil, the good will usually win out, if only we will help it, and help one another. That’s good news. It’s also good religion.

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© Davidson Loehr

September 30, 2007

First UU Church of Austin

4700 Grover Ave., Austin, TX 78756

www.austinuu.org

Listen to the sermon by clicking the play button below.

PRAYER:

Come holy spirits.

Enter the hearts of those who believe that

Love is better than hate

Understanding is holier than bigotry

Peace is more blessed than war

Come, holy spirits,

enter those who know that the whole human sound goes up only from the full chorus.

Enter us, holy spirits, that we may be more inclusive and more complete.

We confess to too many smallnesses.

We confess that we are too often selfish,

serving and caring for only our own values and those held by people who think like us.

We confess to that smallness of vision and of association that is such a stumbling block to our larger humanity.

And yet we are the raw material from which our larger possibilities must be fashioned.

And so come, holy spirits.

Come into the hearts of those who are faithful to high callings.

We will make ourselves ready.

Come holy spirits, come.

Amen.

SERMON: Spirits – Holy and Otherwise

For me, the subject of the Holy Spirit begins with a biographical story. When I was six, I hated the Holy Ghost.

I was in a Presbyterian Sunday School, which I loved because the teacher loved children and told us wonderful stories each week.

The cement-block walls were an awful chartreuse color, but there was a color poster of a blue-eyed, brown-haired Jesus surrounded by six-year-olds, so it was a friendly place to be.

Then one Sunday, with no explanation, the wonderful old Sunday School teacher was gone, and taking her place was this horrible woman who seemed to hate both stories and children. She tried to teach us theology, but we all heard it as another story – though not a very good one.

The title seemed to be “Trinadee,” and it started out OK.

First, there was this God up in the sky. Well, Superman and Captain Marvel were up there, so there had to be room for a God. That was fine.

Then this God had a son. But we had his photo on the wall and he liked kids, so that was ok too.

But then, there was – this ghost. The only mental picture I had was of Caspar the Friendly Ghost, and it was a ridiculous image to try and fit into that story. When she finished, she asked us if we understood. I didn’t even understand why she’d ask that about a story.

Trying to be nice, I said, “Well, it’s a pretty good story, but next time leave out the ghost.”

I didn’t yet know the word “apoplectic,” but that’s what she became. “It is not a story!” she screamed. Well, a six-year-old knows a story when he hears one, so I said, “Yes, it’s a story and it’s not a real bad one, but the ghost is dumb. Leave out the ghost.”

From there, things escalated. She told me that Jesus doesn’t like little boys who call this a story, and I said, “Well, then you can leave out Jesus, too.” So a couple things happened that day. First, my happy childhood Sunday School experience ended. And second, by virtue of wiping out two-thirds of the Trinity, I became a Unitarian.

Ironically, when I grew up and understood what the concept of the Holy Spirit was about, it became one of my favorite religious ideas. We are embodied spirits. I agree with the mystics on that: we aren’t primarily bodies; we’re primarily spirits, wearing bodies.

Honest religion, the theme of the sermons this fall, is a phrase with two words. Honesty is easy enough to do if You’re not afraid of crossing other people’s comfort zones or boundaries of orthodox thinking.

But also to be religious means we must be concerned about seeing and saying the highest ideals to which we can aspire. Not because God commands us to, but because those ideals help define the healthiest and most deeply fulfilling life and world.

And the highest of the spirits is, as nearly all religions have said, a spirit of compassion and love for others, that can over-ride smaller and more self-serving ambitions. The Catholic Church, and after them almost all of Christianity, calls it the Holy Spirit, and that seems the right name for it. St. Augustine write in the early 5th century that the great gift of the Holy Spirit was the gift enabling you to love others as yourself – and that if you didn’t get that gift, you didn’t get much.

Even though the idea of one single holy spirit vastly oversimplifies how complex we and our many spirits really are, it’s useful for speaking not about the spirit but about our own longing for the sense of peace that could come from stilling our quarrelling voices, of raising our own selfishnesses to the higher level of equal concern and compassion for others. You can find this yearning expressed simply and poignantly in some of the great religious poetry.

Here’s just one line from a famous Catholic prayer called “Come, Holy Spirit”. See if you can’t feel the yearning from which this prayer could come: “Come, Holy Spirit, fill the hearts of Thy faithful and enkindle in them the fire of Thy love.”

Don’t you wish it were that easy! In real life, we usually have to tend to a variety of different spirits that drive us. But the larger hope or wish is that we could just be filled with an overriding spirit of compassion and love that could somehow automatically choreograph all our disparate voices. So some of the religious poetry can speak to this yearning of ours, whether we think in terms of gods or not.

Here’s part of another, a poem written by a woman named Edith Stein, who the Catholic Church made into St. Benedicta. She seems to have been one of those rare people who was filled, possessed, by this spirit of love. Just listen to these dozen or so lines from her poem and see if they don’t have an emotional, a spiritual, effect on you, as she stands in awe of this gift within her:

Novena Of The Holy Spirit

by St. Benedicta of the Cross (Edith Stein)

Who are you, sweet light, that fills me

And illumines the darkness of my heart?

You lead me like a mother’s hand,

And should you let go of me,

I would not know how to take another step.

You are the space

That embraces my being and buries it in yourself.

Away from you it sinks into the abyss

Of nothingness, from which you raised it to the light.

You, nearer to me than I to myself

And more interior than my most interior

And still impalpable and intangible

And beyond any name:

Holy Spirit eternal love!

One thing this spirit business is about that’s frustratingly right is that it seldom seems to be under our control. We can control our behaviors under most circumstances, but it’s much much harder to control what we wish we could do, how we feel, what we love or hate. Those things seem to be beyond our direct control. You can quit smoking or drinking, but not wanting a smoke or a drink as easily. We can be nice to someone we hate, but it’s a whole lot harder to want to be nice to them! The reason – and this is really what today’s sermon is about – is that this spirit business is not only much more complex than Western religion implies, but also very different. So I want to talk with you about spirits – holy and otherwise.

The word “spirit” is a rich, multi-layered word. If you look up synonyms, you find things like vital essence, presence, disposition, and my favorite, enthusiasm. The Greeks turned spirits into daimons and gods, for they saw people filled with these powerful dispositions, and saw the same dispositions appear in every generation, as eternal presences that outlived us.

That word “enthusiasm” still contains this ancient history. It comes from the Greek en-theos, which means “filled with a god.” And we are indeed filled with gods, filled with spirits that are the most significant thing about us.

Sometimes we call this character, which also comes from a Greek word meaning a deep kind of mark that identifies us, which is what our guiding spirits do. And we are still driven by spirits you can recognize in the Greek stories of gods and daimons. They are still with us, thirty or forty or more centuries after the Greeks first noticed them:

Harpies. You hear someone screaming “I’ll tear that creep’s arms off! I’ll rip out her hair, gough out his eyes! She’ll never escape my wrath, never! I’ll make him suffer forever!” (Add the wordless screaming “Harpie” sound) We’ve all heard this voice, maybe from our own mouths. It’s the spirit of unmitigated rage and vengeance. These are the voices the ancient Greeks called the Harpies: dangerous, vicious supernatural forces of rage and vengeance.

Or you hear somebody say that “Of course might makes right, and the fact that the US is the mightiest military power on earth gives us the right to invade and occupy Iraq, sell off its assets, take control of its oil, kill over 700,000 of its people, and if they don’t like it, let them try to stop us.” This is the voice of Ares, the Greek god of war.

Or someone does something absolutely destructive and dumb, and says they couldn’t help it because they were in love, and You’re hearing a modern incarnation of Aphrodite, the goddess the Romans called Venus.

You could go through the rest of the ancient Greek gods and daimons and recognize them from people in your own lives, maybe from your own life. The Greeks saw these spirits as so powerful and everpresent they sculpted statues of them, and built temples to them.

In some ways, one of the most interesting of the ancient Greek Olympic deities was the goddess Hestia: the only Greek deity not drawn or sculpted, though there were altars to her. Hestia makes it more clear that these spirits are invisible dynamics, not really supernatural male or female deities. And Hestia is invisible but terribly important. She was the goddess of the hearth, the home. She represents the feeling, the presence, that makes a house feel like a home, or a church service feel like a worship service. It may be invisible, but everyone knows whether it’s present or not, and its presence makes all the difference. We are embodied spirits. When you meet someone you knew in childhood but haven’t seen for many years, what you really recognize as you talk with them is that spirit or character that was distinctive about them. “

“Character” is a word that meant a very deep identifying mark, and a famous Greek saying was that your character is your fate: its style will determine who and what you will be, and how people will remember you.

So the spirit that You’re expressing at the moment gives you your character at the moment. And the spirit that comes to define your life defines your character and your fate. You can probably think of people in your own lives who come to mind, people you can and do sum up very simply: she’s so selfish, He’s so vain, she’s so very caring, He’s such a trustworthy friend.

And while we’re on words, there’s the great German word “Zeitgeist,” which means the ‘spirit of the times.” Whole eras can be defined by spirits. Classical music was defined, as many music historians have said, by the spirit of Apollo, as Romantic music was defined more by the spirit of Dionysus. The Hippie movement of 35 years ago was defined by the spirits of peace, sexual liberation and individual freedom, and those spirits – I think they were mostly the four goddesses Demeter, Aphrodite, Artemis, and Hestia, and the wildcard god Dionysus – choreographed much of that generation, as some here can remember.

It choreographs, defines, drives, is the god that rules for better or worse. This is where the Greeks had a more honest and accurate picture of human nature than our Western religions have.

Our Western religions want to talk just about the Holy Spirit, as they want to talk about just one god, as though there could ever really be just one dynamic in charge. The Greeks saw that we have numerous spirits in us, several or many drives that push us in different directions, that They’re seldom compatible, and that the real goal in life is achieving some nuance, and the ability to moderate the quarreling tendencies we have. The Greeks originally had twelve Olympian deities, though not all sources agree on the same twelve. But they were saying they could identify at least a dozen styles, dynamics, biases, spirits that we can always find driving the lives of ourselves and others. And the gods and spirits seldom agree, and usually bicker, just as they do in our own mind and our culture.

That’s where Zeus came in. As the top dog among the Olympian deities, the Alpha Male among the gods, his job was to try and harmonize all the bickering voices. That’s our job, too: to harmonize the bickering voices that drive us. There were gods that neither Zeus nor the Greeks respected, even though they had to acknowledge their power. Ares, and god of war, wasn’t respected by Zeus because he was all passion and no reason. And Aphrodite, the goddess of love, was also all passion and no reason.

In the stories about Aphrodite, almost no one’s life was made better by crossing her path. It ended badly or tragically for the humans, this passion that followed lust wherever it led, everything else be damned. Without using our reason to play the role of Zeus and balance the often selfish voices within us, we are unlikely to live wise or fulfilling lives, and unlikely to be much blessing to others.

One of the themes in these sermons is our task of evolving beyond the chimpanzee politics that are rooted very deeply in us, the notion of power gained to serve our own selfish ends rather than to serve others. And this is where we tie back to chimpanzee politics. Because each one of these spirits – with the exception of the Holy Spirit – is selfish, concerned only with getting what it wants, no matter what harm it does to us or others.

Hermes is a sneaky guy nobody can trust, very clever at using words to persuade anybody of anything. He creates advertising campaigns that sell Americans on eating unhealthy food and becoming unhealthy people, or cars that guzzle gas and pollute the air, or a thousand other gadgets that run up credit card bills so tens of millions of people are buried under interest rates of 20-30%. Even in ancient Greek mythology, neither humans nor gods could trust Hermes. He was always out for himself.

But so were the other spirits.

The god of war destroyed Germany seventy years ago, and may yet destroy America in our lifetimes. The spirit of Apollo can make organizational or corporate clones of people, subordinating them to structures of authority and ignoring their humanity because that spirit can’t see their humanity. Zeus’s philandering, his sense that the Alpha Male need not be faithful, destroys trust, commitment, and the relationships upon which we and our society depend.

His wife Hera’s fury at being betrayed by Zeus and her endless search for revenge, like Poseidon’s inability to stop carrying a grudge – the entire Odyssey is driven by Poseidon’s ten-year grudge against Odysseus for killing his son – these have some justice to them at first, but soon become so selfishly obsessive that they destroy the lives of others around them. Any single spirit is selfish. We are mostly driven by just a few of them, and our hardest job is like Zeus’s: creating a harmony between our conflicting urges and desires, that can let us be a blessing to ourselves and others.

In modern medicine, we describe cancer as a kind of growth that cares only about reproducing its own kind of cells, even if they kill the body. Left untended, that’s what individual spirits or gods do, too.

They each in their own way further the art of chimpanzee politics by being unable to see anything beyond what they want right then. This includes, many many times in Western history, the God of Western religion. Dishonest religion and bad priests have so often turned that god into a blood-thirsty demon rather than a spirit that could be called holy.

If we’re going to do honest religion, we need to talk about gods. So let’s understand gods. They are not critters in the clouds. They are imaginative constructs, concepts, leading us to centers of psychological and sometimes natural power. And religion – as any Buddhist can tell you – is not about gods. So in honest religion, we can ask – and need to ask – how useful these gods are for us today, as we try to find ways toward healthier ways of being that are less selfish, more integrated, and more compassionate toward the much larger world around us.

And here, I think the idea of Zeus is really much more useful than the idea of the Hebrew god Yahweh. God can’t pull all of our various drives together well, because the obsession with monotheism – which is really mostly an obsession with priestly and political authority – can’t recognize how many other spirits really are present in our lives and our world.

And Western religion almost never invites us to identify with God – that could get you burned at the stake, or committed to an institution – but to worship him, through the rules and rituals made by the people who dress up in his clothes and talk in holy words. That’s not helpful.

The Zeus story, understood psychologically, teaches us that we are the ones who must learn to play the role of Zeus within our own little circle of spirits, mediating and moderating between our various desires to serve – not our own selfish interests, but something larger, more inclusive, more life-giving to ourselves and others.

Here’s what that sounds like in pretty ordinary language. This is from Felix Adler, the Jewish intellectual who founded the non-theistic Ethical Culture Society back in 1876:

The unique personality which is the real life in me, I can not gain unless I search for the real life, the spiritual quality, in others. I am myself spiritually dead unless I reach out to the fine quality dormant in others. For it is only with the god enthroned in the innermost shrine of the other, that the god hidden in me, will consent to appear. (An Ethical Philosophy of Life)

To add a little to that, it’s usually by finding the right gods, the right spirits in others that we can bring out the right spirits in ourselves.

This is close to the Buddhist idea of the sangha, the holy community where healthy transformation is possible because health and wholeness are held as the norm by the community, and the lower spirits of selfishness are disempowered. We can talk about honest religion all we like. But without the commitment and discipline to have a community that can discredit our persistent habits of working only toward the things we like, we’ll just be doing chimpanzee politics. Then your money and your energy and hopes will go to fund a social club to please the most clever and manipulative, whether in a church, a club or local or national politics. That’s chimpanzee politics.

It’s also human history and human nature. But it is that selfish part of human nature we’re here to evolve beyond, by seeking the community of bigger, better, less self-serving spirits. we’re seeking Holy spirits rather than merely clever ones. It is one of the most important of all human aspirations, and the only adequate goal for honest religion anywhere.

Still, the eternally frustrating fact is that, as the Greeks saw over 3,000 years ago, these spirits are not under our direct control, and it often feels like the most we can do directly is open our hearts and minds, and pray that they come into the larger place where we’ve made them welcome.

So we’ll end with a prayer, on behalf of this church, but also of all honest religion anywhere.

Come holy spirits.

Enter the hearts of those who believe that

Love is better than hate

Understanding is holier than bigotry

Peace is more blessed than war

Come, holy spirits, enter those who know that the whole human sound goes up only from the full chorus.

Enter us, holy spirits, that we may be more inclusive and more complete.

We confess to too many smallnesses.

We confess that we are too often selfish, serving and caring for only our own values and those held by people who think like us.

We confess to that smallness of vision and of association that is such a stumbling block to our larger humanity.

And yet we are the raw material from which our larger possibilities must be fashioned.

And so come, holy spirits.

Come into the hearts of those who are faithful to higher callings.

We will make ourselves ready.

Come holy spirits, come.

Amen.

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© Davidson Loehr

September 23, 2007

First UU Church of Austin

4700 Grover Ave., Austin, TX 78756

www.austinuu.org

Listen to the sermon by clicking the play button below.

PRAYER:

An ancient prayer said, “The heart daily hopes, yet daily fears that for which it daily hopes.”

We hope for miracles, changes of all kinds, wondering how much else would change for which we’re not ready. We’ll quit a bad habit like smoking, drinking or drugs, to find that now we can feel the deeper problems those habits had tried to hide, and it can make the old demons look attractive. We often do fear that for which we hope.

How much of our behavior comes from wanting to be safe – financially, professionally, personally safe? How much of our behavior comes from just wanting to be adequate? How powerful the feeling of inadequacy is! As though we’re broken, not knowing how to be fixed.

Where is the still center that might offer a kind of calm for which we yearn? If it can’t come from outside – from buying, owning, driving or wearing it – how can we find, inside of us, that “peace that passes understanding”?

We are not broken people, and not inadequate. We come here unfinished, but not broken. There are things we would add, would change, to help find a more fulfilling home for our thoughts and feelings.

We seek these things here, now in this place. We seek these things together. We seek these things.

Amen.

SERMON: Oh God, is it my turn?

What I’m doing in the three sermons this month is a kind of Unitarian heresy because I’m revisiting the idea of a trinity. The 19th century Unitarians rightly rejected the notion of a supernatural trinity, where the man Jesus was physically fathered by a sky god, and the Holy Spirit was an actual presence connected with God and Jesus. That is superstition, and not very interesting. But as early as the 3rd and 4th centuries, some of the best Christian thinkers had been defining the trinity as a psychological concept rather than a supernatural one – and that’s both more interesting and more universal. So that’s what I’m looking at this month.

It’s still probably easier to understand this three-part idea by looking at the Buddhist version. They also see religion or life divided into three different but complementary arenas, which they call Buddha, Dharma and Sangha. “Buddha” means a source of insight and wisdom. We need a source of insight into the human condition and wisdom about living well. You can call that God, or Buddha, Allah, Science or Reason – or you can just call it Truth or Goodness or other abstractions. We need something there, and something that will stand up to our toughest questions and most personal needs. That’s part of what last week’s sermon was about.

But Buddha, God, Allah, Truth, Goodness or the rest of the grand abstractions won’t do a thing unless we make them ours, and try to guide our lives by them, embody them. In Christian thought, this is called “incarnational theology.” Others see it as a kind of existentialism, meaning ideals aren’t real until we give them the form of our own life. The Buddhists call this dharma, meaning the personal work we need to do to recognize our Buddha-nature, to nurture the Buddha-seed they believe is in each of us.

Others might put it differently by saying that we have to become the change we want. But the message is about the same in each of these ways of talking.

And the third part of this trinity of living within a new kind of awareness is what Christians call the Holy Spirit, which I’ll talk about next week. The Buddhists, as always, talk about it in more down-to-earth ways, as the sangha. That means the community where these important life concerns are held to be sacred, and protected.

This morning, I want to talk with you about how, in liberal religion, the first two parts of this psychological trinity connect: how high ideals can be transformative for you. Or, how do you go from potential to actual change?

Almost every Sunday, you’ll hear stories here about the kind of ideals and insights into the human condition, that have been transformative for many centuries and may be transformative for you. Think of those stories each week as packets of seeds being passed out. They’re good seeds, from good stories that have mostly been around a very long time. They seldom sprout quickly. They mostly just sit there in the background of your mind, like possibilities whose time hasn’t come.

But sometimes your life will take a turn and some of the ideas and stories will come alive for you, when it’s the right time. Here’s a story about what that can sound like. It’s taken from Anthony de Mello, who was born into Indian Hindu culture, then became a Jesuit priest. He saw all religions as variations on deep themes common to all people, as I do and as many religious liberals do. He collected spiritual stories from all over the world, and had a gift for reducing them to short, bite-sized things. Here’s one:

Parable: Who are you?

A woman in a coma was dying. She suddenly had a feeling that she was taken up to heaven and stood before the Judgment Seat.

“Who are you?” a Voice said to her.

“I’m the wife of the mayor,” she replied.

“I did not ask whose wife you are but who you are.”

“I’m the mother of four children.”

“I did not ask whose mother you are, but who you are.”

“I’m a schoolteacher.”

“I did not ask what your profession is but who you are.”

And so it went. No matter what she replied, she did not seem to give a satisfactory answer to the question, “Who are you?”

“I’m a Christian.”

“I did not ask what your religion is but who you are.”

“I’m the one who went to church every day and always helped the poor and needy.”

“I did not ask what you did but who you are.”

She evidently failed the examination, for she was sent back to life. When she recovered from her illness, she was determined to find out who she was. And that made all the difference. Anthony de Mello, Taking Flight, p. 140

This “Who are you?” question is a question that is always hanging in the air in any good church. A good church is an invitation to come into a space where we are committed to holding up very high ideals and given the chance to see how we measure up, and what we might like to change.

It’s like being able to study with masters: stories from many of the world’s great religions and spiritual thinkers. Since we’re religious liberals, they’re all welcome. We’re not trying to make you into theists, Christians, atheists or anything else. We’re here to become more whole, more integrated, more authentic people. And any teaching or story from any source that’s in touch with the possibilities that lie within us is holy thread from which we can weave the fabric of our fuller humanity. That’s one of the great freedoms of liberal religion: all is holy that can connect with life in deep and more life-giving ways.

But traditional religion usually uses such dramatic terms it can feel like going before a god who wants to know who you are and will only accept answers more perfect than almost anyone could give. Then you think, in a fearful voice, “Oh God, is it my turn? Is it my turn for this test I’m bound to fail?” That drama lets churches and priests use fear to exalt not God but themselves and their church’s dogmas. They claim to mediate your salvation, which empowers them far more than it empowers you. That’s not honest religion.

Making it all sound so dramatic can create a lot of fear around the idea of changing your life story – for that’s what religious transformation is about: changing your life story, living out a different part in a different script.

Literal or authoritarian religions often try to protect your soul, spirit, by molding you into the shape of their beliefs. They mean well, but it’s a kind of salvation by obedience and conformity, a “cookie-cutter” salvation that seldom fits actual human beings. It’s easiest to see when they talk about the place of women or gays or people who ask too many questions. They often have a kind of cookie-cutter to put you into the shape they think everyone should have. There’s some comfort in that, I imagine, but it’s not how liberal religions do it.

Liberals try to protect your soul, your spirit, by providing a kind of greenhouse where it’s safe, and you can find the spiritual nutrients to grow and change, in an atmosphere that offers you courage rather than fear. Liberals religions are about a salvation by empowerment. I mean liberal Christianity, Judaism, Islam, Buddhism or atheism. The liberal, open, style of religion is about salvation by empowerment.

Still, it’s a do-it-yourself kit. Most of the time here, you’re not thinking about changing your story or changing very much at all. You’re doing your life, and you find something interesting or stimulating about coming to a place where these stories are told, and so many others seem willing to ask questions that take them beyond the boundaries of orthodoxy. So you file these things away somewhere and get on with your life.

But sometimes that “Who are you?” question can come at you with real force, and you can’t find a good answer in the way you’re living. Maybe you just need to talk it out. That’s one of the things our Listening Ministers are for here. They’re people who have had about thirty hours’ training in learning to be good listeners, to provide a space where you can just talk confidentially, and tell your story. Often, that’s the first step in discovering the wisdom you have inside of you. Most of us really do know what we should do, if we stop to think about it. If you’d like somebody to listen, just call the church office and ask for Extension 18.

Changing your story is crossing over a boundary, breaking rules you once lived by, disappointing some people’s expectations of you, and there’s no way around it: it’s hard.

The classic story of wrestling your way across an old boundary in the Bible – one of the best in any tradition – is the story of Jacob wrestling with something supernatural at the Jabbok river. It is one of the more ancient stories in the Bible, from a time when it was believed that all boundaries were guarded by spirits that didn’t want you to cross over beyond them. Today, we know there’s a lot of truth to that. There is something that makes it hard to break out of old ways, old stories and roles.

So Jacob was to cross over, and in the middle of the night this thing – a god or an angel, depending on whose interpretation you take – began wrestling with him. Jacob wouldn’t give up and wouldn’t let go. The spirit was powerful, and dislocated his hip. But still he wouldn’t let go. Then the spirit pleaded with him to let go because the sun was coming up. That’s another way you know this is an ancient story – the forces of the night can’t survive in broad daylight.

There’s a lot of truth to that too, psychologically speaking. The light of day makes most monsters disappear. So Jacob wouldn’t let go unless the spirit blessed him. Finally the spirit blessed him and gave him a new name – his spiritual name, perhaps his deepest name. He was named Israel, which meant “One who has wrestled with God and with men and has prevailed.” And though the struggle gave him a limp, he became father of the twelve tribes of Israel.

The Jacob story is a myth, of course, which means it isn’t about something that happened in history, but something that can happen always and anywhere, especially when we cross over old boundaries. These old demons are very real. Today, we may call them primitive psychological scripts that still run our lives, and it can be quite a struggle to get out of their grip, to cross beyond the territory where they rule.

Jacob’s was a dramatic, extreme kind of awakening for a dramatic, extreme character. Most of us are less dramatic. But for anything to happen, we have to take it inside ourselves and let it help transform us.

It’s about defining yourself in a different, higher, currency, and we do wrestle to do that. When we do, we come to embody, to incarnate, higher ideals and aspirations than we had been settling for. That’s what’s meant by “incarnational theology,” or doing your dharma. It’s about living your life in the key of life, the key of integrity. If you look at it through that musical metaphor, then a good liberal church is trying to play sacred melodies. The difference from more conservative churches is that we draw our sacred melodies from all over the world, because our goal is to see ourselves as children of the universe, rather than just children of one local creed or dogma.

I remember a liberal Baptist minister I knew a dozen years ago, who made a point in one of his sermons by reading from the Bible, the French existentialist Albert Camus and the Indian Hindu Gandhi. Parts of the sermon were read on a local radio station, and at our weekly ecumenical luncheon, a more conservative Baptist asked him how he could quote atheists and Hindus. “We can’t reduce God to the limits of our own understanding,” he said. “The Holy Spirit includes everything that is holy.” That’s the spirit of liberal religion.

Anything that can help us toward the kind of awakening religion is about needs to be welcomed in, to help the seeds sprout, to help turn potentiality into actuality.

And when the potential begins to become actual, it releases its power, and some magic happens. Denise Levertov wrote a short poem about that magic moment:

“Variation on a Theme by Rilke,” 

by Denise Levertov

A certain day became a presence to me;

there it was, confronting me-a sky, air, light:

a being. And before it started to descend

from the height of noon, it leaned over

and struck my shoulder as if with

the flat of a sword, granting me

honor and a task. The day’s blow

rang out, metallic-or it was I, a bell awakened,

and what I heard was my whole self

saying and singing what it knew: I can.

I can. I can wrestle with this. I can change this. I can do this, because I’m not alone. A mighty spirit of life and health is in me, helping me, becoming me. I can. It’s the moment of rebirth, of knowing you’re a child of God, a child of Nature, a child of the universe, and no one can take that away from you. Not by threats, violence, injustice, put-downs, nothing. When this becomes our most fundamental identity, when we believe this – and it’s always a matter of faith, not being able to prove it scientifically – it is transformative.

It can give birth to a kind of hope that’s otherwise hard to come by. We are then living under a blessing there may be no other way to get. Despair can come when we feel that life is through with us, and hope comes when we realize that life still expects good things of us: expects us to come alive. Like the woman who woke up wanting to know who she was – and just wanting to know that made all the difference. It’s being born again, taking our dharma seriously, incarnational theology. This transformation is the miracle some people come to church every week hoping for.

Still, It can sound so dramatic, you think Well, my life isn’t lived on such a dramatic scale, and I couldn’t begin to be that dramatic or bold. But it isn’t always such a dramatic thing. I was talking with the medical assistant at the doctor’s office this week, asking what he’s doing, what he wants to do. He said he wants to learn X-rays, then hopes to be a technician with MRI and CAT scan machines. Then he said, “I used to be pretty bad, and then we had my daughter. She’s 2-1/2 now and the joy of my life. She’s changed me. Now I want to raise her right, and do what’s right for her and my wife.” There’s a man who has had a change of heart that led to a change of focus in his life. That’s a religious transformation. It doesn’t have to involve God-talk at all. It’s being transformed to live in the key of life – your life.

Theologians can make anything sound so remote you can’t imagine relating to it. But honest religion is very down-to-earth. We’ve all had those moments when we were moved to take ourselves more seriously, to serve higher callings, and they’re moments we’re still proud of. When those moments come, we reach for higher aspirations, and try to find a place where higher aspirations are taken seriously. At it’s best, that’s what a church is for.

We know from thousands of news stories that churches are very often not at their best. Dishonest religion leads to hypocrisy, bigotry, hatred, and a whole host of values that make our lives and our world worse rather than better. At its worst, religion is an enemy of much that is decent and noble.

But at their worst, so are politics and “family values”. Honest religion, like honest politics or healthy family values, is about rejecting lower ideals and serving higher ones: rejecting bad stories and choosing better ones. These paths of honesty and courage are some of our best routes toward becoming better people and a better society. That’s part of what this church is about.

Here’s another way of putting it – another one of those stories. Traditional religions exist to empower themselves and their story as much or more than to empower their people. So many of them will say that whatever we need that’s good can only come from God, and of course they know what God wants of us better than we do. So what we need isn’t in us. We are unworthy, and we have to go begging for it. That kind of theology gives nonsense a bad name!

Religious liberals live within a more abundant story that says the purpose of religion is to awaken us to possibilities that are already inside of us, like a Sleeping Beauty. So one of the best myths of religious transformation that I know of doesn’t come from the Bible, but from “The Wizard of Oz.” I especially like the deep theological reading of the story done by the rock group America, where they say, “Oz never did give nothin’ to the Tin Man that he didn’t, didn’t already have.” The message is as good as the grammar is bad.

The characters were in the land of Oz, which is one of those mythic boundary places like the banks of the river Jabbok. And like Jacob, they start by thinking only the great Wizard can give them what they need: a heart, a brain, courage, home. That’s like begging a god or a church for approval, as though they had the authority to give it. But Jacob, if you think about it, didn’t get anything from that strange night spirit that he didn’t already have. He beat him. He held on, he wouldn’t quit. He earned his new name. God never did give nothin’ to Jacob that Jacob didn’t already have.

And God, or Oz, can’t give you anything you don’t already have, either. But sometimes the stories of gods – or of great wizards from the Land of Oz – can reawaken those buried treasures in your heart. And then, for a moment, you know who you are. It is like a being struck on the shoulder with the flat of a sword, granting you honor, and a task. And you know, for that moment, that you can. In that moment, it can feel like anything is suddenly possible. And it may be, you know – it really may be.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

© Davidson Loehr

September 16, 2007

First UU Church of Austin

4700 Grover Ave., Austin, TX 78756

www.austinuu.org

Listen to the sermon by clicking the play button.

PRAYER

(This prayer’s story has much in common with today’s sermon theme. It’s the first prayer I ever wrote, back in 1982. I did my ministerial internship at a UCC/Disciples of Christ church in Hyde Park (Chicago): a very liberal and creative Christian church.

At some point, the minister told me I was to write and deliver the prayer for a coming Sunday.

“I don’t pray to things,” I said.

“I don’t care,” he said.

“Here, we pray.”

“So I’m supposed to pray to something?”

“Oh no, it will be much harder for you. You need to write something that is a prayer and feels like a prayer, but which you can say with complete integrity. This should be interesting.”

And so – please join me in an attitude of prayer:

We pray not to something,

but from something,

to which we must give voice;

not to escape from our life, but to focus it;

not to relinquish our mind, but to replenish our soul.

We pray that we may live with honesty:

that we can accept who we are, and admit who we are not;

that we don’t become so deafened by pride and fear

that we ignore the still small voices within us,

that could lead us out of darkness. We pray that we can live with trust and openness:

to those people,

those experiences,

and those transformations that can save us from narrowness and despair.

And we pray on behalf of these hopes with an open heart, an honest soul,

and a grateful reverence for the life which has been given to us.

AMEN.

SERMON: The Difference Between a Church and Disneyworld

Before talking about Disneyworld, I need to talk about chimpanzees. Last month, I repeated a version of the sermon called “Chimpanzee Politics” that I had done last spring.

What drives chimpanzee politics – and most of ours – usually boils down to selfishness, getting power and privilege for those in power, and the few allies they have in their drive to gain and keep that power.

And that’s why it’s so significant that the key sin, the fundamental human failing noted by all religions I know about is the sin of selfishness. If we’re to evolve beyond our closest relatives the chimps, we have to do it psychologically, politically and culturally, because human cultures move much faster than biological evolution can adapt to.

At their best, religions are about helping us evolve beyond chimpanzee politics. They are about expanding the sense of who we are and what we’re here to serve. This runs throughout human history, going back at least 2500 years. For Confucius, living well meant living for one’s largest sense of self, which meant that we need to see ourselves as small parts of the much larger social world, the whole society. We need to expand our sense of “self” beyond ourselves. Then we should act in ways that serve that larger self.

In Western religions, that larger horizon is called “God.” Most people use the word God as though there were a critter somewhere above the sky, a guy, a big fellow who watched, heard us, could make good or evil things happen to us, much like the god Zeus from ancient Greek religions. But that’s not honest religion, and it’s not useful.

For the best thinkers in all religious traditions, the word “God” is not the name of a critter; it’s a symbol, a symbol of that highest creative horizon we can visualize. And it doesn’t matter what we call that larger horizon – whether we call it God or something else – as long as we can call it forth, and make it present in our lives and our behaviors. That’s what we’re about here: trying to call forth that larger sense of who we are, and lure ourselves into it. That’s what all honest religion is about.

This isn’t just about liberal religion; it’s about honest religion, which is a much larger category. Here, for example, are some words from a preacher I’ve never quoted or heard of, Brother Carl Porter, an Evangelical Holiness minister from Georgia:

“God ain’t no white-bearded old man up in the sky somewhere”. He’s a spirit. He ain’t got no body”. The only body He’s got is us. Amen. Thank God.”

That’s honest religion.

As some of you know – but most of you probably don’t know – this phrase “honest religion” is an especially important phrase this fall. This past Thursday the third ad of a thirteen-week ad campaign appeared in the Austin Chronicle. The ads are about 2″ high and 5″ wide, and are very simple. The first ad had only two lines, and simply said Honest Religion www.AustinUU.org

The ads are all different, but all contain the words “Honest Religion.” Most add a third line. Last week’s was “Honest religion for skeptics,” and this week’s, in sync with the Austin City Limits music festival, is “Honest religion for music lovers.” Other ads will mention families, straights and gays, or just ask “Got honest religion?” You can usually find them in the Calendar or Arts sections. They’re meant to be provocative and witty, like you folks. But They’re also meant to remind us, and me, that honest religion is what we’re about here, in ways that not many churches can claim.

In honest religion, we have to try and say in plain words what we mean. The only way we have to evolve past our deep animal selfishness – our real “original sin” – is through imagining ourselves as small parts of a much bigger reality that empowers and commands us. And that means living to serve the highest ideals we can see and say. Theists might say this is living to serve God; and that means things like truth, beauty, justice, never doing to others what we wouldn’t want done to us.

Almost every crime, every sin in life is a sin of selfishness. The sins, the crimes, that seem to get the strongest emotional responses from us are sins of betrayal: betrayals of trust. A business like Enron that betrays the trust of not only their stockholders, but also their employees, and cheats them. Politicians who sell out the people who elected them in return for money and privileges from the lobbyists who own and train them. Anyone who betrays the trust of the majority by using it to benefit only a small minority. These are the faces that selfishness takes in our lives, the way we still practice chimpanzee politics in our daily lives.

We feel more betrayed when people use our trust to serve themselves than in any other case, I think, because we know that this selfishness is in all of us, and our greatest commandment is the commandment to outgrow it and learn to live for, and serve, others. This is the goal of good character education. It’s also a goal of honest religion.

The difference between a church and Disneyworld.

So now we can talk about the difference between a church and Disneyworld. How many of you have been to Disneyworld? I wonder how many of you know what the four-word mission statement of Disneyworld is?

Disneyworld’s mission is “to make people happy.” To make people happy – not aware, deep, informed, caring, nuanced or responsible. Just happy. And not happy for a lifetime, or even for years. Just for a few days, leaving a happy memory. It worked for me when I spent a week there with my wife and two young stepdaughters aged 9 and 12 years ago.

A church, on the other hand, is not here “to make you happy.” You’ll find some things in a church that you’ll like, by joining groups, meeting new friends and so on. But the church isn’t here to make you happy. To put it in theological terms, a church is here to make God happy. For some of you, that statement will communicate, and will be enough. For others, it will be confusing or irritating or even useless, and you may have this mental image of something like a Cheshire Cat smile up in the sky: just the smile, nothing else: “God is happy”. It’s a pretty silly picture. But the word “God” is not the name of a Critter in the clouds. It is a religious symbol, trying to point us toward feeling a relationship, a kinship, with the creative and sustaining forces of the universe, and the highest and noblest ideals to which we should be aspiring. That’s what any honest religion will say. It isn’t about Disneyworld; it’s about this world, and our place and duty in this world.

A church is here to make God happy. A church is here to articulate, exalt and serve the highest ideals we can see and say. A church must be a kind of sacred space where these highest ideals are called forth, to help us evolve beyond the self-centered level of chimpanzee politics, and most human politics.

That doesn’t mean that everything that goes on here is religious. Most of it is not: we have parties, dinners, book discussion groups, plays, music, all sorts of things that are fun to do, that make us momentarily happy. But restaurants, book stores, theaters and clubs have those things, too. What has to be different here is that, above all the activities and groups, there is this invisible sort of umbrella we call the church, which holds those high ideals up, always. That’s what we’re trying to do in every Sunday service. It’s our mission: calling forth those highest ideals and larger horizons, and making them present to us again. There are very few places in life where you can count on finding that sanctuary for high ideals, but you can count on finding it here.

What high ideals? Maybe your family or friends wonder just what we care about, or if there is anything sacred to us as religious liberals. There is, and it is neither hidden nor fancy. They are the same high ideals that every religion worthy of the name cares about: ideals that make us feel beloved of this place, and move us to pass the love on to those around us. Though religions say this in different words – some in terms of gods, some not – there is not much variation between the high ideals of different human cultures or religions.

That’s what it means to say a church isn’t here to make you happy, but to make God happy. we’re here to call forth a kind of “voice from above”: not a voice from above the sky. That would have to be a very loud voice, yelling from that far away – it would scare the birds. But a voice from above the fray of chimpanzee politics, a voice from above our clamoring for our own needs to be met. It’s a voice saying that the answer to our self-absorbed yearnings is to grow beyond the self-absorption and to get absorbed in the work of a higher calling and broader identity. It’s about the unfinished business of evolving beyond chimpanzees and bonobos – those apes who are our closest relatives on earth – into a truly humane animal that can be a blessing to others and to the earth.

That’s what honest religion is about, regardless of its brand name.

We yearn to have something in our short existence that somehow partakes of the infinite, the eternal – or at least something good and honorable that will outlive us. We find our most satisfying identity not by shining spotlights on ourselves, but by becoming smaller parts of something larger. To put it in god-talk again, a church exists both because we need things and because God needs things. We say “God needs things” in the same way we say “Truth” needs things, or “Justice” or “Honor” need things from us.

We need to feel beloved by life, and by ourselves. We need to feel that though we’re just here a moment, something about our moment is momentous. Something about our being here is momentous. We matter tremendously. Western religion may say we’re all children of God. That’s one poetic way of putting it. Hindus may say your soul is part of the infinite and eternal forces that create, maintain and destroy everything in the universe. Buddhist may say we have a Buddha seed within us, that we suffer from the illusions we create with words, but that we can wake up, that the light of enlightenment can turn on, even in us.

That’s what honest religion is about, and what this church is about: offering a place where personal and spiritual transformation is possible. Tell your friends that, when they ask what we are all about here.

We are religious liberals because we won’t accept slogans, creeds, dogmas, rituals or mandated behaviors that come from priests, churches or traditions unless they feel honest, and they are useful to us and worthy of God – worthy of the highest we can see and say. We reject creeds and dogmas not because we don’t care, but because we care too much to settle for mediocre versions of religion. (The phrase “useful to us and worthy of God” comes from the 3rd century Christian writer Origen, in his book On First Principles, Book IV.)

There’s nothing supernatural about all this. It’s the part of our human nature we’re trying to nourish, whether you want to call it the Buddha-seed, the God-seed, or the depths of our potential to become more fully human and alive.

we’re all aware of needing to serve ideals higher than our own personal wants and needs. These are the insights and yearnings that gave birth to all of our gods.

Here’s a very simple but important example of how high ideals become a commanding presence, taken from right here in this church. This church has gone through some important changes in its culture over the past few years. It’s getting younger. If you have visited many Unitarian churches, you’ll usually find that the average age is near sixty, sometimes higher.

A few weeks ago, I had dinner with our new members. About thirty were invited, I think about twenty could make it on the Tuesday night. Not one of them was over forty. The next night, I met with ten visitors at the monthly orientation meeting. Eight of them were made of four married couples, all with young children. The other two were men in their 50’s. We seem to have babies and young children everywhere. A few years ago, we had only three or four children in our middle-school program. This year we have about twenty.

For many members who have been here for ten or thirty years, this is a huge change in the church’s culture. They were used to having their circle of friends also be the effective center of the church. No more. Now they are a group among other groups. Of course this happens every so often, but that doesn’t make it less painful for people seeing a whole lot of strangers – and with over six hundred members, and over nine hundred people in the broader church community, no one here will ever know more than a fraction of the people.

If we were just chimpanzees, those members who have lost their “Alpha” status would be forming alliances and trying to gain power to turn back the hands of time, get rid of all these strangers – that’s most of you folks – and somehow try and make it feel like the church where they first found a home ten, twenty or forty years ago. But that’s not what’s happening. Instead, they are finding ways to be noble people acting in noble ways, reframing their role to support a church that’s moving into the future. You may remember the lines from the Lebanese poet Kahlil Gibran’s great poem on children, where he says: You may give [your children] your love but not your thoughts,For they have their own thoughts.You may house their bodies but not their souls,For their souls dwell in the house of tomorrow,Which you cannot visit, not even in your dreams.You may strive to be like them,But seek not to make them like you.For life goes not backward nor tarries with yesterday.

It’s wise and lovely poetry, but it isn’t easy. It hurts to see time pass when it feels like it might be passing you by. So I want you who are new to our church to notice how easy the members of this church make it for you to come in, take part, and take charge. They are the role models that you can look back to in a few years when it’s your turn to pass the torch!

But see how this is an example of how serving ideals that transcend our own personal wants are transformative, both of individuals and institutions?

Now we come to your part in all of this. It’s simple. Your part is to be here, and be present. We’ll promise honest religion for head and heart – that’s another one of the ads coming up in the ad series. I’ll try and focus each Sunday on high ideals that can transform our lives and our world, and to present them in ways that may touch you, move you, and give you something worth taking home with you. I try to make sermons both inspirational and educational. Taken together, a year’s sermons are a kind of spiritual curriculum for both your critical and your compassionate sides.

But you have to be here for it to work. Try to be here every Sunday. We could serve some of the finest spiritual meals in the world, and it wouldn’t make a bit of difference if you aren’t here. And if you want your children educated, they have to be here, too. It wouldn’t matter how good a religious education curriculum were if kids were absent half the time.

So come in, get active, bring your creative and constructive ideas. Add your voice. Be present. Make it your church. Take this strong healthy church and make it stronger and healthier. Make that the legacy you leave to the future here.

And support this institution financially. Discover where you belong in the range of financial giving here, and settle in. Our average pledge is about $1,400, but we have people pledging from very little to tens of thousands of dollars a year. Think about where your income level fits in here. Is it about average? Lower? Higher? Find your most responsible level of financial support, and settle into it. we’re not going to whine or beg – this is a grown-up church and You’re adults. We do expect that you will be generous and pay your way here. For those are also high ideals that help define and shape our character: supporting the institutions we believe in. So pledge something, and be generous in your pledge. It will absolutely transform the way you feel about this good church, and about yourselves.

That is what a church is finally about, and where it is most different from Disneyworld. Let’s face it: Disneyworld has better rides. But when you get off the rides, You’re about the same as you were before they took you for the ride. Church isn’t about being taken for a ride; it’s about transformation. It is about being in an atmosphere where high ideals are sacred things, and where they will rub off on you, and you may become so glad they rubbed off.

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© Davidson Loehr

March 18, 2007

First UU Church of Austin

4700 Grover Ave., Austin, TX 78756

www.austinuu.org

Listen to the sermon by clicking the play button.

PRAYER:

We pray not to something,

but from something,

to which we must give voice;

not to escape from our life, but to focus it;

not to relinquish our mind, but to replenish our soul.

We pray that we may live with honesty:

that we can accept who we are, and admit who we are not;

that we don’t become so deafened by pride and fear

that we ignore the still small voices within us,

that could lead us out of darkness. We pray that we can live with trust and openness:

to those people,

those experiences,

and those transformations that can save us from narrowness and despair.

And we pray on behalf of these hopes with an open heart, an honest soul,

and a grateful reverence for the life which has been given to us.

AMEN.

SERMON: Animal Stories, Part 8: Our Subversive Streak of Hope

The abiding religious questions are Who am I really? and How should I live? All religions have tried to express profound answers to these two questions that define us in grand, even mythic, terms. We have a Buddha-seed within us that wants to grow. We are children of God, the latest reincarnation of Life’s longing for itself, the sons and daughters of the universe, made of stardust, and so on. In other words, we are fundamentally precious, part of an infinite reality, embraced by symbols like the Buddha, God, Life and the universe.

And the way we should live follows from that. Religions teach that we should live in ways that are worthy of our most deep and noble identity. We should see ourselves as integral parts of all life, and walk in paths of compassion, love for all, gratitude for being here, and all the rest of the lovely poetry long used to welcome us into a larger identity, into the hopefully useful and even necessary story of whatever religious community we have claimed.

The argument behind this series of sermons on “animal stories” is that in some ways, religions are just too new to offer many deep or accurate pictures of who we really are or how we should live. The gods involved in today’s world religions were only created a few thousand years ago. The deeper story is the story of life itself, the life that produced us along with millions of other species, the life that links us biologically, genetically, and emotionally.

And we are deeply related to other life. We share traits like our territoriality, desire for dominance and sexual jealousy with snakes, separated from us by 150 million years of evolution. We share the tender care of our young with crocodiles, who were here 200 million years ago – over 125 million years before mammals even evolved. And we show other fundamental traits like empathy, compassion, and a sense of fairness with other species covering over a hundred million years of evolutionary time in the story of life.

That reverence for life, that gentleness with the vulnerable ones for whom we feel responsible – these things are older than the gods. We are on an evolutionary continuum with other animals, and they share so many of our most fundamental traits.

Like us, for example, other animals express joy in play. One author writes of how he once saw a young elk in Rocky Mountain National Park running across a snow field, jumping and twisting, stopping to catch his breath, then repeating the whole exercise with boundless energy. And buffaloes have been known to rush onto ice fields and slide, like children on icy sidewalks, bellowing with the simple fun of it. (Mark Bekoff, The Smile of a Dolphin, p. 114) Others have observed ravens flying to the top of a snowy hill, sliding down it on their bellies, then flying up and doing it again. And penguins have been filmed sliding down snowy hills on their bellies, then waddling up to the top, and standing in line to wait their turn to slide down again.

Even rats love to be tickled at the nape of their neck, and become especially fond of hands that tickled them, but not particularly interested in hands that just pet them. (Mark Bekoff, The Smile of a Dolphin, p. 146) Running, leaping, wrestling, chasing objects or one another or their own tails, animals at play are the very symbols of the unfettered joy of life. (Mark Bekoff, The Smile of a Dolphin, p. 114)

Those studying animals have said for many years that chimpanzees are our closest relative, and the most like us. When it comes to how they practice politics, that’s true, as I tried to show last week.

But recently, scientists who study the behavior of animals including us have said that we are equally closely related to the lesser-known ape the bonobo. And we may be closer than that. It has now been found that a particular piece of DNA that is involved in social affiliation and bonding is present in humans, and is present in bonobos, but it’s absent in the chimpanzee. So we share a particularly important piece of DNA with the bonobo that the chimp doesn’t have, which may indicate the bonobo is more similar to the common ancestor we share with both chimpanzees and bonobos, six to eight million years ago. (Frans de Waal, “The Last Great Ape,” PBS airdate 13 February 2007)

While bonobos and chimps look a lot alike to those unfamiliar with them, they are also deeply different.

As Frans de Waal, one of the foremost experts on chimps and bonobos, has said, “I do not wish to offend any chimpanzees, but bonobos do have more style.” (Frans de Waal, Peacemaking Among Primates, p. 175)

In everything they do, they resemble us. A complaining youngster will pout his lips like an unhappy child or stretch out an open hand to beg for food. In the midst of their lovemaking, a female may squeal with pleasure. And at play, bonobos utter coarse laughs when their partners tickle their bellies or armpits. “There is no escape, we are looking at an animal so akin to ourselves that the dividing line is seriously blurred.” (Frans de Waal, Bonobo: the Forgotten Ape, p. 1)

In some ways, they even seem more advanced. Among bonobos, there’s no deadly warfare, little hunting, no male dominance, and enormous amounts of sex. If the chimpanzee is our demonic face, the bonobo must be our angelic one. Bonobos make love, not war. They’re the hippies of the primate world. (Frans de Waal, Our Inner Ape, p. 30) The French call them “Left Bank Chimps.” And some scientists who work with them have been overheard leaving work on Friday saying, “we’re gonna bonobo tonight!”

While male chimpanzees sometimes inflict serious or even fatal injuries on a female, for a male bonobo to bite a female is just not done. (Bonobo, p. 41) When the alpha male charges at the alpha female, she usually completely ignores him. (Frans de Waal, Bonobo: the Forgotten Ape, p. 60) This could be unthinkably dangerous or suicidal in chimpanzees. And she is dominant when it comes to food. They even fight differently than chimps. Whereas chimps fight by pulling an opponent close and biting him, bonobos tend to fight with well-placed kicks. Kung fu apes.

Chimpanzees would not hesitate to tear monkeys apart and eat them. Bonobos have actually been groomed by monkeys, and bonobos don’t consider them prey – though they do sometimes treat them as toys, tossing them. (Frans de Waal, Bonobo: the Forgotten Ape, p. 65)

Whereas male chimpanzees will sometimes kill the infants of other chimpanzee males and even eat them, there is no recorded infanticide or cannibalism in bonobos. (Frans de Waal, Bonobo: the Forgotten Ape, p. 121)

If there is such a thing as bonobo politics, it more than likely revolves as much around females as around males. (Frans de Waal, Bonobo: the Forgotten Ape, p. 74)

Bonobos don’t even kiss like chimps. A new zookeeper, unfamiliar with sexual encounters of the bonobo kind, once accepted a kiss from a bonobo male named Kevin. (Chimpanzees will often give you lip smacks on your face.) Suddenly, he felt Kevin’s tongue in his mouth! The habit of French-kissing is one of the striking differences between the bonobo’s impassioned eroticism and the somewhat boring, functional sex of the chimpanzee. Chimpanzees show few variations in the act, and most of their adult sex is connected with reproduction. Bonobos perform every conceivable variation with both the same and opposite sex, as if following the Kama Sutra. Their sex life is mostly for pleasure and bonding, largely divorced from reproduction. (Frans de Waal, Peacemaking Among Primates, p. 199)

To oversimplify, chimpanzees and bonobos are like the two wolves I talked about earlier. We have these two wolves inside of us, both fighting to control us. One says, “Fight, Hurt, Take!” The other wolf says, “Help, Care, Love!” Both the tendencies of chimpanzees and bonobos are inside of us, part of our deep evolutionary heritage. They are like the angels of our better and worse natures, or the picture of an angel standing by one ear and a devil standing by the other, each – like the two wolves – trying to control us. And the one that wins is the one we feed, the one we listen to.

There are ways in which bonobos embody some of our highest ideals of egalitarianism, peace and an unfettered enjoyment of life’s pleasures better than any human society in history has ever done. One of the traits present in chimpanzees that bonobos have raised to a very high level is social expectations.

This business of social expectations is one of our most subversive and hopeful streaks, and you can trace its growth very neatly through rhesus monkeys, chimpanzees, bonobos, and our own species.

With rhesus monkeys, there is an absolute rigid hierarchy. When there is food, the alpha male feeds first, and no one else eats until he approves. There are almost no social expectations that can subvert the powerful hierarchy – though again, rhesus monkeys are considered the nastiest of all 200 species of primates. In chimpanzees, the alpha male also controls food, but nowhere nearly as well because many others expect a fair share. And in bonobos, the females control the food, and share with everyone – except, sometimes, the alpha males.

Scientists measure dominance through access to food, because food is the “currency” of most animals, what matters most. In our species, food has been replaced by money, the symbolic paper we use to store the potential for buying food and other things.

Human history shows that we’re like the chimps, and in bad times more like the rhesus monkeys, in the selfishness and ruthlessness with which our alpha people – usually males – control access to money and food. Unlike the rhesus and chimps who use physical violence, we enslave our most powerless people through measures like tax breaks for the rich, laws preventing relief of debts through bankruptcy, U.S. workers made to compete with 3rd world workers, corporate lobbyists owning shares in politicians, and so forth.

This isn’t evolution; it’s devolution, with a selfishness more like rhesus monkeys than even chimpanzees. Our use of language and mass media have let the strong and clever disempower and control the weak on a far greater scale than in any ape species, as I tried to show a few weeks ago in the story of “My Bonny Lies Over the Ocean.”

I could go on with this picture, fleshing it out in a dozen directions, but you see the general outlines, and can flesh it out for yourselves. we’re a mixed bag, born with all it takes to become either good or evil, free, enslaving or enslaved. So really, just what can we do?

First, we need to be realistic. We need to stop mesmerizing ourselves with words like peace and justice, as though we will ever live in a world defined by them. Both human history and animal biology teach us that politics are controlled by the power and alliances that characterize both chimpanzee politics and our own. Words like peace and justice are the anesthetic lullabies sung by politicians the world over to numb us to the way the world is really being run. If real peace is to exist, it must exist along with our ambitions, greed, pride, and our hatreds. (Frans de Waal, Peacemaking Among Primates, p. 22) There won’t be peace until a power structure is established, and it will only last until new alliances can challenge that power structure. Carrying ourselves away with utopian visions of perfect peace and justice can make the “perfect” the enemy of the possible. And the possible states of peace and justice, always imperfect and transient, can happen only through having the skill to form alliances with enough power to subvert whatever alpha structure happens to be in place.

And while some people love the vague idea of ‘speaking truth to power,” it seems clear from the study of both chimpanzee and human politics that those with power simply believe that power can trump truth, as it also trumps fairness and justice. we’re better off speaking our truths to the powerless, in the hope they can make a foundation our of them on which to stand and act.

But what can we hope for, in our lives and in our world, and why?

This list could also be very long, but I’ll limit it to just a few ideas.

Framing ourselves in an evolutionary context is helpful because we’re now at a stage where our cultural changes happen far too fast for evolution to react to. From here on out, we will have to help complete our evolution from apes to truly wise and humane people through the education of our minds and – especially – our hearts. The real bases of empathy, compassion, justice and peace are primarily emotional, not rational.

We can do this as we always have, through educating ourselves through the high ideals we have exalted in the best myths, fairy tales, admonitory stories, religions, or some of the animal stories I’ve shared with you. These teachings are the means by which we complete our evolution. We are such a transitional creature. we’re not a very good ape, and not terribly humane or wise either. If a truly sapient and humane species is to evolve from us, we will have to help it through shaping our education, behavior and culture in ways that honor the best of our animal history and our human aspirations.

But can education really reshape who we are and how we behave? Can thinking differently change the brain? It sounds like really foofy New Age hokum. But here’s where animal stories and modern neuroscience may be joining hands to say, Yes: foofy or not, it looks scientifically true.

Frans de Waal tells of an experiment he did where he put a community of stump-tail monkeys in with a community of rhesus monkeys.

Not only are stump-tails a slightly larger species, they are very tough beneath their gentle temperament; the rhesus must have sensed this fact. So, with the rhesus clinging in a fearful huddle to the ceiling of the room, the stump-tails calmly inspected their new environment. After a couple of minutes some rhesus dared to threaten the stump-tails with harsh grunts. If it was a test, they were in for a surprise. Whereas a rhesus would have fought or fled, the stump-tails simply ignored them. They did not even look up. For the rhesus, this was perhaps their first experience with dominant companions who did not react with physical threats or violence. In the course of the experiment the rhesus learned this lesson a thousand times over. Whereas mild aggression was common, physical violence and injuries were virtually absent; friendly contact and play soon became the dominant activities in this mixed group of monkeys. Not only that; after having lived with stump-tails, the rhesus reconciled more easily. Initially, they made up after fights as seldom as is typical of their species; but gradually they approached the high rate of their tutors, until they reconciled exactly as often as the stump-tails. Even after the stump-tails had been removed and the rhesus were left to interact among themselves, they maintained this newly acquired pacifism. [And they taught it to the next generation of their offspring.] Like chemists altering the properties of a solution, we had infused a group of monkeys of one species with the ‘social culture” of another. (Frans de Waal, Good-Natured, pp. 179-180)

Rather than a blind process, primate reconciliation is a learned social skill, sensitive to the social setting, and used as an instrument to preserve precious ties. (Frans de Waal, Good-Natured, p. 181)

This is a remarkable experiment, using monkey culture to change natural and innate behavior.

And another recent series of experiments seem to offer even stronger hope. These were done both with monkeys and monks. Buddhist monks.

The Wall Street Journal recently ran an essay by Sharon Begley, condensed from her new book Train Your Mind, Change Your Brain (2007). Thirty years ago, what she is saying would really have been considered the flakiest of New Age hooey. But now some of the sciences have caught up, and it can be presented as cutting-edge neuroscience.

The gist of this is that there are some well-controlled scientific experiments to show that learning to think differently changes some structures and active circuits in our brain.

First, she cites an experiment with monkeys in 1993. “Scientists at the University of California, San Francisco, rigged up a device that tapped monkeys” fingers 100 minutes a day every day. As this bizarre dance was playing on their fingers, the monkeys heard sounds through headphones. Some of the monkeys were taught: to Ignore the sounds and pay attention to what you feel on your fingers, because when you tell us it changes we’ll reward you with a sip of juice. Other monkeys were taught: Pay attention to the sound, and if you indicate when it changes you’ll get juice.

“After six weeks, the scientists compared the monkeys” brains. Usually, when a spot on the skin receives unusual amounts of stimulation, the amount of cortex that processes touch expands. That was what the scientists found in the monkeys that paid attention to the taps: The somatosensory region that processes information from the fingers doubled or tripled. But when the monkeys paid attention to the sounds, there was no such expansion. Instead, the region of their auditory cortex that processes the frequency they heard increased.

“Through attention, UCSF’s Michael Merzenich and a colleague wrote, “We choose and sculpt how our ever-changing minds will work, we choose who we will be the next moment in a very real sense, and these choices are left embossed in physical form on our material selves.””

“The discovery that neuroplasticity cannot occur without attention has important implications. If a skill becomes so routine you can do it on autopilot, practicing it will no longer change the brain. And if you take up mental exercises to keep your brain young, they will not be as effective if you become able to do them without paying much attention. (Sharon Begley, Wall Street Journal, Jan 19, 2007: p. B1)

The experiments with monks were even more interesting. The Dalai Lama, who has been interested in their area for over fifteen years, provided eight Buddhist monks who each had done over 10,000 hours of meditation, and a group of novices who had had just a crash course in meditating. One by one, they went to the laboratory set up at the University of Wisconsin, got their heads wired up to record all the different brain waves they were generating, and they began a form of meditation where they focused on unlimited compassion and loving kindness toward all living beings.

As they began meditating, the level of gamma waves rose. These are associated with perception, problem-solving and an inclusive kind of consciousness: in a word, compassion. The monks” gamma waves were much stronger than those of the beginners, as you might expect.

But the surprise came when they stopped meditating. Among the monks, there was no drop in the gamma waves. Their brains remained attuned to inclusive and compassionate attitudes toward all living things. And the more hours of meditation a monk had had, the stronger and more enduring were the gamma waves.

Thinking can change the structure and circuitry of the brain.

A lot of this is saying what liberals have been saying for a long time: that educating ourselves with high ideals can shape or reshape our character. That’s what the Greeks said 2500 years ago, and their insights founded the whole history of humanities and liberal arts education in Western civilization. What biology adds is that we’re not swimming upstream. These nobler traits of empathy, compassion and justice are also hard-wired in us, and we share them with apes, wolves, dolphins, elephants and a thousand other species. Our nature is or can be fundamentally good, and some of its roots go a hundred million or more years deep.

That’s what we have always used our best myths, folk tales and religious teachings for. Today, when just over 20% of our society attends any religious services regularly, a growing number of people don’t have the time or interest to get a deep education in the best of the world’s mythology. But without using any myths at all, simply understanding our place in the animal stories that are part of the story of life can educate us to our larger identity and larger responsibility, probably better than any religion ever has.

So one real-world answer to what we can do comes from remembering what the liberal style of Western civilization has been saying for 2500 years, since the Greeks first taught that to make noble people we must mold them in the form of our very highest, most inclusive and empathic values – much like the monks have done.

We find them in religions of deeds, not creeds, behavior, not belief. And the quality of our vision is to be judged by how we treat “the least among us,” as Jesus said. I could end with those words attributed to Jesus, but when he said that, he only meant humans, and that is not a big enough vision any more. We need a bigger connection to a bigger and more inclusive picture of life.

So instead I’ll end with the much larger vision of Hinduism’s Mahabharata. The Mahabharata, which may have been composed as early as 2,500 to 3,000 years ago, is about twelve times as long as the bible. It, combined with another book called the Ramayana, contains the stories that are at the core of Hinduism.

And the final story, the very last words of the giant Mahabharata, is a story about a dog, which seems a fitting end to a sermon series on animal stories.

A great emperor, at the end of his reign, has set off on a final trek north, toward the Himalayas. He is accompanied by four people. A small pariah dog attaches himself to the group as well. Slowly, every member of this royal troupe dies along the way. The emperor and the dog continue their journey alone. Eventually they reach the end of their voyage, and are at the gates of heaven. Indra, the King of the Gods, comes to greet the emperor in a golden chariot. He invites him to climb into the chariot and accompany him in regal and godly splendor into heaven.

The emperor replies: “This dog, O Lord of the Past and the Present, has been a constant and faithful companion to me. He should go with me. My heart is full of compassion for him.”

The King of Gods says to him: “Immortality equal to mine, O King, prosperity extending over all the earth, renown and all the joys of heaven have you won today. Leave the dog. There is nothing cruel in this.”

The emperor says: “O God of a thousand eyes, O you of righteous behavior, I have always behaved righteously. It is hard now to perpetrate an act that is unrighteous. I do not wish for wealth for whose sake I must abandon one that is devoted to me.”

Indra says: “There is no place in heaven for persons with dogs. Besides, the gods take away all the merits of such persons. Think about this, O King of the righteous. Abandon the dog. It is not cruelty.” (205)

The emperor tells the King of the Gods: “I will in no circumstances abandon this dog now to achieve happiness for myself.”

The King of the Gods tries to convince him one last time: “If you give up the dog, you will acquire the world of heaven. You have obtained heaven through your very own deeds. You have already abandoned everything else. How can you be so confused as not to give up a mere dog?”

The emperor still refuses, saying he will not abandon this dog, this mutt, this pariah mongrel who has remained faithful to him.

At that point, the dog reveals himself to be none other than the God of Righteousness himself, an incarnation of the great god Vishnu. At last, the emperor has passed the final test and is admitted into the company of the gods. (Jeffrey M. Masson, Dogs Never Lie About Love, p. 206-207)

He was admitted into the company of the gods, which means he achieved his own most divine nature, by hearing the voices of the angels of his better nature, brought alive in him by a dog, by feeding the right wolf, by rising to the heights of human nature rather than sinking into its depths.

The point of all these animal stories is the same as the point of the best religious myths and folk tales: that we are inherently good enough to become the kind of people and create the kind of world of which we and the people we most admire can be proud. We don’t need anything added to us to do this. We have what we need within us, if we will be open to being transformed by it.

Once in awhile, this truth even comes through in Western religion, as in this passage from the book of Deuteronomy:

“Surely, this commandment that I am commanding you today is not too hard for you, nor is it too far away. It is not in heaven, that you should say, “Who will go up to heaven for us, and get it for us so that we may hear it and observe it?” Neither is it beyond the sea, that you should say, “Who will cross to the other side of the sea for us, and get it for us so that we may hear it and observe it?” No, the word is very near to you; it is in your mouth and in your heart for you to observe.” (Deuteronomy 30:11-14, New Revised Standard Version)

The words are in our hearts as they are in the heart of a gorilla who saves a 3-year-old boy who fell into her enclosure; or a bonobo who saved a bird, a hippo who saved a small antelope or all the other animal stories we”ve heard. The message to love one another, to reach out and make a positive difference in the world around us, is almost infinitely older than the gods. It is a call that comes from the heart of life itself, and from the yearnings of our own hearts.

We have a call waiting. It’s our move.

—————-

This version has been expanded by about 1400 words from the version delivered in the sermon on 18 March 2007, including an extra story or two, and longer more detailed versions of other stories.

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© Davidson Loehr

May 11, 2007

First UU Church of Austin

4700 Grover Ave., Austin, TX 78756

www.austinuu.org

Listen to the sermon by clicking the play button.

PRAYER:

Help us to love ourselves, and to love people and causes outside of ourselves, that we may be enlarged to include them.

SERMON: Animal Stories, Part 7: Chimpanzee Politics

We are hard-wired to conform, follow others, and defer to authority, even illegal authority, to be emotionally stressed when we don’t follow others. But there is more to us than this.

It’s a story about our other closest relatives, bonobos, and about girl power, the role that social expectations play in chimps, bonobos and us, and about some new and exciting findings of neuroscience in studies of animals, including the human animal. Most of all, it’s about those “better angels of our nature,” how we can hear them, and how, together, we can transform our lives, our relationships, and our world. And it’s a story we’ll tell next week, in the final installment of these animal stories. See you in church!

Four hundred thousand years ago in Germany, our ancestors created wooden spears about six feet long that were clearly used as hunting weapons. The spears were found at a site called Schoningen, among stone tools and animal bones” Just last month, chimpanzees were observed making spears and using them to kill Bush babies for food in the wild. (Barbara J. King, Evolving God, p. 113)

So in the art of hunting with weapons we made, we have now discovered we have a lot in common with chimpanzees. But without going to the drama of hunting with weapons, we share even more similarities with chimpanzees when it comes to the conduct of our politics.

Frans de Waal, who has studied chimps for over thirty-five years, wrote a book on this in 1982, which has become a classic in its field. Called Chimpanzee Politics, it’s based on thousands of hours of observations of a chimpanzee colony in the Arnhem Zoo in the Netherlands, where De Waal first began studying one of our two closest relatives.

The philosopher Thomas Hobbes (1588-1679) described chimpanzee politics over 350 years ago, as “a general inclination of all [mankind], a perpetual and restless desire of Power after Power, that ceases only in Death.” He was actually speaking of human politics, but his words describe male chimpanzee politics perfectly. (Chapter 4 in Hobbes’ 1651 book Leviathan)

When De Waal wrote his book, he was accused of anthropomorphizing chimpanzees: projecting human motives onto them. But he said it actually worked in reverse. After studying chimpanzee politics, he began to see human politics in a fundamentally different way. That’s what happened to me, too: I’ve come out of this with very different, and much lower, expectations for human politics.

Chimpanzee politics is all about getting and keeping power, by the few over the many, and by any means necessary. Alpha males form alliances with influential males and females – or subordinate males form coalitions to overpower the alpha male, and then consolidate their power by forming alliances with influential females. Males seldom maintain the alpha rank for more than four years. Then there’s another round of opportunistic alliances and vicious fighting to crown a new leader – or as we call them, elections.

The two mottoes of chimpanzee politics are “One good turn deserves another,” and “An eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth.” (Frans de Waal, Chimpanzee Politics, p. 202)

And the male political alliances are not personal, but functional – not with friends, but with those who can, at the moment, be useful. Yesterday’s enemy may be today’s ally, and we may attack today’s friend tomorrow.

Adult male chimpanzees live in a hierarchical world with replaceable coalition partners and a single permanent goal: power. Adult females, in contrast, live in a horizontal world of social connections, where power and influence are bestowed by others on the basis of their character, not their physical strength. We know from psychological experiments with human subjects that in Western cultures men and women show similar differences. (Frans de Waal, Peacemaking Among Primates, p. 51)

Tancredo Neves, the briefly-elected president of Brazil (January 15, 1985), neatly summed up the male attitude in this arena: “I have never made a friend from whom I could not separate and I have never made an enemy that I could not approach.” (Frans de Waal, Peacemaking Among Primates, p. 51) Neves had been a powerful critic of the government, and just a few days after he was elected, he mysteriously died – so maybe his alliances weren’t quite the right ones.

If presidential candidates take a sudden interest in women, listen to their problems, and hug their children, there are parallels in chimpanzee males who groom females and play gently with infants, especially during periods of status struggle. (Frans de Waal, Peacemaking Among Primates, p. 49)

Yet strength is weakness: an alpha presence automatically generates alliances among weaker males to see if they can topple the power structure. Only very shrewd chimpanzees can maintain power in the face of younger and stronger males.

But to see how chimpanzee politics works, let’s look at a story of three successive political revolutions within a single community of chimps.

It took place in the chimpanzee colony in the Arnhem Zoo in the Netherlands, and involved four males named Yeroen, Luit, Nikkie and Dandy.

Yeroen was a shrewd older chimpanzee, and had ruled the group for some years, when a younger and stronger male named Luit challenged him for power, and after humiliating him in two violent fights, dethroned him. I’ll come back to what this loss of power did to Yeroen, which is a revealing story in its own right.

But Luit was alpha for only ten weeks. Wily old Yeroen, who Frans de Waal described as the shrewdest politician He’s seen, formed an alliance with a strong young male named Nikkie during those ten weeks. And one night, when the chimps were put into their separate male and female night quarters, Yeroen and Nikkie attacked Luit and killed him. De Waal says he could never again look at old Yeroen without seeing a murderer.

The following day, they released Nikkie and Yeroen into the group. Immediately a dominant female attacked Nikkie fiercely, chasing him up a tree. She kept him there for ten minutes by screaming and charging each time he tried to come down. She had always been Luit’s main ally among the females, and must have watched the murder from her night cage. (Frans de Waal, Chimpanzee Politics, p. 211-212)

But a few hours after her solitary outburst, the other chimps gathered around the killers, grooming them and accepting them as the new leaders. And the very next day, a new triangle emerged. Another young male named Dandy began making overtures to old Yeroen, grooming him and beginning to form an alliance with him against Nikkie. (Frans de Waal, Chimpanzee Politics, p. 212) When Yeroen and the new young male named Dandy finally got enough power to confront Nikkie, he ran out into the water-filled moat and drowned, and another revolution had taken place. Yesterday’s allies are today’s enemies and vice versa, when it suits the pursuit of power. And that process will not end, because it is the plot of chimpanzee politics.

Not only does the process of gaining political power among chimps sound and feel familiar, but so do the effects of losing power once a male is dethroned. So I want to go back to what losing power did to old Yeroen for the ten weeks he was without power.

The first time Luit gained the upper hand – marking the end of Yeroen’s ancient regime – he reacted in completely uncharacteristic ways, surprising the scientists who had studied him for several years. Normally a dignified character, Yeroen became unrecognizable. In the midst of a confrontation, he would drop out of a tree like a dead man, writhing on the ground, screaming pitifully, and waiting to be comforted by the rest of the group. He acted much like a juvenile ape being weaned by his mother. And like a juvenile who during tantrums keeps an eye on mom for signs of softening, Yeroen always noted who approached him. If the group around him was big and powerful enough, and especially if it included the alpha female, he would gain instant courage. With his supporters in tow, he would renew the confrontation with his rival. So his tantrums were another example of his shrewd manipulation. The parallels with infantile attachment in our own species were fascinating, reminding us of expressions like “clinging to power” and “being weaned from power.” Knocking a male chimpanzee off his pedestal gets the same reaction as yanking the security blanket away from a baby.

When even those tactics didn’t work, and Yeroen finally lost his top spot, he would often sit staring into the distance, an empty expression on his face. He was oblivious to the social activity around him and refused food for weeks. They thought he was sick, but the veterinarian found nothing wrong. Yeroen seemed a mere ghost of the impressive big shot he had been. When power was lost, the lights in him went out.

This sounds so familiar; it’s worth a couple animal stories from our species. Professor De Waal mentioned two similar cases of the behavior of an alpha male who has lost power.

One involved a senior professor, a colleague of De Waal’s on a university faculty, with great prestige and ego. He ran the department, but had failed to notice a budding conspiracy. Some young faculty members disagreed with him on a politically sensitive issue. Quietly, they formed alliances and successfully rallied a vote against him at a faculty meeting. The professor was blissfully unaware of this political coup, partly because up until then nobody had ever had the guts to go head-to-head with him. Support for the alternative proposal had been cultivated behind his back by some of his own proteges. Following the fatal vote, which must have come out of the blue, given his expression of disbelief, all color drained from the professor’s face. Looking ten years older, he had the same empty, ghostlike appearance Yeroen had after he had lost his top spot. For the professor, this was about much more than the issue at hand; it was about who ran the department. In the weeks and months following the meeting, his entire demeanor changed as he strode the corridors. Instead of saying “I am in charge,” his body language now said, “Leave me alone.”

Another example of the behavior of a fallen alpha male involves someone much more famous. Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein’s book The Final Days describes President Richard Nixon’s breakdown after it became obvious that he would have to resign, “Between sobs, Nixon was plaintive. How had a simple burglary – done all this? – Nixon got down on his knees”. [He] leaned over and struck his fist on the carpet, crying, “What have I done? What has happened?”” Henry Kissinger, his secretary of state, reportedly comforted the dethroned leader like a child. He consoled him, literally holding Nixon in his arms, reciting all of his great accomplishments over and over until the president finally calmed down. (Frans de Waal, Our Inner Ape, p. 50-51) This is chimpanzee politics, from start to finish.

Staying on top is a balancing act between forcefully asserting dominance, keeping supporters happy, and avoiding mass revolt. If this sounds familiar, it’s because human politics works exactly the same. (Frans de Waal, Our Inner Ape, p. 43)

Power is an aphrodisiac, as Henry Kissinger once said, but it is also charismatic, and hypnotic, drawing subordinate males and females compliantly behind the powerful leader.

This is a really dark side to both chimpanzee and human politics. When the chimpanzee leader was murdered, there was a brief outrage against the murder. But within hours, the group gathered around the murderers, now the new leaders, and began grooming them. They accepted the violence, got over their anger, and helped the new leaders provide stability. “The king is dead; long live the king.” The two males sought power over fairness or justice. The rest sought stability and peace over fairness or justice. For all of them, fairness and justice weren’t a priority.

There are so many instances of this in our own history. It will resonate with some of you in personal relationships, or the silence in families surrounding the sexual abuse of children. But we do it as a society too. Think of the American public’s acceptance of two stolen presidential elections, and the dishonest and illegal invasion of Iraq, and probably soon Iran, with the tens or hundreds of thousands of deaths these illegal actions have caused. This compliant trait of ours is what gives savvy rulers confidence that we can easily be tricked and trained. We support the powerful, no matter how they got their power, if we think they can bring us stability and peace.

And so we say, “Don’t make waves, go along to get along” – or in a more stringent Japanese saying, “The nail that sticks out gets hammered.”

Just this week, for instance, I read an essay by a social critic named Sheila Samples, called “Lost in the Lust of Werewolves.” She reminded me of that chimpanzee female who protested the murders. See how this excerpt from it strikes you:

“I wonder why so many denizens of this Christian nation seem unable or unwilling to wrap their minds around the reality that Iraqi people are human beings just as they themselves are – not rabid dogs to be hunted down and slaughtered.

“They don’t want to know what it’s like for families to cower in terror as their doors are kicked in, mothers and daughters raped, fathers and sons dragged off, never to be seen again. They don’t want to know about prisoners being humiliated and tortured, secretly “rendered” to countries for more torture, held captive for endless years without charges, without hope, without life. They don’t want to know about Iraq’s rich culture, its secular society, its formidable institutions of learning. – All of this, along with Iraq’s long-suffering people were made invisible, the better to smash the country as if it were only a den of thieves and murderers.” (Al-Ahram Weekly, 24-30 April 2003) (From “Lost in the Lust of Werewolves by Sheila Samples, www.dissidentvoice.org, March 8, 2007)

But, as almost always, after a few righteous outbursts, we go along.

By now, you can probably understand why Newt Gingrich put the book Chimpanzee Politics (1982) on the recommended reading list for freshmen representatives, in 1994. (Frans de Waal, The Ape and the Sushi Master, p. 307)

If you’ve heard enough about chimpanzees for one day, there is a story about ravens that I’ve wanted to share with you for over two months.

Ravens are like very big crows, weighing four or five pounds, and seem to be regarded as the smartest of all birds. They are carnivores, and have hunted with wolves for hundreds of thousands of years, as well as with other large predators.

They have been the subject of myths throughout human history, sometimes pictured with wolves, and sometimes just exalted by themselves as wise and mystical birds.

I read a book called Mind of the Raven, by perhaps the world’s leading authority on them, a professor of ethology from Vermont named Berndt Heinrich. He has studied ravens for decades, and traveled the world to observe these magnificent birds. But even he was surprised by some of the stories he heard about ravens.

One was a news story about a woman near Boulder, Colorado. She was working out in the woods behind her cabin, when she was annoyed by a raven making so much noise it was irritating, cackling like crazy and diving low over her head. She had never heard a raven make this much noise, and wondered if it was trying to communicate with her. When it passed over her head again then flew up, she looked up. That’s when she saw the cougar about twenty feet away, crouching and ready to pounce. She weighed only about 98 pounds, so was a good target. But she called her 300-lb. husband, who chased the cougar away.

In the newspaper, she said, “The lion moved his head just a little bit as the raven flew over it. That’s when I saw him. I never would have seen him otherwise. He was going to jump me. That raven saved my life.” The event was described as a miracle in the news. (Berndt Heinrich, Mind of the Raven, p. 193. The event happened September 7, 1997.)

And up in Alaska, a man who had killed a deer came face to face with a bear who also wanted to claim the meat. Wisely, he backed away, leaving the deer for the bear. He said “Ravens were following me and squealing. I thought they were guiding me and telling me that the bear was still following me.” (Berndt Heinrich, Mind of the Raven, p. 194. Event was reported in the Anchorage Daily News, December 29, 1998.)

Pretty impressive and heartwarming stories. But the raven expert said no, that’s not what was really going on. The ravens were making noise to identify the location of prey. The ravens were hunting with the cougar and the bear, and the only thing they were trying to save the humans for was dinner!

Those two people’s reactions to the raven’s actions, like most of our reactions to the story as we hear it, are telling. We tend to assume that the ravens were there to serve us, never thinking that they may instead be there to serve their fellow hunters, hoping to make a meal of us. we’re not special to ravens; when They’re hungry, we’re just meat.

Like chimpanzees, we react to politics this way, too. We assume those in power are going to use the power to serve us, to serve our best interests. We don’t like to think of the fact that they may instead have formed alliances with the influential people who got them in power, and are hunting with them – a hunt in which we are often the victims. When political lobbyists buy politicians in order to get them to remove restrictions on what corporations can do in pursuit of profit, for instance, the bills they pass are given a spin as though They’re somehow for the benefit of the “We the People.” But when the bills they buy also remove bankruptcy protection from workers, remove the ability to sue pharmaceutical companies over faulty vaccines, transfer hundreds of billions of dollars from social services and health care to tax cuts for the rich and huge defense contracts, then we are out in the wilderness with the cougars, the bears, and the ravens, and if we don’t watch out we’ll be dinner.

No, it doesn’t always happen that way. Yes, there certainly are people elected to power who try to serve the interests of regular old powerless common folk. But the temptation is there, and is often strong, to support those whose money and influence got them in office in the first place – to honor the reciprocal nature of the political alliances that brought them into power. But if we’re not rich or influential enough to seek out as allies in the hunt for power, we may just be meat. Any hungry raven or power-hungry chimpanzee would understand this immediately.

We pray to the angels of our better nature and the still small voice that can speak to us when we feel safe enough to listen.

Help us remember that we are never as alone or as powerless as we think.

Help us remember that we can, if we will, invest ourselves in relationships, institutions and causes that transcend and expand us.

Help us guard our hearts against those relationships and activities that diminish us and weaken our life force.

And help us give our hearts to those relationships and institutions that might, with our help, expand our souls and our worlds.

We know that every day both life and death are set before us. Let us have the faith and courage to choose those involvements that can lead us to ward life, toward life more abundant.

And help us find the will to serve those life-giving involvements with our heart, our mind and our spirit.

We ask that we may see more clearly in these matters, and that we have the will to hold to those relationships that demand, and cherish, the very best in us. Just that, just those.

Amen.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

© Davidson Loehr

February 25, 2007

First UU Church of Austin

4700 Grover Ave., Austin, TX 78756

www.austinuu.org

Listen to the sermon by clicking the play button.

PRAYER:

Let us not be merely spectators at our own lives, but also those who are really living them.

It is so easy to let others live important parts of our lives for us, to leave us living second-hand lives. If they give us our beliefs, our values, our ambitions, our duties, we may be living their lives. Then who will live ours?

We play many of life’s games by others” rules, because we are a social species, and must learn to play well with others.

But in other areas, where our integrity and authenticity are involved, we need to honor our own higher values, for no one else is likely to do that. Allegiance to our highest values is what we have to offer to our world, what we bring to the table.

Let us be sure that our commitments and allegiances are to people, relationships and causes that are worthy of the best in us. We must care that the laws and customs of our country serve us, serve the needs of most of our brothers and sisters, rather than just the few who have fought or bought their way into making our rules.

Life is a game of give and take, cooperation and compassion, and it is seldom meant to be about us. Yet we too are among the players. And sometimes, the ball is in our court, and then it is our move. Let us find the will and the courage to make that move. Amen.

SERMON:

The word “seduction” is an interesting word. Most people are surprised to learn that it has the same root as the word “education,” as well as induction, deduction, conduction and abduction. The root, “-duc,” means “to lead.” The prefixes tell you how and where You’re being led. So education means to be led out of yourself and brought up into something bigger. Induction is to be led into something – like the Hall of Fame, or the Army. Conduction means to be led through something, like electricity through a wire, and so on. And seduction means to be led astray: led astray to be used for someone else’s agenda, at your expense. It’s an especially tacky form of deception.

There are tons of stories of seduction and deception. They’re some of our favorite plots. Think of the Trojan Horse, where the Greeks gave the Trojans the gift of this big carved wooden horse. But after the Trojans brought it into the walled city, at night a bunch of armed soldiers climbed down from inside the horse and destroyed the city. That’s what seduction is like. You’re taken in thinking you’ll get something you want, then learn too late that you were just taken to the cleaners, used, robbed or worse.

But it’s one of our favorite stories, in its perverse way. I can name a few examples, and you’ll be able to think of a dozen more:

“Will you walk into my parlor, said a spider to a fly”.”

The spider in this poem from 1829 (by Mary Howitt) lured the gullible fly into its web by flattering it, then ate it – and the moral of the poem was about the fly’s foolishness.

Or these famous six lines:

“The time has come,” the Walrus said,

“To talk of many things:

Of shoes and ships and sealing-wax

Of cabbages and kings

And why the sea is boiling hot

And whether pigs have wings.”

If you know this poem from Lewis Carroll’s book Through the Looking-Glass, and What Alice Found There, you know that the walrus’s words had nothing at all to do with what was really going on. The words came at that moment when the game of Bait-and-Switch turned from “Bait” to “Switch.” They had lured a bunch of oysters to join them for a long walk on the beach. The oysters were looking for fun and adventure, the walrus and the carpenter were looking for supper. The walk on the beach was the advertising brochure; the reality was that the oysters were dead meat.

You could say this was about the oysters” foolishness, but haven’t we all been deceived or seduced by someone in the past – week?

People who play the spider, or the walrus and the carpenter, can use language to cast a spell, or set up an alternate reality, and we are drawn in as easily as flies and oysters. It’s not the way we’re used to thinking about language. we’re used to hearing people talk about language as the pride of our species, what sets us apart from other animals, the key to culture, and so on. But if we think of human language as just one means of communicating, and at culture as a non-genetic way of shaping the social world we live in, it’s clear that most animals have cultures – especially social animals – and all animals have means of communicating.

There is a nice, and somewhat seductive, story about using language. It’s about a chimpanzee named Nim Chimpsky, who communicated with humans through American Sign Language. Sometimes, he used signs in creative ways. At least one of them – the sign for BITE – seemed to take the place of actually biting when he was angry. Nim learned the signs BITE and ANGRY from a picture book showing Zero Mostel biting a hand and exhibiting an angry face. A little later, Amy, his trainer, began the process of transferring him to his new trainer Laura. But Nim didn’t want to leave Amy and tried to drive Laura away. When Laura kept trying to pick him up, the chimpanzee acted as if he were going to bite her. His mouth was pulled back over his bare teeth, and he approached Laura with his hair raised. But instead of biting, he repeatedly made the BITE sign near her face with a fierce expression on his face. After making this sign, he seemed to relax. A few minutes later he transferred to Laura without any sign of aggression. On other occasions, Nim was observed to sign both BITE and ANGRY as a warning. (Jeffrey M. Masson, When Elephants Weep, p. 233)

This is pretty remarkable. Nim Chimpsky made, in a small way, the transition we have made through our language: substituting the word for the real thing: using language rather than actions to express strong emotions. We hear this, and think Well, that’s a good thing that he could just tell her he wanted to bite her, without actually biting her. Especially since a chimpanzee’s canine teeth are as dangerous as a panther’s.

In our own species, we can also use words to replace actions. “Talking things out,” using diplomacy instead of war, and so on. Most psychotherapy is about getting clients out of their heads and into incorporating their feelings.

Language can create an alternate world and seduce us into it, often triggering powerful emotions in us. After all, it’s what comics, novels, movies, television shows, political rallies and religious gatherings are about. When someone can be brought to tears by watching a movie or reading a novel, you see the power of language, not only to create another world, but to draw us into it effortlessly.

We can cry at the story of a spider dying in “Charlotte’s Web,” or be emotionally drawn into stories like “Babe,” “Schreck,” “Jungle Book,” “Bambi,” as well as comic or tragic movies. You can probably think of a hundred. Language, especially in stories, advertisements and propaganda, has an amazing power to seduce us into an imaginary world and play with our emotions, completely bypassing the part of our brain that knows it’s just a story. Just a few minutes ago, we all seemed to buy the idea of spiders, flies and walruses that talk, and oysters that take a walk along the beach.

Sixteen years ago, I had a powerful experience of just how easily and quickly this works, at a two-hour program I’ll never forget. I was in Michigan, but the program was done by an anthropologist named Robbie Davis-Floyd, who was from Austin.

Her program was called “A User’s Guide to Ritual.” She said ritual has two parts, the vehicle and the loading. The vehicle is neutral, and the loading usually carries an agenda. Unless we can tell them apart, we’ll be easy to manipulate by those who control stories and rituals. She was marvelous at controlling the audience of about seventy professors, ministers and chaplains, repeatedly saying she could tell us a story that would take half of us to tears, even though we knew full well there wasn’t a word of truth to it, and how all our graduate degrees couldn’t stop her from doing it. After a few minutes of this baiting – and she was very good at it – the level of anger in the room was palpable, and someone finally said, between clenched teeth, “Then do it!”

She laughed, and said well, she couldn’t do it in this atmosphere. First, we’d need to clear our emotional palates, get rid of this angry mood and get back to a neutral place. She said we needed a mindless activity, something we could do without thinking, that might be fun or at least goofy. She proposed that we all sing a song together, one to which we would already know all the words, and she asked for suggestions.

If you think about it, there really aren’t that many songs that a roomful of people might know the words to, and only a few were suggested. Finally, we decided on “My Bonny Lies Over the Ocean,” and she had us sing it. It was certainly a goofy thing to hear seventy people do. After we’d sung it, she asked if anybody felt anything, and got some laughs. Somebody said, “Nausea,” someone else said “A desperate need for voice lessons.”

But the trap had been set. “My Bonny Lies Over the Ocean” was the vehicle, and she then took thirty seconds to add the loading. This was April 1991, just a few months after the first Gulf War. She said, “Your daughter, your wife, your beloved, Bonny, is in the US Army in Iraq. Three days ago her platoon was captured. You cannot get any information from the Army because they don’t have any information. You don’t know whether she has been raped, mutilated, killed, or all three. You haven’t slept in three days, and have never been so scared in your life.” She paused for about five seconds, then said, “Let’s sing the song.” We sang very slowly and quietly, and there was audible sobbing in the room. We all knew it was a complete fiction, but everyone in the room was emotionally affected as we sang the words, “Bring back, bring back, oh bring back my Bonny to me.”

Her point was that all it takes to seduce us is a story that hooks us, and we can be hooked by amazingly simple stories. Truth has nothing to do with it. Dogs, birds, chimpanzees and other animals can trick each other. But it seems that, through our language, we alone can be taken into make-believe worlds this easily and powerfully. We are a propagandist’s dream.

I remember a wonderful old professor 25 years ago who met with students to play “Dungeons and Dragons.” This very professorial man would dress up in what looked like a medieval monk’s robe with a hood – his wife made it for him. He would join the students, in their costumes, and pass through an imaginative doorway into the world of Dungeons and Dragons every Sunday night. Was the Dungeons & Dragons world real? Well, it was certainly real to him! He was no longer a quiet little man, hard of hearing and with a speech impediment: he was the Dungeon Master! It was “real” – but of course not really.

It is this disconnection from the real world around us, which lets others manipulate our fantasy worlds to lead us astray. Because, seductive as they are, the imaginative worlds have left out something important.

There is a metaphor invented by the philosopher I did my dissertation on, Ludwig Wittgenstein, that captures some of what is going on here, and why it’s potentially so misleading.

“Imagine this game”I call it “tennis without a ball”: The players move around on a tennis court just as in tennis, and they even have rackets, but no ball. Each one reacts to his partner’s stroke as if, or more or less as if, a ball had caused his reaction. (Maneuvers.) The umpire, who must have an “eye” for the game, decides in questionable cases whether a ball has gone into the net, etc., etc. This game is obviously quite similar to tennis and yet, on the other hand, it is fundamentally different!” (Ludwig Wittgenstein, Last Writings on the Philosophy of Psychology, p. 110)

It is fundamentally different because without a real ball, without real-world constraints on our imaginations, our movements just aren’t what they seem to be.

The “My Bonny” experience is what lets us get hooked by seeing a photo of a starving child, hearing stories of disasters like Katrina. We enter into the story’s world, respond emotionally, and that can drive our behavior. We send money or offer to help. When that happens, we think it’s a good thing that we can be moved so easily.

But those who make their living influencing us through stories, ads and political rhetoric know they can play bait-and-switch just as easily, and more profitably.

The game of bait-and-switch isn’t a human invention. You can find examples of it in the animal world, too. Think of Angler Fish – those big ugly fish that look like a rough pile of rocks (though they probably don’t see themselves as ugly) who have this thing dangling in front of their snout that kind of looks like a worm. Fish come close, swim up to snatch the bait, and then the Angler Fish opens its mouth and eats them. It’s a fish version of the spider luring the fly into its parlor.

And earlier in this sermon series, I told you the story about adolescent chimpanzees who would lure a chicken behind a wall with food, then once the chicken has come after the food, they beat it with sticks. It’s a game they seem to have invented to fight boredom. This is a story of chimps playing bait-and-switch with a chicken. The bait is, “we’re going to feed you!” And the real story is, “we’re going to beat you!”

The fact that this game happens so often shows that it’s as much a part of our nature as it is part of the nature of angler fish, chimpanzees, and ten thousand other species.

But we can even fool ourselves. I once had a professor, a theologian, whose excellent lectures were filled with lessons about how the God of the bible was above all else a God of radical love. Pretty words. But in his treatment of some of his students, one of whom I knew well, he could be a petty and vindictive man. In his mind, he was an agent of his God of radical love. In his behavior, some of us just saw a mean and hateful little man. He had used religious language to pull the wool over his own eyes – but not over the eyes of many others.

In religion, this has been the key difference between prophets and priests for thousands of years. Priests call us to believe as we are told, to recite the creeds or repeat the rituals we are taught. Prophets and sages say it doesn’t much matter what we believe or what rituals we practice, but only how we treat one another.

We use words to create imaginary worlds, where we can see the world made small, and can find an imaginative place that gives us meaning and purpose. But the farther we get drawn into the story world and drawn away from the awareness of what our behaviors are doing to ourselves and others, the more easily we can be led astray through the bait-and-switch tactics of those who know how to use language to control us. The chaos of life is given form by virtue of what we choose to omit. Language often omits the cost of what we have excluded, including the effect of our actions on ourselves or others.

Then we are in the land of seduction, where those who create the stories can demand and get obedience, where chimps lure chickens to their doom, where the language of the walrus and the carpenter has no connection at all to their actions, intended only to trick and trap. And all this can happen because language is often like a game of tennis without a ball, without emotional connections to actual people or the environment around us.

Using language of high ideals and emotional stories to cover over actions that are greedy, imperialistic, murderous, bigoted and hateful is playing bait-and-switch. Wrapping low motives in high phrases, covering nastiness with nationalism or ungodly actions in godly chatter, covering recklessness with rhetoric – these are examples of the seduction of language, of how easily and effectively we can be taken in. That’s how language can be like a Trojan Horse.

Of course, the language we use to build character, to raise our sights, the language we use in education and religion, the language I’m using here every Sunday, is also trying to take us in, also trying to lead us somewhere.

All the best religious stories are trying to educate us, to lead us into bigger selves, and to counter all the other stories that have taken us in, those stories playing tennis without a ball, which have misdirected us to avoid looking at the terrible costs of some of the greed and brutality that have taken over so much of our society and our world.

For example, we’re seduced by a phrase like “freedom and democracy” but not shown the actions we’re taking in Iraq under that high-sounding banner: selling off their assets, taking control of their oil, invading the country based on complete lies about Weapons of Mass Destruction, killing over perhaps 650,000 of their men, women and children, losing over 3,100 of our soldiers killed, and over 20,000 who have been wounded. That’s the picture from inside the spider’s parlor, the picture of this game of bloody tennis played with the ball, and it has nothing at all to do with freedom or democracy. That’s how we’re seduced by language.

Another fine-sounding phrase is “free-market economy.” It sounds good. We believe in freedom, after all. But behind the rhetoric, we have found a brutalizing economy of corporate greed that moves to limit our economy to policies, trade and tax structures that benefit them at our expense. That economy isn’t free; it’s imprisoned in corporate headquarters.

Here’s another seductive phrase: the “clear skies act” of 2003. It sounds good; we certainly all want clear skies! But inside that spider’s parlor, we see companies polluting our skies with abandon, while seducing us with clever language.

And recently in the news, we have our governor saying he believes with all his heart that he should insist that all sixth-grade girls in Texas be forced to be vaccinated with a drug made by the Merck Pharmaceutical Company. Meanwhile, on the pages of other newspapers, we”ve been reading for a week that the Merck company has agreed to stop paying lobbyists to pressure or bribe state officials to stick young girls with their vaccine. The language of vaccinating girls to protect them from cancer sounds noble, until you realize that our governor and others are apparently saying it because they have been rewarded for doing so, or promised future rewards, by Merck, the company that manufactures the drug and stands to make a killing in the eighteen to twenty states where it has planted its lobbyists in the fertile soil of our worst politicians.

We need to have a healthy suspicion of people who wrap their messages in idealistic language. We need to be very wary of abstractions and the appeal to high ideals until we see what behaviors are hiding behind them: where the “ball” is.

It’s good to have leaders, depending on where They’re leading us. But what we want and what we need is to educate ourselves into a more aware and compassionate perspective, to induct one another into the company of those better angels of our nature, to conduct ourselves and our nation according to behaviors that treat others as we would want to be treated, to resist being abducted by alien agendas into blind alleys that will leave us, in the end, with nothing but our regrets, our tears, and perhaps the compromise of our very souls. For that’s what can happen.

Just yesterday I read Maureen Dowd’s editorial in the New York Times, where she chastises John McCain for being so eagerly seduced by anything and anyone who might get him more votes. Her final line, her punch line, was, “Sometimes I miss John McCain, even when I’m with him.” (From Maureen Dowd’s “A Cat Without Whiskers,” published 24 February 2007 in NY Times)

That’s what we don’t want: to miss ourselves, even when we’re alone. We don’t want to miss the richness of our relationships, even when we’re together. We don’t want to miss what’s noblest about America, while we’re in it. And we don’t want to miss the chance for an empowered and authentic life, even while we’re living it.

I think I’ve found that ball, that ball missing from these games, the ball that brings the games into the real world, where we have a say about who gets to hit it, and how.

That ball, as almost always, is in our court.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

© Davidson Loehr

February 18, 2007

First UU Church of Austin

4700 Grover Ave., Austin, TX 78756

www.austinuu.org

Listen to the sermon by clicking the play button.

PRAYER:

Let us listen for the right voices.

There are so many voices around and within us, it’s hard to know which ones to listen to.

The strong and loud sounds are voices of authority, voices of power, telling us who to be and what to do, and expecting obedience. These voices come from everywhere – the political and military war cries, the voices of our worst religious leaders parroting those war cries, or voices of friends who are too certain to be right. Jesus was right when he said the road that leads to the destruction of our souls is broad, and many take it.

But there are always other voices, as well. The still, small voices of those better angels of our nature who counsel us toward compassion and justice. This is the narrow path that leads to our authentic selves and a compassionate world, and few ever follow the narrow path.

Let us be among those on the narrow road to understanding rather than condemnation, love rather than bigotry and hate.

Those voices of the better angels of our nature who call us are few in number. But let us listen to them, and let us join them. Let us too become angels of our better nature.

Amen.

SERMON: I’ll Have What She’s Having

The purpose of this series of animal stories is to do two things. First is to say that our evolutionary story as animals, related to all other life on earth, is the oldest, deepest and most adequate framework for understanding who we are, both good and bad. The second purpose is to say that we can also find in this story better clues than we can find through religion, philosophy, psychology or any other cultural creation on how we should live, what we owe to other life and to the future. I’m suggesting that we can answer the two most basic religious questions – Who are we, and How should we live – in empowering and challenging ways from within the oldest life story of all: the story of life on earth, of which we are a part but not the pinnacle.

In the first four parts, I’ve shared animal stories showing that many of our higher moral abilities have roots millions of years old. Our need for connection with others, our empathy, our ability to care for other life – all this can be found, to small or large extent, in species going back a hundred million years or more.

So why, if we’re so great, is the world in such a mess? And why are we still trying to figure out who we are and how we should live? The next few weeks we’ll look at this from a few different angles. Today I want to go back to some of the roots of our empathy to find that those roots contain both what is most promising and what is most problematic. We are born both good and evil, capable of being either a brave blessing or a cowardly curse to others. Not all of it is good, but it’s all natural.

One of the things that can either help us or hurt us is the effect of the cultures we have created. A couple centuries ago, the philosopher Rousseau said we’re born good and pure, but made bad by culture. I’m not saying that. I’m saying we’re born with the whole range of possibilities, but culture seems to strengthen the worst of our abilities, as much or more than it strengthens the best of them.

Last week I talked about the experiment in which people were asked to watch photographs of facial expressions, and involuntarily copied the expressions they saw. They did so even if the photos were shown subliminally, for only a few milliseconds. Even though we’re not aware of having seen the facial expression, our facial muscles nevertheless echo it instantly, without our even being aware of it. (Frans de Waal, Our Inner Ape, p. 177) This is a measure of how deep the roots of our empathy go into the past.

We are social animals, which means we are not isolated, not individual. In balancing our need for personal integrity with our need for social acceptance, the latter wins most of the time: in dress, speech, behavior, etc. For social animals, our social identity is part of our identity, and we conform far more than not.

So we have empathy, but it starts with caring what others think, feel and do, and that is the catch-22.

There are stories showing this from animals separated from us by millions and millions of years of evolution.

For instance, an experiment was done with female guppies on the “I’ll have what sHe’s having” theme. They put two males into the tank of female guppy #1, and she prefers bachelor #1. Then they take the same two males and put them into the adjoining tank with a second female, while the first female watches. The second female (who didn’t see the first part of the experiment) prefers bachelor #2. Then they put these same two males back in the tank with the first female – and now she also prefers bachelor #2. So the I-want-what-she-wants principle had the power of reversing a female’s independent preferences known from earlier tests. (Frans de Waal, Good-Natured, p. 71) The fish who really liked Bachelor #1 chose #2 because it’s what her friend was having.

This reliance on the opinion of others is hard-wired. It is nature, not culture. It’s biology, rather than the local variations on our biological tendencies that make up our many different cultures and subcultures.

In a similar experiment, two Italian scientists trained an octopus to attack either a red or a white ball. After the training, another octopus was allowed to watch four demonstrations from an adjoining tank. The second octopus closely watched the actions of the first one with head and eye movements. When the same balls were dropped in the second animal’s tank, he attacked the ball of the same color as the first octopus. (Frans de Waal, Good-Natured, p. 71)

What both experiments show us is that even animals with minuscule brains compared to primates notice how members of their own species relate to the environment. The octopus identified with the other octopus and the female guppy with the other female guppy, both letting their counterpart influence their behavior. (Frans de Waal, Good-Natured, p. 71) It’s important to remember that the first guppy and the first octopus weren’t right. They didn’t know which was the better mate or the better enemy. They were certain, but they weren’t right. Choosing what she is having comes from a drive to conform that goes so far back in the evolutionary time line that it includes not only us, apes, monkeys and most mammals, but even guppies and octopuses. We imitate. We want to fit in. We want what has been established in our little culture as the norm, for better and worse.

You all know the saying “Monkey see, monkey do.” When we apply it to humans, we mean they are following low, kind of primitive, rules, just aping others, as though that’s behavior that stops with the monkeys. In fact, we ape others better than perhaps any other animal. There was an experiment done in the 1930s, one of the very first where humans tried to raise a chimpanzee as a human. A family (the Kelloggs) had a baby boy, and a young chimpanzee. They thought that raising them together would give the chimpanzee a chance to sort of leap ahead on the evolutionary scale by using their “monkey see monkey do” tendencies to copy the behaviors and styles of the more advanced animal represented by their son. But they had to cancel the experiment because their son was aping the chimp rather than the other way around. He was making chimpanzee pant-hoots and food calls, and when meal time came around they found they were beginning to have two chimpanzees at the table. We ape apes better than they ape us. Human see, human do. I’ll have what sHe’s having.

This tendency to care what others think, want and do carries over into many areas of our lives. In a very interesting and revealing test of other animals – this time human animals – volunteers were tested on a mental-rotation task. These people were asked to decide whether certain three-dimensional objects, when differently rotated, were the same or different. These can be hard to figure out, if you’ve tried one of these tests. In the study, the volunteers were informed of the answer selected by four other participants. These other participants, though, were really actors. Before actual testing began, the volunteers and the actors were put together for a kind of social hour, to get to know each other a little, and establish a little social bonding. During the testing phase, the actors offered false answers half the time. Scientists expected that at least some of the volunteers would go along with the actors” incorrect choices. But instead they found that people went along with the group of actors feeding them wrong answers 41% of the time, far more than when computers instead of live actors were giving them the wrong answers. The volunteers were swayed by what their human companions had to say, although they had just met these people a short while before! (Barbara J. King, Evolving God, pp. 171-172) How much more powerful is the group’s preferences when we know them well? Ask anyone who has ever been in a family, a sorority or fraternity, a club, a church, a political party or a business. Even when They’re wrong, we’ll often have what They’re having.

But this test of people being misled by actors had another finding, just as important. Not everyone conformed. About 59% of the people did not follow the wrong answers suggested to them by the actors. Yet what happened to these nonconformists is fascinating: their brains got emotional. That is, the brain activity of these independent thinkers reflected emotional stress. This is a red-letter finding, because it says that such independence is linked to an “emotional load associated with standing up for one’s belief,” as the scientists put it. Social involvement may alter a person’s perception of the world, and it may be emotionally costly for humans to go against the crowd. (Barbara J. King, Evolving God, p. 172)

Or to put it more simply, you pay an emotional price for not going along with the crowd, as every one of you knows from your own experience. And no matter how proud we may be of our independent actions, the emotional stress hurts more than most of us want to admit. Those who make their living by molding public opinion know this, which is why marketing campaigns and political ads make such a point of showing that the people who use their product or vote for their candidate are always happy, healthy, attractive and thin people: just like we”d like to be. Advertising and other efforts to shape our opinion, to make us want what they want us to want, are now spending about a trillion dollars a year, much of it tax-deductible, so they have not only won in influencing what we’ll buy and often who we’ll vote for, but have figured out how to make us pay for it!

It’s important to remember the fact that a whole culture does something does not mean it’s good. Some cultural innovations are useless, even inane. An American who has worked for twenty years on a mountain overlooking Kyoto, tells of the curious habit of Japanese macaques of rubbing stones together. The monkeys often come down from the mountain to a flat, open area where they receive food from park wardens and tourists. Every day, they collect handfuls of pebbles or small rocks. They carry these to a quiet spot, where they rub or strike them together or spread them out in front of them, scattering them, gathering them up again, and so on”. Young monkeys learn this totally useless activity from peers, siblings, and their mothers, resulting in a widespread tradition within this particular troop”. This behavior is transmitted from generation to generation through education, which is one definition of what a “culture” is. Part of the culture of this particular troop of monkeys is the useless but apparently enjoyable activity of playing with stones. (Frans de Waal, The Ape and the Sushi Master, p. 230)

You can make your own mental list of things we do that are entertaining or familiar but useless, but you might be surprised how long the list becomes.

I’d put this in theological terms, too, by saying that it’s worth asking what our actions serve. Do they only serve the strange habits of our social group? Are we just conforming without thinking, having what our kind of people have? Because it matters what we are serving with our behaviors, especially in human societies.

It may be easier to see in animal stories, so let’s look at chimpanzees. We hear stories of male chimpanzees doing terrible violence to one another, sometimes killing rival males. Male chimps have been observed testing a series of rocks or big sticks to find the one that could make the best weapon, then hiding it behind their backs, going up to a rival male and using the weapon to attack or kill him.

And females are routinely seen going up to the males and taking their weapons away from them. One observer watched a female disarm a male six times in a row (Frans de Waal, Chimpanzee Politics, p. 23).

We hear these stories, and we react differently to them. The story of males with weapons is frightening, unpleasant, and of course hits close to home when we consider the violence of our own species – whether in gang fights or the armed invasion of whatever country has the oil or strategic location we want.

But we react differently to the stories of females disarming the warriors. Here is non-violent behavior in animals separated from us by about three million years, giving us a sense of how deep these more compassionate strains run in us.

These stories are about serving two different things. The males are serving the power of those alpha creatures who are claiming to have the power, and willing to inflict it on anyone who gets in their way. The females are serving not only peace, but also the health and stability of the whole group, rather than the entitlements of those claiming power. The females are smaller than the males and could easily be beaten or killed by them, though that doesn’t seem to happen when They’re disarming males or stopping fights. The females – and it seems that even the males recognize this – are serving what we would call a higher authority: that of health, harmony and peace for the majority rather than the whims of the powerful minority. This looks like the beginnings of a kind of proto-democracy.

But we must always deal with our dual nature here. We have – or at least some in our species have – these deep senses of empathy and compassion, and when we act out of them we can change the course of history for the better, bending it toward the more compassionate. But we do it, often, at an emotional price. And the reason is that the drive to serve those higher and more compassionate ideals is usually weaker than the drive to fit in. That’s why our moral and ethical heroes are so celebrated – because they are also so rare. We are better at imitating than at innovating; better at conforming than at raising the standards that others don’t want raised.

The fact is that in social animals like our species, the pull of social conformity is one of the strongest pulls we have – usually far more powerful than our sense that we should do the right thing when it means going against the crowd. The pull of a social network is the single strongest factor in why people convert to a new religion or join an established religious group. People become attached to those who already belong, and are drawn in. This social pull far exceeds the lure of doctrine or ideology. As a sociologist who has been doing this research for a long time (Rodney Stark) says, “When people retrospectively describe their conversions, they tend to put the stress on theology”. [But] we [researchers] could remember when most of them regarded the religious beliefs of their new set of friends as quite odd.” (Barbara J. King, Evolving God, p. 174)

Conformity often trumps truth in the sciences as it also does in politics and religion. When the medical school at the University of Michigan changed from homeopathic to allopathic medicine a century ago (from about 1875 to 1922), neither homeopaths nor their spouses were invited to social events as the allopaths gained control. While both models still claim millions of cures, the “I’ll have what sHe’s having” syndrome operated there, as it does in many scientific disciplines. There is a dominant paradigm, the expectation to conform with it, and both exclusion and an emotional price to pay for not doing so. From within the paradigm, it seems like a victory for truth or science; from outside, it is seen only as a victory for conformity. Around the world, after all, more people have their symptoms relieved by homeopathic medicine than by western allopathic models.

This same pressure to conform exists in every human activity from politics and religion to fashion and music. We are as hard-wired as the guppies to notice and care about the tastes of others, and there is a strong and deep urge to conform, to want what They’re having, because that’s the way we fit in. Jesus urged people to take the narrow path, the harder path that almost nobody takes, and he knew it was unlikely that many people would do it.

So one answer to why we aren’t as empathic and compassionate as some of the stories of animals we”ve heard, or the stories of our greatest saints and heroes, is because we are a species that wants to fit in, wants to conform, that gets emotionally stressed when we don’t fit in, and so the biases of the lowest common denominator of our groups often restrict our compassion to the lowest level of the group’s compassion.

Caring what others feel and need is a double-edged sword. If we follow the biases of the majority, it will often cut through our sense of empathy and compassion, and reduce us to the lowest common denominator of caring. That’s almost never very attractive or good.

But it can also cut through the urge to conform, and let us be guided by our nobler nature, like the female chimps disarming the males. We can serve the privileges of the powerful, or the needs of the many, the weak. Here is one of the tensions of all human history.

So what can we do? We know better, but we don’t always do better. How can we use some of the insights that these animal stories show us to help answer the question of who we are and how we should live? We are born a mixture of good and evil, selfless and selfish, courageous and cowardly. And we can ignore both paths, and just choose to do things that are entertaining but useless, like rubbing stones together. But almost every religion and philosophy says our life will be more fulfilling if we work toward the light, work toward acting out of compassion.

Abraham Lincoln used to say we need to listen to the “better angels of our nature” rather than the worse ones. Listen to the inner voices counseling disarmament, justice, empathy and compassion. Don’t follow the crowd, don’t have what sHe’s having without first asking whether she is someone you could be proud to follow, or whether she will lead you astray, into serving low and transient ideals rather than high ones.

There’s an old story about wolves that says this differently. These aren’t real wolves, but story wolves, metaphorical wolves.

In one version, an Indian boy went to his grandfather for advice. The boy was big for his age, and stronger than his friends. He said sometimes, he just wants to use his strength to take whatever the others have that he wants. It’s wrong, but he knows he can get away with it. But sometimes, he thinks he should use his strength to help weaker people rather than taking from them. Either feeling can be persuasive, he says, and he wonders if his grandfather has any wisdom on this.

Ah yes, the grandfather says, he knows these feelings very well from his own life. It is like having two wolves fighting within him, he says. One wolf says, “Fight. Hurt. Take.” The other wolf says, “Help. Care. Love.” These wolves are fighting against each other always, as far back as he can remember they are inside of him, fighting to control him.

The boy recognizes this as just what is going on inside of him too. “But grandfather,” he says, “which wolf wins?”

His grandfather puts his arm around the boy and says, “The wolf that I feed, my beloved boy, the wolf that I feed.”

And so it also is with us.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

© Davidson Loehr

February 11, 2007

First UU Church of Austin

4700 Grover Ave., Austin, TX 78756

www.austinuu.org

Listen to the sermon by clicking the play button.

The sermon today is on empathy, on that essential quality of being able to feel another’s pain, and the hope that if we can feel for them we will care for them, and their fragile hopes and dreams will be safe with us. Against that background, I’ve chosen to share a poem with you as our prayer. It is not about empathy, unless a tale of murder can be said to be about life. I think you’ll find that it needs the silence following it. DuBose Heyward wrote it in 1924. He was the Southern white man who in the same year wrote the novel “Porgy,” from which George Gershwin’s folk opera “Porgy and Bess” was derived eleven years later. This poem has the same poignancy, and is named “The Mountain Woman”:

PRAYER:

“The Mountain Woman,”

by DuBose Heyward

Among the sullen peaks she stood at bay

and paid life’s hard account from her small store.

Knowing the code of mountain wives, she bore

the burden of the days without a sigh;

and, sharp against the somber winter sky,

I saw her drive her steers afield that day.

Hers was the hand that sunk the furrows deep

across the rocky, grudging south slope.

At first youth left her face, and later hope;

yet through each mocking spring and barren fall,

she reared her lusty brood, and gave them all

that gladder wives and mothers love to keep.

And when the sheriff shot her eldest son

beside his still, so well she knew her part,

she gave no healing tears to ease her heart;

but took the blow upstanding, with her eyes

as drear and bitter as the winter skies.

Seeing her then, I thought that she had won.

But yesterday her man returned too soon

and found her tending, with reverent touch,

one scarlet bloom; and, having drunk too much,

he snatched its flame and quenched it in the dirt.

Then, like a creature with a mortal hurt,

she fell, and wept away the afternoon.

– DuBose Heyward

SERMON

The ability to sense another’s feelings, needs, fears, and act on them is the greatest blessing we can offer to life. And when we hear of someone who seems to lack that ability to sense another’s hurt, or to care – as in that poem about the Mountain Woman – it is almost an affront to humanity. How could “her man” not tell that flower, that little piece of living, fragile beauty was her umbilical cord to beauty and what was left of hope?

Sometimes I think that if you can just respond to natural beauty, there is greatness about you.

I read of a young man who was working in Africa with chimpanzees, as part of Jane Goodall’s efforts there. One afternoon he took a break and climbed to the top of a ridge to watch a spectacular sunset over Lake Tanganyika. As the student watched, he noticed first one and then a second chimpanzee climbing up toward him. The two adult males were not together and saw each other only when they reached the top of the ridge. They did not see the student. The apes greeted each other with pants, clasping hands, and sat down together. In silence and awe, the human and the chimpanzees watched the sun set and twilight fall. (Jeffrey M. Masson, When Elephants Weep, p. 192)

Some who have observed bears in the wild speak of them sitting on their haunches at sunset, gazing at it, seemingly lost in meditation. (Jeffrey M. Masson, When Elephants Weep, p. 193)

We live in troubled and quite brutal times, but I want to see us as part of an ancient and noble heritage of life that cares about and responds to the feelings, fears and needs of other life. I want to remind us of our deep animal heritage, and to empower us by giving us some animal stories to take with us.

Most of those who work with and write about other animals have a particular concern over the way we treat animals in biomedical research and on the factory farms that produce most of the meat for our species. For over three hundred years at least, we have conducted many scientific experiments on animals, or on other humans, that are far worse than the mountain man’s drunken insensitivity. Some scientists still scoff at the suggestion that animals even have feelings. This seems to have come from the philosopher Descartes (1596-1650) who said, more than three centuries ago, that animals had no feelings, no intentions, but were like machines. This may sound like harmless silliness, but it’s not harmless. A century and a half ago, Charles Darwin wrote about one of these experiments, in a passage that has been quoted hundreds of times:

“” Every one has heard of the dog suffering under vivisection, who licked the hand of the operator; this man, unless the operation was fully justified by an increase of our knowledge, or unless he had a heart of stone, must have felt remorse to the last hour of his life.” (Charles Darwin, The Descent of Man, p. 48)

The neuroscientist Jaak Panksepp from Bowling Green State University writes, “There is overwhelming evidence that other mammals have many of the same basic emotional circuits that we do” At the basic emotional level, all mammals are remarkably similar.” (Jeffrey M. Masson, The Pig Who Sang to the Moon, p. 106)

Our sensitivity to others runs so deep even modern brain scans show it to be an absolutely archaic part of us, which means we would have to share this sensitivity with tens of thousands of other species.

Neuroimaging shows that making moral judgments involves a wide variety of brain areas, some extremely ancient (Greene and Haidt 2002, from Frans de Waal’s Primates and Philosophers, pp. 56-57).

Asked to watch photographs of facial expressions, we involuntarily copy the expressions seen. We do so even if the photo is shown subliminally, that is, if it appears for only a few milliseconds. Unaware of the expression, our facial muscles nevertheless echo it. (Frans de Waal, Our Inner Ape, p. 177)

New research shows that when someone we love feels physical pain, our brain responds as if we felt it. (Barbara J. King, Evolving God, p. 170)

Yet the kind of experiments Darwin mentioned still go on, whether to test cosmetics, drugs, or scientific and medical curiosities.

In one set of tests on monkeys, the animals had been subjected to lethal doses of radiation and then forced by electric shock to run on a treadmill until they collapsed. Before dying, the unanesthetized monkeys suffered the predictable effects of excessive radiation, including vomiting and diarrhea. After acknowledging all this, a DNA [Defense Nuclear Agency] spokesman commented: “To the best of our knowledge, the animals experience no pain.” (Marc Bekoff, Minding Animals, p. 140) The willful blindness in that statement is just incredible. It’s something the Mountain Man might have said, but he was drunk.

And we are often just as insensitive to the feelings of our fellow human animals, aren’t we? Think of Abu Graib, Guantanemo, or the 650,000 Iraqi citizens we have killed since illegally invading and occupying their country, or the million of them whose deaths we caused in the 1990s through Bill Clinton’s sanctions. I remember Clinton’s Secretary of State Madeline Albright being asked to respond to Amnesty International’s estimate that the sanctions had caused the deaths of over 500,000 Iraqi children, when she said, “We think it’s worth it.” Or think of living in the country where over 40% of our citizens have no health coverage – the largest percentage in the civilized world. We routinely dehumanize people in wars to kill them, and Clinton, Albright and the Bush administration have dehumanized over a million and a half Iraqis to remain oblivious to the fact that we caused their deaths. But we have also dehumanized tens of millions of our own citizens, haven’t we?

What is so puzzling and frustrating is that empathy in the 200 species of primates is such a rich area that one researcher analyzed, in an unpublished work, over one thousand examples of empathic behavior in monkeys and apes. So empathy is an ancient and deep part of us, and if it seems rare today, it may be because something else is getting in the way – things I’ll talk about in the next two sermons in this series.

But for now, let me share just a few stories about empathy in other animals, so you can get a feel for how ordinary it is, and how easy it is for you to make a very good guess about what these animals felt, needed, and intended to do through their behaviors.

During one winter at the Arnhem Zoo in the Netherlands, after cleaning the hall and before releasing the chimps, the keepers hosed out all rubber tires in the enclosure and hung them one by one on a horizontal log extending from the climbing frame. Most of the tires had tears or holes in them, and the water leaked out. But one tire was in good shape, and remained full of fresh water. A female chimpanzee named Krom wanted to get this tire down. Unfortunately, the tire was at the end of the row, with six or more heavy tires hanging in front of it. Krom was slightly crippled, and also deaf. She had never mated, but had helped raise many of the young chimps, acting as a kind of aunt. She pulled and pulled at the tire she wanted but couldn’t remove it from the log. She pushed the tire backward, but there it hit the climbing frame and couldn’t be removed either. Krom worked in vain on this problem for over ten minutes, ignored by everyone, except Jakie, a seven-year-old Krom had taken care of as a juvenile.

Immediately after Krom gave up and walked away, Jakie approached the scene. Without hesitation he pushed the tires one by one off the log, beginning with the front one, followed by the second in the row, and so on, as any sensible chimp would do. When he reached the last tire, he carefully removed it so that no water was lost, carrying it straight to his aunt, placing it upright in front of her. Krom began scooping up the water with her hands. (Frans de Waal, Primates and Philosophers, pp. 31-32)

Jeffrey M. Masson, who has written two wonderful books of animal stories, writes that in some extraordinary wildlife footage he got to watch, a small impala antelope in Africa raced away from a pack of wild dogs into a river where she was immediately seized by a large crocodile. In the world of antelopes, this is known as a very bad day. Suddenly a hippopotamus rushed to the rescue of the dazed antelope. The crocodile released his prey and the hippo then nudged the small animal up the bank of the river and followed her for a few feet until she dropped from exhaustion. Instead of leaving, the hippo then helped the little creature to her feet and, opening his mouth as wide as possible, breathed warm air onto the stunned antelope. The hippo did this five times before returning to the forest. “There seems to be no possible explanation for this remarkable behavior except compassion.” If this would seem easier to believe if the animal had been a dolphin rather than a hippo, many evolutionary theorists believe that hippos are the closest living relatives to whales, which evolved some 25 to 38 million years ago, and to dolphins, which evolved only 11 million years ago. (Jeffrey M. Masson, Dogs Never Lie, p. 94, and online references about the relationship to whales and dolphins.)

Almost every day, newspapers and TV shows around the country report stories of dogs who have saved people’s lives. The St. Louis Post Dispatch reported on its front page some years ago (in March 1996) the extraordinary story of two stray dogs, a dachshund and an Australian cattle dog, who kept alive a mentally disabled boy when he became lost in the woods for three “bone-chilling” days. The boy’s mother called the dogs “angels from heaven” after ten-year-old Josh Carlisle, who has Down syndrome, was rescued from a dry creek in Montana by a searcher on horseback. In temperatures close to zero, the dogs had played with him and cuddled him to keep him warm at night. Josh hadn’t eaten while he was lost, but the dogs must have led him to water, for he was not fully dehydrated. The boy had mild frostbite on all ten toes, having spent his first night with a light snow dusting the ground. When Josh was carried to the ambulance, the dachshund followed and kept jumping up to see in the window. “I’ll never forget that dog’s face,” said one of the rescuers. Both dogs found a new home with the child’s family, and his mother told reporters, “They fell in love with my son during those three days.” (Frans de Waal, Dogs Never Lie, pp. 97-98)

This is two-way empathy. The mother also felt that she knew how the dogs must have felt in order to help the boy, and to follow him to the ambulance because they”d formed an emotional connection with him. And the boy’s family formed the same connection, and adopted both dogs. When all the species involved care for the life they see in another, everybody wins.

Studying apes brings the familiarity much closer, as they “think” (or “assess”) much like we do. How much?

Allen and Beatrice Gardner, who first obtained the baby Washoe from our Air Force, began teaching her sign language. They, however, were not fluent in it themselves, so their vocabulary was more limited than that of some of Washoe’s later contacts. They taught Washoe to sign “napkin” for “bib” because they didn’t know the sign for bib. Washoe kept wanting to draw the outline of a bib on her chest with her two index fingers, and they kept correcting her. Several months later when a group of human signers at the California School for the Deaf were watching a film of Washoe, they informed the Gardners that the baby chimpanzee was not signing BIB correctly. It should be signed, they told the Gardners, by drawing a bib on the chest with the two index fingers. Washoe had been right all along – and had reasoned just as the humans did who first invented the sign for BIB. (Roger Fouts, Next of Kin, p. 83)

One beautiful moment early on during Project Washoe illustrated the common need of chimps and children to use their signs. The Gardners were in their kitchen entertaining some friends whose toddler happened to be deaf. Washoe was playing outside. Suddenly, the child and Washoe saw one another through the kitchen window. As if on cue, the child signed MONKEY at the same moment Washoe signed BABY. (Roger Fouts, Next of Kin, p. 88) How different do the recognition and thought processes of these individuals from two different species sound?

And Washoe would often sign QUIET to herself as she sneaked into a forbidden room. (Roger Fouts, Next of Kin, p. 72)

There are lots of stories about empathy in chimpanzees and bonobos. Bonobos are apes that look a lot like chimpanzees. Bonobos and chimpanzees are our closest relatives. One story is about the two-year-old daughter of a bonobo named Linda, who whimpered at her mother with pouted lips, which meant that she wanted to nurse. But this infant had been in the San Diego Zoo’s nursery and was returned to the group long after Linda’s milk had dried up. The mother understood, though, and went to the fountain to suck her mouth full of water. She then sat in front of her daughter and puckered her lips so that the infant could drink from them. Linda repeated her trip to the fountain three times until her daughter was satisfied. (Frans de Waal, Our Inner Ape, p. 4) So far, she looks more evolved than the mountain man.

Frans de Waal tells another story of how a troop of monkeys treated one of their infants, who was born blind. The infant was born into a free-ranging population of rhesus monkeys released onto a Caribbean island. Apart from being sightless, the infant appeared perfectly normal: he played, for instance, as much as other infants his age. Compared to his peers, he often broke contact with his mother, thereby placing himself in situations that he could not recognize as dangerous. His mother responded by retrieving and restricting him more than other mothers did with their infants. In other studies of blind infant monkeys such infants were never left alone, and specific group members stayed with them whenever the group moved. (Frans de Waal, Good-Natured, pp. 51-52)

Another story shows the strength of the ape’s empathic response. One woman [Ladygina-Kohts] wrote about her young chimpanzee, Joni, saying that the best way to get him off the roof of her house (much better than any reward or threat of punishment) was by arousing his sympathy:

If I pretend to be crying, close my eyes and weep, Joni immediately stops his plays or any other activities, quickly runs over to me, all excited and shagged, from the most remote places in the house, such as the roof or the ceiling of his cage, from where I could not drive him down despite my persistent calls and entreaties. He hastily runs around me, as if looking for the offender; looking at my face, he tenderly takes my chin in his palm, lightly touches my face with his finger, as though trying to understand what is happening, and turns around, clenching his toes into firm fists. (Ladyginia-Kohts, 2002 [1935]: 121) (Frans de Waal, Primates and Philosophers)

Jane Goodall describes chimp behavior around the body of Tina, a chimp killed by a leopard. Some of the chimpanzees stay with Tina’s body for over six hours without interruption. None licks Tina’s wounds, as these apes sometimes do when a companion is injured but still alive. Some of the males do drag Tina’s body along the ground a short way, while other chimpanzees inspect, smell, or groom it. Brutus, the community’s most powerful or “alpha” male, who had been a close associate of Tina’s, remains at her side for five hours, with a break of only seven minutes. He chases away some chimpanzees who try to come near, allowing only a single infant to approach. This is Tarzan, Tina’s five-year-old brother. Recently, Tina and Tarzan’s mother died. Now, Tarzan grooms his dead sister and pulls gently on her hand quite a few times. (Barbara J. King, Evolving God, p. 10)

Brutus’s behavior toward Tina’s little brother indicates that he, Brutus, knew that Tina and Tarzan meant something special to each other. Taken together with other evidence to be reviewed in this book – this information suggests that Brutus was capable of feeling something like empathy. If so, Brutus was able to project himself into Tarzan’s situation and imagine what Tarzan might experience at the sight of his sister’s dead body. (Barbara J. King, Evolving God, p. 10)

Frans de Waal recorded an incident that occurred at the Wisconsin Primate Center. The adult males in a group of stumptailed monkeys became extremely protective of Wolf, an old, virtually blind female. Whenever the caretakers tried to move the monkeys from the indoor to the outdoor section of the enclosure, the adult males would stand guard at the door between the sections, sometimes holding it open, until Wolf had gone through. (from Good-Natured, p. 52)

Captive Diana monkeys have been observed engaging in behavior that strongly suggests empathy. Individuals were trained to insert a token into a slot to obtain food. The oldest female in the group failed to learn how to do this. Her mate watched her failed attempts, and on three occasions he approached her, picked up the tokens she had dropped, inserted them into the machine, and then allowed her to have the food. The male apparently evaluated the situation, helped his mate only after she failed, and seemed to understand that she wanted food, but could not get it on her own. He could have eaten the food, but he let his mate have it. There was no evidence that the male’s behavior benefited him in any way other than to help his mate. (Marc Bekoff, Minding Animals, p. 102)

Frans de Waal tells two stories of intuitive empathic communication. “In the course of her studies, Amy Parish developed close relations with zoo bonobos, and the females treated her almost as one of their own. On one occasion when the San Diego bonobos were given hearts of celery, which were claimed by the females, Parish gestured to have the apes look her way for a photograph. Louise, who had most of the food, probably thought that she was begging and ignored her for about ten minutes. Then she suddenly stood up, divided her celery, and threw half of it across the moat to this woman who so desperately wanted her attention.” (Frans de Waal, Bonobo: the Forgotten Ape, p. 157)

The female bonobos had bonded with Amy, but not with De Waal: apes make precise gender distinctions among people. Amy later visited these same bonobo friends after a maternity leave. She wanted to show the apes her infant son. The oldest female briefly glanced at the human baby, and then disappeared into an adjacent cage. Amy thought the female was upset, but she had only left to pick up her own newborn. She quickly returned to hold the ape baby up against the glass so that the two infants could look into each other’s eyes. (Frans de Waal, Our Inner Ape, p. 156)

Here were two females, both friends and proud mothers, showing off their babies. Emotionally, how different do we seem to be from these apes with whom we share over 98% of our DNA?

Roger Fouts is the man I mentioned last week, who has spent forty years teaching the chimpanzee Washoe to communicate through American Sign Language, and establishing a deep and respectful friendship with her. Once Roger had broken his arm and came with it in a sling, but not in a cast, to contain it until the bones knitted.

The chimpanzees must have seen the pain he was trying to hide, because instead of giving their usual, raucous, pant-hoot morning greeting, they all sat very still and intently watched him. Washoe signed HURT THERE, COME, and Roger approached and knelt down by the group. Washoe gently put her fingers through the wire separating them, and Roger moved closer. She touched him, then kissed his arm. Another chimp also signed HURT and touched him.

What is perhaps most amazing about their reaction was that Washoe’s ten-year-old son Loulis didn’t ask Roger for his usual CHASE game. In fact, he didn’t ask Roger to play his favorite game until several weeks later, when Roger’s arm was on the mend. That’s empathy. I”m betting they would also have understood the Mountain Woman’s love for that little crimson flower. (Deborah and Roger Fouts, “Our Emotional Kin,” in Mark Bekoff, The Smile of a Dolphin, p. 207)

Fouts says that he and his wife Debbi “had never hugged one another or been demonstrative in Washoe’s presence. This precaution went all the way back to the late 1960s when Washoe would sometimes misinterpret physical affection and attack the “offender.” Washoe had rarely been to our house since then. As far as we knew, Washoe thought Debbi and I were friends or coworkers. Out of habit, we kept up this act in Ellensburg (Washington) for the first year, but on one of six-year-old Hillary’s first visits to our lab, Washoe asked to hug her good-bye before she left. After they hugged I asked Washoe, WHO THAT?, pointing to Hillary. Without hesitating, Washoe signed ROGER DEBBI BABY. Nobody reads nonverbal behavior like a chimpanzee. And all those years we thought we had Washoe fooled!” (Roger Fouts, Next of Kin, p. 270)

Other animals also have a sense of “justice,” or at least revenge for behavior that crosses the line – a line we understand immediately when we hear these stories. A few weeks ago, I told you the story of the vengeful camel:

Edward Westermarck (1862″1939), retold the story of a vengeful camel that had been excessively beaten on multiple occasions by a fourteen-year-old boy for loitering or turning the wrong way. The camel passively took the punishment, but a few days later, finding itself unladen and alone on the road with the same conductor, ‘seized the unlucky boy’s head in its monstrous mouth, and lifting him up in the air flung him down again on the earth with the upper part of the skull completely torn off, and his brains scattered on the ground.” (Frans de Waal, The Ape and the Sushi Master, p. 338)

Here’s another story about an animal sensing behavioral boundaries, and teaching humans a lesson – a less violent lesson – about justice: Ola, a young false killer whale in an oceanarium, was accustomed to a staff of human divers working in his tank. One diver took to teasing Ola surreptitiously. Oceanarium management had their first inkling of this one day when Ola placed his snout on the man’s back, pushed him to the floor of the tank, and held him there. (He was wearing diving gear, so he did not drown.) Seeking to free the diver, trainers gave Ola commands, tried to startle him with loud noises, and offered fish, to no avail. After five minutes Ola released the diver. Subsequent investigation brought out the teasing. (Jeffrey M. Masson, When Elephants Weep, p. 174)

Feelings of all kinds cross over species lines – sometimes with results that can sound funny to members of one species (though probably not members of the other species).

Roger Fouts tells of the time when Washoe developed a head-over-heels crush on Josh (Roger’s son). “It seems that my son’s looks and sexuality had matured just enough that Washoe’s own teenage hormones now began raging at the mere sight of him. Whenever Josh entered the lab, Washoe literally threw herself at his feet and began shrieking like a desperate, lovelorn suitor. It was bad enough, Josh said, that he couldn’t get the girls at school to pay attention to him. To have a female chimpanzee throwing herself at him every day really added insult to injury. After a few months of Washoe’s entreaties, Josh decided to avoid the lab for a while.” (Roger Fouts, Next of Kin, p. 272)

Being able to read us also lets chimps and other apes trick us, which they love to do. When I visited the Yerkes National Primate Research Center at Emory University in Atlanta last November, I saw – from a safe distance – a female chimpanzee named Georgia, about whom I had read enough to want to stay away from her. She absolutely loved playing the same trick on visitors every chance she got. When she saw a new face, she would go fill her mouth with water, then saunter back over to the fence and act cute, luring visitors in so she could spit the water all over them, then jump up and down hooting her self-satisfied chimp laugh. And of course we can trick them too, though they don’t like it.

There is also a great story about a young man who worked with chimpanzees in the wild, in the Gombe area in Tanzania as part of Jane Goodall’s group. They weren’t allowed to interact with chimps. But an adolescent female chimp developed a small crush on this young man, and kept coming up to groom him. So he suddenly acted as if he saw something in the distance. He moved his head a little from one side to the other, like owls do. The adoring chimp stopped grooming and looked in the direction he was looking, then made a few steps in the direction of his glance and looked back at him. He kept up his act, and she walked off in that direction and disappeared.

A little later she returned, came straight up to him, and slapped his head, thereafter ignoring him for the rest of the day. He said the slap was probably a punishment after she realized that he had tricked her. I’d say, ask some teen-aged girls how they would feel if they got tricked like that by a boy they had a crush on, and whether they might feel like slapping him in the head then ignoring him. (by Frans X. Plooij, “A Slap in the Face” in Mark Bekoff, The Smile of a Dolphin, p. 88)

Roger Fouts said that it was Washoe who taught him that “human” is only an adjective that describes “being,” and that the essence of who we are is not our humanness but our beingness. There are human beings, chimpanzee beings, cat and dog beings, all kinds of beings. (Roger Fouts, Next of Kin, p. 325)

That’s what I think these animal stories invite us into: the larger view of life in which we human beings have the opportunity to know, and to protect, all the other kinds of beings around us.

In 1993, a book titled The Great Ape Project: Equality Beyond Humanity was published. This important book launched what has become known as the Great Ape Project (GAP). The major goals of the GAP were to admit great apes to the Community of Equals in which the following basic moral rights, enforceable by law, are granted:

(1) the right to life,

(2) the protection of individual liberty, and

(3) the prohibition of torture.

In the Great Ape Project, “equals” does not mean any specific actual likeness but equal moral consideration. (Marc Bekoff, Minding Animals, p. 142-143)

For fourteen years, The Great Ape Project has fought to guard the life and liberty of gorillas, orangutans, chimpanzees and bonobos, and to protect them from being tortured by members of our species. Think of that story from the first installment in this sermon series, about the gorilla who saved a three-year-old boy who fell into the gorilla enclosure at Chicago’s Brookfield Zoo in 1996, or today’s story of the hippo saving the antelope, the dogs saving the boy in Montana and some of the others. We respond to these stories because we also have these feelings and this capacity for empathy.

One of the great ironies in studying the natural world and the civilized world is that civilization and the artificial rules of our cultures are so often used to anesthetize the natural caring that animals feel for one another, and to make us more brutal.

One of our greatest dreams must be to find some place between the extremes of nature and civilization where it is possible for us to live without regret. (adapted from Barry Lopez, from Marc Bekoff, Minding Animals, p. 179)

There are more animal stories in this series, but You’re beginning to see, I”m sure, that these aren’t just animal stories. They are snapshots taken from our own family album: the family of all life on earth with the capacity to care for one another.

Marc Bekoff, like many of the people who spend their time with other animals, is a strong opponent of the brutal practices of our factory farms. While there are hundreds of disturbing stories, these three will give some of the sense:

About five million dairy cows are kept in confinement in the US. Female dairy cows are forced to have a calf every year. Their calves are removed from them immediately after birth so they do not drink their mother’s milk. This is extremely demanding on their bodies and on their psychological states. These dairy cows are literally milk machines, and they are not allowed to be mothers, to care for their young. (Marc Bekoff, Minding Animals, p. 151)

Up to about 25 percent of hens sustain broken bones when they are removed from their cages to be transported to a processing plant. Each hen now lays upwards of 300 eggs per year, as compared to 170 in 1925. (Marc Bekoff, Minding Animals, p. 152)

And Bekoff is clear that education makes a difference, and that we can make a difference, when he notes that the production and demand for formula-fed veal has dropped sharply since 1985 and has now stabilized at approximately eight hundred thousand calves per year, a decrease of over 400 percent. Public outrage over how veal calves are treated was the major reason for this decline. (Marc Bekoff, Minding Animals, p. 153)

One last poignant story, a parable of a voice crying in the wilderness:

For twelve years, a deep-sea whale wandered the north Pacific, tracked by scientists at Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute. Traveling all on its own, the whale roamed from the waters off California north to the Aleutians. Using deep-sea microphones borrowed from the U.S. Navy, the scientists eavesdropped as the whale repeatedly called out, trying to contact another of its kind, probably a female. As he matured, his voice deepened, just as an adolescent boy’s does. No response to the whale’s calls was ever heard.

What species of whale this was remains unknown, but the calls heard differed from calls of blue, fin, and humpback whales swimming in the same waters. It is a mystery why this whale received no response. One guess is that some sort of biological miswiring caused his calls to be transmitted on the wrong frequency. Another possibility is that he is a hybrid, the product of a mating between two whales of different species – and thus truly unique, with no others of his kind in the world.

Whatever the explanation, the result makes for a haunting image: a highly social and smart animal, swimming up and down the Pacific Coast for well over a decade, calling into the depths of the sea for a companion who never answered. “He must be very lonely,” said one marine scientist. (Barbara J. King, Evolving God, pp. 164-165. Her footnote says, “Kate Stafford quoted in Andrew C. Revkin, “A Song of Solitude,” New York Times, Dec. 26, 2004)

Some of these animal stories feel like the tale of the lonely whale, but with a twist. The whale, perhaps, really is one of its kind, doomed to a solitary life that may bring forth plaintive cries every day until it dies. We resonate with the story because we too need to have connections with the life around us, and often feel the need for more, and more significant, connections. But we are not alone. We share emotional responses with tens of thousands of species of other animals, if only we would be open to it. Our sin is one of ignorance: we are ignorant of the fact that we are not alone on the earth, that our cries need not be into empty space or onto projected deities created in large part to fill that need for connection (the root meaning of “religion” is “reconnection”).

Perhaps we are broadcasting on the wrong frequency. For centuries, we have judged ourselves – amazingly! – as the world’s only “reasoning” creatures, and to this day, continue to treat animals in experiments and on our factory farms as unthinking, unfeeling brutes.

In 1789, the philosopher Jeremy Bentham spoke to a world already badly misled by Descartes’ silly notion that we alone have a “ghost” in our “machine” placed there by God, enabling us – but no other animals – to reason and to feel. Bentham was concerned, as are many today, about the subject of our treatment of other animals in scientific experiments, and he said, “The question is not, Can they reason? Nor Can they talk? But, Can they suffer?”

Can they suffer? Monkeys dying of radiation poisoning, vivisected dogs, veal calves confined in two-foot wide pens and kept anemic for the duration of their short miserable lives (because whiter veal sells better), chimpanzees who have their teeth knocked out so dentistry students can practice on them – these, and thousands more like them: can they suffer? Could our customary indifference to the suffering of these other animals be related to our national indifference to Iraqi citizens, to the poor and desperate of other countries and the poor and desperate of our own country? Could this learned callousness be crippling our own souls, and making us feel more alone and isolated from the rest of Life’s family than we need to be? If so, how do we differ from the Mountain Man that DuBose Heyward brought to imaginative life over eighty years ago? Is that comfortable? If not, might we expect more of this species that has named itself “the Wise”? What do you think? What do you feel? What do we do?

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This version, like other online versions of this series of animal stories, has been expanded (in this case, by about 3,000 words) from the version delivered as a sermon. Many addition stories have been added back to this version, which has about 6,300 words.