Dar nacimiento a lo sagrado

(Traducción al español, Francisco Javier Lagunes Gaitán)

APERTURA

Este es uno de los dos periodos vacacionales religiosos oficiales del año, cuando mucha gente se despierta y debe tratar de recordar, otra vez, cómo encontrar una iglesia. Ambos periodos vacacionales, Navidad y la Pascua (domingo de resurrección), son casi festivales seculares. La Pascua es más rápidamente identificada con los conejitos de Pascua, los huevos coloridos y los conejos de chocolate que con cualquier mensaje religioso. Y como esas golosinas, las súper anunciadas vacaciones piden a gritos dulzura y nimiedades, una tarjeta de felicitación de Hallmark, nada demasiado pesado, tan solo un bombón de Pascua antes del almuerzo.

Ya que esta también es una iglesia, hemos prometido buscar aquella clase de verdad de dos filos que es capaz, tanto de confortar a los afligidos, como afligir a los cómodos.

Así que nos reunimos para ver cuán fieles podemos ser a nuestro llamado religioso, y a los complejos y ambiguos símbolos de la Pascua. Es bueno estar juntos otra vez, porque?

INVOCACIÓN

Es un Tiempo Sagrado, este
Y un Espacio Sagrado, este
Un lugar para preguntas más profundas que las respuestas,
Una vulnerabilidad más poderosa que la fuerza,
Y una paz que sobrepasa todo entendimiento,
Es un Tiempo Sagrado, este.
Iniciémoslo juntos en una canción.

CENTRAMIENTO

Ofrezcamos una plegaria de Pascua.

Dios de nuestros anhelos ocultos, encuéntranos donde hemos muerto y restáuranos. Corazón del universo, sintamos de nuevo tu pulso dentro de nosotros. Sintámonos conectados otra vez con otros, con nosotros mismos, con nuestros propios corazones y almas. Espíritu de la vida, encuentra a nuestros espíritus e insufla vida dentro de ellos. Algo en nosotros, en nuestras vidas, en nuestro mundo, murió este año. Ayúdanos a traer el milagro de la resurrección aquí, ahora. Espíritu de la vida, Dios de nuestras almas interiores, corazón del universo, escucha nuestras plegarias, tócanos en aquellos lugares en los que la vida se ha ido, para que vivamos de nuevo. Y que seamos tus ojos, tus oídos, y tus manos para alcanzar los sufrimientos de otros. Que seamos agentes de compasión y gracia en este mundo, frecuentemente demasiado severo y demasiado solitario. Ofrecemos esta plegaria con la esperanza de que incluso aquí, incluso ahora, el milagro de la resurrección pueda encontrarnos.

Amén.

SERMÓN

Por todo este mundo el día de hoy, unos mil millones de cristianos volverán a contar la misma historia, de un hijo de Dios que fue crucificado y resucitó y quien, si creemos en el relato, puede ser nuestro salvador personal.

Cualquiera que hubiera vivido en el primer siglo habría conocido una buena cantidad de historias similares sobre dioses que murieron y luego resucitaron. Conocerían la historia de Dionisio, nacido de una virgen y del gran dios celeste Zeus, cuyos seguidores se reunían anualmente para comer carne y beber sangre, que simbolizaban la carne y sangre del dios muerto y creían que les impartían su espíritu. Conocían el relato egipcio de Isis y Osiris, en el que Osiris fue asesinado, resucitó mucho después, se apareó con Isis, quien dio nacimiento al bebé Horus. Todo el mundo conocía la imagen de Isis sosteniendo al bebé Horus: fue el modelo para las imágenes cristianas de la virgen María sosteniendo al bebé Jesús. Y la gente conocía las historias de otros dioses muertos y resucitados, incluyendo a Tamuz o Adonis, y Atis.

Todas estas historias pertenecían a un género literario nacido de la antigua visión científica del mundo de hace 2000 años, en la que la bienaventuranza estaba justo arriba sobre el cielo, el infierno justo bajo la tierra, y todo el universo era un asunto local. En semejante lugarcito, los dioses podían rutinariamente tener deportivos intercambios con las hembras humanas, y los cuerpos podrían bien regresar a la vida, o flotar hacia arriba del cielo para vivir por siempre.

De esta manera, por todo el mundo mediterráneo de hace dos mil años la gente también se reunió anualmente para volver a contar estos antiguos relatos.

Pero por todo el mundo actual ?si bien en cantidades mucho menores? hay estudiosos bíblicos y religiosos que saben que éste era un mito. El mito no tenía nada que ver con el hombre Jesús, quien sin duda quedaría horrorizado por un relato que lo transformó en la figura de un salvador que habría enseñado que el reino de Dios sería una cosa sobrenatural que supuestamente él traería a los fieles.

Así que hay una clase particular de tensión implicada al trabajar con símbolos y mitos antiguos del tipo de los relatos de Pascua. Esto significa que todo aquel que predique sobre estos mitos y símbolos el día de hoy debe decidir cómo manejarlos ?cuán honestamente, cuán profundamente, cuán cuestionadoramente? además de cómo y cuánto respetarán a su audiencia. Esta es la clase de tensión que involucra predicar sobre las vacaciones populares empapadas en siglos de mito que popularmente resulta demasiado superficial para ser religioso.

El tratamiento normal que se da a estos problemas consiste en ignorar el relato ultramundano y convertir palabras tales como “resurrección” en metáforas generales. Si están entre las diecisiete personas en Austin que leen las páginas de religión del periódico dominical, habrán visto que eso fue lo que hicieron los clérigos que escribieron ayer. Bob Lively dio a “resurrección” el significado de “amor”, y dondequiera que vio al amor florecer se regocijó en el milagro de la “resurrección”. Y el obispo Greg Aymond trató el asunto con una poca más de profundidad al hacer equivaler la “resurrección” a una renovación de la esperanza. Es también lo que yo hice en la plegaria de centramiento de esta mañana. Así que no me parece que sea algo inusitado. Pienso que es una pequeña parte de lo que necesitamos hacer con esta sobresaturación de símbolos.

Pero no es suficiente. Esto reduce el mensaje de la religión a la blandura de una tarjeta de felicitación de Hallmark. Y tiene el imperialismo arrogante del que los mejores pensadores cristianos han tratado de desprenderse ?al reclamar esta experiencia humana común para el vocabulario cristiano.

¡Vaya por Dios!: en el hinduismo llegaron al mismo punto de encontrar una reconexión donde daban por perdida la posibilidad de cualquier conexión, y no necesitan la noción cristiana de “resurrección” para lograrlo. Ellos lo entendieron, dentro de la integridad orgánica del hinduismo, como que la realización de su atman ?de su alma individual? es desde luego una parte integral de Brahman ?el poder universal sustentador y creativo.

Los budistas pueden llegar a la misma clase de paz y entenderlo así de simple como un “despertar” de las ilusiones que los habían hecho más miserables hasta entonces. Y los naturalistas pueden expresar la misma experiencia de manera igualmente apropiada, aunque tal vez con menos poesía. “Siento mayor conexión con el mundo”, podrían decir. “Me sentí descolocado y desorientado, fuera de lugar, pero ahora me siento como una parte legítima de la totalidad gloriosa del mundo alrededor de mí, y me siento menos ansioso, más pleno. La vida es mejor ahora”. Así que objeto ambos tratamientos, tanto el oportunista superficial, como el de la arrogancia teológica de pretender que la “resurrección” es un concepto necesario, en vez de uno meramente cristiano.

Hay otro camino para cruzar este pantano simbólico, igual de antiguo. Exige más de nosotros, y se deshace de la capa de azúcar tradicional en que las vacaciones populares están inmersas. Pero pienso que nos podría llevar a una reflexión más seria y podría impartirnos, a nosotros y a nuestro tema, más orgullo. Se trata de hacer la distinción entre la religión de Jesús y la religión sobre Jesús. Los estudiosos se han percatado de esta distinción por mucho tiempo, pero usualmente la esconden tras algunas palabras en clave para iniciados:

  • Algunos hablan del “Jesús de la historia” contra el “Cristo de la fe”;
  • Otros hablan de “Jesús” contra “el Cristo”;
  • O del “Jesús pre-Pascua” y el “Jesús post-Pascua”.

Todas estas clases de palabras en clave se refieren al hecho de que las religiones, los mensajes del Jesús de la historia fueron salvajemente diferentes de los mensajes atribuidos al “Jesús Cristo” de la fe tradicional. Pero como es embarazoso decirlo, tanto los maestros como los predicadores religiosos han colaborado en una conspiración de silencio por muchos siglos para mantener estas distinciones tan dañinas (o provocadoras de pensamientos) lejos de tus tiernos oídos.

Ustedes saben más de la religión sobre Jesús, que es conocida sólo como cristianismo. Ofrece enseñanzas de un Jesús sobrenatural que de alguna manera fue el hijo de Dios, quien realizó sorprendentes milagros, fue asesinado, luego “se levantó” de entre los muertos, según la enigmática frase de los autores del Nuevo Testamento. La mayoría de los estudiosos bíblicos que conozco tienen claro que ningún escritor del primer siglo quiso dar a entender literalmente la resurrección de un cadáver. La interpretación generalizada sobre esta cuestión es que decir que Dios “levantó” a Jesús significa que lo que Jesús enseñó sobre el reino de Dios era correcto.

Comparto esta convicción. No fue original, pero sí profunda, tanto entonces, como ahora. Así que esta Pascua quiero traerles el mensaje de Jesús para que luego decidan por ustedes qué clase de Pascua les enorgullecería intentar y celebrar. En otras palabras, mi táctica aquí es tomar las tensiones intrínsecas a los símbolos de la Pascua y pasárselas, de manera que puedan sentir la tensión, y puedan decidir qué estilo y profundidad de “Pascua” quieren celebrar. No se preocupen: el sufrimiento, según he escuchado, puede ser terapéutico.

La religión de Jesús

La religión de Jesús fue tan diferente de las enseñanzas tradicionales del cristianismo como puedas imaginarte. Pero para entenderla, tienes que entender la clase de mundo en el que nació Jesús.

Irónicamente, la Galilea del primer siglo tenía mucho en común con nuestra sociedad actual ?más de lo que tenía en común con los EUA de hace cincuenta años. Tres siglos de invasiones, por los ejércitos de Alejandro el Magno y las subsiguientes legiones romanas, habían destruido todos los centros de culto y templos que habían dado estabilidad a una buena variedad de comunidades étnicas y religiosas. Para el primer siglo no había un centro compartido, ni una identidad colectiva. Galilea estaba llena de gente que no constituía “un pueblo”.

Las leyes sociales o las restricciones alimenticias de un grupo ?los judíos, por ejemplo? resultaban extrañas o nada atractivas para otros grupos cercanos ?los griegos, por ejemplo. Incluso el simple trato social era más difícil de lo que nos resulta a nosotros hoy. Una familia griega invita a la tuya para el equivalente del primer siglo de una barbacoa. Dado que ustedes son importantes para ellos, invierten dinero extra para comprar algo de mariscos y carne de cerdo de primera calidad. Pero como ustedes son judíos, sus leyes alimenticias les prohíben comer mariscos y carne de cerdo.

En docenas de maneras, Galilea era una tierra del caos, donde las perspectivas de llegar a formar “un pueblo” a partir de este desorden disparatado estaban en alguna parte entre escasas y nada.

En tiempos así de caóticos, parece haber dos clases de soluciones propuestas, así se propusieron aquí. La primera fue la más extrema, propuesta por Juan el Bautista. Juan pensó que la situación era imposible ya de arreglar. Ni siquiera Dios podría resolverlo, pensó él. Así que la única respuesta era que Dios iba a destruir todo el mundo, a aniquilar a todos en él ?bueno, excepto a aquellos que creyeran en lo mismo que Juan el bautista creía, desde luego? y así empezar de nuevo.

Juan contaba con una creciente y ferviente multitud que se reuniría al este del Jordán para esperar el signo del fin del mundo, cuando se suponía que actuarían contra los romanos.

Si conoces algo sobre los romanos, sabrás que esta no era una táctica muy inteligente. Ellos fueron muy eficientes, los romanos. No hubieran gastado 60 mil millones de dólares para bombardear mil millas cuadradas de montañas con la esperanza de matar a 7 u 8 civiles. En vez de esto, ellos capturaban a la cabeza del movimiento y lo mataban.

Pero el asesinato de Juan el Bautista fue devastador para sus seguidores. Significó que el mensaje de Juan, el entendimiento que Juan tenía sobre lo que era “el reino de Dios”, era erróneo. De otro modo, Dios no hubiera permitido que Juan muriera así. Tal era el pensamiento sobrenatural, o supersticioso, del primer siglo.

Juan el bautista fue mentor y maestro de Jesús. Jesús fue uno de sus seguidores. Y no mucho después del asesinato de Juan, Jesús aparece por primera vez como líder carismático, muchos de los anteriores seguidores de Juan lo siguieron.

Pero el mensaje de Jesús era muy, muy diferente. La solución de Juan había sido esperar que un ente sobrenatural arreglara el mundo por medio de destruirlo. La noción de Jesús del Reino de Dios no implicaba una acción por parte de una entidad sobrenatural. Jesús pensó que debíamos recuperar el mundo fragmentado arreglándolo.

Lo que definía todas las líneas de enemistad entre los diferentes grupos eran las reglas de identidad de cada grupo ?reglas que los hacían especiales sólo a través de convertir a los otros en inapropiados. Jesús enseñó que la gente debía desobedecer y subvertir las identidades excluyentes. Él y sus seguidores mendigaban sus alimentos diarios ?un poco de este mendigar se hizo famoso como parte del “Padre Nuestro”. “Come lo que se pone ante ti”, instruyó a sus seguidores judíos. ¡Si los griegos te ofrecen marisco o cerdo, cómelo! ¡No permitas que ninguna autodefinición, inclusive tu identidad como judío, te separe de otros!

Solo una identidad era permisible en la noción de Jesús del Reino de Dios: se nos ordenó vernos mutuamente solamente como hermanos y hermanas, como hijos de Dios. Una y otra vez él frustró a sus seguidores más supersticiosos, quienes todavía esperaban que continuara las enseñanzas de Juan el Bautista. No: el Reino de Dios no es algo que venga a la sazón. No puedes señalarlo y decir “aquí y allí”. Ya está aquí, dentro y entre ustedes. O como lo dijo él en el Evangelio de Tomás, “el reino de Dios se extiende sobre la tierra y los humanos no lo ven“. Está todo aquí ?al menos potencialmente? y nosotros no tuvimos, o no tenemos, ojos para verlo u oídos para escucharlo. ¡Cuántas veces les dijo a sus discípulos que no lo habían entendido!

No hay magia aquí, ni la intervención de nadie. Dios ya hizo su parte. La pelota está en nuestra cancha, y Dios espera que actuemos para traer el Reino de Dios a la tierra. Y lo hacemos simplemente al cambiar nuestros corazones y nuestras acciones hacia los otros. Punto. Amén. Fin del sermón, fin de la religión. Jesús nunca prometió el cielo, ni amenazó con el infierno. Él no habló de una vida después de la vida, sólo de ésta. Y él no habría dejado que la gente se quedara con la creencia de que podían esperar pasivamente que una deidad sobrenatural arreglara las cosas.

La negación de Jesús

Todos los estudiantes de las escrituras cristianas conocen esta frase que se refiere a su apóstol Pedro, quien pareció categóricamente incapaz de entender el mensaje de Jesús. Fue a Pedro, recordemos, a quien Jesús dirigió su frase más furiosa: “Quítate de mi vista, Satanás” (Mc 8:33), Pedro, como la mayoría de (o tal vez todos) los discípulos de Jesús, quería escucharlo predicar el mensaje claro y definido del fin-del-mundo de Juan el Bautista, y no quería escuchar que este emocionante reino sobrenatural de sus expectativas sería reemplazado por una clase muy terrenal de mundo en el que ellos simplemente debían convertirse en agentes activos del amor, en vez de en profetas poseedores de superioridad moral para predicar la destrucción masiva a la que solo ellos sobrevivirían.

El estudioso católico Thomas Sheehan lo ha expresado de una manera acertadamente crítica cuando dice que “Pedro continuó su negación de Jesús con la creación del cristianismo”. El cristianismo comenzó como una religión de reversión hacia la fórmula pagana de la salvación por una deidad sobrenatural que demandaba de nosotros sólo que creyéramos el relato y siguiéramos a los líderes. Esta era precisamente la imagen contra la cual Jesús predicó en su ministerio.

Pablo, el inventor del cristianismo

La mayoría de los estudiosos del Nuevo Testamento que conozco están de acuerdo en que la versión del cristianismo que terminó siendo adoptada como normativa fue desarrollada, en su forma y mensaje por Pablo. Pablo nunca conoció a Jesús, y parece no haber conocido las enseñanzas ?ya que nunca menciona ninguna? sobre la noción central de Jesús del Reino de Dios. En cambio, Pablo enseñó, más a la manera en que Juan el bautista lo hizo, que el fin del mundo estaba por llegar y que Jesús el Cristo sería la salvación de los fieles de una manera sobrenatural.

Siento, con muchos otros, que Pablo reemplazó la mundana religión de responsabilidad de Jesús, con una religión simplista sobrenatural moldeada a partir de los cultos paganos en boga, especialmente los cultos griegos del misterio ?y más particularmente del culto del mitraísmo. Y siento que la crucifixión real de Jesús no vino de los romanos, sino de Pedro, Pablo y de quienes establecieron lo que llegó a ser el cristianismo normativo.

Muchos otros se han percatado de esto, y muchos otros se han sentido furiosos y traicionados sobre esto. Uno de ellos fue el novelista griego Kazantsakis. Puede que conozcan, ya sea su libro, o la película basada en el libro de La Última Tentación de Cristo. En este libro, el autor crea una iracunda y maravillosa escena imaginaria entre Jesús y Pablo. Cuando Jesús se encuentra al inventor del cristianismo, Jesús le dice, ¡Tú! Así que tú eres el que ha inventado todas esas cosas sobre mí. ¡No son ciertas! La respuesta de Pablo es básicamente: ¡Oh! ¿Así que tú eres Jesús? Gusto en conocerte, ¿A quién le importa? Le di a la gente la religión que ellos necesitaban, y ella no te necesita.

Conozco a estudiosos paulinos que piensan que el retrato de Kazantzakis sobre Pablo es tan preciso como es posible. Incluso los defensores de Pablo (y tiene muchos) usualmente reconocen su megalomanía.

Hay incluso reacciones más extremas contra la traición de la religión de Jesús por la religión sobre Jesús. Tal vez la más famosa, y mi favorita, proviene de un libro de Dostoievski, Los hermanos Karamazov, en el capítulo titulado “El gran inquisidor” aparece Jesús en el tiempo de la inquisición, y representa esta sorprendente ?y de nuevo, iracunda? escena entre Jesús y el Gran Inquisidor, en la que Jesús no dice nada. Pienso que Dostoievski entendió perfectamente la religión de Jesús aquí, y pienso que su ira hacia la religión inventada sobre Jesús atina bastante cerca del blanco también:

“Les prometiste el pan celestial, pero ¿cómo puede este pan competir con el pan terrenal para hacer frente a la débil, ingrata, y permanentemente corrupta especie humana? Y aún cuando cientos de miles de hombres te sigan por el amor del pan celestial, ¿Qué pasará con los millones que son demasiado débiles para privarse de su pan terrenal? ¿O es que sólo los miles que son fuertes y poderosos los gratos a tu corazón, mientras que millones de otros, los débiles, que también te aman, débiles como son y que son tan numerosos como los granos de arena en la playa, servirán como objetos para los fuertes y poderosos? ¡Pero también nos preocupan los pobres! ? al convertirnos en sus amos, hemos aceptado la carga de libertad que ellos estaban demasiado atemorizados para enfrentar. ? Les diremos, sin embargo, que somos leales a ti y que reinamos sobre ellos en tu nombre. Les mentimos, dado que no intentamos permitir tu regreso. Hay tres fuerzas, solamente tres, en esta tierra que pueden derrotar y capturar de una vez por todas la conciencia de estas débiles e indisciplinadas criaturas para darles felicidad. Estas fuerzas son el milagro, el misterio y la autoridad. Pero rechazaste la primera, la segunda y la tercera de estas fuerzas y presentaste tu rechazo como un ejemplo a los hombres, ? Actuaste orgullosa y magnificentemente; desde luego, tú actuaste como Dios, pero ¿puedes esperar tanto de los hombres, de esta débil, indisciplinada e infeliz tribu, que ciertamente no son dioses? ? mañana verás rebaños obedientes, como el primer signo de mi, apresúrate a amontonar carbones en el fuego bajo de la hoguera en la que te quemaré, porque, al venir aquí, has vuelto más difícil nuestra tarea. Si alguien ha merecido alguna vez nuestro fuego, eres tú, y para mañana te habré quemado”.

El Gran Inquisidor de Dostoievski y el Pablo de Kazantsakis son importantes para leerlos y enseñarlos, porque se cuentan entre las voces educadas que no han sido parte de la conspiración del silencio. Presentan el contraste entre las enseñanzas difíciles del hombre Jesús ?la religión de Jesús?, por un lado, y las inconmensurablemente más fáciles enseñanzas del cristianismo ?la religión sobre Jesús, por el otro. Y su ira no proviene de una falta de sensibilidad religiosa, sino más bien de la abundancia de ésta. Están furiosos porque creen, como yo, que una religión menor (el cristianismo) desplazó a una religión grandiosa (la religión de Jesús). Esto nunca será repetido con excesiva frecuencia ni lo suficientemente al grano: En oposición directa a las enseñanzas de Jesús, el mito del “Cristo” condujo a la gente a un retroceso hacia la creencia pagana y primitiva en la salvación a través de la expiación vicaria por un dios salvador sobrenatural que rescataría a la gente y la exoneraría, y que tan solo exigiría a cambio su obediencia irreflexiva. Las enseñanzas de Jesús ?hasta el punto en que fueron alguna vez entendidas? resultaron demasiado difíciles. Debía haber una ruta más simple y menos dolorosa si es que el cristianismo habría de ser la fe universal que visualizaban algunos partidarios fanáticos como Pablo ?aunque, en el proceso, traicionaron todo aquello que Jesús consideró sagrado.

En el tiempo de Jesús resultaba poco comedido exigir tanto de la gente ?de gente que parece preferir el milagro, el misterio y la autoridad antes que hacerse cargo de su vida y sus circunstancias, y asumir su responsabilidad. Él fue rudo. Sus propios discípulos no lo entendieron, y Pedro, como es ampliamente conocido, no quería escuchar esto. Si la gente quiere milagro, misterio y autoridad, Jesús ciertamente no les ofreció mucho.

Él dijo que Dios hizo su parte y que ahora era su turno de actuar.

El cristianismo ?la religión sobre Jesús? es en última instancia demasiado fácil. No es digna y merecedora de alguien llamado un hijo de Dios. No es digna de aquellos que podrían considerarse gente de Dios. No es un camino espiritual que cualquier Dios que valga la pena hubiera señalado con urgencia. Fue la creación de Pablo y otros hombres, pero no de un profeta o sabio de primer orden.

Pero sí que hubo un profeta y sabio de primerísimo rango implicado en esta historia. Era un judío marginal y simple de Galilea que hemos aprendido a llamar Jesús. Él enseñó un camino estrecho, no uno amplio, y predicó un Reino de Dios que nosotros, y solo nosotros, podríamos hacer presente en la tierra tan pronto, o tan tarde, como encontremos el valor de actuar como hijos de Dios, de ver a todos los demás como hijos de Dios, y de actuar en consecuencia. Puede suceder en cualquier momento, aquí y ahora. Puede suceder en Israel, si las dos partes cambian el centro de su fe. Puede suceder en Irlanda del Norte, si ambas partes dejan de definirse a sí mismas como protestantes y católicos, y en cambio se definen sólo como hermanos y hermanas. Puede suceder en Austin, puede suceder en tu vecindario, y en tu vida.

Pero solamente si crees. No, no tienes que creer en nada sobrenatural, no tienes que creer en nada a lo que no encuentres un sentido. Tú tienes que creer que la única identidad de la que la gente adulta religiosa debería estar orgullosa es la identidad de verse a sí mismos y a los otros como hermanos y hermanas, e hijos de un Dios de amor. Sólo eso.

Hoy, hemos traducido la promesa y el mandamiento en flores, flores para que se lleven a casa y reflexionen sobre ellas*. Cositas pequeñas y frágiles de gran belleza y vulnerabilidad, tan frágiles como la paz, tan frágiles como el amor. Llévenselas a casa. Las flores están en sus manos. Así también está la esperanza de tu vida, y el futuro del mundo. Aquellas palabras difícilmente parecen adecuadas, sin embargo. Algo más poético y poderoso se requiere. Jesús lo llamó el Reino de Dios. Esto es mucho mejor, y más cercano.

La esperanza del Reino de Dios está en nuestras manos, como siempre ha estado. El sueño ha yacido sin roturar por mucho tiempo. Muchos dirían que ha muerto. Es la Pascua, y el sueño está en nuestras manos. Pensemos en resucitarlo.

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*Esta iglesia celebra una Comunión Floral el domingo de Pascua. Se pide a la gente que traigan una flor, que se deposita en canastas. Al final del servicio, se llevan al frente de la iglesia las canastas con flores y la gente toma una para llevarla consigo a su casa.

UNITARIOS UNIVERSALISTAS DE MÉXICO

Promovemos y vivimos la diversidad de creencias. Estamos para ayudarte a avanzar en tu propio camino espiritual, no para imponerte un camino escogido de antemano.

El movimiento religioso liberal y la institución Unitaria Universalista consiste en una gran variedad de recursos espirituales. Celebramos la sabiduría que contienen todas las religiones del mundo, la razón, la ciencia, el arte y nuestra propia intuición personal.

Reconocemos la necesidad de una comunidad, nos reunimos para aprender juntos y el reto de nuestra diversidad nos impulsa mutuamente en nuestros caminos espirituales.

Respetamos incondicional e integralmente la dignidad humana y el valor inherente a cada persona, consideramos que solamente nuestra diversidad nos hace capaces de entender plenamente lo que significa ser humanos.

Este es un grupo dedicado a explorar el estilo religioso liberal en México. Aquí el inicio, la esperanza, el sueño compartido: aceptación, igualdad, fraternidad. Aquí optamos, de manera libre, por ser cómplices en una búsqueda espiritual individual. Compañeros de asombro, concientes todos de ser parte de la trama interdependiente de todo lo que existe.

Giving Birth to the Sacred

© Davidson Loehr

31 March 2002

First UU Church of Austin

4700 Grover Ave., Austin, TX 78756

www.austinuu.org

Listen to the sermon by clicking the play button.

OPENING:

It’s one of the two official religious holidays of the year, when many people wake up and must try to remember, again, how to find the church. These two holidays, Christmas and Easter, are almost secular festivals. Easter is more quickly identified with Easter Bunnies, colored eggs and chocolate rabbits than with any religious message. And like these candies, the super-hyped holidays cry out for sweetness and fluff, a Hallmark greeting card, nothing too heavy, just an Easter bon-bon before lunch.

Yet this is also a church, where we promise to seek that double-edged kind of truth which can both comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable.

So we gather to see how faithful we can be to our religious calling, and to the complex and ambiguous symbols of Easter. It is good to be together again, for it is a sacred time, this and a sacred place, this: a place for questions more profound than answers vulnerability more powerful than strength and a peace that can pass all understanding. It is a sacred time, this: let us begin it together in song.

CENTERING:

Let us offer an Easter prayer.

God of our hidden yearnings, find us where we have died and restore us. Heart of the universe, let us again feel your pulse within us. Let us feel connected again to others, to ourselves, to our own hearts and souls. Spirit of life, find our spirits and breathe life into them. Something in us, in our lives, in our world, died this year. Help us bring the miracle of resurrection here, now. Spirit of life, God of our inner souls, heart of the universe, hear our prayers, touch us in those places where life has left us, and let us live again. And let us be your eyes, your ears, and your hands to reach out to the sufferings of others. Let us be agents of compassion and grace in this often too-harsh and too-lonely world. We offer this prayer in the hope that even here, even now, the miracle of resurrection can find us. Amen.

SERMON:

All over this world today, about a billion Christians will be retelling the same story, of a son of God who was crucified and resurrected and who, if we believe in the story, can be our own personal savior.

Anyone living in the first century would have known a whole host of similar stories about gods who died and were resurrected. They knew the stories of Dionysus, born of a virgin and the great sky-god Zeus, whose followers gathered annually to eat flesh and drink blood symbolizing the flesh and blood of the dead god, and believed to impart his spirit to them. They knew the Egyptian story of Isis and Osiris, where Osiris was killed, resurrected much later, mated with Isis, who gave birth to the baby Horus. Everyone knew the image of Isis holding the baby Horus: it was the model for the Christian pictures of the virgin Mary holding the baby Jesus. And the people knew the stories of other dead and resurrected gods, including Tammuz, Adonis, and Attis.

All these stories belonged to a mythic genre born into the ancient scientific worldview of 2000 years ago, where heaven was just up above the sky, hell was just below the earth, and the whole universe was a local affair. In such a small place, the gods could routinely sport with human females, and bodies might well come back to life or float up above the sky to live forever.

So all over the Mediterranean world of two thousand years ago people also gathered annually to retell these ancient stories.

But all over the world today – though in much smaller numbers – there are religious and biblical scholars who know that this was a myth. The myth had nothing to do with the man Jesus, who would undoubtedly have been appalled by a story that turned him into a savior figure and taught that the kingdom of God was a supernatural thing that he was supposed to bring to the faithful.

So there is this particular kind of tension involved in working with the ancient symbols and myths of Easter-type stories. This means that everyone who preaches on these myths and symbols today has to decide how to play them – how honest, how deep, how confrontive – as well as how and how much they will respect their audience. That’s the tension involved in preaching on popular religious holidays soaked in centuries of myth that’s popularly taken too shallow to be religious.

The normal spin put on these problems is to ignore the otherworldly story and convert words like “resurrection” into generic metaphors. If you are one of the seventeen people in Austin who read the religion pages of Saturday’s paper, you saw that’s what the clergy writing yesterday did. Bob Lively took “resurrection” to mean “love,” and everywhere he saw love flourish he rejoiced in the miracle of “resurrection.” And Bishop Greg Aymond took it a little deeper by equating “resurrection” with a renewal of hope. This is also what I did in this morning’s Centering prayer. So I don’t think it’s out of bounds. I think it’s a small part of what we need to do with these overloaded symbols.

But it isn’t enough. It reduces the message of religion to the blandness of a Hallmark greeting card. And it has that arrogant imperialism that the better Christian thinkers have been trying to grow away from – by claiming this common human experience for the Christian vocabulary.

Goodness: Hindus come to the same point of finding a reconnection where they had despaired of finding any connection, and don’t need the Christian notion of “resurrection” to deal with it. They understand it, within the organic integrity of Hinduism, as a realization that their atman – their individual soul – is indeed an integral part of Brahman – the universal creative and sustaining power.

Buddhists can come to the same kind of peace and understand it simply as “waking up” from the illusions that had until then made them more miserable. And naturalists can express the same experience just as adequately, though with perhaps less poetry. “I feel more connected to the world,” they might say. “I felt dislocated and disoriented, out of place, but now I feel myself to be a rightful part of the whole glorious world around me, and I feel less anxious, more full. Life is better now.” So I object both to the superficial pandering and the theological arrogance of pretending that “resurrection” is a necessary concept rather than merely a Christian concept.

There is another path through this symbolic swamp, just as ancient. It demands more of us, and takes off the traditional sugar coating in which popular holidays are dipped. But I think it takes us all more seriously and might do both us and the subject more proud. It is making the distinction between the religion of Jesus and the religion about Jesus. Scholars have been aware of this distinction for a long time, but they usually hide it in code words:

Some speak of the “Jesus of history” versus the “Christ of faith”; Others talk about “Jesus” versus “the Christ”; Or the “pre-Easter Jesus” and the “post-Easter Jesus” All of these sets of code words refer to the fact that the religions, the messages of the Jesus of history was wildly different from the message assigned to the “Jesus Christ” of traditional faith. But it’s rude to say this, so both teachers and preachers in religion have collaborated in a conspiracy of silence for many centuries to keep such damaging (or thought-provoking) distinctions away from your tender ears.

You know more about the religion about Jesus, which is just known as Christianity. It teaches about a supernatural Jesus who was somehow the son of God, who performed amazing miracles, was killed, then “raised up” from the dead, in the intriguing phrase of the New Testament writers. Most biblical scholars I know are clear that no first-century writer thought that meant the resuscitation of a corpse. The general take on it is that to say God “raised up” Jesus meant that what Jesus taught about the kingdom of God was correct.

I think it was too. It wasn’t original, but it was profound, both then and now. So this Easter, I want to bring Jesus’s message to you and then let you decide for yourselves what kind of an Easter you can be most proud to seek and to celebrate. In other words, my tactic here is to take the tensions inherent in the symbols of Easter and pass them on to you, so you can feel the tension, and you can decide what style and depth of “Easter” you want to celebrate. Don’t worry: suffering, I’ve heard, can be therapeutic.

The Religion of Jesus

The religion of Jesus was as different from the traditional teachings of Christianity as you can imagine. But to understand it, you have to understand the kind of world into which Jesus was born.

Ironically, first century Galilee had much in common with our own society today – more than it had in common with the America of fifty years ago. Three centuries of invasions, by the armies of Alexander the Great and later the Roman legions, had destroyed all the temple cult centers which had stabilized a fair variety of ethnic and religious communities. By the first century there was no shared center, no collective identity. Galilee was filled with people who were not “a people.”

The social or dietary laws of one group – Jews, for instance – were odd or unappealing to other groups nearby – Greeks, for instance. Even simple social intercourse was harder than it is for us today. A Greek family invites you over for the first century equivalent of a barbecue. Since you’re “company,” they spend extra money to buy some first-rate shellfish and pork to roast. But you’re Jews, and your dietary laws forbid you to eat shellfish or pork.

In dozens of ways, Galilee was a land of chaos, where the prospects of ever making “a people” out of this disparate mess were somewhere between slim and none.

In times this chaotic, there seem to be two kinds of solutions proposed, as they were proposed here. The first was the most extreme, proposed by John the Baptist. John thought the situation was too far gone for anyone to fix. Not even God could make it right, he thought. So the only answer was that God was going to destroy the whole world, annihilate everyone in it – well, except for those who believed as John the Baptist did, of course – and start over.

John had a growing and fervent crowd who would gather east of the Jordan to await the sign of the end of the world, when they were poised to act against the Romans.

If you know anything about the Romans, you know this is not s smart tactic. They were very efficient, the Romans. They wouldn’t spend sixty billion dollars to bomb a thousand square miles of mountains in the hope of killing seven or eight civilians. Instead, they just captured the head of the movement and killed him.

But the murder of John the Baptist was devastating to his followers. It means that John’s message, John’s understanding of what “the kingdom of God” was about, was wrong. Otherwise, God would not have let John die that way. That was the supernatural or superstitious thinking of the first century.

John the Baptist was Jesus’s mentor and teacher. Jesus was one of his followers. And not long after John’s murder, Jesus appears for the first time as a charismatic leader, with many of John’s former followers now following him.

But Jesus’s message was very, very different. John’s solution had been to wait for a supernatural agency to fix the world by destroying it. Jesus’s notion of the kingdom of God involved no action by a supernatural agency. Jesus taught that we must reclaim the fragmented world by fixing it.

What made all the lines of enmity between different groups were the rules of each group’s identity – rules that made them special only by making all others wrong. Jesus taught that people should disobey and subvert exclusive identities. He and his followers begged for their daily food – a bit of begging that became famous as part of “the Lord’s Prayer.” “Eat what is put before you,” he instructed his Jewish followers. If Greeks offer you shellfish or pork, eat it! Don’t let any self-definition, including your Jewish one, separate you from others.

Only one identity was to be allowed in Jesus’ notion of the kingdom of God: we were ordered to see one another merely as our brothers and sisters, as children of God. Again and again he frustrated his more superstitious followers, who still expected him to continue John’s teaching. No: the kingdom of God is not coming. You can’t point to it and say “here, there.” It is already here, within and among you. Or as he said in the Gospel of Thomas, “the kingdom of God is spread upon the earth and men don’t see it.” It’s all here – at least potentially – and we don’t or won’t have the eyes to see or the ears to hear it. How many times he told his disciples that they didn’t get it!

There is no magic here, and no supernatural agency. God has already done his part. The ball is in our court, and God is waiting for us to act to bring the kingdom of God to earth. And we do it simply by changing our hearts and our actions toward others. Period. Amen. End of sermon, end of religion. Jesus never promised heaven or threatened with hell. He didn’t talk of an afterlife, just of this one. And he would not let people get away with believing that they could wait passively for a supernatural deity to fix things.

The Denial of Jesus

All students of the Christian scriptures know this phrase refers to his apostle Peter, who seemed categorically incapable of understanding Jesus’ message. It was Peter, remember, to whom Jesus uttered his angriest phrase: Get the behind me, Satan!” Peter, like most (perhaps all) of Jesus’ disciples, wanted to hear him preach the end-of-the-world clean sweep message of John the Baptist, and did not want to hear that this exciting supernatural kingdom of their expectations was to be replaced by a very down-to-earth kind of world in which they simply had to become active agents of love rather than righteous prophets of a mass destruction which only they would survive.

Catholic scholar Thomas Sheehan has put it pointedly when he says that “Peter continued his denial of Jesus by creating Christianity.” Christianity began as a religion of reversion to the pagan formula for salvation by a supernatural deity who demanded of us only that we believe the story and follow the leaders. This was precisely the image Jesus had spent his ministry preaching against.

Paul, the Inventor of Christianity

Most of the New Testament scholars I know agree that the Christianity that came to be normative was given its shape and message by Paul. Paul never knew Jesus, seems not to have known his teachings – he never mentions any – of Jesus’ central notion of the kingdom of God. Instead, Paul taught, much as John the Baptist had, that the end of the world was coming and Jesus Christ would be the salvation of the faithful in a supernatural way.

I feel, with many others, that Paul replaced Jesus’ this-worldly religion of responsibility with a simplistic supernatural religion in the mold of pagan cults, especially Greek mystery cults – and most particularly the cult of Mediterranean Mithraism. And I feel that the real crucifixion of Jesus came not by the Romans, but by Peter, Paul and those who established what became normative Christianity.

Many others have seen this, and many others have felt betrayed and angry about it. One was the Greek novelist Kazantsakis. You may know either the book or movie of The Last Temptation of Christ by him. In this book he creates a wonderful, if angry, imaginary scene between Jesus and Paul. When Jesus meets the inventor of Christianity he says You! So you’re the one who has been making all these things up about me. They’re not true! And Paul’s response is basically Oh you’re Jesus? Nice to meet you, who cares? I gave people the religion they needed, and it doesn’t need you.

I know Pauline scholars who think Kazantsakis’ portrayal of Paul is about as accurate as it gets. Even Paul’s defenders (and he has many) usually acknowledge his megalomania.

There are even more extreme reactions against the betrayal of the religion of Jesus by the religion about Jesus. Perhaps the most famous, and my favorite, comes from Dostoevsky’s book The Brothers Karamazov, in the chapter entitled “The Grand Inquisitor.” He has Jesus come back during the Inquisition, and stages this amazing – and, again, angry – scene between Jesus and the Grand Inquisitor, in which Jesus says nothing. I think Dostoevsky has nailed the religion of Jesus perfectly here, and think his anger at the religion invented about Jesus is pretty close to the mark too:

“You promised them heavenly bread, but how can that bread compete against earthly bread in dealing with the weak, ungrateful, permanently corrupt human species? And even if hundreds or thousands of men follow you for the sake of heavenly bread, what will happen to the millions who are too weak to forego their earthly bread? Or is it only the thousands of the strong and mighty who are dear to your heart, while the millions of others, the weak ones, who love you too, weak as they are, and who are as numerous as the grains of sand on the beach, are to serve as material for the strong and mighty? But we are concerned with the weak too! – by becoming their masters, we have accepted the burden of freedom that they were too frightened to face.” We shall tell them, though, that we are loyal to you and that we rule over them in your name. We shall be lying, because we do not intend to allow you to come back. “There are three forces, only three, on this earth that can overcome and capture once and for all the conscience of these feeble, undisciplined creatures, so as to give them happiness. These forces are miracle, mystery, and authority. But you rejected the first, the second, and the third of these forces and set up your rejection as an example to men.” You acted proudly and magnificently; indeed, you acted like God, but can you expect as much of men, of that weak, undisciplined, and wretched tribe, who are certainly no gods?” “tomorrow you will see obedient herds, at the first sign from me, hurry to heap coals on the fire beneath the stake at which I shall have you burned, because, by coming here, you have made our task more difficult. For if anyone has ever deserved our fire, it is you, and I shall have you burned tomorrow.”

Dostoevsky’s “Grand Inquisitor” and Kazantsakis’ Paul are important to read and to teach, because they are among the educated voices that have not taken part in the conspiracy of silence. They present the contrast between the hard teachings of the man Jesus – the religion of Jesus – and the immeasurably easier teachings of Christianity – the religion about Jesus. And their anger doesn’t come from a lack of religious sensitivity, but more an abundance of it. They are angry because they believe, as I also do, that a lesser religion (Christianity) has displaced a greater religion (the religion of Jesus). It cannot be said too often or too bluntly: In direct opposition to the teachings of Jesus, the myth of the “Christ” led people back to the pagan and primitive belief in salvation through vicarious atonement by a supernatural savior-god who let people off the hook, demanding only unthinking obedience of them. Jesus’ teachings – to the extent that they were ever understood – were found to be too difficult. There must be a simpler and less painful route if Christianity were to be the universal faith visualized by such zealots as Paul – even if, in the process, it betrayed everything Jesus had considered sacred.

In Jesus’ time it was rude to demand so much of people – people who do seem to prefer miracle, mystery and authority to empowerment and responsibility. He was rude. His own disciples didn’t understand him, and Peter famously didn’t want to hear it. If people want miracle, mystery and authority, Jesus certainly didn’t offer them much.

He said God had done his part and it was their turn to act.

Christianity – the religion about Jesus – is finally too easy. It isn’t worthy of someone called a son of God. It isn’t worthy of those who would consider themselves people of God. It isn’t a spiritual path that any God worth the bother would raise up. It was the creation of Paul and other men, but not a prophet or sage of the first rank.

But there was such a first-rate prophet and sage involved in the story. He was a simple, marginal Jew from Galilee we’ve learned to call Jesus. He taught a narrow path, not a broad one, and preached a kingdom of God that we, and only we, could make present on earth as soon and as long as we find the courage to act like children of God, to see all others as children of God, and to act accordingly. It can happen any time, here and now. It can happen in Israel if both sides change the center of their faith. It can happen in Northern Ireland if both sides stop defining themselves as Protestants and Catholics, and define themselves instead only as brothers and sisters. It can happen in Austin, it can happen in your neighborhood, and in your life.

But only if you believe. No, you don’t have to believe anything supernatural, you don’t have to believe anything you can’t make sense of. You have to believe that the only identity of which grown-up religious people should be proud is the identity of seeing themselves and all others as brothers and sisters, and children of a God of love. Just that.

Today, we have translated the promise and the commandment into flowers, flowers for you to take home and reflect upon.* Fragile little things of beauty and vulnerability, as fragile as peace, as vulnerable as love. Take them home. The flowers are in your hands. So is the hope of your life, and the future of the world. Those words hardly seem adequate, though. Something more poetic and powerful is needed. Jesus called it the kingdom of God. That’s much better, and much closer.

The hope for the kingdom of God is in our hands, as it has always been. The dream has lain fallow for a long time. Many would say it has died. It is Easter, and the dream is in our hands. Let us think about resurrecting it.

————–

*This church celebrates an annual Flower Communion on Easter Sunday. People are asked to bring a flower, which they deposit in baskets. At the end of the service, the many baskets of flowers are brought to the front of the church, and people each come forward to take a flower from the baskets to take home with them.

Demythologized Christianity

© Davidson Loehr

24 March 2002

First UU Church of Austin

4700 Grover Ave., Austin, TX 78756

www.austinuu.org

Listen to the sermon by clicking the play button.

CENTERING:

Sometimes, demythologizing religion feels like stealing stories from the gods, then denying that the gods exist, in the sky or anywhere. It’s seductively easy to stay shallow and smug if we rob life of all its unseen dimensions.

Yet to be honest, it isn’t ever that easy. For we are still faced with the awful transience of life, life which moves so quickly.

As the poet Ezra Pound has put it,

The days are not full enough

and the nights are not full enough

and life slips by like a field mouse

not [even] shaking the grass.

And so we pray, in our demythologized worlds, 

to the gods who are now harder to find,

to the spirit of life, 

love, and all that matters. 

We pray for help

that we may live slowly and move simply 

and look softly 

that we may allow emptiness 

and let the heart create for us a home. 

Amen.

SERMON:

Last week I led a Jesus Seminar program at the UU church in Oak Ridge, TN, so the notion of demythologized Christianity is very fresh. And though it’s a lot of syllables for just one word, demythologizing our religions is one of the most important and most faithful things we need to do if we want our religions to be more real, and more relevant to the lives we’re living in this 21st century.

What does it mean? Sometimes it just means taking religious messages out of their protective mythic wrappings so we can see what, if anything, they have to say to us today.

All of our Western religions were born into a kind of cradle, or manger. They were born into the worldview of their time, which was very different than the way we see our world today. Christianity was born into this kind of a manger. Two thousand years ago, it was born into what today we might call the worldview of ancient understandings, the scientific worldview of the ancient world.

Scholars call that old worldview the ‘three-story universe.” It’s probably the most intuitive, common-sense view of the universe we”ve ever had. You can still experience it just by going outside on a clear day far from the city.

Look around you and you”ll see what the ancients saw: the earth looks flat, like a pizza. Just standing there, you”re seeing farther than most people strayed from where they were born. Up above, you can see the dome of the sky. They called it the “firmament” because they thought it was made of rock. It was so heavy, the Greeks assigned their strongest god, Atlas, to hold it up. There were holes in the firmament, which light came through at night, in the patterns of the constellations. Up above the dome of the sky was where the light came from, and where the “enlightened,” “illuminated” powers and deities were presumed to live in some way.

And down beneath the earth was the place of fire and brimstone. If you doubt that, just watch a volcano erupt, and ask yourself where that stuff came from. It was a bad place, the probably home of bad forces and spirits.

We humans were the playthings of the forces of good and evil, and our prayers were for help with the one against the other.

It was quite a small universe, really just a local affair. There was us, there was Up, there was Down.

This commonsense universe is the cradle into which Christianity was born. And the fantastic things of the New Testament make a kind of sudden literal sense when you remember this old worldview. A passage says the heavens opened and a voice boomed through saying “Behold this is my beloved son in whom I am much pleased,” and you can imagine it. After all, it’s not that far. It could open, you could imagine hearing the voice. Another passage talks about Jesus descending to hell. Well, you”d imagine he”d be protected from the fire and brimstone somehow, but again – it’s just not that far. You can imagine it. Heaven is up, hell is down, we’re on the stage in the middle. Very simple and clear.

No, the world was never made that way, not now and not then. We live in a world that doesn’t have an “up” or “down.” If this sounds odd, think of that photo of the earth taken from the surface of the moon a few decades ago. Imagine you”re standing there on the moon, looking at the earth floating in black space. Then imagine that big voice booming down and asking everyone on the planet to point to heaven. Now imagine the picture, and ask yourself where they are pointing! Locally, they think they”re point up. From where you are, you see they”re pointing out; there is no “up.”

The treasures of religion were hidden up there twenty centuries ago. God was put up there above the sky. You could say that 2000 years ago they hid the message of religion up above the sky to protect and honor it.

Next week is Easter, and the Easter message is a good example. Someone dying, then coming back to life and ascending up above the sky into heaven. What could that mean in a world that isn’t made that way? How are faithful and honest people to understand it? And Christmas talks about a man born of a virgin and a sky-god. What is that to mean? Sperm from above the sky?

Leaving the messages of religion stuck in that old mythic worldview forces our faith to try and live in two different centuries at once – the old 3-story worldview of 2000 years ago, as we need its insights for our 21st century modern worldview.

What would you ask believers to believe? In the religious insights, whatever they are, or in the way people used to think the universe was put together? In the messages of religion, or in first-century science?

Today, we have to protect and honor the messages of religion by locating them in this world. If we can’t find the sacred in the here and now, we may not find it anywhere.

That’s what demythologizing is about. It is saying that to be faithful, to honor the spirit of religion in the modern world, we need to take its message out of its ancient protective mythic wrapping, take off the training wheels, and see what it has to say to us today.

You know that isn’t how religion usually works. The orthodox still try to protect their old faith by keeping it in its old mythic worldview, as though religion is just too frail, too fragile, for the light of day. It fools people who want to be fooled, and many who don’t. But it doesn’t fool all the people, and it makes some of them very angry with the hypocrisy and denial.

On the plane back from Tennessee last Monday I read a book that spoke to this in ways that surprised me. It was a book of short pieces sent in by more than 90 Irish writers (Sources: Letters from Irish People on Sustenance for the Soul, edited by Marie Heaney). The editor had written to ask them what nourished and sustained their souls, and I was quite surprised to find how few of them chose anything from their religion, and how much anger they still felt for it.

Here’s a typical response, from Martin Drury:

Having been, until my early twenties, a devout and obedient Roman Catholic, I can still recall the seismic shock (and indeed can still experience the aftershocks) of the opening up of the fault-line between orthodox religious practice and authentic spiritual experience. I deplore greatly that those who were so quick to claim me for their own church were so slow to nourish my individual spiritual self”. Those who charged themselves with my spiritual formation” gave me no map-making skills by which I could chart my journey. The [maps] I have grown to admire and trust and which I find sustaining [are those] employed by artists of all disciplines.

“My preference is for the ambiguous [maps] of literature and for the celebration of humanity rather than some remote divinity.

This man wasn’t fooled by his church, and what he is resenting here is both his church’s deceptions and its faithlessness. Faithlessness. That’s an ironic accusation against a church, but think about it. Which is more faithless: to give up on believing in another world, or to give up on believing in this one? What would religious messages have to mean if they were about this world rather than another one?

One woman who had left the church criticized it for offering a religion that was not real. And she offered as words that sustained her soul not the Bible but a few paragraphs from the children’s book The Velveteen Rabbit. It had been a long time since I’d read that book, and I hadn’t remembered it talking about how some things can’t be made real. Listen for it in this Irish woman’s critique of her former church:

The Velveteen Rabbit arrived on Christmas morning. The little boy loved him – for at least two hours – but in the excitement of the day he was soon forgotten. For a long time he lived with the other toys in the cupboard – and they were a pretty mixed lot: bossy mechanical toys who were very superior, full of modern ideas and talk of technology. Even the little wooden lion who should have known better pretended that he had connections with Government. The Velveteen Rabbit felt very insignificant. The only person to be kind to him was the old Skin Horse who was very wise.

“What is REAL?” asked the Rabbit one day.

“Real” is a thing that happens to you when a child loves you for a long, long, time,” answered the Skin Horse who was always truthful. He said that sometimes it hurt being real – and that it doesn’t always happen to people who break easily or have sharp edges or who have to be kept carefully.

“By the time you are REAL most of you hair has been loved off and your eyes drop out and you get loose in the joints and very shabby. But these things don’t matter at all, because once you are REAL you can’t be ugly – except to people who don’t understand.”

Religions are like this too. If they are too fragile, break easily, or have to be kept too carefully, you can never snuggle up to them enough to make them real. Demythologizing religions, removing their old protective wrapping to make a home for them in our own lives, isn’t the devil’s work, it’s a godsend.

Many of the Irish respondents quoted William Blake as one of those whose writings and insights fed their souls. And in Blake too they found much anger at the deceptions of traditional religion. It had been a long time since I had read any of William Blake, and I was surprised to read some of these lines:

A truth that’s told with bad intent 

beats all the lies you can invent.

It is right it should be so;

Man was made for joy and woe;

and when this we rightly know

Thro’ the world we safely go.

We’re not made for heaven, he’s saying. we’re not made for a perfect place somewhere else. we’re made for this place, joy and woe intermixed. These writers were absolutely committed to focusing on this life here and now, not another one elsewhere and later. What will this need to mean next week when we ask what message faithful people are to find in the old Easter message? What should we seek new life for? our souls, our society? our religion? our churches?

Another woman brought these lines from the poet Adrienne Rich:

from Twenty-One Love Poems

At twenty, yes: 

we thought we’d live forever.

At forty-five, 

I want to know even our limits.

I touch you knowing we weren’t born tomorrow,

and somehow, each of us will help the other live,

and somewhere each of us must help the other die.

“Adrienne Rich (1929-)

Then more lines from William Blake:

Every night and every morn

some to misery are born.

Every morn and every night

some are born to sweet delight.

Some are born to sweet delight,

some are born to endless night.

We are led to believe a lie

when we see not thro’ the eye

which was born in a night to perish in a night”

I was struck by these last three lines:

We are led to believe a lie

when we see not thro’ the eye

which was born in a night to perish in a night”

In other words, Blake is saying don’t believe pronouncements from on high, don’t believe insights that pretend to be from gods rather than mortals who are born in a night and perish in a night. Here is this great poet of two centuries ago saying that our religion isn’t supposed to help us get to heaven after we die. What religion is supposed to do – these are more of Blake’s words – is to show us how

To see a world in a grain of sand

and a heaven in a wild flower,

hold infinity in the palm of your hand

and Eternity in an hour.

Every heresy trial would disagree with that. Refusing to believe in things you can’t make sense of has been dangerous as recently as the Taliban. Heresy trials don’t care how the heretic lived, only whether they said they believed the story of one particular religious group.

But think about this too. What kind of insecurity do such threats sound like:

— the insecurity of an eternal, omniscient deity who created the whole universe and knows what you think even when you don’t? Could a real god be that ignorant and petty?

— or the insecurity of members of a club, whose f and arrogant claim to truth might crumble if they had to admit that their story is just one among many, and that people do quite well without it?

No god worth the bother would punish people for refusing to believe old stories still left in their ancient mythic wrappings. No god worth the bother would reward us for checking our brains at the church door. Faithful people aren’t supposed to recite their group’s story unthinkingly. Faithful people are supposed to try and find faith worth living by, a way of viewing themselves and the world that can show them a world in a grain of sand and a heaven in a wildflower.”

We who would be faithful today find ourselves in an odd and ironic place. Through the history of our Western religions, people have been taught that the goods of their religion are only available to the faithful, the insiders, the club members.

But that’s a third thing worth thinking about, as I found all the Irish writers thinking about it. What kind of truth could that be, that is only true and only real for members of a club? Anything that’s really true – especially if it’s being presented as coming from the god who created the whole darned universe – would have to be true for everyone. Religious insights have to be available for everyone. Insecure people might get seduced by creeds, principles, confessions of faith, but not gods, and not any real religions either. Religion and truth aren’t about faking it. If Christianity, Buddhism or the others have anything to offer to our lives, it has to be available to all who have the eyes to see and the ears to hear it.

We are in a different place today than we were in ancient times. The meaning of faithfulness has changed. True faithfulness no longer means looking away from this world toward the promise of another world later and elsewhere. It means, as these Irish writers say again and again, looking away from the talk of other worlds later and elsewhere and toward the promises and challenges of this one, here and now.

This is why I think religious liberals may be the most religious people around today. At our best, we can look past the mythic wrappings and other-worldly glows, and ask whether and how this or that religion can help us become more alive and aware here and now, can help us to see the world in a grain of sand and heaven in a wildflower.

The Jews have a story about the day God decided he wanted to play a trick on humans. He was stumped, so as he always did when he was stumped, he called on his favorite rabbi.

“Rabbi,” said God, “I want to play a trick on people. I want to hide from them where they won’t be likely to find me, and I don’t know where to hide. What do you think: the far side of the moon, the outer reaches of the galaxy – what do you think, rabbi?”

And the rabbi replied “Oh, don’t make it so hard. Just hide in the human heart. It’s the last place they will think to look.”

So that is where God hid. And the rabbi was right, for even to this day hardly anyone thinks to look there.

There is a great irony in religion today. Many centuries ago when our Western religions were born, the prophets and sages who gave them birth tried to protect religion by hiding it up in the heavens above the sky. Today when we need our religion to be real, hiding it up out of sight is a death sentence for it. Today in order to protect it, in order to make our faith real, we must find it inside our world, inside our own hearts.

All three Western religions have seen this.

Jews, with their story of God hiding inside the human heart; Christians, through Jesus’ saying that the kingdom of God is not something that’s coming, but is rather something that is already within or among us, if only we will have the eyes to see it. and Moslems, when their Qu’ran teaches that God is closer to us than the vein in our neck. The true faithfulness we need today is not blind trust in another world, but faith in the hidden possibilities for wholeness and redemption in this one. True faithfulness is learned by opening our eyes to the glories of the world around us, and opening our hearts to find the god that is hidden there, the kingdom of God hidden within and among us, waiting to be made real in our own lives, the way the Velveteen Rabbit was finally made real.

In one sense, we are terribly alone in our demythologized world. But our poison can be our cure, for we are alone together.

We yearn together for the gift of vision that might show us

a world in a grain of sand

and heaven in a wild flower,

that might help us learn to hold infinity in our hand

and Eternity in an hour.

Yes, we know the days are not full enough

and the nights are not full enough

and life slips by like a field mouse

not even shaking the grass.

And so we end in quiet prayer to the unseen spirit of life, the unfound god 

hiding in our hearts. And we say Oh God, Oh spirit of life, help us

to live slowly,

to move simply,

to look softly,

to allow emptiness,

and to let our hearts create for us

Help us make a home, right here, within and among the undiscovered kingdom of God that lies hidden within our hearts, where it has always been hidden.

We pray for that, just that, here, now, together.

Amen.

The Morality of Abortion

© Davidson Loehr

10 March 2002

First UU Church of Austin

4700 Grover Ave., Austin, TX 78756

www.austinuu.org

Listen to the sermon by clicking the play button.

OPENING WORDS:

Is life sacred? Always? Is a birth a blessed event? Always? Morality is about behavior that honors life by treating it as it deserves at its best. So is the morality of abortion. These are hard and emotionally-loaded questions we’re asking this morning. It is almost impossible to be neutral about them. But if important and emotionally-loaded questions can’t be raised in church, it’s not much of a church. We gather to ask hard questions, and dare to suggest that we and our society might need to look at these issues in an entirely new way. And that willingness is part of the reason we can say that

It is a sacred time, this

And a sacred place, this:

A place for questions more profound than answers, 

Vulnerability more powerful than strength,

And a peace that can pass all understanding.

It is a sacred time, this:

Let us begin it together in song.

STORY: The Girl Who Loved Hamsters

Once there was a girl who loved hamsters. She badgered and badgered her parents until they finally did two things, one good and one not too smart. They bought her a hamster cage, food, and a hamster. That was good. But they bought her two hamsters. This wasn’t smart, because two hamsters don’t stay just two for very long. Hamsters are very friendly animals. And before long, she no longer had two hamsters, she had twenty.

But this girl loved hamsters, so she saw it as a good thing. She went to her parents protesting that twenty hamsters were too many for the small cage she had, so they needed to buy her a much bigger cage. They did, and the hamsters kept doing what hamsters do. Before long, she didn’t have twenty hamsters, she had three hundred! They started buying food in ten-pound bags.

Still, the girl loved hamsters, so this was fine. But they had overgrown their cage, were running all over the house, hiding under and in the beds, crawling out from under pillows just as you were falling asleep.

“We need bigger cages, and many more of them,” she pleaded to her parents. “And a special roof in the back yard where we can keep all the cages.” The parents yielded, and soon there was a kind of tenement rising in the backyard, with cages organized into blocks with little streets between them. The girl and a couple friends pushed a wheelbarrow down between the cages, throwing food into the rapidly increasing hamster population. They began buying food in hundred-pound bags.

And it was indeed increasing rapidly. Soon there weren’t three hundred hamsters, but about fifty thousand of them! They escaped from the cages, from the yard, and were running all over town, getting into everyone’s house, hiding under everyone’s bed and under everyone’s pillows. There was a loud outcry.

A town meeting was called, but the girl was ready for them. “I really love hamsters,” she said, “but I understand you don’t want them running loose through your town. So the solution is to build a large boat, with several floors, and float it out in Town Lake for these lovely, fluffy little hamsters. Then I can take a rowboat out each day to give them food.”

Somehow, she was persuasive, and the town actually built a huge boat – it would have put Noah’s Ark to shame, it was so big. Before long there were far, far more than fifty thousand hamsters on the big boat. But now nobody could count them. They were breeding so fast they were getting crowded, and they seemed to get meaner, so that it was no longer safe to get onto the boat to play with them – not that anybody could really play with millions of hamsters anyway!

Each day, the girl who loved hamsters rowed out to the big ship in her rowboat filled with hamster food, which they were now buying by the ton, and shoveled food over the sides of the ship before rowing back to shore. Still, she loved hamsters, and loved the idea of knowing there were so many of them out there, even if she had no contact with them any more.

While no one could count the hamsters any more, everyone in town could get a sense of their growing numbers just by watching the big boat sink lower and lower into the water every day. There were millions and millions of them onboard now.

Finally, the big boat sank into Town Lake, taking all the hamsters with it. The girl was very sad, and she called another town meeting.

“The problem,” she said, “was that the boat wasn’t big enough. We need to build a bigger boat – and more boats. And we should buy our own company to make hamster food, it will be cheaper. I”ve done some research, and if we fire about five hundred public school teachers and double the class size in public schools, and stop repairing the roads quite so often, we can afford to do it. And we must do it, because I really love hamsters.”

What to do, what to do?

CENTERING:

For over a generation, America’s cultural liberals have treated abortion as a matter of individual rights, where the mother but not the baby is seen as a rights-bearing individual. Conservatives have countered by claiming rights for the baby, though the law hasn’t recognized a fetus as an individual.

That may soon change. On March 5th, this Tuesday, the Bush administration published a proposed rule designating embryos and fetuses as “children” eligible for medical benefits under the State Children’s Health Insurance Program (SCHIP – 67 Fed. Reg. No. 43, pp. 9936-9939). The pregnant woman herself is not considered the patient, only the embryo or fetus.

This is a brilliant and creative extension of individual rights designed to negate a pregnant woman’s individual rights by pitting her against the fetus, and putting the government only on the side of the fetus. It will be defended as a caring act by those who love children. Is it?

Or is it a cynical tactic to disempower women, to help remove them from the workplace and tie them to caring for children they do not want in an economy set up to treat the desperate children of desperate women as minimum-wage workers without any empowered choices?

Is forcing the birth of unwanted children really caring? Is caring that easy? Is it just a matter of saying we feel strongly about someone else? Or do caring and loving demand more? What would it really take to love children, and how can you tell when someone really does? These are our questions this evening, and I invite you into them.

SERMON: The Morality of Abortion

Fields like religion, ethics and morality differ from history, sociology, or anthropology in important ways. History can ask what people actually did. Sociology can study what different subgroups do, anthropology can try to discern the kinds of behaviors, good and bad, that characterize our species. They”re descriptive disciplines.

But religion, ethics and morality are our attempts to be normative. Religion, ethics and morality can ask whether the gods we’re serving or the rules we’re following are good or bad. Are we following a morality of enslavement or empowerment? Shakespeare observed that “we love not wisely, but too well.” We usually also worship not wisely but too well, and a key role of religion is to ask whether the gods we’re serving are worth serving.

With morality, we always need to ask whether it’s good or bad morality. And the only way we can answer that is to ask whether it helps people achieve their own kind of excellence and grow into their full humanity, or whether the morality being foisted on us is aimed to disempower segments of our society, to turn them into obedient things rather than empowered citizens.

Each kind of life, each species, even each individual, has certain kinds of excellence and development available to it. With lower species, it’s mostly just survival and breeding. Flies, ants, roaches and rats, jellyfish and lobsters are about self-preservation and propagation of the species: survival and breeding. Period. That’s the definition of lower forms of life, and of life reduced to its lowest possibilities.

This is the framework within we need to understand the morality of abortion. We must relate it to the larger question of whether it serves the empowerment of people toward their excellence, or the virtual enslavement of people to levels of diminished capacity where they can hope mostly just for survival and breeding. The morality of abortion is the question of whether it enslaves or empowers both the parents and the potential children.

Human life can be defined down in many ways. Totalitarian regimes can do it, whether in Stalinist Russia, the reign of the Afghan Taliban or the morality of the fundamentalist American Taliban, by curtailing individual rights and freedoms. Overbreeding can do it, by letting a concern for quantity, for the mere existence of life, trump the concern for quality, the development and empowerment of life. People kept desperately poor overbreed, have few real choices, and must obey those who have turned them into starving and desperate workers. The immoral downgrading of human life can be identified through any of these symptoms.

And now we are ready for Pope Leo XIII. By 1891, huge numbers of the world’s poor had been effectively reduced to things, to desperate creatures struggling merely for survival, who could be treated as a desperate labor force under the worst conditions. Children worked in mines by the age of eight or younger, and could look forward to no more than this until they died – usually at an early age.

The Church’s role had been immoral for centuries, conspiring with the wealthy to keep the poor desperate and overbred. And the religious argument always came down to the same passage from the Bible, one that anyone raised in a very conservative religion has heard before. It’s from Genesis, after Adam and Eve had been thrown out of the Garden of Eden, that the line occurs. “By the sweat of your brow you shall live,” the writers have God saying: By the sweat of your brow you shall live. You see, life just is nasty, brutish and short. It’s hard, it’s unfair, and that’s God’s plan, an enduring punishment for the fact that Adam and Eve preferred development over blind obedience. That line had been used for hundreds of years to keep the lower classes of people in their desperate, overbred, hopeless state.

What Pope Leo XIII did in 1891 was to use the same Bible passage to justify the opposite position, and to lay the foundation for workers” unions which the Church would support through its offices. Leo did it simply by emphasizing a different word in the sentence. “By the sweat of your brow,” he said, “you shall live!” And what, he asked, does it mean, ‘to live”? Does it mean merely to exist, to subsist at starvation level? Does it mean to live like lower animals do, or maybe like slugs or plants do? Are we promised, by this God in the Old Testament, only the absolute lowest possible quality of life? Is the mere quantity of life, the mere fact that we breathe and can move all that religion offers? Is it, to keep it in the language of theism, all that God demands, the absolute minimum quality of life?

No, said Pope Leo, it is not life like a lower animal which this God of the Old and New Testaments demands for us. It is the life of a human being. And not the absolute minimal life of a human being, either. Pope Leo’s God demanded that our labors enable us to live fully, to realize the full potential of human beings. That means time for education, time for leisure, time for relaxation with friends and family, time not only to bear life like a burden, but as well to enjoy it, to live it.

Leo contrasted humans with lower animals, which he called “brutes.” Now hear this remarkable Pope Leo’s words as he describes the “brute”:

The brute has no power of self-direction, but is governed by two chief instincts…. These instincts are self-preservation and the propagation of the species…. But with [humans] it is different indeed…. It is the mind, or the reason, which is the chief thing in us who are human beings; it is this which makes human beings human, and distinguishes them essentially and completely from the brute. (“Rerum Novarum,” in Seven Great Encyclicals, New York: Paulist Press, 1963, p. 3)

And what is the role of the Church in all of this? “Its desire is that the poor, for example, should rise above poverty and wretchedness, and should better their condition in life; and for this it strives,” wrote this Pope. (p. 14) And if conditions existed which robbed humans of the possibility of living like humans rather than brutes, if people found themselves in “conditions that were repugnant to their dignity as human beings… if health were endangered by excessive labor, or by work unsuited to sex or age”in these cases there can be no question that within certain limits, it would be right to call in the help and authority of the law [to do what] is required for the remedy of the evil or the removal of the danger.”

And why? Why must the Church and the law do these things? Because God demands it! Demands it, because humans must be given living conditions which allow them to develop fully to the limits of their potential as educated, intelligent, creative, and joyful people. It is for that they were created, and conditions which make that impossible are not merely wrong, they are evil.

This is the theological argument which Pope Leo XIII made over a century ago, and which has changed millions of lives through the force of both its argument and its implementation by the church’s people with the church’s help. And, at the bottom, that’s the only foundation on which a solid and durable theological argument can ever stand: that God demands it.

The only other point that it is important to mention is that this new understanding, issued 111 years ago, changed the position of the Church, a position which it had held and enforced for nineteen centuries. Even traditions which have existed since the beginning of the religion can be changed, as our understanding of the fullest potential of life is expanded. In other words, the fact that things have always been done a certain way is not necessarily an argument for continuing to do them that way. And now we can bring this full circle.

Times have changed. The population of the world has doubled – twice! – since 1891, even more so since the era when the Old Testament and New Testament were written. Two thousand years ago, the world’s population has been estimated at about 200 million. It doubled three times in 1900 years, to about 1.5 billion in 1900. Then in the next sixty years it doubled again, to 3 billion by 1960. And in the next 39 years it doubled again, passing six billion by 1999. The deadly effect of overpopulation and under-education on the possibility of living like human beings has never existed the way it does today. Neither the religious scriptures of the west nor established theological traditions have yet had to address this changed situation.

What this means is that breeding is not a high calling for our species, and hasn’t been for centuries. We have too many people in the world. We don’t need more people, we need better people, and you can’t have both. You can favor quantity – the mere fact of human births – or quality.

Would you like to see what it looks like when human beings live only like animals, driven only by self-preservation and propagation of the species? Go to Mexico City. Or Chicago. Or Detroit. Or New York City. Go to the ghettos, the slums, the shantytowns of the world, and you will see the evil conditions, and the results of those evil conditions.

Do you want to see it up close, one-on-one? Look at fifteen-year-old girls pregnant with their third child, trapped in a welfare system that makes it most profitable for them to remain unmarried and unemployed. Not that there are many kinds of employment open to many of these women. With grade-school educations, what are they to do anyway? They can be prostitutes and their boyfriends can be pimps, drug pushers and drug takers, or exploited laborers living at the edge of starvation and kept there by a system which can demand of them what it chooses and give them no more than it must.

The Church’s understanding of sex arose when high breeding rates were seen as necessary for survival, when breeding was a high calling for people living at the margins.

But that was already a fundamental misunderstanding of the needs of this species. For thousands of years, humans have been able to reach their own peculiar kind of excellence through structures that favor quality of life over quantity of life, that stress development and education, not breeding.

Again: breeding is not a high calling for our species, and hasn’t been a high calling for centuries. We don’t need more people, we need better people. There are too many people in the world, and it is immoral to increase their quantity at the expense of increasing their quality.

Let’s look at some examples of abortions and consider whether the decisions were moral or immoral:

“A young woman gets pregnant and chooses an abortion. That is a completely moral choice, probably the most moral decision she can make. Why? Not because she chose it. Women’s choices aren’t any more or less moral than men’s. But because breeding is not a high calling, we don’t need more people we need better people, and she didn’t want a child. Maybe she sensed that she didn’t have the maturity, the emotional or financial means to give an unwanted child a better life than she had. But she knew she wasn’t ready. Under these circumstances, it would have been immoral to bring the child into the world.

Why not force her to carry the unwanted pregnancy to term, to make her produce a baby for older and wealthier people who want to adopt? Because it is immoral to turn a human being into breeding stock for more privileged people. Because we have too many people in the world. Because we do not need more people, we need better people, and we cannot have both more and better people.

Is it caring or cruel to suggest that more babies can be a bad thing? China has for quite awhile now been urging that their people have no more than one child. That hasn’t received good press here, but it came from the government’s realization that quantity and quality are absolutely opposed in human life, and that the only chance their people have of raising the standard of living for a population of more than billion people is to reduce their numbers to a sustainable level.

When I was in Thailand last month, one of our guides told us that the Thai government has also suggested that Thais limit their families to only two children, for the same reason. Our guide understood it as the government’s concern for the quality of life available for her people, and treated it as responsible leadership.

Let’s consider another common case.

A 20-year-old college woman gets pregnant because she and her boyfriend weren’t careful. He wants to get married and raise the child, but she doesn’t love him, doesn’t want to marry him, and doesn’t want to raise a child. She wants to prepare herself for a career that might let her bring a child into the world later, when she can better provide for the child both materially and psychologically. The abortion is probably the most moral decision she can make. That decision honors the potential of her life, and honors the potential of her future child’s life. Letting the blind fact of pregnancy overrule the higher distinctions she can make with her mind is letting quantity trump quality, letting the merest fact of a potential human life trump the greater concern for the quality of that life.

A married woman with two or three children gets pregnant, does not want another child and gets an abortion, even though the husband wants another child. That is a completely moral decision. Why? Because bringing a new human life into an already overcrowded world is only a moral decision if we honestly believe we can give it a better quality life than we have, and that takes two willing parents, not just one unless that one is going to take full care of the new life.

We have been trained to think that the mere fact of a pregnancy is a kind of moral imperative, trumping other considerations. But it is not, and hasn’t been for centuries. Breeding is not a high calling for our species. We have too many people in the world. We don’t need more people, we need better people, and those closest to the pregnancy know better than anyone whether this is the right time or place for another birth to take place.

The girl who thought she loved hamsters did not love hamsters. She did not even to have known what love is. She confused it with her selfish preoccupation with watching large numbers of desperate little bodies.

Unwanted pregnancies for which a mother is not ready to be a mother should almost always be aborted. Not because a woman has individual rights, but because it is the only moral choice available unless she consents to become a breeder for others.

I’m not trying to answer all the questions tonight, just to sketch a new and different way of understanding the morality of breeding and the morality of birth control and abortion. It is hard enough really to love hamsters. Learning how to really love humans in their highest rather than their lowest possibilities is much, much harder. And much, much more important.

The Meaning of Life

© Davidson Loehr

3 March 2002

First UU Church of Austin

4700 Grover Ave., Austin, TX 78756

www.austinuu.org

Listen to the sermon by clicking the play button.

This is the first of two connected sermons, and should be read in conjunction with the sermon “The Morality of Abortion,” delivered 10 March 2002.

OPENING:

For about 30 years, America’s cultural liberals have understood abortion as a secular matter of individual rights where the mother, but not the baby, is seen as a rights-bearing individual. Conservatives have framed it as a moral issue based on the assumption that life is sacred in and of itself and everyone has a right to it. Under Roman Catholic teaching, when push comes to shove the baby has a greater right to life, since it stands to get a bigger quantity of life.

I expect the Roe v. Wade decision to be overturned during President Bush’s term, and I think the majority of our citizens do believe abortion is primarily a moral issue.

If this is the case, America’s liberals now need to begin doing what we should have done thirty years ago. We need to reframe abortion as a moral issue rather than an issue of individual rights. And if we believe abortion is morally justified, we need to develop moral arguments for it that can be persuasive not only to us, but eventually to a majority of the voting public. I have believed this could be done since I first preached on abortion over 15 years ago.

Now, this week and next week, I will try to persuade you, and hope the picture I sketch is solid enough to begin persuading others.

To tackle such a big issue is to risk failure, and you may not be persuaded, you may decide I fail at it. Still, it is too important a subject to ignore. A new discussion must begin somewhere, and this is a good place to start.

CENTERING:

Is life sacred? Always? If so, what makes it so? Can we ever assume the authority and the right to say No to life? Through birth control, family planning, abortion, capital punishment or war? Ever? If so, how? When? Why?

These are questions more profound than answers. Let us not approach them lightly or we will do a great disservice to them and to ourselves. Let us first be humbled by the subject before us: Life.

Is life sacred? Always? If so, what makes it so? Who are we to pronounce on it, and how? We are here through the accident and gift of life. If we would deny the gift to others, how, when, and why would we do it? Let us begin by letting the questions settle in and being humbled by them, during the silence.

SERMON: The meaning of life

Aristotle said the meaning and purpose of a life was to grow into its own characteristic kind of excellence, to become an example of that particular life at its best. Each species, and each person, has its own unique potential, and the purpose of its life is to blossom into that – for the greater good of its society and world, he might add.

It’s easier said than done, though I think it’s the right answer.

But it takes a lot. It can’t be done alone. As Aristotle also knew, it takes a good community, good friends, a life that offers us the likelihood of this kind of development. Statistically, few people become what they could or should become. So many people with great gifts of art, intelligence, who never develop it, never become the one person that they and only they could become. The obstacles include poverty, toxic home life, mental illness, psychological aberrations, wars, or accidents of life.

So the primary duty of societies is to establish and nourish the conditions within which their citizens can become the best kind of people and society – in the slogan of the US Army, to become all they can be.

This simple insight into the meaning and purpose of life is something we can all agree to, but it has profound implications for all areas of living. I want to explore some of these implications this morning.

But the first thing I want to say is that we all know almost everything I’ll be saying this morning. We know that we are supposed to grow and develop our potential, to become the best sort of person we can, for ourselves and our larger world. It’s what we admire in other people, and in ourselves. We know this.

For example, think of people who breed and show dogs or horses. I was married to a woman who bred and showed a rare kind of French sheep dog called a Briard, and spent about six years attending dog shows and programs put on by breeders concerned with serving and improving their breed.

In dog shows, the breeders of each breed write the standards by which their breed is to be judged. These standards are the best that can be expected of this breed in each area. The dogs are only expected to be what they can be, not what some other breed can be. Greyhounds don’t get any extra points for being able to herd sheep, and sheep dogs get no credit for being able to retrieve a wounded pheasant. Each breed can and can’t do certain things, and the breeders say, as Aristotle did 2400 years ago, that each breed is capable of a certain distinct kind of excellence. The purpose of its life is to strive toward its own kind of excellence.

Horse breeders operate the same way. An Arabian stallion needs to have a certain scoop, or “dish,” a curve from its eyes to its nose. Its nostrils should be flared in official photos, showing an alertness and energy. Its ears should be forward; its body should conform to certain standards. The ideal is the essence of what an Arabian can be at its best, and it is that standard that judges and breeders use to guide them in breeding and training those magnificent animals.

The meaning of each creature’s life is to strive toward its own particular form of excellence. Those who care for the breed try to create the situations within which that might best happen. And they are quick to protect the animals they love from conditions that can harm them – bad food, unhealthy surroundings, cramped quarters or brutal trainers.

With our species, it’s more complicated and more demanding. Ancient writers used to describe us as being caught midway between the beasts and the gods. And the quality of human excellence – the meaning and purpose of our lives – was something available neither to the beasts nor the gods, they said.

We have a degree of consciousness, self-awareness and articulateness that is, as far as we know, not shared by any other species. In that sense, we’re at a higher stage of potential than the other animals. We stew over who we are and how we should live in ways that chimps don’t seem to. We know we will die, and that’s the ever-present background against which we live. We have high existential anxiety compared with dogs or horses.

So we expect more of ourselves than we expect of dogs, horses or chimps, and we judge ourselves failures in ways they don’t seem to care about.

Yet we’re not gods. We aren’t omniscient, omnipotent, or undying. We can articulate more than we can actualize. We can see more than we can be. We yearn for more than we can earn. We yearn for peace, love, justice, a world where the content of our character trumps the color of our skin. And these yearnings are among our noblest traits.

We fail; we fail at almost all of these. It’s a continual battle between high aspirations and low inspirations. And we are marked as human by this odd, frustrating combination. We do not respect people or governments that sell out to low and mean motives. We do not respect those who side with the stronger against the weaker. Something essential is missing in people who do that, something we think is necessary to becoming fully human.

Yet we continually fail. And our history can be seen as the struggle between a glorious vision and an often-vainglorious reality.

The meaning and purpose of human life is to live toward that level of awareness, that level of responsibility, to know the difference between fairness and greed, altruism and narcissism, between treating people as fellow children of God, and treating them merely as things, things that do not even engage our tender mercies or make Lady Justice insist that the scales be balanced and the games played fairly.

And I suggest to you that you know all of this whether you”ve ever articulated it this way or not. You know it.

If you doubt that, try this mental experiment:

Imagine that some benevolent aliens land here, are trying to assess what kind of creatures these humans are. They say “Point to the people, alive or dead, who exemplify the best your race has produced, all that you can be.”

I have a long list of candidates, you probably do to.

I would include Mahatma Gandhi who, even though his revolution in India failed, continued to live by the highest ideals he could see, rather than selling out to the lower interests all around him. This great Hindu heard and answered a higher calling, as we expect our best people to do.

I would include Martin Luther King Jr., who had a vision of Americans as children of God and inheritors of the American dream, and preached that we should, that we must, accept the responsibility to bring this kingdom of God down to earth where it belonged.

I would include Einstein, Darwin, Picasso, Mozart, Bach, Homer, Shakespeare and others as examples of the human imagination and understanding at its finest.

I would include the firemen from September 11th, who died going up the stairs that others were running down, because a sense of duty and compassion called them upward, a compelling link to the suffering of others.

And I would include whole long lists of public school teachers, doctors, nurses, lawyers, clerks and cops who have lived, each in their own way, to be agents of love rather than hate, understanding rather than prejudice, compassion rather than greed.

I would point to these and say here, here is what we can be, if only we will. Here is that kind of excellence that is uniquely human. Here are people who exemplify the meaning of human life, whose lives and examples I try to learn from.

Make your own list, but see if your nominees aren’t people who exemplify this very human struggle to become, and help others become, the best they can be, to establish the just society, the kingdom of God, the possibility of a true democracy, honest and responsible government, and a sense of fairness that pervades all.

Now look at some of the implications of this. Look what is required for people to become fully human, to act like children of God, to be true to the calling of a species with as much potential as ours has.

It can’t be done alone. It takes more than a village to raise a child. It takes a culture: a healthy and courageous community. Because societies and laws that oppress people – that force the game of living to be played by rules that empower the strong and cripple the weak – are societies and laws that are the enemy of our possibility of becoming human. Morally, those conditions are evil which imprison the weak within small or selfish visions imposed on them by the strong or the morally blind.

Quantity versus Quality

There is one simple rule that points toward whether we have set up rules to foster life at its highest or to frustrate it. And this too is true of many species of animals. The question to ask is whether we are exalting the quantity of life or the quality of life. The meaning of life is about rising to our highest potential quality, not just existing. Are we set up to encourage more births, or more excellence?

I’ve seen the results in dog breeding. Briards are still a fairly rare breed, because that’s the way the breeders want it. They have seen what happens to breeds that become too popular, when irresponsible breeders begin accenting quantity over quality in order to sell puppies. Irish setters are now plagued with a whole host of genetic flaws because they were so poorly overbred. German shepherds, Old English sheepdogs and others have had hip dysplasia bred into them, so their mature years will be painful and crippling. Doberman Pinschers, Rottweilers, even Pit Bulls have seen their breeds degraded through breeding for quantity rather than quality, producing lines of mean and dangerous animals.

Quantity is the value of much lower forms of life, forms that depend on breeding large numbers in order to survive. I’m thinking of insects, sparrows, rats and roaches. We seldom speak of an excellent mosquito or a really exemplary fire ant. We just note whether ants, roaches or mosquitoes are present, whether they”ve survived. And in order to survive, they must breed in sufficient quantities. Several centuries ago, and in desperate times, the same was true of humans in some places. When infant mortality was high, when few lived to adulthood, humans needed to breed in large quantities in order to have a few survive to breeding age. That, of course, hasn’t been true for a long time.

With show dogs or horses or humans, emphasizing numbers isn’t a mark of success, but of failure. For the higher and more complex an animal gets, the more we judge it by quality, by how or whether it lives up to the highest that can be expected of that kind of life.

You know this, we all know this, we just seldom speak of it this way.

Serving our daimon Some observers raise the bar of expectations for our species quite high. One of those is worth mentioning because he’s respected, and because his theories are both complex and interesting. This is psychologist James Hillman, whom some of you have read and others may have heard of.

In a book called The Soul’s Code, Hillman suggests that we have within us, from birth, a kind of spirit or “daimon” as the Greeks called it, that urged us toward a specific form of life for which we were made. I won’t follow him all the way, but I follow him part way, maybe you will too.

He cites the stories of a few exceptional people – geniuses, as we”d usually call them – because he believes that in geniuses these daimons, these fires of destiny, burn brighter than they do in most of us.

He tells the story of Manuel Manoleta (1917-1947), the Spanish bullfighter many still regard as the greatest matador who ever lived. As a young boy, Manoleta was shy, afraid, and regarded as a mama’s boy because he would hide behind his mother’s apron, and seemed generally afraid of the world. That all changed when he was eleven years old, and was suddenly interested in nothing but bulls. From that point, he was afraid of nothing. In his first bull fight, he stood his ground and suffered a groin injury, but refused help and walked out of the ring under a new kind of power and a new kind of identity. He had, as a boy, grown into the destiny to which he had been called.

Freudians might interpret his life behind a red cape as a manifestation of early neuroses, where the red cape took the place of his mother’s apron. Hillman says it’s more interesting to turn it around, and suggest that he hid as a child because he was not yet ready for the dangerous challenges for which he had been made.

Let’s take a less bloody, less macho story. The great violinist Yehudi Menuhin also saw his calling at an early age. When he was just three, he heard a great violinist play a difficult cadenza in a concert, and was transfixed. He later said that he knew from that moment that he must become a violinist. He asked his father for a violin for his fourth birthday. A relative gave the young child, instead, a toy metal violin with metal strings. But the four-year-old Menuhin threw the toy on the floor and would have nothing to do with it. His calling was to play a Stradivarius, not a toy. The fact that, at age four, he was too small to hold or play a regular violin made no difference. The young boy had received an adult’s calling, and struggled to grow into it. But the guiding spirit, the daimon, was there very early.

The word “genius” is a clue to this way of thinking. It means someone who is possessed by a spirit, or “genie,” and who serves that genie with their life. The genie gives them great powers, but it also directs their life. I’ve known a few geniuses, and this describes them better than anything else I can think of does. I don’t mean to imply some kind of supernatural mechanics, just a poetic metaphor for an intensely focused sense of purpose and destiny in a few of our most exemplary people.

Or finally, take the story of Golda Meir, the former president of Israel. As a young girl growing up in Milwaukee she was outraged – as a fourth-grade student – at a school policy requiring students to purchase their books, which she felt manifestly unfair to poorer students. This young girl organized a protest, rented a hall, and arranged for classmates to speak, adding her own unwritten speech. At the age of 11, Golda Meir was already a Labor Party Prime Minister.

These stories seem to imply that there is something in us almost like a spirit, a holy spirit, that holds our calling and destiny. We must hear it, respond, and be in an environment that can nurture this aspiration so that we may grow into our own distinctive kind of excellence. That would mean that things which thwart this development are enemies of the holy spirit. And that’s raising the idea of our calling, or the meaning of our life, to a whole new level.

To put it in God-language, it means that not only are we children of God, but that if we will listen, God has a plan for us. There is this ‘s till, small voice” inside us that we need to listen to in order to know who we need to become.

To put it in natural language, it is saying that life gives us not only our genetic packages, but also a certain style of character, a style of being, and our gifts uniquely equip us for certain callings, through which we both grow into our fullest humanity, and nourish the world around us.

Either way, it raises the question of the meaning of our lives to a higher plane, where it becomes our sacred duty to become who we were meant to become, and the sacred duty of our communities and societies to provide the kind of social and legal structures that enable and empower us to do so.

If that is so – and I think it is at least partly so – it is a new way of looking at ourselves, and at human life in general. And seen this way, the prospect of bringing new human life into the world carries with it a tremendous amount of responsibility. Now breeding isn’t a high calling for our species, only excellence is. And this, I’ll suggest, changes the whole moral structure of our views on life and death.

But this isn’t just about what I think. I want to engage you too. This week and next week I want to challenge all of us to think in a very new way about life, and about birth control and abortion.

So take these thoughts with you for a week, and turn them over. Think about the difference between forms of life where quantity is paramount, and forms where quality is paramount. And think about the implications of all this for thinking about abortion, both as individuals and as a society.

I’ll end in mid-air because we are in mid-air on this. Let yourself be stirred, even disturbed, and form your own opinions about the morality of abortion and how you would explain it to yourself, or to a city government. It isn’t supposed to be easy; after all, we are striving to serve human life, which we regard as sacred – and to serve it in the way its unique kind of sacrality demands.

But I will leave you with a teaser. One of the greatest ironies in the area of trying to find good moral arguments for abortion is the fact that the best one was developed by a Roman Catholic pope, over a century ago. I will be using an argument first and famously written by Pope Leo XIII in 1891 in one of the most famous and best papal encyclicals ever written, the Rerum Novarum. No, he wasn’t writing about abortion. He was writing about the condition of labor. But he wrote about it, in this encyclical over which the Church is so proud it issued commemorative updates in 1931 and 1961, by developing an argument which said that concerns for the quality of human life must trump concerns over mere quantity of life. I’ll see you next week with my friend Pope Leo XIII and the brilliant and courageous encyclical he wrote 111 years ago.

The Fundamentalist Agenda

© Davidson Loehr

3 February 2002

First UU Church of Austin

4700 Grover Ave., Austin, TX 78756

www.austinuu.org

Listen to the sermon by clicking the play button.

SERMON

The most famous definition of fundamentalism is probably still H.L. Mencken’s from over seventy years ago, when he defined it as “The terrible, pervasive fear that someone, somewhere, is having fun.” There’s something to this. It’s too fearful, too restrictive, too lacking in faith to provide a home for the human spirit to soar or for human societies to blossom.

But there isn’t enough to it. There are far more fundamental things to understand about the phenomenon of fundamentalism, especially since September 11th. Also, an adequate understanding of fundamentalism has some inescapable and uncomfortable critiques of America’s cultural liberalism of the past four decades. We were given the rare chance of a revelation in the aftermath of those attacks. That revelation came in two stages.

First was list of things some Muslim fundamentalists hate about our culture:

– They hate liberated women, and all that symbolizes them. They hate it when women compete with men in the workplace, when they decide when or whether they will become breeders, when they show the independence of getting abortions, and changing laws that previously gave men more power over them.

– They hate the wide range of sexual orientations and lifestyles that have always characterized human societies. They hate homosexuality, can’t confront the homosexual tendencies that exist in them, so project them outward and punish them in others.

– They hate individual freedoms that allow people to stray from the single rigid sort of truth they want to constrain all people. They hate individual rights that let others slough off their simple certainties.

Not much about these revelations was really new. We saw all this before, when Khomeini’s Muslim fundamentalists wreaked such havoc in Iran in the years following 1979. We have long known that Muslim fundamentalism is a mortal enemy of freedom and democracy.

But the surprise came just a few days after September 11th, in that remarkably unguarded interview on “The 700 Club” between Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson. It was remarkable partly because these men are so media-savvy it’s amazing they would say such things on the air. But it’s also remarkable because as they listed the “causes” of the September 11th attacks, we heard exactly the same hate list the Afghan Taliban had outlined:

– They hate liberated women who don’t follow orders, who get abortions when they want them, who threaten, or laugh at, their arrogant pretensions to rule them.

– They hate the wide range of sexual orientations that have always characterized human societies. They would force the country to conform to a fantasy image of two married heterosexual parents where the husband works and the wife stays home with the children – even when that describes fewer than one-sixth of current American families.

– They hate individual freedoms that let people stray from the one simple set of truths they want imposed on all in our country. Pat Robertson has been on record for a long time saying that democracy isn’t a fit form of government unless it is run by fundamentalist Christians of his kind.

It is terribly important for us to realize that the fact that “our” Christian fundamentalists have the same hate list as ‘their” Muslim fundamentalists is not a coincidence!

From 1988-1993, the University of Chicago conducted a six-year study known as The Fundamentalism Project, the largest such study ever done. About 150 scholars from all over the world took part, reporting on every imaginable kind of fundamentalism. And what they discovered was that the agenda of all fundamentalist movements in the world is virtually identical, regardless of religion or culture.

They identified five points shared by virtually all fundamentalisms:

1. Their rules must be made to apply to all people, and to all areas of life. There can be no separation of church and state, or of public and private areas of life. The rigid rules of God – and they never doubt that they and only they have got these right – must become the law of the land. Pat Robertson, again, has said that just as Supreme Court justices place a hand on the Bible and swear to uphold the Constitution, so they should also place a hand on the Constitution and swear to uphold the Bible. In Khomeini’s Iran of two decades ago, and in the recent Taliban rule of Afghanistan, we saw how brutal and bloody this looks in real time.

2. The second agenda item is really at the top of the list, and it’s vulgarly simple: Men are on top. In every way. Men are bigger and stronger, and they rule not only through physical strength, but also and more importantly through their influence on the laws and rules of the land. Men set the boundaries. Men define the norms, and men enforce them. They also define women, and they define them through narrowly-conceived biological functions. Women are to be supportive wives, mothers, and home-makers.

3. A third item follows from the others – indeed all of these agenda items are necessarily interlocked, and need each other to survive. Since there is only one right picture of the world, one right set of beliefs, and one right set of roles for men, women and children, it is imperative that this picture and these norms and rules be communicated precisely to the next generation. Therefore, they must control the education of the society. They control the textbooks, the teaching styles, they decide what may and may not be taught. In Afghanistan, women were denied any education at all beyond basic literacy – and sometimes not even that much. And in our own country it was a long and hard battle to get women access to college and professional educations and credentials.

4. A fourth point isn’t an agenda item, but an observation voiced by several of the scholars: there is an amazingly strong and deep resemblance between fundamentalism and fascism. Both have almost identical agendas. Men are on top, women are subservient, there is one rigid set of rules, with police and military might to enforce them, and education is tightly controlled by the State. One scholar suggested that it’s helpful to understand fundamentalism as religious fascism, and fascism as political fundamentalism. Fundamentalists spurn the modern, and want to return to a nostalgic vision of a golden age that never really existed. Likewise, the phrase “overcoming the modern” is a fascist slogan dating back to at least 1941.

5. And the fifth point is the most abstract, though it’s foundational. Fundamentalists deny history in a radical and idiosyncratic way. Fundamentalists know, as well or better than anybody, that culture taints everything it touches. Our teachers, our times, color how we think, what we value, and the kind of people we become. If you have perverse teachers or books, you develop perverse people and societies. And they agree on the perversions of our current American society: the air of permissiveness, narcissism, individual rights unbalanced by responsibilities, sex divorced from commitment, and so on. The culture must be controlled because it colors everything in it. So far, so good.

What they don’t want to see is that exactly the same thing was true when their own sacred scriptures were created. Good biblical scholarship begins by studying the cultural situation when scriptures were created, to understand their original intent so we can better discern what messages they may still have that are relevant for our lives. But if fundamentalists admit that their own scriptures are as culturally conditioned as everything else, they lose the foundation of their certainties.

St. Paul had severe personal hangups about sex, for instance, that lie behind his personal problems with homosexuality and women. How else would he say that it is a shameful thing for a woman to speak in church, or that men are made in the image of God, but women are made in the image of men? These are the reasons that informed biblical scholars take some of Paul’s teachings as rantings rather than revelations. But for fundamentalists, their scriptures fell straight from heaven in a leather-bound book, every jot and tittle intact.

Now something should be bothering you about this list. And that’s that except for the illustrations I”ve added, you can’t tell what religion, culture, or even century I’m talking about! This realization also stopped the scholars a dozen years ago while they were presenting abstracts of their papers at the fall meetings in Chicago. Several of them noted that all their papers were sounding alike, that we were reporting on ‘s pecies” and needed to be studying the “genus,” that there were strong family resemblances between all these fundamentalisms, even when the religions had had no contact, no way to influence each other.

This is one of the most important things we need to learn about the agendas of all fundamentalisms in the world. They are all alike. And the only way that can be the case is if the agenda preceded all of the religions.

And it did. These behaviors are familiar because we”ve all heard and seen them many times. These men are acting the role of Alpha Males who define the boundaries of their group’s territory, and the norms and behaviors that define members of their in-group. These are the behaviors of tens of thousands of territorial species in which males are stronger than females. Or to put it into jargon, these are the characteristic behaviors of sexually dimorphous territorial animals. Males set and enforce the rules, females obey the males and raise the children, there is a clear separation between the in-group and the out-group. The in-group is protected, the outsiders are expelled or fought.

What the conservatives of human societies are conserving is the biological default setting of our species – virtually identical with the default setting of ten thousand other species. This means that when fundamentalists say they are obeying the word of God, they have severely understated the authority for their position. The real authority behind this behavioral scheme is tens of millions of years older than all the religions and all the gods there have ever been. It is the picture of life that gave birth to most of the gods, as its projected protectors.

It’s absolutely natural, ancient, powerful – and completely inadequate. It’s a means of structuring relationships that evolved when we lived in troops of 150 or less. But in the modern world, it’s completely incapable of the nuance or flexibility needed to structure human societies in humane ways. It’s absolutely natural and absolutely inadequate.

But it does help us better understand the relative roles of conservatives and liberals in modern society, and the role that liberals play in giving birth to fundamentalist uprisings.

The conservative impulse that has its starkest form in the fundamentalist agenda is our attempt to give stability to our societies. And as many observers have noted, hierarchical structures tend to be very stable.

The liberal impulses serve to give us not stability but civility: humanity. And they do this by expanding the definitions of our inherited territorial categories. The fundamental job of liberals in human societies is to enlarge our understanding of who belongs in our in-group. This is the plot of virtually all liberal advances in society.

Giving women the vote eighty years ago was expanding the in-group from only adult males to include adult females. Once that larger definition was established by liberals, our conservatives began defending that definition of the in-group rather than the smaller one.

Likewise, the civil rights movement was a way of saying that our in-group was multi-colored as well as including both sexes. Every liberal advance adds to the list of those who belong within our society’s protected group.

This means that, while society is a kind of slow dance between the conservative and liberal impulses, the liberal role is the more important one. It provides civility and humanity, it makes our societies humane rather than just stable and mean.

It also means that in order for the liberal impulse to lead, liberals must remain in contact with the moral center of our territorial nature and our need for a structure of responsibilities. Fundamentalist uprisings are an early warning system telling us that the liberals have failed to provide an adequate and balanced vision, that they have not found a vision that attracts enough people to become stable.

Just as it’s no coincidence that all fundamentalisms have similar agendas, it’s also no coincidence that the most successful liberal advances tend to be made by wrapping their expanded definitions in what sound like extremely conservative categories. Take just a couple:

John F. Kennedy’s most famous line sounds like the terrifying dictate of the world’s worst fascism: “Ask not what your country can do for you; ask rather what you can do for your country.” Imagine that line coming from Hitler, Khomeini, the Taliban, or Pat Robertson and Jerry Falwell! It is a conservative, even a fascist, slogan. Yet Kennedy used it to effect significant liberal transformations in our society. Under that umbrella he created the Peace Corps and Vista, and enlisted many young people to extend our hand to those we had not before seen as belonging to our in-group: Liberal ends achieved through what sounded like conservative means.

Likewise, Martin Luther King used the rhetoric of a conservative vision, expanded through his liberal redefinition of the members of our in-group. When he defined all Americans as the children of God, those words could sound like the battle-cry of an American Taliban on the verge of putting a bible in every school, a catechism in every legislature. Instead, King used that cry to include Americans of all colors in the sacred and protected group of “all God’s children” – which was just what many Southerners were arguing against forty years ago. Liberal ends, conservative means.

When liberal visions work, it’s because they have kept one foot solidly in the moral center of our deep territorial impulses, and the other free to push the envelope, to create a bigger tent, to expand the definition of those who belong in “our” territory.

And when liberal visions fail, it is often because they fail to achieve just this kind of balance between our conservative impulses and our liberal needs.

During the past half century, many of our liberal visions have been too narrow, too self-absorbed, too unbalanced. And their imbalance has been a key factor in triggering the fundamentalist uprisings of the past decades. When liberals don’t lead well, others don’t follow. And when society doesn’t follow liberal visions, liberals haven’t led well (or at all).

– When liberals burned the American flag during the Vietnam War rather than waving it and insisting that America live up to its great tradition, they lost the most powerful territorial symbol in our culture, and lost the ability to speak for our national interests. This created an imbalance that planted the seeds of future fundamentalist uprisings.

– When liberals defined abortion in amoral terms, as simply a matter of individual rights – where only the mother, but not the developing baby, were “individuals” – they created a moral imbalance that planted the seeds of future fundamentalist uprisings (as well as quietly losing the support of many liberals, including liberal ministers).

– When liberals over-emphasized individual rights while ignoring the need to balance them with individual responsibilities toward the larger society, they planted the seeds of future fundamentalist uprisings.

Those uprisings are happening in some Muslim societies that hate us and hate the influence our culture is having on their own. They are also threatening within our own culture, as shown by that amazing interview on “The 700 Club” and some of both Robertson and Falwell’s statements of the past two decades. I have heard now that Jerry Falwell has filed suit in federal court to challenge Hamilton’s interpretation of the separation of church and state. I’m not sure how to check this, but if it’s true it is a sign that the Taliban’s power could be transported to our own shores. It would only take revoking the separation between church and state, and the use of state power to enforce church-dictated behaviors and norms for all. And the degradation of American education through the influence of fundamentalist lobbies on textbook publishers is already well-documented.

But if I’m right in what I’m suggesting here, it isn’t their fault. The fundamentalists are reacting absolutely instinctively – whether they think they have instincts or not – to a threat to social stability made up of the narrow and unbalanced liberal teachings of the past three or four decades.

Maintaining both stability and civility, humane content and enduring form in human societies, is an unending dance between the conservative and the liberal impulses within our societies. But the task of liberals is much, much harder.

It’s really quite easy to be a fundamentalist. All you have to do is cling tightly to a few simplistic teachings too small to do justice to the complex demands of the real world. You just have to cling to these, and then pretend that what you have done is either honest or noble.

But to be a liberal, really to be an awake, aware, responsive and responsible liberal – that can take, and that can make, a whole life.

Liberal Salvation

Davidson Loehr

6 January 2002

Text of this sermon is not available but you can listen to the sermon by clicking the play button.

Like most religious literalists, I think religion is about our search for salvation. Unlike religious literalists, I think our salvation comes here and now or it never comes at all. I’m not inventing a new meaning for the word, I’m returning to its original meaning. It comes from the same Latin root as our word “salve,” and means health or wholeness. So what is salvation about for religious liberals? What makes us most healthy and whole?

publicado en el periódico Austin American Statesman

(Traducción de Francisco Javier Lagunes Gaitán)

Como Unitario, soy un liberal religioso. Para mí, la religión no trata sobre Dios. No se trata de Alá, Jesús, Shiva, Vishnú, el Buddha, o del resto. La religión se trata de la música, no de las canciones individuales.

La distinción entre las canciones y la música es lo que separa a la religión liberal de otros estilos espirituales y la abre hacia el diálogo con todas las creencias sinceras.

¿Por qué ir a la iglesia? Porque tratamos de llegar a ser mejores personas, parejas, padres o madres, y ciudadanos. Así que para nosotros la salvación es salvación por el carácter (la palabra “salvación” viene de una raíz latina que significa salud o integridad). Pocos entre nosotros piensan que la recompensa vendrá luego de que muramos. El objetivo es convertirnos en una clase de persona más profunda, consciente y compasiva, en el aquí y el ahora.

Cuando busco una forma simple de explicar de lo que creo que tratan la vida y la religión, frecuentemente llego a la vieja parábola hindú de las personas ciegas y el elefante. Un montón de ciegos que descubren diferentes partes de un elefante e intentan explicar a los otros que es ese elefante.

“Es como un árbol?, dice el hombre que abrazó una pierna.

“¡No, tonto, es como una cuerda delgada y dura!”, dice la mujer que agarró el rabo del elefante.

“Ambos se equivocan?, dice un tercero, que sostiene la oreja del elefante. “Es una grande y plana hoja cueruda”.

El cuarto les responde con un grito, “¿Cómo pueden ser todos tan estúpidos, además de ciegos? ¡Un elefante es como una culebra fuerte y gruesa! ?esto, claro está, lo dijo el que tocó la trompa.

Nuestro ?elefante? es una metáfora de la vida, que es mayor y más compleja de lo que nadie de nosotros pueda jamás abarcar. Cada persona ciega simboliza una forma de percibir ?una religión, una filosofía, una clase de ciencia o arte. Cada uno tiene un trocito de la verdad sobre la vida incrustado en nuestras diferentes tradiciones religiosas, culturales o científicas. Y como estas personas ciegas, siempre estamos tentados a confundir nuestros pedazos de verdad con La Verdad.

Aunque la calidad de nuestras creencias se muestra, no por nuestras certezas, sino por nuestras acciones hacia otras personas que tienen un pedazo diferente de la verdad.

Para los sermones, tomo una gran variedad de mitos, relatos folklóricos, y literatura de las religiones del mundo. Busco lo que sea útil y valioso, de acuerdo a los altos ideales a los que podemos aspirar.

Lo opuesto de la religión liberal es la religión literal. Después de los atentados del 11 de septiembre de 2001, aprendimos que el fundamentalismo de cualquier clase es el enemigo mortal, tanto de la libertad como de la democracia. Resulta preocupante escuchar que la ?lista de odio? del Talibán ?mujeres liberadas, derechos individuales, homosexualidad y libertad de creencias? fue imitada de cerca en nuestro propio país en aquella entrevista señaladamente reveladora entre los predicadores fundamentalistas Jerry Falwell y Pat Robertson en el programa “The 700 Club”. En contraste con este trasfondo, el liberalismo religioso puede ser el más americano de todos los estilos de fe. En el relato hindú, resulta cómico reducir el elefante a pequeños trocitos de él. En la religión y la política esto puede ser mortal.

Esa es parte de la razón por la que soy un miembro activo de Ministerios Interreligiosos del Área de Austin (Austin Area Interreligious Ministries). Sé que el sonido humano en su totalidad se eleva solamente desde el coro completo. Goethe dijo una vez, “La persona que no sepa dos lenguas, ni siquiera puede saber una”, y esto es todavía más cierto en la religión. A menos que aprendamos a entender varios idiomas religiosos no es fácil que seamos parte de la solución, y podemos llegar a ser parte del problema. Mostramos nuestra madurez religiosa a través del diálogo, no con proclamaciones.

Es verdad que perdemos algo cuando ya no podemos pretender que nuestras creencias particulares están en el centro del universo ?cuando nuestras “canciones” se escuchan tan solo como pequeñas pero importantes componentes de la música más universal del espíritu humano. Pero también ganamos algo. Ganamos un mundo mayor y una familia más grande de hermanos y hermanas. Si esta empresa no es sagrada, no sé qué pudiera serlo.

************

Davidson Loehr es ministro de la Primera Iglesia Unitaria Universalista de Austin, en: 4700 Grover Ave. Es integrante de Austin Area Interreligious Ministries, un grupo no lucrativo comunitario, y puede ser localizado en el teléfono: 472-7627 o por internet, en la dirección: http://www.aaimaustin.org

Religion is the Music of Believers Seeking Truth Together

Davidson Loehr

Published in the Austin American Statesman
December 29th 2001

As a Unitarian, I’m a religious liberal. And for me, religion isn’t about God. It isn’t about Allah, Jesus, Shiva, Vishnu, the Buddha or the rest. Religion is about the music, not the individual songs.

The distinction between the songs and the music is what sets liberal religion apart from other spiritual styles and opens it to dialogue with all sincere beliefs.

Why go to church? Because we are trying to become better people, partners, parents and citizens. So salvation for us is salvation by character. (The word “salvation” comes from a Latin word meaning health or wholeness.) Few of us think of the payoff coming after we die. The goal is to grow into a deeper, more aware, compassionate and responsible kind of person in the here and now.

When I look for a simple way to explain what I think life and religion are about, I’m often drawn to the old Hindu parable of the blind people and the elephant. A bunch of blind people discover different parts of an elephant and try to explain to the others what this elephant is.

“It is like a tree,” says the man who grabbed a leg.

“No, you fool, it’s like a hard, thin rope!” says the woman who grabbed the elephant’s tail.

“You’re both wrong,” says the third, who holds the elephant’s ear. “It’s a huge flat leathery leaf.”

The fourth shouts back, “How can you all be both blind and stupid? An elephant is like a very thick, strong, snake!” — this, of course, from the one holding the trunk.

Our “elephant” is a metaphor for life, which is bigger and more complex than any one of us can ever grasp. Each blind person symbolizes one way of perceiving — one religion, one philosophy, one kind of science or art. We each have a tiny piece of the truth about life embedded in our different religious, cultural or scientific traditions. And like the blind people, we are always tempted to mistake our pieces of truth for The Truth.

Yet the quality of our beliefs is shown not by our certainties but by our actions toward people who hold a different piece of the truth.

For sermons, I draw from a variety of world religions, literature, myths and folk tales. I look for what is both useful and worthy of the highest ideals to which we can aspire.

The opposite of liberal religion is literal religion. After Sept. 11, we learned that fundamentalism of any kind is the mortal enemy of both freedom and democracy. It was sobering to hear that the “hate list” of the Taliban — liberated women, individual rights, homosexuality and freedom of religion — was echoed in our own country in that remarkably unguarded interview between Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson on “The 700 Club.” Against this background, religious liberalism may be the most American of all faith styles. In the Hindu story, it is comical to reduce the elephant to just a tiny piece of it. In religion and politics, it can be deadly.

That is part of the reason I am an active member of the Austin Area Interreligious Ministries. I know that the whole human sound goes up only from the full choir. Goethe once said, “The person who does not know two languages does not even know one,” and it’s even more true in religion. Unless we are learning to understand several religious idioms, we are not likely to be part of the solution and may well become part of the problem. We show our religious maturity through dialogue, not proclamation.

It’s true that we lose something when we can no longer pretend that our particular beliefs are the center of the universe — when our “songs” are heard as just small but important parts of the more universal music of the human spirit. But we gain something, too. We gain a bigger world and a bigger family of brothers and sisters. If that enterprise isn’t sacred, I’m not sure what could be.

Getting Into – or Fighting – the Holiday Spirit

© Davidson Loehr

December 16th, 2001

First UU Church of Austin

4700 Grover Ave., Austin, TX 78756

www.austinuu.org

Listen to the sermon by clicking the play button below.

CENTERING

Let us consider how we are united in our religious quests. Religion is the universal language of the human heart. Differing words describe the outward appearance of things. Diverse symbols represent that which stands beyond and within. Yet every person’s hunger is the same, and heart communicates with heart.

Ever the vision leads on, with many gods, with one, or with none. With a holy land washed by ocean waters or a holy land within the heart. In temperament we differ, yet we are dedicated to one commanding destiny.

Creeds divide us, but we share a common quest.

Because we are human we shall ever build our altars.

Because each has a holy yearning we offer everywhere our prayers and our anthems.

For an eternal truth lives beneath our differences. We are children of one great love, united in one eternal family.

Let us remember that our home is with one another, and that we are home.

(Adapted from Rev. Waldemar Argow)

SERMON

This is the time of year when it’s our job to get into the holiday mood. If any of you are having any trouble getting into the holiday mood you’re not alone. You go downtown to a big mall, you’re surrounded by red and green and little sparkly lights everywhere, and tinsel. And the sacred music of the year, like “Deck the Halls with Boughs of Holly,” “Rudolph the Red-nosed Reindeer,” and, of course, “Rocking Around the Christmas Tree.” I get overloaded when I’m in the middle of all that eye candy and ear candy, and I wonder what the meaning of Christmas is.

Then you hear, especially this year, that it’s now patriotic to spend money on Christmas presents. It’s a new twist. It’s sort of like red, white and blue bunting on the manger. We hear that we’re expected to spend our average of a thousand dollars each on Christmas gifts, that merchants are counting on it, and the American economy and probably the American flag and God and America are counting on it. Because merchants make over a third of their annual profit on the Christmas gift sales. I went to Best Buy and The Container Store yesterday, and I was just overwhelmed with red and green and silver and candle and glitter, and a thousand new glitzy things that I’m supposed to buy for everyone I love, to prove I love them. And three hundred kinds of wrapping paper and ribbons to wrap it all in. And I get overwhelmed, and I wonder what the real meaning of Christmas is.

We hear the question about the real meaning of Christmas as though the answer were obvious, but it isn’t obvious. Because Christmas is a very complex holiday, and that’s because it’s a combination of three completely separate and unrelated holidays that have absolutely nothing to do with each other. One is a holy day, and two are holidays.

First is the Christian story, the story of baby Jesus and the notion of God being made incarnate in the child of simple people. That’s the “holy day” of the season. Second is December 25th and all of its history, unrelated to the Christian story. And third is the story of Santa Claus or Saint Nicholas. These are the “holidays” of the season. These three have nothing to do with each other. It’s so complex I’ve decided to take two weeks to do Christmas this year.

Next week I want to get us immersed in the Christian story of Christmas. The story of the notion of bringing God down from the heavens and making the notion of the highest incarnate in someone from the lowest, is a profound and powerful story. I want to spend time with it next week, letting it soak into us. So next week we’ll talk about the holy day.

Today I want to talk about the holidays. Because the holiday spirit that we have has virtually no connection to that story of the manger, except for a couple of songs. So I want to talk about the two holidays that we have at this season. The first has to do with December 25th. Now we know that December 25th was not the day that Baby Jesus was born. We have no idea when Jesus was born. We don’t even know what year he was born, let alone what day. The best scholarly guesses are that he was born between 4 and 6 B.C. – that’s something only Jesus could do! But we have no idea what the day was. For the first three centuries of Christianity, the notion of Jesus? birthday wasn’t important. There were several days celebrated in different local regions for it, but they weren’t big celebrations. In some parts of the world January 6th got settled on as Jesus? birthday. In the Eastern Orthodox Church Jesus? birthday is still celebrated on January 6th.

What we do know about December 25th is that in the ancient calendar it was the date of the winter solstice. In the modern calendar we date that at December 21st. Two thousand years ago it was dated December 25th. What that means is that December 25th, was, by definition, the birthday of all solar deities. That’s the day the sun is “born again” each year. That’s the day the days start becoming longer again. So December 25th was Mithra’s birthday; it was the birthday of half a dozen solar deities celebrated and known at the time.

It didn’t become Jesus? birthday until the fourth century. Around the mid-fourth century Christianity was forced to adopt two days from the religion of Mithraism. Most people don’t know this. The first date was December 25th, which was Mithra’s birthday and was adopted around the mid-fourth century as Jesus? birthday. So now Jesus had a birthday. The second thing Christianity was forced to adopt in the mid-fourth century was the holy day of Mithra. And a sun god has as his holy day the day of the sun. That’s why Sun-day is the holy day of Christianity. In the first three hundred years you can read the church fathers bragging about the fact that there is no holy day in Christianity because only pagan religions have holy days named after their gods. By the mid-fourth century Christianity had one, which we’re still meeting on today.

The winter solstice is the day that had been celebrated for thousands of years as the day that the sun returns. I think it’s our most optimistic holiday. It’s the day in the times of the shortest nights of the year when we throw the biggest party of the year. The Romans had a huge party that they threw at the time. It was the celebration of Sol Invictus, the invincible sun, returning again. They celebrated it with red and green stuff just like we still use – evergreens, holly, ivy – and mistletoe that they probably got from the Druids. These are holidays that borrow props from more traditions than we can even count any more.

After the fourth century when the Christians were forced to adopt the 25th of December, Mithra’s birthday, as Jesus? birthday, the Christians liked the idea of going to the Roman parties. The Church didn’t like it and tried to make it a more somber holiday, but by the sixth century the Church had lost, and the pagan festivals and all the decorations and customs of the winter solstice festival got combined with the story of the birth of Jesus.

When the Protestant Reformation came a thousand years later, most of the Protestants liked Christmas too, though not all of them. There are still some conservative Protestant sects that will not celebrate December 25th as Jesus? birthday because they know that it’s a pagan solstice festival. And we’ll talk about that when we get to the history of Christmas in this country, which has been quite a mixed history.

Martin Luther, the man who started the Protestant Reformation, loved Christmas. He’s credited with being the first person to bring a whole fir tree inside the house for the season. Now Mithraists would have recognized all this, because the fir tree was the sacred tree of Mithras. So we have ancient, ancient religions and traditions involved in December 25th, but none of them had anything to do with the story of Jesus.

When Christians came to this country – this country was settled by Puritans who were very strict – they didn’t like Christmas. They didn’t celebrate December 25th as Christmas; it was not a holiday. You could go to jail if you were caught taking December 25th off work. How do you like that? So this country’s had a hard time getting into the holiday mood too.

What finally brought Christmas into our consciousness and gave us the holiday the way we have it today was really the Romantic era. In the nineteenth century art and music and sort of the whole atmosphere were concerned more with feelings than with facts and rules. Christmas cards began around 1850 in England and became very popular as nice little notes people could send to each other this time of year, and they caught on quickly in this country too.

In the 1880’s Clement Moore wrote his famous poem about the night before Christmas, and he brought a new element into the story that we haven’t heard yet. He brought Santa Claus in. Santa Claus is about a whole different tradition that had nothing to do either with Christmas or with the winter solstice. It’s the second holiday and the third day being combined in this December time, and it’s a story worth knowing. Some of you may decide that you think it’s really what Christmas is about when you hear the story of St. Nicholas told straight.

St. Nicholas, from whom the Santa Claus story evolved, was a real man. He lived in the fourth century, in the early part of the fourth century, before there was a Christmas in Christianity. He was a rich man with a generous heart, and he would go around unseen – because it was important to him that this be done secretly – and give gifts, little bags of gold, to some of the needy people in his town. Eventually he was discovered, it was learned where the gold was coming from, and the story of St. Nicholas and his generous heart spread like wildfire.

When St. Nicholas died around the middle of the fourth century, he died on December 6, and December 6th became known then as St. Nicholas Day. It was a day when Christians were supposed to celebrate the memory of this generous man with his generous heart, by giving gifts to the needy. It had nothing to do with Jesus or Christmas. The gifts weren’t to be given on December 25th. The idea was to give them to the needy on December 6th, and to give them anonymously.

Now the truth is that we may sometimes be big-hearted, but we like to get credit for it. So the idea of anonymous gifts didn’t seem to stick. By the 1880’s, when Clement Moore had made his story of Santa Claus, what was going on in England and this country was that merchants had seized on this and decided that they could combine all the festivities of the winter solstice with the Christian story and the story of St. Nicholas. They had a bonanza. And in the 1890’s, St. Nicholas Day and Christmas became combined, and the notion of giving gifts now became part of Christmas – although it was mostly the notion of giving gifts that you bought, not gifts that you made.

You still find people who don’t combine these. In Holland, St. Nicholas Day and the day of gift-giving is still December 6th. And in some more conservative Christian denominations they don’t combine the two. I have a Mennonite friend who says that all the time she was growing up they separated the holy day of Christmas from the secular day of gift-giving. The problem with not trading gifts is that your kids are the only kids in class who didn’t get Christmas presents, and so they get made fun of. So what her family did was to celebrate St. Nicholas Day on December 6 as a day when they exchanged presents. They celebrated this as a completely secular holiday. Then on the 25th her family would celebrate Christmas. That was a religious holiday when they celebrated the birth of their Lord and Savior. They gathered around the piano, they sang hymns, they had a wonderful Christmas dinner, and they spent the day together as a family.

So what’s the meaning of Christmas? Well, part of it is the meaning of celebrating and singing and having evergreens and holly and ivy. Part of the meaning of Christmas is having fun and throwing a party in the darkest days of the year. That’s the oldest part of it. Part of it is the notion of giving gifts, especially if they can be given true to the old St. Nicholas story.

I want to tell you a story that I just got this week, that retells the St. Nicholas story in a new way. I got this story written in the first person, and I think it reads best in the first person, so I’ll read it to you that way instead of changing it.

* * *

My Grandma taught me everything about Christmas I needed to know. I was just a kid. I remember tearing across town on my bike to visit her on the day my big sister dropped the bomb: THERE IS NO SANTA CLAUS! Even dummies know that, she said. My grandma wasn’t the gushy kind. She never had been, and I fled to her that day because I knew she’d be straight with me. I knew Grandma would tell me the truth, and I also knew that the truth would go down a lot better with a couple of her world-famous cinnamon buns. Grandma was home, the buns were still warm, and between bites I told her everything. She was ready for me.

“No Santa Claus,” she snorted. “Ridiculous! Don’t believe it. That rumor’s been going around for years, and it makes me mad, just mad. Now put on your coat and let’s go.”

“Go? Go where?” I was still eating my second cinnamon bun. “Where? turned out to be Kerby’s General Store, the one store in town that had a little bit of just about everything. As we walked through its doors, Grandma handed me a ten-dollar bill – that was a lot of money in those days.

“Take this money,” she said, “and buy something for someone who needs it. I’ll wait for you in the car.”

With that, Grandma left the store. I was only eight years old. I’d gone shopping with my mother, but I’d never gone shopping with myself, and I’d never been in a store full of that many people. I just stood there for a minute, very confused. I was clutching the ten-dollar bill, wondering what to buy and who on earth to buy it for. I thought of everybody I knew: my family, my friends, my neighbors, the kids at school, the people who went to my church.

I was just about thought out . . . when suddenly I thought of Bobby Decker. He was a kid with bad breath and messy hair, and he sat behind me in Mrs. Pollock’s second grade class. Bobby Decker didn’t have a coat. I knew that because he never went out for recess during the winter. His mother always wrote a note telling the teacher that he had a cough. But all the kids knew that Bobby Decker didn’t have a cough, what Bobby Decker didn’t have was a coat.

I picked out a nice red corduroy coat with a hood. It looked real warm; just what he needed. I couldn’t find a price tag on it, but I figured ten bucks would buy anything. I took the coat and my ten-dollar bill, and I put it on the counter, and I pushed it across the counter to the lady. She looked at the coat and looked at my ten dollars and looked at me. She said, “Is this a Christmas present for someone?”

“Yes,” I said shyly, “It’s for Bobby. He doesn’t have a coat.”

The nice lady smiled at me. I didn’t get any change. But she put the coat in a bag, and she wished me a Merry Christmas.

That evening Grandma helped me wrap the coat in Christmas paper and ribbons and write “To Bobby from Santa Claus.” Grandma explained that it was very important that it be done that way because Santa always insisted on secrecy.

Then she drove me over to Bobby Decker’s house, explaining as we went that I was now and forever, officially, one of Santa’s helpers. Grandma parked down the street from Bobby’s house, and she and I crept noiselessly and hid in the bushes by his front walk. Then Grandma gave me a nudge. “All right, little elf,” she whispered, “Get going.”

I took a deep breath. I dashed for his front door, threw the present down on the step, pounded his doorbell and flew back to the safety of the bushes with Grandma. Together we waited breathlessly in the darkness for the front door to open. Finally it did, and there stood Bobby. He picked up the present and took it inside.

Forty years haven’t dimmed the thrill of those moments spent shivering beside my Grandma in Bobby Decker’s bushes. That night I realized that those awful rumors about Santa Claus were just what Grandma said they were. They were ridiculous, because Santa was alive and well, and we were on his team!

* * *

This Christmas, let me suggest that you give at least one present to someone who needs it, and that you do it anonymously, so they don’t know who gave it to them. You might find that it transforms the whole memory of this Christmas for you.

This is the season when holiday spirits are all around us and are beckoning us, and if we can’t get into the holiday mood, it may be because we’ve got it backwards. It may be because the point of it this season is to let the holiday spirits get inside of us. They’re here. They’re all around us, as they’ve always been, and we have a chance, if we’ll take it, to be on their team. I recommend it, for all of us.

Merry Christmas!

Forgiveness

© Davidson Loehr

November 25, 2001

First UU Church of Austin

4700 Grover Ave., Austin, TX 78756

www.austinuu.org

Listen to the sermon by clicking the play button.

Trying to preach on something like forgiveness is a real preacher-trap. It’s one of those words, like love and truth and sweetness, that can so easily get reduced to the level of Hallmark cards.

There’s a story about President Cal Coolidge that comes to mind. He was called “Silent Cal” because he spoke little and seldom. He returned home from church one day and his wife said,”How was church?”

“Fine.”

“What did the preacher talk about?”

“Sin.”

“What did he say?”

“He’s against it.”

Forgiveness is one of those topics and I have this fear that some of you are going to go home today and someone will ask you what did preacher talk about and you’ll say forgiveness, and he’s for it. So if you want to cut to the chase and get a Cliff Notes version of the sermon, that’s it. It’s about forgiveness and I’m for it.

But forgiveness is not only a tricky thing, it’s a word and a concept that is more foreign to most of our worlds than we seem to be aware of. And before going too far into forgiveness, I need to say the point in life is not learning how to forgive everyone you know over and over, day after day. The point in life is learning to associate with the kind of people and to have the kind of relationships that you don’t have to forgive over and over, day after day.

Still, we mess up – or in religious jargon, we sin. I’m going to be using more religious jargon this morning than I usually do, and it’s worth talking about why. This word forgiveness seems to come primarily from Western religion and almost nowhere else. It’s not a Buddhist concept. The notion in Buddhism that you need to be forgiven shows that you’re suffering under an illusion that you need to be freed from. But in Western religion, it’s pretty powerful stuff.

It’s like the concept of sin. The word sin, which I think is really a good word, comes from an ancient Hebrew term that was actually an archery term. It meant “to miss the mark.” So when we use it in religion, it means that we’ve missed the mark in a bigger way. We’ve missed the mark in that we’ve missed living as the kind of person we should have, establishing relationships at the level that’s worthy of us and worthy of the other person. We’ve missed that kind of mark.

Nevertheless, the problem for an immense number in our society, not just most people here, is how do you find forgiveness when the notion of a Heavenly Father is no longer either coherent or compelling for you? How do you find forgiveness without a forgiver? In the twentieth century, the role of hearing confession and granting absolution for sins, to put it that way, that role was really taken over in our society from religion by psychology. Even ministers and priests went to see their shrinks to get forgiven rather than going to see each other.

It’s an often told story that if you have a problem with alcohol addiction or drug addiction, the last person on earth you want to tell is usually your priest and the last place that you feel comfortable saying that out loud is your church. That’s why people went to twelve step programs and twelve step programs have been called by some the most successful spiritual groups of the twentieth century.

There was a survey done twenty years ago to find out whether people of different religions nevertheless shared similar values. Unitarians were one of the groups that were in this study. And the study was surprising perhaps in a couple of ways. First, it found that we really don’t differ much from other groups in what we believe. We tend to believe in truth and love and justice and compassion and that life is a gift and so on, the whole list. We may put it differently if we don’t put it in traditional jargon, but the values are the same.

Where we did differ though, sort of sadly, was in what we didn’t value that most others did value. For almost every religion in Western religious traditions, forgiveness ranked right up at the top in things that were valued and yearned for. Among Unitarians, it was near the bottom. Now, if in this survey, they had also included the majority of people in this society who don’t attend any church on Sunday, I would guess that the real percentage of people in this society who actually attend church or temple or synagogue regularly is about twenty percent. For fifty years, the surveys have been saying it’s forty percent, but once in awhile other studies come out to say they’re really sort of fudging these numbers and doubling it. So if it’s true that about eighty percent in our society don’t attend church, and I think that’s probably close, if they had asked that eighty percent, I think they also would have found that forgiveness was something that ranked low in their values. I think the reason it ranks low is because for most people the word forgiveness has all kinds of metaphysical and supernatural overtones. It’s been dipped in centuries and centuries of a religious tradition that say forgiveness is something that comes from the grace of God, and I just don’t know what to do with sentences like that anymore.

There are a lot of other places that you don’t find the word forgiveness and some of these are very surprising to me as I was doing my homework for this sermon. If you look in the Encyclopedia of Philosophy, you won’t find an entry for forgiveness. Seems odd. If you look in the Dictionary of the History of Ideas, you won’t find an entry for forgiveness. Seems odd, that’s been an idea for a long time, I think. Even if you look in the Encyclopedia of Religions, the sixteen volume encyclopedia that’s sort of the standard work for all world religions, you don’t find and entry for forgiveness. You find and entry for , and for all kinds of animal sacrifices bizarre practices, but not forgiveness.

Now that’s odd. Where you do find forgiveness is in a thesaurus, but even there it says that it means things like to excuse, to absolve, to let someone get away with, to bury the hatchet. It’s all about us. Where you also find an entry for forgiveness is in the Interpreter’s Dictionary of the Bible. I have all these reference books, I think my secret religion believes in salvation by bibliography. I don’t get to look at them very often, so I’m glad to have a word like this to look up, it makes me feel I was justified in buying those things all those years ago.

In the Interpreter’s Dictionary in the Bible, there’s a very long article on forgiveness. And the person writing the article is saying that estrangement and reconciliation or sin and repentance and forgiveness are what the whole bible is about.

Now those are more religious words so I have to unpack them or you’re going to think we’ve gone into Disney World and I don’t want you to think that. When the bible talks about the fundamental human problem being one of estrangement from God, don’t think in terms of a big critter in the sky. Think in terms of the people who wrote these stories saying that the fundamental human problem is that we are estranged from the center of life, the source of life, those things that make life feel more real, more true and more full. The word God is a symbolic shorthand way of saying that. And a shorthand way of relating to that. But don’t turn them into Hallmark cards.

What’s different about forgiveness in the bible and in western religions is that forgiveness isn’t about us. Forgiveness is part of a relationship that we have with life, with God, whichever terms you’re comfortable putting it in. Sin means that we have missed the mark in trying to live up to what we think is most true, most noble, what we know is demanded of us. Repentance means we’re trying to find a way to say this and somewhere to say it, and someone to whom to say, “Look, I missed the mark, can I be made whole again?” Life isn’t about being perfect, it’s about trying to become whole. And forgiveness is part of a process that lets us restore a wholeness that we’ve lost when we’ve missed the mark.

The fact that you can’t find forgiveness an entry in major reference encyclopedias of the twentieth century, either for philosophy, the history of ideas, or religion is a measure of the fact that our whole world has changed in the last couple hundred years. We’ve lost that easy access to a sense that there is somewhere we can go to say, “I sinned, I messed up, I missed the mark. Can’t somebody forgive me? Can’t this somehow be made whole again?”

There’s a poem written about 160 years ago that I like here. I think usually our poets are aware of these things before most of the rest of us are. I want to read you this poem, it’s one you may not have heard before. A poem by Thomas Hood, a man about whom I know almost nothing, except that he lived from 1798 to 1845. And he lived during the time in the nineteenth century when we were losing touch with the mythic world, the older world, the stories, the Father in Heaven that we could talk to about things like forgiveness. It’s a nostalgic poem and a romantic poem, but see if you can’t identify with some of the feelings, at least at the end of it.

The name of the poem is “I Remember, I Remember?

I remember, I remember the house where I was born,

The little window where the sun came peeping in at morn.

He never came awake too soon nor brought too long a day

But now I often wish the night had borne my breath away.

I remember, I remember the roses, red and white,

The violets and the lily cups, those flowers made of light.

The lilacs where the robin built and where my brother

Set the laburnum on his birthday, that tree is living yet.

I remember, I remember where I used to swing

And I thought the air must rise as fresh to swallows on the wing.

My spirit flew in feathers then, that is so heavy now.

And summer pools could hardly cool the fever on my brow.

I remember, I remember the fir trees, dark and high

I used to think their slender tops would touch against the sky.

It was a childish ignorance, but now it’s little joy

To know I’m farther off from Heaven than when I was a boy.

We’re all farther off from Heaven than when we were children and that’s why a word like forgiveness can’t seem to find its way into our consciousness or even into our reference works anymore. It seems to be part of a world long ago. The problem is that the need for forgiveness comes from within our human condition, so it still remains.

In my way of thinking, forgiveness connects naturally with another religious concept. It’s an idea from the Jewish tradition and it’s the concept of atonement. The Jews have a day of atonement called Yom Kippur every year. This year it was the end of September, the 27th , I think. It’s quite an interesting holiday, but the word atonement is what’s most interesting to me. At the end of the day of atonement, Jews are all supposed to go out and do a good deed for someone else as soon as they can. So the notion of atonement ends with reestablishing connections with others.

The word atonement is wonderful. It’s the only English word, I believe, that became a theological concept. And the meaning of the word is in it’s spelling. If you look it up, the word means “at -one-ment?. It means just what it says. It’s the sense of being at one again as part of a relationship from which we’ve become estranged, that got breached, that somehow now has been made whole again. And the thanks for this is something we express by going out and doing something good for others.

Jewish thought is usually very down to earth and non-supernatural. You see this way of thinking in some of the Jewish writings and some of the psalms, especially the 90th Psalm, one of my favorites. The 90th Psalm begins with words about how God has been our dwelling place forever and ever and ever, but now God is gone, long gone and not around our lives and there’s the hope in the psalm that God will return again – not so God can fix things, but so we can be inspired to fix things. And the end lines in the 90th Psalm are the key to this. The psalm ends with the words, “Let the favor of our God be upon us, and establish the work of our hands upon us. Yea the work of our hands establish thou it.”

It’s easy to see why so many people would still go to God to find forgiveness. And for those people for whom that language works, I envy them. It doesn’t work for me. But mostly the kind of atonement we need, and mostly the kind of forgiveness we need is the work of our hands. And we’ve often forgotten how to do it. Because it involves reestablishing a connection to a bigger relationship that once gave life and that got broken because somebody, maybe us, missed the mark.

I have a story about the kind of forgiveness and the kind of atonement that’s much closer to the kind that most of us need in life. The story was told to me as a true story. I don’t know whether it’s true or not, but it’s one of those myths that are always true whether they ever happened or not.

It’s a story about a nurse named Sue who one night, in a blustery winter evening in January, went down to check on her patients and she checked on the man down in 712. He’d had a mild heart attack earlier. And she checked on him and all of his vital signs were fine, and everything seemed to be stable. But as she turned to leave his room, he suddenly grabbed his sheets so tight that his knuckles turned white and he raised up in bed and he said, “Please, you must call my daughter and you must call her now.” He said, “It’s urgent.” And she said, “Well, sir, you seem to be doing fine.” He said, “You don’t understand. She’s the only child I have and you must call her now, it’s urgent.” And she noticed that his breathing was now quite labored and quite irregular. He said that the daughter’s name and number were in his records and the nurse said she would call her. As the nurse turned to leave, the man said, “Nurse, do you have a piece of paper?” And she looked in pockets and found a yellow scrap of paper so she gave it to him and went to call the daughter.

She expected the daughter to concerned about her father’s health but she didn’t expect the daughter to become nearly hysterical. The daughter was screaming, “No, this can’t be true, he just can’t die.” And the nurse said, “Well, we don’t know and he seems fine although his breathing is a little labored and he wants you to come right away.” And the daughter said, “You don’t understand.” She said, “We’ve lived in the same town for thirty years.” And she said, “I haven’t seen him for a year. And the last time I saw him, we had a terrible fight. I screamed at him, “I hate you, I wish you would die?, and I slammed the door. He just can’t die!”

After this call, the nurse went back to check on the man who’d become now a part of her world. And she found him very still. She checked his pulse and there was none. She did CPR while she was waiting for the emergency team to arrive. But the team was too late. And no matter what they did, they realized that the man had died. One by one, the emergency team left the room, someone finally turned off the gurgling oxygen machine.

The nurse was the last to leave the man’s room and she saw in the hallway one of the doctors talking to a very upset young woman who had to be the daughter. The nurse went out and brought the daughter in to her father’s room. And the daughter cried almost uncontrollably. And then she grabbed the sheet that had covered her father and used it to wipe her eyes and cried more. When she did this the nurse saw the yellow piece of paper that she had given the man. And she picked it up and looked at it and handed it to the daughter. What the man had written on the yellow piece of paper before he died was, “I love you. I forgive you. I hope you forgive me. I know you don’t hate me.” And it was signed Daddy.

That’s forgiveness. And it happened by reestablishing a relationship that had been broken because two people had missed the mark. Maybe the daughter could have found that kind of forgiveness and at-one-ment on her own in years to come without that piece of paper, through thought or through therapy or through time. But I doubt that it would ever have had the power that it had from her father. And isn’t it sad that the forgiveness and the atonement only went one direction? Isn’t it sad that the daughter never got the chance to say those words to her father before he died?

I’m reminded of one last piece of religious wisdom that’s little known and worth sharing. It comes from the Lord’s Prayer. As many of you know, I’ve been involved with The Jesus Seminar for over a decade. That seminar has done a lot of good things. One of the things that it’s done is in clarifying the Lord’s Prayer and translating it. We’re clear that as the prayer as written Jesus never said it, for a variety of reasons, one of them being the whole notion of speaking on behalf of a group of people that he didn’t do anywhere. He would never have said “Our Father?. He would talk about life or truth or the need to establish a more authentic relationship with God, but he never spoke for a group of people or acted as though he were their minister.

But three lines in the Lord’s Prayer are, we think, true to what the man Jesus cared about and would have said. One is the line “thy kingdom come.” Jesus taught about his notion of the kingdom of God, and wanted it to become established on earth. A second line is “give us this day our daily bread.” Jesus and his followers begged for their meals, and we believe he would have asked for just the day’s bread. The third line is the one that is almost always mistranslated. We’ve learned it as “forgive us our sins, as we forgive the sins of others,” and that’s kind of a nice line. But the word “as” needs to be translated better. Read rightly, the sentence should read “Forgive us our sins to the extent that we forgive the sins of others.” To the extent that we forgive the sins of others. Very different!

We need to take this out of mythic language. This isn’t about someone talking to a God in some dramatic way. That’s not what sacred writings are really about. This is an insight into the facts of life. And the insight is that we seem to find forgiveness to the extent that we are able to grant it to others. So finally it is the work of our hands we seek to establish, though it is work we always struggle to learn just how to do, because it is hard for us.

Let us try to seek this kind of forgiveness before we run out of time, before we have to grasp at little scraps of paper to write the messages we can’t find the courage to say out loud here and now. Let us confess our sins for missing the mark, and repent of them, and seek the forgiveness that reconnects us with our larger relationships. The work of our hands, all of our hands. Here. Now. Let us seek it before it is too late. Amen.

Accepting Life's Gifts

© Davidson Loehr

November 18, 2001

First UU Church of Austin

4700 Grover Ave., Austin, TX 78756

www.austinuu.org

This is the season when we start hearing endless harangues about the “real” meanings of these holidays. I’m not sure there’s only one meaning, though it’s easy to lose patience with all the hokey meanings that get glued to these holidays.

A few days ago I received in the mail from a woodworking place here in town the announcement that they have a Thanksgiving sale on drill bits. So you can use Thanksgiving as sort of a warm-up for the biggest commercial season of the year which is coming up immediately following. Thanksgiving can also be and is usually taken as a time of an annual reckoning when we count our blessings. When we look around and realize that the friends, the families, the life that we have is much more blessing than curse, that we’re lucky to have it and the appropriate response is to give thanks for it. This is good, even better than drill bits.

But I want to take this to another level this morning. This is the fifth in a five part series of sermons, though I think I’ll add a sixth part to the five part series next week, just to keep it confusing. But this is the fifth in a five part series of sermons on stages of grieving something that has died for us. It’s used in a lot of ways, but I’ve been using it primarily to talk about old religious beliefs that may once have served us, that may have been familiar, but that no longer give us life. Things that even if you could say you believe them – which in many cases you can’t – you still wouldn’t have any idea what possible sense they make. It’s an old habit and it may be a rut, but it’s your rut, and you’re not sure how to get out of it. There’s a that was developed by Elizabeth Kubler Ross about thirty years ago for dealing with the stages that people go through in dealing with the loss of something. And these are the stages we have been using and applying to religion.

The first thing we do when we’re threatened with the loss of something important and life-giving and from which we have derived our identity is to pretend that nothing really happened. That’s the stage of denial, otherwise known as “the ostrich school” of response. When denial doesn’t work, we can get angry about it. You can see two-year-olds throwing these tantrums where they are trying to use anger to control everyone around them to do things their way: two-year-olds of any age. We have all done it. When anger doesn’t work, we try to make a deal. We try to keep what we can of the old ways so that we don’t have to make the major change that is still scary. So we make a deal, we play at Bargaining.

There are a lot of deals going on in religion where people who have outgrown beliefs of their past, whatever their beliefs were, still go through the motions and still pretend that they really believe things that they have no idea how to make any sense at all of because they want so much to remain a part of the world that once gave them life. And they make a deal and the deal seems to feed them. Some deals are good deals as long as you don’t lose yourself in them. But a lot of times the deals don’t work.

And then you come to the fourth stage which is really the most frightening of the bunch. Elizabeth Kubler Ross called it depression but it was severely under-named. It’s at least a despair and it’s sort of a terrified despair at that. This is what happens when you realize that you have lost a world. You have lost who you were and how you thought things were and you don’t have a story to live within and you don’t know who you are and if you don’t know who you are and what your story is you literally don’t know how to go on. Our stories are our road maps through life.

I told you a story three weeks ago from some of the works of Dr. Rachel Naomi Remen about this kind of despair, this kind of losing a world and how severe it is. There’s nothing romantic about it. This isn’t Hallmark greeting card stuff. It was a story about a young college athlete, quite a football star in California, who had his right leg amputated above the knee because of cancer, and who didn’t want to go on, he lost his entire life. His life had been big man on campus, fast cars, fast women and the rest of it, and it was over for him. That’s the despair of losing a world. He would never be again who he had been until then. Never. And you’ve got two choices, you accept a different kind of life that you never thought you would have accepted just a year earlier, or you don’t go on.

So the acceptance that comes isn’t something light and fluffy. The kind of acceptance involved in this stage means that you’re accepting an identity for yourself and an identity for life that you would not have found acceptable a year ago. This doesn’t mean that you’re defining yourself at a lower level at all. It’s usually at a higher level. It does mean that you’re defining yourself at a deeper level.

I like the Thanksgiving story as one of the most powerful, classic stories of at least the last two stages, though all of the stages were involved in this. I think it’s a classic story not only for Americans, but for the human condition and one we should know and know well. And we should tell ourselves this story at least once a year. I also like the story of the pilgrims and the first Thanksgiving because when you learn more about them you realize there’s a lot about the pilgrims you can not respect or like.

Now we see them dolled up on posters and matching gray costumes with big, white collars cooking a twenty six-pound Butterball turkey and making happy with the Indians. We see the pilgrims wrapped in the American flag. Many fundamentalists will talk about the vision of the country’s founders that we have lost; they don’t mean the founders. Those are the people in the eighteenth century who gave us the Constitution and the Bill of Rights. When fundamentalists look back nostalgically for the image of a nation made in their image, they mean the pilgrims.

And one of the things we can be thankful for every Thanksgiving is that we don’t live in the kind of country the pilgrims wanted! The pilgrims were what today we would call fundamentalists. And the social agenda, and I’ve said this before, the social agenda of fundamentalisms are the same worldwide regardless of their religion. We saw it in the Taliban, we saw in that amazingly unguarded interview between Pat Robertson and Jerry Falwell. And we can see it 380 years ago in the story of the pilgrims.

So let me tell you about the pilgrims. They started in England, but they left England because they didn’t have the freedom to believe what they wanted to believe. Now so far they sound like our kind of people. We’re all about religious freedom and freedom of belief and will go to great lengths to make sure that people have them whether their beliefs agree with ours or not.

From England the pilgrims went to Holland because Holland in the early seventeenth century was a wildly pluralistic kind of country, much closer to the United States of today than England was. And they certainly had freedom of belief in Holland. You could believe anything you liked in Holland but no belief was going to take precedence. And that’s when one of the dark sides of the pilgrims was shown because while they wanted freedom to believe their things, they did not want the freedom for anyone else to believe things that were wrong. And they were lucky enough to know what was right.

So when the pilgrims left Holland to come to this country, they left it ironically because it had far too much freedom of belief. More than they wanted in the new country. They came here to civilize the Indians after they got here, to civilize the wilderness, and to Christianize America and to establish a country where there was freedom only to believe what they believed. And if you know your early American history, you know that is exactly how our colonies began.

Our colonies were on the verge of perpetuating the religious warfare that tore Europe apart and the only thing that prevented it was finally the founders setting up a Constitution with a Bill of Rights including a first amendment. The pilgrims would have absolutely detested the United States of America and its Bill of Rights and they would not have permitted it. So we need to know that about them. Don’t just wrap them in an American flag, they would have hated it.

Nevertheless, they showed a courage and a perseverance that are absolutely astonishing. And we have a lot to learn from them. I don’t know how many worlds they lost. They lost a whole world in England. They lost their families, they lost their grandparents, great grandparents, they lost uncounted generations of history that they would never see again. Imagine how this feels, to leave England to go to Holland willing to lose an entire world, to redefine life and start again in Holland and then they lose it again because the world is much bigger than their beliefs can allow. And they lose a second world. And they came here to start a third one.

Originally, they started out in two ships, but one of them wasn’t seaworthy. So they returned and all of them came in just the one ship, the Mayflower. There were 102 pilgrims who came here in 1620. They arrived in Massachusetts to face an absolutely record breaking, brutal, deadly winter. They come to the New World and the world knows them not and loves them not. During that winter – these are numbers I think we should all know – out of the 102 pilgrims that came, during their first winter, 47 died. Almost half. If you think of winter as four months in Massachusetts, that means that they lost about three people a week, all winter long. How long could you do this? Without losing your own will to live? Without losing your own spirit? The courage and the perseverance of these tough pilgrims is something that we need to make a part of us.

In spring, they planted crops, the crops had to be near the graves of 47 of their people, graves they dug in frozen earth during the winter when they weren’t hunting for food to stay alive themselves. They planted crops, they hunted for food and according to all the stories I’ve read, they made friends with the Indians that were here. The Indians were apparently very friendly towards the pilgrims at first.

Maybe if the Indians could see 300 years into the future, they wouldn’t have been so friendly, but they were friendly in 1621. And in the fall of 1621, as was their custom from England, they had a Harvest Home Festival. It was a very old English festival, when the harvest comes in, you have a big Harvest Home Festival. And the pilgrims re-instituted that here, it’s what we now call the first Thanksgiving. It was quite an event.

The records seem to say that this thing went on three days. Three days of eating and merriment. And the menu was pretty spectacular for the first Thanksgiving, it still sounds good. They had venison stew cooked over an open fire. They had spit roasted wild turkeys stuffed with cornbread, sweet corn baked in its husks, and pumpkin baked in a bag and flavored with maple syrup. After dinner, according to legend, Chief Masasoit’s brother disappeared into the woods and returned with a bushel of popcorn, which the pilgrims had never before tasted.

Perhaps, in life, all’s well that ends well. But this didn’t end well without great loss, great pain, and great resolve. Thanksgiving isn’t a holiday for people who have never lost anything. Without the loss, you can still have the turkey but it doesn’t have the meaning, or the victory, that it had for these first pilgrims.

t first, they must have tried denial. When the first one of them died the previous fall, and then the second and third, they must still have thought that might be all, that the rest of them would make it. We have no records of their anger, and in their style of religion it doesn’t seem likely they would have expressed it – at least not towards God. But inside, how could they avoid anger at the loss of so much and so many? I wonder what were the bargains they offered God in their private prayers? “Just spare our family God, and we will work even harder for your glory.” Then, “at least spare our children,” and “spare something, spare someone, anyone.” In return, they would convert – whom, the Indians?

At some time during that cruel winter, though, despair had to settle in. My God, almost half of them were dead, there was no reason to think the other half wouldn’t follow them the next winter. If this was the land God had chosen for them, he certainly had a perverted way of showing them its bounty! We don’t know the depth or style of despair these pilgrims went through. What would you feel, losing half your people, uncertain whether the rest of you might soon join them? I’ve never had as many good reasons to feel despair as they did. They had at least 47 good reasons for giving up, another 55 reasons to keep holding on, but it had to feel like a close call, don’t you think?

What they were being offered, finally, wasn’t what they had wanted or hoped for at all. Little glory, limited joy, many grave markers, many searing memories, a long long way from their homeland, their relatives – everything and everyone. What did they get? Life, and even then only for half of them. Life, food, the chance to survive another year, and the chance to do something else. Something that still stuns us by its audacity, its unlikeliness, its irony. Right there, right in the middle of the fields of suffering and death, in the heart of this new land which had still not decided whether it would let them live, right there with some new friends, they stopped, they celebrated, they threw a party, and they gave thanks.

I like to think that just that simple act of giving thanks offered them freedom and courage to go on, and began the healing of wounds they would wear like battle scars forever. Just their ability to accept the gift of life – however it was to be offered to them – and to accept it with praise and gratitude, just that. I like to think that offered the most and the best healing and blessing they were going to find. I like to think that just that simple act of giving thanks blessed them, and blessed those who followed them.

I know it works for us.

Remembering Those Who Fought For Us

© Davidson Loehr

 November 11, 2001

 First UU Church of Austin

 4700 Grover Ave., Austin, TX 78756

 www.austinuu.org

We love war stories. We always have. We still make WWII movies, 56 years after the war ended. And one of them (Saving Private Ryan) won several Oscars a few years ago, and almost won Best Picture. The Rambo movies tried singlehandedly to rewrite the history of the Vietnam War, letting us win it.

I think there is a select group of war movies that should be required viewing for people in our society who have never been in a war, to get some small feel of the bloody and seductive power war has always had – at least for most men. On that list, I would include Saving Private Ryan, Apocalypse Now and The Deer Hunter, as well as some powerful anti-war movies like The Americanization of Emily, Gallipoli and All Quiet on the Western Front.

The great combat general George Patton once famously remarked that next to war, all other human achievements shrink to insignificance. I’d hate to see history’s greatest artists, diplomats and geniuses dismissed by this modern incarnation of the god Ares, but for sheer power and excitement, Patton is probably right. Every veteran I have known still defines their war time as the defining experience of their life – as I also do. It isn’t kosher to say it, but I wouldn’t trade anything in the world for my 53 weeks in Vietnam – and almost every veteran of every war will understand.

We love war stories. The oldest story we have preserved in Western Civilization is a war story – Homer’s Iliad, probably written down 2800 years ago: the story of the Trojan war of three millennia ago.

Our notion of the hero goes back to those stories, too. For the Greeks, a “hero” was half way between humans and gods: someone of nearly superhuman personal courage and skill in the service of some higher ideal the Greeks admired.

That’s the key. It isn’t just courage, it’s a selfless courage in the service of a higher ideal. Heroes fight for others. So do the soldiers we admire. When they fight for small or selfish ideals, we never think of them as heroic:

Mafia fights have often been bloody, and required some courage to pull off. But the slaughter was tribal, in the service of one family’s greed, usually involving profits from prostitution, drugs or gambling, nothing nobler. So we may be fascinated by stories of the Godfathers, but we don’t regard them as heroes. We don’t have holidays to celebrate them.

Mercenaries, soldiers for hire, also risk their lives. But we think of them as opportunists with way too much testosterone, not heroes.

And violent atrocities during war are never regarded as heroic. Many of us remember Lt. Calley and the Mai Lai massacres of the Viet Nam War, where his platoon slaughtered an entire Vietnamese village of men, women, children and babies. He was court-martialed, not given a ticker-tape parade.

We have similar reactions to the military violence of the Nazis, the Salvadoran death squads, the horrible acts of “the killing fields” in Cambodia and so many others. Bullying, brutality and barbarism have never been admired, even though they continue to be imitated. We know the difference between barbarism and heroism, and it is a nearly sacred difference for us.

On Veterans’ Day, we try to remember the nobler, more selfless and heroic acts of men and women who put themselves at the service of orders they believed served the best parts of our country’s history and heritage. Few of our veterans were in actual combat. In the Vietnam War, about 90% of our soldiers were support troops, only about 10% saw actual fighting, and I imagine it’s still about the same. But every one of them made themselves available, and was there to do whatever was asked of them, the clerks and cooks just as much as the infantrymen.

There is something here that is striking and heroic. These are ordinary people who will do what they are told because they trust that their country would not ask them to risk their lives if it weren’t necessary. They trust their captains, their generals, their president. They trust us.

There is an unwritten, unspoken covenant that soldiers make with their countries. It’s a deceptively simple covenant. They say, “I’ll risk my life, maybe even lose it, in a cause I can’t fully grasp, in a battle that is part of a larger war I’ll never understand. I’ll do it for you because I am one of you and you have asked me to do it. In return, you must promise me two things. First, you must promise that you will do everything in your power to make sure it is a war that is worth my life. Second, you must promise never to forget. You must promise never to forget me, us, and what we did, because we did it for you. You must promise never to forget.”

Veterans’ Day is one of our annually scheduled times to try not to forget, to keep up our part of this holy, bloody, covenant. But in truth, we mostly do forget, don’t we?

It’s hard, almost contrived, to celebrate Veterans’ Day in a liberal church like this. I took part in a service with another Vietnam veteran in St. Paul a year and a half ago, and when all veterans were asked to stand, only six stood, including the two of us on the stage. Six out of about three hundred. Here in the South, the percentages are higher: we had 12-15 out of the 300 present at our second service. Still, it isn’t a big percentage. If you want to see a bigger percentage of veterans, you’ll probably have to travel east of I-35 to some of the black churches, or up the road to some of the big Catholic churches where there weren’t as many college deferments. But here, and in Episcopal churches and churches on the west side of Austin, we aren’t the warrior class. We get others to fight our wars for us.

And once the wars are over, the veterans become almost invisible – especially the broken ones, who are embarrassments in peacetime. Occasionally, you see a license plate on which a veteran wants to remind you that he or she served, and in which war. Once in awhile, we may be dimly aware that somewhere in almost every major city there is a Veterans’ Administration Hospital, where wounded, broken, disabled vets languish away out of our sight and out of our thoughts.

Even our good wars leave many veterans with wounds that will never completely heal. Our bad wars are much worse.

My veteran friend in St. Paul wrote a book about his experiences in Vietnam, and during his research he discovered that more Vietnam veterans have died of suicide than were killed in the entire war. That’s sixty thousand or more suicides. The fact that this is probably the first time you’ve heard this is one measure of just how invisible veterans are.

With the wisdom of hindsight, we can look back on Vietnam and realize that we didn’t keep our part of the covenant back then. The soldiers never promised it would be a good war, because that’s not their job. That’s the part we were supposed to guarantee. It is our responsibility to insure that it is the right war to be fought in that place at that time, just as it is our job to ask those questions in our present war. The soldiers only promised to serve, to risk and even lose their lives if necessary. We were also supposed to remember them for it. But after the humiliation of defeat in Vietnam, our society blamed the veterans for losing a war that should never have been fought, and many of them – tens of thousands of Vietnam veterans – were undone by it. The effects on their families, children and friends are incalculable.

People who attend liberal churches like this where over 90% of the members hold college degrees are never likely to be well represented in the warrior class. But Veterans’ Day still has a powerful message for us. In fact, it brings challenges which fall more directly to us than to almost any other sector of our society – especially since we are now getting drawn into a new war, whose effects may be with us for a long time.

Our favorite war stories reconnect us with those rare and powerful times when character is put under pressure and under fire. Remember, that’s how diamonds are made. And at its best, war’s ability to shape and temper character is like the story of coal being converted into diamonds through intense heat and pressure. The potential for that clarity and strength was always there, but it would never have emerged without the terrible pressure. Some, of course, can’t withstand the pressure: sixty thousand suicides from Vietnam veterans are a small measure of this.

In times of war, and observances like Veterans’ Day, we are offered the chance and the challenge of putting our own character under that same pressure and seeing what kind of precious jewel we can produce. It will not be the jewel of combat warriors, for that’s not the stuff of which most of us are made. I’m not made of it either. I was on a lot of combat operations, but as a combat photographer. I carried a camera instead of a gun and shot pictures rather than people. And while I was shot at as much as most of them, I was a watcher, not a warrior.

It left me believing that we owe something to those who have fought for us. I believe that every act of bravery that serves us is a kind of debt that we owe, and that we must repay when the time has come for our kind of courage. This Veterans’ Day is, perversely, the two-month anniversary of the attacks of September 11th, so the one day leads to the other. These times since the attacks of September 11th do offer challenges that fall particularly to us and other cultural liberals.

One of the most important revelations after the attacks came from that amazingly unguarded interview between Pat Robertson and Jerry Falwell, where they blamed the attacks on liberated women, abortions, gay rights, the ACLU and all liberal organizations that work for individual rights and freedoms. The revelation was that this was the same hate list produced by the fundamentalist Muslims of the Taliban. The lesson is that fundamentalisms of all kinds are among the most dangerous enemies of freedom and democracy in the world.

Pat Robertson has been very clear about this. He has said that democracy is not a fit form of government unless it is run by fundamentalist Christians under their (and his) rules.

Religious and cultural liberals must be awakened by the fact that any religious or political effort to tie one religion to the political and military machinery of our country will be America’s version of the Taliban, and has the potential to do far more harm than the attacks of September 11th. When God is ordered to bless America, that God has been reduced to a puppet of the government and the media. It isn’t allowed to challenge or question America, only to bless its wars. When that happens, it is no longer a God worth serving. It’s bad theology, and worse public policy. It calls for resistance from the people with the gifts of intellect and articulation that characterize us here this morning. This is our combat zone, our war front.

And the reason it is ours is also because the only antidote to the deadly narrowness of fundamentalisms — again, regardless of which kind of fundamentalisms — is the openness and inclusion that are the very soul of liberal religion. In this church and other liberal churches in Austin and elsewhere is the spirit that this community and this country need desperately as we are being dragged into this new war. It is our job to proclaim the religious alternative of openness and trust over religions that preach fear and obedience.

No, we don’t have the single answer to the world’s problems in a simple set of mandated beliefs, because there isn’t one. What we do have is the deep conviction that the world’s problems can only be addressed through opening the dialogue to a whole range of religious and political answers, learning how to listen to those whose beliefs differ, and asking how those beliefs can be a healthy gift to a world not made in their image. And that, I think, is the answer to the world’s problems.

Friends, nobody in the world can do this better than we can. It is our calling and our mission, and if we don’t engage in this battle for the hearts and minds of our own people we will have failed to answer the call of our times.

What I am suggesting is that you need to spread the good news that there are churches where all sincere beliefs are invited, where a variety of paths toward compassion and inclusion are sought, where the only heresy lies in pretending that there is only one way. That is the Good News I’m trying to spread through my involvement with the Austin Area Interreligious Ministries. I accept every writing assignment or newspaper interview they ask me to accept, because I think it’s my job to accept them. And always, I’m trying to spread the Good News that there is a religious alternative in this community that teaches expansive rather than constrictive visions. It is also the message I will be trying to communicate through my occasional columns in the Austin American Statesman. I’ve already written my first column, to explain this Queen-of-the-chessboard nature of healthy liberal religion, and have been told my first column will be printed on December 8th. We don’t offer a religion here; we offer the possibility of becoming human religiously, along a greater variety of paths than any single religion can offer. That’s Good News. Spread the word.

Churches like this have a terribly important role to play against the background of war. We must ask whether this is a just war, or whether it is being used primarily as a cover, as a tactic of misdirection, while Congress continues to pass bills taking money from the lower and middle classes and transferring it to the top couple percent, as they have been doing in Washington almost since the attacks of September 11th.

Behind the flag-waving, in stories that seldom make the front twenty pages of our newspapers, the real agenda of the people who control our country has been gaining such speed that the restructuring of our economy and our society’s possibilities may be just about over.

The Heritage Foundation and other think-mobs that see 98% of our people as disposable workers for the enrichment of the few who control the capital have been clear that they want “government” shrunk to a size where they can drown it in a bathtub, as Grover Norquist has put it. “Government” here means “all binding restraints on the power and greed of those who control the capital.”

This agenda isn’t subtle; only our willful denial can keep us blinded to it. This president’s cabinet is stocked with a far higher percentage of corporate sponsors and interests than any in our history. Their agenda can’t be a mystery. Under the cover of this new and contrived “war” they are finally able to rush through new bills and laws, unseen, that can change the form of government here into a pure plutocracy — or, as others have suggested, a corpocracy, the rule of the people by the economic ambitions of our major corporations.

The scale and boldness of the greed has even pushed observers like the normally calm Bill Moyers into anger, as he has written in his October 16th speech to the Environmental Grantmakers Association in Brainard, Minnesota:

“While in New York we are still attending memorial services for firemen and police, while everywhere Americans’ cheeks are still stained with tears, while the President calls for patriotism, prayers and piety, the predators of Washington are up to their old tricks in the pursuit of private plunder at public expense. In the wake of this awful tragedy wrought by terrorism, they are cashing in.”

What else can be accomplished under the cover of the patriotic fervor designed to distract the ignorant masses? “Why, restore the three-martini lunch — that will surely strike fear in the heart of Osama bin Laden. You think I’m kidding, but bringing back the deductible lunch is one of the proposals on the table in Washington sacrifice in this time of crisis – by paying for lobbyists’ long lunches.

“And cut capital gains for the wealthy, naturally — that’s America’s patriotic duty, too. And while we’re at it don’t forget to eliminate the Corporate Alternative Minimum Tax, enacted fifteen years ago to prevent corporations from taking so many credits and deductions that they owed little if any taxes. But don’t just repeal their minimum tax; give those corporations a refund for all the minimum tax they have ever been assessed. You look incredulous. But that’s taking place in Washington even as we meet here in Brainerd this morning.

“What else can America do to strike at the terrorists? Why, slip in a special tax break for poor General Electric, and slip inside the Environmental Protection Agency while everyone’s distracted and torpedo the recent order to clean the Hudson river of PCBs. Don’t worry about NBC, CNBC, or MSNBC reporting it; they’re all in the GE family.

“It’s time for Churchillian courage, we’re told. So how would this crowd assure that future generations will look back and say ‘This was their finest hour’? That’s easy. Give those coal producers freedom to pollute. And shovel generous tax breaks to those giant energy companies; and open the Alaskan wilderness to drilling — that’s something to remember the 11th of September for. And while the red, white and blue wave at half-mast over the land of the free and the home of the brave — why, give the President the power to discard democratic debate and the rule-of-law concerning controversial trade agreements, and set up secret tribunals to run roughshod over local communities trying to protect their environment and their health. It’s happening as we meet. It’s happening right now.”

Moyers’ anger is uncharacteristic, but he’s hardly alone. Consider some of the comments by Paul Krugman in the Sunday 11 November New York Times (Reckonings: “Another Useful Crisis“).

He reminded us of the California energy crisis and how “… it illustrated, in particularly stark form, the political strategy of the Bush administration before September 11th. The basic principle of this strategy – which was also used to sell that $2 trillion tax cut – was that crises weren’t problems to be solved. Instead, they were opportunities to advance an agenda that had nothing to do with the crisis at hand.

“It is now clear that, at least as far as domestic policy is concerned, the administration views terrorism as another useful crisis.”

Now the administrations “economic stimulus” proposals have nothing to do with helping the economy, but everything to do with its usual tax-cutting agenda. The administration is now favoring a program with huge retroactive tax cuts for big corporations, and a total cost of $220 billion over three years – less than $20 billion of that total having anything to do with economic stimulus. The rest consists of “tax cuts for corporations and high-income individuals, structured in such a way that they will do little to increase spending during the current recession.”

“Why does the administration’s favored bill offer so little stimulus? Because that’s not its purpose; it’s really designed to lock in permanent tax cuts for corporations and the wealthy, using the Sept. 11 attacks as an excuse. … Politics, while never completely clean, didn’t used to be this cynical…. It’s something new to see crises – especially a crisis as shocking as the terrorist attack – consistently addressed with legislation that does almost nothing to address the actual problem, and is almost entirely aimed at advancing a pre-existing agenda.

“Oh, by the way; the administration is once again pushing for drilling in the Arctic. You see, it’s essential to the fight against terrorism.”

These certainly aren’t the only voices trying to wake the slumbering people of our country – people being kept drugged and drowsy through the collaboration of a cynically manipulative administration and spinelessly compliant media. The list of greedy activities slithering around under cover of all the flags is a long and growing list. Some feel we may be losing the last remnants of democracy and the hopes of the vast majority of Americans right now, while we are being so brilliantly distracted by the super-hyped war (with complete and shameful collaboration by the media).

Could it happen? Of course it could happen. The price of freedom is eternal vigilance, and we the masses are being successfully lulled into a sleep from which we may not awaken as the same nation. Of course it could happen. And then how would our current “war” be seen in retrospect? What could we then tell the families of these new young dead soldiers when they ask us to remind them, again, just what we thought was worth having their loved ones die for?

In retrospect, we now see that the Vietnam War was almost certainly not justified, and that all those people died for no reason we can be clear about. We failed in our most fundamental covenant with those soldiers, and we simply must not fail in that way again now.

We also need to insist that religious dialogues be kept open, and that our Muslim brothers and sisters are not harrassed or harmed out of an ignorant fear of those who look and believe differently. We’re the ones who believe that sincere differences beautify the pattern, and that the whole human sound goes up only from the full orchestra. We need to say so, out loud, to our friends, neighbors, to people in the grocery store, anywhere and everywhere the subject arises. And if they don’t believe there is a church where such things are taught, invite them here. We are certainly not the only open and healthy church in Austin, but we are one of them, and an important one.

This is Veterans’ Day. And the way we serve the sacrifices made by those veterans who have fought for us is by rising to meet the same level of moral challenge. Our mission is not one where we will carry rifles or shoot bullets to kill people. Our mission is to offer an educated vision, articulated in ways that can make a positive difference in the lives of our members, our children, and the larger community and nation. We are called to respond to these challenges just as surely as soldiers are called to respond to challenges on their own battlefield.

I’ll try to wrap my message in a story. This is a parable I wrote a dozen years ago for a different topic, but parables offer many applications. It is called “The ABC of Music.”

The ABC of Music

A. A girl walked by a building she had not seen before. Looking in the window, she was stopped by an odd sight. There was another girl, about her age, standing in a far room of the building, doing what looked like a kind of dance, or at least a dance done from the waist up, for her feet hardly moved at all. She seemed to be biting the end of a metal rod. She was holding the rod in her hands, out to her right side, and she seemed to have the other end of the rod in her mouth, biting it, or at least chewing on it. As she bit it, she moved a little, a kind of gentle swaying motion.

The girl could not see clearly, for the window was dirty, or cloudy. Still, it was the strangest sight! She began stopping by this building each day to watch the strange dance, always about the same, and soon found herself wondering whether perhaps she wasn’t looking into the window of some kind of a hospital-a hospital where they put people who did these slow little dances while biting metal rods.

B. One day when she walked by, the window was open. And now, when the girl looked in, she heard the sound of a flute playing. It was a flute player, not a dancer, and the point of it all had not been the movement, but the music, which the girl had never heard before. “Aha,” said the girl, “now I understand!” Then, no longer interested by the spectacle, she turned to leave.

C. But the flute player saw her, and called out to her. Surprised, the girl stayed by the open window as the other girl approached. “Here,” said the flute player when she reached the open window, “wouldn’t you like to play? This is yours, after all, and it is your turn now.” With that, she handed the flute through the open window to the girl who had, until then, been only a spectator.

And then the flute player disappeared, the whole building disappeared, and the little girl found herself standing there with her whole life still ahead of her, holding a flute-and trying to remember the movements, and the music.

Courage is like this kind of music:

A. From a distance, it can look like strange, foolhardy or Hollywood-style actions of cartoon characters like Rambo or GI Joe.

B. When we understand it more deeply, it isn’t about the dramatic actions as much as it is about character. Courage is what character becomes under pressure, much as diamonds are what coal becomes under pressure.

C. But finally, we have to realize the one thing we hadn’t wanted to realize: that this is always about us, too. When the times call for courage, they call for courage from everyone, each in our own way.

That pressure that turns coal to diamonds asks us where and how we must act now.

The people who fought for us have let us hear the music of courage. But they have offered us that flute too, and told us that the flute is also in our hands. Whether we like it or not, it is also our turn to make our own variety of courageous music.

What can we do? What must we do? What will we do?

Bargaining: The Deals We Make To Avoid Change

© Davidson Loehr

October 21, 2001

First UU Church of Austin

4700 Grover Ave., Austin, TX 78756

www.austinuu.org

CENTERING:

Let us make a bargain with our souls. Let us not trade integrity for approval or trade authenticity for anything at all. Let us learn to ask for what we need in work, in relationships, from our friends and from our religion.

A wise man once said, “Knock and it shall be opened, seek and you shall find, ask and you shall receive.” We need help in believing this for, though it is true, it seems terribly unlikely. And so we often seek too little and let ourselves be treated badly, even like dirt.

If we let ourselves be treated like dirt for too long, it can begin to feel natural. We’re not dirt; we’re stardust. We’re the stuff of which the universe is made. Let us honor that.

Let us seek relationships where we are cherished and not settle for less. Let us never make bargains where we lose our souls, our authenticity, for that’s no bargain at all. And it’s a terrible price to pay for the pretense that everything is still together.

We cannot love our neighbors as ourselves until we know how to love ourselves. Yet how many times have we sold out for something so much less than we are. How many times have we treated or allowed ourselves to be treated, not as people, but as things. Let us not settle for less.

Let us make a bargain with our souls and remember that within each of us is a seed of God, a spark of the divine, and the hope of the world. It is so important. Let us take these few quiet moments to get in touch with our true centers.

SERMON:

We’re in the middle of an extended series of sermons that are talking about the Elizabeth Kubler-Ross developed in her 1969 book on stages of death and dying. There are five stages that we tend to go through when we are grieving the loss of anything important.

Her has been used mostly in hospice work and hospital care, but I first began to realize how broad the is when I was invited to a three day business conference in Chicago ten or twelve years ago. One of the key speakers was going to be Mortimer Adler. I had read some of his books and attended his university and wanted to hear him. So I went in mostly to hear this 90-something year old man (who was still sharp as a tack).

During this business conference, one junior executive from the Bose Company that makes those great little speakers did a presentation on how his company struggled going through what you could call a paradigm shift in understanding the sound business and their future in it. He went through graphs, charts and pictures. I realized what he was doing was going through the five stages of grief that had been used to deal with death and dying. And that’s when I realized that these are the stages that we go through to grieve the death of anything that’s been important to us, to resist having to change.

The first thing we do when significant change comes is to resort to the “ostrich school”, where we stick our heads in the sand and our fannies in the air and we look silly only to everyone else. If that doesn’t work, then we get mad. If you were here last week, you got to see the full-blown tantrum that I got to throw at the beginning of the sermon. And we try to use anger to control people, to frighten people or the universe or God back into line. We’re saying, “Look, I really mean it!”

When that can’t work, we come to the third stage, which is called bargaining. In some ways, it’s the funniest of the stages. It is certainly the most creative. Bargaining is where we ask our brain to trick us. We’ve all had the wool pulled over our eyes by charlatans somewhere or other. But in bargaining, we contrive with ourselves to pull the wool over our own eyes. It’s really quite a trick. Many of the bargains we make are dramatic and very funny. You can think of examples in your personal life and relationships and your job, from all over the place.

I brought you just three from religion because I’m trying to focus on how we change or try to avoid changing dealing with religious beliefs that may have served us once but that have died a long time ago and we just don’t know what to do with them or how to replace them.

The first example is the longest but probably the most fun. When I was in graduate school, there was another doctoral student who was a couple of years ahead of me. I’ve told this story before and I’ve always protected his name. But I figure it’s been twenty years, he’s past it and he could certainly deal with it anyway. It was Steven Post. He was the grandson of Emily Post. And though his family was pretty well off, Steven was a very bright young man and was on, I think, a full ride scholarship at the University of Chicago. He also had a wicked sense of humor and he loved tormenting people.

We were sitting at a Wednesday luncheon one week. This university really didn’t have much of a sense of community. You mostly sat at home in your apartment or you sat in the library and you read and that was called Life. But they tried to fake community by subsidizing a Wednesday luncheon once a week. And we would have a very nice lunch with wine and guest speakers, sometimes world famous speakers. I went to all of them that I could.

Students and faculty would sit together at tables and have a chance to talk. I was sitting across from Steven at this table and we were sitting next to a professor who had been the dean of the school for fifteen years. I knew Steven slightly because after the Wednesday luncheon, he and I were in a very intense, advanced seminar that met from 1:30 to 4:30 every Wednesday afternoon and we were always the two who showed up about twenty minutes early after the luncheon and took notes or read or chatted a little bit. But I didn’t know much about him.

During the luncheon, somehow we began talking about cults and Steven said, “Well, you know “cults” is just what we call other people’s religions.” The professor said, “It’s sounds like you’ve studied this.” Now this is a man already in denial. And Steven said, “No.” He said, “I’ve lived it. I’m a Moonie.” Now that’ll stop a discussion! The professor, still clinging to denial, said, “Oh you were?” “No,” said Steven, “I am.”

This went on for awhile and then Steven said he was also the second person kidnapped by the de-programmers. His family had him kidnapped and taken to the de-programmers because he was an embarrassment to their blue blood. This wonderful professor said, “So, then that ended it?” Steven said, “No.” He said, “I saw through them from the start.” And that really did end the discussion.

After lunch, for no reason I can be proud of, I didn’t want to go to that room with Steven. I didn’t want to be trapped there with him for twenty minutes. I just didn’t. So as I left the room, I turned left and I made it two or three steps before Steven grabbed my arm. He said, “Oh, no you don’t. We’re going up there! – He said, – You’re going to play.” I said, – Steven, I am not going to play!” He said, “You’ll play.” I said, “I won’t play!” He said, “You’ll play.” You’re too curious not to play.” I said, “I’ll go up there, but I won’t play!” He said, “See, you’re almost playing already.”

So we went up to the room and he said, “Come on, this is your chance of a lifetime. You’ve got a Moonie in front of you. You’ve got to be curious.” I said, “I’m not going to play.” He said, “What do you want to know?”

I said, “Alright, I’ll play. What I don’t understand, Steven, is how you keep what you learn here in the same head where you keep the stuff you learn there without being schizophrenic. That’s what I want to know.” And he said, “Oh, that.” He said, “That’s easy. You just have to keep what you know and what you believe separate.” And while I was thinking about that, he reached over and poked me: “You know, there’s a lot of that going on!”

There’s a notable historical example of this kind of bargaining, keeping what you know and what you believe separate. Not well known, but it ought to be better known. It comes from the early 18th century, It was Anglican priests in England and it was called latitudinarianism – one of those words for which the inventor should just be shot. These were priests who wanted to say, “Look, look, we know all these stories are myths. We know this isn’t true. I mean, nobody believes in, you know, virgin births and walking on water, and that corpses get up and walk and float up in the sky, We know this isn’t true.” So they said all of this out loud to regain their intellectual integrity. Then they went back to church and repeated all the creeds and all the stories they just said they didn’t believe. That was called latitudinarianism because they took such great latitude with the teachings. It’s also called bargaining, because they kept what they knew and what they believed separate.

A third example is more current and it’s one I’m involved in, though I’m involved in it as a heretic. That’s the Jesus Seminar. This is a wonderful group of scholars, biblical scholars that have been meeting since 1985. Their stated purpose is to say, “Look, just like the latitudinarians, let’s just be honest about this. Let’s get scholars who’ll use their names to come out in public, make real arguments about the difference we have all known for two hundred years exists between myth and history, between symbols and metaphors and facts. Let’s have them say it out loud and put their name to it and invite any other scholar in the world who wants to come and join the argument to come do so on the conditions that they do it in public.”

Now that’s good stuff. That’s brave and remarkable scholarship and I was attracted by it as soon as I heard about it, which was about five years after they started. I called the founder of it, Bob Funk, on the phone and I said, “I read an article in the paper about this Jesus Seminar thing,” And I said, “I don’t know what it is.” He said, “What are your questions?” And I said, “Alright, it’s this.” I said, “This could really be absolutely honest, exciting and candid scholarship, or it could be a bunch of Christ-sating savages trying to destroy a religion. Which are you?” And he said, “Well, you know, you couldn’t trust any answer I give you to that. If I were the latter, I’d lie about it. So the only way you’re going to find out is to come out and spend a few days with us and make up your own mind.”

So I did. And I was stunned. This was some of the most honest religious scholarship I’d ever seen. They were really doing it. However, in the background, they were playing a mental game. Ninety nine percent of the fellows in the Jesus Seminar are Christians, and they are making about the same bargain the latitudinarians did. Once you’ve thrown out the three-story universe, once you’ve said, “We know there isn’t anything living up there above the clouds. We know that God isn’t a being, God is a concept. It’s an idea, not a critter.” Once you’ve said all of this out loud, you can no longer have a God who sees, hears, cares, or loves. Now take your pick, but you can’t have it both ways. And most of them don’t or won’t see that. That’s bargaining. This is bargaining going on by some of the scholars that I respect as much as anybody in the world. So I’m not making fun of people for doing it. I do think it’s disingenuous, but it is a disingenuousness that we all do.

What we’re doing in bargaining is we’re taking a God, to put it that way, that was alive once, maybe not in our lifetime, but was alive once and it’s dead now. And we stuff it and we prop it up on the altar where it used to sit and we bow down before it and we pretend nothing has changed. But it has changed, because it is no longer giving life to us. We’re faking it. That’s why it’s bargaining. Theologians call this idolatry. A god for theologians is a center of allegiance and orientation and if we live around it, it can give us a more authentic sense of life.

That’s what a god is about. It isn’t a critter. This isn’t a creature at Disney World. It’s a center of value, orientation and allegiance. And an idol is something that pretends to be like that, but we find, usually too late, that it got it’s power by sucking the life out of us rather than helping put more worthy life into us. An idol cannot give life. I think of bargaining as a kind of idolatry.

But I have another image from my childhood that I think of too. I grew up in the North where we had oak trees everywhere and acorns all over the ground in the fall. And I used to love acorns. I liked the little things and I would keep some in my room. I never knew why, but I think part of it, looking back on it, was that it always seemed to me that an acorn was a miracle waiting to happen. Somehow that little nut knew how to become an oak tree. That’s amazing to me. Put the thing in the ground and give it water and give it the right conditions and this thing will become something just immense. And I thought it was miraculous.

Later on, when I was older, at an art fair, I saw a truly magnificent acorn about three inches high that had been carved by an artist. Now the part of it that made no sense at all, and that has always bothered me, was that the artist had carved it out of walnut. If you know woods, you know oak is hard to carve. It splinters and walnut is very easy to carve. Still it was cheating and it wasn’t right. But it was a pretty acorn and I bought it and I liked it and it really was a magnificent carving.

I kept it for some years and looking back was surprised to find that after a few years, the fascination wore off. And the fascination wore off because it wasn’t really an acorn. It was a fake acorn. What makes acorns real is their potential: the fact that they know how to become alive and become something big. Bigger than you can handle. That’s the miracle in an acorn.

This thing, this was just an imitation of an acorn carved by an artist. It was dead. It couldn’t come alive, ever. It couldn’t do anything. It was a fake acorn. That’s what bargaining is like. Bargaining is like putting up a fake acorn and pretending it’s a real one when it has no potential to come alive and no potential to give life. It’s only the memory of the yearning for the nostalgic feeling that once maybe this old belief was supposed to give life though it doesn’t anymore. And we do this in religion all the time and we do it in life all the time.

One of my current favorite authors is a physician, a woman named Rachel Naomi Remen who has worked for about twenty years in San Francisco with terminal patients, cancer patients, AIDS patients. And since she’s so gifted at this, she’s also worked with a lot of physicians and done workshops for other physicians.

One of the exercises she has them do is to make two lists. One is a list of the things they really truly value in their personal life; the other is a list of the things they really value and work by in their profession. She said the two lists are never the same and they’re often very, very different. Sometimes someone will put something like kindness number two in their personal life and number fifteen in their professional life. There are so many things more important than kindness. I mean, you have to know your chemistry, you have to know your biology, you have to know your anatomy, you have to be able to do the diagnosis. There’s a whole list of things that count for more than kindness in the practice of medicine. And yet, in their personal life kindness is one of the things that makes them feel real and makes them feel alive. So living by values they don’t really care much about is the bargain they have made with their profession.

What we do in bargaining is to try to protect life in the wrong way. It’s trying to protect life the way you try to protect butterflies when you stick pins through them and put them under glass. It’s the way you try to protect something when you take that magnificent carving of an acorn (out of walnut), and you put it in a glass museum case and you put it on display. It truly is magnificent – but it’s dead. And it can’t ever give real life to anything.

Part of what is so ironic and sad about all of this bargaining is that all of these games we’re playing are being played against the background and within a world where the possibilities are miraculous and are all over the place and we won’t see them. One of Jesus’ famous lines was to tell a story and then say, “If you have eyes to see this and ears to hear this,” and for the most part the people who listened to him didn’t and we don’t either.

To care for life the right way, to use the image of the glass case, would take a different kind of glass case. Instead of a glass museum case, the way you’d care for life would be with a greenhouse. Something big and protective and nourishing that can let little living things grow into big living things. Even bigger living things than we know how to handle.

But it can’t happen until we’re ready for it. Because until we have eyes to see, we couldn’t see it if it were put right in front of us. Naturally, there’s a story about this too. It’s comes from Hinduism. It’s a great story about Shiva, the Lord of the universe in Hinduism and Shakti, his divine consort. They’re sitting up there in their heavenly space sort of watching mortals, and they are filled with compassion for the suffering that they see as a part of life and with respect for the efforts that people make in so many ways and the love that they see and all of the human drama that they see below them.

Shakti is moved particularly by one poor man that she sees, a poor beggar who is wearing sandals so worn through that they’re tied together with string and a coat so thin, it won’t help him if the night gets too cold. And she turns to her husband and she says, “Look, look at this man, this is a good man, I’ve seen into his heart, it’s a good heart. This is a good man and he’s suffering. Can’t you do something for him?” And Shiva looks down for an instant and says, “Nope.” And she says, “What do you mean, nope? You’re the Lord of the universe! You can do anything! What do you mean, you can’t do anything for him? Give him some gold.”

Shiva said, “Wouldn’t matter, I could give him gold and it wouldn’t matter. He’s not ready for it.” So Shakti said, “Give him the gold and let him see if he’s ready for it!” This is apparently how divine husband and wife arguments go. So Shiva drops a bag of gold in the path, in front of this beggar. The poor beggar in the meantime is coming around the corner thinking to himself, “I’m so hungry. Will I be able to beg enough money today to have food or will I go hungry again tonight? Is it going to be too cold? Where am I going to sleep? Am I going to freeze to death? What am I going to do?” And then he sees this thing in the road and says, “Oh my God. Look at that! A rock and I almost kicked it! If I had kicked the rock, I would have torn my sandals apart and now I’d have to go be going barefoot. It’s a good thing for me that I was watching.” And he stepped over the bag of gold and went on his way.

When religious stories talk like this, you know, they’re always using words in imaginative ways. This didn’t mean a bag of gold coins. This meant the bags of “gold” that are lying all over the place all the time. What are bags of gold? They’re the possibility of finding a religion for your head and your heart. They’re a possibility of bringing together what you know and what you believe. A possibility of bringing together what we love and what we do, how we live and who we are. These are the bags of gold that lie in the road around us that we don’t see until we’re ready.

There are miracles that can happen here on the road of life. And sometimes those bags contain things even richer and more miraculous than gold. Sometimes, they contain acorns.

Controlling Others Through Anger

© Davidson Loehr

October 14, 2001

First UU Church of Austin

4700 Grover Ave., Austin, TX 78756

www.austinuu.org

 

OPENING WORDS

From our many private lives and as many individual worlds we gather here for a hundred different reasons. There are people who are mostly curious or who could use some new friends, people with the vague feeling that there could be more to life than there has been, and those with the very strong feeling there could be more. Some who bring hungry minds and want questions and answers, and others who bring hungry hearts and want comfort.

Some here are young, hoping for direction for the life which lies mostly ahead. Others are closer to the end of their journey and do not want to be ignored just because they are old.

There are parents missing children, students missing home, lovers, ex-lovers, and those who would be lovers. There are those in whom life is bubbling up and others over whom dark shadows may have crept, who wonder how to go on.

We’re here for all the obvious reasons and for some secret reasons known only to ourselves. Everyone who has come here hopes for something from this morning. And perhaps we shall find it, for this is a good and a safe place to be. I’m glad you’re here and I’m glad to be here again with you, for

it is a sacred time, this,

and a sacred place, this:

a place for questions more profound than answers,

vulnerability more powerful than strength,

and a peace that can pass all understanding.

It is a sacred time, this.

Let us begin it together in song.

CENTERING

There’s a story about two Buddhist monks, an old master and his young student. There had been a heavy rain the night before, and what had been a tiny creek had become by morning a raging torrent of water more than a foot deep.

Standing by the edge of the new river was a young woman. She clearly wanted to cross the river, but she was very frail, and was unlikely to survive the swift current.

The young student looked away from her because this order of monks had sworn strict vows against ever talking to a woman, let alone touching one. The young monk had learned his lesson well, so he ignored her. The older monk, however, walked over to the young woman and asked if she would like help crossing the river. The astonished woman nodded yes, surprised that he would even acknowledge her. “Then, please, climb onto my shoulders,” said the monk, “and I will carry you.” She did as he asked and he carried her across the river. On the other side, he set her down, bowed silently to her, and went on his way.

The young monk followed along behind his master in angry silence for several hours, but the farther they walked the angrier he became. At last he couldn’t control himself, and he confronted his teacher with his bottled fury. “How could you? How could you touch her? What about your holy vows? How could you touch that woman?”

The old man looked into the angry face of his student, and at last he said quietly, “My young friend, I set that woman down three hours ago. Are you still carrying her?”

This is, among other things, a time to set down loads we’ve been carrying too long. Angers, resentments, grudges, accusations, and a whole host of furies that can both possess and cripple us. If we cannot let go of them, they will not let go of us. We’re all carrying loads, small or large, that have outlived whatever usefulness they may ever have had. It would be a shame for us to leave here with the same heavy loads we came in with.

What are you still carrying that you ought to set down?

Think of those things, name them to yourself, and you may be halfway to setting them down. Let us become more aware of those angers and fears we have carried too long. In these quiet moments I invite you to turn them into prayers or turn them into flames in the candles of memory and hope.

SERMON

(The following was a kind of loud and angry dramatic tantrum. It was shouted, screamed, accompanied by a furious expression and the violence of hitting chairs, pulpit, and walls – hard – with a rolled-up magazine).

“NO! By God, no son of mine is going to do anything that stupid!” 

“As long as you live under my roof, you’ll do it my way. Aagh!”

“You may be my daughter, but you’re an idiot!”

“Son, no real man would have been such a wimp.”

“And, , you wouldn’t behave that way if you were a bit more feminine! Aagh!”

(flinging the rolled-up magazine across the stage, then sitting on the stool, holding the microphone.)

Recognize that?

Everyone here knows that voice. And that face. We’ve done it or had it done to us. We’ve seen and felt it. We seem to be hard-wired for it.

Years ago I read a study done with some monkeys, juvenile monkeys that had never seen an male monkey of their species. They’d been raised by their mothers. When they were several months old, they were shown a movie of an male monkey doing his anger face, his fear face, with his screaming and gesturing just about like I just did. All of the young monkeys who had never seen an male monkey before in their lives shrieked and ran terrified to hide behind their mothers.

We seem to be programmed to know how to control others through anger, and how to be controlled through it. It seems to be absolutely natural. Being natural doesn’t mean it’s good. Revenge and greed are also natural. And I have read that revenge and greed are the two emotions that produce the most stress in our lives. Anger is full brother to both revenge and greed. Like them, it’s concerned with keeping things our way, inside ourboundaries, ourcomfort levels and our beliefs. It’s absolutely natural.

So it’s no wonder that anger turns up in a list like Elizabeth Kubler-Ross’ list of the five stages that humans tend to go through in grieving the loss of something. She wrote the book in 1969 about terminal patients who had to come to terms with the one fact that they didn’t want to come to terms with at all – the fact that they were going to die. But since then many others have realized that this is a that works in a tremendous number of cases. These are stages we recognize in going through the loss of a religion, of a belief system, of a world view, of a relationship, of anything we once trusted and believed was the way things should be and which we have to come to terms with losing.

The first stage we go through is avoidance or denial. This is the “ostrich” school, where we stick our heads in the sand and our fannies in the air and look silly to everyone but ourselves – trying to pretend that nothing’s really changed. Everything’s the way it was. It’ll be okay. I don’t have to worry about this.

When that doesn’t work, the next thing many of us try is anger. And the anger is used to say, “Look, I really mean it! Get back in line! Stay the way it’s supposed to be! Don’t make me change my world!”

We use anger when a person, or a belief system, or a world, or a god, has become bigger than we know how to be comfortable with it being and bigger than we are willing to permit it to be. It’s immensely powerful, this anger stuff.

Now, there is legitimate anger. There’s anger that can be a very healthy sign. There are many kinds of anger. Those would all be different sermons. Today I only want to talk about anger that’s used to control people, and how anger controls us.

It seems to happen at two levels, in two ways. First it happens as the “fear face” and the shouting and the threats help to control us by creating fear. There is a threat of violence. Someone that angry could do God-knows-what to you. And if they’re bigger and stronger than you, you should be afraid. But some of the fear that anger can create will stay with you forever. It’s awful.

And that’s the second way that it works. It works first through creating fear, and it works secondly through infection. We get infected with anger, and we carry it with us, sometimes, for the rest of our lives, unwilling and unable to let loose of it, like the young Buddhist monk in the story.

I know people, you know people, who went through this in religion. They had a religious experience in their past, in their youth, whenever. Some idiot taught them about an angry, hateful God, and taught them only that. Someone told them about a religion or a God that wouldn’t allow them to be who they really were and needed to be, whoever that was. The religion wouldn’t respect their questions, and it wouldn’t respect their souls, and it wouldn’t respect them, and they are angry as hell – still. I have met people sixty years old who are still angry over something they heard in church with force when they were ten. If anger infects us, it can last an entire lifetime.

One of the most famous sermons – not the best, but one of the most famous sermons in American history – is still, from about 250 years ago, a sermon by Jonathan Edwards. This was an amazing man. He enrolled at Yale University when he was thirteen years old. This was one of the most brilliant minds in American history. Some have called him America’s most original theologian. He’s influenced a tremendous number of horrible religions. Jonathan Edwards was a Calvinist, and the sermon that’s so famous – and I’ve read it, and it’s terrifying to read – is called “Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God,” and if you ever are tired of watching “Halloween, Part Thirteen,” find that sermon and read it, it’s amazing.

He draws pictures of how hateful we are to God. He says, “Imagine, we’re more hateful to God than a spider. This was apparently not a man who loved arachnids, either. Imagine, he said, God is holding us between his fingertips like He would hold a hateful spider by a thin silken line, over the flaming pits of hell. There’s nothing about us that’s attractive or lovable, and the only thing that keeps him from dropping us into hell is the fact that he’s God.

You can get infected with that notion of a hateful God in ways that can keep you infected forever. It’s absolutely powerful stuff. And it doesn’t only happen in religion, as you know.

About ten or twelve years ago I was the theme speaker for a week-long Unitarian summer camp at Lake Geneva, Wisconsin. That’s about 500 s and 300 kids and teenagers who were there for a week, and the theme speaker does a sermon each morning, so you can develop a theme over the five programs.

I didn’t know many people there. They come from all over the country to this camp. But since I was the most visible person there that week, I got hunted down a lot and was surprised at the number of people who wanted to confess something that week. I listened to a fair number – five or six – confessions that people just needed to make, things they needed to feel that they had somewhere safe to talk about.

The most memorable was a woman, one of the angrier people I’ve seen, who was talking about her ex-husband – who, if he had a soul, it was evil. She went on for ten minutes in detail so rich, so vivid, almost so bloody, it was clear that this wound was absolutely fresh and dripping. It was horrible to hear. I don’t know what any outsider might have really thought of the relationship if they’d seen it, but it was clear how it affected her, and she hated it and was still furious. And finally I said, “When was this over? When did this happen?”

“Ten years ago.”

Ten years ago, and she’s still so infected by anger she cannot live. Ten years. It’s astonishing.

And it can be worse than that. It can be cosmic. There are, if you think about it, a lot of things to be angry about. Life isn’t fair.

On September 11th a whole new generation learned that life cannot be made safe. Friends desert you. Governments murder and lie. Partners, lovers, wound up being who they were instead of who your needed them to be. And you won’t forgive them for it. It can happen anywhere, and you can hate an entire world for it.

The most classic version of this story, still one of the best to read, is the story of Job. It’s a little boring to read; you just kind of have to read through it fast and then tell the story to yourself in less time, and it gets better. Now, since I suspect some of you have not been reading your bible this week, or this year, I’ll give you the Cliff Notes version:

Job is a righteous man, a good man. He’s never done anything wrong. Probably even his butler loved him. He has a wife and children and land and money and everything. And God and Satan are up there? whoever wrote this story have God and Satan sitting up on a cloud somewhere looking down watching this, and they can see it pretty clearly. And God is saying, “Look how faithful Job is.” Why he loves me with all his heart.

And Satan says, “Of course he does. You’ve been good to him. He’s got everything. Of course he loves you. Start taking stuff away. See if he still loves you then.”

God said, “Oh no, his faith is pure.”

Satan said, “All right. Tell you what. You let me mess with him, and we’ll see how long he keeps loving you.”

So God says, “All right.”

Satan starts messing with him. And the man loses everything. He loses his land and his children, his family. They die. He loses everything. And throughout this, his faith is certainly tested. And it comes to the point, which for some people is the most famous line in the story. I know that in the seventies I heard some feminists say it was the only character in the story worthy of respect. Job’s wife’s line is, “Curse God and die!”

Now, let’s take this out of mythic language. Otherwise we’ll have this cartoon picture of someone yelling at a cloud and some lightning bolts making him dead and so on and so forth, and whoever wrote the story didn’t think that’s the way the world worked. “Curse God and die? is something that today we would say differently. We might say, “When life is unjust, curse life, curse it to its core.” And if you do that, you will find, something inside of you dies. Something in your spirit will die. Something in your ability to greet life with joy will die. Curse life and die. That’s one option.

Job took the other route. He said, “The Lord giveth and the Lord taketh away. Blessed be the name of the Lord.”

Now, you can make that sound like Job was just a pious wimp. But take that out of mythic language too, to understand what that sounds like when you say it in real life. This is someone saying, “Life is hard. It is a mess. It is a mixed bag. It’s been just awful. I’ve lost everyone I loved. I’ve lost everything I thought I had. I’ve lost all the things that I thought were the real blessing of life.” That’s the package life comes in, and you don’t just take it or leave it. If you just take it, like a rotten deal but the only deal you’ve got, you lose your verve and your joy. You become cynical. You don’t just take the gift of life, you bless it. “The Lord giveth and the Lord taketh away.” Blessed be the name of the Lord.”

Not “I’ll put up with him because he’s the only god whose name I know.”

You don’t just accept this miserable, rotten life. That’s the gift that’s offered. That’s the package the miracles come in. It also hurts. You bless it. The miracle in the story of Job that’s not commented on often enough is that what Job succeeded in doing was in transforming anger into gratitude, and gratitude is the antidote for anger.

The studies that say that greed and revenge are the most stress-producing emotions we have also say that gratitude is the most stress-reducing emotion we have. The only durable escape from anger is gratitude, and it is one of the hardest transitions we are ever asked to make. After every great loss we have to learn how to choose life again, and it’s hard.

I saw the Job story played out, actually played out in reverse. In Job everyone died but him. I saw this story nineteen years ago. It’s one I’ve never used in a sermon before.

I was doing my chaplaincy training in the summer of 1982 at Northwestern Memorial Hospital in downtown Chicago, and I chose the leukemia ward for my assignment. I wanted heavy work. I wanted real work. And when I got on the ward the first day and went to the staff meeting to introduce myself, the nurses said, “Oh, so you’re the new student chaplain.”

“Yes.”

“Good! You go see the woman in Room 11.”

“Why?”

“Cause it’s your turn. We can’t stand any more of her. You go see her. Oh, and welcome to the ward.”

This didn’t sound like the introduction to something pleasant, and it wasn’t.

I went into Room 11 and saw the angriest human I have ever been around, with one of the saddest stories I’ve ever heard. It was a 29-year-old woman who was dying of leukemia. When I came in the room, she said “What are you?”

I told her I was a chaplain. I can’t repeat a single word that she said. The fact that I was a chaplain was such a vile, vulgar betrayal of any notion that there could possibly be a God, that she spent ten minutes telling me what a vile, miserable, slime-ball (these are the kind words) I was. I remember thinking during that ten minutes. She has used every profane and vulgar word I’ve ever heard, and she’s even used them in some creative new combinations I’d never thought of. It wasn’t pleasant. I also thought, I have no idea how to respond to this woman. I agree with everything she’s saying.

It is a miserable story. She’s 29. She and her husband had had some rough years, but then they worked it out, and for the last half dozen years they’d had a wonderful marriage. They had two young children who were delights. Life had finally settled in to being absolutely idyllic. And then four months ago she’d been diagnosed with an extremely aggressive kind of leukemia. And she was dying, and there was nothing that could be done. And she was so furious. There weren’t enough things in the world to absorb the hate that she had. I listened for ten minutes, looking for some way to get out of the room and finally found it, and I got up to leave and she said, “You’ll be back tomorrow.”

“Why?”

“Because I’ll page you. You’ll be here every day ’til I die, and you’ll listen to this story every day until I die.”

God, No!

She paged me the next day and the day after and the day after and every day the story got angrier and louder. The nurses closed the door as soon as I went in the room. It was very painful. I never knew what to do. It was my very first assignment as a student chaplain, and it was clear that I had failed absolutely, completely at every part of it.

I thought about it over the weekend and on Monday I took it to our chaplains’ group and I confessed. I told the story I’ll admit it was fun using all those words. And I said, “I don’t know what to do. I don’t want to go back there again.” John Serkland was the chaplain who taught this – he’d been a chaplain 25 years; he was really quite gifted at it – John said, “Do you want me to save you?”

And I said, “Save me? Hell yes, John! I have no shame left. You save me and I’ll bow at your feet. I’ll worship you. I’ll put up an idol of you at home in a little shrine. Anything you want.”

And he said, “All right.”

I said, “Do you honestly think you can do something here?”

“Yes.”

Part of me wanted to see him fail. Part wondered what “succeeding” might look like, and whether he or anyone could really do it in Room 11.

John went with me the next day. He said he had to get in costume. He wore his chaplain collar, so there’d be no mistaking what he was. We walked into the room together the next day, and this woman spotted immediately what was going on. How I wish I could tell you the words she really used. But the gist of it was, “Well, this young fool has failed, so he’s brought the old fat fool.”

I closed the door. John sat in a chair near the head of the bed, and she let him have it. For ten minutes, the same story, which had become much more polished, much more violent, much more vulgar, even much more angry than it had been the week before when I’d heard five performances of it. And at the end of the story, John sat there – he had never taken his eyes off her – and he said just three words: “You expected more.”

She tried to answer. She’d form words and grit her teeth and go through six emotions, and words wouldn’t come out, and she’d form more words. The words wouldn’t come out.” And finally tears ran down both of her cheeks.” She looked at John and quietly said, “Yes.”

And he reached over for the first time and took her hand and said, “Yes. I’ll come back tomorrow.”

I think that’s the most magical moment I’ve ever seen. Those three words broke the spell. There wasn’t anything to add. There was no need to insult the woman’s intelligence by saying there isn’t more. Any idiot could tell that. That’s what was so frustrating and infuriating. She expected more. Of course she expected more. She’s 29 years old. She’s got a marriage that had just become healthy and good in the past couple years, and she expected to grow old and wise together with this man she loved. She’s got two little kids she expected to watch grow up and have kids of their own. Of course she expected more. There wasn’t more. There’s just that. Die in anger or find a way to pull off a miracle.

She died about two weeks later. But from that afternoon, from that Tuesday afternoon on, she was a different person. At least she was a different person for me. Her husband and kids said that she was the person they’d always known. She was loving, she was caring, she was kind. It became terribly important to her, in her last few days, to tell the people she loved how much she loved them.

I had a short talk with her three days before she died. She was getting weaker, and we all knew that it wouldn’t be long. I said, “How do you sum it up now? I know how you summed it up two weeks ago. How do you sum it up now?”

She thought about it, then smiled and finally said, “With gratitude. Compared to infinite, she said, this wasn’t much. Compared to the 85 years I thought I’d have, it wasn’t very much. But this is what there was. The gift was for 29 years, with some trouble, some pain, a lousy ending way too soon, a lot of love, two amazing children, and more miracles, more miracles than anybody could deserve. I am so grateful for the chance, for the gift.” We held hands and cried together – not in anger, but in gratitude.

Blessed be.