Honest Religion

by Posted in Audio available, Guest Speakers, Sermons

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Tom Spencer

CEO, Austin Area Interreligious Ministries

August 2, 2009

Sermon: Honest Religion Part 1

This is the first of two sermons that I will share with you on the theme of honest religion, a phrase that I have heard in this community and which strikes me as being an essential idea.

Today, I will share some thoughts about why I believe the idea of honest religion is so important, and later this month I will talk a great deal more about what I think an honest religion for the 21st century should look like.

Let me say this strongly right at the outset – I believe that honest religion may be humanity’s best and perhaps last chance of saving itself. More on that in a few moments…

But, speaking of honesty… isn’t it somewhat amazing to many of us that we are still struggling with ideas about faith and religion in the year 2009?

I am taking it for granted that most of us would self-identify as spiritual or religious progressives… and who among us has not wondered to ourselves, honestly, “when will all of that go away?” And when we say “that” we aren’t talking about just old time religion – evangelical, radical, or even reactionary religion – we are talking about religion itself.

Be honest now – How many of you refuse to use the label “religious” when you are talking about yourselves – preferring to use the word “spiritual” instead? Isn’t it more socially acceptable? Doesn’t it just fit more comfortably? I know that in certain circles I have fallen back into that more politically correct stance.

And, don’t we all have secular friends who see religion as the root of all evil and wish it would simply go away now – this very moment?

In fact, there is a small army of newly assertive atheists out there who have turned their disbelief into a cottage industry where they delight in (and profit from) shadow boxing with fundamentalists.

The truth is that each side in that debate is delighted that the other exists… the atheists of the academy with their arch disdain are the perfect foil for the fundamentalists who are only too happy to have atheists banging at the gates. Likewise, the academics relish in the antics of the fundamentalists – it is all so amusing. But what really drives this debate is fear. Fear driven faith needs visible enemies – and fear works as an effective tool in the market and in politics too. All of this sells a lot of books, gets a lot of votes, and fills a lot of pews.

But is there any real honesty in the current atheist / fundamentalist debate? Here is a quote from our fellow Austinite, Dr. Steven Weinberg, the Nobel Prize winning physicist – “Religion is an insult to human dignity. With or without it, you’d have good people doing good things and evil people doing bad things, but for good people to do bad things, it takes religion.”

Really, Dr. Weinberg – religion is the only thing that makes good people go bad? What about crushing poverty? What about patriotism? What happens when love is betrayed? Or, what happens to good people when someone throws verbal hand grenades at traditions they revere? Seems to me we offer each other all sorts of temptations to shed our goodness. Some actually delight in that sport.

And here is a quote from Jerry Falwell, “If you’re not a born-again Christian, you’re a failure as a human being.” …You know, I won’t even bother with a retort for that one.

On and on it goes:

The fundamentalists keep insisting that there is an intervening God who orders every hair upon our heads and who wrote the demise of the Do-Do bird into history before there even was such a thing as history or Do-Do birds.

And the atheists insist that all religion – even “progressive” religion is a mirror of fearful, primitive minds that demand fairy tales to deal with the terrors of existence. They say that all we need is logic and reason – that if we would only educate ourselves, the long march of progress will someday purge us of every irrational impulse. Love itself, I suppose, will lie dissected on a petri dish – understood by its chemical code.

Is that honest? Really? Do you want that world – really? Good luck with that mathematical equation that solves everything. My hunch is that mystery will never, ever, curl up its toes and expire regardless of the beauty of our equations or the power of our telescopes.

A point of real interest for us is that some of the new atheists, like the author Sam Harris, hold religious “moderates” up for special scorn – they argue that religious moderates provide cover and context for the radicals.

This is one of the points I’ll concede to Harris, I actually think he’s on to something here. For example, nearly every “liberal” Christian I know feels queasy about mouthing the Nicean creed or one of its watered down versions in church – and yet millions of them do it every Sunday… declaring before their children their faith in 3rd century concepts of the divine that fly in the face of reason, science and common sense. What is honest about that?

When we recite ancient creeds with our fingers crossed behind our backs, we are on our way down that slippery slope where moderation winks and nods at fundamentalism.

So, where does all of this leave us, in this place and in our search for honesty? Do we dispense with all beliefs that cannot be proved by physical evidence? Or, do we just go “spiritual” hoping that new age vagueness will provide the balm that the age old certainties can no longer deliver?

In some ways don’t you feel that we are right back where I began – don’t you just wish all of this – all of it – would simply go away?

I have struggled with this question for years and my answer is – NO. I don’t want religion to go away – in part, because I know that it never will go away and wishing it would is just as delusional and yes, just as irrational as believing in the legend of Noah’s flood. Sorry, Dr. Weinberg and Mr. Harris it ain’t going to happen.

We see evidence of the allure of religion – even radical religion all around us. Why? Because it is the fate of mankind to suffer and to look for answers to that suffering – we crave explanation and look for that one-encompassing answer.

Mark Lilla is the author of The Stillborn God, a brilliant book which explores the still prevalent attraction of theocracy – that system which unites the “Kingdom” overhead with the kingdom that collects our taxes. In his book he writes, “When the urge to connect is strong, passions are high and fantasies are vivid, the trinkets of our modern lives are impotent amulets against political intoxication.”

What trinkets was he referring to? You’re not going to like this: he’s not talking about cell phones and i-pods, no, he was talking about the bequest of the enlightenment – liberalism, reason, and our notions of progress. He argues, these are impotent amulets when the scales have been tipped and passion and rage are unleashed. Think about the simmering rage in our own nation – the irrational resentment stoked by the angertainment industry of the reactionary right. How does reason reason with that?

Lilla argues that classical liberalism is the exception to the rule – that our progressive little world is the odd man out, that it is imperiled.

So how could I not want religion – that world of passions and vivid fantasies – to go away?

And so, here is the second part of my answer – I don’t want it to go away because I believe that honest religion is neither an evolutionary dead end or a suicide pact – I believe that honest religion is our last best hope to withstand the ever present threat from that other shore described by Mr. Lilla – where alienation, passion and fantasy are being stoked into a raging fire.

The truth is that honest religion can’t inoculate us from every danger in the world – that is the trouble with all religions that promise ultimate deliverance – ultimately they can’t deliver. But, honest religion can help us help one another through the perils we face – it can help us live our lives more deeply and, hopefully, help us to pass on a better world to our children. And what more should be asked of it?

So, how will this work?

Let’s take just a moment to consider the origins of the word religion itself… there are actually two theories about that. One holds that the word religion comes from the Latin, religare which means to bind together – and the other says that it is more closely related to the word religio – reverence.

I think that what we need is a fusion of these two concepts – that only a reverent bond in the form of honest religion can sustain us and strengthen us for the challenges of the 21st century. We need the binding together – the acute awareness of our interdependence – as well as the tempering and humbling force of reverence.

What does this look like in practice here on the ground, in this place? Well, let me be very clear about this – if religion is to be honest it must make demands of us.

I remember having a conversation some years ago with University of Texas Professor, Paul Woodruff, who wrote a beautiful book about reverence. In this conversation he really opened my eyes to the critical distinction between what most of us call spirituality and religion. I had invited him to participate in a taping about “spirituality” thinking that that word would be more acceptable to an academic than “religion” – but, much to my surprise he bristled and said that he rejected spirituality. Taken aback, I asked him why, and he said he felt it was a “conceit that makes no demands of you.”

This is a powerful insight. Don’t many of us think of spirituality as an adornment or as a commodity? Dr. Woodruff’s rebuff helped me realize why spirituality is so popular – it’s because it is, like so much else in our culture, disposable – you can toss it away when it becomes an inconvenience. And what is more inconvenient that something that demands your attention 24/7.

And shouldn’t an honest religion demand our attention? I certainly think it should – I don’t think honest religion is something you pull from a bookshelf when you’ve got a few moments to spare or are feeling spiritual. But we need to recognize that paying attention is the most counter-cultural thing we can do in 21st century America. We live in the age of distraction – not the age of information. We have made careers and an entire economy out of not paying attention.

However if our’s is to be a religion that really binds our world view, holds us together as a community, awakens reverence within us and helps us to embody it – to live it– then, yes, it should demand our attention. But demand our attention to what end?

First and foremost – the test of honest religion should be whether it actively helps us to become better people – to be kinder, more compassionate, more patient, more generous, and more grateful – in short, more virtuous. Honest religion should have one great purpose and that is nurturing human goodness… a goodness that attracts goodness to it – that inspires reverence and awakens a deep gratitude.

Only through human goodness can we be saved – after all we are the ones who are messing everything up – and now, with our life-giving planet endangered, we need goodness enacted more than ever. This is the real promise of honest religion. My friend Michael Benedikt says that God is the Good We Do. I say Amen. That is honest.

An honest religion should also be humble – because none of us will ever be purely good, there will always be a need for humility as well as a well-developed practice of forgiveness and contrition. It is a difficult balancing act, but an honest religion should remind us of our imperfections and help to sustain our aspirations simultaneously.

An honest religion should also make sense – common sense. While our humility should remind us that there are things that we can never know – there is no reason to embrace supernatural theories that fly in the face of first-hand experience. The following quote from Buddha says it better that I could: “Believe nothing, no matter where you read it or who has said it, not even if I have said it unless it agrees with your own reason and your own common sense.”

Another way to say this might be that honest religion should not require theological trampolines. Sure, it should appeal to our heads and, yes, our hearts, but its real business is in helping us to ask better questions and to live better lives not in making up myths about crystals or how many angels can dance on the head of a pin.

And, speaking of dancing, I believe that an honest religion should speak to our bodies as well as our heads. Enacting or embodying our reverence is an essential part of honest religion. I recently returned from a long trip to Turkey where the call to prayer echoed across the cities five times a day – imagine that – stopping your busy life five times a day to say thank you. Frankly, I found myself feeling inadequate because I had no way to share my own reverence in that beautiful communal and physical manner.

The most important part of the ritual comes right at the beginning – you stop, stand, clear your head and silently declare your intentions. You then give thanks and praise – wishing peace to those who stand to right and peace to those on your left – you bow, kneel, touch your foreheads to the ground together.

Let me be clear – and honest – about the call I feel in my own heart: I want to stand shoulder to shoulder with brothers and sisters – to bow, kneel, and pray with them – but when I do, I want to speak in words that that reflect the realities of the world as we see it and experience it every day. Here in the 21st century.

Frankly I long for this kind of honest religion. And I believe that if it existed as a living community – a real binding of brothers and sisters who practiced goodness and shared reverence– it could, by example and deed save the world.

I’ll have a great deal more to say about what honest religion might look like in our lives in my next sermon on the 23rd of this month. But for now, I will close with this thought …

The real question for those seeking an honest religion is simply this – would we honor it? How would we respond to it if it were to spring to life right here before us? Would we embrace it, or, inconvenienced by its demands, would we come to wish that it too would simply go away?

The Miracle of Metaphor

by Posted in Audio available, Guest Speakers, Ron Phares, Sermons

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Ron Phares

July, 26, 2009

Prayer

How strange and heavy that we are here occupying these pews, this place, and this planet, wild minds as the cosmos in process, we are the universe as dream. We are bound by its emptiness and lit by its energy Lit so as to see there are ways of seeing, ways of seeing that emptiness and that energy Ways of seeing the sky above, the earth on which we stand, water. Father. Mother. Child. We are the universe dreaming. Let it be a good dream.

Sermon

I think I’m developing a little ritual. It is self indulgent, I know, so I hope you don’t mind. But I have been, quite naturally and organically, developing a little ritual or habit that I do when I step into the pulpit. You see, the pulpit is like a circuit between the congregation and the better angels of their nature. That makes me the circuit breaker. Sometimes I worry that I might blow. Which brings me back to my ritual. Here it is; I feel like I’ve begun most of my sermons with a confession. Something about preaching makes me want to confess. It’s the same today. I am simply compelled to name my transgression with regards to this role. You see, as I sat down to write this sermon, as I put on my theological space suit, climbed into the ontological rocket chair and hit the ignition switch, I realized that I had no idea where I was going. I had, quite simply, forgotten the topic and title that I had some weeks ago given to the communications wing of this outfit.

Now, in my defense, I did recall that whatever the topic I had given, I had made it intentionally broad so as to be able to fit whichever shape the spirit moved me to take. I remembered that it had something to do with metaphor. And fear not, it most definitely will have something to do with metaphor. So my legal team says I’m in the clear, even if we do take the long way around.

And we will take the long way around, because first I want to talk a little bit about preaching. It’s this compulsion to confession that’s really got me going right now. It goes way beyond the imprecision of my memory. Right? There’s more to my sense of inauthenticity than that because its not just today. This confessional thing happens every damn time. I come up here and offer my inadequacy right off the bat. Maybe I’m just beating you to the punch, just protecting myself and it’s the preacherly equivalent of asking you if this dress makes me look fat. Maybe I am cowed at the immensity of your trust and curiosity in the face of the elusiveness of the spirit. Maybe.

I do think part of my compulsion to confession is some sort of back door approach to authority. I mean the one thing that I am an authority on, is that I am not an authority on anything. And so that is honest or at least a pass at honesty. And so now you think I’m being honest. And it’s through that honesty that you then, in spite of my disclaimer, may grant me authority. Or so I think it goes in my mind. At any rate, it is rhetorical jujitsu. It’s kind of a neat trick.

This doesn’t make it bad. Or untrue. In fact, it is not only true, but necessary in order for me to allow myself to be up here at all. The confession is born only out of the good intention to clear the air, so that you see me, or rather, the message, clearly. So that I see you clearly, so that I see myself clearly and so that I might pursue and communicate those things which I have been charged to pursue and communicate when accepting the invitation to fill this pulpit.

To put it plainly, I come up here and speak to you of things we need to consider, that I do not consider, of things we ought to do, that I do not do, of facts that I present as obvious, if ingenious, but that I had never even heard of until the night before. It’s just a role, or… more like a dream. I am, like this, my own figment. To step into this pulpit is to step into, to inhabit, my dream. It is shocking because it produces in me a feeling of discord that borders on dishonesty. But the beauty is that it forces me to face it. My dream and my being are so divergent here, but inhabit by force of commitment, the same space. Maybe there’s a place in your own life where you feel similarly. At any rate, for me, sometimes this coincidence of divergence feels like atoms splitting.

The energy released from that explosion – it has a sound. And that sound has a shape – in my mouth and in my notebook. And that shape surrounds an idea, rendered, as everything is, by metaphor. And it goes something like this: Religion is a fiction and I am a charlatan.

The word charlatan comes from the Italian word cialare, which means, “to prattle.” Huh! The more full bodied rendering of the word connotes a person, “who is being accused of resorting to pseudoscience in order to swindle his victims.” Well, I admit to not understanding half the science behind the science that I report from the pulpit. Yet, the very medium in which I ply my trade, the very context within which I work, the material of my profession, at its heart, defies evidence. It is, as I said, a fiction. It is a dream. What fact can capture the religious event? What scientific method can empirically measure meaning? What proof can we touch that there is anything beyond machine here? What test is explicit enough to convince me of god or art? There is none. It is all fiction and figment, experience ordered and recast in the storybook of memory. And then, who better to speak of it than a charlatan?

Fiction and figment. Our most basic response to the knowledge that we are alive and that we will someday not be alive… is a fiction. God is a fiction. The big bang is a fiction. History is a fiction. Memory is a fiction. How we relate to one another is a fiction. In fact, in nearly every way, the you that you know – is a fiction. Reality as we understand it and experience it – which does in fact stand as other than or in addition too or sometimes even in contrast with material, chemical fact Ð reality as we understand and experience it is a fiction.

David J. Linden, professor of neuroscience at Johns Hopkins University has written that our brain, “responds to only one particular slice of possible sensory space. Our brains then process this sensory stream to extract certain kinds of information, ignore other kinds of information, and then bind the whole thing together into an ongoing story that is understandable and useful.” To which I might add, “we hope.” We hope it is useful.

Because what is NOT at stake is whether or not it is story or whether or not I am a charlatan or religion is a fiction. That is not at stake at all. It may, I hope, have sounded shocking at first. But shock is a mere parlor trick, a rhetorical slight of hand we charlatan’s use to advance the rubes from A to D without then having to bother with the boring details of B and C.

No, fiction is our reality. So fiction is therefore primary and of the highest esteem, not the other way around. It is because it addresses fundamental fictions via myth and its intersection with experience and logic, that religion occupies the center square of the great game.

And what is a charlatan, preacher, priest or parishioner if not a poet with both hands sunk deep into the ink of this central fiction? So while it may have sounded like I was wallowing self-loathing by calling myself a charlatan, I was doing anything but. In fact, I was not only calling attention to myself, but then paying myself quite the compliment. And I called it confession. What a strange dream.

And it is beautiful. Fiction is beautiful because it is truth unbound to evidence. That is why, for instance, the Bible or say The Grapes of Wrath, are such beautiful works, precisely because they are not evidence. They are truth, not fact. It does not matter, not to me at any rate, if there ever was a King David, Jim Casey, resurrection, or Holy of Holies. They are as true to me as my own name. They are as true to me as my mother, as true to me as my father, as true to me as water, and the sky above, and the earth on which we stand. They are all fictions. They are a dream. And I, as I mentioned before, am also, and especially up here, a dream.

In fact, I had a dream the other day that was similar to this and most peculiar. Have you ever had a dream where you were talking about a dream you had? It’s a strange thing, because you begin to lose track of what you thought was a dream and what you thought was not a dream. See, in this dream I was preaching. Here. Or it looked like it was me preaching. The dream was in the third person, so to speak. I could see what looked like me, dressed in this suit and tie. But even though I could see a person that looked just like me, the only reason I knew it was a dream was because the person that looked like me was not in the pulpit.

He was walking around up here, away from the pulpit. And I do not leave the pulpit. That would terrify me.

And in the dream the preacher was confessing about his inadequacies and how he felt like an atom bomb when his dreams conflicted. He was barking about fiction being a first thing and primary. “It’s like breathing,” he said, and then he took off his coat because walking and talking had made him warm and because he’d seen other preachers and politicians do it repeatedly and at the same time in their talks and so, he supposed, there must be some magic to it. Then the preacher continued pacing, and talking from note cards about dreams and how God is a dream (and he loosened his tie here because he new the stakes were high if he was wrong). The preacher then tried to explain that we are vulnerable in dreams in ways that our culture discourages in waking life, and how that very discouragement winds up creating a nation of neurotics who are out of touch with their inner conflicts. “Dreams,” he said, “are a venue for healing.”

I then saw the preacher roll up his sleeves and for a moment I wondered if this was going to be one of those dreams where the preacher, who looked, really remarkably like me, was going to wind up preaching in his underwear.

“Don’t worry,” said the preacher, “it’s not one of those dreams.” It was weird that he would say that. But dreams are like that.

And in the dream I could tell the preacher was nervous that maybe he wasn’t getting through, maybe he wasn’t communicating as clearly as he had hoped, maybe he wasn’t speaking to the body, to memory, to dreams themselves. He did not know what to do and he began to sweat. And then, I saw the preacher stop preaching and, he seemed pray. He said, “I don’t know that I’m getting through. What do I do?”

And then, in the way dreams do, there came a voice, from everywhere and nowhere. And the voice said, “It’s in the song.”

Well that didn’t make any sense. But that’s okay because dreams often don’t make sense until you analyze them and I wasn’t analyzing just yet. I mean, what the hell is a pulpit, really. And why can’t I leave it? And the voice came again and said, “The truth is in the song.”

The preacher seemed to get it though because he started to lead the congregation in a song, a round, which they sung twice through, where this section started it and then this section came in and then this section over here and they all started singing ROW ROW ROW YOUR BOAT when he said, “One, two, and..”

No, it’s okay. In the dream, the congregation was confused at first, but then they started singing the round when the preacher, for the second time now, said, “One, two, and…”

Hopefully that was memorable. And germinating. Look, dreams are not argument. In keeping with that, I have eschewed presenting much of an argument today, but instead tried to craft into explicitness what is often implicit and ignored: Life is but a dream. The world is but a stage. And Stanislavsky said, “There are no small roles, only small players.” And Ruykeyser said, “The universe is made of stories, not atoms.” So let’s split those stories and play our lives wholly. Holy.

Stories are dreams reigned and harnessed. We are surrounded by them: day dreams, movies, books, advertisements, comics, history, music, dancing, sporting events, reports on science, memory, you, me, everything is rendered in symbols and metaphor. Our lives. Our positions in a room, where we stand in a conversation, who we are in conversation with, our context, colors, where we work and play and how, all mean something and reveal our needs… if we are brave enough to see them as dreams to be harnessed. Truth to be discovered. Now, to make some argument this morning and to throw a bone out to the scientific minds out there, it is compelling that during REM sleep it looks, more or less, from a recording of brain activity, like the person is awake. And see here, its not that dreams and reality are equivalent. I can fly in some of my dreams. And, as of yet, I can not fly in reality. But the meaning we take, the way we form ourselves, how we interact and achieve some kind of happiness, satisfaction and quality of living – the poetics, the fictions are true in similar ways.

And so now we are in the deep end of metaphor. Having stripped reality of its pretense to not pretending, we are left with only metaphor. We are left in a world where meaning is relative, a world drowned in deep symbols. And we can breathe under water, when water is like that. It is here where the speculative art of interpretation can help us live a life more full. It is in dreams where we are forced to confront aspects of our selves we have buried or forgotten. It is in dreams where the genius of our inner artist is allowed free reign and we are reminded, soothed, indulged, lifted and exposed in ways we think are unavailable to us in waking life. But if, as I’ve offered, waking life is a dream, a fiction that can be deconstructed and opened up… well now things get interesting.

I wonder what would happen if we practiced the art of dream interpretation and then applied that art to our waking life. What would happen if, having become somewhat practiced at exploring the metaphors of dream, we turned that metaphorical exploration onto our lives. What institutions, activities, illnesses and relationships that look so necessary as to be taken for granted, suddenly become ripe for personal revelation? What are we really doing? This is what is at stake.

It is a highly, gloriously, subjective mode of being. But it is a way of being that investigates the mode in which we already, subconsciously, bio-chemically live. It is a move away from an oblivious life. Imagine what happens when you bring the subconscious under conscious scrutiny and appreciation or vice versa? We are, after all, myth-makers. We construe our life and the lives of others as beautiful or tragic and that construal IS reality, it is the way the world works. But usually, the myth-making is retrospective. What if we made a practice of making the myth in real-time? What if real-time and dream-time intersect? What depth of meaning and richness of life might we uncover and live into?

How strange and heavy that we are here occupying these pews, this place, and this planet. Wild minds as the cosmos in process, we are the universe as dream. We are bound by its emptiness and lit by its energy, lit so as to see there are ways of seeing, ways of seeing that emptiness and that energy, ways of seeing the sky above, the earth on which we stand, water. Father. Mother. Child. We are the universe dreaming. Let it be a good dream.

For as the bard says, “And as imagination bodies forth The forms of things unknown, the poet’s pen Turns them to shapes and gives to airy nothing A local habitation and a name.”

Out of airy nothing. This is how we live. This is life as god’s process, life as art. You are the poet, accidental or otherwise. The question is: what are you saying?

Listening

by Posted in Audio available, Guest Speakers, Ron Phares, Sermons

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Ron Phares

July 5, 2009

Sermon

Listen.

Listen.

There are depths here. There are depths to listening. And as a metaphor, it is a posture of being, rather than merely the function of one of five senses. In other words, you hear with your ear. You listen with your entire being. I’m here to tell you that our culture does not listen well, and the cost of not listening is usually catastrophic and, at the very least, tragic.

Incidentally, I am fully aware of the irony of talking about listening. It automatically makes me a hypocrite. And where is the integrity in that? The preacher’s supposed to have integrity, right? Well, not today. Not ever, most likely. And I want to talk about that for just a moment because it is related to this notion of listening. Integrity and listening. I hope that relationship becomes clear as I move along. But for now, maybe by way of example, maybe by way of confession, I want to hold up the issue of integrity from my point of view as a future minister. You might think that is just a hazard of the preaching profession. You’d be right. My classmates, my mentors, and I myself wrestle with that particular angel through many, many nights, always begging the question, who am I so low to speak to these people about such high things? Personal and social expectations set a standard that is, frankly, impossible to achieve. And so I, and all my colleagues are doomed from the moment we hear the call. So yes, it is a hazard of the profession.

But then, it’s also a hazard of the species. I take both comfort and caution in the notion that integrity and humanity seem to be metaphysically incongruous. At least I have company.

But, hold on now, preacher. Did I just say you people lack integrity? Yes. Yes, I believe I did. Who says UU’s can’t do fire and brimstone? So you may be thinking, “But, the sermon’s on listening and we’re listening! That’s integrity. Not like the preacher.”

Okay. I’ll let you off the hook. For now. But don’t get comfortable. You see I’ve been doing a lot of thinking recently. And my thinking has coincided, happilyÉ or perhaps problematically, with many of the educational experiences I’ve been pursuing of late. In fact, the subtitle of this sermon could well be, “What I’ve learned so far, and what’s missing.” And I’ve learned a lot. And I’m missing still more. For instance, I’ve learned that Christ didn’t so often forgive people of their sins as recognize and pronounce that their sins had already been released through their faith. That’s from reading in Greek. I’ve learned what its like to feel helpless in the face of a hospital patient who has no hope. I’ve learned that any notion of the divine must compromise on either goodness or ultimacy. That is, there can be no god that is both all-powerful and an unconditional lover of humans and creation. I have learned all these things and more. But it should come as no surprise that of all I have learned, what stands out, is that the more I know the more I know how much I don’t know. And that is exciting. And frustrating. And frightening.

And one of the exciting, frustrating and frightening things that I know I don’t know is how to live with integrity. I have not learned how to do this. Okay, practice what you preach. That’s integrity of a kind. But how do I practice? What do I practice? Is there any practice that make me whole, that allows me, compels me, empowers me to live with integrity? This I have not learned. In fact, I have learned, rather, how much I am by birthright compromised, and worse, how much I compromise myself. I have learned that it is impossible to live with integrity. Keep in mind this sermon is about listening.

So let’s talk about integrity and listen to the familiar Hebrew myth of the garden and the fall. It’s resonant here. Listen and know that we are perfected in ideal only. In life, we are bound to make mistakes. But are we bound to our mistakes? That, in the end, is the question. But we aren’t to the end yet and I want to pick at this scab a bit more.

We are, it is said, fallen. And it makes sense mythically. As I’ve already mentioned, humanity’s understanding of the highest and best and most compassionate and powerful, namely God, demonstrates a lack of integrity that is devastating to its conception. And so no surprise, that we, who the ancient poets described as being created in the image of this God, inherit what we attribute. That is, like God, it is impossible for us to be all good and be who we are.

So what do we do with that? Usually we ignore it. We ignore the planet. We ignore each other. We ignore ourselves. We live half lives.

Maybe ignore is not the right word. It’s close but doesn’t necessarily capture the dynamic at play because there is a willfulness to the ignorance that is at work here. Where does this willfulness come from? Where are its roots? That’s actually a fairly easy answer. Basically we are trying to protect ourselves. Deep down we know there is pain in the world, pain in the hearts of our neighbor, pain in our own hearts and, even worse, that we are responsible for it. That we turn from this so instinctively, so resolutely is ignorance, yes, but it is more. It is denial.

What do we deny? I can lay out some statistics. They won’t mean anything, not really, not effectively. Which kind of proves the point, but I can give them to you. One out of every six American women have been the victim of an attempted of completed rape. That’s over 17 million people. Nearly a million children are abused every year. 14.4 percent of men in prison were abused as children. The U.S. is the biggest global warming polluter. Over 350,000 pigs are slaughtered everyday in this country. 1 billion of the 6 billion people on the planet are going hungry.

I could go on and on, mining the internet and my library for figures that demonstrate the damage we’ve done to our planet, our fellow creatures, our families and ourselves. These statistics in turn may lend my argument some credence. But in reality, that would be a smoke screen. The problem with statistics is that they function on a merely intellectual level. It’s as if we think that by digesting the number, digesting the fact, that we have digested the problem.

But in terms of functioning as a healthy creature, capable of the cosmically rare processes of knowledge and emotion and thereby capable, to some extent, of determining the healthfulness of our evolution, we need another order of interface to fully live. We can’t face our demons just by counting them. In other words, because we are spiritual beings as well as intellectual beings, the use of statistics to prove the point of our culpability in the production of pain and in the degradation of our ecological and social communities and indeed of our very selves, just doesn’t cut it.

At any rate, my argument doesn’t need proof. In this case, proof is the lie because proof is somewhere else. Proof is about someone else or something else. It is a vicarious projection of our guilt onto categories and numbers and words. Statistics are scapegoats. In that there is only the veneer of satisfaction. My argument is self-evident to those brave enough to listen. And here, I do not mean by listening to me. But by listening to yourself.

You see, we already know that the planet is dying to us and because of us. We know that children get hurt, that evil persists, that women have been abused, that animals die to feed our appetites, and that people die because they have no food. We know that we have been hurt and have hurt others. We know it. But we don’t face it. We don’t know how to live in it.

In part this sermon was inspired by a book by Derrik Jensen called, “A Language Older than Words.” Jensen is particularly concerned with the disconnect he sees between our culture and the devastation it has wrecked on the land and on the people that proceeded our occupation of the land. But Jensen’s perspective is unique. Or maybe not so unique. What follows is not for the faint of heart of any age. It is in fact, quite brutal. So I want to warn you. You see, Jensen’s perspective has been influenced by the fact that as a child, he was raped by his father. Jensen, his brother and his mother were all repeatedly beaten and raped by his father. It was an episodic assualt. So while it was repeated, it was not necessarily constant. After each episode, life would return somehow to some kind of normal and the family would persist. Until the father’s rage boiled over and trauma ensued once again.

So Jensen looks out at the land, at the loss of land, at the loss of species, beings, animals and character and the loss of clean water and clean air, Jensen looks out at the devastation of the ecosystem and sees himself. Devastated. Abused. Raped. And denied.

Jensen’s father never left the family. And the family, unbelievably, stayed together. And so it is that Jensen has been able to confront the man who visited such unthinkable pain upon him. And here’s the thing; Jensen’s father, now subdued by age, claims to have no memory of his villainy. In the face of testimony from his entire family, he refuses to accept that he played any part in any thing like what they describe him as doing.

Jensen sees himself in the land. In our culture, that is, in us, he sees his father. And if you think that too strong a claim, you essentially prove his point. Denial. Our crimes. Our trespasses. The food on our table. The comfort of our lives. How do we hold these things together? No statistic can make that go away. No proof will alter the mind of Jensen’s father. He is, by his denial, protecting himself from something he knows will convict him. Our history books do the same. We are left living half lives of unresolved consequences and stunted spirits, too afraid to unfurl, to afraid to listen to the universe speaking through our being.

So let me ease off the doom pedal for just a second to present you with a picture of how the universe speaks through us. David Deutsch is an Oxford physicist who has written a book called the Fabric of Reality. I have not read the book. I have heard him speak, however. Deutsch, talks about the relationship between humans and a Quasar, which is an unfathomably explosive stellar phenomenon. He marvels that, “É some bit of chemical scum (by that he means us humans) could accurately describe and model and predict and explain, above all, explain a QuasarÉ The one physical system, the brain, contains an accurate working model of the other, the quasar. Not just a superficial image of it, though it contains that as well, but an explanatory model, embodying the same mathematical relationships and the same causal structure.” So a Quasar, and in theory, the entire cosmos, is mirrored (at least potentially) in us. Deutsch goes on to conclude that, “Éwe are a chemical scum that is different. This chemical scum has universality. Its structure contains, with ever-increasing precision, the structure of everything.”

And so we contain what we observe. But it’s more than just information and mathematical models. After all, hearing and listening are different, right? Hearing is about information. Listening is about being.

Because as lovely as Deutsch’s idea is, his insight, while articulated with new metaphors, is not itself new at all. And you don’t need the tools of science to come to it.

For instance, there is a story told in Islam about a Mullah who traveled to the grand mosque of Mecca, the Kabah. After hours of meditation the Mullah fell asleep with his feet pointing to the Kabah, which enraged some Meccans. They woke him and berated him for his sacrilege. “Very well,” said the Mullah, “Please take my feet and put them in a direction where Allah is not.” The Meccans left him alone. “Everywhere you turn is the Face of Allah,” says the Qur’an.

I see resonances between Deutsch and this story. The mathematical models of all the cosmos is within us, the face of the cosmos is all around us and in fact, these are the same things. Listening brings these things to our living.

Another verse from the Qur’an says, “And in the earth are signs for those whose faith is certain.” Jamal Rahman, a Muslim mystic who penned our reading today, expands on this, writing that, “The mystics, with their heightened consciousness are eloquent in their expressions: the song of birds and the voice of insects are all means of conveying truth to the mind. In flowers and grasses are woven messages; in the rustling of leaves there are specific instructions; at dawn the breeze has secrets to tell.”

I want to own this as speculation on my part, but I see a path to connectivity by learning to see the world as metaphor. Can I identify with the mathematical model of the cosmos, or find story in the flight of dragonflies, watch God? Would listening to the world metaphorically make the heavens and the planet and the soul and the body line up? Because, ultimately listening, be it to quasars or cousins is listening to yourself or you are the cosmos.

But listening and denial are mutually exclusive. That’s the connection here. And denial is pervasive. So it seems there is some work to do before I can listen to the music of the spheres.

This requires four moves. Find your beauty, the moments wherein your soul is singing in tune. Find your blind spots, those personal and cultural places we have covered over and denied. That, by the way, is very difficult and it helps to have help. Next, reconcile your beauty with that experience of sin. For this, the only tool available is forgiveness. It is the key. Lastly, adjust your life accordingly. This is a never ending process, because we are caught, we are human, flawed and beautiful, capable of knowledge and capable of forgiveness.

And how does one forgive? I don’t know. One example already mentioned was Jesus, who, actually, did not forgive. He merely acknowledged forgiveness. So maybe there is a lesson there. Maybe the lesson, if we listen, is the presence he brought to bare. His presence, we are told, was one of grace, peace, mercy and healing. So I might suggest that listening to the world (because you are the world you listen to) with a presence of peace, grace, mercy and healing might be a first step.

I’ll refer again to Jamal Rahman, who writes, “In the East, the lotus flower is a symbol of beauty and spirituality. Notice, teachers tell us, that the flower has a stem that roots it in the mud. The spiritual flower owes its existence to the mud; it is the mud of daily existence that feeds the root of the spiritual flower.”

This gives me courage to face what I deny, what my culture, my family and my experience have buried out of shame. So, I stand here, feeling as though I am on the edge of a precipice. For I have not done what I see needs to be done. I have not been listening. Not as well as I need to. So again, I am in a posture of hypocrisy and speaking out of my depth. But I see where I need to go. And I have some ideas about how to go about it. In this endeavor, I invite you to come with me.

Beginning July 12 and lasting to July 17, I will be organizing an experiment in connective spirituality. It will be the first annual No Kill Week, a week wherein all those who elect to will vow not to kill any living thing, plant or animal, nor eat what has been killed, plant or animal. This is based on the first of the two creation stories in the ancient Hebrew texts wherein we can read, “Then God said, “I give you every seed-bearing plant on the face of the whole earth and every tree that has fruit with seed in it. They will be yours for food.” This was the ideal, before the fall, before we mytho-psychologically had anything to be ashamed of or guilty for. So we will live into that impossible ideal for a week.

Ultimately, No Kill Week is not about food. And in the end we will realize we are still caught, because we are still human. But the week and dietary restrictions form a frame of extra-ordinary compassion which will be focused through spiritual practices, fellowship and discipline. And we will be a graceful and merciful presence. I’ll leave a sign up sheet for those of you courageous, interested or crazy enough to dive in.

In short, we are going to listen. We are going to listen to the parts of our lives and our culture that we are in denial about. We are going to listen to our joy and our wonder too, no doubt. But we will listen to ourselves, look our world and out lack of integrity square in the face and begin the practice of making peace with it. That practice may require of us a change in lifestyle or not. I don’t know. It may enable us to reconnect with God or The Force, or the Tao or ourselves. Or not. I don’t know. But it seems a worthy pursuit and an exciting first step.

Thank you for listening.

In Search of Freedom

by Posted in Audio available, Gary Bennett, Guest Speakers, Sermons

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Gary Bennett

May 17, 2009

First UU Church of Austin

4700 Grover Ave., Austin, TX 78756

www.austinuu.org

Listen to the sermon by clicking the play button.

READING:

What persons great and not so great have to say on the subject of freedom. All but the last two quotes from Dr. Laurence J. Peter, Peter’s Quotations , 1977

Will Rogers – Liberty doesn’t work as well in practice as it does in speeches.

Mark Twain – It is by the goodness of God that in our country we have three unspeakably precious things: freedom of speech, freedom of conscience and the prudence never to practice either of them.

Theodore Roosevelt – Order without liberty and liberty without order are equally destructive.

Abraham Lincoln – The shepherd drives the wolf from the sheep’s throat, for which the sheep thanks the shepherd as his liberator, while the wolf denounces him for the same act as the destroyer of liberty.

Albert Camus – Freedom is nothing else but a chance to be better.

Ernest Benn – Liberty is being free from the things we don’t like in order to be slaves of the things we do like.

B. F. Skinner – By a careful cultural design, we control not the final behavior, but the inclination to behave – the motives, the desires, the wishes . . . we increase the feeling of freedom.

Eric Hoffer – When people are free to do as they please, they usually imitate each other.

Adlai Stevenson – A free society is one in which it is safe to be unpopular.

Abe Fortas – The story of man is the history, first of the acceptance and imposition of restraints necessary to permit communal life; and second, of the emancipation of the individual within the system of necessary restraints.

Bernard Malamud – The purpose of freedom is to create it for others.

Virginia Woolf – To enjoy freedom we have to control ourselves.

Edmund B. Chaffee – The majority of us are for free speech only when it deals with those subjects concerning which we have no intense convictions.

Harold Ickes – Freedom to live one’s life with the window of the soul open to new thoughts, new ideas, new aspirations.

Gertrude Himmelfarb – Liberty too can corrupt, and absolute liberty can corrupt absolutely.

C. Wright Mills – Nobody talks more of free enterprise and competition and the best man winning than the man who inherited his father’s store or farm.

Norman Thomas – After I asked him what he meant, he replied that freedom consisted of the unimpeded right to get rich, to use his ability, no matter what the cost to others, to win advancement.

Daniel Webster – Liberty exists in proportion to wholesome restraint.

Kris Kristofferson – Freedom’s just another word for nothing left to lose.

Gary Bennett – America is 100 million people going to the same place at the same time to do the same thing, but traveling in 100 million different cars.

SERMON:

I really wanted to give this a title like Freedom: For and Against, but chickened out. After all, if there is any point on which pretty much all 6 billion of us are agree, it is that Freedom is a Good Thing. But deciding what it is exactly that we are for, that is a harder matter. I want us to think about the Tea Parties on April 15. Not the politics, which bothered me a lot; but what I would have to say shouldn’t come from the pulpit. But there were some serious moral issues that drew people to protest. There’s the legacy of debt we are still piling up for the future. The bumper sticker, “We’re spending our children’s inheritance,” isn’t so funny any more. And there’s the idea that taxes are an evil thing, because they take away our freedom.

“No taxation without representation,” the patriots of 1776 said, and for some the British tax on imported tea was such a dangerous matter, it justified dumping perhaps a million dollars worth of tea (10,000 at the time) into the harbor in a monstrous act of vandalism. “Liberty” was the word they used, a little more narrowly political than “freedom.” At the dawn of history we meet the Egyptian Pharaohs and the Sumerian priest-kings, gods or agents of gods who could not be crossed; there was only enough liberty for one. Actually wealthy nobles were there to fight for power with them from the beginning; and they established rules and boundaries over time. The Code of Hammurabi is the oldest set of written rules we know about; and from it we get that rudimentary concept of justice, “an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth.” As far as liberty goes, though, there still wasn’t much left over for anybody else. A similar struggle took place in England thousands of years later, leading to the Great Charter between King John and his barons, still considered the birthplace of our written law. One bullet point was the idea that new taxes could only be imposed by the King acting in Parliament; and some four hundred years later that was the wedge that led to the English Civil War and the transfer of ultimate power to Parliament. So it is no wonder that the idea that taxes were only just with the consent of the governed still was magic over a century after that.

But Americans today do have representative government; there’s nothing in the catchphrase that says that your party has to win for taxes to be legit. But the Libertarians who have been doing these tea parties for a number of years cite a different tradition, one in which taxes even with representation are pretty sketchy. Englishmen, including those of us on this side of the Pond, in the 18th century were actually pretty uncomfortable with the English Civil War as a model. It was bloody, filled with religious arguments, culture wars we might say, pretty dangerous to the propertied classes; a king was beheaded and even a primitive sort of democratic socialism (the Levellers) began to stir. So good Enlightenment thinkers preferred to talk about the Glorious or Bloodless Revolution of 1688. King James II was the sort of ruler who, by combining dangerous ambitions, ruthless means and incredible stupidity, manage to give despotism a bad name; and in short, he managed in three years to unite the whole country against him, went into exile and left everybody feeling that this was the way things were supposed to be done. The Revolution was popular, and so was its chief apologist, John Locke. Inspired by the example of Sir Isaac Newton, he proposed to show that the right to revolution arose from human nature itself. “Man in a State of Nature” is isolated from all other human beings, surrounded by the infinite bounty of the world; but those riches are worthless except insofar as he invests his own life force and liberty into shaping some of them into what then becomes his property. This leads naturally to trading with others, which requires contracts; and ultimately it becomes useful to having some impartial body around to interpret and enforce the contracts. That’s the government; just a bunch of hired hands, as easily dismissed as any unsatisfactory lawn mowing service. No Divine Right of Kings, no superior racial bloodlines, no sacrosanct traditions. And it was nothing like Thomas Hobbes’ assertion that human nature was so depraved and evil that only a crushingly oppressive force could keep people from destroying each other. So Locke’s ideas gained a great deal of favor from the progressive, secular-minded thinkers of the Enlightenment.

But the argument had a force of its own, and some of the conclusions were troubling. Locke agrees that voting is a good way to put governors in place, but he does not think it gives any special moral authority for robbing people of life, liberty or property; only impartial findings of breach of contract by a judge or jury could do that. So taxes, even for proper government services, really were an unjustifiable seizure of property. This has not been a popular idea for governments, not even revolutionary ones. The Declaration of Independence drops the word “property” and talks of “the pursuit of happiness” instead as an inalienable right; the Preamble to the Constitution states that “to promote the general welfare” is as basic an aim of our government as “to provide for the common defense.” Even Locke himself, a practical man, seems not to have taken the idea seriously. But it has taken on a life of its own, with the implicit promise that somewhere down the road all government should just wither away. And so modern Libertarians are inspired by the goal of absolute individual freedom.

But as inspiring as Locke’s words have been to generations of Americans, there are problems. You have to say that his argument is flawed at its most basic: his Man in the State of Nature has no navel. He has come somehow to full-blown civilized English manhood without being born, nourished or educated by the society of people around him; otherwise his absolute moral autonomy would be disappear in all these obligations to others. Any inherited wealth cannot be property created by his own labor. And if you take him out of the woods and put him into a modern American city, invested with the accumulated capital of technology and industry of earlier generations, then his property loses all relationship to Locke’s idea of property; at the same time, the notion that resources are infinite becomes more and more absurd. Perhaps people do have the right to vastly unequal amounts of wealth, but you will have to find a different way of grounding that right from Locke. Try Social Darwinist arguments about “survival of the fittest,” perhaps.

We also see that insisting on an absolute right to wealth will undermine other basic human values, and in the end undercut freedom itself. If you are at the bottom of the economic ladder, you cannot negotiate fairly with giant, immortal corporations; nor is there any good way of providing for the sick, handicapped or elderly in our anonymous cities. And no matter what your skills, you may find yourself in economic trouble if you exercise your freedom of speech, as many people discovered as a result of the McCarthy Era blacklists, or your freedom of religion, as many Moslems found out in the last seven years. So there is a completely different strand of liberal tradition summarized by Franklin Roosevelt in his Four Freedoms Speech: not only should all human beings have freedom of speech and freedom of religion, but also freedom from want and freedom from fear.

So freedom is not just a relationship between the individual and the state; it also involves relationships of individuals with one another, and of entire peoples with one another. In the West we have tended to forget this in the last few centuries, as we have been obsessed with Individualism. In ancient and medieval times it was different. For example, the Greeks prized freedom above all things, but they measured it in the independence of their city-states, regardless of how they were governed; they considered inhabitants of empires to be slaves, even the relatively benevolent Persian empire. Let’s take another look at America in 1776. What did the British do that justified bloody red revolution? Taxes on stamps and tea? Really? Restricting settlement west of the Appalachians to protect the Indians? Oh, nasty. And of course they passed some punitive laws after the Boston Tea Party. Even so, it never added up to the level of abuse that a revolution should demand. And then there’s the question: what would the disgruntled Americans have done if they had gotten representation in Parliament? Would it have quieted them down? Probably not. The real beef our forefathers had was they wanted to govern themselves, and had come to think of us as a different nation. But nobody in the 18th century said that empires were wrong, or that nations had the right to be independent; so we borrowed the vocabulary from very different struggles in 17th century England. We still don’t seem to understand this deep need for national independence. After World War II, Americans came to believe that there was no more urgent moral cause in the world than the struggle for democracy, capitalism and freedom against Communism; we were drawn into struggles in places like Iran, Guatemala, Chile, Cuba and Vietnam, assuming these peoples would share our values. We didn’t see that for many of them, distaste for American armies of occupation or puppet regimes would be a much stronger emotion than anti-Communism; they were traditional cultures that thought in terms of freedom for the whole people rather than for expanded individual opportunity. For them, the magic word was “anti-colonialism.” I will leave it to you to judge whether our past several decades of Middle Eastern policy have suffered from the same blind spot.

I think there’s another problem in our idea of freedom: if everyone does everything he or she can, not just in terms of what’s legal but of what we can do without being punished, can ours or any nation survive? Maybe I could get along, taking short cuts in my job, cheating on taxes, stepping out on my wife and, in the wonderful words of Pete Seeger and Woody Guthrie, stealing the change from blind men’s cups. Some people do, and we probably even know a few. When Amy and I lived in Philadelphia, the story we heard was that whenever a city bus was involved in any kind of accident, more people filed whiplash lawsuits than could ever have fit on the bus. Even in Philadelphia, only a small fraction of people push the envelope this way; and no, if everybody did it, we could not remain free. There aren’t enough enforcers, and more importantly we don’t want for there to be enough enforcers, to have eyes everywhere at once. We just expect that most people will try to operate at a higher standard. So what is the point of individual freedom, if it only works when most people are careful not to use it? Perhaps thinking and speaking freely are always good (except for shouting FIRE in a crowded theater). Other nations disagree with us on this; democracies like Britain, France and Germany clamp down much harder on what they consider hate speech and libel. You can make similar arguments for freedom of religion, of assembly, and of the press; and certainly for all sorts of freedom FROM government intrusion. But in practice, we allow a great deal of freedom of action, including many actions which are not good for us or for society as a whole. Perhaps freedom is a precondition for moral behavior; I get no brownie points for not cheating on the test if the teacher is watching closely the whole time I take it. The Puritans who in the 1600s were arguing politically for the rights of Englishmen, even as they also pressed religiously for the priesthood of believers, must have taken this attitude. Just as a priest cannot assume responsibility for my ultimate salvation or damnation, so the state should not block me from going to hell in my own fashion. Only by being free to sin can I be virtuous in not sinning. Thinkers from Zeno and Epicurus to the Buddha saw liberation in self-denial. Doing what came naturally was to act in a subhuman or bestial fashion; the opposite of freedom was slavery to one’s appetites. Whenever government forces us to good things, such as using our tax money to provide for society’s victims, perhaps it robs us of the chance to aspire to virtue by choosing to contribute of own own free will to charity.

So here we are. For some, freedom is a matter of absence of any external restraint, so that even taxation for good causes is a kind of slavery; for others, only in the absence of outside coercion can we act morally. And a far older tradition says that freedom is the right of your group, your tribe, your nation not to be controlled by others, and that the amount of coercion you personally feel is much less important. To the people at the top of the totem pole, it is about not being restrained from exercising power; to the people at the bottom, it is how effectively their bosses can be reined in. And yet, with all these conflicting ideas of what they are talking about, most people assume that they can bandy the term around and have everyone understand. Why? Perhaps because all of these are pieces of an intuitive feeling for freedom which is hard-wired. The True State of Nature for humanity is not what Locke postulates: it is the lives we lived and which shaped us over hundreds of thousands, even millions, of years, wandering in small hunter/gatherer bands. The early humans, even the protohumans had no strong sense of individuality, or of conflict between their own needs and the needs of the group; there were no police to force actions needed for the survival of the whole, yet the tribes survived. If a tribe did shatter through selfish behavior into individuals or even couples pursuing their own aims, the needs of the dependent, unskilled young would not have been met and the genes of the whole group would have disappeared; so natural selection pushed very hard against selfishness and for what we call altruism. Emotions, religious feelings and moral beliefs reinforced tribal identification; and a concept of freedom which was both tribal and individual became part of our wiring. In evolutionary terms, the last 10,000 years was the blink of an eye. Through all the despotisms and imperfect lives, the image of tribal freedom has endured, and visionaries have kept pressing for it. Confucius’ teachings center on the right relationship of self and society; the Hebrew prophets argued for social justice and compassion, as did Mohammed a millennium later. Jesus emphasized the spirit over the letter of the law. Augustine saw freedom in an all-consuming love for God; but Jesus reminded us that God is invisible and can therefore only be loved through our feelings and action for the people around us. So perhaps the ultimate statement of freedom is this: Love your neighbor, and do whatever you will.