Selves & Souls

June 25, 2006

First UU Church of Austin

4700 Grover Ave., Austin, TX 78756

www.austinuu.org

Listen to the sermon by clicking the play button.

PRAYER

Let us pray for inspiration of the higher sort. Too often, we act inspired by motives too low to be proud of: selfishness, greed, using other people as things to serve our own ends, rather than ends in themselves.

We move so easily into attitudes of taking or entitlement, looking out for #1, as though the other people around us should be assigned numbers rather than respect.

Yet we do this against a background of high ideals, high teachings, high expectations that are continually trying to get our attention, trying to help us become the solution to the human predicament rather than one of its symptoms.

Perhaps Abraham Lincoln said it best when he prayed that we listen to the “higher angels of our nature” rather than the lower kind.

It is about who we shall become, and in the service of what ideals. Let us pray for inspiration from the higher sort, and develop the ear that listens only for the better angels of our nature.

Amen.

SERMON: Selves & Souls

The general theme for this sermon came from Stephan Windsor, the man who bought the right to negotiate the sermon theme at last fall’s services auction. He offered several ideas on which he had done a lot of work, and I chose to address the notion of the Self. I wasn’t sure how I would keep it from being just an academic lecture.

What it means, or what I think it means, is that each of us has this distinctive style of being, a distinctive character that our parents saw the seeds of when we were still babies, and that people who’ve known us all our life say has always been who we are. It seems to come, somehow, as part of our genetic package. Some are shy, some are outgoing; some are aggressive, some avoid confrontation; some analyze, others feel, and so on. That core style helps us choose the teachings, philosophies, theologies and values we find most natural.

This core personality, this fundamental style of being who we are, with all our gifts and strengths and weaknesses: I think of this as our Self.

I don’t need to belabor this; you all have a feel for what I mean. The question is whether that’s enough. Can’t we just follow our intuition through life, follow our own gifts and style? After all, it’s what we largely do. Isn’t it enough? What would or could you add to it? Specifically, what on earth do religion or philosophy or ethics really think they have to add to us that we would care or need to care about? Every person seems to have this core, this Self, that’s apparent not long after birth, still identifiable when they become very old. If we need more than that, why do we need it, and what is it?

You can see how easily this could become so abstract you’d need to doze off.

As I thought about this, I wondered what it might look like if serving that core character got seriously out of bounds. For nobody really wants to defend our total freedom to act however we want. As someone has said, my freedom to swing my fists has to stop at your nose, and eventually my self-serving wishes will run up against your self-serving wishes. And then what? Then does the strongest, the greediest, or the one with the most guns win? Or should there be something else to us?

As I free-associated on this, my mind wandered far from the human species, as I remembered some drama that took place a year and a half ago in the attic above my bedroom, involving raccoons. These are some of the cleverest animals around, and it took many months and finally calling out a roofer to discover that they had torn the heavy screen off from around my hot air escape vent on the roof, crawled in and dropped down to the attic. We never figured out how they got out, though they got in by climbing trees and dropping onto my roof.

But during what passes for “winter” here, one raccoon entered my attic, and the noise she made sounded like she was making a nest. Before long, the noises made me believe she had given birth to a couple little raccoons. So instead of thinking they were invading my space, I started thinking of my attic as a kind of homeless shelter for single raccoon mothers. When her babies were old enough and it got a little warmer at nights, I figured she would take them out into the real world, and I could close my raccoon homeless shelter.

But a few months later on a cold night, I heard a heavier thump on my roof, then in my attic. Soon there was much noise and scrambling, and I heard the two young raccoons squeal and scream, as the intruder killed them.

I knew what had happened, as you can probably guess too. A male raccoon had entered to claim the space and – like males of many species do – had killed the young ones because they weren’t his, weren’t extensions of his own genetic line, had no connection to his raccoon Self.

Now when people do such things – and sometimes they do – we call it murder, and we prosecute them. We don’t hold other animals to those higher standards – I doubt that you thought the raccoon had “murdered” the two young raccoons – because we don’t think they recognize those standards. But we do.

Those raccoons may seem an odd introduction to a sermon about Selves & Souls. But in humans, it can point us to the difference between those acting out of self-interest and those acting out of an allegiance to much higher standards. See if you find it useful as I try and flesh it out.

These nasty raccoon behaviors are things we see in so-called “higher” animal behavior, especially in politics, in our treatment of others around us.

A few months ago, I read an interesting book in the field of ethology, or comparative animal behavior, a field I’ve liked reading in for thirty years. The book was called Our Inner Ape, written by one of the world’s foremost primatologists, a man named Frans de Waal. Among other things, he studied human political behavior by studying chimpanzee political behavior, finding them nearly identical. Both species seek power and privileges over the others through combinations of strength, shrewdness, and carefully chosen political alliances.

He talked especially about a very shrewd old male chimp. In his early years, he had been the strongest and fiercest, so he was the alpha male, with all its privileges of power and access to females. As he got older and weaker, he got more clever, and began forming alliances with a strong younger male who lacked his political savvy. He would help the young male become the alpha male, in return for keeping his privileges and power.

Like human politics, chimpanzee politics can be vicious, bloody business. De Waal described a time when the old chimp got even with a male who had twice defeated him many months earlier, by waiting until night when the human guards went home, then setting up an ambush, in which he and the young alpha male attacked his old rival and killed him. Like the raccoons, these male chimps were only interested in what was theirs, what they could gain for themselves, and no amount of violence seemed too much.

It’s easy for us to see patterns in chimp behavior, to reflect on them and judge them in ways chimps cannot do. That ability to see actions against a background of higher expectations is one of the key abilities that distinguishes us from what we like to call “lower animals.”

That’s a funny, and telling, thing to call them: “lower” animals. It sure isn’t a comment on our relative strength! There’s probably nobody in this room that could win a one-on-one unarmed fight with an adult male chimpanzee, or baboon, leopard, elephant, or a few hundred other so-called “lower” animal species.

We mean something else when we boast that we are “higher” animals. And it has everything to do with this difference between Selves and Souls.

So let’s move from chimpanzees to humans.

First, a few words about souls. Scholars have shown that very ancient Egyptian religions, from which our biblical religions got their message and many of their stories, celebrated a divine presence within us thousands of years ago. The Greeks brought it down to earth about 2500 years ago, when they evolved the concept of Psyche, which is the source of our word “soul.” It was tied to character, to what is most essential about a human, though for the Greeks there was no afterlife; it was all about what happened here and now, and our Psyche referred to what was highest or noblest about us.

They had a visual image of the person rising to their full humanity. It was a set of nested concentric circles. The smallest circle in the center represented what you could call our undeveloped Self: just us. The next larger circle was of our relationships with lovers, friends and family – the relationships that make us bigger people, that begin to call us to higher values than the raccoons and chimps showed.

What the Greeks were doing with those concentric circles – and what Christian theologians followed them in doing – was saying that, since we have the ability to see our actions against a background of the highest ideals and expectations, we have a duty to do this. Living in accordance with the highest ideals, rather than just those that serve our private selves, is what we must do to realize our true nature. That’s what can raise us above the so-called lower animals: our greater capacity for understanding and compassion. In humans, we expect these higher ideals to trump the “Selfishness’ that’s also a part of us.

Ethologists like Frans de Waal argue that much or most of this also comes with our animal heritage: that altruism, a caring for others like us, is as much a part of us. You’ve probably read about the mother gorilla who saved a young boy who fell into the gorilla enclosure at a zoo a few years back, and returned him to his mother. Or stories of how dolphins have saved drowning humans, carrying them into shallow water. And Jack Harris-Bonham has a great personal story about being saved from circling sharks by a school of dolphins that he can tell you. Altruism, even across species lines, is demonstrably a part of our evolutionary heritage.

And every religion, philosophy, culture and system of law expects this of us. Though, like the raccoons and chimpanzees, we have those lower and more self-centered tendencies in us too, of course. We can see the contrast between serving our selves and a need for higher aspirations by looking at our own behavior, even better than by looking at raccoons and chimps.

So let’s move from chimps to people.

I recently had dinner with the District Executive of another Unitarian district out in the East. We were talking about churches with living spirits versus churches with dead spirits, and he said some of the churches in his district seemed to have dead or moribund spirits.

He told me about an old church with only fifteen members. The church itself was old, 250-300 years, begun as a Congregational church in the 18th century, before the members rejected two-thirds of the Trinity and became Unitarians in the mid-19th century. All the members are over seventy now. But once it had many members, and enough money to buy the land and build the church that was now much larger than they needed. And many members over the centuries donated a lot of money to build quite a healthy endowment.

But that was long ago. Now there are just the fifteen members, with no interest in attracting any more, especially young ones. They are content with just themselves, and will use the remainder of the endowment to cover operating expenses, and the cost of burying the remaining members. When they are all dead, the endowment will be gone if they plan it right, the church can slip into past history, and they are all quite comfortable with this.

They’re taking care of themselves, and it looks like it’s hard to criticize them. After all, they’re the only members, they”ve probably all been there for a long time, they can even vote unanimously to spend the endowment on their funerals at a duly called congregational meeting, so it’s perfectly democratic.

They act like there are only the few of them to consider, taking care of themselves with free money for which they owe no one an explanation.

But is it really just them?

For over 250 years, a few thousand people have belonged to that church. They gave their money, their time, energy and spirit to that church, and established the endowment, in the hopes that Something would continue to live into the future.

What is that “Something”? It was certainly not the hope that all this money, all these hopes and dreams, would be buried in the ground, never to be used for serving life again. When we serve only ourselves, we lose access to that higher level of visions and inspirations. We lose the inspiration of that whole Grand Reservoir of our human and animal heritage, and I think we need that Grand heritage to help us rise to our full human (and animal) height.

Well, you see the patterns I’m trying to sketch here, I’m sure. And now that you can see these patterns, and know what I’m trying to get at, let’s move from churches to some of the political behaviors we all see around us, and which are defining us as “Americans” to much of the rest of the world.

As many critics have written, our present administration and lawmakers have effected a huge transfer of wealth, greater than at any time in at least the last eighty years, if not in our nation’s history, and a host of other money-transferring schemes that look for all the world like a vicious kind of greed that the chimpanzees would recognize immediately: looting our society the way Alpha males and females feel entitled to do.

And where to start in our illegal invasion of Iraq? I’m sure most of you have read, as I also have, that the desire to invade Iraq was discussed in January 2001, the week President Bush’s administration moved into power. Greg Palast – who spoke to an audience of over 350 in this room last Sunday – has written that as early as March of 2001 – six months before 9-11 – Dick Cheney met with oil company executives to review oil maps of Iraq. And by October of that year, Paul Wolfowitz had drafted an elaborate plan detailing the “sale of all state enterprises’ in Iraq – that is, most of the nation’s assets, “especially in the oil and supporting industries.”

(See http://www.gregpalast.com/iraqmeetingstimeline.html, or Google terms like “Iraq Timeline,” “9-11 Timeline,” etc.)

We were led into the illegal invasion through outright deceptions about weapons of mass destruction to serve motives that look completely selfish, and far more vicious than chimps could ever imagine – estimates of how many innocent Iraqi people we have killed since invading their country run to 250,000 or more, in addition to the more than 2,500 of our own soldiers whose lives were lost not defending “freedom and democracy,” but defending what looks to many people like little more than the looting of Iraq by some of our greediest and most well-connected corporations.

We could go on to a dozen other activities and events of the past five years that all paint the same pattern of chimpanzee-style US geopolitical behaviors. In this country, when you kill people in order to steal from them, it’s called “homicide in the commission of a felony.” And in Texas, that’s a capital offense. If chimpanzees were observing us, they might say that we kill those people in Iraq because they’re not ours, not like us, because they’re in the way of our greedy ambitions, since we declared ourselves the Alpha Nation. Both the raccoons and the chimps would recognize the behavior, though I think they”d be shocked at the scale of our greed and our wantonness.

You can say we’re acting in our best interests, but without noble ideals it’s just the lowest kind of selfish behavior, serving Selves too low and mean to defend.

Yet there is something in our government’s deceptions about Iraq that is, in an ironic way, encouraging. Something deep in our leaders knew they needed to wrap their actions in noble talk about freedom and democracy because their real motives were so low that all decent people would have been ashamed and would have stopped them.

It’s that same noble part of us that I’m appealing to.

Some of our major cultural institutions today are being used to drag us down to the lowest and most self-serving of ideals. Just listen to Jerry Falwell praying that we blow away people in the name of the Lord, or that awful Baptist church that has taken to protesting the funerals of our soldiers, pretending that God is really killing them because he hates homosexuality – and not realizing that any god worthy of the name would hate their own bigoted and hateful actions far more. Or listen to almost anything from Ann Coulter. These people speak as Christians, so very well: they’re Christians. It is not the religion of Jesus – I think he would have detested what they are doing. But today these people are the best-known spokespeople for Christianity. This means that Christianity and its God have, through people like them, become so vile that they can no longer hope to offer adequate moral guidance for our nation. These people who loudly proclaim that they are Christians have become agents of a terrible selfishness that really is lower than the behavior of my attic raccoon or the wiley old male chimpanzee.

We come back where we begin, creatures with high and low possibilities, always needing to be called to the higher ones.

Yet, at home and abroad, in small or large actions of self-aggrandizement, there is an important way in which we are like those fifteen members of that dying little church: we are not on this stage alone. For millennia behind us, humans have worked, sacrificed, loved and cared about those higher allegiances and more tender mercies that help us become the best that we can be.

They have left these high commands to us, buried within every human institution. The warrior code of our soldiers is marked by some of the highest of human ideals, expressed in speeches like General Douglas MacArthur’s farewill address to West Point in 1962, in which he reminded them that those three words “Duty, Honor, Country” called them to their highest humanity, their most selfless devotion, their most courageous actions, made them heroes not just of war, but of our battle for higher humanity.

Religions at their best – no matter how seldom they seem to be at their best today – also call us toward our tender mercies, reminding us that whatever we do to the least among us we do to our own souls. And secular civic laws say we may not kill people in order to steal from them, and that lying is usually a bad thing.

So here we are. We have the better angels of our nature on one shoulder, and the lower and more selfish angels of our nature on the other. The lower angels say to take what we can, get away with what we can, and to the victor goes the spoils and to hell with the rest. The higher angel says we were meant to be formed in the image of God, not something less – but it’s up to us. The higher angel says when we act selfishly, to take what suits us no matter the harm it does to other humans, animals, and our environment, then we have disgraced ourselves, our race, and our calling – but it’s up to us.

We have selves, and can all act quite selfishly, and at times we all do. We also have souls. Souls are those repositories of all the highest hopes those before us had for what we might yet become, still beckoning to us, calling to us today with voices from ancient ages long past. But it’s up to us.

We have selves and we have souls, and if human history has shown us anything, it is that we can serve either level of ideals we choose, becoming either a low or a high model of what it can mean to come to our full humanity in this time and place.

Now it’s up to us. And the Good News is that we know, we really do know, exactly what we should do, don’t we?