Monday, April 28, 2008
Monday, April 07, 2008
Wednesday, April 02, 2008
"Writing the Minns Lectures" by Mark W. Harris - April 27, 2008
“Writing the Minns Lectures” by Mark W. Harris
April 27, 2008 - First Parish of Watertown
Opening Words from Robert French Leavens
Holy and beautiful the custom which brings us together,
In the presence of the most high:
To face our ideals,
To remember our loved ones in absence,
Ti give thanks, to make confession,
To offer forgiveness,
to be enlightened, and to be strengthened.
Through this quiet hour breathes
The worship of ages,
The cathedral music of history.
Three unseen guest attend,
Faith , hope and love:
Let all our hearts prepare them place.
Sermon
Many years ago in the far off city of Krakow, Poland, there lived a man named Isaac, son of Jacob. He was a poor man whose family seldom had enough to eat. He also lived at a time when dreams still held great power for people. One night he dreamed of the distant city of Prague. In his dream he saw a certain bridge over the Vltava River, and under the bridge a treasure was buried. The dream was so lifelike, he could not forget it, and this was especially so because the dream continued to recur every night for two weeks. Finally, to purge this insane image from his mind, he resolved to walk all the way to Prague to see for himself.
After several days of walking, he finally arrived in the city. Everything looked just as it did in his dream, and he soon found the exact bridge, and went underneath it to search for the treasure. Suddenly a soldier grabbed him by the the scruff of his neck, and led him away to prison for questioning. Under intense pressure form the authorities, he soon told them exactly what he was doing under the bridge - looking for a treasure he had imagined in a dream. All the soldiers quickly broke into laughter, “You stupid idiot,” they said, “Don’t you know that you can’t trust what you see in dreams.” Then, the one who had captured Isaac said, “Why, for the last two weeks I myself have dreamt that far away in the city of Krakow, in the house of one Jew, Isaac, son of Jacob, there is a treasure buried under the stove in his kitchen. But wouldn’t it be the most ridiculous thing in the world for me to go all the way there to look for it? Think how many Isaac, sons of Jacob, there are in a large city. One could waste a lifetime looking for a treasure that doesn’t exist.” Still laughing, the soldier gave Isaac a kick and sent him on his way. Then Isaac, son of Jacob, walked back to Krakow, to his own home, where he moved the stove in the kitchen, found the treasure buried underneath, and lived to a ripe old age as a rich man.
In the wake of the celebration of Passover, it seems appropriate to share a story from the Hasidic masters of eastern Europe. The story’s meaning is so simple. Our treasure is at home all the time, but we must go on a long and difficult journey in order to discover it. Home is Krakow, but he goes to Prague to discover the truth. We must risk ourselves to an uncertain future, to find the treasure that lies within. I want to think of this story in the context of writing the Minns Lectures. I hope none of you were fainting with suspicion that I was going to offer another sermon on Polish Unitarianism as soon as the word Krakow crossed my lips. Today I want to tell you a little about the journey I have taken to write the Minns Lectures. It has been long and arduous, and not without pain.
First, the facts. This week I will begin a series of five lectures that have been given more or less annually since 1944. I made application to become the lecturer, and they have honored me by choosing me for this paid historical gig. During the last few months I have given every spare minute of my life to the lectures. Susan Minns, one of the founders of the Museum of Fine Arts, among other notable accomplishments, established them in her brother's name. He was a descendant of the first minister of First Church, Boston, and a member of Kings Chapel, and therefore the lectures are administered by a committee from both those congregations. You get a sense that they were Brahmins through and through. That makes me a little nervous since the lectures address issues of class, and there has long been a stereotype linking Unitarianism with wealth, cultural elitism and Harvard College. Well, guess what? It is an accurate stereotype, at least for Bostonians in 1850, which is not to say it is true for Universalists, or for UUs today. Yet there is this sense that as a religious institution we only appeal to a narrow segment of the population, which today we might define as a liberal, economically comfortable, well educated elite, who know what is right for America, if only the masses would listen to us. Oops, that’s part of the stereotype, too. Self-righteousness, and yes, you’ve heard it before, children who don’t behave.
Unfortunately, you are not going to get too many answers today. You’ll have to come hear the lectures. And they are very historical, maybe even more so than that infamous Polish sermon. So if history is not your thing, then you can stay home and watch the Sox, and see the lectures later when they are released in the theaters. Ok, so maybe I am exaggerating their importance. While this won’t be an overly historical sermon, it will argue that history is important not just to me or this church, but to you as well. In fact, confronting and shaping and affirming your own history is a vitally important spiritual discipline.
This all started for me a long time ago, more than thirty years. At that time I was in graduate school in New Hampshire working on a thesis about my home town of New Salem. In the process of studying my home town (Think New Salem and Krakow), I began a journey. I discovered two faiths, Unitarianism and Universalism, that both affirmed the use of reason in the interpretation of the Bible, a loving God who embraced all and a basic understanding of human nature that was good. Juxtapose this with a literal understanding of the Bible stories, a judging God who filled me with unending guilt, and sinful nature that really could not do anything right or worthy in God’s eyes until Jesus saved me, and you have captured my reasons for leaving my childhood faith. It was an instant conversion. I became a born again UU. This study of my home brought me a new faith, and it also gave me a calling. I soon came to believe that living this faith and sharing it with others was what I was meant to do with my life, and so it has been ever since.
But that is not the whole story about the genesis of the lectures. I also have money and class issues. For example, having a venture capitalist as our student minister a few years ago was not the easiest task for me. These money issues were part of my journey to UU ministry. The thesis I spoke of was about the decline and failure of rural Unitarianism. The central reason why rural Unitarianism failed was that its rational, intellectual faith could not speak to plain, rural folk who needed someone to listen their needs, and not tell them what their needs were. Then when I served my first church in Palmer, Massachusetts, the then minister in Hartford, an important minister with a long Unitarian pedigree told me that my church was only there for historical reasons, and there was no way we would have a church in Palmer, a poor New England mill town in economic decline, today. It did not fit that green leafy, rich suburb filled with smart people stereotype. I think Andrea encountered some of this when she came to Watertown. Colleagues said, You mean there is a Unitarian church there? No, can’t be. A urban, industrial , immigrant community, with few WASP types simply could not sustain a UU church. That stereotype almost became a living truth, and if it were not for some brave souls, a few of whom are still among us, who said UUism can grow and thrive in Watertown, it would have happened. We are all witnesses to that revival today. In fact our annual meeting is a celebration that you do not need to be a certain kind of person to be a Unitarian Universalist except one that is open minded and understanding and willing to risk all dogmatisms in a search for truth.
My personal money issues partly came from being raised in those places where Unitarianism failed. These are rural villages and mill towns where the stereotype tells us that only hicks come from there, not educated and well-to-do UUs. You do not belong. Ever since, I looked at the content of my thesis and thought the Brahmins didn’t seem to understand. Ever since my former colleague looked at my church and said, you don’t belong among us, you are not one of us, I have longed to write these Minns lectures to say to the stereotype, that I do not have to have a certain pedigree, or education or profession to be a Unitarian Universalist. I don’t need six generations or a Ph.D., or a white collar job, which is not to say those are not fine things. Personally, it has been partly about money because my father did well financially despite being on welfare as a child during the depression, after his father’s business failed, and poverty arrived in an alcoholic stupor. So I enjoyed the benefits of money growing up, but our family values were pure working class, and now I am the educated idiot my father both wanted and feared. My education assigns me to a certain class today, but I have often felt confused, who do I belong with? And those UUs who have promoted a stereotype that we must fit a certain type in a certain kind of town have done us no favors. I first thought UUs were those people who had it made, and never had to struggle with anything. I have learned that rich and poor, educated and not so educated have religious needs that we can respond to. What is wrong with everyone feeling welcome?
That is the essential question, who do I belong with? I have thought about this a lot this year. My first sermon of the year was called “Almost an Atheist.” In that sermon I mentioned how Andrea said to me, “Oh, you still believe.” Believe in God that is. I have thought about that in the context of thinking that none of us really stray very far from our childhood faiths if we are going to have a powerful, life sustaining religious core. At first you might say that is ridiculous. Most of us UUs with a few exceptions are come outers from other religious faiths. I rejected fundamentalism, and another rejected Catholicism. We certainly don’t believe in those old ways. That is true, but we do need to integrate it into our life experience. We need it on our journey or else we only reject Krakow to come to Prague, and don’t know how to get back to Krakow, which is where our home and treasure lie.
Just the other day on the way home Dana was asking about what kind of baby he was. How much crying did he do and so forth. Children always want to learn what they were like when they were younger because it helps them get a perspective on who they have become. In the book Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience, one psychologist writes: “Observing, recording and preserving the memory of both large and small events of life is one of the most satisfying ways to bring order to consciousness. In a sense every individual is a historian of his or her personal existence.” We have all learned that memories of childhood and the patterns we developed determine the kind of adults we grow up to be. Many of us spend time in therapy dealing with these experiences as children of alcoholics or victims of abuse. We try to see how this experience has shaped us, and how we can reconcile ourselves to it. Sometimes psychology has focused on the negative, and especially religiously speaking, we need a more positive turn on our childhood. What kind of moral values or community compassion for others or love for others or peace for the world did we learn about that we still build upon?
If adults become private historians of our own lives, it is also true of older age. Erik Erikson believes that the last stage of the human life cycle involves the task of achieving “integrity.” That is, we bring together what we have accomplished and failed to accomplish into a meaningful story, that we claim as our own. Before my father died, he gathered his three sons for a last trip to Cooperstown , New York to see a painting of his old professional baseball team on exhibit. He wanted to integrate children with what he loved and handed on, that it, among other things, might be a bond between every one. We want to feel forgiveness for mistakes, loving connections that gave meaningful times together, and feelings of pride for what we have accomplished as a family or a community. As Carlyle wrote, “History is the essence of innumerable biographies.”
Many of us try to make sense of our history in our religious communities. Some of us think we join a UU community to purge ourselves of the theological dogmas we endured in our journeys. There is an undiscriminating rejection of the past. In the reading Conrad Wright says that this attitude of rejection is actually quite conventionally traditional, and it has a long history of its own. Furthermore this complete rejection of the past is “a form of bondage to it.” In a way it is like the undiscriminating acceptance of the orthodox faith that liberals sometimes like to make fun of with an intellectual superiority. The renewal of life depends upon the fulfillment of the past rather than the repudiation of it. What this means is that we look at what meaning we have derived from that past. Perhaps Catholicism gave you a good ethical grounding or thirst for social justice, or perhaps Fundamentalism showed me the importance of texts or story or even community, or even that an idea of God was useful to help me think about what grounded the universe in meaning, even if their concept of God was one I rejected. For I took a journey of rejection, but I also kept on journeying to come back to what meaning was gleaned from that experience as I grew and changed. And perhaps that is what Andrea has been saying to me all year.
What is central to our journeys is that we have the courage to go to the far off city, to find the way to our treasure at home. To leave home, is simply to reject the past, and never find the treasure. As Santayana said, those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it. To simply stay home is to stagnate, and never look to find the hidden treasure. This journey of mine has helped me discover that I can return to my home and find meaning there, even as it is transformed. I have also encountered those who never left UUism who did not finish their journey either. They stagnated by believing the stereotypes that only one kind of person belongs here, or that we know what is right. I believe that at heart Unitarian Universalism longs to be a faith that is not an exclusive club, but a wide open door that wants to experience and learn from all kinds of people, rich and poor. I often feel like we do a good job of that here in Watertown. It is a lesson we could teach UUs elsewhere. It is not easy. God knows I have issues, but I don’t want to ever feel like there is anyone, including myself who does not belong. I strive to change and grow and take the risk of a journey that will bring me home to a treasure. The social organism and the person that does not change will atrophy and die. Victor Frankl once wrote, “We who lived in the concentration camps can remember the men who walked through the huts comforting others, giving away their last piece of bread. They may have been few in number, but they offer sufficient proof that everything can be taken from a man or woman but one thing: the last of the human freedoms - to choose one’s attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one’s own way.”
Each of us must make that continuing journey that is our life, may we always remember our past, but also live it forward into the treasure that is our future choosing to fulfill our childhood faith because it took us on a journey that brought us to Unitarian Universalism and home now to a bigger heart and a wider soul. That is our heart’s longing as a people and as a community, to give ourselves a usable past. And that is why I wrote these lectures. I looked ay my shadows, and the shadows of my adopted denomination and have used that journey to call myself to my best self, and that the understanding and love and friendship we can share among all people of all classes can bring power to our feelings of powerlessness, compassion in our times of despair, and community when we feel truly isolated.
Closing Words - from Theodore Parker
Be ours a religion which, like sunshine,
goes everywhere;
its temple, all space;
its shrine , the good heart;
its creed, all truth;
its ritual, works of love;
its profession of faith, divine living.
April 27, 2008 - First Parish of Watertown
Opening Words from Robert French Leavens
Holy and beautiful the custom which brings us together,
In the presence of the most high:
To face our ideals,
To remember our loved ones in absence,
Ti give thanks, to make confession,
To offer forgiveness,
to be enlightened, and to be strengthened.
Through this quiet hour breathes
The worship of ages,
The cathedral music of history.
Three unseen guest attend,
Faith , hope and love:
Let all our hearts prepare them place.
Sermon
Many years ago in the far off city of Krakow, Poland, there lived a man named Isaac, son of Jacob. He was a poor man whose family seldom had enough to eat. He also lived at a time when dreams still held great power for people. One night he dreamed of the distant city of Prague. In his dream he saw a certain bridge over the Vltava River, and under the bridge a treasure was buried. The dream was so lifelike, he could not forget it, and this was especially so because the dream continued to recur every night for two weeks. Finally, to purge this insane image from his mind, he resolved to walk all the way to Prague to see for himself.
After several days of walking, he finally arrived in the city. Everything looked just as it did in his dream, and he soon found the exact bridge, and went underneath it to search for the treasure. Suddenly a soldier grabbed him by the the scruff of his neck, and led him away to prison for questioning. Under intense pressure form the authorities, he soon told them exactly what he was doing under the bridge - looking for a treasure he had imagined in a dream. All the soldiers quickly broke into laughter, “You stupid idiot,” they said, “Don’t you know that you can’t trust what you see in dreams.” Then, the one who had captured Isaac said, “Why, for the last two weeks I myself have dreamt that far away in the city of Krakow, in the house of one Jew, Isaac, son of Jacob, there is a treasure buried under the stove in his kitchen. But wouldn’t it be the most ridiculous thing in the world for me to go all the way there to look for it? Think how many Isaac, sons of Jacob, there are in a large city. One could waste a lifetime looking for a treasure that doesn’t exist.” Still laughing, the soldier gave Isaac a kick and sent him on his way. Then Isaac, son of Jacob, walked back to Krakow, to his own home, where he moved the stove in the kitchen, found the treasure buried underneath, and lived to a ripe old age as a rich man.
In the wake of the celebration of Passover, it seems appropriate to share a story from the Hasidic masters of eastern Europe. The story’s meaning is so simple. Our treasure is at home all the time, but we must go on a long and difficult journey in order to discover it. Home is Krakow, but he goes to Prague to discover the truth. We must risk ourselves to an uncertain future, to find the treasure that lies within. I want to think of this story in the context of writing the Minns Lectures. I hope none of you were fainting with suspicion that I was going to offer another sermon on Polish Unitarianism as soon as the word Krakow crossed my lips. Today I want to tell you a little about the journey I have taken to write the Minns Lectures. It has been long and arduous, and not without pain.
First, the facts. This week I will begin a series of five lectures that have been given more or less annually since 1944. I made application to become the lecturer, and they have honored me by choosing me for this paid historical gig. During the last few months I have given every spare minute of my life to the lectures. Susan Minns, one of the founders of the Museum of Fine Arts, among other notable accomplishments, established them in her brother's name. He was a descendant of the first minister of First Church, Boston, and a member of Kings Chapel, and therefore the lectures are administered by a committee from both those congregations. You get a sense that they were Brahmins through and through. That makes me a little nervous since the lectures address issues of class, and there has long been a stereotype linking Unitarianism with wealth, cultural elitism and Harvard College. Well, guess what? It is an accurate stereotype, at least for Bostonians in 1850, which is not to say it is true for Universalists, or for UUs today. Yet there is this sense that as a religious institution we only appeal to a narrow segment of the population, which today we might define as a liberal, economically comfortable, well educated elite, who know what is right for America, if only the masses would listen to us. Oops, that’s part of the stereotype, too. Self-righteousness, and yes, you’ve heard it before, children who don’t behave.
Unfortunately, you are not going to get too many answers today. You’ll have to come hear the lectures. And they are very historical, maybe even more so than that infamous Polish sermon. So if history is not your thing, then you can stay home and watch the Sox, and see the lectures later when they are released in the theaters. Ok, so maybe I am exaggerating their importance. While this won’t be an overly historical sermon, it will argue that history is important not just to me or this church, but to you as well. In fact, confronting and shaping and affirming your own history is a vitally important spiritual discipline.
This all started for me a long time ago, more than thirty years. At that time I was in graduate school in New Hampshire working on a thesis about my home town of New Salem. In the process of studying my home town (Think New Salem and Krakow), I began a journey. I discovered two faiths, Unitarianism and Universalism, that both affirmed the use of reason in the interpretation of the Bible, a loving God who embraced all and a basic understanding of human nature that was good. Juxtapose this with a literal understanding of the Bible stories, a judging God who filled me with unending guilt, and sinful nature that really could not do anything right or worthy in God’s eyes until Jesus saved me, and you have captured my reasons for leaving my childhood faith. It was an instant conversion. I became a born again UU. This study of my home brought me a new faith, and it also gave me a calling. I soon came to believe that living this faith and sharing it with others was what I was meant to do with my life, and so it has been ever since.
But that is not the whole story about the genesis of the lectures. I also have money and class issues. For example, having a venture capitalist as our student minister a few years ago was not the easiest task for me. These money issues were part of my journey to UU ministry. The thesis I spoke of was about the decline and failure of rural Unitarianism. The central reason why rural Unitarianism failed was that its rational, intellectual faith could not speak to plain, rural folk who needed someone to listen their needs, and not tell them what their needs were. Then when I served my first church in Palmer, Massachusetts, the then minister in Hartford, an important minister with a long Unitarian pedigree told me that my church was only there for historical reasons, and there was no way we would have a church in Palmer, a poor New England mill town in economic decline, today. It did not fit that green leafy, rich suburb filled with smart people stereotype. I think Andrea encountered some of this when she came to Watertown. Colleagues said, You mean there is a Unitarian church there? No, can’t be. A urban, industrial , immigrant community, with few WASP types simply could not sustain a UU church. That stereotype almost became a living truth, and if it were not for some brave souls, a few of whom are still among us, who said UUism can grow and thrive in Watertown, it would have happened. We are all witnesses to that revival today. In fact our annual meeting is a celebration that you do not need to be a certain kind of person to be a Unitarian Universalist except one that is open minded and understanding and willing to risk all dogmatisms in a search for truth.
My personal money issues partly came from being raised in those places where Unitarianism failed. These are rural villages and mill towns where the stereotype tells us that only hicks come from there, not educated and well-to-do UUs. You do not belong. Ever since, I looked at the content of my thesis and thought the Brahmins didn’t seem to understand. Ever since my former colleague looked at my church and said, you don’t belong among us, you are not one of us, I have longed to write these Minns lectures to say to the stereotype, that I do not have to have a certain pedigree, or education or profession to be a Unitarian Universalist. I don’t need six generations or a Ph.D., or a white collar job, which is not to say those are not fine things. Personally, it has been partly about money because my father did well financially despite being on welfare as a child during the depression, after his father’s business failed, and poverty arrived in an alcoholic stupor. So I enjoyed the benefits of money growing up, but our family values were pure working class, and now I am the educated idiot my father both wanted and feared. My education assigns me to a certain class today, but I have often felt confused, who do I belong with? And those UUs who have promoted a stereotype that we must fit a certain type in a certain kind of town have done us no favors. I first thought UUs were those people who had it made, and never had to struggle with anything. I have learned that rich and poor, educated and not so educated have religious needs that we can respond to. What is wrong with everyone feeling welcome?
That is the essential question, who do I belong with? I have thought about this a lot this year. My first sermon of the year was called “Almost an Atheist.” In that sermon I mentioned how Andrea said to me, “Oh, you still believe.” Believe in God that is. I have thought about that in the context of thinking that none of us really stray very far from our childhood faiths if we are going to have a powerful, life sustaining religious core. At first you might say that is ridiculous. Most of us UUs with a few exceptions are come outers from other religious faiths. I rejected fundamentalism, and another rejected Catholicism. We certainly don’t believe in those old ways. That is true, but we do need to integrate it into our life experience. We need it on our journey or else we only reject Krakow to come to Prague, and don’t know how to get back to Krakow, which is where our home and treasure lie.
Just the other day on the way home Dana was asking about what kind of baby he was. How much crying did he do and so forth. Children always want to learn what they were like when they were younger because it helps them get a perspective on who they have become. In the book Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience, one psychologist writes: “Observing, recording and preserving the memory of both large and small events of life is one of the most satisfying ways to bring order to consciousness. In a sense every individual is a historian of his or her personal existence.” We have all learned that memories of childhood and the patterns we developed determine the kind of adults we grow up to be. Many of us spend time in therapy dealing with these experiences as children of alcoholics or victims of abuse. We try to see how this experience has shaped us, and how we can reconcile ourselves to it. Sometimes psychology has focused on the negative, and especially religiously speaking, we need a more positive turn on our childhood. What kind of moral values or community compassion for others or love for others or peace for the world did we learn about that we still build upon?
If adults become private historians of our own lives, it is also true of older age. Erik Erikson believes that the last stage of the human life cycle involves the task of achieving “integrity.” That is, we bring together what we have accomplished and failed to accomplish into a meaningful story, that we claim as our own. Before my father died, he gathered his three sons for a last trip to Cooperstown , New York to see a painting of his old professional baseball team on exhibit. He wanted to integrate children with what he loved and handed on, that it, among other things, might be a bond between every one. We want to feel forgiveness for mistakes, loving connections that gave meaningful times together, and feelings of pride for what we have accomplished as a family or a community. As Carlyle wrote, “History is the essence of innumerable biographies.”
Many of us try to make sense of our history in our religious communities. Some of us think we join a UU community to purge ourselves of the theological dogmas we endured in our journeys. There is an undiscriminating rejection of the past. In the reading Conrad Wright says that this attitude of rejection is actually quite conventionally traditional, and it has a long history of its own. Furthermore this complete rejection of the past is “a form of bondage to it.” In a way it is like the undiscriminating acceptance of the orthodox faith that liberals sometimes like to make fun of with an intellectual superiority. The renewal of life depends upon the fulfillment of the past rather than the repudiation of it. What this means is that we look at what meaning we have derived from that past. Perhaps Catholicism gave you a good ethical grounding or thirst for social justice, or perhaps Fundamentalism showed me the importance of texts or story or even community, or even that an idea of God was useful to help me think about what grounded the universe in meaning, even if their concept of God was one I rejected. For I took a journey of rejection, but I also kept on journeying to come back to what meaning was gleaned from that experience as I grew and changed. And perhaps that is what Andrea has been saying to me all year.
What is central to our journeys is that we have the courage to go to the far off city, to find the way to our treasure at home. To leave home, is simply to reject the past, and never find the treasure. As Santayana said, those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it. To simply stay home is to stagnate, and never look to find the hidden treasure. This journey of mine has helped me discover that I can return to my home and find meaning there, even as it is transformed. I have also encountered those who never left UUism who did not finish their journey either. They stagnated by believing the stereotypes that only one kind of person belongs here, or that we know what is right. I believe that at heart Unitarian Universalism longs to be a faith that is not an exclusive club, but a wide open door that wants to experience and learn from all kinds of people, rich and poor. I often feel like we do a good job of that here in Watertown. It is a lesson we could teach UUs elsewhere. It is not easy. God knows I have issues, but I don’t want to ever feel like there is anyone, including myself who does not belong. I strive to change and grow and take the risk of a journey that will bring me home to a treasure. The social organism and the person that does not change will atrophy and die. Victor Frankl once wrote, “We who lived in the concentration camps can remember the men who walked through the huts comforting others, giving away their last piece of bread. They may have been few in number, but they offer sufficient proof that everything can be taken from a man or woman but one thing: the last of the human freedoms - to choose one’s attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one’s own way.”
Each of us must make that continuing journey that is our life, may we always remember our past, but also live it forward into the treasure that is our future choosing to fulfill our childhood faith because it took us on a journey that brought us to Unitarian Universalism and home now to a bigger heart and a wider soul. That is our heart’s longing as a people and as a community, to give ourselves a usable past. And that is why I wrote these lectures. I looked ay my shadows, and the shadows of my adopted denomination and have used that journey to call myself to my best self, and that the understanding and love and friendship we can share among all people of all classes can bring power to our feelings of powerlessness, compassion in our times of despair, and community when we feel truly isolated.
Closing Words - from Theodore Parker
Be ours a religion which, like sunshine,
goes everywhere;
its temple, all space;
its shrine , the good heart;
its creed, all truth;
its ritual, works of love;
its profession of faith, divine living.
"The Cost of War" by Mark W. Harris - April 6, 2008
“The Cost of War” - Mark W. Harris
Justice Sunday 2008 - Five Years Since the Start of the Iraq War - 4,000 US Deaths -
40th Anniversary of the Assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.
First Parish of Watertown April 6, 2008
Call to Worship - from Deng Ming Dao
Only when peace lives within each of us, will it live outside of us. We must be the wombs for a new harmony. When it is small, peace is fragile. Like a baby, it need nurturing attention. We must protect peace from violence and perversion if it is to grow. We must be strong to do this. But force, even in the name of honor, is always tragic. Instead, we must use the strength of wisdom and conscience. Only that power can nurture peace in this difficult time.
Story for All Ages - Li’l Dan the Drummer Boy by Romare Bearden
Reading - The Things They Carried by Tim O’Brien
Sermon - “The Cost of War” - Mark W. Harris
What is good about war? It seems like such an illogical question. What could possibly be good about the killing of people, destruction of property, and desecration of the earth? Yet I remember the question from my eighth grade teacher as clear as day. She wanted to hear both the positive and negative attributes of war coming from the droll mouths of her sleepy, pubescent youngsters. It was 1965 and Vietnam was only a minor military action with the build up and the anguish soon to follow. I am not sure what prompted the discussion question. Were we reading the Red Badge of Courage, some Hemingway, or All Quiet on the Western Front? I recall the teacher going to the blackboard. The obvious pluses were things like freedom and liberation. As a student of the Civil War, I believed it was fought to free the slaves and preserve the union. So I spoke up to list a good thing about war. The Revolutionary War of course had brought us self-government, freedom from imperialistic control. As an eighth grade class we surely believed in what Studs Terkl later called The Good War fought by those whom Tom Brokaw deemed The Greatest Generation. We all knew about World War II, where the Holocaust was stopped, where a madman who was trying to take over the world was prevented from doing so. As the decades passed, nations learned to stand up for their own sovereignty and human rights, so that more people might live in peace. You sometimes must go to war, to stop war. That was a good thing , too. Defensive war is often listed first when we define a just war. The list grew. There were things like coming of age and initiation rites for young men. There was courage and bravery, skill and camaraderie. There was common cause to unite a people. Someone even suggested population control. It joined the positive list, too. This was before Vietnam tore us apart. This was before 1968 when the My Lai massacre went down in March, and then April 4, forty years ago Friday, Dr. Martin Luther King was gunned down in Memphis.
My son Levi is almost as old as I was when that teacher asked us that question, what is good about war?. Sometimes we live under the illusion that our children are immune from such subjects. Then the other day on the car ride out to their schools, he and Dana began a barrage of questions. Was Hitler worse than Saddam Hussein? What happened to Saddam? Why did they do that? I struggled to try to articulate simple answers to complex questions. The horrible nature of war, and the costs it exacts from us are almost always rational responses for upper middle class white Americans like us because we do not experience the deaths or the wounded first hand. It is usually not our cousins and brothers. Our children play at violent video games, blithely shooting down virtual opponents, and none of it is very real. Modern warfare, as we know, is often like a video game with targets who are not up close and personal. In warfare this changed, Drew Faust tells us, with the Civil War. Before then a soldier’s skill often mattered, and if you were fighting hand to hand you might have a chance of success in battle. Then mass conflict, and modern weapons made killing and death much more random. It also became hard to justify all of this killing in the context of a good God who intended such carnage, and offered eternal life as a reward. Individual deaths became framed more as sacrifices for the good of a nation, so that future generations might profit from the young people who were creating a new and better world.
Today we ask, what are the costs of war? We have been told all along that the atrocities of the Iraq War have been necessary for some larger purpose of protecting freedom. We heard Saddam is developing weapons of mass destruction, and must be stopped. We know this to have been a manipulative lie. But there were others, too. This war must be fought as part of the war on terrorism. But there was never any terrorist connection to Iraq until the war was pursued. This is why one of the things we must dedicate ourselves to is educating each other about these twisted truths. We have military experts saying Iran is training Al Qaeda in Iraq. That is just not true. Iran is a Shi’ite country, who are training Shi’ite extremists, not Al Qaeda, who are Sunni extremists. We must be among those who are determined to know the truth, and commit ourselves to teaching that truth. The authorization of torture and the degrading treatments of prisoners has been excused as another aspect of fighting the war, and yet no rules of war or holding of captives were followed. As one solider said of Abu Ghraib, “They couldn’t say we broke the rules because there were no rules.” Costs pile up in terms of reputations and leadership in international relations, and in the morale and care of troops, and the response of much of the American public who block out the truth of how many civilians have died, how much has been destroyed, and how ill conceived and poorly managed this conflict has been.
Exactly one year before he was assassinated, Dr. Martin Luther King delivered a sermon called “Beyond Vietnam: A Time to Break Silence” at the Riverside Church in New York. In that address, he wrote, “ a nation that continues year after year to spend more money on military defense than on programs of social uplift is approaching spiritual death.” Billions continue to be spent on war, while veterans who have suffered horrible injuries in this conflict suffer from lack of services, and more comprehensively, precious resources are diverted from all people in this the second longest war in our history. A recent editorial in the Globe stated that the money spent on the war could have fixed Social Security for the next 75 years or provided health insurance to all American Children. What could a tab of $720 million per day give us in lunches, schools, teachers or housing?
How has the war made you feel? Many of us we have mentally calculated a cost in dead and wounded and refugees, and after a while we feel helpless. We avoid reading about it. We become numb to it. We just kind of forget about it and go on with our life. We feel like we have no voice. It is a hopeless tide of maybe another 100 years. So we each know we carry some pain and denial and anguish from this war fought in the name of our country. In her book on the Civil War, Drew Faust writes about how difficult it was to identify soldiers who were killed in battle. This was before the days of dogs tags, and so soldiers going into battle might write letters that they would place in their pockets, or pin who they were and where they were from on their shirts. They carried their very names so that they would not be lost forever. They wanted to be remembered and memorialized, not forgotten. They carried all the hopes and dreams of their lives into battle, only to be killed if one stray bullet hit them square, or if they lived, come home with death in their soul. I saw an article the other day that said we would take this war much more personally if there were a draft, and it threatened the very lives of those we love. Then we would take to the streets again, just as we did with Vietnam. Does it take something to touch us personally to activate our outrage over this war?
I am sure all the men of my generation remember the draft lottery. We recall the numbers we received, 93 for me, 18 for my brother who joined the National Guard. Would we get the call up to fight in this unjust war? We all carried our draft cards in our wallets, amid licenses and memberships and bank credit. Some said they would never submit to serving in this war, and they burned their cards in the chalices of Arlington Street Church, and our own Watertown minister hid the draft dodgers in the attic of the house I live in now, where Dana and Levi sleep. These two who asked about war and death. We carried our cards as someone who might go in the rank order of our numbers. The soldiers in Tim O’Briens work The Things They Carried carry all the things they need for living - Things that remind them of home - the picture of the one they loved and the house where they came from. The identity of who they are - the dog tags; The items they need daily for sustenance and personal maintenance, razors and iced beer and chocolate bars. And luck and faith and hope - a rabbit’s foot and a little smiling Buddha or a cross to ponder. To be able to see and hear - a flashlight and a radio. Physical, personal items, too, like memories and illnesses, or the acne scars, or the skinny legs that could run so fast, and help you get away. All that we carry makes up who we are. What has shaped us, who is important to us, what skills or virtues we have, what we own and what we use, what we think works well - From Dial soap to the worn black leather New Testament - let me be clean and truthful about what I know, and hope I get through. The burden is immense, because we carry our comrades, our past, our earth, and even the sky, as the rain falls.
My old draft card reminds me of how I once carried that war around with me. And my children’s questions remind of how they carry an idea about this war around in their minds and hearts. I think we recognize the pain we feel over this war, and that makes it personal. Making it personal means that we are public about the anguish this war causes. We acknowledge this cost, and realize that part of our ministry must be a public ministry against war. The UUA is now considering whether we will become a peace church, and there is an article in the current UU World about this discussion. I do not know how the discussion will end. I believe there are just wars, but one of the problems with wars in our lifetimes is that they have been used to perpetrate a preconceived policy, an industrial and military system, a thirst for oil, that feeds a war economy, for Presidential self-aggrandizement, and then declared divinely sanctioned. The president of my seminary Rebecca Parker writes that Mel Gibson’s film on the Passion of Christ reproduced an understanding of images of Jesus’ torture and execution, presenting violence as divinely sanctioned, necessary for salvation, and an occasion for gratitude and awe. This level of violence is cause to bear grief, to feel the loss of life, the loss of a mother for her child, any child in any nation. When the atomic bomb was developed. J Robert Oppenheimer realized the destructive power that he had helped unleash. He quoted a passage from the Bhagavad Gita, where the god Krishna appears on the battlefield to the warrior Arjuna, that the explosive power of human might was like the Mighty One . .. “I am become death, the Shatterer of Worlds.” We feel so bad because that is what war does to our souls. So we feel grief for all the lost life.
In the Hebrew Scriptures, Abraham refuses to go to war for the sake of gaining land, power or natural resources, but he does go to war when his nephew Lot is captured. He gets him back, but only takes the spoils of war that replace what he has lost, and no more. He is not out for power or riches. War may be necessary it says, to fight for the survival of loved ones. We take care of and protect those we love, and all other ways to pursue war are cruel and unjust.
When children express fears about war it becomes personal. When I recall my fear about the draft years ago, it became personal. When we know someone who is touched by this war it becomes personal. We want to educate others to the truth. We want to be heard, and elect those who will listen to our pleas. We may want to take to the streets again, or at least enlist in antiwar campaigns before it is allowed to last for 100 years. There is a final task. A few minutes ago I asked you to think me how this war makes you feel. Now I want to ask you. What does the word peace signify to you? Here are some I thought of -heal - touch - love - place of rest - - cradle wounded spirits, home, loved ones, and finally, reclaim joy.
One thing we can do in ruminating on this war is feel outrage and grief and madness over how it has been fought, and how Iraq has been devastated, and the world made more dangerous. We may feel all of that. If we choose to feel it rather than deny it, then the strength and power we need to oppose war, to speak the truth, to reveal lies, seems overwhelming. We know that strength cannot emanate from anger or grief, because it will dissipate in sadness and emptiness, and we will feel forlorn and barren. Abraham wanted Lot back because he was life, he was joy to him. We don’t respond to waste with grief, or violence or anger alone. They can be destroyers, too. No, we must live our lives as Dr. King would have suggested we do. We meet violence with love. If I am dead in my heart, then I cannot exude any love or joy or spirit of life to you. The worst cost of war could be to our very souls, if we forget the joy of living. We want to see the colors of our spring flowers, armies of crocuses standing in their own ranks in all their vital beauty. We want to hear each others voices raised in song of connection and care. We want to taste the rich spices of sage , rosemary and thyme that invigorates the marvelous sustenance we can share. We want to touch the cooling waters of country streams that have rushed down from ancient mountain peaks to make our fingers tingle that we might reach out to embrace the world to greet one another. We want to smell the steamy hay that we have sweated all day to harvest, and laboriously loaded in the barn that the sheep or cattle might be fed, that the animals and the plants and the people might all find peace in the circle of life and friendship that would be their joy, if they would simply live and let be.
O gracious people of this community, let us stand against the despair of war, by reclaiming joy in our lives, that for all the anguish of the world, the pain our brothers and sisters at war have endured, and we bear witness to, might be ended that they could find happiness in each other’s company, and meaning in building up a community of justice and understanding and plenty. Abraham looked on Lot. Mary looked on Jesus, and we look on the face of parents and children, on our beloved ones, and realize the loss of loved ones, the children, the smiles, the human potential has always been the most horrible cost of war. In her convocation address at Starr King, Rebecca Parker suggested lighting a white candle for all the grief we feel in response to war, for white is traditionally the color of death. She also suggested lighting a red candle, as well, red that stands for life, the blood flowing through each of our veins that gives us life, that makes our arms reach out, our legs run, and our bodies embrace. Let us always remember that as a community, as people, we are here for life, and we oppose the destruction of life. War shatters life. Pain and grief may lead us to protest war calling for truth and justice, but that will leave our souls empty in the end, the worst cost of all. We find peace by being people of peace in our lives, not living with anger and bitterness, but by embracing life. Embracing everything which is infinite, which is natural, which is yes. We need to protest war by shouting we love life. As a community, we uphold life. We celebrate life. We are life in all its beauty and rhythms and joy and its possibility for renewal. Let us with one heart and voice call out for life.
Closing Words from Dwight D. Eisenhower
Every gun that is made,
every warship launched,
every rocket fired signifies,
in the final sense,
a theft from those who hunger and are not fed,
those who are cold and are not clothed.
The world in arms is not spending money alone.
It is spending the sweat of its laborers,
the genius of its scientists,
the hopes of its children.
Justice Sunday 2008 - Five Years Since the Start of the Iraq War - 4,000 US Deaths -
40th Anniversary of the Assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.
First Parish of Watertown April 6, 2008
Call to Worship - from Deng Ming Dao
Only when peace lives within each of us, will it live outside of us. We must be the wombs for a new harmony. When it is small, peace is fragile. Like a baby, it need nurturing attention. We must protect peace from violence and perversion if it is to grow. We must be strong to do this. But force, even in the name of honor, is always tragic. Instead, we must use the strength of wisdom and conscience. Only that power can nurture peace in this difficult time.
Story for All Ages - Li’l Dan the Drummer Boy by Romare Bearden
Reading - The Things They Carried by Tim O’Brien
Sermon - “The Cost of War” - Mark W. Harris
What is good about war? It seems like such an illogical question. What could possibly be good about the killing of people, destruction of property, and desecration of the earth? Yet I remember the question from my eighth grade teacher as clear as day. She wanted to hear both the positive and negative attributes of war coming from the droll mouths of her sleepy, pubescent youngsters. It was 1965 and Vietnam was only a minor military action with the build up and the anguish soon to follow. I am not sure what prompted the discussion question. Were we reading the Red Badge of Courage, some Hemingway, or All Quiet on the Western Front? I recall the teacher going to the blackboard. The obvious pluses were things like freedom and liberation. As a student of the Civil War, I believed it was fought to free the slaves and preserve the union. So I spoke up to list a good thing about war. The Revolutionary War of course had brought us self-government, freedom from imperialistic control. As an eighth grade class we surely believed in what Studs Terkl later called The Good War fought by those whom Tom Brokaw deemed The Greatest Generation. We all knew about World War II, where the Holocaust was stopped, where a madman who was trying to take over the world was prevented from doing so. As the decades passed, nations learned to stand up for their own sovereignty and human rights, so that more people might live in peace. You sometimes must go to war, to stop war. That was a good thing , too. Defensive war is often listed first when we define a just war. The list grew. There were things like coming of age and initiation rites for young men. There was courage and bravery, skill and camaraderie. There was common cause to unite a people. Someone even suggested population control. It joined the positive list, too. This was before Vietnam tore us apart. This was before 1968 when the My Lai massacre went down in March, and then April 4, forty years ago Friday, Dr. Martin Luther King was gunned down in Memphis.
My son Levi is almost as old as I was when that teacher asked us that question, what is good about war?. Sometimes we live under the illusion that our children are immune from such subjects. Then the other day on the car ride out to their schools, he and Dana began a barrage of questions. Was Hitler worse than Saddam Hussein? What happened to Saddam? Why did they do that? I struggled to try to articulate simple answers to complex questions. The horrible nature of war, and the costs it exacts from us are almost always rational responses for upper middle class white Americans like us because we do not experience the deaths or the wounded first hand. It is usually not our cousins and brothers. Our children play at violent video games, blithely shooting down virtual opponents, and none of it is very real. Modern warfare, as we know, is often like a video game with targets who are not up close and personal. In warfare this changed, Drew Faust tells us, with the Civil War. Before then a soldier’s skill often mattered, and if you were fighting hand to hand you might have a chance of success in battle. Then mass conflict, and modern weapons made killing and death much more random. It also became hard to justify all of this killing in the context of a good God who intended such carnage, and offered eternal life as a reward. Individual deaths became framed more as sacrifices for the good of a nation, so that future generations might profit from the young people who were creating a new and better world.
Today we ask, what are the costs of war? We have been told all along that the atrocities of the Iraq War have been necessary for some larger purpose of protecting freedom. We heard Saddam is developing weapons of mass destruction, and must be stopped. We know this to have been a manipulative lie. But there were others, too. This war must be fought as part of the war on terrorism. But there was never any terrorist connection to Iraq until the war was pursued. This is why one of the things we must dedicate ourselves to is educating each other about these twisted truths. We have military experts saying Iran is training Al Qaeda in Iraq. That is just not true. Iran is a Shi’ite country, who are training Shi’ite extremists, not Al Qaeda, who are Sunni extremists. We must be among those who are determined to know the truth, and commit ourselves to teaching that truth. The authorization of torture and the degrading treatments of prisoners has been excused as another aspect of fighting the war, and yet no rules of war or holding of captives were followed. As one solider said of Abu Ghraib, “They couldn’t say we broke the rules because there were no rules.” Costs pile up in terms of reputations and leadership in international relations, and in the morale and care of troops, and the response of much of the American public who block out the truth of how many civilians have died, how much has been destroyed, and how ill conceived and poorly managed this conflict has been.
Exactly one year before he was assassinated, Dr. Martin Luther King delivered a sermon called “Beyond Vietnam: A Time to Break Silence” at the Riverside Church in New York. In that address, he wrote, “ a nation that continues year after year to spend more money on military defense than on programs of social uplift is approaching spiritual death.” Billions continue to be spent on war, while veterans who have suffered horrible injuries in this conflict suffer from lack of services, and more comprehensively, precious resources are diverted from all people in this the second longest war in our history. A recent editorial in the Globe stated that the money spent on the war could have fixed Social Security for the next 75 years or provided health insurance to all American Children. What could a tab of $720 million per day give us in lunches, schools, teachers or housing?
How has the war made you feel? Many of us we have mentally calculated a cost in dead and wounded and refugees, and after a while we feel helpless. We avoid reading about it. We become numb to it. We just kind of forget about it and go on with our life. We feel like we have no voice. It is a hopeless tide of maybe another 100 years. So we each know we carry some pain and denial and anguish from this war fought in the name of our country. In her book on the Civil War, Drew Faust writes about how difficult it was to identify soldiers who were killed in battle. This was before the days of dogs tags, and so soldiers going into battle might write letters that they would place in their pockets, or pin who they were and where they were from on their shirts. They carried their very names so that they would not be lost forever. They wanted to be remembered and memorialized, not forgotten. They carried all the hopes and dreams of their lives into battle, only to be killed if one stray bullet hit them square, or if they lived, come home with death in their soul. I saw an article the other day that said we would take this war much more personally if there were a draft, and it threatened the very lives of those we love. Then we would take to the streets again, just as we did with Vietnam. Does it take something to touch us personally to activate our outrage over this war?
I am sure all the men of my generation remember the draft lottery. We recall the numbers we received, 93 for me, 18 for my brother who joined the National Guard. Would we get the call up to fight in this unjust war? We all carried our draft cards in our wallets, amid licenses and memberships and bank credit. Some said they would never submit to serving in this war, and they burned their cards in the chalices of Arlington Street Church, and our own Watertown minister hid the draft dodgers in the attic of the house I live in now, where Dana and Levi sleep. These two who asked about war and death. We carried our cards as someone who might go in the rank order of our numbers. The soldiers in Tim O’Briens work The Things They Carried carry all the things they need for living - Things that remind them of home - the picture of the one they loved and the house where they came from. The identity of who they are - the dog tags; The items they need daily for sustenance and personal maintenance, razors and iced beer and chocolate bars. And luck and faith and hope - a rabbit’s foot and a little smiling Buddha or a cross to ponder. To be able to see and hear - a flashlight and a radio. Physical, personal items, too, like memories and illnesses, or the acne scars, or the skinny legs that could run so fast, and help you get away. All that we carry makes up who we are. What has shaped us, who is important to us, what skills or virtues we have, what we own and what we use, what we think works well - From Dial soap to the worn black leather New Testament - let me be clean and truthful about what I know, and hope I get through. The burden is immense, because we carry our comrades, our past, our earth, and even the sky, as the rain falls.
My old draft card reminds me of how I once carried that war around with me. And my children’s questions remind of how they carry an idea about this war around in their minds and hearts. I think we recognize the pain we feel over this war, and that makes it personal. Making it personal means that we are public about the anguish this war causes. We acknowledge this cost, and realize that part of our ministry must be a public ministry against war. The UUA is now considering whether we will become a peace church, and there is an article in the current UU World about this discussion. I do not know how the discussion will end. I believe there are just wars, but one of the problems with wars in our lifetimes is that they have been used to perpetrate a preconceived policy, an industrial and military system, a thirst for oil, that feeds a war economy, for Presidential self-aggrandizement, and then declared divinely sanctioned. The president of my seminary Rebecca Parker writes that Mel Gibson’s film on the Passion of Christ reproduced an understanding of images of Jesus’ torture and execution, presenting violence as divinely sanctioned, necessary for salvation, and an occasion for gratitude and awe. This level of violence is cause to bear grief, to feel the loss of life, the loss of a mother for her child, any child in any nation. When the atomic bomb was developed. J Robert Oppenheimer realized the destructive power that he had helped unleash. He quoted a passage from the Bhagavad Gita, where the god Krishna appears on the battlefield to the warrior Arjuna, that the explosive power of human might was like the Mighty One . .. “I am become death, the Shatterer of Worlds.” We feel so bad because that is what war does to our souls. So we feel grief for all the lost life.
In the Hebrew Scriptures, Abraham refuses to go to war for the sake of gaining land, power or natural resources, but he does go to war when his nephew Lot is captured. He gets him back, but only takes the spoils of war that replace what he has lost, and no more. He is not out for power or riches. War may be necessary it says, to fight for the survival of loved ones. We take care of and protect those we love, and all other ways to pursue war are cruel and unjust.
When children express fears about war it becomes personal. When I recall my fear about the draft years ago, it became personal. When we know someone who is touched by this war it becomes personal. We want to educate others to the truth. We want to be heard, and elect those who will listen to our pleas. We may want to take to the streets again, or at least enlist in antiwar campaigns before it is allowed to last for 100 years. There is a final task. A few minutes ago I asked you to think me how this war makes you feel. Now I want to ask you. What does the word peace signify to you? Here are some I thought of -heal - touch - love - place of rest - - cradle wounded spirits, home, loved ones, and finally, reclaim joy.
One thing we can do in ruminating on this war is feel outrage and grief and madness over how it has been fought, and how Iraq has been devastated, and the world made more dangerous. We may feel all of that. If we choose to feel it rather than deny it, then the strength and power we need to oppose war, to speak the truth, to reveal lies, seems overwhelming. We know that strength cannot emanate from anger or grief, because it will dissipate in sadness and emptiness, and we will feel forlorn and barren. Abraham wanted Lot back because he was life, he was joy to him. We don’t respond to waste with grief, or violence or anger alone. They can be destroyers, too. No, we must live our lives as Dr. King would have suggested we do. We meet violence with love. If I am dead in my heart, then I cannot exude any love or joy or spirit of life to you. The worst cost of war could be to our very souls, if we forget the joy of living. We want to see the colors of our spring flowers, armies of crocuses standing in their own ranks in all their vital beauty. We want to hear each others voices raised in song of connection and care. We want to taste the rich spices of sage , rosemary and thyme that invigorates the marvelous sustenance we can share. We want to touch the cooling waters of country streams that have rushed down from ancient mountain peaks to make our fingers tingle that we might reach out to embrace the world to greet one another. We want to smell the steamy hay that we have sweated all day to harvest, and laboriously loaded in the barn that the sheep or cattle might be fed, that the animals and the plants and the people might all find peace in the circle of life and friendship that would be their joy, if they would simply live and let be.
O gracious people of this community, let us stand against the despair of war, by reclaiming joy in our lives, that for all the anguish of the world, the pain our brothers and sisters at war have endured, and we bear witness to, might be ended that they could find happiness in each other’s company, and meaning in building up a community of justice and understanding and plenty. Abraham looked on Lot. Mary looked on Jesus, and we look on the face of parents and children, on our beloved ones, and realize the loss of loved ones, the children, the smiles, the human potential has always been the most horrible cost of war. In her convocation address at Starr King, Rebecca Parker suggested lighting a white candle for all the grief we feel in response to war, for white is traditionally the color of death. She also suggested lighting a red candle, as well, red that stands for life, the blood flowing through each of our veins that gives us life, that makes our arms reach out, our legs run, and our bodies embrace. Let us always remember that as a community, as people, we are here for life, and we oppose the destruction of life. War shatters life. Pain and grief may lead us to protest war calling for truth and justice, but that will leave our souls empty in the end, the worst cost of all. We find peace by being people of peace in our lives, not living with anger and bitterness, but by embracing life. Embracing everything which is infinite, which is natural, which is yes. We need to protest war by shouting we love life. As a community, we uphold life. We celebrate life. We are life in all its beauty and rhythms and joy and its possibility for renewal. Let us with one heart and voice call out for life.
Closing Words from Dwight D. Eisenhower
Every gun that is made,
every warship launched,
every rocket fired signifies,
in the final sense,
a theft from those who hunger and are not fed,
those who are cold and are not clothed.
The world in arms is not spending money alone.
It is spending the sweat of its laborers,
the genius of its scientists,
the hopes of its children.
"Lies My Father Told Me" by Mark W. Harris - March 30, 2008
“Lies My Father told Me” by Mark W. Harris
First Parish of Watertown - March 30, 2008
Call to Worship - from John 18:37
I was born for this, I came into the world for this: to bear witness to the truth; and all who are on the side of truth listen to my voice.” “Truth?” said Pilate, “what is that?”
Reading - from How Can I Talk If My Lips Don’t Move? by Tito Rajarshi Mukhopadhyay
Sermon - “Lies My Father told Me”
Lies my father told me is the title of a movie that came out in the 1970’s. For some reason as I was trying to think up a title for this sermon, that name popped into the head. It was something with the word lies in the title. I don’t remember very much about that particular movie, except it was the story of a little boy who was growing up in Montreal, and he had a grandfather who was a peddler who took the boy on his rounds and wove fascinating stories which enchanted the boy. The boy also had a father who liked to evade working. Perhaps the lying references were to all the things his father was planning to do to support the family, but somehow they never quite panned out. This character reminds me of David Child, the husband of Watertown's famous Lydia Maria Child. He always had some kind of money making scheme that invariably failed. Many of them were based on his unswerving integrity. For example, when they lived in Northampton, he tried to extract sugar from sugar beets because he did not want to be involved with West Indian island trade that would mix his business up with slavery. Child of course, was well intentioned, but if he were realistic he might have realized that there was no potential for most of his plans.
I don’t have personal recollections of my father or mother lying to me very much. Once in a while one of my boys will say that I lied to them about taking them to a store or playing catch. I might hear, “You said you were going to come outside, but you never did.” I think I am a pretty faithful Dad when it comes to following through on what I promise, but there are instances for all of us when we say, I’ll take you there, or I’ll play catch and it is just a way of putting the child off because we cannot be bothered at that time, or shutting up the child or not having to deal with saying no, and thus disappointing them. No one is perfect, but making promises to children is often a stark reminder that loved ones and others will remember that what we say is truth should translate as truth, and others trust that we are dealing straight with them.
My boys in particular like the story to be told straight and clear without twists or turns.
I am sure nearly every single person in this sanctuary was told by their parents to never lie. This was especially true as young children when we do not understand the subtleties of social interactions. It is better to err on the side of truth. Most of the time. I think I have told you the oft repeated family story of when my step-grandmother came to visit when I was about five. My father looked out the window, and said, “I don’t want to see that old bat.” Being a dutiful son I went out to greet her with my father’s warm words, “My father doesn’t want to see you, you old bat.” I learned quickly that sometimes honesty is not the best policy. Even though our parents do not want us to lie about stealing things, or where we were or what we were doing when we didn’t come home, we do learn as we mature that it is better to stretch the truth in certain social situations. When Will Twombly asked me about this subject, I thought of those strategically important lies that many of us use when it comes to personal appearance or culinary skills. If a loved one has spent hours getting their hair done, or cooking some special dish, it is usually unwise to express an honest feeling if the intended result just didn’t occur. So we don’t say you look awful, or this tastes terrible. We would hurt their feelings. Yet if their are wider social implications, then perhaps we need to be more forthcoming. What if the meal is a test run for an important dinner or the outfit or hairdo is meant for a very special occasion?
We see that what we might think is the simple matter of truth telling becomes complicated pretty quickly. In a recent issue of the New Yorker, Jill Lepore asks “What makes a book history?” She tells us that our modern notion of history as the cult of the fact, that is history as what actually happened is a late nineteenth century development. For centuries writing history was actually a literary art, so for instance, ancient history was filled with the speeches of great men, but most of those speeches were entirely made up. This is why we should look at the four Gospels as nearly pure fiction. In modern times this same approach is worrisome to historians because some people seem to think the past is simply the story we tell about it. A further problem with this is that historians today take these old documents and letters and journals, and treat them as though they are fact. What if that primary document is just as much legend as Robinson Crusoe. I remember trying to determine the first settler of New Salem, MA, when I was doing research on my hometown. Every family wants to promote its own ancestor when they assemble the genealogy, write the local history, or make a diary entry, and so I ended up with many initial settlers, and who knows where the truth lies.
Juxtaposed with this history is that novels once were called histories. As a boy, I was enthralled with Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe. Those wild island adventures were, if you remember, presented as a real journal kept by marooned man, but in reality Defoe was not the editor of a real diary, but instead completely fabricated a good yarn for his readers. One of the reviewers of Robinson Crusoe thought it odd that Defoe openly declared there was no fiction in work that was obviously fiction. Did he believe that the manner of telling al ie could somehow make it the truth. I had the same problem with Hawthorne’s Scarlet Letter. It begins, as you may remember in the Custom House, where Hawthorne actually worked, and perhaps we wonder if he did find the details of this true sordid tale in the files there. This is often an issue with fiction, and we have to ask ourselves how much of this is the history of the private life of the writer
One also has to ask what kind of truth does the book convey. While a history may give us facts, a novel may give us the deeper meaning of an event more than any history ever could. Does it tell us something true about the people or about human nature that we could ot otherwise have deduced?
And what about when we want something to be true? A few weeks ago, all the papers were covering the story of Misha Defonseca, whose best-selling account of a childhood flight from the Nazis was made into a feature film and translated into 18 languages. This amazing story of escape from the Nazis, surviving in the company of a family of wolves, shooting a German solider, and eventually trekking 1,900 miles through the forests of Europe was so gripping, and so potentially lucrative that the publishers failed to check out its veracity. It turned out to be fiction, in the modern sense. Defonseca finally admitted that her memoir was false, but longed for it to be true. “Ever since I can remember, I felt Jewish." She said that even though the book bore no resemblance to actual events in her life, “it still contains an emotional truth.” "The book is a story, it's my story," she said. "It's not the true reality, but it is my reality. There are times when I find it difficult to differentiate between reality and my inner world." So the publisher desperately wanted the story to be true because it worked in her best financial interests to be so, and the author, perhaps partly because her father was called a traitor, also wanted this story to be true, to give herself a different personal history and emotional reality.
We all know that there are emotional truths that we each find hard to face. It may be hard to admit that a marriage or relationship is bereft of meaning, and so we cannot face the truth. We want it to be different, and may even see it as different because the alternative is too painful. Despite the ideal of telling the truth, we know that people lie for social and emotional reasons to protect themselves from facing things, but also to protect their loved ones so that their self-image is not crushed. An election year reminds us how the truth is stretched for political expediency. An editorial by Joan Vennochi in Thursday’s Globe reminded us of this. George Bush campaigned that he would bring honesty back to Washington, but it was certainly reaffirmed to me after watching the two part story of the Iraq War on Frontline this week that every piece of evidence exposing information about weapons of mass destruction was fabricated or twisted so that a predetermined policy could be implemented. Where is the line between truth, or created truth and outright lies? Candidate Hilary Clinton recently had to admit that she did not deplane in Bosnia some years ago while undergoing sniper fire. The video of her landing shows her being greeted by children; not exactly the same. She said she made a mistake, and is human. Perhaps we have come to expect lies and manipulation from our politicians, and the appeal of certain candidates may be partly based on their perceived honesty. What is the boundary Vennochi asks, between selective memory and outright lying?
We don’t want anyone making up stories about themselves to make them look braver, or more exciting, or smarter or more accomplished. When this occurs it destroys the fabric of trust in the society, but it also destroys our relationships. We don’t want a liar in public office who could potentially destroy our society politically, militarily, economically environmentally. How long will we believe people who present a story of plans that never materialize? When does meaning well end? I can’t believe you are going to follow up on something if you say you are going to, but then never do. How long do we believe in statements that seem to be disingenuous? I can’t trust you to be who you say you are unless what you say is true. When is a lie an honest mistake, and when is it manipulation for personal gain? When is a lie perpetrated so that others will think better of us, and therefore like us more or hire us and applaud us, and when do we lose sight of who we are as people.
While we all know of social circumstances where it seems to protect the feelings of our friend or loved one by perpetrating a little white lie, there are other more serious times when lying seems appropriate. We cannot like by the principle of never lie, because many of our moral choice must be placed in the context of the situation. Certainly if a mother asks us where her child is, we would immediately say, at home or at the library, or even I don’t know i’ll help you look.” But if the mother is known to have abused her child then we might want ot lie to her about the whereabouts of the child, and might even need to report her to the authorities. We preserve the life of the child, and would do the same with most people. If a man confronts us with a gun and asks where the person is whom he is chasing, we would probably say they went out the front door, even when we know they exited by the rear entry. Life and limb are more
important than absolute truth. Yet even this must be weighed, and where does higher principle enter the picture?
A few weeks ago I saw the film, The Counterfeiters, which won the academy award this year for best foreign film. It is the story of Salomon or Sally Sorowitsch, who in prewar Berlin was known as the world’s greatest counterfeiter. He is a master forger, and generally a low life, who is out for his own gain and pleasure. Eventually he is arrested in his bed with a prostitute. Once the Nazis take over, he is sent to a concentration camp, but survives by painting portraits of Nazi commanders and their families. Finally, the former police officer who arrested Sally years previously and knows of his counterfeiting expertise appears as a Nazi officer. There is plan afoot, which in real life history was known as Operation Bernhard, to counterfeit American and British currency to flood their markets and destabilize their economies. The Nazis believe Sally is the perfect leader for such a plan. He sets up an operation, and successfully prints millions of British pounds, but the development of the fake dollar goes poorly.
There are some interesting ethical questions which surface in this film. First there is the question of whether you sacrifice your principles in order to merely survive. It seems that Sally would selfishly preserve his own life at all costs. While he has lived a life of lies and self-preservation all along, it would seem that more crime, no matter who it is used against, matters little as long as he lives. Yet the group is threatened by a communist who had been imprisoned for writing anti-Nazi brochures. He keeps sabotaging the effort to make the fake dollars. Sally knows this, and yet will not turn him in or expose him to the Nazis even though it means a delay in finishing the project, and even a threat to their own lives. In the end the project is delayed long enough that the German war effort is defeated before the dollars can be printed in mass quantities. Here the consummate liar and counterfeiter and survivalists refuses to rat out his friends. He will not betray a member of the community. He lies because he will not give up on his friends. The relationship or friendship is more important than the abstract principle of lying, because Sally will lie in this context to protect another, not just himself. Sally feels an ethical obligation to help another member of the community, even when he disagrees with him, and even when there is some threat from that person for their very survival. We lie to makes others feel affirmed or comforted. We lie to survive. We lie to maintain the fabric of friendship, to maintain the community, and perhaps in the end to stop injustice. What is most central though for the counterfeiting survivor is not the expected goal for both a criminal and a concentration camp victim: mere survival. Instead it is the value of a relationship with another. I can see the preservation of this relationship long before I can see an abstract principle. He didn’t care about politics; he cared about people, the people he knew and had come to care for.
The lie here is done to protect a relationship and is perpetrated on an outside force or entity that is trying to do harm to you and those you love. What it means is that the ultimate place not to lie is within the context of that relationship that you would lie to save, preserve, protect and defend. This meaning boomerangs back and forth in the context of the reading from the book, How Can I Talk If My Lips Don’t Move? Tito is an Indian boy who was diagnosed with severe autism at the age of three. His mother refused to believe that a child like Tito was incapable of communication. He learned to read and write in a painstaking process, and has published tow books. In the chapter on “The Torn Shirts,” Tito describes how teachers are dishonest with him in their lame attempts to praise him. He draws stick figure people, and they tell him good job, which he says makes him feel humiliated. But it goes much deeper than merely echoing the words good job to whatever he puts down on paper. He knows it has nothing to do with actual skill, and is not an honest reflection of his work. Their socialization to say good job, is similar in some ways to how we respond to the dinner or the dress. We may say that tasted good, when our true feelings were that it was terrible. But at least we know how we feel, even if we can't be truthful with an honest answer or we use silence for fear that the truth will get us in trouble or make the person feel bad. The words good job to a child may be a reflection that we are not even seeing the drawing, but rather giving a rote reaction. We say, it’s a kid, and I have to say good work. The hearkens back to an era when we gave undiscriminating praise to children without helping them realize what was good or bad. How do they ever know, which might even lead to how they would ever know truth from lie.
This is the deeper level of “good job” that Tito refers to. They tell him good job when he opens a door. Does he have Cerebral Palsy? What he is saying is that not only do they not help him with some sense of the quality of his work by saying in a rote fashion “good job,” but that they do not even know him at all. They pay no attention to him as a person. They don’t engage with the problems or the issues that he must face. Ultimately it means they don’t take the time or energy or love to listen to him. They don’t have a relationship with him. Here full circle is the social nicety that is a lie. It is a lie because they are not doing the job of getting to know their student, or the job of knowing his needs. They are lying to themselves. They put on the appearance of approving his work, but that is a lie, too, and he plainly sees that. It is an amen to the autistic boys every act. How would they stop the lie? They would get to know him. They would know his issues. They would be more honest with him. They would have a relationship with him. It is the ultimate religions challenge we all face.
Pilate asks Jesus what is truth, but Jesus has already answered the question with his very own person. Telling the truth can be like following the rules. It may be a good social lie to tell someone their soup tastes good, but it may do them no favor if the soup is going to be made for an important occasion. It may appear to be a good social lie to say good job, but not if a person wants to know the truth, and needs the truth to help them find their way in the world, and know if they can do quality work, then it may do them no favor. Jesus embodies the truth because he foregoes the rule and goes to the relationship first. Let he who is without sin cast the first stone. We have all lied. The rule is not sufficient. The relationship must be the test of lying or not. In a paper called “What is Meant by Telling the Truth,” the German theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer wrote, “It is only the cynic who claims to “speak the truth” at all times and in all places to all men in the same way but who, in fact, develops nothing but a lifeless image of the truth. He dons the halo of the fanatical devotee of truth who can make no allowance for human weaknesses; but in fact, he is restoring the living truth between men. He wounds shame, desecrates mystery, breaks confidence, betrays the community in which he lives.” Sally the counterfeiter is a crook, but he will not betray his community, for that is the bigger lie. We come to speak the truth by truly caring for each other, by loving each other, by learning about each other. In A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers, Thoreau wrote, “Sometimes we are said to love one another, that is to stand in a true relation to him, so that we give the best to, and receive the best from, him. Between whom there is hearty truth, there is love; and in proportion to our truthfulness and confidence in one another, our lives are divine and miraculous, and answer to our ideal.
Closing Words - from Henry David Thoreau
It takes two to speak the truth: one to speak, and another to hear.
First Parish of Watertown - March 30, 2008
Call to Worship - from John 18:37
I was born for this, I came into the world for this: to bear witness to the truth; and all who are on the side of truth listen to my voice.” “Truth?” said Pilate, “what is that?”
Reading - from How Can I Talk If My Lips Don’t Move? by Tito Rajarshi Mukhopadhyay
Sermon - “Lies My Father told Me”
Lies my father told me is the title of a movie that came out in the 1970’s. For some reason as I was trying to think up a title for this sermon, that name popped into the head. It was something with the word lies in the title. I don’t remember very much about that particular movie, except it was the story of a little boy who was growing up in Montreal, and he had a grandfather who was a peddler who took the boy on his rounds and wove fascinating stories which enchanted the boy. The boy also had a father who liked to evade working. Perhaps the lying references were to all the things his father was planning to do to support the family, but somehow they never quite panned out. This character reminds me of David Child, the husband of Watertown's famous Lydia Maria Child. He always had some kind of money making scheme that invariably failed. Many of them were based on his unswerving integrity. For example, when they lived in Northampton, he tried to extract sugar from sugar beets because he did not want to be involved with West Indian island trade that would mix his business up with slavery. Child of course, was well intentioned, but if he were realistic he might have realized that there was no potential for most of his plans.
I don’t have personal recollections of my father or mother lying to me very much. Once in a while one of my boys will say that I lied to them about taking them to a store or playing catch. I might hear, “You said you were going to come outside, but you never did.” I think I am a pretty faithful Dad when it comes to following through on what I promise, but there are instances for all of us when we say, I’ll take you there, or I’ll play catch and it is just a way of putting the child off because we cannot be bothered at that time, or shutting up the child or not having to deal with saying no, and thus disappointing them. No one is perfect, but making promises to children is often a stark reminder that loved ones and others will remember that what we say is truth should translate as truth, and others trust that we are dealing straight with them.
My boys in particular like the story to be told straight and clear without twists or turns.
I am sure nearly every single person in this sanctuary was told by their parents to never lie. This was especially true as young children when we do not understand the subtleties of social interactions. It is better to err on the side of truth. Most of the time. I think I have told you the oft repeated family story of when my step-grandmother came to visit when I was about five. My father looked out the window, and said, “I don’t want to see that old bat.” Being a dutiful son I went out to greet her with my father’s warm words, “My father doesn’t want to see you, you old bat.” I learned quickly that sometimes honesty is not the best policy. Even though our parents do not want us to lie about stealing things, or where we were or what we were doing when we didn’t come home, we do learn as we mature that it is better to stretch the truth in certain social situations. When Will Twombly asked me about this subject, I thought of those strategically important lies that many of us use when it comes to personal appearance or culinary skills. If a loved one has spent hours getting their hair done, or cooking some special dish, it is usually unwise to express an honest feeling if the intended result just didn’t occur. So we don’t say you look awful, or this tastes terrible. We would hurt their feelings. Yet if their are wider social implications, then perhaps we need to be more forthcoming. What if the meal is a test run for an important dinner or the outfit or hairdo is meant for a very special occasion?
We see that what we might think is the simple matter of truth telling becomes complicated pretty quickly. In a recent issue of the New Yorker, Jill Lepore asks “What makes a book history?” She tells us that our modern notion of history as the cult of the fact, that is history as what actually happened is a late nineteenth century development. For centuries writing history was actually a literary art, so for instance, ancient history was filled with the speeches of great men, but most of those speeches were entirely made up. This is why we should look at the four Gospels as nearly pure fiction. In modern times this same approach is worrisome to historians because some people seem to think the past is simply the story we tell about it. A further problem with this is that historians today take these old documents and letters and journals, and treat them as though they are fact. What if that primary document is just as much legend as Robinson Crusoe. I remember trying to determine the first settler of New Salem, MA, when I was doing research on my hometown. Every family wants to promote its own ancestor when they assemble the genealogy, write the local history, or make a diary entry, and so I ended up with many initial settlers, and who knows where the truth lies.
Juxtaposed with this history is that novels once were called histories. As a boy, I was enthralled with Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe. Those wild island adventures were, if you remember, presented as a real journal kept by marooned man, but in reality Defoe was not the editor of a real diary, but instead completely fabricated a good yarn for his readers. One of the reviewers of Robinson Crusoe thought it odd that Defoe openly declared there was no fiction in work that was obviously fiction. Did he believe that the manner of telling al ie could somehow make it the truth. I had the same problem with Hawthorne’s Scarlet Letter. It begins, as you may remember in the Custom House, where Hawthorne actually worked, and perhaps we wonder if he did find the details of this true sordid tale in the files there. This is often an issue with fiction, and we have to ask ourselves how much of this is the history of the private life of the writer
One also has to ask what kind of truth does the book convey. While a history may give us facts, a novel may give us the deeper meaning of an event more than any history ever could. Does it tell us something true about the people or about human nature that we could ot otherwise have deduced?
And what about when we want something to be true? A few weeks ago, all the papers were covering the story of Misha Defonseca, whose best-selling account of a childhood flight from the Nazis was made into a feature film and translated into 18 languages. This amazing story of escape from the Nazis, surviving in the company of a family of wolves, shooting a German solider, and eventually trekking 1,900 miles through the forests of Europe was so gripping, and so potentially lucrative that the publishers failed to check out its veracity. It turned out to be fiction, in the modern sense. Defonseca finally admitted that her memoir was false, but longed for it to be true. “Ever since I can remember, I felt Jewish." She said that even though the book bore no resemblance to actual events in her life, “it still contains an emotional truth.” "The book is a story, it's my story," she said. "It's not the true reality, but it is my reality. There are times when I find it difficult to differentiate between reality and my inner world." So the publisher desperately wanted the story to be true because it worked in her best financial interests to be so, and the author, perhaps partly because her father was called a traitor, also wanted this story to be true, to give herself a different personal history and emotional reality.
We all know that there are emotional truths that we each find hard to face. It may be hard to admit that a marriage or relationship is bereft of meaning, and so we cannot face the truth. We want it to be different, and may even see it as different because the alternative is too painful. Despite the ideal of telling the truth, we know that people lie for social and emotional reasons to protect themselves from facing things, but also to protect their loved ones so that their self-image is not crushed. An election year reminds us how the truth is stretched for political expediency. An editorial by Joan Vennochi in Thursday’s Globe reminded us of this. George Bush campaigned that he would bring honesty back to Washington, but it was certainly reaffirmed to me after watching the two part story of the Iraq War on Frontline this week that every piece of evidence exposing information about weapons of mass destruction was fabricated or twisted so that a predetermined policy could be implemented. Where is the line between truth, or created truth and outright lies? Candidate Hilary Clinton recently had to admit that she did not deplane in Bosnia some years ago while undergoing sniper fire. The video of her landing shows her being greeted by children; not exactly the same. She said she made a mistake, and is human. Perhaps we have come to expect lies and manipulation from our politicians, and the appeal of certain candidates may be partly based on their perceived honesty. What is the boundary Vennochi asks, between selective memory and outright lying?
We don’t want anyone making up stories about themselves to make them look braver, or more exciting, or smarter or more accomplished. When this occurs it destroys the fabric of trust in the society, but it also destroys our relationships. We don’t want a liar in public office who could potentially destroy our society politically, militarily, economically environmentally. How long will we believe people who present a story of plans that never materialize? When does meaning well end? I can’t believe you are going to follow up on something if you say you are going to, but then never do. How long do we believe in statements that seem to be disingenuous? I can’t trust you to be who you say you are unless what you say is true. When is a lie an honest mistake, and when is it manipulation for personal gain? When is a lie perpetrated so that others will think better of us, and therefore like us more or hire us and applaud us, and when do we lose sight of who we are as people.
While we all know of social circumstances where it seems to protect the feelings of our friend or loved one by perpetrating a little white lie, there are other more serious times when lying seems appropriate. We cannot like by the principle of never lie, because many of our moral choice must be placed in the context of the situation. Certainly if a mother asks us where her child is, we would immediately say, at home or at the library, or even I don’t know i’ll help you look.” But if the mother is known to have abused her child then we might want ot lie to her about the whereabouts of the child, and might even need to report her to the authorities. We preserve the life of the child, and would do the same with most people. If a man confronts us with a gun and asks where the person is whom he is chasing, we would probably say they went out the front door, even when we know they exited by the rear entry. Life and limb are more
important than absolute truth. Yet even this must be weighed, and where does higher principle enter the picture?
A few weeks ago I saw the film, The Counterfeiters, which won the academy award this year for best foreign film. It is the story of Salomon or Sally Sorowitsch, who in prewar Berlin was known as the world’s greatest counterfeiter. He is a master forger, and generally a low life, who is out for his own gain and pleasure. Eventually he is arrested in his bed with a prostitute. Once the Nazis take over, he is sent to a concentration camp, but survives by painting portraits of Nazi commanders and their families. Finally, the former police officer who arrested Sally years previously and knows of his counterfeiting expertise appears as a Nazi officer. There is plan afoot, which in real life history was known as Operation Bernhard, to counterfeit American and British currency to flood their markets and destabilize their economies. The Nazis believe Sally is the perfect leader for such a plan. He sets up an operation, and successfully prints millions of British pounds, but the development of the fake dollar goes poorly.
There are some interesting ethical questions which surface in this film. First there is the question of whether you sacrifice your principles in order to merely survive. It seems that Sally would selfishly preserve his own life at all costs. While he has lived a life of lies and self-preservation all along, it would seem that more crime, no matter who it is used against, matters little as long as he lives. Yet the group is threatened by a communist who had been imprisoned for writing anti-Nazi brochures. He keeps sabotaging the effort to make the fake dollars. Sally knows this, and yet will not turn him in or expose him to the Nazis even though it means a delay in finishing the project, and even a threat to their own lives. In the end the project is delayed long enough that the German war effort is defeated before the dollars can be printed in mass quantities. Here the consummate liar and counterfeiter and survivalists refuses to rat out his friends. He will not betray a member of the community. He lies because he will not give up on his friends. The relationship or friendship is more important than the abstract principle of lying, because Sally will lie in this context to protect another, not just himself. Sally feels an ethical obligation to help another member of the community, even when he disagrees with him, and even when there is some threat from that person for their very survival. We lie to makes others feel affirmed or comforted. We lie to survive. We lie to maintain the fabric of friendship, to maintain the community, and perhaps in the end to stop injustice. What is most central though for the counterfeiting survivor is not the expected goal for both a criminal and a concentration camp victim: mere survival. Instead it is the value of a relationship with another. I can see the preservation of this relationship long before I can see an abstract principle. He didn’t care about politics; he cared about people, the people he knew and had come to care for.
The lie here is done to protect a relationship and is perpetrated on an outside force or entity that is trying to do harm to you and those you love. What it means is that the ultimate place not to lie is within the context of that relationship that you would lie to save, preserve, protect and defend. This meaning boomerangs back and forth in the context of the reading from the book, How Can I Talk If My Lips Don’t Move? Tito is an Indian boy who was diagnosed with severe autism at the age of three. His mother refused to believe that a child like Tito was incapable of communication. He learned to read and write in a painstaking process, and has published tow books. In the chapter on “The Torn Shirts,” Tito describes how teachers are dishonest with him in their lame attempts to praise him. He draws stick figure people, and they tell him good job, which he says makes him feel humiliated. But it goes much deeper than merely echoing the words good job to whatever he puts down on paper. He knows it has nothing to do with actual skill, and is not an honest reflection of his work. Their socialization to say good job, is similar in some ways to how we respond to the dinner or the dress. We may say that tasted good, when our true feelings were that it was terrible. But at least we know how we feel, even if we can't be truthful with an honest answer or we use silence for fear that the truth will get us in trouble or make the person feel bad. The words good job to a child may be a reflection that we are not even seeing the drawing, but rather giving a rote reaction. We say, it’s a kid, and I have to say good work. The hearkens back to an era when we gave undiscriminating praise to children without helping them realize what was good or bad. How do they ever know, which might even lead to how they would ever know truth from lie.
This is the deeper level of “good job” that Tito refers to. They tell him good job when he opens a door. Does he have Cerebral Palsy? What he is saying is that not only do they not help him with some sense of the quality of his work by saying in a rote fashion “good job,” but that they do not even know him at all. They pay no attention to him as a person. They don’t engage with the problems or the issues that he must face. Ultimately it means they don’t take the time or energy or love to listen to him. They don’t have a relationship with him. Here full circle is the social nicety that is a lie. It is a lie because they are not doing the job of getting to know their student, or the job of knowing his needs. They are lying to themselves. They put on the appearance of approving his work, but that is a lie, too, and he plainly sees that. It is an amen to the autistic boys every act. How would they stop the lie? They would get to know him. They would know his issues. They would be more honest with him. They would have a relationship with him. It is the ultimate religions challenge we all face.
Pilate asks Jesus what is truth, but Jesus has already answered the question with his very own person. Telling the truth can be like following the rules. It may be a good social lie to tell someone their soup tastes good, but it may do them no favor if the soup is going to be made for an important occasion. It may appear to be a good social lie to say good job, but not if a person wants to know the truth, and needs the truth to help them find their way in the world, and know if they can do quality work, then it may do them no favor. Jesus embodies the truth because he foregoes the rule and goes to the relationship first. Let he who is without sin cast the first stone. We have all lied. The rule is not sufficient. The relationship must be the test of lying or not. In a paper called “What is Meant by Telling the Truth,” the German theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer wrote, “It is only the cynic who claims to “speak the truth” at all times and in all places to all men in the same way but who, in fact, develops nothing but a lifeless image of the truth. He dons the halo of the fanatical devotee of truth who can make no allowance for human weaknesses; but in fact, he is restoring the living truth between men. He wounds shame, desecrates mystery, breaks confidence, betrays the community in which he lives.” Sally the counterfeiter is a crook, but he will not betray his community, for that is the bigger lie. We come to speak the truth by truly caring for each other, by loving each other, by learning about each other. In A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers, Thoreau wrote, “Sometimes we are said to love one another, that is to stand in a true relation to him, so that we give the best to, and receive the best from, him. Between whom there is hearty truth, there is love; and in proportion to our truthfulness and confidence in one another, our lives are divine and miraculous, and answer to our ideal.
Closing Words - from Henry David Thoreau
It takes two to speak the truth: one to speak, and another to hear.