Monday, October 20, 2008
"Counterfeit Ways" by Mark W. Harris - October 19, 2008
“Counterfeit Ways” by Mark W. Harris
October 19, 2008 - First Parish of Watertown
Call to Worship - from Arnold Ludwig
Fantasy often represents a convenient way for people to temporarily lie to themselves in order to make life more palatable. Although (we) may not fully believe in the actual reality of the products of (our) fantasy, (we) can invest enough belief in them to offer (ourselves) some degree of satisfaction. If (we) were to remain chronically frustrated in the satisfaction of (our) hopes, ambitions and desires, without having access to the solace of fantasy and the temporary solutions and pleasures it provides, it would become difficult to sustain hope and optimism toward the future.
Readings - from Abide with Me by Elizabeth Strout
from Gilead by Marilynne Robinson
Sermon - “Counterfeit Ways” Mark W. Harris
There are many Islamic tales from the Sufi tradition that feature the fool Nasrudin. One story tells of a neighbor who Nasrudin didn’t like very much. He came to Nasrudin’s house one day, and asked him if he could borrow Nasrudin’s donkey. Not wanting to loan his animal to a neighbor he didn’t care for, Nasrudin told him, “I would love to loan you my donkey, but only yesterday my brother came from the next town to use it to carry his wheat to the mill to be ground. Sadly, the donkey is not here.” The neighbor was disappointed. He thanked Nasrudin, and began to walk away. Unfortunately, when he was only a few steps away, Nasrudin’s donkey which had been out behind the house the whole time, let out a very loud bray. Upon hearing this, the neighbor turned to Nasrudin, and said, Mullah Sahib, I thought you told me that your donkey was not here. Nasrudin then turned to the neighbor and said, “My friend, who are you going to believe? Me or the donkey?
How many of us have used deception to try to fool one of our neighbors to keep them from using something of ours? While most of us might not refuse to help on the grounds that we simply dislike the person, there is often an unwillingness to help based on prior experience with the person. Somehow the lawn mower we have loaned so many times before always comes back broken, or the tool is missing a piece, or years go by and the neighbor seems to have forgotten who the item in question belonged to the first place. At our cottage in Maine, Andrea and I have had the unsavory problem recently of dealing with a neighbor who refused to move a tractor trailer from our property for years, after we gave them permission to park there for one winter. In the end we had to sue her, as she claimed the property was really hers. Would you let her park on your property again? With the missing or broken items the logical response might be to confront the person, and say I can’t loan you this item because of prior experience. Unfortunately that honesty sometimes results in a very angry response, so that the neighbor you once waved to on a daily basis, refuses to look your way for a year. Sometimes deception really works. I would love to loan you that first edition, but my insurance policy prevents me from doing so, or you know I gave my steam cleaner to my brother, and never got it back. Otherwise, I would be happy to loan it to you. A little deception, and the neighbor stays friendly, but never asks again to borrow that item that you do not really want to part with. So we can see that deception may lead to some neighborhood social cohesion, and a little piece of mind for you.
What? Is the minister suggesting that we use deception on a daily basis? Isn’t the clergy usually imploring us to speak and live with integrity, and not try to be deceptive? Is this a new approach to faith development? Some years ago, David Rankin, a former minister of this church told the story of meeting with a search committee from a Unitarian Universalist church here on the East coast. He said it was a very congenial meeting until one of the member of the committee asked about his personal theology. When Rankin responded that he was a Christian, the faces turned suddenly to stone and the room went dead. All the air was suddenly sucked out. Finally, he said after the longest meditation he had ever endured, the chair of the search committee said, “Well, maybe we won’t have to tell anyone.” This did not meet Rankin’s criteria for honesty and integrity, and so it ended his conversation with this church forever. Perhaps it reminds us of the military policy on gay and lesbian soldiers of “don’t ask, don’t tell.” It was unfair and unjust to the integrity of all those soldiers to be closeted in order to serve. We would all want full disclosure and full acceptance. Yet as much as we abhorred “don’t ask, don’t tell, it also reflected a reality about the society.
I see that reality in colleagues from many faith traditions. They are Lutheran, Episcopalian, Methodist and Catholic. Being actively gay or lesbian in any of those traditions is not accepted. You can be defrocked. You can have your calling to ministry be denied, if you admit what your sexual identity is in any way, shape or form. Just two years ago I conducted a wedding for two women, one of whom was an Episcopal priest. Her own pastor could not marry her, and she could not publicly reveal that she was united in marriage to the woman she loved, something all straight people just take for granted. Yet clearly her calling, her identification with her faith tradition is so meaningful, even if it asks her to deny her very being, the use of deception outweighs the truthfulness of publicly stating who she is. I am sure it is painful living with this deception, but the alternative is for some people, more painful. And perhaps, too, there is always the hope that we can be change agents within the institution, so that some day deception will be less necessary.
While this seems like a violation of their personal integrity on some level, it also speaks a truth that in many circumstances, all of us use some forms of deception in order to make our way in the world - to save our livelihood, our families, our sense of privacy, and even our lives. Sometimes we are not ready to reveal something until the time is right, or we feel comfortable, and so, in the meantime we use deception. Sometimes this deception is perpetrated upon us. This is something clergy live with every day. People in the community frequently project their ideas of what clergy should be like all the time. In the reading from Gilead, we see how the joking stops when boys are around the minister. It is like my former parishioner in Milton, who always apologized when she said a swear word around me, even something as innocuous as hell, because somewhere in her conscience she was not suppose to say such words in front of clergy, as it will besmirch their purity of body and spirit, or else maybe it is the fear of swearing before God’s representative will surely send you to hell. For me, the reality is I can swear with the best blasphemers. Sometimes it seems as though we clergy live out this deception of who we are. People’s projections may reflect that they expect us to be different than human somehow. It is reflected in what the minister in Gilead says, “people see us as being a little bit apart.” Perhaps he also feels he must keep his dying condition a secret, so the parishioners are not faced with the reality of his demise. All of this reminds us that there is, as he says, “a lot under the surface of life.” There is a lot of malice and dread and guilt and loneliness. I have had conversations about how it is acceptable for parishioners to not believe in God, but since I am clergy it is expected that I have to believe in God. I have to represent that reality. Perhaps the deception lives on, even among liberals that the clergy must live believing that God exists, even if they do not. Somehow it gives comfort, or security or hope in a chaotic world.
The security of deception is real. Nature built that right in. Merely surviving in the world depends upon camouflage - how creatures become the color of their environment striped or brown or white in order that they might better blend in to protect themselves from predators. They are deceiving the hunters so that they might live. We also enhance our true colors in order to propagate, as the male birds wear brighter coats to attract a partner who is coaxed into mating by such beauty. In similar ways humans use deceptive touches to enhance our beauty that partners might be attracted to us. The story of Adam and Eve illustrates the key role of deception, and how an awareness of good and evil is necessary to live in the world.
Art forms are also used in deceptive ways to beautify an area or even to trick the viewer into believing that he/she is seeing something actual when in fact it is an illusion. In Boston at Mass Ave. and Boylston we see a building painted on a otherwise undescriptive wall, and perhaps we wonder if there is a real building there, or if part of it contains a real window or a door. Near Sheffield in England, where Andrea and I stayed a few years ago, there is a grand country estate called Chatsworth House. On one of the interior doors, it appears as though a violin and its bow are suspended, but as you approach the objects, you realize it is only painted to appear as though they are there. Churches may have columns that are not really there, or soaring arches that are only an illusion. This effect is called Tromp l'œil, or "trick the eye." It is an art technique involving extremely realistic imagery in order to create the optical illusion that the depicted objects appear in three-dimensions, even though it is really a two dimensional painting. It is almost as if the human psyche enjoys being tricked, as we have all experienced in magic shows.
The original idea for this sermon arose out of seeing the movie The Counterfeiters. It is an academy Award winning foreign film which tells the story of Salomon or “Sally” Sorowitsch, who is Berlin’s most famous forger. It is based on the true life story of a man who used his counterfeiting skills to helps the Nazis implement a plan for forging the British pound and the American dollar, and then using the counterfeit currency to flood the market, and destabilize the two country’s economies. It was called Operation Bernhard. At first it seems as though Sally is operating out of the sheer need for self-preservation, as he finds some protection and comforts and privileges from painting portraits of German guards and their families in the concentration camp. These privileges increase as he is transferred to a section of a camp devoted to forgery. As the counterfeiting operation begins to unfold, a socialists printer objects as he feels what they are doing supports the German war effort. We realize with Sally that the idealism of living with pure integrity cannot be possible in such a situation. At one point Sally castigates the printer by saying, “Nobody’s prepared to die for a principle.” Although it appears at first as though he is only looking out for his own neck, we soon learn that Sally, despite his life of deception and crime is now using those skills to address broader questions of life and death, especially when they come to appreciate the wider war that the Nazis are fighting , and most especially his relationships with others in the community of the camp, and his concern for them. Keeping them alive becomes more important than anything. We see the complexities of balancing the demands of the Nazis who will stop at nothing to achieve their goals, fellow prisoners who want to sabotage the operation, and his growing attachment to his fellow inmates. When do you stop cooperating with evil? How do you balance staying alive with your obligations to others, and the challenge to fight injustice? While life in the camps was more horrific than anything we could ever imagine, the Counterfeiters also reminds us how much guile or deception it takes to survive in our world, in the complex balancing of life’s struggles. In these times of fear and chaos, we want to protect our families, and have some hope in a future where we can pay our bills and maintain our homes. And the world is often not a place where others seem to live with integrity or concern for others.
It seems odd perhaps to say that deception can help us balance the threats on our lives. Most of us live on the brink of being fed up with deception having just about seen the end of the Presidential campaign. We know that many presidential candidates will tell us anything we want to hear in order to get our vote and to get elected. This is exasperating because we want to hear the truth and we want to know that we can trust our future presidents with such an important job. Then we hear accusations of association with terrorists that are exaggerated rumors or outright lies. And even when the falsehood that the candidate is a Muslim, for instance is dismissed as untrue, we never address the question of what would be wrong if a candidate were a Muslim? Perhaps it is just like the clergyperson who must at least appear to believe in God, the candidate must at least appear to be Christian, so there is a secure, comfort level that we are in no danger. Television tries to provide a truth meter on how close the candidates claims are to actual truth. Yet isn’t it absurdly ironic that a media based on the creation of false images is the judge of how truthful each candidate really is.
The Rev. Tyler Caskey, the main character in Abide with Me, seems very different from Sally, the lifelong criminal. In the passage I read, Charlie says Tyler would turn the other cheek if he popped him one. Perhaps he seems closer in spirit to the idealist activist in the movie who lives by the power of an idea, and Sally ends up protecting him. In his conversation with Charlie, Tyler hears how his parishioners are out to get him, due to a rumored affair with his housekeeper. He is told they go after weakness, especially when they expect you to be strong. Charlie seems to say in their conversation that the Christianity Tyler offers up is a deception. He says it is gobbledygook that he carries on with as though it meant something. He uses it to make himself feel superior. Now it appears as though Tyler, who has never had a satisfactory relationship with his daughters, finally wishes to move beyond the facades of ministerial role and Christian doctrine. He responds that faith does mean something, “if you think how we live our lives means something.” Tyler does not want his religion to be based on false ideas or deceptive roles or pipe dreams of rosy futures. He wants his faith and his life to be real. He does not care what people think. He wants it to be a living truth in the present.
In the novel Gilead, the lonely old minster probably would have given anything to have been able to laugh with the boys. He realized that sometimes deception is good in the service of relationships, to protect oneself or others, to fantasize, or to keep the peace, but the tragic deception is when we believe in a lie. He was not ready perhaps to share that he was dying, but if he could have been human with the boys, and lived in the moment with them., then his life would have seemed more meaningful. We need deception sometimes because we need to hide our pain or sorrow, but we can’t live our lives believing in false promises, that it is going to get better and better, as it may not. Most of us are slugging it out day to day, and in our daily realization of how vulnerable we are to larger forces in the world, disease and personal trauma, we are only too aware of how dangerous and fearful life is. We can be wiped out. The link between Sally and Tyler is that they want to reject the bigger illusion or deception that so many people put their faith in - that human progress or religious salvation will make it all better. Instead they use smaller deceptions to protect the self in their vulnerability and then the self is truly free to embrace the reality of meaning found only in relationship, in the moment.
Life sometimes hangs in the balance. People come after us, and want to take our property or our livelihood. When I lost a job once, the person who engineered my demise said to someone, “I didn’t want to wreck his life or anything.” It was my family, my friends, and members of this congregation who stood by and helped. It didn’t make losing my livelihood any better. But it made it bearable. I was not so alone. Then I could begin again. We are hurt by calamity and disease. It is a jungle, and so we protect ourselves with what deceptions we have. We take care of our families. We are loyal to our friends. We affirm the right of privacy. In the real world Adam and Eve are forced from the idea of Eden because it does not exist. No paradise, only here and now with each other. They come to recognize that the real world is their literal fight against being hurt, losing relationships, and feeling alone. They will use their wills to seek the good because so much evil can befall them. And so we do what we can to stay afloat, affirming the loves and loyalties we have for self and others. Our faith must be grounded, not in a principle like reason or progress or salvation in the sweet by and by, but in love, right now. We must have the will to turn to one another, and not say, I know it will turn out all right, but rather, however it turns out, I will stick by you, I will support you and I love you.
Closing Words - from Annie Dillard
Divinity is not playful. The universe was not made in jest but in solemn incomprehensible earnest. By a power that is unfathomably secret, and holy and fleet. There is nothing to be done about it, but ignore it, or see. And then you walk fearlessly, eating what you must, growing wherever you can, like the monk on the road who knows precisely how vulnerable he is, who takes no comfort among death-forgetting men, and who carries his vision of vastness and might around in his tunic like a live coal which neither burns nor warms him, but with which he will not part.
October 19, 2008 - First Parish of Watertown
Call to Worship - from Arnold Ludwig
Fantasy often represents a convenient way for people to temporarily lie to themselves in order to make life more palatable. Although (we) may not fully believe in the actual reality of the products of (our) fantasy, (we) can invest enough belief in them to offer (ourselves) some degree of satisfaction. If (we) were to remain chronically frustrated in the satisfaction of (our) hopes, ambitions and desires, without having access to the solace of fantasy and the temporary solutions and pleasures it provides, it would become difficult to sustain hope and optimism toward the future.
Readings - from Abide with Me by Elizabeth Strout
from Gilead by Marilynne Robinson
Sermon - “Counterfeit Ways” Mark W. Harris
There are many Islamic tales from the Sufi tradition that feature the fool Nasrudin. One story tells of a neighbor who Nasrudin didn’t like very much. He came to Nasrudin’s house one day, and asked him if he could borrow Nasrudin’s donkey. Not wanting to loan his animal to a neighbor he didn’t care for, Nasrudin told him, “I would love to loan you my donkey, but only yesterday my brother came from the next town to use it to carry his wheat to the mill to be ground. Sadly, the donkey is not here.” The neighbor was disappointed. He thanked Nasrudin, and began to walk away. Unfortunately, when he was only a few steps away, Nasrudin’s donkey which had been out behind the house the whole time, let out a very loud bray. Upon hearing this, the neighbor turned to Nasrudin, and said, Mullah Sahib, I thought you told me that your donkey was not here. Nasrudin then turned to the neighbor and said, “My friend, who are you going to believe? Me or the donkey?
How many of us have used deception to try to fool one of our neighbors to keep them from using something of ours? While most of us might not refuse to help on the grounds that we simply dislike the person, there is often an unwillingness to help based on prior experience with the person. Somehow the lawn mower we have loaned so many times before always comes back broken, or the tool is missing a piece, or years go by and the neighbor seems to have forgotten who the item in question belonged to the first place. At our cottage in Maine, Andrea and I have had the unsavory problem recently of dealing with a neighbor who refused to move a tractor trailer from our property for years, after we gave them permission to park there for one winter. In the end we had to sue her, as she claimed the property was really hers. Would you let her park on your property again? With the missing or broken items the logical response might be to confront the person, and say I can’t loan you this item because of prior experience. Unfortunately that honesty sometimes results in a very angry response, so that the neighbor you once waved to on a daily basis, refuses to look your way for a year. Sometimes deception really works. I would love to loan you that first edition, but my insurance policy prevents me from doing so, or you know I gave my steam cleaner to my brother, and never got it back. Otherwise, I would be happy to loan it to you. A little deception, and the neighbor stays friendly, but never asks again to borrow that item that you do not really want to part with. So we can see that deception may lead to some neighborhood social cohesion, and a little piece of mind for you.
What? Is the minister suggesting that we use deception on a daily basis? Isn’t the clergy usually imploring us to speak and live with integrity, and not try to be deceptive? Is this a new approach to faith development? Some years ago, David Rankin, a former minister of this church told the story of meeting with a search committee from a Unitarian Universalist church here on the East coast. He said it was a very congenial meeting until one of the member of the committee asked about his personal theology. When Rankin responded that he was a Christian, the faces turned suddenly to stone and the room went dead. All the air was suddenly sucked out. Finally, he said after the longest meditation he had ever endured, the chair of the search committee said, “Well, maybe we won’t have to tell anyone.” This did not meet Rankin’s criteria for honesty and integrity, and so it ended his conversation with this church forever. Perhaps it reminds us of the military policy on gay and lesbian soldiers of “don’t ask, don’t tell.” It was unfair and unjust to the integrity of all those soldiers to be closeted in order to serve. We would all want full disclosure and full acceptance. Yet as much as we abhorred “don’t ask, don’t tell, it also reflected a reality about the society.
I see that reality in colleagues from many faith traditions. They are Lutheran, Episcopalian, Methodist and Catholic. Being actively gay or lesbian in any of those traditions is not accepted. You can be defrocked. You can have your calling to ministry be denied, if you admit what your sexual identity is in any way, shape or form. Just two years ago I conducted a wedding for two women, one of whom was an Episcopal priest. Her own pastor could not marry her, and she could not publicly reveal that she was united in marriage to the woman she loved, something all straight people just take for granted. Yet clearly her calling, her identification with her faith tradition is so meaningful, even if it asks her to deny her very being, the use of deception outweighs the truthfulness of publicly stating who she is. I am sure it is painful living with this deception, but the alternative is for some people, more painful. And perhaps, too, there is always the hope that we can be change agents within the institution, so that some day deception will be less necessary.
While this seems like a violation of their personal integrity on some level, it also speaks a truth that in many circumstances, all of us use some forms of deception in order to make our way in the world - to save our livelihood, our families, our sense of privacy, and even our lives. Sometimes we are not ready to reveal something until the time is right, or we feel comfortable, and so, in the meantime we use deception. Sometimes this deception is perpetrated upon us. This is something clergy live with every day. People in the community frequently project their ideas of what clergy should be like all the time. In the reading from Gilead, we see how the joking stops when boys are around the minister. It is like my former parishioner in Milton, who always apologized when she said a swear word around me, even something as innocuous as hell, because somewhere in her conscience she was not suppose to say such words in front of clergy, as it will besmirch their purity of body and spirit, or else maybe it is the fear of swearing before God’s representative will surely send you to hell. For me, the reality is I can swear with the best blasphemers. Sometimes it seems as though we clergy live out this deception of who we are. People’s projections may reflect that they expect us to be different than human somehow. It is reflected in what the minister in Gilead says, “people see us as being a little bit apart.” Perhaps he also feels he must keep his dying condition a secret, so the parishioners are not faced with the reality of his demise. All of this reminds us that there is, as he says, “a lot under the surface of life.” There is a lot of malice and dread and guilt and loneliness. I have had conversations about how it is acceptable for parishioners to not believe in God, but since I am clergy it is expected that I have to believe in God. I have to represent that reality. Perhaps the deception lives on, even among liberals that the clergy must live believing that God exists, even if they do not. Somehow it gives comfort, or security or hope in a chaotic world.
The security of deception is real. Nature built that right in. Merely surviving in the world depends upon camouflage - how creatures become the color of their environment striped or brown or white in order that they might better blend in to protect themselves from predators. They are deceiving the hunters so that they might live. We also enhance our true colors in order to propagate, as the male birds wear brighter coats to attract a partner who is coaxed into mating by such beauty. In similar ways humans use deceptive touches to enhance our beauty that partners might be attracted to us. The story of Adam and Eve illustrates the key role of deception, and how an awareness of good and evil is necessary to live in the world.
Art forms are also used in deceptive ways to beautify an area or even to trick the viewer into believing that he/she is seeing something actual when in fact it is an illusion. In Boston at Mass Ave. and Boylston we see a building painted on a otherwise undescriptive wall, and perhaps we wonder if there is a real building there, or if part of it contains a real window or a door. Near Sheffield in England, where Andrea and I stayed a few years ago, there is a grand country estate called Chatsworth House. On one of the interior doors, it appears as though a violin and its bow are suspended, but as you approach the objects, you realize it is only painted to appear as though they are there. Churches may have columns that are not really there, or soaring arches that are only an illusion. This effect is called Tromp l'œil, or "trick the eye." It is an art technique involving extremely realistic imagery in order to create the optical illusion that the depicted objects appear in three-dimensions, even though it is really a two dimensional painting. It is almost as if the human psyche enjoys being tricked, as we have all experienced in magic shows.
The original idea for this sermon arose out of seeing the movie The Counterfeiters. It is an academy Award winning foreign film which tells the story of Salomon or “Sally” Sorowitsch, who is Berlin’s most famous forger. It is based on the true life story of a man who used his counterfeiting skills to helps the Nazis implement a plan for forging the British pound and the American dollar, and then using the counterfeit currency to flood the market, and destabilize the two country’s economies. It was called Operation Bernhard. At first it seems as though Sally is operating out of the sheer need for self-preservation, as he finds some protection and comforts and privileges from painting portraits of German guards and their families in the concentration camp. These privileges increase as he is transferred to a section of a camp devoted to forgery. As the counterfeiting operation begins to unfold, a socialists printer objects as he feels what they are doing supports the German war effort. We realize with Sally that the idealism of living with pure integrity cannot be possible in such a situation. At one point Sally castigates the printer by saying, “Nobody’s prepared to die for a principle.” Although it appears at first as though he is only looking out for his own neck, we soon learn that Sally, despite his life of deception and crime is now using those skills to address broader questions of life and death, especially when they come to appreciate the wider war that the Nazis are fighting , and most especially his relationships with others in the community of the camp, and his concern for them. Keeping them alive becomes more important than anything. We see the complexities of balancing the demands of the Nazis who will stop at nothing to achieve their goals, fellow prisoners who want to sabotage the operation, and his growing attachment to his fellow inmates. When do you stop cooperating with evil? How do you balance staying alive with your obligations to others, and the challenge to fight injustice? While life in the camps was more horrific than anything we could ever imagine, the Counterfeiters also reminds us how much guile or deception it takes to survive in our world, in the complex balancing of life’s struggles. In these times of fear and chaos, we want to protect our families, and have some hope in a future where we can pay our bills and maintain our homes. And the world is often not a place where others seem to live with integrity or concern for others.
It seems odd perhaps to say that deception can help us balance the threats on our lives. Most of us live on the brink of being fed up with deception having just about seen the end of the Presidential campaign. We know that many presidential candidates will tell us anything we want to hear in order to get our vote and to get elected. This is exasperating because we want to hear the truth and we want to know that we can trust our future presidents with such an important job. Then we hear accusations of association with terrorists that are exaggerated rumors or outright lies. And even when the falsehood that the candidate is a Muslim, for instance is dismissed as untrue, we never address the question of what would be wrong if a candidate were a Muslim? Perhaps it is just like the clergyperson who must at least appear to believe in God, the candidate must at least appear to be Christian, so there is a secure, comfort level that we are in no danger. Television tries to provide a truth meter on how close the candidates claims are to actual truth. Yet isn’t it absurdly ironic that a media based on the creation of false images is the judge of how truthful each candidate really is.
The Rev. Tyler Caskey, the main character in Abide with Me, seems very different from Sally, the lifelong criminal. In the passage I read, Charlie says Tyler would turn the other cheek if he popped him one. Perhaps he seems closer in spirit to the idealist activist in the movie who lives by the power of an idea, and Sally ends up protecting him. In his conversation with Charlie, Tyler hears how his parishioners are out to get him, due to a rumored affair with his housekeeper. He is told they go after weakness, especially when they expect you to be strong. Charlie seems to say in their conversation that the Christianity Tyler offers up is a deception. He says it is gobbledygook that he carries on with as though it meant something. He uses it to make himself feel superior. Now it appears as though Tyler, who has never had a satisfactory relationship with his daughters, finally wishes to move beyond the facades of ministerial role and Christian doctrine. He responds that faith does mean something, “if you think how we live our lives means something.” Tyler does not want his religion to be based on false ideas or deceptive roles or pipe dreams of rosy futures. He wants his faith and his life to be real. He does not care what people think. He wants it to be a living truth in the present.
In the novel Gilead, the lonely old minster probably would have given anything to have been able to laugh with the boys. He realized that sometimes deception is good in the service of relationships, to protect oneself or others, to fantasize, or to keep the peace, but the tragic deception is when we believe in a lie. He was not ready perhaps to share that he was dying, but if he could have been human with the boys, and lived in the moment with them., then his life would have seemed more meaningful. We need deception sometimes because we need to hide our pain or sorrow, but we can’t live our lives believing in false promises, that it is going to get better and better, as it may not. Most of us are slugging it out day to day, and in our daily realization of how vulnerable we are to larger forces in the world, disease and personal trauma, we are only too aware of how dangerous and fearful life is. We can be wiped out. The link between Sally and Tyler is that they want to reject the bigger illusion or deception that so many people put their faith in - that human progress or religious salvation will make it all better. Instead they use smaller deceptions to protect the self in their vulnerability and then the self is truly free to embrace the reality of meaning found only in relationship, in the moment.
Life sometimes hangs in the balance. People come after us, and want to take our property or our livelihood. When I lost a job once, the person who engineered my demise said to someone, “I didn’t want to wreck his life or anything.” It was my family, my friends, and members of this congregation who stood by and helped. It didn’t make losing my livelihood any better. But it made it bearable. I was not so alone. Then I could begin again. We are hurt by calamity and disease. It is a jungle, and so we protect ourselves with what deceptions we have. We take care of our families. We are loyal to our friends. We affirm the right of privacy. In the real world Adam and Eve are forced from the idea of Eden because it does not exist. No paradise, only here and now with each other. They come to recognize that the real world is their literal fight against being hurt, losing relationships, and feeling alone. They will use their wills to seek the good because so much evil can befall them. And so we do what we can to stay afloat, affirming the loves and loyalties we have for self and others. Our faith must be grounded, not in a principle like reason or progress or salvation in the sweet by and by, but in love, right now. We must have the will to turn to one another, and not say, I know it will turn out all right, but rather, however it turns out, I will stick by you, I will support you and I love you.
Closing Words - from Annie Dillard
Divinity is not playful. The universe was not made in jest but in solemn incomprehensible earnest. By a power that is unfathomably secret, and holy and fleet. There is nothing to be done about it, but ignore it, or see. And then you walk fearlessly, eating what you must, growing wherever you can, like the monk on the road who knows precisely how vulnerable he is, who takes no comfort among death-forgetting men, and who carries his vision of vastness and might around in his tunic like a live coal which neither burns nor warms him, but with which he will not part.
“A Fulcrum of Time” by Carmen Emerson - October 12, 2008
“A Fulcrum of Time” by Carmen Emerson
First Parish of Watertown - October 12, 2008
CALL TO WORSHIP
Let Your Life Speak, by Parker Palmer
[quoting Florida Scott Maxwell] “’You need only claim the events of your life to make yourself yours. When you truly possess all you have been and [all you have] done…you are fierce with reality.’ I now know myself to be a person of weakness and strength, liability and giftedness, darkness and light. I now know that to be whole means to reject none of it but to embrace all of it. Some may say that this embrace is narcissistic, an obsession with self at the expense of others, but that is not how I experience it. When I ignored my own truth on behalf of a distorted ego and ethic, I led a false life that caused others pain – for which I can only ask forgiveness. When I started attending to my own truth, more of that truth became available in my work and my relationships. I now know that anything one can do on behalf of true self is done ultimately in the service of others" (Palmer, 71)
RESPONSIVE READING
Adapted from "To Live Deliberately" – Henry David Thoreau:
We must learn to awaken and keep ourselves awake by an infinite expectation of the dawn, which does not forsake us in our soundest sleep;
For we are encouraged that, as human beings, we can elevate our lives by our own conscious endeavors.
It is something to be able to paint a picture, or to carve a statue, and so to make a few objects beautiful;
But it is far more glorious to carve and paint the very atmosphere and medium through which we look, which morally we can do.
To affect the quality of the day, that is the highest of arts.
It is the task of every person to make our lives, even and especially in their details, worthy of the contemplation of our most elevated and critical hour.
Why should we live in such a hurry and waste of life? We are determined to be starved before we are hungry. I wish to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life;
I wish to learn what life has to teach, and not, when I come to die, discover that I have not lived.
I do not wish to live what is not life, living is so dear.
Nor do I wish to practice resignation, unless it is quite necessary
I wish to live deep and suck out all the marrow of life, to live so sturdily and Spartan-like as to put to rout all that is not life;
I want to cut a broad swath and shave close, to drive life into a corner, and reduce it to its lowest terms.
If it proves to be mean, then to get the whole and genuine meanness of it, and publish its meanness to the world;
Or if it is sublime, to know it by experience, and to be able to give a true account of it.
READING – from “Self-Culture” by William Ellery Channing
This morning’s reading is an excerpt adapted from an essay titled "Self-Culture," delivered in 1838 by William Ellery Channing to a gathering of Boston “manual laborers,” to whom he wished to, quote, “…express my sense of obligation, to those from whose industry and skill I derive almost all the comforts of life.”
Adapted from “Self-Culture” by our Unitarian ancestor, William Ellery Channing:
“A human being is great as a human being, be they where or what they may [be]…The powers of human intellect, of conscience, of love, of knowing God, of perceiving the beautiful, of acting on our own minds, on outward nature, and on our fellow-creatures, these are glorious prerogatives…Let us not disparage that nature which is common to all human beings; for no thought can measure its grandeur. It is the image of God, the image even of our infinity, for no limits can be set to its unfolding…Self-culture [is] the care which every human being owes to himself or herself, to the unfolding and perfecting of our nature…Unless we are roused to act upon ourselves, unless we engage in the work of self-improvement, unless we purpose strenuously to form and elevate our own minds, unless what we hear is made a part of ourselves by conscientious reflection, very little permanent good is received…Self-culture is something possible. It is not a dream. It has foundations in our nature…There are two powers of the human soul which make self-culture possible – the self-searching and the self-forming power. We have first the faculty of turning the mind on itself; of recalling its past, and watching its present operations; of learning its various capacities and susceptibilities, what it can do and what it can bear, what it can enjoy and suffer; and thus learning in general what our nature is, and what it was made for. It is worthy of observation, that we are able to discern not only what we already are, but what we may become…self-culture is possible not only because we can enter into and search ourselves; we have a still nobler power: that of acting on, determining, and forming ourselves. This is a fearful as well as glorious endowment, for it is the ground of human responsibility” (Channing, “Self-Culture,” 66-67).
SERMON – “A Fulcrum of Time” by Carmen Emerson – October 12, 2008
"I have lost my faith," she cried. I stood beside her hospital bed, on duty as a chaplain at St. Elizabeth's hospital, and watched her face contort with deepest fear. Tears ran from her eyes and her mouth trembled as she risked the next sentence: "I don't have faith in my doctors, I don't have faith in medicine, I don't have faith in people, and I don't even have faith in God. I want my faith back. Please, can't you help me get my faith back?"
Doctors had once again delayed her surgery, saying it would be at least 5 days before they could insert the pacemaker that would regulate the timing of her heart…but thinking ahead to the physical healing of her heart was impossible for her at that moment…all she could think about was the $400-per-day cost of holding onto her room at the assisted living facility where she had found comfort and safety, kindness and belonging… over and over again she said to me, "5 days…that's $2000 and I can't afford $2000…5 days…that's $2000 and I can't afford $2000." Her mantra of fear continued. I waited…she had more to say…"I'm going to have to give it up," she finally cried out, "and I love it there. But I have to give it up. And I don't believe anything that anyone tells me now…I just want to curl up in a corner and die…I have lost my faith."
A day after that hospital visit I was listening to the morning news on National Public Radio. A reporter was interviewing a woman in Texas, a staunch, lifelong Republican who had attended a Republican fundraising event where George W. Bush had appeared as the keynote speaker. She shared with the reporter a conversation she had had with Bush: "I told him I've had enough – I'm pulling all of my money out of the stock market – all of it." Apparently Bush had responded to her, "Give me 5 more weeks…don't pull your money out of the market…just give me 5 more weeks and everything will be okay." "Yeah, right," she continued, "like I have the faith to give you 5 more weeks…sorry, I don't have that kind of faith, not anymore." And then she laughed – not a laugh of mirth, but a bitter laugh of disdain and disbelief…"I don't have that kind of faith – not anymore."
Five days…five weeks…you know, actually, it was exactly five weeks ago today that the U. S. Government took control of Freddie Mae and Fannie Mac – one of the most intense markers on the timeline of our current economic crisis, and exactly four weeks ago that Lehman Brothers collapsed – another significant marker……but it feels to me that we have been vibrating with fear around economic issues for a much longer time…does it feel this way to you, too? It seems like it is all we can talk about.
I stand at the bed of an elderly woman whose fears around poverty are expressed in teary declarations that she wants to curl up and die…I hear a women – whose wealth means that she can cut her losses and run – express her fears in defensive laughter. I speak to ministerial colleagues around the country and hear stories of UU churches that have fallen thousands short of their annual budgets, and are facing severe cutbacks to staffing and programming because people are afraid around issues of money, and begin to withhold it from their faith communities…I attend a class at seminary and hear a fellow student – an executive during the day, and part-time student by night – share his surprise, his disappointment, and frankly, his pain, when he hears another group of his seminary classmates express their gleefulness that those "greedy executives and Wall Street types" are finally getting what they deserve. The students' fears are expressed as judgment. I sit with 8 other hospital chaplains, and the members of our usually disciplined group talk over each other, each of us with a story to tell about the fear we are witnessing in all these other areas of our lives. In our heads we know that processes and systems have failed – but in our hearts we understand that scared people don't want to blame a system or a process – they want to blame a person because it is part of our human nature to blame another person. They – we – feel powerless against systems and processes; but holding another person accountable, there's power in that, there is power in blaming – and the intensity of their feelings and their fears – our feelings and our fears – scares us.
Perhaps you have witnessed similar conversations. Perhaps you have participated in similar conversations. Talking about it helps, right? I mean, when we have something weighing so heavy on our hearts and minds, talking about it helps, right?
Well, talking about it can help…it helps us wrestle with issues we may not fully understand, and it helps us pass the time in good company until things get better…but I think we have to be careful, because it is so easy to get sucked into cycle of fear and blame, fear and blame, fear and blame….it is a contagious combination. And once we are sucked into that vortex of fear and blame, it takes a great deal of effort – a great deal of time – a great deal of faith – to pull ourselves, and each other, out of that powerful downward spiral and into a more loving, hopeful, peaceful place.
* * *
Now, I want to pause for just a moment to assure you that this is not a sentimental sermon preaching platitudes of "love is the answer" and predicting that all we have to do is simply love each other through it and then the hard times will go away and we can all join hands and skip round the parking lot while singing kum-ba-ya. There are some rocky passes ahead, and we are all smart enough to understand that each of our families may be faced with difficult choices and unprecedented uncertainties. We may be feeling vulnerable in ways that we have never before felt vulnerable, and unfortunately, we Unitarian Universalists do not do vulnerability well! We are a proud and hearty group, accustomed to success in our endeavors. We are a pick ourselves up by our bootstraps kind of people, determined and resourceful. We apply that divine gift, our power of reason, to the challenges we face, come up with answers and solutions, and then move forward into the next challenge.
Except…except that, in times of such persistent fear, other instincts can overtake our power of reason. We get scared, and we instinctively move into survival mode. As a minister friend said to me earlier this week, "when we get scared our energies shift from the crown chakra into our root chakra – into our gut – and we're all and only about me, mine, and survival."
So what are we to do? /// I believe that we are all good people – people who want to stand strong in our faith and not forfeit our reason to fear and blame. We are people who want to "suck out all the marrow of life" and not "practice resignation," as Thoreau reminded us earlier in the responsive reading. /// When we are crushed by fear and distracted by blame, how do we return to our compassionate selves? How do we restore our capacity for binding the wounds of vulnerability?
* * *
I propose that we could accept some guidance and grounding from the wisdom and spiritual practices of our 19th century Unitarian ancestors, who "ceaselessly" engaged in Self-Culture , especially during times of crisis. Remember that they, too, were navigating unfamiliar territory. At the time of the Self-Culture essay quoted in our opening reading – 1838 – we had formally identified ourselves as Unitarian Christians for not quite two decades. We were in our infancy – we were in a very tender place as we came to know and define ourselves as a faith tradition, asking who and how we would be in the changing world, and how we would navigate the changing landscape of our nation. Recall the words of William Ellery Channing, from Self-Culture:
"Self-culture [is] the care which every human being owes to himself or herself, to the unfolding and perfecting of our nature…Unless we are roused to act upon ourselves, unless we engage in the work of self-improvement, unless we purpose strenuously to form and elevate our own minds, unless what we hear is made a part of ourselves by conscientious reflection, very little permanent good is received."
I want to quote this line again, "Unless what we hear is made a part of ourselves by conscientious reflection, very little permanent good is received." What I hear Channing saying is that unless we are engaged in intentional practices that strengthen and deepen our faith, it might easily abandon us – or us our faith – when the going gets tough.
The two aspects of Self-Culture as practiced by our 19th Century Unitarian ancestors were referred to as self-searching, and self-forming. In contemporary language we might say self-examination and self-formation. I believe that these two elements of self-culture are balanced on a fulcrum of time.
On one side of the fulcrum of time is self-examination. So let me share with you the three practices of self-examination – practices that help us know and tend True Self:
First, the practice of reckoning. This includes noticing the details of our own lives; an examination of conscience: offering forgiveness and pardon to ourselves and others; and consecrating ourselves to the work of improvement. The practice of reckoning.
Second, the practice of reverence. This practice is about gratitude. It is about pausing to notice those sacred moments during an ordinary day, noticing the presence of the holy in expected and unexpected places. The practice of reverence.
And third, the practice of communion with the holy. For some this may mean meditation, prayer, or other spiritual practices. For others this may mean being in right relationship with other people. The practice of communion is about offering our best selves to that which is most important to us. It is attention to the holy within.
Reckoning, reverence, communion – the elements of Self-Examination that balance on one side of the fulcrum of time. And I want to emphasize here that these are not narcissistic, self-help, self-centered practices. Remember what Parker Palmer said – "that which I do on behalf of true self is ultimately done in the service of others" – and remember, also, that these practices were rooted in and are resonate with our Unitarian theology: our lives are sacred texts and we are participants in continuing revelation; we have agency in our own destinies; and – in a nod to our transcendentalist ancestors – we can encounter the holy within. ///
On the other side of the fulcrum of time lies Self-Formation. Again, I quote from Channing's Self-Culture essay:
"…we have a still nobler power: that of acting on, determining, and forming ourselves. This is a fearful as well as glorious endowment, for it is the ground of human responsibility."
For 19th Century Unitarians, the practices of formation were formal and specific. Indeed, one of the most famous books of that era was written by Henry Ware, Jr. – a few of us saw his grave on our tour of Mt. Auburn Cemetery last weekend – and titled: "On the Formation of the Christian Character: Addressed To Those Who Are Seeking to Lead a Religious Life." According to Ware, you must begin by reading – "as if your life depended on it" he said, advising that one must "be at all times engaged with two books…one to keep your mind right, and your feelings in harmony with eternal truth" and the other to be of an "instructive character, to enlarge your knowledge, and extend your ideas concerning God, and man, and truth" (Ware, 65). In addition to reading, Ware promoted meditation, prayer, attention to preaching, and taking the Lord's Supper – remember, these were Unitarian Christians.
Reading, meditating, prayer, preaching, and the Lord's Supper…Well, I doubt I know a 21st Century Unitarian Universalist who would protest Ware's advice to "read as if our lives depended on it" – and I doubt if we are content to be reading only two books at a time. I do not think Ware was encouraging us toward the self-help, pop-psychology sections of Barnes & Noble or Amazon.com, though…he was asking us to read books that stretch and challenge, books that expand our minds, enlarge and connect our hearts, and deepen our connections to the holy. ///
Next, meditation. Many of us do practice meditation or contemplative prayer, and I feel certain that Ware would endorse such mind-body practices as yoga, chi-gong, and tai chi as important spiritual practices. Certainly we know that Thoreau and Emerson endorsed walking and spending time in nature – and it's hard not to think of them as I walk the path along the Charles River.
As to preaching – well, a special thank you to all of you who showed up on this beautiful Sunday, a holiday weekend, to hear the guest preacher speak!
And as to the Lord's Supper…well, in my almost two decades as a Unitarian Universalist, I've attended one Unitarian service where communion was offered. I know there are Unitarian Universalist congregations that offer a Eucharist service at least two times a year, and that this is a meaningful practice in the life of their community. But may I respectfully offer this alternative for non-Christian Unitarians: consider a practice of spiritual sustenance…what is it that you are willing to offer of yourself that will help sustain another person in their personal transformation? I think the most crucial gift we can offer one another is sacred listening – and sacred listening means the sacrifice of our most precious commodity: time.
Self-examination and self-formation are balanced on a fulcrum of time. All of the elements mentioned – reckoning, reverence, communion within on the self-examination side, and reading, meditation, prayer, attending worship services, and communion without on the self-formation side – all of these ask the same thing of us: a commitment of time.
Another 19th Century Unitarian, James Freeman Clarke, wrote, "…if a person will be faithful to their highest convictions, to the best thoughts which God gives them to say, the best act given to them to do, they will change time into life."
So I want to leave you with two questions today. First, in the face of the ubiquitous doubt, fear, and blame that will undoubtedly increase, is deepening your faith worth your time? And second, do you have ethical and/or spiritual practices that help you turn "time into life"? As we prepare to walk together over the rocky terrain of uncertainty, doing our best to navigate the territory of vulnerability, I pray that our individual and collective faiths may be strengthened for the journey. And, I hope that if any of you are interested in engaging in any of the self-culture practices introduced today, that we will find our way into conversation about bringing them to this wonderful faith community, as our refusal to yield to doubt and blame, as our offerings of love and hope.
CLOSING WORDS
Adapted from William Ellery Channing’s 1828 sermon, “Likeness to God”:
"Whenever we invigorate the understanding by honestly and resolutely seeking truth, and by withstanding whatever might warp the judgment; whenever we invigorate the conscience by following it in opposition to the passions; whenever we receive a blessing gratefully, bear a trial patiently, or encounter peril or scorn with moral courage; whenever we perform a disinterested deed; whenever we lift up the heart in true adoration to God; whenever we war against a habit or desire which is strengthening itself against our higher principles; whenever we think, speak, or act, with moral energy and resolute devotion to duty, be the occasion ever so humble, obscure, familiar; then the divinity is growing within us…True religion thus blends itself with common life."
First Parish of Watertown - October 12, 2008
CALL TO WORSHIP
Let Your Life Speak, by Parker Palmer
[quoting Florida Scott Maxwell] “’You need only claim the events of your life to make yourself yours. When you truly possess all you have been and [all you have] done…you are fierce with reality.’ I now know myself to be a person of weakness and strength, liability and giftedness, darkness and light. I now know that to be whole means to reject none of it but to embrace all of it. Some may say that this embrace is narcissistic, an obsession with self at the expense of others, but that is not how I experience it. When I ignored my own truth on behalf of a distorted ego and ethic, I led a false life that caused others pain – for which I can only ask forgiveness. When I started attending to my own truth, more of that truth became available in my work and my relationships. I now know that anything one can do on behalf of true self is done ultimately in the service of others" (Palmer, 71)
RESPONSIVE READING
Adapted from "To Live Deliberately" – Henry David Thoreau:
We must learn to awaken and keep ourselves awake by an infinite expectation of the dawn, which does not forsake us in our soundest sleep;
For we are encouraged that, as human beings, we can elevate our lives by our own conscious endeavors.
It is something to be able to paint a picture, or to carve a statue, and so to make a few objects beautiful;
But it is far more glorious to carve and paint the very atmosphere and medium through which we look, which morally we can do.
To affect the quality of the day, that is the highest of arts.
It is the task of every person to make our lives, even and especially in their details, worthy of the contemplation of our most elevated and critical hour.
Why should we live in such a hurry and waste of life? We are determined to be starved before we are hungry. I wish to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life;
I wish to learn what life has to teach, and not, when I come to die, discover that I have not lived.
I do not wish to live what is not life, living is so dear.
Nor do I wish to practice resignation, unless it is quite necessary
I wish to live deep and suck out all the marrow of life, to live so sturdily and Spartan-like as to put to rout all that is not life;
I want to cut a broad swath and shave close, to drive life into a corner, and reduce it to its lowest terms.
If it proves to be mean, then to get the whole and genuine meanness of it, and publish its meanness to the world;
Or if it is sublime, to know it by experience, and to be able to give a true account of it.
READING – from “Self-Culture” by William Ellery Channing
This morning’s reading is an excerpt adapted from an essay titled "Self-Culture," delivered in 1838 by William Ellery Channing to a gathering of Boston “manual laborers,” to whom he wished to, quote, “…express my sense of obligation, to those from whose industry and skill I derive almost all the comforts of life.”
Adapted from “Self-Culture” by our Unitarian ancestor, William Ellery Channing:
“A human being is great as a human being, be they where or what they may [be]…The powers of human intellect, of conscience, of love, of knowing God, of perceiving the beautiful, of acting on our own minds, on outward nature, and on our fellow-creatures, these are glorious prerogatives…Let us not disparage that nature which is common to all human beings; for no thought can measure its grandeur. It is the image of God, the image even of our infinity, for no limits can be set to its unfolding…Self-culture [is] the care which every human being owes to himself or herself, to the unfolding and perfecting of our nature…Unless we are roused to act upon ourselves, unless we engage in the work of self-improvement, unless we purpose strenuously to form and elevate our own minds, unless what we hear is made a part of ourselves by conscientious reflection, very little permanent good is received…Self-culture is something possible. It is not a dream. It has foundations in our nature…There are two powers of the human soul which make self-culture possible – the self-searching and the self-forming power. We have first the faculty of turning the mind on itself; of recalling its past, and watching its present operations; of learning its various capacities and susceptibilities, what it can do and what it can bear, what it can enjoy and suffer; and thus learning in general what our nature is, and what it was made for. It is worthy of observation, that we are able to discern not only what we already are, but what we may become…self-culture is possible not only because we can enter into and search ourselves; we have a still nobler power: that of acting on, determining, and forming ourselves. This is a fearful as well as glorious endowment, for it is the ground of human responsibility” (Channing, “Self-Culture,” 66-67).
SERMON – “A Fulcrum of Time” by Carmen Emerson – October 12, 2008
"I have lost my faith," she cried. I stood beside her hospital bed, on duty as a chaplain at St. Elizabeth's hospital, and watched her face contort with deepest fear. Tears ran from her eyes and her mouth trembled as she risked the next sentence: "I don't have faith in my doctors, I don't have faith in medicine, I don't have faith in people, and I don't even have faith in God. I want my faith back. Please, can't you help me get my faith back?"
Doctors had once again delayed her surgery, saying it would be at least 5 days before they could insert the pacemaker that would regulate the timing of her heart…but thinking ahead to the physical healing of her heart was impossible for her at that moment…all she could think about was the $400-per-day cost of holding onto her room at the assisted living facility where she had found comfort and safety, kindness and belonging… over and over again she said to me, "5 days…that's $2000 and I can't afford $2000…5 days…that's $2000 and I can't afford $2000." Her mantra of fear continued. I waited…she had more to say…"I'm going to have to give it up," she finally cried out, "and I love it there. But I have to give it up. And I don't believe anything that anyone tells me now…I just want to curl up in a corner and die…I have lost my faith."
A day after that hospital visit I was listening to the morning news on National Public Radio. A reporter was interviewing a woman in Texas, a staunch, lifelong Republican who had attended a Republican fundraising event where George W. Bush had appeared as the keynote speaker. She shared with the reporter a conversation she had had with Bush: "I told him I've had enough – I'm pulling all of my money out of the stock market – all of it." Apparently Bush had responded to her, "Give me 5 more weeks…don't pull your money out of the market…just give me 5 more weeks and everything will be okay." "Yeah, right," she continued, "like I have the faith to give you 5 more weeks…sorry, I don't have that kind of faith, not anymore." And then she laughed – not a laugh of mirth, but a bitter laugh of disdain and disbelief…"I don't have that kind of faith – not anymore."
Five days…five weeks…you know, actually, it was exactly five weeks ago today that the U. S. Government took control of Freddie Mae and Fannie Mac – one of the most intense markers on the timeline of our current economic crisis, and exactly four weeks ago that Lehman Brothers collapsed – another significant marker……but it feels to me that we have been vibrating with fear around economic issues for a much longer time…does it feel this way to you, too? It seems like it is all we can talk about.
I stand at the bed of an elderly woman whose fears around poverty are expressed in teary declarations that she wants to curl up and die…I hear a women – whose wealth means that she can cut her losses and run – express her fears in defensive laughter. I speak to ministerial colleagues around the country and hear stories of UU churches that have fallen thousands short of their annual budgets, and are facing severe cutbacks to staffing and programming because people are afraid around issues of money, and begin to withhold it from their faith communities…I attend a class at seminary and hear a fellow student – an executive during the day, and part-time student by night – share his surprise, his disappointment, and frankly, his pain, when he hears another group of his seminary classmates express their gleefulness that those "greedy executives and Wall Street types" are finally getting what they deserve. The students' fears are expressed as judgment. I sit with 8 other hospital chaplains, and the members of our usually disciplined group talk over each other, each of us with a story to tell about the fear we are witnessing in all these other areas of our lives. In our heads we know that processes and systems have failed – but in our hearts we understand that scared people don't want to blame a system or a process – they want to blame a person because it is part of our human nature to blame another person. They – we – feel powerless against systems and processes; but holding another person accountable, there's power in that, there is power in blaming – and the intensity of their feelings and their fears – our feelings and our fears – scares us.
Perhaps you have witnessed similar conversations. Perhaps you have participated in similar conversations. Talking about it helps, right? I mean, when we have something weighing so heavy on our hearts and minds, talking about it helps, right?
Well, talking about it can help…it helps us wrestle with issues we may not fully understand, and it helps us pass the time in good company until things get better…but I think we have to be careful, because it is so easy to get sucked into cycle of fear and blame, fear and blame, fear and blame….it is a contagious combination. And once we are sucked into that vortex of fear and blame, it takes a great deal of effort – a great deal of time – a great deal of faith – to pull ourselves, and each other, out of that powerful downward spiral and into a more loving, hopeful, peaceful place.
* * *
Now, I want to pause for just a moment to assure you that this is not a sentimental sermon preaching platitudes of "love is the answer" and predicting that all we have to do is simply love each other through it and then the hard times will go away and we can all join hands and skip round the parking lot while singing kum-ba-ya. There are some rocky passes ahead, and we are all smart enough to understand that each of our families may be faced with difficult choices and unprecedented uncertainties. We may be feeling vulnerable in ways that we have never before felt vulnerable, and unfortunately, we Unitarian Universalists do not do vulnerability well! We are a proud and hearty group, accustomed to success in our endeavors. We are a pick ourselves up by our bootstraps kind of people, determined and resourceful. We apply that divine gift, our power of reason, to the challenges we face, come up with answers and solutions, and then move forward into the next challenge.
Except…except that, in times of such persistent fear, other instincts can overtake our power of reason. We get scared, and we instinctively move into survival mode. As a minister friend said to me earlier this week, "when we get scared our energies shift from the crown chakra into our root chakra – into our gut – and we're all and only about me, mine, and survival."
So what are we to do? /// I believe that we are all good people – people who want to stand strong in our faith and not forfeit our reason to fear and blame. We are people who want to "suck out all the marrow of life" and not "practice resignation," as Thoreau reminded us earlier in the responsive reading. /// When we are crushed by fear and distracted by blame, how do we return to our compassionate selves? How do we restore our capacity for binding the wounds of vulnerability?
* * *
I propose that we could accept some guidance and grounding from the wisdom and spiritual practices of our 19th century Unitarian ancestors, who "ceaselessly" engaged in Self-Culture , especially during times of crisis. Remember that they, too, were navigating unfamiliar territory. At the time of the Self-Culture essay quoted in our opening reading – 1838 – we had formally identified ourselves as Unitarian Christians for not quite two decades. We were in our infancy – we were in a very tender place as we came to know and define ourselves as a faith tradition, asking who and how we would be in the changing world, and how we would navigate the changing landscape of our nation. Recall the words of William Ellery Channing, from Self-Culture:
"Self-culture [is] the care which every human being owes to himself or herself, to the unfolding and perfecting of our nature…Unless we are roused to act upon ourselves, unless we engage in the work of self-improvement, unless we purpose strenuously to form and elevate our own minds, unless what we hear is made a part of ourselves by conscientious reflection, very little permanent good is received."
I want to quote this line again, "Unless what we hear is made a part of ourselves by conscientious reflection, very little permanent good is received." What I hear Channing saying is that unless we are engaged in intentional practices that strengthen and deepen our faith, it might easily abandon us – or us our faith – when the going gets tough.
The two aspects of Self-Culture as practiced by our 19th Century Unitarian ancestors were referred to as self-searching, and self-forming. In contemporary language we might say self-examination and self-formation. I believe that these two elements of self-culture are balanced on a fulcrum of time.
On one side of the fulcrum of time is self-examination. So let me share with you the three practices of self-examination – practices that help us know and tend True Self:
First, the practice of reckoning. This includes noticing the details of our own lives; an examination of conscience: offering forgiveness and pardon to ourselves and others; and consecrating ourselves to the work of improvement. The practice of reckoning.
Second, the practice of reverence. This practice is about gratitude. It is about pausing to notice those sacred moments during an ordinary day, noticing the presence of the holy in expected and unexpected places. The practice of reverence.
And third, the practice of communion with the holy. For some this may mean meditation, prayer, or other spiritual practices. For others this may mean being in right relationship with other people. The practice of communion is about offering our best selves to that which is most important to us. It is attention to the holy within.
Reckoning, reverence, communion – the elements of Self-Examination that balance on one side of the fulcrum of time. And I want to emphasize here that these are not narcissistic, self-help, self-centered practices. Remember what Parker Palmer said – "that which I do on behalf of true self is ultimately done in the service of others" – and remember, also, that these practices were rooted in and are resonate with our Unitarian theology: our lives are sacred texts and we are participants in continuing revelation; we have agency in our own destinies; and – in a nod to our transcendentalist ancestors – we can encounter the holy within. ///
On the other side of the fulcrum of time lies Self-Formation. Again, I quote from Channing's Self-Culture essay:
"…we have a still nobler power: that of acting on, determining, and forming ourselves. This is a fearful as well as glorious endowment, for it is the ground of human responsibility."
For 19th Century Unitarians, the practices of formation were formal and specific. Indeed, one of the most famous books of that era was written by Henry Ware, Jr. – a few of us saw his grave on our tour of Mt. Auburn Cemetery last weekend – and titled: "On the Formation of the Christian Character: Addressed To Those Who Are Seeking to Lead a Religious Life." According to Ware, you must begin by reading – "as if your life depended on it" he said, advising that one must "be at all times engaged with two books…one to keep your mind right, and your feelings in harmony with eternal truth" and the other to be of an "instructive character, to enlarge your knowledge, and extend your ideas concerning God, and man, and truth" (Ware, 65). In addition to reading, Ware promoted meditation, prayer, attention to preaching, and taking the Lord's Supper – remember, these were Unitarian Christians.
Reading, meditating, prayer, preaching, and the Lord's Supper…Well, I doubt I know a 21st Century Unitarian Universalist who would protest Ware's advice to "read as if our lives depended on it" – and I doubt if we are content to be reading only two books at a time. I do not think Ware was encouraging us toward the self-help, pop-psychology sections of Barnes & Noble or Amazon.com, though…he was asking us to read books that stretch and challenge, books that expand our minds, enlarge and connect our hearts, and deepen our connections to the holy. ///
Next, meditation. Many of us do practice meditation or contemplative prayer, and I feel certain that Ware would endorse such mind-body practices as yoga, chi-gong, and tai chi as important spiritual practices. Certainly we know that Thoreau and Emerson endorsed walking and spending time in nature – and it's hard not to think of them as I walk the path along the Charles River.
As to preaching – well, a special thank you to all of you who showed up on this beautiful Sunday, a holiday weekend, to hear the guest preacher speak!
And as to the Lord's Supper…well, in my almost two decades as a Unitarian Universalist, I've attended one Unitarian service where communion was offered. I know there are Unitarian Universalist congregations that offer a Eucharist service at least two times a year, and that this is a meaningful practice in the life of their community. But may I respectfully offer this alternative for non-Christian Unitarians: consider a practice of spiritual sustenance…what is it that you are willing to offer of yourself that will help sustain another person in their personal transformation? I think the most crucial gift we can offer one another is sacred listening – and sacred listening means the sacrifice of our most precious commodity: time.
Self-examination and self-formation are balanced on a fulcrum of time. All of the elements mentioned – reckoning, reverence, communion within on the self-examination side, and reading, meditation, prayer, attending worship services, and communion without on the self-formation side – all of these ask the same thing of us: a commitment of time.
Another 19th Century Unitarian, James Freeman Clarke, wrote, "…if a person will be faithful to their highest convictions, to the best thoughts which God gives them to say, the best act given to them to do, they will change time into life."
So I want to leave you with two questions today. First, in the face of the ubiquitous doubt, fear, and blame that will undoubtedly increase, is deepening your faith worth your time? And second, do you have ethical and/or spiritual practices that help you turn "time into life"? As we prepare to walk together over the rocky terrain of uncertainty, doing our best to navigate the territory of vulnerability, I pray that our individual and collective faiths may be strengthened for the journey. And, I hope that if any of you are interested in engaging in any of the self-culture practices introduced today, that we will find our way into conversation about bringing them to this wonderful faith community, as our refusal to yield to doubt and blame, as our offerings of love and hope.
CLOSING WORDS
Adapted from William Ellery Channing’s 1828 sermon, “Likeness to God”:
"Whenever we invigorate the understanding by honestly and resolutely seeking truth, and by withstanding whatever might warp the judgment; whenever we invigorate the conscience by following it in opposition to the passions; whenever we receive a blessing gratefully, bear a trial patiently, or encounter peril or scorn with moral courage; whenever we perform a disinterested deed; whenever we lift up the heart in true adoration to God; whenever we war against a habit or desire which is strengthening itself against our higher principles; whenever we think, speak, or act, with moral energy and resolute devotion to duty, be the occasion ever so humble, obscure, familiar; then the divinity is growing within us…True religion thus blends itself with common life."
"Making Up is Hard to Do" by Mark W. Harris - October 5, 2008
“Making Up is Hard to Do” - Mark W. Harris
First Parish of Watertown - October 5, 2008
Opening Words - from “Compensation” by Ralph Waldo Emerson
All things are moral. That soul which within us is a sentiment, outside of us is a law. We feel its inspiration; but there in history we can see its fatal strength. “It is in the world, and the world was made by it.” Justice is not postponed. A perfect equity adjusts its balance in all parts of life. The dice of God are always loaded. . . Every act rewards itself, or in other words integrates itself. . . Crime and punishment grow out of one stem. Punishment is a fruit that unsuspected ripens within the flower of the pleasure which concealed it. Cause and effect, means and ends, seed and fruit, cannot be severed; for the effect already blooms in the cause, the end preexists in the means, the fruit in the seed.
Reading - from Atonement by Ian McEwan
Sermon - “Making Up is Hard to Do”
Yesterday a group from church visited Mt. Auburn Cemetery. Among the graves of famous Unitarian Universalists is that of William Ellery Channing, sometimes called the spiritual founder of American Unitarianism. That title was conferred upon him because he is generally acknowledged to be the leading spokesperson for a liberal Christian understanding of faith that affirmed the benevolence of God, and the potential of human beings to live lives reflective of that divine love which, he believed dwells in each one of us. Channing’s faith, like many of ours was built upon a negative childhood experience of religion. As a boy his father once took him to hear a famous revival preacher. The sermon was meant to evoke feelings of shame and sorrow at human sinfulness, and the awful penalties that might result if humans, like Channing and his father did not repent and follow the way, the truth and the light in the person of Jesus Christ. In the view of the preacher, Channing later said, “a curse seemed to rest on the earth and darkness and horror to veil the face of nature.” (see John White Chadwick, William Ellery Channing, Minister of Religion, Boston and New York: Houghton, Mifflin and Co., 1903, p.23)
The young boy left the meetinghouse thinking that this must be the terrible truth about the human condition. This was seemingly confirmed when his father said to another parishioner, upon leaving the meetinghouse, “Sound doctrine, sir.” Channing went home, thinking it must be true. He wanted to ask his father, but just could not say the words that troubled him. He also began to think that in his silence, his father was overwhelmed, too. The terrible fate that awaited them was too much to bear. Yet once they were home, his father began to whistle. Worse, he said no more about the doom which awaited them, but instead proceeded to put on his slippers, sit before the open fire (which one might suppose would remind him of the dread to come), and then calmly began to read the newspaper, as if nothing had happened. This finally made Channing conclude that what the preacher said was not true, but furthermore began to understand that the true test of faith was not discovered in mere words, but in our actions. Religion requires complete sincerity and integrity of character. And the faith he fashioned from that fearful childhood trauma was one that was not based upon false fears and terror, but rather on human potential to do good, and to bring love into the world.
If Channing noticed that his father’s actions did not reflect his faith, he also experienced him as a strict disciplinarian. While they heard about hell to come in church, Channing experienced hell to pay now at home. He also felt a coldness of spirit emanating from his father, and later wrote that he “kept me at too great a distance from him.” Like the affirming faith he fashioned in response to the fearful preaching he heard, Channing grew up to be a very different
kind of father than his own parent. His concept of baptism was that the rite of passage should be performed to inspire parents “to treat the infant with reverence.” He also wrote about how he was too sick to carry and play with his son George, as he had done with his other children, but that “he would creep to me and climb into my lap, and win from me, by his benignant smile, the notice which I was giving to them.” While his father had been strict and emotionally distant Channing tried to be loving and kind, perhaps establishing once and for all the Unitarian archetype of the indulgent parent.
Channing’s life seems to be an embodiment of Emerson’s concept of compensation. He reacts to hell fire and brimstone with a loving faith, and to a strict father by trying to be a more caring one. We compensate for what has befallen us. We seek a balance to what our circumstances and our choices in life bring to us. This was my experience, too, as least the first time I was a parent. I felt as though my parents had not been effusive enough in showing their love for me. As a boy, I was never hugged or kissed, and truly felt this loss of affection. After my son Joel was born I remembered vowing to be a more affectionate father, and was. Perhaps it could be said that many of us attempt to make-up or compensate for what we feel we lacked in our childhood rearing. While this way of responding to your experiences does not change anything, it does acknowledge that we would like to try something different from how we experienced it. We do not wallow in regret for what we did not receive, but instead move on or make up for what we felt we lacked by trying to find or live in a new way.
For many of us there is a feeling that we want to compensate for what we have lost or never received. We do the best to make our lives different, as we feel this is what we must do to make our lives whole, or at least to fill the void for what has befallen us. I think of a family I was close to in my first church who lost a sister and daughter in a tragic car accident with a drunk driver. The sister compensated for the pain by becoming active in Mothers Against Drunk Drivers. Rather than carrying the pain with us of an lonely childhood, or a tragic incident in life, we find something we can do so that we are making an effort to see that our lives will be different, or that what we do in the world can help make it so someone else does not have to suffer through the same tragedy I did. A classic case of compensating for the pain we caused or endured is John Newton who wrote the hymn Amazing Grace. He was once a slave trader, and then underwent a religious conversion. Having found a new faith in the difference he could make in the world, he eventually became an abolitionist and an Anglican priest to make-up or compensate for the inhuman suffering he had caused. Carrying such guilt and shame could easily destroy our lives, and so rather than letting ourselves be overcome, or become paralyzed, we ask what can I do to forgive myself for the wrong I have done, or the pain I have endured. The answer for Newton was in a complete transformation of who he was and what he stood for, but it took him a long time, as he did not become an abolitionist when he first converted to Christianity.
Emerson’s essay “Compensation” begs the question, Is there some kind of eternal force or karmic yin yang that balances the wrong choices we make or the suffering we endure with times of joy and happiness. Are you a liberal who feels like we have suffered through eight years of wrong headed decisions, and now the forces of war and torture and economic chaos active in the universe will be balanced by a period of peace and prosperity, as soon as we elect the candidate of our choice? Historians often see periods of reform followed by reaction as they look at historical trends. As a people we can only endure change for so long, and then we must live in a time of quietude and calm. Emerson says that when it comes to compensation, the people know more than the theologians. He cites an orthodox sermon he heard in which the preacher says that the wicked are successful in this world, and the good are miserable, but that the good will be compensated for this misery now by being given an beatific afterlife. Perhaps, Emerson reflects, that we would sin now, if we could, but that we will get our revenge tomorrow when the bad are roasting in hell. He says the fallacy in this is the idea that justice is not done now, for he says, we are wiser than we know, we are better than our theology. He says life is like the ebb and flow of the sea, the man and the woman, as every evil has its good, and every sweet its sour.
The Jewish faith has given its highest of holy days over to the concept of forgiveness of sins. Yom Kippur , or the Day of Atonement is when the people symbolically reenact the scriptural story where the sins of the people are placed on the head of a goat, who is then banished to the wilderness, as their scapegoat. The idea that sins must be forgiven or wiped clean becomes central to traditional Christian faith in the doctrine of the atonement. This idea is Christ sacrificed himself for human sin because it was the only way we could be redeemed from our inherent waywardness, and further that God must somehow be appeased in his anger that we are so evil. Right from the beginning advocates of our liberal faith, said God does not need compensation with blood, but that God wants us to be happy. The classic liberal understanding of atonement came from the great Universalist preacher Hosea Ballou. Ballou said God does not need to be paid off or reconciled to us with Jesus’ suffering, but that we need to be reconciled to God, who sends Jesus to help us find love. Atonement for Ballou is not pay back for sin, but a renewal of love.
Ballou was not a person to deny that we commit evil deeds or suffer in this world. Early Universalists were frequently criticized because it was felt that if there was no threat of hell, then there was no incentive to be good. It was like Emerson’s preacher saying, if you have fun now, you will pay for it later. In a way, Ballou was like Emerson in his thinking that there is law of compensation active in our lives, and that we are most likely to be renewed in love if we follow that understanding of balance. Ballou said that if you sin in this life, you will know that, and you will pay for that in some way, even if it is not apparent. Emerson said you cannot do wrong without suffering wrong. We do not need some threat of hell to understand that the wrong acts we have perpetrated haunt us. We do not want to feel bad, and so too, we do not want to continue those things we have learned as children and young adults that make us feel bad. We want to compensate for those things that hurt us, we want to let go of those regrets we feel for what we did wrong, and begin again in love. Channing did not want to live in hell. He did not want to be the punishing father. But he also felt pain at wrongdoing, as when he lived in the south, and was tormented to witness slavery, and finally after some soul searching and encouragement from Lydia Maria Child, spoke out against it.
Last year, Ian McEwan’s novel Atonement was brought to life on film. Atonement is the story of a thirteen year old girl Briony Tallis, who longs to be a writer. She is part of a wealthy family who have all the privileges of an upper class English family living between the two World Wars. Briony witnesses her older sister Cecilia shed her clothes in a fountain at their estate, while Robbie Turner, the well educated son of their housekeeper is looking on. It is expected that Robbie will become a doctor, and move beyond the confines of his class background. In fact there is a heated passion between Cecilia and Robbie that is interrupted by Briony who mistakenly believes he is attacking her sister. She, too carries a crush for him, but lets her imagination run wild after another young woman, Lola, is raped nearby. She wrongly accuses Robbie of the attack. Despite the love between Cecilia and Robbie, he is arrested. Briony falsely testifies against him, and he is sent to prison. The only way he can be paroled from this wrongful conviction is to join the army. All three lives, Robbie, Cecilia and Briony’s, are sent into chaos by this terrible act. He endures the terrible evacuation of Dunkirk. Briony tries to find forgiveness for her childhood misdeed. What is most telling is her effort with her own life to find a path to atonement.
In the reading we see that Briony views her training and performing of nursing work as a form of atonement. She realizes she is responsible for having sent Robbie off to war, and gives up her own chance for university. She throws herself into this work to attempt to make up for her misdeed. This is severe punishment of self, long hours, bed pans, and dying soldiers, for what she did. In effect there are two endings to this novel. In one Briony meets up with Cecilia, who has given up on her family for their failure to believe in Robbie’s innocence.
Robbie, on leave from the army, is present,and after much agonizing Briony tells them that she will try to atone for what she did, and promises to begin the legal procedures needed to prove Robbie’s innocence. In the other ending we learn that Briony is the author of the preceding sections of the book, and the truth is that Robbie died at Dunkirk, and Cecilia died in a bombing during the London blitz, and they never reunited. We can be too late. Can Briony really atone for the terrible crime she committed? While she is haunted by all that she did not admit or say, she ends her part of the novel with Cecilia and Robbie still living -happy together "still alive, still in love" and present for her birthday a half century after the war. At long last in our lives we long to be forgiven, we long to be reconciled with those parts of our lives for which we feel some regret or remorse. How could we rewrite our own story?
What Atonement teaches us is that we are haunted for years, even lifetimes by those parts of our lives where we committed misdeeds, or where we felt that we were not given what we needed to be renewed in love. And most of us do try to make amends for those parts of our lives that were lies or misdeeds, or that left us feeling empty. If we try to remake or change the person who does not give us what we need, we often end up frustrated. Then we must accept them for who they are or for what they can give us and forgive for what they cannot. We then compensate by finding what we truly need. We do make up, but it is hard to do. Briony can’t tell Lola that her marriage to her rapist is wrong. And what if she never did meet up with Cecilia and Robbie? Long ago William Ellery Channing learned that he had to live a faith that was honest in action, as well as in words. We must renew our misdeeds in love. Even though she never does it, Briony is haunted by how she can makes amends for what she did. Can we vow never to do it again? Can we live better lives? We must compensate for our pain with news ways of trying to live in the world - with affection, with involvement, with responsibility for what we say we mean to do. We live our lives looking to be accepted and forgiven, but we are also like Briony in that we want to act to achieve that reconciliation. And this religious day is about that acting. We do not want to be haunted like she was. We want to live in balance for those things we regret. We want to feel that the way we have lived was with the deepest convictions and the most integrity we were capable of. Forgiveness means remembering that everyone sometimes makes bad choices. We are human, we are not perfect. We have all tried to make amends with the lives we live now; with the changes we have made. We all know, as Emerson says that life brings death and loss, and so, too it brings bad choices, regrettable decisions. But as most of us also know, these events have also performed revolutions in our lives. These are opportunities to compensate, to realize that we can begin to form ourselves again in love. And when we fail or fall short, we will know that it has been enough because we tried to compensate, we tried to balance our past and the regrets or shortcomings we feel, with the love we are capable of expressing to each other right now.
Closing words from Jack Kornfield
Forgiveness honors the heart's greatest dignity.
Whenever we are lost, it brings us back to the ground of love.
With forgiveness we become unwilling to attack or wish harm to one another.
Whenever we forgive, in small ways at home, or in great ways between nations,
we free ourselves from the past. -
First Parish of Watertown - October 5, 2008
Opening Words - from “Compensation” by Ralph Waldo Emerson
All things are moral. That soul which within us is a sentiment, outside of us is a law. We feel its inspiration; but there in history we can see its fatal strength. “It is in the world, and the world was made by it.” Justice is not postponed. A perfect equity adjusts its balance in all parts of life. The dice of God are always loaded. . . Every act rewards itself, or in other words integrates itself. . . Crime and punishment grow out of one stem. Punishment is a fruit that unsuspected ripens within the flower of the pleasure which concealed it. Cause and effect, means and ends, seed and fruit, cannot be severed; for the effect already blooms in the cause, the end preexists in the means, the fruit in the seed.
Reading - from Atonement by Ian McEwan
Sermon - “Making Up is Hard to Do”
Yesterday a group from church visited Mt. Auburn Cemetery. Among the graves of famous Unitarian Universalists is that of William Ellery Channing, sometimes called the spiritual founder of American Unitarianism. That title was conferred upon him because he is generally acknowledged to be the leading spokesperson for a liberal Christian understanding of faith that affirmed the benevolence of God, and the potential of human beings to live lives reflective of that divine love which, he believed dwells in each one of us. Channing’s faith, like many of ours was built upon a negative childhood experience of religion. As a boy his father once took him to hear a famous revival preacher. The sermon was meant to evoke feelings of shame and sorrow at human sinfulness, and the awful penalties that might result if humans, like Channing and his father did not repent and follow the way, the truth and the light in the person of Jesus Christ. In the view of the preacher, Channing later said, “a curse seemed to rest on the earth and darkness and horror to veil the face of nature.” (see John White Chadwick, William Ellery Channing, Minister of Religion, Boston and New York: Houghton, Mifflin and Co., 1903, p.23)
The young boy left the meetinghouse thinking that this must be the terrible truth about the human condition. This was seemingly confirmed when his father said to another parishioner, upon leaving the meetinghouse, “Sound doctrine, sir.” Channing went home, thinking it must be true. He wanted to ask his father, but just could not say the words that troubled him. He also began to think that in his silence, his father was overwhelmed, too. The terrible fate that awaited them was too much to bear. Yet once they were home, his father began to whistle. Worse, he said no more about the doom which awaited them, but instead proceeded to put on his slippers, sit before the open fire (which one might suppose would remind him of the dread to come), and then calmly began to read the newspaper, as if nothing had happened. This finally made Channing conclude that what the preacher said was not true, but furthermore began to understand that the true test of faith was not discovered in mere words, but in our actions. Religion requires complete sincerity and integrity of character. And the faith he fashioned from that fearful childhood trauma was one that was not based upon false fears and terror, but rather on human potential to do good, and to bring love into the world.
If Channing noticed that his father’s actions did not reflect his faith, he also experienced him as a strict disciplinarian. While they heard about hell to come in church, Channing experienced hell to pay now at home. He also felt a coldness of spirit emanating from his father, and later wrote that he “kept me at too great a distance from him.” Like the affirming faith he fashioned in response to the fearful preaching he heard, Channing grew up to be a very different
kind of father than his own parent. His concept of baptism was that the rite of passage should be performed to inspire parents “to treat the infant with reverence.” He also wrote about how he was too sick to carry and play with his son George, as he had done with his other children, but that “he would creep to me and climb into my lap, and win from me, by his benignant smile, the notice which I was giving to them.” While his father had been strict and emotionally distant Channing tried to be loving and kind, perhaps establishing once and for all the Unitarian archetype of the indulgent parent.
Channing’s life seems to be an embodiment of Emerson’s concept of compensation. He reacts to hell fire and brimstone with a loving faith, and to a strict father by trying to be a more caring one. We compensate for what has befallen us. We seek a balance to what our circumstances and our choices in life bring to us. This was my experience, too, as least the first time I was a parent. I felt as though my parents had not been effusive enough in showing their love for me. As a boy, I was never hugged or kissed, and truly felt this loss of affection. After my son Joel was born I remembered vowing to be a more affectionate father, and was. Perhaps it could be said that many of us attempt to make-up or compensate for what we feel we lacked in our childhood rearing. While this way of responding to your experiences does not change anything, it does acknowledge that we would like to try something different from how we experienced it. We do not wallow in regret for what we did not receive, but instead move on or make up for what we felt we lacked by trying to find or live in a new way.
For many of us there is a feeling that we want to compensate for what we have lost or never received. We do the best to make our lives different, as we feel this is what we must do to make our lives whole, or at least to fill the void for what has befallen us. I think of a family I was close to in my first church who lost a sister and daughter in a tragic car accident with a drunk driver. The sister compensated for the pain by becoming active in Mothers Against Drunk Drivers. Rather than carrying the pain with us of an lonely childhood, or a tragic incident in life, we find something we can do so that we are making an effort to see that our lives will be different, or that what we do in the world can help make it so someone else does not have to suffer through the same tragedy I did. A classic case of compensating for the pain we caused or endured is John Newton who wrote the hymn Amazing Grace. He was once a slave trader, and then underwent a religious conversion. Having found a new faith in the difference he could make in the world, he eventually became an abolitionist and an Anglican priest to make-up or compensate for the inhuman suffering he had caused. Carrying such guilt and shame could easily destroy our lives, and so rather than letting ourselves be overcome, or become paralyzed, we ask what can I do to forgive myself for the wrong I have done, or the pain I have endured. The answer for Newton was in a complete transformation of who he was and what he stood for, but it took him a long time, as he did not become an abolitionist when he first converted to Christianity.
Emerson’s essay “Compensation” begs the question, Is there some kind of eternal force or karmic yin yang that balances the wrong choices we make or the suffering we endure with times of joy and happiness. Are you a liberal who feels like we have suffered through eight years of wrong headed decisions, and now the forces of war and torture and economic chaos active in the universe will be balanced by a period of peace and prosperity, as soon as we elect the candidate of our choice? Historians often see periods of reform followed by reaction as they look at historical trends. As a people we can only endure change for so long, and then we must live in a time of quietude and calm. Emerson says that when it comes to compensation, the people know more than the theologians. He cites an orthodox sermon he heard in which the preacher says that the wicked are successful in this world, and the good are miserable, but that the good will be compensated for this misery now by being given an beatific afterlife. Perhaps, Emerson reflects, that we would sin now, if we could, but that we will get our revenge tomorrow when the bad are roasting in hell. He says the fallacy in this is the idea that justice is not done now, for he says, we are wiser than we know, we are better than our theology. He says life is like the ebb and flow of the sea, the man and the woman, as every evil has its good, and every sweet its sour.
The Jewish faith has given its highest of holy days over to the concept of forgiveness of sins. Yom Kippur , or the Day of Atonement is when the people symbolically reenact the scriptural story where the sins of the people are placed on the head of a goat, who is then banished to the wilderness, as their scapegoat. The idea that sins must be forgiven or wiped clean becomes central to traditional Christian faith in the doctrine of the atonement. This idea is Christ sacrificed himself for human sin because it was the only way we could be redeemed from our inherent waywardness, and further that God must somehow be appeased in his anger that we are so evil. Right from the beginning advocates of our liberal faith, said God does not need compensation with blood, but that God wants us to be happy. The classic liberal understanding of atonement came from the great Universalist preacher Hosea Ballou. Ballou said God does not need to be paid off or reconciled to us with Jesus’ suffering, but that we need to be reconciled to God, who sends Jesus to help us find love. Atonement for Ballou is not pay back for sin, but a renewal of love.
Ballou was not a person to deny that we commit evil deeds or suffer in this world. Early Universalists were frequently criticized because it was felt that if there was no threat of hell, then there was no incentive to be good. It was like Emerson’s preacher saying, if you have fun now, you will pay for it later. In a way, Ballou was like Emerson in his thinking that there is law of compensation active in our lives, and that we are most likely to be renewed in love if we follow that understanding of balance. Ballou said that if you sin in this life, you will know that, and you will pay for that in some way, even if it is not apparent. Emerson said you cannot do wrong without suffering wrong. We do not need some threat of hell to understand that the wrong acts we have perpetrated haunt us. We do not want to feel bad, and so too, we do not want to continue those things we have learned as children and young adults that make us feel bad. We want to compensate for those things that hurt us, we want to let go of those regrets we feel for what we did wrong, and begin again in love. Channing did not want to live in hell. He did not want to be the punishing father. But he also felt pain at wrongdoing, as when he lived in the south, and was tormented to witness slavery, and finally after some soul searching and encouragement from Lydia Maria Child, spoke out against it.
Last year, Ian McEwan’s novel Atonement was brought to life on film. Atonement is the story of a thirteen year old girl Briony Tallis, who longs to be a writer. She is part of a wealthy family who have all the privileges of an upper class English family living between the two World Wars. Briony witnesses her older sister Cecilia shed her clothes in a fountain at their estate, while Robbie Turner, the well educated son of their housekeeper is looking on. It is expected that Robbie will become a doctor, and move beyond the confines of his class background. In fact there is a heated passion between Cecilia and Robbie that is interrupted by Briony who mistakenly believes he is attacking her sister. She, too carries a crush for him, but lets her imagination run wild after another young woman, Lola, is raped nearby. She wrongly accuses Robbie of the attack. Despite the love between Cecilia and Robbie, he is arrested. Briony falsely testifies against him, and he is sent to prison. The only way he can be paroled from this wrongful conviction is to join the army. All three lives, Robbie, Cecilia and Briony’s, are sent into chaos by this terrible act. He endures the terrible evacuation of Dunkirk. Briony tries to find forgiveness for her childhood misdeed. What is most telling is her effort with her own life to find a path to atonement.
In the reading we see that Briony views her training and performing of nursing work as a form of atonement. She realizes she is responsible for having sent Robbie off to war, and gives up her own chance for university. She throws herself into this work to attempt to make up for her misdeed. This is severe punishment of self, long hours, bed pans, and dying soldiers, for what she did. In effect there are two endings to this novel. In one Briony meets up with Cecilia, who has given up on her family for their failure to believe in Robbie’s innocence.
Robbie, on leave from the army, is present,and after much agonizing Briony tells them that she will try to atone for what she did, and promises to begin the legal procedures needed to prove Robbie’s innocence. In the other ending we learn that Briony is the author of the preceding sections of the book, and the truth is that Robbie died at Dunkirk, and Cecilia died in a bombing during the London blitz, and they never reunited. We can be too late. Can Briony really atone for the terrible crime she committed? While she is haunted by all that she did not admit or say, she ends her part of the novel with Cecilia and Robbie still living -happy together "still alive, still in love" and present for her birthday a half century after the war. At long last in our lives we long to be forgiven, we long to be reconciled with those parts of our lives for which we feel some regret or remorse. How could we rewrite our own story?
What Atonement teaches us is that we are haunted for years, even lifetimes by those parts of our lives where we committed misdeeds, or where we felt that we were not given what we needed to be renewed in love. And most of us do try to make amends for those parts of our lives that were lies or misdeeds, or that left us feeling empty. If we try to remake or change the person who does not give us what we need, we often end up frustrated. Then we must accept them for who they are or for what they can give us and forgive for what they cannot. We then compensate by finding what we truly need. We do make up, but it is hard to do. Briony can’t tell Lola that her marriage to her rapist is wrong. And what if she never did meet up with Cecilia and Robbie? Long ago William Ellery Channing learned that he had to live a faith that was honest in action, as well as in words. We must renew our misdeeds in love. Even though she never does it, Briony is haunted by how she can makes amends for what she did. Can we vow never to do it again? Can we live better lives? We must compensate for our pain with news ways of trying to live in the world - with affection, with involvement, with responsibility for what we say we mean to do. We live our lives looking to be accepted and forgiven, but we are also like Briony in that we want to act to achieve that reconciliation. And this religious day is about that acting. We do not want to be haunted like she was. We want to live in balance for those things we regret. We want to feel that the way we have lived was with the deepest convictions and the most integrity we were capable of. Forgiveness means remembering that everyone sometimes makes bad choices. We are human, we are not perfect. We have all tried to make amends with the lives we live now; with the changes we have made. We all know, as Emerson says that life brings death and loss, and so, too it brings bad choices, regrettable decisions. But as most of us also know, these events have also performed revolutions in our lives. These are opportunities to compensate, to realize that we can begin to form ourselves again in love. And when we fail or fall short, we will know that it has been enough because we tried to compensate, we tried to balance our past and the regrets or shortcomings we feel, with the love we are capable of expressing to each other right now.
Closing words from Jack Kornfield
Forgiveness honors the heart's greatest dignity.
Whenever we are lost, it brings us back to the ground of love.
With forgiveness we become unwilling to attack or wish harm to one another.
Whenever we forgive, in small ways at home, or in great ways between nations,
we free ourselves from the past. -