First Parish of Watertown

“Mechanical Me” by Mark W. Harris

October 25, 2009 –First Parish of Watertown, MA

Call to Worship – from Edward Hays (adapted)

O sacred season of autumn, be my teacher,
For I wish to learn the virtue of contentment.
As I gaze upon your full colored beauty,
Help me to rest in your amber riches.

You are the season of retirement,
Of full barns and harvested fields.
The cycle of growth has ceased,
And the busy work of giving life
Is now completed.
I sense in you no regrets; you’ve lived a full life.

I live in a society that is ever restless.
Always eager for more mountains to climb,
Seeking happiness through more and more possessions. . .
I am seldom at peace with what I have.
Teach me to take stock of what I have given and received,
May I know that it is enough,
That my striving can cease in the abundance of the world’s gifts.
May I know the contentment that allows my energy to come to full flower, that I use both what is close at hand, and less taxing on the resources of earth.

As you, O Autumn, take pleasure in your great bounty,
Let me also take delight in the abundance of the simple things in life, and find contentment in this autumn day.

Reading - “Masks” by Lynn Ungar

What will you wear for Halloween?
The trees are changing faces, and the
Rough chins of chestnut burrs
grimace and break to show their
sleek brown centers. The hills
have lost their mask of green and grain,
settled into a firmer geometry
of uncolored line and curve.

Which face will you say is true –
the luminous trees or the branches underneath?
The green husks of walnuts, the shell within,
or the nut curled intimately inside,
sheltered like a brain within its casing?

Be careful with what you know,
with what you think you see.
Moment by moment faces shift,
masks uplift and fall again, repainted
to a different scene. It means
the cynics say, there is no truth,
no constant to give order to the great equation


Meanwhile, the trees, leaf by leaf,
Are telling stories inevitably true:
Green. Gold. Vermillion. Brown.
The lace of veins remaining
as each cell returns to soil.

Sermon

Andrea’s father used to refer to himself as a car. That could lead to some major role confusion. In any case, he used to refer to the shower as the car wash, where he would be cleansed of all the grease and grime that accumulated on his body from being on the road. Then he talked about the hospital as the body shop where he would go in order to be repaired when he broke down.. When he went to the doctor for a checkup, yes, you guessed it, it became a tune up for his body, the machine. I have known other men who used this same metaphor. Some of the ones I have known would eat and drink whatever they wanted, avoid exercise and sleep, and expect they would stay healthy forever, and if they did become sick, the assumption was the doctor could repair this machine they inhabited. Few of them took care of the gift they had been given very well. Rather than a temple, they treated their body more like a engine that could be worked ceaselessly until it broke down, and then they assumed any malfunction or broken part could be fixed.

Now we are used to hip replacements and mechanical hearts and the like. After I had my ankle repaired in the wake of being hit by the ocean wave many years ago, Andrea used to refer to it as my bionic ankle. This has been a recurring theme in the movies and literature. Those of us who were fans of Star Wars were relieved and grateful that Darth Vader still contained an inch of humanity in his otherwise mechanical body, and was able to feel his love for his son Luke, and destroy the evil emperor. Recently my boys wanted us to take them to see the movie “9,” which it turns out is a grim little picture about nine robots created from the soul of a scientist, who had helped create the ultimate destructive device that had brought on Armageddon. These 9 are the remnants of human compassion that remains on earth. Many of you have probably seen “Wall-E,” a wonderful film about a little robot who collects garbage in a waste covered earth that looks like Armageddon as a result of mass consumerism. Wall-E falls in love with another robot named Eve, and eventually brings a little green back to a world that has been completely standardized and mechanized, as we see people with serious physical neglect of their bodies; there is no muscle left, and they plainly suffer from terrible bone loss. Wall-E follows Eve into outer space on an adventure that transforms the future.

Most of us who are in this sanctuary today know that we have to transform the future, too. Our Green Sanctuary program has the intent of educating us about the dangers of global warming, but also leading us into news ways of living in harmony with the earth. It is not always easy to change our ways of doing things in our daily lives. Years ago I used paper towels for every conceivable household chore, always dried my clothes in a dryer, and left on every light in the house. I grew up in a house where the thermostat was always set at 72 degrees. Slowly I began to use rags for cleanups, turn out lights in my house, and bought a clothes line for the parsonage. But it is easy to fall back into old ways. Gathering a wet wash, carrying it outside and hanging it requires perseverance and commitment. I remember my mother trying to cope with frozen sheets in winter. We need to remind ourselves constantly that the use of less fossil fuels and less electricity will help reduce our carbon footprint, and ensure a future for our children. It is a big task. There are things we can change about the ways we consume, and the ways we live.

What inspired this topic today cuts at the heart of my faith because it emanated from the denominational forms that our student minister has to fill out to prove his worthiness to the UUA ministerial fellowship committee. It is a lot of little boxes that need to be filled in. He needed an outlined plan to predict how he would spend every hour of the week, what he would do in those hours, and the resources he would use to learn all that he needed to learn so that he could then check off the little box that he was now an accomplished minister. It made ministry, that profession that in theory should be built upon relationships between people, and how they together can create a more humane, loving world where people take care of each other, into a defined set of knowable facts that the student could glean from the minister and congregation, his informational resources. It was all very bureaucratized and standardized, while at the same time the denomination was calling for multicultural diversity and more spiritual disciplines, things that you would think would make us reach out to others more. I felt there was a disconnect between making a minister proving his worth by fulfilling a systematic arrangement of defined knowledge with the desire for spiritual depth. The systemic void was that the exacting standards and forms lacked any heart. It was the mechanical minister come to life.

The mechanical me was right out of the Wizard of Oz’s Tin Woodman. You may remember from the movie, that he was a former human who the wicked witch had cast a spell upon, and made into a machine. He was the juxtaposition to the scarecrow who needed a brain. The tin man needed a heart. He also needed constant oiling in order to keep his parts in working order. His friends had to take care of him or he would rust. One of the best parts of the film for me is when he is saying goodbye to Dorothy, and she says, Oh, don't cry! You'll rust so dreadfully. Here's your oil can. He responds: “Now I know I've got a heart, 'cause it's breaking.” His breaking heart, of course, comes from the love he feels for Dorothy, not from any mechanical clock that counts the ticking in his chest.

My concern that came from those ministerial forms is that current obsession with the mechanization of truth with measured results leaves us with no heart, or actual relationships become secondary. You may remember that in the movement known as the Enlightenment, thinkers such as Benjamin Franklin envisioned a God who was like a machine. In fact, he was a clock maker who set the world in motion, and then left it to run on its own. Thinking of life as mechanical has been a theme throughout our history, but it has also been a target of our fears. Historian Jill Lepore makes this relevant in a recent issue of the New Yorker, where she writes about scientific management, which became another name for efficiency in the last century. She says it started as a way to improve the ways in which we work, but it has somehow become a way of life for us. If we have everything organized and standardized and placed into the boxes of correct information, then everything will function like clock work, and we will see results. We must see results. In our time starved culture, Lepore suggests that many of us have made ourselves into these managed machines. We manage our children’s lives with schedules, and we give them standardized tests to prove that they meet the correct educational standards. We are perfectly scheduled to multitask and waste no motions in proving our effectiveness as efficient human beings. The sad thing about all this efficiency is in that the last two decades of the 20th century we added a whole extra month’s time of work. We are exhausted from our competitiveness. We are exhausted from our over scheduled, over worked lives. We are the machine whose relationships suffer, and we end up feeling like we have no heart.

Exhaust might be the word that characterizes this dilemma. We are exhausted because in the rhythms of life we give ourselves no chance to rest from our labors. Going back to hanging out clothes to dry might help with this process because we would not always throw them into the efficient little machine, but would green up our laundry, and perhaps even enlist a child or spouse to help us, and have a conversation in the midst of it all. The standard forms assume that there is this private little cachet of knowledge, and if Duffy meets all those standards then he will become just the right kind of minister. Yet congregations vary, needs vary, people are multicultural, and will be increasingly so. So wouldn’t we want less boxes, and more relationships to fit the variety of needs we have? Our Unitarian Universalist faith is built on the belief that trying to convey one universal truth that can be applied to everyone is erroneous. This is why the exclusive nature of Christianity was left behind with other dogmas, so that we could see that true faith emanates from how we treat one another, and what kind of loving communities we create in our midst.

Truth, as Parker Palmer says, is what happens between us, and not merely from what I convey to you. It is a conversation. We must be alarmed that all of the machines operated by us have polluted the world. It is exhaust that causes ecological dread. We need new applications of machines to help us save the world from ecological disaster, but we also have to be cautious that we are not literally buying into a green consumerism. We also need to remember that we are not machines that need to be driven harder and faster so that we are exhausted. We have not been ecological with ourselves. I cannot convey to Duffy the truth about ministry so he can check it off in the box. Ministry and church are not results driven. He will find the truth about his ministry and ours in dialogue with, in what kind of person he is in relationship with others. Our climate initiative is not meant for you to prove how green you are in competition with others. We all must do the best we can, not in isolation, but in a dialogue of support and helpfulness. How can we together make a difference? Now is the time for us to take time to walk more, hang out clothes more, garden more, and come back to heal the earth. Now is also the time to walk more, hang out clothes more, and garden more with each other that we might heal ourselves.

Closing Words – from Wendell Berry
Within the circles of our lives
We dance the circle of the years,
the circle of the seasons
within the circles of the years,
the cycles of the moon
within the circles of the seasons,
the circles of our reasons
within the cycles of the moon.

Again, again we come and go,
changed, changing. Hands
join, unjoin in love and fear,
grief and joy. The circles turn,
each giving into each, into all.
Only music keeps us here,

Each by all the others held.
In the hold of hands and eyes
We turn in pairs, that joining
joining each to all again.

And then we turn aside, alone,
out of the sunlight gone
into the darker circles of return.

“You Gave Me to Myself” – A Sermon on Margaret Fuller

October 18, 2009 – First Parish of Watertown, MA


Call to Worship – from Margaret Fuller

I stand in the sunny noon of life . . . Every spot is seen, every chasm revealed. Climbing the dusty hill, some fair effigies that once stood for symbols of human destiny have been broken; those I still have with me show defects in this broad light. Yet enough is left, even by experience, to point distinctly to the glories of that destiny; faint but not to be mistaken streaks of the future day. I can say with the bard, Though many have suffered shipwreck, still beat noble hearts. Always the soul says to us all, cherish your best hopes as a faith, and abide by them in action. (p. 190 in Miller)

Sermon

“The true self, [is] that particular emanation from God which was made to correspond with that which we are, to teach it, to learn from it, to torture it, to enchant it, to deepen and to at last satisfy our wants. . . We love most that which by working most powerfully on our peculiar nature awakens most deeply and constantly in us the idea of beauty. Where we have once seen clearly what is fit for us, if only a glance of the eye we cannot forget it, nor can any change in the form where we have seen it deceive us. We know that it will appear again and clothe the scene with new and greater beauty.” Letter to Emerson, 1841 (p. 109 in Miller anthology)


Recently in the Sunday newspaper there was an interview with some celebrity, and he was asked if he could travel in time, what historical figure would he most like to meet. This can be a fun game where we imagine actually meeting a person who has influenced us because reading their biography inspired us, or they played a key role in history. So ask yourself, what famous person, living or dead, would you most like to meet or have dinner with? People usually say someone like Jesus or Abraham Lincoln. But what would you really say to them? I think I would be tongue tied. “So Jesus, did Judas really betray you or was it a plot?” OR “Hey, Abe, was your marriage with Mary Todd really that bad?” In truth, it is awkward to think about this kind of meeting actually happening. Do we say thanks for all you did? The lists of people are endless, but I am willing to bet that few people, especially men, would pick Margaret Fuller. First, few of us have ever heard of her. And, among those who have, we might be intrigued by her vast intellect, but put off by her reputed arrogance. We think of her saying that she had “seen all the people worth seeing in America, and was satisfied that there was no intellect comparable to her own.” The thing is, she was right. And that very fact, made men cower then, and most would probably still do so today.

Perhaps most fearful of all is that Margaret Fuller challenges us. “Give me truth,” she wrote, “Cheat me by no illusion.” She challenges us to embrace the full beauty of our own selves, and not be subject to society’s conventions. She challenges us to embrace male and female not only as equals in society, but in our own soul, so that we would know the psychic balance of head and heart. And finally she challenges us to be adventurers – just as she went West, to see how the new America was developing, then lived in the city to witness poverty and class struggle, and finally, to go to foreign lands and drink in the culture of these distant worlds with their ideas of change and revolution, and then live them out with passion and action. And after failure, to still believe that we can “begin the world anew.”

We all know that building self-esteem is a key to helping children find happiness and success in life. We all like to be appreciated for our efforts, and so it buoys us up to hear “you did a great job.” While we sometimes feel that liberal parents may overdo this by heaping praise on every piece of artwork the child produces, this was hardly the case with Margaret Fuller. Her father, who for many years was a US Representative in Congress, gave her little emotional encouragement, except to push intellectual rigor and classical training upon her. On her fourth birthday, her father wrote to her mother telling his wife to instruct her “To excel in all things should be your constant aim.” Later he said mediocrity was not acceptable, but worse was the under girding philosophy he had held since his precocious child’s birth. “I love her if she . . . learns to read.” Despite these pressures, Fuller took his philosophy to heart and made learning her most important goal in life. As a result she became a true American genius, drawing partly upon her Unitarian faith that God should quicken in her the diligence to acquire knowledge, because learning would allow for personal improvement in every way.

Fuller’s father was something like that professor or coach that many of us had who drove us to work constantly on our skills. This pressure to achieve led in Fuller’s case to a lifetime of migraine headaches. Her father gave little encouragement, and corrected her all the time, pushing her to do better and know more. I can hear those competitive voices in my ear, “Come on, one more lap, run harder.” OR “Do that problem, read another book.” And so pleasing her father, became something of an obsession. This was how he expressed his love for her, and in many ways she took it to heart. Few had minds that were cultivated as deeply and broadly as hers, especially because as a girl, her formal education was severely limited. The result of these rigors was a strong sense of her own capabilities and intellectual attainments. As a child, she read all the literature of Europe - Ovid, Cervantes and Shakespeare; she was talking pure mathematics with her father at the age of 12, and later she studied German in order to write a biography of Goethe. Despite a reputation of being a “prodigy of talent and accomplishment,” something else was surfacing in Margaret’s life as she mixed in Boston’s Unitarian circles. She had been trained as a boy, and soon learned that a woman’s world in the 1820’s was given much to “fashion and frivolity.” Others made fun of her awkward manners and pedantic talk, and she responded with sarcasm, but also had a deeper realization that fierce independence, and a probing mind were unbecoming to a young lady.

“I would have Woman lay aside all thought, such as she habitually cherishes, of being taught and led by men. I would have her, like the Indian girl, dedicate herself to the Sun, the Sun of Truth, and go nowhere if his beams did not make clear the path. I would have her free from compromise, from complaisance, from helplessness, because I would have her good enough and strong enough to love one and all beings, from the fullness, not the poverty of being.” From Woman in the Nineteenth Century (p. 175 in anthology)

I think we sometimes forget how things used to be. Yet sometimes if I listen I can still recall the attitude of my father’s generation towards women. A voice would bellow from the upstairs bedroom, “Marie, where are my socks?” “Look up this phone number for me.” There was a kind of game of helplessness to find even the most mundane of items, as if he was not capable of doing it himself. He acted as though he were dependent upon her to do these things for him, but he was directing the action, and she was expected to be there to answer to his beck and call. The image of my father yelling for my mother’s assistance reminds me of a joke I heard about Japan, and how there would be a revolution in social relations there, if only one day, all the wives would simply refuse to fetch their husband’s underwear for them. One act would produce a nation of naked men with nowhere to go.

A generation ago many women learned that they were created to serve men. They were not meant to compete – girls were not feminine if they were aggressive or pushy. They were not meant to be smart – girls did not go into certain professions. They were not meant to be athletic – girls were delicate and easily bruised. They were not meant to act independently – girls could not make rational decisions. They were not meant to have independent adventures – girls needed to be protected. Still today we know that the ERA was not passed, and it remains a sexist world where fashion and frivolity are often the expected feminine expectation, and domestic violence is still pervasive. Yet think how far we have come. The liberation began with Margaret Fuller, Anthony, Stanton and the others.

After teaching with Bronson Alcott, Fuller first achieved notoriety with the Transcendentalist circle through her Conversation groups. These gatherings of women were important because they contributed to the growth of organized feminism, and showed women a way to intellectual autonomy and emancipation. What was so revolutionary about these conversations was that culture became more than a means of earning wealth or status. When Fuller engaged women in conversation on arts and mythology, it was affirmed for perhaps the first time, that women are capable of creating meaning through concepts and symbols. One of her participants said: “I found myself in a new world of thought; a flood of light irradiated all that I had seen in nature, observed in life, read in books. Whatever she spoke of revealed a hidden meaning, and everything seemed to be put into true relation. Perhaps I could best express it by saying that I was no longer the limitation of myself, but I felt the whole wealth of the universe was open to me.”

Fuller was able to translate that strong sense of intellectual capability and grounding and give it to other women, making it possible for them to experience some measure of the possibility of equality with men. Women could think and reason, and not just be fashionable or flirtatious or only domestic or familial. She somehow transferred to these groups of women a sense of their own power to be true to themselves, so that they did not cover the truth about their feelings or abilities with social conventions of inferiority or helplessness. Sarah Clarke, said that Fuller’s eyes pierced through your disguises. You simply could not fake it with her, because of an unusual “truth speaking power.” Clarke said Fuller spoke “searching words, and told you startling truths [and] though she broke down your little shams and defenses, you felt exhilarated.”

While Fuller pointed to a pathway of liberation for many women with her brilliant ability to engage in conversation, she also paid the price by being a powerful, smart woman. Men were afraid of her, or disliked her. Truth speaking candor like hers was meant, to be corseted tight by society’s conventions. Even Emerson with whom she had an extended conversation about love and friendship was afraid of their budding relationship. She wrote, “I have no wish which is not dictated by a feeling of truth. . . Did you not ask for a “foe” in your friend? Did you not ask for a “large formidable nature?” By 1845 the complete erudition of her feminist philosophy found the light of day in a book called, Woman in the Nineteenth Century. For some the challenge was too much. She went too far.

“From a very early age I have felt that I was not born to the common womanly lot. I knew I should never find a being who could keep the key of my character; that there would be none on whom I could always lean, from whom I could always learn; that I should be a pilgrim and sojourner on earth, and that the birds and foxes would be surer of a place to lay the head than I. You understand me, of course; such being can only find their homes in hearts. All material luxuries, all arrangements of society, are mere conveniences to them.” From a letter quoted in her Memoirs (p. 29 in Anthology)

Margaret Fuller felt like an alien in public roles, because up until her day public roles were male roles. She wrote that she loved being a woman, but found it “too straitly bound to give me scope.” And so she struggled with continuing conflicts over gender identity questions. She gave voice to this by saying that she had a “man’s ambition with a woman’s heart.” She went back and forth between head and heart, home and adventure. From home she had been able to affirm her true capabilities, and not succumb to society’s conventions. She had taken that liberating, truth telling self, and challenged others to embrace it both in social relations and in print, and finally she followed her heart to embrace a larger vision of transforming society, and there she also discovered a romantic adventure that brought love, marriage and a child into her life, only to end tragically in a ship crash off Fire Island, New York, and death at the age of 40,

Her biographer talks about her continuing ability to tap into an infinite ocean of meaning and value in the life of the mind. It continually renewed and refreshed her. She would go anywhere and push herself to engage with all kinds of people in order to fulfill this quest to find spiritual wholeness. Her final ten years of life began when she became the editor of the Transcendentalist journal, The Dial. Then she settled in New York, where she became the first female book editor of the New York Tribune. Finally she became a foreign correspondent for the paper, and immersed herself in the revolution in Italy. Here she fell in love with Giovanni Ossoli, and gave birth to a son.

The bodies of Margaret Fuller, and her husband were never recovered after the shipwreck of 1850. The remains of her little boy lie in a Fuller plot in Mt. Auburn Cemetery in Cambridge. If you visit the cemetery the graves stand close together, and you approach Margaret’s monument from the path by passing Buckminster Fuller of Geodesic dome fame, and then her parents, the intellectual taskmaster father, and her mother, also named Margaret, who left her daughter always seeking more maternal attachments. The white marble looks as though it could crumble easily, but Margaret’s image is quite discernible. We see the physical visage that she was embarrassed by, the long neck, and even the half-shut eyelids. Knowing the details of her life, I feel some degree of sadness that she endured such trials of parental pressure, sexual conflicts, scorn of society and men who were threatened by her brilliance, her independence, and her courage to institute change. Yet I can also see this intense woman finding much food for the mind and soul in the experiences she encounters. The vast expansive possibilities of the West coupled with deprivations against Native Americans, the class struggles in New York revealing the effects of capitalism, the intellectual understanding of a new national romantic literature that others would not grasp for another half century, and finally the willingness to engage personally in the fight for freedom and equality in the midst of revolution. And then the love she finds there.

Some years ago when I was a student chaplain during my time in seminary, I lived for a summer in the hospital with a Carmelite priest, who was assigned the task of writing my biography as part of our group work. It is always a little embarrassing when someone gathers masses of personal data about you, writes it up, and then shares it with others. He met me after I had spent my first year of living in Berkeley, California, where my seminary is located. I don’t remember much of what he said about me except that he thought it was courageous of me to have picked up everything and moved to California to pursue my call to the ministry. I didn’t think of it as courageous, because for me, it was what I need to do to fulfill the destiny I had laid out for myself. Now this may seem like an odd way to use the word destiny, because we generally hear it as a word which means that each of us has a path that is predetermined by God, and we have no free will to stop it from happening. I know I cringe when I hear people say that something was meant to be. Most Unitarian Universalists I know do not believe in some form of predestination, as we ascribe destiny or fate to something we work out in response to the circumstances we are given, and the opportunities we capitalize on to make a vision of a good life a reality.

To the priest, courage might have meant leaving home, or having no ties to any family or familiar surroundings, to start a new adventure in a strange place where there are no markers or conventions to corset your development. Margaret Fuller was willing to have these new experiences that challenged the world she knew because it meant her mind would be challenged anew, and she could take a new step on a continuing spiritual journey. We can choose to embrace the destiny that the deeper life of the heart and mind call us to. Are you continuing on that spiritual and intellectual adventure even as work or family or inertia pull at your time and energy? It is not easy. But this is why Margaret Fuller both fascinates me, and scares me - she fully embraced that adventure. She was willing to challenge conventional experiences, and try new ways of learning and relating. She knew some of those adventures would bring difficult struggle, but she also believed that in the end, they would bring love. Let us find the deepest parts of ourselves, to be truth tellers and adventurers of the soul, and go forth to begin the world anew.

Closing Words - from Margaret Fuller, in a letter to her father,

“Your reluctance to go “among strangers” cannot too soon be overcome; & the way to overcome it, is not to remain at home, but to go among them and resolve to deserve & obtain the love & esteem of those, who have never before known you. With them you have a fair opportunity to begin the world anew. . . (p. 75 in Capper, Vol I)

Imagine Standing in Another’s Shoes

Sermon by Duffy Peet, Intern Minister

Given at First Parish of Watertown on 10-11-09

The stimulus for this sermon and today’s service originated from my participation in the vigil and reinstallation ceremony surrounding the burning of the church’s rainbow flag in July. The burning of the flag triggered an array of powerful feelings for me. My initial reaction upon getting the news was indignation. The burning of the flag was clearly a hostile and unjustifiable action. It posed a threat to the physical structure of the church, but more importantly, it sent a powerful message of threat to those in the community who are Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual, and Transgender. Many people in those communities have adopted the rainbow flag as a symbol of hope and a symbol of identity. With its bright and numerous colors all residing beautifully together, the rainbow flag represents the dream that people can come to respect and honor diversity in the human community. The burning of the flag demonstrated that there is still significant work yet to do before that dream is realized.


A number of you weren’t able to attend the vigil and the reinstallation ceremony. Others of you were there and experienced first hand some of what I am about to say. There was a significant gathering of people. Some estimates claimed there were 300 gathered along the streets of Watertown square. All of those gathered were willing to publicly express their support for what the rainbow flag has come to represent and for those who felt the burning of the flag was an attack on who they are or what they believe. As people sped by in their cars many of them honked their horns, waved, smiled or gave the thumbs up gesture to indicate they supported our reason for being there. I felt heartened by what was happening around me. I began thinking about how all of this would impact me if I was Gay; if I had felt personally threatened or attacked by the burning of the flag. The situation had opened wide my “identify with others” programming.
I use the word “programming” because of some of my prior training as a psychotherapist and because I recognize now how powerful the tendency to identify with others is for me. From as far back as I can remember, my mother was conveying to me, in no uncertain terms, the importance of thinking about others, the importance of considering how others might feel. Without knowing it, she was teaching me the essence of our second UU principle, “to affirm and promote justice, equity, and compassion in human relations.” At her insistence, I began imagining what it would be like to be in someone else’s position or, as the old saying goes, to be in someone else’s shoes. Practicing such an approach can be quite frustrating to a young child who would prefer that the world revolve around their wants and needs. I can tell you that there were many times I really didn’t want to consider others’ wants, needs or feelings. But while thinking of others can be difficult at times, learning to approach the world in such a way has its benefits. Growing up with three sisters, it was important for me to learn to realize what was important to them. If I hadn’t learned how to imagine myself in someone else’s position, the squabbles between my sisters and I would have likely become major battles in a long grueling war for power or control. My guess is I would have come out the loser. I can now recognize what an important lesson and gift my mother shared by helping me learn such a valuable approach to dealing with people and situations.


So on July 25th, as I was participating in the vigil and the reinstallation, I was actively imagining how others might feel. How might the burning of the flag feel to a person who is gay, lesbian, bisexual, or transgender? How might the support that was being expressed feel to people who have been oppressed in our culture for having a sexual preference or a sense of sexual identity considered “out of the norm” by many in our culture. I was left with feelings of acceptance, belonging, encouragement, and hope. I also imagined being in the position of a person who believes the morals of this country are being corrupted by people like myself who support equal rights to the institution of marriage. I realized that such a person might feel angry and frustrated. These were the same feelings I experienced when I was young and my mother would have me consider how someone else might feel. Often it would end up that I wouldn’t get what I wanted. What I know now is that as a child I felt angry as a way of dealing with my fear that I would somehow lose out on what I thought was important. After reflecting on my participation in the vigil I realized that I was carrying on the teaching role that my mother had with me. I was providing others the opportunity to imagine how someone different than themselves might feel. The realization gave me an even deeper sense of the importance of what was occurring. Every person who was there that afternoon and evening was not only offering support and encouragement to those who have been oppressed and threatened; they were also acting as teachers to those who could benefit from imagining being in another person’s position. Being part of the gathering was an uplifting experience for me and I believe it was for many others as well. I began walking home feeling good about what I had been a part of and looking forward to my upcoming internship here at First Parish of Watertown.


Walking home along Main Street through Watertown Square I saw a rock that I hadn’t paid any attention to before. The rock had a plaque on it and I began reading it. The top line stated “Columbus Delta” and under that was written “He Gained a World. He gave that world its greatest lesson. On! Sail On!” The inscription went on to indicate that the area had been dedicated on October 12th, 1940 by the Watertown Town Council. It seemed to me that the area was honoring Christopher Columbus and what he did by sailing to this country and opening it up to the developments that have ensued. Such an honoring of Columbus is not unusual. Every year there is a National holiday that celebrates and honors Columbus. Many people get a paid day off from work. When I was in elementary school I learned that Columbus discovered America. Certainly that would be a reason to honor him. Without his discovery, I wouldn’t be here. But that evening walking home, with my “identify with others” programming on high gear, my reaction to that inscription was unusual. As I read the inscription I imagined how I would feel if I was Native American; if I was an ancestor of one of the indigenous people who were here when Columbus supposedly “discovered” America. The inscription on the rock took on a completely new meaning for me. What it said no longer seemed ordinary or even acceptable. Instead, what was written felt like an insult at the least. In fact, it seemed that the rock, the inscription, and the area around them were an attack or at least posed the threat of attack. Honoring Columbus and claiming that he “discovered” America or that he “gave the world its greatest lesson” would have a very different meaning to a person with Native American heritage than it would to someone like myself whose ancestors came as one of the waves of immigrants who arrived later. Because of my mother’s skillful teaching and my own experiences following the spiritual traditions of the Sioux my reaction to what was written was powerful and disturbing. As I continued walking home my thoughts and feelings were very different than they had been just a few minutes earlier. I began thinking about my first sermon here at First Parish on the Sunday before Columbus Day. I realized that I had just been presented with what I wanted to share with you. I hope this will lead to conversations between us in the future.


The overall topic is not unusual; how do we learn to consider others when making decisions or taking actions? Most of us likely agree that considering others is an important and beneficial activity. When considering others involves recognizing and supporting a perspective that is significantly different than the dominant view however, resistance can be expected. We can clearly see this in some of the backlash that has occurred regarding who has the right to marry. In spite of such resistance, it is imperative for those of us who abide by the fourth UU principle that sets “the goal of world community with peace, liberty and justice for all” to work for changes that will stop oppression that has been institutionalized in so many ways. By becoming a welcoming congregation and by publicly expressing support for the equality of marriage rights, First Parish of Watertown is living out the principles our faith professes. For some of us this has meant that we had to reach out to people in the gay, lesbian, transgender and bisexual community and to consider how they might experience life. We had to become willing to imagine how they might feel about laws and practices in our society that may not impact our lives in ways that seem important or even significant.


I would propose that for many of us neither the inscription on the rock nor the setting aside of a National holiday honoring Christopher Columbus is highly significant in our life. For most of my life, Columbus Day was just one of those special days when I could get paid for not going to work or one of those inconvenient times when the bank was closed when I wanted it to be open. For me, the positive aspects of Columbus Day generally far outweighed the negative. If I were of Native American descent, however, I don’t believe that would be the case. Instead, every Columbus Day would be another reminder that the person who opened the door for the destruction of my culture, the desecration of my people’s sacred sites, the enslavement and slaughter of my ancestors, and the pillaging of the land I call home was being held up as a hero. To a person of Native American ancestry, the message that such a holiday conveys would be at the least one of disinterest or disrespect on one hand or even of threat and intimidation on the other. So I ask you, if you were a Native American would you think that Columbus “gave the world its greatest lesson?” If so, what was the lesson? Maybe the lesson is what I was told in one of my recent Christian History courses. “History is written by the victors.” My guess is that many in the Native American community might find a way to redefine the last line of the inscription. “On! Sail On!” They might wish that Columbus had sailed on recognizing that he hadn’t found the orient. He didn’t realize at the time that his goal of finding the orient by sailing west instead of east had led him to a land that was as yet unknown to the people of the world where he came from. He also had no way of knowing what his action would lead to. Some of what he hoped for he attained. Initially he gained fame and fortune as he returned to Spain. When the riches he had promised for the King and Queen didn’t materialize however, his status and titles of “admiral of the ocean seas” and “governor of all lands he discovered” were rescinded. Instead of being famous, he became infamous and was actually returned to Spain in chains during his third trip to this continent. I wasn’t taught in school that during the time he was governor of Hispaniola, an island southeast of present-day Cuba, many of the indigenous people there were killed or taken into slavery by those who had come along with Columbus from the European continent. Infamous, I believe, is how Columbus may still be perceived by many in the Native American community.


As I mentioned earlier, there was a long period of time when it was taught that Columbus had discovered America. I remember reading that in my text books in school. Possibly some of you read that as well. At the time I was learning this I never considered questioning the illogic of such claim. How could someone discover a place when there were already people living there? Later research concluded that sailors from northeastern Europe had arrived on the continent considerably earlier than Columbus. The claim of Columbus having discovered America was proven false but there was no significant movement to reconsider his stature in the eyes of the general American public. It seemed that there was an inability or an unwillingness to give the credit for having discovered the continent to those who rightfully deserved it, the ancestors of the people who Columbus found when he arrived here the first time. How is it that, as a culture, we have such difficulty giving rightful credit and honor to these people? Their journey to arrive here must have been arduous. If they hadn’t been here to provide food and support to the first settlers from Europe who knows whether the earliest European immigrants would have even survived. To address the injustice that Columbus Day signifies and to recognize the importance of the Native peoples there is a movement growing in this country to change the focus and name of the day to Indigenous People’s Day. In a recent email I received from Rev. Kim Wilson, she noted that UUA offices will be closed on Monday in honor of Indigenous People’s Day. The national offices of our denomination are doing their part to encourage a change in our national consciousness. Acknowledging the importance of the indigenous peoples could lead us to consider the ways in which our beliefs and actions may go against our espoused values and laws.

Let me offer an example here that most people are not aware of.
Most of you are familiar with the First Amendment of the Bill of Rights that states, “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.” It is because of this amendment that we as Unitarian Universalists are able to worship together here today. It has been a long, and at times, hard road for our faith to gain acceptance and respect as our predecessors challenged the commonly held beliefs of the dominant religious movements of the past. I would guess Mark has given a variety of sermons on some of our history. What most of you likely aren’t aware of is that there was a significant period of time when members of Native American tribes in this country could not legally practice aspects of their religious traditions. It was not until the Indian Religious Freedom Act was passed in 1978 that Native Americans were guaranteed such freedom. I want to share with you some of the text of this Act.

“Whereas the lack of a clear, comprehensive, and consistent Federal policy has often resulted in the abridgment of religious freedom for traditional American Indians;

Whereas traditional American Indian ceremonies have been intruded upon, interfered with, and in a few instances banned;

Now, therefore, be it Resolved by the Senate and the House of Representatives of the United States of American in Congress Assembled, That henceforth it shall be the policy of the United States to protect and preserve for American Indians their inherent right of freedom to believe, express, and exercise the traditional religions of the American Indian, Eskimo, Aleut, and Native Hawaiians, including but not limited to access to sites, use and possession of sacred objects, and the freedom to worship through ceremonials and traditional rites.”

In this Act, the Federal Government has taken a step to acknowledge its errors and abuses of the Native Peoples of this country. What is interesting to me, however, is that so few people are knowledgeable of what the Native American people have endured and often continue to endure. In 1983 when Sioux elders invited me to take part in Purification Lodge ceremonies and then assisted me in doing my first Vision Quest, I had no idea that these practices had only been considered legal for five years. I still feel humbled to know that these elders were willing to allow me, a member of the dominant white culture, to take part in the sacred ceremonies that their people had been persecuted for practicing. I have come to learn that even many of my professors at Andover Newton Theological School were unfamiliar with the Act I just shared with you. These professors clearly have a strong interest and investment in religion, religious freedom and religious history. In spite of this, most were unaware that for many years, the indigenous people of the land had not been allowed the freedom to practice their chosen religion.
So what does all of this have to do with us here at First Parish of Watertown? I am not aware of anyone in the congregation who has Native ancestry. I don’t know of anyone here who has been prevented from freely practicing their religious traditions. What I do know is that all of us have been limited in our ability to recognize the plight of others who have not been able to enjoy the freedoms or privileges that we have. I also know that it takes a great deal in order to change systems of oppression. It takes people who are willing to imagine being in another’s place. It takes people who are willing to speak out against injustice. It takes people who are willing to learn and grow in their beliefs in order to offer others the same opportunity. It takes people who are willing to invite us, encourage us, and support us in our efforts to make this world a place where the inherent worth and dignity of every person is not just a principle that we espouse but a mission that we work to live out. It takes working together as a community. During my time here at First Parish as your Intern minister, it is my hope that each of you will help me to step outside of myself to learn what the world is like from another’s perspective and I hope at times I can do the same for you. I have come to believe that what my mother taught me may be one of the most valuable lessons I have ever learned.

And so it may be.

“Stand Up for Love” by Mark W. Harris

First Parish of Watertown - October 4, 2009

Call to Worship – from Wendell Berry (#483)

When despair for the world grows in me and I wake in the night at the least sound in fear of what my life and my children’s lives may be, I go and lie down where the wood drake rests in his beauty on the water, and the great heron feeds.

I come into the peace of wild things who do not tax their lives with forethought of grief. I come into the presence of still water. And I feel above me the day-blind stars waiting with their light. For a time I rest in the grace of the world, and am free.

Reading – from To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee

Sermon - “Stand Up for Love” by Mark W. Harris

We all believe stereotypes. Now I am not saying that stereotypes are true, but that we all believe in certain ones. We believe blacks are fast runners or generally athletic, that Asians are high achievers, that gay men are good at decorating. We may think it is silly, but then we see that black kid on the basketball court, in the back of our mind, we think he is more likely to make that twisting, driving lay-up than any white kid who can’t jump. This has always been true. Long ago Aristotle wrote that those who live in the cold climates of Europe are full of spirit, but wanting in intelligence and skill, but those who lived in Asia are very intelligent but wanting in spirit, and therefore easily subjected to slavery or dictatorship. Of course, Aristotle observed that the Hellenic race, that Greek heritage he happened to call his own, was by a happy coincidence both high-spirited and intelligent. No surprise that his own people were the best sort.

We all believe stereotypes. I teach an online class in Congregational Polity. Several years ago I had a woman named Judith (name changed) who I thought was the best student I have ever had. Her papers were marvelous, and she received an A in the course. Yet I only knew her online, and this was in the days before we posted pictures. She was just a name on the page to me. Then two years ago I met her at a General Assembly. Judith turned out to be, at least in my limited experience, a classic Southern belle with that melodic, friendly drawl. I had to laugh because if she had been a student of mine who I met face to face I might have stereotyped her to be less intelligent and more superficial that she actually was. Maybe I have seen “Gone with the Wind” too many times, but I am afraid that in person once I heard that voice and saw her demeanor, she might have become Scarlett O’Hara, the charming belle who I have stereotyped as my typecast lady who is selfish, shrewd and vain.

We all believe stereotypes. I think this played some role in the infamous arrest of Harvard professor Henry Louis Gates this summer. First, there were the liberal stereotypes we all made. The woman who called the police must have been racist because she saw a black man in a neighborhood where he clearly did not belong. Yet it tuns out she never said he was black. Second, the police officer must have accosted Gates because he was black. We assumed racist white cop with working class background arrests black man. But it turns out Gates was pretty belligerent, and the cop was the trainer for the police racism awareness programs. It is good to question our assumptions, even our liberal ones. Yet there is truth here. As the President pointed out, there is a long history of whites assuming that blacks are committing some criminal act. The DWB, or driving while black statistics do not lie. Our stereotypes lead to assumptions that lead to actions that are reflections of prejudice or even hatred.

The reading from To Kill a Mockingbird reflects this dilemma. Jem and Scout have a conversation about the four kinds of people in the world. Each group in turn does not like the other. At one point Jem even suggests that there may be some cultural similarity here because he has seen Atticus tap his toe to the music. How are they different, he wonders? They discuss family background, and even the ability to read and write. Finally, Scout points out that one of the Cunningham’s is smart, but he gets held back because he has to go work. This reminds me of my own father, who was very intelligent, but because of family poverty simply could not go to college. He had to go work. We all know circumstances like this, where environment or opportunities make all the difference in what can be achieved. Jem and Scout end up concluding there is one kind of folk, but they simply do not seem to be able to get along. Then they understand why Boo Radley stays shut up in his house. He does not want to be part of all this despising that people seem to go out of their way to do to each other.

One problem for each of us, and for Jem and Scout, too, is that people believe the stereotypes. It is why it is so important to recognize those stereotypes we have, even our liberal ones. And so we come to believe that white men can’t jump, and we seek scientific evidence to show its true. Only recently I saw a survey of racial diversity in the area served by the Boston Globe’s “Globe West.” I saw that Wellesley was included among those that were given a fairly high ranking, and said to Andrea, how can that be? But then I applied my stereotype that their diversity was because of the high achieving Asian population that lived there. Of course I was joking, but there was my stereotype, and I really had no data to prove it. I simply believed it true. Our rhetoric of stereotypes can be dangerous, even if we express it in the privacy of our homes.

I say this to make the point that the rhetoric of lies and stereotypes that pervades our country now is being fueled by extremists who are convincing many in the mainstream to believe them. People believe that a health program with a public option is some kind of Communist conspiracy to take over the country. They believe that death squads are going to vote on killing old people. Lies and inflammatory rhetoric are making it possible so that good people can be railroaded by insurance companies, and thousands can lose their home mortgage or mortgage their future because they have to pay for health care. The sad truth is that we have countless examples of right wing crazies infiltrating the mainstream and making many Americans question the legitimacy of public programs because it represents tax and spend liberalism. Jim Adkisson who shot and killed two people and wounded six others at the Knoxville Unitarian Universalist church a year ago wanted to kill liberals because they were what was wrong with America. He said, “the only way you can get rid of them is to kill them in the streets.” Then after he had spouted his hate rhetoric, and gone on his shooting rampage, they searched his home and found his stock of food stamps. The people in Knoxville said that they hoped that if one good thing came out of the shootings it would be that people realize how severe the hate rhetoric can be. So we have people railing against the government while they reap the benefits of its program. I am reminded of the congressman who was against any public option, even as he received full health benefits from the government because he happened to be a veteran.

The other day in the New York Times, Thomas Friedman suggested that criticism of President Obama had devolved from legitimate criticism to violent rhetoric intended to delegitimize the government, creating the same kind of environment that existed in Israel before Rabin’s assassination. He told of a Facebook poll that asked people whether Obama should be killed. Free speech is one thing, but right wingers have destroyed the Republican party and created what Friedman calls a “poisonous environment” in our country. There is a kind of scurrilous speech that leads some people to act upon violent emotions. So doctors who perform abortions are called baby-killers, and the perpetrators of this rhetoric then go out and stimulate others to perform serious acts of violence, like the killing of Dr. George Tiller. Having a Senator get up on the floor of the Senate and call out “you lie,” and then making a joke of his apology is in my view, outrageous. And again there was no substance to the rhetoric, as it is only used to destabilize, and ridicule. As the President tries to pull people together, Friedman asks “Where Did the We Go?” as it seems there is no sense of a collective will to improve things. Even those people liberals generally support can be captured by the rhetoric of exclusiveness. President Obama refers to undocumented immigrants, as illegals. While this may seem mild compared to the violent speech of the right wingers, it does not imply that these immigrants only need proper papers and want to be here, but that they are criminals who are probably deserving of deportation.

The words we use reflect the beliefs we truly feel. The slanty eye Jap of World War Two helped the Americans embody their stereotypes so that they could feel less compunction about killing others. This stereotype also led to the establishment of internment camps. Words made the Japanese Americans less than human, and thus people began to believe the stereotype, or believe the lies as truths about these people. The cover of free speech allows these hate mongers to cower in the shadows and create an atmosphere of fear and paranoia. Then once we legitimize those feelings, we begin to believe the lies. Just as these right wingers have hidden under the cover of free speech, they have also covered themselves in the mantle of racism. Electing our first black president was cause for celebration among many of us, who felt like this symbolized some kind of racial breakthrough. Since the election though we have seen an upsurge in hate group activity, and recruitment among these groups has increased in the last year.

This has brought on increased levels of outright racial hatred, too. Some of this is in a kind of pernicious back handed way that delegitimizes the institutional trauma and effects of racism. In the wake of the Skip Gates / Officer Crowley confrontation in Cambridge a Republican congressman from Michigan called upon Obama to apologize, and one radio host called our President a racist. Since when was there a legitimate philosophical basis for calling a Black man a racist? Ever since the first challenge to affirmative action, white people have been trying to accuse the system of being racist towards them, and now persons of color have been called racist. When Judge Sotomeyer mentioned her Latina heritage, she was called racist. This kind of rhetoric is another way to misconstrue the truth and pervert the very insidious nature of racism. Racism, as an article in The New Yorker pointed out in August, is not about personal failings. Racism is an oppressive, social system. Racism in America is a long, history of legal and political patterns that have discriminated against an entire race to disempower them in our culture. There is no systematic racism against white people in a culture where whites have the power and the privilege. While whites can be discriminated against, even based on race, they are not the victims of racism. The truth has been distorted, and people have constructed a new defintion of racism. Allowing racism to mean anti white or anti black dilutes its meaning, and distorts the history of what has happened in America, and continues to happen.

In To Kill a Mockingbird, Jem wonders why folks can’t just be folk? In July the Boston Globe reported that the election of a black president had not changed racial bias. It went on to say that studies showed that white men were considered more trustworthy and capable. Men get higher ratings, even when women and minorities actually perform better at their jobs. We believe the stereotype that we are getting a better deal from the white guy. Our words and our attitudes become our reality. How do we begin to cultivate a culture of we?

Each of us has our stereotypes. While ours are not violent or hate filled they are still projections of what we perceive as truth. I often find some of this projection of fear is perpetrated upon those who suffer from mental illness. The scare word of our time is bipolar, and so if there has been a heinous murder that is reported in the news, it seems inevitable that someone will put forth a diagnosis of bipolar illness. Those who suffer from the disease or those who struggle with family members who have it, are made to feel like outcasts. The word bipolar becomes a synonym for crazy person who is going to act violent and out of control, and come wreck chaos upon society. We better put them away quickly. The implication is that every bipolar person is dangerous, and treatment is impossible. This is not only a untruthful rhetoric, but it also reflects our tendency to punish before we help. Rather than providing good medical help and a system that supports those with mental illness, we often withhold treatment for mental illness or minimize it, until the burden on the person or the family is too great, and then once there is a breakdown, there is money for prison or legal action.

These are days when rhetoric creates fear, and often we react with fear, and the rhetoric becomes even more violent and fearful. Perhaps we want to run and hide, but this is no time to do so. It is a time to rally around others in our community so that we stand on the side of love, and not hate. Rhetoric of hate is out there in the world. Our friends in Maine are fighting for same sex marriage to be legitimized. We need to stand up for equality. But we should also not be lulled to sleep that we are safe in Massachusetts. While the burning of our flag is fresh in our memories, so too is an e-mail I received two weeks ago wondering why we made a big deal out of the burning of a flag of perversion. We will win, but it will take time and it will take enduring love, to convince the world that you cannot set bounds to the power of love. This person who wrote to me said Obama was trying to destroy the America we know and love. But I believe that this person's rhetoric of hate destroys the America we know and love. John Bohstedt, one of the people who tackled the shooter at the Knoxville, UU church said, “We have found out how much our bonds of supporting each other in love mean. You know how crucial that is, to keep our life going both individually and as a community.” And remember it was Boo Radley, the recluse who stayed inside, and feared interaction with others, who saved Jem and Scout when they were attacked at Halloween.

There is a Hasidic story about Rabbi Meir Cohen who dedicated his life to teaching, preaching and writing about the consequences of spreading gossip, lies and slander. Once he was on a train returning from a trip, when he met another traveler, and he asked the man, “where are you heading?” The man replied that he was heading for the city of Radin to see the great Rabbi Meir Cohen. The Rabbi who was a humble man said, “why do you call him great? There is
nothing so special about him. He is just another person, like any other.” This greatly upset the traveler who shot back, “How dare you speak with such insolence about the great Rabbi.” In fact, he was so outraged, his rebuke was followed by a slap to the Rabbi’s face. Hours later the traveler was brought into the offices at the synagogue of the great Rabbi in Radin. When he saw who it was, he fell on his knees and asked forgiveness for being so rude. Then the Rabbi said, “there is no need to apologize. After all, it was my honor you were defending. But you have taught me something valuable, too. You must not speak badly of any person, even of yourself.” Words carry meaning, and distortions, stereotypes and lies are believed as truth. When others use words that hurt, we must speak words of love that they might know the truth. When we use words that hurt, even about ourselves, we must speak words of love to remind ourselves of our own truth. Words of love so we stand up for equality. Words of love to expose racism. Words of love in solidarity with immigrant populations. Words of love for those who suffer from mental illness. Words of love to end the distortions and lies born of fear and hatred. Words for ourselves, and words for those in our lives for whom we need to speak up. Words of love, of equality, of justice, of community, of just folks, are what our faith calls to us to express. May it be so, now and in the days ahead.

Closing Words – from Reef by Romesh Gunesekera

Are we not all refugees from something? Whether we stay or go or return, we all need refuge from the world beyond our fingertips at some time. When I was asked by a woman at the pub, ‘Have you come from Africa, away from the wicked Amin?’ I said, ‘No, I am an explorer on a voyage of discovery,’ . . . I was learning that human history is always a story of somebody’s diaspora: a struggle between those who expel, repel or curtail -- possess, divide and rule -- and those who keep the flame alive from night to night, mouth to mouth, enlarging the world with each flick of a tongue.

“No More Mr. Nice Guy” by Mark W. Harris

September 27, 2009 - First Parish of Watertown

Call to Worship – from Burton D. Carley

We gather on this Sabbath morn to worship in spirit and truth; to raise a joyful noise to the Eternal Mystery; to reconfirm our covenant to seek wisdom in love; to strengthen our commitment to the common good.

We come from many paths to explore that which is hidden; to consider the ways of our hearts; to confess how we have stumbled; to heal what is broken.

We assemble in the effort to quicken our compassion and mercy; to deepen our understanding; to renew our courage; to remember who we are.

Thus do we celebrate the grace and gift of life and practice our faith.

Sermon

The other morning I was driving back to Watertown from the Carroll School in Lincoln on Trapelo Road. Even though it was eight o’clock in the morning I was moving along in traffic mostly unimpeded when suddenly the person in front of me stopped for no apparent reason. Then after I slammed on my brakes, and narrowly avoided crashing into him, I noticed that he had stopped to let a person enter the flow of traffic from a parking lot where there was a long line backed up waiting to exit. It was a nice thing to do. He was being courteous to this person who may have been waiting and waiting to have a chance to turn onto the very busy street. It was a nice individual act, but from my perspective the result of his niceness might have been disastrous for me. When you stop to let someone enter like that, there is no way to signal the driver behind you. The brakes suddenly flashed. He noticed someone was stuck, and he just stopped. What was odd about this person is that they kept stopping for cars on side streets, as this happened two more times before I reached home. By then I was ready for his random courteousness, and was cursing him under my breath for stopping for every cat or squirrel that was merely contemplating crossing the street. My point is that these seemingly kind or nice gestures can have results that do not serve the greater good. Stopping for one person to do them a favor may cause a chain reaction where all the cars behind you crash into one another. There are consequences of our actions, even the seemingly innocuous nice things we do.

Do I mean there is something wrong with being nice? Isn’t the archetype for a minister that he / she is nice to all persons, at all times, in all seasons regardless of the behavior of that person? Didn’t we learn when we were kids that this was how Jesus wanted us to behave? Didn’t he say love your enemies and turn your cheek so that the person who is hitting you can strike both sides of your face? Then it seemed the reward in the scriptures for being nice was scourging, spearing and suffering. In fact there has been a good number of faithful Christians who have been taught that suffering is good for you. Your reward will be great in heaven. Even as a child I began to wonder about this method. While it may be disarming to the attacker, you begin to wonder if there are some limits to niceness, especially if you want to achieve a greater good.

Don’t get me wrong. In many ways nice is good. We need more nice people. I like people to be courteous and friendly. I like people to have good manners. I want those who request things to say please, and those who receive to say thank you. I like to be greeted by nice check out clerks in the stores. If they are surly or only talk to their friends or on their cell phone, then I don’t think of them as very nice, especially since being nice to customers is part of their job. I try to be nice most of the time in my job, reflecting the stereotype of clergy I am sure. When the potential rental group calls on a Friday afternoon, and I am trying to write a sermon, and they are hoping to rent that very night with a steep discount of the already discounted rate because they are second cousins of someone who once came to church here on Easter in 1935, the average person could become a little exasperated. Dealing with the public requires at least the patience of Job, but after all, I am paid to be nice. So I sign them up, I come open the door, and I may even sling the pulpit over my toe and hoist it up the stairs, so the parents can have an unimpeded look at their child playing the piano. I try to be nice.

And the same is true of you. Most of you are nice. You may suffer through an interminable sermon that makes no sense, and seems to have more historical references than all of Thucydides’ History of the Peloponnesian War, and yet you still say, that was interesting, or smile and comment about the minister’s lovely tie. You are kind to all aspiring ministerial students, even those who practice all manner of gyrations and movement meditations, so that you are wondering if you are participating in dance therapy or worship, and still you say, I enjoyed trying something different. You are nice. You bring food for those who are hungry. You give money to overseas projects to help those who suffer from lack of housing and health care. You volunteer to sort food at local food banks, and write letters to Senators and Presidents. You speak to total strangers (at least some of the time), and you invariably are kind to the children and show interest in what they are doing. Religious communities in general, if they are worth their salt, must be attempting to be models for what we envision the good society to be and that means being nice to others.

Yet nice has its limits. Some would say the Obama administration has brought on a new era of niceness. There is an underlying emphasis on how everyone should get along, as opposed to the Bush years when it was fashionable to torture and threaten anything that moved. I see this niceness movement as much older than that. How long have total strangers been saying to you, “have a nice day.” There has been an emphasis on being pleasant in retail stores, especially as you attempt to return all manner of cheap goods. It is the old kill you with kindness routine. Those smiley faces have been around for a while, too. Wal-Mart hires the friendly senior citizen to greet you with down home friendliness and give you the smiley face sticker, so you can be lulled into believing this is a nice neighborhood store, when in fact they have paid workers in China mere pennies to produce these goods, while refusing to provide health care benefits for their American employees. Nice smiles and good manners may be a social mechanism to make us feel like we are all getting along and everything is fine. Even our therapeutic culture sometimes seems to want us all to be in a kind of blissful state of happiness because sad thoughts or angry feelings are deemed inappropriate.

Some of this attempt to be nice seems to be merely a façade. There is an operation nice blog which asks its readers to take an oath of niceness. This has an air of being fake about it, and moreover it makes everything sickly agreeable and perfectly predictable. The fake, the agreeable and even the predictable are not things we necessarily want to cultivate in a church community where we are hoping to build honest, loving relationships that are the foundation for creating just and equal communities in the world at large. Sometimes we are nice to others because we are afraid to speak the truth. This does have a certain social value to it. My boys when they receive a gift that they don’t like can be agonizingly honest, such as “I don’t like this, Nana.” Most of us are well aware that there are social situations where it is best to not speak the total truth. Yet sometimes we are afraid to say things because we want to be nice or not hurt someone’s feelings, and it would be better if we did say it. We let someone be rude or unprofessional and we excuse it because that’s just the way they are, or they are old or lonely and need our sympathy. But when we let someone behave badly, and don’t speak up, we should be aware that there will be consequences. They will keep doing it until someone stops them, and so it will only get worse. And if they are behaving badly then someone is going to bear the brunt of that bad behavior. If someone is stepping on my toe, then I may act like they are not doing it, and everything can seem fine, but at some point the toe is going to break, or someone will see the bruise, and have the courage to say, that needs to stop. In these situations being nice to someone does not help the person feel responsible for their actions, or show any degree of sympathy for the person who is hurt by their actions, and most important does not call the members of the community to a greater community standard of behavior. I am reminded of this each time someone comes to the church door looking for help, and asks for a Stop and Shop gift card. They always have a story of woe. It may seem nice to help the person in need, but in fact, they may be supporting a habit, and thus on the way to destroying their own life, and that of their family. Our nice response to their sorry story is in reality not so nice.

What we also sometimes fail to see is that speaking the truth is the greater act of love than being nice. How many relationships should have ended sooner, but didn’t, because we were trying to be nice. Usually this fake or the silent way of being nice can also reflect an inclination to avoid conflict. This is also the kind of niceness that I specialize in. I grew up in a household where there was lots of anger floating around, but it was also a place where it was inappropriate to express that anger. As a result we learned to act nice towards each other as well as towards friends and strangers, and never express a true negative feeling, but we didn’t express too many positive ones either. Consequently our demeanor was pleasant or silent or absent, so that it would seem that everything was operating on an even keel. What we had to avoid was the possibility of anybody falling apart. Unfortunately this behavior meant that the family felt like a ticking time bomb. Sometimes that would eventually explode because we had no reasonable way to express some of our differences. As a result, I have had a lifetime of trying to be nice to others as conflicts arise, following the silent pattern of my mother, and yet often feeling the anger that my father sometimes expressed in inappropriate outbursts. How many times in my life have I said, “it’s fine,” when it is not. Sometimes we avoid the conflict because it is too painful or too difficult, but we still feel it nonetheless. And it doesn’t go away.

Being nice in a conflict can be particularly troublesome because others may take advantage of you. If someone is treating you or your child unfairly, and you avoid speaking up or getting involved because you expect somebody to recognize the problem, and help you, it may never happen. The nice, quiet, mouse will be neglected and avoided because they never said pay attention to me. I suppose this goes along with the old Leo Durocher adage, that nice guys finish last. While we might wish that a just society would help those in need, or those who do not have access to health care, or those with children with special needs, it is just not the case. Your pillow of niceness has to be laid down, and you must take up a shield of confrontation. You must be truthful, but you also must be strong, persistent, smart and unyielding when dealing with bureaucratic systems.

Nice is good, but we see it also needs a dose of truthfulness, and a dose of toughness. Does this mean that my new mantra is no more Mr. Nice Guy? As a public figure, and as a minister of a religious community, we all know that a personna of some degree of niceness is never going to disappear. Yet my experiences over the years have certainly taught me that being the nice guy has its limits. So the church wrestles with the truth that ultimately goodness may not be the result of niceness. In fact with niceness, we may become enablers, so that people mistreat each other in communities with self-justifying actions so that the self-involved person gets their way by controlling things or we feel misplaced pity for someone who we feel has suffered or is deserving of our special care, but they take advantage of that concern, or others’ impulse to be nice by becoming attached to the label of victim. When someone’s life is hard we feel sympathy, but we should also ask what are the consequences of my helping them, and how hard is it really?

Separating niceness and goodness reminds us that we come to church to be called back to higher standards. What do we owe to each other? In the novel, The Nice and the Good, Iris Murdoch tries to make this distinction. One of the chief characters John Ducane is a civil servant who is asked to investigate the suicide of a colleague. Ducane, as we heard in the reading, was a man who thought well of himself. In fact, he needed to do so, and therefore thought of himself as good, despite he said, “how rottenly I behave.” His girlfriend, Jessica, is willing to sacrifice her total sense of self merely to be with him as she is obsessed with him, but he is not truthful with her and allows himself to be manipulated into continuing the relationship. Then when she and another woman he is involved with both write letters about their relationship he becomes entrapped in a scheme of blackmail, and his own conception of his goodness becomes tainted. Then when he falls in love with Mary he is called back to his best self. Mary sharpens his conscience so his new self-loathing makes him aware of the love he is truly capable of. He can love others because he has finally learned humility.

In other words he must let go of his limited self-absorbed view that is blind to his defects, so that he only sees niceness as the equivalent of goodness. The celebration of Yom Kippur and its emphasis on personal atonement leading to humility is found in the story of the guest rabbi who came to Tiktin and reproved the congregation for being great sinners. Afterwards Rabbi Meyer Hurwitz, the chief rabbi of the city said: “Why did you not reprove me among ourselves, instead of shaming me in public?” The preacher replied, “I meant no one in particular. I spoke in general terms.”. “Nay,” retorted the rabbi, “All your hearers are good folk. You could have had in mind only my sins.” Ducane was a kind of cardboard cutout that lacked the moral imagination to see the possibilities of human nature, and also see the depth of love he was capable of having, like the stereotype of the insipid minister. More than mere niceness that does not reflect the complex battles we have in the world and the moral dilemmas we face, true goodness means that we must wrestle with our own self-image and see how much of our niceness is motivated by selfishness. In that wrestling, like Jacob wrestling with the angel in the Hebrew scriptures, we come to discover that true goodness is attained, not by being nice, but by being good enough to live the truth, live by standards, and help others live by standards, too and realize the consequences of their actions.

The Nice and the Good reminds us how many secrets we keep from each other, while trying to maintain our niceness. But the secrets unravel, and the niceness in many ways, has prevented the good from being realized. Our desire for goodness makes us realize how far we fall short, even for the nice people we all are. Our community exists to help us realize that we all try hard to be more caring and loving toward others. When we are alone with our thoughts we reflect on what it would take for each of us to truly embrace goodness - how much more truthful might we have to be - how much more direct - how much more willing to risk our love. It is a high goal to be good, and our niceness reminds us of our desire to attain it. It is good to be nice, but better to be good. May we in community remind each other to call ourselves back to our most loving, honest selves. Or as Emily Dickinson once said, “We never know how high we are, Till we are called to rise; And then, if we are true to plan, Our statures touch the skies.”

Closing Words - from Richard Gilbert
In the midst of the whirling day,
In the hectic rush to be,
In the frantic pace of life,
Pause here for a moment.
Catch your breath;
Relax your body;
Loosen your grip on life,
Consider that our lives are always unfinished business;
Imagine that the picture of our being is never complete;
Allow your life to be a work in progress,
Do not hurry to mold the masterpiece;
Do not rush to finish the picture;
Do not be impatient to complete the drawing.
From beckoning birth to dawning death we are in process,
And always there is more to be done,
Do not let the incompleteness weigh on your spirit;
Do not despair that imperfection marks your every day;
Do not fear that we are still in the making.
Let us instead be grateful that the world is still to be created;
Let us give thanks that we can be more than we are;
Let us celebrate the power of the incomplete;
For life is always unfinished business.