Remember Who You Are
- Details
- Created on Sunday, 17 January 2010 00:00
- Written by Gary E. Smith
When I was young, much younger than I am today, I was the Director of a small summer conference center on Penobscot Bay in the State of Maine. This place was owned by the congregation I served in Bangor, built in the late nineteenth century with money bequeathed by a Civil War general to reward, with a free week at camp, perfect attendance in the religious education program! During my years there, we offered week-long camps for children, youth, and families. A large central lodge, a farmhouse for eating, acres of open fields down to the ocean, clam flats to walk, it was an extraordinary place. But, if you can imagine thirty or thirty-five seventh and eighth graders there for a week, boys on this side, girls on that side, hormones everywhere, you can understand that we had to have some rules.
When I arrived there for my first season in the summer of 1976, there were rules everywhere. These rules were posted on a bulletin board to the right of the big doors as one entered the lodge. These rules had begun innocently enough, a few rules, numbered now on yellowing paper:
- Don’t run inside the building.
- Don’t cut across the lawns of abutting property owners.
- No loud radios. And so on
Perfectly sensible rules. Important for campers to understand. But the rules went on. It was apparent in successive seasons that more rules needed to be spelled out. And so, tacked on to the original list of do’s and don’ts, someone had added more rules, keeping the numbers going, and then another season, and so on, until I, as the new Director, was looking at a total of twenty-seven rules.
I tried leaving them there for a season, but I was falling into the same trap myself, thinking of even more rules. Finally, I took them all down and threw them away, and when campers arrived the following summer, I told them we now had two rules: don’t hurt each other and don’t hurt the property.
Flash forward twenty-five years, and I am the President of the Unitarian Universalist Ministers Association, a professional group of our members across the country. We have a Code of Professional Conduct, and we have guidelines for right behavior, well, guidelines for all the behavior we can imagine. But in my three years of the leadership of that organization, cases of misbehavior would come before us for our response and action, and now it is not eighth graders, but professional adults who are telling me, “I didn’t see a rule against that!” Don’t hurt each other and don’t hurt the property.
I’m told that a similar moment happened on Mount Sinai generations ago, there in history sometime before Moses appeared before God. Moses’ sister Miriam had gone up onto the mountain and begged God for guidance in the leading of the people there in the wilderness, and God had told her, so the story goes, to tell the people to care for each other and to respect and care for each other’s possessions. Miriam came down from the mountain and repeated what God had said. Care for each other. Respect each other’s possessions. And the people cried out: Wait a minute! Those aren’t rules! We want rules! And so they sent Moses right back up the mountain for rules.
This is a sermon about rules, here in the context of the early twenty-first century. This is a sermon about rules, in the context of an anti-authoritarian faith that says, “Don’t tell me what I can or cannot do!” This is a sermon about rules, here on the weekend when we remember Martin Luther King, Jr., and racism and classism and peace and justice. This is a sermon in the shadow of the horrible and unthinkable and tragic death and destruction in Haiti. This is a sermon just before an important election here in the Commonwealth of Massachusetts. This is a sermon in a time of war and Al Qaeda and heightened security. This is a sermon when the members of First Parish take a first look at a new future. This is a sermon that begins with rules, and doesn’t begin to cover everything else I just said!
Miriam and Moses; the summer camp and the rules on the bulletin board; guidelines for clergy behavior; what does it all mean for us to try to do the right thing? This political campaign here in Massachusetts for the open Senate seat has devolved into political ads and speeches that have left neither candidate recognizable; not this is who I am, but that is who he or she is, and they’re not following the rules! And to the children who are here, on behalf of the adults, I apologize. We’re acting badly.
What ARE the rules and who gets to say? There is a huge segment of our American society who want everyone to live by the rules, the rules they write and proclaim. These are the rules about marriage; these are the rules to be a citizen; these are the rules about what a fair health care plan will be; these are the rules to be a REAL Republican, a REAL Democrat. And, if you don’t follow these rules, you’re demonized, you’re marginalized, and we’re all polarized! Whatever your politics, have a little sympathy for our current President who has introduced nuance into the pantheon of leadership skills, a quality lacking in some of his predecessors.
Lest we are inclined to throw the first stone, remember we sit this morning in a Puritan meetinghouse, and believe me, our forebears here had rules. In an old sermon folder I found this summer, the folder marked “rules, ten commandments, and absolute truths,” I found this piece written by Suzanne Gordon in the BOSTON GLOBE MAGAZINE. “Looking for guidance in traditional moral recipes can be confusing,” she writes. “Much of this teaching tries to discourage us from being bad without providing us with a way to be good. Thinkers from St. Augustine to Thomas Hobbes have painted humans as naturally sinful characters – slothful, greedy, selfish and insensitive. Given this portrait, their solution, grounded in philosophy and a stern religion, was to provide black-and-white absolutes and severe sanctions for those who disobeyed. Bad behavior, past generations knew, led straight to hell.” And, she adds, “These ideas are still around.”
You shall not murder. You shall not steal. These rules seem pretty clear. But what about honor your father and mother? What happens if the father has been an alcoholic and an abuser? What does honor look like then? We can get caught in absolutes. We can be left feeling we’re never good enough. We say to each other each week in our benediction, hold on to what is good. How can we be faithful to our own idea of what is good without stepping on someone else’s idea of what is good?
We want rules! How could Bill Belichick go for it on 4th and 2? How can the bankers take bonuses? How could we close Guantanamo? Why do our politicians vote strictly on party lines? Where are the voices crying out for common ground? It sure isn’t Pat Robertson or most of talk radio. “We are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality,” says Martin Luther King, “tied in a single garment of destiny. Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere. I have a dream,” he said. It was August of 1963. There were old rules. Whites here. Coloreds there. Two years late, there were new rules, the Civil Rights Act of 1965, equal justice under the law, segregation a shameful blot on our nation’s history.
But a new law and new rules did not make it automatically so, even a full generation later. We have miles to go. We are in new paradigms of racism, beyond the blatant cries of “You lie!” from a South Carolinian congressman, beyond Senator Harry Reid’s careless words. We have new rules about who is an American and who is not, immigration policies that have preferred to close the door as soon as we’re in. The tragedy of Haiti is more than the earthquake itself; it is also that this poorest of all countries in the Western hemisphere had the kind of construction and infrastructure that made it impossible for homes and schools and churches to stand, millions crowded into small spaces. “Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere.”
How do we hold on to what is good? How do we claim the ground of nuance between this is absolutely right and this is absolutely wrong? Where is the truce in the culture wars, the battle between blue and red? Charles Taylor, a political philosopher wrote once that “most of us have been taught to think of ourselves as morally unidimensional. We believe we function according to a single ethical standard or a unified idea of the good. But,” he maintains, “we’re all actually intricate and shifting kaleidoscopes of moral stances and allegiances. We need to accept ourselves and others. There is never a moment when you are morally whole. If we grasped more fully the tragedies and strains of the human condition, we would regard each other less sternly and more empathetically.”
I must say this has been the lesson of my life, this profession of ministry allowing me to peek over into other lives and to become more and more aware each day of the realities and complexities of the human condition. I have requested that my epitaph read, “there’s always something.” We all know that it is far easier to see the world in absolutes. It’s simple and it’s simplistic. Quick, go find the rules. We need a rule.
I am now sprinting to the end. What can guide us to do the good, to know what is the right thing? The moral philosophers I read talk about finding these moments in relationships, “positive sources of moral motivation, places where love and generosity flourish.” So, here’s the commercial break. We can keep this religious community, this First Parish, a place “where love and generosity flourish.” I’m not so sure it’s the content of what we do here, the words of the sermon or song, the curriculum in religious education; what matters is who we are and how we act with one another.
Who are the teachers? How do we interact with children and youth? What are we teaching them and ourselves about love and generosity and peace and justice and dreams and rules? Are we living out our benediction and are we living it out beyond these walls? And maybe those are rules. I don’t know.
I’ll end with a story, one you may have heard before. (New minister. New stories. Upside.) It was a television program on the American family, broadcast when our children were young. In this episode, a mother is seeing her fourteen year old off on a bus early one Saturday morning, off on a week-long trip with her classmates, this child’s first trip away from home. And you can imagine that this mother has many worries, and twenty-seven rules probably wouldn’t even come close to what she would like to list out for her young and innocent daughter.
So, through some few tears of worries, she hugs her daughter close as these excited youngsters board the bus. She brings her lips close to her daughter’s ear, and she whispers, “Remember who you are. Remember who you are.”