Moral Injuries of War

by Caroline H. Knowles
Sermon preached on Sunday, February 5, 2012

A few decades ago, I was living in Thailand, in a culture where the spheres of the living and the spirit world interpenetrated each other.  The Thai’s ancient culture had inherited the Chinese tradition of Hungry Ghosts.

Most homes had a charming little replica of a mansion at the entrance to the property, and tiny bowls of rice and other bits of food were regularly set out in the little “spirit house.”  I thought the custom quaint.  The Spirit House was supposed to confuse and deflect the ghosts of ancestors and even ghosts of wandering strangers who could otherwise threaten the tranquility of the living.  On a special day in the Seventh Lunar month, around the end of August, little pastries marked with red Chinese characters were left on doorsteps for the hungry ghosts.  This was to appease their envy of the living by showing them respect and feeding their need.

I no longer see these ritual arrangements as “quaint” and foreign, as mere superstition. Rather, this communal practice acknowledges our unfinished business with the dead, and tries to control the potent residues of grief, guilt, remorse and shame that haunt us as survivors.

I got to know some hungry ghosts who have been stalled on the threshold of the living for decades, in my work with veterans in the San Francisco Presidio. I was conducting a monthly spiritual support service for veterans, at the Main Post Chapel.  My service included meeting in a small group where the veterans wrote about their lives and challenges.  Most served during the Viet Nam war.  These veterans were and still are haunted by their memories.  These many decades later, they carry grief that has never healed.

One had a desk job at an airbase, but still dreams about the pilots who flew out on mission and never came back?or they came back and drove crazy drunk and died on the roads around the base.  Another vet was nineteen when he was drafted. His closest buddy was killed in Viet Nam.  Recently, he went to see a traveling replica of the Wall, the Viet Nam War Memorial.   He nearly passed out when he found his friend’s name on the wall.  Other anonymous men come again and again to wander around the Presidio Chapel and garden.  There’s one who visits at twilight to meet his two friends who died in Viet Nam.  These ghosts come and stand beside him, while he mourns.

Veterans coming home from today’s wars write how they are haunted by what they witnessed, and by their nightmares about those whom they killed or abused.  A marine in Iraq obeyed orders and cut down a car that wouldn’t stop at a checkpoint.  Then he saw inside a child sitting beside her father, his body severed by weapons fire.  Another soldier flails and wakes from his dreams of Iraqi detainees he saw, young men his own age, lined up with burlap bags over their heads, being abused by fellow American soldiers.  Recurrent nightmares are among the most common experiences of men and women who return from war.  Over and over, in dreams, come the images of fallen or maimed comrades, or enemies slain, or innocents caught in the cross-fire.

These bad dreams are not unique to our modern wars.  In cultures all over the earth, returning warriors have dreams like that.  These dream images of the dead, in many cultures, are called “hungry ghosts.”  They hunger for something from the living.  Often, it’s more than food of they want.  They hunger for respect, for sacred burial, for honor, for redemptive acts by the living.

In Greek sagas and tragedies, the failure to give the dead proper burial rites was a cardinal wrong.

Families and comrades of MIA’s in Viet Nam have been relentless in seeking the remains of the fallen.

Generations of Japanese still make the grievous journey to Tarawa to gather and bring home the bones of the 4,500 Japanese soldiers who perished there in 1943.

Recently, there’s been an uproar about the improper disposal of body parts of dead servicemen and women on arrival at Dover Air Force Base, when it turned out that some remains were being incinerated and thrown like trash in the landfill.

Yet, as a culture, we have only a narrow understanding of how to put ghosts to rest.  Our science has little patience with ghosts.

When returning warriors seek help for their nightmares and depression and explosive emotions, they’ve been commonly diagnosed with Post Traumatic Stress Disorder.  But mental health professionals and their patients have been rethinking that diagnosis.  PTSD, for short, applies when a person has been badly frightened by an event that threatened death or serious bodily injury, and suffers related anxiety and depression.

Yes, servicemen and women back from Iraq and Afghanistan have faced the immediate threat of death and injury.

Yet a psychiatric diagnosis doesn’t really address the deep grief for fallen comrades that goes on forty years without healing, and it doesn’t cover the ache in the soul over killing or abusing a fellow human being, or standing by, helpless to stop the carnage. These are wounds to the spirit, and psychiatric drugs and ordinary talk therapy do not relieve these injuries.  These are the moral injuries of war?the wounds of grief for fallen comrades whose lives were ended by violence?the wounds of shame and guilt at abusing and killing other human beings.  We are only at the threshold of understanding how the wounds of the spirit may be healed.

If moral injury is not PTSD, how should we define it, and how is it created?  What promotes moral injury in our warriors?  And what can be done to heal a moral injury?

A moral injury is a wound to the spirit in which the individual believes that what they have done or witnessed has violated their deepest sense of right and wrong.  Most individuals, by adulthood, have incorporated values and taboos which guide their thoughts, beliefs, choices and behavior.  We call these “conscience” or “ethical sense” or “superego.”

These processes spring from our loving connections to the people who nurtured us in early life and our connection to our surrounding culture.  They are the source of pride and self-esteem when we obey our conscience, and the source of guilt and shame when we violate our values.

Paramount among these values is the taboo against taking human life. “Thou shalt not kill” is embodied in the most ancient codes of law and conduct.

Yet the basic task of training warriors is to overcome this taboo, to create an effective killer.  This takes several stages.  Start preferably with the young.   Then, realign the conscience by isolating the individual from parents and friends, and replace loyalties to the core family or community with the present peer group. Create a deliberately stressful situation.  Issue commands from a powerful authority that run directly counter to the old taboos.

Does this sound familiar?  It’s called brain-washing.  The Nazis did it.  The Stalinists did it.  Gangs do it. It is powerful, and life-changing.  And these strategies are likely as old as humankind.  Societies we call “primitive,” all over the world, have trained warriors to kill.  Adolescents are taken apart from their families, and initiated into the customs and traditions of the warrior with rites of passage. Often the rituals include the infliction of pain by circumcision or scarification.

Our highly industrialized society has gone beyond these rituals of initiation to perfect the modern human killing machine.    In World War II, only about twenty percent of men in combat ever fired their weapons at the enemy, despite orders to fire and the risk to their own lives.  We don’t have that problem anymore.  With sophisticated modern training, now more than 95 percent of our military in combat discharge their weapons to kill.

The modern training techniques intentionally block the ability to think logically or critically by exposing the person to contradictory demands and chaotic situations.  They’re exposed to sleep deprivation, physical exhaustion, humiliation, illogical commands, group punishment for infractions.  Finally, the recruit’s most sacred allegiance becomes the connection to the military unit, to fellow warriors, no longer the civilian world.  “Semper fidelis?we’re faithful to each other, we watch each other’s back, we don’t leave a comrade behind.”

Breaking the taboos against killing is a science.  Instead of the neutral target of concentric circles, the trainee shoots at a human figure.  The trainee shouts “Kill, kill” and plunges the bayonet into a man-shaped bag of straw?and marches to chants like this Marine training song:

Bomb the village, kill the people
Throw some napalm in the square
Do it on a Sunday morning
Do it on their way to prayer….

Trainees are warned their targets are not people like themselves, not children like their own.  They are enemies who threaten our country.  They were gooks in Viet Nam; today in Iraq and Afghanistan, they’re stupid hajjis and ragheads.

Finally the person is led to perform acts and/or to witness acts that were once unthinkable and repugnant, and to tolerate the violent deaths and maiming of comrades.

Yet combat conditions hold at bay the full awareness of injuries to the spirit.  In the context of constant danger, the warrior is sustained by the closeness of comrades, and by the internal flood of stress hormones.

Belief in a rational, just world is shredded, but loyalty to one’s comrades remains and, for a time, suffices.

So the wounds to the spirit typically don’t manifest until the warrior returns from combat, poised to re-enter civilian life.

You’ve seen the TV shots of their homecoming into the arms of husbands, wives, parents, sons and daughters.  Welcome home.  They’re released and out of danger –but now their ties to comrades are severed as their military units disband. There’s no reverse boot camp. They’re expected overnight to step back into their old selves.

Instead, many find themselves confronting the clash between their remembered acts of war and the taboos and rules of civil society.  Conscience begins to thaw.  The inner battle begins between the acts and values of war and the acts and values of peace.

Are you surprised that, last year, 468 service members on active duty committed suicide? Our fatalities for Iraq and Afghanistan combined for last year were 253.  Almost twice as many service members died by their own hand than were killed in war.  These statistics likely underestimate the true number of suicides.

For many, their sense of their own integrity and decency and humanity has been lost?and their trust in the integrity, decency and humanity of the country that sent them to war has been lost.

People express their torment in many ways?“I lost my soul.”  “How can I ever accept myself again, how can people ever accept me if they know what I’ve done, what I allowed to happen?” “How can I be forgiven?”  “How can God forgive me?”

Injury has been done to the soul, to the spirit, to the ethical core of the young person we sent to war.  This is why terms like shell shock and combat fatigue will not address the problem.

This is why many veterans don’t ask for help.  Some re-enlist to be back with their buddies, who understand.  Some veterans numb themselves out with alcohol and drugs.  Others throw themselves into work that maintains the adrenalin rush?police work, fire fighting.  Others just stuff their memories and emotions and keep up a front of being OK?but at the price of the capacity for intimacy.

Some, however, grow from their wounds and point the way to how moral injury can be healed.

Healing happens in community, but it needs to be first a community which can hear the stories they bring, without revulsion, but with understanding of the moral awfulness.   That community can best be built by veterans who come together to support each other.

I work with a non-profit that conducts retreats for veterans, where they come together to heal themselves and each other.

Ultimately, to get their souls back, returning warriors?and those who care for them?have to grapple with the eternal questions: where was God when horrible things happened? How can I feel good again? They struggle with how to feel forgiven by themselves and by the world, for what they did, for what they couldn’t prevent.  They struggle with how to be blessed and feel blessed again?and they cannot do it alone.

As a secular society, we are not used to thinking in terms of forgiveness, the need for blessing and the need for redemptive acts to restore the self and give life fresh meaning.

We would do well to look at how traditional societies restore their warriors to the community.

Songs and chants commemorate the transition from war to peace.  The warrior is honored, but also expected to take on new responsibilities, to be the wise leader, to teach and temper the feisty young.

Some communal rituals go deeper still.  The healers ask the dreamer, “What is your hungry ghost seeking?  What does it ask of you?  What does it ask of us?”  These hungry ghosts that trouble the warrior are not the dreams of the individual alone.  They belong to all of us.  Whatever the warrior did, we are capable of.  The awful lessons of their lives need to teach us and transform us.

Some Viet Nam veterans felt finally healed from their bad dreams when they returned to Viet Nam itself, and were welcomed by the people.  Some prayed or meditated back on the killing fields.  Some wrote their rage and sorrow in poems and stories, as a public witness.  Others built schools for children in the villages they’d wasted.  What a profound sense of forgiving and being forgiven.

No single ritual or redemptive act will give peace to the unquiet spirit.  But we can listen, we can ask what redemptive acts will satisfy the hunger of these ghosts.  And we can ask what redemptive acts we need– to cleanse ourselves, for we sent our sons and daughters to war. We sent the doctors and nurses to witness the destruction of war.

We know that no redemption is really possible without ending these wars that devastate our own military, ruin the people whose countries we occupy, and are destroying our nation with the catastrophic drain on treasure and human life and well-being.

A UU colleague, a minister, asked me, “Who’s going to tell these soldiers that these wars are useless and a hopeless waste?”  I said, “We don’t need to tell them.  They are telling us.”  A recent Pew survey shows now forty percent of active military believe we should not have gone into Iraq and Afghanistan in the first place, and we’re doing no good by staying.

We UU peaceniks mustn’t be smug.  I was at our UU General Assembly in June.  About 2.7 million Americans have been deployed to Iraq and Afghanistan.  Yet I heard not a single word from the pulpit or the platform, raised against the wars, no statement of conscience asking the end of war.

Our veterans and their caregivers will never forget the horrors of war.

They are the ones who can rise up in their generation to become the messengers of peace.  Let’s ask of ourselves to reach out, to heal and empower them to redeem both us and themselves.  Let’s lend them the fire of our commitment to beat their swords into plowshares, so we all will live in peace and unafraid.

We’ll sing together, Dona Nobis Pacem.  Let our hymn be a prayer that wakens us, and strengthens them.

Eboo Patel’s memoir Acts of Faith, a Beacon Press book originally published in 2008, is the UUCLC Lending Library’s Book of the Month for February 2012. Patel’s book is presently being honored as the 2011-12 Unitarian Universalist Association (UUA) Common Read. 

A 2008 speaker at the UUA General Assembly, Patel is founder and executive director of the Interfaith Youth Core (IFYC), an international, nonprofit, youth service leadership organization.

A Common Read invites participants to read and discuss the same book in a given period of time. A committee of UUA staff selected Acts of Faith. “Ten years after 9/11, the book describes the vulnerability of youth to violent, fundamentalist influences and makes a case for all of us, particularly youth, to promote pluralism through engagement in interfaith dialogue, education and social justice work.”

Eboo Patel, Ph.D., is founder and executive director of the Interfaith Youth Core, an international nonprofit. He was appointed by President Obama to the Advisory Council of the White House Office of Faith-Based and Neighborhood Partnerships and serves on the Religious Advisory Committee of the Council on Foreign Relations.

For more information about the UUA’s common read, visit http://www.uua.org/publications/commonread/index.shtml. A discussion guide can be downloaded in PDF format from http://www.uua.org/documents/lfd/acts_faith_discuss_guide.pdf

The UUA Bookstore wants to hear how readers used the UUA Common Read in their congregations or on their own. Stories can be emailed to Ben Jackson at bjackson@uua.org.

 Cynthia Parkhill
UUCLC Lending Library
February 2012

The Unitarian Universalist Community of Lake County (UUCLC) will hold its first service in a new location this Sunday, November 20. The service begins at a new start time of 11:00 a.m. at the Methodist Church at First and Main Streets in Kelseyville. The United Methodist Church is over 130 years old, and has recently agreed to share its space with the 10 year old UUCLC. “The UUCLC looks forward to a new partnership with the Methodists to pursue the missions of each of our congregations as we work together to serve the Lake County community,” according to UUCLC president Carol Cole-Lewis.

The first Unitarian service in the new location will be a celebration of sharing and gratitude. Reflections on gratitude, and a blessing of the sanctuary, banners and buildings will be included in the service, which will be led by the Reverend Dan Kane, consulting minister for UUCLC. Music, including an anthem by the UUCLC choir, will be included in the service. A new member ceremony will be conducted during the service as well. (anyone who wishes to sign the Membership Book and has not yet arranged to do so may call Kathy Windrem for information, at 279-4387)

Artist and UUCLC member Annette Higday has designed and created six incredibly beautiful, large fabric banners to represent the variety of sources of knowledge from which Unitarian Universalists draw their views. “Each member of our congregation is as unique as each symbol is different,” according to Higday.

Guests are invited and encouraged to attend this service to learn more about the history and traditions of Unitarian Universalism. A children’s religious education program takes place during the service, to be held in the “new” RE room adjacent to the large social hall. Following the service, please stay for refreshments and celebrating our move.

Over 30 different people from the congregation have helped to make this day possible. From cleaning to scraping to oiling to removing and re-installing pews, the amount of “person hours” has amounted to over 300! There are more projects ahead, but this week-end we are all celebrating the move and our new home at the Methodist Church. We especially thank the Methodist congregation and leadership for their support and encouragement.

The UUCLC Lending Library’s featured Book of the Month for November 2011 is “The DaVinci Code, Special Illustrated Edition” by Dan Brown.

While in Paris on business, Harvard symbologist Robert Langdon receives an urgent late-night phone call: the elderly curator of the Louvre has been murdered inside the museum. Near the body, police have found a baffling cipher.

While working to solve the enigmatic riddle, Langdon is stunned to discover it leads to a trail of clues hidden in the works of Da Vinci — clues visible for all to see — yet ingeniously disguised by the painter.

Langdon joins forces with a gifted French cryptologist, Sophie Neveu, and learns the late curator was involved in the Priory of Sion — an actual secret society whose members included Sir Isaac Newton, Botticelli, Victor Hugo, and Da Vinci, among others.

In a race through Paris, London, and beyond, Langdon and Neveu match wits with a faceless powerbroker who seems to anticipate their every move. This special collector’s edition of The Da Vinci Code is filled with full-color illustrations that bring the art, imagery, and iconography of Dan Brown’s story to vivid life.

Cynthia Parkhill
UUCLC Lending Library
November 2011

The UUCLC Lending Library’s book of the month for October 2011 is “The Bhagavad-Gita,” translated by Barbara Stoler Miller. The “Bhagavad-Gita” has been an essential text of Hindu culture in India since the time of its composition in the first century A.D. One of the great classics of world literature, it has inspired such diverse thinkers as Henry David Thoreau, Mahatma Ghandi and T.S. Eliot.

Set on an ancient battlefield where the armies of rival cousins stand ready to fight, the “Bhagavad-Gita” recounts the epic tale of the warrior-prince Arjuna as he confronts universal moral dilemmas. What is the purpose or justification for war? Where does the right path of action lie when one duty conflicts with another?

Gradually, through the intercession of his charioteer, the god Krishna, Arjuna is led to a higher understanding of the spiritual nature of man and the world. This Quality Paperback Book Club edition of “The Bhagavad-Gita” is part of the Mystical Classics of the World series.

Cynthia Parkhill
UUCLC Lending Library
October 2011

“Acts of Faith” by Eboo Patel

Acts of Faith: The Story of an American Muslim, the Struggle for the Soul of a Generation is the author’s account of growing up Muslim in America. Originally published in 2008, Acts of Faith was selected as the 2011-2012 Unitarian Universalist Association (UUA) Common Read.

A committee of UUA staff selected Acts of Faith as the UUA’s common read: “Ten years after 9/11, the book describes the vulnerability of youth to violent, fundamentalist influences and makes a case for all of us, particularly youth, to promote pluralism through engagement in interfaith dialogue, education and social justice work.”

A common read invites participants to read and discuss the same book in a given period of time. The selection of Acts of Faith follows up on last year’s UUA common read, Death of Josseline, also available in the lending library. For more information about the UUA’s common read, visit http://www.uuabookstore.org/.

The UUA Bookstore invites readers’ stories of how they used the common read in congregations of on their own: send them to bjackson@uua.org.

A 2008 speaker at the UUA General Assembly, Patel is founder and executive director of the Interfaith Youth Core (IFYC), an international, nonprofit, youth service leadership organization. Patel writes “The Faith Divide” blog for The Washington Post and has also written for the Harvard Divinity School Bulletin, the Chicago Tribune, The Clinton Journal, The Review of Faith and International Affairs, The Sunday Times of India; and National Public Radio. He has been featured on CNN Sunday Morning; NPR’s Morning Edition; the PBS documentary Three Faiths, One God; The New Republic; American Public Media; the BBC; and CNN. He lives in Chicago, Illinois.

“Coming Out in Faith”

Edited by Susan A. Gore and Keith Kron, Coming Out in Faith: Voices of LGBTQ Unitarian Universalists assembles  contributions by various writers. It offers the shared experiences of lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender Unitarian Universalists. It both celebrates Unitarian Universalism’s embrace of LGBTQ people and raises awareness of the strengths they bring to questions of personal faith and organizational vitality.

Susan A. Gore is an educator, activist and entrepreneur and the author of Cultural Detective: An International LGBT Curriculum. Keith Kron is the director of the UUA’s Office of Ministerial Transitions. He is also the former director of the UUA’s Office of Bisexual, Gay, Lesbian and Transgender Concerns.

“Theology Ablaze”

In Theology Ablaze: Celebrating the 50th Anniversary Year of Unitarian Universalism, Tom Owen-Towle shares insights into the essential theology of Unitarian Universalism.

According to Owen-Towle, “Unitarian Universalist theology has caught fire in the past 50 years. In the decades since merger, Unitarian Universalism has been maturing spiritually. We’ve been fanning the flames of our faith. We’ve been growing in theological literacy, dialogue, and depth. We acknowledge that everyone is a bona fide theologian.

“Our brand of progressive theology is sorely needed in the 21st century. As a life-affirming, liberating, and loving religion, Unitarian Universalism stands ready to heal the spirit while reforming society.”

The book explores 29 classic themes including God and death, justice and silence, love and evolution. It includes questions for personal reflection or for group discussion.

Owen-Towle has been a parish minister since 1967 and is the author of two dozen books on personal relationships and spiritual growth. He conducts workshops and retreats on the core themes of his books.

Owen-Towle is married to Carolyn Sheets Owen-Towle and they are the devoted parents of four children and active grandparents of six. Owen-Towle is also a guitarist, Little League coach and a budding magician, especially merry-making with seniors.

Cynthia Parkhill
UUCLC Lending Library
September 2011

a sermon preached by Clovice Lewis on September 4, 2011

In the foreword to her exquisite book of poetry entitled “Sightlines”, Janet Riehl sited a conversation we had as one of the factors that contributed to her writing the book. That conversation took place about six months before she went back to her ancestral home in Illinois to care for her 92-year old father.

Written after the death of her sister in a tragic automobile accident, Janet compiled her father’s mournful poems as well as her own and set out to document the ties that bind, and the things that matter most. What, on that particularly bright early October morning in 2004, sitting at the Farmer’s Market in Kelseyville, was it I said to her that made such an impact? I told her that she needed to know the truth about her life.

You know, as we go through life on this planet, we learn a few things – at least – we should. Those simple words,” you need to know the truth about your life”, became a mantra for me in the early 1990’s when I was going through a divorce. Much of the pain I felt at that time was because I didn’t know the truth about my life. My ex-wife hid the truth about our marriage from me. She knew that she had been attracted to other women all her life. She thought that marrying me could change that. It didn’t. The problem is, I didn’t know that she was gay. I didn’t find that out until she was ready for a divorce.

What a shock it was to me to realize that my ex-wife knew something so important about my life that I didn’t know – that we weren’t going to have children, and that we were not going to stay married. I’m not saying that during the entire five years of our relationship before the divorce that she was consciously planning to leave. The astonishing thing I discovered is that her entire life up to that point was consumed by an attempt to avoid the truth about her sexuality, as well as significant issues with her parents that profoundly affected both her and her brother as they were growing up. So, my ex-wife had made up an identity for herself that could not be sustained. She had constructed a psychological house of cards that came crashing down on her… and me.

The experience I had with my ex-wife taught me about many things. One of the most salient was this idea that I need to know the truth about my life, and that I have a right to wrest it from others if I need to. The other day Carol and I were watching the TV show called “Mad Men”. In one episode the wife of the main character went through her husband’s clothing and possessions looking for evidence of extramarital affairs. Both Carol and I said, in unison to each other, “I’ve done that too.” Since this sermon is about truth and honesty, I’m not asking for a show of hands, but I am seeing a few knowing nods in this room.

What is so compelling that we are capable of going against our own principles, to discard our sense of right and wrong, and to invade another person’s privacy? Are we necessarily trying to prove something? Do we like being sneaky? Do we relish the idea that can finally have closure to our suspicions? Really, it’s not so much all that… we just want to know the truth! And we find out, even knowing that the truth might be very painful. That truth might be that we are failing as a spouse or lover. A diary entry, email, or letter, might well expose the reason for the other’s distance. The truth might be that we are the cause of our beloved other flying into the emotional or physical arms of another person.

We sometimes crash right into the truth in places and times we don’t expect. That is because most of us, as I like say, simply don’t enjoy looking under the hood of our lives. We bumble along in spiritual automobiles that are in bad need of repair. Physically, we abuse ourselves with stress, too much work, not enough exercise… the list goes on. My ex-wife was an extreme case of this ability we have to lie to ourselves, but we all know we accept those blind spots in our psyches. For many of us the places we cannot see are entire fields of view – not just spots.

If we’re lucky, we have spouses or significant others who can have those exquisitely difficult 5:00 in the morning conversations with us that we really need. You know what I’m talking about – you know, the ones that start with “Are you awake”, and then move on into painful territory from there. In my previous marriage we never had those conversations. So instead of the occasional emotional landmines and truth-induced psychic crashes we all encounter with our significant others, I just got the Hiroshima version. Within months, my entire life was in tatters. I’m here to tell you that I prefer the occasional land mines that come from a spouse who is equally interested in brutal honesty as I am over the “blow you off the map, I’m out of here” kind.

When Carol asked me a few days ago what I was going to do that morning, I told her “I’m not going to tell you.” She accepted that, but I halfway suspect she knew I was going to spend the day writing a sermon instead of making money as a consultant, like I am supposed to do. I wasn’t going to lie to her, but I didn’t tell her the truth because I was protecting myself from her disapproval, and protecting her from my – well, creativity. How many times do we lie to another person because we think we are protecting them from the truth?

Well, actually here’s the part of the sermon where I tell you some interesting tidbits about lying. According to WikiAnswers, 12% of adults admit to telling lies “sometimes” or “often”. The profession with the highest number of liars is teaching, with 65% admitting to telling lies, and a surprising 18% telling surveyors that they tell lies “routinely”. The most dishonest time of day is between 9 and 9:30 in the evening, with the early hours of the morning most likely to reveal the truth. (“Aha, it’s 5 o’clock”, I thought o myself as I read that statistic!). The most profligate liar in history was US president Richard Nixon, who researchers found to have lied on record 837 times on a single day.

In his book “After Babel” George Steiner argued that deception was the reason for the development of different languages: it was humanity’s deep desire for privacy and territory that saw the creation of thousands of languages, each designed to maintain secrecy and cultural isolation. Lying is a deeply human activity that goes to the core of our beings.

Maybe it is more useful to say, “avoiding the truth” rather than “lying”. Avoiding the truth is the reason why pilots will fly perfectly good airplanes into the ground because they have ran out of fuel. Avoiding the truth is the reason why people can so easily lie to themselves about their own lives. I know I am guilty of this. The reason why I found myself rummaging through a girlfriend’s closet once was not because I needed proof that she was lying to me about seeing someone else. I already knew that. The proof that I found was something I needed because I was lying to myself about her. I was so desperate to make the first serious relationship after my first wife left work, that I completely disregarded all the red flags my girlfriend was hoisting.

During that time of divorce I learned a lot about knowing the truth about your life. It was at that time that I learned to listen to what others told me in ways that I had not before. I learned that we all have stories to tell, and that no one person’s story is more important than another’s. As I have grown older, I have heard many younger people’s stories about betrayal, heartache, anger, disappointment, bitterness, divorce, finding your way in the world, and come to realize that even though I’ve heard the stories countless times (many times from the same person), I can still connect with the urgency and immediacy of such challenges for that person. That is because they are telling the truth.

This sermon was inspired by a conversation I had late on Monday night with a friend of mine. She told me she was deeply exploring whether to pursue a relationship with a man because I have told her many times that she needs to know the truth about her life. She is 43 years old and wants to have children and to be married. He’s not a fan of marriage, and flatly refuses to have children with anyone. The painful truth is that she may not be able to have children at this time in her life, even though this has been a life-long dream. “The truth is,” she said, “I’m not sure if I really want to be chasing a five year old around the house when I am pushing 50.” Further in our conversation she said that is really the least of her concerns. She said that finding the man who is ideal for her has come at the cost of needing to examine whether to give up on the dream of having children. More specifically, as time has gone by, she has not been truthful with herself about how much her age has played a role in precluding her from having children.

Recently, I have had very close friends deal with significant health issues. If there is anything to wake you up out of the illusion that there is something guaranteed about life, it is that. My oldest friend since I was 14 years old is now dying of a particularly virulent, rare, and nasty form of cancer. Three years ago Laurie underwent experimental cancer treatment at a teaching hospital in southwest Texas. The treatment put the cancer in remission, but left her with significant side effects. Now, back in Abilene, the cancer has returned with a vengeance in mid-June of this year. On August 29 she went to Houston to be evaluated for another experimental DNA-based treatment. The news was not good. Her condition is so advanced that the doctors are not hopeful of a positive outcome. Nevertheless, she will return to Abilene to start the new type of chemotherapy treatment. As you can well imagine, many of our conversations recently have been about facing the truth about her life, in all aspects of it.

Telling the truth is an art. Those of us who practice it can tell you we do so because it just feels better than not telling the truth. Once you get used to it, truthfulness becomes a well-appreciated habit. Telling the truth about things, events, circumstances, and so on, is fairly easy, once you get the hang of it. That is what I would call being honest and having integrity. Telling the truth about your life, or someone else’s life is more difficult. That is often the gray area we like to avoid. George Steiner would say we lie to protect privacy and to gain territory that is at the root of our desires. On a personal level we can certainly all appreciate the need for privacy. But the other reason for lying – territory – doesn’t have to be real estate. It can be desire for another person, the desire to change ourselves fundamentally in a way that might do harm to another, it can be a desire to leave our circumstances, a compulsion to do something others will not approve of, or a host of other ways we covet new territory.

Shri Atmanandji wrote, a book entitled “Sadhak and Sathi”. The subject of chapter 22 in the book is truthfulness. In it he wrote:

“Now, the practice of truth in the day-to-day events of one’s life or in all other matters is the cherished goal of an aspirant. One who is successful in this type of practice is conventionally recognized as a truthful person in society. This is all about conventional truth…

Let us now turn to absolute truth, which dominates in the true spiritual progress (Sadhana). However, it is based on conventional truth. The ultimate aim of spiritual Sadhana is realization of one’s true self. This true self is revealed in direct proportion to destruction of the amount of bondage to Karmas, and this in turn, is achieved by removing the two main causes of bondage to Karma: (a) lack of self-knowledge and (b) lack of self-control.”

Here I think the guru hit the nail on the head. Lack of self-knowledge and lack of self-control go hand in hand. I don’t know if I can fully agree with those being the cause of bondage to Karma, but I do agree that these two evil twin sisters are the cause of some pretty dicey experiences that led to entire periods in my own life.

I might go further to offer a kind of psychic algebra. I believe lack of self- knowledge leads to lack of self-control. After all, knowing about how and why we operate, (that is, if we’ve made a practice of peering under the hood and kicking the tires periodically) stops us from crashing into things.

How privacy relates to truthfulness is very interesting. Privacy is one thing — but secrecy is another. In private is where we work out our desires. It is the safe place in which we wrestle with our two dominant attributes: self-centeredness and other-centeredness. It is self-centeredness that causes us to desire “other territory”, while other-centeredness is where the higher nature to consider the welfare of others springs. To be honest about it, we are all eternally struggling with these great impulses.

Secrecy, by definition, is the attempt to hide something from another person. In secrecy is where we move inescapably from other-centeredness into the realm of self-centeredness. Especially when it relates to relationships, the secret is not so much about working through anything. It is about purposely not telling the truth about something that will affect another person. Whatever lies beneath it, whether it is fear, greed, anger, lust, or any host of other feelings, secrecy in a relationship is almost always bad for both you and others.

I’m not saying either privacy or secrecy is wrong. In fact, secrets sometimes must be kept in order to legitimately protect another person; it’s just that truthfulness must always be the byproduct of self- knowledge and self-control.

Guy Finley wrote an essay called “Free Yourself by Seeing Yourself: 9 Ways to Heal the Hidden Hurting in You”. In the essay Finley wrote:

“No one can be free who refuses to see what actually lives within him. This is why Real self-healing begins with Truthful self-seeing. There is no other order, no other way. Consciousness of any unwanted condition in us must precede its correction, just as the rising sun dismisses the fear hiding in the darkness of night. This is why we must learn that anything in us that does not want us to see the truth about our actual unenlightened condition is itself a part of what is punishing us. We can learn to do much better!”

Finley goes on to describe nine eye-opening facts about areas in our lives he says we have chosen not to see what must be seen… If we would be Free.

I find number 6 especially interesting, and suitable for today’s talk.

“We close our eyes to the fact that just because we have mastered hiding some character fault of ours doesn’t mean that it has stopped hurting those around us who cannot avoid being subjected to it.”

The best way to avoid hurting others is learning not to hide the truths about us that can be damaging others and ourselves. When you can know, then reveal the truth about your life, then everyone benefits. You become an integrated person who has both self-knowledge and self-control.

The third principle that we Unitarian Universalists affirm and promote is “a free and responsible search for truth and meaning”. One of the reasons why this topic came up so powerfully for me is that I realized a few days ago that is how and why I enjoy talking with others in deep, intimate conversations. It surprised me to understand that these conversations are almost always about assisting others in some manner to acknowledge the truth in their lives. And in so doing, I see my own relationships with them more clearly. It is not a far stretch to understand that my truth is affected by theirs.

And so it is with us all. We are all burdened by lack of clarity and purposefulness in our lives. We profoundly affect others around us in ways we cannot imagine when we are not able to see this. When we don’t tell others these truths, we diminish them. Denis Diderot said about truthfulness, “We swallow greedily any lie that flatters us, but we sip only little by little at a truth we find bitter.”

As for me, I thank Carol for those 5 o’clock in the morning conversations we occasionally have. We both agreed before we were married that our union would offer us an accelerated spiritual path that would be difficult to travel alone. I have come to understand, and appreciate that, knowing the truths about our lives are the bricks that pave that path.

Clovice A. Lewis, Jr.
8/30/11

(Sermon by the Rev. Dan Kane read by Anne McAfee on August 28, 2011)

Each June thousands of Unitarian Universalists from across North America, and increasingly from around the world, gather together for an annual convocation called General Assembly.  Each General Assembly opens festively with a banner parade, where representatives from each congregation, society and fellowship – large and small – march through the aisles of vast convention halls carrying individual handmade banners portraying their home churches.  It is a very boisterous, colorful and celebratory affair.

(Choir begins humming Spirit of Life)

In 2002 our General Assembly was held in Quebec City.  As marchers for the banner parade assembled in a very crowded room adjacent to that vast convention hall, a man in their midst began to suffer the severe chest pains of a heart attack.  Now let me assure you that he ultimately survived, but that was not apparent at that moment.  Between the time of the onset of his heart attack and the arrival of paramedics, others in the room were at a loss as to what to do for this man, a fellow Unitarian Universalist, in extremis; but also in the midst of his spiritual community.  Suddenly someone in the room began softly singing Spirit of Life.  Soon everyone else joined in singing and then humming Spirit of Life.  They formed a circle around the man, and the paramedics who were saving his life, praying in the only way that they all knew how “roots hold me close; wings set me free; Spirit of Life, come to me, come to me.”

(Choir sings spirit of Life)

Now for our guests this morning, and for others not familiar with Unitarian Universalism, this spontaneous coming together in prayer and song might not seem like a big deal – but it really was.  We are a faith community of diverse believers and non-believers.  We do not share a common creed.  We are Christians, Jews, Buddhists, pagans, Humanists, theists, atheists, agnostics and none of the above.  We cultivate and cherish vibrant theological diversity in our midst.  We recognize that the ultimate spiritual authority rests within the soul and conscience of each individual.

When we come together in work and worship we strive to speak in broad and inclusive terms that encompass believers and non-believers alike.  Perhaps because of this, or as a consequence of it, we are not conversant in a common language of prayer or reverence.  It‟s not just a matter of political correctness or spiritual meekness that leads us away from this language; it is our commitment and intention to include everyone here gathered on the spiritual journey, that drives us to choose our words – or absence of words – so very carefully.

The importance of this became so clear to me a couple of years ago, at my home in Oakland, California, when I participated in an Oakland Coalition of Congregations Interfaith gospel-singing event.  During the rehearsal the choir director – a very open and loving person – began invoking the name of Jesus to bring us singers to a place where we could be fully present to properly sing praise songs.  There were some whispers in the front rows and soon she stopped the singing, looked towards the back of the room – to no one in particular – and apologized for invoking the name of Jesus, saying “I know that‟s offensive to some people.”

I was struck by her wording – it‟s not that someone there would become offended at the mention of Jesus – we were in a Baptist church singing gospel music, after all – but that some of us there gathered could not be transported to a place of praise by the imagery or idea of Jesus.  We were either unfamiliar with Jesus or had perhaps been a victim of maltreatment or abuse at the hands of someone using the name of Jesus.  The point was to speak in terms that would transport everyone, together, to the place of singing praise songs.

What each of us believes is important but the individual shadings of our beliefs may not be as significant as that which brings us together in collective understanding.  In the words Dag Hammarskjöld “God does not die on the day when we cease to believe in a personal deity, but we die on the day when our lives cease to be illuminated by the steady radiance, renewed daily, of a wonder, the source of which is beyond all reason.”1

We know this as Unitarian Universalists.  There is something beyond our individual human reasoning – be it God or human potential or just plain mystery.  It is that which brings us together in work and worship.  This is why Unitarian Universalism is a most precious and rare gem.  It is the big tent under which we all can come together, in our vast diversity of belief and non-belief, practice and questioning, and seeking and sharing, to build and fortify and deepen that „steady radiance and wonder.‟  The source of which is beyond all reason and therefore – almost always – beyond words.

And that is why Spirit of Life is such a remarkable liturgical gift.  As noted by Kimberly French, editor of the UU World magazine, “no other song, no other prayer, no other piece of liturgy is so well known and loved in Unitarian Universalism.  It is our Doxology, or perhaps our Amazing Grace.”2  It is an anthem that speaks to our openness, love, service and justice-making.  It holds our dreams and aspirations and it encompasses even more; two of the major underpinnings that we do all share.

One is our recognition of nature, our birthplace, lifesource and home – Mother Earth – and the vital interdependent web of existence of which we are a part.  Our spirits and our truth rise in the sea and they blow in the wind and we are incomplete without this recognition and presence in our spiritual lives.  For some this is the divine.  For others it is a manifestation of the divine and for yet others it is the cathedral of the divine or an irreplaceable gift entrusted to our care and stewardship.  Whatever it is, it is part of the sticky stuff that holds us all together.

The thing that Spirit of Life speaks to most directly and most powerfully though, is the conflicting demands that we put on ourselves and on this faith – to hold us, embrace us, make us feel safe secure and grounded – and at the self same time – to embolden us, challenge us, to hold our feet to the fire and make us grow.  And not just to grow a little bit at a time, or only at a certain stage in our lives, but always and in all ways, with wings to soar and to set us free – from the very moment of our births to the last and final breaths of our lives.  That is a pretty tall order – from any religion, any song or any prayer.

And interestingly that is how Carolyn McDade, the author of Spirit of Life characterizes the song – not as a hymn or an anthem but as a prayer.  McDade, one of the co-creators of the merging of the waters ritual, by which so many Unitarian Universalists open their church years each September, attended Arlington Street Church while she lived in the Boston area in the early 1980s.  That was when she composed Spirit of Life.  She tells the story of being spiritually and existentially drained and fatigued.  She was a wife and a mother and felt torn in a million directions from that and all of the activism and social justice work in which she was engaged, “I was tired, not with my community but with the world.”3

One night she told a friend “I feel like a piece of dried cardboard that has lain in the attic for years.  Just open wide the doors and I‟ll be dust.”4  Her friend just sat with her, in silence and solidarity, as she experienced all that was needed from her and that she was called to do – exhausted from the stresses and strains of a world in need of so much justice and so much repair.  Later that evening, when her friend dropped her off at her front door, she just moved through the darkness of her home to find her piano.  As her heart and soul cried, “may I not drop out,” the words and the music just poured forth; “it was not written, but prayed.  I knew more than anything that I wanted to continue in faith with the movement.”5

And this is how it can so often be with us.  Called to live and love and honor the staggering diversity of belief and practice with which we choose to engage.  Such aliveness can overwhelm and exhaust.  Yet we return, yet we
return.

In the words of Reverend Mark Morrison-Reed, The central task of the religious community is to unveil the bonds that bind each to all.  There is a connectedness, a relationship discovered amid the particulars of our own lives and the lives of others.  Once felt, it inspires us to act for justice.  It is the church that assures us that we are not struggling for justice on our own, but as members of a larger community.  The religious community is essential, for alone our vision is too narrow to see all that must be seen, and our strength too limited to do all that must be done.  Together, our vision widens and our strength is renewed.6

The call of our religious community does inspire and encourage but it also demands and exhausts.  Carolyn McDade has given us a prayer and a beacon to light our ways in and through that community and to replenish our souls both within and without of its walls.

That is my definition of grace.

Let‟s face it, it takes something a lot bigger than just our individual selves to accomplish those conflicting needs.  Which brings us right back to our starting point – the mystery and the quest for truth.  It is no wonder that we possess and cherish such theological diversity – there can be no singular path to achieve our lofty aspirations for this life and this world.  Let us hold tight to all that binds us together and let us let go and reach and stretch to make room for every traveler along the way.  That‟s what we Unitarian Universalists do.

Please remain seated and open your hymnals to hymn number 123 and let us join together in song and in prayer to the Spirit of Life.

So be it and amen.

1 Markings: The Spiritual Diary of Dag Hammarskjöld. Dag Hammarskjöld. NYC: Knopf, 1965.

2 Carolyn McDade’s Spirit of Life, Kimberly French. UU World, vol. XXI, no. 3, Fall 2007.

3 Ibid.

4 Ibid.

5 Ibid.

6 Singing the Living Tradition.  UUA.  Boston: Beacon Press 1993. #580.

A sermon preached on August 14, 2011 by Andrew Hidas

Readings

“The old differences separating one system from another now are becoming less and less important, less and less easy to define. And what, on the contrary, is becoming more and more important is that we should learn to see through all the differences to the common themes that have been there all the while, that came into being with the first emergence of ancestral man from the animal levels of existence, and are with us still.” —From Joseph Campbell’s Myths to Live By

“I believe that man must learn to live without those consolations called religious, which his own intelligence must by now have told him belong to the childhood of the race. Philosophy really can give us nothing permanent to believe in either. It is too rich in answers; each canceling out the rest. The quest for meaning is foredoomed. Human life means nothing. But that is not to say that it is not worth living. What does a Debussy arabesque mean, or a rainbow, or a rose? A man delights in all of these knowing himself to be no more. A wisp of music and haze of dreams dissolving against the sun. Man has only his own two feet to stand on, his own human trinity to see him through: reason, courage and grace, and the first plus the second equals the third.” —From Peter De Vries’ The Blood of the Lamb

Sermon Text:

So: Let’s get back to this belief thing, shall we? We UUs are famously free of dogma, but belief is always there bubbling barely beneath the surface of any religiously inclined person and community. As UUs, our individual beliefs and religious practices can be as varied as the stars, but they do coalesce around a certain elastic and liberal frame of mind and heart. When we encounter those who are inelastic and conservative, many of us are thrown back on painful childhood memories that we’ve spent our adult lives working out in some serious self-therapy, if nothing else. But that just makes one key question all the more relevant: What should self-professed religious liberals do about religious conservatives?

Can we talk to them in anything resembling a common language when key words in that language tend to evoke very different interpretations? Words like God? And “my religion.” And “heaven”… “grace”…“spirit”…“faith”… And that two-word combo that has had such an impact on world history: “We believe…”

We believe…” There’s power in them words— for both good and bad. Even stronger is their variant in the Declaration of Independence:

We hold these truths to be self-evident…that all men are created equal…endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights…”

Endowed by their Creator…” What do you suppose our Founding Fathers meant by a Creator who endows certain rights to us? Did they envision a kindly father figure stroking his long white beard on a throne just north of the Big Dipper, pondering the freedom of assembly?

Well, given the Unitarian and Deist cast of many of the Founders, I think it’s safe to say that many of them didn’t imagine any such thing. But I suspect they signed on to the specifically religious language of a “Creator who endows” because the ideas they were trying to convey required a language of profundity and depth.

Human beings have used different terms, concepts and images throughout history to get at the depth dimension of life. It started when our ancestors hovered about in their caves and huts with lots of time on their hands to stoke a fire while thunder and lightning and winds howled outside. They began to wonder: “What’s with all the uproar? Was it something we did?”

“And what about the sun, the fruit that falls from the trees, the animals we catch for our dinner? Who’s behind it all? Must be something stronger and smarter than us!”

“But hey, given their extreme moods, maybe we should buddy up with them! Maybe they’re hungry! Let’s offer them a sacrifice, a nice little rabbit from our stash…But let’s bow down first to let them know we appreciate them. What do we call them? They need names! Hmmm—the ‘gods.’”

Thus were born concepts, imaginings, rituals…to begin scratching at, to attempt to convey, the essential mystery of the Creation. Our experiences of it. Our place in it. The terror it sometimes brings.

You know what happens from there—the putative alpha male thinks he’s figured it all out. Exactly how the sacrificial rabbit needs to be presented…How many times the assembled need to bow. He finds others nodding in agreement, and pretty soon they decide to meet regularly so they can properly court the gods’ sympathy: “Every seventh sunrise at Joe’s cave down by the creek!” And thus begins the tradition of “religious community.”

A little while later, there’s some heated discussion, a few folks say no, no no, that’s not the way it is at all! We shouldn’t even sacrifice rabbits—the gods would surely prefer lambs! That’s why these storms keep pounding us despite the rabbits we’ve been putting out there!

Thus is born Religious Community No. 2. And so on, resulting in the truly incredible spectrum that keeps religious scholars and universalists like us so busy today. We’ve got God and gods and Goddesses, Christs and Yahwehs and Brahmas, Allahs and Voids, Great Mothers and Holy Fathers, Almightys and Great Spirits, Alphas and Omegas and Higher Powers, Sources of All That Is. On and on they go—a thousand upon thousand names for God and the religions and belief structures by which human beings try to make sense of it all.

When I was in graduate school with my head full of Carl Jung, I was chatting with my beloved mother, a God-fearing Christian.

The subject got around to Adam and Eve. As we talked, I realized, to my amazement, that she thought of them as real people. Our very first parents. When I suggested that most religious scholars consider the Garden of Eden a myth, a fable, Mom looked at me wide-eyed, as if I had suddenly sprouted a large antler from the middle of my forehead.

This was incomprehensible to her—the story is in the Bible, isn’t it? And the Bible is the word of God, right? She simply couldn’t entertain the idea that I didn’t think it was real. She wasn’t offended—just greatly puzzled. Oh no, I realized: my mother is one of those fundamentalists!

Was there harm in the views she held? My mom had a heart the size of Chicago, as do many other fine and generous people who hold more or less literal views on matters of religion. She was a gentle soul who found solace in her faith right to her dying day. Her use of language—and what is language but a symbol?— her feeling and living into her reality of “Jesus loves me, this I know,” worked to orient her life around basic principles of goodness and comfort and service, just as many millions of people do today. For her, truly: ’Twas a gift to be simple…

Obviously, literal belief in sacred scripture is not always harmless. True believers can be dangerous and evil. The Crusades, the Twin Towers, Knoxville—history tells a long sad tale of those who think with absolute vehemence and ultimate malice that the world should be a certain way, and when it isn’t, they feel entitled to take that world horribly into their own hands.

But it’s not only madmen and Taliban who leave us shaking our heads in dismay. On an only slightly less malicious note, ministers of prominence such as Pat Robertson can claim in our own supposedly advanced culture that God permitted 9-11 and those 3,000 innocent lives to be snuffed out—why? Because of all those gay people we stubbornly refuse to stone in the town square.

Of course, I keep waiting for all those literalists citing 15 words in Leviticus as the basis of their gay phobia to begin scattering bull’s and goat’s blood over the altar during their next Sunday service, just as the entire chapter of Leviticus 16 instructs them to do. Wouldn’t THAT make for entertaining Sunday morning television! But alas, the wait is in vain. This gets us to what I shall grandly call Hidas Theorem No. 1—Hey, it’s my sermon!—

There is no such thing as true fundamentalism, only selective fundamentalism by those who cherry-pick passages of ancient texts in order to support their biases.

Truly, there has never been a 100% fundamentalist, because carrying out every dictum of most all sacred books requires contradictory actions like absolute compassion and forgiveness in one chapter and unremitting vengeance in the next. Which is it? Only God, in all her fathomless mystery, knows…

Now, we have to ask ourselves: What do we do, as educated, modernist UUs, committed to pluralism, with the almost medieval perspectives sometimes espoused by religious fundamentalism?

One place to start, I think, is by considering Hidas Theorem No. 2. This one concerns How to Build Tolerance and Influence People. It goes like this: Not one person in the entire history of the world has EVER changed their mind about ANYTHING because they were told how stupid they are.

I think of Martin Luther King and Nelson Mandela here. They did not change the world, did not change anyone’s mind, by shouting down their adversaries as stupid, racist and ignorant. They relied instead on something far more penetrating, artful and effective: the magisterial moral force of their rhetoric and physical courage. The persuasive power of their large hearts. They not only changed the minds and hearts of neutral bystanders, but they ultimately changed much of the hate and ignorance of those who opposed them.

I think what really tests us UUs is being “open” and welcoming to those we consider close-minded people—literalist, conservative Christians, most pointedly. That’s where we see our values most tested, where our rubber of tolerance meets the road of our most intense resistance. It’s easy for us to be ecumenical and all-accepting of our nontheistic Buddhist friends, or our leftie Christian congregations that emphasize social justice and inclusion. But those pesky and persistent fundamentalist Christians are another thing altogether. How should we deal with them?

I think we have to take principled, powerful stands against wrongs and injustices wherever we find them—just as Nelson Mandela and Martin Luther King did. But strong and principled does not mean disparaging, however exasperating the opposing view. Hidas Theorem No. 3 goes like this:We cannot diminish the humanity of even our severest political or theological opponents without it diminishing our own humanity in turn.

This calls to mind a line from the tragi-comic novelist Peter DeVries, whose reading you will hear in the closing words. He said, “We are not primarily put on this earth to see through one another, but to see one another through.”

So if we expand this UU community beyond our walls to the larger community beyond, then “seeing one another through” means not dismissing out of hand even literalist symbol systems that bring meaning and purpose and even “explanation” into others’ lives.

This is where the new atheists such as Sam Harris and Richard Dawkins have it so wrong. Not in their basic intellectual critique of the absurdities and dangers of literalist religious belief. Their mistake is the conviction that the sooner those beliefs are ridiculed and blasted out from under believers, the better off they and our world will be. The new atheists’ utter disdain for the enduring value and transformative power of religious language and symbol is truly breathtaking. (But that’s another sermon…)

I left the Catholicism of my youth when I was 14. I almost made it back at age 30 with the help of stunning encounters at Jesuit church services and a Jesuit spiritual director when I was at seminary. But I ultimately found that I couldn’t speak the language from “inside” the tradition anymore. Try as I might, Christian symbols had lost their emotional resonance; I could no longer “live” in Jesus language and draw sustenance from its poetic power.

But now, as an outsider to that tradition, I am becoming more comfortable with its language once again. I see my increasing fluidity with the Christian symbol system as right in line with the “universalism” part of our own tradition. It’s a gesture of solidarity with the overarching spiritual “truth” that all religion attempts to explore and express.

I’d like to suggest this simple idea: a language-and-culture based understanding of religious differences. We humans have our everyday languages that require translation when we travel to other countries:

A coffee, please becomes . Un café, por favor. Café, sil vous plais. Kave, kérem szépen (That’s my Hungarian!)…

Then there is our religious language, which, like our everyday language, we come to out of a nearly infinite variety of cultures, traditions, linguistic development and even our individual experiences. Such a tapestry it all is, rich with diverse expression, concepts and rituals, differing cadences of poetry, differing metaphors:

Christ is risen! (A UU Translation: “Every day, I can make life anew.”)

Allahu akbar! (English translation: God is Great! UU Translation: “The Creation is glorious!”)

Thy will be done. (UU Translation: “What will be, will be.”) (Which is itself a fine Buddhist phrase.)

And then there’s the lovely Hindu greeting Namaste:I salute the God within you, the goodness that shines thru, whatever name you give to that God, which may be different than mine, but Namaste anyway!…

As UUs, we get to delight in Hinduism’s pantheon, in Judaism, Christianity & Islam’s earthly prophets, in Buddhism’s void and emptiness. These are all languages, generally translatable into other languages.

At base, all of them are pointers to the depth dimension of life, to intensely subjective experiences of sanctity and meaning and love.

Respecting even the literal languages used by our neighbors means that when we are “traveling” in their “religious country,” whether it’s with Baptists or Jews or Muslims, we can bow our heads to God and Allah, reflect on the wisdom and gifts of Jesus and Moses and Muhammad, and consider how those gibe with our own conceptions and language of spiritual life.

Let me posit this: As interwoven as religion is with everyday life, ongoing and good-faith translation is absolutely critical to human progress and the cross-cultural understanding that is fundamental to that progress.

We talk a lot in UU congregations—particularly during Canvass season!—about nurturing a culture of generosity. We emphasize the idea that generosity, much as we love and need big checks during the Canvass, really is about more than money. There’s also a generosity of spirit that is almost synonymous with or a prerequisite for the spiritual life.

So it seems to me that a certain generosity and large-heartedness is essential in our interactions with those of more literalistic persuasions than our own.

Generosity serves as a brake on a kind of spiritual elitism that can creep in when we use our intellects and critical skills to deconstruct the basis of all religious expression.

This generosity helps us place the limitations of literalism in a larger perspective—one that sees human religious sensibility as a developmental process. We mostly stopped doing human sacrifices to the sky gods centuries ago. Science and rationalism have helped most educated people understand that the earth is more than 6,000 years old.

Yes, in times of great change as we seem to be in now, many humans scurry to the sure answers of fundamentalism. But when we look over the broad sweep of history, the arc has moved inexorably toward less superstition—toward more rationalism, more open-ended and inquiring conceptions of religion. Less about God as The Great Cosmic Movie Director with his hand all over every scene.

But then again, I know highly educated, liberally minded modernists—personal friends of mine and polar opposites of Pat Robertson—who believe in the physical reality of Jesus’s resurrection. They are liberal literalists! What’s that about?

It’s certainly not that they’re dumb!…I’m convinced it’s because they choose to believe, rational science be damned, and in that choosing to immerse completely into the symbol, a kind of transformation occurs that makes love and service and self-sacrifice come alive for them in a powerful way. And then they go tend the sick and fight for justice and pursue all manner of other activities to help build a better world.

The true “fundamental” question is this: Are we going to deepen our compassion as the Buddha implores us to do? And as, indeed, Jesus does in his consorting with thieves, prostitutes and other downtrodden souls?

Or are we going to…bristle…and seeeeeethe…at those idiotic (you can fill in the blank here—fundamentalists, conservatives, reactionaries……….).

I think I spent too many years on Bristle Road, despairing at the narrow-mindedness, the shallowness and callowness of literalism. I seem to have often fallen short of Martin Luther King and Nelson Mandela in this regard. Darn it!

But what I have come to understand is that Bristle Road has an end—a dead end. You become either a permanent resident of Bristleville, or you look for a way to back your vehicle up, turn it around, and find a thoroughfare. I consider myself still in recovery from the harshness of Bristleville. I finally had to ask myself, “So exactly where is this getting me?”

Slowly, I have come to see literalism in a broader light of differing sensibilities, backgrounds, and relationship to symbol—even as I make as forceful a case as I can when literalists try to impinge on the rights of others.

How we fight the good fight and stay true to our own deepest values is the key. Yes, there are moments and days when I backslide and start fulminating against the fundamentalists, I assure you.

But that’s when I try to pause, take a deep breath, and remember, again, that we’re here to help get each other through. That our own language of reverence and respect and a heart full of love and compassion are the most powerful tools we’ve been given to assist us.

Human consciousness evolves slowly, at a far less rapid pace, unfortunately, than does the iPod. So not only a great resolve, but also a great patience is called for as we contend with the limitations of our fallible humanity, even as we use the beautiful, transcendent tools of language to help light the way to the more just and loving world that calls to us evermore.