Scrupuli

A talk given in essentially this form at Westside Unitarian Universalist Church, May 18, 2014.

Responsive reading

Number 666, “The Legacy of Caring”

Despair is my private pain Born from what I have failed to say failed to do, failed to overcome. Be still my inner self let me rise to you, let me reach down into your pain and soothe you. I turn to you to renew my life I turn to the world, the streets of the city, the worn tapestries of brokerage firms, drug dealers, private estates personal things in the bag lady’s cart rage and pain in the faces that turn from me afraid of their own inner worlds. This common world I love anew, as the life blood of generations who refused to surrender their humanity in an inhumane world, courses through my veins. From within this world my despair is transformed to hope and I begin anew the legacy of caring. —Thandeka

Why we do religion

There are certain things in my life which I call sacred. These are people, places, and events which uplift me by causing me to experience, for a time, what I wish life would be like for everyone all of the time. My spouse is sacred to me. I like being with her, and I like what I become when I am with her. Westside also uplifts me like that, and that is probably why you have to put up with me here more often than not, and my spouse could probably tell you she puts up with me, too, more often than not.

A few years ago, when Dr Elleven, our beloved minister emeritus, was preparing to go on sabbatical, I was called to join the worship team (the people who prepare these worship services). Because I have this duty, I think a lot about why we do what we do on Sunday. I recall to mind what our purpose is here, at this meeting every Sunday, so that I can help the worship service be what we Westsiders need it to be.

Westsiders say religion is a peaceful gathering of people who believe the world can be more compassionate. We learn together, help one another, and collectively pursue an ideal peaceful world, full of compassion. And of course we practice this ideal in our community. Don’t we, for example, make decisions using a democratic process that respects the rights and opinions of everyone, because that is the most compassionate way we know? So Westside not only offers me a place to belong and a sense of serenity, but also models an ideal world for me. It demonstrates for me how I might belong anywhere and be at peace everywhere.

And thinking about the meaning of Westside generally gets me thinking about the whole purpose of religion. What do any of us do any of this for?

The last time I gave a reflection, I said we are of two natures. Our aggressive nature causes suffering; our compassionate nature alleviates suffering. From the time we are very young we take some pleasure in both. The Buddhists put it that loving everyone is not natural, but it is the best thing we can do and we should learn to do it anyway. Because it’s not natural, it takes practice, and I think that is where religion comes in.

By and large, the religious practices with which I am familiar seem to have a therapeutic purpose. They diagnose the problem largely the way we do: there is a lot of unnecessary suffering in the world, which they aim to heal. And they describe the solution largely the way we do: right thinking leads to right action. They aim to clear our minds and hearts so we remember what is most important and are ready to work toward it.

We all have different names for the ideal world we imagine: Nirvāna, Paradise, Kether, Utopia. It may be a place, a time, or a state of mind, but ultimately to me each one is a metaphor for perfect peace arrived at by perfect compassion.

Sacred silence

Many of our beloved religious traditions teach that the most sacred thing of all is silent – or at least very quiet. And many traditions say that great wisdom can come to us in a listening silence. These are the traditions which say that inspiration and prophecy are not dead, or the prerogative of priests, but are essentially democratic. Anybody can receive new wisdom, and we can all learn from it. And what I am reflecting on today is what my own religious history has to say about the value of silence.

Deism and humanism

Henry David Thoreau was reportedly asked by his aunt on his deathbed if he had made his peace with God. He asked, “were we fighting?”

The deist and humanist traditions developed some new ideas. These traditions arose out of a greater reliance on human reason over teachings of the church authorities. Deists and humanists pay attention to the world to find out what is true and what is not, instead of depending on what they are told. Henry David Thoreau is, of course, one of the beloved teachers in our Unitarian Universalist tradition. When Henry retreated to Walden Pond for a couple of years, meditation was a big part of his spiritual practice. He sat for most of every morning and paid attention to what was right around him. And he wrote: “No method nor discipline can supersede the necessity of being forever on the alert. What is a course of history or philosophy, or poetry, no matter how well selected, or the best society, or the most admirable routine of life, compared with the discipline of looking always at what is to be seen? Will you be a reader, a student merely, or a seer? Read your fate, see what is before you, and walk on into futurity.“

Buddhism

To find the Buddha, look within. Deep inside you are ten thousand flowers. Each flower blossoms ten thousand times. Each blossom has ten thousand petals. (You might want to see a specialist.)

Recently I was fortunate to accompany the youth to a service at Kadampa Buddhist Temple in Arlington. I guess 30 minutes of this service was spent in meditation, either silent or else guided by a teacher, though my guess is probably inaccurate, because I was doing it.

I experience meditation as being deliberately and exceptionally awake: mindful of everything because the right attitude in meditation is that everything is sacred and worth attending to. In other words it is a very unselfish practice.

My favorite Buddhist author is a Vietnamese Zen Buddhist monk, Thích Nhất Hạnh. He likens mindful meditation to the attention a mother pays to her child. The child does not need to do anything to deserve love. Love comes from paying attention. As soon as you pay attention, you see. As soon as you see, you sympathize. As soon as you sympathize, you love. As soon as you love, you help.

Buddhism teaches that a person can become so attentive during meditation that compassion eclipses all selfish desires, illusions, and regrets. This is a moment of nirvāṇa, complete absence. Then unsatisfied desires reassert themselves and the person is reincarnated. Not at all like what we mean by “born again” in the Judeo-Christian tradition!

Judeo-Christian tradition

And behold, the Lord passed by, and a great and strong wind tore into the mountains and broke the rocks in pieces before the Lord, but the Lord was not in the wind; and after the wind an earthquake, but the Lord was not in the earthquake; and after the earthquake a fire, but the Lord was not in the fire; and after the fire a still small voice. —I Kings 19

My grandmother was Lutheran, and, I think largely to please her, the church of my early childhood was Lutheran. A lot of dark wood, robed acolytes with big versions of this candle lighter, lighting three candles at the altar to symbolize the trinity, or to memorialize Jesus and the two thieves as I thought at the time, and so on.

Later on, I read about Martin Luther. There is as much to like as there is to dislike about Martin, but I always come back to one thing. At a time when Martin was hiding out from the authorities with his friend Veit Dietrich at Coburg Castle, Veit wrote of him:

I cannot sufficiently admire the singular steadfastness, the happy attitude, the faith and hope of this man in serious times. … There is not a day on which he does not devote at least three hours, the very ones most suitable for studying, to prayer.

As an older child, I attended some Quaker silent meetings with my mother. These meetings generally lasted one hour, and a considerable part of that time was silent sitting, without a lot of fidgeting.

A visitor to a Quaker meeting, seeing everyone sitting in silence with no minister, once asked, “When does the service begin?” The response was, “the service begins at the end of meeting.”

George Fox, a chief founder of the Quaker tradition, was one of those who taught that “people had no need of any teacher but the Light that was in all men and women”, and that if people would just sit still and listen, the Light would reveal them to themselves, and show them how to live rightly. Quaker meetings are held with an attitude of eager expectation, waiting silently for God to speak. When a person believes they have heard God’s “still, small voice” inspire them with something for the meeting, that person stands to share a message, lead a hymn, or read a passage of scripture, and then takes a seat again. The meeting meditates silently on what was shared for several more minutes, while they wait for the next revelation.

Also as an older child, I attended Mormon church meetings with my father, who was and still is very active in his church. (My parents did not see eye to eye on religion.)

Like Unitarian Universalists, Mormons value their history, so they carefully teach their history with all its unusual features to their children. I occasionally attended Mormon religious education classes as a child, and possessed a thick stack of booklets from my father containing Mormon teachings and the history of the church, but as a child I found Mormonism a bit confusing, so I do not altogether disbelieve the story I heard about a young Mormon boy who presented a class report in Sunday School. He said, “The early Mormons believed in having more than one wife. This is called polygamy. But now we believe in having only one wife. This is called monotony.”

But it is clear to me that Mormons share a great idea with Quakers (and here, mother is turning over in her grave). They, too, teach personal revelation. They believe their church is led by a prophet, and from time to time still add prophetic chapters to their scriptural canon. My father taught me that prayers and blessings begin in silence, waiting for words to be inspired by God’s “still, small voice”. I remember him telling me that when his second wife, who he dearly loved, was gravely injured by a drunk driver, he anointed her with oil as she lay dying in her hospital bed, and prepared with other Mormon priests to bless her with health and a complete recovery. Mormon blessings of health are in other words a form of faith healing that my father believed could really save his wife. But when he laid his hands on her head, and waited for the words to come, they were not the blessing he planned. Instead he spoke words of love and farewell, and of his faith that they would eventually be reunited. He said afterward that this was God speaking through him. Certainly I think he was only able to speak those words of release to his beloved because his faith tradition helped him develop the ability to wait for great wisdom in a listening silence.

There is a real difficulty with personal revelation as practiced by the Mormons. New truths should be tested, and a test used commonly by the Mormons is inadequate. Their scripture says “you must study it out in your mind; then you must ask me if it be right, and if it is right I will cause that your bosom shall burn within you; therefore, you shall feel that it is right. But if it be not right you shall have no such feelings, but you shall have a stupor of thought that shall cause you to forget the thing which is wrong.”

This may explain why the founder of the Mormon church, Joseph Smith Jr., was said by a contemporary, Oliver B. Huntington, to believe “the moon was inhabited by men and women the same as this earth, and that they live generally to near the age of a 1,000 years. He described the men as averaging nearly six feet in height, and dressing quite uniformly in something near the Quaker style.” And so my mother wins.

Unitarian Universalism

So now I am finally getting around to talking about our own religious practice here at Westside. Our practice is to set a time and place apart with sacred fire, and in the center we place one minute of silence. We are invited to contemplate, meditate, or give a prayer, and to take into this silence all the joys, concerns, and sorrows among all who have gathered here, including those too personal to share, or unknown to us.

For someone who has practiced Quaker silent meeting, one minute goes by pretty quickly. I am just getting started by the time some of us are already starting to shuffle their feet. But you can go pretty far toward nirvāṇa in just one minute.

Just as Westside is an example for me of what the world could become, the germ of a world, so to speak, so this one minute of silence is, it seems to me, the germ of Westside, our place of beginning.

To express the meaning of that minute to me, I want to repeat something I said last week. Each of us is a deep well of mother’s love. And each of us is a precious child who needs love. And again I invite you to take a moment, right now, to see or touch the people sitting all around you, and embrace all their joys and sorrows, especially those unknown to you.

– I love how people are sitting closer together now. In the moment that we are attentive to another person, we love, and suddenly we are ready act on that love and provide what is needed. We are all of us precious, and all of us ready to love.

Invitation to share

George Carlin said, “Religion is nothing but mind control.” He said, “Religion is just trying to control your mind, control your thoughts, so they’re gonna tell you some things you shouldn’t say because they’re … sins. And besides telling you things you shouldn’t say, religion is gonna suggest some things that you ought to be saying. ‘Here’s something you ought to say first thing when you wake up in the morning; here’s something you ought to say just before you go to sleep at night; here’s something we always say on the third Wednesday in April after the first full moon in spring at 4 o’clock when the bells ring.’ Religion is always suggesting things you ought to be saying.”

George is both right and wrong about this. He’s right that some religions try to control your mind. But he’s wrong to criticize mind control. How we think of something changes how we feel, and that changes what we do. When we direct our own minds to think of everything as sacred, this releases our compassion, and our compassion enables us to create justice. The difference is that at Westside and in many other faith traditions, we decide for ourselves how and what to think, and we share what we learn with one another.

So now I wish to share with you one of my meditation practices. After service, or whenever you feel moved to do so, I invite whoever is willing and able to share with me one of your meditation practices, and to share it with others in our community also.

When I am driving alone, I often practice mindfulness meditation. I do not have music playing, or think ahead to what I should be doing at my destination when I get there, or think back on what I should have done at the place I just left – which is what I am usually thinking about. I sit up straight and focus my awareness on everything around me: my driving and the other cars on the road (of course!), and also my own breathing and heartbeat and the feeling of my hands on the wheel. Everything within my sphere of awareness is sacred and worthy of my full attention.

I find that as soon as I conceive of everything as sacred and worthy, I feel and act differently. The driver who is trying to cut me off to get to the fast lane is not a jerk anymore. He’s suffering. Or his wife is dying and he’s trying to get to the hospital. And so, instead of resenting and fearing his intrusion, I invite him to go before me. This is an example of how I control my thinking, which changes how I feel, which changes what I do.

… As we rise (in body or spirit) and sing our closing hymn, number 88, “Calm Soul of All Things”.

Calm soul of all things, make it mine to feel, amid the city’s jar, that there abides a peace of thine I did not make, and cannot mar. The will to neither strive nor cry, the power to feel with others, give. Calm, calm me more; nor let me die before I have begun to live. —Matthew Arnold (tune: Thomas Tallis)

Some social scientists might say that I have just made several common face-saving and face-threatening gestures associated with favor seeking. According to politeness theory, there are two basic wants in a social situation: wanting to be appreciated, called your positive face, and wanting not to be imposed on, called your negative face, and that people either cooperate to satisfy these wants, called face saving, or oppose them, called face threatening. When I stand here in the pulpit and speak to you, while you sit and listen, that can be analyzed as a potential imposition on you, a face-threatening situation. So it is important that I make face-saving gestures such as expressing my gratitude for you, minimizing my importance, and acknowledging that you could choose to shoot me instead of listen to me.

You could say that face saving is a big part of the work we do here at Westside. Westside is part of a progressive movement towards love, truth, and harmony, and that work takes many forms, but what I think makes all of that possible is our basic doctrine of equality and mutual respect.

I knew a person who attended a Unitarian Universalist explorer class at a different church. This person was taught the basic beliefs of Unitarian Universalists, including the idea that each person comes to Unitarian Universalism with unique beliefs and perceptions, and that the UU faith values this diversity. In fact, the UU faith was contrasted with the creedism of mainstream Christianity, and some rather impolite disparaging comments were made about the inflexibility of the Catholics. This person, who in fact held many Roman Catholic beliefs, felt a little humiliated by the Catholic bashing, and ultimately decided not to join.

About twelve years ago, I was a member of a group of people who met regularly to share their experiences of growing up with an alcoholic parent. The meeting format was designed with face saving in mind. Chairs were organized in a circle to create a sense of equality. We each took a turn to speak for up to five minutes about our experiences. Other members were expected to listen quietly without making comments or giving advice, and to keep what they heard strictly confidential. This very simple social structure was so unintimidating, nonjudgmental, and generally respectful that we learned to speak honestly about extremely personal feelings and perceptions and shocking or humiliating actions and experiences that we had never been able to disclose before with anyone. This was therapeutic because it dissolved guilt feelings made it easier to speak honestly about the same things with trusted counselors, family members, and friends.

That group embodied for me what I now know as the affirmation we read at the beginning of every service:

Love is the doctrine of this church, the quest of truth is its sacrament, and service is its prayer. To dwell together in peace, to seek knowledge in freedom, to serve others in community, to the end that all souls shall grow into harmony with creation, thus do we covenant with one another.

Each person came to these meetings with unique beliefs and perceptions, but we gathered in peace and love, for the purpose of finding and sharing our truth, serving one another to the end that we would grow into harmony with creation.

When I started attending Westside, I realized that it operates the same way. Westside embodies our affirmation. And I feel that this is the greatest work that we do here at Westside. Like other world religions, our religion is, at its heart, therapeutic. It is a joy and a relief for us to come here where there is love, peace, freedom, and community. Westside lifts us up, gives us the hope of harmony, and makes all our other work: our religious exploration, our activism, our teaching, our service to the larger world, possible.

Now I would like to talk a little about the two faces of that larger world.

The opening legend of the 1920 silent movie Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde reads,

In each of us, two natures are at war--the good and the evil. All our lives the fight goes on between them, and one of them must conquer. But in our own hands lies the power to choose---what we want most to be, we are.¹

If you are a parent, you certainly know that babies are naturally helpful. According to a 2009 article in The New York Times, biologists are coming to believe that this is a distinctively human trait. Long before parents start teaching children to be polite, they are innately helpful. “When infants 18 months old see an unrelated adult whose hands are full,” says the article, “and who needs assistance opening a door or picking up a dropped clothespin, they will immediately help.”²

My first proud memory is also my earliest memory. I was about two years old. My baby sister, who was cradled in a bassinet on the dining table, dropped a toy over the side. I just remember reaching the toy way up to the bassinet and seeing her tiny hand grab ahold of it.

But I also remember the summer when I was three or four years old and fascinated by daddy longlegs. Depending on what part of the country you are from, this name may mean something different to you, so I will describe mine: they are arachnids, slow and spiderlike with eight very long legs, no silk glands or venom, harmless and defenseless. That summer I delighted in pulling the legs off them. The next summer, when I saw my first daddy longlegs, I remembered what I did. I felt so remorseful about it that I nearly threw up. I still feel uncomfortable remembering it.

Sidonie Matsner Gruenberg was a writer and authority in child study and parent education. Of Jewish heritage, she embraced the secular humanism of Felix Adler and made parent education her life’s work. She valued the latest scientific discoveries and had a gift for translating them into meaningful information for parents, beginning with her 1912 book Your Child Today and Tomorrow. She wrote many other books and advised the White House on family issues, and was active in her field into her nineties.³

In her 1916 book Sons and Daughters Sidonie wrote that

a child with a certain amount of initiative and curiosity will investigate the structure and insides of everything that he can possibly take apart. While he is still young and inexperienced, he makes no discrimination between dissecting a toy dog and a live insect. … There is a suspicion of cruelty only when the child is old enough to have a clear idea what suffering means, and to realize that other beings can suffer as he can, and from the same causes as those that make him suffer. Moreover [she continues], we must distinguish between the brutality that is a rather negative callousness or indifference to suffering, and the positive cruelty that derives satisfaction from the suffering of others. There are very few children who manifest cruelty in the latter sense.⁴

Notice what she does not say. She does not say that we lose the capacity to be callous to suffering as we grow older, or lack the capacity to be cruel. She says that we gain the capacity to know when other beings suffer. And as innately helpful as we are, we then want to help. This combination can be deadly. Dudley Kidd, an anthropologist who studied the social lives of native South Africans more than a hundred years ago, is notable for the attention he paid to the unique lives of children. He observed:

But there is deliberate cruelty in the way [children] torture some insects and animals which they think hurt men and women. They often choose a harmless lizard, under a mistaken idea that it stings human beings; they slowly torture it to death, talking to it all the time, and telling it that it deserves to suffer because it is an enemy of man. … Instances are not wanting where children under eight or nine years of age have rushed to the defense of the mother, or some other close friend, with the exclamation, “I’d like to kill you!”⁵

These are examples of what we call contempt, which is the devaluation of something or someone, the sense that a person is no longer deserving of our help, that their suffering matters less, or not at all. Some of you have no doubt read Blink, the 2005 book by Malcolm Gladwell. In the book, Gladwell discusses some research results by Dr. John Gottman, a professor of psychology whose special area of interest is relationships and marital stability. Dr. Gottman developed something he calls the Mathematics of Divorce. 10 He became an expert in reading facial expressions, and found that one hour of videotape of a married couple contained enough information to let him predict with 95% certainty whether the couple would still be married fifteen years later, no matter what they thought. The most important piece of information for Dr. Gottman’s predictions turned out to be bits of body language which reflect contempt: nearly imperceptible facial twitches, eye rolls, vocal tones which signal that one person considers the other person to be inferior, that (at least for a moment) they have devalued that person.⁶

What we can do to other people we have devalued is truly frightening. The book History of Windham County, Connecticut relates a story of a public hanging of a man who had murdered his wife, attended by a crowd of six to ten thousand in 1831. This was not an unusual spectacle.

In expectation of the … influx, landlords and liquor sellers provided vast supplies of all kinds of liquor, and hired a special guard to keep watch of the criminal the night before execution, lest he should commit suicide or in any way escape [which naturally would eat into liquor sales]. Long before the break of day, … the various roads were thronged with wagons and foot travelers, single men and families, coming from all parts of Windham county and adjacent states. A gallows was set up in a hollow … where the vast multitude of spectators crowding its sloping sides enjoyed a distinct view of the whole proceedings. “There were never half so many drunk at any one time and place in [the] county”; … the throng was so vast that long before night not a mouthful could be procured in the village either to eat or drink except water …⁷

Love is the doctrine of this church, and we do not believe in devaluing others. We believe that every creature is precious and deserving of love and respect. We are a gentle people who wish to dwell together in peace. But in the larger world we serve there are people with more aggressive personality traits.

Bob Altemeyer is an associate professor of psychology at the University of Manitoba. About six years ago, he released a book titled “The Authoritarians”, in which he describes something called an “authoritarian personality”. The problem of the book is to understand the rise of tyrants in a democracy. Such a person needs the support of large numbers of ordinary people. How did someone like Adolf Hitler gain the enormous popular support he needed to take over political power in Germany? Bob Altemeyer’s answer is that there is a large minority in every population of people, perhaps one out of every three or four, who share three personality traits:

• “a high degree of submission to the established, legitimate authorities in their society”
• “high levels of aggression in the name of their authorities, and”
• “a high level of conventionalism”.

These are people who readily disagree with statements such as “there is no one right way to live life, everyone has to create their own way” and agree with statements such as “what our country really needs is a strong determined leader who will crush evil, and take us back to our true path”. According to Altemeyer, in experiments, the best predictor of who will have these traits is a person’s fear of a dangerous world. These are people who love their children, work hard, support their communities, but also feel threatened not just in dangerous situations, but all the time, day after day. And so it is no wonder that they want an aggressive savior, and that terrible things can happen when they get one.⁸

I have long wondered at the difference between peaceful and aggressive people, and one clue I have found is in the work of a Russian geneticist called Dimitry Belyaev. He carried out a massive breeding experiment with foxes in which each generation was bred by selecting the tamest individuals from the previous generation. And something surprising occurred. The new breed of foxes which developed purely by selection for tameness gained many physical characteristics common to dogs: floppy ears and curly tails, for instance, but also smaller adrenal glands and higher levels of serotonin, which made these animals less fearful and aggressive.⁹ It is very possible that we Unitarians are largely a community of the floppy eared, curly tailed variety of humans, genetically predisposed to be peaceful, loving people because we are less fearful. And it is equally possible that people with the authoritarian personality are genetically predisposed to be more aggressive because they are more fearful.

If this is true, then when we are interacting with people in the larger world, face saving gestures are very important because for many people it is natural to feel threatened. Unitarians want to change the world, and change can be very threatening. I could wish that when people think of Unitarians, they think of us as mostly as the polite, loving, and above all safe people, with floppy ears and curly tails, that we are.

As we rise in body or spirit …