Sunday 1 May 2005

 

 

 

10 Commandments, 5 Pillars, 7 Principles, 4 Noble Truths

and a Pocketful of Suggestions

 

Victoria Safford

 

 

READING #1   from Leo Tolstoy

 

If you cannot do unto others

what you would that they should do to you,

at least do not unto them

what you would not that they should do unto you.

 

If you would not be made to work ten hours at a stretch in factories or in mines,

If you would not have your children hungry, cold and ignorant,

If you would not be robbed of the land that feeds you,

If you would not be shut up in prisons and sent to the gallows or hanged

for committing an unlawful deed through passion or ignorance,

If you would not suffer wounds

nor be killed

in war –

Do not do this unto others.

 

All of this is so simple and straightforward,

and admits of so little doubt,

that it is impossible for the simplest child not to understand,

nor for the cleverest man to refute it.

It is impossible to refute this law because this law is given to us,

not only by all the wisest ones of the world…

but because it is written

in our minds and hearts.

 

READING #2    from Fyodor Dostoyevsky

 

Love all creation, the whole of it and every grain of sand.

Love every leaf, every ray of light.

Love the animals.  Love the plants. Love everything.

If you love everything

you will perceive the divine mystery in things

and once you have perceived it

you will begin to comprehend it ceaselessly,

more and more every day.

and you will at last come to love the whole world

with an abiding universal love.

 

 READING #3  from Daniel Berrigan, Jesuit priest

 

A fairly modest urging –

Don’t kill, whatever pretext.  Leave the world unbefouled.  Don’t hoard.   Stand somewhere.

 

 

 

Unitarianism, said Erasmus Darwin is a featherbed to catch a falling Christian.  (It’s not the worst thing that’s been said about us.) Erasmus Darwin was grandfather to Charles and himself a scientist (in fact an early evolutionist) and some of his best friends and a few of his relations were Unitarians, so he may have been teasing.  He did not, however, mean his remark to be a compliment.  He meant, as many through the centuries have meant, “You people have a fluffy religion.  Feathery.  Flaky.  Not so substantial.  A soft and easy, ethically easy, comfortable, convenient, relativist kind of light-weight, low-expectation, no-fault, so-called religion.”  A featherbed to catch a falling Christian.  I disagree –but I can see how they might think so. We have nothing carved in stone.

 

What is our moral code, our moral law?  I don’t mean the bylaws of the church, nor even the statement of Principles and Purposes which guide our association of congregations.  That covenant (which you can find in the first pages of our hymnbook) is an elegant expression of institutional intent; it begins to describe what a Unitarian Universalist church might be about and look like – but I’m wondering what does a Unitarian Universalist soul look like?  What does a UU conscience look like?   What is each of us faithful to?  What are we trying to be faithful to?  What does the Lord require, or the world require, or the spirit of life ask you or me to attend to?

 

Love all creation, says one writer – the whole of it, every ray of light, and every grain of sand.  In love begins all understanding.

 

Another says:  If you can’t do unto others what you would that they would do to you, at least do not do unto them what you would not want done to you.   Try to do no harm.

 

Be good anyway, says a poet.  Forgive anyway.  Build, be honest, give your love away, anyway, every way. 

 

Don’t kill, says a poet/priest/radical activist/playwright.  Don’t hoard.  Leave the earth unbefouled.  Stand somewhere. 

 

Where do these rules come from, these laws of life, these lists we generate and clip and save and memorize, commandments on tablets and scraps of paper in our pockets?  What are the rules you tend to play by in this game of life, and how did you come by them?  Which ones do you carefully pass on to children, or try to, as if they were universal principles, precious treasure, the family inheritance, necessities - and which do you tend to keep to yourself, your own private quiet commandments?   If someone asked you to state your principles, not your beliefs, your wild ideas about the world and god and life and death, but your own moral rules of the road, those “moral values” that nowadays can make or break elections, could you do it readily? 

 

A colleague, Robert Walsh, offers his own home-made variations on the Ten Commandments, in response to a woman who wanted something she could tape to her refrigerator.  I tried this myself once long ago, but I think I like his translation better (even though he only ends up with nine):

 

·       You shall not worship the finite and conditional as if it were the ultimate.

·       You shall keep to a rhythm of work and rest in the spirit of the Sabbath.

·       You shall keep your promises. 

·       You shall tell the truth.

·       You shall try to make amends for the things you break.

·       You shall honor the people who give and sustain life.

·       You shall honor the earth.

·       You shall grant to others the same rights to life, liberty and property   that you claim for yourself.

·       You shall be kind.

 

Each one a sweet and simple suggestion, typical of refrigerator theology.  But look harder, and each one is in fact a summons to revolutionary action, a call to radical conversion, if you could ever truly take it on and follow it to its conclusion. 

 

Garett Keizer is a former priest, an Episcopalian.  He writes,

 

I am thinking these days of two expressions that I heard from the time that I was [very young].  They sound almost alike, but for me they are as different as heaven and hell.   One is “Are you saved?” and the other is “What must I do to be saved?” 

 

“Are you saved?” is a presumptuous and insinuating question.  Essentially, it means, are you an evangelical Christian?  Do you see your mortal predicament in the same terms as I do?  Your loss if you don’t.”  But to ask “What must I do to be saved?” is to ask the critical question of a fully conscious human being.  If there is any question that could conceivably qualify for the distinction of being the only question, this may be the one.  It is not necessarily a religious question.  It attracts religious answers, but if all religions were to disappear tomorrow, it would still exist.  As long as a sense of mortality, culpability and responsibility existed, it would still exist.  That trinity alone would suffice to bring you to your knees.

 

As I said, I heard the question growing up, and as young people do, I made my escape from it as from the belly of a whale… [But] now at fifty, I find I am up against the question again.  … And I don’t think this is some midlife thing of the usual sort; I feel no inclinations to have an affair or buy a sports car.  To be honest, I’d rather have an SUV (dark green).  Nor do I feel poised for some religious conversion or reversion...

He is simply haunted as he ages by an age-old question: what must I do to be saved?

 

I can no longer ask it in a vacuum… I cannot pose [it] apart from the fact that I am living on the most prosperous nation ever to have thrived on the face of the earth and in a world of unprecedented suffering, much of it the price of my prosperity…

 

We know what he’s asking, though we might choose different language:  What must I do to be an upright person?  What must I do to be a human being, to be right with the world and right with my heart, to be whole and holy, and healthy and healed?  With what transcendent, eternal, bass line melody – what sacred music - are we trying to harmonize our lives? 

 

For us there is no single answer, no creed we can recite, no commandments memorized and handed down.  You keep your own list in your pocket, and it’s tested in community, refined by time and trial and error, honed against the lists of others, against history, against hope.  Conscience, like belief, is a public matter for us, but it begins and ends in solitude, in loneliness, in freedom, and so to others (like Erasmus Darwin) looking in, it can seem arbitrary or casual or optional or easy.  It is not.  It can look as though we just believe whatever we want, and run rampant through the world doing or not doing whatever we want, jumping on the featherbeds.  We do not.              

 

 

 

A man I knew for many years died this winter out in Massachusetts.  He was 94, and his death was not unexpected, except in the way that we sometimes expect that those we admire, the people we love, will be around us always.  Loneliness surprises, and you stumble around a little at first, if the light of the world has suddenly been dimmed – forever - by the lack of this one candle. (This friend was like a candle.)  Sometimes at memorials I read these famous lines,

 

We are always saying farewell in this world -- always standing at the edge of some loss, attempting to retrieve some memory, some human meaning, from the silence -- something which was precious and is gone. 

 

We pray that there is peace ... and a glimpse of sunset.  But today we weep for ourselves.  We are lonelier; someone has gone from our life who was like the certainty of refuge; and someone has gone from the world who was like a certainty of honor.

 

That’s from Adlai Stevenson, writing on the death of his comrade Eleanor Roosevelt, two people whom my friend admired very much.  Roger was like the certainty of honor, the certainty of integrity and humility and an honest life well-lived.  He was one of those rare souls who truly loved humanity; he loved people one by one, and he loved the idea of humanity, and humanity’s potential, despite everything his honest eyes had seen over the course of a long life, despite everything the 20^th century – his century – revealed about our nature and our negligence, our motives.  He struggled with depression, with self-doubt and self-blame, and he was a pessimist, but he was a pessimist who believed it was his duty, his obligation out of affection for humankind, to be optimistic.  He worked at that, at self-imposed idealism.   He worked incredibly hard, and without intending to, he became a model, a mentor for me, in the diligence of hope (which is not the same as easy hope), the moral imperative of hope.  Roger was a maker of lists, a taker of notes, a keeper of files, with floppy disks and envelopes and all kinds of stuff flurrying out of his pockets all the time.  Among the many, many pieces of paper he left behind was a page headed “Over-all Guides,” his own private Sermon on the Mount-in-progress.  Across the top he wrote, “I haven’t always followed these to the letter, but at least I’ve felt badly when I didn’t.”  His list began with what he called “The Religious Ethic:  be in awe of the universe, and try to work in line with, not against, its seeming laws.”  He went from there to “The Work Ethic:  keep busy and productive, never frittering time away…” and then followed:

 

The Conserving Ethic- save things, don’t … throw away things that might be useful. (This was never a danger for him)

 

The Orderly Ethic- put things to rights, clean up, tidy up… (This may have been a challenge)

 

The Understanding Ethic-  study and learn how things work, how to make things, try to understand art, literature, music, ideas…

 

The Social Ethic- serve other people rather than the self...

The Love Ethic- be loving … in response to everybody and everything…  

 

It’s a Unitarian list, because such was the orientation of its author.  It’s a simple list, but not a featherweight list. Roger spent a lifetime - 94 years – trying to see if a person could be true to it.  It was tailor-made for him, by him, chiseled not in stone, but in the deep lines of a kindly, diligent face, nine decades on the earth; it was rehearsed and recited and repeated, not by mechanical rote, but in tears and laughter and a sweet tenor voice, and it was ratified in all of his commitments, serious commitments to and covenants with people he loved and causes he cherished.  Roger’s “Over-all Guides” imposed meaning (home-made, hand-made meaning, which is the only kind there is) on a chaotic world, this mysterious, ungraspable cosmos.  They made order and beauty where order is not, which is part of the work of our lives.  He was a humble, gentle man, a pessimistic idealist acutely aware of his own vast powerlessness, and his ethics gave him access to the only power any of us ever really hold, the power of our own integrity.

 

Where do these things come from?  From our parents if we’re lucky, if we have that kind of parents and if we have ears to hear; from teachers we’ve known in school and elsewhere; close friends; faraway poets; prophets and parables first met when we’re little, in Sunday school or synagogue or scripture, and then proved later, much later, maybe to be useful, maybe to be true.  I think they come- our own lists of “over-all guides” or commandments or laws – from what suffering we’ve seen and known, what peace and grace and love we’ve glimpsed and known, been blessed by, and our ethics is our response, a work in progress, sifted over time into the foundations of conscience and principle.   I will not kill.  I will not steal.  I will try to be kind, try to be open, try to be awestruck, try to be useful, grateful, truthful, faithful, generous, brave - on behalf of all I’ve seen and all I know so far.  I think we gather up, gather in our principles and moral values as we go along.  Some are in us almost from the get-go, almost as instinct, and some are given us by excellent teachers, some acquired by experience.  They vary among us, depending on where we’ve been, how we’ve traveled, what we variously love.  Quite often there is common ground because suffering and grace are common to us all, and there community begins. Ours is not a featherbed tradition, it is harrowing and hard to construct a living ethic, to make a moral life, to keep accountable to your own highest honor.      

 

 

Paul Gruchow was a writer of beautiful lyrical essays, a Minnesota naturalist who died about two years ago (tragically, by suicide).   In a memoir of his childhood, he tells about the bread that he grew up with, handmade by his mother, from wheat grown by his father on their scrappy, rented farm, planted, harvested and milled by hand.  His mother and father put everything they knew about soil and sun and seed, flour and yeast and an oven stoked with wood – into the work of harvesting wheat and making bread.  They applied principles they’d been taught or learned on their own, wisdom borrowed and inherent, every year his father in the field, every week his mother in the kitchen, but still they could never know how the crop would turn out, how the loaves would turn out.  They could only bring their best practices, and their best hope, and their need, to the work.  That’s all the control they had.  That’s all the control we have.  You bring your best practices and your hope and your need to the work.  Paul Gruchow writes:   

 

Each batch of bread ... was the product of a freshly ground canister of wheat that was not industrially milled and therefore varied from year to year, from grinding to grinding, and a cake of yeast that constituted a community of living organisms that multiplied, or didn’t, according to its own state of vigor;  and each kneading was a new and individual kneading, conducted with reference to my mother’s memory of the exact texture that, from this lump of dough, under these conditions of heat and humidity, considering the fecundity of this yeast and the character of this batch of flour, would solicit a fine loaf of bread.  The loaf would be baked to perfection according to its color and to the sound it made when it was tapped, each fire having been built to the occasion, its heat depending upon the condition of the materials  that fueled it and upon the circumstances under which it was stoked or banked, according to the judgment of the baker.

 

My father planted a field much as my mother set out a batch of dough to rise, each paying attention to experience, employing techniques acquired through long practice, and varying the methods as present conditions or the impulse to experiment dictated, each relying upon the faith that these resources would meet the exigencies ahead, but knowing that the fruit ultimately depended upon the season.  The work was creative; it was like making a poem, or dancing, or saying a prayer.

 

The ethical life is like the baking of bread, the raising of wheat or any other human labor.  It demands solid, ancient, tested principles, to which you are committed, to which you will be faithful, principles you’ve chosen over time to own and call your own. You bring them to bear in a world of uncertain and unpredictable circumstances, under all kinds of conditions over which you have no control, with no guarantee of success.  But you bring them to bear, making order and art where maybe none was, holding as true to your own truth as you can. 

 

 

You know, I think about Judge Moore down in Alabama, the notorious Judge Roy Moore against whom legal action was brought to force the removal of a granite monument he installed in his courtroom, a 5,000 pound stone on which were engraved the Ten Commandments. They comprise an elegant code of social and religious conduct, but to carve them in stone, especially a big old stone like that, seems to foreclose all other possibilities, seems to deny that there’s anything more to learn on the subject of how to be a good person, how to grow a soul.  I have a paper copy somewhere, probably in the same drawer with Roger’s list, and the Buddha’s words, and lines from Russian novelists I love and renegade priests, and letters from friends, and pieces of music and the answer of Jesus to the man who asked, “What must I do to be saved?” – and it is not a comfortable or easy answer, but it’s one I wish I tried harder to live by, one I wish I understood.  A wild jumble of sources, commandments, rules and suggestions, still growing, always growing. I will need a second drawer.    

 

In the silence here, I invite you to reflect for just a moment on your own lists, your own ethical map of the world, and to reflect on where it came from, where you got your own rules.  And if you’re willing to speak out of the silence, please tell us: What is one rule you live by, try to practice, or one principle you’d want to pass on - and how did you acquire these things? Where do you get your ethics? 

 

silence and speaking

 

 

Here is one last list, offered by Susan Sontag, who died this past winter, words from a bright candle to graduating seniors in 2003: 

 

Despise violence.  Despise national vanity and self-love.  Protect the territory of conscience,.

 

Try to imagine at least once a day that you are not an American.  Go even further:  try to imagine at least once a day that you belong to the vast, the overwhelming majority of people on this planet who don’t have passports don’t live in dwellings equipped with both refrigerators and telephones, who have never even once flown in a plane. 

 

Be extremely skeptical of all claims made by your government.  Remember, it may not be the best thing for America of or for the world for the president of the United States to be the president of the planet.  Be just as skeptical of other governments, too.  It’s hard not to be afraid.  Be less afraid. 

 

It’s good to laugh a lot, as long as it doesn’t mean you’re trying to kill your feelings.

 

Don’t allow yourself to be patronized, condescended to – which, if you are a woman, happens, and will continue to happen, all the time. 

 

Do stuff.  Be clenched, curious.  Not waiting for inspiration’s shove or society’s kiss on your forehead.  Pat attention. It’s all about paying attention.  It’s all about taking is as much of what’s out there as you can.  And not letting the excuses and the dreariness of some of the obligations you’ll soon be incurring narrow your lives. Attention is vitality.  It connects you with others. It makes you eager.  Stay eager. 

 

____________________________________________

 

 

Closing Words                                                            -  Arthur Foote

May peace dwell within our hearts, and understanding in our minds.

May courage steel our will and love of truth forever guide us.