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Principle #2
Justice,Equity, and Compassion in Human Relations
Reading for "Heaven Forbid" along with GA Resolution
"Real Ovaltine"
My ten year old likes chocolate milk every morning as part of his breakfast. I have always made a moderately chocolatey mix for him out of powered ovaltine, and he's very used to that. Recently though I put the usual two heaping teaspoons in his glass and then discovered that I only had enough milk for 2/3s of a glass. The result was way too rich. I told Ben by way of apology, but after he tasted it he said enthusiastically that this tasted better than "real ovaltine." "Real ovaltine?" I was curious. "What do you mean?" "Well, you know. The way you usually make it."
I was struck. What awesome power we hold over the children in our world. My prejudices define more than what real chocolate milk is for Ben. For example, it's the results I produce in the kitchen that defines what the phrase "Mother's home cooking," means for him. Truthfully, that's a little bit pathetic. >From his father and I also come his standards of how much emotion it's appropriate to show and how clean a house should be kept and how much of a show should be put on for visitors and what he knows of love. Our behavior inadvertently tells him whether he is important in the scheme of things and whether the world is benevolent or cruel. What he gets from us is "real ovaltine," everything else is a little weird.
For most of us these important lessons have come from the example of parents, and, more broadly, from society at large. And yet the day comes when we realize that our parents and our country are fallible. Many of us have spent half a lifetime or more unlearning prejudices we took in with mothers milk. It is hard once we withdraw our blind trust from our parents to ever trust again in such a complete way and yet I believe we yearn to place our trust blindly somewhere. For many religious faith comes to play that role. One difficulty with Unitarian Universalism is that it refuses the responsibility of providing answers in the form of dogma. There are no hard and fast rules.
I told Ben that all shades of ovaltine are real and that my concern has been for his health when I make his chocolate milk. This is the start of many conversations which have a hidden religious sensibility. In them I will not mention "divine purpose," but rather, a purpose that is divine - his well-being - and that, as far as Unitarian Universalism is concerned, is the real Ovaltine.
"Heaven Forbid!"
(The Challenge of our Second Principle)
We all have defining moments in our lives, moments that change the way we see the world. We may think of these pivotal times that change us as earth-shaking, but I have found that more often than not they are small, sometimes almost imperceptible at the time. Today's sermon is a look at the second principle: "justice equity and compassion in human relations." If you aren't familiar with the Unitarian Universalist principles, I invite you to take a look at all seven of them in the opening pages of our hymnal, Singing the Living Tradition.
When I sat and thought about "justice, equity and compassion," for purposes of this sermon, I found my thoughts returning again and again to a conversation that occurred when I was 13 or 14 years old. My next door neighbors growing up were from Sweden. During one summer when I was in junior high they invited a Swedish cousin named Annette to spend July and August with them. Annette spoke excellent English and was just my age. A second cousin of hers was Ingemar Johannson, the boxer who had recently won the heavyweight crown by knocking out Floyd Patterson with his "magic" right hook. It was great fun to watch Annette react to the size of our huge American cars and homes and I remember the charge she got watching our neighbor, Mr. Witchert, ride down the street in his convertible with the top down, fat cigar in his mouth with golf clubs propped up in his back seat. He was, Annette announced, the most American of all of us. I was proud that I had been born in the most admired country in the world, and it was fun to see America through Annette's appreciative eyes.
That changed the day we took Annette to Boston. I don't remember the official sights that we went there to see, but I do remember the ones that made the strongest impression on Annette. As we approached the city the three-deckers that lined the left side of the highway drew her attention. She wanted to know who lived in these shabby apartments with the laundry typically hanging outside. That was the 'black section'" we explained as if that was that. Her attention was also drawn by the street people that dotted the landscape here and there around the Common. Annette grew quiet that day. I could tell that something was wrong, so I didn't ask her how she liked Boston.
The question was inevitable, however, and the next day I was there when others asked, expecting to elicit her praise which was so fun to hear. Instead of praise Annette responded with a heartfelt question, "This is the richest country in the world. Why do you have so many poor people?" Annette had never seen poor people before, it turns out. Sweden didn't have slums or street people, she insisted. "Why does America allow that?" she wanted to know.
I could hardly make sense of the question. "If they were poor it was a shame, but it was their fault, wasn't it? I thought to myself. What does she mean, why do we allow it? Annette asked the question because she was confused about America, and suddenly, for the first time, so was I. Her country didn't permit poverty, and ours did. I felt ashamed and disconcerted. I realize that I had always thought that because freedom in the United States seemed to permit the greatest level of achievement of anywhere in the world, it was the measure of all things. Confusion welled up in me as I realized my country might be fallible.
Today I feel like I can trace my first independent thinking, or at least my first worrying about justice, equity and compassion, to Annette's innocent question in response to the suffering she saw here: "Why do you allow it?" My sense to this day is that she spoke out of a compassion that I had not been trained to feel and out of an understanding of equity and justice which has so far been rejected by our national imagination. The visible suffering in America since Annette's visit 25 years ago has increased. As we consider the meanings of justice, equity and compassion in human relations today, Annette's concern still challenges us with this basic question: is there a basic level of suffering which we should forbid, simply because it is in our power to do so? If the answer is 'yes' then we have invested the second principle, our covenant to affirm and promote these ideals, with a new sense of direction.
The simplest of these three concepts seems to be equity. What is meant by "equity" in human relations? The dictionary defines it as being "the quality of being fair or impartial." To be equitable in our human relations means that what applies to one in a given situation should apply to all. All those who have fought for human right over the years, whether it was for women's suffrage or emancipation or for the rights of gay and lesbians to marry have been fighting for equity in human relations, for equal access to those most precious of American values, life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.
Compassion is defined as "a feeling of deep sympathy or sorrow for another who is stricken by suffering or misfortune, accompanied by a strong desire to alleviate the pain or remove its cause." Compassion is actually two feelings, then: sympathy and the desire to act which results from it. When Jesus describes those who would be welcomed into the kingdom with these familiar words: (MT 25:35-36) "For I was hungry and you gave me food; I was thirsty and you gave me drink; I was a stranger and you made me welcome; naked and you clothed me, sick and you visited me, in prison and you came to see me," -- when he said that he was listing acts of compassion. The message of Jesus was that those who stood passively in the presence of suffering would be denied the kingdom because heaven forbids such misery.
Except for honor thy father and thy mother, the Ten Commandments define prohibitions -universal Thou Shalt Nots...- Compassion is the other side of the Ten Commandments - the unspoken, automatic Thou Shalts -- the kindnesses, large and small, that we should perform in the world to relieve human suffering -- the occasions of which are too numerous to mention. We expect kindness of individuals but curiously, not from nations. What if an entire people, a nation, were to legislate the kinds of actions that Jesus says earn one the kingdom? Heaven forbid! Is it wrong to desire a nation to act from the same well of kindness that we delight to see in individuals? When we ask this question about compassion, we bring the discussion to a new level: we are talking about justice, the third value listed in our second principle.
What is justice? My dictionary defines it as "the quality of conforming to principles of reason, to generally accepted standards of right and wrong, and to the stated terms of laws, rules and agreements." This, America's most common understanding of justice, is a legal one. Practically speaking, our contribution to justice as everyday citizens seems to be in understanding what 'thou shalt not' do. Thou shalt not kill, thou shalt not steal... Then, when laws are broken we expect to see justice "done."
Alexander Solzhenitsyn in a now famous commencement speech at Harvard University in 1978 entitled, "The Exhausted West" critically addressed what he saw as American justice with these ringing words:
"I have spent all my life under a Communist regime, and I will tell you that a society without any objective legal scale is a terrible one indeed. But a society with no other scale but the legal one is not quite worthy of man either."
When most theologians speak about justice the word conveys a use in tune with Solzhenitsyn's. Consider these two theological definitions: Paul Tillich defines justice as "the form in which and through which love performs its work." Reinhold Neibuhr talks about it in a similar way; he says, "justice is the attempt to institutionalize the moral demands of love." This form of justice, which recognizes the law of love as its standard, holds that we have obligations to fulfill, 'Thou Shalts' which are every bit as important to society as the 'Thou Shalt Nots' with which we are so familiar. It is a standard Solzhenitsyn says, that we ignore at our peril. And what is that peril?
For me Solzhenitsyn's warning brings to mind the two years I worked in a DYS facility in the state forest in Plymouth. The program housed boys aged 14 to 17 who had committed serious or heinous crimes. Most of the boys in the program were from New Bedford and Brockton. Most were tough, angry, and capable of being immoral and violent - many of the toughest cases were bright, personable and proud, but not wanting to ask for help from anyone for any reason. They trusted no one, counted on no one. Many were children of parents who had fallen onto hard times of their own - so they were raised in a kind of darkness I could only guess at. I saw from being with these boys that self-determination may not exist in certain contexts simply because it cannot be perceived in an atmosphere darkened by hopelessness.
While working there I became particularly close with a young man named Kevin. Through my relationship with Kevin I came to learn that the lecture that these kids "mattered" came only when they got in trouble, for being an irritant in school or in the courts. The lecture that they "had a life ahead of them," that they were "important," sounded to their ears like a mind game designed to get them to go straight, which was delivered, they felt, not because it was a valid option for them, but because then they'd stop being a "problem." The toughest cases didn't believe in justice because they had never in their young lives experienced a loving structure. Playing by the rules from their station in the world where there was no justice was for fools or wimps or for someone with his spirit broken. And if they were to stumble on a point of light it was seen as just that -- a point of light in a dark world. What these boys were struggling for, it seemed to me, was to be considered a person.
If, as Paul Tillich suggests, justice is the form in which and through which love performs its work, then a just society is one that sees to it that the sick have adequate medical care, the hungry are fed and the homeless sheltered. That society has given structure to a love that says at a minimum, "I see you," "You are somebody," "You matter" "You have value," and "You belong." As Solzhenitsyn says we ignore this standard at our peril. Yet many of the poor in our cities and the children in our lock-ups have not received this message from anyone and we are paying a high price for their neglect. We need to do better.
The issues, of course, are quite complex. We tend to think that any well-intended action is good, but as we all know, goodness doesn't automatically flow from good intentions. (The road to hell, as they say, is paved with good intentions.) One question which surfaces very quickly in any discussion about our nation's social programs, for example, is "at what point does compassion go too far?" Kindness can be beneficial, but it can also be taken advantage of. Many argue that well-intended social programs undermine human initiative and creativity. Offering no help, they argue, is a form of "tough love." Tough love, even though it results in short-term suffering is still a form of compassion. So when "tough love" and "bleeding heart liberalism" go nose to nose in the public square, the argument is really about which form of compassion is most skillful in the long run.
Someone recently wrote into the Parade Magazine column by Marilyn Vos Savant with a good question. They wanted to know if it were possible to banish all suffering from the world, might we be worse off in some unforeseen way? For example, could we lose our ambition to strive for betterment if complacency bred laziness or apathy? Would there be some surprising, insidious down side to a world without suffering she wanted to know. Savant answered that she would feel safe eliminating suffering and misery. I quote: "In a culture that is so sensitive to the teensiest discomfort and inconvenience that we invent things like heated stadium cushions and revolving tie racks, I don't think we'd have a problem finding plenty about which to be unhappy. So our pursuit of happiness will probably not be threatened."
As we consider the meanings of justice, equity and compassion in human relations today, we do it against a backdrop where suffering and misery abound. Annette's concern still challenges us with this basic question: "Why do we allow it?" But if I may use myself as an example -- until I realized and accepted that we allow it, I didn't really even see it. It has been said that we see what we want to see. The great Jewish writer Elie Wiesel has said, "in the face of injustice no one has the right to turn away, not to see. In the face of injustice, one may not look the other way. When someone suffers, and it is not you, he comes first. His very suffering gives him priority...To watch over a man who grieves is a more urgent duty than to think of God." The Unitarian Universalist second principle which challenges us to affirm and promote justice, equity and compassion in human relations, is a clarion call to do away with misery to the extent that we are able. If this ideal is too high to consider, then perhaps the west is exhausted, as Solzenhitzen suggests, but I think not. Let us search our hearts and challenge ourselves each as individuals. Let our hands each week make some real contribution each week to relieve human suffering. The call is ours to answer -- let us rejoice that ours can be the voice and hand of God.
This standard is high but it isn't new. The prophet Micah called ancient Israel to the same standard 700 years before Jesus when he said,
"...what does the Lord require of you but to do justice, and to love kindness
and to walk humbly with your God?"
Heaven forbid if we do not learn.