Goals of Our Meeting

1980 (Probably January 20)
Lakeland
Port Charlotte
Cocoa

Goals of Our Meeting

If I sat where you sit, what would I expect from me, up here? Musing on such a thought stimulated today's topic, "Goals of Our Meeting." Now, I am neither wise enough nor sensitive enough to know the depth or breadth of your expectations. But I can attempt to talk about my own. What do I hope will happen to me because of the experience of worship-spoken word, shared song, wisdom from ancient and modern prophets and poets. How do we deal with the raw stuff from a dangerous world? How do we handle a consciousness of human suffering with few tangible directions available to alleviate or correct the ills which are tearing the fabric of the world?

I do not mind confessing that, for me, the years have not made the task of "preaching" easier. Glib and flashy answers to the difficulties of the human situation are just that, glib and flashy. I resonate to the stage tradition of Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet. The role of the teen-age Juliet is so demanding, dramatically, that it is said that when an actress achieves the stagecraft and emotional depth to play Juliet, she is too old for the part. I relate to that, from my standpoint.

It is a commonplace among Unitarian Universalists that we are free from imposed ideas. Each of us can choose among the smorgasbord of ideas, principles, and issues presented to us or mix and cook our own. The hazard of such a free religion is that we shall have diversity without unity, freedom without fellowship, ethics without common efforts. I like what educator Robert Ulich wrote (EDUCATION AND THE IDEA OF MANKIND) "Freedom without common goals creates a state of alienation within each person and within the community."

[CJW note: positive thinking – power of negative ideas – but not enough]

However we do it, speech, song, dance, music, dialogue, drama, visual art and symbol, I desire that our meetings together will

(A) extend the horizons of the mind
(B) deepen conscience
(C) create or sustain courage

(A) We extend the horizons of the mind when we actively seek to understand persons, their perceptions and values, particularly when these perceptions and values are difficult to understand or strikingly opposed to our beliefs.

In our fellowship and association we interpret the universality of religion not to mean that there ever has been or ever will be one universal religion. We recognize and respect the beliefs of others even though we would not share their doctrines, rituals, or requirements.

Peoples have different interpretations of this experience of religion. They have come to convictions and ceremonies because of many known, some unknown factors – culture, language, economics, resources, climate, government, great events, heroes. Joys and sorrows, fears and hopes – their religious experiences have been pressed through the sieve of a heritage unique, wholly or partly.

We recognize that what is true for others is their truth – even though not true for us. We seek to appreciate without agreement or endorsement.

In a play of a few years ago, Christopher Frye's "The Dark is Light Enough", Belman comments (no attempt to degenderize):

"A man can't know
How to conduct himself towards another man,
Without the answer to certain basic questions,
What does the man choose to believe?
What good and evil has he invented for himself?
In short, how he has made himself exist?"

But when we shift from religion, as such, to other modes of culture – nationalism, tribalism, economics, freedom and repression, that extension of horizons become more difficult. Yet, the same recognitions apply.

We are still in the vortex [CJW note: 6 months today] of the Iranian crisis. Most Americans are quite certain of the rightness of our position. I saw an item in a newspaper (which I should have clipped) which in a paragraph outlined the issues from the point of view of an Iranian. To attempt such a paragraph would be an interesting exercise for any of us. Or, for that matter, try to set out that situation from the viewpoint of the Shah.

Robert Lewis Stevenson once wrote, "there is nothing so evident in life that there are two sides to a question." He was understating it – many issues are so complex that there are as many sides as there are facets on a cut diamond.

If you interviewed successively a soldier of Castro who fought in the Cuban revolution and then a refugee, e.g. a physician or lawyer in Miami – would you get an identical view of what happened? Of course not. Would you be able to say A is entirely wrong, B is completely correct? I strongly suspect you could not.

In one of his novels, G.K. Chesterton wrote, "The only real way to go home is to go out the front door, around the world and in the back door." Were one to do this and listen, question, as we do with each other, the reflection on the experiences would not only increase our devotion to truth, but also, we would bring home with us a reverence for all the possibilities of truth.

Yet, taken alone, this widening of horizons, this attitude toward universality, would result in a dilettante mulligan stew where every body is always right and nobody is ever wrong. That, of course, is absurd.

(B) Therefore a necessary companion to widened horizons is deepened conscience. Remember the last time you cut a fingernail to the quick or received a bad sunburn? The skin was so sensitive that you jumped six inches when touched. That is like unto the way conscience should twinge us often enough.

No one is more conscious than I am that no one can mount a charge against every issue or problem that twinges one's conscience. [CJW note: selective apathy] But one should not be content that because one cannot do everything, therefore one need do nothing. Consider an excerpt from "You Can't Go Home Again" by Thomas Wolfe: "Man was born to live, to suffer, and to die, and what befalls him is a tragic lot. There is no denying this in the final end. But we must deny it all along the way. Mankind was fashioned for eternity, but Man-Alive was fashioned for a day. New evils will come after him, but it is with the present evils that he is now concerned. And the essence of all faith, it seems to me, for such a man as I, the essence of religion for people of my belief, is that man's life can be, and will be, better; that man's greatest enemies, in the forms in which they now exist – the forms we see on every hand of fear, hatred, slavery, cruelty, poverty, and need – can be conquered and destroyed. But to conquer and destroy them will mean nothing less than the complete revision of the structure of society as we know it. They cannot be conquered by the sorrowful acquiescence of resigned fatality. They cannot be destroyed by the philosophy of acceptance – by the tragic hypothesis that things as they are, evil as they are, are as good and as bad as, under any form, they will ever be.

"It is for Now, and for us the living, that we must speak, and speak the truth, as much of it as we can see and know. With the courage of the truth within us, we shall meet the enemy as they come to us, and they shall be ours. And if, once having conquered them, new enemies approach, we shall meet them [from] that point, from there proceed. In the affirmation of that fact, the continuance of that unceasing war, is man's religion and his living faith."

Some one told me of a cartoon which sketched the Gothic front door of a church. Near the door was a sign, "servants entrance". One could interpret this doctrinally or theologically, but for me it is an ethical sign. Obedience to conscience is knitted into the fabric of any religion which provides meaning for living and strength for effort.

It is also true that the sensitive conscience can help clarify clouds on our widened horizons. The more distant the horizon, the more likely there will be haze at its far edges. From time to time when a person is thoroughly involved, others may dismiss his/her efforts "because "she/he is so caught up with fervor and intensity that issue is clouded by emotion." Not necessarily so. Rollo May, the psychologist, made the point "People can observe more accurately precisely when they are involved." (COURAGE TO CREATE)

But on any issue or question of importance and controversy, one's conscience doesn't provide any bargain answers. In ancient Greece, persons would consult the Oracle at Delphi. It is said that the answers the Delphic oracle provided were ambiguous.

Thus the seeker for answers from the Oracle had to think out anew for himself/herself what the answers meant and the kind of behavior that must follow.

In this world of unexpected consequences of actions, it is not unusual for persons obeying conscience to discover they were wrong for reasons which could not or were not anticipated. Better that then letting conscience be calloused over by the grinding overload of agonizing questions in our world. How much good has been lost to the human family because some of us were afraid to act now because we feared we would look foolish or naïve at some unknown time in the future?

(C) Lastly, our religious-meeting should create and sustain courage. Courage is required to live with personal loss, disaster, or defeat. Courage is needed to take unpopular stands. Courage is not the result of living a painless life; courage is the quality of embracing life and its demands when living is hard and tough.

A book published last year – ADAPTATIONS TO LIFE is the result of a study by Dr. George Valiant, a professor of psychiatry at Harvard Medical School. He studied lives of graduates beginning with the class of 1939. The author says it was unforgivable that only men were studied. Of these now past their 50th birthday most are still alive and physically healthy. They have achieved distinction in their occupation and professions. Yet, said Dr. Valiant, "Not one of these men has had only clear sailing." The author says a major thesis is that a man's adaptive devices are as important in determining the course of his life as are his heredity, his upbringing, his social position or his access to psychiatric help. That to me means courage sustains us.

Courage is not a gift from whatever Gods there be. Courage is acquired by acting courageously.

The temptation to play it safe is a difficult seduction to master for it has no requirement. Other temptation – to lie, to steal, to injure another, to be false to another, at least require we act. Playing it safe demands nothing.

This week marked Martin Luther King's birthday. He would have been 51 if he had not been shot down. His life is a model for the principles I have been trying to illuminate. His horizons for the human family were wider than perhaps any person of his time. His convictions, born of conscience, were known in every city and town and across the world. His courage was superb because he knew he was vulnerable; that the price of living his convictions was life itself.

Two of Rollo May's sentences about courage fit Martin Luther King –

"Courage is not absence of despair; it is rather, the capacity to move ahead in spite of despair."

"Perceptual courage equals one's courage to let one's self see the suffering of other people."

The late Paul Tillich, in a sermon of many years ago, summed up:

"He who risks and fails can be forgiven...he who never risks and never fails is a failure in his whole being. He is not forgiven because he does not feel that he needs forgiveness. Therefore we are called not to be conformed to this eon but to transform it; first in ourselves, then in our world, and then in the spirit and power of love."

[Editor’s note: a newspaper clipping, stapled to the first page of this sermon, has the words, “David Belasco, the great American theatrical producer once said, ‘If you can’t write your idea on the back of my calling card, you don’t have a clear idea.’”]