Pride?

Today Lake Chalice begins considering pride.

On the one hand, pride can be a necessary antidote to a history of shaming. Hence, if you hear about "Pride Month" or a "Pride Parade," you'd probably guess that the event celebrates things LGBTQI. There has indeed been a long history of shaming LGBTQI folk, and it's good for us to understand that every one of us has much ground for being proud of who we are as anyone else.

On the other hand, pride is one of the traditional seven deadly sins. Pride can be a problem for ourselves and for others.

In a delightful book called The Clown in the Belfry, Frederick Buechner (b. 1926), American essayist, novelist, and theologian wrote:

“Pride is self-love....Another way of saying Love your neighbor as yourself is to say Love yourself as your neighbor. That doesn't mean your pulse is supposed to quicken every time you look in the mirror any more than it's supposed to quicken every time your neighbor passes the window. It means simply that the ability to work for your own good despite all the less than admirable things you know about yourself is closely related to the ability to work for your neighbor's good despite all the less than admirable things you know about him. It also means that just as in this sense love of self and love of neighbor go hand in hand, so do dislike of self and dislike of neighbor. For example (a) the more I dislike my neighbor, the more I'm apt to dislike myself for disliking him and him for making me dislike myself and so on, and (b) I am continually tempted to take out on my neighbor the dislike I feel for myself, just the way if I crack my head on a low door I'm very apt to kick the first cat, child, or chair unlucky enough to catch my bloodshot eye. Self-love or pride is a sin when, instead of leading you to share with others the self you love, it leads you to keep your self in perpetual safe-deposit. You not only don't accrue any interest that way but become less and less interesting every day.”

In short, it takes a certain amount of self-love to take the risk of connecting and to stay out of "safe-deposit." It required a little pride for the LGBTQI movement in 1969 to begin resisting the forces of shame. Children today won't know about the events of that June, 44 years ago.

Early on a Saturday morning in 1969 June, lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and questioning persons rioted following a police raid on the Stonewall Inn, a gay bar in New York City. The Stonewall riots were a watershed in the LGBT rights movement, and the impetus for LGBT pride marches that now occur around the world, celebrating June as Pride month, in commemoration of Stonewall.

The first Gay pride marches occurred in 1970 June, on the first anniversary of the Stonewall riots. There was a parade that year in New York, and on the same weekend marches in Los Angeles and Chicago, and a “Gay-in” in San Francisco.

The next year, 1971, the second anniversary of Stonewall, saw Gay Pride marches in Boston, Dallas, Milwaukee, London, Paris, Berlin, and Stockholm.

By 1972 the participating cities included Atlanta, Buffalo, Detroit, Washington D.C., Miami, and Philadelphia.

In 2000, then-President Bill Clinton declared June "Gay and Lesbian Pride Month.”

President Obama, in 2009, '10, '11, and '12, has declared June Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, and Transgender Pride month. In Gainesville, Florida, the annual pride parade is in October. Maybe it’s just too hot to march in June – or there aren’t enough students around. For most of the rest of the world, Pride Month is June.

Our little ones will not know this history. When today's toddlers are adults, they may not remember that there was a day when your gender and the gender of the person you wanted to marry had to be opposite before you could get married. We will have to tell them about that. With any luck, they’ll have a hard time getting it. They won’t see what the big deal is about Stonewall, because they will be able to take equality for granted.

With any luck.

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This is part 26 of "The Seven Deadlies" (Part 1 of 5 on Pride)
Next: Part 27: "Pride, the Wrong, and Pride, the Redress"
Previous: Part 25: "The Engine and the Steering Wheel"
Beginning: Part 1: "Seven and Sins"

The Engine and the Steering Wheel

Seven principles for loving and lusting in a healthy and fair way have been developed by a Sisters of Mercy Nun, Margaret Farley. (Portions below in quotes are from Margaret Farley, Just Love: A Framework for Christian Sexual Ethics, 2008.)

1. Do No Unjust Harm

Harm can take many forms: “physical, psychological, spiritual, relational. It can also take the form of failure to support, to assist, to care for, to honor.” Lust tugs us toward situations in which either we or our partner are likely to be uniquely tender and vulnerable. Our values tell us to pay acute attention to the risks of harm.

2. Free Consent

Justice requires autonomy, and without free consent, there is no autonomy. Seduction or manipulation of persons who have limited capacity for choice because of immaturity, special dependency, or loss of ordinary power violates free consent. Promise-keeping and truth-telling are also aspects of honoring free consent, since betrayal and deception limit the free choice of the other person.

3. Mutuality

The old ideas of “the male as active and the female as passive, the woman as receptacle and the man as fulfiller” are violations of the mutuality principle. True relationship entails a context recognizing each partner’s activity and each partner’s receptivity -- each partner’s giving and each partner's receiving. “Two liberties meet, two bodies meet, two hearts come together” – and if they aren’t both bringing roughly equivalent levels of heart and self to the encounter, it isn’t mutual.

4. Equality

The partners bring roughly equal levels of power and autonomy to the relationship. Inequalities of power may come from differences in social and economic status, or differences in age and maturity. Teachers and their students have an inherent power inequality, as do counselors and their clients, ministers and their parishioners. The principle of equality also “rules out treating a partner as property, a commodity, or an element in market exchange.”

5. Commitment

A one-night stand “cannot mediate the kind of union -- of knowing and being known, loving and being loved -- for which human relationality offers the potential.” Nevertheless, a brief encounter may be morally justifiable as long as it includes two commitments: to each of the preceeding principles, and to openness to the possibility that the encounter may lead to long-term relationship.

6. Fruitfulness

The relationship should bear fruit in some way. Traditionally, the fruit of love is procreation. Making babies is one way to be fruitful and keep the relationship from closing in on itself. There are other ways. The point is that love brings new life to those who love, and that new life should bless the world, not just the lovers. Thus is love fruitful and for the good of all.

7. Social Justice

Here the invitation is to understand your own intimate relationship within the context of social justice, which requires that all people’s romantic and intimate relationships be honored and respected. “Whether persons are single or married, gay or straight, bisexual or ambiguously gendered, old or young, abled or challenged in the ordinary forms of sexual expression, they have claims to respect from...[faith] communit[ies] as well as the wider society. These are claims to freedom from unjust harm, equal protection under the law, an equitable share in the goods and services available to others, and freedom of choice in their sexual lives -- within the limits of” these principles.

When lust arises, pay attention to it -- neither indulging nor repressing. In the process, also pay attention to these seven principles of justice in sexuality.

POSTSCRIPT TO PLATO:

So, you see, Plato, it’s not that there’s a good horse and a bad horse – as if our job were to suppress and quell the bad horse as much as we can so that the good horse can take us down the noble road. Rather, there’s an engine and a steering wheel. The steering wheel doesn't make the engine go, and doesn't turn it on or off. We ain’t going anywhere without the engine. Gotta love the engine, take care of it, maintain it. When it makes strange noises, figure out what’s wrong and get it fixed. We need that engine.

We also have a steering wheel. We don’t have a lot of control, and the glory of life is this amazing ride, most of which we don’t choose. But we do have some control. We can steer, kinda. Lust is a blessing. With thoughtfulness we can make good choices about what to do with that blessing.

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This is part 25 of "The Seven Deadlies" (Part 4 of 4 on Lust)
Next: Part 26: "Pride?"
Previous: Part 24: "More Than Two Possibilities"
Beginning: Part 1: "Seven and Sins"

More Than Two Possibilities

We are emerging out from under the long shadows cast by Plato and Augustine. More and more of us now understand that our bodies are not corrupted prisons for our pure and ethereal souls, but, rather, our bodies are themselves vehicles of potential liberation and fulfillment. Our bodies are integral parts of our identity. We aren’t who we are without embodiment. The first awakening of romantic love is sparked by the lust that is our evolutionary heritage, and that we do not choose. It comes upon us unbidden. We “fall into” love.

Yet love and lust can certainly be directed by choice. Even in the beginning, we can influence the course our lust and thus our love takes. If we find that an attraction, an urge, has arisen within us, we have choices about what to do with that. We can indulge it. We can repress it, suppress it, deny it.

Those are not the only two possibilities.

We can, as it were, walk with it. Begin by just being with it. Bring presence and awareness to the urge. Without denying it or pushing it away, investigate it. What is it, exactly? What are the options for honoring it and addressing it? So often we think there is only one thing the urge is asking for, and we either go for it, or we’re horrified by that and try to suppress the urge. With patient presence, alternatives emerge.

You might choose not to identify with the urge. This isn’t the same thing as repression. It’s like: “I see you there lust, and I know you are not me. You are a simply a visitor who has come to see me today. I will treat you honorably, listen to what you have to say, but, no, I’m not turning over the keys to the house to you. Not today.”

You might choose to defer the urge, seeing a greater possibility of fulfillment at a later time and place. We can bring the urge into dialog with our values: that is, not allowing the urge to overwhelm our values, but also not attempting to use our values to deny the legitimacy of the urge. Just: bringing urge and values into dialog.

To have that dialog, it helps to be clear on what the values are. Margaret Farley, a Sisters of Mercy Nun whom Lake Chalice has referenced before (see here), articulated seven relevant value principles, of which there are, it just so happens, seven:

1. Do No Unjust Harm
2. Free Consent
3. Mutuality
4. Equality
5. Commitment
6. Fruitfulness
7. Social Justice

The urge of lust comes from a healthy and good place. When lust knocks at your door, be a welcoming and attentive host. But you don't have to do everything it proposes. Bring it into dialog with these seven values. In our next post, Lake Chalice will unpack a bit these seven lively values.

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This is part 24 of "The Seven Deadlies" (Part 3 of 4 on Lust)
Next: Part 25: "The Engine and the Steering Wheel"
Previous: Part 23: "Lust: Virtue and Vice"
Beginning: Part 1: "Seven and Sins"

Lust: Virtue and Vice

Each one of the seven deadly sins – greed, anger, gluttony, sloth, pride, envy, and lust – contains a virtue as well as a possible vice. In lust, the virtue is that it impels us to risk setting aside our usual defenses and entering into connection – entering into the most radical mutuality.

Radical mutuality comes from this: lust is not one desire, but two. It consists of the desire to please and to be pleased. Those two desires become one, yet conceptually we can begin by imagining them separate. Lovers A and B, in their consummation, find that A takes pleasure in B’s pleasure, and B takes pleasure in A taking pleasure in B’s pleasure, and A takes further pleasure in B taking pleasure in A taking pleasure in B’s pleasure. And so on. In this feedback loop, the two desires – to please and to be pleased – merge into one desire for pleasures belonging to neither lover separately.

While there is much about this that is voluntary, and mutual consent is crucial to the enterprise, there is also a significant role for the involuntary – for the delight we take in evoking from each other involuntary bodily responses. In the merger -- the envelopment and penetration -- there is a depth of surrender, a surrendering of rational will and separate identity, and thus a liberation from the tyranny of our separateness with its calculated self-protection.

The experience reveals, manifests, a spiritual possibility, to which we might be so present that it penetrates and envelopes us. We might learn to encounter each moment of our living with something like that ecstasy of merger – a continuous unfolding lovemaking with reality. The poet Kabir calls it making love with the divine.

“If you don't break your ropes while you're alive,
do you think ghosts will do it after?
What is found now is found then.
If you find nothing now,
you will simply end up with an apartment in the City of Death.
And if you make love with the divine now,
in the next life you will have the face of satisfied desire.
Then plunge into the Truth.”

There is this spiritual possibility, growing from lust, for radical mutuality. Certainly there is a blessing there. Yet there are also problems and risks. We can make love with the divine or screw with the devil.

Evolution made us get hungry when we haven’t eaten for a while. Evolution did not, as it were, “have in mind” the development of fettuccine alfredo, sweet potato and walnut burritos, or Americanized panAsian cuisine. We humans did that. Evolution gave us two basic facts: we like to eat, and, while our tastes are variable and trainable, in general we are especially attracted to foods that have the nutrients in which our ancient ancestors were otherwise likely to be deficient. We take those two facts, and we’re making the best of them. Only, sometimes we’re also making the worst of them: fast food, junk food, excessive intake of the sugars, fats, and salt that once were precious and hard to come by.

Evolution also made us with a desire to mate. Evolution did not, as it were “have in mind” the development of the positions and techniques depicted in the Kama Sutra or The Joy of Sex. We humans did that. Evolution gave us two basic facts: we like sex and, while our tastes are variable and trainable, in general we are especially attracted to young and healthy partners who are more likely to produce healthy children and protect and provide for said children. We take those two facts, and we’re making the best of them. Only, sometimes we’re also making the worst of them. Evolution gave us lust, which we can use as the energy that brings love into its most magnificent flower. But we can also misuse.

* * *
This is part 23 of "The Seven Deadlies" (Part 2 of 4 on Lust)
Next: Part 24: "More Than Two Possibilities"
Previous: Part 22: "An Open Letter to Plato about Sex"
Beginning: Part 1: "Seven and Sins"

An Open Letter to Plato about Sex

Dear Plato,

What are we going to do with you, young man? I'm disappointed with the way you've been intellectually behaving. Don’t you know that your younger brother, Augustine, is just going to want to do what he sees his big brother doing, only he doesn’t even have your tempered judgment? It’s going to be trouble for all of us because of what you started. What were you thinking?

Well, OK, you told us what you were thinking, but let’s think again, for god’s sake.

Lust is not a bad thing. We would none of us be here without it. So what’s this nonsense about the charioteer with two horses? I refer, of course, to that passage in the "Phaedrus" in which you wrote about the good horse and the bad horse. You said:

“The one in the better position has an upright appearance, and is clean-limbed, high-necked, hook-nosed, white in color, and dark-eyed; his determination to succeed is tempered by self-control and respect for others, which is to say that he is an ally of true glory; and he needs no whip, but is guided only by spoken commands. The other is crooked, over-large, a haphazard jumble of limbs; he has a thick, short neck, and a flat face; he is black in color, with grey, bloodshot eyes, and ally of excess and affectation, hairy around the ears, hard of hearing, and scarcely to be controlled with a combination of whip and goad.”

What are you saying, Plato? Everything’s about control, control, control with you. Be a good charioteer, rein in those impulses of that bad horse.

I grant you that controlling ourselves is not an awful idea. In fact, most of the time it’s a pretty good idea. But, Plato, that’s not all there is to the good life. And I don’t think you were thinking about what affect that would have on Augustine. I’m not saying you’re responsible for all the misuses of your ideas by other people, but you tell me this: was Augustine misusing your ideas, or just logically extending them?

It was you, after all, who described all the pleasures of the body as “snares and the source of all ills.”

It's true that you are not the only bad influence on our little Augie. There was that Matthew. Just as you put words in Socrates’ mouth, Matthew put words in Jesus’ mouth. Matthew has Jesus say:

“You have heard that it was said, ‘You shall not commit adultery.’ But I say to you that everyone who looks at a woman with lust has already committed adultery with her in his heart.”

That’s certainly taking the idea of control to a whole ‘nother level. Somehow it’s not enough to control what we do with our desires; we have to prevent desires from arising in the first place. God only knows how. The Jesus Seminar folks figure Jesus probably never said that, but Matthew said Jesus said it, and Augustine believed Jesus said it.

For Augustine, let me tell you just in case you haven't been paying attention, sexual relations are a bad, bad thing. However, we need kids, so sex must be endured. Ideally, there should be no pleasure involved. It should be like shaking hands. Through sufficient exercise of the rational will, we can control our feelings and impulses so that sexual activity occurs without any enjoyment, but solely for fulfilling the duty of procreating. Though even this is second best. Actually, fourth best.

The ideal would be a life of virginity of heart, mind, and body: without a hint of desire ever arising. Second best would be a life of unmarried virginity of body. Third, matrimony without sex. That’s fine if you can do it, but it’s risky to have a spouse around. Fourth would be matrimony with pleasureless procreative activity. Fifth, procreative activity accompanied by pleasure. This is pretty regrettable -- clearly a degraded state of affairs. But even that would be better than the sixth level, acting for the sake of pure sexual pleasure without intending to produce kids.

Now, Plato, don’t give me that, “It’s not my fault he’s seriously repressed” line. He took your ideas about rational will suppressing the impulses of desire and used that to lay out doctrines that repressed all of Christendom for the next 1600 years. And counting.

When Augustine took up the question of whether Christ was ever sad, he said, yes, Christ was sad at least once, “but sad by taking up sadness of his own free will, in the same way as he, of his own free will, took up human flesh.” But, you see, Plato, and I think you understand this much, sadness is not to be switched on and off by a free will decision. If anyone tells me they switch sadness on and off at will, I’m going to figure they’re not actually feeling the real thing. Same thing with sexual desire. Anyone who says they turn it on or off by rational choice isn’t really feeling the real thing.

Not all of life is about what we choose. Some of it is about what chooses us. Sometimes, in fact, we require loss of control. The good life is about being open to the surprises that come to us, including the surprising emotions, and involuntary sensations. The good life includes the possibility of intimate partners, and when and if we do enter into such a partnership, too much control kills it. We want to feel swept away, and we want them to feel swept away. We want to turn our bodies over to the nourishment of a grander thing – a thing grander than our individual rational choice, a thing we don’t choose or control, but simply serve, a thing called love.

Lust is the unchosen desire best satisfied through losing ourselves in the service of love.

Just think about it, OK?

Your concerned friend,
-Meredith

* * *
This is part 22 of "The Seven Deadlies" (Part 1 of 4 on Lust)
Next: Part 23: "Lust: Virtue and Vice"
Previous: Part 21: "Faith Envy"
Beginning: Part 1: "Seven and Sins"

Faith Envy

In Joseph Epstein’s book, Envy, he observes that his greatest envy is for people who have managed to free themselves of envy. Early in the book Epstein mentions what he calls “faith envy”:

“This is the envy one feels for those who have the true and deep and intelligent religious faith that sees them through the darkest of crises, death among them.”

Then, toward the end of the book, he recounts:

“I envied people who can travel abroad with a single piece of luggage. I envied people who have exceedingly good posture. I still envy such people. And, above all, I envied – and continue to envy – those few people, favorites of the gods, who genuinely understand that life is a fragile bargain, rescindable at any time . . . and live their lives day by day, hour by hour, minute by minute accordingly.”

A strong faith does see us through dark crises, including death. If that faith is a liberal religious faith, then it is not the serene and obstinate insistence on certain incredible beliefs. Rather, liberal religion sees faith as an openness to whatever unknown the next moment may bring. Faith, in this light, is the very same thing as that genuine understanding of how fragile a bargain, rescindable at any instant, is life.

If we can envy envylessness, then we can direct our envy toward its own cure. Envy can be the "sin" that motivates us to a practice of learning to let go of envy. In the oldest branch of Buddhism -- Theravada Buddhism -- that practice is called mudita.

Mudita is one of the four Brahma Vihara -- i.e., four noble virtues or four sublime attitudes. The other three are upekkha, metta, and karuna. These words are Pali, the language of the oldest Buddhist scriptures. They translate roughly as follows:

Upekkha is equanimity. Metta is lovingkindness. Karuna is compassion toward those suffering misfortune. And mudita is sympathetic joy – joy at another’s good fortune.

Mudita is the direct antidote of envy. When I truly understand that we are not separate, then I know that another’s good fortune is my good fortune, for we are one. And, conversely, when we practice this noble virtue, mudita, taking joy in the success and good fortune of others, we begin to better understand that we are not separate.

Easier said than done. Through practice, though, it is possible to strengthen our mudita. When I suffer a pang of envy – and envy is suffering – I remind myself that from the universe’s point of view, the other person’s success is just as good as my own. Indeed, the other person’s success IS my own.

When the Miss America winner is announced, and Miss Indiana, or whoever it is, steps forward to be crowned, you see the other contestants smiling and applauding the winner, the one who beat them out. You may be thinking, "They are faking those smiles. Inside, all those runners-up and also-rans are consumed with envy." I don’t know. Maybe some of them are wretched with envy. Maybe others actually are sharing in the joy.

And if a given contestant is faking, that’s not so bad. "Fake it til you make it," as the 12-steppers wisely say. Pretend to have an attitude for long enough and eventually you really will have it. In mudita practice, it doesn’t matter whether you are pretending to feel sympathetic joy, or are actually feeling it. Either way, you are cultivating that feeling, strengthening the neurons that will allow you to go toward joy at the very moment when envy pulls toward misery.

When we're in the midst of a situation that triggers envy, it's difficult to remember mudita. So it's good to practice when you aren't in the midst of such a situation. Sharon Salzberg offers this beautiful meditation for cultivating and nurturing mudita.

"We begin with someone whom we care about; someone it is easy to rejoice for. It may be somewhat difficult even then, but we tend to more easily feel joy for someone on the basis of our love and friendship. Choose a friend and focus on a particular gain or source of joy in this person's life. Do not look for absolute, perfect happiness in their life, because you may not find it. Whatever good fortune or happiness of theirs comes to your mind, take delight in it with the phrase, 'May your happiness and good fortune not leave you' or 'May your happiness not diminish' or 'May your good fortune continue.' This will help diminish the conditioned tendencies of conceit, demeaning others, and judgment. Following this, we move through the sequence of beings: benefactor, neutral person, enemy [difficult person], all beings . . . all beings in the ten directions." (Lovingkindness: The Revolutionary Art of Happiness, p. 134)

Even if you don't think of yourself as an envious person, we could all use mudita strengthening. If you'll take 5 minutes, three times a week, to sit quiet and still and take your mind through this exercise, it will change your life. I guarantee it.

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This is part 21 of "The Seven Deadlies" (Part 4 of 4 on Envy)
Next: Part 22: "An Open Letter to Plato about Sex"
Previous: Part 20: "Upsides of Envy"
Beginning: Part 1: "Seven and Sins"

Upsides of Envy

Envy -- arguably the least fun of the seven deadly sins -- has a positive side. The pinch of envy might spur us to a wholesome pursuit of justice, or it might drive us work harder to achieve the qualities we admire in others.

Envy springs from the same place from which comes concern for justice and equality. The impulse that makes us care about fairness and equality is a little voice that has been hardwired into us to say, “I don’t want anyone to have it better than me.” As William Hazlitt remarked:

“Envy, among other ingredients, has a love of justice in it.”

The envious tend -- for good and for ill -- to be injustice collectors. Envy is what we get mired in when the childish demand that everything be perfectly equal isn’t qualified and moderated by understanding.

Envy also has roots in another, secondary source: admiration.

“Aristotle writes of emulation as good envy, or envy ending in admiration, and thus in the attempt to imitate the qualities one began by envying” (Joseph Epstein)

Noticing a certain inequality – someone has a talent or a virtue in greater degree than you – you might want that for yourself, and so strive to emulate it. Admiration informs and motivates your own character development. Or, noticing an inequality that comes from some unfairness, we might engage for the sake of greater fairness. Both of those are positive, healthy, good.

Envy is the turning bad of these positive forces in human life. Kierkegaard wrote that

“admiration is happy self surrender; envy is unhappy self-satisfaction.”

Some people “feel envy only glancingly if at all,” others “use envy toward emulation and hence self-improvement,” and still others “let it build a great bubbling caldron of poisoning bile in them.”

We are built with different sensitivities. After all, some chimps pulled that rope to collapse the table and others didn’t. Still most of us compare ourselves with others -- and we want the comparison to favor us.

“Studies such as Robert H. Frank’s Luxury Fever have shown that people would agree to make less total money so long as they make more than their neighbors: that is, they would rather earn, say $85,000 a year where no one else is making more than $75,000 instead of $100,000 where everyone else is making $125,000.”

Indeed, H. L. Mencken said that contentment in America is making $10 a month more than your brother-in-law.

Academics and artists seem to be uncommonly afflicted with envy. The writer Gore Vidal admitted,

“Whenever a friend succeeds, a little something in me dies.”

The advertising industry is built on the aim of inducing as much envy as possible. Envy seems to cut across all economic systems. As the saying goes:

Under capitalism, man envies man. Under socialism, vice-versa.

* * *
This is part 20 of "The Seven Deadlies" (Part 3 on Envy)
Next: Part 21: "Faith Envy"
Previous: Part 19: "Envy and the Desire for Equality"
Beginning: Part 1: "Seven and Sins"

Envy and the Desire for Equality

Envy is not to be confused with jealousy. One is jealous of what one has, envious of what other people have. Nor is envy to be confused with generalized resentment. Real envy is personal. You envy a particular person. You don’t envy a class – say, the rich. You may resent the rich, but envy is reserved for a specific person who has gotten richer than you and, you are quite sure, does not deserve it.

“Real envy is reserved not for the great or the greatly gifted, but for those whose situation seems only slightly better than our own.” (Epstein)

We envy people who we see as roughly comparable. I don’t envy LeBron James because I have long since given up any hope of that kind of athletic genius. But another middle-aged minister whose basketball skills clearly exceed my own might trigger a brief, ‘hey, why not me?’ thought. So women tend to envy other women and men tend to envy other men – because we see them as being in a comparable position, and we’d like to do as well as they do.

Envy is also the only one of the seven deadlies to be proscribed in the ten commandments. Yahweh declares himself to be jealous, and forbids us to be envious:

“You shall not covet your neighbor’s house; you shall not covet your neighbor’s wife, or male or female slave, or ox, or donkey, or anything that belongs to your neighbor.”

Not a word in the ten commandments, or, indeed, anywhere in the Tanakh – which Christians call the Old Testament – prohibiting the other six. Leviticus, in particular, is filled with page after page of rules, but nothing there forbids gluttony, anger, sloth, pride, or greed. There are a lot of ways your lust cannot be expressed, but there’s no law against lust itself. Coveting, however, that’s not allowed.

Why not? The commandments already say, “You shall not steal.” So as long as coveting your neighbor’s house or ox doesn’t lead to stealing it, what’s wrong with coveting it? The commandments already say, “You shall not commit adultery.” So as long as coveting your neighbor’s spouse doesn’t lead to that, what’s the problem?

The problem, I guess, is that other side of envy: the side that says, well never mind me getting it, I’ll just make sure my neighbor doesn’t have it either. If your neighbor’s ox mysteriously dies, you haven’t exactly stolen it. Iago doesn’t end up with Desdemona – he just makes sure Othello doesn’t have her either. Iago’s envy and Othello’s jealousy together drive the plot.

Nasty business, this envy.

This, “If-I-can’t-have-it-you-can’t-either” impulse runs deep. In an experiment with chimpanzees, there’s a chimp in a cage, there’s a table of their favorite foods outside the cage. The cage is on wheels and the chimp can reach out, grab the edge of the table and pull it over and get the food. There’s also a rope attached to a couple of the table legs. Pulling on the rope causes the table to collapse and the food to roll away, irretrievably out of reach. Now put two chimps in side by side cages. They can both reach the table, and they each have their own rope that can collapse the table. As long as they pull the table closer to where they both can reach it and share the food, all was well. But if one chimp pulled the table over toward himself out of the reach of the other chimp, then the aggrieved chimp would often pull the rope, collapse the table and thus ensure that neither of them got the food.

Often. Not always. Some chimps have the “if I can’t have it you can’t either” impulse stronger than others. It’s the same with their cousins, the humans. And it’s a good thing. We need people who care about equality just for equality’s sake – even when that sometimes means taking away something from someone else with no tangible benefit to anyone.

That’s a strange thing to say. But even though there may not seem to be any benefit in one particular instance, over the longer haul there may be. The chimp who pulls the rope to deny food to another chimp gets no benefit THIS TIME. But next time, the greedy chimp will be more likely to share. Maybe in some circumstances we know that there will be and can be no next time, but our emotions are wired the way they are from millions of generations dealing with situations in which there were next times.

An important detail that I didn’t mention is that when a deprived chimp does pull the rope to say, “fine, then neither of us is getting any food,” that chimp doesn’t just quietly pull the rope, as if the collapsing table might have been some unfortunate accident. Oh, no.

“When the table rolled away from them, the annoyed chimps exploded in rage, turning into screeching black furballs.” (Ariely)

They are very loud about communicating a message for next time: treat me fairly. The roots of envy lie in an impulse to insist upon equality because even though there may be no benefit to you this time, you increase your odds of better treatment next time. Without that impulse, we’d never have developed as much fairness as we have.

Life isn’t fair, but it’s a good thing for human beings in their dealings with each other to try to be.

* * *
This is part 19 of "The Seven Deadlies" (Part 2 on Envy)
Next: Part 20: "Upsides of Envy"
Previous: Part 18: "Wanting the Cow Dead"
Beginning: Part 1: "Seven and Sins"

Wanting the Cow Dead

A genie pops out of a bottle and sees three people. Since it’s unclear which one of them actually opened the bottle, the genie gives one wish to each of them. The first one says that friend of hers has a cottage in the Cotswalds, and she would like a similar cottage, but with two extra bedrooms, an additional bath, and a brook running in front. The second one says his best friend has a twenty-five-year-old blonde mistress, and he would like such a mistress himself, but a redhead instead of a blonde and with longer legs and bit more culture and chic. The third one is silent. Then he says, “I have a neighbor who has a cow that gives a vast quantity of the richest milk, which yields the heaviest cream and the purest butter. I want that cow . . . dead.”

Envy may be the most hidden of the seven deadly sins. We tend to hide it from others, and from ourselves. When my mind turned to the subject of envy, I was thinking, well, this one I don’t have much. Maybe you have that reaction too – and maybe you really don’t have much of it. Or maybe you and I have hidden our envy from ourselves because, one, it’s pretty easy to hide, and, two, it’s no fun to have.

Envy really is no fun. Envy is the least fun of the seven deadly sins. Gluttony and lust are fun. Sloth is enjoyable. Vanity feels good. Greed can be satisfying, and even anger we speak of as an indulgence. But envy? That’s just no fun at all. It’s not easy being green (with envy) – in the sense that life in that sickly-hued state is difficult and unpleasant.

Envy works basically like this:

“You see something, want it, feel it only sensible and right that it belong to you and not the person who has it. One the injustice of the other person having it is established – this doesn’t usually take too long – his unworthiness must be emphasized, at least in your own mind. Your own greater worthiness goes quite without saying. His loathsomeness doesn’t; it may be said over and over, to yourself. Whatever the object of inordinate desire – an item of art or luxury, the friendship or love of another person, the prestige that goes with a position or place or prize in life – the world begins to seem out of joint, so long as he has it and you do not.” (Epstein, Envy)

It’s that double-reality that’s insufferable: he has it AND you do not. If you both have it, that’s fine, and if neither of you have it, that’s OK. Envy says there are two solutions: one, you get what they’ve got, ideally in a slightly better version, or two, they lose what they had. Envy doesn’t care which. Of course, there’s a third solution: learn how to not be envious, but Envy won’t tell you that.

“Envy asks one leading question: What about me? Why does he or she have beauty, talent wealth, power, the world’s love, and other gifts, or at any rate a larger share of than I? Why not me?” (Epstein)

The first recorded case of envy is in Genesis, chapter 4:

“Now Abel was a keeper of sheep and Cain a tiller of the ground. In the course of time Cain brought to the Lord an offering of the fruit of the ground, and Abel for his part brought of the firstlings of his flock, their fat portions. And the Lord had regard for Abel and his offering, but for Cain and his offering, he had no regard. So Cain was very angry, and his countenance fell. . . . Cain said to his brother Abel, ‘Let us go out to the field.’ And when they were in the field, Cain rose up against his brother Abel and killed him.”

So it's a sin with a distinguished history. Indeed, unless you count eating the fruit of the tree of knowledge of good and evil among sins to which we are currently liable, envy is the oldest still-practiced sin in the Bible. Followed shortly by murder.

* * *
This is part 18 of "The Seven Deadlies" (Part 1 on Envy)
Next: Part 19: "Envy and the Desire for Equality"
Previous: Part 17: "The Real Work"
Beginning: Part 1: "Seven and Sin"

I Pray Thee: Pray

We need a Unitarian Universalist theology of prayer, because, for many of us, what we learned in childhood about what prayer is doesn’t make sense to us anymore, so we don’t pray.

Prayer is not about asking for stuff with any expectation that it will magically appear. Prayer does not require believing in a personlike entity or committing to the notion that reality-as-a-whole knows or desires.

It does help to address the prayer to something other than yourself, though it’s fine if you understand this as merely a device to help you hear yourself better – like beginning your journal entries with “Dear Diary,” as if you were writing to a pen-pal. It’s a good device – helps you really do it, slow down, complete your sentences, present yourself without the shortcuts habitual to our rushing thoughts.

So that's part one: imagine reporting to someone whose judgment you need not cajole, who will never hold against you whatever you say, and whose sympathy is assured. Maybe you’re sure there’s no one there, or maybe you suspect it. That’s fine. Pretend. Role-play. It's good to excercise the imagination. Knowing when to go ahead and play make-believe and burst the bonds of the literal and prosaic -- and when to return to those bonds -- is the better part of wisdom.

You can address the prayer to "God," "Goddess," "Jesus," "Mary," "Avalokitesvara," "Vishnu," "Thor," "Ghosts of my ancestors," "Saint Francis," "Reality," or -- the two I most frequently invoke -- "Ground of being," or "Source of healing and wholeness called by many names." You can address your prayer to an imaginary person you name "Hilda," or "Cuthbert." In some ways it does matter whom you name as your addressee in prayer, so try out various possibilities to see what resonantes best with you. As far as whether or not you actually are praying, it doesn't matter how you name your (imagined) listener. Put "Dear" in front -- or don't -- as the spirit moves you.

Kneeling is good, though by no means necessary. Kneeling tells your body, "we're doing something a little different from the rest of life now." It helps the body take seriously what you're doing -- and the body, after all, runs our lives a lot more than the thin layer of upper cortex that likes to believe it's in charge. It also seems to help to look either down or up.

Prayer is about caring enough about life – yours – to check in with it, see how it’s doing. The purpose of imagining you are reporting to something outside yourself is to discover what you say.

Then begin. So what do you say? What goes in part two, the "body" of the prayer?

Anne Lamott’s latest is a little book about prayer, and the title is three words that say it all:

Help. Thanks. Wow.

That’s it. Help. Thanks. Wow. To take up a practice of prayer means that you’ll regularly say those three things. You’ll say them to yourself, and in private, because prayer is not for display.

Sometimes you say, “I sure do need some help. I don’t know what to do.”

Sometimes you might be specific about the sort of help you’d really like, and that’s where the idea of prayer as asking for things comes from. But the point isn’t to ask so you can get it. The point is to ask so you can hear your own heart’s yearning – and thereby reveal to yourself also an option of maybe letting it go. Maybe.

Sometimes you say, “Thank you. Thank you for a day of sobriety, for my granddaughter, for the blossoming azaleas.”

And sometimes you say: “Wow. I’m stunned. I might or might not also be grateful, but mostly right now, I’m stunned. I gasp. The song of a bird, an image of war, the massive scale of poverty, the infinity of the cosmos. Wow.”

Wow is what you say when you look at the ocean for the first time. I will always remember a story I heard the first year I was serving the Unitarian Universalist Fellowship of Gainesville, Florida. It seems that a member of the congregation had a relative who had reached the age of 80 and had spent her life in the same north Alabama town in which she was born. She had never seen the ocean. So the family got together and planned the trip so she could see ocean. The elderly relative was brought out to the beach, and she gazed upon the ocean for her first time: this vast expanse stretching to the horizon in 180 different degrees of directions. She said, “I thought it would be bigger.”

That story is so memorable because it’s so funny, and because I can’t wrap my mind around how the ocean could not be a “wow.”

Help. Thanks. Wow. Saying it helps us know we mean it, that’s all. It helps us become self-aware, which we rarely are. A regular practice of prayer changes us, but it changes us so slowly that it’s easy to think nothing is happening, it’s not doing anything, it’s pointless. As the years wash up like waves, the habit of daily prayer gradually yields up its fruit of self-awareness.

You know who you are – really know. You know where you fall down and need help. You know what you love and are so grateful for: those are your resources are for getting back up. And you know you’re alive in a world of wonder.

It’s one thing to have a moment of irritation, sadness, anger, disappointment, fear. Such feelings, too, are threads in the fabric of the wonder of life. It’s another thing to nurse such a feeling like a grudge, to run a cognitive loop to tell myself over and over not just that I’m having the feeling, but how justified I am to have it. Every time I want to cling to my own crankiness, wield it with righteous conviction, I am forgetting who I am. Saying help and thanks and wow gradually gets me where I’m quicker to remember again.

Then, at the end, part three: say, “Amen.” Or say, “and so it is,” or, “truly,” since these terms are translations of "amen." Also popular: "Blessed be." All these endings underscore that prayer is not about wishful thinking, but about being in touch with things exactly as they are in your heart. It's about blessing what is -- even if "what is" is your own desperate need for help.

Help. And so it is.

Thanks. Truly.

Wow. And so it is, truly.

The Suffering of Job: From Aww to Awe

The sweetness of this moment and also its sorrow is the love we make of fleeting lives. Right where we are. Love opens the door of awe and wonder – and that, too, is always right here.

In the Biblical book that bears his name, Job suffers. “Why do I suffer?” he cries. He is visited by friends who offer trite moral simplifications that leave Job still crying, "Why do I suffer? This isn’t fair. I don’t deserve it."

Finally, God Godself appears to answer the charge that Job’s suffering is unfair and without basis. It’s not clear, however, that what God proceeds to say can be accurately called an “answer.” God unleashes four chapters of rhetorical questions that invoke the wonders and grandeur of creation. Here’s a sampling (which includes readings #424 and #427 in Singing the Living Tradition):

“Where were you when I laid the foundation of the earth? (38:4)...Or who shut in the sea (38:8),...made the clouds its garment (38:9)....Have you commanded the morning since your days began, and caused the dawn to know its place? (38:12)...Have you comprehended the expanse of the earth? (38:18)...Have you entered the storehouses of the snow, or have you seen the storehouses of the hail? (38:22)...Who has cut a channel for the torrents of rain, and a way for the thunderbolt, to bring rain on a land where no one lives, on the desert, which is empty of human life, to satisfy the waste and desolate land, and to make the ground put forth grass? Has the rain a father, or who has begotten the drops of dew? From whose womb did the ice come forth, and who has given birth to the hoarfrost of heaven? The waters become hard like stone, and the face of the deep is frozen. Can you bind the chains of the Pleiades or loose the cords of Orion? (38:25-31)...Do you know when the mountain goats give birth? (39:1)...Do you give the horse its might? (39:19)...Is it by your wisdom that the hawk soars, and spreads its wings toward the south? Is it at your command that the eagle mounts up and makes its nest on high?” (39:26-27)

How does any of this answer Job’s question? How does any of this explain why there is unearned suffering, why bad things happen to good people, why children die, why baby birds’ lifeless bodies are found on the sidewalk, why life hurts? I’ll tell you: it doesn’t.

Yet confronted with the vast awe of creation, Job is humbled and speechless. He abandons his plea, for he grasps that the mystery of the cosmos is so much deeper than principles of justice. Job doesn’t get an answer to his question about why there is unearned suffering. What Job gets is awe. What Job gets is a filling full of awe at the magnificence and majesty of creation. Job doesn’t get an answer. Instead he gets a sense of the smallness of his question.

Before the grandeur of this life and world, our complaints are puny indeed. Awe means being in touch with the wider context of our lives, the vast beauty of life and the world. Awe is the felt sense, more than words can say, that the tragedy and unfairness and pain exist always within a wider context of beauty and wonder.

Gustavo Gutierrez (b. 1928)

The experience of awe enables us to act for fairness and social justice, and let go of attachment to results. The liberation theologian Gustavo Gutierrez is a deeply committed advocate for social justice. At the same time, Gutierrez notes in his discussion of Job that:

“emphasis on the practice of justice and on solidarity with the poor must never become an obsession and prevent our seeing that this commitment reveals its value and ultimate meaning only within the vast and mysterious horizon of God's gratuitous love.” (96)

We might prefer to say the gratuitous grace of being alive. Only within the vast and mysterious gratuitous grace of being alive is revealed the value and ultimate meaning of working for justice. Gutierrez is talking about awe – for when we experience the wonder of creation deeply and personally, it feels like an awesome gratuitous love.

Let the awe Job experienced hearing the voice of reality from a whirlwind be always with you. Let the love we share be always with us. And so it is. Truly.

Kick the Bucket List

The sweetness of this moment and also its sorrow is the love we make of fleeting lives. Right where we are.

The 2007 film, “The Bucket List” starring Jack Nicholson and Morgan Freeman further popularized the idea of having a list of things to do or places to go before dying – before "kicking the bucket."

Dear friends, this is a bad idea. Don’t do it. Don’t make that list, and if you have one, throw it away. The measure of a life is not the length of the list of things done once, but the integrity of things done over and over, 10 years, 20 years, 30 years, until they radiate with beauty and grow fresher with each repetition.

Too often have I said, and heard, “been there, done that” – as if everything in the whole possible conceivable world was worth paying attention to once, at most, and never again. Go back to that place you have been and that thing you have done because last time you were there you didn’t stay. Go back to what you do know, but live as if you’ve forgotten. Touch that familiar cloth, and the electric jolt of mad implication:

This is it. All of it. All of it right here. There is nowhere to go except here.

When Ecclesiastes said there is no new thing under the sun, it meant that that's because all things are always new beneath this sun. So hanker not for the fresh and new but open your eyes to the wonder that is always before you.

Let us be a countercultural people, standing counter to the consumer culture exerting all its might to entice us to buy new experiences, a consumer culture that would sell water to a fish if it could, for we are as immersed in constantly shifting new experience as a fish in the ocean.

Do you want to change the world? Congratulations, you have. Each of us changes the world every day, and is changed by it.

Nothing could be more abundant than brand-new, fresh, never-before experience. Forget about making a list of the ones you want, and notice the amazing ones you have.

If religion is a way of living, an approach to life, the film “The Bucket List” is bad religion. For good religion in film, I would mention “Ground Hog Day.” Presented with the exact same circumstances every morning, Bill Murray makes each day different by how he responds to it. He learns at last to live in the moment and finds that when he does, his life becomes one of compassion and joy – right there in the same old small town, Punxsutawney, Pennsylvania.

The sweetness of this moment and also its sorrow is the love we make of fleeting lives. Right where we are.

Yay for Our Team

We Unitarian Universalists have a reputation for being logically minded. There was a Unitarian Universalist who was on death row. On the eve before his execution, the Warden asked, “It’s customary for the condemned to have time with a priest or chaplain. Would you like me to get you a priest? A chaplain?"

The man said, “I’m a Unitarian Universalist.”

The Warden said, “In that case, would you like to talk to a math professor?”

I’ve got this part of me that says, “Now that’s not fair!” Then I’ve got this other part of me that says, actually, I think, before I die, I would like some help making my peace with transfinite cardinal numbers. (Neither infinite nor finite? What kind of Zen math is that?)

We of liberal religion do have a reputation for being logically minded. We’re also quick thinkers. There was a Unitarian Universalist youth, working her first job in grocery store. A man comes up and asks for half a head of lettuce. She says, “Hold on.” She goes back to talk to the manager. She’s telling the manager, “There's a jerk out there who wants to buy half a head of lettuce.” Just then she notices that the man has followed her and is standing behind her, so she says,“and this fine gentleman wants to buy the other half." Quick thinking!

For all that, we have learned that it isn’t thinking that saves us. It’s each other. Thinking can be glorious, but it can also be dreary when we’re by ourselves. I heard about a highway sign along a desert stretch of highway: "Your Own Tedious Thoughts, next 200 miles." Together with others we are lifted out of the constant tedium of our own thoughts.

It’s said that Jews don’t recognize Jesus as the Messiah, that Muslims don’t recognize Jews as God’s chosen people, that Protestants don’t recognize the Pope as the leader of the Christian world, that some Episcopalians don’t recognize their own bishop (if said bishop happens to be gay), that Baptists don’t recognize each other in the liquor store, and that UUs don’t recognize each other in Wal-Mart. We do, however, love to recognize the famous people in our history. Three of the first six presidents were Unitarian: John Adams, Thomas Jefferson, and John Quincy Adams. The 13th president, Millard Fillmore, and the 27th president, William Howard Taft, were also Unitarian, as was the Democratic Party's nominee in 1952 and 1956, Adlai Stevenson. Back in the 16th century, there was a Unitarian King: King John Sigismund of Transylvania, reigned 1560-1570.

Other political figures include:
Benjamin Franklin (1706-1790), scientist, writer, statesman, printer.
Paul Revere (1735–1818).
Abigail Adams (1744–1818) women's rights advocate and first Second Lady and the second First Lady of the United States
John Marshall (1755-1835), Chief Justice of the United States Supreme Court.
John C. Calhoun (1782–1850) U.S Senator, Co-founder, All Souls Church, Unitarian (Washington, D.C.)
Daniel Webster (1782-1852), orator, U.S. Senator, Secretary of State, presidential candidate.
Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr. (1841-1935), lawyer and member of the U.S. Supreme Court, 1902-32.
Harold Hitz Burton (1888–1964) U.S. Supreme Court Justice 1945-1958
Elliot Richardson, former Secretary of Health, Education and Welfare, and Attorney General (1973).

Unitarians or Universalists in the arts and entertainment include:
Nathaniel Hawthorne (1804-1864), 19th century American novelist, author of "The Scarlet Letter."
Margaret Fuller (1810–1850) Journalist.
P. T. Barnum (1810–1891) American showman and Circus Owner.
Charles Dickens (1812–1870) English novelist.
Herman Melville (1819-1891), writer, author of Moby Dick.
Julia Ward Howe (1819–1910) author of "The Battle Hymn of the Republic".
Louisa May Alcott (1832–1888)Author of Little Women.
Beatrix Potter (1866-1943), author of Peter Rabbit and other children's stories.
Carl Sandberg (1878-1967), American poet, won Pulitzer Prize for his biography of Abraham Lincoln.
Béla Bartók (1881–1945) Composer.
e. e. cummings (1894–1962) Poet and painter
May Sarton (1912-1995) Poet.
Ray Bradbury (1920–2012) Author.
Kurt Vonnegut (1922–2007), writer.
Rod Serling (1924–1975) Writer; Creator of "The Twilight Zone" television series.
Paul Newman (1925–2008) Actor, film director.
Christopher Reeve (1952–2004) Actor.

Our activists, organizers, and humanitarians include:
Horace Mann (1796-1859), leader in the public school movement, founder of the first public school in America, U.S. Congressman.
Dorothea Dix (1802-1887), crusader for the reform of institutions for the mentally ill.
William Lloyd Garrison (1805-1879), abolitionist, editor of The Liberator.
Horace Greeley (1811-1872), journalist, politician, editor and owner of the New York Tribune, champion of labor unions and cooperatives.
Susan B. Anthony (1820–1906).
Florence Nightingale (1820-1910), British nurse and hospital reformer.
Clara Barton (1821–1912) organizer of American Red Cross, Universalist.
Albert Schweitzer (1875–1965) Nobel Peace Laureate 1953.
Whitney M. Young (1921–1971) Social work administrator, head of the Urban League.
Morris Dees (b. 1936) Attorney, cofounder, chief legal counsel of Southern Poverty Law Center.

Inventors, innovators, and scientists who were Unitarian or Universalist or Unitarian Universalist:
Joseph Priestley (1733–1804) discoverer of oxygen and Unitarian minister.
Charles Darwin (1809-1882), scientist and evolutionist, author of Origin of the Species.
Alexander Graham Bell (1847-1922), inventor of the telephone; founder of Bell Telephone Company.
Buckminster Fuller (1895–1983) inventor, engineer.
Linus Pauling (1901–1994) Nobel Laureate for Peace and for Chemistry.
Tim Berners-Lee (1955-) inventor of the World Wide Web.

Best known Unitarian or Universalist clergy include:
Ferenc Dávid (often rendered Francis David) (1510–1579) Hungarian-Transylvanian priest, minister and bishop, first to use the word "Unitarian" to describe his faith.
Hosea Ballou (1771–1852) American Universalist leader. (Universalist minister and a unitarian in theology)
William Ellery Channing (1780–1842), Unitarian minister whose "Unitarian Christianity" was the manifesto of the new Unitarian denomination.
Adin Ballou (1803–1890) Abolitionist and former Baptist who became a Universalist minister, then a Unitarian minister.
Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882) Transcendentalist, essayist.
Theodore Parker (1810–1860) Transcendentalist and abolitionist.
Edmund Hamilton Sears (1810-1876) Author of the first social gospel Christmas Carol, "It Came Upon a Midnight Clear."
Olympia Brown (1835–1926) suffragist, Universalist minister.
John H. Dietrich (1878–1957), primary intellectual force in the development of religious humanism.
James Haynes Holmes (1879-1964), co-founder of the American Civil Liberties Union, anti-war activist.
Robert Fulghum (1937-) Essayist.

As much as we love and honor our past, our eyes are ever cast to the future. We work to build a world of peace and of justice – a heaven right here on this earth. Many of us share this prayer with Diane Ackerman:

School Prayer

In the name of the daybreak
and the eyelids of morning
and the wayfaring moon
and the night when it departs,

I swear I will not dishonor
my soul with hatred,
but offer myself humbly
as a guardian of nature,
as a healer of misery,
as a messenger of wonder,
as an architect of peace.

In the name of the sun and its mirrors
and the day that embraces it
and the cloud veils drawn over it
and the uttermost night
and the male and the female
and the plants bursting with seed
and the crowning seasons
of the firefly and the apple,

I will honor all life
—wherever and in whatever form
it may dwell—on Earth my home,
and in the mansions of the stars.

* * *
This is part 3 of 3 of "Yay For Our Team"
Previous: Part 2: "UU By The Chuckle"
Beginning: Part 1: "When the Spirit Says UU"

UU by the Chuckle

By following where our heart leads us, following the dictates of our conscience rather than the dictates of someone else, we do often end up with unique and interesting viewpoints. Like the little girl in one of our Religious Education classes. She was drawing a picture. The teacher asked what she was drawing a picture of.

“It’s a picture of God,” she said.

The teacher said, “But no one knows what God looks like.”

The little girl answered, "They will when I've finished."

Sometimes we take things pretty literally – and yet in a way that might open up a new perspective. Like this other little girl that was sad because her cat had died. She was crying, and her neighbor said, “Don’t cry. Your kittie is with Jesus.”

And she did stop crying because she was turning this over in her mind. Then she said, “What would Jesus want with a dead cat?”

Whatever you may believe about where kitties go, or where humans go, what matters for us is the peace, joy, and love we find here, together.

Ours is a tradition that has Jewish and Christian roots. There were Unitarians and Universalists over 200 years ago in this ago country, and they were all Christians then. But we were Christians with critical thinking, and, though we followed Jesus, we weren’t sure we believed everything in the Bible. I’ve heard there was a Unitarian Bible study class, and the newsletter notice said, “Bring your Bible and a pair of scissors.”

The Unitarian Thomas Jefferson did just that. He clipped out only those parts of the new testament that he especially wanted to have available to study and he created “The Jefferson Bible.”

So it’s not that we aren’t interested in Bible scholarship. In fact, some of us, like Thomas Jefferson, bring scissors, but others get into the theology. For intance, there was the UU who, legend has it, was present at one of Jesus' public addresses.

“Who do you say that I am?” asked Jesus.

The UU piped up and answered: “You are the kerygma behind all myths. You are the incarnate logos. You are of one substance and coeternal with the Father, or the Mother, as the case may be. You are the eruption of eternity into the space-time continuum."

And Jesus looked at the UU and said, “What the heck is that?”

When Eastern religious writings began to be available for the first time in English – in the mid-19th century, both the Unitarians and the Universalists were very interested, and they studied those, too. Yes we do have a friend in Jesus, but not just in Jesus. We don’t stop there. We find wisdom that guides our life also in Socrates, Buddha and Confucius, Moses and Esther.

What a friend we have in Jesus, what a friend in Socrates.
What a friend we have in Buddha, to the kingdom we have keys.
We believe in many saviors, we believe in many seers.
Souls whose universal gospel, speaks to us across the years.

What a friend we have in Moses, what a friend in Esther, too.
We have Lao-zi and Confucius, and a prophet lives in you.
When you're weak and heavy laden, cumbered with a load of care,
Think of friends thruout the ages, ev'ry when and ev'rywhere.

Have we trials and temptations? Is there trouble anywhere?
We should never be discouraged. U U saints are ev'rywhere.
Souls like President John Adams, souls like Olympia Brown.
Oh, what friends we have to guide us. Oh, what sages we have found.

What a friend in Charles Darwin, what a friend in Susan B.
What a friend in Clara Barton, they all helped to make us free.
What a friend in P .T. Barnum, what a friend in Jefferson.
We've four hundred years of friendship, and you bet there's more to come.

- Lyrics by Tony Larsen

* * *
This is part 2 of 3 of "Yay For Our Team"
Next: Part 3: "Yay For Our Team"
Beginning: Part 1: "When the Spirit Says UU"

When the Spirit Says UU

Yay for our team! Let's celebrate ourselves. It’s a good idea to do that every once in a while. Yay, us! Give our own selves a pat on the back.

It’s great to be a Unitarian Universalist! Yeah!

We don’t mean any slight to any other world religion when we say this. We are not at war with other tribes. We’re just proud of our own (or, if we have transcended pride, say rather that we are especially grateful for our own). If your heart and conscience lead you to follow a Muslim, or Christian, or Jewish path, more power to you. That's just not our path.

Actually: Don't Believe ANYTHING You Think

Sometimes people in those other faiths think they’re right. But let’s be honest. Sometimes we think we’re right. I appreciate what I saw on a bumper sticker once: “Don’t believe anything you think.”

The reality is, pretty much all of us are suckers for our thoughts. We all believe our thoughts. There's a saying:

"The world is divided into those who think they're right."

That's the whole saying, because everyone thinks she's right. So let’s also keep that in mind as we celebrate Unitarian Universalism.

In many ways, we don’t choose our faith beliefs, they choose us. It’s up to us to be true to them, to do the work of cultivating them to their fullest flower. Whichever seed got planted in you: do the work of cultivating it to its fullest flower. The flower of liberal religion is rooted in the understanding that revelation is continuous, there are always new things to learn, that our community is based on freely entered covenant, that we work for fairness in the whole world, that conflict is a good thing, and doesn’t mean any side is evil or wrong, and that a better world and a richer life is possible for all of us. That is the root grounding from which liberal religion grows.

It doesn’t mean you can believe anything you want to. Let me tell you a story about that. What you want to believe might be what is easy – a theology that is superficially attractive, doesn’t require much thought or creative work. You might want some belief that you can hold and gaze upon like a pretty crystal: beautiful and static. But hearing and heeding what your heart, mind, and conscience dictate requires effort. Thirty years ago, I was 24 years old. Neecie Vanston and I were members of the Unitarian Universalist Fellowship of Waco, Texas. Neecie was 70-years-old, which, you know, doesn’t seem as old to me now as it did when I was 24. She came up to about the middle of my chest. Neecie was a long-time and dedicated member of that fellowship. She had been part of the small group that founded the Waco UU Fellowship back in the 50s. I was newly returned to the fold after having been unchurched since high school. I didn’t understand that distinction between the easy and lazy believe-anything-you-want-to and the disciplined quest to discern your own heart and mind’s dictates. One Sunday in Waco, during our holiest sacrament -- the coffee communion after the service -- I made the mistake of blithely blurting, “We’re Unitarian Universalists. We can believe whatever we want to.”

Neecie overheard that remark. And she turned around. I will never forget it. It was a religious moment.
“You think I believe in what I do because I want to?” she said. “I believe this because I have to. You think here in Waco, Texas my life wouldn’t be a lot easier if I could be a Baptist? But I can’t. My conscience won’t let me. If this were about what I wanted to believe,” Neecie continued, “about what I found it convenient and easy to believe, you wouldn’t see my face here on Sunday morning.”

Unitarian Universalism: It’s not about believing anything you want to. It’s about being free to believe what you find you have to – because your conscience won’t let you believe otherwise. You got to do when the spirit says do. You got to UU when the spirit says UU.

* * *
This is part 1 of 3 of "Yay for Our Team"
Next: Part 2: "UU By the Chuckle"

The Real Work

Seneca

As protective strategies go, anger is not that great. It’s an impulse that comes out of pain or fear of pain, and seeks to inflict pain back. Aristotle defined anger as “a burning desire to pay back pain.” In the process, it does more harm to us. Holding on to anger, the saying goes, “is like drinking poison and expecting the other person to die.”

When anger arrives, it comes with a certain energy. Breathe into it. That energy is usually not immediately useful outside of situations in which fleeing and fighting actually are the only two viable alternatives.

There are times when a protective use of force may be called for, yet it’s best not to use that first wave of anger energy to carry out whatever protection is needed. Protection is better served without being carried primarily on anger’s energy because that energy is so narrow, so tunnel-visioned, all it can see is the hurt or the fear and how to hurt back.

Anger makes it harder to get things right. Think of the old Kung Fu TV show from the 1970s. Caine, played by David Carradine, was indeed formidable at protecting himself. He’s able to do that all the more skillfully because he maintains inner calmness while fighting. The point was noticed many centuries before by Seneca, the first-century Roman philosopher and statesman:

“The energy of anger is not steady and reliable. It attacks violently at first, but quickly wearies and cannot sustain the fight....Nor is anything great which is not at the same time calm.”

It’s not having anger that is the sin, it’s indulging it – resigning ourselves to the fire of anger and letting it burn us up. Cultivating understanding, insight, patience, and forgiveness, allows the fire to settle into an energy for creative and healing engagement.

In the end, we are not separate. Most of the stuff I am made of, everyone is made of. And everything that I am made of exists in a lot of other people, too. Not born, not destroyed, just constantly shifting around. When that is not forgotten, the anger energy can transform into healing.

What then about Amos’ anger? Amos relays God’s view that:

“I loathe, I spurn your festivals, I am not appeased by your solemn assemblies. If you offer Me burnt offering – or your meal offerings – I will not accept them”

Is Amos, or Yahweh, indulging wrath, or is he using the energy to be a calm voice for healing? It seems more like indulging wrath – but we can’t say for sure.

I’m reminded of an old Zen story. The semi-legendary founder of Zen, Bodhidharma, migrated from India to China. In China, his reputation as a spiritual teacher spread to the emperor who, himself a Buddhist, asked to see this foreign teacher. The emperor said, “Since I came to the throne, I have built many temples, published numerous scriptures and supported countless monks and nuns. How great is the merit in all these?"

Bodhidharma answered, “No merit.”

The Emperor then asked, “What then, is the essence of the holy teaching?”

Bodhidharma said, “Vast emptiness. No essence, no holiness.”

The stunned Emperor said, “Who are you?”

Bodhidharma said, “I don’t know.”

Amos was saying, “Your shallow rituals count for nothing.” Bodhidharma was saying, “Your outward displays count for nothing.”

Is the practice of your faith doing the real work of connection? Or do your faith practices merely protect you, bolstering ego in its delusions of separateness and specialness? Probably, at least sometimes the one, and at least sometimes the other. The energy of anger, the fire whose first impulse is aggressive protection, provides a key practice ground for re-directing energy to that real work of connection.

May that path be found, and the courage to take it, step by step.

* * *
This is part 17 of "The Seven Deadlies" (Part 4 of 4 on Wrath)
Next: Part 18: "Wanting the Cow Dead"
Previous: Part 16: "Powerful and True Bad Examples"
Beginning: Part 1: "Seven and Sin"

Mr. Trigg Takes Mr. Singer to Wall St

"To challenge my students to think about the ethics of what we owe to people in need, I ask them to imagine that their route to the university takes them past a shallow pond. One morning, I say to them, you notice a child has fallen in and appears to be drowning. To wade in and pull the child out would be easy but it will mean that you get your clothes wet and muddy, and by the time you go home and change you will have missed your first class. I then ask the students: do you have any obligation to rescue the child? Unanimously, the students say they do. The importance of saving a child so far outweighs the cost of getting one’s clothes muddy and missing a class, that they refuse to consider it any kind of excuse for not saving the child. Does it make a difference, I ask, that there are other people walking past the pond who would equally be able to rescue the child but are not doing so? No, the students reply, the fact that others are not doing what they ought to do is no reason why I should not do what I ought to do. Once we are all clear about our obligations to rescue the drowning child in front of us, I ask: would it make any difference if the child were far away, in another country perhaps, but similarly in danger of death, and equally within your means to save, at no great cost – and absolutely no danger – to yourself? Virtually all agree that distance and nationality make no moral difference to the situation. I then point out that we are all in that situation of the person passing the shallow pond: we can all save lives of people, both children and adults, who would otherwise die, and we can do so at a very small cost to us: the cost of a new CD, a shirt or a night out at a restaurant or concert, can mean the difference between life and death to more than one person somewhere in the world – and overseas aid agencies like Oxfam overcome the problem of acting at a distance. At this point the students raise various practical difficulties. Can we be sure that our donation will really get to the people who need it? Doesn’t most aid get swallowed up in administrative costs, or waste, or downright corruption? Isn’t the real problem the growing world population, and is there any point in saving lives until the problem has been solved? These questions can all be answered: but I also point out that even if a substantial proportion of our donations were wasted, the cost to us of making the donation is so small, compared to the benefits that it provides when it, or some of it, does get through to those who need our help, that we would still be saving lives at a small cost to ourselves – even if aid organizations were much less efficient than they actually are. I am always struck by how few students challenge the underlying ethics of the idea that we ought to save the lives of strangers when we can do so at relatively little cost to ourselves."
- Peter Singer, New Internationalist, 1997 Apr

In 1975, the year young Meredith Garmon -- who then went by "Steve" -- turned 16, the national high school debate topic was, "Resolved: That an international organization should control the development and allocation of scarce world resources."  Some affirmative teams chose to focus on food. There's enough food in the world for everyone, they argued, so let's set up an international organization to distribute it so that starvation would be eliminated.

Some time in the fall of that year his debate coach set Steve up to participate in a "public debate" for the edification and possibly amusement if not amazement of the local Rotary or Lions or some such civic club. This would be different from the usual debate competitions to which Steve was accustomed. For one thing, it was a one-on-one affair as opposed to the two-on-two debates of tournament competitions. Steve would be squaring off against Paul, the classmate who was Steve's partner at said tournament competitions. For a second thing, this audience, unfamiliar with the technical jargon and fast talking of competitive debate would require Paul and Steve to adopt a style that was considerably slower and that spent more words (as well as time) explaining each argument.

Steve was assigned the affirmative, and, drawing on evidence researched in preparation for the national debate topic that year, he argued that starvation was significant and that, in terms of the quantity of food on Earth, ending it was possible. Therefore, we ought to, indeed, distribute food so as to end starvation. Paul shrewdly countered that this would mean food producers (which included some of the stalwart citizens in the room) would either get less than the market value they were now getting, or that we would have to all be taxed to pay the food producers the market value for their crops. And either way we'll all be taxed to pay for the distribution.

Steve thought, and argued, that surely the compelling need of 10,000 premature deaths a day from starvation outweighed these concerns. It was clear to him that we would not begrudge the costs to save our neighbors. The fact that the great mass of the most hungry are overseas doesn't matter, he said. We have obligations to help others when we can. A human life is a human life, and our obligation is not limited only to fellow citizens of the same country as us. A life doesn't stop mattering just because it's on the other side of a national boundary.

At the end of the debate, the audience applauded appreciatively. They were not polled as to who they thought won the debate, but somehow Steve had the impression that, had they been polled, he'd have lost. The audience was implicitly patriotic and would have included a number of WWII veterans. Steve suspected that he had not persuaded very many that people far away counted just as much as fellow Americans.

Lake Chalice believes that, like the students in Peter Singer's classes, we know that saving a life is saving a life whether it's someone a few yards away or on the side of the globe. Lake Chalice believes that we know that saving a life is the right thing to do even if it causes us some inconvenience and sacrifice. It's just that when the dying person in need is far away and out of sight, it's easy to push out of our minds. Steve Garmon, age 16, clearly understood that lives should be saved wherever on the globe they may be. But, as with most people, time passed and he allowed other matters to command his attention. Lake Chalice is grateful that Peter Singer has been relentless in not letting us push from mind a truth that we know but prefer to live as if we didn't: that neither distance nor nationality are morally relevant.

Other philosophy professors have picked up Singer's thought experiment, and pose to their own classes the hypothetical drowning-toddler scenario. The discussion sometimes hits students as a revelation. The revelation is not that all lives are equal, entitled to equal concern and respect. Students have all been told as much since grade school. And most teens are able to follow this out to at least a fleeting thought that overseas deaths are every bit as tragic as those close at home (which is why Singer is able to so readily elicit classroom consensus that distance and nationality make no moral difference). But the typical young person then looks around, notices that neither their peers nor the grown ups they know show any concern for this point. All around them is the general Jeffersonian agreement that "all are created equal," combined with near-total negligence when it comes to living that truth. As these teens are almost always still dependent on their parents by the time their minds mature enough to draw logical moral inferences, they confront, consciously or unconsciously, a cognitive dissonance between the equality principle and the benefit they derive from the fact that their own parents ignore that principle (i.e., their parents regard the care of their own children as much more important than caring for the youth of urban slums throughout the Third World). The revelation, then, is not the idea of equality. The revelation is that there actually are grown ups who take it seriously. Some at-least-moderately clear-thinking adult has stood in front of them and stated out loud a moral inference which, in their experience up to that point, is as universally avoided as it is undeniable. That's the revelation. It's suddenly clear that their own dim and buried realization of that moral truth is not, after all, crazy.

Jason Trigg

Occasionally, such a student will re-orient her or his life because of such a 15-minute discussion in a philosophy class. One such student was Jason Trigg. Jason was the subject of a wonderful piece in the Washington Post a few days ago. Impressed by the inescapable inference which most of us know but in forgetfulness of which live -- and of which Singer so boldly confronts us -- Trigg set out to save as many lives as he can. The way to do that, he calculated, is to make a lot of money and give it away.

"Jason Trigg went into finance because he is after money — as much as he can earn.
The 25-year-old certainly had other career options. An MIT computer science graduate, he could be writing software for the next tech giant. Or he might have gone into academia in computing or applied math or even biology. He could literally be working to cure cancer.
Instead, he goes to work each morning for a high-frequency trading firm. It’s a hedge fund on steroids. He writes software that turns a lot of money into even more money. For his labors, he reaps an uptown salary — and over time his earning potential is unbounded. It’s all part of the plan.
Why this compulsion? It’s not for fast cars or fancy houses. Trigg makes money just to give it away. His logic is simple: The more he makes, the more good he can do.
He’s figured out just how to take measure of his contribution. His outlet of choice is the Against Malaria Foundation, considered one of the world’s most effective charities. It estimates that a $2,500 donation can save one life. A quantitative analyst at Trigg’s hedge fund can earn well more than $100,000 a year. By giving away half of a high finance salary, Trigg says, he can save many more lives than he could on an academic’s salary.
In another generation, giving something back might have more commonly led to a missionary stint digging wells in Kenya. This generation, perhaps more comfortable with data than labor, is leveraging its wealth for a better end. Instead of digging wells, it’s paying so that more wells are dug." (Dylan Matthews, "Join Wall Street, Save the World." Washington Post, 2013 May 31. Click here.)

David Brooks, writing in the New York Times, suggests the missionary approach would be preferable. Better to go dig the wells yourself than to pay others to do so. Why? Apparently because the Wall Street life is liable to corrupt you.

"Every time you do an activity, or have a thought, you are changing a piece of yourself into something slightly different than it was before. Every hour you spend with others, you become more like the people around you. Gradually, you become a different person. If there is a large gap between your daily conduct and your core commitment, you will become more like your daily activities and less attached to your original commitment. You will become more hedge fund, less malaria." (David Brooks, "The Way to Produce a Person." New York Times, 2013 Jun 3. Click here.)

Brooks is certainly right that we become what we do. It's not clear, however, that financier-who-gives-away-half-his-wealth is not a sustainable identity. Is that not indeed the identity that Trigg is reinforcing with every week at the office and every consequent fat check he puts in the mail? There is no "gap between [Trigg's] daily conduct and [his] core commitment" if, from the beginning, his daily conduct is in the service of -- is the manifestation of -- his core commitment (as, in Trigg's case, it appears to be).

On what else would Trigg spend his money? A large house? A fleet of Italian sports cars? Why should we think that what he spends it on must somehow compete with how he earns it? If Trigg's wealth went into a large house, we wouldn't worry that over time he would become more hedge fund, less mansion. If  his wealth went into sports cars, we wouldn't worry that over time he would become more hedge fund, less Ferrari. Such worries would be silly. Isn't it equally silly to worry that Trigg will become "more hedge fund, less malaria"?

Perhaps it's not the work itself that is corrupting but the company Trigg keeps. He'll "become more  like the people around" him. But Lake Chalice is not sure that applies to what he does with the money. Trigg's coworkers' attitudes will surely reinforce the core value that making bucketloads of cash is a wonderful thing. But his coworkers will have different projects for the spending of it. Some will want a yacht. Some will want the earliest possible retirement. Some will want trophy lovers. Some, perhaps, will want to reinvest all earnings until they have a enough to conquer the world. Lake Chalice's guess is that Wall Street culture is pretty flexible about leaving plans for the spending up to individual taste while holding adamant to the proposition that nothing could possibly be better than acquiring. We could be wrong about that, but the honored place of wealthy philanthropists among the monied class suggests that giving it away is acceptable within Wall Street culture.

Brooks offers:

"Second, I would be wary of inverting the natural order of affections. If you see the world on a strictly intellectual level, then a child in Pakistan or Zambia is just as valuable as your own child. But not many people actually think this way. Not many people value abstract life perceived as a statistic as much as the actual child being fed, hugged, nurtured and played with."

True enough. Not many. But a few -- and Trigg, it seems, may be one. To say that not many actually think this way is only to say that not many people are able to do what Singer shows us morality requires. It is not to claim, let alone argue, that morality does not require it. OK, most don't. But should we all?
Brooks continues:

"If you choose a profession that doesn’t arouse your everyday passion for the sake of serving instead some abstract faraway good, you might end up as a person who values the far over the near. You might become one of those people who loves humanity in general but not the particular humans immediately around. You might end up enlarging the faculties we use to perceive the far — rationality — and eclipsing the faculties we use to interact with those closest around — affection, the capacity for vulnerability and dependence. Instead of seeing yourself as one person deeply embedded in a particular community, you may end up coolly looking across humanity as a detached god."

Brooks then invokes the Buechner quote that we have ourselves so often invoked:

"When most people pick a vocation, they don’t only want one that will be externally useful. They want one that they will enjoy, and that will make them a better person. They want to find that place, as the novelist Frederick Buechner put it, 'where your deep gladness and the world’s deep hunger meet.'"

It's a fair enough point that one might end up valuing the far over the near, etc. Might. That's true for any of us. Also, might not. But, yes, it's worth keeping an eye on. Lake Chalice hopes that young Mr. Trigg's passions are, in fact, aroused by the challenges of the job and the prospect of making money to fight malaria. We hope that he finds his work fun and enjoyable. If it's possible for someone to enjoy being a hedge fund manager for the sake of buying vast tracts of real estate, then it would seem possible to enjoy being a hedge fund manager for the sake of buying vast flasks of malaria medicine. It is, of course, always a good idea to check in with oneself and ask whether one is sufficiently loving to the particular humans immediately around as well as to those far away. Trigg would appear to be in no greater danger of emotional detachment from friends and family than anyone else. It's a good question for all of us.

From the briefest of glimpses afforded into Jason Trigg's life by Dylan Matthews' article in the Washington Post, we have no basis for supposing that the job he's in isn't the place where his "deep gladness and the world's deep hunger meet." As an MIT computer science graduate, it may well be that he enjoys solving the sorts of puzzles involved in writing "software that turns a lot of money into even more money."

That said, at the end of the day, we actually have considerable sympathy for Brooks' point. Our souls do require work that is intrinsically rewarding rather than merely extrinsically.

"Taking a job just to make money is probably going to be corrosive, even if you use the money for charity rather than sports cars."

Yes, it probably is. We notice, however, that this objection applies to anyone working on Wall Street. To work in the financial sector is precisely to work "just" to make money -- that's why they call it "the financial sector." Money is the only product of that industry, and if we encourage people to choose work that is valuable for its own sake, then we must always discourage them from Wall Street jobs, since money is the one thing that, by its nature, cannot be valuable for its own sake. Its value necessarily lies only in what can be done with it. If Jason Trigg shouldn't be on Wall Street, no one should. And if the making of money the Wall Street way can ennoble any soul -- because said soul holds a sincere and undeluded belief in the good that money can do -- then Jason Trigg's soul is eligible.