The Greatest Virtue

Reading

Lives We Almost Live

There are lives we almost live,
Moments when we almost change,
Times when the possibility of connecting
When the knock on the door is opportunity.
When we almost confront our shadow.
There is the dream we almost follow.
There is the vision we almost own.
There is the opinion we almost change.
There is the habit we almost change.
There is the truth we almost tell.
There is the resentment we almost give up.
We go along to get along and
In so doing we almost live.
There is the adventure we almost take
The challenge we almost accept.
All that is lacking is courage.

Meditation in Words

People Are Precious

I have just one important theological idea
It is:  people    are    precious.
It is the height, depth and wideness of my beliefs,
The sum and summary of my whole life,
That people are of infinite worth and beauty.
Human, humus, humor, all from the dirt, earth,
Possessing, indeed crammed full of what has
Been called god, god arising from the people.
Millions of years and out of the primal bacterial
Ooze, flush, tidal movement and boiling world
We humans arose from earth to become the
Earth upright and proud singing, chanting,
To become beautiful, kind, generous, helpful,
In love with each other and our life together.
We gave the gods all our big words like
Omniscient, omnipresent, ontological,
Reified, compassionate, teleological.
Even after loading the gods with big
Words and attributing all the best to them
Men and women have always been better
Than their god, gods, or goddesses.
We are dirt, earth, bacteria filled persons
Possessed of charm, music, and all crafts.
We are the inventors, the poets, servers, makers
Those who clean and care, wash and cook,
Who tend the lying-in at birth of babies,
Who plant at the end our dead in earth.
The geniuses, singers of strong songs.

Prayer

The Thirteen Blessings

I have many more than thirteen blessings.
Limited only by mind and imagination.
Thirteen for this day would be: sleep, book
s, Food, pen, paper, car, wife, children, coffee,
Schools, teachers, libraries, those who love me.
For tomorrow it could be money, computers,
Toasters, treadmill, coffee grinder, cooking pans,
Radio, watch, bicycle, answering machine,
Drill, reciprocating saw, my beautiful wife.
The lists can go on and on, the trick
Is to focus attention each day
On those things blessing me continually,
Without my asking, without my being
Grateful, just upholding my life.
Thirteen more: the gift of this day,
The sun, moon, companionship of animals,
The snow falling even now, birds flying south,
A daughter who writes poetry, my feminist
Grand-daughters, a heart that's beating
Smoothly, music, sons of the middle border,
A mother who lives, and anticipation.
And then there are thirteen more:
I give thanks for silence, for listening,
The seas, earth at night, my bed,
Peace of mind, the pleasure of making
Gifts and being generous, clean clothes,
My cook, good appetite, restaurants
The US Mail, my darkly beautiful wife.
Give us this day our daily everything:
Health, friends, roads, sex, tea, chocolate,
Bread that's fresh, hot from the ovens, breath,
Rain in the night, order out of chaos,
Christmas lights, long life, honey in the heart.

The Greatest Virtue

Writing and preaching are about courage, fearlessly putting down what is true, standing by it. Life is about courage too, the willingness to risk, to change, to move outside the boundaries of the safe and familiar. It is hard because we do not even know we are bounded, that we are swimming in a small pool, up a little stream and that just beyond is a larger river. .Beyond that, another stream and another river that, at last, flow into the salt sea, a sea without banks or boundaries. The ocean that has the steady oscillation of waves upon a shore moved by celestial objects, in turn moved by love.

Courage is easily done when the challenge is clear, harder when we don't know where to throw our heart.

Writing is like that. I must press on, print up, rewrite, stand by my words. Of course, preaching is about courage too. If one is honest there is nothing harder than preaching, nothing calls for greater courage. We wish to be loved, to have the admiration and respect of the congregation. We wish to advance, have a good income, to have a happy church. Truth can sometimes make a make them happy. It is easy to forget preaching is about courage. It becomes routine, set off by boundaries, limitations, rules, guidelines, understandings and contracts tacit and spoken. We may begin to preach because it is our job. We forget it is about courage, heart, faithfulness to the heart, faithfulness to our deepest commitments.

I came to the ministry-the 1960s- at a time when we saw clearly we were to say the truth, we were to summon courage for the impossible. I actually conceived ministry as the "art of the impossible" — to advocate for the poor, to be against ethnocentrism, to challenge the comforts of our congregations, to go off out of the parish and "meddle" in affairs not strictly our own. We were to speak against the principalities and powers, challenge the elect and the elected. We were to ring down condemnation upon the best and the brightest, to protest war, advocate for women's right, stop the killing of our young men, to speak up for peace, humane race relations, sympathy for the poor, protesting against the machinery of the state, the establishment, the power structure, the institutions, the corporations, and the moneymen. It is the moneymen who in every age are privileged to run things for their convenience. This was a moment in time, five, possibly ten years, then the light went out, it all fell apart, all fragmented.

One could go on protesting, demonstrating, go on lacerating the dead horses and become a crank. The reaction set in. It had gone far enough. There came the revolt of the powerful who by hook, by crook, by money and manipulation won a series of elections promising to restore law and order (with no consciousness that this was the slogan of the Nazis in Germany). Never fully endorsed in a popular mandate they won when it counted and the business of America moved from being about justice and liberty for all to being what it has been for so long, perhaps even from the beginning, business, money making. The classes would be in their place, the poor near the bottom, the lumpen — the dumb, the stupid, the crazed, mad, hurt, injured that clutter and clot our smooth running system at the bottom. All the rest — the great middle class and all who can pretend to it set in place. Above these the Upper Middle Class, those who are rising, who run the business of today in behalf of our rulers, the tiny one or two percent whose wealth opens all doors and stops all reforms, all revolutions. They are the ones who can purchase and good or services including pardon, preference and justice with their wealth.

So it is for now. It is why courage in every age is so hard, why it is so hard to speak the truth as one sees and hears. Powerful words may not be heard because of the dramatic din of a corporate media with their word-whores interpreting and spinning every event. We get lost in facticity, bedazzled by extreme and maddening comments, the sheer volume rushing out so fast we hardly register we have been violated. Seldom do we see brute strength the power of money to manipulate pointed out. Unfairness, inequality, injustice are all through our system even as we celebrate the 225th year of the republic.

But let me bring it closer to home, closer to the bone. Courage is always needed in the public sphere. It is by men and women of courage and commitment that we advance and are inspired. My heroes were Martin Luther King and Fred Shuttlesworth in the public arena. But Alfred Hobart, Charles Zukoski, Marjorie Linn, Peggy Fuller, Herb Oliver, David Vann, Carolyn McCoy, Shan Tomisek, my own Sandra Harris, are heroes too for they lived with bravery and courage in Birmingham, Alabama in the 1960s to bring change and eventually a rough kind of justice in race relations. We are inspired and lifted by others.

Each of us in our lifetimes will face challenges that call for courage. We can all nod our heads for we know we have faced difficult problems. Let me offer what Carolyn Myss is calling archetypal challenges. She says everyone, if they live, will face these challenges. They are:

1. Each one of us will find the need to separate from a tribe.
2. Each one of us will experience betrayal and we will betray.
3. Each of us will experience rejection and we will reject.
4. Each of us will need to be forgiven and we will need to forgive.
5. Each of us will break our word and dishonor our promises during our lives.
6. Each of us will be unjustly judged and misunderstood.
7. Each of us will know what it is to feel the absence of faith.

I find that a powerful list, a powerful description of the human condition. In my life I find it to be true. As I have reflected on my life and biography in retirement it is these kinds of situations that make it hard to write glibly. I am not here to do a confession but I have done these things. The precise form in which these challenges present themselves to us must surely be infinitely variable and intense. They will be individual and personal. Yet to face each one, to negotiate that challenge, will call for courage. We will have to give up the fairy tale fantasy of ourselves, the belief that we are somehow better than others, that somehow and exception will be made in our case. Failure to summon the will and the courage will mean you will be stuck, cease to grow. You can embrace victimhood. You can say: "I was betrayed, I was abused, I was rejected, they lied to me, they treated me wrong and the world is a suck and a sell.

David Gelernter may not be a name familiar to you. He was one of the Unabomber's targets. He is a professor at Yale. In 1993 Theodore Kaczynski considered Gelernter one of the persons destroying the earth. He is one of the big thinkers about the use of technology. He sent the Yale professor a package bomb. He became the twnety-third victim of the Unabomber. It blew off his right hand, tore his face to shreds and ripped his upper torso. It took 20 months of rehabilitation to get back to a kind of normal, which for him was to be non-dependent. He was recently addressing his colleagues in the computer information technology trade group about a new software to make information on computers more usable, to make the computers think more like us human beings. At the press conference following the reporters pressed for his views on his handicap, the attack and his attacker. He brushed it all off. "That's in the past. Kaczynski means nothing to me. Victimhood is a choice and I have chosen not to be one. Next question."

The archetypal challenges hardly announce themselves as moments when courage will be needed. If they came with flag on them we can do pretty well. I know when people get a cancer diagnosis they are frequently courageous and brave. Although a disease like cancer is often seen as a betrayal--one's body betrays one's self. Yet when we betray our job, our country, our spouse, our children it seldom presents itself in a way in which we can square up on it. Or when we have dishonored promises. I can't imagine what David Hanssen, the spy, must have told himself when he dishonored his oath, betrayed his colleagues, lied every day, deceived his wife, caused the death of others.

Someone we love rejects us. The hurt from that act or series of acts makes it difficult to see that some sort of courageous and definite action is needed on our part. Or we betray our parents by not living up to their standards, their hopes and dreams for us. We may not live up to our own dreams for us. The idea came on little cat feet to me that I did not want to go into business, I did not want to run a store, I did not want to be in ambit of my mother and father forever. I must betray them, reject them. I must leave my tribe. It did not feel good to do so. It felt ungrateful, mean spirited, even hateful.

I meet with two other writers almost every week. I have also taken a course in poetry this past year. Repeatedly I see fear in others, fear about their writing. Fear of writing badly. They become self-censoring, blocked and locked up by fear. Huge and big-voiced inner critics shut down the writer. I know it seems strange in this day and time when so many books and articles are pouring form the presses to suggest that there is an epidemic of fear. For months I wrote each week confidently presenting the chapters and then revising them. I encouraged my colleagues to press on. I helped them over the humps and we got a published book out of little group. Then, when I was almost through with my civil rights memoir--when I had a large manuscript, I stopped. I didn't write anymore.

I began to dawdle. I wrote poetry. Short pieces, Letters. Journal entries. My courage had flown, dissolved. I was afraid. My inner critics looming like beasts said "Its not good. You don't have it right. The dates are wrong. It is self-serving. It didn't happen that way. Can you prove it? Can you document it? No one is really interested in this? Why are you living in the past? It will never be published?"

I could see I was lacking something. Was it courage? Was I willing to just tell my truth and have done with it? Could I face into the lurking perfectionism--which I say I do not have--and just do it?

I have preached for thirty-five years or more standing in front of people not unlike yourselves, smarter and brighter than me and collectively knowing far more. I just say what I have to say. I know that it takes courage. Our congregations are not uncritical. Yet here was a book, a book about my life and I could not organize it, write it, shape it and make it into a book because of fear. Was I betraying myself? Was I lying to myself?

I fell back on what I have often done, preach about what is on my mind. So I decided to preach about courage and about how it is needed in our daily lives. Some us need courage to get up and face the day. Some need courage just to get dressed and hobble down to breakfast. So many people live in pain and pain takes it toll. Some need courage to keep their commitments to another. Some need courage to make the best of the betrayal, lies, and isolation they live with daily. Others need courage to keep going, courage to face prejudice, hatred, poverty, and suspicion. For some it courageous to get out on the freeway, to apply for a job, to take the risk of rejection, or to try again with a relationship. To make that call to a mother or father or son or daughter and ask for forgiveness. To make the call that offers apology and forgiveness. It take courage to crawl out of the deep cave of the self, to roll away the stone of self entombment, and set yourself in relation to others--to come to church, to admit you may not be perfectly right, that you had a part in your spouses' drifting away, that you contributed to the mess you are in. It will take courage to abandon your ordinary life, the comforts of home and go out and live in faith to do something you've dreamed. None of us really know what another must endure, what another is suffering. I have preached too many Sundays and gone later to the homes of the persons in deepest despair or find suicides who listened to me. I know we are a fragile race of beings. We are a tough and resilient race too but I also know that those seven archetypal challenges can come silent or roaring into one's life and leave us devastated.

And that's just the half of it when we consider illness, wrecks, murders, deaths of children, fires, loss of job, loss of health, loss of status, loss of a companion, death of a spouse we are going to need courage. Hope is most important. Forgiveness is a grand virtue.

It is when we play safe that we put ourselves in a difficult and vulnerable place. The more we try to avoid suffering, the more we deny our grief and pain, the more we deny our fear, the more we refuse to face our failures, the more we deny our losses, the more is the knot pain increased and frozen in us.

Life is mainly froth and bubble,
Two things stand like stone —
Kindness in another's trouble
Courage in our own.

Cedar Lane Unitarian Universalist Church
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