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Living with Integrity
A Sermon Given
by The Reverend Kerry Mueller
on August 1, 1999
at Cedar Lane Unitarian Universalist Church
Bethesda, Maryland
The following purportedly true story popped up in my computer
one day, part of the HUUMOR chat line:
On a British Airways flight from Johannesburg, a middle-aged,
well-off white South African lady had found herself sitting next to
a fine looking black gentleman. She called the cabin crew
attendant over to complain about her seating. "What seems to be
the problem, Madam?" asked the attendant.
"Can't you see?" she snapped out loud, "You've sat me next to
a [Kaffir]." I'll just have to call this the K word. It's an offensive
term for a black African, one I can't bring myself to say aloud. "I
can't possibly sit next to this disgusting human. Find me another
seat!"
"Please calm down, Madam," the stewardess replied. "I believe
the economy section is completely full today, but I'll go and check
to see if we have any upgraded seats available in club or first
class."
The woman cocked a snooty look at the outraged black man
beside her (not to mention many of the surrounding passengers.)
A few minutes later the stewardess returned with the good news,
which she delivered to the lady, who couldn't help but look at the
people around her with a smug and self-satisfied grin.
"Madam, as I suspected, economy is full. I've spoken to the
cabin services director, and club is also full. However, we do have
one seat in first class." Before the lady had a chance to answer,
the stewardess continued: "Please realize, it is most extraordinary
to make this kind of upgrade, however, and I have had to get
special permission from the captain. But, given the extreme
circumstances, the captain felt that it was outrageous that someone
should be forced to sit next such an obnoxious person."
With that, she turned to the black man and said: "So if you'd
like to get your things, sir, I have your first-class seat ready for
you . . ." At which point, the surrounding passengers burst into a
standing ovation while the man walked to the front of the plane. <
/P>
We hear a lot about integrity, or lack of integrity, these days,
usually with respect to politicians. We spent a good chunk of the
last year obsessed with questions about President Clinton's
character, and we may be faced with a presidential campaign that
is more about persons than issues. Long before these had become
the stuff of the nightly news, law professor Stephen Carter wrote:
No matter what our politics, no matter what causes we may
support, would anybody really want to be led or followed
or assisted by people who lack integrity? People whose
words we could not trust, whose motives we didn't respect,
who might at any moment toss aside everything we thought
we had in common and march off in some other direction?
But what do the analysts or commentators, historians or pundits
mean when they speak of integrity? One day when I was ten or
eleven, driving home from the Hackensack Unitarian Church with
my father, he spoke harshly of a certain politician. "He lacks
integrity," was how Fred summed up the politician's character.
You have to understand that my father was in the habit of using a
fairly sophisticated vocabulary with me, and then when I asked
"What does that mean?" he'd just send me to the dictionary. He
once said I looked like a Botticelli. I thought that meant some
kind of insect. But he was speaking of the Italian painter who
pictured women with big hips and apelike arms. Anyway, I tried
asking Fred what integrity meant, and for once he gave an answer.
But I didn't have the life experience to understand his explanation,
and as a result I was unable to absorb or remember what he said.
Nor does Fred have any memory of this conversation -- I checked
with him when I asked his permission to use this story. But he had
made an impression. (You are always teaching your children
something, though you might not realize just what it is). The idea
stuck with me. I knew integrity was mysterious and important,
something that grownups understood.
So now that I'm a grownup, what does integrity mean? I
always approach such questions etymologically at first.
Linguistically, integrity comes from one of those very basic
concrete Indo-European roots with a large number of fanciful
metaphoric derivatives. "Tag" means to touch, as in tag, tangible,
tactile, contact, etc. "In-tag," or "untouched" means "whole" as in
integer, a whole number, and by extension pure, unsullied, whole.
That's a good start, but what does it mean in everyday life?
Stephen Carter, who teaches law at Yale University, has written
an excellent book on the subject, called simply Integrity. He writes
primarily out of his legal training, but also as a committed
Christian, and as an interested citizen and student of the American
political scene. Carter's view of integrity is true to the root
meaning of the word, wholeness. He writes that a person of
integrity is a whole person, a person somehow undivided. The
word [he says] conveys not so much a single-mindedness as a
completeness; not the frenzy of a fanatic who wants to remake all
the world in a single mold but the serenity of a person who is
confident in the knowledge that he or she is living rightly. The
person of integrity need not be a Gandhi but also cannot be a
person who blows up buildings to make a point. A person of
integrity lurks somewhere inside each of us: a person we feel we
can trust to do right, to play by the rules, to keep commitments.
Perhaps it is because we all sense the capacity for integrity within
ourselves that we are able to notice and admire it even in people
with whom, on many issues, we sharply disagree.
Integrity, says Carter is in some sense prior to everything else.
It is a kind of foundational virtue, one that makes it possible for
the other virtues to be expressed. Carter's idea of integrity goes far
beyond consistency or even simple honesty. He offers a three step
definition integrity. Acting with integrity means:
- discerning what is right and what is wrong,
- acting on what you have discerned, even at personal cost; and
- saying openly that you are acting on your understanding of right from wrong.
To live an integral life, you must discern carefully, act
integrally and acknowledge that you are doing so.
Discernment is the first crucial step. This is
not a simple,
mechanical process. After all, people of integrity can come to
different conclusions about what is right. You have to pay
attention to the world around you and to your own conscience.
But your conscience must be informed, by the human condition and
experience and a sense of rightness that comes from beyond the
individual. You have also to consider what others think, and
search out the right balance between reason and received wisdom.
Theodore Kaczinsky, in his long Unabomber career, may have been
acting consistently with his beliefs, but in his extreme isolation, he
was unable and unwilling to filter his ideas through a real dialogue
to gain a greater wisdom. The philosopher Stuart Hampshire asks:
"If a person has lived a blameless life according to his lights," as
the saying goes, the question always arises -- "Were his lights
good enough, or could they have been better."
For some, including Carter, those lights are religious i
n nature.
Integrity has to do with acting in conformity to divine will. He
cites the great Jewish sage Maimonides: "Everything that you do,
do for the sake of God." But Carter offers a secular version as
well, quoting a professor W. S. Taylor in 1857: "Integrity implies
implicit obedience to the dictates of conscience -- in other words,
a heart and life habitually controlled by a sense of duty." Carter
doesn't say if Taylor was a Unitarian or a Universalist, but he
seems to have been one of those people who spells God with two
O's.
Whatever the sources of authority, true discernment requires
deep and frequent moral reflection. It won't do just to cling
automatically to your cherished beliefs. An integral democracy
depends upon real dialogue, not just the shouting of slogans.
Carter puts it strongly:
But to maintain a genuine and respectful dialogue among
integral citizens, we must be careful to listen with our ears,
not just with our mouths. If we listen closely and
sympathetically to others, if we allow our views to be
challenged, we are actually aided in the discernment that
makes integrity possible.
The second step in integrity is acting on the basis of o
ur
discernment, even at risk to oneself. We think of the steadfast
person, who keeps commitments and acts out of principle, not for
personal advantage. Here Carter cites some of the great heroes of
non-violent resistance, as we heard in the reading: Mohandas
Gandhi, Martin Luther King and Aung San Suu Kyi. They risked
everything, even their own lives, and the lives of their followers,
to create justice for oppressed peoples. And he tells a story I had
not heard before of a Roman general, Petronius, who was ordered
to erect a statue of the Emperor Caligula in the Temple in
Jerusalem. The Jews stood up to him, baring their throats and
stating their willingness to die before accepting this idolatrous
violation of their religious integrity. Petronius engaged in genuine
dialogue with these citizens of Jerusalem, and was moved. He then
told the emperor that honor would not allow him to erect the statue
in the Temple. Carter does not tell us how Petronius' career went
after this daring message, or even whether he survived.
These are extreme examples of integrity under extreme
conditions. But think of American politicians of integrity -- yes,
there are such. They may not risk physical death, but their
political lives. Senator Russell Feingold of Wisconsin was a
cosponsor of a bill to introduce greater integrity into the election
process. The McCain/Feingold campaign finance reform proposal
would have banned so-called soft money, raised and spent by
national party organizations, and currently the source of much
abuse, not to mention nasty negative campaigning. Although the
bill was killed by the Republican leadership in the Senate, Feingold
held himself and his 1998 reelection campaign to its constraints.
He refused to accept soft money, and discouraged independent
organizations from running ads on his behalf. His opponent,
however, received a great deal of party money -- aimed directly at
Feingold and his ideals. They blitzed the airwaves with negative
ads. Feingold said he'd rather lose the election than compromise
his principles. As it happened, despite plummeting poll numbers
in the weeks running up to the election, he won. Did he win in
spite of being outspent? Or did the people determine to reward his
stand for integrity?
Or think of Doris Haddock who is living out her integrity on
the same issue, but in a different arena. "Granny D," as she is
called, is walking across America to make the point that the health
of our democracy would be much enhanced by campaign finance
reform that would remove candidates from the necessity to raise
large amounts of money. Ms. Haddock is 87-years-old. She
believes that this demonstration is the best way of spending a year
of the time left to her.
We're not all politicians, and we may not be as vigorous and
heroic as Granny D. or Aung Sang Suu Kyi. But integrity has
everyday applications as well, and everyday risks. If the cashier
at the Giant undercharges you, do you point out the error? Is your
integrity worth more than the 59 cent difference? Do you obey a
stop sign in the middle of the night when there is no traffic, and no
police officer in sight? Do you make that decision after moral
reflection?
Or think of a championship tennis game, in which the line
judge made an obvious miscall. Everyone, both players and all the
fans, saw that the ball hit by the legendary Pancho Gonzales was
inbounds. But it was ruled out of bounds, a point to his amateur
opponent, Ted Shroeder. The umpire refused to overrule the line
judge. And so, on the next play, Shroeder simply let the first ball
go by him. Balancing the scales in this quiet but forceful way
ultimately cost Shroeder the match, but it preserved his integrity.
Carter sums it up: "He decided what was right, did it at cost to
himself, and was quite open about what he was doing."
The third step in acting with integrity is saying openly
that
you are acting on your understanding of right from wrong.
The person of integrity is unashamed of acting out of principle, and
says so openly. Think of those thousands of civil rights workers
and hundreds of thousands of people simply aspiring to the full
rights of citizenship due them who found the courage to oppose
injustice, and do so openly, in the face of guns and clubs and dogs
and fire hoses. After the death of Matthew Shepard, hundreds of
people in Wyoming and around the country demonstrated their
solidarity with gays and lesbians who are threatened every day by
the possibility of violence and the probability of lesser
humiliations. A group of allies made a cordon around the funeral,
protecting the family mourners from the sneers and catcalls of so
called Christians who seemed pleased that Matthew was dead. To
be an out gay person -- or a heterosexual ally, wearing ribbons or
"Straight but not narrow" buttons -- is to take a daily stand for
integrity.
To say forthrightly that you are acting out of principle is to
promote integrity in our public life as citizens. To cheat on taxes
out of greed when you are claiming to be making a protest is not
integral. Nor is it integral to pretend that you are just conforming
to the general level of cheating, when your purpose is really to
withhold money as a form of protest. I knew someone in the early
sixties who refused to spend a penny traveling in the South,
bringing his own food and sleeping in his car. But he did not take
that third step from stubbornness to integrity, and the Southern
tourist industry never learned that racial discrimination has dollar
costs.
Those who practice civil disobedience intend to
bring change
to a flawed society. Carter makes a fine distinction between
societies that are basically just, and those that are hopelessly unjust.
In the former circumstances, civil disobedience requires the
application of the third criterion of openness. To be integral, and
effective in creating change, civil disobedience generally must say
what it is doing and why. Under normal conditions, integrity must
state its name, to create a climate of integrity.
Here's where the story about the British flight attendan
t in
South Africa comes in. She was outside the system. She had the
ability -- and the duty -- to act with full integrity, openly rejecting
the unjust and demeaning prejudices of the obnoxious woman. But
for a person living under the yoke of apartheid, such an explicit act
might have been impossible, or futile or just too intimidating.
Heroes like journalist Stephen Biko died for their courage. Aung
San Suu Kyi, the Burmese dissident, has been willing to speak
openly and risk her life, but she also says that "It is not power that
corrupts, but fear. Fear of losing power corrupts those who hold
it, and fear of those who wield power corrupts the powerless." The
pervasive fear in an unjust society erodes integrity in all its
citizens, both those who mean to support injustice and those who
reluctantly acquiesce to it.
Under conditions of tyranny, true integrity may not meet
the
full criteria developed by Stephen Carter. What could integrity
have meant during slavery times here in our country? Pilfering and
theft, sly disobedience, duplicity, passivity, code words embedded
in spirituals -- these were the only means of resistance available to
people who were regarded as property, people whose children and
parents and spouses were held hostage their whole lives long.
Open rebellion was likely to end in crushing violence, and small,
covert acts of resistance offered the only means of expressing the
integrity of human dignity. What could integrity have meant to
Sally Hemings, who lived for years as the concubine of her owner,
Thomas Jefferson? Was there genuine affection between them?
Could that even be meaningful, given the disparity of power in
their lives? Did she acquiesce sullenly, or did she calculate the
advantage to her children fathered by the master? How did she
maintain her integrity? And what of Jefferson himself? A man
with such intelligence, such high ideals -- but his integrity
crumbled to hypocrisy in the cauldron of a deeply unjust system.
And the more recent tyranny of the Nazis. When the SS c
omes
pounding on your door and demands to know if you are hiding
Jews, it is no lie to deny the existence of the family of four
trembling in your cellar. It is an act of the highest integrity. Or
perhaps you can follow the example of the good Christian lady I
heard about from Pauline, a former parishioner. This lady could
not bring herself to tell an actual lie. Instead, she looked wide
eyed and innocent, and said, "Yes, officer, I am hiding Jews!"
"Where are they?" demanded the troopers. "Right here, under the
dining room table." She pointed. The Nazis looked at the empty
and innocent dining room and went away. In the hiding hole,
under the dining room floor, beneath the door hidden by a rug, the
Jews let out a sigh of relief. She had managed to protect them
without uttering a false word.
Or the story another parishioner -- Felix, a Dutch Jew, a radical
and outspoken young man, and later Pauline's husband -- told me
from his days in a Spanish prison, after he was caught trying to
flee the Nazis. Felix quickly became a leader of the other Dutch
inmates. The prison was designed to wear down the prisoners with
heavy and useless labor. They were required to spend their days
carrying heavy baskets of rocks from one pointless pile to another
down the road, and then back to the first pile. To keep the pace
moving briskly, the guards forced the last man to get in line to
carry a double basket, and escorted by a special guard to torment
him. The men under Felix's leadership acted with the only sort of
integrity available under tyranny. They figured out the system, and
together they decided not to throw the slowest and weakest
members of the group to the dogs. Nor did they allow the group
as a whole to be ground down by the relentless demand for speed.
Instead they stood in solidarity with one another, and against the
tyrants. Quietly, they simply took turns accepting the punishment
of being last. Their integrity helped them to maintain their dignity,
even in the face of a harsh and violent regime.
So I want to end this morning by thanking all persons of
integrity. I am grateful for the heroes who have gone before us.
I am grateful to all those who have risked their lives or their
freedom to stand up against every form of tyranny, and so enabled
us to live unconstrained by the fetters of oppression. I am grateful
for every small act of integrity by ordinary people, acts which chip
away at the mountain of hatred and intolerance that threatens our
whole culture. I am grateful for lives of quiet resistance and
moments of great courage. I am grateful for the people of integrity
yet to come, who will make it possible for my gay and Lesbian
descendants -- and I have no doubt that I will have gay and
Lesbian descendants -- to live lives of full integrity, so that they
will not have to struggle with the question of coming out, but will
be free just to be themselves. I am grateful to the people of
integrity yet to come who will make it possible for my black and
brown and red and yellow descendants--and I am certain that I will
have such descendants -- to live lives of full integrity, so that they
will not have to run every good or bad event in their lives through
the filter of race, but just be themselves. May we be inspired by
all people of integrity. May we live lives of fuller integrity. May
we take that extra step to promote integrity around us. For our
world's sake.
Amen. Shalom. Blessed Be. Salaam.
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