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September 2000 Sermons
September 10, 2000 SermonRev. Nancy D. DeanSeptember 10, 2000 Ingathering SundayWhere have You Been? Where are You Going?Once again we begin our congregational year and feel the connectedness of the interdependent web as we have brought nature’s gifts back to this sanctuary we create here on Sunday mornings. I always feel a profound sense of gratitude for this congregation on this Sunday, and, as I am beginning my sixth year with you, I find I feel this more each year. This looks to be an especially exciting year, for if we all send out those positive vibrations of love and hope to the universe—and especially New Castle County Planning Board—then we may find ourselves gathering in our own home this Sunday next year. This summer has been a reminder, too, of how very important, this caring community is to so many people; and equally, and maybe even more significantly, how important a number of people learned this community is for them, those who did not realize it before. There has been a good deal of struggle for several members of this community over the summer; a time we usually do not expect to have to deal with a lot of struggle. This congregation is special, and I say that without as much bias as you might think. I have belonged to many churches and UU congregations; have served at two others before coming here; and also listen with intent to my colleagues at our monthly district ministers meeting. So I know that this is a very special gathering of very special people. You not only read and know the guiding principles for our faith, but you live them as well. I grew up in a fundamentalist church that talked every Sunday about love; the love of God, the love of Christ, about love as a guiding principle, but I have never seen a group of people who lived the meaning of love more than you who gather here each Sunday. When I posed the questions for my sermon today, I was thinking initially about where we might individually have physically been and certainly where we have been spiritually, and where we might be going. Might is the operative word, for as we have all learned thus far in our lives, we rarely wind up where we thought we were going. I thought , too, about this UU Society of Mill Creek; where we have been and where we are going. You surely must know that it is the stuff of dreams to build a church, to create a congregation such as ours. When I came here from Concord, MA., I left a large, prosperous congregation with a beautiful New England meetinghouse church building, a large staff, and lots of people from which to get those ever-important volunteers who make any congregation work, large or small. I knew that there was a small (numbering sixty-four at the time), group who had high hopes to soon find a home of their own. We had space here on Sundays, we had various cabinets and closet space to house all our paraphernalia, and willing hands and giving hearts. We have in these past five years since I came in 1995, now consolidated our holdings into one closet, and have done the miraculous—with the help of a couple UU angels—feat of acquiring land, and successfully conducting a Capital Campaign to build our own congregational home. I am amazed at where we have come from. Remembering, as well, those five years before that the congregation met in various places, went through changes of ministry with an extension and interim minister, then calling me. It is amazing what a few determined people can do. But everything wonderful that has ever happened started with one idea, and a few determined people to make it happen. Where are we going? Well we plan, we hope, but we never know with absolute certainty. Just one of the little irritations of life—or is it the real beauty of life? Dorothy Parker was great writer and greater wit who led a very busy life in NYC. One day she was foolish enough to accept two baby alligators as a gift. She brought them home, ran a little water in the bathtub, and put them there until she could decide what to do with them. The next day, the cleaning woman came by while Parker was out. When Parker returned that evening, she found the house not cleaned and this note: "Dear Madam, I am leaving. I cannot work in a house with alligators. I would have told you this before, but I never thought the subject would come up." While you can be sure Dorothy Parker was upset at having her cleaning woman quit—something she did not anticipate, you can be equally sure, that she loved the story this funny incident provided her. And this story reminds us that there are always things in life, our own lives and the life of this faith community, that we will not be able to anticipate. Does it mean that we should avoid the unexpected gifts, for fear of the consequences? Of course not. To have the good things, the beautiful and wonderful things of life, we know that there comes along the reciprocally difficult, ugly and horrid things in life. Would we forsake the wonderful just to avoid the horrible? Again, I think not. Many have said that all our spirituality arises from our knowledge that one day we will die. That we cannot conceive of our own non-existence, which is why traditions around the world have both stories and theology that say life can and will go on. Once I talked to my son, who tends to have a philosophical bent, about this paradox called life; and the equally paradoxical thing called love. Would you, I asked, chose not to love just because you knew that there would be an equal amount of pain at losing that love because the person left or died? Most people would chose to have love. Or as the poet Tennyson wrote, " it is better to have loved and lost, than never loved at all." Pain and joy go hand in hand. Life is about the unexpected pain and the unexpected joy. This congregation is about having a safe place to share them both, for that is what makes the pain bearable, and the joy all the better for having people with whom to share it. A young girl woke early one morning, and as she was going downstairs to get something to eat, the grandfather clock struck seven. But it didn’t stop there. It went right on striking: 8,9,10,11,12,13,14,15, and so on. The girl ran back upstairs shouting to the whole family, "Get up! Get Up! It’s later than it ever was!" Looking at the election results this morning for the Delaware Republican primary, I rather imagine there is a lot of second-guessing about what might have been done to get that handful of voters to turn out that chose not to—a narrow 44 vote margin. One is perhaps feeling a deep sense of relief, the other probably an equal portion of regret. Truly, though, "there is no future spending the present worrying about the past." This line comes from the cartoon strip character Ziggy, which has been taped to my desk for years. I read this at a time when I was doing precisely that, and found that there can be deep wisdom even in a cartoon block. It helped remind me that life must be focused on the here and now and toward tomorrow. We can learn from the past, we can look forward with hope, but most importantly, we can live with joy in the present. In the process, we can strive each day to live a life that is purposeful. A life that is giving, caring, ever learning that some of the greatest joys in life are the ones we might never see coming, would never be able to anticipate. That serendipity is far more likely than catastrophe, and that love is always more important than anything else with which we often seek to replace it. We know, or can know, where we have been with research or contemplation. Where we are going is yet a dream. What we have is here, now, in this place, with this group of people, each of you wanting to make the most of your individual lives. My friends, it is clear to me that you see with some unknown clarity that what happens best, and for the best, does so when we come together to share and to grow. September 17, 2000 SermonRev. Nancy D. DeanSeptember 17, 2000Judging the Present by the PastI am just going to make a wild guess here, but I believe every single person in this room has a pair of special glasses. Not just any kind of glasses, mind you, but very special glasses, "retro" glasses, ones with 20-20 vision that we use to look at the past. Whether that past was five minutes ago, or fifty years back. You have them, don’t you? I have them, too. And we usually say the following sorts of statements when we put on these 20-20 retro-glasses: "If only . . . .or why . . . ." These glasses also could be called our "shoulda, woulda, coulda" glasses. Santayana gave us the famous line, a reworking of one of Aristotle’s ideas, that if we do not learn from the past, we are doomed to repeat it. The operative word here is "learn." Unfortunately, we tend not to do the learning piece, but instead tend to look back with our other pair of glasses, the ones with the rose-colored glass, and idealize the past, remembering only the good parts, and neglecting the rest. That is, we are nostalgic for time we perceive as better, even though the facts may tell us something altogether different. Cornel West is a professor at Harvard who thinks a good deal about the past, but also about the present; especially how we in the present remember and view the past. West understands better than most that the past is a textbook, something to learn from. But, as he said recently in a lecture, "we cannot measure the present by the past." Measuring the present by the past is not about learning from the past; it is usually about nostalgia, or something more misguided. We, in our all-too-human fashion, often think we understand the voices of the past better than we understand the voices of the present—a faulty and sometimes dangerous habit. Not unlike the experience Emerson had with someone who knew a lot less than he realized. Ralph Waldo Emerson, was one of America’s greatest thinkers and philosophers, and, like his father, a Unitarian minister. One day, he was visited by a local farmer who saw a book by Plato, an even greater thinker and philosopher from ancient Greece. The farmer asked if he might borrow it, which Emerson was glad to oblige. When the farmer returned the book, Emerson asked him how he liked it. The farmer replied, "Oh, I liked it. This Plato has a lot of my ideas." Cornel West talks most potently about how we can, as he states, get "beyond multiculturalism and Eurocentrism" to something that reflects who we are now, what our needs are now, and what we will hope to accomplish for our legacy to the future. He examines this process in language that sounds more religious than philosophical at times, because, I think, he understands our religious inclinations reflect our nostalgic or our future vision more than our present insight. He terms the learning process he thinks we would be best served by as "prophetic thought." Prophetic thought is less about past, and more about how we view what is happening here and now and the effects our present will have on the future. This was the way of the prophets of ancient scriptures. One of things I am hearing about a great deal in regard to the upcoming elections is the effect of the vote, not on legislation or foreign policy, or most of the things that presidents do, but more about what it will mean for the Supreme Court. Since there is a likelihood of a least two Supreme Court nominations for the next president to make in the following four to eight years, the balance of the Court could be dramatically altered. Some prognosticators believe that as many as three-hundred precedents set by the Court over the last thirty years could be overturned or undone depending on the changed character of the Court in the next eight years. All this dependent on the outcome of this presidential election. That is prophetic thought. Or may one day be viewed in that light. Cornel West looks at this process of prophetic thought as having four main features, "four constitutive elements." They are: discernment, connection, tracking hypocrisy, and hope. "Hope" was probably the operative word for Robert Benchley in a story he relates from his college days. Probably most of us used our "coulda, woulda, shoulda" glasses a good bit back in our school days. Robert Benchley ,the well-known humorist whose career flourished in the first half of the 20th Century, showed his sense of humor early on. When he was a student at Harvard, he took a course in international relations. Benchley, who mind was agile but who didn’t do much serious studying, came into the final exam unprepared and was faced with this question: "Discuss the influence of the northern fisheries case upon international relations." Benchley pondered a bit and then began his essay. He wrote: "I shall discuss the northern fisheries case from the point of view of the fish." I believe that to some degree, this is Cornel West’s tack; to take the point of view—in this case— of the people involved, rather than ranging philosophically, both heavily and widely about what we should have, could have, or would have done about the human condition, particularly the human condition of the poor and disenfranchised. That it is both a mistake to measure the present by the past, and foolish to think the measuring tools of the past can come up to the needs of the present, much less be up to the potential needs of the future. So we always need to react to those who tell us that what worked in the past is what we need for today or tomorrow, to look hard at whether those tools were all that good then, and especially whether they are up to snuff for the needs of this time. It is important to understand that West does not view the past, present, or future as discreet times; rather, each time, each age both creates and informs the next. That is, there is much to learn from the past and from the present. The key is what we do with the information we glean, for as every good scientist in this room knows, you have to have some suspicion about the tools you are using in experimentation. There is in the scientific world the principle known as Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle ( believe me, I use this in ministry, too); that is, the act of observing, or measuring, impacts the outcome. For instance, if you put a cold thermometer in a beaker of warm liquid, the thermometer makes a change that itself requires measurement. So to, in human affairs, the impact of our actions affects the outcomes we propose. This is one of the reasons I get somewhat hot-under-the-collar with negativism in life, especially the congregational life—or to be plain, negative people. If we want change that improves, the introduction of either negativism or positivism impacts the outcome. It is my bias that negativism gets in our way a lot more than positivism, but the fact is we need always to look at all sides of any proposed change or issue. West breaks up the process of "prophetic thought" into the four areas in an effort to help in the process of cross-checking, or measuring the measuring, as it were. So he begins with "discernment," or as he states: "the capacity to provide a broad and deep analytical grasp of the present in light of the past." "[A]n analytical moment." All of which is about my cosmological understanding of "string theory"; that is being able to see the many strings of what the past was, and how those strings are connected to the strings of the present, and how then they might be connected to the strings of the future. In our good Unitarian fashion, West calls on us to question everything, especially the so-called "facts" of the past. West in a great jazz enthusiast; which I am myself more today after hearing the jazz guitarists last night at the first show in the new Baby Grand Theater at the Opera House complex. I saw Ann and Jack Davis there, too. We heard Jay Giels, Duke Robillard, and Jerry Bowdoin playing the dickens out of their guitars. For West, though, what we witnessed was not a pure moment in the present. He would have reminded us that we are witnessing no "pristine" heritage or experience. That jazz is not a pure American movement, but like all music and all experience for those of us in the country, it is a "hybrid" experience, because we are a hybrid culture. As he writes: "There is no jazz without European instruments. But this is true all the way back to the beginning of the human adventure in Mesopotamia, Egypt and Pakistan, and Northern China off the Yellow River. So when we talk about Europe, we are not taking about anything monolithic or homogenous. When we talk about multiculturalism, we are talking about a particular critique of something which is already multicultural." How we can apply this to the human condition, particularly the ones who fall in the lowest places, is to make sure, as West says, that we allow "the suffering [people] to speak." While they who suffer have no "monopoly on truth," we can be sure that the truth cannot emerge without their voices. We who are not poor, cannot speak for the poor. We all must have a voice. "Connection," the second piece, is about empathy. You know, the feeling of what it is like to be in another person’s situation. West, along many others, feels that empathy has been losing ground in an age of growing prosperity for the United States generally. West calls up my favorite philosopher, William James, who wrote in 1903 about the annexation of the Philippines, raising the question of how it could be that so many Americans were unable to be empathetic with the Filipinos as human beings, but instead cast them in mostly stereotyped pictures. We still have this problem. West tells us that we need empathy for others; that the "moment of human connection means never losing sight of the humanity of others." We UUs address this in our First Principle. E.g., each one of us needs to try to understand what it might be like to be a Mexican immigrant, or an aborigine, or a poor woman with three kids and no home. The third part of West’s vision is what he calls, "keeping track of human hypocrisy"; which, he says, is "accenting boldly, and defiantly [there’s a word that get folks uncomfortable] the gap between principles and practice, between promise and performance, between rhetoric and reality." Oh, how I wish we could get all political candidates to memorize in the hearts as well as their minds, that statement. Mr. Bush, Vice-President Gore, Mssrs. Cheney and Lieberman: Will you please note and correct in your speeches and action, "the gap between principles and practice, between promise and performance, between rhetoric and reality." Edmund Burke, the British statesman, who fought against the colonialist practices of the East Indian Company, wrote in his 1791 Letter to a member of the National Assembly: "You can never plan the future by the past." Once again, we see how we human beings tend to misuse the past rather than learn from it. Well, they say, we did this, it worked then, so we will do it from now on. One of the chief complaints of any organization, and even more so in the church or congregation are the dried up phrases, "We have never done that before." Or "We don’t do that here." As if anything new or different can never be introduced because of the past--even if continuing the old or former ways is detrimental to the whole. Change is trying, but change is absolutely necessary to good health in mind, body, and especially in organizations. On the other hand, to throw out everything from the past, or always be seeking something new and different is heading for trouble, too. We ever find ourselves striving to find Aristotle’s "golden mean." The last part of West’s understanding of prophetic thought is the element of human hope. West finds hope hard to talk about, not only because he sees so much that is "ghastly" in much of our past, but equally because of what he calls the "hope peddlers who are manipulative, charlatan-like, blinding, obscuring." This is something UUs have long striven to challenge in the faith community. Still, as we who are gathered here want, too, West understands that to "talk about human hope is to engage in an audacious attempt to galvanize and energize, to inspire and to invigorate world-weary people." What he points out is that too many are "world-weary," and that there can come from that a "misanthropic" tendency. In other words, the misanthropic types say: those people—meaning the poor, the uneducated, the disenfranchised—are always going to be around; let’s just take care of the rest of us. This attitude is an unfortunate legacy of Jesus’ statement that the poor will always be with us. But Jesus was not making a statement about the poor; he was making a statement about the rich. He was talking about the misanthropes who will dismiss any other human being who does not fit their prescribed notions of what human beings are supposed to be like. The poor will always be with us, not because of the poor exclusively, but equally because of the rich. In one of his own many moments of prophetic thought, Emerson wrote back in 1867: "There are always two parties. The party of the Past and the party of the Future; the Establishment and the Movement." What he might have added, what I suspect Cornel West would have asked to be added, would be the piece about the present, that the connections between the past and the future are our work every day. This is the work of religious, of spiritual, minds. We are the ones who will be the learners, and the prophetic voices; it is our call as ethical people. It is our spiritual work. We cannot measure the present by the past, but no doubt we will be measured by the generations to come for our efforts. May it be that we here will come up to the mark.
September 24, 2000 SermonRev. Nancy D. DeanSeptember 24, 2000Lies, Half-Truths, and Sins of Omission
"In 1960, many Americans were genuinely astonished to learn that President Eisenhower had lied when asked about the U-2 incident, in which an American spy plane and pilot had been forced down in the Soviet Union. But only fifteen years later, battered by revelations about Vietnam and Watergate, 69% of the respondents to a national poll agreed that "over the last ten years, this country’s leaders have consistently lied to the people." (Sissela Bok in Lying) We hardly need a poll today to tell us that the percentage of people who distrust political leaders is certainly as high as that poll taken in 1970, and very likely to be a good ten points higher. We hear more than ever of political life that is disenchanting, and certainly hear it all faster than ever; and even the most innocent of mistakes is likely to be stated as yet another example of the dishonesty rampant in the government. Not a happy picture. Yet, how much of this general distrust relates purely to the world of politics? How many people nowadays trust the people they work with, or their employers? How many trust their neighbors? How many feel they can trust family members? Watching bits and pieces of the Olympic games coverage this past week, I was/am astonished, or maybe more saddened, by reports of athletes who have been sent home with their whole team because drugs were detected in their urine or blood. This 2000 Olympics has the dubious distinction of being the first to have this high level, and extent, of drug testing for a variety of banned performance-enhancing drugs. Drugs that can have a very damaging effect on these young athletic bodies; many of these drugs cause cancer or serious heart problems, among other things. We can only sit by in astonishment that there is any level of cheating going on in what is supposed to represent the height of noble effort; what is supposed to be the epitome of physical development. Why take the risk in the first place with one’s health? is the first question, but the second is, How could anyone feel they had really earned the gold medal if they cheated? What is being taught to the world’s athletes to make this such a major problem? What seems patently clear from all this, and the recent years of doping in various high-level competitive sporting events, is that if there is a way to cheat, people will try to find a way to do it. Seems a long way from Olympic ideals of ancient Greece. I remember this bit of wisdom in some literature from a school my son attended:
So here we are, in the midst of the Olympics and the elections and I can hardly find a day passing when credibility is not a major issue in one way or another. Of course, the accusations are flying fast and loose between the political candidates these days. Each group is accusing the other of giving inaccurate information, or telling downright lies, although they most often use the various euphemisms for lying, or the great substitute--innuendo. There is nothing so sure about politics in the United States than the accusation that one or another of our elected—or want to be elected—officials are up to their earlobes in lies, half-truths and, the easiest shot of all, sins of omission. How is it that we even understand what these things mean on a larger political level? (Just to get you thinking ahead, on Oct.1, next Sunday, our own Emily Knearl, who has two degrees in political administration, and experience working for various DE congress people, most recently Gov. Carper, will lead a service on an insiders’ view of political campaigns--it should be fascinating) Naturally, whatever reaches the realms of politics will always be reflected on the micro levels, in community, social organizations , family, and even our most personal relationships. Then, there are those, such as the writer/journalist, Robert Wright, who explore the possibility that we have an evolutionary predisposition for how we function , especially when it comes to the ethical ground underneath truth-telling. Religion, which I see as rising up out of our human need for order in community, has always had something to say about the subject of lying in any form. I was brought up in my devout family to see evil hierarchically. Murder was at the top, stealing was next down, and lying was a close third on the list of things guaranteed to get you on the express train to hell. In Dante’s Inferno [as Bok related in Lying], those who lie, the deceivers, are put in the eighth circle of Hell, the only ones lower were traitors. Dante wrote:
No doubt, many of us gathered here this morning experienced the cleansing effects of a bar of soap, judiciously applied by mother, for either saying naughty words, or telling a lie. The strong religious vein in all of our society makes us feel that lying is repugnant, yet we seem to have a moderating gene for understanding some lies over others. Which is the point Robert Wright and any number of social biologists claim, and that is we have evolved a complicated system for using and excusing various forms of deception. But, there can be no misunderstanding that most people very much respect honesty, and truth telling, even as we feel bombarded by lying from various quarters. "’All truth is simple.’ Is that not doubly a lie?" So wrote Frederich Nietzsche, who was intent on making the point that truth is no more simple than a lie. Why people lie is often quite obvious, and various studies tell us people lie—in the strictest sense of the word lie—dozens of times a day. Now such polls look at such things as when someone asks, How are you? And we respond, Fine, even if all is not well with us. In the absolute sense, this is a lie, but as Robert Wright and Sissela Bok, remind us, there are the social niceties that makes life comfortable, and lying fits into these. We understand such exchanges in our culture to be merely social niceties, but they are, importantly, part of the social glue of community. Mark Twain, who always had a statement to make on just about everything related to our cultural habits, wrote of his own profession: "Most writers regard truth as their most valuable possession, and therefore are most economical in its use." The half-truth is often used to gain an advantage, as well, but makes the teller feel, one assumes, half as guilty for not telling a whole and complete lie. I have a story that illustrates far better that I could this matter of the half-truth
This story brings Nietzsche to mind once again, when he wrote: "Convictions are more dangerous enemies of truth than lies." This past week, eight years later, and fifty-two million dollars later, we find nothing much to report from the Whitewater Investigations. Fifty-two million dollars of the public’s money—money that could have paid a lot of medical care for children and the elderly—just to find out the President did something naughty, admittedly vile. The polls showed quite clearly, though, that this was not the sort of dishonesty the people wanted to hear about. (I could have sent my mother and her bar of Lifebuoy to Washington to better effect!) I believe that most people think lying stems from the desire to gain an advantage, of some sort. Further, what I witness of politics is that people tend to think that since winning is the whole point, lying is bound to be a part of it. Or, at the very least, avoiding telling the whole truth, or the sin of omission. This was initially the crime of Bill Clinton, who defined very rigidly for himself what constituted sexual relations. More people were upset by this evasion tactic they feel is typical of legal wranglings, than what the man had done and his clumsy efforts to keep it from his wife and daughter and the public. Which is not to say that the people approved of his behavior, for most found his actions unworthy of our nation’s leader. Choosing the truth versus the lie is not always clear cut, though. Expediency often strikes us as preferable, but there can be a price to pay for that expediency. Often, too, we may miscalculate the gullibility of the listener, as in this story:
At some point, if we are forced to make a stand, most of us will stand with the virtues of truth, for that is what makes family and community work best. Or, at the very least, as Mark Twain, also commented, "If you tell the truth, you don’t have to remember anything." But, unless we are tied up with moral conviction, we see that lying is a lot like water in the basement, a little can be ignored, but a lot can create permanent damage. Whatever shades of truth we are examining, we must remember that truth is a lot less easy to discern than we think, and the same can be said of lying. We know that truth in a historical sense is usually a problem of who is writing or relating the history. Perhaps the biggest problem of truth in relation to history is accountability; and this is equally the problem of the present. Much of the time, people do not live long enough or stay around long enough to be held accountable. We are required to put a lot of trust in people, especially those we elect to public office, for we have to put up with them for some set length of time. I saw a political sign that had a line on it, "No child left behind." Which goes right to the heart of this issue. Does anyone believe that will happen? I cannot even believe that it is possible, unless a lot of miracles happen along the way. Does the political candidate really believe that; or is this "pap for the masses," as someone once wrote of political promises. During my years as a public school teacher, I saw school administrators come in and promise to change all the things that were wrong in the system. They would institute dozens of sometimes radical changes, then in three or four years take off to another school district, promising them similar things. Yet, there was never any accountability on their shoulders. And that still happens here in Delaware, too. Every year I have voted since I was twenty-one, I have heard politicians promise to make the schools better, because they are in such a bad way—yet we hear little of real long-term change, or real improvement. Promise, promises. Which may be why my political science professor back in my undergraduate days once told our class that school reform is one of the biggest smokescreen issues in politics; and, as far as I can tell, the drug problem is right beside it. Consistency, reliability, things that bespeak truth-telling and honesty, are what we really need most. Now, even in the most honest of hearts rests the stories or myths we learn to live by--or accept in order to live as we wish. And, as Wright pointed in out in the reading, we will pass on our understanding of what constitutes truth and dishonesty far more through our actions than our statements about morality and ethics. I doubt that I am alone, when share with you, that I have been guilty of telling my children that "I am not home" if such and such a person calls, clearly putting my children in the position of having to lie, or skirt the truth judiciously. So despite my chastisements to them to always tell the truth, I taught them far more plainly by my actions. I had a relative, an aunt, a simple, but deeply religious countrywoman, who when I was growing up often boasted regularly that she did not lie, for, in her words, "the Lord could not love a liar." Her honesty often gave her pain, and someone else some suffering, but she was a Bible-believing woman. It was not until I was a young adult that I realized that she was drawn to untruth occasionally, but in each and every circumstance that I observed, she had convinced herself of the truth of what she was saying. The particular instance that first grabbed my attention was at a family gathering, and someone had asked her about her daughter’s pending divorce. Now at this time, in the late sixties, no one in our family had ever been divorced. (Which is no statement about the conditions of marriages in the family!) Rather cornered in the discussion, my aunt said that her daughter had a Biblical reason for divorce, meaning the offending spouse had committed adultery. I was more than a little surprised by this revelation, since my cousin had made it clear to me that she would not talk to her mother about the problem, mainly because she knew she would get a lecture on going to hell if she divorced her husband. And her reasons for getting a divorce had nothing to do with adultery. Added to all this was the fact that this couple had lived in Hawaii since they married, as he was stationed there in the Navy. So, I asked my aunt how she knew that, and you have never seen indignation like I witnessed; her neck got bright red, she had her lips pursed tightly, and she shook her finger at me, stating, "I just know, that’s how." She stormed off. What I learned from this incident was that she needed to believe a version of what the truth that would keep her daughter in grace. So she believed what she wanted. I do not know if we have developed an evolutionary predisposition to lying as a matter of gaining an advantage, or in relation to survival, as the socio-biologists suggest, but what they also suggest, is that we have developed our moral code in response to our equally great need for cohesive communal relationships. And for that, we need a high level of trust and honest behavior. We rely on consequences to take care of the more egregious forms of dishonesty within the group, but the greatest damage from lying happens not to others, but within ourselves. We need to be reliable for ourselves as well, that is if we are to truly grow intellectually, emotionally, and certainly if we are to grow spiritually. The greatest lies are often the ones we tell ourselves, and the greatest damage is to our souls. Lying is a symptom of deeper psychological dis-ease, for whatever it is that motivates the lie is more important for us to know, than the substance of the lie itself. You and I who come here to find community, to strength and develop our moral being, can only do so effectively if we are not afraid to examine our hearts and minds. The motivations that drive us are what spirituality is all about. Yet, the greatest fear of all seems to be the willingness to look deep within and learn what urges us toward the behaviors we exhibit for the world, and whether or not they are honest in origin. A 19th Century author, Samuel Smiles, wrote: "The greatest slave is not he who is ruled by a despot, great though that evil be, but he who is in the thrall of his own moral ignorance, selfishness, and vice." Lies, half-truths, and the sins of omission are the chains of this moral slavery of the soul. What we want of our politicians is really what we want of ourselves, not perfection, or perfectly clean slates, but recognition of our tendency toward imperfection, and our equal need to strive for something better. As Sissela Bok wrote: "Trust and integrity are precious resources, easily squandered, hard to regain. They can survive only on a foundation of respect for veracity." |
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