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February 2007    
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February 4, 2007 Sermon

Rev. Nancy D. Dean

February 4, 2007

Healing the Hurting Heart

Every now and then I have this peculiar situation arise when I start writing one sermon, but another takes over, which is how I find my self with a sermon that is about both Abraham Lincoln and love. I trust you will follow my path from the one to the other and back again.

Clearly the fact that February holds both Valentine’s Day and the birthday of the 16th president has some impact. So the connection is not so far fetched as it might seem on the surface.

For one thing love is the greatest strength of humanity; love for our selves and for others drives virtually everything we do in one way or another. Suffering is paired inextricably with love; for, to love is to eventually experience loss. This is how I explained Lao Tzu’s aphorism, that every front has a back, to my son when he was a boy. As I said it to him, if you know real love, then if you lose the person you love through any means, be it death or that they cease to return your love, then you will suffer. But would any of us choose not to love in order to avoid the suffering that is inevitable? Most of us would not. Most of us do not.

So love and suffering are twin emotions, mirror emotions might be a better way to think of them. For people will do great and wondrous things out of love, and people will do horrible and despicable things because of or as a result of their suffering.

Love has been called a “many splendored thing” for people experience love so variously, so differently, too. We do love people so variously and so differently. What one of us may love in a person, may be terribly objectionable to someone else, like a goofy sense of humor. There is just no telling what or why one person loves another. Equally, there is a lot of mystery around the issues or things people hold dear, the ideas that they love enough to fight and die for, like freedom or justice.

Love, then, has to do with the heart, that is the seat of our sense of well-being; the ego and conscience are also ways of understanding or locating this emotion.

I officiated at a wedding yesterday which on the surface had some oddities that might have caused people to wonder what the pair saw in each other; yet, it was clear to me in my counseling with them some months ago and at the wedding yesterday, that they are in love. That they truly wanted to spend their lives together.

Actually, if we just take that last point, that people overwhelmingly, around the world, want to live with another person for the rest of their lives; to live with one other person for all the rest of their days. That is an impressive commitment! Just goes to show you what a powerful emotion love is, and why it creates both our greatest joy and our greatest pain.

The power of some of the promises we make out of love had never hit me until yesterday, while I was in the midst of saying, in effect: Do you promise to live faithfully, with respect and love for each other, all the days of your life? to forsake all others, to be kind, considerate, and nurturing to one another, all the days of your life? etc, etc, etc, what a profound thing this binding of ourselves to others is in reality. All the days of your life! You don’t get a sabbatical or vacation from this commitment.

While I have always appreciated the ritual import of the wedding ceremony, for some reason the apparent absurdity had never touched me before now. Only love could accomplish such a thing as marriage as we know it. We don’t even promise our children that we will take care of them all of our lives! In fact, most people, myself included, do not think that is a good or healthy thing.

One only has to appreciate the absurdity within the beauty, to begin to understand how it is that love can make us both forsake all others and to commit murder.

The British crime novelist P.D. James stated that it is said there are four L’s in murder: love, lust, lucre, & loathing. Most people think loathing (hate) is the most likely to lead to murder, but James says, “don’t you believe it, the most dangerous is love.”

The most dangerous is love. Think of what that means for the self, and what it means for the ones we love. Love is powerful, yes, but it can also be dangerous.

Love of the self, the ego, drives much of what is dangerous; while love of others drives most of what is wonderful in the human family, in the human community.

Here is where Abraham Lincoln comes in. Lincoln loved this country, loved the democracy that had cost so many lives in the century before his, and now here he was leading a nation with half of the country in revolt. Lincoln knew his Bible, which teaches that a house divided against itself cannot stand; will indubitably fall. The issue of slavery, which is at bottom the issue of the root of all evil was causing a potential schism, a breaking apart of the nation. Many people have heard that money is the root of all evil, but that is not what the Bible says; not what it says in 1Timothy of the New Testament from whence it comes. The phrase is not that money is the root of all evil, but the love of money. The love of money is the root of all evil. Which is really the love of self; the desire for what one wants, even at the expense of others. That was the root of slavery, the love of money, the love of self.

This little anecdote illustrates:

      Dear Keith: I have been unable to sleep ever since I broke our engagement. Won't you forget and forgive? Your absence leaves a void nobody else can ever fill. I love you, I love you, I love you.

      Your adoring Tiffany

      PS: Congratulations on winning the Power Ball lottery.

Clearly the tide of suffering had turned for Keith and Tiffany!

Lincoln’s face has been noted as a face of suffering; a face that showed all that he was feeling in his heart; the pain he held in his heart. We too generally show the suffering we feel when our hearts are thus afflicted.

The heart is a nice euphemism for the self, the mind, the spirit, however you understand the essence of who you are. When that essence of us hurts, we try to find a way to stop the pain; for the suffering in the heart or mind is just as painful as any physical wound. Just as we would try to stop the pain of a bee sting or broken arm, we also try to stop the pain of broken love. I have, more times than I can count, seen this agony on the faces of people whose hearts are aching; I have seen it on my own visage. I have seen the desperation of people not knowing where to turn or what to do to make the pain go away. This is suffering with no easy treatment.

Lincoln of course knew the personal pain of loss, with the death of a well-beloved son, and he lived the pain of the possible loss of the nation. He did not turn to war easily; it was a decision of much agonizing and suffering. Slavery was and is a hateful institution; love of money gone terribly awry, that anyone could accept the enslavement of a whole race of people in order to provide economic benefit for another. Slavery has not gone from the earth, nor has our willingness to turn a blind eye to the fact that millions of people work for near slave wages to provide much that makes our lives easier.

I had someone call and ask me: Should I go for the low bid on some work around my house when I feel certain that the only reason that I’m offered this price is that the laborers are illegal immigrants who have no power to negotiate a fair wage? Well! that question hit me like a rock between the eyes. Is our love of our money, our comfort worth the wrongs that are committed? The heart says, not if I am the one who suffers the consequences. I know the arguments on both sides; but the argument means more or less depending on whether you have choices or not.

Love of ourselves, our comfort, our prestige, our whatever-it-is that gives our life meaning and worth can cause us to do things, to say things, even to think things that are often beyond the pale logically or ethically.

Churches supported secession of southern states to protect slavery and the bountiful economy it generated. Churches, religions, even today support wars and systems (like, for instance, those that create global warming) that economically disadvantage whole peoples.

Love that leads people to support such things, love that leads to committing murder, is a love distorted, maimed, disfigured by what we want for ourselves at the expense of others.

P.D. James has said that the motive for murder that interests you most is that arising from disordered love--from the misguided attempt to protect or avenge someone one loves. What makes this motive especially rich? James states:

      I think [disordered love is] particularly rich because it arises from something that in itself is good. Other motives for murder, such as selfishness, greed, lust, anger and envy, are sins. The love and protection we feel for someone else is in itself good, but even that good, if taken to excess, can result in this terrible crime. What makes someone who is essentially good, who is educated, who is law-abiding--someone who should be able to understand his motives and perhaps have more insight into himself and others than most people do--what makes him cross that invisible line that divides the murderer from the rest of us? That's an interesting and complex puzzle.

Disordered love, love that is out of its best and most productive track causes many a suffering heart, and many a bad reaction. I have a pretty extensive Dear Abby file; one such letter points out how we can get off track by the things we ask of those we love. The letter said:

      Dear Abby: My husband has always been very close to his mother, and she has never cared much for me. I asked my husband if I was drowning and his mother was drowning which one would he save? He said, "My mother, because I owe her more." I am so terribly hurt, Abby. What shall I do? Arlene

      Dear Arlene: Learn to swim.

Why did Arlene need to ask that question in the first place? Why wasn’t it enough that her husband loved her? At root, it was her ego, her need to be loved, not as well as her husband’s mother, but better. I have serious doubts that Arlene and that husband stayed together. Arlene was too greedy.

How might she have found some healing for her hurting heart? Healing, as any medical person will tell you, is often a painful process; indeed, healing is often an ugly process. The suppurating wound is not something we would choose to experience, yet this is how the body tries to fight the infection. Without going through the stages of healing, we won’t get better. The wound won’t close and heal over.

Broken hearts, painful feelings of love for others, often can only be healed by letting go of the person or thing we most want; and that happens in part by believing there are other people or things that we can love. Healing the hurt of a nation or a heart begins with recognizing the evil that lies at the base of the word “I.” I want; I need; I have to have; I can’t live without. But true love is not a singularity; love is “we.” Love is “you and I.” Unless we can move outside of our own ego-centric motivations, suffering usually just grows and continues to distort even further.

The last year I lived in Massachusetts, there was approximately one murder every week of a woman by an estranged boyfriend or husband. That is how distorted love can get, so distorted that to end the life of the one you believe you love becomes desirable. It boggles the mind. But what we are talking about is the love of self being greater than the love for anyone else.

Healing happens when we love enough to let the other live as s/he chooses, which may not include us.

But, as with Lincoln, that also has a limit, for if the choice causes pain and suffering for others, then eventually we have to find a way beyond the impasse. Lincoln did not want war, but he did not want to see the nation destroyed over slavery.

Stowe said of Lincoln:

      No man in this agony has suffered more and deeper albeit with a dry, weary, patient pain, that seemed to some like insensibility. “Whichever way it ends, I have the impression that I sha’n’t last long after it’s over.”

That is usually the feeling of suffering we know in the hurting heart. We believe in the suffering that we will never get over it. Yet, had Lincoln not been assassinated, he most likely would have gotten over it; for he would then have needed to focus his energy on the healing. He would have needed to think about his and the nation’s children and their children, about the future. We heal by many means, some easier, some more painful, but healing begins by believing that good things are yet to be. Good things that we each can bring into being by our willingness to move out beyond our own desires.

Valentine’s Day is coming in a few days, and for all the cards and candy, flowers and dinners, there will be some who suffer because they did not get what they wanted. Let me offer that the best way to avoid the hurting heart is to think beyond it. If you want flowers, ask for them, if you want a particular kind of flower, ask for them, but while you are asking, ask what the one you love would like. And even if it is as mundane as a bowl of mashed potatoes, it will be a gift of love.

We are filled with love, that is the great glory of human beings. Love which we can gift any day and every day; it takes just a little consideration. Love is how to heal the pain of love. I know that sounds like a paradox, for indeed it is a paradox. Love is how to heal the pain of love. This is coded in our Seven Principles as ethical action, but really, everything in our UU faith is about the healing power of love. Hallelujah, that it is so!

So be it.

 

February 11, 2007 Sermon

Rev. Nancy D. Dean

February 11, 2007

Wicked: Evil by Nature

The sermon today was bought by Frank MacArtor at our annual Service Auction back in October. To buy a sermon means you get to choose the topic, and I do the research, writing, and preaching on the topic. I am always happy to oblige the congregation, especially when you are willing to pay well for the privilege. If I wanted to be ornery, or orn’ry as we say out west, I would suggest it was a wicked impulse for Frank to ask me to preach on the problem of evil! It is just the primary problem of human civilization, after all!

I’m just kidding. Frank is a good man, who, like most of us, is troubled by the real evil in the world that all of humanity struggles to understand and to overcome. H.L. Mencken, a clear-eyed humanist and newspaperman of a previous generation, once said: It is a sin to believe evil of others, but it is seldom a mistake.

Since I did mention the Wild West, an area with which I am familiar (as some of you know I am from Idaho, once a part of the Wild West), I have a story that shows us one of the problems with wickedness or evil:

      It was a quiet Saturday afternoon in Buffalo Bend, Wyoming in 1876, and the boys were socializing over a bottle of rye when Ol' Jeb comes racing into the saloon hollering, "Big John is coming to town! Big John is coming to town!"

      The frenzied crowd rushed for the door. As the bartender tried to secure the saloon, a man comes galloping down Main Street on a bull buffalo and reins up out front. He dismounts, grabs the buffalo by the horns, and orders "Stay!" The buffalo cowers submissively at the hitching post. The man rips the saloon doors from their hinges, stomps in, and catches the bartender heading for the back door. "Hold up bar-keep!" the stranger orders. "I crave red-eye."

      Shivering with fear, the bartender eyeballs the stranger. He’s big as a grizzly, wears rattlesnake chaps, a greasy rawhide shirt, a filthy Stetson, steel-tipped boots, and he smells like he hasn't as much as looked at a bathtub in years. He's carrying a sawed-off shot gun, and on his scarred, stubbled face is a look of cruel, insane meanness.

      "Right away sir." The trembling bartender quickly fetches a bottle and pours a large shot. The stranger knocks back the drink and slams down the glass on the bar.

      "W-would you like another, sir?" the bartender stammers.

      The stranger wipes his mouth with the back of his hand. "Not on your life! I'm getting the heck out of here." The stranger glances around anxiously. "Haven't ya heard? Big John is coming to town!"

The story of Big John illustrates that often we make more of appearances when it comes to what we think is evil, when just as often real evil appears, on the surface, dressed up in finery and/or has a title of importance attached to his/her name. Which is part of the reason that people have such a visceral reaction when a person who is a minister, rabbi, imam, or priest does something evil since they are believed to be agents of goodness, safety, and protection. Of course, depending on the evil, it can often take a long while before people begin to see that the wickedness was in fact wicked. Like the religious leader Moktada al-Sadr who is really the head of a militia, an army, seeking to get power in Iraq. He has been responsible for much of the insurgency, especially in the early days of the war. People who follow him do not see what he is doing as evil, but as protection. Eventually, the truth will be lifted up, but it may take a long while for the followers to acknowledge it; even as it took generations before Christians would acknowledge the evils of the Crusades and the Inquisition.

Herein lies one of the problems of evil, which is determining or defining what is a wicked impulse or an evil act. What are the things we see as evil, wrong, depraved, immoral, iniquitous, sinful, heinous, fiendish, etc? We have no shortage of words to attempt to capture the essence of the unethical or hateful response. In general we believe that evil is part of human reality, though that is not the case in all religions.

The main religions of the west uniformly teach that sin comes from human choice, not God, but that God allows evil in order that we have free will. Religions of the east, by contrast, tend to say that God is the creator of all things, including evil and that evil is part of the necessary balance. Non-theists, that is atheists and non-religious philosophers, tend to say that bad things happen, yes; but that evil arises from our biologically evolved survival instinct that is no longer in consonance with civilization—in fact that civilization is really our human response trying to overcome this instinct for self preservation that gets distorted into greed and the hunger for power.

Whether we see evil as having a source or reason, evil exists, and for we as Unitarian Universalists, our response to evil comes from our ethical grounding. Our seven Principles are our attempt to lift up the ethical response to how we would best act with each other and with the world in general.

Frank fortunately narrowed the topic a bit for me. He wanted to know, are cruel, mean, hateful, evil people born or reared to it, and how should society respond? That, of course, is the on-going question that all societies deal with as they make laws and try to live the values of religion.

Perhaps you have heard that the opposite of love is not hate, but indifference. This might also be said of our response to the world, to individuals and to the community, too. That when we love, we seek to care for and protect; so, correspondingly, when we hate we would seek to destroy. But the greatest evil usually is not hate, but our indifference to the suffering of others.

How else could someone sell illegal drugs? How else could the world turn a blind eye to the genocide in Rwanda? The act of the warring in Rwanda may be stimulated by racial hatred, but our response to these acts of violence is mostly a matter of indifference. In religious circles, these differences of response are often talked about as sins of omission versus sins of commission.

But to the question of whether cruel, mean, hateful, evil people are born or reared to it, comes into the purview of the nature versus nurture debate. For many centuries it was chiefly believed that people were born of good or bad blood, meaning if your grandparents were bad people, you were labeled a person of bad blood, and not given much of a chance to prove otherwise. By the 1950s researchers like Harry Harlow had begun to test whether nature or nurture was the most important. Harlow conducted the famous monkey studies where baby monkeys were taken from their mothers, with some given surrogates in the form of a cloth-covered wire mesh, others nothing but food and basic care. The results showed that these monkeys could never form attachments, when deprived of the nurture of their natural mothers; the monkeys with the surrogates did only slightly better. Many other such behavioral experiments followed, and at this point in time the debate is pretty much in the middle; meaning that most people studying the subject, and I personally as a minister, believe it is a combination. Both are vital. Thankfully, the bad blood ideas have less of a hold than they did even a couple of generations ago, but the lingering ideas of bad blood are still with us, which is in reality part of our recognition that some things are a matter of nature.

Yet, whether we believe the causes of evil acts that dominate our news media come from ingrained biological drives or from the way people are reared, there remains the issue of how is a person or society is going to respond to the evil.

Historically we see that people can be led to evil acts by charismatic leaders, especially when there is a direct gain either of property or recognition. Hitler was certainly a man filled with evil ideas, but he was gifted with the ability to get other people to believe his ideas were for their own good. Hitler and his circle of power remain the epitome of evil for people of this age, but in the wider scope of history, Hitler is one among many; and some of them are alive and in action today. Any one or group that perpetuates war under false pretenses is evil. Yet, we may believe that we are being saved by such people. Again, it often takes the wider lens of history to see the truth, even while people down through the ages have tried to lift up the truth of the evils while they were or are happening. But such truth-tellers are quickly labeled traitors or it is said that they are aiding and abetting the enemy. The age old methods of delusion.

The boy or girl next door, who grows up to do evil things, is not really so different a matter, it is just that we expect a certain evil in the world, but we do not expect evil to come from next door. The woman astronaut arrested this past week for allegedly trying to kidnap and kill her ex-lover’s new girlfriend is just such a case. Here is someone who was an example of good parenting, a child who was well educated, had achieved a position of great merit and acclaim, who apparently attempted a great wickedness. Does that mean nature or nurture failed?

It all depends on whether the rearing she had was grounded in ethical principles, or simply in a get-ahead mentality. If we teach our children that it is all right to do whatever it takes to get ahead, then we should not be surprised if they go over the line. On the other hand, if we teach them that they must learn to accept some kinds of defeat in order to live decent lives, then they are less likely to go out and shoot up the post office or try to kill a rival. In that sense, I believe nurture has a far greater weight than nature. We have an impact on the children which cannot be denied.

At the same time, we also know that some forms of mental illness cause sociopathic tendencies, and these are often not spotted or diagnosed until the person has committed a heinous act. This is the dark side of nature.

One of the reasons I believe it is so important to give our children good religious education is so that they have the tools of our ethical principles at their fingertips when they confront the difficult problems in life, like this woman who was thrown over for someone else. Need I mention that this was evil on evil, for she is married with three children--you can see how the bad blood might have played out for these kids in days of yore. But while people of the past may have believed evil to be in the blood, or genetic we would say today, they also recognized that her parenting probably reflected her values, in which case it would seem possible that her own children would be likely to follow her example.

Again, I believe it is both nature and nurture. Being well loved, taught the difference between right and wrong, all that is tied up with our ethical principles, is far more likely to produce people who have that strength of character that enables them to check an evil impulse.

Part of the dilemma was stated well by the poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge, who wrote: We shut our eyes to the beginnings of evil because they are small, and in this weakness is contained the germ of our defeat.

In other words, we are likely to not see the flaws in our own ways of believing or reacting to the problems of the world. I talked last Sunday about the fact that we always have the ability to respond with love, or to do the right thing, but often we won’t unless we see that we will benefit. Often we are so caught up in the short term benefit we see in revenge, or gain, that we cannot see the longer term benefits that always would be preferable.

The famous Christian scholar Thomas Aquinas made the sagacious remark that evil always exists in what is good, and that sheer evil is impossible, meaning that, as Coleridge pointed out, good shields the eye from incipient evil. For example, the child molester who lives in the neighborhood doing good deeds for people who desire to live with their neighbors in trust; these abusers do good that is seen and their evil by stealth.

This is the problem with not giving children a proper education, especially a proper sex-education, for you cannot trust everyone, and rather than live in a fool’s paradise (consider that phrase!), we must acknowledge that while most of our neighbors are good people, even amongst those who appear to be good there lies an impulse towards evil. Sometimes that impulse may be to sue you if they fall on the sidewalk in front of your house, sometimes that impulse goes towards more despicable things, like sexual perversion.

Jane Frelick has mentioned before that her mother taught her that there is bad in the best of people and good in the worst. This is true. Which means we all have to learn to exercise discretion, and to have some kind of moral code to live by that helps guide us through the muddy and sometimes slimy waters of human corruption.

Which leads us to how we are to respond to evil. The whole system of laws, and the religious ritualizing of law into doctrine and creed, is how humans have attempted to deal with the problem of evil. The system, like democracy, is not perfect, but it is a work of good intention. The best we have. On a personal basis many people often don’t think they should be governed, at least around some issues, even while they would have the rest of the community governed. Like people who run red lights. Yet, I have no doubt that a person who regularly runs red lights would have no compunction about using the law to prosecute fully someone else who ran a red light if s/he was the person who got hit in a resultant accident.

It may be in our nature to believe we can get through the red light and not hurt anyone, but our nurture can have taught us that running red lights is simply wrong because of the potential for an accident and all that could happen as a result.

Laws developed to help guide people toward a better or safer response to the multitude of situations of communal living, which are in constant flux. A thousand years ago, a red light was meaningless, and indeed may be meaningless two hundred years in the future.

That is why ethical principles are so much more important than laws, for they enable us to shift with the situation and the times to act out of compassion or reason as the need requires. Which is how we can be in favor of war against the Nazis during the 1940s, and against the war in Iraq. Which is not to say that the evils of the Nazi regime were separate and distinct from the evils of the other regimes that led up to World War II.

Evil, wickedness, sin are always complex for human beings are complex. Yet, even as I say that, I also say that you and I know when we are acting unethically. If we bother to consider our nature at all, and we ought to, then we will see those incipient seeds of evil that look simply like gossip, or fairness, or achievement, but grow into trees of terrible destructiveness like the McCarthy hearings, Nazi-ism, or a brilliant astronaut who can’t accept emotional suffering.

When I was growing up I was taught to pray before going to bed and ask for forgiveness of my sins. While the form of the prayer I certainly take issue with today, the function I still think is good, for it was meant to make me evaluate my actions. Was this day a day I could be proud of or a day in which I had done wrong. This is what I still value about the power of prayer and meditation; that it means taking time to ponder one’s actions and to consider alternatives.

Clearly, the more we know, and the greater effort we put into educating ourselves about the world around us, the harder it will become to dismiss the evil within us and around us.

My devout belief is that one of the reasons our Unitarian Universalist religion is so important is that this is a place for us to find that greater knowledge. We learn from each other, we challenge each other, the governing bodies, the whole of religion and society in our effort to get closer to the ethical truths that makes life worthwhile.

There is no simple or easy answer for why evil exists and no easy solutions to the evil. But we do know that human self-serving is at the root, and the solution is moving beyond selfishness to care for one another; to live more compassionately.

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