February 27, 2005
Authority Dilemmas
Welcome
Good morning. Welcome to the Unitarian Universalist Church of Chattanooga and thank you for joining us in worship. My name is Carolyn Moore and I serve on the Board of Trustees. I have three reminders:
The emergency exit is over here to my right, child care is available downstairs in the nursery, and the arm chairs here in the sanctuary are for the use of those people who need a little support when standing.
After the service, please join us for coffee and fellowship. And after that, please join us for a special forum right here in the sanctuary.
In our Unitarian Universalist tradition, we believe that the truth is not imparted to only one person, that inspiration comes from many sources, the clergy and laity alike. And so each month we open our pulpit to speakers and other people whose message is important to hear. This morning, our service is led by long time member George Helton and his topic is the balance between ethics and authority. Our minister, Jeff Briere, is taking a break from his preaching duties this week and he is working with the children today. He’ll be back in the pulpit next week. To begin our service, Marcia chose a Duke Ellington piece, Come Sunday.
Duke Ellington: Come Sunday
Kindling the Chalice
I ask Mary Hunter to light our chalice. To accompany the lighting of the chalice, here are the words of Ralph Waldo Emerson, a Unitarian minister and essayist.
Finish each day and be done with it. You have done what you could. Some blunders and absurdities no doubt crept in; forget them as soon as you can. Tomorrow is a new day; begin it well and serenely and with too high a spirit to be encumbered with your old nonsense.
Let’s stand now and blend our voices in Hymn 121, We’ll Build A Land.
[After the last notes die out] I invite the young and the young at heart to come foreward for a story about Mr. Peabody’s Apples.
In the early 60's, Karen Armstrong entered a convent at a very young age and left it after seven years. Today she enjoys a world–wide reputation as a theologian and expert in Islam. This is taken from her autobiography, The Spiral Staircase:
In the course of my studies, I have discovered that the religious quest is not about discovering “the truth” or “the meaning of life” but about living as intensely as possible in the here and now. The idea is not to latch on to some superhuman personality or to ‘get to heaven’ but to discover how to be fully human—hence the images of the perfect or enlightened man, or the deified human being. Archetypal figures such as Muhammad, the Buddha, and Jesus become icons of fulfilled humanity. God or Nirvana is not an optional extra, tacked on to our human nature. Men and women have a potential for the divine, and are not complete unless they realize it within themselves.
Candles of Community
We’ll pause in our worship service for a few moments now to honor those moments that make us and keep us human. Those times we’ll always remember—of supreme joy and abject sorrow. Sharing stories and our joys and sorrows is one way we connect to other people and to life. If you’d like to share something with us, please light a candle and tell us your name and what’s on your mind.
The offering is a sacrament of the free church. It is supported by the voluntary generosity of all who join with us. The offering will now be given and received in grateful appreciation of our shaped hopes and values. The Louis Wilhoit Memorial Food Bank Gladly accepts your donations of non-perishable food and household items. The collection basket for that is by the front door.
Andre Previn: Why Are We Afraid?
Reading: The Essence of Religious Life [George]
Another passage from The Spiral Staircase:
The myth of the hero shows that it is psychologically damaging to live in the wasteland. If you slavishly follow someone else’s ideas, you will be impoverished and impaired...The heroes of myth and religion do not preach unbridled individualism, of course. There were, as I would discover, checks and restraints.
And here they are:
All the world faiths put suffering at the top of their agenda because it is an inescapable fact of human life, and unless you see things as they really are, you cannot live correctly. But even more important, if we deny our own pain, it is all too easy to dismiss the suffering of others. Every single one of the major traditions—Confucianism, Buddhism, and Hinduism, as well as the monotheisms—teaches a spirituality of empathy, by means of which you relate your own suffering to that of others. Hyam had quoted Hillel’s Golden Rule, which tells you to look into your own heart, find out what distresses you, and then refrain from inflicting similar pain on other people. That, Hillel had insisted, was the Torah, and everything else was commentary. This, I was to discover, was the essence of the religious life.
Those words are from The Spiral Staircase, by Karen Armstrong.
This morning, I’ll be talking about professional or occupational ethics. I’m going to focus on a particular kind of ethical dilemma that sometimes occurs in the workplace. This kind of dilemma is called an authority dilemma and it occurs when someone above you in the organization directs you to do something illegal, unethical, just plain wrong, or all of the above. It’s called an authority dilemma because it pits the bureaucratic authority behind your supervisor’s command against the authority that law, ethics, and/or conscience holds for you.
My colleagues at UTC and I have done some research and writing about authority dilemmas and I’ll be discussing that research. But I also want to explore how one’s personal theology provides both foundation and context for dealing with such dilemmas.
So, I’ll begin with some words from an author I admire very much and whose personal theology makes a lot of sense to me. In her autobiography, The Spiral Staircase, Karen Armstrong traces her life and the evolution of her personal theology. Her journey took her from several years of training to become a nun, to leaving her order before taking final vows, to an almost completed doctorate in literature form Oxford, and, finally, to a career as an author of more than 10 books on religion. One of her better known books is A History of God: The 4000 Year Quest of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. One reviewer described her as “contemporary religion’s foremost public intellectual.”
In The Spiral Staircase, Armstrong states that she came to a conclusion that may be offensive, perhaps to many, but is for her, heartfelt. She says,
In most religious traditions, faith was not about belief but about practice. Religion is not about accepting twenty impossible propositions before breakfast, but about doing things that change you. It is a moral aesthetic, an ethical alchemy. If you behave in a certain way, you will be transformed. The myths and laws of religion are not true because they conform to some metaphysical, scientific, or historical reality but because they are life enhancing. They tell you how human nature functions, but you will not discover their truth unless your apply these myths and doctrine to your own life and put them into practice. The myths of the hero are not meant to give us historical information about Prometheus or Achilles or, for that matter, Jesus or the Buddha. Their purpose is to compel us to act in such a way that we bring out our own heroic potential.
I have only read The Spiral Staircase within the past six months. But Karen Armstrong helped me recognize and make more coherent what I have believed for many years. We all have the potential to become our best selves and to help others become their best selves. We also have the potential to become less than our best selves and to keep others from becoming their best selves. It can go either way and there are forces within us and in our environments that push development in both positive and negative directions. We need, to the best of our abilities, to align ourselves with the positive forces.
I also agree with Armstrong that trying to align ourselves with the positive forces is more important than wrestling with questions such as the divinity of Jesus or the possibility of an existence after death. It is not that I am uninterested in such questions but I believe that, for me, they represent mysteries that I won’t be able to resolve through intellect or intuition or faith. I know that others are confident in their beliefs on these questions and I respect their beliefs and their confidence in them. But it’s not where I am at this moment in my life.
Now, to authority dilemmas. I’ve faced them in my work as a school psychologist and school administrator and I suspect that some of you have faced them in your work. Once, in Texas, my immediate supervisor, an assistant superintendent, stopped by my office at quitting time. He asked me to stay a few minutes, saying that he had a question for me. The question went something like this: “Helton, I’ve been trying to figure out who you are. Are you some kind of closet, do-gooder liberal, or the hard-nosed system administrator we pay you to be?” He didn’t smile as he asked the question.
I think what he wanted to know was whether my first loyalty was to the organization and its administration. I understood his concern. He saw himself as working hard to bring positive changes to the school system. He and the other assistant superintendents and the superintendent had been under some fire from elements in the community. He believed that if those elements gained control, they would take the system backward, in a negative direction. He believed that the current administration remaining in control was essential to the welfare of the system he had spent his life serving. He wanted to know if I was on board, if he could count on me.
I wanted him to be able to count on me. I knew that he worked very hard, that his beliefs were sincerely held. I also knew that the organization rewarded those it viewed as loyal and he had given me notice that my loyalty was in question. But I also sensed that a decision to give my first loyalty to the organization and its administration was potentially dangerous and should probably be avoided. Why?
There were several reasons. This was the era of Watergate. We had seen a president and members of his staff put the welfare of an administration above the law and democratic processes. So, I believed that one should place loyalty to certain values above loyalty to individuals or groups.
I was also aware of the research on the “risky shift” phenomenon. This occurs when a group of like-minded people confers only among themselves and does not seek out divergent opinions. Group forces can lead closed groups to conclusions that are more extreme than those held by any individual members of the group.
In addition, I knew that the codes of ethics of my professional associations required us to be individually responsible for our conduct. These codes did not (and still do not) excuse us from ethical misconduct because an organizational superior ordered us to do something. The codes, instead, required that we explain the ethical conflict to our boss and seek a resolution of the dilemma that avoided misconduct.
But there was something else keeping me from promising him my first loyalty. It was a sense that, as Armstrong says, your behavior transforms you and it transforms others. It can move you and them toward your best selves or toward your worst selves. I wanted to move toward my best self, a self I could be proud of. I was afraid that if I stepped in the other direction, the “slippery slope” would overtake me. I was also concerned that my colleagues could be taken over by their own “slippery slope” as well. I knew from my own experience that the desire for bureaucratic “victory” can become more compelling than the desire to do the right thing.
So, I told the assistant superintendent, my boss, something like this: “I see my job as trying to serve the mission of the school system to provide its students with a good education and legal and ethical treatment. I think I can do that job best by telling you the truth as I see it and complying with legal requirements and the ethics of my profession. I will tell you whenever I can’t go along with something and why and I’ll try to come up with a suggestion that satisfies both our needs.
“But I also think my stance actually shows a lot of loyalty to you and my colleagues. I may say things sometimes that cause you to see something from a different perspective or help you stay out of trouble. I believe that you’ll make the best decisions when you are able to hear different points of view. You can trust me not to tell you something just because I know you want to hear it. And I won’t go behind your back on anything.”
He paused and nodded to let me know he had understood what I had said. And then he left. And, he seemed satisfied with my answer, sort of. But it also seemed to nag at him because he asked me the same question in different ways several times over the last year that I worked in that system. I do believe that he understood what I told him but somehow, down deep, felt that loyalty to the group should come first, that my version of loyalty was somehow slippery and not really to be trusted.
This episode led to my interest in studying authority dilemmas and I have had the good fortune to pursue this interest with some able colleagues. Barbara Ray and Mike Biderman and I have collaborated on the research I’m about to describe.
We conducted a national survey of school psychologists and special education teachers, asking them to predict how they and their colleagues would react to four different authority dilemmas. We took 3 of the 4 dilemmas from experiences our students and graduates had told us about. Here are some of our findings:
A majority of the school psychologists and special education teachers we surveyed predicted that if, they were faced with these dilemmas, they would respond according to their ethical codes rather than acquiesce to administrative pressures to practice unethically. Some, however, who predicted that they would behave unethically said that they would do so to protect themselves from the possibility of administrative retaliation. Others who predicted that they would respond unethically to the dilemmas did not seem to realize that following orders would result in unethical conduct. They were unaware that the situation presented an ethical dilemma.
The nature of the situation had an impact on their predictions of their own behavior. Over 90% predicted that they would respond ethically to 3 of the 4 dilemmas. However, only about 60% predicted that they would respond ethically to the fourth dilemma. Why the difference? This fourth dilemma, we think, represented less serious danger to student welfare than the other dilemmas and, hence, had less “moral intensity.” Doing the ethical thing in this dilemma probably seemed less important and less worth the trouble of bucking the system. In other words, our respondents seemed to believe in picking important battles rather than fighting all the potential battles out there.
Coworkers also seemed to influence whether our respondents predicted ethical or unethical responses to these authority dilemmas. Those who reported that they worked with people who valued independent decision making were more likely to predict that they would respond ethically than those who reported that their coworkers favored deference to administrators. In other words, it seems easier to stand up when someone is willing to stand beside you.
Our respondents also believed that they and others in their particular occupational groups were more likely to respond ethically to these dilemmas than would other staff in the schools. In this, they responded like other groups who participate in surveys like this one. It seems that most of us, regardless of who we are or what groups we belong to, believe that we and the others in our group are more ethical than average. Most of us believe that, ethically, we (but not they) live in Lake Woebegone.
You may think at this point that predicting how you’ll behave in a difficult situation is a lot different than actually responding to it, that our predictions don’t always match our actual behavior. And you’re right. A survey like this one can’t capture all the elements in an actual situation that may sway us this way or that. But predictions of behavior do reveal our beliefs about our ethical obligations. And our beliefs about our ethical obligations are important in determining our actual responses.
We were encouraged by the results of our survey. It seemed that these school psychologists and special education teachers believed that the requirements of their ethical codes represented serious ethical obligations for their work. In addition, many of them suggested creative and effective ways of dealing with these 4 authority dilemmas.
The strategies they suggested usually involved actions that met the needs of both students and the school system. Their strategies recognized that both the individuals and the systems they’re in have legitimate needs. These strategies most often involved taking steps to prevent ethical dilemmas from occurring in the first place, educating others involved in the dilemmas about relevant legal and ethical requirements, involving others not currently involved in the dilemmas in problem solution, and combining these strategies in various ways.
Our respondents seemed to have the motivation as well as the skills to practice what Karen Armstrong has called a “spirituality of empathy.” I believe that we need to cultivate this “spirituality of empathy” in ourselves and in others. As Armstrong says, “This habit of empathy had to become a regular part of my life, and it had to find practical expression. It could easily degenerate into self-indulgence, and would not have changed me had I not acted upon it.”
Please stand now and join me in singing Hymn 123, Spirit of Life.
Announcements
Please check out the insert in your program. It contains a lot of information about the life of the church.
By the end of the week you will have received your newsletter and in it is a description of next week’s service. This is the service that was cancelled on January 30th. It’s a special service and one in which you have a part. We don’t have the time now to go into it, but briefly, we ask you to bring a small lightweight item which symbolizes your participation in the life of the church. To find out more, please read the newsletter or call the office or Jeff for more information.
Jeff will be out of town from Wednesday through Saturday. You may call the office for routine matters and Chris will find him. In an emergency, his cell phone number is printed in the newsletter.
In about 15 or 20 minutes, we’ll convene a special forum right here in the sanctuary to discuss the expectations we hold for each other and for our children in church. This will be an important discussion for the growth of this church. Please grab a cup of coffee and re–assemble here in 15 minutes.
Please send announcements to the office by Thursday for inclusion in the Sunday service.
This passage is from the Book of Deuteronomy:
“I call heaven and earth to witness today that I have set before you life and death, blessings and curses. Choose life so that you and your descendants may live.”
Jules Massenet: Elegie
Link to this Service
February 20, 2005
Islam in 20 Minutes
Welcome
Good morning. Welcome to the Unitarian Universalist Church of Chattanooga and thank you for joining us in worship. My name is Margaret Hudson and I serve on the Board of Trustees. I have only three announcements: The emergency exit is over here to my right; if you need it, child care is available downstairs in the nursery and the arm chairs here in the sanctuary are reserved for people who need a little support when standing. After the service, please stick around for coffee and fellowship.
Our service this morning will find some threads which connect Unitarian Universalism with Islam. Evelyn chose some music with middle eastern motifs or allusions. She begins our service with a composition of Maxwell Eckstein, a pianist who is well– known as an editor of classical piano compositions.
MAXWELL ECKSTEIN: Mystic Cave
Kindling the Chalice
Responsive Reading 609 & Hymn 180
Mosleh al-Din Saadi Shirazi or Saadi was born in Persia in the late 12th century and began life as a student of the Koran, which he later exchanged for Sufism. During his life he traveled widely and settled in Shiraz around 1256. The legend is that Saadi traveled for some thirty years, and it was his experiences and his gift of acute observation that made him such a wonderful storyteller.
Saadi displays great wisdom in all his works with an understanding of the human mind, and many of his lines and sayings have been frequently quoted.
Please read responsively with me a short passage by Saadi. It’s number 609 in your hymnal. Your lines are in regular type, mine in italic.
To worship God is nothing other than to serve the people.
It does not need rosaries, prayer carpets, or robes.
All peoples are members of the same body, created from one essence.
If fate brings suffering to one member
The others cannot stay at rest.
If you speak with devout Muslims, something you’ll hear often is a short, almost parenthetical, blessing of Allah. The Arabic word is Allhamdulillah and loosely translated, it means Alleluia, or more colloquially, Praise the Lord. And that’s the name of this hymn. Please join in when you know the melody.
Children's story
How many of you like candles? I like candles, too. In fact, almost everyone likes candles. Do you like the smell of this candle?
Candles are really nice, but we all know that we must be very careful with candles because they can be a real fire hazard and cause things to catch on fire that we don’t want burned. You should never light candles alone, but only when adults are around to help you.
I have learned that if I put the lid on this candle, the flame goes out in just a few seconds. Watch. What do you suppose causes the flame to go out when we put the lid on? That’s right - to burn, fire needs oxygen to live, just as you and I need oxygen to live. As soon as all the oxygen is burned up inside the jar, the flame goes out.
But you know, this candle has a lot to teach us. Inside every one of you, there is light or a flame that is wanting to burn. Some have called it a “Divine Spark” that we were born with. And the great teacher Jesus said, “You are the light of the world; let your light shine.” How would you let your light shine?
But if we try to cover up the flame or light that is within us, what will happen? It won’t burn or shine. At times, others may even think that the flame within us has gone out, just as this candle went out a few minutes ago. How would you hide your light?
But the difference between children and candles is that the Divine Spark is always in there and never completely goes out. It is up to us to uncover the light within us and let it shine.
WRIGHT & FORREST: Medley from Kismet
Poetry from Hafiz
One way to understand another culture is through its literature, and so I bring to you some poetry from Persia. Shams-ud-din Muhammad Hafiz lived from about 1320 to 1389 and he is the most beloved poet of Persia and is considered to be one of history’s greatest lyrical geniuses. Emerson once remarked that “Hafiz is a poet for poets,” and Goethe wrote that “Hafiz has no peer.” The translator of these poems is Daniel Ladinsky and in the introduction, he quotes Hafiz, “A poet is someone who can pour light into a cup then raise it to nourish your parched holy mouth.”
You have not danced so badly, my dear,
trying to hold hands with the Beautiful One.
You have waltzed with great style,
my sweet, crushed angel,
to have ever neared God’s heart at all.
Our Partner is notoriously difficult to follow,
and even His best musicians are not always easy to hear.
So what if the music has stopped for a while.
So what if the price of admission to the Divine
is out of reach tonight.
So what, my sweetheart,
if you lack the ante to gamble for real love.
The mind and the body are famous for holding the heart ransom, but I know the Beloved’s eternal habits.
Have patience, for He will not be able
to resist your longings and charms for long.
You have not danced so badly, my dear,
trying to kiss the Magnificent One.
You have actually waltzed with tremendous style,
my sweet, O, my sweet, crushed angel.
A few years ago, Donald Neale Walsch wrote a popular book called Conversations with God, in which he recorded a long dialogue he had with the Almighty. At one point, Walsch queried God and asked him why he created human beings and the universe. God replied that he was incomplete with only himself, so he had to create us. He said the same thing to Hafiz.
My Beloved said, “My name is not complete without yours.”
I thought: How could a human’s worth ever be such?
And God, knowing all our thoughts—
and all our thoughts are innocent steps on the path—
then addressed my heart,
God revealed a sublime truth to the world, when He sang,
“I am made whole by your life.
Each soul—each soul—completes me.”
This last poem underscores the connection all people have.
If God invited you to a party and said,
“Everyone at the ball tonight is my special guest.”
How would you treat them when they arrived?
Indeed, indeed!
And I know that there is no one in this world
who is not standing upon His jeweled dance floor.
Islam in 20 Minutes
Alahu akbar. Say it now: Alahu akbar. Alahu akbar. Alahu akbar. God is magnificent.
La’il aha ill’Allah. Muhammadun rasul Allah. There is no god but God and Muhammed is his messenger. Despite the title of this sermon, I don’t need 20 minutes to take a look at the beliefs of Islam. In speaking those Arabic words, it only takes 20 seconds, because those words sum up everything about Islam. There is no god but God and Muhammed is his messenger.
Those words form the shahada, the profession and testimony of faith. They are repeated in Arabic by Muslims around the world and several times a day. La’il aha ill’Allah. Muhammadun rasul Allah. There is no god but God and Muhammed is his messenger.
Today’s service, Islam in 20 Minutes, is another in a series which examine various beliefs. In October I did Christianity in 20 Minutes and next month I will give Buddhism the 20 minute workout and Judaism in May. These services are not an exhaustive examination but more like an aperitif. Just as we have a Taste of Chattanooga, you might think of these sermons as a Taste of World Religions.
I don’t pretend to be an expert in world religions. In preparing the services, I look for connections, something about us and them that we have in common, some way around the concept of us and them. Suppose you went to a Taste of Madagascar, and you saw pork ribs cooked over a wood fire and slathered in a piquant sauce of peppers and seasonings. You’d think, “Barbeque!” and you’d try the ribs believing that this must be something the Madagascarites and Americans have in common. Well, at this Taste of World Religions, I’m looking for barbeque.
The title, Islam in 20 Minutes, is intentionally provocative. It reminds us, and especially me, that no religion can be explored nor explained in 20 minutes. However, that is about how much time I have in a worship service, although Kate keeps telling me I don’t have to use all 20 minutes.
One thing Muslims and Christians have in common is the belief in an eternal spiritual element to human beings. A soul. As I said in October, this is an article of faith, not knowledge. No one can prove conclusively that human beings are composed of a body and a spirit.
And yet we act that way. We talk about the hereafter. We talk about heaven and hell. We are concerned about our actions in this life. We have religions—and Islam is one of them—which establish guidelines for behavior on earth that insure happiness for our souls after death.
Since September 2001, when the Western world took a stronger interest in Islam, it has become more widely known that Judaism and Christianity are closely related to Islam. The three religions first appeared within 800 miles of one another in the ancient near eastern region that today is Arabia, Jordan, Israel, Lebanon, Syria and Egypt.
All three religions respect the same creator God. The Christian God, Yahweh and Allah are all names for the same transcendent divinity. Actually, another word for the creator God in ancient Hebrew is El and this is linguistically related in the Semitic family of languages to Allah.
The early stories of all three religions coincide in what we call the book of Genesis in the Hebrew Scriptures. With the story of Abraham, however, the Muslims claim descent from Ishmael, who was expelled from his tribe after his step–mother Sarah gave birth to Isaac. Jews claim descent from Isaac.
Muslims also accept the Hebrew Scriptures and the New Testament as divine revelations. But they regard the Qur’an as authoritative and superlative and the final word of God. This makes the others not obsolete, but lesser in importance than the Qur’an.
The Qur’an is not this book I have here in my hand. This is The Meaning of the Holy Qur’an. I make this distinction because we must understand the importance of Arabic in Islam. Muslims believe that the word of God was transmitted through the Angel Gabriel to Muhammed, and although Muhammed was illiterate, he and a couple of friends managed to write down God’s words. In Arabic. Muslims believe that Arabic is the language God used to speak to humans and translations of the Qur’an into other languages are neither inspired nor authoritative.
There is also an element of beauty and grace about the language of the Qur’an that is impossible to translate. And it is related to the maturation of the Arabic language, which was in a sort of “golden age” when the Qur’an was written. The Qur’an is regarded as the height of eloquence and beauty in the Arabic written word.
The nearest equivalent experience I can imagine would be translating Shakespeare into an obscure Chinese dialect. It can be done, but the reader with a good command of English, European history and western culture who reads Shakespeare in English will appreciate the allusions, allegory and nuance of the original, which will be lost in translation. Now apply this principle to a religious document and what is lost, Muslims say, is just as important as the surviving content. What is lost is the word of God, so translations are not the Qur’an. So in a very real sense, we cannot appreciate the Qur’an as Muslims do.
Unitarian Universalists, who usually draw inspiration from several sources, may have a hard time with the idea that the Qur’an is the ultimate authority in civil, religious and cultural matters, and yet that’s exactly what Muslims believe. Huston Smith is widely regarded as the most accessible contemporary authority on the history of world religions. About the Qur’an he says,
It is impossible to over–emphasize the central position of the Qur’an in Islamic life. With large portions memorized in childhood, it regulates every decision and interprets every event. It is a memorandum for the faithful, a reminder for daily doings and a respository of revealed truth. It is a manual of definitions and guarantees and at the same time, a road map for the will. Finally it is a collection of maxims to meditate on in private, deepening one’s sense of the divine glory.
Arabic words often have several shades of meanings, more so than in English. The word Islam is no exception—it actually has two meanings, one of which is rooted in the notion of peace, or more exactly, the peacefulness that comes with surrendering oneself to the ultimate authority, God. And surrender is the other meaning of Islam. Not the surrender you give to your conqueror, but the surrender you freely offer in the face of the awe–inspiring glory and power of God. This is not the repugnance and dread you feel upon surrendering to an election result that is not in your favor, but the only realistic emotion you can have in the majesty of God. We should note that references to God’s mercy number 192 in the Qur’an and to his wrath only 17. Allah is the Consoler, the most Compassionate.
Muslims will often say that to be a slave to Allah is to be freed from other more degrading forms of slavery, such as greed or ambition. In this regard, I see a connection to Buddhism, which advocates for relinquishing one’s earthly desires. In both cases, the result is a surrender of ego, a surrender of arrogance and ambition.
Quoting Huston Smith again, he says, that Muslims believe that God revealed to Abraham the great truth of Himself, that only one God exists; to Moses he gave the Ten Commandments and to Jesus, the Golden Rule. How to put into practice the Golden Rule is what Islam provides. And it does so, spelling out in explicit directives, beginning with the opening lines of the Qur’an, “Guide us in the straight path.”
That straight path is marked by five signposts, often called the Five Pillars of Islam. The first is the shahada, which I recited at the beginning of my sermon. The shahada is the profession of faith and testimony that “There is no god but God and Muhammed is his Messenger.” You may hear Muslims pronounce the shahada at any crisis, be it a difficult childbirth, an auto accident or a tsunami. The shahada is the ultimate answer to all questions.
The second signpost on the straight path is salat or prayer. Muslims are enjoined to pray five times a day. Muslims tell the story that Allah had originally set the number at fifty times a day, but when Moses heard about that, he pronounced it ridiculous and prodded Muhammed to negotiate with God to reduce the number to five. And God said, “OK. Praying five times a day is plenty.” Thinking God was in a good mood, Moses wanted to press their luck, and reduce it to once a day, but Muhammed stood pat at five. So Muslims pray upon arising, at noon, at mid–afternoon, at sunset and before retiring.
The third signpost on the straight path is zakat, or charity. Muslims are to donate 2½ percent of their net worth to people in immediate need: the poor, strangers, travelers, debtors and the overwhelmed peoples of the world.
The fourth signpost on the straight path is sawm, the observance of the holy month of Ramadan. During that month—which moves around the calendar because it follows the lunar cycle—during that month, the able–bodied Muslim who is not involved in a crisis like war or on an unavoidable journey, abstains from food, drink, smoke and sex from sunrise to sunset. From this Muslims learn discipline, how to focus their thoughts and they learn compassion, for only the hungry know how the hungry feel.
The last signpost on the straight path is hajj or pilgrimage. Every able–bodied Muslim, if he or she can afford it, is obliged to make a pilgrimage to Mecca at least once in a lifetime. Several religious rituals are re-enacted during the hajj, and since it happens only once each year, a stunning amount of people will descend on Mecca during a few days in the first month of the year. This year the days of Hajj were January 18th through the 20th and as many as three million Muslims attended.
Which is a powerful thing. Think of Woodstock, where about a quarter million folks had a good time. Now multiply that by 12 and you’ll have an idea of the power generated by so many people gathering for a religious ritual at one time in one place. Islam brings together people of many countries and cultures in a common religious setting. And in a small way, that’s a possibility for Unitarian Universalists. I say possibility, because all too often, Unitarian Universalists end up fraternizing with more of their own kind.
You may have concluded by now that Islam is a way of life, encompassing more than other religions, and you’d be correct. There is very little left to chance by the Qur’an and Islamic law. The law, called Shari’a, is enormous in scope, but I will boil it down to four areas:
Economics. Islam does not object to the profit motive, so long as wealth continues to circulate in society. The Qur’an put into place reforms that break up clots of wealth: Competition must be balanced with fair play, charity must be observed and all children– even daughters–stand to inherit their parent’s estate. The taking of interest is also forbidden, although modern Muslims have found ways around this stricture.
The status of women. Fairly or not, Islam has been criticized for the degradation of women. To be sure, Islam introduced many reforms: female infanticide was prohibited, the education of women was encouraged and inheritance extended to daughters. Islam sanctified marriage by making it the only appropriate place for sexual activity and it gave women the right to consent or demur betrothal to a man. Islam counsels divorce only as a last resort. As for the excesses of clothing and the veil, the exclusion from society, commerce and education, the way women are treated is a local custom. Men intent on establishing a repressive, backwards– looking culture can easily pervert the teachings of the Qur’an to bolster their enterprise.
Race Relations. Islam stresses racial equality and has achieved a remarkable degree of interracial co–existence. I say good for the Muslims because we have much to learn in this area.
Jihad. We’ve heard this word enough, I suppose. Jihad, which means struggle—and is most often linked with the interior struggle against personal demons—the term jihad has been hijacked by some very angry Muslims for wicked purposes. This is a social issue, not a religious one. It’s not unlike skinheads and Ku Kluxers absconding with some elements of Christianity for odious activities. Or the Crusaders. Religion can and will be perverted for political goals, as we can see in this country right now.
The Qur’an defines a holy war nearly the same as a Just War, a concept that is familiar to westerners since the time of Aquinas. It ought to be defensive or to right a terrible wrong. Unfortunately, the latter proscription—to right a terrible wrong—is open to interpretation and we don’t often see the horror in warmongering until hundreds of years later.
And contrary to stereotypical images of ferocious Muslims on horseback waving swords, the second book of the Qur’an, the 256th verse states very clearly, “Let there be no compulsion in religion.” That is, religion depends on faith and will, and these would be meaningless if induced by force. Huston Smith concludes that “Islam’s record on the use of force is no better and no worse than that of Christianity’s.”
You know, there is much to admire in Islam. The daily prayer, which I think would benefit everyone in this room. The mandatory donations to charity, which would benefit our community. The egalitarian nature of the faithful. The absolute and unyielding insistence that God is a singular unity and not a trinity. The fact that the clergy is held in high regard.
But ultimately, some of what I tasted in my 20 minutes with Islam is unpalatable. What is hardest for me to digest is the absolute and unyielding insistence that the Qur’an is God’s final word for human beings. I believe revelation is constantly unfolding, that it’s not sealed up and finished. I believe that everyday God speaks to humans. I know God. And I know he is one talkative fella. I mean if you were God, and you could command the universe as your audience, would you stop speaking?
What God said to Muhammed and Moses and Jesus he said many years ago. The world was different then. What he said was appropriate to the time and the place. And some of what he said still stands, in my opinion. But the world is growing, changing and evolving. It’s not static and no static set of guidelines can be all–encompassing.
In this regard, Islam is no different from conservative Christian sects, which popularized the bumper sticker, “God said it. I believe it. And that settles it.” As a rule, this Unitarian Universalist minister likes to keep his holy book open to the last page, ready to be annotated, edited, appended and revised when appropriate.
I know that critics will say I am no different than a “cafeteria Catholic,” taking from the table only what I like to eat. Well, I prefer to think that I take only what I can swallow. And besides, what’s wrong with a cafeteria?
As a child, I didn’t know what was nutritious from what was delicious. My grandmother suggested I try the kale and peas and spinach, and I grew to like them. Never did like squash, though.
And with religions and spirituality, it’s not all that different. As an adult, I know what spiritual nourishment I need. I can go to a cafeteria and I don’t need a chef to prepare a complete spiritual meal for me. I can get along without the squash just fine.
Islam, like Judaism and Christianity, arose in a tribal society in a time of chaos and strife. The orderliness of these religions brought some measure of order to society and provided spiritual structure for the people. Each of these religions grew initially within an oppressed group of people who lived in a time of great poverty and great wealth. So I am not surprised that in the face of enslavement by the Egyptians, subjugation by the Romans and in a time of constant tribal warfare, a religion arose with an almighty monotheistic God who would champion the cause of the people.
Well, that time has passed, although some of the conditions have not. Warfare and chaos and strife are still with us and people still accumulate great wealth and masses of people are still impoverished. So these religions still speak to those conditions and eloquently.
But a closed book containing God’s words of 1400 years past cannot address all the puzzling conditions of modern life. What the Qur’an tells us about the role of women argues with our understanding of human nature. What the Qur’an tells us about lending money at interest argues with our understanding of international economics. And in its uncompromising exclusive nature, Islam itself argues with our understanding of a pluralistic world, a world ever–evolving and multi–dimensional.
So at this Taste of World Religions, I found some barbeque. It wasn’t as good as Famous Dave’s, but it was OK. I just wish they had cole slaw.
Please take a look at the insert in your program. It contains valuable information about the life of the church.
The annual canvass is coming a bit earlier this spring than in previous years, and because Easter is early this year. The canvass is the one time in the church year when we ask ourselves and each other how we’ll support the church in the following year. Instead of one person leading the canvass committee, Fred Tregaskis, Bill Berry, Carolyn Moore and Jeff Briere are acting a co-chairs. They are asking for volunteers to help with the various aspects of this vital campaign. If you can help, please see one of them.
I would like to invite the newer members and friends of this church to sign up for Circle Dinners on March 5th. This is an excellent way to meet people and get to know them better in a casual situation away from the church. And it’s good eating, too. All the dinners happen the evening of March 5th and the sign–up roster is posted on the kitchen door to the deck.
And two oversights need correction: the program thanks Steve Hollingsworth for playing piano today, and of course, we meant to thank Evelyn Wood; and we neglected to identify our two poetry readers, Mary Hunter and Linda Pehlman.
Please remember to send announcements to the church office by Thursday for inclusion in the Sunday service.
Postlude
SCOTT: Twilight in Turkey
Link to this Service
February 13, 2005
Common Clay Royals
Welcome
Good morning. Welcome to the Unitarian Universalist Church of Chattanooga and thank you for joining us in worship. My name is Sonja Helmholtz and I serve on the Board of Trustees. I have only three announcements: The emergency exit is over here to my right; if you need it, child care is avail-able downstairs in the nursery and the arm chairs here in the sanctuary are reserved for people who need a little support when standing. After the service, please stick around for coffee and fellowship.
This morning our service concerns love, and the music that Linda has chosen reflects the many facets of love. She begins with a piece that speaks to the constancy of love—that love is with us come rain or come shine.
MERCER & ARLEN: Come Rain or Come Shine
Kindling the Chalice
MINISTER. To accompany the lighting of our chalice, I bring these words of Robert Frost, The Master Speed.
But you have speed far greater. You can climb
Back up a stream of radiance to the sky,
And back through history up the stream of time.
And you were given this swiftness, not for haste
Nor chiefly that you may go where you will,
But in the rush of everything to waste,
That you may have the power of standing still
Off any still or moving thing you say.
Two such as you with such a master speed
Cannot be parted nor be swept away
From one another once you are agreed
That life is only life forevermore
Together wing to wing and oar to oar.
Hymn 6
Just As Long As I Have Breath
Love You Forever
MINISTER. A mother held her new baby and very slowly rocked him back and forth, back and forth, back and forth. And while she held him, she sang:
I’ll like you for always,
As long as I’m living
my baby you’ll be.
MINISTER. The baby grew. He grew and he grew and he grew. He grew until he was two years old, and he ran all around the house. He pulled all the books off the shelves. He pulled all the food out of the refrigerator and he took his mother’s watch and flushed it down the toilet. Sometimes his mother would say, “This kid is driving me crazy.”
But at night time, when her son was quiet, she opened the door to his room, crawled across the floor, looked up over the side of his bed; and if he was really asleep she picked him up and rocked him back and forth, back and forth, back and forth. While she rocked him she sang:
I’ll like you for always,
As long as I’m living
my baby you’ll be.
MINISTER. The little boy grew. He grew and he grew and he grew. He grew until he was nine years old. And he never wanted to come in for dinner, he never wanted to take a bath, and when grandma visited he always said bad words. Sometimes his mother wanted to give him to the zoo!
But at night time, when he was asleep, his mother quietly opened the door to his room, crawled across the floor and looked up over the side of the bed. If he was really asleep, she picked him up and rocked him back and forth, back and forth, back and forth. And while she rocked him she sang:
I’ll like you for always,
As long as I’m living
my baby you’ll be.
MINISTER. The boy grew. He grew and he grew and he grew. He grew until he was a teenager. He had strange friends and he wore strange clothes and he listened to strange music. Sometimes the mother felt like she was in a zoo!
But at night time, when he was asleep, the mother opened the door to his room, crawled across the floor and looked up over the side of the bed. If he was really asleep she picked up that great big boy and rocked him back and forth, back and forth, back and forth. While she rocked him she sang:
I’ll like you for always,
As long as I’m living
my baby you’ll be.
MINISTER. That teenager grew. He grew and he grew and he grew. He grew until he was a grown up man. He left home and got a house across town. But sometimes on dark nights the mother got into her car and drove across town.
If all the lights in her son’s house were out, she opened his bedroom window, crawled across the floor, and looked up over the side of his bed. If that great big man was really asleep she picked him up and rocked him back and forth, back and forth, back and forth. And while she rocked him she sang:
I’ll like you for always,
As long as I’m living
my baby you’ll be.
MINISTER. Well, that mother, she got older. She got older and older and older. One day her son came to visit her. When he came in the door she sang:
I’ll like you for always...
MINISTER. But she couldn’t finish because she was too old and sick.
The son went to his mother. He picked her up and rocked her back and forth, back and forth, back and forth. And he sang this song:
I’ll like you for always,
As long as I’m living
my Mother you’ll be.
MINISTER. When he got home that night, the son walked upstairs and stood very still for a long time at the top of the stairs. Then he went into the room where his very new baby daughter was sleeping. He picked her up in his arms and very slowly rocked her back and forth, back and forth, back and forth. And while he rocked her he sang:
I’ll like you for always,
As long as I’m living
my baby you’ll be.
MINISTER. One of the most attractive aspects of love is it constancy. We derive great comfort and security from knowing that our lover or the ones we love will be around for the foreseeable future. We use words like forever, always, steadfast and true.
In a small, but important way, we define ourselves by those we love or those who love us. “I am Kate’s husband,” I say. She’s my wife. We are who we are by virtue of whom we love.
And so if I stopped thinking about myself as Kate’s husband, I’d have to re-identify myself. I’d have to re-imagine myself, and that is a hefty task, one which I don’t want to undertake. One which I cannot imagine. So it’s not surprising that the constancy we feel in loving reinforces our sense of who we are, underscores our identity. And that’s something we want to continue.
This story is about that constancy, about that devotion lovers have to each other and how that supports their identity.
AMY. Ten years ago, I invited my mother for a visit.
She loved to travel, but my 83-year-old father would no longer travel anywhere from their California home. So she declined kindly, saying, “No, he would never leave me.”
A few months later my mother was devastated by a severe stroke, leaving her paralyzed, unable to speak, not responsive to our questions. But she was usually aware of my sister and me and most especially of my Dad. She now smiles at us when we arrive and sometimes at our little jokes and family stories.
But she is unable to care for herself in any way and has been in a nursing home ever since the stroke. And so has my father—not as a resident, but as a daily, without fail, visitor.
Most of every day he is there—feeding her, massaging her wasted muscles, reading to her, telling her of any news from friends and family, rubbing her back, singing little songs, showing her family photo albums—watching over her in every way he can and helping her be more comfortable.
My Dad is eighty-eight now and he has become a legend in the nursing home because of his devotion. He has been with my mother every day since that terrible evening—the night of their 59th wedding anniversary. I see her look at him and I know that she knows that he would never leave her—as she wasn’t willing to leave him either, even for a short family visit.
So. This is what my Dad has taught me about devotion and caring and compassion and love and duty—and he has never been one to give advice.
Only the example of his life.
True Love: Old Love & New Pajamas
MINISTER. Love will make you do nutty things, that’s for sure. What could it be that has such power over people that they would risk what they have for what they imagine might be? What could possibly be so wonderful that it would dispel common sense, induce recklessness and still be attractive?
Passion. That’s a polite word for sex.
It’s real easy to confuse love with passion. The symptoms are nearly the same. I am sure that someone before me has compared passion to hot pepper. Passion can sure heat up a loving relationship, but passion alone will not let the flavor of love come through. Like a good pot of chili beans, you have to cook a relationship for a long time over low heat to taste the flavor of love.
I’ll bet I’m the first to compare a love affair to a pot of chili beans.
I’ll bet you’ve confused love with passion, haven’t you? Learning the difference between them is not easy, because you lose your perspective in a passionate embrace. This story is about a man who lost his perspective and had to hit himself upside the head to regain it.
FRED. I have reached the age when I wonder what happened to people I knew when I was young.
There was one special girl I met at a USO dance when I was in the Navy. We had a one-week love affair I never forgot, but I was shipped out before I could tell her I was leaving and we lost touch. After the war, I married someone else, had kids, a career and all those things.
Well, I wanted to find out about this girl. So I hired a private investigator to look for her and he found her. She was living in Palm Springs and since I live in Los Angeles, I thought I would just call her up and go see her. She was really glad to hear from me, especially after I explained why I had disappeared.
So I went to see her. We had a wonderful time. And it felt like we were kids again. She was just as attractive to me as I was to her. She said that life was short and we ought to spend a weekend together like old times.
I went back home with fire in my heart. When I looked at myself in the mirror, I didn’t look so good. If I was going to spend a romantic weekend, I would need some decent covering. I’m an old man with old man’s habits, and I have always slept naked and slopped around the house in an old pair of house slippers and a bathrobe I’ve had forever. I couldn’t go to Palm Springs with these things.
I went down to the store and bought two pairs of nice pajamas, a silk bathrobe, and some new house slippers. I got some new underwear and socks, too. When I got home, I began unwrapping my new romantic wardrobe when my wife walked in. She was really pleased because she was tired of the way I dressed for bed. Now I had to lie to her about why I bought new pajamas and I had to wear them, too. I felt awful.
I have never worn pajamas and am not used to them. That night when I was trying to put them on, I got one leg in and the other leg stuck in the waistband and hopped around until I lost my balance. I fell backwards in the bathroom and hit my head, knocking myself cuckoo. I cut my head and got a concussion.
The next thing I knew I woke up in the hospital and I couldn’t remember why.
My wife brought me several new night shirts to replace my pajamas, but I couldn’t remember why I had pajamas in the first place. Slowly it all came back to me. I called my old girlfriend to explain, but she didn’t believe me. She said it was the last time I was ever going to stand her up and slammed down the phone.
It’s just as well. I’m getting used to sleeping in night shirts. Old love and new pajamas are dangerous.
PRESTON & FISHER: You Are So Beautiful
MINISTER. This congregation had planned to take up a second collection on January 30th for the relief efforts in southeast Asia after the tsunami. Nasty weather forced us to cancel services that day, so today we’d like to take that extra collection for tsunami relief. We’ll collect your generous morning offering and the tsunami donation at the same time, so please write tsunami on your check or use one of the envelopes that the ushers have, we’ll be able to keep it straight.
The Louis Wilhoit Memorial Food Bank gladly accepts your donations of non- perishable food and household items. The collection basket for that is by the front door.
MINISTER. There’s a huge spectrum on which human love can appear. The spectrum could loosely be described as running from the personal to the political. At the personal end is passionate erotic love, and there you’ll find Orpheus and Eurydice, Romeo and Juliet, Abelard & Eloise. At the political end of the spectrum is agape, brotherly love, love of humanity, and there you’ll find Mother Theresa, Albert Schweitzer and Mahatma Ghandi.
In between the extremes are more loves than I can imagine, at least one for every human being on earth, now or ever: Parental love, brotherly love, puppy love, young love, old love, secret love, missed love, tough love, lost love, free love, first love, last love, mad love, true love and muskrat love. We are lovelorn or lovesick. We are love birds, building a love nest, sending love letters, having a love child and drinking love potions. And so many more.
And with so many possibilities of love, it’s not surprising that the word love is used in so many ways. People talk of being in love with someone they’ve never met, with someone with whom they share an elevator, with the postman, with their teachers, the paperboy, with their jobs, with their houses,...well, the possibilities are endless.
One thing is for certain. Love is not the exclusive province of one man and one woman. There are as many varieties of love as are human beings.
PRISCILLA. I chose love over safety and societal acceptance. And it’s the best choice I’ve ever made.
After graduating from college, I went alone to South America to travel and work. Three months into my trip I met and fell in love with a Chilean named Carlos. We had a brief and exhilarating love affair, but I returned to Berkeley ready to do the traditional thing—find a nice Jewish boy, have a big wedding, make my mother happy.
And then I fell in love. I fell in love hard, crazily, head over heels, unable to do anything but think about how in love I was. We spent two glorious weeks lying in bed, talking and talking, connecting with our minds and our bodies. The only problem was that my new love was a woman.
When we met, Jill had been casually dating a man and like me had sworn off women.
My mind said, “Katie, this is not a nice Jewish boy. Why make life hard for yourself?”
But my heart said, “Katie, you’d be an absolute fool to let her go.”
Well, I listened to my heart. And, thanks to my heart, I’ve never been happier. Jill is my best friend and my lover. She is my co-conspirator, my confidante and the most natural person I know.
She taught me what it’s like to grow up working class. I taught her how to win at Scrabble. Collectively we’ve been through eight years of medical school, three years of residency, deaths in the family, times of extreme bliss and times of just trying to survive. Our relationship is ever evolving.
It’s not always been easy. The windshield of our car was painted with “We kill homosexuals and we’ll get you too.” I’ve struggled against my own homophobia. But it’s a struggle I’ve never regretted.
And in one month our first child will be born.
MINISTER. I’d like to start with a disclaimer. Occasionally in life there are those moments of unutterable fulfillment which cannot be completely explained by those symbols called words. Their meanings can only be articulated by the inaudible language of the heart. I repeat those words of the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. acknowledging that today I will add very little to the existing body of sermons, essays, proverbs and wisecracks about love. Today’s service will not answer your questions about love. If anything, it will provoke more questions, which is not a bad thing.
Anything I say about love has undoubtedly been said before and in better ways. And I will probably omit or ignore some aspect of love that you consider worthy of inclusion. That will give us something to talk about. The reason that I included some true love stories in the service is because they say things so much better than I can. And even though we hear the stories in words, what they say is communicated not with words, but in the inaudible language of the heart.
So with that disclaimer, what I’d like to do this morning is poke around just one aspect of love and see where it takes us. The title of my sermon comes from a lecture given in 1929 by Robert Ingersoll. He said, “Love is the magician, the enchanter that changes worthless things to joy, and makes right royal kings and queens of common clay. It is the perfume of that wondrous flower, the heart, and without that sacred passion, that divine swoon, we are less than beasts; but with it, earth is heaven, and we are gods.”
Boy, Ingersoll sure thought of some great metaphors, didn’t he?
Love is a magician, an enchanter. Well, we know that’s true. Just look what it did to the guy who bought new pajamas. Ingersoll said love is the perfume of that wondrous flower, the heart. That’s nice, comparing the lover’s heart to a blossoming flower, which implies that love makes us more beautiful as we grow.
But it’s Ingersoll’s contention that love elevates us to the status of a divinity or at least a king or queen that really got my attention. Love makes kings and queens of common clay. It is a “Sacred passion,” he said; a “divine swoon.” Love turns earth into heaven.
Becoming divine. Although Ingersoll was speaking in metaphorical language, that’s still a powerful image. And without love, we are “less than beasts,” lower even than a worm. I’ve been without love before, and I know exactly what he means. I was lower than a worm.
Becoming divine. Wow. You know the overall point to Islam, Christianity and Judaism is be reunited in happiness with your creator. In Buddhism, it is to release yourself from this life and achieve enlightenment. In other words, to become divine.
So can we become divine by being in love, by loving? Well, it’s worth a try, I think.
I’ll bet that love is the single most talked about, most written about, most danced about, most painted, most agonized–over subject in the world. I don’t know if arcane branches of science, like three-dimensional trigonometry or sub–atomic physics address love, but I wouldn’t be surprised. I would not be surprised if engineers turn out to be the most ardent lovers in history.
A quick perusal of poetry, painting, drama, music, literature, sculpture, dance and song reveals millions of artistic works with a theme of love. Every painter and poet, every dancer and dramatist, every composer or writer who put pen to paper has created something about love. Even architects express love. The Taj Mahal.
Even though love may be a popular topic, a friend reminded me that not everyone experiences love. Or if they do, they may be unaware of it or think of it as profound respect or deep affection. My friend thought that some people have a difficult time with the concept of love. Even the word love, my friend said, is tossed around with abandon these days.
Love requires a measure of courage and trust. You must open yourself completely to another person and be willing to subsume your persona in the relationship. That’s not a natural thing to do, nor an easy lesson to learn. I think love must be absorbed through example early in life, because as we grow older, we settle more comfortably within ourselves and love seems more treacherous at sixty than it does at sixteen.
It’s often said that God is love. We say that when we’re in love, we’re on top of the world, which is where gods live. Love makes us beautiful, and all gods are beautiful. Love makes us strong, invincible even, like gods. When we’re in love, we can do anything, be anything. We can leap tall buildings in a single bound when we’re in love. We’re super men. And super women. We are more than human and love has made us that way.
Love lifts us up where we belong, to quote a popular song. Before love came along, we were lower than worms. We were the common clay through which the worms slithered. Now love has made us “right royal kings and queens.”
Common clay into royalty. Human into divine. Earth into heaven.
Many years ago, Plato posed an interesting idea. He fantasized that the first human beings had four arms and four legs and two faces on one head, each looking in opposite directions. If you could imagine identical twins, standing back–to–back, and then being fused into one creature, that would approximate what Plato had in mind.
Well, these creatures were pretty powerful. They had twice the strength of a modern human and two more arms and legs. With two faces, they had eyes in the back of their heads, so to speak. And they were twice as smart and twice as beautiful as modern humans, too.
They were so smart and so powerful that they began to threaten the gods. So Zeus, in an effort to control them, decided to split them apart—right down the middle from top to bottom and create two creatures, each about half as powerful as the former. So he did just that and had Apollo smooth out the wrinkles, and your belly button is the point where Apollo’s sculpture left its mark, sort of like the little dollop you make when frosting a cake.
Well, these creatures wanted to get back together with their other half, naturally enough. They were now half the person they used to be, and they wanted to be strong again, and twice as beautiful. Plato said that each half would be forever searching for its other half, its “split–apart,” or as we would say today, its “soulmate.” For Plato, this explained the concept of true love and why lovers are attracted to each other. It also explained how two people can share a deep and abiding love but avoid romance and sex in their relationship.
Plato’s ideas appear in a work he wrote called The Symposium and his mouthpiece is the playwright Aristophanes. At the end of his tale about the origins of love, Aristophanes says, “Love is the god who brings this about; he fully deserves our hymns. For not only does he bestow the priceless boon of bringing us to our very own, but he also supplies this excellent hope for the future, that if we will supply the gods with reverent duty he will restore us to our ancient life and heal and help us into the happiness of the blest.”
All we have to do, he says, is “supply the gods with reverent duty” and love will restore us to our ancient life and heal and help us into the happiness of the blest. In other words, we’ll find our split– apart; we’ll find our soulmate, our own true love. And maybe we’ll be as strong as the gods. Of course, supplying the gods with reverent duty is a task that people have argued about ever since the Reformation.
Love fuses two people into something stronger and makes each lover feel whole and complete. Two individuals die and one stronger couple is born. The two come together to grasp what is beyond the reach of either one alone. Because it feels so glorious to join with another, I am tempted to believe that we are not complete as human beings until we connect with another; until we love another; until our individuality is obliterated by the union with another.
And so I return to that concept, “God is love.” For if the point of existence is to be re-united with your creator, if the point of existence is to lose your earthly ties and ascend to a higher plane, could it be that love is the point of our existence? When we find our split–apart, when we find love, could it be that we also find God, that we leave behind the common clay and become divine?
MICHAEL. For a long time, I wondered if my story qualified as a love story. I think it does.
When I was going through puberty I did what most young boys do. I bought a bunch of very sleazy and much used girlie magazines from an older kid at school and kept them hidden under my mattress where I was sure, of course, that nobody would ever find them.
One day I noticed that several of the magazines were gone, but somebody had replaced them with much newer and higher quality magazines. The girls were much prettier.
I was really excited. And really embarrassed.
Either my mother or my father or my older sister had done it, because nobody else came into our house. Nobody ever said anything or let on, and I was too scared to ask. This happened every once in awhile for a couple of years, until I left for college. Once there was a whole book about love and sex education with very explicit photographs.
To this day I don’t know who tended to my magazine collection. I guess I don’t want to know. I like thinking that anyone in my family might have loved me enough to understand my adolescence and not make a fuss about my normal sexuality or embarrass me.
SONJA. Please check out the insert in your program. It contains important information about the life of the church. Two things we should bring to your attention: First, next Saturday will be the first–ever, Mulch Party here at the church. Even though Walt Jenison already put down about five loads of mulch, the playground needs several more loads. So Dolores invites all pickup owners and all pitchfork and rake owners to attend the mulch party. The mulch is free, all we gotta do is pick it up and put it down. Just bring your pickups & pitchforks! The party starts at 9am and will feature award–winning pizza and soft drinks for all the party– goers.
Circle Dinners will begin on March 5th. Here’s how it works: If you can host a dinner and prepare the entree, sign up on the host sheet. If you’d rather not host the dinner, but can prepare another dish, sign up as a diner. Diners don’t have to prepare an entree, but they do prepare other dishes as directed by the host. Sign up sheets are posted on the glass window near the kitchen. The cost of the dinner is divided among attendees. This is a great way to meet people in the congregation and get to know them better. For more information, please see Lee Adler, who also known as the Circle Dinner Queen.
Announcements received by Thursday can be included in the worship service on Sunday. Let’s blend our voices now in Hymn 100, I’ve Got Peace Like a River.
True Love: Peanuts
MINISTER. If you like Robert Fulghum’s books, you may recognize some of the true love stories we heard this morning. They were taken from a book of stories he compiled called True Love. Fulghum is a Unitarian Universalist minister who wrote Everything I Need to Know I Learned in Kindergarten. This is his personal credo:
That myth is more potent than history,
I believe that dreams are more powerful than facts,
That hope always triumphs over experience,
That laughter is the only cure for grief,
And I believe that love is stronger than death.
As a benediction today, we’ll have one more story, a story that never fails to touch me. It’s the one I think that exemplifies best what love does best. It does lift us up where we belong. It makes us kings and queens, even gods.
CATHERINE. My brother and I owe our existence to peanuts. This is really my mother’s story, but she’s too shy to tell you.
When she graduated from high school my mother had everything going for her. She was pretty, smart, and came from a well-to-do family. But she was terminally shy, especially around men. Boys didn’t like to take her out because she was so quiet.
She attended the same college her mother went to, and to please her mother, she rushed her mother’s sorority. At the first rush party, she sat out of sight at one end of a room, in a comer by a table that had snacks on it. She ate a lot of peanuts out of nervousness.
She noticed a waiter, who seemed to be as shy as she was. He never said anything, but he was taking care of her. He kept her glass filled with nonalcoholic punch and he kept her peanut bowl full. From time to time their eyes met and they smiled at each other.
When the dancing started and the party got rowdy, she walked into the kitchen and out the back door to escape. As she was going down the alley, she heard someone calling, “Wait, wait, please wait.” It was the waiter, running down the alley after her with a paper bag in his hands.
They stood in awkward silence, just smiling. Then he reached into the bag, pulled out a whole can of peanuts and offered them to her and said, “I only wish these were pearls.” He ran back up the alley and into the sorority house.
Well, one thing led to another.
Twenty-five years later, on their silver wedding anniversary, my father—the waiter—gave Mom a sterling silver jar marked “peanuts.” She thought that was the gift and was really pleased. But there was more. When she lifted the lid, inside was a string of pearls.
No gift ever pleased her more. She wore those pearls as her only jewelry for years. When my father was killed in a traffic accident, she put the silver peanut can in his coffin with him. I’ve never seen her wear the pearls since. I think I know where they are, but I’m too shy to ask.
MINISTER. The quotation on the cover is from L’éternelle Chanson by Rosemonde Gérard. In English it is,
Today more than yesterday and less than tomorrow.
Postlude
HOLYFIED & HOUSE: Could I Have This Dance?
Link to this Service