The inherent worth and dignity of every person:  From sentence to lived reality

15 January 2012

I was ordained in 1970 as a United Church minister and my first congregations were in southwestern Manitoba.  One Sunday, one of my parishioners in the Napinka church, Maisie White, exclaimed to me, “John, why can’t you preach sermons like that every Sunday?”  Later I passed this comment on to my spouse, Barbara, who said in reply, “Well John, your sermons are boring.” 

  I was quite mystified why Maisie had liked that particular sermon for, near as I could tell, it was pretty much like all my sermons.  I was writing them like I had been taught at Queen’s, their structure the “three points and an illustration” variety.  Gradually what developed out of those comments by Maisie and Barbara was a new style of writing sermons, a narrative style, telling stories even if the stories had to do with me.  Not that I was really trying to set myself up as an example.  Rather, through the use of story I wanted to invite people to reflect on their own personal story.

  So, the inherent worth and dignity of every person:  It does roll off the tongue like sweet wine.  Bring on the three points and an illustration or two.  How can you argue with that kind of affirmation?  The sentence easily becomes ‘an ought,’ a rule, a goal in life: It is my duty to live my life in such a way that the inherent worth and dignity of every person I meet is protected and communicated.  I will, I shall, I must.

  My first question is, “If that first principle of Unitarian Universalism is not a law, not a dogma, not a requirement, how does such an affirmation move into a grounding principle, a passion, an affirmation that gets lived out, almost unthinkingly, in one’s daily and most intimate relationships?  If this is a grounding principle for you, how did it become that?  Here are two stories from my past but I tell them to stir up the embers of your memory.

My parents were instrumental in the establishment of the Waupoos Cottage Cooperative in Prince Edward County.  It was made up of several families from Canada and the United States.  One of those families was a black American family who, over the years, lived in New York, Washington and Baltimore.  The members of the Carroll family were our closest cottage neighbours at the co-op and we shared the same outhouse in the days of the late 1940’s to mid-1960’s when we had no flush toilet.  One day, maybe when I was six or seven, but I can’t be sure at this point, I was standing fairly close to the outhouse, playing a game of some sort and saying, “Eeny, meeny, miney moe, catch a nigger by the toe.”  Ed Carroll, the dad, came over to me and asked if I knew what the word “nigger” meant.  I had no idea.  He told me and he told me how that word hurt him and his family.  I was mortified, ashamed, stricken to the core.  The Carroll family, Phenola and Ed, Nanci and Ed Jr., were honoured and special people to my family and to hurt them in any way was totally mortifying.  But, I have to say, the Carroll family was the only black family I knew coming from the small southern Ontario villages in which I grew up but that event as a youngster had a profound effect on how I saw and how I related to people of non-white skin.

Several decades later and now living as a minister here in Guelph I was co-chair of the Education and Students Committee of Waterloo Presbytery, the committee that oversees candidates for ministry within the United Church.  Was it 1978, I don’t know, but we were interviewing people who were graduating and thus coming up for ordination or commissioning.  Two of those were a married couple who had recently separated.  We met the wife first and asked about the marriage.  So she told us her story of being a lesbian, knowing for years, how she had hoped being married would deal with it, how it had all ended so horribly.  As a committee we didn’t know what to do so we asked for time, one week to think and we would meet her exactly 7 days later.  We told no one of our dilemma but somehow the word was out in the student and church community and the executive of Hamilton Conference passed a motion in the middle of that week that no self-declared homosexual students would be ordained or commissioned until the United Church as a whole had settled the matter.  So it was here, right here, that the United Church odyssey began over the ordination or commissioning of self-declared homosexuals with a similar thing happening in British Columbia.

The thing for me was that I had this weird inner reaction, a kind of inner revulsion to the idea of homosexuality but never any revulsion when the person was in front of me, talking, laughing, being who they were.  And, as a reminder to me that God has a deep sense of humour, it is exactly 20 years ago this month that one of our daughters began to share with us her unfolding realization that she wasn’t who she thought she was.  For many years now Barbara and I walk with our beloved daughter, other parents and their children in the Gay Pride Parade in Toronto.  Barbara and I even walked once in San Francisco.  We took a Canadian flag and made a sign that read, “Guelph, KW, Cambridge PFLAG.”  Who would ever know in San Francisco where Guelph, KW or Cambridge were.  At one point in the parade, there was this young Asian man jumping up and down and shouting at the top of his voice over the crowd, “KW, KW, KW.”  As he jumped and shouted, he waved me over and when I got to him he flung his arms around me and said, Thank you.  Thank you.  Thank you.” 

I don’t know about you but it is events such as these that make me want to live my life where the inherent worth and dignity of every person is honoured.  The conviction on my part has emerged out of actual lived experience, experiences with people different from me who have caused me to enter into their experience.  Otherwise, I would argue, it is but a law, an attitude I should have 

And a second question:  It seems obvious to me that this principle is not self-evident.  How does one convey the inherent worth and dignity of every person to the Adolph Hitlers of the world?  But maybe more pertinently, how does one work out that principle in relationships that are fraught with difference of opinions or revulsions or complications?   

So let me start with two issues on my plate at the moment.  There is a guy up the street whose name I do not know who, early in the morning, starts his truck from inside the house, one of those electronic keys, and he runs that truck to warm up the cab and sometimes the truck turns itself off and he turns it on again.  I hate it.  I hate what I perceive to be an attitude of disregard for the environment and non-renewable resources.  So it is easy for me to say that this man has inherent worth and dignity but truthfully, in my heart, I hate what he is doing and have struggled to figure out how to respond without conveying my hate for what he does. 

I have similar feelings for conservative Protestantism.  I have a long list of complaints and recently something has happened, is happening in this city, that if I let myself think about it too much, the wrath starts to boil within me.  For 2 ½ years, I attended the Evangelical Fellowship even though it felt somewhat unsafe as a father with a lesbian daughter.  Finally I just couldn’t do it any longer.  I loved their energy and enthusiasm but I came to realize that although they call themselves evangelical they are conservative Protestants.  I know they have inherent worth and dignity but there are some expressions of their faith I find utterly repulsive.  So how is inherent worth and dignity lived, conveyed, when you abhor parts of someone else’s faith and you belong to the same broad faith family?

In the last six months I have had two acquaintances tell me of sexual exploits and conquests.  One of those guys I actually admire and value our relationship and the other, well we belong to the same cottage coop and we have to make decisions together.  If I did what they did I would be filled with so much shame and self-disgust so how do I look at them without such a filter. 

Which brings me to my very final point:  When I trained as a hospital chaplain one of my fellow students was asked by our supervisor to share some of his self-talk.  The supervisor said, “Say out loud some of the words you use against yourself.”  He could not do it, revealing that the words he used were simply profanity upon profanity. 

It is about, at some basic level, the inherent worth and dignity of you.  You!  And me!  And those three grandchildren who will take a life time to unfold the meaning of both their love for each and their rivalry.  I conclude with one of my favourite prayers:  "O God, help me to believe the truth about myself – no matter how beautiful it is!"  (Macrina Wiederkehr)

TRUE BELIEVERS/TRUE UNBELIEVERS

15 March 2009

You will likely be aware of the media interest in the atheist bus ads currently running in England: "There's probably no God. Now stop worrying and enjoy your life." Recently the Freethought Association of Canada has indicated its intention to run these ads in various Canadian cities.  So several Saturdays ago I opened my Globe and Mail and there was a full page ad from the people of the United Church of Canada, and me being one of those United Church people.  The ad presented two boxes where you could check off your vote, the original wording of the English ads and a second, "There probably is a God, so stop worrying and enjoy your life." I should also add that the more visible atheist movement was also the front page story of the United Church Observer in February and that article got picked up by the Globe and Mail.  

    So that is the immediate background to this talk but the longer view goes back to my days as a graduate student in the history department of McGill University.  The general area I was interested in was the Reformation in England, Henry VIII and all (most of which I have forgotten, I must say), but when it came to researching and writing a thesis my advisor suggested that I look to Scotland.  So it was I wrote a thesis on the early Scottish covenanters and the political and military role of the Scottish clergy from 1638 to 1643.  The Scottish Covenanters were the authors of the National Covenant and the Solemn League and Covenant, actual documents that circulated throughout the country for people to sign.  People were captured by the vision that as a people they were in a unique relationship with God, that God had called them as a privileged people.  Well, if you have any acquaintance with that period of history you will know that a few short years later Oliver Cromwell and his forces invaded Scotland and the destruction of the country was such that it took decades to recover.  I was reading the original documents and secondary sources for my thesis back in the late 1960’s and I was deeply struck by how similar the theology and the attitudes sounded to the Afrikaner theology and attitudes that were the underpinnings for white rule in South Africa with apartheid.  

    So it was that studying intensively the late 1630’s/early 1640’s period of Scottish history shaped me before I entered theological school.  To give you a taste of the impact, if I were to express my Christian faith as a composer of music then I would be a minimalist like Philip Glass.  I have a great deal of sympathy with the book written during World War II, The Christian Agnostic.  And in my first or second year of theology I read for the first time, The True Believer by Eric Hoffer.  Published in 1951, just six years after the defeat of the Nazi regime and in the midst of the rise of communism in Russia and China, the Cold War coming to a boil, it is a book that condemns  Communists, Fascists, Nationalists, and early Christians. Part of Hoffer's thesis is that mass movements are interchangeable and that true believers will often flip from one movement to another. Furthermore, Hoffer argues that these movements spread by promising a glorious future but the motivations for mass movements are interchangeable: religious, nationalist and class-based movements tend to behave in the same way and use the same tactics, even when their stated goals or values are diametrically opposed.

    If you google Eric Hoffer’s name you will get a short summary of the book and learn that it has been published in 23 editions between 1951 and most recently in 2002. It is still pertinent today.  And if you google his name the summary of the book is a whole lot easier to read than the book itself but I would still commend the book to you (and I have a copy here that I did not put in a garage sale yesterday so if someone wants the book and you can put it in a garage sale it is here for the taking).

    As a result of my graduate work in 17th century Scottish history I entered theological school with a great deal of fear, yes I think fear is the right term, of ‘the true believer.’  And fear of ‘the true unbeliever’ too.  I don’t know how many of you have seen the movie Religulous by the comedian Bill Maher.  It is a fun movie to watch.  Maher is militant in his scorn of religion but he also interviews fringe religious people to make his points.  How serious is one to take that, other than to have a good laugh?   Richard Dawkins, as another militant atheist, wrote in The God Delusion that he wanted to see all religion disappear because people like me, moderate as I am, make it possible for the crazies of the religious world to exist in this world.  But that is like suggesting that science should be abolished because it has made it possible for nuclear bombs to be developed even if it has also made it possible for the eradication of many former childhood diseases.  What is your attitude to ‘the true believer?’  Or, for that matter, ‘the true unbeliever?’

    Let’s return to the statement, “There probably is a God, so stop worrying and enjoy your life."  Or, if you like, “There is probably isn’t a God, so stop worrying and enjoy your life.”  You decide which box you would tick off on that ad the United Church put in the Globe and Mail.  I want to share a few thoughts about my vote, inviting you to consider how you would vote and why and all of these comments have this backdrop of ‘the true believer’ or, as it might be, ‘the true unbeliever.’

    First, let’s be clear about the word, ‘faith.’  In theology, the primary meaning of faith is trust with the supporting notion of loyalty.  In theology, faith is verbal and its primary meaning is not beliefs.  Faith in English is a noun, not like love that can be used as a noun and a verb.  However, faith in Christian theology is always verbal in the sense of having to do with an abiding sense of trust.  This sense of trust is always open to doubt, indeed, cannot function without doubt, and it is never water tight.  I got married in 1966 and I spent that summer in Sonningdale, Saskatchewan, living in a little one room shack with no telephone and working as the United Church student minister in four little communites.  I got home to Ontario on a Wednesday night, having bused it from Saskatoon to Toronto because there was a train strike at that time.  We got married on the following Saturday not having seen each other for four months.  Barbara and I communicated by letter and one phone call from the end of April to the end of August.  I remember being in that one room shack, knowing in my head that I was scheduled to get married on the 3rd of September and wondering what was I doing.  A true believer wouldn’t have a doubt.  A person of faith is open to questions, second guesses and weighing options.  Faith as trust does involve leaping into the dark.  You hope you leap with all the wisdom you can muster but you still leap.  I had a root canal this past week; I put my trust in my dentist

    Second, true believers come in many forms and varieties.  It is for that reason that I asked that a little quote be included in the announcements today.  It speaks to me a lot:  “…I think of the dignity that is ours when we cease to demand the truth and realize that the best we can have of these substantial truths that guide our lives is metaphorical – a story.  And the most of it we are likely to discern comes only when we accord one another…respect….  Beyond this – that the interior landscape is a metaphorical representation of the exterior landscape, that the truth reveals itself most fully not in dogma but in paradox, irony, and contradictions that distinguish compelling narratives – beyond this are only failures of imagination: reductionism in science; fundamentalism in religion; fascism in politics.  (Barry Lopez, Crossing Open Ground quoted in God in All Worlds, ed. Lucinda Vardey, p. 671.)

    Truly, for me, true believers are those who champion reductionistic science, fundamentalist religion, fascist politics and I fear all three.  For instance, as I was reading Richard Dawkins’ The God Delusion I was aware within myself that it was the materialism or naturalism of his science that irked me for it seemed like an article of faith that could not be touched.  Can the whole of life be reduced to elements, chemicals?  Am I only a bag of fluid, chemical compounds arranged in a particular way?  Well, we could get into a discussion on these three, reductionism, fundamentalism and fascism but they all speak to me of a true believer..

    As a way of ending, I do have this profound belief that all theology is grounded in story, my story and your story.  Story or stories have been part of this talk.  In fact, if I removed all the stories out of this talk it would come down to my deep distrust and fear of true believers, whether those true believers are conservative Christian fundamentalists or liberal Christian fundamentalists or their kind in other religions.  And ditto in science and politics.  Story is so often camouflaged by intellectual beliefs where we easily get to slinging opinions at one another.  

    So why do I say that there probably is a God?  Most of the time, I experience God’s absence.  However, over the years I have developed a life of spiritual practices, spiritual practices that shift and change but which are rooted in the Christian tradition and those practices provide focus and backbone to my life.  Occasionally, through those practices the absence of God which is my primary felt experience becomes a presence.  My words are totally inadequate but the result is a joy and a purpose for which I am deeply grateful.