There Is No God, and She Is Always With You

READING

The living tradition we Unitarian Universalists share draws on many sources. In 1961, the Unitarian Universalist Association was formed from the consolidation of the American Unitarian Association and the Universalist Church of America. The first UUA bylaws, adopted that year, 1961, identified sources of our living tradition and included mention of one of those sources as:

“Humanist teachings which counsel us to heed the guidance of reason and the results of science, and warn us against idolatries of the mind and spirit.”

In 1985, revisions of the principles and sources were adopted, but that language about humanist teachings was retained without change from the 1961 bylaws.

Today we celebrate our Humanist heritage. A key document of American Religious Humanism is the Humanist Manifesto of 1933. The entire manifesto is relatively brief -- just a couple pages. Here are some excerpts which will give you the flavor of the document (including the male-dominated language of the time). This is about one-third of the entirety (See the full "Humanist Manifesto I" HERE):

"The time has come for widespread recognition of the radical changes in religious beliefs throughout the modern world....

In every field of human activity, the vital movement is now in the direction of a candid and explicit humanism....

Today man's larger understanding of the universe, his scientific achievements, and deeper appreciation of brotherhood, have created a situation which requires a new statement of the means and purposes of religion....

We therefore affirm the following:
Religious humanists regard the universe as self-existing and not created. Humanism believes that man is a part of nature and that he has emerged as a result of a continuous process....

Humanism asserts that the nature of the universe depicted by modern science makes unacceptable any supernatural or cosmic guarantees of human values....

Religion must formulate its hopes and plans in the light of the scientific spirit and method....

We are convinced that the time has passed for theism, [or] deism,...

Religion consists of those actions, purposes, and experiences which are humanly significant. Nothing human is alien to the religious. The distinction between the sacred and the secular can no longer be maintained....

In the place of the old attitudes involved in worship and prayer the humanist finds his religious emotions expressed in a heightened sense of personal life and in a cooperative effort to promote social well-being....

We assert that humanism will:
(a) affirm life rather than deny it;
(b) seek to elicit the possibilities of life, not flee from them; and
(c) endeavor to establish the conditions of a satisfactory life for all, not merely for the few....

Man is at last becoming aware that he alone is responsible for the realization of the world of his dreams, that he has within himself the power for its achievement.”

SERMON

There is no God, and she is always with you. What do I mean saying this?

Our reality – the reality that we live our lives in, the only reality possible – is populated with concepts. Reality has houses, streets, cups, chairs, trees, stars, ourselves, and other people in it – which is to say, we have concepts of all those things. Reality also has abstract things, like the number 7, abstracted out from any particular collection of 7 objects and just there before our minds in its pure seven-ness. Reality has abstract things like freedom and love, like greed, anger, and ignorance, like music and the rule of law – also abstracted out from any particular example and present to mind as a concept of what all members of a set of examples have in common.

Reality has some things even more abstract, like the square root of negative one – which is not a real number. It’s an imaginary number, but it’s part of our reality. Other imaginary things, like unicorns and dragons and Harry Potter are also among the concepts that populate our reality. Most of us know who Huckleberry Finn and Anna Karenina are. We understand that our concepts of them are in the category of “fictional characters,” but they exist for us as concepts nonetheless.

But part of the concept of God is that God is way beyond the capacity of our limited, finite human minds to conceive. Whatever your concept of God is, it’s wrong, because it’s just one more limited, finite, human concept. The concept of God thus cancels itself out as a concept. If I ask you to think something that’s unthinkable, you can’t do it. Think something that, not only can you, now, today, not think, but that no human or collection of humans jointly will ever be able to think. You can’t do that, of course – because, if you could, it wouldn’t be unthinkable. So we can have no concept of such a thing.

Reality is populated with concepts – even concepts of fictional and imaginary things – but the concept that can’t be conceived is not among them. It can’t be part of our reality – can’t be invoked as an explanation, can’t be prayed to or cursed, can’t interact with us or our world. That’s how I would unpack, “there is no god.”

At the same time, there is always something with us that is just outside our capacity to think it. We might want to call it the mystery, but even the name “mystery” is a concept. For that matter, “always with you” is a concept, too – yet I think it is inescapable. If, as noted, our thought – our understanding, our awareness, our love – is limited, and finite – yet also growing, or, at least evolving, changing – then there is always that toward which our aspiration may be pointed, even if we can’t quite conceive of what it is.

It's a something, and it’s always there.

And it is fertile and fecund, it bears new life, so I call it “she.” So I wanted to put that out there at the outset. I’ll be circling back as we explore today our fifth source:

“Humanist teachings which counsel us to heed the guidance of reason and the results of science, and warn us against idolatries of the mind and spirit.”

First, then, I want to celebrate our humanist tradition which continues to inform who we are as Unitarian Universalists. The 1933 Humanist Manifesto, a portion of which is included in the above Reading, was very much a product of developing Unitarian thought. A key moment – perhaps we might say the beginning of American Religious Humanism – or, at least, the first coming together of the people who, working together, would systematically develop and spread American Religious Humanism – happened 15 years earlier, in 1918 – and it happened right here in Des Moines, Iowa.

The minister of this congregation back then was Rev. Curtis Reese. He had been preaching from this pulpit I am now honored to occupy some of the ideas that would later come to be identified as humanist – though Reese wasn’t calling it that then. This Des Moines congregation hosted the 1918 gathering of the Western Unitarian Conference, and a minister from Minneapolis named John Dietrich came down for the event. Dietrich and Reese got to talking and discovered that they had each been developing a conception of religion without God. Dietrich called it humanism, and that’s the name that stuck. Through the years that followed Dietrich and Reese collaborated in developing, promoting, and organizing the humanist movement that culminated in the 1933 Humanist Manifesto.

The Humanist Manifesto of 1933 had 33 original signatories, 15 of whom were Unitarian ministers, including Dietrich and Reese. One Universalist minister was a signatory, as were 17 other prominent public intellectuals who had been brought on board with the project.

When I re-read that manifesto, I am stirred and moved by the boldness of these Humanists 91 years ago – by their vision and their hope. The implicit critique of traditional religion – which, for them, pretty much meant Christianity – is valid. The West's religious tradition has often not harmonized well with the understandings emerging through the work of scientists. The West's religious tradition has sometimes obstructed rather than aided progress in addressing modern social problems. It has often separated people rather than bringing them together. So the Humanists said, “Let’s do religion. Religions have always been means for realizing the highest values of life, and we need that. But let’s have religion without God."

Today we still live in a world where people plant bombs – on themselves, in cars, in buildings – and fly jet airliners into buildings – and are led to do so in a way that is enmeshed with their understanding about something they call God.

Today we still live in a world where people want to take away women’s reproductive freedom, and punitively stigmatize gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgender people, and their thinking makes heavy and frequent reference to something they call God.

Today we still live in a world where our children are liable to be told by their classmates that they are going to hell.

Today we still live in a world where a few people make it their life's mission to devise elaborate refutations of evolution, and where more than a few people work to change the public school science curricula to present as science their views about something they call God.

Today we still live in a world where our own experience of many religious institutions is that their devotion to something they call God goes hand in hand with authoritarianism: they don’t allow questioning; they don’t allow critical thinking; they demand uncritical acceptance of authority. They say that the authority is a book, but the perceptive quickly see the authority really is a community of human leaders who have settled on one interpretation of that book, when the book itself equally well – or better -- supports very different readings.

Today we still live in a world where we see that “faith” so often means “believe what the authority figure tells you to believe and pray what the authority figure tells you to pray.”

Today we still live in a world where countries that social scientists measure as “high on religiosity,” venerating something they call God, also measure higher on violence, drug and alcohol addictions, teen pregnancies, imprisonment rates, and high school drop-out rates.

No wonder it would seem important to Humanists 91 years ago as well as today to call for a religion that doesn’t have this thing called God in it.

In recent years we have seen a real renaissance in religious humanism – even though it’s often not labeled that. Try typing “Spiritual Atheism” into your favorite search engine. You'll find there's a LOT out there exploring and developing the idea of religion and spirituality without God. It’s a New New Atheism, much of which sprang up in the wake of the New Atheism.

“The New Atheism,” as it’s called, refers to a spate of books grouped together that came out about 20 years ago now. This included:

• Sam Harris, The End of Faith (2004)
• Richard Dawkins, The God Delusion (2006)
• Daniel Dennett, Breaking the Spell (2006)
• Christopher Hitchens, God is Not Great (2007)

These books derided belief in God and also despised faith, spirituality, religion, and religious institutions. Soon, however, books started appearing that also touted atheism, but didn’t want to deride anything. While still disbelieving in God, these authors explicitly valued faith, spirituality, and religion. These included:

• Andre Comte-Sponville, The Little Book of Atheist Spirituality (2008)
• Chris Stedman, Faitheist: How an Atheist Found Common Ground with the Religious (2013)
• Alain de Botton, Religion for Atheists: A Non-believers Guide to the Uses of Religion (2013)
• Nick Seneca Jankel, Spiritual Atheist: A Quest To Unite Science And Wisdom Into A Radical New Life Philosophy to Thrive In The Digital Age (2018)
• Todd Macalaster, Looking to Nature: Exploring a Modern Way of Being Spiritual Without the Supernatural (2020) -- and just this year appeared:
• Brittney Hartley, No Nonsense Spirituality: All the Tools, No Belief Required (2024)

If that first round of books constituted “The New Atheism,” then these books that followed may be called, “The New New Atheism.” The New Atheists came and went in the middle of the aughts, but these New New Atheists just keep cranking.

The New New Atheists argue that atheists, instead of deriding religion should steal from it because, as de Botton says: “the world’s religions are packed with good ideas on how we might live and arrange our societies.”

“Faith,” as Karen Armstrong points out, in the New Testament, is the Greek word psistis, which means trust, loyalty, engagement, commitment. When Jesus calls for greater faith, he’s not calling for people to cling harder to a set of propositional beliefs. He’s calling for engagement and commitment. “Spirituality,” as growing numbers of spiritual atheists are saying, isn’t about spirit-stuff as opposed to material stuff. It’s about claiming the depths of awe and wonder, serenity and compassion, abundance and acceptance, indissoluble union with the great All, and of belonging to the universal.

This idea of connecting with the religious impulse rather than denying it is just what the Humanist Manifesto called for 91 years ago. And speaking of good ideas that we can draw from the traditional faith traditions, one of those ideas, which is, in fact, a staple of Christian Theology going back centuries, is that there is no God. Yes, that’s right. John Scotus Eriugena, a 9th-century Christian theologian, made an argument somewhat similar to the one with which I started this sermon. Eriugena wrote:

“We do not know what God is. God himself doesn’t know what he is because he is not anything. Literally, God is not, because he transcends being.”

Got that? This is a Christian theologian saying that God does not exist. Eriugena doesn't mean that God is nonexistent in the way that, say, my Ferrari is nonexistent. Rather God transcends the categories of existence and nonexistence, being and nonbeing.

To understand this, let’s look again at that fifth source of the living tradition we Unitarian Universalists share:

“Humanist teachings which counsel us to heed the guidance of reason and the results of science, and warn us against idolatries of the mind and spirit.”

It might seem a little strange that this reference to idolatry is in there. “Warning against idolatry” is probably not among the first things that come to mind when you think of humanism. Or when you do think of the repudiation of idolatry, your first thought probably wouldn't be humanism. Your first thought would more likely be the first of the Ten Commandment (or the first two Commandments, depending on which tradition is doing the counting):

"Thou shalt have no other gods before me. Thou shalt not make unto thee any graven image, or any likeness of any thing that is in heaven above, or that is in the earth beneath, or that is in the water under the earth. Thou shalt not bow down thyself to them, nor serve them:" (Exodus 20:3-5, KJV)

What’s the big deal about graven images? you may wonder. Historically, it seems to have been a tribal thing: the neighboring tribes made statues that represented their deities, so the Hebrew people, to be distinctive, insisted on having no deity statuary. Nor, for that matter, any angel statuary, nor thing-in-the-earth statuary, nor thing-in-the-water-under-the-earth statuary. No figurines of elephants or parrots or fish: none of that. For the ancient Hebrew people, this was part of how one affirmed one’s loyalty to the tribe. They said: “We’re the people who don’t do that – so don’t do that.”

It may have started that way, but then a funny thing happened on the way to the Temple. The sanction against idolatry ended up pointing the Hebrew people toward something more important than statuary. Just as a statue is fixed and static and unchanging, a person might also have certain ideas, beliefs, concepts that become fixed and static. The commandment against idols evolved so that it was understood to be not just about statues, figurines, or graven images. It’s about any concept or thought-pattern that has become fixed and rigid. By abjuring graven images, the Hebrew people were subtly reoriented toward a conception of God as dynamic, unfolding, and always beyond whatever you can imagine, always other than anything you think.

The divine creative movement of the universe is dynamic, changing. Human understanding is ever unfolding. Idolatry means clinging to a fixed, static conception; closing ourselves to new learning. Thus we see that it actually is quite apt for this mention of idolatry to be included in our humanist source. The guidance of reason and the results of science continually overturn our idols, challenge what we think we know. Moreover, this is really the point that I think John Scotus Eriugena was on about.

Any time someone says God exists, she has some idea of what this God is that exists. This is problematic because any concept at all, if you’re stuck on it, is an idol. As soon as you have an idea of God – any idea – smash that idol and return to a stance of total openness to whatever the world might present to you without forcing it into one or another of your preconceived conceptual categories. This is humanist teaching warning us against idolatries of the mind and spirit.

Don’t even make an idol of your own past statements or beliefs. If you find yourself saying things that contradict other things you’ve said, that’s OK. Emerson said, “A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds.” And Whitman said: “Do I contradict myself? Very well, I contradict myself. I am large, I contain multitudes.”

In a sermon I gave last March called, “The Ontological, The Semantic, and the Tribal,” I suggested that, the core uses of the word ‘God,’ were to point to any or all of the following:

• community-forming power;
• love;
• the greatest source of beauty, mystery, or creativity;
• the widest or deepest inspiration to gratitude, humility, wonder, and awe;
• origin;
• any ultimate context and basis for meaning, value, ethics, or commitment;
• the widest reality to which our loyalty is owed;
• the cosmos.

But those, too, are concepts that could become idols. By saying “God” we are also saying more than all of these definitions. Or rather, maybe, less. We’re saying THAT – while at the same time whispering “but remember, also not THAT.” By saying “God,” we are invoking a tradition which, for all its abuses and its nonsense, also includes the reminder that all our ideas are inadequate, a tradition which calls us to smash our idols, a tradition that says there is more there than our words can say – so much more that even our truest words are also false to the fullness of the mystery within which we live and breathe and have our being.

There is no God – that is, there is no possible concept that can encapsulate all of the wonder and the paradox that is this dear life – the wonder and the paradox that is directly staring us in the face every moment, saying, “hey you, knock over the idols of what you think you know and wake up.” Whatever you think you know, this moment has something new and fresh to teach you. Are you listening? Are you looking? Always. For there is no God, and she is always with you -- whispering: “Pay attention.”

Amen.

Pardon, Forgiveness, and Reconciliation

I hear there is a Unitarian Universalist church out west somewhere, in a downtown area where parking is at a premium. People not coming to the church would sometimes park in the church parking lot. The church put up a sign:

Church Parking Only.
Violaters Will Be Forgiven.

The congregation didn’t really mind people parking there through the week – and I’ve always thought that was a clever way to advertise the forgiving nature of the church.

We’ve all been harmed, and we’ve all committed harm. I am mindful of Jean-Paul Sartre’s line that hell is other people, yet I also know that heaven is other people – that existence itself IS relationship. Homo sapiens is not merely a social species, but a hyper-social species, and our identity is formed not merely IN relationship but AS relationship. George Herbert Mead taught us that the self is a generalized other. We ARE our relationships, which is why they sometimes hurt so much.

Even with strangers, an offence is so much more than the physical effect. Imagine this scenario. You’ve been grocery shopping and are carrying three brimming-full paper grocery bags as you cross the street from where you parked to get to your apartment. Your field of vision is now somewhat limited as you cross, and then some clod walking by the other direction bumps into you. Your groceries spill in the middle of the street. Your body floods with that anger reaction. You spin around, clutching the one bag of groceries that didn’t spill, angry, loud words about to come out. In that moment you see . . . the white cane. It was a blind person. The anger drains away as you see the truth of the situation with clarity. It’s not the spilled groceries themselves that bother us so much – it’s another person treating us with disregard, whether negligent or intentional.

As the hyper-social species we are, we constantly monitor relationships – with strangers and especially with those we know well. Those relationships are continually being torn, and continually in need of repair. As Reinhold Niebuhr said, in a passage we used as this morning’s chalice lighting,

“No virtuous act is quite as virtuous from the standpoint of our friend or foe as from our own. Therefore, we are saved by the final form of love, which is forgiveness.”

Forgiveness.

This word, “forgiveness,” is used in such a broad range of situations. There’s the casual forgiveness as a social courtesy, like forgiving people for parking on your lot, forgiving them for being a few minutes late. There are also those situations of much deeper emotional hurt, where forgiveness is hard to ask for and hard to give. Then there are horrific atrocities like the Charleston shooting on Jun 17, 2015, when 21-year-old Dylann Roof entered a predominantly black church and shot 9 people dead. At the sentencing hearing a year and a half later, Felicia Sanders, mother of one of the slain, told Roof, “I forgive you.” This was not a meaningless thing to say. It meant something. But what? What did it mean for Sanders? For Roof? For the audience of the media who covered it?

Sometimes we are able to unilaterally decide to stop carrying the weight of some resentment. The other person might not have asked for your forgiveness, might not have apologized, might not know that you are releasing your resentment, yet letting go of the anger is something you do for your own sake because the burden of your own resentment has been weighing you down. Do we call that forgiveness?

Other times there’s a bilateral process of two people working together toward reconciliation, intentionally engaged in an extensive process of rebuilding of trust. The forgiveness that might emerge from such a process would be more substantial.

Sometimes there’s something there that’s easy to choose to do. All it takes is saying the words, “I forgive you,” and those words are easy to say, easy to mean, and that’s all it takes.

Other times, in other cases, the heart isn’t ready. The head might compel the mouth to say the words, “I forgive you,” but the heart feels the emptiness of the words because the heart is not ready to forgive. If you say it, and your head means it (or thinks it does), but the heart doesn't, does that constitute forgiveness?

Forgiveness cannot be demanded, cannot be not required – no one has a right to say to you, “you should forgive,” say, an abusive partner or parent. Sometimes, though, victims might feel, unbidden, a forgiving grace descend upon them. No reason they should – but a feeling like that sometimes happens, and that, too, may be called “forgiveness.”

In all of these scenarios, there is some sort of shift in your relationship with another person – or with the memory of another person. It would be handy if we had an agreed-upon vocabulary to distinguish the different kinds of relational shift that may go by the name forgiveness. There are more than two distinguishable experiences that get called forgiveness, but today we’ll just be looking at two: from Danya Ruttenberg’s book, On Repentance and Repair. The book – which is the Unitarian Universalist Common Read for 2023-24, and which is the subject of our forum after the service – has eight chapters: the next to last one is on forgiveness.

There are two Hebrew words: Mechila and Slicha. “Mechila,” Ruttenberg suggests

“might be better translated as ‘pardon.’ It has the connotation of relinquishing a claim against an offender. The injured party acknowledges “that the perpetrator no longer owes them, that they have done the repair work necessary to settle the situation.”

Ruttenberg explains:

“You stole from me? OK, you acknowledged that you did so in a self-aware way, you’re in therapy to work on why you stole, you paid me back and you apologized in a way that I felt reflected an understanding of the impact your actions had on me. It seems that you’re not going to do this to anyone else. Fine. It doesn’t mean that we pretend that the theft never happened, and it doesn’t mean that our relationship will return to how it was before or even that we return to any kind of ongoing relationship. With mechila – pardon – whatever else I may feel or not feel about you, I can consider this chapter closed. Those pages are still written upon, but we’re done here.”

Pardon requires sincerity, but not a lot of emotional display. Pardon may be undertaken in a matter-of-fact, businesslike way: The debt is considered paid, or, at least, written off. It’s closing the book on the matter – a closing of accounts. There is no further obligation.

Pardoning isn’t quite the same thing as forgiving. The Hebrew word that that would come closest to forgiveness is slicha. With slicha there’s the idea of a step toward eventual reconciliation and restoration of the relationship. As Ruttenberg explains, slicha

“includes more emotion. It looks with a compassionate eye at the penitent perpetrator and sees their humanity and vulnerability – recognized that, even if they have caused great harm, they are worthy of empathy and mercy.”

Reinhold Niebuhr called forgiveness the final form of love – and there’s a little of that flavor in the Hebrew slicha. The injured party doesn’t merely close accounts, but beholds the perpetrator with a higher level of compassion and empathy for their vulnerability.

We can say that there might sometimes be an obligation to pardon. There is never an obligation to forgive. “Forgive” is from the Old English word forgyfan – “to give, grant, or bestow.” It’s a gift. It cannot be required. If it is forced or coerced or pressured, then it’s not a gift.

Pardon, on the other hand, can be an obligation – the pentitent harm doer may, under certain circumstances, have a right to be pardoned. And what are those circumstances? It requires the five steps of repentance and repair as indicated by the 12th-century Jewish rabbi and philosopher Maimonides.
1. Naming and owning harm
2. Starting to change
3. Restitution and accepting consequences
4. Apology
5. Making different choices
An obligation to pardon arises, as Danya Ruttenberg says,

“in the context of a sincere penitent who has come to apologize – to appease, ask, make amends, implore, seek to meet the full human being they have hurt to the best of their ability. And if they didn’t do a good enough job, they came back later with their support people to help them figure out how to do it better. And after doing that, this person came back two more times, trying, and trying again, to truly see and speak to their victim’s pain.”

If they have named and owned the harm, they have committed to changing and begun to change, they have provided restitution and have accepted consequences of what they’ve done, then comes the apology. “A true apology” says Ruttenberg,

“is about trying to see the human being in front of you, to connect with them and communicate to them, to make it clear – abundantly, absolutely, profoundly clear – that you get it now, and that their feeling better matters to you. Your apology is a manifestation of genuine remorse. It demands vulnerability, and it is a natural by-product of all the work of repentance and transformation that you’ve been doing up until this point. . . . You don’t apologize at a person. You apologize to them. It’s not, of course, a petulant, 'But I said I was sorry!' It’s also not about crafting the perfectly contrite words of regret and remorse. There’s a difference between saying you’re sorry because you realize that a thing you did had a bad consequence, and doing so because you really understand that you hurt someone – and that person’s feelings, experience of the world, safety, and self all matter profoundly.”

Suppose you offer a true apology, but the person who was hurt isn’t able to accept it, cannot pardon, even after the asking and imploring. You might not have done as good a job as you think you did. The harm might be more serious than you thought. Maybe something else. At this point Maimonides says you bring backup with you – three supportive friends whose job is to help you make sure you are doing this right. They aren’t there to gang up on your victim, but as observers for your contrition and your guides to help and ensure that your contrition is clear. Here’s what Maimonides says:

“If the other person does not wish to pardon, they should bring a line of three people who are their friends and they will approach and ask for pardon. If the victim still refuses, the perpetrator must bring people a second and a third time.”

So that’s four separate apologies – the first one by yourself, and then three more with friends. At that point, if all has been done sincerely, there is an obligation to pardon – to close the books on the matter. If the victim is still not appeased, she or he has failed at that obligation and is unreasonably holding a grudge. The perpetrator should simply leave them alone at that point.

Maimonides was concerned about the victim and their wholeness. As Ruttenberg says,

“even if we’re hurt, we must work on our own natural tendencies toward vengefulness, toward turning our woundedness into a power play that we can lord over the penitent, or toward wanting to stay forever in the narrative of our own hurt, for whatever reason.”

So Maimonides injunction of an obligation to pardon is for the victim’s own good.

Granting of pardon – closing the accounts – releasing our grudge -- “can be profoundly liberating in ways we don’t always recognize before it happens.”

Indeed, even without a true apology, or any apology at all, or any of the steps of repentance, I believe that if there isn’t actual trauma, then you have some responsibility for your hurt. You can’t decide what will be traumatic for you, and you can't decide to make trauma go away, though you can decide to seek therapy and treatment. Injuries that are less than traumatic afford you some room to decide how offended you want to be. We all learned as children that “sticks and stones may break my bones but names will never hurt me.” We know, of course, that names do sting, and that in extreme circumstances the hurt might even rise to the level of traumatic -- but what that little jingle taught us as children is that at least some part of how we respond to a hurt is in our own hands. We can decide whether to focus on vengeance, or to, as Ruttenberg put it, turn “our woundedness into a power play that we can lord over the penitent,” or to dwell, brooding, in the narrative of our own hurt.

And we can decide not to – decide simply to let go of the burden of our resentment. It helps if the perpetrator is penitent, but this sort of letting go of nontraumatic injuries is possible even if the perpetrator is not penitent. Lutheran minister Rev. Nadia Bolz-Weber described this letting go as “actually a way of wielding bolt cutters and snapping the chain that links us.” It’s freeing – and Bolz-Weber goes on to say:

“Free people aren’t controlled by the past. Free people laugh more than others. Free people see beauty where others do not. Free people are not easily offended. Free people are unafraid to speak truth to stupid. Free people are not chained to resentment.”

So this obligation to pardon is an obligation to ourselves to be free of chains that may be dragging us down. Close those books so you can move on for your own good.

For forgiveness, as opposed to pardon – in Hebrew, slicha as opposed to mechila, there is an orientation toward a reconciliation. Forgiveness can happen without reconciliation, but forgiveness is pointed in the direction of getting to reconciliation. Even where reconciliation might not be a good idea, might not be appropriate, might not be desirable to one or the other or both parties, forgiveness can happen.

It can happen – though it is often not easy. We might say the words “I forgive you,” – and say them sincerely – yet our limbic system may still be attached to rehearsing the narrative of its hurts – in which case forgiveness hasn’t really happened and the path to reconciliation remains blocked.

Another way that forgiveness may fail is the forgiver coming off as superior. Saying, “I forgive you,” may cast me as the magnanimous one, all superior. Rather than return the parties to equality, it maintains a reversed inequality.

Forgiveness may also fail due to forces outside of the ostensive forgiver. If there’s a context of the forgiveness being expected or demanded, then the mouth may say, “I forgive you,” yet the path to reconciliation and wholeness remains blocked.

Situations of abuse require an intentional and extended process if the relationship is to be repaired at all. Yet a certain concept of "forgiveness" -- as if it were easy and instantaneous -- short-circuits the process that is needed. We also have to consider the possibility that no plan or process for repairing the relationship may have enough chance of success to be worth pursuing, and that getting out of the relationship needs to be the priority.

Something Ruttenberg doesn’t mention, but that Unitarian Universalist minister Rev. Rebecca Parker does, is that grieving for the injury is part of the process. Parker writes:

“The capacity to grieve unlocks the psycho-magic of passing the pain on to someone else. Grief allows the pain to pass through one with its full power. The ability to mourn is the foundation of the capacity to forgive, and it is strengthened by those operations of grace which mediate comfort and consolation to us.”

Both pardon and forgiveness release the violator from the obligation to suffer – or suffer any further -- for their violation. This is not a release from accountability. Forgiveness involves, Rebecca Parker says, "calling another to accountability, but relinquishing the desire for retribution.”

When I say accountability, I mean accounting for ourselves to one another – a relation in which we accept the task of trying to make our selves make sense to another human being – who has seen our past behavior as making no sense. The harmdoer must accept the call to accountability if forgiveness is to be genuine.

Forgiveness is a form of love – the final form, per Niebuhr -- and like love generally, it is a need. We need it in both directions. We need to love; and, in general, we need to forgive. We don't need to forgive everything -- some injuries are unforgivable -- but in general we need a capacity to forgive and to sometimes exercise that capacity. We need to be loved; and we need to be forgiven.

Sometimes, though, we may fail to do the work required to earn a meaningful forgiveness. For the fabric of relationship is all we have and all we are. Reweaving that fabric from all the ways it is rent and torn requires ongoing attention to effect accountability, and repentance, and repair. Let us attend skillfully to that work. May it be so. Amen.

Election Decompression Reflection

We are here, in the wake of an exhausting election, to process our feelings, regain our grounding, and re-orient ourselves to move forward in love. Love is at the center of what we are about as a people of faith – and so we resist the temptation to give in to hate. Our watchwords are the ones from Martin Luther King Jr. that we often quote. It’s from a sermon he seems to have delivered in 1957 in Montgomery titled called “Loving Your Enemies.”

“Why should we love our enemies? The first reason is fairly obvious. Returning hate for hate multiplies hate, adding deeper darkness to a night already devoid of stars. Darkness cannot drive out darkness; only light can do that. Hate cannot drive out hate; only love can do that. Hate multiplies hate, violence multiplies violence, and toughness multiplies toughness in a descending spiral of destruction.”

I know it is hard to think of loving our enemies when we feel disempowered – as though our neighbors have decided that everything we learned to hold most dear is of no account -- doesn’t matter anymore: caring about other people, trying to tell the truth and live with integrity, justice, equity, rule of law. It is hard right now to say yes to the world as it is. A poem by Rosemerry Watola Trommer posted late last night is titled: "When You Ask Me If I Can Say Yes to the World as It Is -- November 5, 2024"

Today yes is made of lead.
You look at me
and I nod —
and together
we carry the weight.

The president-elect has promised mass deportations. He has promised retribution against the enemy within – which, in his mind, is you and me and people like us. The people he will appoint will set to work implementing Project 2025 which will:

• Gut enforcement of civil rights laws
• Appropriate the Department of Justice to go after its enemies.
• Seek to exclude noncitizens from the census count.
• Attack Reproductive Rights, ban mifepristone, and prosecute people who send medication abortion drugs in the mail.
• Expand Digital Surveillance to enforce laws against women seeking to exercise their reproductive rights.
• Proliferate Online Misinformation and Disinformation by ending ongoing federal efforts to combat online disinformation.
• Enact “Schedule F” reforms, that would force tens of thousands of civil servants — including in agencies that protect civil rights — to serve the president’s political aims instead of serving the public interest.
• Erase the very existence of communities by deleting the terms sexual orientation, gender, and gender identity — as well as diversity, equity, and inclusion — out of “every federal rule, agency regulation, contract, grant, regulation, and piece of legislation that exists.
• Weaken the Fair Housing Act and scale back affordable housing.
• Weaken key provisions of Affordable Care Act which helped millions of people gain health care coverage.
• End to American climate leadership on the international stage, which would harm Americans and prevent the global community from achieving climate goals necessary to maintain a livable planet.

Will the coming administration succeed at these things? We don’t know. Comedian Jon Stewart:

“Here’s what we know: we don’t really know anything. We’re going to come out of this election and we’re going to make all kinds of pronouncements about what this country is, and what this world is, and the truth is we’re not really going to know. This isn’t the end. I promise you, this is not the end. And we have to regroup and we have to continue to fight and continue to work day in and day out to create the better society for our children, for this world, for this country that we know is possible. It’s possible.”

Tom Nichols writing in the Atlantic, said:

“The first order of business is to redouble every effort to preserve American democracy.... Nothing is inevitable, and democracy will not fall overnight.... If there was ever a time to exercise the American right of free assembly, it is now — not least because Trump is determined to end such rights and silence his opponents. Americans must stay engaged and make their voices heard at every turn. They should find and support organizations and institutions committed to American democracy, and especially those determined to fight Trump in the courts. They must encourage candidates in the coming 2026 elections who will oppose Trump’s plans and challenge his legislative enablers....Trump’s victory is a grim day for the United States and for democracies around the world. You have every right to be appalled, saddened, shocked, and frightened. Soon, however, you should dust yourself off, square your shoulders, and take a deep breath. Americans who care about democracy have work to do.”

We are called to love – to live from compassion. Let’s remember the broader context.

For much of the last 3,000 years, much of humanity lived under autocratic rule. The briefest flash of a partial democracy appeared in ancient Athens amidst an otherwise constant crush of Pharaohs, Kings, Emperors and their vassals. Three thousand years is a long time, but this does not mean that autocratic rule is somehow "natural" for our species, nor did it become inevitable once agriculture generated surplus resources that were taxable to support standing armies. Actually, archeologists and anthropologists have been uncovering details of earlier civilizations and ways of living that exhibited all sorts of diverse political arrangements, hundreds of thousands of people living without a ruling hierarchy, peoples without kings, or kings that were purely ceremonial, or kings for a season, and then the duties rotated -- and many of them had developed some form of agriculture.

Nothing about the way humans are built, nor about the contingencies of grain agriculture, makes autocracy inevitable. For much of humanity’s time on the planet, we didn’t live under autocratic rule. Then, for a few thousand years, much of humanity did. We were beginning to work our way out of it – and if we take a step backward for a century or so, we can nevertheless return to working our way out of it. That's the broad context.

For us here today, our work is very much the same, whichever candidate had won the White House. Our task is compassion. Our task is empathy and understanding. Our task is to help one another. Our task is respect for every being’s worth and dignity. Our task is to forthrightly and creatively rise to meet all the challenging realities of modern society.

These are tough tasks no matter who is the President, or who is in the US Senate and House, or who sits on the Supreme Court. Our task is the same.

And so we gather because we draw strength from each other – and we need a little boost right now to carry out our task. We gather because we draw joy from each other – and joy is a subversive activity – joy is resistance to injustice. Let me share these words from Rebecca Solnit, and then I’ll want to hear from you.

“They want you to feel powerless and to surrender and to let them trample everything and you are not going to let them. You are not giving up, and neither am I. The fact that we cannot save everything does not mean we cannot save anything and everything we can save is worth saving. You may need to grieve or scream or take time off, but you have a role no matter what, and right now good friends and good principles are worth gathering in. Remember what you love. Remember what loves you. Remember in this tide of hate what love is. The pain you feel is because of what you love. The Wobblies used to say don't mourn, organize, but you can do both at once and you don't have to organize right away in this moment of furious mourning. You can be heartbroken or furious or both at once; you can scream in your car or on a cliff; you can also get up tomorrow and water the flowerpots and call someone who's upset and check your equipment for going onward. A lot of us are going to come under direct attack, and a lot of us are going to resist by building solidarity and sanctuary. Gather up your resources, the metaphysical ones that are heart and soul and care, as well as the practical ones. People kept the faith in the dictatorships of South America in the 1970s and 1980s, in the East Bloc countries and the USSR, women are protesting right now in Iran and people there are writing poetry. There is no alternative to persevering, and that does not require you to feel good. You can keep walking whether it's sunny or raining. Take care of yourself and remember that taking care of something else is an important part of taking care of yourself, because you are interwoven with the ten trillion things in this single garment of destiny that has been stained and torn, but is still being woven and mended and washed.”

In this time we need to hear each other’s voices. We need the help of each others’ words to make sense of what happened. I will invite your reflection on two questions:

• One: What is going on? As best as you can figure, how do you account for how this election went the way it did? And
• Two: What will you be doing about it?