Borders and Belonging

Back in 2018, during our first go-round with this president, Adam Serwer wrote an analysis for Atlantic magazine that seemed the only explanation for the inexplicable. The title was: "The Cruelty is the Point." (Serwer later expanded his article into a book of the same title.) I read a lot of articles and forget most of them, but that stuck with me. Serwer said, “The president and his supporters find community by rejoicing in the suffering of those they hate and fear.”

Oh, gosh.

Now, a liberal, according to Judith Shklar’s famous definition, is a person for whom cruelty is the worst thing they do. This doesn’t mean liberals are always less cruel than others, but it does mean that when we see we have been cruel, we regret it. We recognize that humans are prone to be cruel, and, for liberals, that's the worst in us. Nonliberals have a different idea of what is worst: such as dishonor -- and a particular conception of "weakness" is usually involved in the idea of what is dishonorable. On that view, it's better to be cruel than dishonorable. It's a fundamentally different orientation to life.

Now a new level of harsh and cruel anti-immigrant policies are being implemented – and we face the reality that a lot of our neighbors support those policies – and don’t regard cruel as a criticism. Indications are: they rejoice in it.

Next week’s sermon will be “You, UU, and Social Justice.” I’ll talk about the ways that we do resist and can resist. Today, I want to talk instead about how we open our hearts to make ourselves more compassionate, more ready to reach across borders and walk across borders. Today our question is: What can I do to commit myself to loving-kindness across borders? The first step in standing up against cruelty is making ourselves less cruel.

I’ll look to the Book of Ruth for an instructive parable for us. Before I get to that, let’s take a moment to be clear about what exactly borders are – and what they’re for.

Two things: you need a border, and it needs to be porous. A cell has to have a cell wall to hold it together – but it has to be a porous wall. We have to have skin to hold us together. And the skin needs to be porous. It needs a flow coming in and out. We die if we don’t have skin holding us together, defining us and making us a definite thing. We also die if we are sealed off and nothing goes in or out. We need to let in, and let out, air and nutrients.

The average human adult has 7 million pores on their skin: 5 million hair follicle pores that secrete oils, plus 2 million sweat gland pores. Your pores secrete and also take in – which is how, for example, nicotine patches work. You have to have boundaries – definition. And there has to be a flow through those boundaries – just to be biologically alive.

But we humans are also social animals– in fact, hypersocial animals, as I have often said. We need communication, connection flowing in, out, and through. We need ideas and love to flow in, to flow out, and flow through us – or we perish. Through our connections, we form ourselves into groups, and the group also needs a definition, a boundary – some way to identify itself and be identified as a group. We need to belong, and our belonging requires a sense of US. So borders, boundaries, and belonging are wrapped up in each other. You don’t know who you are if you don’t know whose you are.

But the group’s border also needs to be porous: to take in and to give out. Whether the group is a nation, or a congregation – a trade union, sports team, or a gender or ethnic identity -- its definition of itself cannot be rigid or static, but must be somewhat ambiguous, vague, and evolving -- without being too much so.

For the last three years now, Ukraine has been trying its darndest to defend its borders – to fight off and push out an incursion that threatens its existence. But fending off a very real organized hostile takeover attempt is one thing. Delusions of takeover from imagined dangerous others are quite different.

Fear – for our individual person, or for the group which is our belonging – heightens focus on our border, on protecting ourselves by shoring up that border however we can. Fear morphs from a useful tool, blaring a warning when needed, to a pervasive condition: consuming and debilitating. Here in the U.S., division and polarization tears us apart. There is fear of the other in anti-immigrant attitudes, and in the cruelty of our policies toward people who live in different, poorer neighborhoods. There’s fear of the other driving every form of white supremacy, misogyny, and colonialism.

A few years ago, for the 2021-22 church year, the Unitarian Universalist Association’s Common Read that year was Zach Norris’ Defund Fear – or, as it was originally titled, We Keep Us Safe. Zach Norris points out that what really keeps us safe is – or would be – good schools, good jobs, effective affordable health care, clean and safe drinking water and air, safe roads and bridges. Funding for what really keeps us safe has been eroding for decades. Instead, we’ve been erecting a more and more pervasive framework of fear, the four key elements of which are deprivation, suspicion, punishment, and isolation.

We’ve been erecting and fortifying borders to keep THEM away from US. This has only reduced our safety. Our fears grow and grow, fueling counterproductive reactions that further reduce our safety in a vicious cycle. Instead we need to cross borders, reach out to whoever is, or has been perceived as, OTHER. WE keep us safe – as the book’s original title says – and we can do so only if we embrace a larger WE instead of fearfully shrinking our WE.

So what do we do about that? Well, Unitarian Universalists are doing a lot – there’s a lot of ways to join in – and I’ll be more specific about that next week. Today, I want us to pause a moment and look behind that question. Sometimes when we ask “what do I do about it?” – or “what does our congregation do about it?” – the question behind the question is: "How do I make other people agree with me? How do I change THEM?" We think: “I see the problem; I am not the problem. It’s those other people, people who watch the TV news of that reprehensible network, and who voted in these reprehensible leaders."

Thus the war between relatively privileged red America and relatively privileged blue America upstages the needs of the more-often-politically-disengaged poorer communities most at risk. The challenge for us is to find ways to cross two different borders – to open our hearts across the red/blue divide and across the class divide.

“How do we change the system?” is a good and important question, but we must always also be asking: how do we change ourselves? To help us think about that question, let’s recall together an old, old story – possibly familiar to you – about a woman who did cross a border, and the difference it made. Perhaps it will inspire you to creatively imagine a way that you might reach, and step, across a border that you have for too long treated as impermeable.

The story is that of Ruth, the Moabite, who crossed borders to stay with her mother-in-law Naomi as she returned to Bethlehem in Judah. I’m inspired to bring that story to our attention this morning because of the work of Padraig O Tuama and Glenn Jordan, two Irishmen who a few years ago began leading workshops bringing together people across the divisions of the Brexit issue. In the face of the deep and wide social and political divisions, O Tuama and Jordan led people through an exploration of the Book of Ruth. The story of her border crossing helped participants cross the borders that separated them from others. O Tuama and Jordan were looking for

“a story that might lead us to say things other than the things we are shouting at each other in the letters section of newspapers, comments sections of websites and social media, shouty parts of shout programs on radio and television” (Borders and Belonging: The Book of Ruth: A Story for Our Times xii).

In these polarized times, O Tuama and Jordan asked:

“Can we be held in some kind of narrative creativity by a story whose origins we do not know?”

The Book of Ruth, they found, offered just such a container of narrative creativity. The book of Ruth is short -- just four chapters – a drama in four acts.

Act 1. It’s the time of the judges. A famine comes to Judah. Elimelech, his wife Naomi, and their sons Mahlon and Chilion cross borders and go to Moab. Elimelech dies. The two sons marry Moabite women, but then, after about 10 years, the sons also both die. Naomi packs up to return to Bethlehem. Her two daughters-in-law expect to go with her, but she tells them to return to their own mothers and remarry. One of them, Orpah, reluctantly does so. But the other, Ruth, pleads: “Do not press me to leave you or turn back from following you. Where you go, I will go. Where you lodge, I will lodge. Your people shall be my people, and your God my God. Where you die, I will die – there will I be buried. May the Lord do thus and so to me, and more as well, if even death parts me from you.” So Naomi and Ruth cross the border and return to Bethlehem, and arrive at the beginning of the barley harvest.

Act 2. Word gets around Bethlehem of Ruth’s remarkable loyalty and devotion to Naomi. To support her mother-in-law and herself, Ruth goes to the fields to glean. As it happened, the field she goes to belongs to a man named Boaz, who, impressed by what he’s heard of the young woman’s devotion to her mother-in-law, is kind to Ruth. Ruth tells Naomi of Boaz's kindness, and Ruth continues to glean in his field through the remainder of barley and wheat harvest.

Act 3. Boaz, being a close relative of Naomi's husband's family, is therefore obliged by the levirate law (or may feel obligated by the spirit of that law) to marry Ruth to carry on his family's inheritance. Naomi sends Ruth to the threshing floor at night where Boaz slept, telling Ruth to "uncover his feet and lie down. He will tell you what you are to do." Ruth does so. Boaz awakes and asks her who she is. She answers, “I am Ruth, your servant. Spread your cloak over your servant, for you are a redeeming kinsman.” Boaz tells her there is a closer male relative. In the morning, Boaz sends Ruth home with six measures of barley, then he goes into the city.

Act 4. Boaz meets with the unnamed closer male relative whom he had mentioned. Boaz says, “Naomi is selling the parcel of land that belonged to our kinsman Elimilech. As the closest male relative, you have first shot at redeeming it if you want it.”
The relative says, “I will redeem it.”
Boaz says, “You will also be acquiring Ruth to maintain her dead husband’s name on his inheritance.”
Then the relative says, “I cannot redeem it for myself without damaging my own inheritance. Take my right of redemption yourself.”
So Boaz redeems the property, and Ruth. Ruth and Boaz marry. They have a son named Obed. We are told Obed will become the father of Jesse, and Jesse the father of David.

To understand what this story is doing in the Hebrew Bible, first we need to understand what Moab means to the Israelites. Moabites are despised. As Glenn Jordan explains:

“In Hebrew folklore Moab was stereotyped as a place lacking in hospitality, and with some justification. There is a memory preserved in the words of the Torah from another time of hunger and distress. In Numbers 22, the Israelites, recently freed from Egypt, are travelling through the wilderness on the way to the land of promise and they camp in the land of Moab. There is a reference in Deuteronomy 23:4 to a request made by the people to the Moabites for bread and water. The king of the Moabites, Balak, terrified by the number of people he would be required to supply… refuses their request for aid and shelter. Balak even hires a man to pronounce curses on them as he expels them from his land.” (27)

So, the Israelites do not like Moabites. They despise them with a special vigor beyond their general distrust of foreigners. The sentiment is codified in Deuteronomy 23:3:

“No Ammonite or Moabite shall be admitted to the assembly of the Lord. Even to the tenth generation, none of their descendants shall be admitted to the assembly of the Lord.”

And Ruth is a Moabite, as the text continually emphasizes. Hardly does the text ever say “Ruth,” without saying “Ruth the Moabite.” At one point, Boaz's fieldhand even describes her as, “Ruth the Moabite,...from Moab” --just to emphasize that her country of origin is not to be overlooked.

Yet Ruth’s devotion, her lovingkindness to Naomi, is clear. She declares: "your people will be my people." When they get to Bethlehem, Ruth takes the initiative in providing for them, saying, “let me go to the field and glean among the ears of grain.”

And, the story tells us, Ruth ends up the great-grandmother of King David, Israel’s greatest ruler. She makes a big contribution to Israelite history.

But does the Hebrew Bible really need this story illustrating that foreigners can be decent people who make a positive contribution so we shouldn’t be hostile toward them? The admonitions were already in Exodus:

“You shall not wrong or oppress a resident alien, for you were aliens in the land of Egypt.” (22:21)

And in Leviticus:

“When an alien resides with you in your land, you shall not oppress the alien. The alien who resides with you shall be to you as the citizen among you; you shall love the alien as yourself, for you were aliens in the land of Egypt.” (19:33)

Evidently that was not enough, and to see why, we need to look back to what was going on in Judah around the time when the Hebrew Bible was taking its form.

By about 601 BCE, the kingdom of Judah was a vassal state paying tribute to Babylonia. Judah made a series of attempts to escape Babylonian dominance. Nebuchadnezzar of Babylonia laid siege to Jerusalem in 597, and again, 10 years later, in 587. He razed the city, destroyed the walls, demolished Solomon’s temple, and exiled the Jews to Babylonia. About 50 years later, Persia conquered Babylon, and Cyrus, King of Persia, decreed that the Jewish people return to Jerusalem. It was during the period of Babylonian captivity, that the Hebrew Bible began to form as various oral and written traditions were brought together.

Just after the exile, further writings were added – in particular the books of Ezra and Nehemiah. Ezra the priest and Nehemiah the governor were the two best-known leaders of the Jewish community in the years just after the return to Jerusalem. In the books for which they are named, we read that Ezra insists on obedience to the Mosaic law’s separation from non-Jews, and that Nehemiah encloses Jerusalem with a wall and purges the community from all things foreign in order to build a distinctive Jewish identity.

It's in that context that this little story of Ruth, which had probably been a part of the oral tradition for a couple of centuries, got written down and emphasized, so much so that it became scripture. I’m saying maybe the Book of Ruth is in the Hebrew Bible specifically to push back against the rather xenophobic outlook of Ezra and Nehemiah. As Glenn Jordan writes, there may be

“occasions in history when the proper response to the times is not another war or new legislation, not even an election, but a work of art. In this case, the process of gathering an oral account and committing it to writing stands in front of the juggernaut of history in an attempt to divert the hearts of people towards some lasting values, and to remind them of their better selves.” (47)

So maybe that’s why this story is there: to address a felt need to counterbalance Ezra-Nehemiah. In the face of the insularity and division and the border-enforcing of Ezra and Nehemiah, we needed Ruth, the Moabite, the immigrant, the border-crosser, to call us back to our better selves.

There’s Nehemiah proclaiming, “We will not give our daughters to the peoples of the land or take their daughters for our sons” (10:30), but a few books away there’s Ruth the Moabite standing before us to say, “Excuse me?” While Deuteronomy had said, no Moabite shall be admitted to the assembly of the Lord even to the tenth generation, the Book of Ruth tells us that the great King David was just three generations down from a Moabite.

So if you're asking, "What can I do about divisions all around us, and the mistreatment of people on the wrong sides of those divides?" and what you mean is, "What can I do to change those other people who are so foolish and pigheaded as to disagree with me?" then I don't know if that can be done. But if you're asking, "What can I do to commit myself to the open-hearted devotion and loving-kindness across borders that Ruth exemplified?" that is a more promising question.

And if that's your question, let me turn it back to you: What can you do? You yourself can best answer that -- if you set your mind to answering it. May that question, and not our fears, command our attention -- that question: What can I do to commit myself to loving-kindness across borders? May this question be our guide. Amen.

Borders and Boundaries

Our monthly theme for February is Borders and Boundaries. These two words are synonyms – or they used to be. They both mean the outer edge, the bound or the limit of something. In recent years, though, the words have come to be used in different ways. A “border” is more often now used to mean the kind of line that shuts people out -- like a "border wall," either personal or national. We’ve come to think of a border as something to be crossed or surmounted or maybe expanded.

And boundaries, on the other hand – like your personal boundaries – are something to be maintained and respected and upheld. So, for example, "Doctors without Borders" is a wonderful organization, and a wonderful concept – providing necessary medical care without regard to the political or social borders that function to limit access to care. But "Doctors without Boundaries" sounds like a bad re-boot of the TV show, “House MD.”

Some lines, it’s good to cross. Other lines are better respected. You’ve probably heard the verse by Edwin Markham, titled “Outwitted.”

He drew a circle that shut me out -
Heretic, rebel, a thing to flout.
But love and I had the wit to win:
We drew a circle and took him In!

In those four lines we see both the good and the bad of the lines we draw – the boundaries and borders we put up. Some lines shut people out. Other lines hold people together. And sometimes it’s the same line: holding US together and keeping out THEM.

Our Unitarian Universalist seminary, Meadville Lombard in Chicago, has had a requirement that students design a focused project to carry out during their internship in which the student shows how they cross borders in their ministry – borders of race or culture, gender or generation. Crossing borders is a crucial component of building a more just and harmonious world – a more beloved community. At the same time, Meadville Lombard’s course offering also include one called, “Healthy Boundaries, Healthy Ministry.”

Those lines that shut people out: we have to find ways to erase them or at least move across them with greater facility. Boundaries, on the other hand, are a good thing. Having good boundaries is a part of being psychologically and emotionally healthy, and a key to effective leadership. What I’d like to do today is first talk about good boundaries: what that means and why it’s helpful to have them. Then we’ll take a look at borders – the lines we draw that shut people out. The objective is some greater clarity on what sorts of lines we should be looking to cross, and what sort to respect and uphold.

Having good boundaries is also called being self-defined, differentiated, or having a well-developed self. Good boundaries are what let you be guided by what you think of yourself rather than other people’s opinions. Without those boundaries, your identity merges with the people around you. You’re more susceptible to “groupthink.” On the one hand, you’re more controlled by other people’s judgments. On the other hand, you’re also more controlling – more devoted to actively or passively trying to control others.

The self-differentiated person, on the other hand, is more able to say, “I’m going to do me, you do you. I’m not interested in judging you, or in your judgments of me, but I am interested in nonjudgmentally watching how we each are and looking for ways we might harmonize or complement each other. There’s not a right answer or a blueprint for how we should work together or play together or be together. Rather, as I do me and you do you, I’m open to being surprised, to discovering unexpected creative ways that our different gifts can synchronize, or contribute in different ways to a common goal.”

Many psychologists note that a person’s degree of self-differentiation, while it probably has some genetic component, is largely influenced by family relationships during childhood and adolescence. Once established, the level of self boundaries tends often to be set for life. It can be changed, but it’s hard. It takes a structured and long-term effort to change it.

People with poor boundaries may be chameleons or bullies, or vacillate back and forth. Chameleons depend so heavily on the acceptance and approval of others that they quickly adjust what they think, say, and do to please others. Bullies likewise depend on acceptance and approval of others, but pursue their need by dogmatically proclaiming what others should be like and pressuring them to conform. Disagreement is a threat to chameleons and bullies alike. In both cases there’s a need for conformity – whether by conforming to others or making them conform to me.

A third type of poorly differentiated person would be the extreme rebel who routinely opposes the positions of others. Reactionary opposition is just as much a way of being controlled by others as reactionary agreement is.

We are each unique and we bring unique gifts and perspectives to the table – of course. But when we don’t have good boundaries, we blur our own uniqueness, or seek to minimize others’, or both.

What about George Herbert Mead? The great American sociologist made the point that the self is a "generalized other." We create our sense of self from generalizing from what we learn about others. Does this mean we can't really be differentiated from others? No, it doesn't mean that. The self is a generalized other, but that generalizing is a creative activity -- in large part an unconscious creativity. We all come up with different generalizations. We are generalizing from different pools of experience with others, and even when two people, like twins, grow up with the same pool of other people around them, they creatively generalize in different ways. What’s more, we’re always learning, and the self is always growing and changing – but, again, this need not be a process driven by a felt need for conformity. What about our our historic seventh principle? That principle says there is an interconnected web of all existence in which we are a part. We depend on each other. But this also does not mean we can't be self-differentiated within that web.

A person with good boundaries can stay calm and clear-headed in the face of conflict, criticism, and rejection. They can assess criticism in the context of their own long-term principles and considered values rather only reacting from the emotions they’re feeling in the moment.

Boundaries keep you contained – rather than a puddle of emotions and needs for acceptance. Boundaries thus afford integrity: the ability to live from a more-or-less consistent set of more-or-less thoughtful values rather than being pulled this way and that by the shifting currents of opinion and judgment of others.

Last month’s theme was “Vow” – and the packet for the month included exercises for drawing out of yourself and articulating your great life vow. Implicit is the idea that other people will have different vows for their life. Keeping your eye on your vow, while also appreciating and collaborating with those with different vows: that’s good boundaries.

In a couple, when the partners are self-defined, they can each talk about what they’re thinking and listen carefully – rather than taking on anxiety about the partner’s issue and reacting out of their anxiety. Each can appreciate the other’s decision-making strengths while also able to think things through for themselves. Neither assumes the other generally knows best, but looks at each situation fresh. They can talk about their fears or concerns without expecting the other to fix or solve them, but simply because sharing our fears helps us think more clearly about them. When they bring their anxieties to each other, the interaction doesn’t escalate the anxiety. Their boundaries help keep the anxiety contained and thus manageable. Each is a resource for the other: emotionally available without either fixing or blaming.

It’s helpful here to recall the distinction between a request and a demand. The difference between a request and a demand is in whether you’re upset if it isn’t met. Sometimes its clear that a demand is being made: "Do what I’m saying or I’m going to be angry or upset!" That’s a demand. Other times, what is presented as a request is not revealed to really have been a demand until after the answer is “no.” But the extent to which you are upset if the answer is “no,” is the extent to which there was some demand in your request. You might hide the upset – the anger or disappointment – and pretend you’re not upset, but if you are, then you were demanding, not simply requesting.

When we have good boundaries, when our perceived worth doesn’t depend on things going our way, we can make true requests – that is, requests which, if answered no, we can roll with that answer without getting upset or anxious.

Good boundaries aren’t a barrier against caring, but are a protection of our integrity. They don’t make us detached or aloof, but allow us to be present to a situation without taking anything personally, without taking on the anxiety. The notion of being a nonanxious presence in the midst of anxiety once seemed self-contradictory to me. My strategy for being present was to show that I was just as worried or scared or angry about the situation as anybody else. My strategy for being nonanxious was to check out, become detached, emotionally distant. But the reality is that taking on someone else’s anxiety isn’t really being present to it. Nor is detaching and not being present to it being nonanxious – detachment is one way anxiety may manifest. The only way to be truly present is to be nonanxious, and the only way to be truly nonanxious is to be present. And that requires being self-differentiated, having good boundaries that allow you to know that your worth, your dignity, the worth-while-ness of your life is not threatened by whatever mess of which you might happen to find yourself in the middle. Having good boundaries solves the 84th problem. Do you know what the 84th problem is? I’ve told the parable before, in a sermon last May, and it's worth re-telling. The Buddha comes to town, and a farmer comes to see him and starts complaining about his problems. His wife this; and his children that; and the ox is sick; and the soil is poor; and there hasn’t been enough rain and, if there were, the roof would leak; and the people to whom he sells his rice are cheating him.
The Buddha stops him and says: You have 83 problems.
Farmer says: That sounds about right. How do I fix them?
Buddha says: You’ll always have 83 problems. Maybe you solve one, or it goes away on its own, but another pops up to take its place. Always 83 problems.
Farmer says: Well, what good are you?
Buddha says: I can help with the 84th problem.
Farmer says: What’s the 84th problem?
Buddha says: You think you should have no problems.

For the person with good boundaries, problems don’t bother them. Problems arise. One responds to them as well as one can. This is life. Whether you call them problems or challenges, there’s always the next one to meet. Having good boundaries doesn’t keep out your 83 problems, but it does keep out the 84th problem. Your problems then don’t define you; you aren’t consumed with the thought that you shouldn’t be having this problem.

The 84th problem is the extra. Your problems (or challenges) are enough by themselves; you don't need to add anything extra. But we often do add extra problem to our problems. Whenever we're annoyed by the problem, when we think it's wrong that the problem exists, when we let the problem trigger our reactivity and upset our equanimity, we are adding extra problem to our problem. Good boundaries keep out that extra bit. Life IS problems, or we’d have nothing to do with ourselves, no reason for being. This is a very ancient spiritual insight and teaching. All things belong. On the one hand, being mindful that all things belong eases anxiety, irritation, annoyance, anger. On the other hand, it’s also true that if all things belong, then so does your anxiety and anger. This, too, is recognized in ancient spiritual teachings, though the very modern perspective of evolutionary psychology helps us understand it.

Anxiety belongs because our ancestors needed anxiety. Anxiety about that lion prompted them to run away, anxiety about a brewing storm prompted them to seek shelter. Homo sapiens emerged with a particularly advanced capacity to worry about the future, to imagine dangers that weren’t immediately visible. This was probably driven by the processes that made us not only social animals – as wolves, orcas, emperor penguins, chimpanzees and others are – but ultra-social: able to adaptively cooperate at an extraordinary level because of an astonishing capacity to imagine ourselves into another person’s situation, grasp what they’re trying to do, so we can help them do it.

We were motivated to be helpful because we were able to imagine the future – farther into the future and in more detail than other species. I would help you because I imagined a future in which you would help me – and that capacity allowed systems of reciprocal altruism to begin to form. As our symbolic language emerged, we were able to communicate to create shared imaginary futures, and then cooperate to bring them about. Which is all very wonderful. But there’s a rub. Our ability to imagine the future, and to be goaded to appropriate action by a little anxiety about that future, can easily go too far. Evolution gave us these goads, but it didn’t give us very good mechanisms for turning them off when they’re no longer helpful. Our brains were built to worry, and it’s very easy for them to fall into a pattern of worrying even when it does us no good, and only produces chronic stress and anxiety.

Making matters worse, the futures we imagine aren’t just worries about the weather, or predators, or food sources. Our imagined futures are heavily peopled. "Can Bob be counted on?" "Was Sandra lying, and she’ll stab me in the back?" Our brains evolved to negotiate the fantastically complex balancing act of wanting and needing to cooperate, but also guard against being taken advantage of – balancing the costs and risks of cooperation against possible benefits.

This balancing act is carried out through – or manifests as – our sense of fairness. We are as ultra-social as ants or bees, but for us, our sense of fairness is the crucial regulator of our sociability. My brain is built to monitor possible future scenarios of people being unfair to me, and whether they’ll think that I’m unfair to them, and whether they’ll think I’ll think they’re unfair to me – it’s exhausting. Or, rather, it seems like it would be exhausting, but in fact our brains seem to rarely tire of thinking about fairness. Our ability to think about fairness in such complicated ways is also our beauty as a species.

So we are built to worry what other people think, and to want to be in agreement with them. Yet, the more clear we are about who we are, the less need we’ll have to be self-protective, i.e., defensive. Ironically, the better your boundary is, the less need you have for a protective border wall of defensess. That is: those who are self-differentiated don’t have to be self-protective. When difference and conflict aren’t a threat to your sense of self, then ego defense mechanisms don’t get triggered, and the walls that block empathy don’t go up. When boundaries are solid, borders don’t have to be. When we’re comfortable with ourselves, we can let people in -- we can take down the walls that shut them out.

So how are your boundaries, would you say? Today, after the service, please pair off with one other person – next to you in line at the refreshment table, or anywhere. Pair off with one other person and exchange your self-assessment of your boundaries. Would you say your boundaries are excellent? Pretty good? A bit of a struggle for you sometimes? How are your boundaries? Pair off and share that with one other person after today’s service.

When we don’t require conformity of ourselves, or of others, we can be free to connect with and work with very different people, appreciating and not being threatened by their difference – while also appreciating and not being scared by our own differentness. This is true on the personal level, and it is true on the national level. As a nation, the US has lost its boundary -- that is, we've lost clarity about who we are as a people. We are, as it were, “out of bounds.” We used to have consensus about a basic story about what it meant to be Americans, and we were defined by that story. That old story had problems. It was a story shot through with patriarchal and white supremacist assumptions, and the critique that helped dismantle the old story was well warranted.

But a new and better story has not emerged. In the interim, we don’t know who we are, don't know what "America" is. In compensation for our lack of boundary definition, the national psyche instead turns to border protection. A lot of us want to put up a wall -- blocking empathy, blocking compassion, blocking our own growth, blocking the very connections that our spirits crave. We are afraid that if we let people in, they will change us -- and we have that fear because we aren't, as a nation, self-differentiated and clear about who we are to start with.

Emma Lazarus wrote the words that appear on our Statue of Liberty:

“Give me your tired, your poor,
Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,
The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.
Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me,
I lift my lamp beside the golden door!”

She wrote that in 1883. We were then a nation with a clearer sense of who we were. We were confident that we could take in newcomers without losing our sense of national selfhood -- that newcomers would enrich us with their differences while at the same time would learn to cherish certain common values with the rest of us. Today, we do not have that confidence. So instead we are self-protective, defensive, erecting border walls, shutting out "the other," and cutting off our nose to spite our face.

It's true that that confidence was a confidence in white supremacy and patriarchy -- that the values we were confident newcomers would pick up were values that would leave the basic supremacist power structure unchallenged. Whether we can learn to have confidence in ourselves -- trust in ourselves and our neighbors -- as a nation of pluralism and equality remains to be seen.

As our national norms break down, lines are crossed. Lines of civility are crossed. These lines were helpful, as David Brooks once noted. Those lines, he said, help

"political leaders hold two opposing ideas in their heads simultaneously:...the first is that your political opponents are wrong about many things and should be defeated in elections. The second is that you still need them. You need them to check your excesses, compensate for your blind spots and correct your mistakes."

But it's gotten easier and easier to cross the lines that held our leaders in a system that helped them know how to work together amidst disagreements, and find and build on common ground while respecting the beneficial role of political opposition. Crossing those lines of civility and cooperation makes it harder and harder to cross the other lines, the ones that exclude and shut out -- the lines of enmity and othering.

The task before us is daunting. But as Rabbi Tarfon says, be not daunted. "You are not obligated to complete the task. Nor are you free to abandon it." The task is to strengthen our boundary – clarify our principles, our values – our vow -- know our story and stick to it, develop equanimity in our integrity, bring our nonanxious presence. Only thus will we be able then to cross borders, replace walls with bridges, join hands, and end the loneliness. May it be so. Amen.

Desert Theory

The inauguration has happened -- happened on Martin Luther King day -- and we are now into this President’s new term. From what we’ve seen so far, it doesn’t look great. What is ours to do is to keep living by our values, keep living into this mission that we share: to love radically, to grow ethically and spiritually, and serve justly.

Every act of caring about someone or something other than yourself and your narrowly conceived self-interests is an act of resistance. Every time you acknowledge that you don’t know something, but are interested in learning more about it, even if the truth is uncomfortable, that’s an act of resistance. Every time you accept responsibility when something goes wrong, that’s an act of resistance. Every time you give credit to others when something goes right, that’s an act of resistance. Every time you thoughtfully examine an issue rather than grasping at quick fixes or dismissals, that is an act of resistance.

We sang in our opening hymn:

Come spirit come, our hearts control.
Our spirits long to be made whole.
Let inward love guide every deed.
By this we worship and are freed.

And our spirits do long to be made whole. Even when we understand that we are whole, the world leaves us often feeling that we aren’t. We don’t feel connected with our neighbors. The fragmentation in the nation’s public political sphere produces a fragmentation in our psyches. We need to feel part of something we’re all in together.

There are a number of conditions that have contributed to our current predicament. Social media enable instantaneous spread of false information – and that’s certainly a factor. Today, though, I want to look at meritocracy.

The rise of meritocracy, which has been going on for decades, by its nature and design, left many behind. Maybe we shouldn’t have been surprised at the intensity of resentment about that which erupted in the 2016 election, simmered through the 2020 election, and grew stronger yet in the 2024 election.

Meritocracy is based on the idea that people get positions of power and authority – and wealth – by deserving to have those positions. So meritocracy depends upon some implicit or explicit desert theory. Desert theory is not a theory about why people like to have something sugary at the end of a meal. Nor is desert theory about why people desert or abandon other people, or areas. It’s spelled like “desert” but desert theory is also not about why some regions become dry and arid. Desert theory tries to offer an account of what constitutes deservingness.

It’s in our mission to grow ethically and spiritually, and the role of your conception of desert in your ways of thinking is a part of your ethical reasoning. So let’s think about that conception – and see if we find some avenues for growing ethically – because growing is an act of resistance.

We very commonly talk and think in terms of who deserves what.

“We say that a hard-working student who produces work of high quality deserves a high grade; that a vicious criminal deserves a harsh penalty; that someone who has suffered a series of misfortunes deserves some good luck for a change” ("Desert," Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy).

An athlete might deserve a prize in virtue of having excelled in a competition. A researcher might deserve our gratitude for having perfected a vaccine against a disease. Someone who acts without any regard for the welfare of others may deserve our contempt. The victim of an industrial accident may deserve compensation from her negligent employer. An employee may deserve a promotion in virtue of evident talent, hard work, and years of valuable service.

Desert – deservingness – is a kind of fiction, a social imaginary, but that doesn’t mean it doesn’t have real potency to make big differences in our lives. After all, money is a fiction, a social imaginary, and it certainly makes a big difference. It used to be a shiny yellowish metal that was too soft to be useful, but an implicit agreement arose to regard it as valuable, and so it was. Then it was just slips of paper, and now it’s even more imaginary – but since we have agreed to share this imagination, we have developed clear procedures for when you have it, and how much. The electrons inside of bank computers keep track of each person’s amount. Desert is this kind of fiction. How deserving you are, and of what, is not nearly as precisely determined as how much money you have. Yet notions of desert do shape our lives and the ways we treat each other.

Sometimes we say a person deserves something if they are entitled to it. We might say a customer deserves a refund from a merchant if the customer purchased a product that was sold with a guarantee and then the product turned out to be defective. Being entitled to something is one way to deserve it, but that’s not the only way. Entitled means there are rules in place that say what you are to get, but sometimes our sense of what is deserved doesn’t match up with what the rules say. Suppose a wealthy old man dies, leaving behind two grandsons – one of whom is vicious and never treated his grandfather with respect and one was virtuous and always respectful and caring. We would feel that the virtuous grandson deserved to inherit more of the fortune, but the vicious one would nevertheless be entitled to the greater share if that was what the will stipulated. So you can be entitled to some reward even if you don’t deserve it, and you can deserve something without being entitled to it.

Some things, we say, everyone deserves. Everyone deserves fairness, justice, human rights. Then there are other cases where only one or a few people will get the job, or the promotion, or the win, and we might talk about which person deserves it, or deserves it most.

I think a lot of our desert theory is mostly absorbed from the discourse around us. We hear people talk about what so-and-so deserves, and over time we internalize ways of applying the sentiment. But sometimes we do reason with each other about deservingness. It’s not always just an intuition. It can be reasoned about. This is easiest to see when it comes to what we think everyone deserves, just in virtue of being a person.

So we come to the argument for meritocracy: that positions of greatest power and prestige should be open to everyone on the basis of merit. The US never had an official aristocracy, but it certainly had an unofficial one: the old-money families got in to the best schools and went out to the best paying and most powerful positions in society. The argument for meritocracy was an argument that people of merit deserved those positions, not people of breeding. So meritocracy seemed like a great step forward for justice and fairness.

Ivy league institutions, from their founding up until about 1960, admitted only white, Christian men, and within this group selected students for breeding. These were schools for the sons of well-established families. Then in the middle of the 20th century, Harvard President James Bryant Conant and slightly later Yale President Kingman Brewster, choose to abandon their historic role as finishing schools for America’s aristocracy. Daniel Markovits writes:

“Alumni had long believed that their sons had a birthright to follow them to Yale; now prospective students would gain admission based on achievement rather than breeding. Meritocracy — for a time — replaced complacent insiders with talented and hardworking outsiders.”

Surely, a very positive move, right? People with merit deserved to get admitted. People of aristocratic breeding had no special deservingness. By 1970 a fierce merit-based competition had completely replaced the old cordial alliance between the universities and old-money established families.

Today, however, it is past time to reconsider our judgments of deservingness based on merit. We tend to think that merit is the product of two factors: talent and effort. But it’s actually a product of three factors. We often overlook the importance of the third factor: quality training: teachers, tutors, coaches, good equipment and other resources. Excellence at basketball or ballet, at chess or computer programming, at piano or painting or composing poetry, or at any academic subject is not just a matter of native ability combined with dedication and determination.

Whether you spend 4 hours a week or 40 hours a week practicing at a skill, you won’t make as much progress as you will if you also have a skilled and attentive coach guiding your practice. Further, when it comes to competitive college or professional sports programs, it takes more than A good coach. It takes platoons of coaches AND lots of expensive equipment. When I was a graduate student at the University of Virginia in the late 1980s, it seemed all wrong to me that the University was then in the midst of spending $50 million to build a shiny new athletic training facility. In fact, though, a school can’t be competitive at division I football without such resources. Resources make a difference.

Because quality training is so crucial, it means that a big part of what admissions departments regard as merit can be bought. So what started out as a move to open up elite institutions to deserving students from the middle- and lower classes now entrenches the advantages of wealth.

Expensive private schools pay off. A typical public high school spends 15 thousand dollars per child per year. Some poorer public high schools spend 8 thousand to 10 thousand dollars per child per year. But the top 20 private schools (as measured by Forbes) average 75 thousand dollars per child per year. This buys results: it buys training, it buys smaller class size and more teacher attention, it buys more talented teachers, it buys careful educational programs.

The result is that, while the average middle-class kid’s SAT is 125 points higher than the average score of kids in poverty, the average score of kids whose parents earn more than 200 thousand dollars a year is 250 points greater than the average middle-class kid. Yes, the gap between rich and middle-class is twice the size of the gap between middle-class and poor.

What does your desert theory say about whether the wealthier kids deserve those higher scores, and the benefits they get as a result of those scores?

Discounting the few who outright cheated, we can say, yes, they had talent and worked hard. On the other hand, they also had a lot of quality training that wasn’t available to middle- and lower-class kids. The result is that at Ivy league and what are called “Ivy League Plus” schools (the "plus" includes such schools as Stanford, MIT, University of Chicago, Duke, Northwestern, Johns Hopkins, and Caltech) the proportion of students who come from the top 1% of household incomes is greater than the proportion that come from the entire bottom 50% of household incomes. This comes as the upshot of meritocratic admissions policies that were originally supposed to reverse that very disparity.

Further, what students get when they arrive on campus is more quality training -- much greater resources being spent on them. And the students and their families don’t even have to pay for most of what they get. There’s an enormous public subsidy that results from universities being taxed as charities, with alumni donations being tax deductible and endowments able to grow without being taxed. Princeton’s tax exemption amounts to a public subsidy of $100,000 per student per year. Rutgers’ public subsidy is less than $13,000 per student per year. Nearby Essex Community College has a public subsidy of $2,500 per student per year. We’re pouring vast public resources into further advantaging the already advantaged. What does your desert theory say about that?

And just as the resources expended at elite high schools matter for preparing the students to get into and succeed at elite universities, the resources expended at elite universities matter for preparing students to get into and succeed at the highest-paying jobs. Many of the top law firms and financial institutions will only recruit at a few elite universities – and rarely hire graduates of an average state school. So that’s one thing for us to think about: that our intuitions about the deservingness of merit often overlook the vastly unequal distribution of quality training.

Now let’s look at another factor. Our desert theory tends to say that working hard increases deservingness. But don’t we also recognize that there’s such a thing as working too hard? After all, it’s not that the children of the elites aren’t working hard for what they get. In fact, overall, they are working too hard. The pressure on the elite kids to do well is inordinate. As Daniel Markovits writes:

“Elite middle and high schools now commonly require three to five hours of homework a night; epidemiologists at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention have warned of schoolwork-induced sleep deprivation. Wealthy students show higher rates of drug and alcohol abuse than poor students do. They also suffer depression and anxiety at rates as much as triple those of their age peers throughout the country. A recent study of a Silicon Valley high school found that 54 percent of students displayed moderate to severe symptoms of depression and 80 percent displayed moderate to severe symptoms of anxiety.”

So what does your desert theory say about whether someone deserves what they’re working for if what they’re working for is a sleep deprived, depressed, anxious, unhappy life? And it’s only getting worse, as the competition is getting more and more intense, and exclusive institutions are getting more and more exclusive. As recently as 1995, the University of Chicago admitted 71 percent of its applicants. In 2019, it admitted less than 6 percent. It’s getting worse.

Then, notes Markovits,

“the contest intensifies when meritocrats enter the workplace, where elite opportunity is exceeded only by the competitive effort required to grasp it. A person whose wealth and status depend on her human capital simply cannot afford to consult her own interests or passions in choosing her job. Instead, she must approach work as an opportunity to extract value from her human capital, especially if she wants an income sufficient to buy her children the type of schooling that secured her own eliteness. She must devote herself to a narrowly restricted class of high-paying jobs, concentrated in finance, management, law, and medicine. Whereas aristocrats once considered themselves a leisure class, meritocrats work with unprecedented intensity.”

It used to be the poor that worked long hours and the rich were the leisure class. Not that that was a good system, but it’s striking that now it’s more often the rich who are working 70, 80 hours a week. And many of them are working at jobs they aren’t particularly happy at. One might be tempted to say that this is getting what they deserve -- in the sense that it is the punishment they deserve.

Markovits goes on to say:

“Elite workers find it harder and harder to pursue genuine passions or gain meaning through their work. Meritocracy traps entire generations inside demeaning fears and inauthentic ambitions: always hungry but never finding, or even knowing, the right food.”

Moreover, doesn’t your desert theory suggest that there should be some connection between the income that a given job deserves and its actual contribution to society? Yet that connection has been getting weaker and weaker.

Don’t both the losers and the winners of the Meritocratic rat race deserve better than they are getting? The basic conceit of Meritocracy is that those who succeed deserve to. So those in less prestigious positions in society internalize the message that it’s their own fault that they are less-than. They grow resentful of the elite, and, yes, start voting for populist demagogues who articulate resentment against elites. As Markovits notes:

“demagogues and charlatans monopolize and exploit meritocracy’s discontents. Meritocratic inequality therefore induces not only deep discontent but also widespread pessimism, verging on despair.”

So: we think people deserve what they merit. But meritocracy has these two problems. First is the fairness problem. There’s unequal access to quality training – and this inequality is so great that meritocracy today is really aristocracy by another name.

Second, even if it were all perfectly fair and equitable, there’s more to life than merit. Sure, merit matters in a lot of ways, but merit has become tyrannical. We shouldn’t have to work that hard – shouldn’t have work 60 hours a week to deserve the concern and respect of our compatriots. Don’t we all “deserve” better? Or, rather, can we give ourselves a break from the very idea of desert, of merit, of the constant pressure to deserve, to earn everything?

We could build a society with dramatically expanded access to quality training. We could build a society where we all have a chance to contribute meaningfully to the overall social good – and where a person’s income bears some relationship to their real contribution to society. But even more importantly: we could build a society that affords everyone enough rest and leisure for physical and psychological health.

May all that be so. Amen,

Acceptance and Resistance

Acceptance. This is a central spiritual quality. Yet we might also feel that evil cannot be accepted. Oppression, racism, misogyny, homophobia and transphobia are surely unacceptable, right?

Martin Luther King, Jr combined spirituality with activism – so on this weekend when we are celebrating King’s birthday and honoring his legacy, I wanted to look at this apparent tension. For instance, in September 1967, King addressed the annual conference of the American Psychological Association, an organization for helping people be well-adjusted, and he said:

“There are some things in our society, some things in our world, to which we should never be adjusted. . . We must never adjust ourselves to economic conditions that take necessities from the many to give luxuries to the few”

How do we combine inner peace with social agitation? How do we cultivate both acceptance and resistance to injustice? Martin Luther King Day is tomorrow, on the same day that the 47th president of the United States is to be inaugurated – which does bring a particular context to these questions.

There are injustices and harms – some of them, perhaps, may soon be worsening – and we are called to resist what is wrong, to not simply go along with it, not simply adjust to it. Acceptance doesn’t mean nonresponsive. It means recognizing reality – and responding with compassion to make things right where we can.

For Unitarian Universalists, the issue is encapsulated in the third of our historic principles: Acceptance of one another and encouragement to spiritual growth. But, wait. If we truly accept one another exactly as we are, then how come we’re also encouraging each other to change?

Parents negotiate this question from the moment of their first child’s birth. New parents holding their newborn for the first time are very apt to say, “She’s perfect” – or “he’s perfect.” They are, of course, right. That newborn IS perfect. Yet at the same time, the parents expect and hope their child will grow and change over the years ahead. But if that baby is perfect, why would they want it to change? They don’t want it to be any different from what it is right now – but eventually they expect growth, and they will teach their child and encourage it along a path of growth. The child’s current perfection lies in part in the perfection of that present moment – the timeless quality of the love that wraps around parent and child – the eternal now the parent may feel. The child’s current perfection also lies in the fact that this timeless present eternal now includes the baby’s potential – its as-yet-unknown trajectory of growing up.

Indeed, our capacity throughout life to learn and grow and change is a key element in what makes us perfect right now. Like a stone thrown in the air, our lives arc in a perfect parabola, whatever the angle, direction, or force. Perfection is dynamic – an ongoing, unfolding process rather than a static thing. Acceptance is the capacity to recognize this inherent perfection.

Psychologist Robert Cloninger developed a Temperament and Character Index that measures, among other things a person’s spirituality. On this measure, it’s the sum of three sub-scales. First, self-forgetfulness. This has to do with experiences of “flow” – with being immersed in an activity, being “in the zone”, and you’re

“performing at peak efficiency while having no sense of boundary between yourself and others. Most people have had this type of experience at least a few times in their lives. Spiritual people tend to have them more frequently.... People often experience flashes of insight or understanding when they are in this frame of mind. Creativity is maximized, originality is fostered. Even the most ordinary things seem fresh and new.”

Second, transpersonal identification.

“The hallmark of this trait is a feeling of connectedness to the universe and everything in it – animate and inanimate, human and nonhuman, anything and everything that can be seen, heard, smelled, or otherwise sensed. People who score high for transpersonal identification . . . sometimes feel that everything is part of one living organism.... Love of nature is a recurring theme in spirituality, from the beginnings of civilization up to the present.”

Third, acceptance. This measure has to do with the sense that underneath, or behind, or in the midst of all the pain, and the tragedy, the suffering and the anguish, there is a fundamental joy of being.

In the 90s, I was a professor at predominantly African-American Fisk University, and later, I was a divinity student for a couple terms at a predominantly African-American divinity school, so I’ve had repeated exposure to Black Church worship and culture. One of the things I often heard, like a mantra of affirmation and hope, was: “God is good all the time; all the time god is good.” These were people that were not oblivious to, nor in denial about the very real pain, suffering, injustice and oppression in life. They or their families had often directly seen and felt the worst effects of prejudice and bigotry. They were not retreating into escapism from that reality, nor were they complacent about the need for the very hard ongoing work for social justice. When they greeted each other, and me, with a bounce in their step, a broad smile on their face, and an outstretched hand if not two outstretched arms, and the buoyant words, “God is good all the time; all the time, God is good,” they were expressing a deep sense of the joy of possibility and hope back behind or underneath the tragedy -- of which they were keenly aware. It wasn’t about whether there was anything in this wide reality that can appropriately be called “God.” It was about the felt sense, more than words can say, that the tragedy and unfairness and pain exists always within a wider context, a context deeply affirmable. Indeed, only within a context that ultimately felt holy, sacred, could tragedy be fully seen as tragedy instead of random pain.

From this kind of acceptance comes equanimity but not complacency. And without the calm, abiding equanimity to leaven the energy of anger that so often arises when working for social justice, activists burn out.

Acceptance means not hating. It doesn’t mean we don’t resist injustice, but we resist without hating. Martin Luther King urged us to not be adjusted to injustice, but he was clear that this didn’t mean hating anybody. He followed Jesus’ teaching to love your enemies. As he said,

“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.”

King goes on to add:

“hate scars the soul and distorts the personality.... hate divides the personality -- and love, in an amazing and inexorable way, unites it.”

King then adds:

“Love is the only force capable of transforming an enemy into a friend. We never get rid of an enemy by meeting hate with hate. We get rid of an enemy by getting rid of enmity. By its very nature, hate destroys and tears down; by its very nature, love creates and builds up. Love transforms with redemptive power.”

Acceptance doesn’t mean resignation or complacency. It means we act out of compassion more than anger. And even where we do have some anger, we can be at peace with our own anger. We don’t have to be upset by injustice – we just calmly do everything we can stop it.

There are two sorts of pain and suffering. The first kind is what the world -- reality -- throws at us – sickness, old age, death -- the facts of injustice and everything else we don’t like. The second kind is our own reactivity against the first kind. We make our suffering so much worse be refusing to accept it, by getting upset about things. In the Buddhist scriptures there’s a text called the Sallatha Sutra, where the Buddha says:

“When touched with a feeling of pain, the uninstructed run-of-the-mill person sorrows, grieves, & laments, beats his breast, becomes distraught. So he feels two pains, physical and mental. Just as if they were to shoot a man with an arrow and, right afterward, were to shoot him with another one, so that he would feel the pains of two arrows; in the same way, when touched with a feeling of pain, the uninstructed run-of-the-mill person sorrows, grieves, and laments, beats his breast, becomes distraught. So he feels two pains, physical and mental.”

Spiritual maturity, spiritual development doesn’t prevent the first arrow, doesn’t generate immunity to it. But spiritual maturity does prevent that second arrow: which is our reactivity, our upset about the first arrow.

“Happiness can exist only in acceptance.” Said George Orwell, of all people. Acceptance is crucial for our well-being. And acceptance, as I said, does not mean resignation or complacency. Acceptance opens up the possibility of enjoyment. Without acceptance, there can be no equanimity, no peace – only a shifting kaleidoscope of anger, resentment, sadness, and fear.

Activism on behalf of changing things can be vigorous and energetic yet also grounded in a calm and peaceful equanimity. How does that work? Let me turn to some words of Ruben Habito. I’ve been a Zen practitioner for almost 23 years, during which time I’ve been a formal student of four Zen teachers. My first and longest-lasting was with Ruben Habito. Ruben is a slight Filipino man – in his 60s when I was studying with him. As a young man, he became a Jesuit priest, got stationed in Japan, and found himself practicing Zen at a monastery there for 16 years before coming to the states and taking a faculty position at SMU’s Perkins Theological School in Dallas. In one of his books, Healing Breath: Zen Spirituality for a Wounded Earth, Ruben wrote:

“To see the natural world as one’s own body radically changes our attitude to everything in it. The pain of Earth at the violence being wrought upon it ceases to be something out there, but comes to be our very own pain, crying out for redress and healing. In Zen sitting, breathing in and breathing out, we are disposed to listen to the sounds of Earth from the depths of our being. The lament of the forests turning into barren desert, the plaint of the oceans continually being violated with toxic matter that poisons the life nurtured therein, the cry of the dolphins and the fish, come to be our very own pain, our own cry, from the depths of our very being.”

With deep acceptance of our world and of our selves comes a seeing through of the artificial boundary between what is me and what is other. Cultivating a love for what is turns out to also cultivate awareness that what is -- is me. “Mountains and rivers and the great wide earth, the sun and the moon and the stars” – they are all me. The earth’s forests, deserts, oceans are my own body.

When I stop believing those thoughts that judge everything in light of my own separated, isolated interests, then I start recognizing that I’m not separated or isolated. Loving the world and loving myself become the same thing. And when that happens, I naturally reach out to soothe suffering.

Resistance to social injustice, to the despoiling of our planet, doesn’t so much feel like resistance anymore. It feels like simply being carried in the flow of love for what is. To put it in one word, the force which brings acceptance and resistance to pull in the same direction rather than in opposite directions is this: compassion.

Of course, there is a great deal of resistance in this world that isn’t grounded in compassion. Perhaps we can work on letting go of that kind of resistance. Resistance grounded in compassion rather than in the illusion of a separate self: that’s the kind of resistance that is also known as love -- and justice, as as been noted before, is what love looks like in public.

Social activism fueled predominantly by anger, by resentment, by condemnation of the evil other will burn out. It will also be counterproductive. It will fail us. Activism fueled predominantly by acceptance, by compassion, by loving all that is and therefore naturally moving to care for all that is – social activism that, while attentive to effective strategy, is not attached to results – that is what will save us.

The Satyana Institute, a nonprofit service and training organization has developed a set of principles for spiritual activism. Here’s their first principle:

“Transformation of motivation from anger/fear/despair to compassion/love/purpose. This is a vital challenge for today’s social change movement. This is not to deny the noble emotion of appropriate anger or outrage in the face of social injustice. Rather, this entails a crucial shift from fighting against evil to working for love, and the long-term results are very different, even if the outer activities appear virtually identical. Action follows Being, as the Sufi saying goes. Thus 'a positive future cannot emerge from the mind of anger and despair' [says the] Dalai Lama”

And here’s their second principle:

“Non-attachment to outcome. This is difficult to put into practice, yet to the extent that we are attached to the results of our work, we rise and fall with our successes and failures—a sure path to burnout. Hold a clear intention, and let go of the outcome—recognizing that a larger wisdom is always operating. As Gandhi said, “the victory is in the doing,” not the results.”

Being upset doesn’t help. In the long run, equanimity is more effective for resisting the wrongs we are called to resist.

Marin Luther King embodied a path of loving enemies – that is, opponents, the people who vote differently from you – while at the same time never being adjusted to injustice. He said:

“I believe we will have to find the militant middle between riots on the one hand and weak and timid supplication for justice on the other hand.”

For King, that middle ground was civil disobedience, which he argued could “be aggressive but nonviolent” with the power to “dislocate but not destroy.” It’s acceptance and resistance.

May we go and do likewise.

Freedom

FIRST READING: Genesis 4:1-16, New JPS (1985)