Who Cares?

"Who cares?" We all care about something – but we don’t all care about the same things – which is why we sometimes signal that we don’t care about something by saying, “who cares?” But there are some things we all care about.

Our theme of the month for April is Caring. There are two questions here: what to care for and about – and how to care effectively. Are there things we care about that we’d be better off being a bit more nonchalant about? Are there other things we should be paying more attention to? When is worrying a helpful way to keep us focused, and when is it simply useless and harmful anxiety?

Let’s look more closely at the premise I started with: we don’t all care about the same things – but there are some things we all care about. Marshall Rosenberg had a way of distinguishing between the sort of things we all care about and the sorts of things that some of us care about and others of us don’t. The things we all care about, he called, “needs.” Per Rosenberg, a need is not something we will die if we don’t get, it’s just something we all want – something we all care about getting – often in proportion to how long its been since we had some. So food and sleep are needs – increasingly so as the hours go by since we last ate or slept. Oxygen is a need – increasingly so as the seconds go by since our last breath. These are part of the sustenance need, which also includes shelter and exercise. We need to sustain ourselves.

The other eight universal needs are: Safety, love (which includes the need to love and the need to be loved), understanding or empathy, creativity, recreation, a sense of belonging, autonomy, and meaning. Everybody cares about those things. Where we differ is in our strategies for getting them.

Everything we do is in service of our needs – but some of our strategies work better than others. So if you’re thinking, “I need a new mobile phone,” that’s not really a need in this sense – it’s a strategy. Getting a new mobile phone is, you are thinking, a strategy for meeting needs of connection.

You probably grew up hearing a distinction between needs and wants. As a kid you might say you needed some toy or the latest cool gadget, and your parents would say no, you don’t need it, you just want it. You probably found that unsatisfying. So I’m saying, forget that. Forget the distinction between needs and wants. They’re all wants. Even just staying alive is a want. There is no helpful distinction between needs and wants.

Instead, the helpful distinction is between needs and strategies – between wants that everybody has, and the wants that are your particular means to an end, where the end is something everybody wants. So the parent, instead of saying, “you don’t need that toy, you only want that toy,” might say, “that toy isn’t a universal want, since not everybody wants the toy. So it’s a strategy. What is the universal need (or want) that you see this toy as a strategy for meeting?”

Then you can look at what’s behind the particular desire. Maybe there’s a sense of belonging. Or maybe its recreation, or creativity. Or a combination of several needs.

And once we put it that way, then we are positioned to think about whether there might be other ways to meet that need. Once you recognize your strategy as a strategy, and then identify what need it is a strategy for, then you’re less prone to getting attached to and stuck on that strategy. You are freed to explore alternative strategies for that need. It’s liberating.

Caring, of course, is what defines us, what makes us who we are. Yet caring can turn into cares – as in careworn, worn down by cares. And if we aren’t paying attention, then what we find ourselves caring about – as judged by the habits we live by – can be out of alignment with what is really conducive to a good life.

Yesterday morning, at the Zen meditation on Zoom that I lead starting at 6:00am, Tuesday through Saturday morning, I was sharing with the group some words from Charlotte Joko Beck saying that we honor and pay attention to “the god of comfort and pleasantness and security. In worshiping that god, we destroy our lives" (Joko Beck, Nothing Special). She pointed out that by caring too much about comfort, pleasantness, and security, we pick bad strategies. We can get drawn into “drugs, alcohol, high speeds, recklessness, anger” because these things seem to offer comfort, pleasantness, or security. They seem to assuage our “fear of encountering any kind of unpleasantness.”

Joko says:

“If we must have absolute order and control, it’s because we’re trying to avoid any unpleasantness. If we can have things our way, and get angry if they’re not, then we think we can survive and shut out our anxiety about death. If we can please everyone, then we imagine no unpleasantness will enter our life. We hope that if we can be the star of the show, shining and wonderful and efficient, we can have such an admiring audience that we won’t have to feel anything. If we can withdraw from the world and just entertain ourselves with our own dreams and fantasies and emotional upheavals, we think we can escape unpleasantness. If we can figure everything out, if we can be so smart that we can fit everything into some sort of a plan or order, a complete intellectual understanding, then perhaps we won’t be threatened. If we can submit to an authority, have it tell us what to do, then we can give someone else the responsibility for our lives and we don’t’ have to carry it anymore.... If we pursue life madly, going after any pleasant sensation, any excitement, any entertainment, perhaps we won’t have to feel any pain. If we can tell others what to do, keep them well under control, maybe they can’t hurt us.”

Joko says that “every being on earth pursues” to some degree this “god of no discomfort and no unpleasantness.” And, “As we pursue it, we lose touch with what really is.” This pursuit inevitably fails. In the frenetic business of our pursuits to avoid pain, we lose touch with “the absolute wonder of what our life is.”

We begin to experience that wonder “only by contacting our own pain, which means no longer worshiping the god of comfort and pleasantness.” For Joko, experiencing our pain, paying attention to it, rather than “finding a place where we can shut the pain out,” is what leads to “surrender and opening into something fresh and new.”

Our biggest problem is the thought that we should have no problems. Problems and challenges are our life. We come more alive when we are with the pain than when we seek to avoid it. This is the practice of cultivating compassion. Passion, in its original sense, means suffering. We see that meaning in the Christian phrase, “the passion of Christ” – meaning the suffering and pain. So compassion is “com” – meaning “with” – and passion – meaning pain. Self-compassion is being with your own pain – compassion for others is being with others pain.

Sometimes there’s a fix. The pain of hunger just needs a little food. Sometimes there’s not – but rather than denial, just be with the pain.

David Brooks’ column this week was about people deliberately choosing what was uncomfortable. He talks about Haruki Murakami, who took up running. “By the late 2000s, [Murakami] was running six miles a day, six days a week every week of the year, and had run in 23 marathons, plus many other long-distance races, an ultramarathon and some triathlons,” Brooks writes. The thing is, running was often painful – miserable. Murakami’s memoir has lines like:

“As I ran this race, I felt I never, ever wanted to go through that again.”
And: “At around 23 miles I start to hate everything.”
And: “I finally reach the end. Strangely, I have no feeling of accomplishment. The only thing I feel is utter relief that I don’t have to run anymore.”
And: “It was draining physically, as you can imagine, and for a while afterward I swore I’d never run again.”
Yet he does run again. Brooks then says,

“All around us there are people who endure tedium to learn the violin, who repeatedly fall off stair railings learning to skateboard, who go through the arduous mental labor required to solve a scientific problem, who agree to take a job managing other people (which is truly hard) or who start a business (which is insanely hard).”

He goes on to say:

“When it comes to the things we really care about — vocation, family, identity, whatever gives our lives purpose — we are operating by a different logic [from the logic of seeking pleasure and avoiding pain], which is the logic of passionate desire and often painful effort.”

When he says “passionate desire” in this way, it seems to bring together the modern sense of passion and the original sense of passion as pain.

“People commit to great projects, they endure hard challenges,” not by anything remotely like a cost-benefit analysis, but “because they are entranced, enchanted. Some notion or activity has grabbed them, set its hooks inside them, aroused some possibility, fired the imagination.”

“The capacity to be seized” is an great talent.

“Some people go through life thick-skinned. School or career has given them a pragmatic, instrumental, efficiency-maximizing frame of mind. They live their life under pressure, so their head is down; they’re not open to delight, or open to that moment of rapture that can redirect a life.”

If all we care about is pleasantness and security, we aren’t open to wonder and delight – openness to which also means being open to discomfort and pain.

The wonders of life come from being open – broken open – to all of life – the full catastrophe. Close off a part of it – like the pain – and you also close off the real wonder. That phrase, “the full catastrophe,” I take from the title of a book by Jon Kabat-Zinn, “Full Catastrophe Living,” – and he got it from “Zorba the Greek,” where Zorba says, "I'm a man who's got the full catastrophe" – meaning his life is full of joy, sorrow, love, loss, and everything in between. Kabat-Zinn uses this concept to highlight the idea of embracing life as it is – the full catastrophe that life is, with all its ups and downs. Embrace, rather than resist or avoid difficult experiences. Take in and pay attention to human experience in all its messy, imperfect glory.

Without the difficulties, without the pain, we wouldn’t cultivate resilience, and find our fulfillment and well-being. David Brooks’ column is interested in how that openness can lead us to be seized by what becomes our great life passion – in the sense of a great pain but also a great meaning and purpose in a life dedicated beyond reason to something: to running, or playing the violin, or scientific inquiry or writing. Kabat-Zinn is interested in how that openness can lead us to be seized by the simple wonder of a moment. Either way, that openness gets closed off when, as Joko Beck says, what we care about is comfort and pleasantness and security.

Consider Sisyphus, the figure in Greek Mythology condemned by the gods to Hades and eternal punishment. He had to roll a heavy boulder up hill. When he got it to the top, it would roll back down again, and he’d have to start over. He was condemned for all eternity to pushing a heavy boulder, and to an awareness of the futility of his labor.

The futility aspect is rather curious, isn’t it? We feel like if we get that boulder to the top of the hill, we’ve accomplished something – but if it doesn’t stay there for even a minute but rolls back down again – then it was all futile. But why is a boulder at the top of a hill an accomplishment anyway? Why is it any better to have it at the top than at the base of the hill? It’s really no more futile to have the boulder rolling down the hill than to have it staying perched for a while on the hilltop.

So if we forget about the futility part, then there’s just the pushing part. We are all Sisyphus, pushing our rock. It’s not a condemnation or punishment, it’s just each moment. Pushing the rock or watching it roll down. We’re all doing what we do, moment by moment. But then we add judgments and ideas. The hell isn’t in pushing the boulder but in creating ideas of hope and disappointment. It’s the idea that we shouldn’t have to be doing it that turns any activity into hell.

The French writer Albert Camus in his essay, “The Myth of Sisyphus,” offers an extended reflection on the lessons of this myth. Camus concludes, “We must imagine Sisyphus happy.”

“If we are totally what we are, in every second, we begin to experience life as joy” (Joko Beck 20) – whatever boulder we may be pushing. Experiencing life as joy doesn’t mean there’s no sadness. It means we are experiencing that full catastrophe. Sadness might be the opposite of happiness, but it isn’t the opposite of joy – it’s part of the joy, because it’s part of life.

There are those universal needs: sustenance, safety, love, understanding or empathy, creativity, recreation, belonging, autonomy, and meaning. Those needs impel us to devise strategies to meet them. And that’s our boulder to keep pushing on. That’s what we care about.

What we don’t have to care about is whether the boulder will stay on the hilltop. Or whether we can get someone else to push it for us. Or whether we can distract ourselves from the pushing, or forget about it with substances. Just push on. Pay attention to your pushing, pay attention to observing the wonder of the boulder rolling down the hill again – how elegantly it rolls!

If we stop thinking life should be other than exactly what it is, we find the joy in it. No, the boulder won’t stay on the hilltop. Who cares?

Amen.

Training in Compassion 12: Put It In Context

Our Training in Compassion today is: Put it is context. Whatever difficulty you are experiencing, take a moment to put it in context.

What context? The context that the distinction between self and other is an empty illusion. The absolute context, that there is no self and other. There's only Being, and there's only Love, which is Being sharing itself with itself without impediment and with warmth. It just happens to look like you and me to us because this is how our minds and sensory apparatus works.

"Put it in context" means seeing your situation and what you are experiencing in the context of this love without boundary. All the disturbances of your life -- all your confusion, which is to say, your resistance, your pain, your fear, your grief, your frustrated desires, and so on – put all of this in the absolute context.

This means we look at the underlying reality of our disturbance. What is actually going on when we are upset or angry? If we unhook ourselves from the blaming and the wishing and the self-pitying, and look instead at the actual basis of what is in fact going on, what do we see? We see time passing. We see things changing. Moment by moment, time slips away and things transform. The present becomes the past -- or does it become the future? And yet as soon as we examine "now" it is gone.

Every moment of your life, all your moments of pain or despair or confusion – those, too, are moments of your own inherent wholeness, your inherent perfection. This is a fact, whether you see it or not. Learning to see it is the path of wisdom.

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For the full version of this post: SEE HERE.

Authentic Selves

Our Unitarian Universalist Association selects a Common Read each year recommended for Unitarian Universalists across the country to read and talk about. But didn’t I already preach about this year’s Common Read? It was the book by Rabbi Danyi Ruttenberg, On Repentance and Repair, where Rabbi Ruttenberg drew on the medieval Jewish philosopher Moses Maimonides to lay out and explain some really helpful ways that we can repair relationships that have been wounded or broken. I preached about it, we had classes about that book.

Ruttenberg’s book was actually the Common Read for 2023-24, and we were getting to it a little later in 2024. There is another Common Read for 2024-25, and that is this collection of first-person accounts celebrating Trans and Nonbinary People and their families, titled Authentic Selves. Each of its 35 chapters tells the story of a trans or nonbinary person, and many of the chapters also have statements from family members telling their story – partners, siblings – often parents.

What’s amazing and moving about the amassed stories is how different they are – how many permutations there are of assigned-at-birth – which might be male, female, or intersex – with gender identity, which might be male, female, both, neither, something else, or none – with gender expression, for which the possibilities are as infinite as the person’s imagination. It's a great book to start looking at as we prepare for hosting the Trans lives festival on Sat Mar 29.

Our job – our mission here at First Unitarian Des Moines – is to love radically, grow ethically and spiritually, and serve justly. Today, let’s focus on that first part: Love radically.

To love radically means unconditional acceptance, compassion, and kindness. It doesn’t mean that protective use of force is never called for, but a commitment to love radically does make us more hesitant to resort to it. Loving radically means curbing the fearful impulse to employ protective use of force first and ask questions later. So, yes, this means taking some risks. There’s a chance of being vulnerable and getting hurt when we could have been more protective. So radical love requires the courage to take that chance – to ask questions first unless the danger is immediate and extreme.

Radical love also requires the courage to stand against injustice, oppression, and discrimination, even when that is difficult. To love radically means even when we do have to go to protective use of force, we do so in the most compassionate, kind, and accepting way we can.Loving radically means not judging, not blaming, not expecting others to change. Loving radically means recognizing the inherent worth and dignity of all individuals, regardless of their gender or gender identity or gender expression. Loving radically means recognizing and challenging our own biases, privileges, and limitations to become a more loving and compassionate person. Because it is radical, it is counter cultural.

Loving radically is not transactional. It welcomes reciprocity, but it stays away from any precise measurement of who has done what for whom. Radical love requires being imprecise about that – because being precise means you’re being transactional, means you’re thinking quid pro quo rather than a beautifully vague reciprocity.

Radical love includes yourself, so it doesn’t mean being a slave to other people’s needs. Your needs also count – but radical love recognizes that one of those needs is to help others, because their suffering is yours. So no one has to earn your positive regard, your respect of their dignity.

To love radically is to commit to unconditional solidarity in which all beings, just because they exist, are worthy of being loved. Radical love refuses to flatten people into roles, labels, or projections. Radical love’s enemy is judgmentalism and its allies are curiosity and a willingness to embrace complexity.

To love radically is a deliberate act of resistance, of liberation, and of deep presence – disrupting systems that thrive on fear, hierarchy, and disconnection—systems that benefit when we believe we are separate, unlovable, or alone.

There is a close connection between love and understanding, as the Vietnamese Zen monk Thich Nhat Hanh emphasized:

“Understanding and Love are not two separate things, but just one. To develop understanding, you have to practice looking at all living beings with the eyes of compassion. When you understand, you cannot help but love. And when you love, you naturally act in a way that can relieve the suffering of people.”

He added:

“Understanding is the very foundation of love. If understanding is not there, no matter how hard you try, you cannot love . . . Understanding is love’s other name. If you don’t understand you can’t love.”

So the better we understand, the better we can love.

There are some things we all simply need to know about gender identity – so that we can understand and love radically. Gender identity means a person's internal, deeply-held sense of their own gender, which may or may not align with the sex they were assigned at birth. Gender identity is different from gender expression which is how one presents oneself to the world. In our culture clothing styles, hair styles, make-up and certain behaviors are key ways a person can express gender.

A person's gender identity can be:
Cisgender (aligning with the sex assigned at birth)
Transgender (not aligning with the sex assigned at birth)
Non-binary (identifying as neither male nor female, or both)
Genderqueer (identifying as something outside the traditional male/female binary)
Agender (not identifying with any gender)
Or Bigender (identifying as both male and female).

There’s a lot of possibilities and it can be hard to understand – but love helps us understand and understanding helps us love.

We should all be familiar with the formula, "insistent, persistent, consistent." Children do sometimes have a phase of experimenting with or exploring gender expressions. Of course, give them the space to experiment and explore – it can be fun to try out all kinds of roles and expressions. If they are genuinely transgender then they will be insistent, persistent, and consistent about it.

• Insistent: is the child you had thought was a girl adamant that ze is a boy. Or is the child you had thought was a boy adamant about that ze is a girl?
• Persistent: The child's cross-gender identification persists over time.
• Consistent: The child's cross-gender identification is consistent across different contexts and with different people, rather than just being something ze expresses at home or with certain friends.

There seems to be an increase in this country in transgender identification. In a recent survey of over 2 million American adults, the number of 18-24 year olds identifying as transgender quintupled in 9 years, from 2014 to 2023 – from 0.6% to 3% of that age cohort.

We are not sure why these numbers are going up. Growing awareness and acceptance, and decreased stigma, may be a factor in more people being willing to come out. Improved data collection as survey design has improved may be a factor in getting more accurate numbers on what has long been true. Increased access to information might be leading to people recognizing themselves in an identity description they wouldn’t otherwise have thought possible. Some research also suggests that there might be environmental factors, such as prenatal hormone exposure, that contribute to the development of transgender identities. We don’t know how much weight each of these factors would have, but whatever accounts for the growing numbers, it’s not mass Satanic possession.

Lots of cultures have a role for nonbinary people. The Navajo Nadleehi could have been assigned either male or female at birth, but they embody both male and female qualities and fill a respected spiritual and social role.

The Lakota Winkte is typically a male-bodied person who takes on a female role in ceremonial or artistic functions.

The Zuni Lhamana are male-bodied in traditionally female roles respected as mediators and craftspeople.

The Omaha mixuga have cross-gender roles, often involved in rituals or crafts.

The Cheyenne Hemaneh are “Half-man, half-woman” individuals with spiritual or social importance.

The Cree recognized gender-diverse people with unique roles.

The Ojibwe language has a term for people with a man’s body and a woman’s heart.

Looking beyond indigenous North American cultures, in Samoa the traditional culture had Fa'afafine: people assigned male at birth who live and identify in a feminine gender role and are a recognized third gender with social functions seen as natural and important.

Cultures from India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, and Nepal have the Hijra: also recognized as a third gender. Hijra can include transgender women, intersex people, and others who don’t fit neatly into male-female binary. They traditionally had important ceremonial roles.

In Thailand the Kathoey are transgender women or effeminate men, visible often in entertainment or beauty industries. Gender fluidity is normalized.

In parts of the Balkans, particularly northern Albania, some women take on male gender roles and live as men. They are called sworn virgins, and are treated as such, though it’s not based on internal gender identity as we think of it.

The Bugis culture in Indonesia recognizes five genders: men, women, masculine women, feminine men, and bissu, which are gender-transcendent shamans.

Gender is a cultural construct, so of course all the ways nonbinary genders are constructed varies from culture to culture. Most cultures have found some need to recognize and form norms for more than just two genders. That’s an overview of some of the basics that I want us all to know.

Let me tell you my gender story. In the spirit of the book, Authentic Selves, of people telling their stories of finding their way to who they are, I wanted to tell you this morning my own personal story with the concept of gender identity. Sharing my reflections and experiences about my own journey toward self understanding might help you think about yours.

I’m not sure I have a gender identity. It’s clear that I do have a sexual orientation. As a teenager, I was interested in girls in a way that was strange and mysterious and terribly awkward, yet undeniable. My inner, authentic me had this desire for intimacy with someone from roughly half of humanity that felt quite different from the kinds of relationships I felt inclined to have with anyone from the other roughly-half of humanity. Very puzzling. Very ordinary, apparently, yet still very puzzling.

This meant that other people’s gender mattered to me in that way – my own gender, not so much. For some people it’s the other way around. For a bi-sexual person, a prospective romantic partner’s gender doesn’t matter to them in that way – though their own sense of gender identity maybe does. I'm the reverse of that.

I don’t mind presenting as male, and I have the biology that commonly goes with that: testosterone, and reproductive organs, and facial hair, and a low voice, and male pattern baldness, height that’s average for a man but is two standard deviations above the mean height of women, larger hands, more pronounced Adam’s apple – the whole package of traits that often but not always go together. Living life the way that the society I grew up in expects of males has just been easier – the wardrobe is easier, the socially expected grooming is quicker, and I’ve gotten accustomed to being treated the way society treats people it thinks are men.

But none of that means I identify as male. It just means others identify me as male, and I acquiesce to that. If, from my birth, my parents had told me I was a girl, dressed me the way other girls were dressed, had me grow my hair long and put bows or ribbons in it occasionally, taught me to value being “pretty,” and had somehow kept me from finding out about the anatomical differences between me and the other girls, I suspect I’d have gone along with that, too.

I don’t feel the presence of an inner true and authentic “me” in there that would have rebelled against gender assignment as a girl –nothing that would have told me, “this feels wrong.” I feel fine with how I’m perceived and treated as a man, but I don’t feel a strong internal sense of 'maleness' beyond that.

It is possible that I am deluded. Always worth considering. I might be so cisgendered that I don’t even notice it – so comfortable in the match between my assigned-at-birth sex and the gender expression I am content to display that I imagine I would be that comfortable in any gender – when, in fact, I would not have been as comfortable being raised a girl as I imagine I would have been. I don’t know. Maybe.

There are some clues that suggest I might not be self-deluded to think I don’t have a gender identity. First, the literature on gender identity recognizes people like me. For instance, I read that,

“A lot of cis-men and cis-women don’t feel a strong gender identity but don’t notice it because everything about their social role feels frictionless. The idea that everyone must have a deep, internal, self-defining gender identity is itself a kind of cultural assumption—but not a universal truth. Some people have strong gender identities; others don’t. That’s all part of the natural diversity of human experience.”

For a second clue that maybe inner gender ambiguity is, for me, authentic rather than delusional, there is the story of my name. My name is Steven Meredith Garmon. From birth through ninth grade, I went by Steven and in high school shortened it to Steve. When I went away to college at age 18, I decided to go by my middle name. I share that middle name with my father, who was Gerald Meredith Garmon, and with his father, who was Orion Meredith Garmon (which means his initials were OMG). Apparently, naming boys Meredith is a Welsh thing, and my paternal line goes through Wales.

Partly, I liked the hint of dark romance about it – Meredith seemed to my 18-year-old self like the kind of person you might find brooding on a moor, like Heathcliff or Ravenel. But mostly, I wanted a name that was gender-ambiguous – in fact, in the US it’s much more often a girl’s name – and that was attractive to me. It was convenient that I didn't have to make up a gender ambiguous name but could switch to using one I happened to already have.

It was 1977, and people didn’t know much about transgenderism – I’d never heard the phrase gender nonbinary. The term more often used back then was transvestite, which was usually understood to mean men dressing in women’s clothing -- that was their kink, as we might say today, but we didn’t understand it the way we now understand gender identity.

I didn’t want to change the way I dressed – which was invariably sneakers, blue jeans, and a t-shirt in summer and a sweatshirt in winter – which was also the uniform of a lot of the young women at my college. I was in favor of unisex everything. Down with constraining gender norms! I wasn’t interested in presenting as female because I disapproved of the very idea that there should be any such thing as “presenting as female.” We should all, I felt, abandon the concepts of masculinity and femininity, in favor of simply “human.”

When I look back on that 18-year-old, ze was actually pretty militantly anti-gender-identity. Forty-eight years have gone by since then, and the world has changed, and I’ve changed. I was wrong to think gender identity was as dispensable as, back then, I hoped it was. For a lot of other people, it’s clear to me now, gender identity is no more dispensable for them than sexual orientation is for me. On a gut level, I don't really get that. I don't feel it. But on a cognitive level, I've now heard from a number of people who say they do have a clear gender identity (which usually comes to light because that gender identity doesn't match what they were assigned at birth), and I have to believe them. On a heart level, love and understanding go together and call for welcoming acceptance. Feeling what they feel on a gut level is not required.

Yet the fact that I thought the way I thought as an adolescent does suggest that being agender-ish really is, for me, authentic. I have been, from youth, pretty insistent, persistent, and consistent about that. You’ve been hearing it when I declare my pronouns as "ze/zir or he/him."

For many people “being a boy or man” or “being a girl or woman” – or even being both or being neither -- is a crucial part of their sense of who they are – I’m just not one of them. And for those who do have a clear gender identity, for some it matches what they were assigned at birth and for others it just doesn’t.

The key, as the book title suggests, is finding and being our authentic selves. But what is authentic for you? We are, all of us, a hodge-podge of conflicting desires trying to balance. We have internalized messages some of which contradict other messages we have internalized. We try to construct the most coherent sense of who we are, and whose we are, that we can, but it’s never fully coherent – we all have some tensions and contradictions in us. So how do we be authentic? Which of your contradictory ideas and desires are your authentic ones?

To answer that question, let’s go back to that idea of loving radically, and apply that to ourselves. Remember, radical love is not transactional. Loving radically yourself is also not transactional. If you’re thinking: “if I be this way, there’s something I’ll get out of it,” that’s being transactional with yourself. You’ve got an internal quid pro quo going on.

It’s not that transactions are always wrong. You go to the grocery store, you buy groceries – it’s a transaction. You need the food, and the people at the store and all their suppliers need your money to meet their needs. We need transactions, but we also need close relationships with family and friends that aren’t transactional – that are reciprocal in an imprecise way -- I called it “beautifully vague reciprocity.”

And sometimes we need to be transactional with ourselves for a bit. We tell ourselves, “I don’t really want to be in this role, it feels a little awkward for me, or a lot awkward, but I can do it for now and it’ll help meet some needs and keep me safe.” To love radically ourselves means that we aren’t always so transactional. Sometimes there’s being what you want to be just for its own sake, not because it gets you anything you could put your finger on. It’s at those times that we are our authentic selves.

So: may your authentic self – whatever it might be -- shine ever brighter. Amen.

Training in Compassion 11: Be Grateful to Everyone

Be grateful to everyone. Very simple but very profound.

We began life entirely dependent on others, and, while we now exercise greater autonomy than infants, we are still dependent on others to grow our food, till the soil, transport the food, staff the stores where we get it. We depend on others to make our cars and pave the roads and extract and refine the fuel. Make our clothes and our homes. But more.

It's thanks to others and their presence and effort that you have friendship and love and meaning in your life. It’s thanks to others that we are who we are. They cared for us, taught us, gave us the language that we think in – the language in which we tell ourselves the story of who we are, what we’re trying to do, what we’re feeling. We didn’t invent this language that constitutes ourselves.

The idea of an independent, isolated, atomized person is impossible. Every thought in our minds every emotion that we feel, every word that comes out of our mouth, every material sustenance we need to get through the day, comes through the kindness of and the interaction with others.

And not only other humans. Our nonhuman companions, the wildlife that sustain ecosystems that sustain us, and the animals whose pain and flesh provides food for some humans all contribute to making us who we are. Indeed, the whole of the earth, the soil, the sky, the trees, the air we breathe and water we drink constitute us. We not only depend on all of this, we are all of it and it is us.

Gratitude is the happiest of attitudes: you simply cannot be grateful and unhappy at the same time. So be grateful to everyone all the time.

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For the full version of this post: SEE HERE.

Training in Compassion 10: No Blaming

Whatever happens, don't ever blame anyone or anything else. Take responsibility. Don't blame others, and don't blame yourself either. "Take responsibility" doesn't mean directing blame at yourself.

We often blame ourselves and have been doing so most of our lives. We are constantly feeling guilty about everything, and if we are not guilty, we are ashamed. You don't need to blame yourself for the situation you find yourself in. Just take full responsibility for what to do now that you're in that situation.

Even if it's actually someone's fault, you really can't blame them. Something happened, and since it did, there is nothing else to be done but to make use of it. Everything that happens, disastrous as it may be, and no matter whose fault it is, has a potential benefit, no matter how bad it may seem at first.

No blaming means you take the full appreciation and full responsibility for everything that arises in your life, no matter whose fault it is. No blaming is a tremendous practice of cutting through the long human habit of complaining and whining, and finding on the other side of all of that the strength to turn every situation into the path.

The important point is to accept that what has happened has actually happened. Accepting reality and accepting that you are now responsible for how to respond, you figure out what to do next. Sometimes this is especially hard to do. Try your best to stay present and patient and not let your mind run away with you.

Here you are. This is it. It is not some other way -- it is this way. There is no place else to go but forward into the next moment.

Repeat the slogan -- "No blaming" -- as many times as you have to.

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For the full version of this post: SEE HERE.

Money, money, money

Here is what I have to say today. I'll say it now, and I'll say it again at the conclusion. It is this: Through the practice of generosity, we are connected, made whole, better able to be the people we want to be.

Generosity isn’t entirely about money, but it does include money. Money, money, money. If you are unusually self-aware, you might have noticed a very slight feeling of tightening or closing at just the mention of the word. If you're that self-aware and spiritually evolved, you may have allowed that reaction to pass on as quickly as it arose. If you didn’t notice it, that doesn’t mean it’s not in there pulling the strings your reactivity unconsciously.

Research suggests that simply having the idea of money planted in mind has a tendency sometimes to reduce inclinations toward generosity. So I’m taking a risk by just saying the word money. I’m hoping that knowing about human psychology around money will allow us to consciously override the usual reactivity.

The average income per person worldwide is less than $10,000 a year. Perhaps your income is a little above the world average. Our very wealth itself can make us less generous, if we let it – if we don’t intentionally counter-act the effects of wealth through the practice of generosity.

In one study, experimenters enlisted undergraduates to play monopoly, two players at a time, but with different rules. One randomly selected player started the game with $2,000 of monopoly money, got $200 for passing Go each time, and threw two dice for every move – which, you may recall, is the normal way monopoly is played. Let’s call this player Bob. The other player, let’s call him Bill, started with $1,000, got $100 for passing Go each time, and threw one die for every move. “The students play for 15 minutes under the watchful eye of two video cameras, while down the hall researchers huddle around a computer screen, later recording the subjects’ every facial twitch and hand gesture.” What happens? Initially Bob "reacted to the inequality between him and his opponent with a series of smirks, an acknowledgment, perhaps of the inherent awkwardness of the situation. 'Hey,' his expression seemed to say, 'This is weird and unfair, but whatever.' Soon, though, as he whizzes around the board, purchasing properties and collecting rent, whatever discomfort he feels seems to dissipate.... He balloons in size, spreading his limbs toward the far ends of the table. He smacks his playing piece as makes the circuit – smack, smack, smack – ending his turns with a board-shuddering bang!...As the game nears its finish, [Bob] moves his [piece] faster....He’s all efficiency. He refuses to meet [Bill’s] gaze. His expression is stone cold as he takes the loser’s cash."

Privilege can function to shut down compassion – if we don’t consciously decide not to let it. Another study “showed through quizzes, online games, questionnaires, in-lab manipulations, and field studies that living high on the socioeconomic ladder can, colloquially speaking, dehumanize people. It can make them less ethical, more selfish, more insular, and less compassionate than other people.” In one experiment, wealthier people were more likely to take candy from a bowl of sweets designated for children. If there is such a thing as entitlement culture, it is more often the wealthy who feel most entitled. As psychologist Paul Piff concludes, “While having money doesn’t necessarily make anybody anything, the rich are way more likely to prioritize their own self-interests above the interests of other people. It makes them more likely to exhibit characteristics that we would stereotypically associate with, say, [jerks]....People higher up on the socioeconomic ladder are about three times more likely to cheat than people on the lower rungs.”

The extent to which people with money behave as if the world revolves around them was further illustrated in another study. Paul Piff and this research team “spent three months hanging out at...a gritty, busy corner with a four-way stop....[They] would stake out the intersection at rush hour, crouching behind a bank of shrubs… and catalog the cars that came by, giving each vehicle a grade from one to five. (A new-model Mercedes would be five; an old, battered Honda would be one.) Then the researchers would observe drivers’ behavior. A third of people who drove grade-five cars, Piff found, rolled into the intersection without first coming to a compete stop....‘Upper-class drivers were the most likely to cut off other vehicles even when controlling for time of day, driver’s sex [as it appeared to be to the observers], and amount of traffic.’"

A similar experiment tested "drivers’ regard for pedestrians....A researcher would enter a zebra crossing as a car approached it. The results were more staggering....Fully half the grade-five cars cruised right into the crosswalk. ‘It’s like they didn’t even see them,' [said Piff]."

Timothy Judge (Notre Dame), Beth Livingston (Cornell), and Charlice Hurst (U of W. Ontario) published a study, "Do Nice Guys -- and Gals -- Really Finish Last?" “Subjects were asked to assess whether they had a forgiving nature or found fault with others, whether they were trusting, cold, considerate, or cooperative. Then they were given an agreeableness score. Men with the lowest agreeableness earned $42,113 in a given year; those with the highest agreeableness earned $31,259."

In another study researcher Kathleen Vohs merely planted the idea of money in subjects' minds. As the subjects filled out questionnaires, some of them were in a room with Monopoly money present (left over from a prior monopoly game), and some were not. "Vohs got her result only after the ¬subject believed the session was over. Heading for the door, he would bump into a person whose arms were piled ¬precariously high with books and office supplies. That person (who worked for Vohs) would drop 27 little yellow pencils, like those you get at a golf course. Every subject in the study bent down to pick up the mess. But the money-primed subjects picked up 15 percent fewer pencils than the control group." (Miller) That’s just from the thought of money planted by having Monopoly money nearby.

Vohs stressed that money-priming did not make her subjects malicious — just uninterested. She said: 'I don’t think they mean any harm, but picking up pencils just isn’t their problem.'

Over and over, Vohs has found that money can make people anti-social – less pro-social. She primes subjects by seating them near a screen-saver showing currency floating like fish in a tank or asking them to descramble sentences, some of which include words like bill, check, or cash. Then she tests their sensitivity to other people. In her Science article, Vohs showed that money-primed subjects gave less time to a colleague in need of assistance and less money to a hypothetical charity. When asked to pull up a chair so a stranger might join a meeting, money-primed subjects placed the chair at a greater distance from themselves than those in a control group. When asked how they’d prefer to spend their leisure time, money-primed people chose a personal cooking lesson over a catered group dinner. Given a choice between working collaboratively or alone, they opted to go solo.” (Miller)

In some ways, on some measures, there may be a plus side. Thinking about money makes people more oriented to efficiency and productivity – like Bob, the advantaged monopoly player who became all efficiency. Money-focus encourages thoughts of self-sufficiency: less willing to help, but also less interested in being helped. Research so far hazards no guess as to where the tipping point is after which personality transformation kicks in – and that point is surely highly variable from individual to individual.

There is a basic human tendency to protect what we have, and the more we have, the stronger the tendency to put our energy into the having. It requires intentionality to avoid being sucked into that pattern. So we come to the spiritual practice of generosity. Deliberate generosity counter-acts that self orientation. Warm-heartedness also reduces blood pressure, anxiety and stress and improves health.

You’ve got however much money you’ve got. How much of it can you give away and still meet your material needs? Give it away. We can make it into something that connects us to others, that connects us to the world’s suffering. Otherwise, it will be a force of disconnection, tending to makes us less social, less caring. Give it away as a regular practice – weekly if possible.

You will never meet a generous person who was bitter or a bitter person who is generous. That bears remembering. Generosity and bitterness are incompatible. It’s not entirely clear whether generosity causes reduction in bitterness, or reduction in bitterness causes generosity – just as it isn’t always clear whether wealth causes disagreeableness or disagreeableness facilitates wealth acquisition. Either way, they go together.

Generosity – also known as hospitality, kindnesss, largesse, benevolence, bounteousness, magnanimity, openhandedness, warmheartedness, compassion – life as overflow – enriches our lives. When we live from an awareness of abundance rather than in the grip of the delusion of scarcity, generosity becomes possible. And generosity grows through practice.

To develop in an area requires disciplined commitment. The skilled athletes are not the ones who exercise when they happen to be in the mood for it. The skilled poets or musicians do not just write poetry or rehearse when they feel like it. They show up for daily practice, whether they feel like it or not. Generosity develops in us through a disciplined commitment to develop it as a way of being.

The baseball catcher and later manager and coach, Yogi Berra, once said, “You can’t think and hit at the same time.” He meant that we have to show up for the discipline of training our habit muscles, so that the habit muscles can be our guide when, as in most of what we do in the days of our lives, there isn’t the time or the inclination to think them through very much. For hitting, as for many actions, we must rely on habits, so the formation of the habits we'll need is crucial. For that matter, even when there is time for reflection, the way we think is governed by the feelings and values formed as habit.

Consider the story I’ve heard of a woman getting off a subway train. As she readies for climbing the steps into the cold outside air, she reaches into the pockets of her coat for her gloves. She finds only one glove. The other must have fallen out of her pocket. She turns around and looks back into the subway car, and she can see the seat where she had been sitting, and, sure enough, there’s her other glove on the seat. But now the doors are closing. She won’t have time to get back in and retrieve her glove. So she takes the glove she has, and throws into the subway onto the seat next to its mate – just as the doors close.

I love that story. One glove isn’t going to do her much good, but now somebody else can have the complete pair. That’s the reflex of a person who has cultivated generosity as a deep habit of being, a habit of the heart. It’s the reasonable thing to do, but if you rely on reason, the train will be long gone before you’ve worked it out. Random acts of kindness and senseless beauty flourish as the fruits of disciplined habit-formation that is not at all random or senseless.

I picked up this story from my colleague Rev. Terry Sweetser. Rev. Sweetser remarked:

"You know she must have lived a long life of generosity, a life of wild and creative generosity of spirit, to be able to think so quickly, to act so urgently and healthily, to know precisely in that moment what would bless the world right then and there. It happened in an instant, but that was planned giving through and through. Something in her past, or everything in her past, prepared her for her gesture -- habits of living and giving practiced and refined her whole life long."

As a piece of the happy discipline of generous giving, the piece that has to do with giving away our money, it will help to think in terms of percents. This gift comes from you. It is you, so place it in the context of your overall income. Are you giving away twenty percent? Ten percent? Five percent? I ask you to decide the percent first – what percent are you going to give away? Maybe this year it can be a higher percent than last year. After you’ve decided the percent, do the math and figure out what dollar amount that comes to. Don’t start by thinking about a dollar amount. Start by thinking about a percent.

Percent of what? The general guidelines would be AGI – adjusted gross income. Certain vital expenses are subtracted, but itemized or standard deductions are not. Adjusted Gross Income is the benchmark used by researchers into giving rates. And what percent of your AGI do you choose to give?

The traditional “tithe” for the church is 10 percent. The Torah, the central part of the Hebrew Bible, also known as the first five books of the Old Testament (Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, Deuteronomy), set forth law requiring that a tenth of all produce, flocks, and cattle be given to support the Levites, the priestly class in ancient Israel. The Torah also emphasized assistance to foreigners, orphans and widows, those in need, in addition to the tithe of support for the priestly class. The Christian Testament mentions no specific rules about tithing. Jesus is simply clear that we are obligated to be cheerfully generous to those in need.

The tithing rules in the Torah were based on the religious and social system of ancient Israel and on an agricultural economy. The Torah is not authoritative for us. Even it were, it does not address modern-day questions about what percentage we should give, how much to the church and how much to other charities. Still, I do find there’s something psychologically significant about 10 percent – just move the decimal over one place, and that’s what you give away. If you’re just starting out with generosity practice, giving away 10 percent is a good start. Those who have been at it longer, or are better established in life, can think about higher percentages.

Giving is a crucial part of your spiritual life, a necessary component of your spiritual growth, and growing ethically and spirituality is the mission of this congregation. It is our business – it is our mission -- collectively to encourage compassion in each other. It's really good for us to do this.

"Research from the University of British Columbia and Harvard Business School shows that spending money on someone else — as little as $5 a day — can significantly boost your happiness. Students who practiced random acts of kindness were significantly happier than those who were not given this task. In another study, college students were given money and directed to either spend it on themselves or spend it pro-socially (on activities meant to benefit other people). Participants who spent it pro-socially were happier at the end of the day than those who spent it on themselves." (Mark Ewert, The Generosity Path, 2)

Part of your giving goes to charities. Charitable giving is an important spiritual practice. For this part, I encourage looking at website called givewell.org. They’ve put thousands of hours into researching which charities are most effective, dollar for dollar, and are underfunded. They search for the charities that save or improve lives the most per dollar. Right now, their charities include the Malaria Consortium, which dispenses malaria prevention medicine. The Against Malaria Foundation, which provides mosquito nets to reduce risk of exposure to malaria. Helen Keller International which provides supplements to counteract vitamin A deficiency in children under 5. And New Incentives, and organization that provides cash incentives for routine childhood vaccines. Those are some good charities to receive a portion of the percentage that you set aside for giving away. They are listed at givewell.org.

Other websites you might take a look at:
Giving What We Can http://www.givingwhatwecan.org/
80,000 Hours http://80000hours.org/
The Life You Can Save http://www.thelifeyoucansave.org/
Effective Animal Activism http://www.effectiveanimalactivism.org/

Peter Singer mentions these websites in his TED talk where he makes the point that helping others is a requirement of an ethical life. Singer addresses the questions: How much of a difference can I make? Am I expected to abandon my career? Isn't charity bureaucratic and ineffective anyway? Isn't it a burden to give up so much?

Once you’ve decided the total percentage you’re going to give away – for the sake of the wellbeing of others, and for the sake of your own spiritual wellbeing – then there’s the question of how much of that goes to support your congregation and its programs. If you determine a percent first, then calculate what dollar amount that comes to, your pledge amount will probably not be a nice round number. But you’ll know it’s a nice round percent.

For your congregation's thriving, and for your thriving as a part of it, I suggest thinking in the range of three to five percent of adjusted gross income. Again, the more well-established you are in life, the higher the percentage can be. If you’re a young couple just starting out, two percent is a level of generosity you can feel really good about.

Pledging is a part of the meaning of membership, a part of what makes membership meaningful, and part of your spiritual practice and development. Through the practice of generosity, we are connected, made whole, better able to be the people we want to be.

May it be so. Amen.

Training in Compassion 9: Turn All Mishaps into the Path

As we reflect on dignity this month, recall these words of the Roman emperor and Stoic philosopher Marcu Aurelius:

“When anything tempts you to be bitter: think not, 'This is a misfortune' but instead: 'To bear this worthily is good fortune.'"

Mishaps happen. If we treat them as part of our spiritual path, then they are. Often, though, we don't want the mishaps to be there. We want them gone as soon as possible. We think they are certainly not the spiritual path toward wholeness.

But turn all mishaps into the path. When something difficult or terrible happens to us -- a loss, a setback, a frustration, an insult -- naturally we immediately feel dismay, anger, disappointment, or resentment. The training in compassion is to remind ourselves to turn all of this into the path! When we catch ourselves trying to run away from the things that make us feel bad, we can, instead, reverse course and turn toward our afflictive emotions, understanding that they are natural, under the circumstances.

Dismay, annoyance, anger, anxiety, resentment arise sometimes for all of us -- this is how the human heart works. Allow them all to be present with dignity. Forgive yourself for having the negative emotions. Forgive others -- whoever you might be blaming for your difficulties. With these forgivenesses come relief and even gratitude.

We can say to ourselves, for example:

"Oh, yes, I am angry and upset right now, but this is what animals feel under such conditions -- so of course I feel this way. And I am grateful to feel what anyone, under such circumstances, would feel. I am glad to stand in solidarity and understanding with other beings who may be, right now, also having these feelings.”

This is not far-fetched. It does, however, take training. Repeat the slogan, “turn all mishaps into the path,” to yourself at various points during your day. Write it in your journal, and reflect on how it is working in your life. Keep doing this until it is thoroughly internalized.

Each time you turn a mishap into the path it becomes easier than the last. Little by little you establish a new habit of turning toward rather than away from all of life, including the parts we don’t like. Eventually, you can even welcome mishaps, for it is when we face difficulties, not when things are going smoothly, that we learn the most.

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For the full version of this post: SEE HERE.

Dignity

A. HOW THE CONCEPT OF UNIVERSAL DIGNITY EMERGED
B. USES OF UNIVERSAL DIGNITY
C. THREE DIGNITIES AND THE TENSION BETWEEN UNIVERSAL AND ATTAINED DIGNITY
D. THE CAPABILITIES APPROACH

Our theme for March is “dignity.” Last spring, when Faith and I were discussing what themes to have for the upcoming year, we decided to include “dignity” because the new article II bylaws of our denomination, the Unitarian Universalst Association, speak of dignity under the “equity” value. The bylaws say,

“Equity: We declare that every person is inherently worthy and has the right to flourish with dignity, love, and compassion.”

This has clear echoes with the historic UU first principle:

We, the member congregations of the Unitarian Universalist Association, covenant to affirm and promote: the inherent worth and dignity of every person (or every being).

So what is this dignity thing that our faith affirms?

Proto-Indo-European is the hypothetical original source language from which the 500 or so Indo-European language. Linguists think that the English word dignity derived from the Proto-Indo-European “dek,” which meant “to take, accept.” By the time it had become the Latin dignitas, it meant worthiness or merit -- suggesting something that is acknowledged or accepted as valuable. When we treat someone with dignity, we take or accept that they are worthy of respect, honor, and esteem. Dignity is conferred by acknowledging worth.

A. HOW THE CONCEPT OF UNIVERSAL DIGNITY EMERGED

Generally, up until modern times, it was understood that not everyone could be regarded as having worth. Stoic philosophers like Seneca (born 4 BCE), and Epictetus (born 50 CE), had a counterpoint. They maintained that all humans have an inner worth due to their rational nature, regardless of external status. But theirs was very much a minority viewpoint. For most of the Roman and on through the medieval world, dignity was reserved for the special, the noble. This meaning is still present in words like “dignitary,” or “dignified.”

Augustine, born 354, did say that all humans have a divine essence, and Christian thinkers have often invoked the concept imago dei -- creation in the image of God -- but not until centuries later did it become popular to say that this meant that all humans have dignity.

In Islamic thought, there’s a passage in the Quran declaring that God has bestowed dignity upon all humans. Muslim scholars Al-Farabi (born 870), and Ibn Sina (born 980), emphasized rationality as central to human dignity. Along similar lines, Thomas Aquinas (born 1225), built on Aristotle, arguing that dignity comes from rationality and moral capacity, given by God.

Pico della Mirandola (born 1463), wrote Oration on the Dignity of Man, which emphasized human potential and freedom, and strengthened the idea of universal dignity. In England, John Locke (born 1632), argued that all humans are equal and possess natural rights. Immanuel Kant (born 1724), transformed dignity into a moral concept, saying that all rational beings have intrinsic worth and should be treated as ends, and not as a means only.

While these philosophers’ ideas were gradually seeping into the general populace, most people still thought of dignity as a property of the dignified dignitaries and not a property of the hoi polloi rabble. Before about 1830, writes Remy Debes,

“neither the English term ‘dignity,’ nor its Latin root dignitas, nor the French counterpart dignité, had any stable currency as meaning ‘the unearned status or worth of all persons’, let alone the grounds of universal rights or equality.”

So what changed around 1830? The abolition movement to end slavery. That, and early labor rights movements were driven by the idea that all humans have dignity regardless of race or class.

Finally, in 1948, in response to the atrocities of World War II, the new United Nations adopted the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Its article 1 declared: “All human beings are born free and equal in dignity and rights.”

B. USES OF UNIVERSAL DIGNITY

The claim that dignity is universal -- an equal possession of every person -- implied a universal moral duty to recognize and respect that dignity. Thus the idea of universal dignity was important to the abolition movement, and the UN's move to protect groups subjected to atrocities in World War II. Indeed, dignity has been invoked in every 20th and 21st century social justice movement, including the civil rights movement, the feminist movement, the LGBTQ rights movement, and workers’ rights movements. Policies that ensure access to healthcare, to education, or to social services are apt to be framed as affirmations of human dignity. Advocates of criminal justice reform invoke dignity. The argument that the death penalty is incompatible with the dignity of human life contributed to the European Union banning the death penalty.

These are examples of dignity used as a grounding for individual autonomy, human rights, personal freedoms and protections. On the other hand, conservative perspectives appeal to dignity in support of traditional values, social harmony, and respect for authority. Communitarian perspectives appeal to dignity as embedded in relationships and societal structures, arguing that dignity demands social policies that uphold communal well-being rather than just individual rights. Some non-Western societies critique Western conceptions of dignity for imposing individualistic values that do not always align with their cultural traditions.

You know the stone soup story, in which a stranger shows up in town and claims to have a magic stone that will produce nutritious soup merely by being placed in simmering water. The stranger then coaxes the villagers to make the soup even better by adding some cabbage, some carrots, maybe some beans, onions, et cetera. In the end, it’s all the other ingredients that do the work of making soup.

We may wonder whether dignity is like the stone in stone soup. We get one sort of soup if we add in human rights, another sort if we add in traditional values and respect for authority, yet another if we add in structures of relationships and communal well-being. Dignity may be claimed as the support for any of these, but maybe the human rights, or the traditional values, or whatever sort of soup we may be desiring, can stand on its own. We don’t need that stone thrown in the pot. Or do we?

The hungry villagers were unable to bring forth those other ingredients and produce a communal pot of soup until coaxed to do so by that stranger with his stone. So in some sense the stone is not superfluous – it’s necessary.

We have to think of ourselves as beings of worth -- bearers of dignity -- in order to get any other social or political project going. The expansion of dignity to apply to everyone thus reflects a relatively new tendency to want to involve everyone – or as many people as we can – in our social and political projects.

C. THREE DIGNITIES AND THE TENSION BETWEEN UNIVERSAL AND ATTAINED DIGNITY

We may identify three broad categories of meaning that dignity has signified across context and history.

First, dignity as status: noble or elevated social position or rank – dignity as what a dignitary has. This sort of dignity, like the word “nobility,” tends to conflate a standard of character or gravitas with the accident of birth class, though social status can, at least in principle, be attained by those not born to it.

Second, dignity as dignified behavior. This might be gravitas: a poise or grace associated with behavioral comportment. This might sometimes be particularly associated with the sophisticated manners or elegant speech in which the upper classes are typically trained, though it is not exclusive to class. Or it might indicate composure in the face of insult or duress – a dignified response to hardship that people of any class might display. Or dignified behavior might be living with integrity -- living up to personal or social standards of character and conduct, either in one’s own eyes or the eyes of others.

Third, dignity as universal: the unearned worth or status that all humans share equally.

With the first two, one might have dignity – or not. You either have a high social status or it’s somewhat less. You either retain composure under stress or you don’t, live with integrity, or don’t. But this third category of dignity applies to everyone equally. One’s dignity in this sense cannot be increased or diminished, it can only be recognized or not recognized. This universal dignity can be violated, as when we treat people as not having dignity, when we fail to recognize the worth, the value that a person has simply in virtue of being a person. But this is a sense of dignity as something everyone always has, whether it is respected, ignored, or violated. So we have these three dignities:

1. Dignity as high status, as being a dignitary.
2. Dignity as a standard to live up to – an aspiration to live in a dignified way, with composure and integrity, and a measure of poise. And,
3. dignity as universal – as something that everyone has, and has equally, and so cannot be achieved or aspired to and cannot be lost. The first one I’m not going to pay much attention to.

I'm not going to give further attention to the first meaning. I suppose unequal status will always be a thing among humans, and, yes, there is a lot to be said about how higher status is assigned, and how it functions, but a concern with dignity today doesn’t have much to do with who is a dignitary and who isn’t. Rather, it’s those other two that are the concern: acting and living with dignity, and recognition of universal dignity. And I think both of those are important and valuable.

There is something in the area of dignity for us to work on and develop in ourselves – composure and integrity -- and there is also something called dignity that is universal and equal and unearned. And both matter.

There is, though, this rather obvious tension between attained dignity and universal unearned dignity. If we seriously believe in human dignity – and maybe expand the circle beyond humans to a concept of primate dignity, or mammal dignity, or warm-blooded dignity, or vertebrate dignity, or beings dignity – this dignity can’t be gained or lost, and isn’t something to attain.

We might try to deal with this tension by distinguishing between ourselves and others. I might say: for myself, I will aspire to composure, poise, and integrity. I want to live in dignified way, and when I have behaved in an undignified manner, I want to learn from that and get better. At the same time, I will regard others as having inherent, equal universal dignity.

I’m not sure that approach will work. We might cut others more slack than we do ourselves, but if we’re paying attention to standards for ourselves, we can’t help but notice which other people are models for us to emulate and which ones seem to be exemplifying what we’re trying to avoid. Also, if there is a dignity that is universal, then I kinda have to allow that "universal" includes me, too. So I don’t think distinguishing between the way I approach myself and the way I approach others helps with this tension between attained dignity and universal dignity.

D. THE CAPABILITIES APPROACH

I think the idea that will help us here to either resolve the tension or live creatively in the tension is: capability. There is in the world of ideas a thing called the capabilities approach. The capabilities approach was first developed by Indian economist Amartya Sen in the 1980s. Sen argued that traditional measures of well-being, such as income or utility, are insufficient. Instead, well-being should be evaluated in terms of an individual's capabilities to function. Capabilities are influenced by a range of factors, including income, education, health, and social environment.

In the 1990s, American philosopher Martha Nussbaum picked up on Sen’s work and began collaborating with him to further develop and expand the capabilities approach. Her book, Women and Human Development: The Capabilities Approach, came out in 2000, and is a key work in the development of the approach. Nussbaum’s version of the approach particularly emphasizes human dignity and the opportunities individuals need to lead a flourishing life.

True well-being depends not, or not just, on GDP and wealth, but on whether people have real opportunities to live a meaningful life. A person with the legal right to vote but who lacks education or access to polling places does not truly have the capability to participate in democracy. Providing a wheelchair to a person with a disability is helpful, but real dignity comes from ensuring they have accessible environments to function independently. Thus, instead of just looking at what people have, Nussbaum focuses on what they can do and be.

Nussbaum identifies ten essential capabilities that societies should support to ensure human dignity:
1. Life – Being able to live a full life of normal length.
2. Bodily Health – Having good health, adequate nutrition, and shelter.
3. Bodily Integrity – Security from violence and bodily autonomy.
4. Senses, Imagination, and Thought – Access to education and intellectual development.
5. Emotions – The ability to love, grieve, and form meaningful relationships.
6. Practical Reason – Being able to exercise thought and conscience to make choices about one’s life.
7. Affiliation – The ability to engage in social relationships and be treated with respect.
8. Other Species – Living in a way that respects nature and other life forms.
9. Play – The ability to engage in recreation and leisure.
10. Control Over One’s Environment – Political participation and property rights.

A just society, per Nussbaum, ensures that every person has the capability to achieve these functions rather than merely providing formal rights without real access. A fair and just distribution of primary goods is important, but we must also consider how individuals can actually use these goods in their real circumstances. Can all their capabilities be exercised? Can their capabilities be developed and brought into full flower? Here we have a way to approach dignity that is both affirms the universal and leaves room for the attainable.

What’s universal is that we all have these capabilities. We have the universal dignity that we are beings capable of living a lifespan that our genetics allow –
Capable of the bodily health that reasonable nutrition, exercise, sleep, and shelter allows –
Capable bodily autonomy and security from violence -
Capable of learning and intellectual development –
Capable of loving, grieving, and forming meaningful relationships --
Capable of reflecting on our values and how to live by them in the choices we make --
Capable of social relationships, friendships, and group affiliations within which we are treated with respect –
Capable of loving and respecting nature and other life forms –
Capable of play and recreation –
Capable of political participation and owning things and effectively using what we own.

What’s universal is that we all have these capabilities – and we have the inherent dignity that comes from having these capabilities.

The dignity that is left to be attained is the fuller development of the capability, the exercise of the capability. We don’t always get the chance to do what we are capable of. Of course, no one can do ALL that ze is capable of doing, but one can develop in all 10 of the basic capabilities. A world is possible in which all of us have some chance at all of the 10 basic capabilities.

An individual may attain a life of dignity, may be a dignified person who retains grace under pressure, composure under stress, integrity with poise. Collectively, we may aspire to ensure that everybody has the chance to develop their capability for a dignified life, however they may conceive of it. And both the individual and our collective attainments are grounded in recognition of the universal, equal, unearned dignity that we are beings with these capabilities.

I said at the beginning that the root of dignity was to take, accept. When we treat someone with dignity, we take or accept that they are worthy of respect, honor, and esteem. What Amartya Sen and Martha Nussbaum help us see more clearly is that it is their capabilities that make them so worthy of respect, honor, and esteem. Some of us haven’t had much chance to do and be what we are capable of doing and being – but the capability alone warrants our respect, our esteem, our honor. And by respecting, honoring, and esteeming every person’s capabilities, we encourage and assist the use and development of those capabilities – and make way for the greater flourishing of all life.

May it be so.
Blessed be.
Amen.

Training in Compassion 8: Turn Things Around

Where there's confusion or pain in your life, make use of it instead of trying to get rid of it. Trying to get rid of it usually doesn't work anyway. It only makes things worse. Of course, if your painful situation can be resolved somehow, resolve it. Otherwise, try accepting it and looking for the lesson it contains.

Whatever comes into our consciousness will spur a reaction in us, and this reaction will be one of these three: we will either like, dislike, or be neutral to the object. Greed, hate, and delusion are the emotional activities we indulge in response to liking, disliking and feeling neutral. We are greedy for what attracts us; we hate what repels us; we are confused or indifferent about neutral objects.

Turn things around" means turning the three reactions and the emotions that go with them into seeds of virtue. Things constantly arise, and we are constantly trying to grab them and make them stay or push them away as soon as possible, depending on the style of our reactivity and emotion. The flow of these objects and emotions goes on constantly, usually below the level of conscious awareness. Three seeds of virtue appear when turn around our standard reactions.

We don't have control of much, but we do have control of whether to turn around the greed, hate, and delusion that appears in our lives. The basic human mess of likes and dislikes, in which we seem to be trapped and which seems to be so dangerous and troublesome, is actually wonderful, a real treasure. Our messes and our problems are our treasures! Our suffering, our troubles, our problems, the things that we really don't like and want to get rid of but can't, or the losses we feel, the things we wanted to keep and sadly cannot -- all of this is a treasure to us if we can understand it in the right way.

Everything painful and difficult has the potential to bring us great joy and deep spiritual riches. We can turn toward and appreciate our suffering, our problems, and the suffering and problems of others. Turn things around means recognizing that our very likes and dislikes and the suffering they bring us, can be the source of spiritual growth.

So: try writing down "turn things around." Try to fix it in memory. When you find yourself annoyed or upset by instances of liking and disliking that are causing you suffering think: turn things around. This practice might help you to let go a little in that moment. Even if you don't believe it and are only a little intrigued by it, it can be helpful to practice this slogan. It will have the effect of causing you to stop your lamentation for a moment and recall that it might just be possible that there is something potentially good and positive in this agony in which you are right now enmeshed.

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For the full version of this post, SEE HERE.

UU Uses of the Bible

Many of us, I know, have a conflicted relationship with The Bible – the anthology of 66 books in Protestant Bible or 73 in the Catholic Bible, or 76 in the Eastern Orthodox Bible. Yet this particular anthology of old writings (in any of its variants) is powerful, and hugely popular.

Bibles have always sold well in this country. You might think everyone in the US has long since had one by now. Yet sales have not only continued at a brisk clip with 9.7 million Bibles sold in the US in 2019, but sales climbed to 14.2 million in 2023. Then in the first 10 months of 2024, sales were up another 22% over the first 10 months of the year before. But buying Bibles doesn’t mean people know their Bible very well. Time magazine observed in a 2007 cover story that only half of U.S. adults could name one of the four Gospels. Fewer than half could identify Genesis as the Bible's first book. I like to think Unitarian Universalists could do better than that – but I don’t have data on that.

A Gallup and Castelli survey concluded: “Americans revere the Bible but by and large they don’t read it.” Christianity Today wagged: “Americans love their Bibles. So much so that they keep them in pristine, unopened condition."

For many, apparently, the Bible is a sort of talisman: an object to possess as a symbol of tribal loyalty, not a text to study, know, and wrestle with.

Or: and this may be part of what’s going on with the recent boom in sales, as more and more people are growing up unchurched, what they’ve heard of the Bible makes it seems like this mysterious source of truth, and in these deeply uncertain times, they get curious to take a look.

But without a community and tradition to provide a context of meaning, without background on how the texts came to be written, and how those particular texts and not others came to be canonized, they aren’t likely to get much from their attempts to read it.

But if we do engage the text, and also the context – engaging the various interpretive possibilities in open discussion, the stories and the poetry offer us touchstones and wisdom as we seek to make sense of our lives and our world. Two weeks ago, I talked about the Book of Ruth as offering us a helpful inspiration to cross borders and make connections. I’ve spoken of the Loaves and Fishes story from the Christian Testament. At Christmas, we look at the two different Christmas stories, and last Easter we looked at the four different Easter stories.

There’s a lot more to glean from this rich and influential anthology. In fact, I’ll be offering a class, starting next Saturday March 1 at 2:00. We’ll have four Saturday sessions: Mar 1st and 8th, and then April 5th and 12th. We’ll be reading and discussing the book “Understanding the Bible: An Introduction for Skeptics, Seekers, and Religious Liberals,” by John Buehrens. Buehrens is a Unitarian Universalist minister, and was president of the UUA from 1993 to 2001. Let’s plunge in and expand our appreciation and understanding of how to use these resource for understanding our world. Get the book and join me for the class. First, though, where does the notion of God come from? There are lots of theories. Here’s mine.

Our brains do their best to cope with this world in which we find ourselves. They rely heavily on predicting what’s going to happen. Psychology researchers have been learning more and more clearly that the brain is not best understood as a stimulus-response mechanism – waiting for some stimulus, then responding. That would be way too inefficient – and often there wouldn’t be time to figure out much of a response. Rather, our brains anticipate events, and plan in advance. They are prediction machines. And as the infant grows into the toddler, it begins to form concepts of belief and desire. People believe things and people want things. This turns out to be tremendously useful in predicting how people – the most important features of our world -- will behave – which allows us to coordinate our behavior with theirs.

Apparently, conceiving of other people’s beliefs and desires comes first, and only later do we apply the process to ourselves and form a conception that we ourselves believe certain things, and desire certain things.

Beliefs and desires are a fiction. We might someday be able to make a complete map of someone’s brain – its 100 billion neurons firing across 100 trillion synapses, and know just what neurotransmitters are passing across which of those synapses, and at what rate. But nowhere in all of that will we find such a thing as a belief or a desire. Yet these are indispensable fictions for giving us a rough and ready way to predict and get along with other people and ourselves. There is no other practical way to understand each other.

We are made to relate to others as believing and wanting. We can’t avoid it. We can, with training, avoid relating to the universe as a whole as having beliefs and desires. Though we can’t get along without imagining that people have beliefs and desires, we can get along passably without imagining that the universe has beliefs and desires. We can do it, but I don’t recommend it.

If you’re a physicist at work, or if you’re reading an explanation of what physicists have concluded, you need to set aside any conception of the universe believing or desiring, but even the physicist gets off work at some point, and the exercise of imagining that the universe itself knows things and wants things is a helpful exercise for feeling at home in this universe.

We feel at home with people by relating to them as believing and desiring. Likewise, it helps us feel at home in this universe by relating to it as if it believed and desired. We explore our place in the order of things by asking ourselves what the universe seems to believe about us, what it seems to want from us. Imagining the universe as a person – an entity that knows things and wants things, that has feelings, like love and anger – is a construct that can be helpful for pulling in our whole humanity, not just the logical left-brain. By engaging with that construct, playing with it, wrestling with it, it can put us into a relationship with our world, with nature – or at least can help us cope with it.

And so we come to the God of the Hebrew Bible, the God of the Hebrew people. As probably every people have done, the Hebrews imagined the universe as having beliefs and desires – and the agents of these beliefs and desires are the gods, or, as Hebrews came to conceive, the one God. The Hebrew God has some powerful positives. In the Exodus story – a.k.a. “Yahweh and Moses’ Excellent Adventure” – Yahweh is liberation. He is sustenance; strength to rebel against oppression. Yahweh is covenant, the power of people to come together to be in community, to walk in a shared way of life aimed at transformation and healing and the realization of human potential to have and live in beloved community.

But the Hebrew God is rather bipolar. Life itself is rather bipolar. The God of the Hebrew Bible swings between dishing out unearned grace and unearned wrath – and life does include a lot of pleasantness and unpleasantness that we didn’t earn or deserve. The Bible is A LOT – and there are so many fascinating stories in it and about how it came to be, and what it might mean. I’m not going to try today to articulate overall the message of Buehrens’ Understanding the Bible – we’ll do that in the class starting Saturday. Nor will I make a general point about UU uses of the Bible. Instead I’m going to take just one example of the way God is characterized – God at God’s very worst – the abusive God who appears most harshly in some of the books of the prophets. We’ll see if even the parts of the Bible that are most likely to turn you off of the Bible entirely – if even those parts might have some use for us today. It will be difficult. And if, in the end, you decide that’s a bridge too far for you to find any use for, I won’t blame you. But let’s give it a try and see. The God of the Hebrew Bible is sometimes angry and punitive toward his people. Sometimes in life it does feel like the world is punishing you. The God of the Hebrew Bible is sometimes abusive. It’s the prophets that express this abuse – Hosea, Ezekiel, Jeremiah. These imaginative street preachers described for their listeners a universe that fits the profile of what we know about how abusers behave, casting Yahweh as the abusive boyfriend or husband, with Israel as the girlfriend or wife. This description so resonated with the people of Israel that they made these descriptions scripture.

My first semester of divinity school, every week, on Thursday, I was in Old Testament class for three hours in the morning, then had Pastoral Care class for three hours in the afternoon. In the pastoral care class we got to a unit on battering and abuse: how to recognize the signs of an abuse relationship, how that abusive dynamic works. In the Old Testament class we kept talking about this Yahweh character who fit the profile of an abuser that I was learning about in Pastoral Care.

Here are some of the aspects of the profile we learned:
Smashing things. (like maybe Sodom and Gomorrah).
Destroying her property.
Harming pets (like demanding animal sacrifices, or perhaps the Flood).
Acting invincible (Yeah).
Putting her down.
Calling her names.
Humiliating her.
Making her feel guilty. (Yahweh does all those things to Israel.)
Unreasonable demands or expectations. (Hmm. “Thou shalt not covet” seems a rather unreasonable demand.)
Limiting her outside involvement (like when Yahweh commands “have no relations with the other people in the land”).
Embarrassing her in front of others.
Using the children to relay messages.
Threatening to take the children away (as in Ezekiel, “Your survivors shall fall by the sword”).
Here’s one: Using religion to control her.
Degrading her about her relationships.
Abusing the children.
Treating her like a servant (that fits, doesn’t it?)
Making all of the rules. (like pretty much the entire book of Leviticus)

This Yahweh has serious power and control issues. Our pastoral care text said, "extreme jealously and accusations of infidelity characterize most men who batter." Yahweh is famously jealous, proclaiming in Exodus, "I the Lord your God am a jealous God.”

And in such books as Hosea, Ezekiel, and Jeremiah, Yahweh repeatedly levels accusations of infidelity at Israel. Israel’s unfaithfulness is described as sexual unfaithfulness and promiscuity. The accusations, the threats of public shaming in Hosea, Ezekiel, and Jeremiah are in the Bible, and those parts of the Bible are more graphic than I feel comfortable sharing with you out loud in a worship service.

The abuse cycle, as counselors now recognize, includes episodes of tender seduction – “honeymooning her” -- periodically recurring between episodes of violence. Both phases – manipulating tenderness and dominating humiliation – are designed to assert and reinforce the abuser's power and control. Here, too, Yahweh fits the profile. Hosea describes how Yahweh will humiliate Israel, and then Hosea continues, in passage I will share:

"Therefore, I will now allure her, and bring her into the wilderness, and speak tenderly to her. From there I will give her her vineyards, and make the Valley of Achor a door of hope. There she shall respond as in the days of her youth, as at the time when she came out of the land of Egypt." (Hosea 2:14-15, NRSV)

“Honeymooning,” it’s called, and it’s a tactic of abusers. For a long time the official Christian line on all of this was that God’s acts were fair punishment for Israel’s sins. As our understanding of the nature of abusive relationships grows, and we use that understanding to help us interpret the Bible, more and more people – including more and more Christians – are now saying: there’s not enough sin in the world to justify that much punishment.

Jewish scholar David Blumenthal, in a book titled, Facing the Abusing God, writes:

Abusive behavior is abusive; it is inexcusable, in all circumstances. What is true of abusive behavior by humans is true of abusive behavior by God. When God acts abusively, we are the victims, we are innocent. When God acts abusively, we are the hurt party and we are not responsible for God’s abuse. Our sins – and we are always sinful – are in no proportion whatsoever to the punishment meted out to us. Furthermore, the reasons for God’s actions are irrelevant. God’s motives are not the issue. Abuse is unjustified, in God as well as human beings."

So what is the point of these awful stories? Yeah, this world, which we viscerally respond to as person-like, it does abuse us sometimes. And it abuses some of us more than others. How do we, today, make use of those stories? The answer, I suggest, is that we are called to Social justice.

Last week, we talked about the work for social justice that we do. We do direct service. We attend and sometimes may lead classes to educate ourselves and others about the issues. We organize, we advocate, we witness. Last week those in attendance were asked to write on sticky notes what they have been doing, or want to do in the coming year, in any of these five areas of justice work: service, education, organizing, advocacy, and witness. We put those sticky notes on the map that’s at the back there. If you weren’t here last week, I want to invite you to peruse that display and add your own sticky note – or two or three. And if you were here, but you’ve thought of an additional area you have or would like to contribute in, then please add another sticky note to our map.

One way that we can relate to those old stories of an abusive God is to move ourselves out of the role of the abused partner, and into a role of ministering to the abuser. The call to social justice is the call to minister to God. In that Pastoral Care class I mentioned, we talked about some ways to minister to victims of abuse. And we also talked about appropriate responses for a minister when the abuser himself comes to see you, or you see him.

How do you minister to an abuser? Our Pastoral Care textbook stressed accountability: holding the abuser accountable. In our social justice work, we seek to hold accountable the sources or injustice.

“The appropriate frame," our textbook said, "is that the abuser has committed a criminal act, and he should not be allowed to evade the consequences of his behavior."

He may be asking for forgiveness, but forgiveness is not appropriate if it allows him to elude accountability for his violence and his mania for power and control. Abusive men can be truly anguished – but the reality of the anguish is not always accompanied by readiness to engage with counselors or clergy to change their behavior and assumptions. "The minister's task," said our text, “is 'to become an ally of that part of the man that gravitates toward change.'"

An ally of the part that gravitates toward change. They won't change overnight – though they might swear they have. But they can gravitate toward change if enough sources are making clear that they cannot get away with their old ways. That’s the take-home phrase I offer to you today: be ye “allies of the part that gravitates toward change.”

There is a place for us in the framework of the picture that Hosea, Ezekiel, and Jeremiah put before us. We can take on the role of ministering to the victims, yes, and of ministering to the abuser, too. What would it be like to imagine ourselves as God’s pastor – to imagine ministering to the world that batters its poor with starvation, disease, violence, denial of education, economic hopelessness? How do we carry out such a ministry?

We minister to an abusive God as we would minister to an abusive human. We hold accountable. We avoid easy forgiveness that allows the abuse to continue. We are allies of the part that gravitates toward change. We find the thread of value there and work to weave with it a new cloth. We befriend the aspect that can transform.

Ministry for justice and security means alliance with that part of reality-as-a-whole that gravitates toward change, toward justice, toward a true and healthy love, toward freedom and the relinquishing of dominating power and control. This means standing up to Yahweh, staring him in the eye and naming his abuse – naming and confronting the hurt – facing directly the sources of power, whether they be governments or corporations or natural disasters. It won’t get better if we don’t hold it accountable.

As a minister would say to an abusive husband – “I am judging your behavior, not your humanity” – so we, as befrienders of a world our souls want to treat as a person, can say, in effect, “I am judging your behavior, not your divinity. I am not going to desert you, but I am not going to excuse you either. This is not betrayal. Speaking the truth is the best way I can help you.”

Here, then, is a new psalm – a poem, prayer, and promise.

You are my shepherd.
You provide for me in so many ways.
In you, I have the still waters of peace.
From you, security and love, beauty and abundance.
My cup truly overfloweth.
You also hurt so many humans and other animals and ecosystems.
There is such cruelty in you.
As you are my shepherd, so I will be yours.
I will stand with you, and I will not enable your harming.
I will hold you accountable.
I will stand with you as an ally of that in you which gravitates toward change.
This change will not be easy.
The change is too fundamental to be possible without anguish.
Universal peace and justice will take a long time.
They will not be attained in my lifetime -- they will in yours.
I will be with you, as you have been with me; I commit my life to that.
Together, we will take the next step.
I insist.
Amen.