October 18,2009

 Biology, Psychology, Theology:How we find and make meaning in our Lives

Today’s sermon is brought to you by the generosity of Dr. Wes Bowman, a member of this congregation who bought the sermon topic of his choice at our Service Auction in March for a goodly sum, which is good for our church and good for livening up the topics. He set for me the task of examining how meaning is derived from not just one sense or source, but from a combination of our human evolution, our mental development, and our religious understanding; that is, biology, psychology, and theology, or the study of life, the mind, of God. These are not static states of being, and have always been in the process of change, both culturally and personally.   He also gave me four wonderful readings to share and for illustration, here is the first.

The Expert (a Sufi story), by Anthony de Mello, the Jesuit priest and psychotherapist:

A man who was assumed dead was carried by his friends to his interment.  When the coffin was ready to be lowered into the grave, the man suddenly regained consciousness and rapped on the coffin lid.  They opened the coffin and the man sat up.  “What are you doing?”  he asked the assembled crowd, “I am alive. I am not dead!”  His words met baffled silence.  Finally, one of the mourners said, “My friend, both the coroners and the priests have certified your death.  Certainly the experts cannot be wrong!”  So, they screwed the coffin lid back on and the man was buried—as was appropriate.

Ah, the experts, the know-it-alls, how they do complicate our lives, especially since often, as this story illustrates, we know the truth of the adage that a little learning is a dangerous thing.  

This topic is one dear to my heart for it ties together what I believe are the foundational elements of our human nature, all that in reality makes us tick, all that makes for meaning in our lives. Further, I believe we cannot in reality, in ourselves, separate these from what it means to be human, though it is useful to talk about each as a discreet study in order to understand why we are at a place in our human history where there is in many places conflict about them.

          Keep in mind that these are each very broad fields, so I must be general in my approach. Indeed, Wes, my biological and psychological well-being was challenged by the breadth of this topic, and it is only because of my personal theology that I was able to persevere.

          I begin with biology, where all life begins; which is not to say that this has nothing to do with theology. Research is showing, with more and greater depth each year that passes, that there is nothing that is not rooted in our biology. From our beginning in the joining of the egg and sperm that develops into the child to be, biology is at work. Biology is, after all, the science of living matter in all its manifestations, from origin, reproduction, growth, structure, and behavior.

          The origin of life, as we’ve been taught, comes out of the very origin of the universe; the big bang, the creation of all that exists came about because the basic elements for life existed in that explosive event. The elements of all life were there: hydrogen by far the largest contributor at about ¾ of all elements, followed by helium, and everything else; but from those basic chemical building blocks of the Big Bang, thirteen billion years ago, all life came into existence through the processes of evolution.  Anyone who doesn’t believe in evolution is simply not paying attention. Aside from the fossil record, which is extensive, you only have to look at paintings of early history to see some subtle changes, for example the earliest paintings show that our toes are not as long as they were when our feet where in closer contact with the earth on a daily basis. Or look to the fact that the majority, around 85%, of youth between 16-20 year-olds now get impacted wisdom teeth requiring unpleasant surgery. Why is that?  Science tells us our jaws have been receding because we don’t do that same hard work of chewing that our ancestors did; so, with less room, those once hard working teeth cannot emerge correctly.  And many people no longer have wisdom teeth, and we’re told that we are also evolving out of our little toes. So evolution is happening all around us, but we do not generally see it, since these life-changing processes happen over a span of time that seems long to us, though in reality it is not all that long in the scope of millions of years. 

Scientists who study insect life, because insects have a very short life span, can see evolutionary changes. The famous fruit fly studies are important because the life cycle of the fruit fly is only a few weeks, so in the course of a year, many generations of fruit flies can be studied.  Plants, similarly can be dramatically altered, hybridized, and most look much less like their ancestors of even three or four hundred years ago. My father, who grew apples and plums, told me that in his boyhood days in the twenties, fruit was about half the size of that grown today.  So whether we are talking about plants or animals, it is clear in scientific circles that life came into being out of the chemical stew of the creation explosion and since that time has been ever changing. 

Humans, as we understand them, developed about 2-3 million years ago, and so-called modern humans, that is those since the Neanderthals and Cro-Magnons, are about 150,000-to-300,000 years old, of which there is plenty of fossil evidence, which also tells us that animals and humans and all forms of life have been in a progressive process of change.

          What I believe is most significant in terms of our biology is that having spent the overwhelming majority of our existence as primitive beings, struggling for survival, we are at root survival oriented; we are fear oriented; we do much of what we do first to survive, then to propagate the species. This is also the root of our psychology and theology. Consider that it has been less than a blink in human evolution that we have not had to be first and foremost concerned with just staying alive long enough to insure the survival of the species.

          And most of that time we were tribal, small in our numbers worldwide. For most of human history there were less than a million people; by the time of Jesus, roughly 2000 years ago, the world population was still small, about 300 million (we are now just over three hundred million just in the US); and the world population is rushing toward seven billion, and by 2030 will be at 8 billion—and it only gets worse from there. Unless, that is, which has happened before, some disease strikes eliminating large numbers; like the black plague in Europe in the Middle Ages.

          We would be foolish to expect that those driving forces of survival, developed and refined over millions of years, would cease to be important in human existence or in human illness, both physical and mental—indeed mental derives from the physical and more and more research is showing that it is foolish to separate the two.

          About 10,000 years ago a major change developed with the advent of agriculture.  Tribes of people no longer had to move from place to place as did the hunter-gatherers for thousands upon thousands of years; and by about 6000 years ago, the modes of agriculture had developed well-enough that complex communities began to be built where those small bands had stopped and planted and developed the first villages, then towns, and eventually small cities like Jerusalem, or Babylon, to name two of the more important we all learned about.

          From those small clans then tribal societies that had existed for most of our history, people began to live longer, more securely, and eventually developed more formal communities, so they had expanded needs to learn how to get along.

          From all that I have studied, the main thesis is that when we lived in small clans, we followed the head, and all went reasonably well, but as our interactions with other groups became more complicated, we needed more complicated systems of rules and laws in order to live together.  I believe from what I have learned that ethics came first; we had to have accepted values/mores in order to live in harmony, and those were probably pretty basic when all we were dealing with was the few dozen people of the clan, but as we began to try to live with each other, our needs became progressively greater.  Out of the basic ethics, such as you may not kill in this community, or steal, or interfere with the family, etc, we get both religion and law.  The Ten Commandments is the best example, for about half of the ten are really laws of human community, like not stealing, while the other half relate to the formalization of the laws into religion.  If you look around the world, ethics are pretty much the same, but religions differ remarkably.  Ethics relates to how people will exist together, while religion developed to lift up those culturally agreed norms and expectations, and made them significant in ways the people could remember. These differences were important, because tribal thinking (biology) was also at play, protecting property and blood lines, and so forth, all these were being formalized/delineated. This reading, The Formula, by Anthony de Mello, illustrates:

The mystic has returned from the desert.  They asked him eagerly: “Tell us, how is God?”

But how could he ever put in words what he has experienced in the depths of his heart?

Can anyone express truth in words?  Finally he gave them a formula—inaccurate and inadequate—in the hope to entice some of them to search themselves what he had experienced.  They clung to the formula.  They made a holy text from it.  They pressured everyone to make it his holy faith.  They made every effort to spread it to foreign countries.  And some of them even sacrificed their lives for it.  And the mystic was sad.  Perhaps he had better to have been silent. 

          The Hebrew scriptures are mostly laying down laws for the growingly complex community of the Israelites, and how they will differentiate themselves from other groups in the way they formalized their ethics in religion.  Circumcision, for example, was not done for health reasons; rather, it was a religious mark of the tribe.  Saying: We will know our people from all these other people through this ritual act—and, by the God we worship, the food we eat, the ways we treat marriage, birth, death, and all the important aspects of community life. So ethics and theology emerge from our biology. Like me good, not like me bad.

          Psychology also becomes important, for as the people had more time in these settled communities, as they began to this work of delineating themselves from other groups, while still living with and among them, they did not lose their competitive survival instincts, which always made them conscious of protecting their own groups, with blood lines ever important and growing even more important as people begin to crowd each other. Yet, exposure to other groups complicated our understanding of ourselves as human beings, as this reading points to:

On Good and Evil, by Kahlil Gibran

…Of the good in you I can speak, but not of the evil.

For what is evil but good tortured by its own hunger or thirst?

Verily when good is hungry it seeks food even in dark caves,

And when it thirsts it drinks even of dead waters.

You are good when you are one with yourself.

Yet when you are not one with yourself you are not evil.

You are good when you strive to give of yourself.

Yet you are not evil when you seek gain for yourself.

For when you strive for gain you are but a root

That clings to the earth and sucks at her breast.

Surely the fruit cannot say to the root, “Be like me,

Ripe and full and ever giving of your abundance.”

You are good when you walk to your goal firmly and with bold steps.

Yet you are not evil when you go thither limping.

Even those who limp do not go backward.

But you who are strong and swift, see that you do not limp

Before the lame, deeming it kindness.

You are good in countless ways,

And you are not evil when you are not good.

Lao Tzu, said it 3000 years ago:  Every front has a back!

          Biologists like Harvard’s E.O. Wilson, tell us that most animals are territorial, protecting their areas of food, water, safety, and so forth.  Humans are the most territorial; we are still territorial.  God bless America! Is a statement less of national concern and more of territorial protectionism.

          As we have more time, and more people, we learn at a far faster rate than in those dim cave days when just getting through the day alive, with enough to eat and drink, was all that mattered.

          People in their early stories, that became the scriptures and holy books found around the world, begin to try to explain differences between groups, to explain or rationalize why you do not kill in this community, but it is okay to kill in that community.  Many holy books are essentially books explaining why it was right for the people to do all the things they did, both good and bad; not surprisingly, always because they had the permission or command of their God/s to do so.

          Psychology, the study of the mind, the way we think, why we do what we do, has been developing as a discipline for about four hundred years; indeed the term came into being in the middle 1600s, while the term biology, relating to study of living things, did not come into use until1805. 

          Trying to understand why we are like we are, why we are here, why we do what we do, was the province of religion until the latter 19^th Century. In the western world, your behavior was dictated by church teachings. There were people either in the good graces of God, or controlled by Satan and his minions.  People we would now know to be schizophrenics, or otherwise mentally disturbed, were believed to be in the clutches of the devil. Exorcism was done to force the demons out of these afflicted souls, and they are still done in many places around the world, including this country.

          Theology and psychology were not really separate until a couple hundred years ago, for nearly everything that was a concern of the human mind was answered by religion.  If a child was born with a defect, it was because the mother was marked by evil in some way, this had been true in pagan times, and carried forward into Christianity.  Even as a child I would hear from the old women that so and so had a birthmark because of something the mother had eaten or seen that scared her.

          But in the 19^th Century science was becoming the way to see the world without bias (at least that was the goal); disciplines were developing rapidly, and out of the many so-called hard sciences like chemistry and mathematics, other disciplines like linguistics and literature were also become separate and distinct areas of study; at this time psychology also begins to use scientific methods, (as the Encyclopaedia Britannica states) to solve practical problems of human and animal behaviour and experience.

          By the middle of the 20^th Century medicine and psychology were competing with each other, and with the other disciplines, especially theology, about the causes for all kinds of human behavior.  Behaviorists like B.F. Skinner believed everything we did could be accounted for by the way we were reared. Nurture was everything. What was in the mind, what we thought, versus what was in the brain, the organic source of health, were believed to be distinct, or separate. A person grew up to be a criminal because of the way he/she was reared. There was a growing belief that behavior was affected by environment, and the sciences had not developed sufficiently to see that there was far more overlap than not. 

          Religion fought all scientific developments up and through the Enlightenment, and was even more challenged by the growing evidence of science that mind, health, social and cultural behaviors were not from some Intelligent Design set in stone, but rather a part of human evolutionary development.  We know from his letters and journals, that Charles Darwin would have published his theory on the origin of species much earlier if he had not been fearful for his family of the condemnation of the church and the society dominated by religious ideas and ideals.  We still see religions fighting against the developments of science, for they see these developments as tearing holes in the fabric of their theological beliefs.

          To believe in an all powerful, all knowing God, who intervenes in the world, becomes harder as science opens doors to the workings of the brain and all life.  And, more so, as the science in all these disciplines of biology, chemistry, medicine, and psychology learn that much that we once thought was simply thought/soul, independent of biology, is actually the result of the electro-chemical engine that is the brain.

          The neurologist Oliver Sacks has popularized some of this brain science in his books, like The Man who Mistook his Wife for a Hat.  One interesting case I read, in another source, was about was a nun who began having these beautiful visions of Jesus and Mary, and getting messages of great import, but she also became very ill and developed a seizure disorder. The physicians discovered that she had a tumor in the temporal lobe causing temporal lobe epilepsy, which was the source of the visions--a condition now well-documented. When the nun was told these facts, she declined the surgery, for she believed that God was the source of her visions.  Now, if she had had different symptoms, say just the seizures with strong smells as is common, or some other manifestation, she probably would have had a different reaction.

          Theology has always been about trying to explain ourselves to ourselves. Why are we here?  What is the point of human existence? Is there more to life than we can see? What, if anything, is our purpose?  What happens when we die? The religions of the world have given us thousands of different answers down through time.

          One of my chief issues with religion, as I grew up with it, was that it should not be so esoteric; God should have made what we were here for, and what we were to do here, as simple as are the need for food and water.  If an alien had landed on the earth, it could never figure out from our morass of religious differences, the point for our having religion at all.  Religion would look like fashion, a cultural phenomenon.  Not so ethics, no so science.

          Theology eventually developed a scientific branch, and by the 19^th Century, great theologians were using the methods of science to examine the books that had been put into the Bible, and it soon became clear that many hands had written the books of the scriptures; that errors were common, that the order of the books of the Bible was arbitrary, and translations down through the ages had made egregious errors, like changing female names to male, for one.

          Religion, that in prehistory was attempting to understand the world and why things happened through story and ritual and common themes meant to strengthen the community, had through the ages become a device for power.  As being in one clan/tribe was better to another, so one religion was better than being another.  Psychology is more important here than religion, for dominance is about convincing the people being dominated that they are inferior.  By the time of the Enlightenment, we had many religions developing, each believing it was the one and only right religion.

          We have not lost our desire to be in the superior, be it religion, class, neighborhood, school, everything. Each new generation of youth try to distinguish themselves from the older, and within each generation are different classes and groups valiantly trying to show some superiority. This is biology as it emerges through theology and psychology.

          What else is all this superiority about, whether it is superiority of god worshipped, beliefs, culture, or whether you are a Mac or PC?  What is at the root of our need to find something that sets us apart and above in some way?  Why is it that racism is worse, and religion more dogmatic, among the poorer classes?  Probably the fact that we are always trying to find something that makes us feel better about ourselves and our condition.  What is that if not biology working for our survival?

          I read just a couple years ago that some studies showed there is relatively little depression among more primitive peoples, those struggling with day to day survival. The psychologists interpreting the studies proposed that perhaps we have more depression as we have more leisure to consider our condition; that cultural conditions affect health, wealth, belief—so that biology, psychology, and theology are tightly intertwined, each affecting the other.

Psychological anthropology, as it developed in the 1930s, most famously by Dr. Ruth Benedict, led psychologists to recognize the existence of an inevitable cultural component in all processes of perception, motivation, and learning.

          You are what we eat, from your head down to your feet, as the old jingle stated; turns out that is true, and we are learning more and more about how our bodies and minds are affected by what we ingest, as food, by breathing, bathing, or any of the ways chemicals, nutritional and otherwise, get into our bodies. We are what we ingest; we think and behave in relation to what we eat, drink, smoke, breathe, etc.  When, in 1917, Albert Schweitzer went into the African interior to set up his hospital, he found disease and infection, but was surprised that he found no diabetes, heart disease, and only one case of cancer in several years. Schweitzer, who had a doctorate in religion (he was Unitarian in theology) as well as being a medical doctor, was among those early figures to draw attention to the diseases of the west. What we eat, how we think, what we believe, all of what we are comes from the intricate interplay of the biological, psychological, and theological or philosophical beliefs we hold. 

          There are certainly lots of chicken and egg questions, and those are being studied around the world.  I have no doubt that there will be continuing discoveries that teach us more about how one affects the other.  Perhaps there is a God gene, and an atheist gene, and genes that turn on or off all kinds of both good and bad processes within the body.  I believe genetic science will give us the greatest discoveries of this the 21^st Century.

          My feeling is that there is no gainsaying God or science; perhaps it is as the deists believed, that God or some creator force, did create world, and set it in motion, then left it to develop in its own way and time; after all, if your time frame is eternity, you would hardly limit yourself to a six-thousand year old universe as creationists believe.  Or, perhaps we are great cosmic accident; or something we are yet to imagine.  What seems clear is that we have been evolving these brains that love to question, challenge, seek out the new and different, and have shown no indication to quit moving along this path towards ever greater knowing. 

          We have come a long ways since people believed the Gods lived in the neighborhood, and could come walk and talk with them, but in many ways as God got bigger, people got more inclined to shrink God to fit in their neat boxes of beliefs.    Whether God is something like the God of the Hebrew scriptures, or Jesus, or Buddha, or a simply an unknowable mystery without form or name, is far less important than how we use these brief years we call our lives. Especially, that we be open to new understanding about all facets of human life, and thought, and spiritual expression of our being.

          Unitarian Henry David Thoreau wrote:

Be resolutely and faithfully what you are, be humbly what you aspire to be.  Be sure you give men the best of your wares, though they be poor enough, and the gods will help you to lay up a better store for the future. 

          All of human life is spiritual, this is my creed, one that can live comfortably with biology, psychology, and theology, for I believe what is most important is the ology, the study of what it means to be human. 

          Let us not be worried that we do not have all the answers, our role is not to put the period at the end of the sentence, but to add a mere word to the great story of human existence. 

***

October 11, 2009 

The Last Thing You Ever Want: An Abortion Story 

Some sermon topics are hard. Today’s sermon topic is one of the most difficult for the subject is one that touches upon that which we hold most dear: life.  For above all, the thing we value most is our own lives. No doubt survival is at the root of most of what we do, and some would say all of what we fear; so, we hold on tenaciously to this thing called life.  Further, those that chose, or perhaps stumble, into parenthood, as did many of us, we hold dear the lives we create in the act of bearing children. We also know that life, both the giving of it and the taking of it, has become the most politicized of all matters in recent history.  Both abortion and the death penalty have become highly charged topics over the last twenty years, and many who support the one do not support the other, which can seem paradoxical at best, ignorant at worst.

            So I take up this subject with some trepidation for no matter how carefully this subject is framed, one runs the risk of alienating somebody. 

            The death of Dr. George Tiller, on May 31^st of this year, was a source of great anger and frustration for me, and for many who believe in the constitutionally guaranteed freedom of a woman, ( working with her family and her doctor) to have an abortion.  Further, Dr. Tiller was one of the exceedingly few doctors to perform late term abortions. Abortions of this type are only about two percent of all abortions, and invariably done to protect the life of the mother.  The anti-choice forces named these partial-birth abortions, which is not a clinical term, in order to stir up precisely the kind of anger and animosity that resulted in Dr. Tiller’s murder by Scott Roeder, one of these so-called pro-life activists. Creating a purely political kind of incitement, but incitement that usually does result in some extremist, within extremist groups, deciding to take action with a gun.  Indeed, I have great fear for the safety of our President for exactly the same reasons; radicals and extremists can all too easily be motivated to act when incited by the likes of Rush Limbaugh and Glen Beck--people who are in it for the money, not for the causes they proclaim with such vehemence.

            So in the loud and ugly rancor that becomes the seething milieu of anti-abortion politics, the women and their families who need unhindered medical care are lost. Their stories are not heard.  Their suffering of less importance than who can or will wield the power over life and death; but in my opinion it always amounts more to who will have power over great wealth.  So, the bottom line in this political fight is that women and their health concerns, women and their ability to care for a baby, are really of very little importance against these larger forces.

            My belief from the experiences I have had the last thirty years or more speaking to young women and older women who decided to have an abortion is that there are very few women who chose an abortion because they are simply uninterested in babies, or life, or because it is simpler than using birth control.  Such a notion defies logic.  There are many reasons why women do seek abortions, but the one thing that I believe is that abortion is the last thing a woman will ever want.  But then, many things that we have some choices over, are the last things we would chose if we had all the knowledge beforehand. 

            We all would have taken better care of our teeth, watched our weight, exercised, had regular check-ups if we knew beforehand that we would wind up with root-canals, diabetes, cancer and heart disease, dementia.  That, though, is not the way life works.  That is not the way life or death works.

            Here is one story, only one, but it illustrates the hundreds of stories about late term abortions:

If the [2003 Federal ban on so-called partial birth abortions] were in place in 1995, Tammy Watts would likely be dead, she says.

In March of that year, Watts was in the eighth month of a much-wanted pregnancy and was eagerly anticipating the birth of her first child. During a routine ultrasound (the only way to detect abnormalities that require late-term abortion), she discovered her baby had Trisomy 13, a chromosomal abnormality that causes severe deformities and carries no hope of survival.

Because her baby was already dying and because this put her own life at stake, Watts had an intact dilation and extraction (D and X), the procedure that Bush condemns as "brutal."

"Losing my baby at the end of my pregnancy was agonizing," says Watts. "But the way the right deals with this issue makes it even worse.

            I doubt if I could find even one person who would tell me that abortion is good; and I doubt that I could find many who would say the death penalty is good.  Ending life is not about being or doing good.  It is what it is; in the case of abortion usually a necessity. 

            The story of an abortion almost always starts with some kind of sadness. Some of those I have had personal experience of relate to very sad conditions, in one case the woman was near fifty, had several children, and was neither financially or physically healthy enough to have another child.  Many cases of abortion involve incest.  Others involve foolish behavior or just as often lack of reasonable information on sex, contraception, but the result is that a young woman (or couple) will be unable to care adequately for the child.  The idea of pro-life should equally attend to the life of the women in question; not just to the potential for life that is housed in a fetus.  And this is at the root of the problem: when does life begin, and when does simply the potential for life begin?  To the extent that for centuries any sort of nocturnal or deliberate emission of a male was considered a sin, because such emissions could not result in new life.

            We of liberal religion tended to think that when state bans were first lifted on birth control in the 1930s, and then on abortion in 1973 with Roe v. Wade, that our work was done.  Yet, even the right to birth control was still in question in Connecticut until 1965; and we know that attempts have never stopped to encroach upon and/or impede the right of a woman to get an abortion.

            You may be surprised to learn that there are still attempts to ban birth control.  As recently as this month, in an article in a central Florida newspaper:

Petitions to amend the Florida Constitution over the possible banning of birth control and abortions have been the center of debate in Tallahassee this month.The group behind the amendment, Personhood Florida, is a Christian-based movement run by volunteers.

            All of which leads me back to the reasons I am preaching to you about abortion.  First and foremost, the rights to birth control and abortion are not secure rights.  The religious and political forces within our borders, both state and nation, are not sitting quietly accepting that women have the right to chose what is best for their lives and the lives of children they could potentially bear.  As long as they remain active, we must remain active.  A former member of this congregation, who works at Planned Parenthood in Wilmington, told me only this past Wednesday that she daily runs the gauntlet of anti-choice protestors to get into her building.  I do not mention her name in print because she and all the people she works with fear for their safety and the safety of their families.

            As the new health care legislation goes through its various idiotic machinations—I speak not of the ones that matter, for no one else is either—but as we hear what is going to bring this bill down, the top two are cost and abortions, and whether the government will pay for them for women who cannot afford them.

            Last month, reporter David Kirkpatrick wrote in a New York Times article:

Abortion opponents in both the House and the Senate are seeking to block the millions of middle- and lower-income people who might receive federal insurance subsidies to help them buy health coverage from using the money on plans that cover abortion. And the abortion opponents are getting enough support from moderate Democrats that both sides say the outcome is too close to call. Opponents of abortion cite as precedent a 30-year-old ban on the use of taxpayer money to pay for elective abortions.

Abortion-rights supporters say such a restriction would all but eliminate from the marketplace private plans that cover the procedure, pushing women who have such coverage to give it up. Nearly half of those with employer-sponsored health plans now have policies that cover abortion, according to a study by the Kaiser Family Foundation.

            As an aside, my deepest wish, and one I have been writing in my letters to my congressmen, and the administration, is that whatever the least of Americans get in this plan, I expect congress to get in theirs.

            Here is another story that a young woman wrote following the murder of Dr. Tiller:

In October of 2004, I was pregnant with my sons Nicholas and Zachary. With great joy and expectation, my husband, my best friend, and I visited my doctor for a normal growth ultrasound. I was nearly 23 weeks pregnant, hovering at the start of the third trimester. Within moments it was clear something was wrong; one of the boys was still and had no heartbeat. When I met with my doctor, routine screening revealed the worst: the symptoms I'd been experiencing that I thought were normal with a twin pregnancy were actually evidence that I was sick -- very, very sick. I was immediately admitted to the hospital with severe preeclampsia, and though my doctors tried mightily to slow the progression of the disease, by the morning of October 27, 2004 a group of doctors stood at my bedside and delivered the worst news I'd ever received. I was in advanced kidney failure. My blood pressure was skyrocketing, and it could not be controlled with medications. My liver was beginning to decline. The horrific headache I was experiencing could no longer be treated with pain medications because they were afraid it would depress my ability to breathe when I began to have the seizures they expected at any moment. I would soon likely suffer a stroke or a heart attack. In other words, I was going to die unless the pregnancy was terminated. Immediately.

There was no hope for my surviving son. He was too tiny and too frail to be viable. With my dangerously high blood pressure, a c-section would have likely caused me to bleed to death, and inducing labor would have stressed my system too much. My safest option was the procedure known as an intact dilation and extraction. It would save my life, and preserve my future fertility.

            What gets lost in the religious and political fighting, the religious and political determination to control this issue, is the destiny of many women and their potential children.  Indeed the life of women who have circumstances that only the physician and woman, or the woman and her husband or family, can know.  To have people outside you and your life, telling you what is best for you around this extremely sensitive and variable matter, is at best an intrusion, and at worst dictatorial.

            The last thing any of us would want is usually something that we wish we could have avoided, if only we had the information, the wisdom, the health. 

            I am astonished that there a people in these anti-choice camps who are doing things day and night that will lead to their own early deaths, like smoking, excess drinking, eating themselves into Type 2 diabetes and worse, who have no compunction telling women and girls, people they will never know, that they have no right to make the best choice they can for their lives.  It is hypocrisy of the first order. 

            You and I who are in the front ranks of liberal religion are in our small, but significant numbers, all that stands between the rights of women and these people who have agendas of their own that usually have more to do with their own salvation than the lives of children born with severe birth defects, or into poverty, or any of the thousand things that result when women are left without options.

            Certainly we all wish there would be no need for abortions, but as long as there is a need, we ought to leave such decisions where they belong, which is with the females in question.

            Who can ever know the realities of another person’s life?  What makes people so determined to be God, rather than leave these decisions between a woman and her God? 

Clearly, the desire to control women is still a strong element of religious and political human activity worldwide.  Women are still at risk around the world, and right here at home, because there is so little lack of respect for women in much of the world, again including right here at home. 

One writer said it quite well, when she wrote that the only right abortion is my abortion.  Meaning that as long as abortion remains something abstract, something other people have to deal with, it remains easy to pontificate on its rightness or wrongness.  I had a good friend who was one of two doctors in our small town, who told me that one of the fieriest preachers against abortion had no qualms coming to see this physician when his own fourteen year old daughter was raped and impregnated by her uncle.  And, by the way, it did not stop the preacher from continuing to preach against abortion, even after his daughter had safely had an abortion in the area Planned Parenthood facility.

 Hypocrisy is rife; and nowhere more rife than with this subject of such very personal concern.

            Beloved, of all the many things I have learned as a minister, the primary one is that no one knows what goes on behind closed doors; meaning, we never can know what goes on in another person’s life. We cannot know their motivations, their struggles, their heart-searching, over all kinds of painful subjects and events.  We owe it to our own desire for privacy and freedom of choice, to not be quick to condemn others for decisions they might make that we would not.  Lives of many young women (and men) have been saved, both physically and psychologically, because they made the difficult decision to abort a fetus.  Not something most are willing to talk about, for reasons of privacy, and also for reasons of cultural concern.

            Someone said, I think it may have been the philosopher Schopenhaur, or it just as easily may have been Penn Gillette the comic-cum-atheist: If everyone who says they believe in God really did believe in God, the world would be a very different place.  To add to that theme, if everyone had to be put in the position to decide whether a life would come into the world despite the hardships or suffering it would face, far fewer people would be willing to live with that decision.

            No decision is without repercussions, indeed here is another story I came across: It was about a child born with the severe mental and physical disabilities of the genetic disorder called Trisomy 18; the father left the mother before the child was a year old, the mother abandoned the child with a woman who had been caring for her, then that woman died of an illness.  That was a child born because the mother was talked out of getting an abortion.  Where were the right-to-life people then? And--where is God in the creation of untenable fetuses--babies with horrific deformities, even babies born without a brain—where is God in such awful circumstances?

            Many if not most of the same people who would deny women the right to control their own bodies, are also fighting to deny people in need, especially those poverty, any kind of help, like social assistance or welfare, including health care.  Where is the right-to-life in that kind of thinking?

            Too much of what masquerades as concern for the unborn is simply the desire to keep people powerless, beholden to forces of religion and government, and at root a thirst for power and control over other people’s lives.

            That is why we of Unitarian Universalism have long taken the stand in support of women’s right to chose what is best for their lives and the lives they may or may not bring into being.  To do otherwise is to play God. 

            My friends, we are not only not done with these battles for women’s rights, I am convinced we are still at the very beginning, and that our daughters and granddaughters cannot be assured that these rights will be there for them, unless we make it our business to keep it in front of the powerbrokers we vote in to office.

            Choice should be about what it really is about, a personal spiritual struggle, not a religio-political struggle.

            We honor no one, if we do not honor women.  We can honor women no more than to let them be their own arbiters of what is best for their lives.  I pray that one day it will be so.  I hope we all will meditate and work that it will one day be so.

*****

September 27, 2009      

Persuasion Nation

            The wedding I did here yesterday made me think of this silly story in my files that also fits my topic today. A man says:

My wife was wrapping an odd assortment of gifts to take to a bridal shower: an antique pitcher, an electrostatic dust wand, a box of brownie mix, and a blue-flowered candle. I asked her what the strange collection was all about. "It's traditional," she replied. "Something old, something new, something bar-coded, something blue."

In case you are not familiar with the old ritual. Apparently borrowed, has been replaced by something bar-coded. But, here is the real irony that is exactly the way things change over time in our rituals and traditions.

Of all the peculiar books I have come across perhaps the most peculiar in recent years is one published in 2006, called In Persuasion Nation, by George Saunders, professor of literature at the Univ. of Syracuse, NY.  Peculiar in the interesting sense, for this book of fiction is really a series of linked, in some cases, short stories or vignettes, that go from absurdity to absurdity, in such a way that the reader simply must give in and go with the flow of it all.  Now, I confess that it has been a while since I read that strange little gem, but I do recall that I found myself reminded of Kurt Vonnegut, or at least how I similarly reacted to Vonnegut when I first read him. Like Vonnegut, the stories in Saunders books stay with me less than these isolated snippets that one remembers, like I remember driving down Valley Road one time and watching a couple of run-away cantaloupes cascading down the driveway, as if of their own volition as no one was in sight to make sense of the whole thing. Perhaps, too, because I am a grandmother, the story of the rebounding Grammy who lands in the rosebushes (one assumes thorny rosebushes) stayed with me. Grammy who can’t get her grandson to leave his microwave mac&cheese and video game long enough to call 911.  Naturally, the more bizarre and out of the ordinary, the more likely these odd episodes are stick. 

            The reason that Saunders and Vonnegut (a humanist/ and one-time member Unitarian) strike me as similar is that both find that much of what is in our modern western culture is mockable; peculiar and mockable. As you will, I hope, recall from the reading, which truly is one of the less peculiar, the normal empathy and concern of one person for another, especially a grandson for his grandmother, has been turned upside down in a culture of materialism and selfishness.  The boy does not wish to wait for his Macattack mac&cheese, or turn off the video, or remove the headphones even for the short time it would take to at least dial 911, much less go outside and give Grammy a compassionate bit of aid. Timmy has different priorities and different values; which, as the story seems to imply, come from a modern set of values we call materialistic or materialism; commercialism is how Saunders terms.  Meaning to value things more than people or relationships and perhaps even one’s own character.  Though it could be that Saunders is telling us that all the old, traditional values are simply no longer in play, no longer valued.

            I read in a review, or perhaps I just concluded it from the reading, that these stories in In Persuasion Nation are telling us that those things of a pre-materialistic age like spirituality, religion, connections, are being consumed, subsumed, by the extreme materialism and commercialism of our time.

            As once source stated:

Saunders goes way out there and expects the reader to keep up, which is possible because the imagined worlds operate according to familiar rules: the rules of satellite television, of commercials and advertising, of movies and cartoons and jingles and promo spots, of reality shows and game shows and, well, religious texts in which gods [not The God] and bushes and animals talk and wreak vengeance and show mercy.

And from another:

In Saunders' world, life is a reality television show, advertising slogans replace reasoning skills and mind-control devices are cheerfully absorbed as the way things are, and ought to be. Everything's hunky-dory, as long as the Dermafil camouflaging that drill hole at your hairline is packed in tight and you get your daily dose of Aurabon (a brand name certainly not meant to denigrate a certain addictive cinnamon shopping-mall snack).

                                                                                    [www.georgesaundersland.com/persuasion.html]

            Whether you agree that Saunders fiction is a reflection on modern day American values, or not; I can tell you that I hear this from people all the time. I hear it from people from all walks of life, and increasingly on the radio, TV, etc.  I can also say that I feel this to be true myself.  Materialism, a commercial driven culture of disinterest in the welfare of the least among us, and a general sense that somehow things can fill that void of meaning that we all are constantly trying fill.  To me and many of my colleagues, it often does feel like religion has been and is in the process of being replaced by materialism. The question is, then, is this truly possible; is it possible that we can we grow spiritually from acquiring things?  Or is all this stuff of commercialism only giving us an allusion, or more likely, a delusion of meaning?

Religion, and each person’s innate spirituality, is primarily about how we make meaning for ourselves, and in community, as well as in the creation of ritual reminders of our past and present; and from all that, and our experiences, both broad and narrow, lead us in growing in ethical knowing and behavior.  That growth in spirit then is extremely important, for from religious/spiritual ethics comes grace, love, comfort, and the value we give to relationships and things.

Of course there is nothing fundamentally wrong in things, or wanting good things; like all attitudes and behaviors the way in which we go after them is what matters, and where on the priority scale we place them.  And, what we expect as our due.

Which reminds me of this anecdote:

A famous author was autographing copies of his new novel in a department store. One gentleman pleased him by bringing up not only his new book for signature, but two of his previous ones, as well.

"My wife likes your books," he remarked, "so I thought I'd give her these signed copies for a birthday present."

"A surprise, then?" hazarded the author.

"I'll say," agreed the customer. "She's expecting a Mercedes."

            I was listening recently to Doctor Radio, a program run out of the Langone Medical Center, of the University of New York; a teaching hospital.  They have board certified doctors in all range of specialties who speak about their particular fields, but recently they also have been speaking to the national health care debate. From what I have heard thus far, these doctors are very much in favor of making sure all Americans have health coverage. One physician said that he was dismayed that we of the clergy, we religious leaders, were not speaking out on this topic more; after all, is this not about taking care of the disenfranchised, the disabled, the poor, all those who for whatever reasons are unable to afford health insurance?  He reminded me that I came of age in a very different cultural milieu, for in the 1960s there was a very sense abroad in the land, which said that we as a wealthy nation should be ashamed not to be finding ways to help those who are not privileged, not moneyed, not powerful, etc.  That we, as a nation, should care as much for the poor as we clearly care for the rich.  Grammy was not to be ignored; it would be shameful to ignore the plight of Grammy.  That it ought to be shameful to not care about people who don’t have health insurance; it ought to be shameful that every twelve minutes someone in this country dies because s/he did not have health coverage.

            This is how far we have persuaded ourselves that we should never experience any discomfort, even if a tiny bit of loss could helps so many—or so one can conclude listening to those who think we should leave everything as is. Isn’t there something wrong when we who have so much would not be willing to give up a couple hundred dollars of our benefit in order to insure this nearly fifty millions of our brothers and sisters who have none?

            We have gone up and down these hills of caring to not caring more than once in this nation’s history.  It seems, despite the fact that Americans are the most religious nation in the western world, that poll after poll tells us that upwards of 90% believe in some Supreme Being/God, but that even with such a statistic we as a people do not seem very filled with the love bespoke in all these religions/beliefs when it comes to taking care of the least of these, as Jesus called the poor and disenfranchised.

            We want what is good for us, ourselves, and are increasingly it seems, less and less concerned about what is good for all of us as a country.

            One of my current gripes, in this vein, is that a child can’t go to a birthday party without expecting to also get presents.  When my daughter plans the birthday  party for my twin granddaughters, she does this, and I complain to her—as only an aging mother can—That’s not how they did it when I was a child!  You went, you took the birthday kid a present, and you filled up on cake and ice cream.

            I think it was comedian Dave Barry who said: My kid is very conscious of presents. Last week I lost my balance and fell out the window, staggered around to the front door, and rang the bell. She opened the door and said, "Oh hi, Daddy. What did you bring me?

            But this is not about children, it is about adults; the adult citizens of this country.

            I just heard an interview this past week  of film maker Ken Burns, speaking to Bob Edwards on NPR, about his new PBS program on the National Parks system that will begin airing next month. Burns talked about why it was such a phenomenal act that these parks were set up at all, for many people were opposed to doing this for the nation, may were angry that they would have to either give up land, or subsidize this national parks program, which by the way, we still do.  And, there are still people complaining about it; yet, I venture that the vast majority of Americans are very pleased and proud of our wonderful national parks. (I found out on this program that Delaware is the only state that does not have a national park.  We’ve got to do something about that.  It looks like the First State, is to be the Last State in this noble endeavor.)

In this Burns interview, he talked about the fact that there have always been attempts, and there still are, to use and ultimately abuse these vast tracts of our American wilderness. But, what really stunned me, because it rang so true, was Burns saying that the reason for this is that: Americans are by nature acquisitive, extractive, and rapacious. So, without the protections of the national park system, those lands would have been made use of in ways that would have deprived us all of the treasures they are today.

It is true, we are acquisitive: we want to acquire things; and we are extractive; we want to see what we can get out of things; and we can be rapacious, meaning that unchecked we will go to extremes that result in abuses.  Again, we run into that problem of what is enough.  To be acquisitive and extractive are not at root bad; these are traits that have led us to many great discoveries, but such behaviors become bad, unhealthy, or dangerous when we move into the realm of rapaciousness.  Rapacious, same root as rape; that is, as one dictionary states: the act of seizing for plunder or the satisfaction of greed.

            George Saunders, like Kurt Vonnegut before him, are artists speaking to cultural trends that are not good for us in the long run, no matter how appealing they may be in their development.  We cannot be a caring nation if we are not first a caring people; we cannot be caring people, in the plural, if you are not a caring person, if I am not a caring person.

            Persuasion Nation is fiction, but it speaks, albeit fantastically, to the reality we are facing in this time, our time. 

            The very last paragraph in the book one of the characters, who feels overwhelmed in this dystopian nation of so much commercialization, is summing up a life that had once been about the self, but changed, redirected him to compassion, and saved others as well. He says of this fact of living not just for self but for others:

That is why I came back, I was wrong in life, limited, shrank everything down to my size, and yet, in the end, there was something light-craving within me, which sent me back, and saved me.

My friends we have moved far enough toward our own experience of dystopia, utopia gone wrong. We know we not only cannot have it all, despite what we hear most of our waking hours, we do not need to have it all.  That our natural acquisitiveness and extractive-ness has a healthy limit beyond which we simply become another of that growing rapacious, greed crowd who can easily sit by while others suffer. A suffering we have it in our power to mitigate.

May it be that we can understand that empathy is a part of love, and if we are to love others as we love ourselves, we must be willing to make sacrifices.  Sacrifice used to be a public act, a religious act of giving up something of value; the slaughter of a valuable animal in the olden days, which meant giving up food that could easily mean suffering in the lean times of the year.  We have no such animal to sacrifice, nor would we want to, but we have the equivalent, we have our something of own financial comfort to give up.  Surely we in this most comfortable of all nations can give up a mite, a small amount, in order that others may have some measure of health and security.  For in the end, we will gain far more than we gave up.

That is the way of love; that is the way of the charity of heart and mind that makes us good.  Blessed be that which makes us good.

September 20, 2009

Sabbath of the Sinful

I have had a few inquiries the past couple weeks about the title of this sermon.  Which only goes to support that people in general, even in our UU circles, are uncomfortable with the subject of sin.  Perhaps not because it is a subject, but because we are all subject to the subject; that is, we are all inclined to sin.  Jesus was clearly making this point when he said to the judges who had condemned a woman to be stoned for adultery: You who are without sin, cast the first stone.

          Of course we make mistakes, we do things we feel bad about, some major some minor, but we are all capable of sinning.  Sin is error. To sin is to transgress the cultural or societal or religious ethical bounds, to do that which we would not like done to us, to make those errors of omission or commission that in one way or another hurt or disadvantage another, even ourselves. 

          The early days of Christian religion looked a good deal like what they where, which was a new form of Judaism.  Since we are in the High Holy Days of Rosh Hashanah, the ten days of awe that lead to Yom Kippur, the Jewish New Year it seems a good time to talk about sin and about how ideas of sin have changed in western civilization.

          In Judaism these are the days when a faithful Jew is supposed to examine his/her conscience and look to the sins of the past year.  Atonement is the next step, when you are to make amends, then look to forgiveness; and, if you have wronged someone, you are to go to them and ask their forgiveness.

          As Rabbi Irwin Kula stated in an interview last year:

The first thing is you have to actually realize that you’ve done something wrong, which is, in some ways,  the most difficult.  The next is there needs to be some regret, some remorse. Then there needs to be some reconciliation.  If it is something that you’ve done to somebody else, you need to actually ask for forgiveness, and only then is there repentance.

          Prof. Judith Hauptman of the Jewish Theological Seminary goes on to point out that just praying to God is not enough; if at all possible, you have to ask forgiveness from the person against whom you transgressed.

          Then, assuming the faithful Jew had done all this housecleaning of the soul, on Yom Kippur his/her name will be again written in the book of life by God.  A clean slate for the new year.

          As an aside, I have always felt that Judaism had it right about this being the right time of year for the New Year. For several reasons, like the harvest is in or soon will be, and in most parts of the world, this is the time when schools take up again, and many religions, too. 

          The clearly defined time frame of a year in which to avoid sin, then be forgiven of sin in the holy days, was how Jesus and his disciples, all Jews, would have understood sin and how to respond to it.  For Jesus, the main problem with his religion was that they had, as it were, gotten in the way of creating more ways for people to sin with laws, rules, regulations, which to Jesus had nothing to do with the love and nature of God.  Jesus was a reformer, not a founder of a new religion; no, that came well after his reported death.  Rather, it was Paul, formerly Saul of Tarsus, a Jew, a citizen of Rome, who took the new forming cult of Jesus, called Christ in the Greek, and sent it down the path that would take it to Rome, to Roman values, Roman sensibilities, into what would become Christianity.  Had the sect stayed in the holy land, it would have remained sect of Judaism, and possibly died out as did dozens of others. 

          Back to sin; not that we are ever very far from it.  Sin is something we all recognize, something we all know.  We know when we transgress, when we are led into temptation, or give ourselves over to evil impulses or evil ways of being.  We usually just call it wrong vis-à-vis right.  In the child dedication ceremony we do here, I say that in this place you will learn why we call one thing right and another thing wrong. That is what parents do, and what all the healthy social bodies do like schools and religions, also do.  Most of us try to teach our children, in the Biblical phrase, in the way they should go.

           Of course, I have a story, one you may have heard before:

During the hours before D-day, three chaplains--Reverend Paul, Father Mike, and Rabbi David--sat together solemnly discussing the possibility that one or more of them might be killed in the next few hours.

"It makes one feel the necessity of unburdening one's soul and making confession," said Father Mike. "I must own up to a terrible impulse to drink. Oh, I fight it, I do; but the temptation haunts me constantly, and sometimes I give in to it."

"Well," said Reverend Paul, "I don't have too much trouble with liquor, but I must own up to the terrible sexual urges I feel toward attractive women. I fight this temptation desperately, but every once in a while, I fail to resist."

After that, there was a pause. Finally both turned to the Jewish chaplain and one said, "And you, David, are you troubled with a besetting sin, too? What is your persistent temptation?"

Rabbi David sighed and said, "I'm afraid I have a terrible, irresistible impulse to gossip."

                   This story points to sins that clearly hurt oneself and others.  But sins come in all forms, some more obvious than others.  Further, there are conditions that have the potential to move from irritation to sins, like discontent as I mentioned in a sermon a couple weeks ago. The man who was impatient while driving, who gave over to a growing discontent, that allowed him to act in a way that resulted in the death of one, serious injury to a child and to himself through reckless driving.

                   Christianity over the ages became very like the ruling bodies in Judaism (the Sadducees and Pharisees) of Jesus’ time; in that they started with a fairly simple, straightforward religion and then began to codify it, most importantly at the Council of Nicaea in the 325 CE, with the foundational beliefs. Remember that there had been several differing sects of Christianity in the Roman world by the 4^th Century CE, so the ruling authority decided to set out the rules everyone in the Roman Empire would be expected to follow.  From that point on, rules were added, changed, expanded, until by the time the Protestant Reformation in 1517, the year the German priest Martin Luther nailed the 95 Theses on the door of the church in Wittenberg, he was essentially doing the same thing that Jesus had down fifteen plus centuries earlier in Israel.  For after all this time the church had become so bogged down with rules against this, that, and the other—and, all the ways you could get out from under your sins, usually with money (by buying indulgences, papal bulls, etc), that one can only marvel at the irony.  But, at the root of the all these rules lies changing definitions of sin.  Sin was no longer the more simply defined transgression against self and others, but rule-breaking.  Not going to church was a sin, having thoughts of sex was a sin—sex in particular, and more than any other culture was criminalized in the church and made sinful; what and how and when you ate-dressed-thought; further, church obligations of all kinds developed, some borrowed out of the Hebrew scriptures, like tithing, but mostly added or enlarged in this growingly powerful religion. Like fasting at Lent.

                   Sinning then was increasingly about law, as Dr. James Walters (who spent his young adult years as a Catholic priest) said in a sermon at our congregation in Mt. Airy:

Small wonder then that even St. Paul elsewhere in his letter to the Romans (7:7-13) observes that “before the law, there was no sin.” Small wonder, too, that while present-day Unitarian Universalists continue to debate about what they call sin and evil, many would agree that, to the extent UUs believe in such things at all, our ideas are far from the conventional understandings of these terms. With good reason we stand in a long line of liberal, rational thinkers who reject the notion that dismissing -- or if you prefer, violating – prescribed moral codes is a sin.

          Clearly most Unitarian Universalists feel that sin is primarily related to issues of right and wrong as both commonsense and the culture determine.  Unlike our Puritan forebears, and many contemporary Protestant religions, we don’t think you have to be in church all day on Sunday to be a good person. Though we UU ministers think it can certainly improve your odds of being a better person.  There are UUs on the golf course at this moment. Which reminds me about a man who asked:

"Minister, is it a sin to play golf on Sunday?"

"Son, I know you play golf, I've watched you play golf, and frankly it's a sin for you to play any day of the week."

          Those Puritan ancestors took sin so seriously that the Sabbath day, Sunday was more than anything a Sabbath of the Sinful. A daylong summarizing of the way the people in the pews were filled with sin, were sinners, indeed they were sinners in the hands of an angry God, as the fiery preacher Jonathan Edwards said it so famously. Those preachers railed at the people with the punishments they could expect from this increasingly angry God.  The modern day religious fundamentalists have moved gradually to a more loving God, and despite their hammering away at sin, like it is a sin not to be their kind of Christian, they would have no standing with their Puritan forerunners. God for them was angry and getting meaner by the minute because of all the sinning he saw. 

          In all cases, religion has used our propensity to sinning as a way to either guide or manipulate us.  The more liberal or progressive the religion, as with UUs, the more we understand that sin harms us and humanity in general, that we cannot be happy if we are harming others, that sin is something we can learn to exercise control over.  This is why we teach our children to stop, count to ten; we say: think about it before you do something you will regret.

          Religions on the fundamental and/or controlling side of the sin issue, use sin to manipulate the people’s fears, by saying that unless you do as the leaders tell you, you will be sinning and in danger of your immortal soul suffering for all eternity in hell.

          The problem with sin is that it is often relative. For example, almost all people believe that telling lies is a bad, or sinful, thing to do; yet repeatedly research shows that even very good people lie several times a day.  Perhaps we don’t want to talk to whoever has called us on the phone, so we say that someone is coming to the door, or we have to leave for an appointment.  We say such things in order to both get away from the caller and to avoid hurting his/her feelings.  Where lies the sin in this. Would it be better to let the person ramble on for thirty minutes, or tell them plainly: Jody you always talk too long and I simply have better things to do than listen to you?

          Which has led to our modern color-coding of lies. We say it’s a white lie to say a falsehood in order to be kind.  Black lies are for advantage, or to hurt someone, and so forth. Various colors of untruth lie between white and black.

          A principle understanding of sin in religion is that a sin is anything that separates you from the love of God, or as one source states, sin is: missing the mark, a failure to meet the divine standard; trespass; the intrusion of self-will into the sphere of divine authority.

          In the mid-1800s, Rev. Samuel May, president in 1867 of the American Unitarian Association wrote (remember this is still Unitarian Christianity):

We Unitarians believe that the consequences of transgressions are evil, only evil, and that continually, both in this world and in the world to come. Sin is the poison of life, and it is "the sting of death." 

May goes on to talk about it as this separation from the divine, then states:

We believe that our all-wise, all-merciful Father in heaven can feel no more displeasure, no more anger at our sins, than the wisest and kindest parent ought to feel. He cannot be stimulated to vengeance, as the Orthodox would have us suppose, by any pride of place, or jealousy of his power. He will inflict no more suffering, no more punishment, upon any, than it is right we should endure, until we repent, and return to him in entire obedience of life and thought.

          James Freeman Clarke, one of the great Unitarian ministers who with others of the primarily Unitarian Transcendentalist vein, believed that sin was a disruption in the fabric of a peaceful spirit and of peaceable relations with others. Emerson and the other Transcendentalist carried this further to say that God cannot be both loving and cruel, that the orthodox notions about original sin made no sense, that most people were not depraved as the Church, and Calvinist American Puritanism, would have it, but rather people were capable of growing out of sinful tendencies which were clearly most likely an evolutionary bias as Mr. Darwin had been helping later enlightenment figures like Emerson to see. We are ego-centered out of a survival prehistory mindset, but able to grow out of the selfishness towards a more loving and peaceful, indeed happier future.  The Transcendentalists believed that God gave us the scope in which to do this growing in the soul.

          This, then, has been the vein of Unitarian Universalist thought over the last hundred or so years.  That we all can succumb to the temptations of the selfish gene, the predisposition to self-interest (which has nothing to do with the original sin of Adam and Eve).   We all are troubled with our own egotism.

          Today, in our UU congregations, we have no sabbaths of the sinful in which you can expect to be excoriated for your patent sinning, but we do have a sabbath of the sinful in the recognition that we have all fallen short of the best expectations of our parents, ourselves, our community, and so on.  Despite that, we know we have the possibility, not just once a year, but at any moment to recognize the redeeming possibilities in each new day. That at any moment we can decide to refrain from harmful practices that hurt us and others, or get help to change a self-destructive path.

          Each day offers numerous opportunities for atonement with God or that which you understand is greater than yourself, and certainly opportunities for atonement with our better selves.

          This day, this Sabbath, may we understand that love is the ultimate guiding force for a better, more wholesome, and happier life for each of us.  May we each find in our minds-hearts-souls the sins we would root out, and in so doing model for ourselves, our friends, our children, indeed all who come within our sphere of influence, a model for a truly better future for humankind.