After Ecstasy, the Laundry
A Sermon Preached October 1, 2007
at the First Religious Society Church in Carlisle, MA,
by the Rev. Dr. William F. Schulz.
When I ended my term as UUA President in 1993, I vowed that I would never preach in the pulpit of any minister who had not been kind to me when I was President. That automatically eliminated about 50% of our congregations. The president of the UUA is not always treated with the greatest of respect. When I was President, I once arrived at a small church in western Massachusetts a few minutes before I was to speak at the Sunday service. The church sexton greeted me with a warm welcome. “Dr Schulz,” he said, “I’m about to ring the morning bell and I want to explain to you my philosophy of bell-ringing. I ring the church bell once, you see, when our own minister is preaching. I ring it twice when we have a guest minister. And I ring it three times when the President of the UUA is in the pulpit or when some other natural disaster befalls the community.” So I refuse to preach in some pulpits but not Carlisle because Victor has been a dear friend for many years and I am honored to be helping you celebrate your 250 years as a congregation.
Now as you can imagine, it was an enormous privilege to serve for twelve years as head of Amnesty International USA and enormously rewarding to see the advances in human rights that took place over those years. Shortly before I left Amnesty, I participated in a conversation with a bunch of professors at Syracuse University and someone asked whether over the course of the last 200 years human rights had gotten better or worse. With one exception, the professors all offered abstruse reasons why the human rights situation was worse today than in 1806. I listened to all this moaning and finally I said in my customarily tactful way, “Are you folks nuts?”— And then I said, “Why, just in the twelve years I’ve been with Amnesty we’ve seen the creation of the International Criminal Court; war crimes tribunals for Rwanda, Bosnia and Sierra Leone; the Truth and Reconciliation process in South Africa following apartheid; the ruling by the British Law Lords in 1999 that tyrants like Augusto Pinochet could indeed be held responsible for their crimes in any country on earth that chooses to prosecute them; successful civil suits against torturers who have taken up residence in the United States; the rapid spread of democracy around the globe; a majority of countries in the world having abolished the death penalty in law or practice; and the US Supreme Court having ruled the execution of juveniles and the mentally retarded as unconstitutional. And you don’t think we’re better off than when the slaveholder Thomas Jefferson could get elected President?” But these were professors so it didn’t shut them up for an instant.
And yet, despite these all those successes, there is much more to do and in no small measure what there is to do is of a religious nature. Because the struggle for human rights and, more broadly, for social justice is in very profound ways a religious struggle and a spiritual calling. Over and over again I found my work at Amnesty International profoundly informed by my Unitarian Universalist faith.
As practitioners of a religious enterprise, after all, all of us are called upon to grapple with such profound questions as "Why is there something rather than nothing?," "What is the meaning of life?," "Is there a God?," and "Why do bad things happen to good people?" These are very challenging questions; they are questions I have been seeking answers to for more than forty years and, if only Marni had given me a few more minutes this morning, I would supply you the answers. But the truth is that even the answer to the age-old question, “Is it more religious to sit in a pub and think of the church or to sit in a church and think of the pub?”—even that is not self-evident.
In a way, then, going from my years with the UUA to Amnesty International where the kind of questions we dealt with were at least a bit more concrete, questions like, "How can we get the Chinese to stop torturing fifteen-year old Tibetan nuns?"-- going from the contemplation of religious questions to questions of human rights is a little like traversing the reference points referred to in the famous Zen saying, "After ecstasy, the laundry." And yet the laundry doesn’t get done if those who are supposed to do the washing lack the inspiration. That of course is where religion comes in.
We are witness today to an enormous struggle in this world today between those who would close down culture and those who would keep it open. Between those who would resort quickly to violence and those who would resist it as long as possible. Between those who believe that the future is set by forces beyond human control and those who would take responsibility for the planet’s future. Between those who welcome the preeminence of one nation and those who give their fealty to the common interests of the globe. It is, in short, a struggle between those with a parched vision and those with a generous heart. And Unitarian Universalism, for better or worse has always cast it lot on the side of the generous heart.
And at the center of that generous heart is the conviction that truth takes many forms, that love takes many guises and that there is no necessary correlation between wisdom and power. Osama bin Laden doesn’t believe that. Dick Cheney doesn’t believe that. Pope Benedict doesn’t believe that. Bill O’Reilly doesn’t believe that. Judge Judy doesn’t believe that. But it is true.
Sometimes, I admit, I wish it weren’t. Sometimes I wish the secret of life was a lot simpler than it is The Chinese philosopher Hung Tzu-ch-eng said, “Only those who can appreciate the least palatable of root vegetables can possibly know the meaning of life.” I wish it were that easy. “What is man,” asked the Danish novelist Isak Dinnessen, “but an elaborate machine for turning red wine into urine?’ I wish that was all there was to it. But I’m afraid my sympathies lie with the rabbi who upon his deathbed was asked by the head elder to reveal the meaning of life before he passed beyond it. “Life,” said the rabbi, “is like a river,” and those wise words were passed on down the row of elders—the rabbi says, “Life is like a river”—until they reached the lowest of the low, the poor, stupid schlemiel. But the schlemiel was puzzled. ‘What does the rabbi mean, ‘Life is like a river?’” he asked. And the schlemiel’s question was passed on back up the row of elders until it reached the head elder who put it to the rabbi, “I’m sorry, good sir,” he said, “but the schlemiel, poor, stupid fellow, has asked what you mean ‘Life is like a river.’” But the rabbi just shrugged: “So,” he said, “Life is not like a river.” Truth takes many forms; love takes many guises and there is no necessary correlation between wisdom and power.
And then there is a second feature of that generous heart and that is the recognition that what human beings share is far broader and more important than what divides us.. Though truth takes a myriad of forms, there is one truth that remains beyond dispute and that is that all blood flows red, that more profound than all our differences is our common suffering and that what will save us and save our planet is a recognition of the frailty we share.
In the midst of the 1994 Rwandan genocide a girl's school was attacked by machete-wielding militiamen in the middle of the night. The teenagers were rousted from their beds about 2:00 AM and forced to line up in the dining hall. They were ordered to separate themselves, Hutu from Tutsi, so that only the Tutsi would die. But the girls refused. A second time the commander ordered them to divide up by ethnic group. But still they refused. And finally one of the girls found her voice and, though very frightened, this is what it was reported later that she said: "We cannot separate ourselves, you see, because we are not Hutu; we are not Tutsi; we are Rwandan" at which point every one of them was slaughtered.
But what a legacy they leave! "We are not Hutu; we are not Tutsi. We are Rwandan." That sentiment is the most fundamental religious sentiment of them all and the echoes of that young girl's voice bespeak a graciousness for which the world is desperate. In her magnificent essay "The Moral Necessity of Metaphor," the novelist Cynthia Ozick quotes this passage from Leviticus, chapter 19: "The stranger that sojourneth with you shall be unto you as the home-born among you and you shall love him as yourself for you too were strangers in the land of Egypt" and then she goes on to say that it is exactly because we too were once strangers in the land of Egypt that we can identify with another, that "doctors can imagine what it is to be patients. Those who have no pain can imagine what it is to suffer. Those at the center can imagine what it is to be outside. The strong can imagine what it is to be weak…And we strangers can imagine the familiar hearts of [other] strangers."
I have never been tortured nor had my arm amputated but I know of plenty of people who have and I am compelled by my religious faith to make a metaphorical leap from my own trivial sufferings into those of the hearts of strangers. Familiar hearts. Of every stranger The second feature of Unitarian Universalism’s generous heart is its conviction that what we share is far more important than what divides us and that all blood flows red-even the blood of my adversaries. And that, my friends, is truly an earth-shattering recognition—that my enemies too can bleed.
I guess I was just naïve but I never thought I’d see the day when hundreds of people would be hunted down in this country, rounded up, imprisoned, shackled, denied access to their families, because of the color of their skins, the ethnicity of their names, the practice of their religion. I thought that day was past in this country but that is exactly what happened to hundreds of foreign nationals in this country since 9/11. I never thought I would see the day when the United States government would imprison two of its own citizens and then try to deny them the most fundamental rights any US citizen has a right to claim, rights that every one of us was taught we had in our elementary school civics classes—the right to a lawyer; the right to know what you are charged with; the right to confront your accuser. I thought that day was past but that is exactly what is happened to Jose Padilla and Yaser Hamdi. I never thought I would see the day when the United States would thumb its nose at the Geneva Conventions as we have done at Guantanamo Bay or deny the right of habeas corpus to prisoners. I never thought I’d see the day when the Transportation Security Administration would construct a “no-fly” list to prevent certain US residents from getting on airplanes but not tell us how to get our names off such a list. So far the “no fly” list has snagged a 78-year old nun from Wisconsin and Sen. Edward Kennedy of MA who is a “terrorist” only for the purposes of his political opponents’ fundraising. And I certainly never thought I would see the day when US interrogators would unapologetically torture suspects, as we are did systematically in Iraq and Afghanistan and Guantanamo Bay and may still be doing today with the full approval of the highest authorities of our government. Taken together, these actions constitute the gravest threat to human rights since the creation of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights in 1948 because they threaten to undermine the entire structure upon which international human rights have been built—the notions that we are trying to build a civilized world together in which all people are respected and all nations abide by the rule of law. You need not love your adversaries and you certainly ought not allow them to hurt you but, if you strip them of their dignity, you plunge the world even further into barbarism and invite upon yourself even more horrific retaliation.
And then there is a final feature of Unitarian Universalism’s generous heart and that is the conviction that history is not finished; that the future is not fated; and that every one of us has a responsibility to build a more benevolent nation, a more hospitable people, a more welcoming world.
Somewhere in one of the great art museums in Europe hangs a large painting of Faust and the Devil sitting at a chess table. Faust has made his pact with the Devil and now his face is contorted in anguish because he retains on the chessboard but a knight and a King and the King is in check.
One day a great chess master happened into the museum and naturally this painting eye caught his eye and he sat down in front of it and stared. Fifteen minutes passed. Then twenty. And still the master stared. And then suddenly, leaping to his feet: “It’s a lie!” he shouted at the top of his lungs for all to hear. “It’s a lie, I tell you. The King and the knight—they have another move. They have another move.”
And that, my friends, is the final message of UUism’s generous heart—that, no matter what orthodoxy may claim or ideology may bluster, history is not finished, the future is not fated, what comes next is in our hands, so that in the face of hardship and injustice, of suffering and of death, we say, “The story is not over. The end is not here yet. For it is not just the King but the knight, not just the Queen but the rook, not just the Bishop but pawn, not just the wealthy but the pauper, not just the powerful but every starving, lonely, frightened person in the world, every single person, every single one of us, who has another move. We all have another move.
These three gifts of a generous heart, then, signal how critical a Unitarian Universalist faith is to the trepidations of the day—a conviction that truth takes many forms; a recognition that what human beings share in common is far greater than what divides us; and a certainty that the future is not in the hands of an inexorable fate or an angry God but is waiting to be shaped by either our foolishness or our benevolence. It is a demanding faith that we claim, this Unitarian Universalism, but one that has never been more important to sustain.
If I learned anything from my days at Amnesty, it is this—that no authentic person can live in this world unmoved by how immense is the tragedy that is Creation. No pretty words can cover it up; no simple faith can fix it; no complex theology can explain it away. It just is. Truly religious people know that, fear it, sometimes flee it but more often do their best to face it. For they know—we Unitarian Universalists know--that our job is not to deny evil or heartache or death but to keep companion with them at the same time that we keep companion with blessings and possibility and grace, losing our faith every single night and gaining it again with the coming of the day. That’s what happened to me at Amnesty for twelve years—I lost my faith every single night and gained it again with the coming of the day.
That’s just the way it is with us human beings—flawed and fragile as we be. I was often tempted to wish it otherwise—to never hear another story of torture, to never learn of another senseless killing, to never see tears again. But whenever I wished for such a state, I reminded myself of just one thing--that in the ancient world a poetry contest was held each year and the third place winner was presented a rose made out of silver; the second place winner a rose made out of gold; but the first place winner received a real rose, a living rose that, while it was far from perfect and did not live forever, spoke while it did of art and beauty and passion and power. And who among us, my friends, if we had to choose, would not always choose the living rose?