A PROLOGEMIA TO A UNITARIAN UNIVERSALIST THEORY OF SOCIAL JUSTICE

11 January 2004
James Ishmael Ford

The Text
And Mary said,
My soul magnifies the Most High,
And my spirit rejoices in God my savior,
Who has looked with favor on the lowliness of God’s servant.
Surely, from now on all generations will call me blessed;
For the Mighty One has done great things for me,
And holy is God’s name.
God’s mercy is for those who fear him
From generation to generation.
God has shown strength with God’s arm;
And has scattered the proud in the thoughts of their hearts.
God has brought down the powerful from their thrones,
And lifted up the lowly;
God has filled the hungry with good things,
And sent the rich away empty.
God has helped his servant Israel,
In remembrance of God’s mercy,
According to the promise God made to our ancestors,
To Abraham and Sarah and to their descendents forever.
Luke 1:46-55

The other day I learned that Karen Lebaq, an eminent ethicist is retiring from her teaching position at the Pacific School of Religion. I recall how, now some fifteen years past, when I was taking a class with her, that Professor Lebaq opined in passing how men cannot be feminists. I objected, citing my bone fides as a fervent supporter of feminist principles. A small woman with an amazing ability to just attend to whoever she’s in conversation with, even in a large lecture hall, she carefully listened to me. After listening and a long pause, the professor replied she meant that in order to become a feminist one must be willing to become a sister.

This sermon is about that. How can men become sisters? How do we square the circles of our lives? How can each of us identify deeply, profoundly, truly with one another? I suggest this means moving beyond sympathy, and even beyond empathy. And it is critical. In this time of sorrow and danger, if we are to have any hope of healing, for ourselves, or the world, we must learn the secret truth about each other.

But here I bring good news. We can. And this is the whole purpose of today’s sermon. Now, I know as a preacher I have an inclination to long and dense. And what we’re exploring today is something I’ve been thinking about for years. So, we’re all in some danger here. But, I hope we can try to meet halfway. I’ll try not to be too obscure, or throw out too many points. I’ll save as much as possible for future ruminations. And at the end I hope you’ll forgive my falling short on that goal.

David Loy observes in his wonderful book, The Great Awakening: A Buddhist Social Theory how “the last few centuries have been a steep downhill slide for human hubris.” Everything is challenged. And few institutions have taken as significant a hit as religion. A critical examination has revealed much of religious sentiment is a “sacred canopy,” a safe shelter humans have constructed from the harsh realities we must otherwise face, including pervasive violence and our own mortality.

But now the canopy has been shredded. We find how we human beings are no longer at the center of the cosmos. We’ve been forced to notice how even our grandest ideas of ultimacy, our many names for God are way too often simply projections of our very human fears, and hopes, and longings. Within our post-modern situation instead of eternal verities, we discover how we are historically conditioned.

A plus of this is we can unravel some of this and see how we have been shaped. So David Herndon, a Unitarian Universalist minister whom I particularly admire, in his sermon “Skepticism and Social Justice,” has briefly outlined what we UU’s have inherited from the western traditions, just what it is we consider important, what we assume to be true.

Now while we are inheritors of perspectives from the whole of the Jewish and Christian tradition, as UUs we are particularly heirs to the Enlightenment, from which we derive three principles in particular. I suggest they pervade most all our thinking as contemporary UUs. One is subjectivity; that is we honor our individual insight more than that of institutions. Another is how reason is the central way we come to know things. Indeed, for many of us reason is the whole deal. And third is how everything may be questioned.

Indeed, in some very deep ways our contemporary western liberal religious tradition is fed by a profound sense of skepticism, a thread of western thought that traces back at least to Protagoras in the fifth century before the common era. But skepticism has now come to its own through the Enlightenment and into our own contemporary culture, and particularly, I suggest, our liberal religious tradition.

And this is where it gets rough. Here we discover everything is relative. Our understanding of anything in particular is determined by where it is we stand. Even our political positions are unveiled as conditioned. As Tom Wolfe somewhat dryly observed, “If a conservative is a liberal who’s been mugged, a liberal is a conservative who’s been arrested.” We find even our highest ideals were shaped by something. The canopy is shredded.

And yet, as we proceed beyond the canopy, we discover there is something else that religion offers. As Loy suggests, “Even if reassurance has been its main social function, religion has served and continues to serve another role, now becoming more obvious and more important. Religions are vehicles for self-transformation. Not only (can) they reassure us, (religions may) provide us with principles and precepts and practices that can change us or show us how to change ourselves.”

Here we come to our Unitarian Universalist Principles and Purposes. I hope at this point I don’t need to spend much time assuring folk the P&Ps are not a creed, no one must sign a document saying they believe in them in some sense or another to belong here or in any other UU congregation. Rather, they’re just a very good summary of what is thought among us in general at this time. Now with that caveat in hand, I want to hold up the first and the seventh principles, not as articles of faith, but as expressions of intuitions, of what we might actually encounter as we step beyond the canopy.

The first principle is that famous assertion all individuals have worth and dignity. It is an unqualified statement, including Hitler and Pol Pot, along with you and me. I suggest, however, its real value is understood only within the light of the seventh principle, the declaration of how we are all part of an interdependent web. This is amazing stuff. Harsh and beautiful. It is the secret truth about each of us. But it is also devastating, it shakes foundations, and reorients our very understanding of reality.

Mark Bellettini was another of my professors at seminary. A parish minister serving a UU congregation in Hayward at the time, he taught part-time at Starr King School for the Ministry. I recall how during a lull in a lecture on Jesus and the nature of jubilee, for some reason someone asked him about Buddhism. Professor Bellettini, a large man with hands that constantly move as he speaks, opined how he wasn’t sure, but he understood the core principle of Buddhism to be, and he stretched his arms wide, his fingers splayed. “So grow up already.” I think he was right. And that’s exactly where I see the connection to our contemporary western liberal religious perspective.

And here we also encounter the parallel evolution. In the Flower Ornament Sutra, a core Buddhist text, one of the most important associated with the Zen schools there is a strikingly similar metaphor, called the Jeweled Net of Indra, which like the image of the web of which we are a part, also attempts to point to how we are all profoundly interdependent. Another image in that same text is the golden lion. The world, it suggests, is like a golden lion, where the strands of hair, intestines, brain, stomach, claws, etc, etc, are all different. And all are gold. Once again the secret revealed, we are unique and at the same time woven out of each other.

Here we come to the hard part. We cannot rest under the canopy. We cannot simply tell ourselves stories, not even truer stories such as the interdependent web or the golden lion. We need to know for ourselves. So David Herndon, in the finest UU tradition calls us to “Spiritual growth… not primarily (as) an intellectual pursuit of determining which beliefs are true, or which beliefs can best withstand questioning; rather, spiritual growth is primarily a matter of acknowledging where one has fallen short of the mark, or coming to understand how one’s behaviors and choices and beliefs may needlessly diminish or limit one’s own life or the lives of others.”

Here we find how we must not allow anything, not even reason to rule the roost. Here’s another truth revealed in the harsh light once the canopy is gone. Even reason is a construct. Reason is a useful construct, and for survival’s sake, an essential construct. But, to make our way to the promised land, to authentic freedom, to our true heritage as human beings, we must accept that reason, like Moses, might take us to the hill at the river’s edge, but reason cannot cross the river. No construct can.

We must step out for ourselves. Each of us must walk the path. Each of us must find for ourselves whether the taste of water is cool or warm. I must find how I am a sister. Another must find how he is gay. Another how she is black. And another how he is a mountain. We must each of us discover the other within ourselves. At this moment we discover what social justice might really be. It is here we are given a compass to make our way through the rest of our lives.

What I find so amazing is that as we walk this path, as we make our way across the river all is restored. Our reason returns. We see how we are different, you and I. But, in our hearts we know the secret. We know somewhere as our very souls we are one.

At least that’s how I see it. However, we are a tradition of free pulpit and free pew. I am given trust of this pulpit, and so long as I serve among this congregation I’m charged with speaking as fearlessly and honestly as I can. And free pew means you reserve your own judgment. Today, let’s honor that free pew in deed as well as in spirit. Let’s hear what you think about the great matter of who we are, you and I, and how we might best act in the world.

(Congregational reflections)

So, just briefly, let’s return to my opening remarks today. Professor Lebaq suggested for men to become feminists we/they need to become sisters. What I suggest lies at the heart of this reflection, the true core of the parallel call of liberal Buddhism and Unitarian Universalism, is that we are all sisters, and , of course, brothers. We are both as individual as individual can be, and we are one hundred percent completely woven out of each other. And as we come to understand this, not as a good idea, but as our essential truth; then the way of liberation truly opens up for us. And that, my friends, is a good thing.

Let me close with a verse from Li Po, perhaps the greatest of ancient China’s poets.

Life passes like a flash of lightning
Whose blaze lasts barely long enough to see,
While earth and sky stand still forever.
How swiftly changing time flies across our face.
You who sit over your full cup and do not drink,
For what are you waiting?

Amen.

(For further reading I suggest David Loy’s Great Awakening: A Buddhist Social Theory and Ken Jones’ The New Social Face of Buddhism: A Call to Action. Both are available from Wisdom Publications: http://www.wisdompubs.org.)