AMERICAN DREAMS Abraham Lincoln as a Spiritual Guide
James Ishmael Ford
18 February 2007

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In 1908, in a wild and remote area of the North Caucasus, Leo Tolstoy, the greatest writer of the age, was a guest of a tribal chief ‘living far away from civilized life in the mountains.’ Gathering his family and neighbors, the chief asked Tolstoy to tell stories about the famous men of history. Tolstoy told how he entertained the eager crowd for hours with tales of Alexander, Caesar, Frederick the Great, and Napoleon. When he was winding to a close, the chief stood and said, ‘But you have not told us a syllable about the greatest general and greatest ruler of the world. We want to know something about him. He was a hero. He spoke with a voice of thunder; he laughed like the sunrise and his deeds were strong as the rock… His name was Lincoln and the country in which he lived is called America, which is so far away that if a youth should journey to reach it he would be an old man when he arrived. Tell us of that man.’
Doris Kearns Goodwin, Team of Rivals

I understand when the leadership of our congregation here decided our theological center had shifted to such a degree that the large brass cross which had forever sat on what we prefer to call the “chancel table” no longer seemed right, they experimented with a number of possible replacements. One such possibility, I’ve been told, was an image of Abraham Lincoln. I really understand how that could be.

Jan and I’ve been to the nation’s capital twice. One of the few things we did both times was visit the Lincoln memorial. If we go again, one of the few things we will surely do again, is visit that shrine. And it is more than any other monument in our capital a shrine, the Memorial is patterned on the Parthenon and like the Parthenon it stands as an enduring symbol of the dream of democracy and freedom. However instead of the goddess Athena, at the heart of this monument sits Daniel Chester French’s statue of a worn, exhausted, Lincoln gazing out at the Republic which he preserved, washed if not thoroughly enough, of its founding sin.

While many of the monuments in the capital are impressive, I think particularly of the eloquent sadness of the Vietnam memorial, the only other monument in the capital that even approaches the significance of the Lincoln Memorial, to my mind, to my heart, is that of General Ulysses Grant, sitting atop a great war horse, not with a sword outstretched leading a charge, but also exhausted, slump shouldered as if worn down in a torrential rain, or carrying a horrendous burden, interestingly facing away from the halls of Congress, ready to defend the Republic.

For me too many of Washington’s monuments have that sense of Roman triumphalism about them, an aura I find somewhat distasteful. While massive, no doubt, the worn figure of Lincoln within that great monument at the end of the long reflecting pool sings another song, frozen in white Georgia marble. On the walls flanking the statue are the complete texts of his Gettysburg Address and his Second Inaugural. For me they rank with the Declaration of Independence as the documents that justify America. Inspired by the one, Lincoln wrote the other two. He is that important to what it is that our nation might be. He, more than any other, has become the conscience of our country’s hope, the only reason it really deserves the term “great.”

I vividly recall the last time I stood before that statue, a cold and blustery day, the wind whipping right through me. Nonetheless I stood back into the open so I could drink in the whole image. Just in case I couldn’t ever return again. I’m not massively sentimental, but I felt my eyes welling wet. Today, the Sunday of the President’s Day long weekend, I’d like to reflect on why. Why Lincoln could end up on our chancel table, why visiting his memorial feels like standing on holy ground, at least to me. I find myself wondering what he was and stood for that carries over the ages and across the globe an aura of sanctity.

Unitarian Universalist ethicist and theologian, Ronald Engel frequently used the term “Democratic Faith” to suggest our religious principles and those that informed the founding of the Republic draw from the same sources. UU minister Joshua Snyder underscores how this vision which he thinks can be summarized by the slogan of the French Revolution’s call to liberty, equality and fraternity, and which I find summarized nicely as freedom, tolerance and reason, speak to a “larger tradition, of which we Unitarian Universalists are but one institutional incarnation.” I’m acutely aware my deep resonances with those UU principals speaking to an inherent worth ascribable to every individual and our intimation of interdependence as an insight held by many more than simply UUs. That dual insight of the worth of the individual and our profound interconnection are the essence of a Democratic Faith.

Joshua suggests “Lincoln stands in this larger tradition even if he does not stand in our own institution. Thus,” Joshua suggests. “(H)is views are of interest to us.” I would add, at least they should be of interest to us. I know I read these words in Joshua’s sermon on Lincoln, and I felt a deep recognition. I thought of that cold, cold day staring at Lincoln’s statue, and these deep emotions that bubbled up from I know not where. I know how I felt a deep sense of gratitude that there are guides for us all around, not only our own exemplars, the Thoreau’s, the Fuller’s, the Emerson’s, the Peabody’s the Parker’s, as precious as they all are; there are so many more who’ve drunk deep from the well of freedom, reason and tolerance, and ready to share that wisdom waiting only our willingness to notice and listen.

One of the things that most impresses me about Lincoln is his raw humanity, how he carried great hurt. For the last few years I’ve maintained an on-and-off correspondence with Tom Armstrong, a blogger and webpublisher who lives in California. Tom is a very interesting thinker and I really enjoy our connection. For instance he heard former President Bill Clinton on C-Span once and transcribed some of Clinton’s remarks regarding Lincoln that speak to his wounded humanity. Bill Clinton it appears said “It’s really interesting. Lincoln had, you know, serious depression problems. And when he lost a son in Illinois; then he lost a son in the White House; then his wife lost three of her half brothers fighting for the Confederacy. Then, she, suffered all of her trauma. And then he had all the blood of the Union streaming from his decisions.” I read this, particularly “all the blood of the Union streaming from his decisions,” and I felt that same feeling as when staring at his statue in Washington. A trembling. I don’t like it when I can’t quickly put words to feelings. But sometimes, that’s the way it is. And here it was.

Of course it’s important to reflect on our deeper feelings. Lincoln not only was informed by great personal suffering, his actions, which continue to seem to me to have been right, nonetheless led to a flood of blood across this country. What about that? And also, he was a moderate, not a radical. Early on he believed the Constitution would not allow the abolition of slavery where it already existed, and his first election platform only called for slavery to be blocked in new territories. I have friends who think he really was just a political hack that got lucky, at least so far as history is concerned. What about that?

I think the “what about that” is how there was a nimbleness in Lincoln that allowed him to address the changing conditions as they arose. I consider this a prime lesson. I look inside myself and I try to find that nimbleness. And you know, I suspect I find it in myself only as I hold my own opinions lightly. Not without passion, but lightly. So, for instance, while I’m deeply committed to the pursuit of marriage equality, I try to recall how those who are opposed to it are not evil, mostly they don’t hate gay and lesbian people. Given different circumstances, I could be any one of them. They and I and we are all woven of the same stuff, only our history is slightly different. There is, I do not doubt, a deep rightness in pursuing the call to justice and to assuring marriage equality in our Commonwealth and beyond. But it can’t be won through making those who oppose it evil. Such things are about changing hearts, finding a deeper perspective.

We all share the sins of oppression. My hands are not cleaner. In this case I’m just more fortunate in being in the right place at the right time to be able to get just enough perspective to see how the patterns of the past were oppressive of one aspect of human dignity. It’s hard to rise above one’s conditioning, the stories we’ve been told since childhood. Without good fortune and good friends at the right moment, it’s extremely difficult to gain that broader perspective. That acknowledged there is a way. I try hard to commit to being open, to being ready to be surprised, shocked and edified. This is a spiritual discipline I find in Lincoln’s personality, and try to find in my own.

My old friend Tom Schade, a minister in our congregation in Worcester tells how he has “come to be drawn by the picture of Lincoln as someone whose positions kept evolving as time and the river flowed toward him. Adherence to principles matters a lot,” Tom acknowledges. “I think it more important to be able to see what is the right thing for this moment in time.” Tom summed his point up by quoting one of his mentors who observed “Sometimes, you have to put aside your principles and just do the right thing.” I read this and immediately I returned to standing in the cold and staring at that statue. This is an audacious assertion. This is a dangerous assertion. And it is the only hope we have of moving beyond the status quo, beyond what was always right to a new vision of justice and care and engagement.

Here we come back to that call to openness, to not following one dogma or another as completely and unassailably true. As an example Forrest Church a UU minister in Manhattan, observed “Abraham Lincoln was not a believer in humankind’s intrinsic goodness. Though non-doctrinal in theology, he stood squarely in the Puritan tradition of self-judgment, believing that we are united not by righteousness but by sin.” I think about that, and it causes me to pause. I think our vaunted UU confidence in humanity’s goodness needs to be tempered. For most of us, certainly for me, I think we need a little more self-judgment.

There is just too much evil in the world to pretend something like sin doesn’t exist. Sin is a difficult term for us, I understand. But if sin can be seen as turning away from the good, the openhearted, the insight of the value of the individual and how all individuals are related; oh my, I see that in myself, all the time, and truthfully, in my friends, as well. And I see the consequences of that turning away from my nobler angels being deeply hurtful. Lincoln’s approach was not to vilify his opponents as the only sinners, but to acknowledge his own complicity, our communal complicity in the evils of the world. Nor did he stop there. Instead he offered a next step, toward that nobler possibility which is also our inherent potential, which is always in our hands.

Lincoln’s Second Inaugural address delivered bare months before his assassination is a summary of what I think we can hope for in our lives, both our interior investigations, and in our manifestation of that interiority. It spoke to how we might engage our lives. It spoke to the deep currents that make the American experiment something worth defending, as well as how that should be done. He spoke to how we might approach the great questions facing our nation and world today, shadowed by terrors and visions of terrors yet to come. Here we are in an era of war and prejudice, of extremes of wealth and poverty, of love and abiding hatred; and all the time while threatened with being swept away, we must stand and engage. We have no choice in that matter. Our choice is only how we will engage, passive or active, standing against the current, or using the current. Lincoln, shadowed by his own death, a prophet of Democratic Faith, tells us how we might do it.

“With malice toward none, with charity for all, with firmness in the right as God gives us to see the right, let us strive on to finish the work we are in, to bind up the nation’s wounds, to care for him who shall have borne the battle and for his widow and his orphan – to do all which may achieve and cherish a just and lasting peace among ourselves and with all nations.”

I read those words, again and again. The bitter cold of that time in Washington cuts through me again. And, of course, I tremble. These words speak to a world in turmoil, a broken and bleeding world. They speak to the possibility of something deeper that may guide us through the horrors of it all. It is the wisdom of a Democratic Faith, it is more than we think, and it certainly can be enough.

May we rise to the occasion; nothing less than the fate of the world depends upon it.

Amen.