READING
Hear the inspiring words of Peace Pilgrim:
In 1953, ... I felt guided or called or motivated to begin my pilgrimage for peace in the world - a journey undertaken traditionally. The tradition of pilgrimage is a journey undertaken on foot and on faith, prayerfully and as an opportunity to contact people. I wear a lettered tunic in order to contact people. It says 'PEACE PILGRIM' on the front. I feel that's my name now - it emphasizes my mission instead of me. And on the back it says '25,000 MILES ON FOOT FOR PEACE.' The purpose of the tunic is merely to make contacts for me. Constantly as I walk along the highways and through the cities, people approach me and I have a chance to talk with them about peace.
I have walked 25,000 miles as a penniless pilgrim. I own only what I carry in my small pockets. I belong to no organization. I have said that I will walk until given shelter and fast until given food, remaining a wanderer until mankind has learned the way of peace. And I can truthfully tell you that without ever asking for anything, I have been supplied with everything needed for my journey, which shows you how good people really are.
With me I carry always my peace message: This is the way of peace: Overcome evil with good, falsehood with truth, and hatred with love. There is nothing new about this message, except the practice of it. And the practice of it is required not only in the international situation but also in the personal situation. I believe that the situation in the world is a reflection of our own immaturity. If we were mature, harmonious people, war would be no problem whatever - it would be impossible.
...
I have chosen the positive approach - instead of stressing the bad things which I am against, I stress the good things which I am for. Those who choose the negative approach dwell on what is wrong, resorting to judgment and criticism, and sometimes even to name-calling. Naturally, the negative approach has a detrimental effect on the person who uses it, while the positive approach has a good effect. When evil is attacked, it mobilizes, although it may have been weak and unorganized before, and therefore the attack gives it validity and strength. When there is no attack but instead good influences are brought to bear upon the situation, not only does the evil tend to fade away, but the evil-doer tends to be transformed. The positive approach inspires - the negative approach makes angry. When you make people angry they act in accordance with their baser instincts, often violently and irrationally. When you inspire people they act in accordance with their higher instincts, sensibly and rationally. Anger is transient, whereas inspiration sometimes has a lifelong effect.
SERMON
Unitarian Universalists struggle with the word evil. Since we don't believe in a dualistic division of the world into a power struggle between God and Satan, we tend to see evil more as a kind of ignorance of the good. If people could just be raised and educated properly, maybe we could eradicate evil or at least control it well enough to manage it harmlessly. We proclaim everyone has inherent worth and dignity as our first principle. And there are organizations, individuals and actions we feel so strongly about like tobacco companies, the use of weapons of mass destruction, certain politicians, murders and child molesters, we are tempted to remove the offensive people from the human race and label them evil. How do we fit these people into our sunny theological outlook?
A central defining question of Unitarian and Universalism is the good or evil nature of humanity. Both the Unitarians and the Universalists rejected the Calvinist view of the depravity of humanity and pre-birth election of a select few to eternal life while the rest were damned to roasting in the fires of hell irrespective of how they lived their lives. The early Universalists believed that Jesus died on the cross for all people not just the converted. Thus all of us would be on that train bound for glory with no one left behind. This kind of thinking created a great deal of controversy at the turn of the Nineteenth Century. Many believed the fear of eternal damnation was the only thing keeping men from raping, killing, pillaging and acting like animal predators. Take away that fear and all hell would break loose destroying the social bonds which make society possible. Even within the Universalist circles there was concern. Two camps developed. The first, led by Hosea Ballou, were the ones who believed people were already saved. The redemption occurred in the past when Jesus atoned for our sins. If any suffering would happen, it would be in this life, not the next. Opposed to this view were the ones who believed that, yes, everyone would be saved, but the really bad ones would need some time of purification in purgatory first before joining the good folks who followed the Ten Commandments and generally behaved themselves. The atonement was in the future, not the past.
More than being rankled by the illogical nature of the trinitarian construction of Christian religion, the Unitarians objected to the Calvinist view of humanity as sinful and depraved. Following the Augustinian doctrine of Original Sin, from the time of Adam's transgression against God's will, we have been "doing our own thing" in rebellion against God piling up sin after sin wallowing in a pit of degradation. This characterization didn't sit well with some of the first families of Boston. Many of the first Boston Unitarians were pillars of their community, the Boston Brahman, who felt they were quite different from the drunken sailors in their port, thank you. The early Unitarians had a much higher valuation of human possibility and sanctity inspired by the advances in science and a newfound faith in the people being able to justly and democratically govern themselves without religion at the helm. Not only did the human person have good in them, that good could be cultivated through the use of the mind, the use of Reason. William Ellery Channing's enthusiasm for "the cultivation of character" was the Unitarian motto for the first half of the Eighteen Hundreds.
The cultivation of character fit well with the rapid advances in science onward and upward forever. In the scientific view, evil became a solvable problem with the right technology and moral guidance. So much of the madness of the past was diagnosed as brain disorders which can often be treated. Madness was not evil but a disease. Advances in child-rearing practices and accommodation of learning disabilities helped rear healthier, better adjusted children. It has only been in the Twentieth Century that this positivistic bubble has been burst by the horror of two brutal world wars, the failed struggle with alcohol during prohibition and controlling illegal drug use today, and seeing the tenacity of racism, sexism and xenophobia. There are human dilemmas and deviations that do not seem to yield to reason.
Rather than seeing this intractability of the human condition as sin which implies disobedience to a God, I assert it is nature, even creation itself, which contains the flaw. The difference between being inherently sinful and inherently flawed is very important in shaping an understanding of evil which can also embrace the worthiness of each person, even of all creation.
When looking at the natural world, one always sees work in progress, rarely if ever a finished perfection. This can most easily be seen in the greatest building block of all life, the DNA molecule. Every life form has a signature DNA molecule in it which completely describes its physical construction through a very long coding scheme inside the molecule not so unlike a computer program. As it is the key which opens the door to understanding a great deal about being alive, scientists have been closely examining this molecule in its many forms. One of the most notable discoveries they have made is just how many unused and unnecessary links exist in all of our DNA coding chains. Huge chunks are leftover deactivated coded sequences which are no longer of any value - flaws if you will. It may be that lurking in our DNA is the genetic programming to have six fingers or toes, gills, feathers, or scales. Normally they are harmless - unless activated by mistake transforming the cell into a deadly killer like a cancer cell. There are many psychologically debilitating diseases today which show evidence of errors in genetic programming for their origin because they run in families.
These minor defects can have catastrophic effects. Lack of immunity to Small Pox cost millions of Native Americans their lives and decimated their populations. One could argue that it was European diseases which conquered the Americas. The beautiful elms which rose majestically over our cities and countryside are almost completely wiped out by the Dutch Elm Disease. Scientists now believe that a defect in the way alcohol is metabolized may contribute to, maybe even drive its addiction process. Anyone with allergies knows that there is a defect in their immune system which they wish would go away. When one begins to examine just how many flaws there are in the way our immensely complicated biological systems function, it is a marvel we exist and can live the average span of some seventy odd years.
And sometimes the proliferation of flaws all by themselves are deadly. The virus which causes AIDS is quite sloppy about how it reproduces itself making many errors or mutations, in the thousands a day. This sloppiness is very difficult for the human immune system to cope with. Before it can fight off one kind of HIV it has to figure out how to fight yet another strain. It is a tribute to the resiliency of out immune systems that it does as well as it does.
Much as the result of these flaws can be tragic, their abundance makes clear they are a permanent fixture of the natural order. In fact evolution could not occur if there were no errors, no novelty, no flaws in reproduction to give rise to better adapted species. Given the necessity of error to drive evolution forward at the cellular level, it should not surprise us that this flawed nature extends to our consciousness.
I hope I don't have to spend much time convincing you we are constantly challenged by errors in our thinking. Balancing our checkbook each month convinces me my ability to do simple arithmetic is impaired. Putting our checkbook on our computer with Quicken has made a very big difference in my life. Each sentence we hear from another person is a censored and filtered version of what she or he was really thinking and feeling while speaking. Comedians would lose their jobs if we were able to always say truthfully what we mean. The newspaper we use to form opinions about the events of the day are chock full of error and deception as those who read their words rearranged and edited by a reporter will tell you. We deceive ourselves into thinking we know what is going on around us. Then we stumble on the ignored bump in the sidewalk, are surprised by an unexpected mistake in our work, the anger of a spouse at an allegedly hurtful oversight and the presence of error and self-deception is revealed.
Given that our bodies are full of flaws and our thinking full of holes, should it surprise us a great deal that our behavior is often flawed. We say and do things we later regret. Others do harmful things to us for no good reason. Philomena and I are having to teach Andy that he has to listen to his teacher and us rather than doing what we wants to do. If he is sitting in a circle of kids, it isn't okay to punch and kick. Chairs are for sitting not for climbing. When we're inside we don't run. Philomena and I are realizing our easy going flexible style of living is flawed when applied to child rearing to prepare our son to function successfully in our society. It isn't easy to acknowledge one's shortcomings as a parent even if you don't feel like an expert.
The Buddha had great insight into the flawed dimension of creation when he diagnosed it as creating the experience of dissatisfaction within us and the urge to fix it or avoid it. The Buddha taught that this flawed dimension of existence could not be removed from reality. Fortunately, if one accepts this reality, one can learn to work with it in skillful ways which reduce and even eliminate our sense of dissatisfaction with the way things are.
The reason we must accept, even celebrate the flawed nature of reality is because life would not be possible without it. Flaws are the future of life on this planet driving the evolutionary process forward. No one ever said evolution is pretty - ask any species which is extinct. If you want flaws which become gems as they randomly fix or avoid problems improving the ability of a species to survive, you've got to tolerate the ones which threaten us as well.
Thankfully, there is more to life than a gradual accumulation of errors which will eventually finish us off. Life has within it more than the tooth and claw struggle for survival and genetic victory. Our ability to come together as individuals forming connections and social networks can actually overcome the degenerating process of error. The capacity for cooperation and community greatly enhances the survival of a species giving them a competitive edge. The farther one goes up the evolutionary ladder, the more important this cooperation becomes getting expressed in increasingly complex social behavior.
What threatens this victory over the processes of error are rogue self-absorbed individuals at all levels of evolution who care only about themselves and not the greater whole. Evil is usually defined as an egregious violation of the social code which binds us together. Murder, rape, stealing, lying, cheating, cruel behavior are common in the animal kingdom especially between species. It's eat or be eaten. Yet when people behave like animals it is easy to read into their behavior demonic overtones. And to label a person as evil is to rob them of their humanity, the inborn social capacity which forms the root of their worthiness.
The movie Dead Man Walking for me captured so much of our struggle with evil. The Sister who visited the condemned man probably felt as if she had fallen into a pit of snakes. Not only was the hostility and manipulation of the condemned man directed at her, so was the emotions of the families who wanted to punish him for the rape and murder of their children which had wrecked their lives. For them he was evil incarnate. It was only toward the end of the movie we begin to detect any tenderness in the condemned man. It became clear he too experienced feelings for other human beings, for his family, his brothers and mother who he didn't want to hurt.
No matter how damaged we are by the way we are not nurtured as children, no matter what dysfunctional combinations of genetic flaws we receive at birth, no matter what ill fortune may come our way, if we survive to adulthood we have far far more in common with everyone else than we have differences. The ways our bodies function, our desires and aversions, our experience of pleasure and pain, collectively held together, are universals which provide the ground for our ability for empathetic connection. To survive at all, we must love and be loved. The seed of our inherent worthiness is built up from all these capacities for social interaction, for love.
We can cultivate our worthiness by loving ourselves and others but we will always remain flawed by our capacity for forgetting. At the same time, no matter how bad we behave or conduct ourselves, we cannot lose our birthright capacity for love. We are stuck with always being both flawed and worthy.
What is critical for all of us is to remember that we are both flawed and worthy. The fact that we all share this trait together is the foundation of a feeling of connection with, of compassion for all life. It is human nature to forget the flaws and pretend they are not there. It is human nature to forget our worthiness and dwell in our depravity. When we forget one or the other we are sure to run astray.
The secret is to choose the cultivate the seeds of our worthiness and accept without too much worry, with equanimity, our flawed nature. In the end, we will discover to our amazement that our capacity for worthiness far exceeds our capacity for error. Our worthiness, our love, can carry us beyond our flaws if we are willing to trust its power.
In this lies the secret to a happy life.
Copyright (c) 1996 by Rev. Samuel A. Trumbore. All rights reserved.