Who Cares?

Sermon by Stephen D. Edington, March 19, 1995

When I chose my title for today's sermon I honestly did not realize what I was setting up when it comes to how those two words sound when they're spoken out loud. Each week I change the message on our office answering machine in order to announce what the sermon title, or service theme is for the upcoming Sunday. So, last Sunday afternoon I'm putting the weekly message into the machine and hear myself say: This Sunday, March 19th, the sermon title is 'Who Cares?' For the first, and for what I hope will be the only, time I've ever put a sermon title on the answering machine I felt the need to add an editorial comment to the effect: That is not a wisecrack; it is really the topic of the sermon..

But then, when I look back over just the past several weeks at some of the incidents I've encountered in the day to day course of ministry, the both serious and joyful answer to the question is "we do." About a week and a half ago I went to visit one of our members who was at the Lahey Clinic recovering from an operation; and when I walked into the room there were two more of our members giving him what amounted to a little party--balloons, flowers, cheerful conversation. All I had to do was join in. Those of us who were here last Sunday for our Youth Service I know could not help but be tremendously moved by what Iva Horvatic had to say in telling her story about having to leave, nearly four years ago, her native home in what used to be Yugoslavia and make another life for herself here in this country. Being a teenager is tough enough without having to have your country ripped apart by terribly cruel war. But it was wonderful to hear her talk of finding an open and accepting place for herself with our Youth Group here; of finding a place to be within the larger life of this congregation.

Many of you have been made aware, and have graciously responded, over the past number of weeks now to one of our newer families, the Kalika's, as one of their members, four year old Paige, continues with her bone marrow transplant operations at a Chicago hospital. This is where she and her parents have had to go, from their home in Amherst, in order for her to get the treatment she needs. Paige's mother, Susan, recently sent us a letter which begins "Dear UU Congregation"--which means its to all of you, all of us, and says in part:

Thank you for your wonderful show of support. Your cards, letters, and gifts have been received with gratitude and appreciation. Paige continues to do well and maintains her special little light in her eyes and heart...we are hoping all goes well...We will stay in touch. Thank you again for all you have done for us.

In addition to the personal stories that are behind and within incidents like these, they are also a part of a larger and ongoing story about our liberal religious tradition, and about our faith assumptions as to the nature of human beings, and about what it means to be human. I'll be touching on that larger story from time to time this morning. Over the past couple of hundred years our Unitarian and Universalist ancestors--and I don't just mean the leaders and spokespersons, but also those men and women who have made up our congregations for a couple of centuries now--have had to deal with the charge that we are naive sentimentalists when it comes to our views of human nature and of the goodness, or the "perfectibility" as the Universalists once called it, of human beings. The truth is that we have never flinched from the reality of evil, and from the reality that human beings are indeed capable of doing very destructive, very cruel, very thoughtless, and very depraved things to other human beings and to themselves. Its just that we have refused to accept this reality as being the final word on the human condition.

So, it was with my awareness of the many acts of human kindness that go on amongst us, coupled with my awareness of the tenets of our liberal religious tradition, that I recently re-read a very compelling little book by Dr. Willard Gaylin called Caring. I've been relying rather heavily on Dr. Gaylin of late. He provided one of the focal points for my thoughts on the subject of pride a couple of weeks ago. I'll use him again today, and then it will be time to let him rest of the shelf for awhile. Originally published twenty years ago, his is a pretty amazing book when read against the backdrop of how our world is presented to us through printed, spoken, and televised media. Here's a basically secular-minded, New York based psychiatrist and bio-ethicist setting out to show that human beings are inherently loving and caring creatures. And he's not even a Unitarian Universalist. But Gaylin's writings do show, however, some remarkable parallels to those of the man who is regarded as being the theological founder of American Universalism, the Rev. Hosea Ballou of Richmond, New Hampshire. In 1805 Rev. Ballou published a religious tract called A Treatise on Atonement which became the founding manifesto, so to speak, of Universalism in America. In many places Gaylin's book Caring reads like a late twentieth century secularized update of Ballou's Treatise...

My purpose in citing the works of these two gentlemen, though, is not simply to offer a book report, or even to lead a little excursion into our UU heritage. Admittedly, I'll be doing some of both; but my final aim will be to bring us back to where I started just a few minutes ago--back to what it means for us here to be a caring and ministering liberal religious community. My use of the word "ministering" is quite deliberate. I feel I am at a point now in my ministry here where I now wish to work on some purposeful ways of expanding and strengthening a ministry in which we all can and indeed do participate. As I know some of you've heard me say before that ministry in a free and liberal religious congregation is not just something that a minister "does to" or with a congregation; it is also the life, the interaction, the caring and the sharing that go on within and amongst the congregation as well. This kind of ministry is often spontaneous; a need arises, a hurt becomes known, there is a joy to be celebrated, a pain to be healed--and caring people respond. I love spontaneity; it is part of the life blood of any human community-- be it family, church, neighborhood, affinity group, and the like. But ministry, in the broad sense of which I now speak, also needs structure; and how we can have both spontaneity and structure in what I hope will be an expanded and shared ministry within our religious community here is something I'll also speak to towards the close of what I have to say this morning.

Now, before I lose sight of Dr. Gaylin and Rev. Ballou, let me return to them for awhile because I feel they each offer a mindset, or a way of thinking and believing, about caring and about ministry that can be very helpful to us. I gave you a taste of Gaylin's book a few minutes ago and his assertion that there is a misplaced emphasis upon the aggression, the hostility, and the territorial acquisitiveness of human beings. We should also be aware, so he says, that Homo sapiens is a supremely loving animal and a caring one. Among the many reasons as to why I like Gaylin is that he's about the only academic and psycho-analytic type I've encountered who isn't shy about writing about love and caring. He's not a romantic philosopher or poet--or even a liberal minister. Given the side of life he often sees in the profession he has chosen you might expect a certain amount of cynicism from him about the whole idea of love, but its really not there.

I just mentioned that he reminds me of the Universalist founder Hosea Ballou who challenged the Calvinists of his day and their idea that human beings live in an inherent and totally depraved condition from which God might choose to deliver a select few. Ballou's Treatise on Atonement was the Universalist's "Declaration of Independence", if you will, from such a theology. Ballou's contention was that for all the flaws, pitfalls and, yes, sins of persons and societies, we still could not live together as well as we actually do, and be happy to the extent that we are able to be, if we were totally depraved creatures. Here's Ballou:

Man's main object in all he does is happiness ... what would induce [us] to form societies, to acquire knowledge, to learn the sciences, or till the earth if [we] believed [we] could be as happy without as with."

Happiness, as Ballou uses the term here by the way, does not mean perpetual joy or everlasting euphoria. He means more of a state of general contentment, or a basic state of peace with oneself and with one's world. The goal of living, as Ballou saw it, is not to go on hoping against hope that one might be delivered from a state of Original Sin, but to strive towards the happiness he described--on the assumption that it is, at least to some degree, attainable. That's Ballou.

Now, compare Ballou's words to those of Gaylin's:

Man cares because it is his nature to care. Man survives because he cares and is cared for ... Civilization is at least in part of form of crystallized love.

There are some 250 years between the writings of these gentleman with one being an early 19th century theologian and the other a late 20th century psychiatrist and ethicist, but they both come out in the same place with regard to the nature of humanity and the meaning of human history. [Parenthetical note: As much as I admire the writings of these guys, they both write in what is well nigh hopelessly sexist language--to the point that it's too much to try to clean up. So I'll just read the way they write and we can each and all do our own translating.]

So how does Gaylin get away with a statement like "civilization is a form of crystallized love" and his contention that we human beings are inherently caring creatures? One might argue that Ballou could get away with what he said about a natural inclination to pursue happiness and will it for others in the relative innocence of early 19th century, agricultural and pre-industrial America. Thomas Jefferson, another strong anti-Calvinist and Unitarian of that same era, said basically of the same thing when he wrote the Declaration of Independence stating that our Creator has bestowed upon us the "right" to pursue "life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness." But with all that has transpired since then can we still speak of humanity's inherently loving and caring nature, and of our natural inclination to pursue the good, the right, the caring thing? Dr. Gaylin apparently thinks so, and good developmental psychiatrist that he is, he begins with babies to make his point. In fact about half of his book has to do with babies. Ballou went to the Bible, as read from the perspective of a 19th century liberal Christian, to make his case for human goodness; Gaylin goes to biology.

The Doctor's case is that of all the creatures in the animal kingdom, human beings are born in an inordinately helpless and dependent state, and stay that way for an inordinate length of time. The reason for this, he says, is that during our gestation period our brain and, therefore, our head, develops at a far more rapid rate than the rest of our body so that after nine months it's now or never if we are going to make it through the birth canal. The whole first year of life is actually an extended period of what he calls "fetalization". The only other creatures so born are marsupials--kangaroos--and they get a pouch to live in for awhile which is a kind of transitional living facility between the womb and the world. Humans don't get that which is why, according to Gaylin, there has to be an innate capacity for loving and caring for the sake of human survival. As he puts it:

No other animal exists for so long in so helpless a state (and with so much) dependence on those around him, and their good will, for his survival.

Granted, practically all newborns of nearly any species need a degree of care, but nothing on the order of what human beings need. Gaylin again:

All animals respond to their infants, but with the human organism the indulgence required is enormous.

Tell any parent of a newborn that the indulgence required on their part is enormous and you will get very little argument! So, given that long period of human helplessness, Dr. Gaylin then speculates that the human capacity to offer love, care, and protection is a genetically inherited impulse. Genetically inherited, he believes, because we could not have survived as a human race without it. To cite the text again:

No species so designed could have survived the hundreds of thousands of years from its inception to the point of organized civilization ... unless there had been from the beginning an innate genetic response of caring and loving...

I want to stay with this developmental business for just a bit longer because, if the good Doctor is right, he's giving an interesting insight as to what goes on in a baby's brain. If the infant is being given proper care then he/she quickly comes to believe that they're omnipotent. It cries at any discomfort--wet diaper, hunger, stomach ache, whatever it is--and gets taken care of--fed, changed, or comforted. The baby thinks (actually it doesn't think think); it senses that the yelling and screaming on his/her part alone causes the discomfort to be alleviated, without actually realizing that another human being has anything to do with it. But then at some point in infancy the infant realizes, not intellectually of course, but realizes on some level that far from being omnipotent he/she really totally dependent upon the workings of its larger environment for survival.

Gaylin takes a little Carl Jungian side trip at this point to say that this is where the various religious myths about a fall from grace actually originate--from the recall in our collective racial memory of that moment, when we went from feelings of omnipotence, which is to say oneness with God--to utter dependence, or separation from God.

To quickly finish out the scenario, three things then happen in sequence "after the fall." Gaylin's words for them are attachment, separation, and then identification. Attachment to some symbol of security after you realize that you're just out there--mother, father, relative, whoever the caregiver is. Then comes separation, as some self-awareness and the need for a separate identity comes to be felt. Then comes identification, which begins in adolescence and actually continues on through one's life: Identification means finding those with whom you wish to connect as you continue to develop your identity--who your role models will be, who you'll form your relationships with, who and what you'll commit yourselves to, what communities you'll become a part of--be they geographical, professional, social, religious, etc. And it's not just some nice, neat thing if this process comes off; it's absolutely essential for the continuation of our human race. Furthermore, what fuels that process is our innate capacity for making connections, and what Gaylin calls our innate capacity for caring and nurture and love; this capacity is what fuels the growth of the individual child and also fuels the buildings of societies and cultures and assures the continuation of the species. All of which is why Will Gaylin refers to civilization as "crystallized love."

I find myself attracted to Gaylin's psychological and anthropological ideas for what I would imagine were some of the same reasons that the early Universalists in this country were attracted to the theology of Hosea Ballou. To people who were being constantly exposed to a religion and a theology which taught them that they were hopelessly fallen creatures born into a state of eternal damnation from which they stood maybe some chance of deliverance, Ballou and his fellow Universalists taught and preached of a loving God who cared so much about humanity that it was this God's will that each person find his or her rightful place in this world, and know the personal peace and sense of contentment that comes with finding that place. That is what, as I say, Ballou meant by "happiness." In a world today where we are so relentlessly exposed to all of the, shall we say, less than ennobling aspects of humanity Gaylin's thoughts and ideas carry a note, and a tone, of hope similar that those of Ballou's.

For reasons I don't have to time to enumerate now, and don't need to anyway, it is easy to take a pretty dim view of humanity; to believe in a kind of "secularized Calvinism" that says we really are inherently fallen creatures who have lost our capacity--if indeed we ever had it--to create loving and nurturing communities for ourselves and for humanity. To think in such a fashion creates a self-fulfilling prophecy and makes despair OK. Dr. Gaylin just one more time:

We welcome the prophets of doom who describe all of (human) horrors as the inevitable products of the very nature of humanity...We embrace this concept because in a perverse sense if one cannot be really good, there is always a peculiar pleasure in being really bad...

Whether it was the theological Calvinists of Ballou's day or the secular Calvinists of today, the effect the each of their messages is the same--to keep us from believing in who we really are and in what we may yet become.

I have just a couple more thoughts now as I bring this back around to where I began. Neither Rev. Ballou in his day, nor Dr. Gaylin now, nor I standing up here would ever deny that human beings as individuals, and humanity and civilization in general, has its shadow side. While I do not believe that we are inherently fallen creatures, I know that we still do fall. While I do not believe in an inherently tragic nature to life, I know that life does at times visit inexplicable tragedies upon us. The thing that makes Gaylin's writings especially intriguing to me is that he is in a profession that affords more glimpses into the shadow side of humanity that do most. I'm sure he knows, as do we, that some people, for whatever reason (and the reasons are more unknown than they are known) never quite get in touch with their loving and caring capacity, or just cannot seem to find the person that they can indeed be--and have to be dealt with as such.

Even with his pronouncement of civilization as "crystallized love" both Gaylin and we know that certain civilizations and societies can become irrational and oppressive and embody humanity's shadow side in a writ large manner. For all of his emphasis upon the primacy of the social and the primacy of society, Gaylin never suggests that the individual is therefore subject to every capricious, and sometimes destructive, whim of rulers or governments. To be modern day "anti-Calvinists", even as our spiritual ancestors were in their day, does not mean that we ignore the separation we see all around us of people and societies from their better selves. It means that we keep seeking wholeness, and keep believing in the possibility of wholeness, even in the midst of all the separation we see, and at times experience, in ourselves. This being the case, to care is to often run a risk. The risk is that the person or persons to whom one extends care is, for whatever reason, not in a place to be able to receive it. To extend care is means also running the risk of being hurt by not having it accepted or acknowledged. It is important that we remain true to ourselves as caring human beings, even while knowing that we do not and cannot control the outcome of the care we offer.

I began all this by referring to certain acts of kindness and caring that I've seen take place within this religious community in recent days, just as I've seen them take place throughout the course of my ministry here. I am going to be bold enough to suggest that there are at least two reasons why each of us have come here today, and do so on all the other occasion we bring ourselves to this place. (And its a bit of a risky thing for a UU minister to make pronouncements that purportedly apply to everyone in the congregation.) Nontheless: Number one, I think we come here for the same reason that people have always sought out Unitarian and Universalist and UU churches or communities--it is to be assured that our lives count, that they matter, that they have value and worth, that we each do have a "core self" that is worthy of nurture and care and affirmation. While the language by which we have expressed these truths, and the symbols we have used to express these truths, have changed over the course of our religious history, that has always been the essential message.

The second reason is because we want and need to know who cares--who cares about us; and about how we care about each other, and about the world beyond our walls. If it is in fact the human capacity for caring that has driven the human community at large over the course of human history, then it is this same capacity that drives the communities we create for ourselves and affiliate with--communities like the one that gathers here. We come here to extend our care as well as to be cared about, and I'm pleased and gratified to see both happen. When I spoke at the beginning of these remarks about our finding ways to keep extending the ministry I did have some specific things in mind. I, and we, have tried this before with some success, but I'd like to get even more deliberative now about collecting a resource bank, or a caring or ministry bank, if that's a better term of members and friends who can be of particular service or help to other members and friends when such is needed. In some churches and fellowships this is called a Caring Community Network or a Parish Network. Barbara Berrios, our Membership Co-ordinator, and our Membership Committee are going to work on getting this into place. Barbara has some information gathering forms that you can get at the Information Table in Coffee Hour. The purpose of this, I must quickly emphasize, is not to replace the spontaneity by which so many of you just automatically reach out to others on you own initiative when the need arises; but rather it is to extend our common ministry even further than it now reaches.

I'll finish with these thoughts. When I think on what I've read, and tried to share from the writings of people like Ballou and Gaylin today--and of other men and women at other times who have words of wisdom and insight for us as religious liberals--I am also aware that good words, good ideas, good theology, and good theory, valuable as they all are, cannot by themselves save us; cannot save us, that is, from life's pains, pitfalls, and tragedies. We will still have our "why me" moments; we will still fall prey at times to our own smallness and pettiness, as well to the smallness and pettiness of others. We'll still know despair at times, and still rail occasionally at life's apparent unfairness and cruelty. The life, the affirmations, and the traditions, of our UU communities of faith do not ultimately protect us from any of that. But they do give us a place to stand in the midst of all that swirls around us, and they give us people who will care enough to stand with us. That's a good deal of what ministry is--providing a place to stand and people to stand alongside--people who do know who cares. This is the ministry to which we are each and all called.

Unitarian Universalist Church of Nashua

Who Cares?