Our National Spiritual Health
Sermon by Steve Edington
November 7, 2010
In the fall of 1994 the late Carl Sagan, one of the 20th century's pre-eminent astronomers and cosmologists, delivered a lecture at his alma mater, Cornell University. He showed a photograph that had been taken from the Voyager I spacecraft four years earlier as it was leaving our Solar System, some four billion miles away from our Planet Earth. What he had to say, as he showed that photograph to those in attendance at Cornell for his presentation has been widely published over the 16 years that have followed, usually under the title of "The Pale Blue Dot."
With the mysterious ways my mind often works, I found myself thinking of Dr. Sagan's words in the days leading up to last Tuesday's election, and even as I drove to the polls to cast my vote. The image Sagan showed was just what he said it was - a barely discernable blue dot in the middle of a photograph of a small part of the inner space of our Solar System. The dot was our planet earth. Here's where Carl Sagan went with it:
"You see a dot. That's home. That's us. On it everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever lived, lived out their lives. The aggregate of all our joys and sufferings, thousands of confident religions, ideologies and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilizations, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every hopeful child, every mother and father, every inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every superstar, every saint and sinner in the history of our species, lived there on a mote of dust, suspended in a sunbeam.
Sagan continued: "The earth is a very small stage in a vast cosmic arena. Think of the rivers of blood spilled by all those generals and emperors so that in glory and in triumph they could be momentary masters of a fraction of a dot. Think of the endless cruelties visited by the inhabitants of one corner of the dot on scarcely distinguishable inhabitants of some other corner of the dot. How frequent their misunderstandings, how eager they are to kill one another, how fervent their hatreds. Our posturings, our imagined self-importance, the delusion that we have some privileged position in the universe, are challenged by this point of pale light.
"Our planet is a lonely speck in the great enveloping cosmic dark. In our obscurity - in all this vastness - there is no hint that help will come from elsewhere to save us from ourselves. It is up to us...There is perhaps no better demonstration of the folly of human conceits than this distant image of our tiny world. To me it underscores our responsibility to deal more kindly and compassionately with one another, and to preserve and cherish that pale blue dot, the only home we've ever known."
I returned to these words following the election a few days later, not because I wanted to get my mind off the results, but because I needed the perspective they offer. Elections, depending upon when they happen, and how they affect those involved in them, are elating, disappointing, joyful, painful, hopeful, despairing - you name it. In the course of my life, as I've engaged in the political life of our nation at a variety of levels, I've known all of those feelings and many more. Those of you who have heard my speak my mind of any number of topics from this pulpit, particularly those that relate to our larger social and cultural and political life as a nation, will probably know that I was not exactly jumping for joy last Wednesday morning. I wasn't completely disappointed, but hardly elated.
But this is not to be a sermon about my political persuasions and preferences. For all of my varied interests and involvements in the political order, one of the many careers I chose not to pursue was that of a political commentator or that of electoral politics. My primary calling is that of a minister in the liberal tradition; and that is the stance from which I speak when I enter this pulpit which you have entrusted to me.
Let's pick up on some of Sagan's words again: "Our planet is a lonely speck in the great enveloping darkness...there is no hint that help will come from elsewhere to save us from ourselves. It is up to us...it (is) our responsibility to deal more kindly and compassionately with one another, and preserve and cherish that pale blue dot, the only home we've ever known." How, then, do we live in a kindly and compassionate and justice seeking way - and through what kind of a lens do we view - this pale blue dot of a world, on the little piece of its territory we occupy for the few seconds of cosmic time we're given?
It's the lens through which we look that I'll first take up by doing a dip into the history of our faith tradition - on the Unitarian side of the family for this one. As the 19th century was giving way to the 20th, if you'd asked most Unitarians of that era what their beliefs were, they probably would have cited what were known as the Five Points of Unitarianism. These Five Points were one of the predecessor affirmations of our present Seven Principles of UUism. The first Four of the Five were: 1) The Fatherhood of God; 2) The Brotherhood of Man; 3) The Leadership of Jesus [note it was "Leadership" and not "Savior-ship']; and 4) Salvation by Character - meaning that we are "saved," as it were by the kind of personal character we cultivate during our lives. If you do a little de-genderizing, and a bit of theological recasting, those Four Points still have some resonance.
But it was the Fifth Point that's the most intriguing. After reeling off those first four, your turn-of-the-20th-century Unitarian would have added the Fifth Point: "The progress of mankind onward and upward forever."
Wow; that's quite a statement, and one that took some pretty severe hits over the century that followed. Those hits included a couple of world wars, a holocaust that accompanied the rise of Nazism, nuclear weapons dropped on civilian populations, Stalin's Soviet Union death camps, a continuing de facto kind of racial apartheid in this country for at least the first half of that century, and on and on. And to be sure, there was also a great deal of admirable human progress made in the realms of human creativity and human inventiveness as well as the advancement of human justice.
But it sure didn't happen in a straight, "onward and upward forever" trajectory, dearly as our Unitarian spiritual ancestors may have believed and wished it so a little over a century ago.
The more realistic metaphor, I believe, when it comes to looking at the course of human history was offered by yet another 19th century Unitarian, and fiery abolitionist, the Rev. Theodore Parker, who noted that "the moral arc of the universe is long, but it bends towards justice." Martin Luther King was fond of quoting that phrase, and it's sometimes attributed to him, but he got it from Parker. What the Reverends Parker and King were saying--each in their own era--is that, yes, over the broad sweep of human history we do move in a gradually more humane, just and compassionate direction, but it's not a straight line. It's more like a slow moving arc that oscillates back and forth, progressing and regressing, even as it ever so gradually bends forward.
So what does all this have to do with just completed mid-term congressional--and other--elections on this one little piece of territory on our pale blue dot? Among other things they represent a point on Parker and King's moral arc. The question of whether that arc moved forward or backward largely depends upon one's political persuasion. But I also look to them as an indicator of what I'm calling our national spiritual health. The most simple way to put it--which means running the risk of over-simplification--is to say that our spiritual health is pretty queasy.
Perhaps it has always been so. How much of a truly United States of America we've ever been is a good and intriguing question. We weren't even a hundred years into our life as a nation before we fought a really bloody horrible civil war, after all. Our truly unifying moments have been borne out of times of crises or loss or an occasional unifying triumph--a world war, a presidential assassination, a moon landing, a terrorist attack. Then we set aside our divisions for a time before returning to them.
Maybe it is just endemic to the nature of the complexity and diversity of this nation that there will always be those who feel disaffected or disempowered or on the outside while others are on the in. Perhaps someone, or some collection of citizens--and it's not always the same person or collection of persons--are always going to be angry or disaffected or fearful about something, however reality based or not that anger and disaffection may be. I've known those feelings myself at times over the course of my as I've worked on my ongoing relationship with my country.
Much of what happens in the political arena has to do with attempting to play and channel such anger and anxiety, wherever it might be coming from. With the number of our citizens still out of work and with the economy as uncertain as it continues to be, those very real kinds of anxieties are naturally going to be addressed and catered to by those seeking office. How much integrity has been shown by those doing the catering is the real question. We have, for example, a President of our country who is about as much of a socialist as your average bank president, but that hasn't stopped the charge from being hurled, and in some places actually sticking to the wall.
Yes, some of the anger and anxiety and sense of disaffection felt by many in our populace is real, while some of it has been manufactured and manipulated. Whichever the case may have been, in the various quarters of our nation and state, the outcome is what it is. As many of those now elected will soon learn--assuming they do not know already--anger and disaffection, however much of it is real, and however much of it is conjured up and manipulated, may get one elected; but it is not a program or strategy for good and meaningful and productive and caring governance. How well that lesson is learned remains, of course, to be seen. However much national spiritual health we achieve will in the end be determined by how well we can be called to our better and higher selves rather than to our fearful and angry selves.
I said earlier that I am not primarily a political commentator. Before I end up making a liar out of myself, I'd best be moving on. I'll offer some thoughts now about what it means to be a prophetic community; about what my UU ministerial colleague, the now retired Rev. Richard Gilbert, calls the prophetic imperative. Dick Gilbert gave a sermon here on that topic as a visiting minister some four years ago.
A little less than two years ago, just as our current President was about to take office, I offered a sermon on the varying life journeys of Mr. Obama and Martin Luther King, respecting the value and the integrity of each of those journeys. I'll briefly revisit what I said about the role Dr. King chose to play on the national stage with respect to the workings of the political order.
His was the role of the prophet. The prophet, in the Judaic tradition--within which I include the ministry of Jesus of Nazareth--was the one who purposefully stood outside the corridors of power in order to speak truth to power. When he stood before the Lincoln Memorial on that August day in 1963 and directed his call and challenge to this nation to "rise up and live out the true meaning of its creed" Dr. King was speaking in that prophetic tradition--which was also a universal human truth as well--to the halls of power. The prophetic imperative, then, is to be that voice. How well attuned the ears of those who hold political power will be to the prophetic voice will not always be the same, such are the vagaries of our political landscape with all of its fluidity and its fluxuating ways. But the voice must still be spoken.
Our seven Unitarian Universalist principles--as they have emerged out of our faith tradition of many centuries--are the same today as they were, well, last Sunday. Our covenant with one another that we will "affirm and promote" them is the same today as it was last Sunday. We may not all share the same strategies for promoting the "inherent worth and dignity of every person," or for the advancement of "justice, equity and compassion in human relations" or for the preservation of the "interdependent web of existence of which we are all a part." But it is that prophetic imperative that calls us to stand together seeking the best ways to attain their greater fulfillment. It is the prophetic imperative that calls us to be that prophetic voice in the public square in seeking their greater fulfillment. The makeup of that public square may change; our call and challenge to be there does not. How much of a fulfillment of these principles we see--as important as that is to us--is still not as important as our remaining faithful to them.
I think of Susan B. Anthony in making that statement. One of our Unitarian forebears, she devoted her life to the cause of women getting the vote. She did not live, however, to cast a vote herself. But, familiar as she was with the words of Rev. Theodore Parker, she felt she was still helping to move that moral arc of the universe forward, with all its fits and starts, with all of its progressions and regressions. Her prophetic faith was, in time, vindicated. How she might feel about some of the women now in the public arena who are the beneficiaries of her efforts is another matter--but it's not the important one. She sought to move the moral arc; and she did; and that's what does matter.
When the founders of our nation stated in the Preamble to our Constitution that they were seeking to attain "a more perfect union" they were implicitly acknowledging that there will always be imperfections to be overcome. They may have sincerely desired a more perfect union, as I believe they did. At the some time, they were only willing, in their day and age, to enfranchise white males who were property owners when it came to those who were legally permitted to take part in our political life. Some of them also owned slaves. Yet they desired a more perfect union. And even with the social and cultural blinders that these most brilliant of individuals wore, they still managed to give us a process and a means by which we can still keep working towards that yet unrealized perfect union which they sought. Our calling to bring our values and principles and prophetic convictions to that process remains unchanged and undiminished.
I'm back, finally, to the pale blue dot. What strikes me the most about the late Carl Sagan's commentary is the passion and the intensity of his words. He takes a photo from space ship showing what a speck in this vast universe we are, without taking anything away from the significance of our being here. We may be a speck in space, but as Sagan reminds us, that speck is also home. I'll leave you with his words: "To me it underscores our responsibility to deal more kindly and compassionately with one another, and to preserve and cherish that pale blue dot, the only home we've ever known."
Stephen Edington
November 7, 2010
