First Parish Unitarian UniversalistReverence, Courage and other Veteran Virtues
A sermon by the Reverend Diane Teichert
First Parish UnitarianUniversalist - Canton, MA
November 13, 2005
Intro to the Sermon in place of a Reading
A few years ago, in early winter 2003, the Reverend William Sinkford, President of the Unitarian Universalist Association of Congregations, caused a stir among UU’s by advocating what he called a “language of reverence.” The controversy began when he was misquoted in a Fort Worth, Texas newspaper article after his sermon to our congregation there. The article began, "A former atheist who is now president of the Unitarian Universalist Association will push to put the word 'God' into a new statement of principles."
The on-line chat for UU ministers was abuzz with the controversy. First of all, in our polity or form of governance, the president can’t do any such thing! Such a change would come via the congregations and their delegates to the annual General Assembly. Second, putting the word God in our principles and purposes would be such a departure from our self-definition as a “non-creedal religion” in which an individual’s search for truth and meaning is unfettered by religious doctrine.
Poor Bill found himself in hot water! So, by way of correction, President Sinkford explained in the UU World magazine that is mailed to the members of each congregation, and I quote,
“Our Principles serve us well as a covenant, presenting a vision of a more just world on which we agree and our promise to walk together toward that vision, whatever our theology. But I wonder whether the language of the Principles is sufficient to capture our individual searches for truth and meaning. For that, I think we need a ‘language of reverence.’” (UUWorld, March/April 2003, p. 9)
Being a former atheist, Bill himself has a devotional life involving “God,” as do many of us. But, he’s not saying all UU’s must.
He’s just saying to those of us who are atheists, agnostics, or humanists two things: one, let’s acknowledge (and these words are mine, not his) that there is a spiritual dimension to life in which we can participate that grounds us and gives us energy and hope, opens us to beauty, and connects us with each other in love. And, two, let’s use that language in public, or else the religious right will be the only religious voice out there.
Sermon
This past summer, that controversy about the “language of reverence” came to mind when I saw this small volume for sale called Reverence: Renewing a Forgotten Virtue. I bought the book on a whim, usually a bad idea! But I was also attracted by the lovely peaceful photo on the front, taken by the author and looking much like the New England shore scenes I love, even though the back of the book jacket says author Paul Woodruff is a philosophy professor in Texas.
If you remember a Reading several weeks ago, on the morning after our wonderful Saturday night concert-fundraiser, a description of an amateur string quartet playing a piece by Mozart, it was from this little book on reverence. Woodruff was making the point that the quartet had experienced reverence in their playing together.
The book is a philosopher’s discourse on reverence as a virtue. One thing I’ve observed about philosophers, in my very limited experience, is that they like to be clear about definitions. Woodruf is. He defines a “virtue” as “a capacity, cultivated by experience and training, to have the right feelings at the right time that incline one to do the right thing.” (p. 62).
Take, for example, courage as a virtue. Courage, he says, is a “well-developed capacity for feeling confidence and fear in the right places, at the right times, and in the right degrees of intensity; that is, courage lies somewhere between fearlessness (which often looks like courage) and timidity (which no one would mistake for courage).” This definition “points to a distinction between courage and fearlessness, but it does not spell out the difference between them—aside from the obvious point that one (courage)is always good while the other (fearlessness) can go too far.” (p. 8).
In many ways, Veterans Day is about courage. We honor the courage of our veterans of war, who were put in harm’s way for the higher purposes of our nation. As one who has never known combat, I can hardly imagine that pair of fears that might render someone timid in warfare: the fear of being killed and the fear of killing; in fact, I don’t even know if those are the key obstacles to courage. Nevertheless, so many in the armed forces rise to their wartime occasions with courage.
Similarly, but differently, this morning we also recognized the courage of our veterans for peace, people who served our country as conscientious objectors and Peace Corps Volunteers, and also all those who have ever faced heckling or swinging batons during a march or rally or sit-in for peace or for justice. It may be a different kind of courage in a different setting than that displayed in combat, but is it not courage?
We say, yes, Rosa Parks was courageous, but only if we put aside that convenient myth about Rosa Parks preferred by many white people—that she was just too tired to get up off her seat after work that one day—and see her for who she actually was that day: an African American community leader who consciously-developed her capacity for courage, through leadership training at the Highlander popular education Center in nearby Tennessee, by serving her NAACP chapter as an officer, and by previously refusing to cooperate with laws she knew to be unjust until one day the timing was right, and the Montgomery bus boycott was launched.
We say, yes, it’s courage , when we remember James Reeb, the white Unitarian Universalist minister in our Famous UU Minute this morning, who heeded the call to clergy from Martin Luther King Jr , left his work among the poor of Boston, and joined thousands to march from Selma to Montgomery, but was killed in Selma by white segregationists.
Each of us has cause to consider our own lives in regard to courage: have we developed the capacity for feeling confidence and fear in the right places, at the right times, and in the right degrees of intensity—to know that place of courage somewhere between fearlessness and timidity in the situation—so that we do the right thing? Or is it our practice to just avoid altogether those places and times that might demand courage of us?
Recently I watched on video the movie Iron Jawed Angels, starring Hilary Swank as Alice Paul, the suffrage leader who went on a hunger strike in a DC prison for women’s right to vote. When it was over, I had to admit it wouldn’t have been me with huge banners out front of the White House after President Wilson had taken the country into war, inviting a violent reaction from passersby and police alike, who said you don’t picket a wartime president. It wouldn’t have been me in that prison refusing to eat, raw egg being forced down my throat.
But what would have been fearlessness for me was courage for Alice Paul, and lucky for us: the courage of all those suffragettes in prison with their leader refusing to eat in 1920… brought about the 19 th Amendment, signed by President Wilson that very year.
Recently, I asked our minister David Blanchard in Syracuse NY to send me news clippings about his month long juice-only fast for peace. He began fasting on September 15 th and ended it on Yom Kippur. He is quoted as saying “I had no illusions about the humble expression of my religious principles. And I know the troops will not be home for Christmas. But I do it as a public witness for an orderly withdrawal of our troops from Iraq.”
A month-long fast for peace would not be recklessly fearless, for me--I’m healthy enough. But, fasting for peace hasn’t been me either, not yet anyway. Would it be you? 60 members of his congregation participated on some level in the fast. The whole congregation was invited to the meal of soup and bread at which the fasters broke their fast and at which they read aloud the names of those who died in Iraq during those four weeks. One of those names may, in fact, be known to some of us: Lance Corporal Shayne M. Cabino.
It doesn’t take any courage only time, but I have been working with peace activists from other towns in our 9 th Congressional District to arrange for a public forum on the war in Iraq. We met with Congressman Steven Lynch and he agreed to the idea, after he gets back from his next visit to Iraq for the upcoming election there in mid-December. However, I will be out of town for the next planning meeting on November 28 th and on sabbatical when the forum is likely to be scheduled, so if you are interested in picking up the work I have begun, please let me know.
But the opportunities for courage are not only in the public sphere, of course. Many of us know that the private and personal opportunities to be courageous are even more challenging. Those of us who have faced and are beating an addiction, or made it through a brutal regimen of cancer treatment, or cared for an ailing loved one for years, or lived through a series of personal trials any one of which would have stopped others in their tracks… these are examples of great personal courage and you, too, are veterans, veterans of neither war nor peace but veterans of struggle, of the struggle for life itself.
Such courageous people, these veterans of the struggle for life, heroes to family and friends, and yet they are rarely heralded. Maybe you would want to stand and be heralded now as the courageous people you are: anyone who has faced and is beating or has beaten an addiction, r made it through a brutal regimen of cancer treatment, cared for an ailing loved one for years, or lived through a series of personal trials any one of which would have stopped others in their tracks…
What helps us, you, me to have that veteran virtue, courage, whether in private or in public? How do we come to feel confidence when we need confidence, and fear when its right to be fearful? For me, that other veteran virtue, reverence, helps.
In his little book Reverence: Renewing a Forgotten Virtue, Paul Woodruff says the virtue “reverence” is “the well-developed capacity to have the feelings of awe, respect, and shame when these are the right feelings to have, leading to right actions.” (pp. 8-9)
Furthermore, he says that each of these reverence-feelings that can motivate right actions—respect, shame and awe—have a different kind of object. Respect is for other people, shame is over one’s own shortcomings, and awe is usually felt for something that satisfies at least one of the following conditions:
-it cannot be changed or controlled by human means
-it is not fully understood by human experts
-it was not created by human beings or
-it is transcendent. (pp. 117-118)
Each of these reverence-feelings of respect, shame and awe serve to remind us of our human limitations, either in relation to other people, in relation to our own ideals, or in relation to all that is not understood, created or controlled by humans. Such humility is a good thing for most of us, shortening the fall that pride cometh before!
Contrary to a lot of traditional religious beliefs, Paul Woodruff says, the object of our awe need NOT be God, a god or gods, whether they be fearsome or perfect. (pp. 125-128).
[So, the object of our awe could be a starry sky or a raging hurricane, a stately autumn tree, or a delicate Praying Mantis (did you know that almost every year someone sees a Praying Mantis here at First Parish in the vicinity of the door by the wheelchair ramp? Last Sunday one was spotted and lots of us got a good look at it! Did you know that they are the only insect fast enough to eat mosquitoes? Did you know that they aren’t and never were listed as Endangered, contrary to what I’ve always thought, but maybe people revere them and think they ought to be protected because they appear to be praying?) Anyway…. ]
But if the object of our reverence is God, Woodruff says, that “that God is not supposed to serve special interests.” (p. 166). To be an object for true reverence, it’s not a God that’s on anybody’s side. We see in history, and today, those worshipping a God who takes sides tend toward vice not virtue, the vicious not the virtuous.
Hubris, or arrogance, is the vice that opposes the virtue reverence. I see it today in too many of the world’s leaders, elected and not, in the world today.
“ War is nothing new, and neither are killer strains of religion,” writes Paul Woodruff. They are “pathogens that take hold of a people and send them into paroxysms of violence. War and religion will always be with us; we can’t expect to shake them off. But we can ask what it is in religion that might keep the dogs of war on leash, and what it is that whips them into a frenzy and lets them loose. It is reverence that moderates war in all times and cultures, irreverence that urges it on to brutality.”(p.13-14).
When I think way back to the Biblical stories of the Hebrews’ persecution of people who revered gods not Yahweh; or to the Inquisition, the Crusades, and the slaughter of native people in the Americas—all in the name of Christianity—or (not as far) back to the persecution of Jews in the Holocaust and the more recent and current genocides in the Balkans, Africa and elsewhere, or to the present tyranny of terrorism perpetrated by extreme Islamic fundamentalists, or to our own President who says he feels he was called by God to his leadership role… When I survey history to the present in this way, I do wonder: what ever happened to reverence and humility in the religions of the world’s leaders?
Being a happy and devoted dog-owner like many of you, I don’t like this image of “keeping the dogs of war on leash.”
Yet I can fathom how reverence, even as it strengthens us to be courageous, might also be one virtue that moderates war in all times and cultures.
This means we need not just the language of reverence, but the virtue of reverence, and the courage to name it as it is true for us.
For me, there is a spiritual dimension to life in which we can participate that grounds us and gives us energy and hope, opens us to beauty, and connects us with each other in love.
And so I submit to you two hopes on this Veterans Day Weekend:
One) that we each alone and here together learn to cultivate the reverence-feelings of respect, shame and awe when each is appropriate, so that reverence might give us courage when we are challenged to be veterans of the struggle for life itself,
And two) a recklessly audacious hope: that all people, the world around, cultivate these veteran virtues—courage and reverence—so that by Veterans Day next year, not one more person—the world around—will stand to be honored as a veteran of war than stands today… and millions more than today—the world round— will stand proudly as veterans for peace and justice.
Amen.