First Parish Unitarian UniversalistBetrayal
A sermon preached by the Reverend Diane Teichert
First Parish Unitarian Universalist - Canton, MA
September 29, 2002
Over the summer, the news was dominated by stories of betrayal. The abuse of trust and authority was making headlines like it hadn't' since Watergate thirty years ago, this time in church and corporate settings Cardinal Bernard F. Law, James M. Porter, Rev. John Geoghan, Rev. Paul Shanley-these were among the names in the summer's headlines. Enron, Tyco, Haliburton, Martha Stewart, Worldcom-these were among the names in the summer's headlines. It was disturbing to open the newspaper.
Any preacher worth her or his pulpit ought to offer some commentary, some words of wisdom on these crises, I thought to myself. Yet, being Unitarian Universalists, the crisis over clergy sexual misconduct in the Roman Catholic Church, doesn't much affect us. And, not being super high-income corporate executives.I don't think any of you are, are you?.the crisis over CEO ethical misconduct doesn't much affect us.
But, of course these scandals do affect us. Not unlike September 11th, which didn't so much change the world as force us to see it for what it already was, these scandals have forced upon us a certain unwelcome knowledge as to the truth.
We may have already sort of known.
Many of us or those we love are survivors of sexual abuse by someone whose love ought to have been trustworthy, and if the statistics are to be believed, a few among us are or know perpetrators.so the betrayal being exposed in the Roman Catholic Church comes as no great surprise. The incessant media coverage of it might be for some an unbearable reminder of personal experience and for that you have my deepest sympathy, and for others it might evoke a sense of "just rewards" which I would gladly echo, not without some caution, though, on behalf of the innocent falsely accused.
Additionally, some of us have watched as our stock holdings plummet while the CEO's of the companies made out like bandits, and others of us have been cheated or lied to in business dealings, and most of us have at least known the temptation to do so ourselves, so the betrayal being exposed in the corporate world also comes as no great surprise. The fact that the media coverage is not incessant on this issue might be for some a cause for relief and for others it might arouse indignation and accusations of truth-evasion designed to protect the guilty in boardrooms, Congress and even the White House.
We may have already known, sort of. Even so, it seems to me to be perfectly fitting to feel angry that our collective trust was, is, being violated.
Over the summer, I encountered two individuals who have been directly involved in these scandals. One, I met at the summer cottage of a college friend with whom I recently renewed contact after 25 years. The other I met in my own backyard, a guest at a potluck picnic for my husband's co-workers, their friends and families.
The first was my long-lost college friend's nephew by marriage, a privileged young white man in his twenties, who answered the phone at the cottage like a thirteen year old who you just know won't pass on the message. Fortunately, my friend was there and he handed her the phone. But, when later in the evening I heard his story from her, I regretted my judgment of him: he'd been through so much.
Rev. James F. Talbot had sexually abused him and others, some of whom are also stepping forward to press charges, while they were students at the private Catholic high school in Maine where Talbot taught from 1980 to 1998. Like so many of these clergy abuse cases, Talbot had been transferred there in 1980 under a cloud of suspicion from his prior job, as teacher and coach at Boston College High School. The Globe recently reported that Talbot has been indicted on charges that he sexually abused three students there in the 1970s (Sacha Pfeiffer, Globe Staff, 9/18/2002).
This summer, having iced tea and snacks on their lake-side deck with this young man and then hearing his story from my friend .brought this scandal home to me in a way that the news stories hadn't. Whatever made him vulnerable to this priest's advances and whatever kept him from reporting them at the time, the impact of the abuse caused long-term trouble for him. I hope that pressing charges will build the self-worth of this young man and bring closure to his brush with the clergy sex scandal.
By way of contrast, the guest in our backyard, also a privileged young white man in his twenties, had not been a victim of the corporate ethics scandal. In fact, it was as if his connection with it gave him a certain cache, now that he's a law student at one of our area's top schools. He had worked for several years post-college as a sales rep, he told me, for a software company in the Washington area that had been wildly successful expanding into all sorts of areas. Alluding to unethical practices, he said, "then the firm got carried away by its greed, cooked its books," resulting in a pop of its bubble during the dot-com fiasco. He is too young and was too low on the totem pole to be effected, but when the company's stocks plummeted to 75 cents a share, there must have been some who were hard hit. As he considers the job offers he now has from two of Boston's most prestigious law firms, I wonder what lessons this young man carries with him from his brush with the corporate ethics scandal.
These encounters prompt my reflections on betrayal in numerous directions, too many to develop in a single sermon. So what might be of most importance?
Surely, on the institutional and societal level, it is important that the rule of law be brought to bear on both these scandals. Criminal allegations of sexual abuse by priests are now working their way through the civil courts, where I am sure most of us believe they belonged in the first place. Furthermore, in response to the scandal, the laws in Massachusetts regarding the reporting of suspected sexual and other kinds of abuse have since been revised to require clergy of all faiths to report suspected abuse to civil authorities in a timely fashion.
And the corporate scandal has resulted at least in the Corporate Fraud Bill signed into law by President Bush in mid-summer. Whether his administration will win in its effort to avoid government regulation of the accounting industry remains to be seen, such regulation being a matter of disagreement among thoughtful people. However, I see no reason why accountants should be in any less need of government regulation than any other profession- we're all human in our susceptibility to temptation. Even Federal Reserve Chairman Allan Greenspan admitted to having been wrong in his pre-scandal belief that "accountants didn't need government regulation because they had such a strong self-interest in maintaining their reputation for honesty." He, too, blamed the scandal at least in part on "infectious greed." (www.cbsnews.com/stories/2002/07/16)
But, that said, about laws and regulations, these scandals have mostly led me to wonder about human moral development.
How do we learn what is right and what is wrong? What goes into knowing right from wrong, and then acting on that knowledge? Why is one person able, and another not able, to stop him or her self from doing wrong? Why is one person able, and another not able, to stop, or at least report on, someone doing wrong? The power of a clergy person over a child or a boss over an employee makes it very difficult to stop an authority figure bent on doing wrong, But reporting the behavior afterwards is another matter, yet some are able and some are not.why?
I'm reminded of the line in "Let It Be a Dance," our closing hymn last Sunday, which goes, "If nothing's wrong, then nothing's right."
How can we shore up our own abilities to do right and to stop or report wrong? How do we know what is right, what is wrong? How do we teach the children in our midst about right and wrong? How do we teach children that they are so inherently worthy that no one, even the most powerful adult in their lives, has the right to abuse them emotionally, physically, spiritually, sexually. How do we teach them to be scrupulously honest and to value the good in life over the goods?
These scandals raised such questions in my mind. How did I learn right from wrong? How did you? Have my children? Have yours?
Author Alice Walker recalls "a scene when I was only three or so in which my father questioned me about a fruit jar I had accidentally broken. I felt he knew I had broken it, at the same time I couldn't be sure. Apparently breaking it was, in any event, the wrong thing to have done. I could say, Yes, I broke the jar, and risk a whipping for breaking something valuable or No, I didn't break it, and perhaps bluff my way through."
She continues, "I've never forgotten my feeling that he really wanted me to tell the truth. And because he seemed to desire it-and the moments during which he waited for my reply seemed quite out of time, so much so I can still feel them, and, as I said, I was only three-I confessed. I broke the jar, I said. I think he hugged me. He probably didn't, but I still feel as if he did, so embraced did I feel by the happy relief I noted on his face and by the fact that he didn't punish me at all, but seemed, instead, pleased with me. I think it was at that moment that I resolved to take my chances with the truth, although as the years rolled on I was to break more serious things in his scheme of things than fruit jars." (from Fathers, Jon Winokur, Ed. quoted in A Call to Character, Greer & Kohl, Eds., p. 237).
"Because he seemed to desire it.I confessed." "He really wanted me to tell the truth." Alice Walker learned at an early age that telling the truth was the right thing to do, because she could tell that's what her father who loved her really wanted. He did not punish her for breaking the fruit jar, but embraced her for telling a difficult truth.
What would she have learned if her father had whipped her for breaking the jar? She might have learned it was better to lie.
What would she have learned if she had tried to bluff her way through it and he had let her, despite the fact that he pretty well knew she had broken the jar? She might have learned it was okay to lie.
Do you have childhood memories of learning right from wrong?
I have one from a much later age than three. I was old enough to be a Girl Scout as opposed to Brownie, so perhaps I was in fourth grade or so. Our troop had gone on an overnight camping trip. Upon my return, I enthusiastically reported to my mother that it had been fun. But, after our next weekly Girl Scout meeting, I told her a very different story, a story my mother could tell in an instant I'd gotten from the troop leaders: all about how awful it had been that there were no outhouses and we had to dig our own latrines. I remember feeling ashamed as my mother reprimanded me for changing my story, telling me it was wrong to be so influenced by other people's opinions that I negated my own experience.
As children, we learn right from wrong in childhood interactions with, and observations of, the people upon whom we rely for our daily sustenance and protection. Walker could sense as her father waited that he desired her to tell the truth, which she did. That intuitive sense of hers was then confirmed by the happy relief she saw on his face. Likewise, I could tell from my mother's anger and disappointment that she thought I had done wrong, and that she expected me to tell the truth.
The truth has a certain clarity to it: the fruit jar broke, or it didn't. It was a mostly fun camping trip, or it wasn't. You violated a child sexually, or you didn't. You hid financial transactions from your auditor, or you didn't.
Vagueness, on the other hand, allows for shading of the truth, permits falsehoods, and conspires on behalf of deception. George Orwell made a similar point, but in reverse, in his 1946 book Politics and the English Language, "The great enemy of clear language is insincerity." (Bartlett's Familiar Quotations, p. 711)
I think public discourse in our culture is becoming increasingly vague. It worries me. Such vagueness obscures the truth. You've heard of the "dumbing down" of language. This is more like "vagueing out."
A democracy, a congregation, a family, a friendship, a commercial transaction, a legal contract-the success of any of these depends on sincerity and clarity of agreement.
Let me give you a few examples of this vagueing out.
It is common for people to say a particular behavior is "inappropriate" when what we mean is not that it's "not proper" but that it just isn't right. For example, I would say (as Canton High School has recently declared, however unpopularly) that bare midriffs down nearly to the pubic hair are "inappropriate" as in "not proper" high school attire. But, I would not call gay-bashing at the high school "inappropriate." I would call it "wrong."
Another example. We say "that makes me uncomfortable" as if our comfort was the bottom line. It would be clearer to instead say, "in my judgment that is wrong." True, we often recognize when something we want to do or say is wrong because it makes us feel uneasy inside, but being uncomfortable can also be a good thing, as in the discomfort that often attends personal growth or change.
These are examples of how we talk in public, vaguely.
Public figures, increasingly, are even worse. Hear George Orwell, again, "Political language.is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind." ( Bartlett's).
For example, we have heard all too many public figures describe a lie or fabrication as a "mistake" as if there was no intent, no volition, no responsibility for the falsehood, as if one can "white out" a lie the way you can white out a typing mistake.
Additionally, this month many references were euphemistically made to "the events of September 11th." The terrorist attacks on that day were not mere "events," like cultural or sporting events! They were terrorist attacks. We need the clearest, most honest ways to describe what is going on in the world if we are to understand what is true, what is right and what is wrong in the world.
Likewise, by coining phrases like "the war on poverty," "the war on drugs" or "the war on terrorism," the word "war" came to have a vague connotation, one that does not require a Congressional vote, nor require sacrifice from the citizenry the way real wars used to. And so, over time, we the people could be deluded. We might just forget that the people, through Congress, are guaranteed a voice in the declaration of war, and the executive branch of government might just assume greater power than the Constitution allows.
I have not forgotten that I have a voice. I called my Congressional representatives about the proposed war on Iraq-have you? In my case, it was to say I believe this new doctrine of pre-emptive war to be wrong, though I recognize some of you may think differently. Today, during Coffee Hour, the Social Action Committee is offering us the opportunity to send post cards to our congressional representatives and, whatever you might write on it, I urge you to use your voice. We ought to bundle them up and send them Same Day Express, as a vote could well take place tomorrow.
Let us be clear. Mistakes are accidental, like breaking a fruit jar. Cooking the books and sexual abuse are not just inappropriate; they are wrong. War is a military campaign.
Let us be clear. The more we allow language, the words with which we describe reality, to be employed to obscure the truth rather than reveal it, the more we, collectively and individually, lose our ability to tell right from wrong. or to know when we have been betrayed.
Amen.