May 3, 2008
May 17, 2008
June 7, 2008
Delivered at
The Unitarian Universalist Fellowship of Vero Beach
August 29, 2004
READING
THE FREE MIND
I call that mind free which masters the senses, and which recognizes its own reality and greatness:
Which passes life not in asking what it shall eat or drink, but in hungering, thirsting, and seeking after righteousness.
I call that mind free which jealously guards its intellectual rights and powers, which does not content itself with a passive or hereditary faith:
Which opens itself to light whencesoever it may come; which receives new truth as an angel from heaven.
I call that mind free which is not passively framed by outward circumstances, and is not the creature of accidental impulse:
Which discovers everywhere the radiant signatures of the infinite spirit, and in them finds help to its own spiritual enlargement.
I call that mind free which protects itself against the usurpations of society, and which does not cower to human opinion:
Which refuses to be the slave or tool of the many or of the few, and guards its empire over itself as nobler than the empire of the world.
I call that mind free which resists the bondage of habit, which does not mechanically copy the past, nor live on its old virtues:
But which listens for new and higher monitions of conscience, . and rejoices to pour itself forth in fresh and higher exertions.
I call that might free which sets no bounds to its love, which, wherever they are seen, delights in virtue and sympathizes with suffering:
Which recognizes in all human beings the image of God and the rights of God’s children, and offers itself up a willing sacrifice to the cause of humankind.
I call that mind free which is cast off all fear but that of wrongdoing, and which no menace or peril can enthrall:
Which is calm the midst of tumults, and possesses itself, though all else be lost."
William Ellery Channing
SERMON
It is good to be here. This is my home congregation, and I’m looking at all the faces that have nurtured me and supported me in my process of growing as a Unitarian Universalist and also in the process of becoming a minister up at the church in Melbourne. Just a little update about that, I’m preaching almost every Sunday at three congregations in Melbourne, and also down at the Treasure Coast UU Church periodically. So I’m learning what it’s like to be an itinerant minister and what they must have felt as they rode from church to church during the week. I’m actually loving it quite a lot.
On this Sunday we are going to talk about social justice. I’m not necessarily going to talk about what we do as a Social Justice Committee, because we do many things and I hope we continue to many things such as workshops, community education, and calling our congregation’s attention to those issues that need attention that are about social injustice. What I want to talk about today is the environment in which social justice can occur. And I’m going to begin to talk about an environment in which social justice did not occur, and I hope by doing it that way we can see the difference and the contrast. There are probably I think three or four points that I want to communicate, and the first point is that we need to be cautious not to let the political override the prophetic. The second point is without Civil Liberties there is no social justice. The third point I want to make is that we live in a culture and the cultural myth that we live in moves us away from social justice. The last thing I want to talk about is why UUs are in trouble and also may be part of the last hope of democracy.
What I want to talk about at first is the struggle for Social Justice in the nation of Israel from 750 - 350 B.C.E., and I want to mention the prophetic voice that was in the nation of Israel, and I want to read from Amos , Isaiah, and several other prophets very briefly, and I want to capture some of their sentences and some of their words that we can get an idea of what is like not to live with social justice.
From Amos. "You oppress the poor and crush the needy. You say to your husbands bring us more drink. You make the poor pay taxes. And their crops you exert a grain tax from them. You trample the needy and you get rid of the destitute of the land" (and the verb for "get rid of" is exterminate.). "You are eager to sell less for higher prices and to cheat the buyer with rigged scales."
From the prophet Isaiah: "Those who accumulate houses are as good as dead. Those who accumulate landed property until there is no land left, and you are the only landowners remaining within the land."
From Micah. "Those who devise sinful plans in the evening because they have the power to do so, they confiscate field after field after field. They seize house after house after house. And they deprive the man of the land they inherited." (Micah was writing in the year 700 B.C.E.) "You hate justice and you do not do what is right. Her leaders take bribes when they decide legal cases. Her priests teach for profit and her prophets read omens for pay."
And this one when I was reading it reminded me particularly of El Salvador. "Faithful men have disappeared from the land. There are no godly men left. They all wait for ambush so they can shed blood. They hunt their own brother with a net. They are determined to be experts at doing evil. Government officials and judges take bribes, prominent men make demands, and they all do what is necessary to satisfy themselves. Do not rely on a friend. Do not trust a companion. Do not even share secrets with the one who lies in your arms. For a son who thinks his father is a fool, a daughter challenges her mother, and a daughter-in-law her mother-in-law, and a man’s enemies are his own servants."
From Jeremiah. "Do not believe in the lying words and have confidence in what the rulers say. Stop oppressing foreigners who live in your land, children who have lost their fathers, and women who have lost their husbands. Stop killing innocent people. You are putting your confidence in delusional talk. You steal. When you take an oath you lie."
From Lamentations. "Strangers take possession of the land we inherited. The foreigners to occupy our homes. We must pay money to drink our own water. We must buy our own wood" (their source of energy) "at a very steep price." (So privatization is not new.) "Our ancestors sinned, those who have gone before us, and we are left to bear their punishment."
What I noticed about this 350 year period is there wasn’t a government; there were governing systems. That’s going to be important for us to understand, because the four governing systems I identified as the prophets spoke were an economic system, the political system, a justice system, and a religious system. Four different governing systems created legislation to rule the people. And the absence of Civil Liberties is just glaring.
What’s missing is Civil Liberties, and why is that so important? Civil Liberties need to stand between the citizenship and any governing force. They are the guard against oppression. They are the guard against tyranny that can move throughout the land. In the place of the prophets, they needed Civil Liberties between the government, the justice system, the economic system, and the religious system.
Not just Civil Liberties between them and one of the governing systems. I think we’ll see this clearly when we read the words of William Ellery Channing and what he has to say about Civil Liberties. Channing was the author of the reading we read, and that was from a sermon called "Spiritual Freedom" which he delivered to the Massachusetts Legislature. Channing connects our spiritual lives and the formation of our inner lives with Civil Liberties. He is saying that Civil Liberties are what create the spiritually free mind, which is described in the reading we read earlier. "I now proceed, as I proposed, to show, that civil or political liberty is of little worth, but as it springs from, expresses, and invigorates this spiritual freedom. I account civil liberty as the chief good of states, because it accords with, and ministers to, energy and elevation of mind… Liberty which does not minister to action and the growth of power, is only a name, is no better than slavery." What is the chief curse of tyranny, he says, and this should teach us that civil freedom is a blessing, chiefly as it reverences the human soul and ministers to growth and power without inward spiritual freedom, outward liberty is of little worth and is dominated by those who oppress us. What Channing is saying, the highest function of a governing system is to pay attention to the inner mind of the citizens that it rules. I have never read that before. I’ve read about protecting our rights and Civil Liberties and those kinds of things. I never really read before how Civil Liberties are connected to our inner world. And Channing talks about our inner world in a way that is alive and a way that is invigorated in which the imagination just springs forth. He says let us guard our intellectual properties. Let us guard our intellectual rights jealously. He says that we should not behave in habits, that we should look at our habits and we should transform away from our habits if they are oppressive.
What he is doing when he says that, he is saying that our imaginative capacities must be able to step out of our lives and our histories and look ourselves and evaluate who we are in our history and determine if we need to be in a process of transformation. And I’m suggesting that we are in a culture that influences us not to be able to do that. We’re living in a culture that would move us away from what Channing calls spiritual freedom. So we must ask ourselves, who and what are the governing systems today in which we need to have Civil Liberties between us and those governing systems?
Jamie Court writing in the book called Corporateering asks "Do corporate values govern American life today?" It’s a fair question. Robert Reich, President Clinton’s former Secretary of Labor, in March 2001 has this to say. "There is no countervailing power in Washington. Business is in complete control of the machinery of government." I got to thinking about that. Who are the persons in charge of the businesses that control the machinery of government? And how do they influence the systems of governance? And how do they use legislation to bypass the needs of the people? This is how it works.
Our Congress passed legislation called the Clean Air act, because it says that if the contaminants in gasoline rise to this level, it’s harmful for the citizenship. As a result of that we’re going to clean the air up and we’re going to create legislation that’s going to rule in the land to clear the air up. But Venezuela said to the World Trade Organization, that is unfair to us. They appealed to the WTO, and we changed our legislation. The influence of another nation changed the legislation that rules the citizens in this country. And there are many other examples and we could go on and on and on. What Channing is pointing out is that the states and the governing systems need to be for the individual, not the individual for the state. Historically governments and governing systems created a way of life and imposed that way of life on the citizenship. What Channing does is he turns that upside down. He says the governing systems need to nurture the inner worlds of the citizens so that they can be free. And he says that if it’s not happening that way, it is tantamount to slavery.
So we must ask ourselves a question, how is that we as a body of people have allowed governing systems to rule over us in which we do not have Civil Liberties to protect us? We know that economic systems, religious systems play a role in the governing of who we are and we also know that other countries play a role in the governing of who we are, and we also know that there are organizations out there that we have trade treaties with, that have more power than local citizenship. The question we need to ask, not necessarily is it right or wrong, because we need economic systems, we need corporations to pull together masses of resources to create an environment which we have to build roads, to build cars, and those kinds of things. We need them. The question we need to ask is how is it that we were negligent in creating a set of Civil Liberties between all the systems that govern us. Because in order to have social justice, you have to have Civil Liberties. Many of us are quite aware of the attack on the Constitution to change the formation of our Civil Liberties.
In a recent article Bob Barr writes... and many of you have a picture in your mind of who Bob Barr is, if you remember when the Republicans crossed the street to impeach Clinton and Bob Barr was there, so I made a lot of assumptions about Bob Barr that were inaccurate because of that. How he has helped me understand who he is little better... he wrote an article recently that because of the Patriot act, this can happen–he says at this particular time FBI agents can knock on your door and can visit you at work and ask you if you are a potential protester. Not that you’ve done anything wrong, but are you a potential protester. Now the justice system said that this is not a violation of our Civil Liberties. So the FBI has permission to do this by the justice system. It’s frightening. If they ask you if you know of anybody who might protest, and you say no, even though you do, it is a crime. When the FBI interviews you, you have to speak the truth, and if you don’t speak the truth, it is a criminal offense.
So the question I have it is how do we get here? How does the citizenship get here? One way that gives me a clue that something is happening in our inner minds that is not helpful–and this is an indictment against myself, and this may be uncomfortable for some, but it is nonetheless, I feel, true–I can go into a store and buy a pair of shoes that I know are made by workers in poor working conditions, some call it slavery, poorly paid, in toxic conditions; and I’ll buy that product, and I’ll wear that product, and I will have no empathy or compassion for the laborers who made that product. What has happened to my mind that I can do that? And how did it happen to me? How did it happen to us as a people? That we can stand on the back of people who are treated unjustly that create products that make our life better and not really feel it. And not feel compassion.
I think I have somewhat of an answer to that. A theorist who writes in the psychoanalytical world, Christopher Bollas, has a chapter in one of his books, Being a Character, and the chapter is called "The Fascist State of Mind." He asks the question in that chapter, how can it possibly be that a free nation can move to be a fascist nation? How does that happen? And he says that cannot possibly happen unless first this happens. That the inner minds of the people create an ideology that they can’t even question within themselves. Create a belief system that they can’t even question within themselves. No critical self reflection. Recently I was talking to a friend, a fairly conservative Christian friend–and we are good friends, so I can tell the story–and he believes in hell. And I don’t believe in hell. And when I told him that I did not believe in hell, he looked at me and his head went kind of crooked. "If there is no hell, then what are we to do?" he asked. Behind the ideology that there is a hell, behind the belief system that there is a hell, in his mind at that moment in time, was blank. It is not a thought that he ever considered. And we have a lot of areas where we have a belief system and behind that belief system, we are blank. When I talked about buying a product that I am confident was made by laborers that are not treated fairly, I have to begin to look at what I call our "lived ideology," not our "spoken ideology," because if I were sitting in the living room with my family, if I’m preaching from the pulpit, I would certainly say that I do not support slavery, and I do not support poor working conditions. That is my spoken ideology. But my lived ideology tells a different story. My behavior tells a different story. So Bollas says something needs to happen in order for the individuals of a nation to begin to wall off who they are with particular belief systems, so they don’t even question themselves, and we defend ourselves intensely when people challenge that system, because we can’t get beyond it, because we have so much energy invested in it.
For another example, I was talking to a friend and this friend was passionately criticizing a political person. I mean, it was intense. So after the intensity passed, I asked the question, well, what is the voting record of that candidate? He had no idea. When that happens, an ideology of right and wrong has been imposed by that person within themselves, and they push a particular idea but there’s no critical reflection and logic to back up the belief.
Christopher Bollas says there are eight stages to moving from a free state of mind to a fascist state of mind. And this is why I think UUs are in trouble, because I think that these eight stages are so intertwined in our culture, so intertwined in our self beliefs, that we act with them and we believe in them and we move in the direction of these eight characteristics just like the air we breathe and we don’t question them. I believe they have been normalized in our culture. These eight stages are decontextualization, distortion, denigration, caricature, character assassination, change of name, aggregation to a group, and absence of reference.
So what does decontextualization mean anyway? What it means is that when I say that what happened in New York on 911 is the same as what happened in Pearl Harbor, what happened at that particular point is I take all my understanding of Pearl Harbor, what it meant to the country, what it meant to us militarily, what it meant to us economically, socially, politically, what it meant to rile the people up and say this is a problem–all of that I bring from that date and I bring it over into the context of 911 and I merge the two. And when I merge the two, it confuses the issues. Because now what I believe to be true, that one was like the other, I have to interpret what happened on 911 in terms of what happened at Pearl Harbor. I don’t necessarily interpret what happened on 911 in the present cultural context. I’ve decontextualized it. And when we decontextualized, we can work things so they fit better with our belief system. Relationally or personally, how decontextualization works is I am having an argument with somebody and I say, "Remember two years ago when you did this? That’s just like what’s happening right now." Well no, it’s not like what’s happening right now because what’s happening right now is different from two years ago. And how many of us do that as couples? We take something from history and we impose it on the here and now, and we interpret the here and now from history, not the here and now. The personal decontextualization is how we surrender the aliveness of our inner minds, which presents us from having the free mind that Channing talks about.
Distortion. Pick up the newspaper. Go on the Internet. And it’s not just one side or the other side: it has become a way of life, and we don’t question that, we just accept it. It’s in the cultural mix. We’ve normalized distortion.
Character assassination. One guy is not bright, one guy is a coward, neither is true, but we assassinate their character for a particular reason–to move our belief systems to match culture, we do character assassination. We belittle. We shame people. And when we shame people what happens is we don’t have to listen to them. We don’t have to hear their voice when we shame them. We can say, 0h they’re just part of that liberal group. They’re just part of that conservative group. And as soon as we do that, we’ve stopped ourselves from listening to a voice of a fellow citizen. As soon as we do that within ourselves, and you can look at your own inner life, is their a critical voice connected to a sense of shame? Do we criticize ourselves? Are we hard on ourselves? How many of us have ever said, I’m harder on myself than anybody else. When we do that we shame ourselves. And when we shame ourselves, we move closer to the fascist state of mind.
Change of name. I think on a personal level, and in personal relationships, this may be one of the most horrible, well they’re all horrible, but this is one that catches me. The change of name. Because I know that as the first act of aggression or the first act of conflict, you change the person’s name, or you change the group of people’s names, because when I do that I am no longer relating to an individual. I am no longer relating to a human being. I am relating to this name that I created. And when I can relate to a name that I created, that’s not the human being, I can objectify that name. And when I can objectify that name, I can eliminate that name because it’s a problem.
The last one, absence of reference. Who writes the history? The powerful right the history. How many of you have ever looked at Howard Zinn’s book The People’s History? How many of you have looked at that? Look at that book. When you read that book, you will read history that you were not taught. You will read history that will shock you and you will also read history that has a major impact on who we are as a people and as a nation, but it’s not in our history books. One of my dreams is to one day write a book called the Silent Civil War. The Silent Civil War is how the labor movement and companies enacted with one another in the 1920s ‘30s and ‘40s. Because people were removed from their homes, people were arrested without breaking the law; it was a war. But there is no conversation in the general public about this Silent Civil War. I took U.S. History One and Two in high school and college, and that labor movement is not included in that history in the detail it needs to be. It’s just not there. There’s an absence of reference. If we just don’t talk about it we don’t have to deal with it.
As Unitarian Universalists, we were born creating Civil Liberties. It is who we are. Social justice runs through our veins. You cannot separate Unitarian Universalism from social justice. When you read our history you cannot separate the two. We cannot allow the political to eliminate the prophetic voice.
Because when we do that Civil Liberties disappear. And when Civil Liberties disappear, ways of being in the world disappear. We must answer the call of our faith ancestors who fought and created Civil Liberties coming out of Poland in the 1570's to 1640s. We must answer that call. And when we see these eight characteristics that are movement toward tyranny and fascism, we are to call the community’s attention to decontextualization, to distortion, to belittling, to shaming, and we are to look within our own minds to see if we do those things to ourselves, and if we do those things to those whom we love.
We’re called to that as Unitarian Universalists. Bill Sinkford walks the picket lines with the sanitation workers of New York. He goes to Washington, talks against the war, and he is a representative of Unitarian Universalism who is in the midst of our culture saying what he feels and believes whether it is popular or not popular. He is the only leader of a religious group that I know of that does that. He does that because he is in a prophetic tradition. He is true to the history of who we are as Unitarian Universalists.
In conclusion, this social justice that runs through our veins, this sense of social justice moves us in a way that it makes our minds alive, critical thinking, making meaning; it does not allow us to accept meaning made by others. It creates a buffer zone between us and culture for us to evaluate, for us to think about. It creates a way of life in my mind that when I go into a store, I pick the product up, and I read about it, and I look at the labels, and I try to understand it so that I can separate myself from an unconscious process that is tyrannical for another person in this world.. We were born out of the cry for justice. And so be it.
Copyright 2004, Rev. Gregory Wilson, D.Min.
