Bending the Arc of the Universe Toward Justice

Right now, in the Oval Office of the President of the United States, there is a rug.

It seems like an obvious thing, to have a rug in an office, even one as spectacular as the Oval Office. This is not the first rug to ever be there, nor will it be the last.

But truth be told, it never occurred to me that there would be a rug in there. I just assumed it was carpeted.

This rug was commissioned by President Obama.  Apparently, this is a thing. Presidents get new rugs in their office.

Around the perimeter of this rug are five quotes, and those five quotes are the reason that I’m even talking about the rug with you this morning.

The five quotes around the presidential rug are, according to Mr. Rich Ruggeri, President of Scott Group Custom Carpets who created and donated the Presidential Rug:

The only thing we have to fear is fear itself, by President Franklin D. Roosevelt. The arc of moral universe is long, but it bends towards justice. That was Martin Luther King. The government of the people, by the people, for the people, that was obviously President Abraham Lincoln. No problem for human destiny is beyond human beings, that was President John F. Kennedy. And then the last presidential quote was the welfare of each of us is dependent fundamentally upon the welfare of all of us, and that was President Theodore Roosevelt.[1]

The President chose these quotes to serve as guide and inspiration to him during his impossible work as President of the United States.

Now you may notice a theme already.  The second quote, attributed by Mr. Ruggeri to the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., “The moral arc of the universe is long, but it bends towards justice.”  Earlier Linda and I read to you two longer quotes from ministers in both the 19^th and 20^th centuries.

Melissa Block, NPR Reporter, did this story about the presidential rug, and a second story in which she uncovers the true origin of the Moral Arc quote, as well as a second of the five quotes. Lincoln’s famous quote about the government of the people, by the people and for the people? Turns out that President Lincoln borrowed that phrase from none other than Unitarian minister, Theodore Parker.

So there you have it. President Obama, perhaps unknowingly, reaching back to the lessons learned in his childhood attending Sunday School at the First Unitarian Universalist Church of Honolulu. Two of the five quotes around the oval office have clearly Unitarian Universalist origins.

Now about this moral arc of the universe business…

Theodore Parker’s sermon from 1853 is terrific. It’s also written to be preached for about 90 minutes at almost 9,000 words. Dr. King’s sermon is, as you would expect, invigorating. Though I didn’t do a word count on his sermon, I listened to it as well as read, and it was about 20 minutes.

There are common themes between the two ministers and their sermons. Rev. Parker is addressing his congregation in a time when slavery is still the law of the land, and he decries this. In fact, Rev. Parker decried slavery a lot. To be fair, at first he didn’t see the fight against slavery as his fight, but he was convinced by a friend that it in fact WAS his fight, and fight Parker did. He was so outspoken about abolition that many of the other ministers in Boston stopped talking to him and he stopped being invited to ministerial gatherings….of his fellow Unitarian ministers.

That’s right. Like all people, we like to make the best of history, and not shine the flashlight of truth too deep into the recesses of our history, but there was a time when an Anti-Slavery Unitarian Minister was considered a trouble maker. Happily, with the constant debate over just how involved the Unitarian ministers of Boston ought to be in the fight over slavery, eventually we came out on the right side of history, well before the Civil War. 

But we didn't start off that way.

It was a process.

As a faith, it took us time to bend.

In his sermon, Of Justice and the Conscience, Rev Parker writes:

Attraction is the most general law in the material world, and prevents a schism in the universe ; temperance is the law of the body, and prevents a schism in the members ; justice is the law of conscience, and prevents a schism in the moral world, amongst individuals in a family, communities in a state, or nations in the world of men. Temperance is corporeal justice, the doing right to each limb of the body, and is the mean proportional between appetite and appetite, or one and all ; sacrificing no majority to one desire, however great, — no minority, however little, to a majority, — but giving each its due, and all the harmonious and well-proportioned symmetry that is meet for all. It keeps the proportions betwixt this and that, and holds an even balance within the body, so that there shall be no excess.[2]

But because this is not a completed process, he also writes further along in his sermon, “Yet the mass of men are always looking for what is just.”[3] Implying that it is not yet readily found.

In Parker’s sermon he lays out the idea that humanity is seeking the balance of justice because it is a natural law, a law, that like gravity must be figured out. A natural law, to his definition, is not one that we create, but that we discover has been there all along, but only articulated by us as we develop as a species. To Parker, Justice is a natural law, a law that is consistent with a Benevolent Diety.

Dr. King’s sermon is full of imagery of mountains. He wrote and delivered his “Keep Moving this Mountain” sermon for the Temple Israel in Hollywood.  It’s natural, given his intended audience, that Dr. King would use the story of Moses and the escape of the Jews from the slavery of Egypt.

The trouble began, King says, when the Jews realized that getting from slavery to the Promised Land was going to be a lot of effort. From King’s sermon:

Moses stood up over and over again in Pharaoh’s court and cried out, “Let my people go!” Pharaoh with a hardened heart refused over and over again. But then came that glad day when the Red Sea opened and God’s children were able to leave the darkness of Egypt and move on to the other side. But as soon as they got out of Egypt they discovered that before they could get to the Promised Land there was a difficult, trying wilderness ahead. They had to realize that before they could get to the Promised Land, they had to face gigantic mountains and prodigious hilltops.

And so, as a result of this realization, three groups of people emerged. One group said in substance that “We would rather go back to Egypt.” They preferred the flush parts of Egypt to the challenges of the Promised Land. A second group that abhorred the idea of going back to Egypt, and yet they abhorred the idea of facing the difficulties of moving ahead to the Promised Land and they somehow wanted to remain stationary and choose the line of least resistance. There was a third group, probably influenced by Caleb and Joshua who had gone over to spy a bit and who admitted that there were giants in the land but who said, “We can possess the land.” This group said in substance that “We will go on in spite of...,” that “We will not allow anything to stop us,” that “We will move on amid the difficulties, amid the trials, amid the tribulations.”[4]

King then talks about a very real, common experience of humanity:

In some real sense, we are all moving toward some "promised land" of personal and collective fulfillment. In every age and every generation, men have envisioned a promised land. Some may have envisioned it with the wrong ideology, with the wrong philosophical presupposition. But men in every generation thought in terms of some promised land.[5]

And then Dr. King talks about three metaphorical mountains that his contemporaries were dealing with, just as Moses dealt with the mountains outside of Egypt. We must leave the Mountain of Material Comfort, the Mountain of Racial Injustice and the Mountain of Indifference Concerning Poverty.

We must, he instructs his listeners, move out of the mountains and through the dangers of the land between us and the Promised Land. Though the way, he acknowledges, will be made with both physical and spiritual losses.  But these must be borne, he says, to bend the moral arc of the universe toward justice.

At the conclusion of his sermon, given over 100 years before Dr. King’s, Rev. Parker tells his listeners that Justice may well be the Natural Law, the Will of the Loving God they believe in, but

in human affairs the justice of God must work by human means. Men are the measures of God's principles ; our morality the instrument of his justice, which stilleth alike the waves of the sea, the tumult of the people, and the oppressor's brutal rage. Justice is the idea of God, the ideal of man, the rule of conduct writ in the nature of mankind. The ideal must become actual, God's thought a human thing, made real in a reign of righteousness, and a kingdom — no, a Commonwealth — of justice on the earth. You and I can help forward that work. God will not disdain to use our prayers, our self-denial, and the little atoms of justice that personally belong to us, to establish his mighty work, — the development of mankind. You and I may work with Him, and, as on the floor of the Pacific Sea little insects lay the foundation of firm islands, slowly uprising from the tropic wave, so you and I in our daily life, in house, or field, or shop, obscurely faithful, may prepare the way for the republic of righteousness, the democracy of justice that is to come. Our own (pg 101) morality shall bless us here; not in our outward life alone, but in the inward and majestic life of conscience. All the justice we mature shall bless us here, yea, and hereafter; but at our death we leave it added to the common store of humankind. Even the crumbs that fall from our table may save a brother's life. You and I may help deepen the channel of human morality in which God's justice runs, and the wrecks of evil, which now check the stream, be borne off the sooner by the strong, all-conquering tide of right, the river of God that is full of blessing. [6]

Both of these men, these amazing preachers of their time, call for justice for all of humanity. They focus in part, but not exclusively, on the place of African Americans in our society.

Each of these men issues a call to action for people of good conscience to act in small and large ways to bend the arc, not wait for the arc to be bent, but to bend the arc ourselves toward justice.

If the arc of the moral universe is going to be bent toward justice, it is we who must provide the labor to make it so. As Rev. Parker tells us, Justice is a Natural Law, an undeniable state of being, but it must be realized by us. As Dr. King tells us, the path will not be easy, and suffering will be part of bringing Parker’s ideals into being.

It’s hard to follow two such giants in the theological, historical and rhetorical landscape of our nation, but I would humbly add this message to you.

We must do what’s right. We must add our own hands to the work of bending the universe.  Like the people in the time of Parker and of King, there are people who’s vision of what is fair and just is not the same as our vision, and they are working as diligently, if not more so, than we are to bring about their hopes for a world that feels “right” to them.

In leaving the metaphorical mountains that Dr. King spoke about will be uncertainty and there will be hurt. But there will be uncertainty and hurt in staying in the mountains, too, but without the benefit of new vistas of beauty to discover along the way.

Let us spend 2015 answering the call of both our Unitarian forebear, Rev. Theodore Parker who tells us that humanity is responsible for bringing the Commonwealth of Heaven into reality here on Earth; and Dr. King’s call step out into the uncertain to help create the world we dream of.

May the words and works of the men and women whose examples we follow inspire us to live more fully into our dreams.

Amen.

---

[1] http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=129584565

[2] Pg. 74

[3] Pg. 79

[4] http://www.americanrhetoric.com/speeches/mlktempleisraelhollywood.htm

[5] ibid.

[6] Of Justice and Conscience

Space is Sacred

This space is made sacred by our presence.

By your presence.

This building has value to us because it is where we come to see friends, where we sing hymns together, even if we are not the most confident of singers.

It is the place we think of as safe.

Safe for ourselves and for our children.

Safe no matter who we love, no matter the tone of our skin, no matter the accent we have when we speak.

It is where we turn in times of trouble. Both trouble as an individual and also as a nation.

This is our place. We are safe here.

And we want this to be true that others, the stranger who comes to our door, would also feel safe.


Like every human institution though, as indeed with every human being themselves, we are not always what we hope to be.

There are some lovely aspects to our building. The windows, for example, are terrific. Look at how big they are!  On glorious days they show us the natural beauty of the world around us.

Or on a day like today, they show us that gray, vaguely hazy MidWest Sky that we all know very well. The one that will be in place, save a few days here and there, until March.

And the heat loss!

But still, they are wonderful.


There are other parts of our church building that I could wax eloquently upon, but I’m sure you’ve picked up the message. Even if though a place may be sacred, its value does not guarantee that it is also perfect.



Behind my seat in the office back there, I have a quote by Alex Haley, author of Roots, among many other things. The quote says “Find the good and celebrate it!”

It’s been kind of a hard couple of weeks to think about celebrating.

There’s been so much social media attention on what’s being termed “Blue on Black Crime,” meaning crimes committed by members of the police force against people who are African American.

There have been rallies and protests across our nation in response to Grand Jury opinions and there are calls to action.

Some calls I have answered. I went downtown two weeks ago to witness to the protest of the ruling out of St. Louis. Rina was there, as was Rev. Denis and Lois.

I have scoured the news for future events where my voice might be given a chance to be heard, or more accurately, where I could witness to others’ voices who need to be heard, and keep my own voice in check.


A little while ago, I lit the first candle of Advent. Advent is the season of waiting and anticipation. Our Christian friends and neighbors are of course awaiting the anniversary of the birth of Jesus, their prophet.

While I’m not in that particular version of advent, I too am in the season of an advent. I’m waiting, anticipating the arrival of a world more fair and just.

I read an article this week, written by a reporter who attended an event put on by The Ethics Project in St. Louis, Missouri.  The President of the Ethics Project, Christie Griffin wanted a different kind of discussion to take place, so she invited several African American women to the stage, and they spoke about having to have “the talk” with their sons.

By “the talk” it’s meant of course Things you need to know in order to survive in this country of ours, with our broken and unfair systems. To quote the Arabic-American woman who reported on this event “She wanted to invite mothers of other races to hear directly from black mothers the reality of raising a black son in America. She wanted them to hear the words they each had said to their own sons, in different variations over the years, but all with the same message: Stay alive. Come home alive.”

Even though I’ve known African Americans my whole life, been taught by people who were Black, worked and studied with people whose families had descended from the bonds of slavery, even though I had lived by choice in both the City of Detroit and the South Side of Chicago… even though I knew that “the talk” existed, I had never witnessed it.

These are the words of Grandmother, Marlowe Thomas-Tulloch:

She said that when she noticed her grandson was getting bigger and taller, she laid bare a truth to him: Son, if the police stop you, I need for you to be humble. But I need more than that. I need for you to be prepared to be humiliated. 

If they tell you take your hands out of your pockets, take your hands out. Be ready to turn your pockets out. If they tell you to sit down, be prepared to lie down. 

You only walk in the street with one boy at a time, she told him. 

"What?" her grandson said. In his 17-year-old mind, he hadn't done anything wrong and nothing was going to happen to him. 

"If it's three or more, you're a mob," she said. "That's how they will see you." 

She started to cry. 

"Listen to me," she begged. "Hear me." 

Finally, she felt him feel her fear. 

If they ask you who you are, name your family. 

Yes, sir and no, sir. If they are in your face, even if they are wrong, humble yourself and submit yourself to the moment. 

"I'm serious," she said. "Because I love you." 

She told him she would rather pick him up from the police station than identify his body at a morgue. 

When her grandson left to go home, she called her daughter to tell her about the conversation. Her daughter asked her what she had said, because her son came home upset, with tears in his eyes. 

"I hope I said enough to save his life," Thomas-Tulloch said. "I'd rather go down giving him everything I got."

If this story was upsetting for you, if these words were very hard to hear, as they were hard for me to read, look around you.

You have heard these words in a place where you feel safe.

Imagine what it might be like to not have a place of safety.

Or perhaps you already know.

Perhaps you already know that pain of betrayal when the place you thought was safe, that should be safe, turned out not to be.


We cannot stay idly by as the our friends and neighbors continue to be hassled, arrested, abused and killed by a police force that is mis-operating in the manner that is has been in Cleveland and in many other parts of our nation.

I want to be clear about something as well. I know that police work is very difficult. It was one of the most stressful careers for someone to choose. Our police officers deserve support and credit for the job they are trying to do.

Our minister emerita, the Rev. Peggy Clason wrote to me this week, telling me that her own daughter was inspired to become a police officer because when she was a child, an officer helped when she was lost. Good people take these jobs.

But also, they must be alerted when the job they are doing terrorizes the very people they've sworn to protect.


This means that we must accept the difficult assignment of both critiquing and supporting a broken system of justice. We cannot continue to accept things as they are, nor can we complete tear down the structure that is in place. We must find a new way to engage.


We must engage with love as our guiding principle. Not some namby-pamby idea of love, but real deep love, which involves work.

We must love our neighbors, we must love our City and all the flaws that comes with loving a big bunch of people who are widely varied and different.

We can show them that a street corner can be as sacred as a cathedral.

Because what makes a space sacred is us, and the intentions we bring to the place where we meet.

And we must continue to meet and talk and work out our problems until a Grandmother like Mrs. Thomas-Tulloch no longer has to worry about her grandson.

I don’t have the answer to the larger problem, in part because I alone am too small to know all that must be known. But I have a plan, and that plan is to meet with those who are closer to the problem and offer my assistance, as meager and ineffective as it might or might not be.

I am going to show up.

And the next place I am going to show up is at the South Euclid UCC Church tomorrow. My mini-van leaves here at 6:15 in the evening, and I hope that we have so many people showing up that my car won’t hold us all.

When you called me to be your minister, one of the things you told me was that you wanted to reflect our neighborhood. In order for us to reflect that which is around us, we must go out into the world and meet people.

Please, come and join me in so doing.

Clemency in the Name of Love

Reading from the Global Scripture

Michael Price, from the Science Bureau of the Monitor

Historically, there are two schools of thought on revenge. The Bible, in Exodus 21:23, instructs us to "give life for life, eye for eye, tooth for tooth, hand for hand, foot for foot" to punish an offender. But more than 2,000 years later, Martin Luther King Jr., responded, "The old law of 'an eye for an eye' leaves everybody blind."

Who's right? As psychologists explore the mental machinery behind revenge, it turns out both can be, depending on who and where you are. If you're a power-seeker, revenge can serve to remind others you're not to be trifled with. If you live in a society where the rule of law is weak, revenge provides a way to keep order.

But revenge comes at a price. Instead of helping you move on with your life, it can leave you dwelling on the situation and remaining unhappy, psychologists' research finds.

Considering revenge is a very human response to feeling slighted, humans are atrocious at predicting its effects.[6]

Sermon

All of the world’s great religions teach us lessons about clemency, forgiveness, balancing good and evil. Like hospitality and other concepts that are the basic building blocks of community, some ideas are so ancient that they are everywhere.

The Indo-European language is one example. There has been much debate about the origin of the Indo-European language, a language that has evolved into 103 modern languages ranging across, as the name suggests, the European and Indian continents.

There are two main schools of thought about the Indo-European language, and the two schools do not coincide gently together. One group believes that the language’s origin comes out of the Steppes of Russia, spread by a warring hoard of people on chariots who spread their language at the point of a sword, about 4,000 years ago.

The other school, somewhat newer, and aided by computer modeling, asserts that the origin of the Indo-European language is Anatolia, in modern day Turkey. In this theory, the language is spread not by the sword by farming tools. Evolutionary biologist Quentin Atkinson of the University of Aukland asserts that this process began 9,000 years ago and not through violence but rather farming.

A key piece of their evidence is that proto-Indo-European had a vocabulary for chariots and wagons that included words for “wheel,” “axle,” “harness-pole” and “to go or convey in a vehicle.”[1] Some say that because of technology, these words prove a certain time in human history that the Indo-European language could NOT have been spread from before, say 3,000 before the common era.

Atkinson and his researchers started with a menu of vocabulary items that are known to be resistant to linguistic change, like pronouns, parts of the body and family relations, and compared them with the inferred ancestral word in proto-Indo-European. Words that have a clear line of descent from the same ancestral word are known as cognates. Thus “mother,” “mutter” (German), “mat’ ” (Russian), “madar” (Persian), “matka” (Polish) and “mater” (Latin) are all cognates derived from the proto-Indo-European word “mehter.”[2] Through this method they deduced that Anatolia is the origin of the language and report that with the spread of agriculture about 9,000 BCE, the language spread, too.

Our ideas about justice are ancient, too. Almost every ancient text talks about justice, what is fair, what is right, how to punish those who have committed crimes against others. The most famous of ancient written laws is of course Hammurabi’s Code. Hammurabi is the best known and most celebrated of all Mesopotamian kings. He ruled the Babylonian Empire from 1792-50 B.C.E. [3]

"Anu and Bel called by name me, Hammurabi, the exalted prince, who feared God, to bring about the rule of righteousness in the land, to destroy the wicked and the evil-doers; so that the strong should not harm the weak; so that I should rule over the black-headed people like Shamash, and enlighten the land, to further the well-being of mankind ..."

So begins the Law Code of Hammurabi, a list of nearly 300 laws etched into a two and one-half meter high black diorite pillar, discovered in 1902[4]

This code is believed by many to be the oldest surviving place in writing where the phrase “an eye for an eye” is recorded.

There has been much commentary by people of faith to this “an eye for an eye” idea. And for many, even these 38 centuries later, this is the basis for our ideas on justice. Yes, 38 centuries.

We see this all the time, when someone is the victim of a crime, they feel violated, they feel fear. I don't know if you personally have ever been the victim of a crime, but I have.

Back in Detroit, when I was in my early 20’s, I was renting to own a home there. It was also a time when I was working three jobs to pay for school along with the rest of the expenses of life, like food and shelter. I came home one night, after job number 3 to find that my home had been burgled.  Someone had been in my house, the house that I loved, worked for, cleaned, and kept up to the best of my ability, even though I was so busy trying to improve my life.

Among the things that were stolen were my computer and my instruments, which were very high end, professional level instruments from Paris.

Also missing was my pet cat, Nikolai. 

I found that I couldn’t stay in the house. I couldn’t sleep there at night, every little noise made me jump. In robbing my house, they had stolen my sense of home.

And so I fled, as many who feel powerless do.

Now having your home burgled is awful, but it is not the worst crime ever committed against a person. I know this, but still it is a horrible memory.

I tell you this story to demonstrate that I understand a little of what it means to feel victimized, vulnerable and powerless.

This is a universal set of feelings for those who have been the victim of a crime. Whether that be someone hitting your car in a parking lot and not leaving their contact information, all the way to more serious sufferings like sexual assault and murder.

Every crime leaves behind someone who is traumatized. 

And those who feel traumatized want justice.

Many of us are tempted to go back 38 centuries to Hammurabi to look for justice.

The Ancient Hebrew texts of the Books Exodus of Leviticus make reference to this phrase “and eye for an eye.”

In the New Testament Book of Matthew, when Jesus gives the Sermon on the Mount, in Chapter 5, he is said to have offered some of the following:

The Beatitudes

He said:

³ “Blessed are the poor in spirit,
    for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.
⁴ Blessed are those who mourn,
    for they will be comforted.
⁵ Blessed are the meek,
    for they will inherit the earth.
⁶ Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness,
    for they will be filled.
⁷ Blessed are the merciful,
    for they will be shown mercy.
⁸ Blessed are the pure in heart,
    for they will see God.
⁹ Blessed are the peacemakers,
    for they will be called children of God.
¹⁰ Blessed are those who are persecuted because of righteousness,
    for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.

These are called The Beatitudes. They are very well known, of course, and they are in part the origin of some of the movement called “Liberation Theology” in Latin America, which is a topic for another sermon.

But also Jesus makes reference to the Code of Hammurabi.  From the Book of Matthew, Chapter 5, verses 38-42:

³⁸ “You have heard that it was said, ‘Eye for eye, and tooth for tooth.’^[h] 39 But I tell you, do not resist an evil person. If anyone slaps you on the right cheek, turn to them the other cheek also. ⁴⁰ And if anyone wants to sue you and take your shirt, hand over your coat as well. ⁴¹ If anyone forces you to go one mile, go with them two miles. ⁴² Give to the one who asks you, and do not turn away from the one who wants to borrow from you.

Though many of us struggle with people who quote from the Bible, I hope that you will see here some of the goal of gentleness and justice that many of our Christian friends and neighbors think of when they think of their faith.

And of course, in our own times, the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King talked about Hammurabi’s code:

"Violence as a way of achieving racial justice is both impractical and immoral. It is impractical because it is a descending spiral ending in destruction for all. The old law of an eye for an eye leaves everyone blind. It is immoral because it seeks to humiliate the opponent rather than win his understanding...".[5]

Winning his understanding is very much what the process of Restorative Justice is about. 

The origins of Restorative Justice are murky at best. Like the Indo European language group, there are camps that are in serious debate about the origins of this process that is becoming more and more into use in our modern era.

There are those who speak wistfully of the ancient tribes of man using restorative justice in a time before harsh codes of law where introduced. There are those who believe at least the modern origins of restorative justice come out of Australia with ties to the Aboriginal people there.

The origins of restorative justice are of interest of course, but not the point of this morning.

Restorative justice is a process whereby a victim of a crime and the person convicted of that crime mutually agree to meet to try to understand each other, bringing what can feel like an utterly inhuman act, into focus on a human scale, and in the process, hopefully provide healing to both the sufferers of the crime and the people who created the crime.

I’ll confess that when I first heard of this process, I wasn’t very convinced of its effectiveness. It seemed sort of soft to me, and frankly, I didn’t really see the point. In my imagination, I saw people in a room, angry and hurt almost beyond measure, berating a person who’d killed their loved one. I thought it would serve only to further traumatize everyone involved.

And then in 2006 there was a shooting at the West Nickel Mines School, where a gunman entered the school, shooting 10 girls, 5 of whom died, and then committed suicide.

It hurts my soul to have to say this phrase “This was back when a school shooting was shocking to the nation.”

Part of what moved my understanding of the power of restorative justice was the response of the Amish community to the killing of their children.

Much in the same vein that I resist the temptation to romanticize the origins of restorative justice in ancient times, by grabbing on to the coat tails of the whole “noble savage” school of history and story telling, I do not want to overly romanticize our Amish neighbors. They are not two-dimensional characters in a play. They have real life and struggles just as we do.

Which is what makes their response to the shooting so remarkable.

The community reached deeply into its theology of passivism and non-violence, turned to their understanding of faith and responded out of that. Their response was to visit the home of the parents of the man who’d shot their daughters and say to them “You too have lost a child today.”

It was an act that struck me to my core.

And thereafter I began to see restorative justice as an act of compassion for all involved. Acts of compassion are not easy. They require a deep rootedness in a desire for doing what is right.

At the time when Hammurabi wrote his code, an eye for an eye was a ruling defining the amount of retribution for crime.  Limiting the retribution, no longer could you escalate the punishment in a way that well out-stripped the original offense.

Eighteen Hundred years later, Jesus preached about that same definition, saying that it’s time had passed, that an eye for an eye, that retribution need not be part of the transaction for an offense.

And two thousand years after that, Rev. King taught us that retribution in equal amounts leads to equal suffering on all fronts.

Recently I was at a wedding where the Greek Orthodox Bishop used the story from the Book of John where Mary, the mother of Jesus, makes Jesus turn water into wine at a wedding.

It had been the tradition, which I’m sure never happens any more, to serve the good wine first, and then as people became drunk and unable to tell the difference serve up the wine of lessor quality. The Metropolitan, as bishops are known in Greek Orthodox churches, then instructed my friends who were being married, to save some of the good wine for later. Not to use up all the good stuff at the beginning of their marriage, leaving only the meh stuff for later.

It occurred to me that this of course was really good advice, but what the Metropolitan did not tell them was this: If you are the recipient of the good wine, you must be open to enjoying it for it to be enjoyed.

If you are too embittered by life to accept and enjoy the good wine when it is offered to you, you might as well be drinking the two-buck chuck.

In order for restorative justice to work, the victims cannot be so embittered that they can only see the process as a way to exact revenge on those who have hurt them.

May we all be wise enough as we go through life to recognize when someone is offering us their best. May we be gracious in accepting those imperfect gifts, and may our own meager offerings be gladly accepted with deep generosity of spirit.

Blessings to you on this, our shared journey.

---

[1] http://www.nytimes.com/2012/08/24/science/indo-european-languages-originated-in-anatolia-analysis-suggests.html?pagewanted=all&_r=0

[2] ibid.

[3] http://www.ushistory.org/civ/4c.asp

[4] ibid.

[5] from The Words of Martin Luther King, MLK III.

[6] Monitor, 2009, Vol 40, No. 6.

The Death of Etiquette

Once upon a time during my semi-misspent youth as an activist I found myself at a luncheon on Mackinac Island. My table companion, a patrician elder lady sat across the table from me, protected by a barrier of a pair of matching table settings.  My setting included, and I know because I counted, four forks, three spoons, three knives, 7 pieces of china and 3 pieces of stemware.

I was duly intimidated.

Now, I’d heard the old silverware rule of “start at the outside and work your way in,” but one of the knives was at the top of the setting, and I had no clue what to do about the three goblets.

Rather than panic, I decided to pretend I was Jane Goodell, and as the lady across the table and I conversed I observed her very carefully.  She seemed very comfortable in this environment. I didn’t touch a single thing on my side of the table until after she did.

At the end of the luncheon, she complimented me on my manner, that I had been a perfect gentleman, allowing her to set the pace for lunch and that I was very attentive during our time together, a habit she thought had been lost on the younger generation. I thanked her, wished her a good afternoon and thought to myself  “Lady, if you only knew!”

I have always been somewhat fascinated by etiquette and social customs. For years I have been collecting and reading books on “how to be a gentleman” from different eras.  One of my most treasured books on the subject came to me as a gift from a cultural historian that I had worked with during our time as historians at Jane Addams’s settlement house, the Hull House.

At the end of my time with the project Ellen handed me a package that clearly contained a book. Of course I love books, so I was pretty happy to receive this. It wasn’t until I opened it that I saw what a treasure it was.  The book is called “The Golden Censer: the Duties of Today, The Hopes of the Future,” written by a Mr. John McGovern, published in Chicago in 1891.

It is a book written in1881 on how to be a modern gentleman. How to navigate the waters of the shifting of America from the rural to the urban landscape.

There are chapters on governing oneself, and also chapters that explain the duty that a man owes to his parents and his sister, which include your not falling in with a bad crowd because it will damage her reputation, and how to be sure that she marries a man who will treat her with the respect she deserves.

Nine years later, Theodore Drieser will publish a book called “Sister Carrie,” a cautionary tale of a young woman, who unsatisfied with her rural life, follows her sister, safely married, to Chicago to pursue a more exciting life. I won’t tell you the whole tale this morning, but let’s just say that the trouble begins when she takes a position as a sales girl in a downtown department store, which leads to inferences that because she works outside the home, she might have some questionable morals.

Oh, Sister Carrie is in for some wild times, with all that talking to male customers who are buying gifts for their wives.

A more universal exposure to etiquette for many might be the story of Pygmalion, the play by George Bernard Shaw.  In the play, Professor of phonetics Henry Higgins makes a bet that he can train a bedraggled Cockney flower girl, Eliza Doolittle, to pass for a duchess at an ambassador's garden party by teaching her to assume a veneer of gentility, the most important element of which, he believes, is impeccable speech. The play is a sharp lampoon of the rigid British class system of the day and a commentary on women's independence.

The story was also popularized in song as “My Fair Lady,” which is how I first heard of it.

Shaw’s commentary on class system and etiquette, softened up a bit by Lerner and Loewe’s treatment, still presents the idea that nice manners, a nicely presented exterior, is morally bankrupt without an interior life that matches it.

I guess it could be stated, from the lessons learned there, that it is better to be gold on the inside, that’s a little scruffy, than to be all polished on the outside, and hollow.

And that’s what I think most of us think of when we hear the word etiquette.

That it’s a way, a very stiff and rigid way, to appear polished on the outside, no matter how disordered things are inside. I think that we have found this way wanting, and have frequently and consistently rejected it.

For some of this, I’d like to lay the blame on President John F. Kennedy.

That’s right, John F. Kennedy.  You won’t often hear him criticized from Unitarian Universalist pulpits, but you will today.

In his book “Hatless Jack: The President, The Fedora, and The History of American Style,” Neil Steinberg lays partial blame of the demise of the fedora squarely on the head of John Kennedy’s fear of being photographed wearing a hat, lest he should look like an old man.

With presidents doing kooky things like not wearing hats at their inauguration, the social fabric of the nation began to unspool.  Now, this is an obvious, and hopefully humorous oversimplification, but there’s apparently some truth to it.

Etiquette and social graces are not only suffocating and empty rituals. They are also guidelines for safety in uncertain situations.

These rules were devised in part to smooth over the rough edges of community life. Now, yes, it’s true that some people went a little overboard and got all persnickety, but at their core these guidelines are a help, not a hindrance to society.

Amy Vanderbilt wrote her book on etiquette, as Sarah shared with you earlier, in 1958, compiling many social and societal norms.  She knew that norms would change with time, and said so in her introduction, but still she wanted to produce a helpful guide to navigate the “modern” world of the 1950’s.

We have become a world wherein we travel more than ever. In the song titled “The Long Way ‘Round,” the trio known as the Dixie Chicks sing “My friends from high school married their high school boyfriends. [They] moved into houses in the same zip code where their parents live, but I, I could never follow. I hit the highway in a pink RV with stars on the ceiling. Lived like gypsy, six strong hands on the steering wheel.”

More and more of us do this.

Maybe not in a pink RV, but how many here in this room no longer live in a house in the same zip code as your parents?

In our travels, vacation or career inspired, we have encountered social norms. Some of those norms are deeply ingrained and important. Such as never show the bottom of your shoe to ANYONE in an Arabic culture. Others are also important, but lack the insult of the shoe sole, for example, when I went to England for the summer and my backpack was stolen. I had no idea how to call the police. There wasn’t a sign at the Manchester airport that said “Welcome to Manchester, in case of emergency dial 999 on your mobile phone.” No, it just said “Welcome to Manchester.” Now a stolen, second-hand backpack, or rucksack as they kept calling it, is not a big deal. But what if I had witnessed someone having a heart attack, or a serious car accident. I would have stood there helpless.

Or social norms can be as harmless and amusing as the whole “Pop” or “Soda” divide. I’ve lived on both sides of that divide, and tried using “sodapop.” I still get funny looks.

In fact someone here at social hour corrected me when I asked for a “soda.”  You mean a pop, don’t you they said with grin.

So much for diversity. ;-)

To get back to President Kennedy for a moment, all kidding aside, his refusal to wear a hat can easily be seen as him taking part in the modernist movement in America.  In Modernism, the past was eschewed as unnecessary, irrelevant and in some ways extremely harmful.

You can see this Modernist movement in all manner of disciplines. You can see it starting with Frank Lloyd Wright in the early 1900’s, but really it’s extremely visible in the work of Meis Van der Rohe’s buildings, a style called “New Internationalism.”

In church music, you can hear this movement anytime you listen to work by Randall Thompson.

In gentleman’s wear, you can see it by the lack of a hat.

People have been wearing hats since the dawn of time and there are often good reasons to wear them. There are religious reasons, status reasons and weather reasons to wear them. But the Modern Man tossed them aside, along with his father’s Oldsmobile.

It’s true that not all things from the past deserve to be dragged forward into the life of today. I can think of a number of classifications of people whose lives are easier and better off then they were in the past. One of my favorite quotes illustrates this quite nicely.

Beth Lapides said "I was at a party where somebody was talking about 'The Good Old Days.' I was like, 'Which Good Old Days? During the McCarthy Blacklist? Or when blacks couldn't vote? When they burned women at the stake because they were herbalists? THOSE Good Old Days?'"

But to throw aside all of the past is a bad idea.

Because the past had ideas and rules with which we knew to, or learned how to, interact.

Worse yet is to paint, with a broad brush, the idea that old ways are universally bad and oppressive. Without social expectations we have come to a place where store clerks, like our dear old friend and lost soul Sister Carrie, no longer strive toward customer service, but rather, they spend time at the counter texting on their phones and talking with one another, ignoring the store’s customers.

I heard a story about an event like this just this week.

When the remove our cultural context completely, as Modernism has tried to do, we are left swimming in a turbulent lake of unknowns.

This fall, in a new show called #selfie, the story of Pygmalion is once again reconstituted. The series follows the life of Eliza Dooley, a woman obsessed with the idea of achieving fame through the use of social media platforms, including Instagram where she posts selfies. She begins to worry that "friending" people online is not a substitute for real friendship, and she seeks help from Henry Higgs, a marketing image guru.

It seems that every thing old might indeed be new again.

In pretty much every one of the books I read on the art of being a gentleman the advice given is that it the responsibility of a gentleman to set the stage so that each person in his presence is comfortable. One cannot make another feel comfortable, of course, but there is a responsibility to think of others first, to consider the needs of your meeting-mates, your date, the random person that you encounter on the street.

This idea is etiquette at it’s finest.

Some rules may feel antiquated to us, and perhaps they are. After all, Amy Vanderbilt herself wrote as the dictionary changes over time to reflect the malleable English language, so too must the book of etiquette. 

Like the dictionary, though, it ought not be tossed out completely because it feels like something from a by-gone era.

It’s true, gentlemen don’t wear hats anymore, well they’re starting to start again, thankfully!  I mean, a hat is cool!  (Though I don’t know about fezzes…) And ladies certainly don’t wear gloves and carry matching bags anymore. In fact, many women bristle at the very term “ladies.”

There are many examples of what happens as the guidelines of etiquette shift. One of them happens right here in this sanctuary every Sunday. 

It is conundrum of clapping.

We clap at concerts, right? But do we clap at church? If by showing either our exuberance, or our delight, are we turning church into a performance? Some would have us never clap in church because to do so would be breaking the spirit of the gravitas of church, and some would clap in church, demonstrating how fully they are moved by the experience of church.

We can either see rules of etiquette as things that strangulate us, or we can see them as helps along the way to navigating a life wherein the people you meet are more likely to feel comfortable in your presence.

As Unitarian Universalists we strive to be more welcoming to those around us. The new comer to our church, the new comer to our neighborhood, and the new comer to our nation.

A common etiquette makes it easier to be a new person in a new situation.

If you forget all the rest of the funny rules about how far a stamp should be from the corner of your letter, or how one should introduce a baroness to a duchess, don’t worry! I mean those things are kind of fun to know, but no one should sweat that kind of stuff, let alone be offended by the misapplication of such rules. But always, always let kindness be your guide in your interactions with others.

Be kind to the stranger.

Be kind to your friend.

Be kind to the store clerk, who may not be as attentive or kind to you in return as you like.

Be kind to those you love
Even those who you used to love.

And be kind to yourself.

Blessed be.

© The Rev. Joseph M Cherry

October 19, 2014

Written for and Presented to

The Unitarian Universalist Society of Cleveland