“and see ourselves as part of a bigger whole of humanity. . .”
The Rev. Mark Stringer, who serves the First Unitarian Church of Des Moines, Iowa, earned himself quite a bit of attention when he performed the first, and only, legal same-sex wedding in the state of Iowa, literally moments before the ruling allowing this wedding was placed under a stay order. You can read his account of the wedding, as presented to his congregation this past week, here.
While performing that wedding ceremony was certainly a headline-grabber, Rev. Stringer’s sermon from almost a year ago, on October 22, 2006, demonstrates it to have been an act of deep faith, of the courage to live in one’s convictions. Unitarian Universalism is at its core a religion that calls us to walk our talk, to covenant with creation itself to live in service and in love.
Please enjoy these words, which, I think, illustrate beautifully the struggle and the commitment this faith shows to our principles.
The Inherent Problem with Inherent Worth and Dignity
by the Rev. Mark Stringer
Today I will consider the first of the seven principles of Unitarian Universalism, as articulated at a General Assembly of our association in 1985: “We the member congregations of the Unitarian Universalist Association covenant to affirm and promote the inherent worth and dignity of every person.” This first principle is a foundation for all the principles that follow. It is, in my estimation at least, a principle that exemplifies Unitarian Universalism.
But its importance in our religious tradition does not mean that it is revered by all UUs. In fact, I have heard from several people for whom this first principle is a concern, if not a major stumbling block. As one newcomer recently told me [paraphrased], “Mark, I don’t know about this inherent worth and dignity stuff. What about sex offenders…or murderers…or Osama Bin Laden? Do we have to affirm their inherent worth and dignity? I don’t think I can.”
Well, I am here to tell you that as Unitarian Universalists, we don’t have to affirm anything. These principles are merely a best attempt to articulate the things most UUs believe. However, they are not a creed and should not be viewed as such.That said, I will share with you today my understanding of the first principle and why it is essential to my religious perspective.
Before I do that, let’s get right to the inherent problem with it.
To do this, I begin by sharing a scene from the movie Independence Day. The movie, you may recall, is about a global invasion of creatures from another world. In the beginning of the film, it is unclear whether these aliens, who are arriving in enormous spaceships, are friendly. One by one, their vehicles appear in the sky, hovering over buildings on all continents, without clear purpose or intent. Reactions of the world’s citizens are mixed. Some respond with fear, sensing that the end of the world is at hand. Others are cautiously curious…willing to wait and see. And then there is one small segment of the population who embraces the arrival with an outpouring of love and celebration. These people who choose the path of welcoming the aliens are mockingly portrayed as hippie, religious types singing songs of hope and peace. In the scene I describe today, a gaggle of these folks are standing atop a skyscraper, above which hovers one of the ominous spaceships. As the groovy peace-makers lift their arms to the air in joyful rejoicing, the alien craft sends down a bolt of green that instantly zaps the peaceniks (and the building) into oblivion.
In the New York City theatre where I saw the film [incidentally, a full five years before the events of 9-11], the crowd responded to this scene with their own joyful rejoicing…the raucous applause and shouts of delight signaling to everyone present that the welcome wagon of trust obviously got what it deserved.
The lesson taught by the filmmakers and celebrated by the audience was clear: If we choose to be naïve about the nature of the universe, particularly if we choose trust over suspicion or fear, we can expect to be destroyed.
Now I know it may seem odd to begin a consideration of our first principle with a story of how dangerous it can be to assume the inherent worth and dignity of each extraterrestrial. And yet, in many ways, that is what our first principle can seem like at times…at least to those of us who can’t help but wonder about the usefulness, if not the sanity, of such a principle in the face of the monstrous acts of evil that have been and, no doubt, will continue to be perpetrated by humans against each other…monstrous evil that is, at its core, no different than that expressed in the destruction brought by aliens in Independence Day.
Why should we affirm and promote the inherent worth and dignity of any human whose behavior is inhuman, at best? What is there to affirm in an unrepentant mass murderer, or a pedophile, or a terrorist? Where was the inherent worth and dignity of Charles Roberts, the man who entered an Amish schoolhouse earlier this month, took ten girls hostage and shot them before ending his own life? What was inherently dignified or worthy of affirmation and promotion in Mr. Roberts as he meticulously planned and carried out this brutal and senseless attack?
We already know at least one answer to this question…an answer evident in the reaction to the slayings offered by the Amish community, which has chosen to not only forgive Mr. Roberts, but to actually reach out in support of his family. The Amish have chosen to respect the inherent worth and dignity of their seemingly alien invader because their faith perspective teaches that he, as a human, is a child of God, and therefore worthy of compassion and deserving of forgiveness no matter how heinous his crimes.
While this response of the Amish has been largely heralded as an extraordinary act of Christian self-sacrifice and love, instructive in its confident appeal to our better natures, some have questioned its wisdom or at least wondered aloud about what the ramifications of such all-encompassing forgiveness and regard for someone so clearly undeserving. Aren’t some crimes (and therefore, some people) simply unforgivable? Don’t some people, by their actions, effectively withdraw whatever inherent worth and dignity they might have had? And if we continue to affirm and promote their worth and dignity, aren’t we being as naïve as the obliterated love-in crowd?
None of us want to be naïve. We don’t want to be duped. Clearly Boston Globe columnist Jeff Jacoby doesn’t. He wrote not long after the killings:
“I admire the Amish villagers’ resolve to live up to their Christian ideals even amid heartbreak, but how many of us would really want to live in a society in which no one gets angry when children are slaughtered? In which even the most horrific acts of cruelty were always and instantly forgiven? There is a time to love and a time to hate, Ecclesiastes teaches. If anything deserves to be hated, surely it is the pitiless murder of innocents.”
He continues:
“…I cannot see how the world is made a better place by assuring someone who would do terrible things to others that he will be readily forgiven afterward, even if he shows no remorse. I wish…[the Amish] well, but I would not want to be like them, reacting to terrible crimes with dispassion and absolution…. The murder of the Amish girls was a deeply hateful evil. There is nothing godly about pretending it wasn’t.”
Even as I emotionally understand his perspective, I think that Jacoby has misunderstood something essential about forgiveness. He focuses on the community’s acts of forgiveness as though they are gifts being bestowed on the killer and his family, when, in reality, forgiveness, any time we can muster it, is a gift we bestow on ourselves. Our human capacity to forgive is, in fact, a vital component of what I would call our inherent worth and dignity. That anyone else benefits when we forgive is secondary to the benefit that we receive whenever we can bring ourselves to let go of those things that have been done “to” us and see ourselves as part of a bigger whole of humanity, of which we are all merely a part.
This is the same point made by 20th century minister and theologian Howard Thurman. He suggested that when we begin with the premise that “all life is one—that there is no…ultimate detachment of any part of life from the whole—then we can no longer say “Look what he, she or they is doing” but rather, “They, as a part of us, have done this to us” (H. Thurman, Meditations of the Heart, pp. 117-118).
This can be a big leap for many of us…this seeing the capacity for evil as somehow an inherent component of us all…right alongside our worth and dignity. Furthermore, can any of us know for sure how we would feel if one of our loved ones were violated in such a vicious and senseless way as the Amish girls were? Would we be able to forgive the attacker, seeing him as a part of ourselves? Would we want to? I do feel quite certain that I would want some kind of justice…that I would want the attacker to feel some real consequences of his actions. But granting forgiveness to him? Hard to say if I could to that.
For the Amish, devoted followers of the teachings of Jesus, the requirement of forgiveness is clear. Unitarian Universalists, on the other hand, are not bound to Christian edicts, nor, it seems are many Christians. It’s common for us all to revere Jesus as a great teacher, even as we may ignore what he had to say, or try to wrangle his teachings to our benefit. It’s like the story of the mom who was making pancakes for her sons, Joe and Eddie. The boys start to argue over who will get the first pancake. Mom, seeing an opportunity for a lesson in generosity, says to her older son, Joe, “If Jesus were sitting here, He would say, “Let my brother have the first pancake. I can wait.” Joe then turns to his younger brother, and says, “OK Eddie, you be Jesus!”
I also realize that our UU first principle does not say that we covenant to forgive every person. Still, if we do affirm and promote each persons’ inherent worth and dignity, aren’t we suggesting that each person is inherently worthy of forgiveness, and that we would be somehow betraying our religion (if not our inherent nature) to withhold forgiveness, even in the most extreme of circumstances?
“Come on,” some of us might say. “Some things are simply unforgivable.” And again, we come back to the inherent problem with inherent worth and dignity: Does everyone indeed have it?
In a world where violence is rampant, where genocide is a reality and where torture is being performed not just by shady foreign types, but by our own government, our answer matters a great deal.
Back in June, former UUA president, Bill Schulz gave an address to UU ministers with the title “What Torture’s Taught Me.” Schulz knows a lot about torture, not because he served as president of our association, but rather because he spent 12 years following his tenure as UUA president as the executive director of Amnesty International, a role that exposed him to a worldwide view of the ways in which human rights have been denied, especially through acts of torture.
He says that when he began, he wanted to see the torturer as a monster…someone alien to humanity… when in reality, he learned, a torturer is more typically a person not all that unlike any of us…a person who has been conditioned into obedience by a restrictive and stressful environment and who is given reason to believe that he (or his loved ones) are being threatened by a vulnerable, though disrespected, category of people, against whom the torturer now has the motive to take out his fear and aggression.
Even if a torturer has been cajoled into the role, as Schulz contends, the question follows, how can a human with inherent worth and dignity be so easily led to deny others the same? And how can we justify our faith in inherent worth and dignity when we can be so easily converted into “savages.”
Schulz says, “I suspect that we base our belief in the inherent worth of human beings on some…[vague] notion that aliveness itself is good and some long-outdated hierarchical assumption that because human beings represent the pinnacle of aliveness, we possess inherently some kind of merit. Well,” he says, “I don’t buy that anymore.”
He explains how he has endlessly fought the death penalty, not because every one of the lives in question have inherent worth, but because we can’t be sure which do and which don’t, nor can we know in all cases who we can trust to decide. He goes on to express my belief (and probably some of yours) that the use of executions [or torture…] by the state diminishes the dignity of every person in whose name it is enforced. But more precisely, he says, he has learned that he needs “to assign the occupants of death row worth and dignity in order to preserve” his own. For Schulz, whether or not this worth and dignity is inherent is beside the point.
I appreciate the way he has reframed the principle of inherent worth and dignity for himself to read that he affirms and promotes the “assignment” of worth and dignity to every person, not on the basis of divinty, or natural law, but by “pragmatic consensus”, consensus that must involve the global community, or else our “judgments…[would be] fit only for a desert island upon which we ourselves are the only occupant.”
Our capacity and freedom to reach consensus with others to determine what is appropriate behavior is, in fact, one of the most foundational aspects of what I would call our inherent worth and dignity. To me, inherent worth and dignity does not excuse inhumane behavior; rather it challenges us to respond appropriately, acknowledging that there are consequences to our actions, just as there are consequences whenever we demonize any part of humanity without considering how interconnected and interdependent we truly are. Inherent worth and dignity, therefore, is not a theological end-point, but rather a starting place in our understanding of ourselves and our sisters and brothers. It accepts that we are all much closer to evil than we may want to acknowledge and that, if we deny human rights to any person or group, we are, in effect, diminishing ourselves.
Doing my best to affirm and promote the inherent (or assigned) worth and dignity of my fellow humans, no matter how despicable their actions, is a way to honor the reality that “there but for the grace of God…” or genetics, or privilege, or education, or good timing, or even dumb luck, go I.
Ultimately, I don’t think the first principle is really about other people. It is about ourselves. Who do we choose to be in the world? And how do we face the oftentimes painful realities of what it means to be human without being more naïve than we have to be, yes…but also without being so shielded or paralyzed by our suspicion or our fear that we limit our understanding of others…and therefore, of ourselves.
In the Adrienne Rich poem we shared in the readings today, [”Dedications”], she imagines the different life circumstances of her readers.
She writes,
I know you are reading this poem listening for something, torn
between bitterness and hope
turning back once again to the task you cannot refuse.
I know you are reading this poem because there is nothing else
left to read
there where you have landed, stripped as you are.I hear in her words the kind of humility and understanding that is required if we are to live up to the inherent worth and dignity with which I believe we each enter this world…and the freedom to choose who we will be that goes along with it. The freedom to choose who we will be as individuals, yes. But also the freedom to choose who we will be as a religious community, as a nation, as a global community of imperfect, unpredictable, and yes, sometimes evil, humans. Humans with the capacity to do awful things…but also great things: to forgive, to express compassion, to love, to endure and keep going despite all the reasons not to, and to work toward a better world where evil stands less of a chance and where human worth and dignity is not just a quaint religious notion, but a way of life…for all.
May it be so.
May it be so.
Source: “The Inherent Problem with Inherent Worth and Dignity,” Rev. Mark Stringer, minister of the First Unitarian Church of Des Moines, Iowa, October 22, 2006, released under Creative Commons.
Tags: covenant, forgiveness, living faith, Mark Stringer, principles, worth and dignity
