SPACE TO TURN
A sermon for Yom Kippur by F. Jay Deacon
Preached at the Unitarian Society of Northampton and Florence
September 15, 2002
I want you to notice a word that lies at the heart of this day: it is "to turn," as in "Turn back, turn back, forswear thy foolish ways;" as in "Space to Turn." In the Hebrew Bible it's the word t'shuv. Turn.
This is a stupendously hopeful idea. The hope at the heart of the Jewish faith is that we humans are not helplessly depraved and fallen creatures but are instead the crown of creation, a stupendous achievement of the evolution of life — even if, at times, we crash and burn. And in this the Unitarian and Universalist tradition has more in common with the Jewish than the Christian. In his greatest sermon, William Ellery Channing declared humanity's "Likeness to God."
It is not the presence of the worst, most perverted, most barbaric elements that should surprise us or dominate our consciousness; no. Rather than these, what we ought to take as remarkable, what ought to astonish us, is the appearance of the highest and best and finest: for there is at work in this world — gradual as it is, imperiled as it is — the realization of the Spirit hidden in all nature, the inexorable evolutionary advance of consciousness.
The call of these days is to turn — to turn to our highest, finest selves, our most godlike capacities.
T'shuv, to turn.
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So, for a few moments, I want for us to think about another word because it's something that, in the human process that leads to our turning, we may experience first. It's guilt. I could have given this the subtitle, "A World Without Guilt?" — with a question mark.
This means you've come to a Unitarian Universalist service to hear about guilt! But isn't guilt the specialty of the more traditional religions? Aren't we beyond it? I thought we didn't believe in it.
Guilt has held a prominent place in the history of religions. To get rid of it, Moslems make pilgrimages to Mecca so they can return home guiltless as a newborn child. Look in a synagogue at Yom Kippur. Such a crowd you will see, standing room only.
Catholicism specializes in guilt, and confession, and absolution of guilt.
Protestantism is built on guilt, and its meeting-houses are built like courtrooms, and its theology built on the thought of St. Paul, who asks one central question before all others: what is your legal status before God? Have you been justified by Christ's sacrificial atonement on your behalf to pay your fine to a wrathful righteous God?
I looked through my collection of hymnals and found gobs of guilt.
While other religions seem far more interested in guilt, seem to wallow in guilt, Unitarian Universalists aren't supposed to talk about it. Try finding hymns in our hymnals about guilt.
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We can feel guilty about the darnedest things. I used to feel guilty when I didn't go to Boy Scouts, which is particularly ironic because today I might feel guilty if I did participate in Boy Scouts, but anyway. My guilt then was particularly silly if you know that going to Boy Scouts meant putting on your uniform and going to the Methodist Church where Mr. Strang, who was the minister and the Boy Scout Leader, would take attendance, using your last name so it would feel like the real grown-up army, then have us recite some Boy Scout Pledge or salute the flag or something, do a couple of push-ups, and then, if Mr. Strang was feeling ambitious, tie a couple of knots. All this was done slowly, so as to give the impression of having been a full evening's worth of program, and we would go home. Now deciding whether or not to go hardly ranked with the great moral dilemmas of our time; and yet when I'd stay home instead of engaging in this foolishness, I'd feel guilty.
Well, that's guilt. I'll call it habitual guilt, which we feel for lack of any real moral vision. If you haven't learned any sharper moral sense than habit and routine, which I hadn't as a kid of boy scout age, then you haven't got anything more worthwhile to feel guilty about than breaking the habit and routine. To this, I say, phooey.
There are other equally specious guilt trips endured by humans. Take sex. In some forms of religion, sin and sex are the same thing. See this? It isn't a pocket New Testament, just looks like one. Gold edges, leather cover. It's called
The Catholic Girl's Guide
Want guilt? Read this.
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Here's another neurotic guilt. It's artistic guilt, creative guilt. If you create some new artwork — whether it's music or painting or a novel or a new idea or some new religious or philosophical expression — if you've created something, you may feel artistic guilt. Such gall we have, to lay our own creation next to some older established work someone else has already done. What have I done, who do I think I am, does my painting imply that Monet isn't good enough for this world that I should paint something else. Pretty silly, isn't it?
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So. We've done away with guilt. Congratulations.
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Of course, in our passion for justice, we always hope that others who perpetrate the kinds of things we regard as sins — environmental polluters, bigots, warmongers, you know — we always hope they will feel guilt about what they are doing.
Howard Moody recounted a story about a friend he met in college after the second World War. This friend fought, as Howard did, in the war. It's a war story — his friend told him about a terrible day out there lying on an open field in France. And there were German soldiers all over on one side of the field pinned down by the mortar fire and he had a rifle with telescopic site. And he picked off 14 Germans that day, looked through the telescopic sight right into their magnified faces and shot them. After it was over he couldn't sleep for days. There were nightmares and cold sweat. So he went to the chaplain. Who said, patting him on the head,
"There, there, son, you've done nothing wrong, this is war!"
He said after that he gave up on religion.
Howard calls that chaplain a "hired absolver" paid by the government to absolve the guilt about war so it wouldn't constitute a morale problem.
But you see? This human being didn't want to be told he shouldn't feel guilty. There is an inner wisdom in people that won't accept so easy and false an answer. There are things worth lying awake over and having cold sweats over.
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Guilt is a universal pain. My dog had a capacity to put her tail between her legs and when she did you could be pretty sure it was with good reason. You will never see this in cats; they don't care.
Guilt belongs to the family of affects known as shame. There are many kinds of shame, most of them symptoms of the fundamental conviction in our hearts that we are not adequate; that we are failures, or no good.
But guilt — guilt is that special kind of shame that arises not out of what and who we are but what we have done or failed to do.
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When the experience of guilt strikes, we can usually benefit by imagining a courtroom and looking to see who is the judge and who is the accuser.
Is it a nagging, moralistic parent who has become a part of you and whose judgments are as irrelevant to any real offense as the actual parent's were? Is it a fire and brimstone preacher out of the past who was only yelling out of his own neurosis and unresolved conflicts? Or was it a distorted and oppressive society that accuses you? Is it some false expectation of someone who expects of you things that are simply not yours to give?
Or is it — some voice within you that represents dimensions of your life that have been shortchanged, neglected — or contradicted by what you are doing? Is it your most human and divine striving and aspiration — is it your destiny?
If I'm being accused by a Self larger than the self that has so far evolved, then I think I wanna listen. That guilt reveals the chasm between what potentially we are and what actually we dare to be in our living. It has to do with the fact that we are responsible for our own evolution. It is our own inner way of knowing that we are missing the mark and that we are capable of more.
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Missing the mark. That is really what the biblical word for sin means. In Hebrew, it's chyet. In Greek, it's hamartia.
I grew up in a Christian home, and attended a Christian college, and four Christian graduate seminaries, where sin was something else. There, sin meant that human begins are fundamentally flawed, essentially evil — the Calvinist Christian doctrine, so beloved by Jonathan Edwards, of the total depravity of human beings, capable of no good.
But in Jewish theology, sin means just what literally it says in both the Hebrew, and still in the Greek of the New Testament.
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And when we maintain the moral sensitivity and humility to experience healthy guilt, we can turn, we can be more than we have been. That is true of individuals, and of nations.
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There is an ancient story associated with these High Holy Days — the story of the prophet Jonah, whom God sends to Ninevah to preach repentance. But Jonah doesn't want to go. God has to send him there in the belly of a whale because he won't get on the plane and go. He doesn't want Ninevah to repent and here's why.
Jonah seems to think that not only he, individually, but his people, as well, his nation — are beyond sin, beyond fault. But Ninevah — Ninevah is the lynch-pin of the great Axis of Evil. The right thing to do with Ninevah is to obliterate it. The last thing Jonah wants to do is to allow Ninevah the space to turn. Jonah was so sure that he and his people were always right, that God was always on their side because they were the special chosen people, that the world would be just fine if his own people simply maintained overwhelming military might. He couldn't see how everyone else felt bullied; how this brought out the worst in others.
To him, evil was something "out there" — so when he looked at the disorder and suffering in the world, the violence and the injustice, he could only say "not me!" — because he lacked the capacity to see the other in himself and himself in the other, all one humanity, with godlike potentialities for good or for ill.
He could acknowledge no wisdom, no moral vision, out there. Consequently he wanted his people to have no part in an international court of justice, or climate treaties, or missile treaties. Poor Jonah. He felt no guilt. He could not ask: what am I contributing to this disorder, this injustice, this cycle of destruction?
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Our eyes are not the only eyes to have witnessed horror on a scale, and of a kind, that no human eye ought ever to see, and that no human psyche is quite prepared to handle. New York became Serajevo and Stalingrad and Belfast and Jerusalem and Ramallah.
With our advancing command of the material world, humans are capable of greater terror, just as we are capable of greater advance toward universal wellbeing. What these terrorists have done is worse than previous evils only to the extent that there were great aircraft to be commandeered, potent jet-fuel, and immense concentrations of people in those buildings, in a great city. But others have meant as much harm as they meant, age upon age of violence and retribution.
And so the events of a year ago bring us to a crossroads in human history. It can be a moment of dramatic advance or of dramatic retrogression.
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There's a boiling sea of rage out there, and it's directed at us. Moral people, people who want to be more and better than they have been, will want to know why there are people who hate us so much they'll kill themselves to hurt us.
We all know the difference between where our primitive rage might go, and where the best energies of our intellect, love, and spiritual vision might take us. And we know these are starkly different places.
To some greater or lesser degree, we have practice in this choice most days of our lives.
There must be greater men and women, because today this planet, through whose life-process we ourselves came to be, is threatened by its human inhabitants, who now have the power to extinguish life on earth.
Yet we are expressions, perhaps the latest and highest expressions, of the vast Life of the Universe. We are an unfolding of the genius and an artistry at the heart of all things, and we may be sure there is more yet to unfold.
Our continued evolution requires that we learn new and finer ways of being in the world. And our best friends require that we be true to our best selves. "What is it we heartily wish of each other?" Emerson asked.
Is it to be pleased and flattered? No, but to be convicted and exposed, to be shamed out of our nonsense of all kinds, and made [humans] of, instead of ghosts and phantoms. We are weary of gliding ghostlike through the world . . . . We crave a sense of reality, though it come in strokes of pain. [New England Reformers]
That is a central meaning of these High Holy Days, and of Yom Kippur. It comes to us every year, as a friend, to ask hard questions.
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The transformation of our public life must be a flowing-out of an inner transformation in the minds and hearts of individual persons in our time; and a new era will be the work of new people.
That implies a new and vital role for religion. For in past ages, and still today, religion has been, more than anything else, a backward-looking force fixated on an imaginary perfection that once existed, long ago, and from which we have fallen. Therefore it cannot imagine higher laws than those that once seemed adequate, but which cannot serve us now.
Yes, some of the worst atrocities of history have been committed in the name of religion, as we have seen by the bent and distorted version of Islam that authorizes terror, or as we have seen in the historic force of Christian antisemitism that led bishops and popes to revile Jews and demand their exclusion from society. It was not, after Adolf Hitler, who invented the yellow badge that stripped Jews of their rights, but the church, for six hundred years. And then there was the joint statement last year from Falwell and Robertson.
That is religion looking backward, fixing ancient fears and ignorance as divine law. We must represent religion looking forward.
In this and coming ages religion must be visionary, prophetic, bold.
It will not be afraid of the sting of an elevated conscience that creates for us that space, hnged between worlds, that precedes change and allows it.
Yom Kippur reminds us to be grateful for the sting of guilt we feel when we betray or highest possibilities. That our ethical sensibilities are alive and well is a tribute to our humanity. When we can be thus grateful, we aren't likely to wallow in our guilt, the guilt that can only paralyze us. We can receive from the heart of life itself and from our own hearts the full measure of forgiveness, and go on, try again, pick up the work of making our lives, and this world, magnificent artworks.
These days call us to a spiritual life that is direct and real and your own, unfettered by outworn dogma, undiminished by obedience to the false authority of those who claim to be God's spokespeople and brokers in the world, undistorted by conformity to the limited understanding of past ages, transcending primitive laws demanding retribution and blood.
A spirituality of soul that insists on living out of our highest and best selves — that alone — will have the potency to lift us above the worst, the most primitive of human capacities and crown the new day we'll sing about in our last hymn, — when all speech shall flow to music, all hearts beat as one.
Born of love to love, we grow weary, heavy with regret, sorry for ourselves, and afraid to know what might have been.
Look now to the cities:
see the broken streets, poor and decayed, and all afraid.
See them and ask: What have we done?
Behold the water and air and soil, and see:
Still we beat plowshares into swords,
and make spears out of pruning-hooks.
Disfigured lies the human form divine, estranged from its center! "Your iniquities have separated you from your God."
Vision fades as the Presence recedes;
the voice grows still.
We are alone, all alone, our meaning unremembered.
Here, now, we need not be alone with our failings.
Let us recall, together, blessed moments when clouds parted and the sun appeared.
We looked. We saw.
There was healing and the joy of hope.
Life of life, turn us to the heights where human goodness finds its dwelling; lead us home.
There are moments when we hear the call of our higher selves, that links us to the divine.
Then we know how blessed we are with life and love. May this be such a moment, a time of deeper attachments to the godlike in us and in our world.
This is the time;
P: We are the people.
All: BE IT SO!
Our origin is dust,
and dust is our end.
Each of us is a shattered urn
grass that must wither,
a flower that will fade,
a shadow moving on
a cloud passing by,
a particle of dust floating on the wind,
a dream soon forgotten.
But there is That which is our life and the life of all; there is an Immensity beyond the everlasting silence.
And this, about a place where we spend a lot of the days of our lives in tension, in discomfort, that place just before our minds and hearts are enlarged and expanded, and we turn.
A note waterfalls steadily
through us,
just below hearing.
Or this early light
streaming through dusty glass:
what enters, enters like that,
unstoppable gift.
And yet there is also the other,
the breath-space held between any call
and its answer —
. . . .
A little sabbath,
minnow whose brightness silvers past time.
The rest-note,
unwritten,
hinged between worlds,
that precedes change and allows it.