On Being Otherwise

A Sermon by
The Rev. Dr. John A. Buehrens

President, Unitarian Universalist Association of Congregations

Delivered Sunday, November 14, 1999

At First Parish in Bedford

Readings

FINITE FREEDOM from If Yes is the Answer, What is the Question by G.K. Beach

To acknowledge tragedy and evil and not lose heart—to suffer and yet sustain a confident good will—requires of us a deeper understanding of the human condition. We never begin with a clean slate; rather, it is up to us to clean our personal slates when and as we can, to make a new beginning again and again. We are ‘born free’ but we are thrust immediately into history. Thus...Lincoln meditated on history and called for ‘a new birth of freedom.’ Thus...Tillich named our condition ‘finite freedom’ and our need, a New Being.

We are free, Tillich said, but finite. We have untold possibilities, but we are limited by our own cultural myopia and physical frailty, by the fallibility of our moral judgments and the fear of our own mortality. We tend to deny reality, behaving as if we were an exception to the rules that govern ordinary mortals… [But] imagining ourselves to be exceptions to the human condition is the stuff tragedies are made of…

The psychotherapist Victor Frankl [called] "spiritual freedom" ...what enabled him [and others] to survive...captivity in a Nazi concentration camp — [recalling]:

Two capacities sustain us, allowing us to resist dehumanization, to use our finite freedom well: the capacity to sustain love, and to respond to the unmerited beauty of being itself.

I got out of bed
on two strong legs.
It might have been
otherwise. I ate
cereal, sweet
mil, ripe, flawless
peach. It might
have been otherwise.
I took the dog uphill
to the birch wood.
All morning I did
the work I love.

At noon I lay down
with my mate. It might
have been otherwise.
We ate dinner together
at a table with silver
candlesticks. It might
have been otherwise.
I slept in a bed
in a bed with paintings
on the walls, and
planned another day
just like this day.
But one day, I know,
it will be otherwise.

Sermon

When my mother was growing up, during the Great Depression, she and her friends, when they had a nickel, liked to stop at the corner store in their immigrant neighborhood for an ice cream to share. "What flavors do you have?" they would ask the storekeeper. And he would invariably rattle back what sounded like a list, but in an accent or language none of the girls could understand at all, until he ended, "plus stwabelly, chawklet, and wanilla." So they’d settle for one of those, half-wondering what else might exist, half-suspecting that’s all he ever had.

For a long time, it occurs to me, religion in America was like that. I was in Washington, DC, on a June day some years ago, lining up with religious leaders to "Stand for Children" at the Lincoln Memorial. A woman with a clipboard approached me: "Protestant, Catholic, Jewish—or...otherwise?" she asked. "Oh, put me with the ‘otherwise,’" I replied. "After all, they sound like good company!" For I was suddenly struck by how the word seemed both apt and ironic.

"To really understand religion in a pluralistic world," says my friend Bill Vendley, "requires a high I.Q. Which has nothing to do with your intelligence. That stands for your Irony Quotient." Bill should know. He carries the title Secretary General of the World Conference on Religion and Peace. Bill once asked me if I could guess who wrote these words: "Liberals have been correct throughout history on issues of social justice while we have been neglectful or derelict in applying the principles of our faith to establishing justice in a fallen world." Ralph Reed, late of the Christian Coalition.

"What’s irony, Daddy?" a daughter once asked. "Irony, sweetheart? Mm...it’s when what you expected turns out to be, well, otherwise, with you wiser, too. When people you don’t like turn out to have some wisdom after all. When someone you considered ‘other’ teaches you something—about yourself. In history it’s when, say, it takes an adamant anti-Communist like Nixon to be the President who opens up relations with Communist China. That’s irony. When left and right, bad and good, weak and strong, turn out to be deeper and more complex than you had ever imagined they could be."

Two weeks from now I will be celebrating American Thanksgiving with Bill Vendley, and a thousand religious leaders from all over the world, at an assembly of the WCRP in Amman, Jordan. One irony of my experience is that it took representing all those leaders in China, three summers ago, along with Vendley, to realize how amidst all the freedom and pluralism you and I take for granted here, our mission—yours and mine— may consist in this: in truly being ‘otherwise,’ in every sense of the term.

A generation ago, in a so-called ‘Cultural Revolution,’ China tried to stamp out religion. It nearly succeeded. Every shrine, temple, mosque, church, monastery and seminary was closed. Only 15% of China’s people now have any religion at all. Every leader we met—Buddhist, Protestant, Catholic, Muslim and Taoist—was either nearing 80 or barely 30.

We found a more open China booming. That year, consumer spending rose by 25%. So did the crime rate. The only thing remaining of Marxism is the materialism. The gap between rich and poor has been growing ten times faster in a so-called communist country than in our own. That’s irony, too. There’s such a moral, spiritual vacuum that the Communist Party enlisted religious leaders in pushing their newest Party slogan: "Renounce Scientific Materialism; Embrace Spiritual Civilization!" Beyond ironic.

At a banquet in The Great Hall of the People, hosted by China’s top official in charge of religion, I presented symbolic gifts: simple pewter cups and wooden pen-trays, both designed by Thomas Jefferson, author of the world’s first statute for religious freedom. We spoke of religion’s proper role, in every culture, in preserving the deepest memories and wisdom of humankind. The Communist official replied: "You are quite right; grave crimes against religion took place here. Deep apologies have been needed."

Going on to a meeting of the International Association for Religious Freedom in South Korea, I kept thinking how easily you and I take for granted our spiritual freedom we enjoy. With the result, ironically, that we don’t always know how powerful it might be, if only we would invest it more wisely in, well, being ‘otherwise’—truly wise toward others, amid the growing religious and cultural diversity all around us.

For in the last generation, America has experienced its own form of cultural revolution. We have become not only the most religiously active, but the most religiously diverse country on earth. There aren’t just three or four flavors of American religion any longer. A month ago I was at prayers at a mosque in Las Vegas. There are nearly as many Muslims in the U.S. now as there are Jews; more Hindus than Congregationalists; more Buddhists in California alone than there are UUs all across this country. Which fact keeps me humble, even as I am pleased and amazed at our own growth, both in numbers and in diversity.

For a generation ago we came in three dominant flavors as well—called humanist, theist, and liberal Christian. But today, it’s easy to see, our ways of deepening our own and one another’s lives draw on wisdom from many sources—Jewish, Buddhist, Muslim, Hindu, Native American, and ancient forms of natural religion.

Over half a million North Americans, surveys say, now identify as Unitarian Universalists. And if only half that many are official members or friends of our 1,050 congregations—well, that only proves to me that we need more congregations, and larger ones—able to reach out and truly be ‘otherwise’—reaching broader segments of the population, among whom are millions yearning for something spiritually deeper than conventional conformity, wiser than the fear-mongering posturing as faith on the Religious Right.

For our way in religion, with its commitment to democracy and the rights of conscience, has a catalytic power in pluralistic society far beyond our own circles. It witnesses, in interfaith dialogue, to the possibility of putting aside differences in abstract doctrine or speculation in favor of a practical, centered religion with a civic circumference. For the memory we seek to embody is of forebears wise enough to put aside the creedal question others use, "What do we all believe in common?" for more profound, convenantal questions: "How shall we treat and help one another here? What hopes might we share? What promises shall we make to help deepen on another’s lives in the time we have?"

In Jane Kenyon’s poem, "Otherwise," wisdom comes in seeing what we take for granted, then remembering, in dealing with one another, that what we also share is our mortality, for "one day...it will be otherwise." Kenyon first wrote that poem when her husband, Donald Hall, was diagnosed with cancer. Within a year, ironically, it was she who had died of leukemia. He survived to make it the title poem of her collected works.

Morally, our lives are mortared together by our shared mortality. The words human and humane come from the same root as humus, the good earth, which bears us all, to which we return, which we are asked to walk together, in the time that is ours, in humility, remembering, as Jefferson put it, that "It is in our lives, and not from our words, that our religion is truly read." Read from how fully, wisely we use the finite freedom that’s ours.

Take my mother again. For years now she has not "got out of bed on two strong legs." She has multiple sclerosis. Largely housebound, in a wheelchair, she phones and writes to stay wisely engaged. Doing things like raising money for a young neighbor woman, the religious educator of a UU society, who one winter was in a car wreck with her children, without insurance. Ironically, that summer Mother was in a car accident herself, with Dad, who just cracked a few ribs, painfully. But Mother lost the very last of her ability to stand. So that, in a nursing home, for months of rehab, with a chronic irreversible illness, she understandably became depressed, saying, like Frankl’s companions, "I have nothing to expect from life anymore," or as she put it, "I’m such a useless burden now!"

It was Thanksgiving, celebrated then at my brother’s home. His wife, Ann, who is Jewish, loves Mother very much, having lost her own parents early in life. Over the holiday meal, we found ourselves talking about gratitude, finite freedom, and Frankl, when a story came to mind. That afternoon, in the nursing home, I told it to Mother. Saying that, far from being a burden to us, she still had work to do: the work of being—for me, my brothers, our wives, our children; for Dad, her friends, her neighbors, even the nurses and others in the nursing home then trying to help her—what she’s always been: an example of someone who uses her finite freedom wisely and well, with all the best that is in her. Responding to the Otherness that Life can be with ironic wisdom, by being well, ‘otherwise.’ Which led me to the story heard at Ann’s table, with which I’ll close this morning.

An early snow was falling on Munich, in Nazi Germany. A young woman was riding a bus home from work when the traffic stopped. Most passengers were just a bit annoyed. But from the back of the bus she could see into a sidestreet, where soldiers were loading people into trucks, and became terrified. SS men boarded the bus at the front to check papers. She began to tremble in the back, tears running down her cheeks. "What is the matter? Can I help?" a man next to her whispered, kindly.

"I don’t have the papers you have," she answered. "I’m a Jew; they’re going to take me." The man paused a moment, stepped back, looked her in the eye, and then, to her horror, began to scream, cursing at her: "Damn! You stupid b- - - - h! I can’t stand to be near you!" "Hey! What’s going on back there?" the soldiers shouted. "Oh, hell!" the man replied, "My wife has forgotten her papers again! She always does this. I’m completely fed up!" The soldiers laughed and moved on. She never saw that man again. She never even knew his name. Or what it was that, in that moment, had prompted him to be so…"otherwise."

My friends, Frankl was right. At every moment, we are "questioned by life." One day it will be otherwise. We may never grasp the Otherness that poses those questions to us. But that may not matter. What does matter is that while we have breath, we respond well. With the capacity to sustain love; with gratitude for the unmerited beauty of being itself; with other wisdom. Saying ‘No’ in the face of death and threats of dehumanization, ‘Yes’ to all that serves and enhances life. So that, at the very end, our final word may be one of thanks. So others may be thankful for how we have lived. So may it be. Amen and amen.