By Rev. John T.
Morehouse
A letter was dropped off at an outpatient
clinic of a large teaching hospital this is what it said was this:
“As you pick up that chart today and scan that green Medicaid card,
I hope you will remember what I am about to say. I spent yesterday with you; I was there with my mother and my
father. We didn’t know where we were
supposed to go or what we were supposed to do, for we had never needed your
services before. We have never been
labeled charity.
I watched yesterday as my
dad became a diagnosis, a chart, a case number, a charity case labeled “no
insurance.” I saw a weak man stand in
line, waiting for hours to be shuffled through a system of impatient office
workers, a burned-out nursing staff and a budget-scarce facility, being robbed
of any dignity and pride he may have left.
I was amazed at how impersonal your staff was, huffing and blowing when a
patient did not present the correct form, speaking carelessly of patient’s
cases in front of passerby…My dad is only a green card, a file number to
clutter your desk on appointment day, a patient who will ask for directions
twice.
This is what you see, not
a man but a case. What you don’t see is
a cabinetmaker since the age of 14, a self-employed man who has a wonderful
wife, four grown kids and five grandchildren, with two more on the way – all of
whom think their granddad is the greatest.
This man is everything a daddy should be- strong, firm and tender; rough
around the edges yet respected.
He’s my dad, the man who
raised be through thick and thin, gave me away as a bride, held my children at
their births, stuffed a $100 bill into my hand when times were tough and
comforted me when I cried. Now we are
told that cancer will soon take him away.
You might say that these
are words of grieving, lashing out in helplessness at losing the one I
love. I wouldn’t disagree. Yet, I urge you to not dismiss what I am
saying. Never lose sight of the people
behind the charts. Each chart
represents a person with feelings, a history, a life. You have the power, with eyes to see, a person who you can touch. Tomorrow it may be your loved one, your
relative, your neighbor who turns into a case number with a green card, a name
marked off as done for that day.
I pray that you will
reward the next person you greet at your station with a kind word because that
person you see is someone’s dad, husband, wife, mother, son or daughter or
simply because he or she is a human being created and loved by God, just as
they are. I am going to bet you can do
this. (Adapted from a A Second Helping of
Chicken Soup for the Soul Ed. By Jack Canfield, 1996)
I spend a lot of time in
hospitals and other large institutions and I know that while many do not treat
people as this man was treated there are some who do. This particular letter touched me so deeply because I have seen
it happen both as your minister and as a son who accompanied his mother in many
such settings. It is one reason why
when you are in the hospital I am there.
I am there because at a time when you are most scared and most
vulnerable you are at the mercy of a system that can ignore you as the person
that you are. In fact, often my role in
a hospital is to act as your ombudism, to help you navigate the system that
sometimes forgets our humanity.
It was a moving letter for
another reason as well. It speaks
directly to the first principle of Unitarian Universalism: “We believe in the inherent worth and
dignity of every human being.” Through
out the course of my time with you this year, I will be speaking to each of our
7 principles as UUs. I have entitled
this first sermon New Bets for an Old World, because it is my belief that if we
can learn to truly live towards this first principle we truly will change. Tomorrow is the first full day of Yom
Kippur, the day of atonement in the Jewish calendar wherein we ask forgiveness
from God for all of our transgressions and failures. It is more than fitting that we fold our collective spiritual
thoughts to such a day. For what a
better way to atone for our failures than to look anew on each other and those
we meet. To bet again on this old
world.
The recognition of Yom
Kippur is important for another reason as well: this is the time of year when
we are reminded to practice Tikkun, Hebrew for “bringing the world in for
repair”. Tikkun is the outward
manifestation of atonement or At – one –ment with God and each other.
I can think of no better
way to practice Tikkun than to recognize our first principle.
What does it mean, then, to believe in the inherent worth and
dignity of each and every one of us.
By way of understanding
this principle permit me to consider its parts. The inherent worth is that faith we have that no person is wholly
lost. We may do things that are bad,
even evil. We may need to be removed
from a community, even a congregation for those actions, but there is still in
each of us a seed of worth.
Theologically I find the
best explanation in the teaching of Taoism.
Taoists believe that within each person there resides the potential to
do good and evil. As optimists of faith
we look towards the good as the greater, but we cannot ignore the evil capacity
as well, what Carl Jung and others call our shadow side. Believing in the inherent worth of each
person is possible for me when I take this balanced view. Best symbolized by the Ying and the yang, we
are complex beings of good and wrong, in each good person resides a pinpoint of
evil and within each bad person is a pinpoint of good.
Even a Hitler, responsible for murdering 6 million Jews (a
retraction from my quote of 13 million last week) had a pinpoint of goodness
even if he never acted on that.
This belief in the
universal potential towards worth is deeply rooted in our faith. It was our Universalist forebears who
believed that a loving God would never condemn anyone of us to everlasting
damnation. This doesn’t excuse evil,
but it does put it into perspective. It
helps us to separate wrong actions from well meaning people. We must still work to stop the wrong but we
need not condemn the doer to depravity.
How many of us, myself included, are able to live up to this principle?
How many times are we able
to look a cashier in the eye and see beyond our need to pay and get out, a
person who is worthy? Or even closer to
home, how many of us get annoyed with someone who is crabby without trying to
first understand why they feel that way?
I, for one, have learned the hard way, that better than half the time
someone is angry has nothing to do with me, but with something wrong in their
lives. Believing in the inherent worth
of another person means that we see beyond their actions to – as the woman in
the letter said – the person, the parent, the spouse, the life, the
struggles. It means loving the person
while sometimes hating their actions.
It’s not easy to do. Perhaps
that is why it is our first principle.
Or as my colleague Ron Crawford often reminds me “Our job is to love the
unlovely”. Rest assured he never says
whom the unlovely are.
Combing a faith in the
inherent worth of another goes hand in hand with the next part of this
principle and that is dignity. Dignity
is the active tense of a faith in our inherent worth. We are called to show dignity to each other. Martin Buber, the great Jewish theologian
called this the “I-Thou Relationship”.
Treating another like they are a Thou, a person, a fellow human being,
even an emanation of God (the ultimate Thou), means that we do not treat
another as an “it”. The old man in
hospital was an it; how else could the workers be so insensitive to the
patient’s rights to privacy or even their feelings. That store clerk is a thou, although we all treat them like an
it. The power of this distinction is most aptly illustrated in its demonic
form; how do you think those 6 million
Jews were killed? They were murdered
because Hitler’s culture had turned people, “thous” into “its”, the were made
progressively less human in the eyes of their killers in order that they might
be killed. Propaganda works on this
very principle: make the enemy subhuman and then it makes it easier to destroy
them.
On the Television program
“Faith in the Community” this past week up in Frederick, I tried to make this
point as we passed the anniversary of Sept. 11th. How much have we learned? Are we still allowing the media and our
government to portray the other, the Muslims, the Arabs as its? Did we ever learn what the political agenda of terrorism is? Or are they just bearded terrorists? Do we care?
Dignity implies not
forgiveness, that is something else, but rather human accord. One year after Sept. 11th I am
still calling for us to understand what led these terrorists to commit such an
evil. I do not forgive it, but can we
understand it even as we grieve? Better
yet, if we did understand what could we do to alleviate the conditions that
such evil breeds in? As I said on TV
last week, the bravest sign I saw after Sept. 11th last year was
from a Christian church “Jesus said: Love Thy Enemies”. While that moral bar may be too high for
most of us, myself included, I wonder if we will ever take the time to at least
understand our enemies? Do we have the
eyes to see something beyond their hatred for us? I am still willing to bet that we do.
With eyes to see, I bet
that we can live by this principle.
That is not to say it will be easy.
Not even here. We come together
again as a people with vastly different beliefs, vastly different political
views, and vastly different lifestyles.
We are young and old, republican and democrat, independent, with kids,
sans kids, too busy, not busy enough, Christians, mystics, pagans, agnostics,
gay, straight and undecided. If any
group needed a principle like this it would be us. In religion, there are many takes on the truth. Reality in human opinion is never
consistent. That makes living by this
principle so much more difficult. All
of us act out of what we think is reality and our best intentions within that
reality.
But as one feminist writer
put it so well, “we don’t perceive the
world as it is but as we are”. Even so,
there comes a time while respecting the inherent worth and dignity of another
that we have to ask someone to not be a part of even this congregation.
What seems like blasphemy
is, I believe, a confusion of our first principle with harmful actions. In order, to be an open and searching
spiritual people we must first and foremost be in a safe place. Suggesting that someone leave pushes what is
for many of us what I call the exile button.
Many of us come from religious pasts in which we were exiled. For any of us who have been marginalized by
a community, we know the visceral feeling that comes from asking someone to
leave. Somehow we want to universally
include everyone in our congregation.
But while we respect the kernel of worth or even try to treat someone
with dignity, it is not always possible to leave with harmful behavior. Believing does not mean excusing what hurts.
Being welcome here is not
dependent on your worthiness but what you do with that worthiness. Our inherent worth and dignity implies a
responsibility to act out of the worth and dignity. We have to hedge our bets if we want to change the world. And to hedge them means we have to take
responsibility for ourselves first and foremost.
There is a Sufi story in
which a man is walking through the forest and sees a fox that has lost his hind
legs. He wonders how such an animal can
survive. Just then a tiger comes into
view with meat in its mouth which he drops in front of the fox. The man seeing this wonder says to
himself “I am even more worthy than
this fox, I too shall rest and let God provide.” And so he lies around for many
days. Finally, nearing starvation he
hears the voice of God: “Get up Old Man
and find your own food. Follow the
example of the tiger and stop imitating some disabled fox.”
While all of us are wounded,
our first principle implores us to do everything we can to live our own lives
with worth and dignity. Living in this
way is the first step to respecting others.
We live first with self-respect and only then are we able to respect
others. How different the world would
be if we could do this. Do we have the eyes to see another as they are? Do we have eyes to see how we are not so
much different as the same? Are we
willing to bet that we can change the world with our own actions however small?
It was the great Universalist Margaret Sanger who said “We come not to take our
stand so that others might wage war upon us, but to find common ground on which
we stand.”
Can we see that common
ground? Aaron Feinstein did. Mr. Feinstein owned one of the largest
woolen factories in Wooster, Mass.
Employing 400 families. Then it
burned to the ground. He could have
just taken the insurance money and moved on but he lived in that
community. He knew what it would do to
not reopen. And so incredible personal
fortitude and a lot of resistance from regulatory authorities, Aaron Feinstein
rebuilt the factory. He took a bet on
an Old World and remembered that human dignity involves responsibility.
I bet that with eyes to
see, we will become much more than what we are. With eyes to see we will see that the ground on which we all
stand is the same, full of worth, full of dignity.
Amen.