Conscience
Unitarian Universalists affirm “the right of conscience.” As we create space for conscience, it helps to remember the context of community, and the arts of humor and gentleness. This sermon was delivered on March 27, 2011.
The first Gulf War broke out when I was a senior in high school. My friends and I were just a little to young to vote, but old enough that our response to the war seemed important for the direction of our adulthood. Some of my friends who had never considered military service started to think about it more seriously. Some of my friends jumped into the peace movement with both feet. Most people I knew were busy trying to finish school and line up summer jobs, current events being just one more worry.
Around that time, Arlo Guthrie revived his “Alice’s Restaurant Massacree” routine. It’s a comedy piece that he wrote during the Viet Nam war. According to the story, Arlo and his friends were arrested for littering while visiting his friend Alice. The incident was blown out of proportion in funny ways, and he and his friends had to pay a fine and pick up the garbage. His arrest record led to some amusing experiences when he reported for the draft, with the result that he was not admitted to the military. It’s an eighteen-minute routine, so I’m not going to quote the whole thing. He says during the routine that he brings it up “because you may know someone in a similar situation, or you may be in a similar situation.” With the possibility of another draft coming up in the early nineties, it seemed like similar situations might happen again.
Arlo pictures what it would be like if people reported for induction, sang the Alice’s Restaurant song, and walked out. He says that of one or two people did it, the military would make assumptions based on stereotypes and wouldn’t take them. Then he asks, “Can you imagine three people walking in, singing a bar of Alice’s Restaurant, and walking out? They may think it’s an organization. Can you imagine fifty people a day, I said fifty people a day, walking in, singing a bar of Alice’s Restaurant, and walking out? And friends, they may think it’s a movement. And that’s what it is, the Alice’s Restaurant Anti-Massacree Movement.” For the rest of the routine, he teaches the song to the audience so that they can join the movement.
I’ve been thinking lately about our fifth UU principle, “the right of conscience and the use of the democratic process in our congregations and in society at large.” It seems to me that Arlo was on to something when it comes to the right of conscience. There’s a romanticized image of the person of conscience, one person expressing moral conviction alone in the face of opposition. I think conscience in context is more like Alice’s Restaurant, part of a whole life with ripple effects in the community. None of us is alone. We all have histories, futures, and other lives we touch. I’d like to take some time today to explore the right of conscience in its context. What does an ethical declaration mean for living, breathing people in community?
As with the Alice’s Restaurant Anti-Massacree Movement, the right of conscience increases in meaning when it is embodied with joyful action. Grounding an ethical principle with everyday, lived experience helps us to be more compassionate with life’s messiness, to let go of the myth of political purity. Yet, even in a purely verbal form, a declaration of conscience can give encouragement, calling out to other people of conscience and creating space for moral discernment. Embodiment, experience, and encouragement are all aspects of the right of conscience when we view it in context.
Embodiment
“I want to live where soul meets body,” our house band sang earlier. I want to live there, too. I want my ethical and spiritual life to be part of my physical life, not just ideas hanging around in space. When moral thought and religious contemplation are embodied, the result can be joyful.
One of the areas where I’ve seen this is in activism for lesbian and gay issues such as marriage equality. I remember a male friend in California, the day after one setback hit the news, rode the subway all the way across the bay to come to class wearing a big, floppy hat and a sign that said, “marry me.” He said it was the only thing he could do to keep from wallowing in disappointment and frustration. Similarly, I met a woman who had three wedding dresses—one in her office, one in her car, and one at home—so she could be ready for a protest or a vigil in favor of equality at a moment’s notice.
I have heard the argument that “statements of conscience” and demonstrations don’t mean much, they are just words or symbols. And sometimes they are. I’ve also seen these creative actions serve as a positive focus for intentions. People of conscience are more clear about their goals and poised for change as a consequence of giving structure to their ideas. As you may remember, I have said the same thing on the spiritual side about prayer and meditation. These practices may not change anything by themselves, but they change us and help us notice opportunities to make a difference.
The voice of conscience reverberates when it’s embodied in joyful action. Humor, drama, and art make it possible for an ethical idea to play out, as it were. We can imagine a world that is more just and sustainable when we’ve practiced living with that idea in creative ways. And, as my friend with the lovely chapeau pointed out, it beats the alternative of giving in to despair. Disappointment is part of the deal when we live in the real world, and we need strategies for the times when victory is not in sight. Ideas by themselves can be carried off by a strong wind. Once embodied, ideas have weight. They have gravitational pull toward people who want to live out their values in gladness.
The joyful love of life is an important part of the mix. Humanist scholar Sharon Welch writes: “It is possible to combine skepticism about the likelihood of certain, total victory over injustice and persistent, energetic work for justice. The key is a complex, fluid, concrete love: love for the earth, for oneself, for those who are oppressed, and for those who work against oppression. It is our love for life that enables the critique of particular strategies for further resistance. It is our love for life that enables us to maintain rage and vision in the face of the disclosure of more forms of oppression.” (From A Feminist Ethic of Risk, p. 172) Dr. Welch is speaking at the downtown church on April 13.
I think she has a point about all kinds of moral and ethical issues, not just the ones we might identify as anti-oppression or controversial. Our ideas need form and substance, they need to be fleshed out with love for life in order to be sustainable. Ben, the teacher in our youth RE class, let me know they would be talking about conscience with regard to responding to the disaster in Japan. What’s fair? What’s an appropriate response? World events can be overwhelming. I agree with Welch that love is key to persistence, and I would add that embodied creativity is a good way to make that love visible.
Gentleness of Lived Experience
Embodiment leads to my second point, which has to do with lived experience. One of the reasons why the Alice’s Restaurant routine sticks with me so well is that it tells a complex, messy, almost believable story. The protagonists start out trying to do something helpful and get into trouble by way of littering, which is not exactly admirable coming from a group of perceived hippies. The message of resistance seems more accessible when illustrated through flawed characters.
It seems to me that reflecting on unpredictability and real-life limitations softens rough edges in one’s outlook. Attempting to live out ethical principles can sometimes devolve into perfectionism or judgmental zeal. We stitch our lives together with the materials we have: the best of our knowledge, whatever resources we can cultivate, people we care about. A certain amount of seam allowance makes it possible to join crisp, smooth ideals together with this motley fabric and still end up with a wearable garment. Sometimes we have to cut each other some slack.
There’s a story from the life of the Buddha that illustrates this. When Siddartha Gautama left the comforts of his father’s kingdom on the quest for enlightenment, he went to the most renowned spiritual teachers in the land to study their methods. He apprenticed with ascetics, holy people who sought spiritual heights by denying the body. After studying with them all and mastering their techniques, he still had not achieved enlightenment. He and five companions went off to practice asceticism on their own. His daily meal would be a leaf or a nut. One day, he collapsed in a river and almost drowned. The path of luxury in his early adulthood had not worked. The path of denial had not worked. Siddartha Gautama decided to try a middle path. He remembered a moment in his childhood when he felt calm and deep peace. This, he realized, was part of the solution. He would need nourishment to regain his strength for the quest. At this moment, a young woman named Sujata came with an offering of milk and rice for the tree spirit. Mistaking the thin man for a ghost, she gave him the food and he ate it. His five companions thought such a radical departure was a sign that Siddartha had abandoned his spiritual quest, and they left. Alone under the Bodhi tree, nourished by rich sweetness, he meditated for as long as it took to achieve enlightenment. From then on, he was known as the Buddha, the Awakened One.
I’m not a Buddhist by any means, but I think often of the middle way, the path of self-care and compassion that sustains us as we live out the dictates of conscience. Sometimes, in our friendships with others seekers of the ethical life, we play the role of the five companions, focusing on purity of method and getting irritated with the give and take of life on earth. In this story, the Buddha expanded his expression of conscience to include sweetness, and to accept a gift from someone outside his circle. He was able to review what was working and what was not working, to make a course correction, and to find peace.
The middle path is important for me to remember when it comes to chocolate. I like chocolate. A lot. I don’t like exploitative trade practices that leave cocoa growers with little to feed their families at the end of the day, or in some cases even allow slavery and child labor. Just as this church does for coffee, I aspire to choose Fair Trade chocolate when I have the opportunity. I don’t always make it.
For a long time, the way I talked about Fair Trade chocolate and my inability to meet my own standards was annoying to people around me. I could be kind of whiny about it when there weren’t fair trade options at the grocery store, or when I decided to skip s’mores after we ran out of the good stuff. I wasn’t always as graceful as I would like to be when accepting gifts of chocolate that were offered with the friendliest of intentions.
Around Christmas last year, I was complaining to my Dad, saying I don’t know how we ended up with so much mass-market chocolate in the house and I didn’t think I brought any of it home. (This was not actually true. I conveniently forget sometimes when I contribute to a situation.) Dad raised his eyebrows. “Oh, really? Well.” Then I remembered that he had brought a holiday sampler with him that day. I apologized and ate one of the chocolates.
I had to think about what the practice of choosing Fair Trade was doing for me. I think individual consumer choices matter, but not as much as regulations and equitable trade agreements and the policies of non-government organizations like the World Bank. To the extent that eating my preferred chocolate was a reminder to advocate on the larger scale, it was useful. Looking at labels helps me to be mindful about my choices, to be aware of how my life is affected by others all over the globe. To the extent that my statement of conscience was driving a wedge where it didn’t need to be, or fueling my self-righteousness, it was not helping. Weaving my practice into the relationships of real life, I hope to retain the mindfulness without being a jerk. I’d like to think I’m less of a purist these days. I will say that it makes me happy that there are more options for Fair Trade Easter chocolate than ever before.
Dr. Welch says that this desire to manage every detail of our moral lives, to get an A-plus for ethical consistency, is a trap that particularly affects the middle class. She says this trap is dangerous, because the all-or-nothing approach is likely to end up with nothing. She writes: “The search for guarantees and for single comprehensive solutions is often paralyzing. Taking as the norm of power the ability of the political and economic establishment to meet its goals, middle-class activists often become trapped in a culture of despair.” Dr. Welch suggests a way forward, partly through the call and response of sharing individual experiences. Rather than imposing one comprehensive map for an ethical utopia, solutions will come from the stories of our living, all of our stories, with all of our imperfect attempts to embody the dictates of conscience.
This is part of the reason why I think our discussion and sharing time in worship is so valuable. We’re all trying to figure this stuff out. Sharing stories is one of the ways we can think through the implications of our philosophies, and to offer each other encouragement on the path of discernment.
Effectively giving voice to the right of conscience means grounding our ideals in experience. My hope and my expectation would be that reflecting on the realities of ethical living will lead us to have compassion for ourselves and each other, and will help us sustain our commitments for the long term.
Encouragement
A third communal aspect to the right of conscience is encouragement. The voice of conscience gains meaning when it is heard as an invitation. It could be an invitation to shared action, or an invitation to respond with a different perspective. Along with compassion, I think we can offer each other positive challenges to which we can rise. Church is one of the places where we protect the right of conscience. Often, when one person expresses the fire of commitment, others are re-ignited by that spark, remembering that all of us have the capacity for passionate engagement with the world. Giving voice to conscience is a form of encouragement.
Sometimes I have the good luck to hear that voice when I attend worship. I’m able to do that at ministers association meetings, or sometimes on my Sundays off, or when I go to UU conferences. There was one such occasion at General Assembly (GA) in 2005, at the Service of the Living Tradition. The Service of the Living Tradition honors religious professionals who have died or are retiring, as well as those who are entering.
The sermon in 2005 was given by the Rev. Dr. Patrick T. O’Neill. He and I see the world differently, in some ways, yet the way he spoke what was on his mind and heart woke me up out of my mid-conference exhaustion. Speaking to the newly fellowshipped ministers, he said, “The liberal ministry of our time needs ministers with fire in the belly, fire in the eye, and fire in the heart. So ignite, young colleagues, I beseech you! Catch fire!”
(He continued.) “The Church’s reason for being is to make real the Beloved Community on earth, nothing less. And your office in all its varied forms, exists to embody the work of that ideal, nothing less.”
I think it may be literally true that my hair stood on end. I left that service with a racing heart and with a long list of notes on my palm pilot. Most of those notes were not about what he said directly. They were about remembering the reason why I am committed to Unitarian Universalist congregations. The possibilities for what we can do together are breathtaking. I wrote down at least a dozen ways I felt called to engage with the world. I was three tiers up in stadium seats for that worship, but if there had been an old-fashioned altar call, I would have been down the stairs in a flash. My friend sitting next to me said her summary of the conference would be, “Went to worship, got my [rear end] kicked.” You know, in a good way.
When I hear any one of you telling of your hopes for this congregation, or witnessing to the difference it has made in your lives, I feel the glow of that same calling. When one person speaks the truth in love, others are inspired to do the same. Worship here encourages moral freedom because of the way you participate with active minds and passionate hearts.
I have my own way of understanding our reason for being. I believe that the purpose of church—the purpose of this church—is to save lives. We save physical lives when we can do our part to relieve hunger and poverty in Harford County. I don’t think it’s an exaggeration to say that it saves lives to sustain this place of acceptance, where the bullying and discrimination of the outside world have no quarter. This church saves us from the humdrum of the unexamined life.
Hearing someone give voice to conscience helped me remember that. It was energizing to have that memory called forth from me. May we all be so lucky, and may we be so blessed as to offer our gifts to the institutions that make those moments possible. We need church as a place where people are empowered and equipped to live out the dictates of conscience.
Conclusion
The right of conscience is about so much more than the lone dissenter. The voice of conscience leads us to the joy of embodiment, the gentleness of experience, and the challenge of encouragement. What might seem to be an individual act is made possible by a network of past, present, and future souls.
Conscience has meaning in relationship. We are in relationship with our liberal religious ancestors who fought to make way for the right of conscience. We are part of the spirit of life, which sustains the will to thrive and brings us to the opportunities of this moment. We are connected in comfort and in challenge as we care for one another. Community gives life to conscience.
May the coming week bring you smiles and laughter as conscience meets creativity. May you feel the compassionate, gentle guidance of experience on your ethical path. May you hear the voice of discernment encouraging you on your way.
So be it. Blessed be. Amen.
