"Ordinary People Living Extradordinary Lives"

Rev. Bruce Russell-Jayne
September 27, 2009

For the last six months, I have watched the Teabaggers’ protests and actions of civil unrest with increasing apprehension.  I am afraid the angry mood being stirred up could easily escalate into bloodshed.  A lot of the people I know are also concerned that somebody will cross the line from heated talk to political violence.  We all support free speech, but it was shocking to see people carrying loaded weapons in the middle of an angry crowd at a Presidential appearance.  I have felt both fear and anger at the signs people take to these protests.  How can the protestors make such outrageous claims about the ideals I hold so dear?  It is tempting to accept MSNBC’s leftish commentator Rachel Maddow’s characterization of the Teabaggers as the “lunatic fringe.”  When I argue with my wife Cece that while there probably are some loonies in the crowds, most of them are not, she challenges me to explain what the driving force behind these passionate demonstrations is.  I have been trying to understand what is behind this conservative populist outrage, so let me tell you what I think is driving it.

To be sure, a liberal probably shouldn’t be the one to explain conservatives, bless their souls, but I will try to be fair.  We can see several conservative ideals at work here: small government, free market capitalism, individual responsibility for success in life and its attendant repulsion at anything like a welfare state, to name some of the main ones.  While historians disagree on what brought the conservative movement to pretty much dominate American politics for the last 40 years or so, I’m convinced what we’re seeing with the Teabaggers is not so much “movement conservatism” as it is a “populist politics of displaced frustration,” in which Teabaggers rage at [Obama and liberal values] is reflected anger about the underlying problem of economic insecurity.”  People are increasingly afraid they will not be able to preserve their way of life and the institutions of home, family, school and neighborhood over which they used to have control.   As the rightist media fans the flames of this “Politics of Resentment,” I am concerned about the furies it might unleash.

And, you know what?  I'm not tickled with the way things are myself!  The government bailout of Wall Street Bankers made all of us fear for our economic survival, and it made us wonder if our economic system based on abstract and speculative financial products was totally out of touch with reality.  But even before the Crash of 2008, outrages to the way I thought life should be were mounting, from deteriorating inner cities, suburban sprawl, and snarling traffic, to the overpricing of basic requirements of American life – homes, cars, college, etc.   In our world, one theoretically made increasingly wonderful by dazzling new electronic devices, “anyone who cannot afford something as tangibly remote as health insurance can become an economic non-entity—virtually expelled from active participation in the culture at large.  The ideology I learned in the 1960s, which predicted continued American prosperity and intellectual progress thru modern technological advances, no longer describes our world, if indeed it ever did.

If you are a Unitarian Universalist, you likely have already confronted the reality that our modern dilemmas won’t be resolved by absolutist ideologies.  There is not just one right way to persevere in the world.  And “Modern commercial society is far too weak a vehicle through which to express ourselves or to satisfy our longings for an essential life.”   What we are looking for is chances to perform healing acts of love and service and to transform the tragedies of our history and the maladjustments of our public system into opportunities for self-creation and social reform.
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The blurb about this sermon in our newsletter, The Harbinger, mentioned I would relate lessons from the great practitioners of non-violence in the 20th century such as Gandhi, Wiesel, and King, as explained in Robert Inchausti’s book, The Ignorant Perfection of Ordinary People.  The ideals lived out by these people not only provided the basis for their extraordinary successes in making our world a better place for us all, their ideals can be universally applied by every one of us in our own lives.  Our reading this morning said Inchausti advocates for a way of living in which common women and men accomplish good in the world adhering to the values they respect rather than to a set ideology.  This morning we’ll look to those who grappled with the worst oppressions of the 20th century for the foundations for a way of living in our 21st century postmodern world.

The primary technique every one of us can use is Gandhian non-violence.  Practicing non-violence offers a way of fighting oppression without resorting to the dehumanizing tactics of the oppressors and so becoming like them.  It might be tempting to belittle Rush Limbaugh and Glenn Beck or to write off the Teabaggers as a bunch of crazies, but that won’t turn down the level of rhetoric nor will it reduce anyone’s anxiety over underlying causes of our societal concern.  Discussion and debate is one thing, but the rude, disruptive tactics we saw last month at Congressional Town Hall Meetings was verbal abuse.  If people on the other side of the issue had also been acting out that way physical violence would probably have erupted.  If we look at health care as a basic human right, as I believe it should be, then we must courageously standup alongside those who don’t have it and demand that it be made so.  But instead of falling into tactics which lead to violence we can look to Martin Luther King’s practices of non-violent protest during the civil rights era for an example of how to act.  His second commandment for volunteers was: “Remember always that the nonviolent movement in Birmingham seeks justice and reconciliation—not victory.”  On this Yom Kippur eve, let us begin to think about how we can reconcile and become at one with those whom we see as “the other side” in the health care debates.

Gandhi knew people feel a tension between the greatness of their aspirations for a more humane world and the mean spirited environments in which they exist.  He understood this paradox creates internal conflict, and “for Gandhi, its resolution resides in a spiritual awakening, in Ahimsa—in overcoming this duality through conscious suffering and nonviolent noncooperation with evil.”   The suffering comes when we choose to engage the confounding forces of oppression rather than remaining aloof.  Since we do not know what the perfect solution to making healthcare available to all will be, it is frustrating trying to gain clarity about the alternatives while being bombarded with all the inflammatory messages in the media.  Most of the time, we can only “grope toward an approximation of universal care amidst the confusing claims of the opposing sides.

Gandhi’s method “of noncooperation with evil is not a recipe for moral perfection so much as a prescription for personal authenticity.  It is a way, not to gain power, but to remain faithful to oneself.”   That is why we should practice nonviolence before we engage opponents on the issues.  It may seem distasteful to you to try to engage with people on the far side of the political spectrum from you, but it can be done with integrity.   Elie Wiesel, whose attempts to come to terms with the Holocaust – for himself and for the Jewish people have been heroic, and whose interpretations of that experience are so valuable to us all, says that refusal to see reality and life through the Nazis’ eyes, that refusal to resemble them, to grant them that victory, too, was the only ethical act left to many Jews.  Given the fact that the Holocaust and our ideals for humanity are irreconcilable, Wiesel says the Jews who resisted both the complacency of the neutral and the hate of the killers retained their humanity.  It required them to be a little bit insane to do that, but some of them were able to show friendship and to maintain hope to the end.  Such “holy madness” may have been the biggest miracle of the Holocaust.   It may seem like madness to you to try to work with a Teabagger, but most of them probably already think we are crazy, so I encourage you to go ahead and engage them and stick to your values when you do.

To forge solutions with others, especially those with whom we disagree, requires us to be willing to seek mutuality and to compromise.  To compromise means to be able to change, but before we do that, we should be grounded in our own values so we can remain faithful to ourselves.  To work with opponents, we must be willing to try to understand their needs, to accept their kindnesses, and to give in to reason all while living for truths they may not see.  Doing this, we can turn them into friends while retaining our authentic selves.  Trying to understand and eventually love our rivals is certainly a creative challenge.  It does limit our absolute freedom of individual thought, but it can be spiritually transformative.  Reconciliation between people with opposing viewpoints is the only way we’ll achieve real reform of our health care mess.  I call on Unitarian Universalists to lead the way using nonviolent, noncooperation with the nastiness we’re seeing.
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Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn tells stories in his epic, the Gulag Archipelago, of people continuing to demonstrate human dignity in the face of state [terrorism]. At the same time, his Gulag exposes the ultimate moral failure of a state bound to flawed ideology and of the atrocities committed in its name.  We have been victimized in our own country by ideologically driven disasters, 9/11, the Iraq War, and the Housing Bubble and Crash to name a few.  Solzhenitsyn warns us to be leery of Marxism, Capitalism, or any state theory which holds itself up as a means of progress but which does not value human life as an end in itself.  His message of hope is that we, as common people, can enter history as witnesses to the force within us that intuitively resists oppressions born of the will to power.  That is, we know an oppressor when we see one, and we can help each other to retain our dignity when power is stolen from us.  Authentic expression of our values can change the way our neighbors see things and thereby change the world. Solzhenitsyn says we can’t rely on a pre-modern story of humanity redeemed by the Church for salvation in our postmodern world whose redemption is still in the balance.  In the camps he witnessed a true morality, one which operated at the level of the individual conscience.  Not everyone in the camps possessed the same level of integrity, it was something that had to be won back, earned, recreated every day.  That integrity has to be won is the postmodern reality; our redemption as a people is still in the balance.

For Lech Walesa, leader of Solidarity, it was his personal integrity, not an ideology, which allowed him to lead.  Genuineness is a different thing than abilities, moral superiority or even political ideals.  He was committed to consensus politics and knew he was fallible.  Thus he was open to new ideas and became a consummate negotiator.  But what he would not compromise on was the idea that social institutions should be moral.  At a time when the country and workers were poor, Solidarity said there would be time to come to economic health, but only after institutions functioned for the benefit of the people.   Their formula for progressive action was a very simple one: “What brings people into a common effort is good; that which divides them is bad.”  Thus, Walesa’s democratic values include pluralism and self-determination, and creating institutional forms that allow common people to lead their lives by conscience, and “conscience demands self-critique, personal honesty, and a leadership that serves them rather than manages them.”

Going inside ourselves to get in touch with our deepest values, maintaining our integrity through non-cooperation with violence, following our conscience, engaging others at the level of our highest ideals, and in concert with other common people creating institutions that benefit all of the people – these are the lessons of 20th century progressive politics we need to use.
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This is the first of two sermons I will deliver this year on Compassionate Relationships and our Covenant of Beloved Community.   This is the more theoretical one, in which I wanted to propose some moral underpinning for our efforts at creating community.  My goal for us this morning is that we will gain some perspective from the viewpoint of the heroes I have held up to you.  For one thing, I hope you can see where their ideas are complementary to our principles, and where they aren’t so close to think about what we might change.  Gandhi, King, Solzhenitsyn, Walesa, all of them are Universalists who believe that all people can be part of a just society and none of them think we can do it alone.  This is why cultivating compassionate relationships belongs within their philosophies.   Nurturing human relationships is a terminal value.  That is, for the people involved in them relationships are important all on their own.  In addition, strong relationships provide the foundation for accomplishing all of our societal goals.

I hope you have already made the connections between the messages of these progressive heroes of the 20th century and Unitarian Universalist values.  Our historic Universalism translates into support for universal human rights; our 6th Principle, the goal of a world community with peace, liberty and justice for all supports the use of non-violence as both a personal and a social action technique; and our 5th Principle, affirming the right of conscience coincides with their sense of personal integrity being the basis for action in the world.  With the support of a caring church community, we can have the space to cultivate our deepest selves and the courage to commit ourselves to live out our highest ideals according to our consciences.  Our lives can transcend our history.  In fact, since they inevitably end in death, I believe they must.

But wait, I almost forgot about the Teabaggers. What can we do with them?  We need to engage with our wider community to find ways of working together across ideological divides to solve societal problems.  When we can’t change other people by our convictions, “we can offer a space where people are encouraged to disarm themselves, lay aside their pre-occupations and listen with attention and care to the voices speaking in their own center.”   What is important about the people I mentioned this morning is not whether we label them conservative or liberal, Democrat or Republican.  Instead, it is what they say about living out of our best selves, and about how we can liberate ourselves from convention to create a more inclusive community.  To quote Inchausti, “We are, it seems, exquisite creatures of the sublime—born to novelty, invention, challenge, and transcendence.  How can we simply repeat the revolutions of the last two centuries?  We are called beyond such ordinary business…” And let us rise to the challenge of the anti-humanitarian forces and prove that a spirit can emerge from the lives of ordinary people that can heal the world.