"WHEN OTHERS CONDEMN US"

"WHEN OTHERS CONDEMN US"
by the Rev. Roger Bertschausen

Fox Valley Unitarian Universalist Fellowship
2600 E. Philip Ln.
P.O. Box 1791
Appleton, WI 54912-1791
(920) 731-0849
Website: http://fvuuf.org
October 27-28, 2001

Call to Gather: from Encountering God: A Spiritual Journey from Bozeman to Benares by Diana Eck

If our world were a village of a thousand people, who would we be? The World Development Forum tells us that there would be 329 Christians, 174 Muslims, 131 Hindus, 61 Buddhists, 52 Animists, 3 Jews, 34 members of other religions, such as Sikhs, Jains, Zoroastrians, and Baha'is, and 216 would be without any religion. In this village, there would be 564 Asians, 210 Europeans, 86 Africans, 80 South Americans, and 60 North Americans. And in this same village, 60 persons would have half the income, 500 would be hungry, 600 would live in shantytowns, and 700 would be illiterate.[1]

Reading: from Encountering God: A Spiritual Journey from Bozeman to Benares by Diana Eck

Over forty years ago, Chief White Calf of the Blackfeet of Montana offered a critique of Christian exclusivism that was very expressive of Native American attitudes. As an old man, in the summer of 1958 he told the story of creation to one Richard Lancaster, whom he called his son.

I am Chief White Calf of the Blackfeet, and I am one hundred and one years old, and I give you this story that I got from my father, Last Gun, who got it from the old men of the tribe...You are my son and I give it to you. Only once before I tried to give this story. There was a missionary and I called him son and gave him a name and tried to give him this story but he would not take it because he said that this is not the way things were in the beginning. But I was not proud to have him for my son because he says there is only one path through the forest and he knows the right path, but I say there are many paths and how can you know the best path unless you have walked them all. He walked too long on one path and he does not know there are other paths. And I am one hundred and one, and I know that sometimes many paths go to the same place.[2]

**********

About a year-and-a-half ago, I joined four other Fellowship folks in attending a conference in Atlanta for mid-sized Unitarian Universalist congregations. I remember feeling excited when I saw in the schedule that the Rev. Bernice King, the youngest child of Martin and Coretta King, was going to preach at one of the morning worship services.

I think maybe our group was kind of late getting to the service, because we took the last few seats--at a table at the very front of the room. Riveted to our front row seats by her presence and skillful oratory, we listened intently as the Rev. King shared her message. You could tell she was Martin's and Coretta's daughter.

Reflecting on the future of social ministry in the United Sates, she talked about how so many people in our society are broken--wounded by racism, poverty, violence, drug abuse and the other troubles that continue to plague our society. Each of these broken, wounded people, she suggested, is like Humpty Dumpty after he fell off the wall. With Humpty splattered on the ground, we send in a twenty-first century version of all the king's horses and all the king's men--social workers and medical people and welfare caseworkers and a host of others--to put him back together again. But time after time these good horses and good men fail in their task. And when they do occasionally succeed, Humpty doesn't stay up on the wall for long. Humpty falls off again, because the real root cause of Humpty's brokenness is never addressed. The real root cause of Humpty's fall has to do with Humpty's soul--not with economic or social factors, as important as those are. As I heard the Rev. King say all this, I nodded my head in agreement.

Then she came to her answer for what ails us. "As I look at the host of societal problems," she said, "the great need in our society is for a return to being one nation under God." The answer, she said, is an "infusion of the Lord in us and on us." The answer to all the broken Humpties lies in transforming their lives, not in trying to fix all of the problems while ignoring their souls. And the only way to transform lives, she declared, "is to develop a real relationship with Jesus Christ." Suddenly I was no longer nodding in agreement.

And then with great reluctance (she claimed), she proceeded to witness against Unitarian Universalism. Social ministry must aim to transform people through getting them in relationship with Jesus Christ. Whatever good works we Unitarian Universalists do on behalf of justice and peace, she said, ultimately will do no good unless we also work to save people through Jesus Christ. Without Jesus, we will never be able to put back together all of the Humpties. She said that as long as we UU's lack a commitment to transform people's lives through Jesus Christ, there is precious little that we can accomplish together with her and other Christians. Our misguided UU approach to social justice renders us worthless at best. In a word, she condemned our religion as off the mark--and I believe at least implicitly condemned us to the fires of hell.[3]

As I sat listening to Bernice King witness against us, I could not help but think of the Rev. James Reeb--killed at Selma--and other UU ministers and lay people who walked with her father in the long march against segregation. What a different attitude Martin Luther King had toward working with us in 1965 than his daughter articulated in 2000!

After the Rev. King finished her talk and left the room, the conference leaders sensed we might all need some time to process what we had just heard. We spent a few minutes talking at our tables. I was amazed that some at our table responded enthusiastically to the Rev. King's message, basically by watering down her hard-hitting remarks. In their rush to be accepting of the diversity present in the person of the Rev. King, they ignored her message. She didn't really mean that wounded people need Jesus specifically, they said; she was just saying how important spirituality is in healing people. She didn't really mean only Jesus saves; she was talking metaphorically about spirituality in general. To me, by refusing to engage seriously with the whole of the Rev. King's strong words, their response revealed a lack of respect for her. Had she been sitting in our conversation, I believe she would have made it abundantly clear that she was not talking generally about the importance of spirituality in healing; she was talking specifically about the importance--no, the necessity--of Jesus Christ to healing.

The Rev. King's sermon posed a challenge to Unitarian Universalists that is not unfamiliar to us: How should we respond when others condemn our religion and us? For the better part of 2000 years, the formative ideas of our faith--belief in universal salvation and rejection of the Trinity--were defined as heretical by mainstream Christianity. Many of the pioneers of Unitarianism and Universalism were attacked, imprisoned and even executed for their beliefs--like Francis David, the founder of Unitarianism in Transylvania. Imprisoned for his beliefs, he died in captivity in Deva--the home of our partner church--in 1579. These same Unitarian and Universalist ideas continue to be seen as heretical by some Christians today. There can be no doubt: ours is a heretic religion. By heresy I mean that our faith has been consistently defined to be outside of the circle of orthodoxy. Maybe Mary Daly's definition of heresy is more to the point: as heretics, we're "weird beyond belief."[4]

Then, with our move in the 1800's and 1900's to encompass more than Christianity, we migrated in the eyes of some Christians from heresy to the even more damning category of apostasy. In using the label apostasy, with its roots in the Greek word meaning "to revolt" or "to defect," critics argue that we have completely abandoned Christianity.[5] It is this perception that today prevents Unitarian Universalism from joining the World Council of Churches; it is this perception that no doubt shaped the Rev. King's view of us. Nowadays, particularly with our openness to pagans and our acceptance of gays and lesbians, this view of us as apostate has only intensified in some circles. Some who condemn even declare that our religion is a cult.

One approach to religion, the Harvard scholar Diana Eck suggests, is exclusivist. For exclusivists, there is only one true path: their path. They are ardently enthusiastic about their own religion--and just as ardently negative about all other religions. Christians who claim Christ as the Way and Truth and Muslims who declare "There is no God but God and Muhammad is God's messenger" give voice to an exclusivist viewpoint.

With the world rapidly becoming a global village and the reality of radical religious diversity increasingly hard to avoid, exclusivism is on the rise around the world. It is one way of responding to this diversity. It's neat and tidy, with clear boundaries: we're in; everybody else is out. Exclusivism in the face of the world's expanding diversity fuels fundamentalisms around the world. Exclusivism was the face of Christianity the Rev. King articulated at the Atlanta conference.

For many of you, all this is very real and very personal and very challenging. Many of you, I know, face the terribly painful situation of being condemned not by a stranger like the Rev. King but by your mom or dad or sister or brother or partner or child or a colleague. For you, the question "How should we respond when others condemn us?" is no academic question. It is a burning, intensely personal question.

How should we respond when others condemn us? Let me begin by exploring how we should not respond. Namely, with self-righteousness and ignorance. Unfortunately, others' condemnation can lead us UU's to the shadow side of our faith quicker than you say Unitarian Universalism. In the face of the hostility of others' condemnation, we too often become self-righteous. We too often answer condemnation with more condemnation. Guess what this response leads to? Exclusivism. Our exclusivism. Christianity (or Islam or whatever religion seems to condemn us) is fatally flawed, we say. It leads people to hatred and bigotry. We're superior because we love all people and condemn no one--except maybe those who condemn us. Our way is inherently right; their way is inherently wrong. Is this attitude any different from exclusivist condemnations thrown at us?

Another typical UU shadow response to others' condemnation is painting with too broad a brush. A Christian such as the Rev. King condemns us, and we turn around and condemn all Christians for the view she articulated. All Christians are narrow-minded bigots, we conclude. All Christians are ignorant fundamentalists. All Muslims are narrow-minded bigots. All Muslims are ignorant fundamentalists. They all refuse to use their brains when they think about faith. They're just looking for someone to give them all the answers because they're not as smart as we are. These are flat-out ignorant statements. They ignore the truth that there are countless faces of Christianity and Islam and every faith on this earth, including our own. Some faces of virtually any religion are exclusivist, but many are not. Most Christians--her father for example--do not share the Rev. King's assessment of our UU faith. Most Christians today are not exclusivist. Bernice King does not speak for all Christians. In fact, she does not speak for most Christians.

Responding self-righteously and ignorantly to others' condemnation also leads many of us to develop a siege mentality. We start believing that everybody hates us, and so we start building up fortress-like walls around our faith. This, too, is not a good response to others' condemnation.

In addition to avoiding the shadowy traps of self-righteousness and ignorance, how should we respond when others condemn us? The main thing is not to abandon our UU principles. A cornerstone principle of our faith is that each individual has the right to freedom of conscience. We believe that each person has the right to come to her or his own religious understanding. We respect the inherent dignity and worth of all people and the different religious understandings individuals embrace.

This doesn't mean we necessarily agree with other religious understandings--for example, I don't agree with Bernice King's religious viewpoint. But I respect her view enough to listen to her with an openness to her ideas. I respect her view enough that I don't simply dismiss her as hopelessly wrong or eternally damned. I respect her view enough that I engage seriously with her ideas and don't dismiss her--as some of my tablemates did--by ignoring the parts of her sermon with which I disagree. I respect her view enough to try to engage with her in dialogue. And dialogue is the heart of our faith. I respect her view enough that I am willing to risk a change in my heart or mind by listening to her.[6]

This leads to the trickiest part of this whole question of how we should respond to those who condemn us. From my experience, such people are seldom interested in dialoguing with us about faith. I would guess from the Rev. King's remarks that day in Atlanta that she wasn't much interested in hearing our truth. She was more interested in a monologue than in a dialogue. How do you dialogue with her or with a mother or father who condemns you and shows no interest whatsoever in dialoguing?

I don't have an easy answer to this question. You can't force someone to dialogue with you. In keeping with our UU principles, you can try to be open to their viewpoint and to the possibility of having a dialogue. Maybe eventually the other person will be impacted by your persistent openness and come to a point of willingness to dialogue. You can't make them get to this point, but you can be ready to welcome it if it comes.

So stick to your principles! Don't condemn back! Stay open! Stay inclusive! Our Universalist forebears help me in my response. Their heresy was to believe that because God is so loving, everyone goes to heaven--no matter what a person does or says or believes. Everyone goes to heaven. Some attacked the Universalists for this heresy by condemning them to hell. And how did the Universalists respond? By maintaining that those who condemned them were going to heaven, too. In the spirit of Jesus, they responded to condemnation with love.

That is our challenge: to respond to condemnation with love and with a commitment to pluralism. This poem by the American poet Edwin Markham captures the spirit of how the Universalists responded--and how we can respond--to condemnation:

He drew a circle that shut me out--
Heretic, a rebel, a thing to flout.
But Love and I had the wit to win:
We drew a circle that took him in.[7]

One other principle guides me when I respond to another person's condemnation: I try to remember always that I just might be wrong. Who knows: I might get to the gates of heaven and be greeted by Bernice King telling me, "I tried to warn you!" Or maybe in listening to her or someone else who has a different viewpoint, I'll learn something I didn't know about myself or my faith. Even as I hold my position vigorously and give my whole heart to my beliefs, I always try to remember to be open to new learnings.

One of my role models in all this is Mahatma Gandhi. He was a master at the art of holding opinions strongly--so strongly he was willing to die for them--but always remembering, too, that he might be wrong. That's a big reason why he didn't want to assault or kill those with whom he disagreed. He didn't want to kill to promote a belief that might turn out to be wrong. Religiously, Gandhi was a committed Hindu who also remained open to dialogue and to learning from others. In the museum commemorating his assassination, there is a sign on the wall with this quote from Gandhi: "I do not want my house to be walled in on all sides and my windows to be shut. I want the cultures of all lands to be blown about my house as freely as possible. Mine is not the religion of the prison house."[8] That's the kind of house of faith I want to live in. Like Gandhi, I hope I can live and die true to my universalist beliefs. When he encountered another's belief, he took his shoes off, for he understood that he was on holy ground

Given the reality of today's global village--the reality captured in the picture of a global village I shared in the Call to Gather--it seems to me that we must find a way to dialogue with another. As a rabbi Diana Eck quotes said, "It is dialogue or die."[9] We're all living too close together not to dialogue. Condemning one another is the pathway to the kinds of horrors we've seen these past six weeks. Dialogue is the way to peace. Dialogue, as Eck writes, "doesn't mean that we will agree, but only that we will understand more clearly and that we will begin to replace ignorance, stereotype, even prejudice, with relationship."[10] It is to this dialogue that I commit my life. And while I can't force others to enter into dialogue, I can always choose the option of trying to enter into it.

It seems appropriate to close this sermon with the words of Martin Luther King, words far closer to Gandhi's image of a house of faith with all the windows open than to his daughter's condemning faith. King introduced a talk called "The World House" with these words:

Some years ago a famous novelist died. Among his papers was found a list of suggested plots for future stories, the most prominently underscored being this one: `A widely separated family inherits a house in which they have to live together.' This is the great new problem of mankind. We have inherited a large house, a great `world house' in which we have to live together--black and white, Easterner and Westerner, Gentile and Jew, Catholic and Protestant, Moslem and Hindu--a family unduly separated by ideas, culture and interest, who, because we can never again live apart, must learn somehow to live with each other in peace.[11]

[1]Diana Eck, Encountering God: A Spiritual Journey from Bozeman to Benares (Boston: Beacon Press, 1993), p. 202.
[2] Ibid., pp. 177-178.
[3] This account of the Rev. King's sermon comes from my memory and from a summary of the sermon on the Unitarian Universalist Association website. Direct quotes come from the UUA's written summary.
[4] Kathleen Norris, Amazing Grace: A Vocabulary of Faith (New York: Riverhead Books, 1998), p. 197.
[5] Norris, p. 202.
[6] Eck, p. 199.
[7] From Pierre Pradervand, "Ibrahima Sall's wider circle," Christian Science Monitor, September 27, 2001. Sent to me as an e-mail from the Monitor website.
[8] Eck, p. 210.
[9] Ibid., p. x.
[10] Ibid., p. 19.
[11] Ibid., p. 228.