"At Home in a Community of Otherness"
A number of years ago when Unitarian Adlai Stevenson was running for presidency of the United States, Mrs. Kiplinger, a prominent republican, was serving as producer and editor of the Cedar Lane Unitarian Church Weekly Bulletin in Bethesda, Maryland.
The congregation at the time consisted in the main of what we were calling liberal democrats. The church, of course, did not engage in partisan politics but a number of the active democrats in the church did rent the building for a Stevenson rally when Adlai came to town.
That week at the very end of the last page, Mrs. Kiplinger typed into the Bulletin these words, “If there are errors in this week’s Bulletin it is because a Democratic Party rally is being held in my church and I am a republican!
But she did it, after all, in good humor. That is an introduction to the healthy spirit I should like to suggest today as appropriate for our fellowship as a church, to be at home, to be of good humor of otherness in a community of otherness—a community made up of persons who hold diverse views, who remain unified in the trust which allows each to make his own case, hold his own convictions, which encourages us to meet and go on meeting each other, to move out to meet the other person or persons and hold our own ground while we do so or at least hold our own ground until and if we honestly have reason to shift that ground.
Unitarian Ralph Waldo Emerson said once that the “only sin which we never forgive in each other is difference of opinion.”
I have not found that true in my own experience. I believe it has been true of my fears at times, but not true of experience. If some of your apprehensions have been like some of mine, you may have felt that too wide a divergence of opinions might have smashed the community’s ability to survive difference that any threat to the sense of affinity and belonging was too great a threat to risk complete openness and hard differing in matters of controversy. But if we cannot reveal where we truly live, trusting that ours is a community in which otherness is valued and we are valued, then we become bound up inside ourselves or perhaps worse may become obsequious followers of opposing self-righteous cleaves, a condition in Unitarianism devoutly to be shunned.
Or one could be afraid that if he or she were to open up honestly, the angers inside at having held back one’s truth would be so great that one would not know how to contain them. We then become more afraid of ourselves than others, and afraid of what we might do or say if the cork on our views is popped!
This can be extremely disturbing, particularly if one fears loss of love or respect because of his opinions, and most of us, I trust, want love and respect. But refusing to be open is a demoralizing thing. It is built on suspicion and inferiority. You and I are going to disappoint some people some of the time and displease somebody much of the time. We cannot live without doing so, so it might as well be while going out to meet them again and again, standing on our own ground as we do. I don’t think I would use Emerson’s word “forgive” with regard to differences though I think there have been times when I have forgiven or have been forgiven for opinions harshly put. Rather, acceptance of difference is more often the Unitarian Universalist ideal and one we attempt to apply constructively. Experience says to me it is the better way.
I have not come back this first Sunday to raise old issues and events, but to move beyond them, not so much to bury hatchets as to appreciate the cutting edge that keeps us keen in this changing world.
There were differences of opinion in the congregation and in me last January. Some of these differences may have been misunderstood then and may not be fully grasped now, but they came out. It has not crippled us that they did.
The congregation did not fall apart. The angers, at least as I experienced them or have heard about them, were not so destructive that we could not move on despite them or even because of them. Thus far it appears that you as a congregation have been proving that we are a community which can bear, can learn from, can go on to the next things following conflict.
We ought to rejoice in that!
The Black Caucus Project, as I have heard about it (and you have read about it and may hear about it at the forum), strikes me as needed in our larger community and deserves a good hearing and support. I hope we find it possible to agree in large numbers.
But, my point today is that we benefit from otherness, our own and that of varying viewpoints within our congregation. I got the words “community of otherness” from one of the men whose works I read and whose class I attended at San Diego State College, a visiting philosopher and scholar, Maurice Friedman. Of such community of otherness, he has written, “It is not requisite upon a community to forego all action for the sake of the lone dissenter. But much depends upon whether it takes the action as a real community or just as a majority which is for the moment able to override the minority. The reality of community is many voiced. In real community the voice of the minority is heard because real community creates an atmosphere of trust which enables this minority to make its witness.”
This kind of witness was possible in classes I attended in California. At least it was the direction in which they moved. For example, I participated in a class at the University of California, San Diego in Race and Ethnic Relations, taught by Dr. Tony Ngubo, a Black South African trained in British universities and working and teaching in this country since the early sixties.
In the class were various groups, people of differing socio-economic backgrounds within their own groups. There were Black and brown people, Chicanos and white Anglo-Saxon protestants, Roman Catholics, Unitarians, and oriental people of Japanese and Chinese ancestry. Everyone was learning something, not alone from textbooks, probably not most importantly from textbooks, but from the professor and from each other.
Any day one could bring up questions or make comments but Fridays were wide open. Dr. Ngubo, a marvelous mixture of firm convictions and kindly and openly smiles, would enter the room and say, “Ladies and gentlemen, I am at your service.”
There were conflicts and misunderstandings in his class, sensitivity showing, confrontations erupting as well as quieter groping for rapport. At times there was more otherness than community and one could not say that the course ended with everyone feeling everyone else was his chum. But people did make their witnesses. They were heard. People held their ground but allowed the next to stand on his. It was a great experience.
The idea that meant most to me in that class, one I had heard and felt before myself, came toward the end of the semester from Tony Ngubo. He said essentially this, “There is so much to be done and you can’t agree on everything. I suggest to any group or between groups that you can develop some common ends or goals that you pick something to act for together without regard to ideology. If you stop and wait to agree on philosophy you’ll never make it very far. If several individuals or groups realize that an article will take them closer to their goal, then go ahead and act together in those areas where you can.”
Then you find you are creating your own history as a group without regard to race or ethnic background. You create your own rapport by doing something together. You go out and have a success or two and you celebrate that success and are stronger as a group. You get your noses bloodied together and fail in an effort, but you find you are together discussing how your noses were bloodied. You build a community not based on everybody’s thinking alike or being the same but based on common experiences and efforts. These ideas, familiar to Ngubo, are familiar to any group action organizer. To be sure, wisdom would have such groups beware of the ideologies who merely uses them and anyone and always for his own ideological purposes. Tolerance of his Tolerance of his gross and secretive intolerance is not acceptable in efforts that call themselves democratic. But fear of demons should not stop us. Let us add some smart to our innocence and then go ahead and stand up for what is right and we can move in some ways through difference. As individuals we do not hold the same theological ideologies. We do not hold identical political views. In this place at the cognitive level we are held together by the free mind principal. Not only do we have different ideologies in our midst, we welcome the fact.
These are political times. Most everybody is interested in elections and issues and parties even though our major parties are really much like each other with perhaps greater differences within them than between them. But, of course, we have our preferences.
You will not hear me from this pulpit making partisan political speeches. But I won’t hide sympathies and I do have to tell you this aside. In California, supporting his views but believing he had little chance of winning the primary, much less the nomination, Peggy and I nonetheless spent a little time ringing doorbells for George McGovern.
It was pretty lonely for us in the neighborhoods we visited. I suppose the quick stereotype of San Diego is that it is a conservative military and retirement town. Be that as it may. Not many people declared an intention to vote for our man. We continued to like him anyway and do.
When we returned to Delaware with McGovern stickers on the bumper, we also felt and do feel very supportive of and hope for the reelection of Russ Peterson, and not just because he is a Unitarian either.
Well, I asked for some Peterson stickers for the bumper. This was before the Republican primary here. And as he handed me the Peterson stickers, my colleague said, “Just wait till the Buckson supporters see the McGovern and Peterson stickers on the same bumper. They’ll say, ‘I told you so!’”
It was a joke but it brought again to mind the question, why do people insist on making stereotypes of people in San Diego or Kansas City, or here?
Let me stand up in his uniqueness, attempt to persuade missions for solutions to problems as he sees them. It’s okay to be different.
Mind you, as I said earlier, this is not a political speech, but a sermon illustration. I learned long ago that free thinkers like Unitarians make their own political choices. What I am talking about is a community of otherness here, like the one in Bethesda in Mrs. Kiplinger’s day that allows everyone, to say where he is, in a community of trust. I personally would make a terrible political activist. It is simply not me! But I’m very glad there are many among us. I feel something like the Lebanese poet, Kahlil Bibran, when it comes to politics. During the last years of Bibran’s life his countrymen tried to persuade him to return to Lebanon and become their leader to help solve their many problems.
Gibran knew it would be a mistake and he wrote, “I am not that solution. I myself am a problem. If I went to Lebanon and took the little black book (The Prophet), and said, ‘Come let us live in the light,’ their enthusiasm for me would immediately evaporate. I am not a politician, and I would not be a politician.”
In a community of otherness each speaks from where he lives and from his aspirations and talents.
But Gibran did address himself to young Americans of Syrian origin, and a couple of things he wrote apply to the theme this morning:
“I believe it is in you to be good citizens. And what is it to be a good citizen? It is to acknowledge the other person’s rights before asserting your own, but always to be conscious of your own. It is to be free in word and deed, but it is also to know that your freedom is subject to the other person’s freedoms.”
In other words, go out and meet the other, holding your ground as you do, being open to his ground. Do not exclude the other as you follow your path. The largest issue, it seems to me, facing a people, especially as a church, are the same ones that have been with us for centuries, though new specifics arise under them in every present time and debates continue as to how to solve them. They are the issues of war and peace and of human brotherhood. How to work for peaceful and harmonious human relationship? How to love and not hate? How to save healthy human environments?
For years I spoke against the Vietnam War, worked in the Committee for Sane Nuclear Policy and so on, and for years spoke against racism.
After years to make words on those themes time and time again in our kind of church seemed rather like a dead ritual. Sunday we have the message. Yet we must continue to struggle to live up to our ideals. If we have the message more is demanded of us. And the evils and bigotry and beastliness and killing go on in the world. What insanity it is to put any people down—any race or ethnic group or any religious group because of race origin or religion—what a costly and repulsive business and how silly but most of all how immortal!
And of this war in Southeast Asia. We cannot imagine it. Can we imagine the bloody and criminal destruction of thousands of innocent people? Say the bombs were falling here from the planes of a nation thousands of miles away and suppose it were a nation of infinite power compared to our own, one that should never have been involved in such a war. Suppose a bomb were to rip through this ceiling to wound and tear and annihilate us and napalm to roast us alive.
People still say we can’t get out of Vietnam just like that. I talked with a marine officer recently who said, “How do we get out?” We march the troops down to the wharfs. They embark on the waiting ships and the ships sail away. Out.
And what to the American people say? Never again. Never again like that anyway.
Then do we also say never again to all forms of institutional destruction and repression of peoples? Never again right here at home? And yet it continues.
Perhaps all of us in churches should stand up each week and say the same thing: War - No, Racism - No, and demonstrate all week long every week. That would not do it, of course. In secular power terms, organized religion has little effect. Religion outside of the churches has turned to pietism. The cult of secular relevance is already passé. And yet war, no, brotherhood, yes is what is being said and over and over and over again. Every time the question of loving human relationships is addressed, every time community is urged, every time caring is observed and acted upon, and it starts not with what should one do, but the personal question on what should I do and say! So often there seems so little one can do, each “I” can do. How helpless, deeply moved but helpless. I felt attending the memorial service for the slain Israeli Olympiads last week at Temple Ads Kofech’s. All I did was go and listen just as the man beside me did. We find our personal ways to do, to stand against nothing, to stand against killing, to stand against all sorts of racism, to be decent. And I pray the nations will come to stand against reprisal and violence and counter violence, the ongoing cycle of evil.
I cannot speak from a platform of personal self-righteousness. It is extremely difficult for human beings to get a grip on guilt or innocence rationally. We are guilty of our mistakes even if we did not know they were mistakes.
Franz Kafka said, “Only those who fear to be put to the proof have a bad conscience. They are the ones who do not fulfill the tasks of the present. Yet he goes on to say, who knows precisely what his task is. No one. So that every one of us has a bad conscience.”
This is true. Everyone has a bad conscience, because so much of the world of experience turns out to be absurd and there is no human perfection. And, often enough, when we thought we were righteous we later found we were mistaken as had been used or were just not able to see how the future would turn our certainties into doubt.
Yet each is called as best he can to make his witness in word or deed or both, to act, to speak from where he lives, to live and let live, but with real dialogue.
Go out and meet the other, and go again, and hold your own ground as you go. You cannot demand that he think the way you do, but what you can demand of the other, and he of you, is that each reveal to the other where he is, where he truly is, that he express his otherness.
I believe it is done best in a community of trust. It is good to be home, trusting that we are such a community.
