The observant ones among you have probably noticed that a subtitle has been added to the title for today’s theme that was in the newsletter. This is because after the February newsletter came out I realized that way back in November, when I spoke about “Worth and Dignity, Revisited,” I’d promised that I’d revisit each of the Principles in the same way, and I hadn’t even got to the second one yet! Fortunately, “More About Love” meshes very well with the second of our current Unitarian Principles, which is "justice, equity and compassion in human relations," so I thought I could get away with just slipping it in.
I talked back in November about the process which is now underway of revisiting the Principles which the Canadian Unitarian Council inherited from the Unitarian Universalist Association when we separated from that organization in 2002. I said that over the next few months, I planned to explore with you each of the seven Principles as they now stand, considering what they mean to us and how we might wish to shape them to our context of time and place. We’re going to have an opportunity to help do that through the course beginning on February 25th which I drew to your attention in the announcements this morning. The more familiar we can be with the current wording, the better position we’ll be in to determine whether change is needed, so today’s theme is timely, I think. Of course, any shaping of our Principles in new words will in no way negate our respect for the words which have been the basis of the Unitarian movement in North America since 1985.
I think it's especially important, in a time when many new people are joining us as visitors, friends and often eventually as members, to try to orient newcomers to the basics of our religious movement. Those of us who've been around for a while also need to rethink those basics regularly if we're going to have a faith that's truly ours. I invite each of you to consider, along with me, what you find valuable or otherwise in each Principle. This morning we’ll focus on the second one, "justice, equity and compassion in human relations."
The first time I spoke here on this theme, three years ago, the impetus came out of discussions that were initiated in the Social Action Committee, and continued in a forum after a Sunday service, about a tax rebate that many of us were receiving from the Ontario Government. Remember that? There were strong opinions voiced about how the rebate might best be used by those of us who didn’t feel in urgent need of the whole amount we were to receive and who might be able to spend it in a "discretionary" way.
Someone then suggested that like that are very complex matters, as are most decisions involving ethical ways of using our resources, and it would be appropriate for me to explore with you our Unitarian Universalist Principle of "justice, equity and compassion in human relations." I’m doing that for the second time today, and I hope you’ll keep in mind, as you hear my reflections, that justice, equity and compassion are just abstract ideas until they're brought to bear on a particular situation. That first time I reflected on the Principle, the particular situation I asked you to consider was the tax rebate. This morning, I suggest we keep in mind a story from Friday's Record, headed "Religious groups favour tax hikes to help poor," and how our principle of justice, equity and compassion in human relations might be calling you to think about that issue for yourself.
The religious groups referred to in the article are a coalition of many faiths, including Unitarian (Jeff Brown, Minister in South Peel, is our representative); it’s called the Interfaith Social Assistance Reform Coalition, and its members met on Thursday with government representatives here in Kitchener. Locally, Revs. David Pfrimmer and Brice Balmer are actively involved with the coalition. You can imagine that there is not unanimous approval of their call to raise taxes! When has it ever been a popular request? Some opponents call for the churches themeselves to take on the responsibility of caring for the poor; others believe that social assistance should be kept to a minimum, at least until spending deficits are eliminated. What do you think that justice, equity and compassion call us to do in relation to the disadvantaged in our society? Who is our neighbour, and where is love in all this?
Let me go back for a moment to a more personal story. It comes from when I began my professional ministry, which was in Montreal in 1991. I was a ministerial intern, the same position that Beryl Baylis held here before I came to Waterloo. 1991 was only four years since the disastrous fire in 1987 which burned down the historic Unitarian church, named the Church of the Messiah, on Sherbrooke Street, but it seemed as if a long time had already elapsed with no firm plans for rebuilding or moving or anything other than the quite workable arrangement of meeting in the part of the building which had escaped the fire. Long range planning meetings were held with some regularity to try to keep in everyone=s minds the importance of making a decision about which direction to go. Almost everyone agreed that to stay put, with the insurance money of well over a million dollars sitting in the bank, was an unsatisfactory arrangement, but there was very little agreement about how to proceed.
It may or may not suprise you to learn that your current Minister, even brasher and less careful then than I am now, if that's possible, stood up in one of the planning meetings and said that if we were to take our Christian heritage seriously we would follow Jesus' admonition to the rich young man to "sell all that you have and give to the poor". I suggested that perhaps the fire was giving the members of the congregation an opportunity to live in the way that Jesus intended. We could give away all that insurance money, sell the still-very-valuable property on Montreal's "golden mile" in which we were meeting, and rent some modest quarters which would be paid for from current offerings. That way, we would be able to do some real good for Montreal's many needy people (a couple of million dollars still isn't chickenfeed by most of our standards) and also find out what really brings us together if we don't have a familiar and comfortable place in which to meet. It would be a growth experience, I think I said. Justice, equity and compassion demand it, I think I also said. Love calls for it, I said.
It probably won't surprise you to hear that the good people of the Unitarian Church of Montreal didn't immediately ask their treasurer to liquidate their assets and take the course that I proposed. Instead, some of them tried to help me see the excellent reasons for using their money and resources to continue the work that had been begun in 1842, the work of being a strong, respected and viable presence of free religion in a city which continues to be a mixture of Catholic Christianity, many other religions, and a vibrant non-religious multiculturalism. Other people at the meeting cast me in a role which I find almost too congenial, the role of naive idealist, the eccentric who must be tolerated, and even encouraged to remind us of our principles, but not taken too seriously. In a world of injustice, inequity and uncaring, I was self-appointed to speak of justice, equity and compassion -- and a congregation of just, equitable, caring people knew that they had to remind me of the facts of life: that money is given in trust, that we have a responsibility to use it wisely, and that Jesus himself is said to have told a parable about talents and resources that must be well invested, not squandered, if we are to have a clear conscience and peace of mind.
So they didn't do as I said, and five years later, in 1996, I found myself having driven from Windsor to Montreal, sitting in that new and impressive sanctuary, having seen the other new and impressive facilities, including a dishwasher into which you just slide the loaded trays of dirty coffee cups just as they are and they're clean and dry in 90 seconds -- and I was loving every bit of it!
Had I given up on justice, equity and compassion? I hope not. Had I been converted to a new understanding of how those virtues are achieved? Not entirely. I think what was in my mind on both occasions, in the old Montreal church and the new one, was basically the same concern, but I had been reminded that nothing is simple, and the motivations of the best and worst of us are always mixed -- not to mention the limitations of our intelligence and ability to understand what our Principles demand and how to hold those demands together.
I don't suppose there's anyone here, even if you've never been to a Unitarian Universalist service before, who doesn't agree with the separate virtues of justice, equity and compassion, but we may well disagree about which should have precedence in any given situation. Justice: getting what we deserve. Equity: treating everyone fairly. Compassion: feeling for and with someone in their needs. These are very different things, aren't they? And so this second Principle, which looks almost like a cliche at first, emerges (like the first one) as something not self-evident, something which needs to be said, and struggled with, over and over again.
The second Principle follows from the first, I think. It's because we affirm the inherent worth and dignity of every person that we commit ourselves, as congregations and individuals, to work for justice, equity and compassion. If we thought that some groups of people were without inherent worth, were disposable in fact, there wouldn't be much incentive to work for those values which suggest fair and equal treatment for everyone. The working out of human relations would be a much easier process if we could invoke some simple rule such as "might makes right" or "survival of the fittest". Justice and equity are much harder to understand than that, let alone to achieve. Compassion – love -- is perhaps more within our grasp ... theoretically at least ... on its own at least, but when you put it together with justice and equity it makes them even more complicated. How on earth do we even attempt to bring together justice, equity and compassion in our relation to a sadist or an advocate of the denial of rights to minority groups?
There's no way, I'm afraid, that I'm going to be able to make it easier. If justice means giving everyone what they deserve or are best "fitted for", as Plato put it, how do we know what they deserve or are fitted for? Who deserves to be a millionnaire -- anyone who's smart enough or lucky enough to make or inherit or win big money? Who deserves to be poor -- anyone who's unfortunately not smart? Who deserves to be free, or in prison, or kept alive or allowed to die? These things are highly problematic, yet we commit ourselves to believe they're resolvable.
And equity. We may associate it with such contemporary phenomena as pay equity or employment equity, affirmative action and the advancement of disadvantaged groups, but these are modern applications of a much older concept. "With righteousness shall he judge the world, and the people with equity," it says in Psalm 98, showing us that the ancient Hebrews had an understanding of equity -- fairness -- as a righteous and even divine quality. To combine justice and equity seems in the Bible to have been a positively superhuman aspiration. Yet we covenant to affirm and promote a way of being in our human relations that is both just and fair, that doesn't discriminate in any way between class, creed, ethnicity or status but sees every person as a member of our human family. We're aiming high!
And we aim at compassion, a high form of love. Justice and equity are somewhat abstract and intellectual concepts, but compassion, by its very definition, involves feeling. "Compassion" means "to suffer with", to share in someone else's experience. It seems to me very significant that we covenant to affirm and promote compassion -- that we undertake to try to feel with our sister and brother humans in their joys and sorrows, to rejoice with those that rejoice and weep with those who weep. As psychological sophisticates we may be fond of saying (well, I'm fond of saying) that feelings can't be commanded, feelings aren't good or bad; they just are. And yet here we are committing ourselves to having particular feelings, feelings of empathy with and sympathy for other people, feelings that may not come naturally to us at all.
If it makes any sense to talk this way, I think it's only insofar as we commit ourselves to recognizing our universal kinship and being open to our interdependence, so that we are indeed hurt by the plight of the sick and the poor and the disadvantaged and the oppressed. Compassion is about lessening the distance between ourselves and all the needy of the world, until I feel something of your trouble and am moved to try to lift some of it from you. It's one of those self-fulfilling things -- if we can't feel another's pain or delight, but act as if we do, soon we probably will feel it.
I want to share with you now three items from widely different times and places which I believe illustrate much better than anything else I could say the delicate nature of justice, equity and compassion when we try to hold them together in our hearts and minds and lives. The first is from an ancient source; it's the story of the wisdom of King Solomon in the Hebrew Bible. It relates justice and compassion and the equity with which those of the lowest status are entitled to the highest and wisest judgment.
The story comes from the First Book of Kings, chapter 3, and it tells of two women, despised prostitutes, who were quarreling about a baby which they each claimed as their own, and brought their quarrel, their maternity suit if you like, to the king who was renowned for his wisdom, Solomon. They went on arguing in the king's presence. Then the king said, "Fetch me a sword." They brought a sword and the king gave the order: "Cut the living child in two and give half to one and half to the other." At this, the woman who was the mother of the living child, moved with love for her child, said to the king, "Oh sir! Let her have the baby; whatever you do, do not kill it." The other said, "Let neither of us have it; cut it in two." Thereupon the king gave judgement: "Give the living baby to the first woman; do not kill it. She is its mother."
And just in case you're mystified by what on earth this old story has to do with our times, other than illustrating that King Solomon knew a thing or two, consider this: we still face a situation where the rulers of our affairs, our kingly equivalents, mostly respond to the conflicting demands of society, and apparently insoluble dilemmas, by proposing ever-deeper cuts, in some cases lethal cuts. Consider too that what caused King Solomon to be known for ever after for his wisdom was his compassion, his ability to recognize that what look like justice and equity may not be that at all, and to bring about a solution which calls for no cutting at all!
The second item is a piece of poetry which I learned as a child, and perhaps some of you did, too. It's from Shakespeare's play The Merchant of Venice, written around 400 years ago, about 2000 years after that story about the wisdom of Solomon. Here's what Shakespeare had that great feminist role-model Portia say about justice, equity and compassion (or love) -- he leaves us in little doubt about which of the three he believes should take first place:
The quality of mercy is not strained;
It droppeth as the gentle rain from heaven
Upon the place beneath: it is twice blessed;
It blesses him that gives and him that takes;
Tis mightiest in the mightiest: it becomes
The throned monarch better than his crown.
His sceptre shows the force of temporal power,
The attribute to awe and majesty,
Wherein does sit the dread and fear of kings;
But mercy is above this sceptred sway:
It is enthroned in the hearts of kings,
It is an attribute to God himself,
And earthly power does then show likest God's
When mercy seasons justice.
Therefore, [friend],
Though justice be thy plea, consider this,
That in the course of justice none of us
Should see salvation: we do pray for mercy,
And that same prayer doth teach us all to render
The deeds of mercy.
Render the deeds of mercy, exercise compassion, love your neighbour.
The third illustration I want to share with you is a more contemporary story, though it may not be totally modern in its origin – I’ve unfortunately lost track of its source – but it’s a compelling commentary on justice, equity and love, so I shall end with it and add no comment.
A frail old man went to live with his son, daughter-in-law,and young grandson. The old man's hands trembled, his eyesight was blurred, and his step faltered. The family ate together at the table. But the elderly grandfather's shaky hands and failing sight made eating difficult. Peas rolled off his spoon onto the floor. When he grasped the glass, milk spilled on the tablecloth.
The son and daughter-in-law became irritated with the mess. "We must do something about Grandpa," said the son. “I've had enough of his spilled milk and noisy eating and the food on the floor.”
So the husband and wife set a small table in the corner. There, Grandpa ate alone while the rest of the family had dinner together. Since Grandpa had broken a dish or two, his food was served in a plastic bowl. When the family glanced in Grandpa's direction, sometimes he had a tear in his eye as he sat alone. Still, the only words the couple could find for him were sharp admonitions when he dropped a fork or spilled his food.
The grandson watched it all in silence. One evening before supper, the father noticed his son making something with playdough on the floor. He asked the child, "What are you making?" The boy responded, "I am making a little bowl for you and Mommy to eat your food in when I grow up."