Reading: from Saint Joan, by George Bernard Shaw

Robert: What did you mean when you said that St. Catherine and St. Margaret talked to you every day?
Joan: They do.
Robert: What are they like?
Joan: I cannot tell you: you must not talk to me about my voices.
Robert: How do you mean? Voices?
Joan: I hear voices telling me what to do. They come from God.
Robert: They come from your imagination.
Joan: Of course. That is how the messages of God come to us.
Cauchon: Woman, you have said enough to burn ten heretics. Will you not be warned? Will you not understand"
Inquisitor: If the Church Militant tells you that your revelations and visions are sent by the devil to tempt you to your damnation, will you not believe that the Church is wiser than you?
Joan: I believe that God is wiser than I; and it is His commands that I will do. All the things that you call my crimes have come to me by the command of God. I say that I have done them by the order of God: it is impossible for me to say anything else. If any Churchman says the contrary I shall not mind him: I shall mind God alone, whose command I always follow.
D'Estivet: Then your voices command you not to submit yourself to the Church Militant?
Joan: My voices do not tell me to disobey the Church; but God must be served first.
Cauchon: And you, and not the Church, are to be the judge?
Joan: What other judgment can I judge by but my own?

"What other judgment can I judge by but my own?" Does any one of us liberal religious folk here today have a satisfactory answer to Shaw's fictional, but wonderfully convincing, Saint Joan? Oh, it may seem very simple on the surface, and we may immediately find ourselves wanting to say to Joan, "Right on!" The central Principle of our Unitarian movement, the leading principle of this congregation, enshrined in our by-laws, is a free and responsible search for truth and meaning, for the shaping of our own personal conscience, and we stress our mental and spiritual independence of any kind of authority.

The first of the six sources of our living Unitarian Universalist tradition, as described in the same document as our Principles, is "Direct experience," followed by five other main sources but prior to all of them. (I'll be exploring that topic of direct experience in the first of six Adult Education sessions on Thursday night, by the way, and there's still room for a few more people.) So it does seem as if most of us would agree with Joan's rhetorical question, "What other judgment can I judge by but my own?" Our separate, individual judgment, our conscience, is sacred, isn't it?

Or is it? What about the conscience of the terrorists responsible for last week's atrocities? There seems little doubt that they were following something like conscience when they sacrificed their lives - something like a sense of duty, of religious allegiance - some inner voice or voices, at least as much as outer ones - voices perhaps not so different from the ones heard by Saint Joan in Shaw's play, telling her how to lead the French soldiers to victory, or the voices heard by saints and heroes of all times and places - or the little voice we encourage our children to listen to, the one which says - "Do this; it's right. Don't do that; it's wrong." The terrorists listened, with results that have appalled us all. If it was conscience telling them to do that, most of us would say, their conscience was wrong. Faulty. Misguided. WRONG. Much better if they'd ignored it. And yet, they might well ask too, "What other judgment can I judge by but my own?"

While I was preparing this talk, I had a phone call from a friend and colleague who'd just come from the Intensive Care Unit of a teaching hospital. A teenage boy had been in that hospital for almost a year, his condition steadily deteriorating despite all the innovative, expensive, experimental treatments he'd received for his complicated illness. When he was first admitted, his parents, from a small rural community, had understood very little about his disease or the possibilities for treating it.

Probably if they'd been told at that point that their son was going to die, they would have been deeply sorrowful but able, with the help of their Christian faith, to accept that reality. In the months since his admission, they have discovered that with what we might call heroic measures, life of a kind can be extended for a long time, although by now there's no joy left for the boy, no real living. The parents now insist that everything that can be done to prevent their son's death must be done. Their conscience, which a year ago would have told them to submit to God's will, will now not permit them to do what they see as giving up. Are they wrong? Should they defer to the advice of the health professionals who, after teaching them in the first place that they need not and should not give up are now saying it's time to give up? What other judgment can they judge by but their own? . . . which yet is not entirely their own, having been shaped and changed by the context in which they found themselves, but now in tension with that very context.

The tension between and among the consciences of individuals and societies demands great ingenuity and creativity from us in devising solutions which respect and protect, as far as possible, that still small voice which the Quakers, the Religious Society of Friends, call the "inner light". Many years ago I was tremendously impressed by the legal ruling made in one of those classic cases in which a Jehovah's Witness family wanted on grounds of conscience to deny a blood transfusion to their child, even though she would almost certainly die without it.

The obvious tension was between society's respect for the conscience of the family, and for its religion, and society's duty to protect all children from harm. The child was made a ward of the court so that the transfusion could be given: the parents did not have to betray their beliefs - they no longer had control or responsibility -- and those who did not share their beliefs did not have to let a child die. It's not always possible to find solutions like that, and even that wasn't perfect, but I believe we need constantly to be looking for a tolerance which is not indifference, a conscientious respect for others' ways of looking at things.

And make no mistake, what we decide about things like that dilemma and the terrorist crisis and the seemingly smaller aspects of our daily lives does matter. We are responsible. An old story tells about two old friends who were driving down the street.

They both had a lot of heavy stuff on their minds. At an intersection, the car zoomed right through a red light. The passenger could hardly believe her eyes. At the next intersection they ran that red light also. Now the passenger was beside herself. "Can this be happening?" she thought. Just then the car approached a stop sign at a crossing, and ran that too. The passenger said to herself, "I know I'm not imagining this. I'm going to pay attention at the next intersection and see if he runs that light." Sure enough, they sped right through the red light. "Billy!" the passenger scolded, "You've run three red lights and a stop sign. You're going to get us killed!" Billy looked astonished and replied, "Oh! Am I driving?"

Yes. We're driving. And what other judgment can we judge by but our own?

I've been talking with a few people in our congregation recently who suffer from various kinds of eye problems, which vary in both seriousness and treatability. Not being able to see clearly, let alone not being able to see at all, is horribly disconcerting and disabling, and if the problem can be helped or even cured, the relief is tremendous. I remember about 25 years ago, when I was first prescribed lenses for my own relatively mild nearsightedness, how amazing it was to see sharply what had been fuzzy for quite a while before I realized that there was something wrong. I wasn't seeing the world clearly, though I didn't know it. And after all, whose eyes could I see with but my own? It was wonderful to discover that there's a standard, something called 20-20 vision, and that with glasses I could regain something close to that standard vision. Even people who can't regain it, know that there's a standard which is by definition the normal-sighted way that human beings see things. Of course, non-human creatures see the world quite differently, and we don't know, can't know, which is closer to seeing the world as it "really" is, but we do know the normal way for humans to see.

If only conscience were like that! If only there were a standard, accepted by everyone, about the normal, correct way of seeing right and wrong, of understanding what's the best moral and ethical decision in a given situation, of perceiving spiritual correctness - even to the tiny and tentative extent that we now think we understand political correctness! Wouldn't it be wonderful to be able to fit a corrective lens to someone's moral eyesight when we realize that they're seeing things wrongly! Or do you, perhaps, think that moral vision, the perception of right and wrong, conscience, is more complex than eyesight and that maybe trying to correct people's conscience sounds like the kinds of re-education programmes we hear about in parts of the world we're glad we don't live in?

I find these exceptionally challenging, paradoxical and even bewildering things to think about. I certainly don't have any easy answers to suggest, and I know that in a little while from now I'll end up saying something simplistic about how you I hope you'll follow your conscience when you vote at our meeting today and in all the other moral decisions you'll have to make in your life. But I'd like to offer a few thoughts first about how we might possibly bring together our ideas about the authority of individual conscience and the need to restrain people from doing whatever they might think is right regardless of what others believe.

Last week, although I couldn't listen to the excellent talk by David Seljak, I was able to attend the discussion afterwards. He spoke powerfully about the need to act to combat evil together with others, not in isolation, and I asked him if that meant that solitary prayer and thought and contemplation had little value. "Not at all!", he said, quite shocked. "Prayer and thought and contemplation are all done in community, whether we're physically alone or not. We join with others in prayer; our thoughts are shaped by our experiences and our education; we contemplate a world which goes far beyond our single selves." I think this is totally true of conscience. It's never a completely individual thing; it's formed in community, shaped in context, and it continues to be formed throughout our lives, unless we're morally stagnant.

If we acknowledge that, we'll want to open ourselves to influences which seem likely to shape it well - giving more weight to thinkers who've stood the test of time than to the latest T.V. personality or pop psychologist or powerful politician, perhaps - respecting the great religions of the world as likely to have at least some truth in them - listening more attentively to the views of people whose lives we admire than to those who are glib but unsupported by right conduct, to use a Buddhist phrase. Conscience always has a context.

Conscience calls us to something beyond what easy and natural. All religions do this, and I think this is why we individualistic Unitarian Universalists, who reject so much that is traditional, still insist on respect for all religions - because they are calling people to do better, to stretch themselves, to become (as we would tend to say) more fully human, or as some of those religions would say, more divine. The prescriptions for how to do that vary tremendously, but great religions all include a call to be more; that is, they are about conscience, about the still, small voice which calls us beyond our simple self-interest. Will Feinberg, a ministerial colleague in the States, says,

For me, the words "soul" and "spirit" and "conscience" speak to the same essence, the same religious truth, that there is something in me that yearns for the transcendent; [they] connect me to "the interdependent web of existence."

(Oh, and in case any of you have difficulty with that word "soul", let me just throw in this thought from a non-Unitarian friend: "You always know you're in a Unitarian church when people believe that animals have souls but humans don't.")

Far from having difficulty with the word "soul," Unitarian poet Mary Oliver says, "The first, wisest and wildest thing I know is that the soul exists and that it is built entirely out of paying attention." Try the word "conscience" there and it makes even more sense to me: our conscience is built entirely out of paying attention. Attention to what? Not only to the written and spoken teachings of others but, most vitally, to the needs of the world we live in and the demands that those needs make upon us. I'll say that again - and nearly always when I repeat something, it's for the same reason -- I need to hear the words again and pay attention to them: to the needs of the world we live in and the demands that those needs make upon us.

Who knows what, if anything, could have averted the tragedies of September 11, but I feel fairly sure that if we'd all been paying more attention to the needs of the world we live in and the demands that those needs make upon us - that is, if we'd tended our consciences more actively - disaster would have been at least somewhat less likely.

Conscience is a hard thing. Not only does it call us beyond ourselves, if we listen and pay attention, but it keeps on calling; it's never satisfied. Craig Beam lent me a journal recently which had in it an article called "Schindler's List." Nice simple title, right? We've all heard the phrase. I really liked the article, so I try not to hold it against the author, John Davenport, that he felt he had to give it a subtitle: "Schindler's List: A Personal Kierkegaardian Reflection on the Nature of the Ethical." But it really is just about the movie and about conscience. It begins with a piece of the filmscript; Schindler who has saved many Jews from death, is talking:

I could have got more out.
I could have got more. I don't know; if I just . . .
I could have got more, Itzhak.
If I'd made more money,
You have no idea! If I just . . . I didn't do enough.
This car, [I could have sold this car].
Why did I keep the car? Ten people, right there. Ten people.
This pen, two people. This is gold: two more people.
He would have given me two for it . . . at least one.
He would have given me one more.
One more person. A person died for this.
I could have got one more person, and I didn't!

Here is a man who has acted with extreme heroism and courage, way beyond what most of us are able or willing to do, recognizing that he could have done more, even should have done more! What mixed feelings that elicits in us - and yet, who can contradict him? he had held on to a gold pen which could have saved another human being. His conscience, once having been awakened, could never be satisfied, and who is to say that those of us who rest easily and without guilt are more human? Is Schindler's angst perhaps a dramatic form of the tender conscience which, if we shared it, might save the world? Davenport concludes his article:

But unlike Schindler[s], our story is not finished. We still have a chance to act, to answer the evils and injustices of our times with the particular ways open to us. Perhaps . . . it is this ethical challenge itself which makes us individual persons. If so, then it is worth the terror and the anguish to stand where Schindler stood, and invest everything - our very selves - in pursuit of the Good.

How might we wake our consciences to a less sleepy state? I've suggested that the first thing to do is to pay attention to the world's needs and to the demands of those needs on us. In a statement last Wednesday, September 18, the man who many of us have come to associate above all with paying attention, with mindfulness, Thich Nhat Hanh, offered the following thoughts:

What needs to be done right now is to recognize the suffering [of this time], to embrace it and to understand it. We need calmness and lucidity so that we can listen deeply to and understand our own suffering, the suffering of the nation and the suffering of others. By understanding the nature and the causes of the suffering, we will then know the right path to follow.

The violence and hatred we presently face has been created by misunderstanding, injustice, discrimination and despair. We are all co-responsible for the making of violence and despair in the world by our way of living, of consuming and of handling the problems of the world. Understanding why this violence has been created, we will then know what to do and what not to do in order to decrease the level of violence in ourselves and in the world, to create and foster understanding, reconciliation and forgiveness.

A grandson told of his anger at a schoolmate who had done him an injustice. Grandfather said:

"Let me tell you a story. I, too, have felt a great hate for those that have taken so much, with no sorrow for what they do. But, hate wears you down and does not hurt your enemy. It is like taking poison and wishing your enemy would die. I have struggled with these feelings many times. It is as if there are two wolves inside me: one is good and does no harm. He lives in harmony with all around him and does not take offense when no offense was intended. He will only fight when it is right to do so, and in the right way. But the other wolf is full of anger. The littlest thing will set him into a fit of temper. He fights with everyone, all the time, for no reason. He cannot think because his anger and hate are so great. It is hard to live with these two wolves inside me, for both of them try to dominate my spirit."

The boy looked intently into his grandfather's eyes and asked, "Which one wins, Grandfather?"

The grandfather solemnly replied, "The one I feed."

Which creature within us will we feed today, in the way we act with one another, the way we react to international terror, the way we vote in our upcoming meeting? Let it be the one which takes us closer to the very best we have ever been able to glimpse. And I end with the words of a colleague, Alice Blair Wesley, also written this week in the U.S. context, but most appropriate to our own:

We don't gather here to decide collectively what is "the" truth or what is the "one" thing all will do. We gather here in the spirit of love earnestly to witness to one another concerning the truth as best we can see it, in the confident hope that we human beings learn best when we both say honestly what we see and feel and have experienced, and also listen to other viewpoints that we might come to see from other wider perspectives than our own. In this way we live out our obligation to seek truth as a disciplined community of love, and we faithfully honor the responsibility of each to think and believe and act with their own integrity.

May this be a time of faithful witness, not contentious argument. May ours be a fellowship in which we are strengthened to think and to act as well as it is given us to do, even in times of confusion, even especially when we ourselves do not agree.

So says a colleague, and so may it be. Salaam. Namaste. Shalom. Amen.