I talked last week 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. Over the next few months, I plan to explore with you each of the seven Principles as they now stand, considering individually and together what they mean to us and how we might wish to shape them to our context of time and place. That's what our becoming an independent Canadian movement has always been about, and it's never a once-for-all-time change, always more of an evolution. There's another stage in that evolution possible for Canadian congregations as they decide whether or not to retain our nominal membership in the UUA which continues at present. Whatever decision this congregation makes on that matter, it won't affect our ties of appreciation and friendship with U.S. congregations, any more than shaping our Principles in new words will negate our respect for the Principles which have been our basis 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 ensure that our Sunday services, as well as our discussions and adult education programmes, help 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. So, although I spoke on each of the Principles just three years ago, as I was reminded by someone who keeps track, I think it's worth doing again - and to do in a slightly different way this time. I invite each of you to consider, along with me, what you find valuable or otherwise in each Principle, and how you might wish to reword those concepts that you find worth retaining.

We begin today with the first of the seven Principles as they now stand: "the inherent worth and dignity of every person". As I consider this with you today, I'd like us first of all to be aware of the limitations of this statement -- all that it doesn't say. There are many things that most of us believe to be true and worth affirming about people which aren't included in this first principle, and I think it's important not to read into it more than is there. Does that mean that it's simply a motherhood statement, a lowest-common-denominator principle, framed so that we can hardly avoid affirming it? Perhaps so, and it's certainly not unique to our religious movement. I've seen it stated as policy by organizations as far apart as the Ontario Government and the Waterloo District Catholic School Board. It seems like something which needs to be said.

I referred to the Catholic School Board because I recently became the newest member of their Equity Advisory Committee which also bases its work on this concept - that human dignity and worth require us to find ways of creating a climate of understanding and mutual respect. It seems to call for affirmation, not to be entirely self-evident. But it doesn't mean the same things to everyone at all times. For instance, unlike the writers of the American Declaration of Independence, I (and perhaps you) do not hold it to be self-evident that everyone is created equal. In fact, this principle doesn't speak of the equal worth and dignity of every person -- did you notice that? Equity's mentioned in the second principle, which I'll be discussing with you in a few weeks, but it's not in this one. It says "inherent" worth and dignity, not equal. Maybe you have lots of it and I only have a little! The possibility is left open here. And it only refers to persons, not to animals or any entity which might be considered less than a person, even though I've heard animal-lovers claim, only half-humorously, that "animals are people too"!

If you've ever followed any of the legal and moral arguments over abortion, you'll know that the definition of a person is obscure and difficult and very important in deciding rights and responsibilities. You'll also recall that it wasn't until well into this century that women were recognized as persons, with the same rights and responsibilities as men, and that for people of various races and backgrounds in this country as well as in other parts of the world, the fight to gain recognition as persons has been a long and painful one. It's still not clear to some of us exactly what constitutes personhood -- is it something that can be surrendered or lost, for instance, by someone guilty of inhuman behaviour, or by someone in what is referred to as a vegetative state, or is it something you have forever, once you're conceived, or born, or reach a certain stage of development? This Principle only says that those human beings recognized as persons (by you or me or society at large) have inherent worth and dignity.

I wonder what difference it makes whether we believe in this Principle or not. Not all beliefs translate easily into action. Probably almost all of us here believe in the evolution of everything in the universe from earlier forms, but that belief doesn't have an everyday impact on our lives and behaviour, except when we're engaged in debate with creationists. Our Unitarian principles are important only inasmuch as they're foundations for our way of living; otherwise they're just abstract mental exercises. So how might our affirmation of the inherent worth and dignity of every person affect our behaviour? At best, I think, it makes us want to create "a climate of understanding and mutual respect for the dignity and worth of each person ..."

How do we do that? How do we best understand and respect each other, and create a welcoming climate? In a way, I think it's a circular process. By thinking through our beliefs and exploring them in each other's company, we come to understand each other better and to create that respectful climate. And the climate of respect that we find here helps us to articulate our beliefs and commit ourselves to making them real, not only here but in our lives away from this congregation, out in the wider community. As we become more diverse in the congregation, we have ever-increasing opportunities for enlarging our understanding and appreciation of different kinds of human beings and their worth.

Does it mean we'll like everyone equally? No way. That's against human nature and it would be a losing struggle. But it's when we don't naturally feel drawn to someone that it's most important to respect them. There's no challenge or moral stretch involved in acknowledging that our favourite people are worthwhile, but there's a big challenge in recognizing the worth of people who we may find anything from mildly unattractive to morally repulsive. The stronger the repulsion, the greater the spiritual stretch!

And that's where this Principle stops being a platitude and becomes a difficult and essential platform of our faith. Where's the worth and dignity of Paul Bernardo? Saddam Hussein? The newborn baby with literally no brain? Your abusive spouse? The drunk driver who kills a child? Your worst enemy? According to this Principle, if they're persons (and as I've already suggested, there's a challenge in coming to an understanding of who's a person), if they're persons, they have inherent worth and dignity which we, as a Unitarian congregation, have covenanted to affirm and promote. I suggest further that to decide who and who is not a person is a very, very serious decision, because it affects our thinking and our behaviour towards those whom we've included or excluded from personhood.

Sometimes, the little accidents of life are marvellously instructive. I once noticed in another congregation's newsletter that by some keyboarding slip the title of a sermon on this topic appeared as "Inherit Worth and Dignity". When I saw that, I wondered whether it altered the overall sense of the title in any important way, and I decided it did and it didn't. "Inherent" worth and dignity suggests something that belongs to us simply by virtue of who we are, not something that's gained by what we do; it's inherited; it's our heritage as persons. And yet, an inheritance can be squandered and lost. Can we, similarly, lose our inherent worth and dignity, by our acts or our inattention?

I believe that just as we inherit a physical capacity for growth and health, which can be distorted and even negated by accident or intention or neglect, so it is with our spirits. There's a tremendous thrust in all human beings, right from conception, towards healthy growth, but all kinds of things can go wrong. Still, even the most diseased and disabled body needs physical care -- the more so, in fact, for being diseased or disabled -- and even the most diseased and disabled spirit deserves a comparable care, I believe. It's the form the care should take which makes for so much disagreement among us. The inherited, inherent worth can only be given reality and substance by how we treat each other with dignity, and we see that in so many different ways.

When I spoke passionately in my first year of ministry here about Robert Latimer's ending of his daughter's life, I did so out of the conviction that he was respecting her worth and dignity. This is one of the areas in which striving to understand and respect each other's beliefs can be most helpful to us, however difficult it is -- perhaps because it's difficult. Let me take this opportunity to remind you, in passing, that Robert Latimer is still imprisoned for what he did, and forgotten by the system which has said it can do no more for him than keep him away from the family who love him. Some of you are young enough not even to remember his story or who he is, but he is for me a living example of how deeply we can differ in our concept of what affirming worth and dignity requires.

I try to remember, when I'm talking with people who hold very different views from my own on matters of life and death, that what we differ on is how to affirm worth and dignity, not whether to affirm it. The worth and dignity may be inherent but how we create and maintain the climate where it can best flourish and be respected will probably always be a matter for productive and passionate debate. What I know for sure, for myself, is that no-one is of no account, and that whether we're involved in the giving or sustaining or taking of life, our own worth and dignity, in addition to that of the other, requires that we always act with care and attention.

The question of how we can best treat each other with care and respect is one of the greatest human challenges, I think, and it's one which has concerned philosophers and teachers from Plato and Jesus to Immanuel Kant. Kant, the 18th century German philosopher, gave us a cornerstone of ethical thinking when he wrote that we should "So act as to treat humanity, whether in your own person or in that of any other, in every case as an end, never as a means only."

Each person, that is to say, is worthwhile for who they inherently are, not only for what they can do for me or you or the world at large; no one is ever just a tool, a means to an end.

Kant lived in a very different time and place from this, but his ideas transfer right to our situation. In this congregation, we don't ask anyone to give up who they are by nature or background or choice for the sake of the congregation, as a means to making the congregation more identifiable or coherent or unified. Rather, we believe as Unitarians that each person's embodiment of worth and dignity enriches the whole, and that our care and respect for each differing person is a source of personal growth for us as well as for them. You are valued primarily for who you are, not as a means to some end.

Learning to respect the dignity of our Sikh neighbour who has won the right to wear his turban in the Legion or the RCMP is perhaps not as difficult as respecting those who insist on teaching their children that believing in Jesus as your personal saviour is the only way to be saved from hell. True respect for inherent worth and dignity has to go even further, even to those who drink too much, or who vote for the politician we despise most, or who give us bad advice which makes us ruin a relationship or lose money on the stock market -- these people are ends in themselves, quite apart from whether they provide the means of ruination or salvation for the rest of us, quite apart from whether they're willing to change or not.

Anyone who's ever talked with friends about their personal problems has heard the hope that someone will change in some way. I was in therapy myself at various times, and I used to think all my troubles would be solved if only my husband or children were different. Well, maybe so, but they weren't going to change, and only when I came to terms with this was there any hope for a more healthy way of living for me. Sometimes the most vital change, even the only change that we can make is in ourselves, and the most useful change we can make in ourselves may be to find a little more understanding and respect for the inherent worth and dignity of the other person. That can be truly transformative. Many of you have probably heard the story of how a mediaeval Jewish community was saved from extinction by the advice of a wise teacher that the members of the community should begin to treat each other as if any of them might be the Messiah, unrecognized. Mother Teresa expressed it as treating the most unattractive of human beings as "Christ in distressing disguise."

In this month's issue of Quest, the publication of the UUA's Church of the Larger Fellowship, there are stories illustrating the same insight, focused on the idea of "epiphany" - a moment of illumination, or more literally an encounter with the divine. Rev. Jane Rzepka writes,

In ancient times, epiphanies were a dime a dozen. You think you are talking to a new friend, and darned if that person doesn't turn out to be a divine apparition. The line between what was divine and what was human was pretty vague back then. The Iliad is full of epiphanies, where Greeks and Trojans encountered gods and goddesses face to face, and in the Acts of the Apostles Paul and his disciple Barnabas were mistaken for Zeus and Hermes in what seemed a natural enough mistake. Abraham invites three strangers for tea, and one of the men turns out to be Yahweh, his God, and the other two are angels. Not all that surprising. Just another epiphany. ..... For most of the world, divine encounters are part of everyday life. ...

[But] We're Unitarian Universalists. It's up to us. Is the person before us divine, however we define that? It's up to us. Is the moment sacred, however we define that? It's up to us. Is the ground we stand on holy ground, however we define that? It's up to us. We are deemers of the divine, we are creators, we are the dreamers.

"Is the person before us divine? It's up to us." Does each person we encounter have worth and dignity? It's up to us. We are the deemers of the divine, we are the creators, we are the dreamers. That is what I for one would like to retain about this first of our present Principles. I want to keep the concept that human worth and dignity, however inherent they may be or whatever their potential for growing or being lost, need to be constantly affirmed and promoted and made real, and that it's up to us to do so. I haven't worked out how I'd want to say it yet - how I'd make it short and simple yet conveying all that meaning. But I want to say, like that grandfather with the little girl who saw her own reflection, "That's where worth and dignity live," and help to make it come true by my affirmation. So may it be; so may it always be.