Creating Heaven on Earth

October 29, 2006

Rev. Arthur Lavoie

OPENING WORDS,

from Theodore Parker, 19^th century Unitarian minister, theologian, and abolitionist.

There is a hole in the dim-lit public bridge, where many fall through and perish.  Our mercy pulls a few out of the water; it does not stop the hole, nor light the bridge, nor warn men of the peril!  We need the great Charity that palliates effects of wrong, and the greater Justice which removes the Cause.            

Theodore Parker’s Experience as a Minister

READING/STORY

It was only her mother.  Surely it would be safe to see her mother.  If it had been her father or her brother—no way.  But her mother was coming and would bring the papers, and she would sign the papers and it would be all over.  Well, not all over.  This was Pakistan and for women it was never all over in Pakistan, but it would be better. 

Such were Samia Sarwar’s thoughts as she waited for her mother to arrive at the lawyer’s office. . . . Married at sixteen to her first cousin, Samia had borne a son shortly afterward but from the beginning she had found her husband vulgar, dirty, alcoholic, and violent.  She had tried to leave him many times, and each time her parents had refused to take her back.  For women in Pakistan, even those from relatively wealthy families like Samia’s (her father was a prominent businessman, her mother a doctor), if the young woman’s family will not take her back, there are very few places to go.  When Samia was pregnant with her second child, though, her husband had kicked her down the stairs and her parents had finally relented.  They took her back.  That was five years ago. . . .

Samia Sarwar sat in (the lawyer’s) office on April 6, 1999, waiting for her mother, for the (divorce) papers, for her freedom.  “It will be all right,” Hina Jilani (her lawyer) thought as she waited with Samia.  “It is just the mother and, after all, the mother is a doctor.”  But when Samia’s mother arrived and walked into the office, she was not alone.  “Who is that man?” Hina demanded of Samia’s mother, who clutched a stranger’s arm. “He is my helper; I cannot walk,” she offered.  In the next instant the stranger unloaded a pistol into Samia’s head.                         In Our Own Best Interest, William F. Schulz, pgs xxi-xxv

SERMON

UU minister Harry Meserve is known to have posed the following question:  “If you were arrested for being a Unitarian Universalist, would there be enough evidence to convict you?”  People have been arrested before for their religious beliefs, so I don’t think it’s an unrealistic question to ask. 

“If you were arrested for being a Unitarian Universalist, would there be enough evidence to convict you?”  Do our lives as Unitarian Universalists stand for something, or is this just a convenient place for us to hang out on Sunday mornings?

When we think about the things that mark us an Unitarian Universalist, many of us would point to the statement of principles and to a long history of being involved in causes of justice that make our religious identity different or unique.  As I’ve said earlier this year, the seven Principles call us to a rigorous self-assessment, an evaluation of what we believe and how those beliefs inform how we act in the world.  If our religion doesn’t have meaning that we put into practice, doesn’t have a critical edge, then maybe it’s just a social club and not a religion at all.

So, this week I want to explore with you our second Principle: “We covenant to affirm and promote justice, equity, and compassion in human relations.”

justice, equity, and compassion.  I’d like to begin with compassion because I think compassion is foundational to understanding equity, justice and other important religious values.  Compassion comes from the Latin.   Com, is a word that means “together,” and pati, is a word that means “to suffer.” Compassion then means to suffer together. 

A poor woman has a young child who has just died.  She goes from door to door, carrying her son, asking, begging for anything that might help bring him back to life.  She meets a wise man who sends her to see the Buddha. 

When she presents herself to the Buddha, he tells her to go back to her village, and visit every home, and from each home that has not experienced grief, she must bring back a mustard seed to make the medicine for her son.  She goes from door to door, eager at first.  But, she finds that there is not one household that has not experienced grief, loss, or sadness.

The woman comes to understand compassion, suffering together, by being able to join her sadness with the experiences of others.  And, her own grief begins to heal as she comes to know and share the grief of other people by listening to their stories.

Each of us has stories of sadness and loss.  Compassion is the place where our hearts open to know that we are not alone in our own suffering.  It is the place where we know that when another suffers, we also suffer.  It is the place where we know that our hands and our hearts are not clean when others are destitute and oppressed.  Compassion is the emotion that expresses a spiritual bond between and among people.

David Rhys Williams says it this way:

“The precious life that is in you and me is the same in all.  Rich and poor, wise and simple, strong and feeble, we are joined together by a mystic oneness whose source we may never know, but whose reality we can never doubt.  When one suffers, we all suffer.  When one hungers for bread, we all hunger.  When one tramps the streets in search of work, we all tramp the streets.  When one defrauds another, we are all implicated.  When one destroys a human life, we all share the guilt.  When one attains their heart’s desire, we are all partners of their joy. . . We are our neighbor’s keeper, because that neighbor is but our larger self.”

We can identify with the pain and struggle of Samia Sarwar, the young woman in this morning’s reading because we have known our own pain and struggle.  Our hearts, our spirits can reach out to her, and other women like her, only because we too have been hurt and broken, we too have sought healing and deliverance.

There are two things in life that rob us of the ability to feel compassion.  One is that like the woman who sought the Buddha to heal her dead child, we become so self-focused that we fail to recognize the suffering of others.  The other happens when we do not allow ourselves the time and space to feel our own pain, our own grief, our own loneliness. 

And, when we truly know pain or sorrow, our own and that of another, we cannot help but want to alleviate its cause.  It is our sense of compassion that leads us outside of ourselves, leads us to engage in working for justice, not out of some benign sense of obligation, but because we have some personal knowledge of the face of suffering.

Hina Jilani, Samia Sarwar’s lawyer, grew up in Pakistan, where her father was a human rights activist and was often in jail.  The pain that this caused for her family and her growing understanding of the condition of women in Pakistan aroused in her a passion for the law.  She, her sister and two other women lawyers formed the first all-female law firm in Pakistan.  She has dedicated herself and her legal practice to helping promote some measure of justice, equity and compassion for Pakistani women.  What is our call to work for justice, to work to alleviate suffering and sorrow in our community?

Equity is defined as “the quality of being fair or impartial.”  For me the word “equity” is much more appropriate as a spiritual value than the word ‘equality,” which may carry a presumption of “sameness.”  “Equity” recognizes that though there are differences among all people and their circumstances, each and every person must be treated fairly and impartially, that is without prejudice or pre-judgment. 

Barbara Ehrenreich was having a conversation with her editor. “How does anyone live on the wages available to the unskilled,” she asked.  “How were the roughly four million women about to be booted into the labor market by welfare reform going to make it on $6 or $7 an hour?  “Someone ought to do the old-fashioned kind of journalism—you know, go out there and try it for themselves?”

“I meant someone much younger,” she writes in her book, Nickel and Dimed: on (Not) Getting By in America,” some hungry neophyte journalist with time on her hands.”  “But (he, my editor) got this crazy looking half smile on his face and ended life as I knew it with the single word, ‘You.’”

So she did.  She spends three different month-long periods in different parts of the country posing as a recently divorced woman re-entering the workforce.  She knows that she can leave at any time.  She makes sure she has a car, which puts her in a better position than many other women in these circumstances and she does not have children to support.  Even with all of these advantages, her story is both scary and enlightening for those of us who may never have to face this level of poverty in our own lives.

In all three of her adventures she has difficulty finding a place to live.  Places that are available for poor people are often dirty, rundown motels that charge by the week.  These places are often more expensive than most apartments.  But, any decent apartment requires a large amount of cash up-front for a security deposit as well as first and last month’s rent.  It is nearly impossible for most poor people to save up that kind of money.

One of the places she had to stay, “contains a bed, a chair, a chest of drawers, and a TV fastened to the wall . . . Instead of the mold smell, I now breathe a mixture of fresh paint and what I eventually identify as mouse droppings,” she writes.  “But the real problems are all window and door related: the single small window has no screen and the room has no air conditioning or fan.  The curtain is transparently thin; the door has no bolt .

. . I’m pretty much open to anyone’s view or to anything that might drift in from the highway.”                                                                                           Pgs. 151-152

As she explores the job market, she finds that there is such high turnover rate in low-paying jobs that employers are always accepting applications whether or not there are jobs available.  And, the interviews are demeaning; employers rarely made eye contact, and treat employees as little better than dirt. 

She also had to undergo dehumanizing drug and personality testing for each job.  She had to work two jobs, just to support herself, and she was lucky that she didn’t have children to care for.  And, she found that most people, including people like us treat low-class workers very badly. 

“Maids, as an occupational group, are not visible,” she writes, “and when we are seen we are sorry for it.  (One day I asked my co-workers “why so many of the owners (of the houses we cleaned) seem hostile or contemptuous toward us.  ‘They think we’re stupid,’ was (the) answer . . . ‘We’re nothing to these people, we’re just maids.’  Nor are we much of anything to anyone else.  Even convenience store clerks, who are $6-an-hour gals themselves, seem to look down on us.”              pgs. 99-100

Reading her book made me sick to my stomach.  It changed the way that I looked at people around me.  It opened my eyes to real-life living conditions, right here in our country and probably in our community.  I became aware again of how much the privilege that I have as a middle-class, white male insulates me from the experience of people who have much less.  And, this knowledge causes me to question again where I stand on the values of justice, equity, and compassion.

In our families, in our churches, in our communities; these are the places we must begin for these are the places where our relationships and our behavior have the deepest meaning.

I have seen it happen so often in families, in churches, and even in my own life.  It is so easy to let a hurt or resentment get out of control, to be so self-focused that we have no willingness to see the other person’s point of view.  If we don’t know how to communicate effectively with each other, if we can’t be compassionate of another’s struggle and pain, if we are bearers of judgment rather than justice; then we have failed to understand and embody this principle.

There is a story that appeared in the Chicago Tribune in which Mother Teresa was asked the “question of life’s final meaning.”  “To become holy, and to go to Heaven,” was her response.  The Rev. Eugene Pickett, then President of the Unitarian Universalist Association, was asked the same question and his response was, “The purpose of life is to become whole and to create Heaven on earth.” 

As Unitarian Universalists, our vision, our understanding of the meaning of life is not dependent on some future time or future form of existence.  We believe that we are called to live our lives today, in the here and now.  Our mission is to become the most fully realized human beings we can be, and to make this world a better place for all of us who live here, and for the generations who come after us.

If we covenant to affirm and promote justice, equity and compassion in human relations then we have to begin today to make changes in our attitudes toward other people who have less that we do, who are in any way different from ourselves; to understand their stories and their struggles.  We have to begin today to work to create heaven on earth, a wholeness within our own lives that embodies these values.

“Religion is not just a way of believing.  It is not just a set of beliefs,” writes the Rev. Dr Marni Harmony.   “It isn’t even an attitude or a way of organizing one’s inner life.  Religion for us as Unitarian Universalists is a way of living – it is as profoundly manifest in our actions as in our thoughts and values . . . Whether we want it so or not, the realization of justice, equity and compassion in human relations is our responsibility.  We have to live them into being.” 

from a sermon on the second Principle by the Rev. Dr. Marni Harmony

Blessed Be