A MIDDLE DISTANCE
by Galen Guengerich
April 4, 2004
It is always a relief when the daffodils bloom. For months, a deathly pall has shrouded the natural world. Two weeks ago, at the vernal equinox, the season of light commenced in earnest once again. It was time for daffodils.
I love Wordsworth's description of the coming of the daffodils:
I wandered lonely as a cloud
That floats on high o'er vales and hills,
When all at once I saw a crowd,
A host, of golden daffodils,
Beside the lake, beneath the trees,
Fluttering and dancing in the breeze.
Continuous as the stars that shine
And twinkle on the milky way,
They stretched in never-ending line
Along the margin of a bay:
Ten thousand saw I at a glance
Tossing their heads in sprightly dance.Daffodils are an exuberant if insubstantial celebration of spring. Each bloom is a trumpet of golden sunshine atop a slender column of air wrapped in green. As they flutter and dance in the breeze, daffodils signify the literal rebirth of a long-slumbering earth. But they also play a symbolic role, offering hope that our season of suffering as human beings has ended as well. If daffodils can rise from the cold, dark ground, perhaps our world can emerge from its winter of violence and destruction.
Then again, perhaps spring has not yet come. This week's news from the Iraqi city of Fallujah was profoundly disconcerting, in part because it was captured so powerfully by the photographer Khalid Muhammed. His photograph of the bridge at Fallujah seemed to be everywhere on Thursday morning. In the foreground of the photo, we see a group of men, most of whom appear to be quite young. They also seem exuberant, as if celebrating victory at a soccer match or a baseball game. One holds aloft a piece of paper and displays it proudly for the camera, while another jubilantly raises his fist in triumph. Dominating the forefront is a young man, probably in his early teens, who is holding his arm aloft and eagerly shouting to his friends—and to us, the viewers—to come over here and look. And so we do. There, hanging by ropes from the superstructure of the bridge are the mutilated and charred corpses of two dead Americans.
It has become conventional wisdom in recent months that democracy is a much more difficult plant to grow than some people assumed. But events in Spain and elsewhere have raised a related concern. Perhaps democracy itself is more fragile than we imagined. Democracy requires both individual liberty and collective responsibility. The freedom we exercise as private individuals is enabled and also constrained by our public institutions. One week from Thursday—it's April 15 for those of you who are in denial—we will each acknowledge our financial obligation to the common life we share as citizens, which will doubtless lead to the usual grumbling about our taxes being too high. While that may be true, high is a relative term. Our taxes would certainly drop if we would, say, eliminate the police department or the fire department. We could close down the public schools and eliminate government spending on roads, bridges, and mass transit, and even air traffic control. Perhaps we could do without the people who inspect restaurants, grocery stores, and meat packing plants. We could disband the armed forces, shut down the judiciary, eliminate all those detested regulatory agencies, and sell off the national parks. The tax savings would be astounding. This would ease our tax burdens as individuals and leave us free to—to what, exactly? Hunt and gather? Our freedom as individuals is made possible by our collective responsibility as citizens, which in turn limits our individual freedom.
I am reminded of parable once told by the 19th-century German philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer. It goes something like this. A prickle of porcupines—yes, that's the accepted collective noun—is trying to survive a bitterly cold winter's night. In order to keep from freezing, the animals try to huddle closely together and share their bodily warmth. In so doing, however, they painfully jab each other with their quills. In order to stop the discomfort, they spread out, so their quills do not touch. But then they lose the warmth of being together, and they begin to shiver and freeze. This sends them back towards each other, and the cycle repeats. Their struggle is to find what Schopenhauer calls a middle distance between the pain of too-close entanglement and the perils of being too far apart.
I've thought a lot about this parable in recent weeks, in relation both to us as citizens of our nation and to us as members of this congregation. In political terms, it is clear that democracy is a search for a middle distance between the freedom of the individual and the enabling yet potentially coercive power of the collective. In religious terms, I've mostly been thinking about how the parable applies to the relationship between Unitarian Universalism and Christianity. It is tempting to say that we should stay close enough to Christianity to be warmed by the teachings of Jesus the prophet, yet far enough away to avoid the dogmatic quills of Christ the King. This is consistent with our overall approach to the historic religions, which allows us to appropriate their essential truths without getting poked by their dogma.
This is a fine idea, except that I'm not certain it's possible. It sounds a lot like showing up for Easter lunch at grandma's house without being willing to sit down at the table. George Santayana once put the problem this way. He said that the attempt to have a religion without having a particular religion is like trying to speak without speaking a particular language. People who move from one religion to another, he said, often retain what he called a neutral residue of belief, which the traveler may wrongly regard as the essence of all religion. Yet upon careful examination, this essence proves to be nothing but the vestige of former beliefs. There is no such thing as religion in general. There are only particular religions, each of which has its own symbols, stories, rituals, and obligations. Every living and healthy religion, Santayana concludes, has its own special and surprising message. "The vistas it opens and the mysteries it propounds are another world to live in; and another world to live in—whether we expect ever to pass wholly into it or not—is what we mean by having a religion."
What we seek, both as Americans and as Unitarian Universalists, is another world to live in—one that finds a middle distance between an individual quest for freedom that leaves us each isolated and a totalitarian insistence on certainty and security that leaves us all in bondage. The special and surprising message that creates this world is that to be free, we must be responsible, and vice-versa. In political terms, of course, this means that in order to be free as citizens, we must take responsibility to pay our taxes and ensure that the money is well spent, among other things. In religious terms, this challenge constitutes what theologian Paul Tillich calls our moral imperative: to become a person in a community of persons. In the same way as one cannot be a citizen without being a citizen of a particular country, so Tillich insists that one cannot fully be a person without a being a member of a community.
All Souls is one such community. Like all religions, ours is constituted by two distinct but related impulses: a sense of awe and a sense of obligation. The feeling of awe emerges from our experience of the grandeur of life and the mystery of the divine. This feeling becomes religious when we respond with a sense of duty to the larger life that we share. As a congregation, our challenge in finding the middle distance lies not in exercising our freedom—we already excel at that—but in forging a shared faith that is uniquely our own. Our religion needs to be more than the residue of former beliefs that have been rendered innocuous enough to be applicable anywhere. It must create another world to live in—a world made possible by a special and surprising message, one that opens new vistas and propounds hidden mysteries. Our faith is transmitted by the stories we tell, expressed by the symbols we bring into play, explicated by the theological concepts we rally around, and validated by the standards we set. Some of these elements were handed down to us by our Jewish and Christian forbearers, while others we take from other faiths or create them on our own. The point is that they must cohere to create one world in which we can live together. Our moral imperative is to become complete as individuals by being members of a genuine community.
I have always been struck by the story of how Jesus spent his last evening with his disciples. They went to dinner—an event now known as the Last Supper. For Jesus himself, being Jewish, this supper was the regular commemoration of Passover. The New Testament says that on the evening before Jesus died, he asked his disciples to join him in a rented upstairs room on the outskirts of Jerusalem. There they shared a supper of bread and wine. Jesus also asked his followers to make a tradition of sharing a meal in that way as a means of remembering him and their time together.
If Jesus did have a sense of his impending death, then the way he chose to spend his final evening speaks volumes about how he understood the cohesiveness of the community he had created. Passover is a time when Jews commemorate the exodus of the Israelites from their enslavement in Egypt. It is a time for gathering at table with friends and family to remember the pain of yesterday and celebrate the promise of tomorrow. As long as you do this, Jesus said, your community of disciples will remain strong.
It matters deeply to me what stories we tell as a congregation, what symbols we bring into play, which theological concepts we rally around, and what standards we set for ourselves. But I believe that the proof of the theological pudding comes, as it were, at supper time. It's the time when we exercise our freedom to take responsibility for each other.
I sometimes picture all of us gathered at the long table and imagine the questions and remarks I would overhear. How was your week? I'm sorry to hear your mom has cancer; is there anything I can do to help? How did your presentation go?—I know you were worried about it. I'm really upset about how poorly my son is doing in English—do you have any ideas? What did the doctor say about the lump? I'm truly sad to hear about the divorce. Did you finally get the promotion? I need someone to talk to—can we get together for coffee? Sit at table together, Jesus said; the communion you share will set you free.
I close with a request. Sometime during this Holy Week, call up several friends from All Souls—perhaps new friends—and invite them to supper. Talk about the world you live in—our world as Americans and as Unitarian Universalists. Tell stories, talk about symbols and standards, and ask about work and family. What you will find is that the middle distance between I and they includes both, and it begins with "we."