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Unitarian Church of Sharon
4 N. Main St.
Sharon, MA 02067
781-784-3652
E-mail UCS
A Fierce Courtesy
Sermon by Rev. Deborah Cayer
March 11, 2007
I pulled into a supermarket lot around suppertime one evening last week, and I thought I could slip around through a knot of cars bunched up at an intersection. But I found out I’d made a mistake when I heard a horn blaring, looked in my rearview mirror and saw someone screaming at me and making rude hand gestures. I think what must have happened is that I didn’t see this car coming and unknowingly pulled out in front of it.
But that wasn’t the end of it. The driver followed me as I parked my car and when I got out proceeded to scream obscenities at me as I’ve never heard before. I wasn’t angry, but I was completely confused, and I wanted to find out why she was so upset, and so I walked toward her car. At which point she sped off, almost hitting two other cars.
I felt pretty bad, first that I might have cut her off and caused her upset, and then that I didn’t find out what she thought I’d done, and if I had actually done what she thought was wrong, apologize. Though she was so upset I don’t know if she could have heard anything I might have said...Then the whole event was tremendously unpleasant and uncivilized. If I do something wrong or dangerous, especially when it’s unintentional, I’m ok with someone telling me about it; it’s important information that might save a life. But I’m not ok with someone treating me with such contempt.
I have no idea who that woman was or what was going on in her life that day. I’ve thought about it and have tried to imagine what might have caused her to act in such an uncivilized way. And I wonder, what might be going on in all of our lives now that we seem to feel it’s ok to scream vulgarities at each other in public. It’s not ok in private either, but certainly this kind of behavior doesn’t do much to build the common good.
It reminds me of the movie Crash—which started out with a police officer sitting in his cruiser at the scene of an accident reflecting out loud about all the ways in which people are isolated from one another, how we don’t really hear each other or truly touch each other anymore. And the rest of the film is about all the various ways people are disconnected, by prejudice, racism, income and class, and how all of this disconnection leads to violence, tragedy and death.
In his book, The Cheating Cuture, David Callahan says, “As income differences among Americans have grown larger in recent decades, so have social differences….Looking at each other across the chasms of class and race, many Americans see little reason to believe that they share each other’s values — and little reason to trust each other.” Our differences, he and others say, are dividing us and eroding public trust.
And yet, while the movie Crash was about how trust, love and community break down, the film was also about how tiny connections between people lead to love, and also how a tiny connection sometimes might make all the difference between life and death. The film shed a ray of hope on the healing power of love between family and friends, and also the healing power of altruistic love between strangers. This larger, humanistic love affects both individuals and the larger community.
We desperately need genuine, caring human connections that offer us warmth and shelter, protection from the severity and bleakness of life. We need to be able to come in from the cold of loneliness and isolation. Finding a loving community sometimes feels exactly like coming in from the snow and cold to warm, necessary shelter. And sometimes when we are in need, by accident we stumble into such a place. Others hold the door for us and say: “Welcome. Come in for awhile; get dry and warm.” It can feel like the difference between life and death.
And so finding a loving community can be a joyous, happy experience. We merge with these new folks and feel great as part of a larger group. It’s like falling in love; we lose ourselves for a little while. It feels wonderful. We’ve needed exactly this warmth, love and shelter; we didn’t know how thirsty we were for it till we found it and it was like water in the desert.
But just like falling in love, that’s just the very first, very beginning stage of finding a real community. I think perhaps that community, like love, beguiles us for a time, then offers us something more that’s really important—if we’re willing to do the work. Like any authentic, real relationship, real community challenges us in ways we might not have expected.
Even in the best of families, people don’t love and agree with each other all the time. They challenge one another and ask things of each other. It’s safe for them to do this when there are some basic commitments between them. Teens blast their parents with challenges. My husband who works with teens says this is because home is the safest place for them to try out newly hatching, clumsy, unfamiliar parts of themselves. And a parent’s job is to respond firmly but with kindness, so these new skills and abilities don’t wither in a blast of criticism, and are encouraged and refined with use. Teens need feedback from their parents, even when they’re growling at you to leave them alone.
Actually, any loving partner in any relationship needs feedback. All couples, all families, in fact all living systems grow with the right kind of feedback. Feedback is a basic for any living organism to really thrive. In community, as in families, this takes the form of offering each other different perspectives, wider truths.
Which isn’t always a warm and fuzzy experience. Kent Groff says: “In a life-giving community you hear a word that comes as a severe mercy, the fierce courtesy only a good friend or a good dream dares to voice.” A severe mercy…a fierce courtesy….his words point toward the importance of facing up to the truth. Fierce—this would be feedback that is very intentional and focused. And, he says, courtesy—meaning perhaps that it’s polite; well mannered, predictable.
In a wonderful set of lectures that she gave at Harvard’s JFK School of Government, Judith Martin, aka “Miss Manners” talked about the necessity of manners in public life. She says that far from being a phony set of behaviors that distance people and keep them apart from one another, manners more properly can be understood as something like oil for the creaky gears of both private and social life. Manners, like oil, keep the whole works from jamming up. Manners are not a false face or a mask that you hide behind. Manners actually offer us protection. They make it safe and just comfortable enough for us to show to do the work with others that makes democracy and civil society possible. You might not think of it on first glance, but practicing good manners is an important contribution toward building trust and the common good.
Truth and trust share the same root word—troth. “I plight thee my troth” are the words that come from an older version of a traditional wedding ceremony. “I pledge you my truth.” Relationships are built on truth telling, because we need to know where each other are. Telling the truth is like telling someone where you are. And when we know where people are we know whether we’re safe, and whether we can count on them to do the things we’re counting on them to do, or not do. It allows us the freedom of feelings, of movement, of trying new things—it allows us to explore and move and grow. And that can offer a benefit not only to us personally but also to the larger community. We discover new ways of doing things when our creative mind is free to explore.
Some people really don’t like dialogue, which is different from back and forth conversation, because it’s a slow process that takes time. But it’s an exaggerated style of communication that can teach us a lot. I think it is a valuable tool that can help build community because it’s a stylized, ritualized, mannered way of communicating. It’s predictable. It offers time to consider and integrate what is being said. It offers pause time before other ideas can get piled on top of what’s just been said and obscure it. So the process can be a kind of shelter in which ideas really can be heard and understood.
Breathing and listening while someone shares their ideas that are very different from yours can be really difficult. It takes a lot of maturity and patience to listen when you’re feeling threatened, even in a small way, over a small matter. It takes a lot to stay open to new or challenging ideas sometimes. And sometimes it’s important to simply be quiet and listen.
Fierce, severe…Kent Groff is telling us something very interesting, that real community isn’t merely polite. He says that it requires a kind of fierceness from us. I don’t think he means loudness or rudeness. I think he means that if a community is to serve the process of being life giving and life enhancing, it has to be severe and fierce, in terms of community members knowing what’s important. It’s severe and fierce in insisting that people be accountable to this greater truth, this greater good. Community members have to know what’s most important, what’s ultimate, and they have to ask each other to honor what’s most real and important.
It’s difficult sometimes to simply manage being civil, let alone accomplish the more difficult work of lifting up ideals and insisting people honor them if that’s what they say they intend to do. But this is actually the kind of feedback real community members need from one another.
I believe that in order to grow and mature, a real community also needs new information. It gets this new information when community members show up and calmly say what they feel, what they think, what their experience about an issue is, in a civilized way.
I think this is important because we’re all in this together. The system we have in our country and in this spiritual community for instance is democracy, and democracy is a participatory process; it’s imperfect, but it’s the best we’ve got and it needs us to contribute the best of what we’ve got.
It could also be that no one has a corner or a handle on the whole truth. To me the truth seems like one of those round gazing balls people put in the garden; wherever you stand around it reveals a different perspective, a slightly different version of reality. Standing across from you, I can’t see what you see. We need each other to accurately describe a whole reality, a whole truth. When you’re trying to figure out something new this is really important.
Or maybe the truth is more like a pointillist painting—it needs every different dot of color or there won’t be a coherent picture.
I believe that there is wisdom in knowing when not to speak. The wise silence…but it’s also the case that at other times when we hold back on speaking truth, when we remain silent, it leads to no good. For instance, there’s a big difference between keeping a confidence, which creates protection and shelter in a good, healthy way, and secrecy, which creates darkness and claustrophobia. Truth is powerful and it needs to be handled carefully. But while this is true, it’s also the case that in a family, or in a relationship, if you hide your truth, it comes out in strange ways, if not in that very moment, then at some future point down the road.
Truth telling is important for civil society to function. It’s also important for individuals. We need to live with our own truth in order to be at peace inside ourselves. I think this is why our dreams are so important. Our dreams keep bringing us truth in very strange, sometimes comic, sometimes frightening ways. Our unconscious mind wants us to notice what’s real and true, no matter what we tell ourselves and others during the day. Our dreams can’t lie to us. They’re designed to surface truth. We ignore them at our peril.
If you’ve ever been in the company of someone who has a spiritual practice of noticing and naming the truth of their experience, it can be very startling. All the normal places you lean into, smile, joke, gloss over and slide past aren’t there to grab onto or riff off of. Your only hope is to sit down, take a deep breath and look inside for your own experience, your own integrity. And once you begin to experience that, you can’t easily go back to sliding around the world behind a mask. Integrity is wholeness; it’s sacred. There is real power in integrity.
Real, healthy community honors the integrity, the experience in the worth and dignity of its members. It also helps members cultivate their own integrity. Real community needs to be a place where we encourage each other to be in right relationship, in part by simply telling the truth.
In UU tradition, we build effective, functional religious community through telling the truth of our experience and making commitments. These are the spoken covenants we make with one another that honor the larger set of natural conditions, the natural reality in which we live our lives.
In religious terms, showing up and speaking truth in community builds trust—which is not the same as building agreement. Sometimes when people offer their truth in community it’s as if they each put a stake in the ground in different places all around an issue. And that can be extremely useful, particularly if you put a covering over the stakes and tie it down, because then what you’ve actually created with the tension of difference is an open space where the spirit can dance, a shelter in which we might each encounter something larger than ourselves.
Some simple processes help accomplish all this when you’re the speaker: communicate in real time; directly to another person; without heat; with kindness; using “I” statements, assuming best intentions, and then listening carefully to the response. And when you’re the receiver, stay open, curious, and assume best intentions.
It sounds simple and it is. Except that we need to constantly practice, because in reality it’s some of the most difficult work we can possibly do. And given the state of the world, I think it’s also some of the most necessary.
This is the work of growing our character, our soul. It’s spiritual work that also benefits the larger community when we have the capacity to show up and respond, not react in anger or with violence. It’s perhaps at times the work of transcendence—we “get over ourselves”, we overcome the small, angry, weak parts of our self and emerge into a larger graciousness. And in doing this is the possibility that we might set our self free from anger, from hostility, from rage.
Members and friends of this congregation are going to have lots of opportunity in the next couple of years to listen and respond to one another. It’s going to be vitally important to the accessibility and expansion project that we show up and speak what’s most important with love and integrity. And listen. And honor our differences. And stay curious and ask questions. And always, if we’re going to assume anything, assume best intentions on the part of others.
If we practice this kind of fierce courtesy, I believe that what we will create will be a real community far stronger than the thickest, most, sheltering walls could ever be, yet at the same time, a community that offers a loving spaciousness we’ve only dreamed of for our spirits, our souls. Amen.
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