by Larry H. Ingraham
| I once heard the late Rev. Sid Peterman, former JPD district consultant,
say that living our UU faith was extremely difficult and demanding. At the
time I found this remark puzzling. Unitarian Universalism had never seemed
very difficult to me . I went to tochurch whenever sermon topics appealed.
I picked and chose those church activities that gave me the most personal
satisfaction. Whether or not I got involved in social justice issues was
left entirely to me. And when the church asked for money it was usually with
an embarassed apology. What was so difficult about being a UU, I wondered.
If anything, I thought we ought to demand more of ourselves and each other.
Now in my mid-50’s, I am realizing the truth in Sid Peterman’s words. I find my ideals cost more these days, and I find I need a church community as much as ever to help me become comfortable with them. I acquired my ideals second hand from respected familiy and friends without my giving a lot of thought to the matter. I treasured them because they were emotionally satisfying. When I was younger, simply talking about my ideals was enough to set my heart racing, and sometimes even set my feet moving. In those days, to earnestly invoke words like freedom, justice, or peace thrilled me in the same way merely seeing the letters S-E-X in print had thrilled me as a junior high school student. In 1968, I stuffed envelopes for Clean Gene McCarthy, the people’s candidate for president. I wrote passionate war protests to President Nixon. I protested the transfer of St. Elizabeth’s mental hospital from federal control to the District of Columbia. Clean Gene was not elected. The Vietnam war hemorrhaged on. St. Elizabeth’s became more wretched than ever. After graduateschool my activism and high ideals died quietly, or at least slept peacefully, as I put my energies into career and family. I still chattered about racial equality, adequate housing and feeding the hungry. But I contributed little money and no time to such ideals. Not that I was ever a wild-eyed social activist. I saw myself as a political liberal who, if I had any real convictions at all, vaguely feltgovernment ought to do more. Sometimes, when pinched for money, I even argued to myself that private charity only exacerbated social problems by giving lawmakers the illusion that government action was not required. Later in life, when I had the house payments under control, I contributed when asked, based mostly on whims following whatever heart wrenching appeal appeared early in the Christmastime deluge of heart wrenching appeals. I took a spare change approach to charity and social action without much thought to which causes I really cared about and why. After all, I told myself, I had so little money to give that whatever I did or did not contribute wouldn’t make much difference. Of late, however, these patterns of old have begun to trouble me. Perhaps it is because I am now more aware of my conflicts and inconsistancies, and the feelings of inconvenience, greed and fear that underlie them. Before going further let me clarify that my purpose today is not to simply whine about how difficult it is to walk my talk (although I can’t deny the deeply satisfying comfort of an occassional moan, especially when done in approving company). But no, my purpose today is to share with you significant challenges in my faith journey and what I expect from my religious community as I explore these frontiers of my faith. Sometimes I find my ideals, there’s no delicate way to put it, inconvenient. I think I am talking about more than the old sin of sloth, but perhaps not. Take my humble morning cup of coffee. I love good coffee, dark roasted, French pressed without any brown paper bag aftertaste. For this daily delight I pay about $7.00 a pound at my neighborhood supermarket who gets it from a corporate warehouse where it arrives from national distributors who buy it from international vendors who acquire it from large coffee plantations who pay low wages to their workers and use large amounts of pesticides on their crops. Low wages and much pesticide rankle my liberal conscience, but what is my choice? Well, my local food cooperative carries organic coffee. This coffee, grown on small, family sized farms, is sold through democratically run cooperatives to my own democratically run cooperative. It would seem a perfect match of my tastes and my values. Unfortunately, the cost of organic coffee runs about $10 a pound . Ah, there’s the rub. I know in my heart of hearts that economic justice requires narrowing the gap between the rich and the poor, but it never occurred to me that this would come at the price of my morning coffee! Now three dollars a pound is not a lot of money for someone in my income bracket. I spend that much on a cappuccino and biscotti. It’s the idea of having to pay more for my ideals that really galls me. Somewhere I acquired the conciet that my ideals, at the minimum, shouldn’t cost extra, and really ought to go for bargain prices, sort of a bonus for right thinking and compassionate action. I now see it doesn’t work that way. Doing the right thing becomes expensive, in terms of money and psychological turmoil. I want my church to be there for me as I try to rationalize my way our of the invonenience of making a special trip to the coop for coffee and of paying a bit more for the produce. Ideally, my church community would lead the way in serving only this kind of coffee at church functions, and in uring its members to serve the same in their homes. Investing is another area in which I need help. Investing makes me acutely aware of my greed. I digress here for a moment to acknowledge that talking about money and personal finances is the most taboo topic in American society. I find it embarassing to state I have money to invest. Many people, some in this room, only wish they could have the dilemma I am about to describe. Yet it is in how we spend our money (and our time) that we live our values). If I cannot bring my conflicts about my money and my values to church, then where else might I bring them? Hear me out, and consider what resources this congregation might offer a person in my situation. My mother left me what amounts to a year’s income.. It’s not enough to park in bonds and live comfortably clipping coupons, but it’s too much to fritter away on nice-to-haves. It is mother’s sweetest curse because I get no pleasure at all in managing money. Yet I feel compelled to manage well what I have out of an unexamined terror of wandering the streets hungry and destitute. I dumped mother’s money in mutual funds, the ones that aim to preserve principal while producing modest growth and income. Sor far so good, but then other ideals began nagging me. Following a service pilgrimage to Haiti, I find I can no longer in good conscience support companies like Disney, Nike, the Gap, Hecht’s, and WalMart because of their tacit collusion with unfair labor practices in the developing world. Neither am I comfortable investing in tobacco and liquor companies, manufacturers of handguns or land mines. What’s an idealistic investor to do? Turn to the internet, obviously. Www.socialinvest.org or www.goodmoney.com have the latest on ethical, environmentally friendly, socially responsible investment options. Judging their rates of return over the past five years, I note their respectable, but not spectacular earnings. Now this is where my greed comes into play. I imagine myself at a cocktail party where more knowledgeable investors talk about the 18, 22, and 24% gains they raked in, and I smile wanly thinking of my 15% return. I could have done better in more aggressive growth funds, I sigh. Better than what? It’s so damned difficult keeping my goals in mind: preserve capital, generate a modest return, and support my values. Even so, it took me four months, four months of dithering, before I invested in an ecology friendly fund. Well, you say, at least you did act on principle, even if it took a while to do it. True, but wait. I closed out only one fund. Just in case living my values proves a losing proposition, I still hold other funds entangled in products and practices I despise. Sloth and greed then complicate living my ideals, as does fear. If I really lived my ideals, what would other people think? Adjectives like crazy, depressed, or sanctimonious come to mind. For example, I would like to go on a street retreat. This idea, first tried by Zen buddhist Bernard Glassman, is to live on the streets of a major city for five days, eating in soup kitchens, finding public toilets, begging for coffee money, and meditating in city parks. Now here’s the catch. To go on one of his street retreats, Glassman requires aspirants to solicit over $2000 from 10 other people. Even if they can pay this amount from their own pockets, he requires begging, just like the homeless have had to do with their friends, relatives and strangers. I hasten to add that Glassman uses this money to support innovative social action projects in the South Bronx, and to establish an Order of Peacemakers who bear witness in places of suffering such as Bosnia, Africa and Auschwitz.. Like all the other aspirants who have come to Glassman, I find the idea of begging from friends and relatives really scary. Some will dismiss this as a silly, even frivolous idea; indeed the money could be better spent, they might argue, in feeding the poor rather than eating their meager rations with them. Some will dismiss me selfish. The very idea of collecting all this money for my own spiritual advancement when I would be better off bike riding for AIDS or walking across America for peace. Some will turn me down out of embarrassment with mumbled apologies that they don’t have that much cash at the moment, hiding the fact that my doing something about my ideals makes them uncomfortable about theirs. No matter how much I try to convince myself that my asking offers my friends an opportunity for expressing their compassion, I still clutch at the thought of actually asking anyone for anything, and thereby acknowledging my dependence on them. And so it goes as I spin delusion upon delusion of how people will react to my proposal, never getting up the courage to test any of these fabrications against reality. I remain a prisoner of what others might think, say or do. My goodness, what if they don’t like me anymore? I’ve spent most of my life terrified of that question. I want my church community to help me come to terms with my fear. Back to my original question: Why do my ideals appear more costly as I age? Perhaps it has to do with death. I don’t have a lot of time left to make my life count. The time remaining is probably more than I fear, but definitely less than I once imagined. Perhaps it is simply boredom. I’ve lived a very comfortable and, on the whole, satisfying life. I’ve already had a successful career, raised two wonderful children, and struggled to create a loving home life. What’s left for me that gives life savor? Perhaps this is just the latest installment of my life-long battle with low self esteem. Or perhaps it is simply wisdom kicking in after half a century. Despite my grumbling today, the fact is that right now, nothing gives me greater happiness than struggling to live deliberately, with integrity. But I have come to understand I can’t do it alone. I need a small coterie of spiritual friends, a religious community, perhaps even a church. I want my spiritual friends to do two things for me. First, I want them to provide a safe place for my reflections. Actually saying out loud what I believe makes it real, even when I later contradict myself or change my mind. Until I speak them out loud, my ideals remain pretend--mud pies held together with sentimenal tears. It’s abundantly clear to me that my mind,-- the one that imprisoned itself in sloth, greed, and fear-- cannot think its way out of these brambles without help. I need other people to hear me say what I believe, and what I am willing to do about my beliefs. Nudging me toward acting on my beliefs is my second requirement for spiritual support. To my spiritual friends I would hope to bring my quandaries about the mixed motives that entangle my life. Here, among supportive friends, I would hope to examine all sides of questions like responsible investing, community service, bearing witness, and doing no harm to those I serve. Speaking my ideals out loud and then publicly committing to action would go a long way in helping me pay the psychological costs of my ideals. The bottom line for such a group would be to prompt and guide inner work, not to bray about how good we are, nor to weep over on how bad we are, nor even to lament how far we have to go to perfection. The purpose would be to honestly examine professed ideals and what living in harmony with them requires, and to encourage each other to act both courageously and compassionately. Sid Peterman was right; we have chosen a very difficult faith. Our faith demands that we not only define our ideals, but also provide the motive power to realize them. I, for one, cannot succeed alone. I need spiritual friends to help me better afford my ideals and so purchase a life that matters. For me, reducing fear and increasing love is what the church and the spiritual life is all about. |