|
Sermon:
Examples & Exemplars - So
Who's a Hero, Anyway?
With the announced title in the Order of Worship, there's only one
obvious place to start: 
1. How many have at least one hero? (you define who a hero is - I'm
not going to - at least, not yet)
2. WHY is that person a heroic figure for you?
It was purely a coincidence that the August 20 issue of US News &
World Report, which I almost never see, was a special issue devoted
to heroes and heroism. * happened to see it in the library
and knowing the working title of today's reflections, brought it to
my attention, and I was both intrigued by the articles and relieved
to discover that at least the writers had not swiped all the points
of my sermon….
Did anyone else happen to read it?
The part I found most intriguing was the survey - a Harris poll taken
in July that seemed to indicate a real cynicism about heroes. Now,
I'm no expert on surveys, but I do think it's worth noting that there
were only 1,022 individuals who took part in this one. How representative
they would be of the larger population I have no idea. I don't know
how the poll was conducted or whether the participants were self-selected,
and I suspect that might affect the results. But with that disclaimer
in mind, the results I think are still interesting.
More than half the respondents did not regard any currently living
public figure as heroic, although if they reached into the past, they
could come up with some unsurprising names: Jesus, Martin Luther King
Jr., John F. Kennedy, Mother Teresa among others. Still, nearly a
quarter of the respondents could not identify anyone as heroic at
all. 25% of those responding said that they had removed someone from
their list of personal heroes - Bill Clinton, John F. Kennedy, Jesse
Jackson, O. J. Simpson and Franklin D. Roosevelt in particular have
toppled from a number of pedestals. They fell - and here's no surprise
- because they were perceived as immoral, unethical, self-centered,
and/or failures as leaders.
But what I found most interesting was the fact that 29% of the respondents
- nearly a third of them - did indeed have heroes, but they did not
name any exalted public figures of extraordinary fame or great global
accomplishment - and they could have, because multiple responses were
permitted. They named a friend or a relative - and overwhelmingly
the heroic relatives are fathers and mothers.
Once again, how many could think of at least one hero? How many of
those heroes would be "public figures"? How many thought first of
family or friends?
The respondents in this Harris Poll didn't get the chance to think
up their own definitions of a hero - they were given a list of qualities
and asked to rank how important those qualities were in identifying
a worthy hero - major qualities, minor qualities, or not important
at all. The three top traits were tenacity - "not giving up until
the goal is accomplished" (86%); "doing what's right regardless of
personal consequences" (85%); and "doing more than what other people
expect of them" (81%). "Overcoming adversity" and "staying level-headed
in a crisis" tied for fourth place (79% of respondents ranked them
as a major reason for regarding someone as heroic); the fifth major
reason, at 77%, was "Changing society for the better."
Kim Clark, who wrote the Introductory article for the magazine, came
up with a slightly different list of heroic traits. In Clark's definition,
Heroes are those who
o go beyond the call of duty,
o act wisely under pressure,
o risk their life, their fortune, or their
reputation,
o champion a good cause, and
o serve as a calling to our higher selves.
That last one - which was not on the list of traits offered in the
survey - that last is the one that matters most. And that's the heart
of what I want to offer you this morning.
It isn't hard to come up with a list of qualities - tenacity, wisdom,
courage, integrity, vision, generosity, altruism, kindness, compassion,
humanitarianism, service - that we would be likely to agree are admirable.
Philosophers over the centuries have devoted miles upon miles of parchment
and paper to the effort to define in clear, precise words what it
means to be an admirable human being. It's the heart of the human
endeavor, the heart of the religious endeavor - in fact, (and I'm
indebted to my colleague Patrick O'Neill for pointing this out) psychologist
Abraham Maslow describes it as well as any philosopher or theologian
when he says
A religious life is defined by its efforts
to ask and engage age-old spiritual
questions: What is the good life? What is
a good man, what is a good
woman? What is a good society and what is
my relation to it? What are
my obligations to society? What is best for
my children? What is
Justice? Truth? Virtue? What is my relation
to nature, to death, to
aging, suffering, illness? How can I live
a meaningful life? What is
my responsibility to my brother and sister?
Who are my brothers
and sisters? What shall I be loyal to? What
must I be ready to die
for? (Quoted in F. Forester Church's Born
Again Unitarian Universalism.)
Those are the questions that our heroes answer far more satisfactorily
than even the greatest of our philosophers - for the simple reason
that unless we see our values, our dreams, our goals, our ideals embodied,
incarnate in the lives of real live human beings, those values and
dreams, goals and ideals remain mere abstractions. Without flesh,
without breath, without human form, they don't - they can't - touch
us. We learn best who we are, who we can be, who we wish to be through
the examples, through the lives, through the stories, of others.
Our heroes help us tell ourselves the stories we want for our own
lives. And then they help us live those stories into reality.
Last year there were a number of requests for more sermons dealing
with our Unitarian Universalist history - and this year's series on
"Examples and Exemplars" is in direct response to those requests.
It's been my experience that by and large we do enjoy hearing and
re-hearing those stories, and Unitarian Universalists in particular
have a long tradition of telling our religious community's story as
a series of biographies. For many years we had on the wall in what
is now the Conant Room a line of black-and-white photographs of busts
of famous American Unitarians.
Not too many years ago, we began naming our classrooms for important
(or interesting) figures in our UU history - Beatrice Potter, Phineas
T. Barnum, Sophia Lyon Fahs - and for people who have been "adopted
in" to our story, like Charles Darwin (who was at least nominally
a member of the Church of England all his life, even though he did
marry into the Unitarian Wedgwood family) and Dr. (not "Mr.") Spock,
whose peace activism resonated with many UUs in the '60s and '70s.
If you check our Associational website, you'll find a link to lists
of "Famous Unitarian Universalists." We're pleased to claim such individuals
as Benjamin Franklin, Margaret Fuller, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Bela Bartok,
Charles Dickens, Horace Mann, Jane Addams, Dorothea Dix, Susan B.
Anthony, Rod Serling, Pete Seeger, Kurt Vonnegut, Frank Lloyd Wright,
e.e.cummings, May Sarton, Mary Shelley, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Linus
Pauling, Adlai Stevenson, Paul Newman, James Reeb - it's a long and
varied and distinguished list, and no, that's not a complete list
of the men and women who were members of our faith community, whom
we admire for difference their lives have made in our world.
Now, it's certainly fair to listen to the list and to ask, "So what?"
It's possible that a name or two on that list might not be someone
you would admire. I did not include Millard Fillmore or John C. Calhoun
- and they too were Unitarians. I wouldn't claim that all prominent
Unitarians and Universalists were heroes - and I would definitely
not suggest that they were any of them perfect human beings - but
they all do, in their own particular ways, as their own consciences
guided them, exemplify a living out of the values and dreams, the
goals and ideals that our faith tradition has honored through the
years.
And for a religion that does not have one unifying creed, the stories
of such individuals become especially important. The creators of the
"Famous UUs" website comment that since ours "is a creedless religion,
our deeds speak louder than our words, and so it may be easier to
understand UUism as a living faith by noting the individuals who have
been associated with [it]." The struggle to create and expand a faith
community that combines respect for human reason, acceptance of human
diversity, freedom of individual belief and conscience within a community
of shared values and commitments - all this is much more clearly described
in the telling of the stories of the people involved than in any other
format or style.
Our heroes, our examples and exemplars of the faithful life as we
understand it, serve at least three important functions.
First, they remind us that ours is a longstanding and worthy tradition.
Our roots go deep into the soil of ancient Israel, the classical civilizations
of the Mediterranean, as well as Europe of both the Christian and
the pre-Christian eras. Our religious values and expressions were
not created in a West Coast commune in the psychedelic sixties. We
come from a long line of men and women - a people united through time
- who were remarkable for the way they lived out their deepest convictions
and highest values within cultures and societies that often did not
or would not understand or accept their beliefs or their ways of faith
expression. Our shared history - our legitimate claim on the stories
of those women and men who have gone before us - is part of what links
contemporary Unitarian Universalists in one unusual, vital, creative,
transformative community.
Second, their lives and works are the clear and continuing expressions
of many of our shared core values and beliefs. We are all of us -
regardless of our particular individual theologies, philosophies or
practices - the spiritual descendents and heirs of, for example, the
Transylvanian Unitarian Ferenz David, who said, "We need not think
alike to love alike." We have ancestors in common in Universalists
John Murray, who urged his followers to "Give the people…not hell,
but hope and courage," and Hosea Ballou, who reminds us that "If we
agree in love, there is no disagreement that can do us any injury,
but if we do not, no other agreement can do us any good."
It's not likely that many of us - myself included - will be inclined
to read through the full transcripts of David's debates before King
John, or Michael Servetus's dissertation On the Errors of the Trinity,
or Hosea Ballou's Treatise on Atonement. Much of their theology, in
fact, is no longer either interesting or relevant to us. But the stories
of how they came to their beliefs, how they then risked everything
to live them out - those stories are interesting. Those stories are
relevant. And this is the third role our examples and exemplars, the
heroes of our religious story, play for us. In addition to linking
us to our rightful tradition and embodying the values and dreams that
are still cherished today, they also serve as our teachers of the
possible. There's a tendency to think of heroes as doing that which
is out of the ordinary - beyond the call of duty, beyond what others
would have expected of them - risking themselves for the sake of someone
or something else. And yes, some do become heroes in dramatic, life-threatening
emergencies, attacks or disasters. The police officers, the firefighters,
the soldiers, the medical teams in the midst of epidemics, the kid
who jumps into the icy lake to pull out a drowning friend - they do
look larger than life - in part because they've demonstrated abilities
that most people probably don't have or found themselves in situations
most people won't face. They meet the US News & World Report's criteria
- they are heroes. But if we think of what a hero does as "beyond
the normal," that has a way of letting us off the hook. If heroes
are somehow "superhuman," then the rest of us mere mortals can rest
easy - we don't have to be heroic. And if our heroes are all beyond
our own particular physical, intellectual, psychological limits, then
they are no threat to our comfort. We can admire them, idolize them,
worship them - but we do not have to be like them. But I would suggest
that our truest heroes are not in fact beyond us. They may seem to
go beyond what would be "normal" - but their spiritual role is to
call us to also go beyond what we have accepted as our own limits.
Cynics - and there are many, and I'll admit I'm often one of them
- cynics look at those who seem to be such figures of human greatness
and look for the clay feet on the pedestal. There are even some who
say that we no longer want heroes - we eagerly tear them down, "demythologize"
them, write exposés of their failings, tsk-tsk judgmentally over their
foibles, devalue their accomplishments - so that they are no longer
in any danger of being regarded as superhuman but rather as only human
- as though "only human" were a bad thing to be. But a true hero -
one who does call us to be our own highest selves - is not - cannot
possibly be - superhuman. He or she is fully human, fallible, imperfect,
weak in some parts of his or her life - both merely human and gloriously
human. A true hero is not fundamentally different from the rest of
us - if she or he were, we would be looking not at a hero but at a
god. And strongly though I do believe the divine burns within us,
we are none of us gods. Our heroes are not gods for our idolatry nor
saints of perfection -John Murray vacillated between suicidal ideation
and delusions of infallibility; Queen Isabella of Transylvania was
a manipulative politician; Michael Servetus practically begged to
be martyred; our own Augustus Conant of blessed memory was a bit of
a prig. But they are heroic figures nonetheless - all the more so
for being imperfect. They reveal the potential within every fallible
human being for a greatness of spirit beyond the banal mediocrities
we are too apt to accept as "the norm." They set an example that is
not beyond us - an invitation that calls us to live out our own deepest
loves and highest values, to live courageously, faithfully, with integrity
and principle. They call us to acknowledge what is possible, and to
become our own true best humanely human selves. Over these next months,
I'll be telling some of our heroic stories - about people like Isabella,
John Murray, Olympia Brown, Norbert Capek, Augustus Conant and others.
I will hope to do justice not only to their heroism but also to their
essential humanness - for their humanness is our promise of salvation.
They show us what we might also be. Never pretending to be anything
but human, they reveal the holy fire that burns within each soul.
(next)
|
 |
