August 24, 2008
Original Blessing
by Rev. Colin Bossen
Each of our lives begins with the unasked for blessing of birth. Everyone of us is a miracle. Each person is unique. Our Unitarian Universalist Association affirms this through our first principle "the inherent worth and dignity of every person."
We do not always remember this. Even the gentlest of us has inflicted suffering on others. All of us have witnessed and experienced violence in some form. In the face of violence we sometimes forget to recount the blessing of birth. But as Rabbi Abraham Heschel once wrote, "Just to be is a blessing. Just to live is holy." The suffering that our birth brings into the world and the violence that we participate in and experience comes only after the mystery of our creation.
If you have ever been present at the birth of a child you know what I mean. My son was born at home. I was blessed to be in the same room with my wife as she brought him into the world. One moment there was only one person. The next, there were two. Life had begot life and a mysterious, unique, new being was among us.
At such times it is easy to uphold the blessing that is each person's birth. Watching my children grow reminds me of the creative powers of the universe. Each day it seems that both of my children learn something new about the world and its mysteries. My daughter surprises and educates me with her questions. Her passion for play and friendship help to renew me. However, there are times in each of our lives when it can be easy to forget that "to live is holy."
My middle school years were miserable ones. There was a clear social hierarchy at the school. One of the primary ways children increased their status was to torment those lower on the social ladder. If a child could demonstrate that there were other children beneath her she was less likely to be picked on.
The school district that I grew up in was largely Catholic and almost entirely white. With the exception of my neighborhood, which was technically part of the neighboring college town, most people in the district were relatively affluent. The community is located outside of Lansing, Michigan and in those days it was the preferred environment for Michigan's politicians, the middle management of the local auto-plants and the greater Lansing community's circle of doctors, lawyers and other non-academic professionals.
My neighborhood was more working class than the other neighborhoods in the school district. In addition to modest single family homes like ours, my neighborhood had a lot of rental units, apartment buildings and a large trailer park. By the time I got into high school there were even a couple homes that were reputed to be crack houses. The main difference between my neighborhood and the others in the school district was that in my neighborhood there were a lot of families in which someone worked the Oldsmobile line.
When I got to middle school I learned that the kids from my elementary school were looked down upon because our neighborhood was less affluent than others. This, when coupled with the fact that my family was one of only a handful of non-Christian families in the district, made me just enough different from my classmates to be the target of frequent abuse.
Between class periods, in gym class and during lunch I was often called names and beaten. This torment hurt most when it came from someone I thought to be my friend. Children in our school had one very clear way to emerge from a lower strata social group. That was to reach out to children in a social group with more status and join in with them in publicly humiliating someone from the child's current group. This worked best if the child actually took the lead in harassing his or her current friend. Such behavior demonstrated the child's willingness to distance him or herself from his or her peers in search of status. It was also showed that the child was in some perceived way superior to other members of his or her current group. He or she might come off as tougher, with a sharper wit or a better sense of what was popular. Such actions were meant to demonstrate that the child had more in common with the desired social group than with the old one.
The most brutal beating I received came at the hands of a friend seeking to climb the social ladder. My friend had moved to the trailer park in my neighborhood after elementary school. During my seventh grade year he was someone who I sat next to on the school bus. He was also someone who really wanted to be part of the cool kids. This meant, of course, that he had to differentiate himself from my circle of friends and me.
One day he decided to make a clean break with me. I can't remember exactly what happened but we had some sort of disagreement. He started to call me names and then a circle of kids, mostly from a social group that he was trying to join, gathered around us. Before I knew it my former friend had shoved me face first up against a brick wall, grabbed me by the hair and smashed three of my front teeth. At that point a school administrator showed up and dragged me to the nurse's station and him to the principal's office. My former friend was suspended for several days from school. When he returned he had been accepted into his new social group.
I continued to be harassed by some of my classmates until almost the end of middle school. It is to my shame that I was able to end such harassment by doing what my former friend did. One day during gym class I selected a child who was smaller than me, had roughly the same social status that I did, and beat him up in front of an audience. From that moment forth my life at school changed. I was able to move into a new school group. That group was enough higher on the school's social ladder that its members were not generally picked on. To reinforce my place in the school's social hierarchy I began, with other members of my social group, to pick on those who had less status in school than I did.
As an adult, I look back upon that period in my life with perplexity. Now I understand the social dynamics at work much more clearly than I did then. As an 11 or 12 year old, the narrative I could construct about the actions of my peers and I would have been muddled. I could not clearly explain why we acted as we did. Our motives hovered in our subconscious. Thinking about that time now, I want to know why children treated each other so badly. Why did we inflict suffering, violence and cruelty upon one another? Why did I act so poorly? Could we not have found different ways to create our school community?
Human beings have long sought to answer such questions. In the Western Christian tradition the origin of suffering is often explained by the existence of original sin. The doctrine of original sin teaches that we human beings are born so wicked that unless we receive salvation God will punish us forever for our depravity. The doctrine of original sin descends primarily from Augustine of Hippo. Augustine believed that human beings are born into "bondage to sin and inevitable death" because of the disobedience of Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden.
More than any other thinker Augustine has shaped the Western Christian tradition. Catholics, Anglicans, Lutherans and Calvinists all revere him. Like other theologians he arrived at his theology by examining his personal experience.
Augustine was born in what is now Algeria at the close of the Roman Empire. It was a chaotic time. For most, life was short and violent. In the span of twenty five years, Rome was sacked twice--once by the Gauls and once by the Visigoths. Pagans, Catholics and other Christians all argued and often fought over whose religion and world-view was correct. Each religious group taught different things about how people should behave and to whom and what allegiance was owed. With so much uncertainty life could be confusing.
Augustine was a product of these tensions and conflicts. He was the child of an interfaith marriage. His mother was Catholic and his father pagan. For this reason, he struggled throughout his early life with questions of identity. He began his spiritual life as a pagan but eventually converted to Christianity. According to his Confessions, as a pagan he delighted in living a life filled with passion and lust. He kept a mistress, drank, partied, lied and generally acted like a debauch. It was only after he converted to Christianity that he was able to tame his passions and serve God.
This experience led him to argue that human beings are born slaves of our passions and our emotions. Freedom came when people accepted God as their sovereign. It is only through God that we can escape our nature. Without God, Augustine believed, humans are incapable of ever transcending our tendencies towards cruelty, lust and violence. This had been true for him. Therefore, it must be true for others.
Such tendencies are innate within us from birth. Augustine thought that they formed the greater part of human nature. He wrote, "no...[person] be clean from... sin; no, not an infant of a day old upon the earth...I myself have seen and observed a little baby to be already jealous..."
Augustine's view of human nature dominated Western Christian theological thought for more than a thousand years. Martin Luther and John Calvin expanded it upon. Arguing that humans were born totally depraved and without any innate goodness, Calvin wrote "our nature is not only destitute of all good, but is so fertile in all evils that it cannot remain inactive." It other words, people are born with a tendency towards violence and cruelty. This tendency far outweighs whatever leanings we might have towards altruism, compassion and empathy.
It was such a view of human nature that our Unitarian ancestors rebelled against. In his sermon "Likeness to God" William Ellery Channing posited a counter view to Augustine and his theological descendents. He taught that humans have "a kindred nature with God." The purpose of religion, in his mind, was "to turn...[people's] aspirations and efforts to that perfection of the soul." When people strove to perfect their souls, he believed, they would find that God dwelt within them.
Instead of lifting up the innate depravity of humanity, Channing affirmed the human ability for self-improvement. He admitted that we are all flawed. However, our flaws did not prevent us from being kind or reaching towards God. In fact, he felt that "our present state, made up, as it is, of aids and trials, is worthy of God, and may be used to assimilate us to him." In Channing's view it is our flaws that give us the opportunity to hone our conscience, develop our courage and learn compassion. If we were born perfect there would be no need for human development. Our imperfections allow us the opportunity to constantly reach towards greater self-awareness and empathy for our fellows. "We are thus," Channing wrote, "without parting with our human nature, to clothe ourselves with the divine."
This path towards recognition of the divine within need not take place outside of the scenes of daily life. As he put it, "the germs of sublime virtue are scattered liberally on our earth." By looking to our own daily experience we might encounter them. He described how he had "seen in the obscurity of domestic life, [such virtues as]...[the] strength of love,.. endurance, ...[and] pious trust..." We can each try to awaken the divine within by being kind towards those around us.
Channing was not naive to the more troubled side of human nature. In the same sermon in which he argued that humans can find the divine within them, he stated "I shut my eyes on none of [human nature's] weaknesses and crimes. I understand the proofs, by which despotism demonstrates, that...[people are] wild beast[s], in want of a master, and only safe in chains." This, however, did not mean that people should discount the more tender side of human nature. The violent and cruel side exists but it can be best checked not by an authoritarian God without but by appealing to people's better nature within. Human nature, Channing believed, could be honored because despite human cruelty there was the "struggle against oppression...[and] growth and progress." These things, Channing taught, "are marks of a divine origin."
Augustine and Channing's understood of human nature quite different. Augustine affirmed human wickedness and cruelty and claimed that they could only be tamed by utter submission to God. Channing admitted to human flaws but believed that they could be lessened and, perhaps, ultimately transcended by cultivating the divine within.
Which of these understandings people lean towards can have a profound effect upon how they view the world and lead their lives. Cognitive psychologist Stephen Pinker argues that "Everyone has a theory of human nature. Everyone has to anticipate the behavior of others...that means we all need theories about what makes people tick." The theory of human nature each of us develops helps determine both what we think we ourselves are capable of and what we think others can achieve. People who share Augustine's viewpoint tend to support stricter governments and parenting techniques. Often they suggest that human problems can be solved through punishment and violence. Those of us who lean towards Channing generally believe that people can mostly govern themselves, that children should be allowed to unfold with guidance and that altruism, empathy and love are ultimately more corrective than violence and punishment.
Thinking back on my own poor behavior, and that of my peers, during my middle school years I realize that most important thing about it is that I learned to behave differently. It is true that most of us treated each cruelly at the time. It is also true that most of us grew into relatively decent human beings capable of loving and serving others. We might have made a lot of mistakes and needed more guidance than our public school system--with its ratio of roughly thirty children to one adult--could afford but in the end we learned to behave better. In short, we grew up.
I encounter few adults engaged in the systematic cruelty of my middle school classmates on a day-to-day basis. It is true that we witness great violence in the world. But it is also true that we are surrounded by beauty, kindness and compassion. When we acknowledge the first but hold fast to the second we remember that life begins with the blessing of birth and emerges from the power of creation. At such times we heed Heschel's words and recollect that "Just to be is a blessing. Just to live is holy." So, in the hopes that none of us will ever forget this, I say Amen and Blessed Be.