Laura Schlessinger and I have a lot in common. We are the same age, part of that bumper crop of 1947 babies that includes Kenn Hurto, Gary Fitzpatrick, Phyllis Gonigam, and probably quite a few more of you. We were both raised by strong, ambitious, feminist dads who expected no less from their daughters than from sons. We both started out in academia in the late '60's; she's a Columbia-trained physiologist and I'm a linguist from the University of Wisconsin, but we both successfully slugged our way through male-dominated graduate programs because we were both really good at the kind of razor-edged argument that wins you points in a Ph.D. program but is rather hard to live with on a daily basis, as my husband will be happy to attest. We both have children now who are good enough to beat us at our own game: that's karma, I guess.
Since graduate school, our paths have diverged somewhat. Dr. Schlessinger worked her way through her counseling certification program as a late-night advice show host on a local LA radio station and then left academia for private practice, while I have confined my efforts to manage other people's lives to my own loved ones, and I have stayed a college professor, where I have a captive audience of students who hang on my every word because I hold their grades hostage; they can't just turn the dial and make me go away when the going gets tough. We are both in long-term marriages to kind, patient, tolerant men who know quite well how to get out of the way of a moving bulldozer. And whatever else we are, we are both, above all, our kids' moms.
But we have something else in common. Let me read you a little from the opening chapter of her book, The Ten Commandments: The Significance of God's Laws in Everyday Life (1998): "Believing in God is a relatively recent experience in my life. My father, born a Jew in Brooklyn, New York, never mentioned God, religion, or Judaism-except for one all-encompassing criticism of the Jewish Passover service. He said how, at a very young age, he walked out of his parents' Passover celebration screaming that he 'wouldn't celebrate the wholesale slaughter of Egyptian children.' . . . My mother was born in Italy to a Catholic family, met my father as he participated in the U.S. military's liberation of northern Italy, and married him at the end of the war in 1946. Her only contribution to my religious training was that American Catholics take it all more seriously than the Italians and that she hated the priests because, while they walked around well-garbed and fed, the people starved.
Once, when I was an adolescent, my parents asked me if I believed in God. 'Of course not,' I said with assuredness. 'That's Twilight Zone stuff.' Remembering back now, they seemed surprised. Probably feeling that they had made a mistake, or because they felt they were missing something in their own lives, my folks decided to do something religious when I was about sixteen years old. "Compromising" their different faiths and backgrounds, they signed us up at the local Unitarian church. I remember my confusion between the weekly service literature extolling the virtue of "no dogma" or commandments while the choir sang beautifully about Jesus Christ. The Unitarians taught that there was truth and beauty in many traditions and that believing in God or Jesus as divine was optional" (xv-xvi). Frankly, I doubt it was Jesus Christ. In the UU churches I grew up in during the same years, we carefully and courageously said Jesus of Nazareth except for a few Jesu Christes that slipped in around Christmastime. Nevertheless, she clearly left the Unitarian church as lost as when she entered it.
Laura Schlessinger is perhaps my generation's most conspicuous UU failure. In her search for a religious infrastructure within which to make her life make sense, she has had to backtrack from nothing all the way to orthodox Judaism-and a particularly strident, right-wing branch of ultraorthodox Judaism at that. Still, her comments on her brief Unitarian experience are disheartening; they make UU's seem like dilettantes, or-worse, still-scavengers who pick through the debris of other religion's practices in search of a nugget of truth or beauty with which they can then scurry home to their own nest.
Dr. Schlessinger's memories of the Unitarian church in California in the 1960's call to mind my own experience when I took my brother and sister-in-law to Christmas Eve services at Arlington about ten years ago. Joan Gelbein was preaching (the gist of it was I'm Jewish, so I don't really get this Christmas thing) and the choir, still under Vera Tilson, was doing a full program of traditional carols and anthems, including a Bach chorale, suitable for the Kennedy Center. My sister-in-law Kathleen's one reaction was "It's the first time I ever heard the Christmas homily delivered by a middle-aged Jewish lady in a Halloween.costume." Although my first reaction was defensive, I know how she felt. I felt a little that way myself, as if my church were suddenly unsure, feeling its way, offending no one and-in order to accomplish this goal-saying nothing of substance. Peace and love are good-no disagreement, but can one truly understand peace without experiencing war or love without experiencing hatred? It's just words unless the feelings they represent come from inside your very bones.
When I was a senior in high school, I gave the sermon on Youth Sunday, and although I no longer have a copy of it and haven't a clue what I actually said, I do remember the title: Our Uncarven Image. It was about the failure of the RE program to give us enough solid ground to hang a personal belief system on. I remember saying that the church spent more time explaining what Unitarians did not believe than affirming what our beliefs actually were. Of course, Unitarians have much more in common in terms of what they don't believe than in what they do. There is wide diversity in belief systems among individuals in any congregation and people's beliefs are, for the most part, very personal and private.
I remember arguing that it's all very well and good to insist that people decide their own beliefs, but you have to give them a little raw material; we have to have a handful of dust into which to blow the breath of life. However, I look back now at that sermon and recognize that I was wrong. In fact, Dr. Laura and I came out of the UU RE program with two things in common: an inchoate set of beliefs about god and the universe that did not snap into shape until twenty years later when we had children, and a firm commitment to the concept of faith in action that has shaped our whole lives and is only getting stronger now that we are both over 50 and starting to care less and less whether other people agree with us, or what they think, as long as we are convinced we are doing God's work.
I started to listen to the Dr. Laura program about four or five years ago when the sports talk station that I regularly listened to on my commute to Baltimore switched to Don Imus from 6-10 in the morning and I had to go shopping for another station. The kids and I have a deal now: we listen when she is talking with callers and change to rock music stations whenever she launches into one of her political tirades, most of which I find too repugnant to listen to, despite my respect for her perspicacity concerning human nature. It was in this church, after all, that I learned not to reject people with whom you disagree but to embrace them, so that you can learn their point of view and, by befriending them, perhaps even convince them to come around to yours. But the distance between us is too great, I am too old, and she is too intolerant-so I spare myself the rhetoric but tune in with fascination to the clinical work that occupies most of her air time.
Despite our profound disagreement on most political matters, I was attracted from the beginning by Laura Schlessinger's talent as a clinical psychologist-in particular by her ability to penetrate right through people's evasions and pretensions to get to the heart of the matter. My mother and grandmother used to do that-and never pulled their punches. My brother and sister and I use to cover our heads and holler "Incoming" when my mother let fly one of her acerbic comments on the absurd pretentiousness of most of middle-class American society. It has long been the tradition of mothers and grandmothers to teach values, and when they ran the schools and the churches as well as the homes, there was no way for children to escape the lessons of the village. Now here we are, turning to the mass media for values training-just as our children do.
I admire Laura Schlessinger's determination to nag, scold, cajole, and embarrass people into admitting that they know how to act but lack the courage and resolve to do what they know is right, because they are selfish, or fearful, or both. At first I used to simply enjoy listening to her trap people in their own self-justifying contradictions like a latter-day Socrates. Someone called in not too long ago whose wife had been in an automobile accident that had left her a quadriplegic. He wanted to know which was the morally correct choice: since he planned to satisfy himself extramaritally: Should he tell her (which would be hurtful) or and keep it from her (which would be lying). I waited almost gleefully to see what strategy she would use to turn him into hamburger.
Over the years, however, I have found the show more and more troubling-not just because of her political ranting, which seems to be becoming shriller of late, and more irrational, but because I am starting to see disturbing patterns of truly outrageous selfishness among her callers. A not-so-funny version of the story I just told you is that a similar event happened to an acquaintance of mine in our neighborhood, whose husband suffered a disabling stroke in his mid-40's. She nursed him for about six years, then suddenly left him when their three children were sixteen, thirteen, and eleven. I can appreciate her wishing to divorce him, though it would not be my choice, but I cannot comprehend her leaving the children with someone unable to care for himself-let alone three teenagers. I am increasingly disappointed in what seems to me a genuine deterioration of character, courage, and conscience in this selfish, greedy, hurtful, fearful society in which I am trying to bring up my children.
People call Dr. Laura because they are experiencing what many psychologists call "cognitive dissonance": a disconnect between their behavior and their value system. When we are engaging in behaviors that we recognize as "wrong," we feel uncomfortable, guilty, conscience-stricken. Call it the superego or original sin-it amounts to the same thing. To quote Mark Twain again: "The fact that man knows right from wrong proves his intellectual superiority to the other creatures; but the fact that he can do wrong proves his moral inferiority to any creature that cannot." The interesting thing about the theory of cognitive dissonance is that it asserts (I think correctly) that people resolve this ethical dilemma not by changing the behavior because-God knows--they want to keep doing whatever they are doing, but by attempting to reconcile the behavior with their value system through some form of rationalization. A benign version of this practice is finding oneself with an empty aluminum can at a softball field that has no recycling receptacles and, instead of bringing the can home, tossing it into the garbage with the quick excuse, "It's just one can. It won't make any difference." A more toxic version is when a man beats a woman and justifies it by saying, "Well, she deserved it."
I've gotten to the point now where, once I listen to a caller present the problem, I know exactly what Dr. Laura will say. Kids call fairly often to ask if they should turn in their friends who have broken the law by shoplifting, or smoking marijuana, or leaving the scene of an auto accident. She will say every time that the best thing to do is to persuade friends to turn themselves in-to sit with them and talk, lend your emotional support, and offer to go with them to make things right. A real friend, she says, will care enough about the people they call "friends" to try to get them to accept responsibility for their actions. A real friend tries to help her friends be their best selves. Surely that is what we Unitarian Universalists also teach.
Parents call all the time to seek permission to lie in order to shield their children from unpleasant realities: a dying grandparent, an alcoholic partner, an ex-spouse who has moved away, remarried, and effectively abandoned his or her children. Dr. Laura is a relentless advocate of telling kids the truth, adapted so it is age-appropriate, and is quick to point out to parents who want to make themselves look good to their kids that children are pretty tolerant of most adult behavior but cannot bear to be lied to, because it yanks their stability right out from under them. I have friends who have yet to tell their children they are not just living separately trying to work things out but are actually divorced, simply because they are having trouble owning up to the failure of the marriage. It's been almost four years. Guess what-Rick and Lynn-they know. What they don't know is why you are keeping it a secret.
To parents who don't want to take their children to visit grandma in the hospital or nursing home because it might "upset" them, she says: "It's more likely to upset you than them. Be strong. When you take them to see their grandmother so they can make the most of their remaining time together, and when you help them make get well cards and bring drawings to decorate the hospital room, you are teaching them how to treat you when you are old." Her whole "ministry" is really about overcoming two things: selfishness and fear. The same axioms drive every answer: Who will benefit? Who will be hurt? To put it as Hillel did, "What is hateful to you, do not do to your neighbor. That is the whole Torah."
When new members join MVUC, our congregation gives them the following charge: "We challenge you to live a principled life/We encourage you to seek for spiritual meaning." I am coming to believe more and more is that it is impossible to fully achieve the second of these goals without experiencing the first. Whenever callers say to Dr. Laura: "I don't know why my husband is doing this; it just isn't like him," or "My mother really isn't the type of person who goes out of her way to hurt people"-Dr. Laura will respond, "Guess what: your actions are your character. To put it as our hymnal does:
What good is it my brothers and sisters, if you say you have faith
but do not have works? Can faith save you?
If your brothers or sisters are naked and lack daily food, and one of you says to them: "Go in peace. Keep warm and eat your fill."
And yet you do not supply their bodily needs, what is the good of that?
So faith by itself, if it has no works, is dead.
Show me your faith apart from your works, and I by my works
will show you my faith.
James, Chapter 2
When my daughter Mary was in seventh grade, I had the great privilege of joining Linda Peebles on the first morning of the Coming of Age class's pilgrimage to Boston. Mary had a dive meet in Pittsburgh on Saturday morning, so Saturday afternoon I drove her from Pittsburgh to Boston and delivered her to Linda at the First Church of Dedham, Massachusetts. Linda invited me to spend the night and go to church with them in the morning. The church we went to was Arlington Street. That was my first church: my parents went while my father was doing a surgical residency at Mass Memorial and had me dedicated there. While the kids were climbing up into the steeple, I went and found my name on the cradle roll. I looked at the statue of Dana McLean Greeley, the minister who dedicated me, with its loving inscription. (Greeley subsequently went on to become the first president of the UUA.) I had a really chilling, marvelous sense of being part of a tradition much greater and more sacred than myself. I was filled with the awe and wonder that I think is essential to all religious experience.
It was Canvass Sunday when we were there, so we had Sunday dinner in the church basement, and I ate with some of the older people in the congregation who would have been between my parents' age and mine. I congratulated them on their attendance: if you think this building is costly to maintain, try a late 18th century minicathedral with a roof that is leaking onto solid mahogany box pews and around dozens of stained glass windows. One of the women laughed a little ruefully and said: "The only problem is--now we have to try to make UU's out of all these people."
Many people come to Unitarianism as an escape from religion. My grandmother was one: After her mother died she took her kids across the street from the Congregational Church to the Unitarian because she could not bear to say the Apostles' Creed. But what she came to understand and taught her children was that becoming a Unitarian binds you to a higher order of religion, a more demanding spiritual journey, than one which is satisfied merely by observing all the required rituals.
Catholicism and Judaism make conversion difficult for a reason. It is not something to be entered into lightly, or temporarily, or on a whim. Accepting the idea of a principled life is one thing: living a principled life quite another. Years ago, when I was at Accotink when the kids were little, John Wells came over from Reston to give a guest sermon. I can't remember the exact topic, but one comment really stuck with me. He said, "You know-this church hasn't had any martyrs for a really long time."
Think about it. The last one, really, was Jim Reeb, who was killed in the march on Selma in which many of the members of this congregation participated. He was my cousin JD's youth minister at All Souls, and had been gone less than a year when he boarded a bus for Alabama and achieved immortality. I wonder, really, if there are any causes out there for which we would actually be willing to put our lives on the line. Jefferson closed the Declaration of Independence with a pledge of "our lives, our fortunes, and our sacred honor." In the 21st century, which so far resembles the fin de siècle of the 20th in its unashamed materialism, we've shown ourselves reluctant to pledge even a small part of our personal fortunes to the greater good, let alone our lives-and we don't know if we have any sacred honor because we haven't had a challenge serious enough to force us to go searching for it.
When I was eleven, my parents moved from Iowa City, Iowa to Memphis, Tennessee. That was in 1958, the year of the Montgomery bus boycott. My dad was from a small town in South Carolina. His whole family was pretty racist, and after he left home at 17 to attend college, he never went back except for brief visits. But he made a lateral career move from a career-making job as Director of the Cardiovascular Research Lab at the University of Iowa to the University of Tennessee Medical School because, as he told us, Iowa City was an oasis that did not reflect the real world: he wanted to take us back to the South so we could experience the society that needed fixing for ourselves.
Iowa City was not so idyllic either, as it turned out. My parents offered their house to the only African-American on the Iowa faculty, the chair of the department of hydraulic engineering, whose family had lived in an apartment for fifteen years because no one would sell them a house. Ours was an unpretentious but nice house on a corner lot in a faculty neighborhood across from the city park. The Hubbards said "yes" immediately, but our neighbor on one side, who was a banker, redlined the loan so they had to go to Des Moines to get financing, even though they had a fortune in the bank which they had been accumulating for years, knowing that, if anyone ever sold them a house, they would have to make sure it was the showplace of the neighborhood. Our neighbors on the other side, who had been close friends, did not speak to my parents again for the six months before we left. "That's what I mean," said my dad. "You need to see it so you can understand what has to be done." He had had his own conversion experience in World War II, when the Evacuation Hospital in which he served ordered the surgeons not to make transfusions across races. Fortunately he, and all those other young white doctors from Charlottesville, made the right choice-to save lives. From there it was an easy step to my mother's religion. While he was overseas, she and her mother helped found the Thomas Jefferson church in Charlottesville so they would have a place to go on Sundays.
My sister and I were the only white teenagers we could see at the Memorial March for Martin Luther King in Memphis the day of his funeral in Atlanta. Although it was scary, since there was no reason for the marchers to expect that white people would actually be coming to pay their respects, there was no question of not going either. King had been murdered in our city. People had died in ours and in neighboring states. It was the right thing to do.
The Unitarian church in the 1960's was a powerful voice for right action in a society already crippled by corruption. The church was totally, consumingly, passionately dedicated to the civil rights movement. The opportunity for faith in action gave us a raison d'être beyond arguing the fine points of liberal theology. The example of nineteenth century Unitarians who had made social justice their life's work served as a beacon. Social justice was not just a desirable thing, it was a categorical imperative-a sine qua non. I rode in the backs of buses, drank from Colored water fountains, and sat in Colored waiting rooms. I endured vicious taunts and threats. I picketed and marched, although I am by nature timid about causes, because my religion made it clear that all that was necessary for evil to triumph was for good people to do nothing, and therefore every individual was required to do her part. Who will benefit if I do my part, I asked myself. Who will be hurt if I do not? The answer was clear, "If I am only for myself, who am I?"
It is easy to be a drawing-room Unitarian. The trick is being a Unitarian when it is hard. Voting for the principles is no problem. Living them is not so easy. Accepting "Compassion, justice, and equity in human relations" means not putting yourself first. Accepting the democratic process means you might lose. The Unitarian church, governed as it is by its congregations rather than its clergy, is a radical experiment in Jeffersonian democracy. It is a leap of faith that a group of people, large or small, left to their own devices and the rule of their individual consciences, will ultimately overcome their self-interest and do the fair and honorable thing, whatever it is. Physiologists like Laura Schlessinger recognize perhaps more easily than humanists like me that to ask human beings to overcome their biology is asking a lot. Our first instinct is self-preservation. Getting out of the bottom rungs of Maslow's hierarchy of needs and climbing toward self-actualization requires enormous will and self-control. Buddhists recognize this quite well-the path to Enlightenment is rigorous and backsliding is easy.
And so we bring our kids to RE. We want them to have religious instruction. But we don't want them taught a belief system; we want them to find their own. So we teach them everyone else's-and do it very well. Most of what I know about Christianity, Buddhism, Judaism, and Islam I learned at the Unitarian church. But what about values? Aren't we here in part because we want to be in community with others who share our values? And don't we want our children to live a principled life-to put the values they are learning at home into a larger social context of group values that will counterbalance the group values they are learning in other groups.
Ah-but it has to be the right values. When I first went back to church, to Accotink, when Jimmy was three and I was pregnant with Emily, I signed myself up to teach the three-year-old RE class. The RE director then was Valerie Wills, who is now the minister in Hagerstown, Maryland, but was then a teacher in the public schools who was generously putting her talents to use as a religious educator. The parents of the three-year-olds were complaining that RE was just another day of preschool-stories, art projects, songs and games. "Well, of course," we said, "That's how you teach preschoolers." But then my co-teacher went on to say, "You can't teach values to three-year-olds." I was speechless, thinking of the Martin and Judy books that I still remember after forty years. I blurted out the first thing that came to my mind, "Sure you can. Sesame Street does it all the time: Don't lie, don't cheat, don't steal, don't hurt people, don't make fun of people who are different." It's all the golden rule, really, and if kids haven't learned self-respect and respect for others by four, they're not going to be ready for kindergarten, where they will learn all the rest of everything they need to know."
The world's major religions have vastly different belief systems, rituals, codes of worship, and celebrations. Each contends that its system is right, and that unbelievers put their souls at risk. But they are remarkably similar in their code of conduct for "right" behavior. We can simply recite the seven principles as a worthy goal of a flawed species, or we can take the word "covenant" seriously and overcome our natural greed and inertia to live them. Religion is there, I think, to help us handle tough times and make tough choices. Institutionalized religion supplies both a set of concepts around which to arrange the events of one's life and a caring community of like-minded souls within which to live it.
So why do I feel this peculiar emptiness where I should feel faith? Because I fear that Unitarianism may have drifted so far from its origins in right conduct that it has lost its way and confused individual freedom of belief with situational ethics, and liberty with license. With rights come responsibilities. What is hateful to you, do not do unto your neighbor. That is the whole Torah.
I am profoundly doubtful that 21st century Americans can rise above the level of what the Renaissance called "appetites." We are soft with luxury, delayed gratification is a distant memory, what we want we get or someone else will get it first. Over 90% of the freshmen at the University of Maryland have never had to share a room before arriving at college. How many will take advantage of the opportunity to learn to share rather than beg their parents to rent them an apartment so they can get back within their comfort zone? Once they get past the romantic glow of the honeymoon, how will they ever share a bathroom? How will they ever be able to put their kids ahead of their careers? A colleague of mine who teaches ethics does an exercise each term in which he asks students what they would do for a million dollars: cut off their hair, sacrifice a toe, a kidney, have sex with a stranger, kill someone at a distance with a car bomb. Every semester, over half the class will elect to push the button to blow up the car.
Last year, my daughter lost a bronze medal at the U.S. Diving National Junior Championships because the gold medalist cheated. She did not mean to do it: she put her feet down on an armstand dive and neither the referee nor the balk judge caught it. Her coach kept her from volunteering to the judges that she had balked and she was awarded the gold medal. I asked my daughter this week if she would have given up the gold medal if she had been the one who balked. She hesitated, arguing that no one was really damaged since both the silver and gold medalists make the world team, but finally admitted that she would probably have done it only if the silver medalist would have been hurt if she hadn't. It is better than nothing, but it is disappointing. It unsettles me.
This same daughter made me proud beyond belief last year when she did speak up to protest unjust and cruel behavior and group cowardice in one passionate moment. Hearing a vicious anti-Semitic joke (What is the difference between Jews and pizza? Pizza doesn't scream when you put it in the oven), she blasted the girl who told it, and then turned on a teammate, yelling: "Kenny, you're Jewish! How can you laugh at that? You're just laughing because other people are laughing!" Disgusted, she motioned me to take her home.
Integrity is not relative, neither is kindness or compassion. I'm not suggesting that we all be like my husband, who won't take a tax deduction to which he is entitled if he thinks the IRS shouldn't allow such a deduction, but we cannot let the small opportunities for decent behavior slide by unnoticed, nor excuse bad behavior because it was harmless or impulsive. If we let the small stuff go-the "borrowed" cd, the copied homework-how will we teach our kids to handle the big stuff? When Jews come to their door and say, "Hide me," will they let them in? When the Gestapo comes, will they say, "No one is here"? Too many of us already do too much of our children's homework in the guise of helping so they won't get bad grades and build their Pinewood Derby cars for them so they won't be disappointed. Life is about disappointment. We even forgive John Kennedy and Martin Luther King their numerous extramarital affairs because we don't want the myths disturbed. No harm, no foul. Harmless little exceptions weaken the fabric of the principles and eventually a single dripping stream of water can erode a rock away.
AA-and other organizations like it-have demonstrated that human beings can rise to the challenge of resolving their cognitive dissonance the hard way--by discontinuing the behavior. With help from a supportive community, and a dodecalogue of steps that define the way to salvation, the path, the halácha, human beings can overcome their fear and greed through faith in a higher purpose for their lives than self-indulgence. To my mind, folk wisdom has it just right: Religion is what you do after the sermon is over.
This and this alone is true religion-to serve thy brethren.
This is sin above all other sin-to harm thy brethren.
In such faith is happiness.
In lack of it is misery and pain.
Blessed be he who swerveth not aside from this strait path.
Blessed is he whose life is lived thus ceaselessly in serving God.
Bearing others' burdens and so alone is life, true life, to be attained.
Nothing is hard to him who, casting self aside, thinks only this-
How may I serve my fellow man?
Tulsi Das, translated by Mohandas Gandhi