To Affirm the Integrity of Each

The Rev. Mark Ward
Unitarian Universalist Church of Asheville

Asheville, NC

April 6, 2008

READING

From The Story of My Life by Helen Keller

One day, while I was playing with my new doll, Miss Sullivan put my big rag doll into my lap, spelled “d-o-l-l” and tried to make me understand that “d-o-l-l” applied to both. Earlier in the day we had had a tussle over the words “m-u-g” and “w-a-t-e-r.” Miss Sullivan had tried to impress it upon me that “m-u-g” is mug and “w-a-t-e-r” was water, but I persisted in confounding the two. In despair she had dropped the subject for the time, only to renew it at the first opportunity. I became impatient at her repeated attempts and, seizing the new doll, I dashed it upon the floor. I was keenly delighted when I felt the fragments of the broken doll at my feet. Neither sorrow nor regret followed my passionate outburst. I had not loved the doll. In the still, dark world in which I lived there was no strong sentiment or tenderness. I felt my teacher sweep the fragments to one side of the hearth, and I had a sense of satisfaction that the cause of my discomfort was removed. She brought me my hat, and I knew I was going out into the warm sunshine. This thought, if a wordless sensation may be called a thought, made my hop and skip with pleasure. . . .

We walked down the path to the well-house, attracted by the fragrance of the honeysuckle with which it was covered. Someone was drawing water, and my teacher placed my hand under the spout. As the cool stream gushed over one hand she spelled into the other the word water, first slowly, then rapidly. I stood still, my whole attention fixed upon the motions of her fingers. Suddenly I felt a misty consciousness as of something forgotten – a thrill of returning though; and somehow the mystery of language was revealed to me. . . .

I knew then that “w-a-t-e-r” meant the wonderful cool something that was flowing over my hand. That living word awakened my soul, gave it light, hope, joy, set it free. There were barriers still, it is true, but the barriers that could in time be swept away.

SERMON

It has been over a century since Helen Keller wrote the words that you heard in our reading earlier. A precocious 27-year-old, she was recalling the transformative moment in her life, when, at the age of around 7, having lived since 18 months of age unable to see or hear,  she was helped to see how words, language could connect her own intelligent mind to the unique world of sense in which she lived.

Some of you may remember this emotional scene from the famous 1962 film “The Miracle Worker” starring Patty Duke and Anne Bancroft, when Patty Duke’s Helen suddenly calls out “wah-wah” after making the connection between the sign that Bancroft’s Annie Sullivan was making on one hand and the cool liquid spilling over the other hand. There’s some dispute among those who know the story about whether Helen actually said anything at the time, or whether the filmmakers may have added it to make the moment more dramatic.  But for me, to be honest, the scene as Keller’s memoirs paint it is almost more electrifying than the film version. She writes, as you’ll remember, “as the cool stream gushed over one hand she (Sullivan) spelled into the other the word water, first slowly, then rapidly.”

Keller’s next sentence catches me every time I read it: “I stood still, my whole attention fixed upon the motions of her fingers.” I try to imagine what Helen Keller remembers going on inside while she simply, as she put it, “stood still.” All we know is that, as she put it, “That living word (water) awakened my soul, gave it light, hope, joy: set it free.”

Today is the latest in a series of sermons this year that I have offered to help us think about who we are and who we hope to be as a congregation as we work through a process to help us plan for our future. It is this understanding of our identity and what we do, after all, that will guide us in making those decisions, and so it’s worth taking the time to reflect on how we will frame those decisions.

So far I have suggested that as a religious community we gather to learn to live what love teaches, that we make room for the experience of wonder and the holy, that we regard ethical living and service to justice as religion’s truest witness, that we welcome all, and that we honor the reasoning mind. Today I want to add to that list that we affirm the integrity of each person.

This proposition relates closely to the first of our seven Unitarian Universalist principles, our covenant to affirm and promote the inherent worth and dignity of every person. In this first principle, we promise to treat each other, in fact all people always as ends, never as means. We may disagree. We may not even like each other, but we will never act so as to depreciate the value of others, push them aside, or treat them as deserving less consideration, less respect than ourselves.

Today I would like to suggest that we push this principle a little farther, that what we affirm is not just that each person has worth and dignity, but also that each person has and is called to a fundamental integrity.

When we say that something has integrity, we mean to say that it is sound, whole, complete.  In the context of our lives we say that we act with integrity when our values align with our actions. To say that each person has integrity is to say that each of us is enough, that we have within us all that it takes to be good, loving, effective people.

 Now, we may not be in touch with that integrity at this particular moment in time. Indeed, I would argue that coming to know and accept that integrity is one of the central tasks of our lives, the heart of our spiritual journeys. And, as we come to know that integrity it calls us to a wider sense of integrity. We see the integrity in others, and it teaches us how we are to be in the world. It illuminates our interconnected existence, how each thread we pull is connected to another.

All of this, of course, is much more easily said than done, and the path is not always clear. The Quaker writer Parker Palmer describes this integrity as a “hidden wholeness.” Wholeness, he insists, is a birthright, not something we must go to someone else to get. As he puts it in a passage in a recent book that I particularly resonate with right now, “when my first grandchild was born, I saw something in her that I had missed in my own children some twenty-five years earlier, when I was too young and self-absorbed to see anyone, including myself very well. What I saw was clear and simple: my granddaughter arrived on earth as this kind of person, rather than that, or that, or that. . . . In my granddaughter, I actually observed something I could once take only on faith: we are born with a seed of selfhood that contains the spiritual DNA of our uniqueness – an encoded birthright knowledge of who we are, why we are here, and how we are related to others. We may abandon that knowledge as the years go by, but it never abandons us.”

As we grow up, he suggests, many of us lose confidence in this wholeness. Instead, we learn compromises. We learn how to game the system, to develop strategies to get by. We create public personas as constructs to help us navigate the world around us, and often we don’t invest much of our true selves in them – not at work, not in relationships. Yes, we get by, but we are numb and disconnected.

In Palmer’s words, we live “divided lives.” We sense that there is an inner self and an outer self, and they don’t have much to do with each other. And so, we act, not out of our hearts but out of what we think others expectations are for us. As a result, we go out into the world, in Palmer’s words, “masked and armored,” a way of life that is carefully calibrated and averse to risk, yet not especially tuned to the moral dimensions of human relationships.

So, it’s not surprising that we observe even those in the most honored positions in society caught up in abusive behavior and blame it on low ethical standards. But, Palmer insists, “doctors who are dismissive of patients, politicians who lie to the voters, executives who cheat retirees out of their savings, clerics who rob children of their well-being – these people, for the most part, do not lack ethical knowledge or convictions. They doubtless took courses on professional ethics and probably received top grades. They gave speeches and sermons on ethical issues and more likely believed their own words. But they had a well-rehearsed habit of holding their own knowledge and beliefs at great remove from the living of their lives.”

If ethics is merely an external code of conduct it amounts to little more than what Palmer calls “a moral exoskeleton,” something we can slip off as easily as we can slip on. What it lacks is traction, a connection to who we truly are.

And, as it turns out, connection to who were truly are is not just a good idea: it’s what we want. Most of us have had those moments where suddenly everything felt right, moments when, in Helen Keller’s words, we “stood still” and saw things clearly in a way we never did before, when we were engaged in something a way that put our full being into play.

But those moments are fleeting. They leave us wondering where they came from and how to touch them again. We may make the mistake of assuming that the source of those moments can only be outside of ourselves. And so we use different strategies to pursue them. We seek out the right holy person or place, the right relationship, or, perhaps, the right stimulant to give us that blissful buzz. Disappointment, though, brings us back, sadder but not much wiser.

The theologian Paul Tillich once made the observation that much of what most religions describe as “sin” really amounts to “separation.” We feel estranged from each other, from our images of ourselves, from that sense of wholeness that Palmer described. Not only that but we come to dwell on that estrangement, on our own and the world’s imperfections, the terrible fruits of hatred and oppression. And so, we are given to a kind of numb despair. It is as if we can only confront the world around us through a lens of grim judgment, in Parker Palmer’s words, “masked and armored.”

And yet, behind that judgment, Tillich suggests, is another understanding, one that may be unspoken and even unacknowledged but present all the same: recognition of the unity of life. Tillich adopts another traditional religious word, “grace,” to describe this understanding. It is a way, he says, of looking at the world “in spite of” how separated we may feel.

Ultimately, he says, grace is “the reunion of life with life, the reconciliation of the self with itself.” Even amid our despair and doubt, there is unity that argues against our estrangement. As Tillich puts it, “Sometimes at that moment (when despair destroys all joy and courage) a wave of light breaks into our darkness, and it is as though a voice were saying, ‘You are accepted. You are accepted.’”

Such an experience is at the heart of an affirmation of the integrity that is ours as a birthright, our fundamental wholeness and goodness. And, Tillich goes on to say, this realization spreads to our views of others. It allows us, in his words, “to look frankly into the eyes of another . . . to understand each other’s words. . . . We experience the grace which is able to overcome the tragic separation of the sexes, of the generations, of the nations, of the races, and even the utter strangeness between humankind and nature. . . . For life belongs to life.”

Part of what draws me to Helen Keller’s story is that I hear just such an experience in her awakening. Relegated from a young age to a darkness and silence that cut her off from the world and kept her agile mind searching fruitlessly for something to seize onto, it is hardly surprising that she led a nearly feral existence with her family, involuntarily “masked and armored” as she was from the world.

And so in that moment when she made the connection between the symbols that Annie Sullivan was doggedly pressing into her palm and the cool liquid flowing over her fingers she not only grasped the power of language, the vehicle to break out of the vague, formless world in which she lived and communicate with others, but also in that moment, her separation, her cruelly divided life fell away and she was brought into the graceful unity of all things.

And so may we all be. I opine that our religious movement calls us to affirm a fundamental integrity in ourselves and in all things. We need not justify ourselves to anyone. We are accepted. And once we understand and act on that truth we are prepared to be agents of healing and renewal in the world.

 Our churches exist as places to welcome our true selves to be present. This is work that we do together because on our own we can get discouraged and lose our way. As Parker Palmer puts it, “I find it at least as confusing ‘in here’ as it is ‘out there.’” It takes time, and it involves far more than just filling our heads with information. It means gathering in ways that build trust and leave room for discovery.

As we build a stronger sense of our own integrity we are drawn naturally to extend that learning more widely: in our work lives and our home lives. It shatters the illusion that separates us from people of other ethnicities, sexual orientations and economic circumstances. We are no longer inclined to put up with the soul-killing compromises that divide us from ourselves and sustain inequality and oppression.

In time, we may come to know, and, even better, express and act on a deep understanding that Parker Palmer suggests my newly-born granddaughter has entered the world knowing: that we are each worthy, possessing a fundamental integrity that links us with each other and all things. It is my hope that she will never forget that and that the religious tradition I serve will never cease reminding her.