Ours is the choice. Poised between love and hate, Whatever way we turn weighs down the scale. Life gives the power to choose! It’s not too late. But as we tighten bolts or strike the nail Where duty lies, or opportunity, We are not robots, we determine fate.
Tomorrow’s walls, or weak or strong, will be What we the builders do this day create. We this day choose for light of the red hail Of all-destroying death, for rhapsody That heavenward lifts us, or the helpless wail Of children born to hopeless misery; And every day, as we choose ill or well, We build our heaven or stoke the fires of hell.
Out of our sweat and tears, or miseries, Out of the hopes and dreams of far-lit eyes, Victorious over chance and dread disease Earth yet may be a shining Paradise.
Fear not the wind! Nor to its wrath conform! Stretch out your hand in trust! God’s in the storm!
Spirit of Love and Life, Help us always to remember that it’s not too late, that we can affect fate in each and every moment. Help us to choose well and to create with integrity. Teach us to trust in ourselves and in the power of love to heal and save.
Reading: from The Sinai Myth, by Andrew Greeley
Even in the post-Freudian, post-Marxist age there are such things as good and evil. No matter how complex the issues, technical competence is not enough to arrive at decent and humane solutions. Dialogue between moral principles and technical complexity is difficult and intricate, but attempts must not be abandoned.
There are no simple answers to any of the problems facing the American nation. To pretend that there are is to be irresponsible.
People of good will, intelligence, and complexity can agree on moral principles and still disagree on the application of these principles. To claim moral sanction for one’s own solution and to repudiate others as immoral brings one dangerously close to fanaticism.
The intelligent and educated person is able to maintain involvement in social problems without becoming a fanatic. It is not necessary to have zealots in order that we might have reformers. Young people may have deep and permanent commitments to working for social change without needing to create scapegoats on which they can blame social problems.
Underlying these propositions is the assumption that there is a dimension of the human personality – which we call moral intelligence – which can be developed in the maturation experience. Moral intelligence is the capacity to reexamine and clarify one’s own values repeatedly in the light of concrete situations in which one finds oneself. Moral intelligence is the habit of not letting the picture of the complex gray reality which constitutes the social and political world be blotted out. Morally intelligent persons are not satisfied with their own conventional wisdom, whether that wisdom inclines them to withdraw from problems that seem too complex or to charge into the problems that seem simple.
Sermon
According to my theology professor in seminary, the only commandment that human beings have ever been able to keep was the one that God gave through Adam, instructing us to be fruitful and multiply and fill the earth.
Usually when we hear the word "commandment," we think of the ten that Moses brought down from Mount Sinai. We have had them for some 3000 years. Those ten are often cited, as a group rather than individually, as the basis of morality in our civilization, as in "I believe in the Ten Commandments and the Golden Rule." Interestingly, Jewish practice doesn’t identify these ten sayings at commandments, preferring to call them “utterances” instead, perhaps in order to avoid the temptation to make idols of them, as has recently occurred in certain American courtrooms.
I suggest, contrary to what you might think, that the ten commandments have become trivialized in the popular mind. Most people would be hard put to list all ten, let alone explain what coveting means, and few would understand all the attention being paid to graven images and taking names in vain. Whatever do those things have to do with morality?
In addition, the media have latched onto the Ten Commandments as an attention getting gimmick, a cute way of organizing an story. In a periodical search recently, I came across articles on the ten commandments of business, the ten commandments of marketing, the ten commandments of car repair, and the ten commandments of interior decorating, but very little on the ten commandments of God's covenant with Israel. They have lost their divine sanction and have become the ten pretty good suggestions and the number ten has become a sort of talisman that connotes authority.
But then, by themselves these laws haven't done very much in 3000 years to change human behavior. We are still scandalized by the number of murders in this country. Violent crime may be down, but embezzlement seems to be up. Perjury has become a tool of politics, and adultery is a constant theme in our entertainments if not in our lives. And our entire economy sometimes seems to depend on covetousness. So something else is needed in addition to the list of commandments, something like the attitude that leads a person or a nation to be guided and instructed by those basic rules. By themselves the Ten Command-ments are sometimes said to give us the beginnings of a legal code, but a legal code always places emphasis on obedience, fear and punishment. On the other hand, if the Commandments are written on our hearts, if they are part and parcel of our sense of who we are, they call us into a holy life of freedom and autonomy. So maybe I should change my title slightly to make it read, Are The Ten Commandments Enough? The answer is, no. They don’t accomplish much without the will to be guided by them.
One of my favorite Calvin and Hobbes cartoons makes this point: as Hobbes jumps over a brook, Calvin asks him, "Hobbes, do you think our morality is defined by our actions, or by what's in our hearts?" Hobbes climbs up on a large rock and says, "I think our actions show what's in our hearts." Calvin looks small, startled and alone in the next panel, then he shouts angrily, "I resent that!"
Our actions show what's in our hearts. If we are truly moral at heart, our inner morality leads us to consider the effects our actions may have on others. If we are moral at heart, we are unwilling to do harm, we're committed to the well-being of our neighbors, we're guided by loving kindness. The important element in any ambiguous situation is our sense of ourselves as moral agents. We stop to think. We see the connections between the Ten Commandments, or Love of Neighbor, or the Golden Rule, or whatever other moral guides we may use, and the action we are about to perform. We allow our actions to be guided by principle.
And, if we are truly moral at heart, we don't stop behaving morally when no one else is watching. With no one but the Universe as our witness, we do the right thing, even if we could get away with the wrong thing.
But what if we start out in the same condition as the Children of Israel when they were in slavery in Egypt, lacking any inner moral sense other than righteous indignation, and having someone else tell them what to do throughout their day?
Let's try putting ourselves in the position of the Israelites when they found themselves in a strange land, out there in the wilderness, before God delivered the Ten Commandments to them. We are always invited to find ourselves in the stories of the Bible, even to become part of the story. We don't have to be Jewish, we just have to recognize that their story is also our story, and we should, of course, thank them for handing the story along so that we may participate in it.
Before I go any further, I need to say a few words about God. For me God is a metaphor, in much the same way that the parables of Jesus were metaphors. Tell us about the kingdom of God, say the disciples. The kingdom of God is like a man who finds a pearl of great price and sells all he owns in order to purchase it, says Jesus. The Kingdom of God is a metaphor. The same principle applies to God: Tell us about God, some modern doubters might say. God, I might reply, is the largest idea our minds can hold. God is as if the idea of love was so strong that it could fill our awareness, so compelling that we are overcome with awe. God is as if the entire universe called out to us and made us feel special.
Let me offer a variation of Jewish practice, which always refers to God as haShem, or “the Name.” I’m going to try referring to God as “the Metaphor.” That may feel silly, but we’ll see if it helps.
So, returning to our narrative, we find ourselves in the wilderness, standing before what is termed “the mountain of the Metaphor.” Ever since we left Egypt we have been reluctant, carping, unruly and unappreciative fugitives from slavery, hardly the sort of people that one would consider to be self-aware moral agents. Rather than accept responsibility for our own actions, we are quick to blame others, especially our leader Moses.
Instead of leading us directly to the promised land, where, faced with so many temptations and accustomed so little to being responsible persons, we would immediately fall into our slavish ways again, haShem has brought us to a rugged mountain somewhere in the south of the Sinai Peninsula, several days' journey from anywhere.
The Metaphor has a purpose in mind for us. "You yourselves have seen what I did to the Egyptians," the Metaphor says to us, "and how I bore you on eagles' wings and brought you to Myself. Now, then, if you will indeed obey my voice and keep my covenant, then you shall be my own possession among all the peoples, for all the earth is mine. And you shall be to me a kingdom of priests and a holy nation." Not only is the Metaphor a metaphor, but the Metaphor loves to generate other, new metaphors. What might it mean to be a holy nation, especially if the nation in question is a rag-tag collection of former slaves who have not yet discovered the meaning or extent of their freedom? And what if that rag-tag collection of former slaves is us?
The event at Sinai creates a symbol for that specialness. In that story, the Metaphor, the Universe, Ultimate Reality, the Ground of Being, said to a group of human beings, "I choose you." Now, Israel often misunder-stood what that choosing was about and figured that because of it they could do no wrong. They even rationalized some early forms of genocide by saying that they were following the Metaphor's directives.
But the real force behind the symbol of the covenant entered into at Sinai is the idea that this special relationship with Reality should fill us with humility, with confidence at being loved, and with the desire to be worthy of that love by behaving responsibly. If Reality loves us, we had best live out that love by extending it to others. Our love of the Metaphor should create in us the need to love our neighbors.
It works the other direction, too. Loving our neighbors, we learn more about loving the Universe, the whole of it, with all its dangers as well as its pleasures..
Returning to Sinai, the ten principles that the Metaphor writes out for us are actually not very hard to keep. Don't dilute the experience of being loved by giving attention to idols of any kind. Observe the Sabbath, so that you will have some time in your lives to think about what it means to be the Metaphor's chosen vessels. Honor your parents. Don't murder or steal or violate your marriage vows. Don't testify falsely against anyone. And don't conspire to seize another person's property.
These are quite livable guidelines. They warn us against the most obvious ways that we might behave unjustly or inequitably toward our neighbors, but they still leave us a fantastic amount of freedom. More important than these few explicit behaviors is the sense of being the Metaphor's own, the sense that Ultimate Reality loves us and cares about us. Since we want to be worthy of that love, since we want not to disappoint the Metaphor, we will act as one of the Metaphor's children ought to act -- not out of fear but out of appreciation and affirmation.
We still have lots of ambiguity to deal with. Especially today, we have an almost infinite variety of moral dilemmas presented to us. Politicians on the campaign trail have to decide whether holding office is worth the price of their souls, and voters have to decide whether those politicians' moral lapses are sufficient to rule out their being elected. Women surprised by pregnancy face the decision of whether or not to keep the child. Kids who don't do drugs have to weigh the meaning of loyalty to friends who do use them. Children of dying parents find that they must decide whether to continue or remove life support. A while back, scientists working for Johnson and Johnson Medical Research Laboratories have to decide whether to believe their company's Credo or the instructions of their supervisors – there’s a double bind for you. And we all have to develop the moral courage to face the consequences of our own mistakes. The examples are endless.
Each time we grapple with such a problem, we discover once again that we are fallible and we run the risk of getting hurt or causing pain. That can be scary, so the temptation is always with us to create very explicit rules in place of general principles. A few years ago, when Sydney and I worked with an Affirmation Class, we got the kids to make a list of the Ten Commandments, then we asked them if they would add anything to the list to bring it up to date. The kids thought for a while, then added commandments about not using drugs, about safe sex, and about not polluting the environment.
Given time, they could have come up with commandments to cover all of society's ills. This was an opening to a legalistic approach toward morality, which we all share to some extent. We prefer certainty over ambiguity. We don’t want to have to think – just give us a rule we can follow!!! This, of course, is what we find in the Book of the Exodus, right after Moses has delivered the first ten laws. HaShem goes on to enunciate six hundred-three more laws pertaining to all manner of social relationships: what to do if your ox strays into your neighbor’s field; what to do if your slave doesn’t want to be freed after his period of indenture has ended; what to do about someone who has a disfiguring skin condition. Laws for every occasion.
The problem with legalism and its explicit rules is that 1) they are never broad enough to cover all the situations that may arise, especially today when so many cultures and sciences are bumping up against each other to create situations no one could have imagined just five years ago, and 2) explicit rules deprive us of the practice of reasoning or feeling out our own moral response to things that come up in our lives, since they depend on someone else's doing the difficult work of deciding what has most value in each situation. We cannot respect or trust ourselves if we continually pass on to others the burdens of our existence. Legalism actually violates the spirit in which the Ten Commandments were handed down to us. Legalism comes between us and that openness to the presence of the Metaphor or Reality that the commandments were intended to promote.
The Metaphor has hopes for us, rather high hopes: to become a people who will know the presence of the divine in their lives, a holy nation, a light unto the world that will show other peoples what it's like to be filled with love and act accordingly toward each other. Actually, we only need the one commandment, the first one, the one that says, "I am the reality who brought you out of pain, out of depression, out of addiction, out of fear, out of all the many forms of enslavement. Honor me by being a free and worthy person."
But don't expect it to be easy. We'll have to study out each dilemma as it arises, every time. In her study of the moral reasoning of women who came to abortion clinics for counseling, Carol Gilligan found the more sophisticated, responsible and self-aware women were able to transcend the motivations of fear and guilt and inconvenience, and to make choices based on their sense of the total gestalt of their lives, especially of their personal strengths and their existing relationships. But they all had to work it through.
They considered such questions as whether they could fairly attend to the children they already had if they gave birth to another, whether they were mature enough to be mothers, whether the home they could provide would be a safe and nurturing place for a child, whether the child would enlarge their lives or force them into isolation, whether their spouse or lover was capable of nurturing a child.
No fixed rules could help them with their decisions. Each woman had to weigh her own life and the circles of meaning and relationship around her. The same question would lead one to keep the foetus and another to abort it and another to bear the child and give it up for adoption. And always for these women the decision was gravely serious.
Acting from an awareness of being loved means always cracking ourselves open, for we can’t accept love nor give it if we hold ourselves in a tight little shell. Being loved demands that we become involved, that we take risks, and that we therefore be willing to stumble from time to time and sometimes fall, and that we accept the consequences of our actions, even the ones that go wrong. Acting from love requires that we struggle to enlarge and deepen our understanding of ourselves and of human nature. Our sense of ourselves has to be tempered by our awareness of our families, and awareness of our families by our understanding of our community, understanding of the community by our hopes for our nation, and love for the nation by our sense of its place in the grand balances of nature, economics and politics. Acting from love makes it imperative that we consider the long range effects of whatever we do, since any policy or solution creates new problems, since any choice is likely to be a compromise.
Reality, Life, Experience, the Metaphor, Civilization and its Discontents, are shaping us, stretching us, sometimes breaking us so that we can be reborn wiser and more loving, just as “haShem” “the Name” that created Israel has worked and continues to work century after century to shape a holy people. Yet the thing we have to learn is so simple. As the prophet Micah said, all that is required of us is that we do justice, love mercy, and walk humbly before our Metaphor, our sense of connection with this astonishing world.