First Unitarian Universalist Church of New Orleans
Sunday, November 16, 2008
What are you worth? In the meltdown of our country’s economy since mid-September, many Americans, including some in this church, have spiraled into crisis, with home foreclosures skyrocketing and investments in the stock market – where many of us with retirement accounts have our retirement accounts – have plummeted. Many people who had thought they had so-called “good jobs” have discovered painfully that they have insecure jobs, or even no jobs at all. And it is difficult for us to interpret and cope with this situation without recourse to self-blame. In these circumstances, “What are you worth?” becomes almost an accusation instead of a question.
That nagging sense of guilt comes from our unwitting participation in the pervasive American civil religion. A major component of this civil religion is the idea of the self-made person, the person responsible for themselves, the person who pulls themselves up by their own bootstraps. In this nearly-unconscious perception of reality in America, financial success is seen as the result of personal hard work and perseverance while financial failure is the result of personal shortcomings and laziness. Almost no matter our real religious heritage, nearly all of us Americans have absorbed this notion that people who are successful have earned it, and correspondingly, that people who fail deserve it as well.
The American myth of success developed out of a secular exaggeration of the teachings of French reformist theologian John Calvin, whose doctrine of predestination and God’s chosen or the “elect” rapidly became a religious endorsement of the status quo. Calvin’s quote: “…[W]ordly success and prosperity are construed as signs of God’s approval” grew into a doctrine of the materialist American creed. Over time, the opposite was also thought to be true: if the rich were rich because they had God’s approval, then the poor must be poor because of God’s disapproval. Whatever happens to you, you must somehow deserve it.
Whether we choose it or not, we are all affected by this philosophy. When things are going well, we feel pretty good about ourselves. It starts with the positive feelings engendered by our parents’ and teachers’ approval, good grades, high ACT and SAT scores, and getting accepted into good schools, and progresses to getting a raise, a promotion, recognition among our peers (or even better, among the public), a bigger and better apartment and then a house (with numbers of bathrooms and the newness of kitchens enhancing the positive glow), more exotic and luxurious destinations on our longer and more frequent vacations. Later, one can feel blessed and secure by the number and amount of supposedly secure investments guaranteeing us happy golden years. While we congratulated ourselves on our hard work, and perhaps a little on our good luck, it all seemed, at the time, to be signs that we were somehow good people.
Clergy are not immune to this peculiarly American syndrome. In nearly every religious faith, when we ordained gather, we ask each other about the size of our congregations, observe the size of buildings and campuses and parking lots, an speculate on the amount of compensation. Ministers who have moved from a smaller church to a larger one are congratulated; those going in the opposite direction are commiserated with. I do not absolve myself – there have been times in my 14 years of ministry before I returned home here when I judged myself as “moving on up” – going from a 150-member church to a 365-member church. From there, I once assumed that I would either build that church into more than 500 members or I would “graduate” to another such church. In large part in at least 12 of those years, I saw my self-worth as a minister tied to the size of the church I was serving, and the size and prominence of the city in which that church was located. I neither condemn this attitude nor celebrate it; it just was.
And so, for many of us, myself included, the failure of the stock market and the loss of value of our homes and of our investments, the diminution of value of our children’s college funds, the loss or potential loss of our jobs, all become marks of personal failure, symbolic that even God or the Universe is no longer on our side. We can even see this attitude reflected in the way that some of us have responded to the current crisis. As my colleague Tom Schade asked in a note to the UU Ministers’ Chat, “Do we think those who suffer now do so now because they were imprudent in their borrowing, or in their spending?” Do those going through foreclosure or those being laid off in the financial industry deserve their fates? Does thinking that way make us feel better about our own situations – they deserved their bad end, those other people, because they were stupid or gullible, or greedy and grasping, but we will be all right, because we are smart and unselfish? Isn’t that just another form of good people flourish and bad people fail?
What are you worth? What makes you feel good about yourself? Maybe you already know it’s not the size of your house or the newness of your appliances or the smallness of your electronic gadgets; maybe you’ve already grasped that basing your worth on the amount in your bank account or IRA is specious. But what if your self-worth is founded something else, something less selfish – like the achievements of your children or grandchildren, their grade point averages, the specialness of their schools, the exclusivity of their college, the prestige or recompense of their adult job? What if your child or grandchild failed a class or failed a grade level, or dropped out of school, or took drugs, or got arrested – would you then be worth less?
What are you worth? What in your life makes you feel valuable? From where do you get your sense of self-worth? The questions are no longer, if they ever were, rhetorical or academic. These are inherently religious and spiritual questions, not because they cannot be answered using pure science or reason, but because those answers are so ultimately unsatisfying. After all, the scientific answer to the question, “What are you worth?” might simply be the commercial value of your physical parts and chemical make-up, or it might reasonably be the total value of everything material you own. But when we proclaim, as our Unitarian Universalist principles do, “the inherent worth and dignity of every human person” we intuitively understand that the “worth” referred to is not the monetary value of our bodies, nor is it the total amount of all we own, nor the social status we might have inherited or worked toward, nor even the achievements of our precious children or grandchildren.
Human beings have inherent worth and dignity. We Unitarian Universalists do not subscribe to a doctrine of depravity, wherein human beings are thought to be incapable of moral behavior without God’s grace. We do not believe there is such a thing as God’s elect – since our ancestors developed the idea of universal salvation, we have held that ALL humanity is God’s beloved, or, less theistically, that all human beings are equal. We do not reduce human beings to the worth of their bio-chemical components, nor do we rate human beings as better and more valuable due to their material wealth or achievements. While we rejoice in the accomplishments of our children and grandchildren, having children or grandchildren without numerous accomplishments does not diminish our worth.
But here’s the trickier part: we UUs also do not judge people as “over-reaching their station” when poor and working class individuals and families reach for the supposed security and safety of the middle class, no matter their success or failure. We do not rub our hands gleefully over the demise of Wall Street firms and the tumbling-down of financial titans. Schadenfreude, rejoicing in the troubles of others, is unworthy of us, unworthy of our UU principles. People who suffer misfortune, whether they are rich or poor, deserve our compassion and fellow-feeling.
I do not pretend to know what the solution is to our nation’s financial and economic crisis. I offer no suggestions to our new president or other elected officials on how to extricate us from the present situation. I am just a pastor, and can only lift up religious principles, a spiritual way forward. There are difficult times ahead for our church, for our city, for our country. Our church budget will be stretched very thin, as you will learn in more detail at next week’s Congregational Meeting. I’m sure your personal budgets, like mine, will be pulled pretty tight as well. There is help available. Because you worship in this neighborhood, every one of you is eligible for Angel Food Ministries, which can help with monthly groceries. If you need other assistance, please make an appointment to come see me. We’ll get through this together.
For myself, I have found a great deal of freedom and joy in coming home to New Orleans to serve this church and I’m discovering a whole new kind of success. To me, every day that First Church remains open as a spiritual home in a recovering and wounded New Orleans is an achievement; to me, every returning member and every new member is a tremendous victory. I have never been prouder to serve a congregation, and never been happier to live in any city anywhere. I would not exchange this ministry for one in a UU church with $1000 monthly budget for flowers (and there actually is such a church). No home I have ever owned is as comfortable to me as the apartment I rent on Annunciation Street. And I refuse to look at my retirement accounts, since I figure I won’t be using them for at least another 10 years or so, and who knows what will happen in the meantime?
Perhaps we New Orleanians are more prepared than other Americans for a sudden and complete shift in the way things are valued. It has already happened to us, 3 years ago, and we learned how to live through that, get through that, and come somehow, more or less intact, to the other side. The “how” turned out to be crazily and devastatingly simple – it was love. Love for our families and closest relationships, love for our friends, our neighborhoods, our congregation, love for this exasperating and wonderful city.
In a meditation written in 1992, my colleague Robby Walsh writes of coping when seismic plates of security shift:
Did you ever think there might be a fault line
passing underneath your living room:
A place in which your life is lived in meeting and in separating,
wondering and telling, unaware that just beneath you
is the unseen seam of great plates that strain through time…
And that your life, already spilling over the brim,
could be invaded, sent off in a new direction,
turned aside by forces you were warned about but not prepared for.
Shelves could be spilled out,
the level floor set an angle in some seconds, shaking.
You would have to take your losses,
do whatever must be done next.
When the great plates slip
and the earth shivers and the flaw
is seen to lie in what you trusted most,
look not to more solidity,
to weighty slab of concrete poured
or strength of cantilevered beam to save the fractured order.
Trust more the tensile strands of love
that bend and stretch to hold you
in the web of life that’s often torn but always healing.
There’s your strength.
The shifting plates, the restive earth, your room, your precious life,
they all proceed from love,
the ground on which we walk together.
What are you worth? You are, we are, each of us, precious and wonderful. We are good gifts, just as we are. We have nothing to prove. We do not need to earn a right to be here. Everything we once thought permanent is, in reality, temporary, on loan, provisional, interim. We do not grieve, but rejoice in what is permanent and real and steady – the foundation of love and compassion. These are real and reliable. It is the ground on which we walk together, in good times and hard times and all times. AMEN – ASHE – SHALOM – SALAAM – NAMASTE – BLESSED BE!
