MARTIN LUTHER KING AND OUR FIRST UNITARIAN PRINCIPLE
January 14, 2007 The Reverend Anne Felton Hines
Those of you who are involved in our Small Group Ministry program may have had the opportunity by now to explore each of our seven Unitarian Universalist Principles in some depth over the course of seven separate sessions. And you may be some of the participants who struggled so mightily with the very first Principle: “We affirm and promote the inherent worth and dignity of every person.” I am told that of all the sessions, the one that delved into that first Principle posed the biggest challenge for many of you.
I’m not surprised. That’s the reaction I always get when I speak on that Principle. “What about a Hitler?” is the most commonly-asked question. “How does he have ‘worth and dignity?” It is a challenging question that carries within it a collective anguish.
You may remember me telling you a few months ago about a speech given at our UU General Assembly last June by former UUA president William Schulz – who also spent the last ten years as director of Amnesty International. The title of his address was “What Torture Taught Me” – and it was one of the most powerful speeches I have heard in a long time.
In it, Rev. Schulz talked about two kinds of torture: That which has a “rational” purpose behind it, such as forcing information from an enemy; and that which has no purpose but to humiliate and dehumanize someone. While most of us here would probably question even the first type of torture, and wonder about the soul of the person who is able to do it – still, we can understand how people throughout history might use such techniques to further some greater good.
But the second type of torture is much more sinister, and leaves most of us stunned. Schulz pointed to some statistics that while a fairly large percentage of Americans support the use of torture – especially during wartime – as a method to learn information that might save others, an even larger number of Americans were sickened by the stories we heard of torture at Abu Graib. That’s because it became clear that the sole purpose of that torture was to strip the prisoners “of their humanity.” Those conducting the torture did it solely for their own gratification, and seemed to lose their own humanity in the process.
Schulz contends that most torture today – be it Abu Graib or the brutal genocide going on in Darfur – is this second type – done for no other reason than cruelty and revenge. “In what sense,” asks Schulz, “can we defend the notion that the torturer (in these cases) is a person of ‘inherent worth and dignity?”
But I would argue that it is the very “inherency” of worth and dignity that gives our first Principle its truth. My understanding of the word “inherent” is that it refers to that element that is at the very core of something – that defines the essence, without which that “something” would be something else.
In contrast to the old Calvinist doctrine of “original sin” and human depravity, early Unitarians believed we are each born with the potential for goodness. Our first UU Principle affirms that the very fact of our humanness implies “worth and dignity;” it is our core. An individual may experience such a brutal childhood that they never glimpse their “worth;” or they may have some biological disorder that obscures their sense of “dignity.” And the consequence may be that they become frightening monsters – torturers, killers, brutal dictators. But I don’t believe they were born a torturer or killer or dictator; I believe they were born with the same potential for goodness as anybody else.
It is true, I know, that evil is also created by the most “normal” among us – that Hitler’s deeds were carried out by supposedly ordinary men who loved their wives, read bedtime stories to their children, and took care of their ailing parents. Indeed, whenever people learn that someone they’ve known has committed some terrible crime, what horrifies them as much if not more than the nature of the crime, is the fact that they never suspected this person could be capable of such a crime. They suddenly see the person with no “inherent worth and dignity.”
Yet at birth, it is apparent in all of us – no matter what twists and turns our lives may take; no matter what kind of human being we are to become. And it is that seed of “worth” that our first Principle calls us to remember in one another – and even in the worst among us.
Indeed, in Rev. Schulz’s speech last June, he ended with stories of people who had been imprisoned unjustly, and in some cases tortured as well, yet who were able to transcend the horror of their experience and reach out to their oppressors – to see the “inherent worth and dignity” in the very people who had hurt them, and offer them forgiveness and reconciliation. Shouldn’t those of us who haven’t suffered such horrors be able to do the same?
It is that sort of transcendence that was one of the cornerstones of Martin Luther King’s leadership, and he would have had no problem with the idea that every person holds “inherent worth and dignity.”
“There is within human nature,” he wrote, “an amazing potential for goodness….something that can respond to goodness.” He didn’t discount the equally “amazing” potential for human beings to do evil – what he called a “strange dichotomy of disturbing dualism within human nature.” But he insisted that “the image of God is never totally gone” from a person; “there is something in human nature that can be changed.”
And therefore, said King, we must approach everyone – even those who hurt us – with love. Grounding his vision in the techniques of Gandhi and the teachings of Jesus, King wrote that “at the center of nonviolence stands the principle of love.” We must cut off the chain of hate, he said, and this “can only be done by projecting an ethic of love to the center of our lives.”
This is probably the most difficult teaching of King’s. How are we to love someone who has done terrible things to us or to those we love? Who in the world could seek to do anything but retaliate in kind? Yet we witnessed under his leadership amazing acts of non violent resistance by people of all ages in the face of terrible cruelty.
Perhaps that was because King assured them he wasn’t speaking of love in the more common meanings of affection or sentimentality. “It would be nonsense,” he acknowledged, “to urge people to love their oppressors in an affectionate sense.” Rather, he called us all to practice “agape,” which he defined as “the love of God operating in the human heart.”
“Agape is the recognition that all life is interrelated; he said; that all humanity is involved in a single process, and all men (speaking in the language of his time) are brothers. To the degree that I harm my brother, no matter what he’s doing to me, to that extent I am harming myself.
The only way I know to practice “agape” toward someone who has hurt me, or who causes great harm to others, is to imagine the spark of God within them – that seed of love, and that potential for goodness – that we were each born with. The only way I can imagine forgiveness and reconciliation is to see their “inherent worth and dignity” that was a part of them from their beginning. But oh…sometimes it is impossible for me; I do not begin to be the kind of person King was.
I know that some of you have been the victims of evil up close. But most of us, find plenty of challenges to our first UU Principle in more mundane, everyday experiences.
Friday I spent the day sitting with my sister in the surgical waiting room of Torrance Medical Center, as my brother-in-law was undergoing quadruple bypass surgery. The surgeon had told my sister that it would take about four hours, and consequently we were expecting him to be brought out of surgery around 12:30. The time came and went; and then another hour, and another. A volunteer kindly kept us informed of the progress, assuring us that everything was going just fine, but that it was simply taking longer than they’d expected. Nevertheless, my sister was a nervous wreck.
At some point a man came in and sat down opposite us. For a few minutes he read the newspaper, and then put it down and began chatting with us. He seemed pleasant enough at first – though quite self-centered. My sister asked him who he was waiting for, and he said his mother, who had had some minor surgery and was doing well in ICU. He asked my sister about her situation; she told him, and he immediately began complaining about all the care he’d been having to give his mother. He seemed to have no interest in my sister’s far-more-serious situation.
But the worst part came when he began talking about other things unrelated to why we were all there. There was a television in the room, and Oprah Winfrey appeared. “Huh!” he began; “She makes $34,000 a minute, and now she’s sending a bunch of it to schools down in Africa! Guess she can’t spend that money on schools here in L.A. ‘cause none of them want to learn! They’d rather shoot each other – the Mexicans and the Blacks – a bunch of gangs killin’ each other! Huh!” he grunted.
My sister and I each mumbled something and began knitting, hoping the guy would go back to reading the newspaper. But no such luck. When he heard the television announcer say something about a “painful secret” that Oprah was going to reveal, he said, “Huh! Probably gonna’ say she’s a lesbian! That’d be good! And then she’d wanna’ get married! Geez!”
We kept knitting. And the guy launched in on another subject: “Of course, now our governor wants to tax the doctors and drug companies so we can give free health care to all the illegals!” My sister and I by now had resigned ourselves to simply ignoring him, and finally he got up and walked out – much to our relief. When my sister told her daughter a while later about the encounter, her daughter said, “Boy, was he preaching to the wrong choir!”
And in retrospect, it was amusing. But at the time, I wanted to wring his neck – first of all because he was being so insensitive to my sister who was in no mood to talk about these subjects, even if she had agreed with him! But secondly, because I immediately pegged him as an ignorant and self-centered racist, homophobe, and probably war-monger. I saw nothing redeeming in him – certainly no hint of “worth and dignity!” He was everything I detested.
But what Martin Luther King, Jr. and our first UU Principle calls me to do is open my heart so that I might see beyond this man’s persona to that spark of the Creator that was present when he was born, and that does not get extinguished, no matter how hard he may try to cover it up.
King once wrote, “I’m very happy that Jesus didn’t say ‘like your enemies,’ because it is difficult to like some people. But Jesus says to love them, and love is greater than like. Love is understanding, redemptive, creative, and good will for all.”
Love, said King, “is the willingness to go to any length to restore community.” And that means seeing the other – no matter what they have done – as a part of me, born with as much “worth and dignity” as was I.
Our world is being torn further apart every day, it seems. Our goal of “world community” keeps slipping further and further out of our grasp, and there are numerous people who it is easy to blame for this situation; my current favorite is George W. Bush and his entire Administration. As I have said here before, I think he is the most dangerous President this country has ever known, and I am fearful of what he will do with his remaining two years of office.
Yet what Dr. King would tell me to do is to move beyond my fear and my anger, and open my heart to President Bush’s “inherent worth and dignity” – to fight the deeds of this Administration, but not the individuals. What Dr. King and our first Unitarian Universalist Principle teach me is that the most important kind of love – albeit probably the most difficult - is that which leads me to understanding, and to a faith in the possibility that love can transform even the most tightly-closed hearts.
It was one of the prison inmates with whom I used to correspond who taught me the Hindi word, “namaste” – loosely translated as “The God in me bows to the God in you.” This isn’t a greeting I’m to give only to those people I like or agree with. It’s to be shared with anyone – including those people I dislike; including those I fear or even abhor.
“Namaste” is an acknowledgement that God – the Spirit of Life and Love – is alive in every person. And the task for us all – perhaps most especially Unitarian Universalists – is to keep our hearts open, so that we may see beyond the facades and speak to the “worth and dignity” that is born in each of us at our birth.
As we remember and celebrate tomorrow the life of the great Civil Rights leader, let us remember and celebrate too our first Unitarian Universalist Principle, which he exemplified so well.
Namaste. And Amen.
© 2007 Anne Felton Hines. All rights reserved.
