WHAT WE CHOOSE: ETHICS FOR UNITARIAN UNIVERSALISTS
A Tapestry of Faith Program for Adults
WORKSHOP 6: THE STORY OF OUR LIVES: NARRATIVE ETHICS
BY AMBER BELAND AND MANISH MISHRA-MARZETTI DEVELOPMENTAL EDITOR, GAIL FORSYTH-VAIL
© Copyright 2012 Unitarian Universalist Association.
Published to the Web on 9/29/2014 11:35:30 PM PST.
This program and additional resources are available on the UUA.org web site at
www.uua.org/religiouseducation/curricula/tapestryfaith.
WORKSHOP OVERVIEW
INTRODUCTION
In the holding environment of true community, people share experiences of meaning—they share storylines, which are more compelling than the barriers or boundaries that separate them. These common narratives prepare the way for reconciliation. — Rev. Jacqueline Lewis, The Power of Stories
This workshop presents narrative ethics, a framework for ethical decision making grounded not in abstract concepts but in the more subjective, emotionally powerful reality of life experience. Undoubtedly, our life stories shape our moral and ethical positions and actions. For example, if someone is gay or lesbian or has a friend or family member who is gay or lesbian, their personal experiences will undoubtedly shape their moral stance regarding homosexuality. Our life stories carry their own logic, creating an emotional imperative with the power to either trump or support the theoretical ideas and laudable intentions of any other ethical system.
The narrative ethics framework for making moral and ethical choices fits easily with Unitarian Universalist values and practices. Our faith is rooted not in common scriptures but instead in common values, and as we live these values together, we draw on life experiences to illuminate, illustrate, and justify our moral and ethical choices and actions. Narrative ethics leads us to share our own stories and to attend to those of other people as we consider ethical and moral choices. Further, narrative ethics invites us to consider "the words and deeds of prophetic women and men," one of our Unitarian Universalist Sources.
This workshop asks: How can narrative ethics lead to sound moral decision making? What limitations and shortcomings might narrative ethics have?
Before leading this workshop, review Accessibility Guidelines for Workshop Presenters found in the Introduction.
GOALS
This workshop will:
LEARNING OBJECTIVES
Participants will:
WORKSHOP-AT-A-GLANCE
Activity | Minutes |
Welcoming and Entering | 0 |
Opening | 2 |
Activity 1: Opening Scenario | 10 |
Activity 2: Sharing Stories | 30 |
Activity 3: Changing the World | 15 |
Activity 4: Narrative Ethics and Equality | 15 |
Faith in Action: Stories from Our Social Justice Partners | |
Closing | 18 |
Alternate Activity 1: Telling Each Other's Stories | 30 |
SPIRITUAL PREPARATION
Set aside time for journaling, reflection, prayer, and/or meditation, using these focus questions:
WORKSHOP PLAN
WELCOMING AND ENTERING
Materials for Activity
Preparation for Activity
Description of Activity
Welcome all participants and draw their attention to the workshop agenda.
OPENING (3 MINUTES)
Materials for Activity
Preparation for Activity
Description of Activity
Light the chalice and share Reading 585 in Singing the Living Tradition, "Councils," by Marge Piercy.
ACTIVITY 1: OPENING SCENARIO (10 MINUTES)
Description of Activity
Share this scenario:
You are a chaperone on a middle school youth group trip. As the bus passes through an economically depressed section of town, one of the youth comments on a teen walking down the street, saying that this teen's look is "so ghetto." You can tell from his tone that he is using this phrase to say the kid's clothes are "cool." None of the adults or teens around this youth respond to the comment.
Invite participants to respond to these questions:
ACTIVITY 2: SHARING STORIES (30 MINUTES)
Materials for Activity
Preparation for Activity
Description of Activity
Invite participants to consider a moral or ethical choice they made. Ask them to choose a decision that is far enough in the past that they have had time to measure its outcome. Give examples:
Invite participants to write notes in their journal about the experience and what they learned. Let them know they will be asked to share the story with others. Allow five minutes for them to find their story and make notes. Then, offer paper and drawing materials for participants to go deeper by drawing a representation of their experience. Ask: "What did the experience feel like? What were the moods and contours?" Invite them to give life to that experience, and those feelings, artistically. Be sure to mention that no one will be judged on artistic skills—this drawing can take any form or format they desire. Allow ten minutes for drawing. As the allotted time comes to a close, say participants can continue these drawings at home if they are not yet finished.
Inviting participants to go still deeper, ask how the experiences they have artistically represented affected their ethical sensibility. Ask: "How has this experience affected your ongoing choices, beliefs, and actions?"
Allow two minutes for silent reflection. Then, invite participants to move into pairs and share their writing and/or drawing with one another or simply relate the experience/story they chose. Invite pairs to respond to the posted questions after each has shared their story/experience. Allow ten minutes for paired conversation. Re-gather the large group and have volunteers share insights and observations that emerged from their paired conversations.
ACTIVITY 3: CHANGING THE WORLD (15 MINUTES)
Materials for Activity
Preparation for Activity
Description of Activity
Introduce the story, saying:
A narrative ethics framework involves not just reliance on our own stories and experiences for moral and ethical guidance, but also attending to the stories of others. The story I am about to read is about a person whose identity, life experience, and social circumstances—their life story—not only shaped their own ethic, but also shaped their efforts to shape the ethical decisions and actions of others.
Read your chosen story aloud. Then, lead a short discussion using this question to guide you:
Post the three questions you have written on newsprint and invite participants to silently consider them one at a time. Read each question aloud, and then allow a minute or two of silent reflection.
Including All Participants
Create a large-print handout that includes the discussion questions to assist those who are visually impaired.
ACTIVITY 4: NARRATIVE ETHICS AND EQUALITY (15 MINUTES)
Materials for Activity
Preparation for Activity
Description of Activity
Invite participants to consider what they have personally encountered, or witnessed, of the struggle for greater equality in the areas of race/ethnicity, differing physical abilities, sexual orientation, and gender. Perhaps they have experienced barriers or witnessed someone else experiencing barriers to true equality. Perhaps they have experiences or stories of hope or resilience. Give each participant a marker and invite them to move around the room, and list a few key words or phrases on the appropriate newsprint to capture the experience that came to mind. Tell them that they need not have something to share in each category.
Invite participants to rejoin the large group. Read aloud the words and phrases shared on each piece of newsprint.
Ask: "How does telling these stories matter? Did the stories you represented here affect your choices and actions? How? Did the stories make moral or ethical demands on you? How do such stories make a difference, both for the teller and for the listener?" Invite comments about insights and observations from the exercise.
Including All Participants
Be sure to allow ample space for all, especially those who are mobility impaired. Post the newsprint at a height accessible for all. If you have participants who cannot move around the room, modify the activity, using eight sheets of paper on clipboards (two for each category), and passing them from person to person.
CLOSING (18 MINUTES)
Materials for Activity
Preparation for Activity
Description of Activity
Lead a conversation using one of these questions as a guide:
After a few minutes of conversation, distribute Taking It Home. Share Leader Resource 1, The Wisdom Tree, as you extinguish the chalice.
FAITH IN ACTION: STORIES FROM OUR SOCIAL JUSTICE PARTNERS
Materials for Activity
Preparation for Activity
Description of Activity
Say:
Congregations typically partner with other organizations for one or more of their social justice ministries. These partner organizations have their own histories—the stories of how they became engaged in their work. Just as the narrative of experience is an important source of guidance for individuals, it is also an important source of guidance, and even inspiration, for institutions.
Share the story of the partner organization or invite your guest to share it. After sharing pose these questions:
Make a plan to collect partner organization stories from individual congregants. Publicize stories that support the partnership and its ongoing work.
LEADER REFLECTION AND PLANNING
Consider these questions as you review the workshop with your co-leader:
Save the covenant newsprint to post at the next workshop. Review and assign tasks for the next workshop.
TAKING IT HOME
In the holding environment of true community, people share experiences of meaning—they share storylines, which are more compelling than the barriers or boundaries that separate them. These common narratives prepare the way for reconciliation. — Rev. Jacqueline Lewis, The Power of Stories
Think about how you live out your own story in the world. Are there ways in which you have lived a life that others can take as an example as their own stories unfold? What stories from your own experience might offer guidance or wisdom for others? How might you share those stories?
Make it a spiritual practice to listen to the experiences of other people, especially those whose perspective, circumstances, or identity differ from yours. How can another's experiences offer guidance for ethical or moral decisions you face?
ALTERNATE ACTIVITY 1: TELLING EACH OTHER'S STORIES (30 MINUTES)
Materials for Activity
Preparation for Activity
Description of Activity
Invite participants to consider a moral or ethical choice they made. Ask them to choose a decision far enough in the past that they have had time to measure its outcome. Give examples:
Invite participants to write in their journals about an experience and what they learned from it. Let them know they will share the story with others. Allow ten minutes.
Have participants to turn to a partner to share their story. Encourage listeners to pay close attention to their partners' story because the listener will share it with the large group. Invite the person telling the story to provide details and context that will paint a word picture for the listener, making recall easier. Allow ten minutes for pairs to share stories, inviting them to change roles about half way through the time.
Re-gather the larger group. Invite each pair to share each other's stories. Pause a minute after the story is told and allow the person whose story it is to correct any misinformation or missed details that might help others understand. After all the stories have been told, invite participants to speak about what it was like for someone else to tell their story. What was it like for the person telling the story? How does this task affect the interactions between the participants? Did the exercise illuminate the ways the narrative shaped their ethical understandings?
WHAT WE CHOOSE: ETHICS FOR UNITARIAN UNIVERSALISTS: WORKSHOP 6:
STORY: HARVEY MILK
In 1977, Harvey Milk was elected to the San Francisco Board of Supervisors, becoming the first openly gay man elected to public office in the United States. Milk grew up in New York, quiet about his homosexuality. He studied mathematics and graduated from New York State College for Teachers in Albany before joining the Navy during the Korean War. After his Navy service, he worked as a teacher and as an insurance actuary before experiencing considerable success as a researcher for a Wall Street firm. Throughout the 1960s he lived openly in a gay relationship, although he kept his gay life hidden from his family. Later, he left his financial job and moved with a new life partner to San Francisco. Together they opened a camera shop in the city's Castro District. By this time Milk's views had become more and more left of center; he decided to run for public office.
In 1973, Milk ran for a position on the San Francisco Board of Supervisors. Although he lost this election, he learned the importance of building coalitions. He allied with other small-business owners, Teamsters, construction-workers unions, and firefighters, for a solid voting base. He ran for office again in 1975. During this campaign, he worked hard—promoting voter registration, organizing a community-building street fair in the Castro, and writing regularly in the local newspaper. He lost the election for a second time, but the mayor appointed him to the Board of Permit Appeals, making him the first openly gay commissioner in the country. In 1977, Milk ran a third time for the Board of Supervisors and won. He was the first openly gay person elected to any office in the country.
One his first tasks was to promote passage of a citywide Gay Rights Ordinance that protected homosexuals from being fired from their jobs. He also worked to protect those with little power from real estate developers and large corporations. When a political opportunist began a campaign for a ballot initiative that would have made it mandatory for schools to fire any homosexual teachers or any school employees who supported gay rights, Milk used his celebrity to call for homosexual people to educate others about their lives and their presence. At a 1978 speech commemorating the anniversary of the Stonewall Riots, he urged gay people to "come out":
I ask my gay brothers and sisters to make a commitment to fight. For themselves, for their freedom, for their country. . . . We will not win our rights by staying quietly in our closets. . . . We are coming out to fight the lies, the myths, the distortions. We are coming out to tell the truth about gays, for I am tired of the conspiracy of silence, so I am going to talk about it. You must come out. Come out to your parents, your relatives.
Harvey Milk's public position elicited hate mail and death threats. On November 27, 1978, a former member of the Board of Supervisors, Dan White, who had clashed with Milk on gay rights and other issues, entered City Hall and assassinated first Mayor George Moscone and then Harvey Milk, shooting Milk five times at close range. That evening, tens of thousands of grieving people gathered and walked from the Castro to City Hall holding candles in honor of Harvey Milk. Milk was cremated, and his ashes were scattered in the city he had adopted and served. Some of his ashes are buried under the sidewalk at the former site of his camera store.
Although he was gone, his life and death left a profound legacy. He once said:
You've got to keep electing gay people . . . to know there is better hope for tomorrow not only for gays, but for blacks, Asians, the disabled, our senior citizens and us. Without hope, we give up. I know you cannot live on hope alone, but without it life is not worth living. You and you and you have got to see that the promise does not fade.
WHAT WE CHOOSE: ETHICS FOR UNITARIAN UNIVERSALISTS: WORKSHOP 6:
STORY: OLYMPIA BROWN
Universalist Olympia Brown is known as the first woman minister whose ordination was recognized by a denomination. She spent a lifetime working for women's suffrage and was among the few original suffragists still alive to vote, at long last, in 1919.
Olympia Brown was born to a Universalist family who valued education. Determined to seek higher education, she persuaded her father to allow her and a younger sister to go to college, first at Mary Lyons's Mount Holyoke Female Seminary in Massachusetts, and then at the better-suited Antioch College in Yellow Springs, Ohio. Brown felt called to the Universalist ministry, and sought admission to theological school, although this was not an option open to women. She finally persuaded the president of St. Lawrence University to admit her in 1861. In her autobiography she writes, "Mr. Ebenezer Fisher, the President, replied that I would be admitted but he did not think women were called to the ministry." She continues, "President Fisher, in spite of his discomfiture at my entering the school, was just to me as a student, and never discriminated against me until I began to take steps toward ordination." When Brown completed her course of study in 1863, she had to convince the male ministers of the St. Lawrence Universalist Association to vote to ordain her so she could be called to parish ministry. The positive reception she received when she preached at local churches swayed the opinions of many of the ministers in her favor and Brown was ordained. She says, "Mr. Fisher had so far overcome his feelings that he took part in the [ordination] exercises."
After ordination, Brown served the church in Weymouth Landing, Massachusetts. With the blessing of her congregation, she spent months in Kansas speaking on behalf of women's suffrage, making her own living and speaking arrangements as she traveled. In 1870, she accepted a call to the Bridgeport, Connecticut, church. She married in 1873, keeping her own name, and gave birth to her first child the next year. In 1874, she decided to resign her ministry, although she continued to live in Bridgeport for two more years, giving birth to a second child in 1876.
After careful consideration of her calling and her options after her resignation from Bridgeport, Brown wrote to Mr. A. C. Fish, the clerk of the Universalist Church in Racine, Wisconsin, to offer her services. He wrote back that the parish was in an unfortunate condition, thanks to "a series of pastors easy-going, unpractical, and some even spiritually unworthy, who had left the church adrift, in debt, hopeless, and doubtful whether any pastor could again rouse them." Brown accepted the challenge, and she and her family moved to Racine in 1878. She worked to rejuvenate the church and establish it as a center of learning and culture and a forum for the discussion of social issues of the time, including women's suffrage. She invited Julia Ward Howe, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, and Susan B. Anthony to air their views from the pulpit. Under her ministry the women began to vote and hold offices in the church. After nine years of ministry, Brown left a thriving congregation and moved on to a new challenge. She left full-time ministry to become an activist for women's rights. For the next thirty-two years, she labored, spoke, and demonstrated on behalf of this cause.
In the fall of 1920, she returned to the Racine church and spoke about her life's work. She spoke the familiar words we find in Singing the Living Tradition, Reading 569:
Stand by this faith. Work for it and sacrifice for it. There is nothing in all the world so important as to be loyal to this faith which has placed before us the loftiest ideals, which has comforted us in sorrow, strengthened us for noble duty and made the world beautiful. Do not demand immediate results but rejoice that we are worthy to be entrusted with this great message, that you are strong enough to work for a great true principle without counting the cost. Go on finding ever new applications of these truths and new enjoyments in their contemplation, always trusting in the one God which ever lives and loves.
Looking back on her career as a parish minister, Olympia Brown wrote:
Those who may read this will think it strange that I could only find a field in run-down or comatose churches, but they must remember that the pulpits of all the prosperous churches were already occupied by men, and were looked forward to as the goal of all the young men coming into the ministry with whom I, at first the only woman preacher in the denomination, had to compete. All I could do was to take some place that had been abandoned by others and make something of it, and this I was only too glad to do.
WHAT WE CHOOSE: ETHICS FOR UNITARIAN UNIVERSALISTS: WORKSHOP 6:
LEADER RESOURCE 1: THE WISDOM TREE
By Meg Barnhouse. Used with permission.
I dragged myself to the early morning Theme Talk, even though it was the last day of a week at church camp and I was tired from staying up late singing with friends and dancing my fool head off. A panel of old-timers was talking about the early days of SUUSI—Southeastern UU Summer Institute, but no one calls it that—which has now grown to nearly a thousand Unitarian Universalists coming together every July on the campus of Virginia Tech. Here is the story that stuck in my mind; Roger Comstock, the former district executive of our Thomas Jefferson District, is the one who told it.
There was a teacher who used to come to the camp every summer, a man who could transform himself into Thomas Jefferson, Ralph Waldo Emerson, or Theodore Parker in turn. He would bring his class to sit under a large oak tree out on the quad, and the conversation would range over history, philosophy, and theology. Summer after summer folks would look forward to that class, to sitting under what they came to call "the wisdom tree." They would look forward to having the kind of conversations where you hear and even say things yourself that surprise and delight you.
One summer night, during the church camp, a storm came through. As the people slept, winds and rain whipped the campus. Lightning flashed and struck hard. It struck close. In the morning, daylight revealed the wisdom tree scattered in splinters on the ground.
As the grounds crew came to clear it away, church people came from every corner of the campus to circle round. One by one they asked to take a piece of the tree home with them.
This story struck me. It makes such a good picture of who we UUs are. There is a broad and spreading wisdom available to us, which shows up in history, theology, poetry, music, art, scripture, conversation, nature, and ritual. Individuals have a spark of the Divine inside, an inner wisdom that, related to sanely, responsibly, and in community, will lead to truth and peace.
Sometimes the place where you used to find wisdom gets destroyed. People fail you, a church disappoints you, new information strips away your feeling about a scripture. It's as if your wisdom tree is lying in splinters.
In the aftermath of such a coming apart, we are tempted to take our piece of wisdom home with us and stick it in a place of honor, savoring and celebrating that one little piece of wisdom of which we can be sure, pulling it out whenever there is a new question, a new issue, acting as if that piece of wisdom is self-sustaining, and as if it is enough, on its own, to sustain us.
In acting like this, we are forgetting the crucial next step. What is needed is to bring our piece of the wisdom tree back together with the others, to stand together on the roots of what wisdom we have. We do have wisdom within us, but it is not enough to hold and savor just the wisdom we can grasp. Our piece needs to be added to the others.
It is difficult to walk a good spiritual path solo. It helps to be in relationship to a community where your wisdom can be made more whole, challenged, and where it can have fresh life breathed into it by touching it, again and again, to its roots, by bringing it together with the wisdom others carry with them. Then if lightning strikes, if all the places you used to go to learn are ruined, if all the things you used to know for sure are gone, just hold up your piece of wisdom. I'll be holding mine, and we'll find each other.
FIND OUT MORE
To learn more about how personal experiences can offer guidance for undertaking complex moral, ethical, and spiritual challenges, see The Power of Stories (at www.uuabookstore.org/productdetails.cfm?PC=1139) by Jacqueline Lewis (Nashville, TN: Abingdon Press, 2009). You might also read the introduction to Building the World We Dream About (at www.uua.org/religiouseducation/curricula/tapestryfaith/buildingworld/index.shtml), a Tapestry of Faith program written by Dr. Mark Hicks for Unitarian Universalists and congregations about welcoming racial and ethnic diversity.
Olympia Brown
See her entry in The Dictionary of Unitarian and Universalist Biography (at www25.uua.org/uuhs/duub/articles/olympiabrown.html), the article "Olympia Brown: Minister, Suffragist, Antiochian (at antiochiana.antioch.edu/Olympia%20Brown.htm)" in The Antioch University Archives, the Olympia Brown Unitarian Universalist Church history (at 69.94.104.198/pdfs/aboutus/Our_History.pdf), and in the Ohio History Central story about Olympia Brown (at www.ohiohistorycentral.org/entry.php?rec=2146).
Harvey Milk
Watch the film Milk (dir. Gus Van Sant, 2008), and use the Tapestry of Faith study guide (at www.uua.org/documents/belletinimark/milk_study_guide.pdf) for the film, by the Rev. Mark L. Belletini.