WHAT MOVES US
A Tapestry of Faith Program for Adults
WORKSHOP 9: WILLIAM F. SCHULZ
BY REV. DR. THANDEKA
© Copyright 2013 Unitarian Universalist Association.
Published to the Web on 9/29/2014 11:56:35 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
No one knows better than I that the [Spirit] often fails to keep appointments with our congregations on Sunday morning. When that happens, it is often useful to go for a walk in the woods on Sunday afternoon! But even so, what has happened Sunday morning is not without value. For even when the Spirit fails to show, the church is where we learn how to touch It elsewhere, what to look for in the woods, and how to see. — William F. Schulz
This workshop introduces the Rev. Dr. William F. Schulz's theology, Unitarian Universalism in a New Key. Schulz, president of the Unitarian Universalist Association of Congregations from 1985-1993, executive director of Amnesty International USA from 1994-2006, and current president and CEO of the Unitarian Universalist Service Committee, created this theology to "sound Unitarian Universalism in a new and more melodic key." To this end, Schulz emphasizes the experiential aspects of our Unitarian Universalism faith tradition: "While what we believe about religion is important, what we experience of the religious is even more so." We must nurture, says Schulz, an "organic faith that refuses to truck with nationalism or cultural stereotyping but is faithful first to the needs of our planet. ... Human survival depends upon our willingness to think and act in global and nondualistic ways." Schulz shows us what this "organic faith" looks like as Unitarian Universalist theology and ministry today. (Finding Time and Other Delicacies, p. 46, 39)
Schulz emerged from his Amnesty experiences with a firm belief in the importance of the community consensus of nations, as he puts it, to assign worth, dignity, and value to individuals. Such valuing of persons does not come automatically, Schulz says. It is assigned. But who, Schulz asks, does the assigning? Schulz opts for global public opinion. And also something more: Unitarian Universalist religious tradition and our worship services where one learns how to seek, perceive, and touch the Spirit.
Thus throughout his 12-year tenure at Amnesty, Schulz regarded himself "first and foremost as a Unitarian Universalist minister." For him, his work at Amnesty was Unitarian Universalist ministry.
What in our religious history and our congregational life shapes and forms our moral values and informs the way we act in the world? And how does our own social justice work inform our own personal Unitarian Universalist religious perspectives, practices, and experiences? How do we learn to look for, see, and touch the Spirit in our worship services? Schulz's Unitarian Universalist Theology in a New Key invites us to answer these questions. Schulz also calls on us to "invite the Spirit to dwell within our hearts;" to talk about "the Holy" as Unitarian Universalists; and to talk about Grace as a wellspring of our own Unitarian Universalist faith tradition.
Before leading this workshop, review the Accessibility Guidelines for Workshop Presenters found in the program introduction.
Preparing to lead this workshop
Read Handout 1, Biography of William F. Schulz and Handout 2, The Theology of William F. Schulz. Use some or all of the following exercises and questions to help you reflect on Schulz's Unitarian Universalism in a New Key and how his theological perspective relates to his own personal experiences as a world renowned social justice leader and Unitarian Universalist minister. These questions and exercises parallel the five sections, or topics, presented in Handout 2. You may wish to write your responses in your theology journal:
I. Schulz's Assessment of Human Nature
II. Unitarian "Universalist" Values
III. Religion Is a Discipline
IV. Schulz's Definitions of Theological Concepts
V. The Source of Our Ethical Injunctions
GOALS
This workshop will:
LEARNING OBJECTIVES
Participants will:
WORKSHOP-AT-A-GLANCE
Activity | Minutes |
Opening | 5 |
Activity 1: Personal Faith and Your Congregational Life | 10 |
Activity 2: Introducing William F. Schulz | 5 |
Activity 3: Confronting the Scariest Things — Story and Response | 30 |
Activity 4: Testing Schulz's Theological Reflections | 25 |
Activity 5: Personal Experience — Large Group Reflection | 10 |
Closing | 5 |
SPIRITUAL PREPARATION
Read Leader Resource 2, What Torture's Taught Me, or the story, "Amy," which is excerpted from the resource.
Part of the role of both government and faith community, Schulz says, is "to save us from our basest passions in order to extract some semblance of worth and dignity out of the muck and meanness that infects our hearts." He disputes the idea that the worth and dignity of every person is inherent, and asks who assigns worth and dignity. Of the available options—divinity, natural law, and global public consensus—he believes that public consensus is the only viable option.
How do you respond to Schulz's story and his assertions regarding the nature of human beings? What personal experiences lead you to agree or disagree with Schulz?
WORKSHOP PLAN
OPENING (5 MINUTES)
Materials for Activity
Preparation for Activity
We are here to abet creation and
to witness to it,
to notice each other's beautiful
face and complex nature
so that creation need not play to
an empty house.
Description of Activity
Welcome participants. Invite a participant to light the chalice while you share Reading 429 in Singing the Living Tradition, "Come into this Place," by William F. Schulz.
Invite participants to join in reading the opening words you have posted on newsprint, "We are here to abet creation" by Annie Dillard.
ACTIVITY 1: PERSONAL FAITH AND YOUR CONGREGATIONAL LIFE (10 MINUTES)
Materials for Activity
Preparation for Activity
Description of Activity
Introduce the workshop using these or similar words:
This workshop will invite you to use major insights from William F. Schulz's theology—his Unitarian Universalism in a New Key—to examine your own faith.
We will begin by focusing on a personal experience from our own lives.
Read aloud the questions you have posted on newsprint. Invite participants to reflect on the questions and respond in their theology journals. Tell them as the workshop unfolds you will invite them back to these personal reflections, to help keep their work grounded in their own personal experiences. Allow seven or eight minutes for journaling.
ACTIVITY 2: INTRODUCING WILLIAM F. SCHULZ (5 MINUTES)
Materials for Activity
Preparation for Activity
Description of Activity
Project or distribute copies of Leader Resource 1. Briefly introduce the Rev. Dr. William F. Schulz. Read or convey biographical information using these paragraphs as a guide:
The Rev. Dr. William F. Schulz has celebrity status for all the right reasons. He has taught the world how to practice what we preach. Or as the June, 2002 edition of The New York Review of Books put it, he "has done more than anyone in the American human rights movement to make human rights issues known in the United States." As executive director of Amnesty International, USA from 1994-2006, Schulz traveled hundreds of thousands of miles abroad, leading missions to Liberia, Tunisia, Northern Ireland, and Sudan and visiting places as diverse as Cuba and Mongolia—and he traveled tens of thousands of miles in the United States, spreading the human rights message from campuses to boardrooms to civic organizations. Add to this his frequent guest appearances on television programs like Good Morning America, The Today Show, Hardball, and Nightline and include the books he has written or edited on human rights, and you will know that we are talking about a social justice stellar figure.
An ordained Unitarian Universalist minister, Schulz was president of the Unitarian Universalist Association of Congregations from 1985 to 1993 before becoming executive director of Amnesty International, USA from 1994 to 2006. He is currently president and CEO of the Unitarian Universalist Service Committee. Born November 14, 1949, in Pittsburgh, Schulz is third generation Unitarian. His father, William F. Schulz, was for 33 years a professor of law at the University of Pittsburgh. His mother, Jean Holman Smith Schulz was a housewife. Schulz's grandfather, also named William F. Schulz, was a professor of physics at the University of Illinois, a member of the Unitarian Church of Urbana, and for 17 years, the church treasurer who invariably paid the church's year-end deficit out of his own pocket. Schulz is married to the Rev. Beth Graham, also a Unitarian Universalist minister.
Distribute Handout 1, which contains more detail about Schulz's life, and invite participants to read it at home.
ACTIVITY 3: CONFRONTING THE SCARIEST THINGS — STORY AND RESPONSE (30 MINUTES)
Materials for Activity
Preparation for Activity
Description of Activity
Share with participants:
Schulz does not preach the assurance of faith. He preaches the practice of steadfastness. Schulz believes, "Religion exists in large measure to help us confront the scariest things under the sun: things like boundless injustice, the explosion of dreams, the hard edge of suffering, and the magnet of death." He says we must learn how to stay the course through our own anxious feelings. So Schulz encourages us to be "a little less ashamed of our anxieties."
Distribute the story. Introduce it as a personal experience Schulz relates to help explain his view. Invite a volunteer to read the story aloud; participants may either listen closely or read along, whichever will best help them absorb the full impact of the story. After the reading, invite participants to respond to the story in their theology journals. After five minutes, read Schulz's own reflections on his experience:
We are all tempted, in the face of our own failings, to lash out at others. But from a religious perspective, the appropriate response to a recognition of our own demons is not to demonize others. It is to seek out common bonds. It is to recognize that virtually all people, of whatever stripe, feel the need to be safe in their homes, to be treated fairly by the authorities; to pass on a better life to their children; and to enjoy their rightful share of the earth's abundance. Part of the job of a government is to make it as easy as possible for its citizens to be good, to be their best selves, not their most ugly and degraded, and part of religion's job is to help us understand what those best selves look like. (See Leader Resource 2)
Continue with these or similar words:
Part of the role of both government and faith community, Schulz says, is "to save us from our basest passions in order to extract some semblance of worth and dignity out of the muck and meanness that infects our hearts." He disputes the idea that the worth and dignity of every person is inherent, and asks who assigns worth and dignity. Of the available options—divinity, natural law, and global public consensus—he believes that public consensus is the only viable option.
It is important to remember here that Schulz defines himself as someone who begins with lived experience. He understands human beings based on the experiences that shape their interests, guide their lives, and help them restrain or release their basest impulses. For Schulz, communities play a major role in shaping the experiences of the individual. Schulz's experiences as executive director of Amnesty International, USA, for 12 years caused him to fundamentally shift his perspective on human nature and the individual. Moreover, the role of the community (of nations, of worshippers, etc.) in shaping the individual's actions and mores gained new centrality in his thinking. He emerged from his Amnesty experiences with an even more firm belief in the power of our own worship services to be—even when they don't quite work—the "incarnational power of our faith."
Schulz believes "religion is not solely a matter of true or false beliefs. "Religion," he says, "is also a matter of practice and praise, feelings and faith. It is, that is to say, not just about the running itself; it is also about the catching of breath and the feel of the wind."
Invite participants to consider Schulz's observations and reflections about the role of religion and the faith community in saving us from our basest passions and helping us understand what our best selves look like. Allow two minutes of silent reflection and/or journaling. Then invite participants to form their small groups of three to share their personal experiences of the role their Unitarian Universalist community's worship life plays in their spiritual life. Would you think of it as the institutional incarnation of your faith, as Schultz suggests? Invite them to recall their example, thoughts, and reflections from Activity 1 to help them explain their response in concrete experiential terms.
Explain the small group process in these or similar words:
Listen deeply and caringly to the personal reflections of the other members of the group as each person speaks in turn for about three minutes. After each person has spoken a first time, the group is encouraged to move to a second round of reflection so each member may offer personal insights and ideas resulting from the first round of sharing. Please share your own feelings and thoughts rather than discussing or critiquing the thoughts and feelings of the other members of the group.
Allow 15 minutes for small group reflections.
ACTIVITY 4: TESTING SCHULZ'S THEOLOGICAL REFLECTIONS (25 MINUTES)
Materials for Activity
Preparation for Activity
Description of Activity
Distribute Handout 2, The Theology of William F. Schulz. Say there will only be time to delve into some of this material and encourage them to read the entire handout at their leisure.
Call participants' attention to a section of the handout you have chosen to highlight. Invite volunteers to read aloud the quotes in this section.
Call participants' attention to the questions you have posted on newsprint and invite them to remain in their groups of three to reflect on the questions together. Explain the small group process using these or similar words:
Listen deeply and caringly to the personal reflections of the other members of the group as each person speaks in turn for about two minutes, responding to the first question. After each person has spoken, move to the second question and follow a similar process. Continue in this manner until each member has responded to all of the questions. Please share your own feelings and thoughts rather than discussing or critiquing the thoughts and feelings of the other members of the group.
Encourage groups to appoint a timekeeper or share timekeeping duties so the group can devote time to each question. Allow 25 minutes for this small group exercise in deep listening.
ACTIVITY 5: PERSONAL EXPERIENCE — LARGE GROUP REFLECTION (10 MINUTES)
Materials for Activity
Description of Activity
Re-gather the large group. Share this quote from Schulz:
We Unitarian Universalists believe that the future is not set, that History is not determined, that destiny is not fated. We believe that human beings create history and can change it if we will. But we also know that the tools with which we have to work—the measure of our energy, the degree of our intelligence, the allurement of the sun—are outside our control, are gifts of an abundant grace. Will and grace go hand in hand; justice and grace are inseparable. ("On Trying to be a Non-Anxious Presence")
Ask participants to think of an experience in their lives as Unitarian Universalists that leads them to affirm, amend, or refute Schulz's claim. Allow a minute for them to find their story. Then invite each person in turn, as they are willing, to share their experience with the larger group.
CLOSING (5 MINUTES)
Materials for Activity
Preparation for Activity
Description of Activity
Gather participants around the altar or centering table. Affirm the good work that participants have done in this workshop.
Distribute the Taking It Home handout. Explain that each workshop will provide a Taking It Home handout with ideas for continuing to explore the workshop's subject with friends, co-workers, housemates, and family. Mention that the Faith in Action activities included in the handout offer another extension opportunity.
Offer a benediction from William F. Schulz, Reading 459 in Singing the Living Tradition. Extinguish the chalice and invite participants to go in peace.
Including All Participants
Be inclusive of people with a variety of living situations—for example, living alone, with a significant other, in a multigenerational family, or with housemates—in the way you explain the Taking It Home activities.
LEADER REFLECTION AND PLANNING
After the workshop, co-leaders should make a time to get together to evaluate this workshop and plan future workshops. Use these questions to guide your shared reflection and planning:
TAKING IT HOME
No one knows better than I that the [Spirit] often fails to keep appointments with our congregations on Sunday morning. When that happens, it is often useful to go for a walk in the woods on Sunday afternoon! But even so, what has happened Sunday morning is not without value. For even when the Spirit fails to show, the church is where we learn how to touch It elsewhere, what to look for in the woods, and how to see. — William F. Schulz
Reflect with your family, your friends, or in your journal about times when you have found your own impulses and behavior not in line with your espoused values. What helps you to integrate your own scary impulses? What keeps you from acting in a way that is counter to your own Unitarian Universalist values?
Faith in Action
Reflect on Schulz's notion that the international community determines agreed-upon human rights. Does this notion call us, as Unitarian Universalists, to action that will influence the international community to align itself more closely with Unitarian Universalist Principles and values?
Learn the work of Amnesty International (at www.amnesty.org/) and find out about the Unitarian Universalist Service Committee's (at www.uusc.org/) work on behalf of human rights. Explore how to bring this important work to the attention of your congregation and your community, perhaps as a small group ministry Unitarian Universalist theology initiative.
WHAT MOVES US: WORKSHOP 9:
STORY: AMY
Excerpted from the 2006 Berry Street Lecture by the Rev. Dr. William F. Schulz.
When I was seven or eight years old, I lived across the street from a little dog named Amy. Every afternoon after my school let out, Amy and I would play together for an hour. One of Amy's favorite games was a dancing game in which I held her two forepaws in my hands and we would dance around the yard. Sometimes Amy even put her paws in my lap to signal that she wanted to dance. But I noticed that after a few minutes Amy's hind legs would get sore and she would pull her paws away. The first few times we played our dancing game, I dropped her paws the moment I sensed her discomfort and we went on to something else.
But one day I decided to hold on. The more Amy tugged, the tighter I held on until finally, when she yelped in agony, I let her go. But the next day I repeated my demonic game. It was fascinating to feel this little creature, so much less powerful than me, entirely at my mercy.
I was lucky that Amy was such a gentle dog for she had every right to have bitten me and when, after two or three days, I saw that my friend, who had previously scrambled eagerly toward me on first sight, now cowered at my approach, I realized with a start what I had done and I was deeply frightened of myself and much ashamed. Whatever had come over me that I would treat someone I had loved that way?
What had come over me, I now know in retrospect, was the displacement of anger onto one who held no threat to me. Bullies at school might pick on me. My two parents might tell their only child what he could and could not do. My piano teacher might try to slam the keyboard cover on my fingers when I played off key. But in that yard I ruled supreme. Not only did I hold the power but the one who was powerless for a change was Not-Me.
WHAT MOVES US: WORKSHOP 9:
HANDOUT 1: BIOGRAPHY OF WILLIAM F. SCHULZ
This professional biography was provided by Dr. Schulz in 2009. On November 3, 2010, The Board of Trustees of the Unitarian Universalist Service Committee (UUSC) announced that Dr. William F. Schulz had been named the new UUSC president and chief executive officer.
"William Schulz... has done more than anyone in the American human rights movement to make human rights issues known in the United States." — The New York Review of Books, June, 2002
From the refugee camps of Darfur, Sudan, to the poorest villages in India; from the prison cells of Monrovia, Liberia, to the business suites of Hong Kong and Louisiana's death row, the Rev. Dr. William F. Schulz has traveled the globe in pursuit of a world free from human rights violations. As executive director of Amnesty International USA from 1994-2006, Dr. Schulz headed the American section of the world's oldest and largest international human rights organization.
Dr. Schulz is currently a Senior Fellow at the Center for American Progress in Washington, DC, where he works in the areas of human rights policy and religion and public policy and holds appointments as an Adjunct Professor of Public Administration at the Wagner School of New York University and as an Affiliated Professor at Meadville/Lombard Theological School at the University of Chicago. He is or has been a consultant to many institutions and foundations, including the UN Foundation, Humanity United, and Simmons College in Boston, Massachusetts. During 2006-07 he served as a Fellow at the Carr Center for Human Rights Policy at Harvard's Kennedy School of Government.
During his 12 years at Amnesty, Dr. Schulz led missions to Liberia, Tunisia, Northern Ireland, and Sudan and visited other places as diverse as Cuba and Mongolia. He was tailed by Tunisian secret police, threatened with assassination by Liberian warlord Charles Taylor, and made an appeal for reconciliation of Protestants and Catholics in Northern Ireland that brought tears to the eyes of then-Prime Minister David Trimble.
He also traveled tens of thousands miles in the United States, spreading the human rights message from campuses to boardrooms to civic organizations. A frequent guest on television programs such as Good Morning America, The Today Show, Hardball, and Nightline, Dr. Schulz is the author of two books on human rights, In Our Own Best Interest: How Defending Human Rights Benefits Us All (2001, Beacon Press) and Tainted Legacy: 9/11 and the Ruin of Human Rights (2003, Nation Books), and contributing editor of The Phenomenon of Torture: Readings and Commentary (2007, University of Pennsylvania Press) and The Future of Human Rights: U.S. Policy for a New Era (2008, University of Pennsylvania Press). He is regularly quoted in The New York Times and other national publications. All of this prompted The New York Review of Books to say in 2002, "William Schulz... has done more than anyone in the American human rights movement to make human rights issues known in the United States."
An ordained Unitarian Universalist minister, Dr. Schulz came to Amnesty after serving for 15 years with the Unitarian Universalist Association of Congregations (UUA), the last eight (1985-93) as president of the Association. As president, he led the first visit by a U. S. Member of Congress to post-revolutionary Romania in January, 1991, two weeks after the fall of Nicolai Ceausescu. That delegation was instrumental in the subsequent improvement in the rights of religious and ethnic minorities in Romania.
Dr. Schulz has served on the boards of People for the American Way, Planned Parenthood Federation of America, and the International Association for Religious Freedom, the world's oldest international interfaith organization. He is currently chair of the board of the Unitarian Universalist Service Committee, and a member of the Council on Foreign Relations and the Board of the National Committee for Responsive Philanthropy.
Dr. Schulz has received a wide variety of honors, including seven honorary degrees (University of Cincinnati, Grinnell College, Lewis Clark College, Meadville/Lombard Theological School, Nova Southeastern University, Oberlin College, Willamette University), the Public Service Citation from the University of Chicago Alumni Association, and the Distinguished Achievement Award from the Oberlin College Alumni Association. He has been included in Vanity Fair's 2002 Hall of Fame of World Nongovernmental Organization Leaders and was named "Humanist of the Year" by the American Humanist Association in 2002.
Dr. Schulz is a Phi Beta Kappa graduate of Oberlin College, holds a master's degree in philosophy from the University of Chicago and the Doctor of Ministry degree from Meadville/Lombard Theological School (at the University of Chicago). He is listed in Who's Whoin America and Who's Who in the East.
He is married to the Rev. Beth Graham, also a Unitarian Universalist minister. Dr. Schulz has two grown children from a previous marriage.
WHAT MOVES US: WORKSHOP 9:
HANDOUT 2: THE THEOLOGY OF WILLIAM F. SCHULZ
Information and short excerpts from the writings of William F. Schulz—presented in five sections, or topics, for ease of study and discussion—convey his theological point of view. All quotations are used with permission of William F. Schulz.
I: Assessment of Human Nature
William F. Schulz defines himself as someone who begins with lived experience. He understands human beings based on the experiences that shape their interests, guide their lives, and help them restrain or release what he calls "their basest impulses." His experiences as executive director of Amnesty International, USA, for 12 years caused him to fundamentally shift his perspective on human nature and the individual. He understands the community (of nations, of worshippers, etc.) to be central in shaping the individual's actions and mores.
Schulz does not preach the assurance of faith. Rather, he preaches the practice of steadfastness. This is the case, he says, because Unitarian Universalist ministers can provide:
... the confession of one human soul that the way beyond mourning, for example, leads into it and not away; that the way beyond oppression requires confrontation and not avoidance... . The minister's job is to take affliction—her own surely but the world's every bit as well—to take affliction, to honor it, share it, as taste and health allow, knowing that out of such engagement will come, if they are to come at all, newborn intimations of the possibility, faith, grace, and God. (Finding Time and Other Delicacies, Boston: Skinner House Books, 1992, p. 116-117)
Schulz's Unitarian Universalist faith, its principles, and its gathered worshiping community were the primary resources from which he drew his strength as Executive Director of Amnesty International, USA. It shaped and informed his best self. And this is why throughout his 12-year tenure, he always regarded himself "first and foremost as a Unitarian Universalist minister." Schulz explains his understanding of our ministry in this way:
Now I learn from my colleagues that a true minister strives to be what Rabbi Edwin Friedman calls a "non-anxious presence," and I feel more inadequate than ever... . The problem for me at least is that the aspiration to be a non-anxious presence is so frequently at odds with another value I hold dear: personal authenticity... .
Surely, some will want to contend that I have failed in my quest for authenticity—but of one thing I am certain: that anyone who does not experience anxiety in the face of chaos or heartache is either far "healthier" than I can ever hope to be or dead to the world. The first step to coping with anxiety, I have found, is to give yourself permission to feel it. The way through pain is not around it but right through the middle.
Religion exists in large measure to help us confront the scariest things under the sun: things like boundless injustice, the explosion of dreams, the hard edge of suffering, and the magnet of death. I don't think it makes much sense to try to pretend that things like that don't call up a little anxiety. Indeed, I think the great Danish existentialist Soren Kierkegaard had it exactly right when he suggested that "fear and trembling" are requisite to being a religious person and that only when we overcome our denial of death are we likely to truly "remember existence."
... I would almost always rather have passionate engagement, even if it be tinged with anxiety now and then... .
And I would like to encourage us all to be less ashamed of our anxieties. There are few more difficult lessons to learn: feelings by themselves are value-neutral. They really are. Only actions are good or bad. But feelings, no matter how "nasty" they may seem to us, lead us inexorably to our hearts. (Finding Time and Other Delicacies, 119-120)
Schulz believes that anger displacement (and other emotional impulses) can lead persons to debase themselves and others. He believes that the role of a community is to show persons how to manage and restrain such feelings for the sake of the greater good. This is the case, he argues, because the worth and dignity of human nature is not innate. It is assigned:
So is the worth and dignity of every person inherent? No, inherency is a political construct—perhaps a very useful myth but a myth nonetheless—designed to cover up the fact that we all are sinners and that we are not always certain which sins (and hence which sinners) are worse than others. Each of us has to be assigned worth—it does not come automatically—and taught to behave with dignity because, as Sartre once said, "If it were not for the petty rules of bourgeois society, we humans would destroy each other in an instant."
But who does the assigning of worth? How do we decide that something is a sin? How do we know that torture is wrong? What is the basis for human rights?
There are only three options. Rights are established by divinity, by natural law or by pragmatic consensus. I wish we could get everybody to agree on one of the first two. But because we cannot... we are left with public opinion as the basis for determining rights. Global public opinion, to be sure, but public opinion. (See Leader Resource 2)
Schulz believes we should participate in corporate worship, because:
the holy—those things which matter most in life—does not show all its colors in solitude and silence. Sometimes it requires the clarity of another's voice, sometimes the cacophony of community, and often the touch of other pilgrim's eyes and arms and hands... . [Moreover, another reason] to support the worshipping community is that whatever it is we value, be it freedom, courage, love, can only be preserved and only be transmitted with the help of institutions. No one passes on a heritage all by herself. No one by himself alone can provide a countervailing force to sheer iniquity. Our worship signals the institutional incarnation of our faith. (Finding Time and Other Delicacies, p. 111).
II: Unitarian "Universalist" Values
Schulz, a third-generation Unitarian, emphasizes his Universalist heritage as a Unitarian Universalist. He writes:
Indeed, what we gather from our Universalist roots may be even more germane to today's world than our Unitarian traditions. I can explain my Universalist fealty in four simple observations:
1) Universalism had a Gospel, a doctrine, a core of belief, around which its members rallied. While rarely putting that doctrine into creedal form, Universalism was unafraid to proclaim that it had some Good News which the world needed desperately.
2) Universalism imaged God as gentle and conciliatory rather than violent and retributive. If, as seems most likely, our images of divinity affect how we behave in the world, Universalism's conviction of God's beneficence has much to recommend it.
3) Universalism affirmed religious experience and feeling. Religion was not just something to think or talk about; it was something to be held deep inside the heart and something to be shouted from the rooftops.
4) Universalism taught a global consciousness long before it was fashionable. It called us to transcend national loyalties in the interests of the human spirit. (Finding Time and Other Delicacies, p. 95-96).
III: Religion Is a Discipline
Schulz believes that:
... religion is not solely a matter of true or false beliefs. Religion is also a matter of practice and praise, feelings and faith. It is, that is to say, not just about the running itself; it is also about the catching of breath and the feel of the wind.
Moreover, Schulz believes that:
The first thing we need to do is to understand that religion is not a pastime but a discipline; not an amusement but a craft. Woody Allen said, "I read War and Peace in twenty minutes. It's about Russia." Well, that's how we sometimes treat religion—casually, quickly—and we get about as much out of it. Unitarian Universalism is not fundamentally about creedlessness; it is not fundamentally about believing whatever you want; it is not fundamentally about the liberty of the individual—all of these are mere pastimes, amusements. It is rather an opportunity to pursue ultimate religious questions within a context which respects mystery and is open to a multitude of revelations. (Finding Time and Other Delicacies, p. 23).
He wrote:
The best way to experience spirituality is not to chase it—and surely not to run as if we're being chased. The best way, I suspect, is to pause and ponder in silence. In silence we can feel our breath return. And occasionally, if we are very, very quiet, even the wind itself may speak. (Finding Time and Other Delicacies, p. 10).
IV: Schulz's Definitions of Theological Concepts
In his Unitarian Universalism in a New Key, Schulz gives context and definition for traditional theological terms and concepts:
GRACE
To my mind no theological concept is more worthy of our reclamation than that of grace. Used so often by the orthodox to exclude and divide, grace in fact refers to whatever blessings of Creation come to us unbidden, unheralded, and unearned. In this sense, the gracious—whether manifest in the rising of the sun, the sparkle of a fish, the chuckle of a child, or the deliverance of death—is the gateway to gratitude and the wellspring of faith. We need to rescue the notion from the orthodox and claim it as our own... . (Finding Time and Other Delicacies, p. 40).
THE WORLD TO COME
We need, to be sure, a new theology of social change and a contemporary doctrine of evil capable, for example, of addressing the Holocaust. But what we need even more is a new eschatology, that is, a new vision of the social world to come. To the extent to which liberal religion has depended upon liberal/economic liberalism for its image of the Blessed Community, the former will perish with the latter. But neither traditional capitalism (even in its neoconservative form) nor traditional socialism (even in its democratic form) offers viable alternatives... So we need a new Unitarian Universalist fantasy of utopia. We need, in other words, to know what (in the world) we're working toward...
If we are to be lost to the world, let it be because we were too far ahead of our times and not because we were oblivious to them. And if we are to be found, let it be for a faith worth finding. (Finding Time and Other Delicacies, p. 40)
SOURCES OF AUTHORITY
Schulz writes of sources of authority for Unitarian Universalists:
For though the individual certainly is the ultimate source of religious authority within Unitarian Universalism, the individual is not the only source... ... here are five additional sources of religious authority for Unitarian Universalists which complement the authority of the individual:
1) The Tradition. The Unitarian and Universalist traditions provide a sort of "early warning system" for the recognition of tenets at odds with the norms of our faith. The tradition is not definitive—part of our genius is our conviction that it will inevitably be superseded by new "revelation" —but if you hear someone preaching hellfire and damnation or insisting that the future is solely in God's hands, chances are it's not a Unitarian Universalist!
2) The Community. While Unitarian Universalism encourages each person to see his or her own religious truth, we also believe that such truth is most likely to be disclosed in the context of a religious community... hence, congregations. The love and nurturance, the feedback and critique, which we find in a healthy congregation, are invaluable resources in the shaping of a religious pilgrimage...
3) Reason. Sullied though it be by misuse and exaggerated expectations, the human capacity to reason and its most famous offspring, the scientific method, are still worthy recipients of our praise. Spirituality is not contra-reasonable but supra-reasonable, taking off from the boundary where reason cannot tread. But until we reach that boundary, reason reigns, and even once we pass beyond it, it is wise to keep our heads.
4) Nature. If we posit, as we do, the value of the earth, then the natural rhythms of Creation provide authoritative echoes of their own. Some of these are undeniable: our utter dependence upon the generosity of other living things, our partnership with Being in the tending of abundance...
5) The Holy. The final and most idiosyncratic source of religious authority is whatever we call Holy. Be it God or Good, Jesus or Jeremiah, the Bible or the Bhagavad-Gita, that which commands our highest loyalty commands our hearts. This last source requires testing against the previous four. But then those four must be judged also in reference to the fifth. Indeed, no source stands alone; each requires the wisdom of its colleagues, all informing the authority of the individual.
We Unitarian Universalists believe that the future is not set, that History is not determined, that destiny is not fated. We believe that human beings create history and can change it if we will. But we also know that the tools with which we have to work—the measure of our energy, the degree of our intelligence, the allurement of the sun—are outside our control, are gifts of an abundant grace. Will and grace go hand in hand; justice and grace are inseparable. (Finding Time and Other Delicacies, p. 43-50)
V: The Source of Our Ethical Injunctions
Schulz says he sees "Unitarian Universalism today in the midst of a major theological transition. That transformation takes at least these five different, if related, forms:
1) Heretofore an exclusively North American movement, Unitarian Universalism is becoming more global in its focus and its consciousness.
2) Fiercely proud of its emphasis on individual freedom of belief, Unitarian Universalism is nonetheless becoming less frightened of the primacy of relationships and the disciplines of community.
3) While what we believe about religion is important, what we experience of the religious is even more so. Unitarian Universalists are learning not just to talk about religion but to invite the Spirit to dwell within our hearts.
4) Reason is still a cherished standard in our religious repertoire, but reason is coming to be supplemented by our immediate apprehensions of the Holy and by our conviction that the Holy is embodied in the abundance of a scarred creation.
5) If we Unitarian Universalists believe that human beings are responsible for History, we are at the same time far more aware of all that which we cannot control. We are, in other words, balancing a conviction of Will with an appreciation of Grace. (Finding Time and Other Delicacies, p. 46)
Schulz continues:
The reason ours is a creedless faith is because we have a theory about Creation and our theory—unlike that of most religious traditions—is that Creation is too grand, too glorious, too complex, and too mysterious to be captured in any narrow creed or reflected in any single metaphor.
It is exactly because we so cherish the world in all its multi-hued grandeur that we resist the temptation to see it through only one lens. Our conviction is that we will come a little closer to the truth about the world—and certainly be more receptive to its splendor—is we use a variety of vehicles to apprehend it: all the world's great religious traditions, for example, but also the sciences, the secular arts, the disciplines of mysticism, and the electric touch of love.
The bedrock of Unitarian Universalist affirmation is not individual freedom of belief. The bedrock affirmation is a belief in the complex majesty of Creation which in turn entails the adoption of a creedless faith. But the complexity and the majesty come first! (Finding Time and Other Delicacies, p. 47)
[W]e human beings are not masters of Creation but simply one more expression of Creation's jubilation...
From this embrace of the holistic, a series of ethical injunctions flow: that I and the Other need not be enemies for we are both held in the hands of the same Creation; that rigid ideologies are an outmoded brand of politics; that all life on the planet—not just human—has value unto itself; that power is to be shared and ultimate loyalty paid not to a nation or a region or a culture but to the Universal...
To recognize the complex mutuality of Creation is to be in pain at any instance of its denial, to be a surrogate to anyone who suffers. It is to recognize, quite literally, that we and all that Is are bonded...
What is our special role as a religious movement today? Perhaps to teach the world that no one is saved until we All are—where All means the whole Creation: the animals, the rain forests, the tiniest of microbes, the Soviets, black and white South Africans, the Israelis and the Palestinians.
Every religion is confronted with two great tasks: First, to teach human beings how to be in right relationship with each other and the world, and second, to help us be at peace even in the face of death. As to the first task, Unitarian Universalism derives from its convictions about the world the faith that strangers need not be enemies, that the interdependence of Creation compels us to acts of reconciliation. And as to the second, Unitarian Universalism begs us to be so engaged in life that—paradoxically—we may even look kindly upon the letting go. For we know that the best way to meet death is to have looked upon the routines of our dailiness through the prisms of surprise and to have found in the utterly unexceptional the very evidences of God. The more we love and the more we mourn, the more acceptable becomes the letting go. (Finding Time and Other Delicacies, p. 48)
WHAT MOVES US: WORKSHOP 9:
LEADER RESOURCE 1: WILLIAM F. SCHULZ PORTRAIT
WHAT MOVES US: WORKSHOP 9:
LEADER RESOURCE 2: WHAT TORTURE'S TAUGHT ME
This lecture was delivered by the Rev. William F. Schulz, Executive Director of Amnesty International, on June 21, 2006, at Unitarian Universalist Association General Assembly in St. Louis, Missouri. It was the 2006 Berry Street Essay. Used with permission.
When I ended my term as UUA President in 1993, I vowed that I would never preach in the pulpit of any minister who had not been kind to me when I was President. That automatically eliminated about 50 percent of our congregations. But as I look out over the audience this afternoon, I realize that many of you weren't even around for this ancient history and, besides, I've matured, become more mellow, have put things in perspective, can let bygones be bygones and so will now be glad to preach in anybody's pulpit... unless you were really, really mean to me.
At one time I knew the name, settlement, and partner's name and occupation of virtually every minister in the Association. David Starr Jordan, the first President of Stanford, was a world renowned ichthyologist and after he became President, he was heard to complain that every time he remembered the name of a student, he forgot the name of a fish. But having known nothing about fish and little about anything else when I became President, there was very little danger that my remembering people's names would carry any great cost. But it does prompt me to apologize to those of you whose names I don't know (and far more to those I do but can't remember). If I get really desperate, I will simply resort to the practice of the first President of the UUA, Dana McLean Greeley, who never could remember anyone's name and therefore began every interaction by saying, "You're, you're... " at which point one would feel compelled to say "Bill Schulz," to which Dana would roar back, "Of course you are.Of course you are.Don't be ridiculous." All of which is simply to thank the Berry Street Lecture Committee for taking a chance on someone who has been somewhat removed from the life of the Association the past 12 years, despite his marriage to Beth Graham, and for whom this Lecture signals something of a homecoming.
But while I may have not been as active in Unitarian Universalist circles over the past decade as I once was, that does not mean that Unitarian Universalism has been far from my heart. It has of course been an enormous privilege to lead the world's oldest, largest and, I daresay, most respected human rights organization and Amnesty has afforded me unparalleled opportunities—the opportunity to be insulted in the nicest possible way by Lauren Bacall at a high-falutin' dinner party on the Upper East Side, for example ("Darling, aren't you that dear little human rights man?" "Yes, Ms. Bacall, I suppose I am."Well, may I sit with you at dinner?"Me, swooning: "Why, yes, Ms. Bacall, I'd be delighted."You see, darling, I wouldn't ask but, frankly, I don't know a fucking soul here.") Or the opportunity to be tailed by the Tunisian secret police through the medina of Tunis and have them quite thoughtfully tap me on my shoulder and return my passport seconds after they had retrieved it from a pickpocket; or the opportunity to be threatened with assassination by a Liberian war lord (1); or the opportunity, when Amnesty in 2004, rather melodramatically, I must say, labeled Guantanamo Bay "the gulag of our times," to be denounced over the course of five days as "absurd" and "anti-American" by the President, Vice President, Secretary of State, Secretary of Defense, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and Sean Hannity (who, I can report, really is as much of a horse's ass as he appears on Fox).
Or perhaps, more to the point, the opportunity to greet Wei Jing Sheng, the Father of Chinese Democracy, on his arrival in America after 17 years in prison or the opportunity to work with Gary Gauger and several others of the 123 people convicted of capital crimes in this country, sentenced to death and subsequently exonerated after serving an average of 9.2 years on death row or the opportunity to go into the refugee camps in Darfur, Sudan to meet those terrorized out of their homes and then into thestate offices in Khartoum to confront the ministers who ordered the terror.
There is a smell to refugee camps which, once you have inhaled it, you never forget—a smell of goat dung and human waste; of sweat and tears and unstaunched menstrual blood; but also a smell of desperation that gives way to sagging shoulders and the decay of the human soul.For a body can be clothed in the raiment of fear or stalked daily by death for only so long before the soul—whatever makes the human animal "human"—begins to collapse upon itself as surely as the shoulders do.
So the opportunities Amnesty provided me were singular and I am deeply grateful for them but I have always regarded myself first and foremost as a Unitarian Universalist minister. This faith and community have always been the principal resources from which I draw my strength and so I thank you for welcoming me back into the fold today, if not a wayward sheep, then at least one who has taken a very long detour and seen things both horrific and awesome along the way.
And of those things that I have seen nothing has had a deeper impact on me than my exposure to torture—to both victims of torture and perpetrators of it and, not incidentally, to all of us in between.So I want to talk with you this afternoon about torture but not in a political context—this is not another social justice screed imploring us all to do more to save the world or excoriating the President one more time.You will get quite enough of that in other lectures this week.I want instead to talk about torture in a theological context and about what it may have to say concerning how we understand God, human beings and the world, and maybe even a thing or two about ministry.
About a week after I began my work at Amnesty in 1994, I came across a report of how the Mujahadeen in Afghanistan—the predecessors to the Taliban—got rid of their prisoners. They tied each live prisoner to a corpse and then left the pair out in the sun to rot. Clever, simple, low-tech, but to one who always tried to stand with his back to the open casket at memorial services, utterly terrifying.
Close to two-thirds of the countries in the world practice torture. (2) Of course if I had cited that statistic to an ancient Greek philosopher, his response would have been utter astonishment. "Why only two-thirds?" he would have said. "Why not every one?" For the ancient Greeks and the Romans who came after them, torture was not only acceptable; it was standard practice. But the Greeks were very discriminating about who could be tortured. It was only slaves—not free citizens—who could be subjected to the whip and the chain. That was true, however, not just because slaves were slaves. No. The reason slaves could be tortured was because slaves did not possess the faculty of reason and hence lacked the capacity to dissemble. And so if you wanted to know the truth about something, all you had to do was to torture a slave who, unlike a free citizen, wasn't smart enough to lie to you.
Unfortunate as the ancient use of torture may have been, it at least had the merit of being employed for a rational purpose, namely, to establish truth and resolve disputes. And the rational use of torture extended into medieval times. In the Middle Ages both civil and religious courts believed that it was unethical to convict someone of a crime on somebody else's word alone, that the only valid evidence of thievery or heresy or murder was a confession and what more effective way to elicit a confession than the rack and the screw?
Indeed, torture was such a reputable instrument of justice that it was not until 1754—only 252 years ago—that Prussia (now Germany) became, ironically enough in light of subsequent history, the first country to abolish the use of torture altogether. For about 150 years torture went out of vogue—at least as an official instrument of government policy. (3) But in the 20th century it began to raise its ugly head again. And this time there was an important difference: for whereas in ancient Greece and medieval Europe torture had been used to determine truth or convict someone of a crime, in the 20th century torture became an instrument of pleasure, a means of intimidating political opponents, a way to inflict pain on another person for the sheer sadistic joy of it.
The reason Abu Ghraib struck Americans like a thunderbolt is not because prisoners were being tortured—some 63 percent of Americans say that torture is acceptable at least occasionally when, for example, information about the location of a ticking bomb in a high density neighborhood must be procured quickly .(4) (I don't have time to explain why the perennial "ticking bomb" argument for torture is itself a red herring but, believe me, it is.) The reason Americans turned ashen at Abu Ghraib was because even the staunchest defender of the use of torture as a means of extracting information could not pretend that forcing naked prisoners to form a pyramid or to masturbate for the cameras or to be tethered to a leash like a dog had any purpose other than sheer humiliation. The ancient Greeks would have been ashamed.
Over my years at Amnesty I was perpetually dumbstruck by the sheer creativity of modern torturers. Of course beatings are the most commonplace form of the art—on the back, the buttocks, most painfully on the feet. And electroshock, especially to the penis, the vagina, the eyelids, the earlobes, is quickly gaining popularity with ever more sophisticated electroshock equipment available now even to the general public. But these are for the mere beginners.
In King Leopold's Congo Belgian labor bosses regularly cut off the right hands of boys who did not meet their mining quotas for diamonds and then proudly displayed baskets of those severed hands on their office desks. (5)
In Brazil prisoners were stripped naked and locked in small, bare concrete cells with only one other occupant—a boa constrictor. (6)
In Central America soldiers were notorious for ripping open the wombs of pregnant women, tossing the fetuses into the air and catching them on their bayonets.
In Pinochet's Chile women were raped by men with visible open syphilitic sores, sexually abused by dogs trained in the practice, forced to watch their own children being sexually assaulted, and then fed the putrefied remains of their fellow captives. (7)
In contrast, our American obsession with water torture, most recently in the form of waterboarding or simulated drowning, sounds almost pristine. During our occupation of the Philippines at the turn of the 20th century, our soldiers inserted bamboo tubes into victim's throats and poured in gallons of water, the filthier the better. The Filipinos got their revenge, however. They buried captured American soldiers up to their heads in manure, poured molasses over their heads and dropped hundreds of fire ants into the molasses. (8)
Practices such as these have no rational purpose at all; they are designed solely to strip another of his or her humanity. If anything deserves to be called unadulterated evil, this does. I tell you about it not to shock you but to ask you to consider a question that has haunted me the last 12 years—is what I say from the pulpit about the world around us, about the nature of God and humanity, about the dynamics of human relationships—is what I preach to the people sufficient to encompass a world in which such coarseness and brutality exists? Or, to put it another way, if a member of my congregation or my listening audience had herself been a victim of such terror, would she find my words, my faith, my theology, naive and pallid or authentic and satisfying?
I know of course that few Unitarian Universalists have been subjected to torture but far more people in our congregations than we know have been raped or abused and even those who have not have to live in a world, cope with a world, feel at home in a world in which such practices flourish. I find it a helpful exercise to use torture as a plumbline test of the adequacy of my worldview and sophistication of my sermonizing. I remember a cartoon from years ago in which the wayside pulpits of an Episcopal church and a Unitarian Universalist church were both visible on a street corner. It was Easter and the title of the Episcopal rector's Easter sermon was "The Truth and Power of the Risen Christ" while across the street the Unitarian Universalist was preaching a sermon entitled "Upsy-Daisy." My point is simply that to my mind an "upsy-daisy" theology fails the torture test.
Sallie McFague, a theologian whose work is popular among liberals, says that "there is no place where God is not." Process theologian Marjorie Hewitt Suchocki insists that "[God is] pervasively present, like water, to every nook and cranny of the universe, continuously wooing the universe... toward its greater good." (9) But I would submit that no God worthy of the name is present in a torture chamber. I am sure that some victims of torture have found solace in their faith sufficient to sustain them through the ordeal. That appears to be the case, for example, with some of the Islamic prisoners being held at Guantanamo Bay. But I have talked to dozens of survivors of torture, read hundreds of others' accounts, and I have rarely, if ever, come across a testimony that it was faith in God that saw them through the night. For when the needle slips under the fingernails and the pliers rip them off, that pain obliterates the very face of God.
I am not here scoring some cheap humanist point against vapid notions of God. Over the years I have myself become increasingly comfortable using the word to describe that source of graciousness upon which we depend for our very lives. All I am saying is that, whatever our conception of God, it needs to be both complex enough and circumscribed enough to account for the fact that God's absence—true absence—is as real a phenomenon as God's immanence.
Similarly, our traditional doctrines of human nature rest uneasy in a world full of torturers. In what sense can we defend the notion that a torturer is a person of "inherent worth and dignity?"
A South African neuropsychologist has recently theorized that cruelty, especially in males, is grounded in an adaptive reaction from the Palaeozoic era when early humans were predators and had to hunt for their food; that the appearance of pain and blood in the prey was a signal of triumph; and that gradually the evocation of such reactions—howls of pain, the appearance of blood—in our fellow humans became associated with personal and social power, with the success of the hunt. (10) That theory strikes me as plausible but, if it is true, it doesn't lend much credence to the notion of inherent dignity.As that great theologian Genghis Khan put it in the 13th century: "The greatest pleasure is to vanquish your enemies, to chase them before you, to rob them of their wealth, to see their near and dear bathed in tears, to ride their horses and to sleep on the bellies of their wives and daughters." (11) Had he lived a few centuries later, Mr. Khan would surely have been a Calvinist.
So who are the torturers?Are they madmen? Deviants? Hardened criminals? Sexual predators? Almost never. In fact, most police and military units weed out the psychological misfits from their midsts because they know such people have trouble taking orders. No, the horrible truth is that the vast majority of torturers are average Joes (occasionally, but rarely, average Janes).
And it is remarkably easy to turn Joe into what most of us would regard as a monster. You put him in a restricted environment like a police or military training camp under the command of a vaunted authority figure. You subject him to intense stress. (The Greek military police in the time of the Greek generals, for example, were reknown for their brutality and they got that way because each of them was subjected during training to severe beatings, forced to go weeks without food, and not permitted to defecate for up to 15 days at a time.) And then, having created an angry, bitter, but obedient servant, you provide the sanction, the means, the opportunity and the rationale for that servant to take his outrage out on a vulnerable but much despised population. "These are the people who are threatening our country." "These are the people who are killing your comrades."
Who is this creature of "inherent dignity" who is so easily led astray? Sixty five years ago James Luther Adams delivered the most heralded Berry Street Lecture of the 20th century entitled "The Changing Reputation of Human Nature" in which, while rejecting the doctrine of total depravity, he resurrected the notion of "sin."
... [W]hether the liberal uses the word "sin" or not, [Adams said], he cannot correct his "too jocund" [blithe] view of life until he recognizes that there is in human nature a deep-seated and universal tendency... to ignore the demands of mutuality and thus to waste freedom or abuse it by devotion to the idols of the tribe... It cannot be denied that religious liberalism has neglected these aspects of human nature in its zeal to proclaim the spark of divinity in man. We may call these tendencies by any name we wish but we do not escape their destructive influence by a conspiracy of silence concerning them. (12)
Have we forgotten Adams' exhortation?If we no longer think of human beings as made in the "likeness of God," are we not still reticent to dwell upon the features of the flesh that make us not just "slightlylower than the angels" but out of the angels' league altogether?Do we even have a commonly shared doctrine of human nature today and, if we do, is it sufficient to explain why even the most reputable souls may, under the right circumstances, be transformed into savages?
When I was seven or eight years old, I lived across the street from a little dog named Amy. Every afternoon after my school let out, Amy and I would play together for an hour. One of Amy's favorite games was a dancing game in which I held her two forepaws in my hands and we would dance around the yard. Sometimes Amy even put her paws in my lap to signal that she wanted to dance. But I noticed that after a few minutes Amy's hind legs would get sore and she would pull her paws away. The first few times we played our dancing game, I dropped her paws the moment I sensed her discomfort and we went on to something else.
But one day I decided to hold on. The more Amy tugged, the tighter I held on until finally, when she yelped in agony, I let her go. But the next day I repeated my demonic game. It was fascinating to feel this little creature, so much less powerful than me, entirely at my mercy.
I was lucky that Amy was such a gentle dog for she had every right to have bitten me and when, after two or three days, I saw that my friend, who had previously scrambled eagerly toward me on first site, now cowered at my approach, I realized with a start what I had done and I was deeply frightened of myself and much ashamed. Whatever had come over me that I would treat someone I had loved that way?
What had come over me, I now know in retrospect, was the displacement of anger onto one who held no threat to me. Bullies at school might pick on me. My two parents might tell their only child what he could and could not do. My piano teacher might try to slam the keyboard cover on my fingers when I played off key. But in that yard I ruled supreme. Not only did I hold the power but the one who was powerless for a change was Not-Me.
Adams, like 19 centuries of theologians before him, would try to rescue humanity from its own degradation by asserting that freedom was what underpinned our inherent worth—the capacity I retained to decide to stop tormenting Amy, the fact that not every student of torture chooses to finish the course.
But, quite apart from arcane philosophical debates about free will or more contemporary insights into the traits of animals, is freedom robust enough a characteristic of human beings sufficient to overcome the basest of brutality? And when we speak of the "inherent worth and dignity of every person," are we really thinking first and foremost of free agency anyway? I doubt it. I suspect that we base our belief in the inherent worth of human beings on some far vaguer notion that aliveness itself is good and some long-outdated hierarchical assumption that because human beings represent the pinnacle of aliveness, we possess inherently some kind of merit.
Well, I don't buy that anymore. I have fought tirelessly against the death penalty in this country. I have visited death rows, spoken frequently with condemned prisoners. Some of them have acknowledged their crimes and altered their hearts.Others of them are truly innocent. Many of them are mentally ill. And some of them are vicious, dangerous killers. I oppose the death penalty not because I believe that every one of those lives carries inherent worth. In some cases their deaths would be no loss at all to anyone. I oppose the death penalty because I can't be sure which of them falls into which category and because the use of executions by the state diminishes my own dignity and that of every other citizen in whose name it is enforced. I need, in other words, to assign the occupants of death row worth and dignity in order to preserve my own. But I find no such characteristics inherent in either them or me.
If a loved one of mine were murdered, I would want her murderer to suffer the worst torments of hell I could imagine. No torture would be too great to satisfy my lust for revenge. But I do not want the state to indulge me in my worst impulses. Part of the role of government is to save us from our basest passions in order to extract some semblance of worth and dignity out of the muck and meanness that infects our hearts.
So is the worth and dignity of every person inherent? No, inherency is a political construct—perhaps a very useful myth but a myth nonetheless—designed to cover up the fact that we all are sinners and that we are not always certain which sins (and hence which sinners) are worse than others. Each of us has to be assigned worth—it does not come automatically—and taught to behave with dignity because, as Sartre once said, "If it were not for the petty rules of bourgeois society, we humans would destroy each other in an instant."
But who does the assigning of worth? How do we decide that something is a sin? How do we know that torture is wrong? What is the basis for human rights?
There are only three options. Rights are established by divinity, by natural law or by pragmatic consensus. I wish we could get everybody to agree on one of the first two. But because we cannot—because not everyone agrees with the Montanists, for example, that God will only save those who eat a steady diet of radishes nor with Isak Dinessen's conception of natural law as reflected in her famous question, "What is man but an ingenious machine for turning red wine into urine?"—we are left with public opinion as the basis for determining rights. Global public opinion, to be sure, but public opinion.
This is a discomfiting notion, I know. We Unitarian Universalists are champions of the individual as the source of authority for both truth and righteousness. We are well aware of all the many instances in which majority opinion has been just plain wrong. We are aficionados of the lonely, courageous soul standing up for truth, justice, and Esperanto even in the face of the crowd's disparagement.
But you know something: Most of the time those lonely, courageous souls are sheer crackpots. And unless they can get a whole bunch of other people to agree with them—at least eventually—we would usually be wise to keep them at a safe distance.
Was torture wrong even before anyone in the world, including the slaves being tortured, thought it was wrong? The hard answer is "No." Or if it was "wrong" in some parallel ethical universe, it was certainly no violation of anybody's rights until a significant number of people (13) I'm sorry but there is as yet no international consensus that all human beings have a right to play video poker.
Human rights are whatever the international community—through its various declarations, covenants, treaties, and conventions—say that they are. This means that theoretically at least the world could regress and torture could once again be deemed acceptable. But experience seems to show that the more people who are involved in decision-making about rights, including the victims of their violation, the less likely the backsliding. If there is one arena in which Theodore Parker's famous dictum that "the arc of the universe bends toward justice" seems to have been borne out, it is the evolution of human rights.
But what all this means is that, when it comes to deciding right and wrong, when it comes to assigning worth and dignity, the individual is not the final source of authority and without a reference to the values of the larger community—the world community, not that of any one nation alone—our judgments are fit only for a desert island upon which we ourselves are the only occupant.
But what it also means is that our job as ministers, as builders of the blessed community, is tougher and more important than ever for if we can't rely upon the inherency of human worth and dignity, if we have to assign worth and teach dignity, then we cannot escape confrontation with the forces of idolatry who wouldreserve worth to only a few and save dignity for their immediate neighbors, people like those children and grandchildren of immigrants, for example, who would not be where they are today if their forebears had been treated the way they propose to treat a new American generation .And if the individual is not the ultimate source of authority when it comes to some of the most important decisions on earth, like who lives and who doesn't, then autobiographical theology, popular as it is and tempting, is inadequate—not deleterious or to be shunned—but insufficient for a faith that would not just engage the world but transform it. What torture has taught me is that, fascinating as I find my own life, it alone is a cloudy prism through which to view Creation absent reference to the experience of others, the wisdom of community, the demands of tradition, the judgment of history, and the invitation of the Holy.
And it has taught me one thing more. If these 12 years have caused me to re-think the nature of God, the inherency of human worth and the credibility of individual authority, they have more than confirmed two other bedrock Unitarian Universalist principles, the indomitability of the spirit and the mysterious workings of an unfettered grace. I want to close with four short vignettes out of dozens I could have chosen, four vignettes which build upon each other, the first from the memoir of a torturer, in which the stirrings of the spirit are just barely visible but working nonetheless.
General Paul Aussaresses was a French intelligence officer in occupied Algeria in the 1950s.To this day he is one of the most outspoken defenders of the use of brutality in the cause of national security.His memoir, The Battle of the Casbah, is full of callous disregard for his victims.But here is his fascinating description of a conversation he had with a physician over the dead body of a prisoner he had just tortured to death.
"I was talking to the prisoner and he fell ill," I said unconvincingly. "He told me he had tuberculosis. Can you see what's wrong with him?"
"You were talking to him?" the doctor asked incredulously."But he's drenched in blood. You must be kidding!"
"No, I wouldn't do such a thing," I said.
"But he's dead," said the doctor.
"It's possible," I answered, "but when I called for you, he was still alive."
And then, since the doctor was still not cooperating, I lost my cool and said: "And so?You want me to say that I killed him?Would that make you feel better?Do you think I enjoy this?"
"No," said the doctor."But then why did you come to get me when he was dead?"
I didn't answer.The doctor finally understood.I had called him so that he would get the body out of my sight once and for all . (14)
Occasionally the angel finds even a torturer'sear.But more often of course it is the victims of torture and their families who teach us how to live.
The great Soviet poet, Anna Akhmatova, spent 17 months waiting with others in the prison queues of Leningrad to see their loved ones who were being tortured inside.One day somebody in the crowd recognized her."Standing behind me," Ahkmatova later recalled, "was a woman with lips blue from the cold... 'Can you describe this?' [she asked]... I said, 'I can.' Then something like a smile passed... over what once had been her face." (15)
Nick Yarris spent 23 years in prison for a murder he did not commit—a singular form of torture.When he was released and was asked how he felt, he said, "What are my choices?I could be really devastated and angry and let them continue to own me or I could have fun.[Having fun] sounds better... The lowest insult would be if I came out destroyed, a broken man... My survival technique was to become a good man." (16)
Perez Aguirre was tortured mercilessly in a South American prison.Many years later, walking along the street, he ran into the man who had tortured him.The torturer was now among those being prosecuted and he tried to avoid Aguirre's gaze.But Aguirre took the initiative."How are you?" he asked his torturer.The man said he was very depressed.There was a long pause and then Aguirre said, "If you need anything, come to see me."And then, "Shake hands, friend. I forgive you." (17)
What torture has taught me, what all those brave souls and, yes, even a few of their tormentors, have taught me, is to never give up on the glimmers of grace for not everything is all that it seems.If even survivors of torture can reclaim a sense of life's bounty, then surely you and I and all to whom we minister can too.If the torturer cannot fully break the human spirit, nobody can.For we Unitarian Universalists know, out of the depths of our faith and the teachings of our tradition and the succor of our community, that the chess master was right.Chancing upon a great painting in a European gallery of a defeated Faust sitting opposite the devil at a chess table with only a knight and a King on the board and the King in check, the master stopped to stare.The minutes changed to hours and still the master stared. And then finally, "It's a lie," he shouted."The King and the knight have another move!They have another move!" And that's finally what torture has taught me—that it is not just the King but the knight, not just the Queen but the rook, not just the Bishop but the pawn, not just the wealthy but the pauper, not just the fortunate but the weary, not just the torturer but the tortured, not just the powerful but every single person, every single blessed person, until the day we die, every single blessed person on this earth, every single blessed person who has another move. We all have another move.
(1) A story described in detail in Schulz, William F.,
(2) In its annual country reports Amnesty International cites about 130 countries every year as practicing torture or cruel, inhuman, or degrading (CID) treatment.
(3) For the history of torture, see Peters, Edward, Torture (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1985) and my own I Used To Be Innocent: Readings in the Study of Torture to be published by the University of Pennsylvania Press in late 2006 or early 2007.
(4) Pew Research Center for the People and the Press, "America Place in the World," November 17, 2005. Fifteen percent say it is "often" justified; 31% "sometimes" and 17% "rarely."
(5) Hochschild, Adam, King Leopold's Ghost: A Story of Greed, Terror, and Heroism in Colonial Africa (New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1998), pp. 120-123.
(6) Archdiocese of Sao Paulo, Jaime Wright, Trans. Joan Dassin, Ed. Torture in Brazil: A Report by the Archdiocese of Sao Paulo (New York: Vintage, 1986), pp. 16-17.
(7) Ronertson, Geoffrey, Crimes Against Humanity: The Struggle for Global Justice (New York: The New Press, 1999), pp. 390-91.
(8) Schulz, William F., Tainted Legacy: 9/11 and the Ruin of Human Rights (New York: Thunder's Mouth Press/Nation Books, 2003), p. 155.
(9) Quoted in Rasor, Paul, Faith Without Certainty: Liberal Theology in the 21st Century (Boston: Skinner House Books), pp. 20-21.
(10) Victor Nell, "Cruelty's Rewards: The Gratifications of Perpetrators and Spectators," forthcoming in Behavioral and Brain Sciences. www.bbsonline.org (at www.bbsonline.org/), 2005.
(11) Quoted in Buss, David, "The Evolution of Evil," www.edge.org (at www.edge.org/), accessed on January 8, 2008.
(12) Adams, James Luther, Voluntary Associations: Socio-Cultural Analyses and Theological Interpretation (Chicago: Exploration Press, 1986), pp. 49-50.
(13) "South Carolina High Court Derails Video Poker Game," The New York Times, October 15, 1999.
(14) Aussaresses, Paul, The Battle of the Casbah (New York: Enigma Books, 2002), p. 131.
(15) Akhmatova, Anna, "Instead of a Preface," in Forche, Carolyn, ed., Against Forgetting: Twentieth Century Poetry of Witness (New York: W. W. Norton Company, 1993, pp. 101-02.
(17) Weschler, Lawrence, A Miracle, A Universe: Settling Accounts With Torturers (New York: Pantheon Books, 1990), pp. 198-99.
WHAT MOVES US: WORKSHOP 9:
LEADER RESOURCE 3: SCHULZ'S THEOLOGY IN THE CONGREGATION
Begin by sharing this reading:
... the holy—those things that most matter to us—does not show all of its colors in solitude and silence. Sometimes it requires the clarity of another's voice, sometimes the cacophony of community, and often the touch of other pilgrim's eyes and arms and hands... [Moreover, another reason] to support the worshipping community is that whatever it is we value, be it freedom, courage, love, can only be preserved and only be transmitted with the help of institutions. No one passes on a heritage all by herself. No one by himself alone can provide a countervailing force to sheer iniquity. Our worship signals the institutional incarnation of our faith.
Invite participants to consider together the ways their own Unitarian Universalist congregation understands itself as the institutional incarnation of our faith. Engage participants using some or all of these questions as a guide:
WHAT MOVES US: WORKSHOP 9:
LEADER RESOURCE 4: ENGAGING AS RELIGIOUS PROFESSIONALS
Materials
Preparation
Description
Invite participants to silently read Dr. William F. Schulz's Berry Street lecture, even if they have heard or read it before. Invite them to mark the copy as they read, noting places that trouble them, challenge them, or provoke thought. Invite them to also note places where their response is enthusiastic agreement.
After everyone has read the lecture, engage participants in conversation, using questions and topics participants suggest.
FIND OUT MORE
William F. Schulz, Finding Time and Other Delicacies (Boston: Skinner House Books, 1994).
William F. Schulz, ed., The Future of Human Rights: U.S. Policy for a New Era (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania, 2008).
William F. Schulz, Making the Manifesto: The Birth of Religious Humanism, (Boston: Skinner House Books, 2002).
Unitarian Universalist Service Committee (UUSC) "President's Corner (at www.uusc.org/presidentscorner)." Here can be found Schulz's additions to UUSC's website like blog posts, articles, videos, and podcasts; submissions to other websites where he is a regular contributor (like the Huffington Post); and other pieces he has written like editorials, opinion pieces, and letters published in the media.