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Laura Schlessinger and I have a lot in common. We are the same age,
part of that bumper crop of 1947 babies that includes Kenn Hurto,
Gary Fitzpatrick, Phyllis Gonigam, and probably quite a few more of
you. We were both raised by strong, ambitious, feminist dads who
expected no less from their daughters than from sons. We both started
out in academia in the late '60's; she's a Columbia-trained
physiologist and I'm a linguist from the University of Wisconsin, but
we both successfully slugged our way through male-dominated graduate
programs because we were both really good at the kind of razor-edged
argument that wins you points in a Ph.D. program but is rather hard
to live with on a daily basis, as my husband will be happy to attest.
We both have children now who are good enough to beat us at our own
game: that's karma, I guess.
Since graduate school, our paths have diverged somewhat. Dr.
Schlessinger worked her way through her counseling certification
program as a late-night advice show host on a local LA radio station
and then left academia for private practice, while I have confined my
efforts to manage other people's lives to my own loved ones, and I
have stayed a college professor, where I have a captive audience of
students who hang on my every word because I hold their grades
hostage; they can't just turn the dial and make me go away when the
going gets tough. We are both in long-term marriages to kind,
patient, tolerant men who know quite well how to get out of the way
of a moving bulldozer. And whatever else we are, we are both, above
all, our kids' moms.
But we have something else in common. Let me read you a little from
the opening chapter of her book, The Ten Commandments: The
Significance of God's Laws in Everyday Life (1998): "Believing
in God is a relatively recent experience in my life. My father, born
a Jew in Brooklyn, New York, never mentioned God, religion, or
Judaism-except for one all-encompassing criticism of the Jewish
Passover service. He said how, at a very young age, he walked out of
his parents' Passover celebration screaming that he 'wouldn't
celebrate the wholesale slaughter of Egyptian children.' . . . My
mother was born in Italy to a Catholic family, met my father as he
participated in the U.S. military's liberation of northern Italy, and
married him at the end of the war in 1946. Her only contribution to
my religious training was that American Catholics take it all more
seriously than the Italians and that she hated the priests because,
while they walked around well-garbed and fed, the people starved.
Once, when I was an adolescent, my parents asked me if I believed in
God. 'Of course not,' I said with assuredness. 'That's Twilight Zone
stuff.' Remembering back now, they seemed surprised. Probably feeling
that they had made a mistake, or because they felt they were missing
something in their own lives, my folks decided to do something
religious when I was about sixteen years old. "Compromising"
their different faiths and backgrounds, they signed us up at the
local Unitarian church. I remember my confusion between the weekly
service literature extolling the virtue of "no dogma" or
commandments while the choir sang beautifully about Jesus Christ. The
Unitarians taught that there was truth and beauty in many traditions
and that believing in God or Jesus as divine was optional"
(xv-xvi). Frankly, I doubt it was Jesus Christ. In the UU churches I
grew up in during the same years, we carefully and courageously said
Jesus of Nazareth except for a few Jesu Christes that slipped in
around Christmastime. Nevertheless, she clearly left the Unitarian
church as lost as when she entered it.
Laura Schlessinger is perhaps my generation's most conspicuous UU
failure. In her search for a religious infrastructure within which to
make her life make sense, she has had to backtrack from nothing all
the way to orthodox Judaism-and a particularly strident, right-wing
branch of ultraorthodox Judaism at that. Still, her comments on her
brief Unitarian experience are disheartening; they make UU's seem
like dilettantes, or-worse, still-scavengers who pick through the
debris of other religion's practices in search of a nugget of truth
or beauty with which they can then scurry home to their own nest.
Dr. Schlessinger's memories of the Unitarian church in California in
the 1960's call to mind my own experience when I took my brother and
sister-in-law to Christmas Eve services at Arlington about ten years
ago. Joan Gelbein was preaching (the gist of it was I'm Jewish, so I
don't really get this Christmas thing) and the choir, still under
Vera Tilson, was doing a full program of traditional carols and
anthems, including a Bach chorale, suitable for the Kennedy Center.
My sister-in-law Kathleen's one reaction was "It's the first
time I ever heard the Christmas homily delivered by a middle-aged
Jewish lady in a Halloween.costume." Although my first reaction
was defensive, I know how she felt. I felt a little that way myself,
as if my church were suddenly unsure, feeling its way, offending no
one and-in order to accomplish this goal-saying nothing of substance.
Peace and love are good-no disagreement, but can one truly understand
peace without experiencing war or love without experiencing hatred?
It's just words unless the feelings they represent come from inside
your very bones.
When I was a senior in high school, I gave the sermon on Youth
Sunday, and although I no longer have a copy of it and haven't a clue
what I actually said, I do remember the title: Our Uncarven Image. It
was about the failure of the RE program to give us enough solid
ground to hang a personal belief system on. I remember saying that
the church spent more time explaining what Unitarians did not believe
than affirming what our beliefs actually were. Of course, Unitarians
have much more in common in terms of what they don't believe than in
what they do. There is wide diversity in belief systems among
individuals in any congregation and people's beliefs are, for the
most part, very personal and private.
I remember arguing that it's all very well and good to insist that
people decide their own beliefs, but you have to give them a little
raw material; we have to have a handful of dust into which to blow
the breath of life. However, I look back now at that sermon and
recognize that I was wrong. In fact, Dr. Laura and I came out of the
UU RE program with two things in common: an inchoate set of beliefs
about god and the universe that did not snap into shape until twenty
years later when we had children, and a firm commitment to the
concept of faith in action that has shaped our whole lives and is
only getting stronger now that we are both over 50 and starting to
care less and less whether other people agree with us, or what they
think, as long as we are convinced we are doing God's work.
I started to listen to the Dr. Laura program about four or five years
ago when the sports talk station that I regularly listened to on my
commute to Baltimore switched to Don Imus from 6-10 in the morning
and I had to go shopping for another station. The kids and I have a
deal now: we listen when she is talking with callers and change to
rock music stations whenever she launches into one of her political
tirades, most of which I find too repugnant to listen to, despite my
respect for her perspicacity concerning human nature. It was in this
church, after all, that I learned not to reject people with whom you
disagree but to embrace them, so that you can learn their point of
view and, by befriending them, perhaps even convince them to come
around to yours. But the distance between us is too great, I am too
old, and she is too intolerant-so I spare myself the rhetoric but
tune in with fascination to the clinical work that occupies most of
her air time.
Despite our profound disagreement on most political matters, I was
attracted from the beginning by Laura Schlessinger's talent as a
clinical psychologist-in particular by her ability to penetrate right
through people's evasions and pretensions to get to the heart of the
matter. My mother and grandmother used to do that-and never pulled
their punches. My brother and sister and I use to cover our heads and
holler "Incoming" when my mother let fly one of her acerbic
comments on the absurd pretentiousness of most of middle-class
American society. It has long been the tradition of mothers and
grandmothers to teach values, and when they ran the schools and the
churches as well as the homes, there was no way for children to
escape the lessons of the village. Now here we are, turning to the
mass media for values training-just as our children do.
I admire Laura Schlessinger's determination to nag, scold, cajole,
and embarrass people into admitting that they know how to act but
lack the courage and resolve to do what they know is right, because
they are selfish, or fearful, or both. At first I used to simply
enjoy listening to her trap people in their own self-justifying
contradictions like a latter-day Socrates. Someone called in not too
long ago whose wife had been in an automobile accident that had left
her a quadriplegic. He wanted to know which was the morally correct
choice: since he planned to satisfy himself extramaritally: Should he
tell her (which would be hurtful) or and keep it from her (which
would be lying). I waited almost gleefully to see what strategy she
would use to turn him into hamburger.
Over the years, however, I have found the show more and more
troubling-not just because of her political ranting, which seems to
be becoming shriller of late, and more irrational, but because I am
starting to see disturbing patterns of truly outrageous selfishness
among her callers. A not-so-funny version of the story I just told
you is that a similar event happened to an acquaintance of mine in
our neighborhood, whose husband suffered a disabling stroke in his
mid-40's. She nursed him for about six years, then suddenly left him
when their three children were sixteen, thirteen, and eleven. I can
appreciate her wishing to divorce him, though it would not be my
choice, but I cannot comprehend her leaving the children with someone
unable to care for himself-let alone three teenagers. I am
increasingly disappointed in what seems to me a genuine deterioration
of character, courage, and conscience in this selfish, greedy,
hurtful, fearful society in which I am trying to bring up my children.
People call Dr. Laura because they are experiencing what many
psychologists call "cognitive dissonance": a disconnect
between their behavior and their value system. When we are engaging
in behaviors that we recognize as "wrong," we feel
uncomfortable, guilty, conscience-stricken. Call it the superego or
original sin-it amounts to the same thing. To quote Mark Twain again:
"The fact that man knows right from wrong proves his
intellectual superiority to the other creatures; but the fact that he
can do wrong proves his moral inferiority to any creature that
cannot." The interesting thing about the theory of cognitive
dissonance is that it asserts (I think correctly) that people resolve
this ethical dilemma not by changing the behavior because-God knows--they
want to keep doing whatever they are doing, but by attempting to
reconcile the behavior with their value system through some form of
rationalization. A benign version of this practice is finding oneself
with an empty aluminum can at a softball field that has no recycling
receptacles and, instead of bringing the can home, tossing it into
the garbage with the quick excuse, "It's just one can. It won't
make any difference." A more toxic version is when a man beats a
woman and justifies it by saying, "Well, she deserved it."
I've gotten to the point now where, once I listen to a caller present
the problem, I know exactly what Dr. Laura will say. Kids call fairly
often to ask if they should turn in their friends who have broken the
law by shoplifting, or smoking marijuana, or leaving the scene of an
auto accident. She will say every time that the best thing to do is
to persuade friends to turn themselves in-to sit with them and talk,
lend your emotional support, and offer to go with them to make things
right. A real friend, she says, will care enough about the people
they call "friends" to try to get them to accept
responsibility for their actions. A real friend tries to help her
friends be their best selves. Surely that is what we Unitarian
Universalists also teach.
Parents call all the time to seek permission to lie in order to
shield their children from unpleasant realities: a dying grandparent,
an alcoholic partner, an ex-spouse who has moved away, remarried, and
effectively abandoned his or her children. Dr. Laura is a relentless
advocate of telling kids the truth, adapted so it is age-appropriate,
and is quick to point out to parents who want to make themselves look
good to their kids that children are pretty tolerant of most adult
behavior but cannot bear to be lied to, because it yanks their
stability right out from under them. I have friends who have yet to
tell their children they are not just living separately trying to
work things out but are actually divorced, simply because they are
having trouble owning up to the failure of the marriage. It's been
almost four years. Guess what-Rick and Lynn-they know. What they
don't know is why you are keeping it a secret.
To parents who don't want to take their children to visit grandma in
the hospital or nursing home because it might "upset" them,
she says: "It's more likely to upset you than them. Be strong.
When you take them to see their grandmother so they can make the most
of their remaining time together, and when you help them make get
well cards and bring drawings to decorate the hospital room, you are
teaching them how to treat you when you are old." Her whole
"ministry" is really about overcoming two things:
selfishness and fear. The same axioms drive every answer: Who will
benefit? Who will be hurt? To put it as Hillel did, "What is
hateful to you, do not do to your neighbor. That is the whole Torah."
When new members join MVUC, our congregation gives them the following
charge: "We challenge you to live a principled life/We encourage
you to seek for spiritual meaning." I am coming to believe more
and more is that it is impossible to fully achieve the second of
these goals without experiencing the first. Whenever callers say to
Dr. Laura: "I don't know why my husband is doing this; it just
isn't like him," or "My mother really isn't the type of
person who goes out of her way to hurt people"-Dr. Laura will
respond, "Guess what: your actions are your character. To put it
as our hymnal does:
What good is it my brothers and sisters, if
you say you have faith
but do not have works? Can faith save you?
If your
brothers or sisters are naked and lack daily food, and one of you
says to them: "Go in peace. Keep
warm and eat
your fill."
And yet you do not supply their bodily
needs, what is the good of that?
So faith by
itself, if it has no works, is dead.
Show me your faith apart from your works,
and I by my works
will show you my faith.
James, Chapter 2
When my daughter Mary was in seventh grade, I had the great privilege
of joining Linda Peebles on the first morning of the Coming of Age
class's pilgrimage to Boston. Mary had a dive meet in Pittsburgh on
Saturday morning, so Saturday afternoon I drove her from Pittsburgh
to Boston and delivered her to Linda at the First Church of Dedham,
Massachusetts. Linda invited me to spend the night and go to church
with them in the morning. The church we went to was Arlington Street.
That was my first church: my parents went while my father was doing a
surgical residency at Mass Memorial and had me dedicated there. While
the kids were climbing up into the steeple, I went and found my name
on the cradle roll. I looked at the statue of Dana McLean Greeley,
the minister who dedicated me, with its loving inscription. (Greeley
subsequently went on to become the first president of the UUA.) I had
a really chilling, marvelous sense of being part of a tradition much
greater and more sacred than myself. I was filled with the awe and
wonder that I think is essential to all religious experience.
It was Canvass Sunday when we were there, so we had Sunday dinner in
the church basement, and I ate with some of the older people in the
congregation who would have been between my parents' age and mine. I
congratulated them on their attendance: if you think this building is
costly to maintain, try a late 18th century minicathedral with a roof
that is leaking onto solid mahogany box pews and around dozens of
stained glass windows. One of the women laughed a little ruefully and
said: "The only problem is--now we have to try to make UU's out
of all these people."
Many people come to Unitarianism as an escape from religion. My
grandmother was one: After her mother died she took her kids across
the street from the Congregational Church to the Unitarian because
she could not bear to say the Apostles' Creed. But what she came to
understand and taught her children was that becoming a Unitarian
binds you to a higher order of religion, a more demanding spiritual
journey, than one which is satisfied merely by observing all the
required rituals.
Catholicism and Judaism make conversion difficult for a reason. It is
not something to be entered into lightly, or temporarily, or on a
whim. Accepting the idea of a principled life is one thing: living a
principled life quite another. Years ago, when I was at Accotink when
the kids were little, John Wells came over from Reston to give a
guest sermon. I can't remember the exact topic, but one comment
really stuck with me. He said, "You know-this church hasn't had
any martyrs for a really long time."
Think about it. The last one, really, was Jim Reeb, who was killed in
the march on Selma in which many of the members of this congregation
participated. He was my cousin JD's youth minister at All Souls, and
had been gone less than a year when he boarded a bus for Alabama and
achieved immortality. I wonder, really, if there are any causes out
there for which we would actually be willing to put our lives on the
line. Jefferson closed the Declaration of Independence with a pledge
of "our lives, our fortunes, and our sacred honor." In the
21st century, which so far resembles the fin de siècle of the
20th in its unashamed materialism, we've shown ourselves reluctant to
pledge even a small part of our personal fortunes to the greater
good, let alone our lives-and we don't know if we have any sacred
honor because we haven't had a challenge serious enough to force us
to go searching for it.
When I was eleven, my parents moved from Iowa City, Iowa to Memphis,
Tennessee. That was in 1958, the year of the Montgomery bus boycott.
My dad was from a small town in South Carolina. His whole family was
pretty racist, and after he left home at 17 to attend college, he
never went back except for brief visits. But he made a lateral career
move from a career-making job as Director of the Cardiovascular
Research Lab at the University of Iowa to the University of Tennessee
Medical School because, as he told us, Iowa City was an oasis that
did not reflect the real world: he wanted to take us back to the
South so we could experience the society that needed fixing for ourselves.
Iowa City was not so idyllic either, as it turned out. My parents
offered their house to the only African-American on the Iowa faculty,
the chair of the department of hydraulic engineering, whose family
had lived in an apartment for fifteen years because no one would sell
them a house. Ours was an unpretentious but nice house on a corner
lot in a faculty neighborhood across from the city park. The Hubbards
said "yes" immediately, but our neighbor on one side, who
was a banker, redlined the loan so they had to go to Des Moines to
get financing, even though they had a fortune in the bank which they
had been accumulating for years, knowing that, if anyone ever sold
them a house, they would have to make sure it was the showplace of
the neighborhood. Our neighbors on the other side, who had been close
friends, did not speak to my parents again for the six months before
we left. "That's what I mean," said my dad. "You need
to see it so you can understand what has to be done." He had had
his own conversion experience in World War II, when the Evacuation
Hospital in which he served ordered the surgeons not to make
transfusions across races. Fortunately he, and all those other young
white doctors from Charlottesville, made the right choice-to save
lives. From there it was an easy step to my mother's religion. While
he was overseas, she and her mother helped found the Thomas Jefferson
church in Charlottesville so they would have a place to go on Sundays.
My sister and I were the only white teenagers we could see at the
Memorial March for Martin Luther King in Memphis the day of his
funeral in Atlanta. Although it was scary, since there was no reason
for the marchers to expect that white people would actually be coming
to pay their respects, there was no question of not going either.
King had been murdered in our city. People had died in ours and in
neighboring states. It was the right thing to do.
The Unitarian church in the 1960's was a powerful voice for right
action in a society already crippled by corruption. The church was
totally, consumingly, passionately dedicated to the civil rights
movement. The opportunity for faith in action gave us a raison
d'être beyond arguing the fine points of liberal theology. The
example of nineteenth century Unitarians who had made social justice
their life's work served as a beacon. Social justice was not just a
desirable thing, it was a categorical imperative-a sine qua non. I
rode in the backs of buses, drank from Colored water fountains, and
sat in Colored waiting rooms. I endured vicious taunts and threats. I
picketed and marched, although I am by nature timid about causes,
because my religion made it clear that all that was necessary for
evil to triumph was for good people to do nothing, and therefore
every individual was required to do her part. Who will benefit if I
do my part, I asked myself. Who will be hurt if I do not? The answer
was clear, "If I am only for myself, who am I?"
It is easy to be a drawing-room Unitarian. The trick is being a
Unitarian when it is hard. Voting for the principles is no problem.
Living them is not so easy. Accepting "Compassion, justice, and
equity in human relations" means not putting yourself first.
Accepting the democratic process means you might lose. The Unitarian
church, governed as it is by its congregations rather than its
clergy, is a radical experiment in Jeffersonian democracy. It is a
leap of faith that a group of people, large or small, left to their
own devices and the rule of their individual consciences, will
ultimately overcome their self-interest and do the fair and honorable
thing, whatever it is. Physiologists like Laura Schlessinger
recognize perhaps more easily than humanists like me that to ask
human beings to overcome their biology is asking a lot. Our first
instinct is self-preservation. Getting out of the bottom rungs of
Maslow's hierarchy of needs and climbing toward self-actualization
requires enormous will and self-control. Buddhists recognize this
quite well-the path to Enlightenment is rigorous and backsliding is easy.
And so we bring our kids to RE. We want them to have religious
instruction. But we don't want them taught a belief system; we want
them to find their own. So we teach them everyone else's-and do it
very well. Most of what I know about Christianity, Buddhism, Judaism,
and Islam I learned at the Unitarian church. But what about values?
Aren't we here in part because we want to be in community with others
who share our values? And don't we want our children to live a
principled life-to put the values they are learning at home into a
larger social context of group values that will counterbalance the
group values they are learning in other groups.
Ah-but it has to be the right values. When I first went back to
church, to Accotink, when Jimmy was three and I was pregnant with
Emily, I signed myself up to teach the three-year-old RE class. The
RE director then was Valerie Wills, who is now the minister in
Hagerstown, Maryland, but was then a teacher in the public schools
who was generously putting her talents to use as a religious
educator. The parents of the three-year-olds were complaining that RE
was just another day of preschool-stories, art projects, songs and
games. "Well, of course," we said, "That's how you
teach preschoolers." But then my co-teacher went on to say,
"You can't teach values to three-year-olds." I was
speechless, thinking of the Martin and Judy books that I still
remember after forty years. I blurted out the first thing that came
to my mind, "Sure you can. Sesame Street does it all the time:
Don't lie, don't cheat, don't steal, don't hurt people, don't make
fun of people who are different." It's all the golden rule,
really, and if kids haven't learned self-respect and respect for
others by four, they're not going to be ready for kindergarten, where
they will learn all the rest of everything they need to know."
The world's major religions have vastly different belief systems,
rituals, codes of worship, and celebrations. Each contends that its
system is right, and that unbelievers put their souls at risk. But
they are remarkably similar in their code of conduct for
"right" behavior. We can simply recite the seven principles
as a worthy goal of a flawed species, or we can take the word
"covenant" seriously and overcome our natural greed and
inertia to live them. Religion is there, I think, to help us handle
tough times and make tough choices. Institutionalized religion
supplies both a set of concepts around which to arrange the events of
one's life and a caring community of like-minded souls within which
to live it.
So why do I feel this peculiar emptiness where I should feel faith?
Because I fear that Unitarianism may have drifted so far from its
origins in right conduct that it has lost its way and confused
individual freedom of belief with situational ethics, and liberty
with license. With rights come responsibilities. What is hateful to
you, do not do unto your neighbor. That is the whole Torah.
I am profoundly doubtful that 21st century Americans can rise above
the level of what the Renaissance called "appetites." We
are soft with luxury, delayed gratification is a distant memory, what
we want we get or someone else will get it first. Over 90% of the
freshmen at the University of Maryland have never had to share a room
before arriving at college. How many will take advantage of the
opportunity to learn to share rather than beg their parents to rent
them an apartment so they can get back within their comfort zone?
Once they get past the romantic glow of the honeymoon, how will they
ever share a bathroom? How will they ever be able to put their kids
ahead of their careers? A colleague of mine who teaches ethics does
an exercise each term in which he asks students what they would do
for a million dollars: cut off their hair, sacrifice a toe, a kidney,
have sex with a stranger, kill someone at a distance with a car bomb.
Every semester, over half the class will elect to push the button to
blow up the car.
Last year, my daughter lost a bronze medal at the U.S. Diving
National Junior Championships because the gold medalist cheated. She
did not mean to do it: she put her feet down on an armstand dive and
neither the referee nor the balk judge caught it. Her coach kept her
from volunteering to the judges that she had balked and she was
awarded the gold medal. I asked my daughter this week if she would
have given up the gold medal if she had been the one who balked. She
hesitated, arguing that no one was really damaged since both the
silver and gold medalists make the world team, but finally admitted
that she would probably have done it only if the silver medalist
would have been hurt if she hadn't. It is better than nothing, but it
is disappointing. It unsettles me.
This same daughter made me proud beyond belief last year when she did
speak up to protest unjust and cruel behavior and group cowardice in
one passionate moment. Hearing a vicious anti-Semitic joke (What is
the difference between Jews and pizza? Pizza doesn't scream when you
put it in the oven), she blasted the girl who told it, and then
turned on a teammate, yelling: "Kenny, you're Jewish! How can
you laugh at that? You're just laughing because other people are
laughing!" Disgusted, she motioned me to take her home.
Integrity is not relative, neither is kindness or compassion. I'm not
suggesting that we all be like my husband, who won't take a tax
deduction to which he is entitled if he thinks the IRS shouldn't
allow such a deduction, but we cannot let the small opportunities for
decent behavior slide by unnoticed, nor excuse bad behavior because
it was harmless or impulsive. If we let the small stuff go-the
"borrowed" cd, the copied homework-how will we teach our
kids to handle the big stuff? When Jews come to their door and say,
"Hide me," will they let them in? When the Gestapo comes,
will they say, "No one is here"? Too many of us already do
too much of our children's homework in the guise of helping so they
won't get bad grades and build their Pinewood Derby cars for them so
they won't be disappointed. Life is about disappointment. We even
forgive John Kennedy and Martin Luther King their numerous
extramarital affairs because we don't want the myths disturbed. No
harm, no foul. Harmless little exceptions weaken the fabric of the
principles and eventually a single dripping stream of water can erode
a rock away.
AA-and other organizations like it-have demonstrated that human
beings can rise to the challenge of resolving their cognitive
dissonance the hard way--by discontinuing the behavior. With help
from a supportive community, and a dodecalogue of steps that define
the way to salvation, the path, the halácha, human beings can
overcome their fear and greed through faith in a higher purpose for
their lives than self-indulgence. To my mind, folk wisdom has it just
right: Religion is what you do after the sermon is over.
This and this
alone is true religion-to serve thy brethren.
This is sin
above all other sin-to harm thy brethren.
In such faith
is happiness.
In lack of it
is misery and pain.
Blessed be he
who swerveth not aside from this strait path.
Blessed is he
whose life is lived thus ceaselessly in serving God.
Bearing
others' burdens and so alone is life, true life, to be attained.
Nothing is
hard to him who, casting self aside, thinks only this-
How may I
serve my fellow man?
Tulsi Das, translated by Mohandas Gandhi © 2000 Betsy Greenleaf Yarrison |
