Unitarian Universalist Church of Palo Alto

Miss Manners’ Guide to Being a Unitarian Universalist

Reverend Amy Zucker Morgenstern
March 12, 2006
Palo Alto, CA

Like the man in one of Moliere’s plays who was astonished to learn he’d been speaking prose all his life, most of us are unaware that we are living within covenants. This is because most of the communities in which we live have only unspoken covenants. Sometimes, we discover that the assumptions we have made about what it takes to make an enjoyable community aren’t shared by everyone in the community. We think it’s obvious that none of our neighbors should play their music so loudly that we can hear it clearly even with our doors and windows closed, but the neighbors don’t agree. We think it’s reasonable to let our dogs do what dogs do, as long as we clean up after them, but others think no dog should ever do that except at home, while still others think that they don’t have to clean up after their dogs. We think people should apologize when they’ve accidentally hurt us, but their lawyers tell them otherwise. Some of us think that everyone should contribute equally to our parenting co-op, some think the contributions should be weighted depending on number of children, some think the contributions should be weighted depending on number of parents and how many non-employment hours they have available, some note the contradictions and decide to give as much time as they find convenient.

These kinds of disagreement create bad feeling in our communities, and often we don’t know how to address them short of going to the rulebook, or the police — and it does not resolve bad feelings when the way that you learn that your music is too loud for your neighbors’ liking is that a police officer comes to your door to inform you about the noise ordinance. In a congregation, we want to create a model community, and one way we do that is to put the unspoken expectations into words. We can do what we have begun to do here and will continue to do this afternoon, articulate a relational covenant, which is the formal way of saying, record in writing the promises we make each other about how we want to treat each other and be treated.

We may discover that we don’t all share the same assumptions about what makes a community thrive, and that we need to talk together about them — that may happen today, during our Town Hall about our draft covenant. We may discover that we all hold the same values, such as honesty and kindness, but aren’t sure how to balance them: what about when the truth that we wish to speak does not seem possible to speak kindly? What is clear is that we all have expectations and hopes of any community in which we live, and that we are most likely to have them met if we all know what they are. I’m beginning at the end today because it’s where our minds often go when the topic of relational covenants come up: what if we break the covenant? What happens then? Do the covenant police show up at our door? Who are the judge and jury? I think we ask that question because we are very used to thinking legalistically. We are accustomed to finding out, whenever we go to a new town, a new job, a new school, what are the rules? What are the penalties for breaking them?

As Gil Rendle says in the reading we heard earlier, “While we currently live in a world of rules that are often found in legal or assumed contracts, the language of covenant speaks of promises … When a legal rule is broken, we seek compensation … When a covenant is broken we seek understanding and recommitment. We want to know what went wrong. What are we having trouble with? How do we try again?”

Another way of saying this is that we are committed, first and foremost, to our relationships. It’s important to be compensated and to make sure justice is done when something goes wrong, but while taking your neighbor to court may achieve those things, it will do very little to create a relationship between you that you can cherish. As Laurie Anderson says — the performance artist, not our own Lauri Anderson here at church — “When love is gone, there’s always justice, and when justice is gone, there’s always force.”¹   How sad it would be to be reduced to force, or even to resort to mere justice among us. We are creating a beloved community, a community whose lifeblood is love.

One of my guides in how to do so occupies the perhaps unlikely realm of a newspaper advice column. Miss Manners is another person who is very interested in the distinction between enforceable and unenforceable codes. Her realm is etiquette, and as she says, “Being a volunteer system, etiquette cannot, by definition, be forced upon others.”²   But without it, force does indeed rule the day.

I’m a big fan of Miss Manners, who is much more than a person to consult about proper placement of silverware. She provides the invaluable service of helping people to think through the real meaning of manners and why we rely on them. She’s also an excellent writer and very funny. While it might be a bit of an overstatement to claim, as does the title of one of her books, that Miss Manners Rescues Civilization, she makes a convincing case that etiquette — or, if you prefer, the practice of manners — is absolutely foundational to civilization: to living together in a peaceful, agreeable, and productive community.³   And this belief, like the values she espouses, could come straight out of our religious principles. In fact, Miss Manners provides a very good guide to being a Unitarian Universalist, and I hope she would not object to my borrowing her for that purpose this morning.

As a congregation, we have already signed a covenant with all other Unitarian Universalist congregations. It is our statement of principles and purposes, and in it we covenant to affirm and promote, to cite the first two of them, “The inherent worth and dignity of every person … and justice, equity and compassion in human relations.”

Both we and Miss Manners put the first principle at the very heart of our approach to community. In an exercise led by Robert Mittman on the first Saturday in February, each of us wrote on cards two principles that we wished to guide our interactions. These would be the raw material from which the covenant crafters would work. One that came up on the cards of many around the circle, and got enthusiastic nods and murmurs from many more, was respect. We all wish to be treated with respect, and, treasuring this community, we pledge to treat each other with respect. Miss Manners writes, under the heading “Who (Besides Miss Manners) Deserves Respect?”: “Respect is due to all human beings just for being human beings.”⁴

Has she been going to UU services? She sounds for all the world like she is referring to our first principle: the inherent worth and dignity of every person. And it’s true: we embrace that principle, not just because we want it to govern this congregation or all our congregations, but because we believe it to be true out in the whole world, the world of classrooms, weddings, family gatherings, public meetings, and mealtimes, where Miss Manners is often called to arbitrate.

Miss Manners made this pronouncement because she was asked by a Gentle Reader whether respect should be given to everyone who is demanding it — panhandlers, young people alienated from their parents, minority populations. Did we have to show esteem to all of these people? She replied, “There may be people in any of these categories who do not exhibit admirable behavior … How do we resolve this contradiction? … we separate basic respect from respect for a particular individual, the admiration that your dictionary means by esteem.” Admiration must be earned, but basic respect is non-negotiable. We may particularly admire some members of our community; we give all of them the respect due to people as people.

Our second principle appears in many religious traditions as the Golden Rule: do unto others as you would have them do unto you. We phrase it “justice, equity and compassion in human relations.” Miss Manners has a few things to say about it as well.

She spends a lot of her correspondence, responding to readers who claim not to believe in manners; Miss Manners replies that they most emphatically do. Everyone believes that manners should be applied to themselves, and in the contexts in which they live.

One reader who believes manners are the enemy of fun challenges her — has she ever “eaten a pizza with bare fingers? Been to a bowling alley? Gone on a date in a pickup truck?” And she replies that none of these things is rude, but each has its own code of behavior. Wearing the wrong shoes in a bowling alley is as bad a violation of manners as wearing sneakers to a formal ball.

A chemistry teacher worries whether he, as a white man teaching in an inner city school, can “instill proper manners in teenage black boys and girls without being thought of as racist or ignorant of their culture.” Miss Manners assures the teacher, “The truth is that your students don’t really believe [the bigoted idea that civilized behavior is inherently white]; they simply share the universal desire to be free of rules by any argument that works on timid adults. Astonishingly enough they also despise rudeness … when it is practiced on them.” ⁵   Everyone does. That is because manners are based on the golden rule: treat others as you would like to be treated. Justice and equity require that we are governed by principles that do not vary whether we are the ones with more power in a situation, or the ones with less.

One poignant example is that of smoking. As Miss Manners explains, good manners used to require that smokers, as people indulging in a strong-smelling activity, retire to a separate room and even wear special clothes that they then changed when returning to the company of non-smokers. When smokers became a majority, they abandoned etiquette and began using the power of their numbers to assert their “right” to smoke wherever they liked; nonsmokers could just go outside if they didn’t like it. Nonsmokers then gave up on appeals to manners and fought back with the recourse that was left to them: the law. It is now smokers who are out in the cold.

There is no question that cigarette smoke is a dangerous pollutant and that no one should be compelled to breathe it. But that could have been decided without a single lawsuit if the rule of manners had prevailed: that we are all due fair treatment and should treat each other compassionately. Instead, many people on both sides of the smoking divide scrapped fairness and flexed their majority muscle. In other words, when manners break down, the ones left with the power are the bullies. Our protection against those who would be rude or unkind to others, who would bully their way to control of our community, is simply the promises we make to each other — whether they be the unspoken promises of manners, or the spoken ones of a relational covenant.

As Miss Manners reminds us, if we do not want the law to take over, we can create the community we want to live in through the observation of manners. As Unitarian Universalists, we are committed to taking responsibility for creating the kind of community we want. We accept no one’s authority but our own: that of human beings. The promises we make to one another as members of a faith community have no police backing them up, not even an authoritative text to which to point and say “that’s the rulebook, that’s the legal code.” We don’t even allow the principles I have been citing to become a creedal test. We trust to our own goodwill and intentions in the creation of a beloved community, just as we trust ourselves to find the truth and meaning that we seek.

Which brings us back around to the question of “what are the consequences if we don’t keep our covenant?” Will we be punished? Well, no, not by anyone here. If I break a law, the consequences may be punishment. If I break a promise, the consequences are … that a promise has been broken. That is all. The violation is its own punishment; trust has been weakened. The solution is to rebuild trust. We aim high with our covenant: we aim to extend compassion and kindness, to act from courage rather than fear, to treat one another with respect, to honor each other’s contributions, to listen to each other, to address disagreements directly. What if we fall short, as we surely must with such lofty aims? We mend and move forward, because our aim is not a rigid community of rules and penalties, but one where love and trust flourish. The power to make it so is in our hands, and our hands alone.

For an illustration of how this works, I close with a story told by John Holt, a teacher and writer about education. He was teaching 5th graders math, and he wanted them to be able to talk amongst themselves, but also wanted to maintain enough quiet that everyone could work. Children can become very noisy and too much noise makes it hard for them to concentrate.

So he proposed a rule. When he wrote a Q in the corner of the blackboard, with a box around it, that meant no talking without raising one’s hand and getting permission from Mr. Holt. The rest of the time everyone could talk. The children quickly developed a very funny game: when they saw him heading for the board, they would make more and more noise, climbing a crescendo as he wrote the Q, and reaching a shriek just as he completed the box. At that moment, in accordance with the rule, they would fall silent. (Being a wise teacher who loved children, he found this rebellion-within-the-rules amusing instead of annoying, and let it keep happening. He said, “It was the children’s way of making the Q theirs as well as mine, and because it was theirs as well as mine, they respected it.”)

If someone talked when the Q was up, he or she got a mark next to his or her name, which meant a mild penalty of writing lines before being able to go out for recess.

Only once, he says, did children test the Q. A few of them began to talk a lot, and others, noticing how frantically he was writing down marks, all began to talk too. “The game began to be, see how fast we can make Mr. Holt write down marks.” Could he keep up?

He could not. They had discovered what he, as a good teacher, already knew: the Q only worked because they allowed it to work. He affirmed that by saying to them: “Look, everyone, … You’re trying to find out whether you can wreck the Q system, and the answer is, of course you can. It only works because basically you think it’s a pretty fair and sensible system and are willing to let it work. The only thing is, if we lose the Q system, what are we going to put in its place? If I don’t have the Q, I’ll have to control [the noise level] the way other teachers try to, which is not to let you talk at all.” They talked about it some more and all agreed that the aims were reasonable and this way of attaining them fair. And having learned that the system was really controlled by them, the children never tested it again.⁶

The power to shape our communities is in our hands, and if we often feel dis-empowered to make our neighborhoods, our towns, our schools, our workplaces the way we envision them, here is a place that we have the power. We can create a community where all are respected; all are heard; all can seek freely; all can give, and have their gifts acknowledged; all can find kindness and caring. The power is in the promises we make and the commitments we keep.

---