Unitarian Universalist Church of Palo Alto

Life Outside the Law

Reverend Amy Zucker Morgenstern
May 21, 2006
Palo Alto, CA

Welcome, new members, to our free faith. Welcome, everyone — and fair warning. In other faiths, you might receive the sacred texts. We could not begin to hand you the scriptures of Unitarian Universalism — there are too many. So rather than send you home with your arms full and overflowing of the Bible, Quran, Bhagavad-Gita, Talmud, Vedas, Theravada and Mahayana Sutras, the collected works of Shakespeare and Audre Lorde and Emerson and Walt Whitman, we give you … a gift certificate to our bookstore. To be used in the free and responsible search for truth and meaning in whatever way you choose. Because you have a choice.

Yes, we all have a choice, and we all go on having choices about all sorts of spiritual and theological matters, and ethical matters too. And we will guide and advise and cajole and sometimes badger each other about what choice we ought to make, and we certainly have guidelines about how we should all behave toward one another, but one thing Unitarian Universalism will not do is tell you straight out, “You must believe this way, worship this way, vote this way, or else cease to be a Unitarian Universalist.” This is a radically free faith you’ve joined, dear friends. All of these things are up to you.

Now, I said that this is a warning. That’s because freedom is a volatile substance. It can break down into much less noble qualities, like self-indulgence — I can do anything I want! — and sloppy thinking — I can believe anything I want!

As members of a free faith, we have set ourselves outside many of the laws that govern most religions, and that can be spiritually dangerous. The Reverend Scotty McLennan has spoken here about the dangers of spiritual bushwhacking — making one’s own way instead of following a set religious path. But to some extent, we are all bushwhackers, insisting upon ourselves as our final compass: in the Buddha’s words, being lamps unto ourselves, our only lamp. So as you walk through places that are sometimes wilderness, often dark and difficult, here is a guide, a one-sentence guide to making sure that your path leads to good places: “To live outside the law, you must be honest.”

To live outside the law, you must be honest. Those words were written and sung by Bob Dylan 40 years ago.¹  I want to honor Dylan today, because he is still singing his song and — brace yourselves, baby boomers — he turned 65 last week. Most of all, I want to honor him because he has lived his artistic life according to this principle for these past 45 years. It makes him a spiritual guide to those of us who have deliberately set ourselves outside the laws handed down by scripture, by tradition, by religious hierarchies.

What does it mean, “To live outside the law, you must be honest”? To me it means that if you are going to consider yourself above the rules that others have set, you had better be very, very sure you are acting for the right reasons — you have got to have the utmost integrity. When Dylan released that song in 1966, the country was struggling with the whole question of what to do once one had declared certain laws to be unbinding. Just three years before, Martin Luther King, Jr., in his letter from a cell in the Birmingham, Alabama, jail, had asserted that in an unjust system with unjust laws, a person must sometimes disobey the law in order to do what was right. He was following in the footsteps of others such as Jesus, Thoreau, and Gandhi. And the question that reasonably arose for him, as for them, was, what then would keep mere anarchy from being unloosed upon the world?

Dylan’s answer is honesty. It is not enough to say “my conscience tells me to break this law”; you really need to mean it, and you really need to know. Otherwise it’s too tempting just to ignore laws that are inconvenient. He has been an iconoclast, one who smashes rules and traditional structures, and he has asserted the individual judgment and conscience above all of them. And so have we, my brothers and sisters. So, we must be honest.

How do we do that? Dylan’s own example shows us three things we must do. To be honest,

• we have to know our own truth;

• we have to live by it even at those times when it would be easier to do otherwise;

• and we have to stay connected to our roots.

Know your own truth. If each of us is the final authority on matters of belief and conscience, as I believe we are, then we really have to know how to listen inside ourselves and hear that guiding voice. (Spiritual practices are one way we do this, but I’ll come back to that topic two Sundays from now.) We have to be ourselves and know ourselves, even when that means breaking away from who we used to be.

Dylan, as I said, is an iconoclast, an icon-shatterer, and oftentimes the icon he was shattering was his own legend-sized persona. His entry into the music world was through folk music. He was heavily influenced by Woody Guthrie, singing politically-charged music with acoustic guitar and harmonica, and he was hailed as a “distinctive folk-song stylist” at age twenty.²  After three very political albums, having been declared the voice and conscience of a generation, he shrugged off that burden and put out an album devoted almost entirely to songs of love and other apolitical concerns, Another Side of Bob Dylan. And with the next album, at the height of the folk revival, when acoustic music was king, he followed his muse and “went electric.” Dylan has said of his songs, “I just write ’em as they come,”³  and he has stayed remarkably true to the words and music that flow through him, refusing to be held back by convention, fashion, or what he had done before. Country, rock, gospel — whatever form suits what he must say, he adopts it. He knows his own truth.

Do we have that same flexibility? All the opportunities are here, in our tradition, in our congregation, in the wide world of sources upon which we draw. We can each choose the form that works for us, mindfully and carefully.

Going to a Bob Dylan concert is a challenge for the listener because Dylan challenges himself. He reinvents the old songs, changing the instrumentation, the style, even the melody. Those who want to hear the same familiar versions they have on their CDs go away disappointed and often angry — “I couldn’t even recognize that song!” But for Dylan, singing “Like a Rolling Stone” the same way he sang it 40 years ago would be artistic death — I’d even venture to say spiritual death. He keeps coming up with new things to say and he doesn’t hold back. As he sings, you have to “trust yourself”: “Trust yourself to know the way that will prove true in the end / … / Trust yourself to find the path where there is no if and when.”⁴

Sometimes the way that we know to be true is not a walk in the park. It leads us to have to change our minds, to abandon a path that had brought us happiness, to clash with those we have been traveling alongside. And the second guideline to living outside the law is that when our truth leads to these difficult places, we must follow it just the same. If our truth keeps making things easy for us, chances are we’re no longer being honest — we’re just believing what we want to believe.

Dylan knows all about going the hard way. When he plugged in his guitar at the Newport Folk Festival in 1965, the folk community nearly had collective apoplexy. I still know people who say they only like Dylan “before he went electric,” which is to say, they’re only interested in the first three years of his 45-year career. Dislike of someone’s musical taste is one thing, but at the time he was reviled as a “Judas,”⁵  a traitor! — not just to a form of music, but to everything it had come to stand for in that charged political moment. And speaking of politics, others never forgave him for shunning his role as political spokesperson for a generation (a generation, by the way, he did not even belong to. Notice that Dylan, having been born in 1941, had passed peak draft age well before the Vietnam War reached its height).

Dylan’s path has so frequently taken him through controversial territory that the inescapable conclusion of those who follow his career closely is that he deliberately takes on that challenge, shunning the easy way that would bring continued acclaim and fortune. In the 1960s, a culture war raged between country and rock, between the “Okies from Muskogee” who “still respect[ed] the college dean” and the rock-inspired hippies. In 1969, Dylan crossed the demilitarized zone in this war and made a country-flavored album called Nashville Skyline, recording with the very conservative Johnny Cash and scaring off a lot of his own fans. (Johnny was a great border-crosser himself, by the way, who risked alienating his subculture not only by recording with the rebel icon, Dylan, but by embracing as his cause, of all things, justice and compassion for convicts.) Ten years later, Dylan embraced evangelical Christianity and lost many more fans by beginning a three-album run of explicitly Christian music. No doubt when he returned to his Jewish roots a few years later, he then lost some of the Christian fans who had eagerly embraced a Christian Bob Dylan.

When we have strong convictions, they will bring us into conflict, sooner or later, with our former selves, with the powers that be, and perhaps most painfully, with our friends and supporters. Some of you left the religion of your families, of your ancestors, the one you were taught, in order to become Unitarian Universalists. And the beliefs that were so strong that they pulled you away from all of that, don’t have to be what you believe for the rest of your life. They may, if you test them again and again and find them to be true. But we are all searching, and the more likely outcome, if we’re all honest, is that when we rigorously test our beliefs, we will change some of them. Our faith gives us the room to do that. In exchange, it demands that we do it, because a belief untested becomes another orthodoxy, another cul-de-sac on the road to truth.

What justice cause or theological belief would make the people on “your side” raise their eyebrows? Are you against abortion? For the Iraq war? Do you pray with a rosary? There’s room for you here, and don’t let anyone tell you otherwise. Orthodoxy of any kind is a demon that Bob Dylan’s example tells us to exorcise — and he’s in good company with our rebellious Unitarian and Universalist forebears. Emerson insisted, “Why may not I act and speak and write and think with entire freedom?”⁶  And his friend Thoreau urged us each to follow our own drummer, even if it means being out of step with our companions. “Let [us each] step to the music which [we] hear.”⁷

The third guideline to living honestly outside the law, however, is: don’t cut off your roots.

Dylan is a musician who knows his roots. He has grown in unexpected ways, putting out wildly original and unpredictable branches, but he isn’t making it all up from scratch. If he were, I doubt he would ever have achieved the artistic heights he has. We don’t make it up from scratch either.

When Dylan plugged in that guitar and became a rock singer, he was going back to his roots. After all, in his high school yearbook, his classmates’ prediction was not that he would be the next Woody Guthrie; it was that he’d be the next Little Richard. He has named as his influences country singers like Hank Williams, blues singers like Robert Johnson, folk singers like Guthrie, and rock singers like Elvis, not to mention gospel music, standards, the Bible, poetry, American history, and the land on which he was raised. The result has been that he has a tremendous well from which to draw his own musical vision and express the truths he wants so urgently to say. Not just a well: an aquifer, going deep under the ground and coming from all directions.

We have our roots, too, the things that made it possible for us to grow in the ways we have. If we are going to live outside the law, we need to know what it is and where we came from. Besides, it’s plain dishonesty to deny where we come from. You were taught to believe in the Bible? Reject it as the inerrant word of God, certainly, but don’t reject the wisdom it still has to give you. You have inherited a world of religious traditions? Yes, we all have. They impart plenty of bad advice and flawed belief, but they are also where we come from and they are a part of us that we are foolish to amputate. In this free faith, we deny that any one scripture or tradition is authoritative; that does not mean it doesn’t have a lot to teach. It’s foolish not to draw on the well at all just because we don’t want to drink the whole thing.

So, my brother and sister outlaws, let us be honest. Let us know our own truth, live by it even when it’s difficult, and always acknowledge where we came from. Just as you pledge to do so, I pledge to help you. And then, as Dylan sings, you will “always know the truth and see the light surrounding you.”⁸  So may it be.

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