Unitarian Universalist Church of Palo Alto

Reflection: Acting on our Principles

Sunday, May 20, 2007
Palo Alto, CA

Opening Words:

Our challenge and our commitment must be how to globalize what is good for us, globalize compassion, globalize respect, globalize conscious thinking that recognizes that every choice we make has a string attached to everything and everyone that ever has been, is now and ever will be.

— Julia Butterfly Hill, Redwood tree “Luna” sitter for over two years

Reflection

What would move anyone to risk personal safety and take a position they believed was right but their family, respected leaders, and society considered illegal or ethically wrong? What would give a woman the courage to step out of her expected role and act in a way she felt morally compelled to but that could lead to her silencing — by imprisonment, excommunication, or even death?

It is tempting to enter a game of “what if” with these starting questions and test one’s own beliefs, commitment and personal courage. A recent review of the Dutch movie “Black Book,” set in the Netherlands during World War II, started me on this game. In it, a Jewish Dutch woman learns her family has been murdered by the Nazis while she is rescued, and given a new identity and a chance to seek personal revenge as well as save other Jews in the Dutch resistance. What if that woman were me? What if I were a simple Dutch citizen with Jewish friends or colleagues, could I be someone like Miep Gies, the woman who helped hide Anne Frank? What if I were a woman living in the time of the Protestant Reformation and felt that I must honor my faith and help others do the same? What if I believed that an ancient redwood forest that had been sacred ground for thousands of years was about to be irretrievably destroyed?

These scenarios took me to frightening yet hypothetical places, but eventually I found myself coming back to a different challenging question. When one has such strong beliefs and such courage to stand alone against the seeming whole of one’s world, what gives one such certainty? Why are these beliefs so powerfully compelling to women and others in those times when authorities tried so hard to silence them?

In all of these periods, there were heroines who acted on what seems be an underlying assumption of universal principles of justice, equality, and the moral treatment of life. That is, an assumption that certain principles of right and wrong transcend the church’s edicts, transcend society’s laws, and transcend accepted conventions of the roles of men and women. These actions of belief were demanded, not arbitrarily taken, by the fact that human lives have certain basic rights and responsibilities in common. These exist whether male or female, whether Jew, Catholic, Protestant or other, whether of this culture or another. The power of these beliefs seems to come from the power within any of us — even under duress — to know when our basic rights are denied and when our basic responsibilities are ignored.

The concept of universal principles of justice is often challenged as a view of the privileged or of the white European Judeo-Christian world when looking at other different cultures. Those who argue against it are generally proponents of moral relativism, or the position that a society’s morality can only be judged by those within that society and not by those outside it. I don’t mean to go into a philosophical debate, but only to point out that in many times of great conflicts of belief, in the Holocaust of WWII, during the period of practicing American slavery, during the Protestant Reformation of the 16th century, in our own time in environmental fights of rights for clean air and water, there were many heroes who believed that the rights for which they imperiled themselves were universal rights.

At the time, it was probably widely said that many of these were those whose rights had been removed or unrecognized in those cultures and, like criminals, they felt keenly denied certain privileges they did not deserve. But what we recognize is that they fought with and were aided by those from within privileged groups who were also persuaded and compelled by the same concept of universal principles, who believed that these rights that they had were undeniable, and regardless of any loss of their own power, they must be given to all.

In the course of this reflection, I came to the realization that I find these heroines and their fights so powerful because I do believe in certain universal principles of justice and morality. I do believe that although I have grown up in a privileged society and my experience in and understanding of other cultures is limited, I share certain human experiences with all human beings on the planet. This is what allows me and I think all of us to understand just how difficult it was for women at certain times in history to take extremely dangerous positions of belief, just how amazing it was for these women and those who helped them to act on these beliefs, and just how absolutely compelling it would be to act on our principles of justice and morality if it were us.

 

Sermon: A Wagon Full of Sardine Barrels by Reverend Alicia McNary Forsey