Tolerance, Acceptance—or What?

April 14, 2002

The Rev. Gretchen Woods

READING

from A History of Unitarianism: In Transylvania, England, and America by Earl Morse Wilbur

. . . it is proper that we should give a brief retrospective glance and ask how far this history has succeeded in accomplishing its purpose. As stated at the beginning, the undertaking was not to present a history of Unitarianism as a doctrinal system, but to trace the development of three controlling principles that have characterized the movement, namely: complete mental freedom, unrestricted reason, and generous tolerance for differences, in religion. The movement began by calling in question the authority of the creeds that restricted the thinking of men in religion. But this step did allow the complete freedom of religious thought; for men abandoned the authority of the creeds only to substitute that of Scripture as supreme. The Socinians in Poland came to realize that in at least some cases even Scripture had to be submitted to the test of reason. In England, indeed, this transition came slowly, and it was not until the middle of the nineteenth century that Unitarians, following the leadership of Martineau, reluctantly began to abandon scripture as the prime source of religious truth; and the Americans, stimulated by the influence of Emerson and Parker, took the same step, and the leaders of their thought have now for two generations ceased to seek for proof texts as authority for their religious beliefs. Acceptance of mutual tolerance as a guiding principle in religious thinking has been last to be achieved, Of course it is inevitable that free minds guided by different factors, should often reach differing conclusions, and it is natural that having reached them they should conflict with each other. Hence have risen most of the quarrels that have distracted Christendom, Now there are but two ways in which such conflicts may be resolved. The parties may abandon the hope of mental freedom and submit to the judgment of another, or else they may waive the effort to think alike as futile, or at all events incidental, while they agree nevertheless in working for the ends they have in common. This is the way of tolerance, in which men, though disagreeing in incidental matters, allow each other equal liberty of belief, and unite happily for practical ends which they have in common.

Freedom, reason and tolerance then are not the final goals to be aimed at in religion, but only conditions under which the true ends may best be attained. The ultimate ends proper to a religious movement are two, personal and social: the elevation of personal character, and the perfecting of the social organism, and the success of a religious body may best be judged by the degree to which it attains these ends. Only if the Unitarian movement, true to its principles of freedom, reason, and tolerance, goes on through them and finds its fulfillment in helping men to live worthily as children of God, and to make their institution worthy of the Kingdom of Heaven, will its mission be accomplished. (pp. 486-487.)

SERMON: Tolerance, Acceptance—or What?

I cannot say anything of meaning this morning unless I acknowledge that people in the Middle East are destroying each other as quickly as they can in the most grisly ways possible in the names of two different gods – and I don’t know what, if anything, I can do about it. I feel puzzled, powerless, and pained. It breaks my heart. When I planned this sermon months ago, I did not imagine that it would seem so relevant, yet impossible. Yet I know that I am called to try to bring some glimmer of hope, some sense that human beings can do better – so here’s my best try:

I spent twelve years as a relatively new Unitarian Universalist in the Birmingham Unitarian Church in Bloomfield Hills, MI. There I learned the UU trinity of reason, freedom, and tolerance. It was invoked as often as the Trinity in traditional Christian Churches. It seemed to give hope that human beings could manage anything that life sent us, so long as we kept these three values in mind.

I maintained this perspective until my last year of study at John Carroll University. The Ohio/Meadville District of the UUA offered a conference on “The Limits of Reason, Freedom and Tolerance.” I was fascinated. When I went I found myself seriously challenged by the thought of ministerial colleagues. It inspired my own thinking and questioning of these fine values.

Reason, I remain convinced, is a blessing to human beings that cannot be overestimated. It has given us technology far beyond our ethical capacity as human beings, even with opposable thumbs. Most of our art and culture stems from our capacity to reason. Would we used it more when involved in violent conflict that can come to no good end!

Still, I fear we have limited our potential to rational, linear, reductive reason far too often. There are more human ways of knowing than that, and we need them all now. Howard Gardner expands our understanding of human potential when he offers eleven ways of knowing, some of which seem far removed from direct reason, such as knowing of art and music. I remember Jean Huston’s story of a boy who could not show his work in math class, but who always got the correct answer if he was allowed to hum while doing the problem.

What troubles me most about the promise of reason is that it has not brought equity, justice, or peace to the world as we imagined it would when we got rid of God and put our faith in reason. We seem to be just as far behind in our moral growth as we were with rigid Natural Law. The reason of situational ethics has left us with no solid ground upon which to stand, and little guidance, other than wishful thinking. Reason did not keep the Holocaust from happening, nor does it deter the present insanity in the Middle East.

In like manner, when we speak of freedom, we often ignore the question: Freedom from what, for what? We assume that there is some immediately understood state of freedom upon which we can all agree. Ayn Rand suggests, “We are only free as we can choose our own masters.” Freedom is not license to treat other people horribly in the name of our free expression. That is simply rudeness. Now I sound like Miss Manners, but manners need to have a place in this whole process. A.S. Neill found this to be the case when he had to respond to people who read Summerhill. They set no healthy boundaries for their children, so he wrote, Freedom, not License to remind them that simple courtesy and awareness of the needs of others have place in human negotiations. It is the sense that there is no freedom to choose among the peoples of the Middle East that drives them to violence, yet they take away others’ choices in the process.

And what of tolerance? While it has been a primary UU value, at least for the decades since Wilbur wrote his famous history, it certainly comes from a “one-up” position. Its meaning comes from “tolerate: to allow, permit, not interfere with,” implying the privilege to do such. Of all people, Wendell Wilkie stated the problem most clearly: “No man has a right in America to treat any other man tolerantly, for tolerance is the assumption of superiority.” It is this assumption of superiority that has consistently given UUs the appearance, if not the practice, of arrogance and class privilege. Clearly, one who is “tolerating” another is not meeting that person as a human being of inherent worth and dignity.

So, what of acceptance? To accept is “1. to take (what is offered or given); to receive (something) willingly. . . 2. To receive favorably, to approve. . . 3. To agree to; acquiesce in; consent to. . . 4. To believe in” (Webster’s New World Dictionary of the English Language) In essence, if I say I accept someone, the assumption is that I agree – and I may not agree at all. Herein lies the conundrum: do I want to imply agreement? Perhaps tolerance is the better word?

Hence, my thoughts upon this subject bring me to a place where I, at last, must revert to the first of my own trinity: respect. I need not agree with another, nor assume a “one-up” position to that person, to respect him or her. With respect I imply that I am willing to stay connected to this person whether I agree or not. It is in this connection that transformation is possible. Like Schleiermacher and Thandeka, I believe that “God is in the interstices,” the connections between and among people that lead to more meaningful understanding of all of life. It may not be God, but it assuredly is where we need to make our connections and create positive – rather than negative – energies.

It is this sort of respect to which Kurt Vonnegut referred in his famous speech to the General Assembly entitled, “Love Is Too Big A Word.” Vonnegut, a card-carrying Hoosier Unitarian, made the case that love is more than we can manage toward most other human beings. This is certainly clear in the Middle East, the Balkans, and East L.A. Perhaps, if we made respect a recognition of the rightness of another’s position from his or her perspective, we might actually be able to find some transforming presence in the interstices between us. That might even lead to love as creative interchange.

Out of anger, desperation, despair, fear comes the incredible violence that seems to be overtaking our world. All I can plead for is some modicum of recognition that each of us, regardless of our family’s origin, our race, creed, sexual predisposition, physical or mental abilities -each of us – was once born a helpless child of our universe with all the potential to become a creative force for good for every other child. If we could bring our Unitarian Universalist values into action, recognizing “the inherent worth and dignity of every person,” working for “justice , equity, and compassion in human relations” so that people’s homes could not be razed to create settlements for other people; if we could somehow remind people of our common origins, there might be a chance to move beyond the violence and rage we see destroying so much of our world. If we could appreciate the value of others’ differences, still feel the value of our own being, and recognize a correlation between the two, there might still be hope.

In that spirit, I close with words from Claire Bateman’s poem, Childhood of a Stranger :

You too once were carried in your sleep –

you to someone a warm weight of breath and cloth.

wisps of sleep like slow steam off your seamless face,

day distilling into dreams in a skull yet soft.

Now we are encrusted with barbed years,

flinty, adamantine, ready to repel

all assaults on our independence.

But for that hint of honey, trace of down,

that secret nerve that never has grown numb,

there is a debt between us even now

that our autonomy cannot remove:

a bent toward something more than tolerance,

older than kindness, oddly akin to love.

How may we help those in so much pain to revive that “secret nerve,” so that we may bend “toward something more than tolerance, older than kindness, oddly akin to love.” Our Unitarian Universalist religious understanding calls us to speak, to write, perhaps even to pray, that all humanity may find that awareness and turn from destruction to creation.

So Be It! Blessed Be!