Evil
SERMON GIVEN BY REV LINDA HART AT RICHMOND & PUTNEY UNITARIAN CHURCH
There are some questions that just don’t seem to have good answers, no matter how many times we try to answer them. Take evil. It’s truly a problem for people who are religious liberals. In a class I was teaching some years ago the question came up.
"It's not something we're very good at," I told the man who had asked. "We're good liberals: we believe that people are essentially good and whatever bad that anyone does is probably related to problems in their environment one way or another.“ It wasn't enough of an answer, even for me, so I tried again.
"You see, we do hold that each person has within them a bit of the divine, we are essentially connected to each other, and that is very important to us to affirm and even honor the worth and dignity of every person. And yet none of us are or can be oblivious to the deep troubles that vex human beings around the globe. Some days it seems that more than anything else greed, violence, cruelty and pride are what characterize the humans who we share this earth with. We would be fools to forget or try to deny the many ways there are that we damage and harm one another in ways small and large. The truth is that we hold those things in tension: a fundamental trust in the potential of all persons for goodness, and a recognition that in the world there is tremendous evil done."
But even that seems not quite enough to acknowledge. Liberal religion generally holds a deep optimism about what is possible in the world. We do -- at least, I think most of us do -- believe that we can change the world through the works of our hearts and hands. It may well be that we can't have an impact upon the whole of the universe, the whole of culture. But it seems that we trust that we can tend to at least one small part, at least touch one heart, at least exhibit some kindness, at least live in such a way that we don't hurt each other quite as much. Our willingness to arrive in a place like this on Sunday mornings shows some sort of hopefulness, and perhaps even some optimism.
But, throughout my life it hasn't seemed enough to be cheerful and optimistic. Somehow, somehow, we have to find a way to voice and speak of what it is that we see around ourselves.
This is one of the big theological questions that thinkers and philosophers have struggled with over the centuries. It's one of those many wholly unsolvable questions that comes to all of us at different times. It's a question that humble and hard living people have had to work through. None of us escape it.
I have been haunted for years now by questions asked of me by a 14 year old boy I worked with in Chicago. It was a hot Chicago day, and Joey was hanging around the office. Joey was a sweet and adorable young man, quick witted, and aching from a life that didn't make sense to him. He had run away from home a couple of times, his mother had finally given up on him, and The Night Minister, the outreach organization I worked for at the time, was providing him with a foster home until the child services could take him into custody and provide a longer term home for him. Joe never asked us easy questions, and this was another day when he asked all the hard ones. There were several of us ministry trained people in the office that day, and it was just after lunch so we were all sitting around in this hot church basement talking. Joe was our focus. He was telling us his view of the world, telling us what was right and wrong, drawing those hard and fast lines that somehow for him seemed to help to keep the world together. This was good, and that was bad and he knew all the answers. One after another he came out with them, until finally Stu, one of my colleagues, tried to help him to see other perspectives, to not be too judgmental.
John Wayne Gacy was a name that was terrifying to kids on the street in Chicago, the man who murdered young men and then hid their bodies in his walls, preying in large measure on young men who were living on the streets. Gacy was our most frightening fellow. Stu tried to suggest to Joey that perhaps part of the problem that Gacy had faced was having been assaulted as a child, that he had been so badly hurt and damaged by the abuse he faced that he was, in some sense at least, not responsible for what he had done.
It's one of those sorts of tricks that I find helpful most of the time: learning to see what might on its face appear to be evil as more systemic, as something that couldn't have been helped. It's turning a situation to see a different perspective, see a differing view of the circumstance, and hopefully then alleviate some of the horror. Even Stu, who worked in the gay community and who knew young men who might well have been Gacy's victims, who knew men who were in fact the victims of Jeffrey Dalmer, another serial killer who had just a year before murdered a dozen men from that community, wanted to put a human face on the difficulties, wanted somehow to make it less hard and fast, take away some of that evil. We all wanted some measure of forgiveness to be possible and we all knew that Joey needed to see the world in more gray shades.
But Joey wasn't working with speculation here. He wasn't trying to make sense of a hypothetical situation: what Joey was trying to make sense of was his father's abuse of him as an infant, though we didn't know that until he asked us the question, wondering what he had done that was so bad. “Why would he burn me with cigarettes?” he asked us, with urgency in his voice. He could still see the scars.
Confronting what has been done to us, confronting what has been done to those we love, confronting what is done to those who are our family, our neighbors, our fellow companions in this country, those who journey with us: that is the confrontation of evil that matters most. That is where the easy cut and dried answers fail, a shift in perspective doesn't heal and help. Looking into the face of those who have suffered through cruelty and torture and pain steals away from us most of the answers that help us move through the days and nights and years.
Those answers work for me most of the time. The ones that say that there really isn't anything or anyone that is wholly unredeemable. A couple of years ago a colleague talked about the study he had done on the Celestine Prophecies, and commented that in an interview the author commented that he really believed that everything happened for a reason, and that if you looked closely enough that you could see that reason. What was the reason and where might the good be found, the interviewer asked, in the famine that was happening in Africa at the moment. Who was it that was finding the good side of that? Surely not the hungry people, the children with inflated bellies. The author was able to mumble out something about raising the awareness in the west of global climate changes. It's not enough.
It's when I think back to Joey's face on that hot Chicago afternoon, with the sounds of traffic passing on the street outside, and the silence among my colleagues and I as we were unable to look into his face and tell him the good that came out of that tragedy. It haunts me. It haunts me and likely will through my life.
It is that same sort of power -- that power of what is evil and dark -- that May Sarton calls upon in her "Invocation to Kali". Kali is the Hindu goddess who is both destroyer and creator. When Sarton writes to her, the images that she brings back is that of the concentration camps. Later in the poem she writes:
Ages ago we closed our hearts to blight.
Who believes now? Who cries, "merciful God"?
We gassed God in the ovens, great piteous eyes,
Burned God in a trash heap of images,
Refused to make a compact with dead bones,
And threw away the children with their shoes.
She was clearly haunted by those images, as I am haunted by Joey's face: innocent and mistreated.
I cannot imagine that we've not all been confronted by some image of that sort, some picture of cruelty that is beyond explanation, beyond answers. We've all known something, I should think, that we cannot help but name evil.
And it's not just that stuff out there. Lawrence Kushner reminds us of that. He writes:
We lose our temper because we want things to be better right away. We gaze with lustful eyes because we have forgotten how to love the ones we want to love. We hoard material possessions because we imagine they will help us live more fully. We turn a deaf ear, for we fear the pain of listening would kill us. We waste time, because we are not sure how to enter a living relationship. We even tolerate a society that murders, because we are convinced it is the best way to save more life. At the bottom of such behavior is something that was once holy. And during times of holiness, communion, and light our personal and collective perversions creep out of the cellar, begging to be healed, freed and redeemed.
The awful truth is that whatever we see out there -- the destruction of hope and promise that was the Holocaust, the destruction of hope and promise that continues in ethnic battles happening now around the world, the trauma of children whose parents know nothing of care and love and the need to nurture tender hearts -- all of this has its roots in our hearts as well. We are not immune from what seems to us to be evil intent. We are not immune to acts of cruelty. We are not immune to embodying the worst of what humanity has done. We are not immune.
I began this all by saying that liberals are indeed optimistic people and we live in that tension between evil and our affirmation that we are able to achieve meaningful change, positive change and the sure belief in the worth and dignity of all people, no matter their life circumstance, no matter their struggles. Let us return to the poet, May Sarton. She ends her invocation to Kali this way:
It is time for the invocation:
Kali, be with us.
Violence, destruction, receive our homage.
Help us to bring darkness into the light,
To lift out the pain, the anger,
Where it can be seen for what it is --
The balance-wheel for our vulnerable, aching love.
Put the wild hunger where it belongs,
Within the act of creation,
Crude power that forges a balance
Between hate and love.
Help us to be always hopeful
Gardeners of the spirit
Who know that without darkness
Nothing comes to birth
As without light
Nothing flowers.
Bear the roots in mind,
You, the dark one, Kali,
Awesome power.
Kali is the goddess of destruction and of creation. It is creation that is born of that tension between the promise that we perceive. On the one side there is:
the possibility that lives within each and all,
the hope that transcends the destruction,
that of love that lives within everyone of us -- in you and you, and in the man with lost eyes on the street, and in Joey whose pain will haunt me evermore.
And on the other side is that horrifying vision that we know too well: that of what we can only name evil in the world around us, and in ourselves. Remember: we are not immune, no matter how wonderful we may be.
The final question is how do we live with this tension? It is easy to lose track of the promise sometimes. And it is easy to close our hearts to blight.
I want to end by offering you a story. My friend Roxanne Whitelight told it to me many years ago, and I don’t know the source. It came from a writer who was at one of the concentration camps. He and his mates in the barracks were, like everyone there, struggling to survive. Thin, hungry all the time, colder than they could have imagined. And the smell of the acrid smoke that hung over the camp all the time lined their noses. They all knew what their eventual end would be.
And finally the day came -- he and the other men from his barracks were loaded onto a truck and taken the short distance to the building where they would be gassed. But as they got out of the truck one man -- crazy perhaps -- grabbed the hand of the man next to him and in a loud voice said, "I'm going to read your palm and tell you of your future! “ He gazed at the man's palm, "Oh," he exclaimed with great joy, "Oh! You will live a very long life! Tell me do you have children? “ The other man with a puzzled look on his face shook his head gently. "Ah! Well you will! Lots and lots of children! Grandchildren! It's a miracle."
The crazy man grabbed another's hand and read with intensity: "Oh! You, too, you shall lead a long and happy life! And have children. Lots and lots of children! What a blessing! “ He grabbed another and another, and soon they were all reading each other's palms, exclaiming the blessings of leading a long and happy life, exclaiming the blessings of many children and great love. The guards were...well...confused by all of this great exclamation of long life and children and blessings, and must have gotten mixed up about what was supposed to happen, for they loaded these men back on the truck and took them back to the camp.
They didn't all survive to live long and happy lives with lots of children. But some did. Some made it through and one of them told the tale of the mad palm reader, the one who in the midst of this horrific trauma could still see the hope and the promise, could still tell a story with a happy ending. The one who reminded them all of the promise and gift that we all possess even in the midst of evil, even in the presence of our own evils.
So take a moment now, to turn to your neighbor and look at his palm, look at her palm. Read their palm, tell them of the long and glorious future you see for them. And then let us pause in silence together.