Signs of Leadership:

Reflections for President’s Day

A sermon offered at the Unitarian Universalist Church of Lafayette, Indiana

By Rev. Hilary Landau Krivchenia

February 18, 2002

Two Sundays ago I said goodbye to my father at the Indianapolis Airport and drove up the Interstate to Pokagon State Park to a meeting of about 30 Unitarian Universalist Ministers.  Aside from our usual business agenda was a workshop led by our colleague the Reverend David Bumbaugh.  We all sat facing one another around a small conference room.  Our topic was “The Future of Unitarian Universalism”.  Difficult questions were raised and our discussions were impassioned.  Certainly, this is the question facing us today.  In part, this is always the question facing us any of us – what is our role in the future?  Last week Brian Straight explored the nature of time and, whether you are an astronomer watching the past pierce the darkness of the night sky, a Buddhist seeking peace, or a person hoping to build toward a positive future -- the seed of the future is always held in the present moment – the only real moment that we have. I take the present seriously – because it is the only time available.  Still – just like those stars carrying the light of the past to our eyes gazing in the present – the past lives with us and in us.

Anyway – I was driving up the interstate and I passed a sign – one of those that just seem to appear out of nowhere and seem to be appearing everywhere.  A big sign with billowy clouds and in small formal letters were the words – One Nation Under God – then in huge letters – the word Indivisible – and then in smaller letters again – with liberty and justice for all.  Indivisible. The pledge of allegiance.  I was sent, in sixth grade, to the principal’s office – that would have been in 1967 -- because I accidentally pledged with my left hand and my friend Jan corrected me and then we giggled.  So there I was trying to explain to the principal how it was just an accident but that, in fact, I didn’t really like the pledge of allegiance.  She called my mother to come and get me from school.  My mother explained to the principal that I and any other child should and did have the right to refrain from the pledge, a ruling of the Supreme Court in June of 1943,and that she was just sorry that it had been inadvertent on my part.  It was Dwight Eisenhower, in 1954, who added the words “Under God”.  It was a trip down memory lane – one that brought to mind again the air raid drills of elementary school – used to reassure us – or were they used to terrify us about a possible attack from foreign powers.

Then some miles down the road there was another sign – this one a quotation of our current president – George W. Bush – I think it went something like this “we will not tire, we will not falter, we will not fail”.  It just begs the question -- at what – at what will we not fail?  What are we about?  What is our national purpose – what seeds of the future shall we cultivate in ourselves and in the world?

Are we the axis of good with license to destroy all that we deem the Axis of Evil.  I will use the freedom of the pulpit – so you may disagree with me – but let us use this time – this precious time -- to question these loaded, haunted, and yet somehow empty images -- to question a world of clear opposites and simple answers.  It is almost president’s day and I want to reflect on leadership, on citizenship, and on the seeds of the future that are planted in American soil, in this soil.  There were and are great ideas here – in this soil.  As Jacob Needleman wrote in The American Soul: “No idea exists alone, but is related to a network of ideas that provide a sense of direction to human life, that altogether comprise their message and benefit to the world.  But what we see in history is that ideas and symbols are often broken off from the larger matrix of which they are a part.  Such piecemeal ideas may then intensify violence and self-deception.” I think he put it well.

There are signs everywhere, now.  Every few miles now you can find one of these roads signs – avoiding the grief, side stepping the tough questions, polishing up the fear, and filling the air with jingoism.  Jingoism – which is defined as an extreme form of nationalism and foreign policy.  And there is also an air of emptiness about jingoistic slogans – empty slogans – meant to empty our heads.  Yet often these phrases reflect and echo the most profound hopes of the founders of this nation – during a time when every word meant something – because some of them had never truly been spoken before.  And because they had been so fresh spoken they had not yet been broken off and lost and distorted.

            I remain a champion of the separation of church and state for the usual reasons – because I want no church to take and hold national power and because religion, the sacred, God, the holy is too complex to be used as a team mascot or the muscled big brother who can beat up the other kids’ big brother.  Yet it is imperative to explore these ideas in church for one because this is a place where we can sit with our values, where we can clarify for ourselves our moral place in the scheme of things and, also, because religion has always lived, in it finest and foulest form in the heart of American politics.  This nation was established based upon beliefs about the nature of the souls of humans.  The waves of Pilgrims who first sailed here, after stopping in the Netherlands, were the families of the Puritans of the English Civil War – heirs of Oliver Cromwell’s attack on the British monarchy in the seventeenth century.  It was one of Cromwell’s soldiers – Richard Rumbold – who said from the scaffold before he was beheaded – “I never could believe that Providence had sent a few men into the world, ready booted and spurred to ride, and millions ready saddled and bridled to be ridden.”  In David McCullough’s fascinating and ubiquitous biography of John Adams he described a scene in 1786 in which John Adams – whose great, great, great grandfather Henry had sailed to this land with those Puritans in 1638 – stood with Thomas Jefferson at Worcester – the place where Charles I finally lost to Cromwell.  Adams spoke: “this was the scene where freemen fought for their rights – this is holy ground.”

            The notion of rights implies a belief about the nature of the human soul.  And the history of the establishment of the United States is the history of a struggle between varieties of these beliefs.  On one end of a spectrum there is a long history in the West of religion and politics promoting the notion that people are inherently dim – at best – and mostly bent toward evil and that only an aristocratic few – the elect – could be capable and entitled to govern – entitled often, by a right of divine inheritance.  The enlightenment began to put paid to that idea – in Dissenting Churches, in Radical communities, in laboratories, and universities.

            People gathered and spoke and listened and wrote and debated – they passed out pamphlets and asked questions and spoke heresies that would once have resulted in death.  The other aspects of the spectrum looked like this – somewhere at the end far away from the entitled few were those who held the notion that people – well at least white men – we’ll have to leave the rest for later -- are purely good at core and that it is only power that corrupts and centralized power that corrupts most certainly.  At this point in the spectrum if humans were left to their own natural independent devices and subject to only minimal interference that a state near to paradise could be obtained.  There would be greater justice and deeper mutual care in the world of absolute equals.

            And somewhere else along this spectrum is the notion that people are beings on a cusp of choice – capable of great good or great evil.  That there is no natural aristocracy. That humans need one another, at times, to discern the path of the good and to balance one another and that they may govern themselves if they combine structure, accountability, and leadership that rises from an educated people with a great breadth of freedom and choice.

            These were not disembodied ideas – they were the deep soul searchings of men and women on both sides of the Atlantic and on both sides of the Channel.  In the American colony the difficulties of, as Joseph Ellis said, “an island ruling a continent” were becoming more apparent.  Rebellions were fomenting and there was a hunger to throw off the yoke of England, a hunger for self-government.  An English workingman – a tax collector – lost his job for rallying other excise collectors for better wages.  He approached Mr. Benjamin Franklin for a letter of reference to get him to America.  Sometimes I think that had it not been for Franklin sailing back and forth across the Atlantic and bubbling with a passion for life in all its many facets that history would have looked very different.  Worse or better, I do not know.  In a moment of anxious vanity after Franklin’s death, John Adams wrote in a letter to Benjamin Rush: “What lies will history tell of our revolution?  The essence of the whole will be that Dr. Franklin’s electrical rod smote the earth and out sprung General Washington.”  Yet, there is a spark of truth in Franklin’s importance.  He was alight with the new sciences and the new age of reason.

With the letter of introduction that Franklin gave him, the excise collector – Thomas Paine – made his way to America.  It was still quite dangerous to spread liberal ideals over here, though, but nothing would deter Paine.  As soon as he began to eke out a living, he wrote a scathing condemnation of slavery, which was published in 1775.  And although it is true that it was written in an anti-Jewish light -- yet it was one of the most powerful early protests against slavery in America.  He looked around at a land hungering for freedom and saw within that land a terrible contradiction lived -- he asked: “With what consistency, or decency they complain so loudly of attempts to enslave them, while they hold so many hundred thousands in slavery; and annually enslave many thousands more?”  His work brought him to the attention of the physician and Universalist Dr. Benjamin Rush whose sentiments were deeply anti-slavery.  Rush encouraged Paine in his writing and in January of 1776, Paine anonymously published his pamphlet Common Sense.  It was the match to the torch and blazed through the streets of this country selling thousands of copies and stirring even the most timid.  His thoughts were radical in the extreme and reflected one end of the spectrum I spoke of earlier.  He wrote: “Society in every state is a blessing, but government even in its best state is but a necessary evil; in its worst state an intolerable one; for when we suffer, or are exposed to the same miseries by a government, which we might expect in a country without government, our calamity is heightened by reflecting that we furnish the means by which we suffer. Government, like dress, is the badge of lost innocence; the palaces of kings are built on the ruins of the bowers of paradise.”

Paine’s words provided the very spark that had been needed to ignite the real battle for Independence – the Declaration was signed that year defying English Rule.  All agreed on some basic principles – that people could govern themselves, that independence was inevitable and essential, that education was a core responsibility of government, that charity was a vital human expression.  However, each founder had his own place on that spectrum of government – Paine believed in a single legislative body.  Jefferson supported a slightly stronger executive but a single legislative structure without a broad judicial system.  Adams was convinced that three strong branches of government were needed – a double legislative body, a strong judiciary, and a strong president.  Paine, though an Englishman, offered himself heart and soul to the American project – he worked with Benjamin Franklin to draft the Pennsylvania constitution and, as war reached its roughest stretches he wrote inspirational pamphlets called “The Crisis” to hearten the revolutionaries -- "These are the times that try men's souls...".

"These are the times that try men's souls..." And the rest, as they say, is history.  McCullough recounted a conversation between Thomas Jefferson and John Adams, in which Adams asked, “ Who shall write the history of the American Revolution? Who can write it? Who will ever be able to write it?” “Nobody,” answered Jefferson, “except perhaps its external facts.”  In 1783 George Washington, the Commander of the Armed forces, said: The Citizens of America, placed in the most enviable condition, as the sole Lords and proprietors of a vast tract of continent, are now acknowledged to be possessed of absolute freedom and Independence; they are, from this period to be considered as Actors on a most conspicuous Theatre, which seems to be peculiarly designed by Providence for the display of human greatness and felicity.” At the time he yet owned 200 slaves, as did Thomas Jefferson.  John Adams never did.  The history of the American Revolution is less the history of facts than it is the record of the searching of human hearts and the struggling within them.

Our founding fathers – the mothers we will turn to later – were caught up in their own revolutions, their violent turnings of the soul.  Jefferson had to struggle with an overweaning materialism, competitiveness, and greed that made him internally at odds with his passion for freedom but completely and profoundly human.  Adams struggled with his yearning to be of service and his hunger for glory again profoundly human.  The Independence of the United States was simultaneous with continued slavery and the continued dispossession of Native Americans from their lands.  Despite the many outcries for ending slavery along with gaining Independence the inability of the United States to go that far for freedom would ultimately cost a Civil War.

The Unitarian Universalist theologian James Luther Adams said that our actions are the habits of our beliefs – and our beliefs only have meaning if they influence our behavior.  Jacob Needleman wrote: “As for the idea of democracy the founding fathers never conceived of it solely as an external form of government.  The meaning of democracy was always rooted in a vision of human nature as both fallen and perfectible.  To a significant extent, democracy, in its specifically American form was created to allow men and women to seek their own higher principle within themselves.  All the rights guaranteed by the Constitution were based on a vision of human nature that calls us to be responsible beings.”  Paine directed that specific monies be allocated for the universal education of all persons.  Jefferson carved on his grave that he was the founder of the university of Virginia.  John Adams had a monumental fondness for books. He  wrote into the Massachusetts constitution Section II paragraph 6, which was headed the Encouragement of Literature and began – “Wisdom and knowledge, as well as virtue diffused generally among the body of the people being necessary for the preservation of their rights and liberties ... it shall be the duty of legislators in all future periods of this commonwealth to cherish the interests of learning…”

            Although the War of Independence had done good, it also unleashed its broad share of harm and history has released its record in the bloody excesses of the French Revolution, the Alien and Sedition Act, the oppression and genocide of the Native American peoples, and the American Civil War and so on...until today.  For, as Needleman wrote, we are still living their legacy.  The light of that past is still reflected in our eyes and our lives.

            So what should we ask of our leaders – as the world’s first large scale attempt at democracy, that is the same question as “what should we ask of ourselves”.  We are the leaders – we build them in our schools and elect them.  John Adams and Thomas Jefferson were farmers, content on their lands and yet they were moved to discomfort for the sake of changing the world.  What should we ask of ourselves – busy with our lives and individual challenges?  The time of simple struggle has long passed – if it ever existed.  The time has passed when catch phrases and simplistic visions should fool people.  And yet people are fooled and frightened.  The axis of evil turns within as does the axis of good – humans become, by mistake, that which we most fear and loathe.  The lesson of the 20^th century was that good and evil both live in humanity and need heroic efforts, sincere hearts, and watchful eyes – but the heroic efforts are as much internal as external – the sincere heart as loving as it is needful of love, the watchful eye more on the soul within than on the shadows about.

What is our future?  It lives in our efforts in the present.  The finest inheritance of Unitarian Universalism is a historic, though sometimes forgotten, commitment to the full question, the deep search, and the complex answer that honors the complexity of the human soul – of the power of human hands to make real both dreams and nightmares.  The future of Unitarian Universalism is to honor the wholeness of this world and of the wholeness and strength in the souls of persons.  These are the times that try our souls – therefore our future is here in this time – of trial – may we be guided by our leaders – one another – to make real that display of human greatness and felicity of which our first president spoke.  In each one of you is the soul of greatness – we have established democracy in order to develop that greatness.  May we strengthen one another to stand together -- not indivisible but collective and interdependent and meet our times with discernment, courage, justice, and love.  For this is the time given to us and we are the leaders given to this time.