Full of Wonder, Full of Dread
In the neighborhood where I grew up in Maryland, all of the kids got together in the afternoon to play in the street. Kickball and capture the flag were our favorites, with football and kick the can coming in a close second. We played uninterrupted for hours, losing ourselves in the setting sun and the joy of the game. One thing though, could bring us to a screeching halt - if the ball went into the Ridgely's yard, the game was over. Rumors had spread that the Ridgely's had an alarm system on their meticulously manicured lawn and that if you went on to it, even if you just wanted to get your ball, you would be shot immediately. None of us had any evidence to support this rumor, in fact I even learned later, as a teenager, that the Ridgely's were nice people - but when I was eight years old, you could not have convinced me of this. I knew, all of the neighborhood children knew, that to go onto the Ridgely's lawn meant certain death. So, after the loss of each ball we spent hours with our noses pressed up against the side fence of their yard-watching our ball and daring each other to go get it, waiting for just the right moment when a brave child would break away from the pack, dash out across the lawn, and return alive and victorious.
So many movies carry scenes just like this one, children crouched low on the far side of a broken down fence - eyes glued to the looming house in front of them - the house that holds the neighborhood's secret - the house that holds the recluse, the fabled witch, the elderly man, the sick child, the different - children not yet chased away by their parents, by the neighbors, by the people inside the house - they have not yet learned to be ashamed of their fascination with death, with fear, with the different and the difficult - they know this fascination as exhilarating, enlivening, something that makes their pulse quicken and their breathing turn shallow, a mystery before them that they do not comprehend. This fascination, I believe, is our fascination too. We may drive by the house now, glancing as we pass to see the lights on - and wonder what is inside. What would we find inside that house, inside our own hearts, if we dared to look.
Oftentimes, as adults, we dare not look deeply into those places of dark and mumbled fame. We leave fairy tales and midnight explorations to the children, occasionally allowing our fascination to emerge when we go to the movies, read a book, or attend an art exhibit. Our culture does not give adults much opportunity to examine the true complexity of fear, evil or violence. Instead, our culture encourages a constant striving for more money, more things, more escape and more distance from the realities of our life and our human limitations while all the time convincing us that danger lurks around every corner and in the face of every stranger. While anxiety leaps from every newscast, we are not encouraged to look deeply at our fears or their connection to reality. Rare indeed are the moments when we investigate the things we fear, looking closely at the realities of our limitations - moments when we look at death, at our undeniable dependence upon one another and the earth, at the loneliness we sometimes feel when we slow down long enough to notice.
We are taught, over time, both by our culture and by our emotional responses, to turn away from those dark and mumbled places of fame. But try as we might to escape it, evil comes to us in many forms.
I like to think that I don't really know evil, that somehow I am not qualified to speak of it, that it is distant from my life and from my experiences, but if I sit still for even a moment, I know differently.
I have known evil in my home - when someone has spoken or moved in a way to intentionally hurt another, when someone, considering only themselves, ignored the needs of others and gathered all of the resources into a tight circle about them. I have known evil in my work - hearing the stories of children and families - stories of abuse and neglect, poverty and discrimination so subtle and so severe that they tore lives apart, removing the through-line of connection that holds a person and a family together. I have known evil in the world - in stories of war and hate crimes, in nightly accounts of politicians and religious leaders separating and denouncing entire groups of people, in stories of suicide bombings and seemingly random violence. And, perhaps most difficult of all, I have known evil in myself - those moments when anger rises in my throat, my thinking clouds, far and shame take center stage and I long to strike out or shut down.
Evil is not so far from me after all, much as I am always trying to increase the distance. Whenever I attempt to shut off one part of myself or the world, whenever I try to put some difficult experience or feeling away indefinitely, my life gets a little bit smaller, my world contracts, and I lose a bit of myself and of my ability to connect deeply with others. When I turn away from evil, I willfully turn away from a clearer knowledge of my own heart and of the world.
And I want, more than anything, to know this world, to know my heart, to live with it as free and open as a barn door, taking in all that is before me. I want, more than anything, to live a whole and full life, a life where I join with others to create the world of justice and beauty that we long for. I want a life where I can offer a true hand to those in need, always searching for and finding the points of connection I share with another. I want a life of compassion, and as the theologian, Henri Nouwen says, "For the compassionate person nothing human is alien: no joy and no sorrow, no way of living and no way of dying."
People who deal with the difficult daily, people whose eyes are open wide to the horrors we commit against one another, directors of prison systems, counselors on the frontlines of gruesome wars and sights of terror, survivors and perpetrators of abuse, many of these folks agree on one thing when it comes to talking about the human capacity for evil. Fred Alford, scholar and author of the book, What Evil Means to Us, puts it this way. "Evil," he says, "is what reveals to us the limits of being human...The root of all evil is the inability to love or value anything, and the dread this inability" to love or value anything evokes.
We are more likely to turn to violence, to inflict pain on others out of ignorance or intention when we are disconnected from ourselves and from our communities. When we turn away from love, from the vibrant beating of our own hearts, we are less likely to see and name evil when it occurs, and we are more likely to contribute, either passively or actively, to the doing of evil in the world. When we stay connected to ourselves, when we join with others committed to living with eyes and hearts open to all that is, we are far more likely to see and name evil when it exists, and we are far more likely to resist and change the situation effectively.
Living as whole and healthy people, we come to know that thinking about and experiencing evil will not break us - living our lives as whole and healthy people, we may come to fear the state of ignorance and disconnection more than evil itself. We may come to know that we, like all people, carry the potential for both evil and good; that we, like all people, make choices within the frame of reference we are given; that we, like all people, carry a deep responsibility to constantly expand that frame of reference to include ever more people and possibilities.
Several years ago, I took an intensive course at Meadville Lombard Theological School titled "Evil, Trauma and Ambiguity." Ministers, scholars and ministers in training - we arrived in Chicago from all over the country to meet for five days in a row, eight hours a day. By day four of the class, a bond had formed. We had watched The Deer Hunter, shared personal experiences of violence and trauma and read and discussed several theories of evil. We learned that experiences of evil often share five common characteristics: an experience of fragmentation, feelings of helplessness, loss of language or the inability to communicate, a feeling of timelessness and redundancy and extremes of behavior or of the environment. The articulation of these characteristics was new to me, and I found it helpful to see that things like an inability to communicate and feelings of helplessness and fragmentation might exist both as pre-conditions to and as results of encounters with evil.
We sat together, sharing thoughts about a particular reading, when my friend Karen spoke up - "Wait a minute," she said, and after a brief pause, she began to tell her story. "Twenty years ago, when I was in college, I woke up one night and there was a man in my bed, he was taking off my clothes. I couldn't speak. I lay there, paralyzed. After a few moments I reached up to the bunk above where my roommate was sleeping, grabbed onto her covers and pulled until she woke up. She turned on the light and chased the man out. I wanted to scream, to yell, to make him stop myself, but I did not. I've carried that experience with me for years" she said - "I've taken every self-defense class I could, practiced screaming, 'No' at the top of my lungs at a fake attacker, reminded myself that I am a powerful, confident woman - but still, when I looked back on that night all I've been able to feel is anger and shame - anger at myself for not stopping him, shame that I could not speak, that I could not protect myself." She paused for a moment and looked up, "But now I see it differently, my experience is like so many others - when evil confronted me face to face, body to body, alone, I lost the ability to speak - I was simply stunned, I experienced the loss of language so many of these authors have described."
I looked across the room at my friend and, wanting to honor her deep sharing and openness to transformation I said, "Karen, you just did six months' worth of therapy in five minutes." She smiled, and that's when my professor stepped in - my professor who has dedicated her life to the practice of psychotherapy and ministry. "Most therapy," she said, "exists in lieu of community." A ripple spread across the room - most of us there had either been in or were currently involved in a therapeutic relationship, and all of us had recommended it to others at different points. We knew the deep need for connection and healing that therapy can fill, and we agreed that it is often a useful tool.
As we let the professor's words settle in, we slowly started to talk again, this time sharing stories of transformation and shifts in perspective that happened in an instant - moments of insight and hope that changed our lives when a friend or a minister, a therapist or a teacher or family member really heard us, saw who we were, offered us some new information and allowed us to see ourselves and our stories anew.
Those moments, when we see and re-write our history, when we come to know ourselves and our experiences anew, when old ways of being crack open and the sunlight shines in - those moments happen most often in community - they happen when we are living in relationship with others. In our culture, so many of us lack that community where we live in deep relationship with others. While meditation and reflection, prayer and time alone reading and writing and walking are indeed good for the soul - they are rarely enough to create an environment for spiritual growth and transformation all on their own.
When I try to do things on my own, whether it is fixing the bed frame so that the boards don't all out anymore or whether I am trying to learn how to mediate and reach some semblance of inner peace, I have often found that I can get there on my own if I try really hard, but it takes twice as long, sometimes I strain my back, and I rarely have any fun in the process. I have also found, that try as I might, there are certain things I simply cannot do on my own. I need other people to help me gain a new perspective, to hold up one side of the bed frame, to comfort and strengthen me in difficult moments. And I need to reach out to others and offer my help as well. There are certain feelings I cannot have on my own: the feeling of compassion and empathy when I truly see another person and their struggles, the feeling of joy and connection when I create something of beauty and share it with another. Whether I like it or not, I need other people.
I find these people, these connections to myself, to others and to the world, the encouragement to stay awake and aware and engaged in the world, when I come to church. In this place of wonder and possibility, we are offered fellow travelers for the journey, an ever-broadening wealth of knowledge and alternate perspectives and a deep engagement with the questions themselves.
And, hopefully, we also find here a bit of love and connection - food for our spiritual journey - a community that can shore us up and help us to tear down the ideas and the beliefs that harm us and our world. Hopefully, here we find a place where our stories are welcomed, where our experiences, as varied and complicated and complex as they are, come with us into this sacred space.
When something happens in our life that changes everything, when evil comes to our door, either from within or from without - we are left needing to make sense of our experiences. As Unitarian Universalists, we approach these questions of life with a willingness to dispose of the dualities that crowd our culture and instead look deeply into the paradox of existence. We believe that life, that ideas of good and evil, are more complicated than a simplistic solution can offer us, and we look instead to the world in all of its glory and limitations - to our own experience and to the experiences of others - to science and the reason of our minds - that we might craft an integrated and useful understanding of this world and our place in it. As we bump up against our own experience of evil in the world, in ourselves, in those we love - we must work to stay engaged, to create an understanding of our experiences and the experiences of others, so that we can reach beyond ourselves and create the world of beauty and justice we so long for.
Ultimately, I believe that it is love and connection that draws us, as individuals and as a community, away from the doing of evil, and ultimately, I believe, it is love and connection that helps us to deal with the evil we inevitably experience. It is love and connection with ourselves, with others, and with the world that help us to stay engaged, to avoid the seductive path of disconnection and apathy; it is love and connection that help us to know ourselves in all that we are - that allow us to experience the fullness of being human, with all of its wonder and all of its dread. It is this community, the community of intimate friends and trusted strangers, that calls us into knowing who we really are, that calls us out of passivity and into action, that calls us by our true names.
May the community we find here and in all areas of our life strengthen us with its love and connection, challenging and supporting us that we might reach beyond ourselves to offer care to another. May the community we find here and in all areas of our life call us by our true names, awakening us to the truth within and without, that we might know our stories and make sense of our lives.
May it be so, and Amen.
August 7, 2005