by Rev. Dr. Marilyn Sewell

A sermon given June 1, 2008

First Unitarian Church

Portland, Oregon

CALL TO WORSHIP

Good morning!

We come together in this place

To give thanks,

To offer forgiveness,

To grow in compassion for both strangers and friends—

Come now, and let us worship together.

“The Devil made me do it.”  You know, I get tired of leaders who fail to take responsibility for their actions— and now we have a new memoir by Scott McClellan, President Bush’s former Press Secretary, who is apparently telling the nation how he was misled by the President and his compatriots about the motives for the war in Iraq.  It wasn’t really McClellan’s fault, you see.  And actually, as I heard him say on NPR the other day, it really wasn’t the fault of the Administration that they led the nation into this ill-conceived, illegal war, this quagmire of death in Iraq—as he said, “We all just got caught up in a system.  That’s just the way the system works.”  It appears McClellan became enlightened about the system soon after receiving a book contract.

Of course, for some time now, our nation has been bent on ridding the whole world of evildoers—or so our President assures us from time to time.  Good luck with this is all I have to say.  You see, in order to rid the world of evil, we would have to just—well, get rid of the world itself; a radical solution, but one which some of our fundamentalist friends are not beyond invoking.

On the other hand, religious liberals too often do not want to acknowledge the presence of evil in the world.  “People are essentially good,” we say.  We understand that people do bad things, but we believe that wrongdoing—the theological term for that is sin—is the result of bad parenting and too little government money spent on social programs.  If only every child had loving parents who read them a story from E.B. White every night, and gave them milk and warm cookies, there would be no more drug addicts and serial killers.  Actually, when we take a hard look, we find that evil is a lot more complicated than that.

Take Hitler, for example.  I mean, why not start at the top of the heap of evildoers?  I asked myself the question that any good liberal would ask, “How could anyone—especially from the same country that spawned Goethe and Beethoven—mastermind the horror of the Holocaust?”  I picked up a hefty tome by Ron Rosenbaum entitled Explaining Hitler: the Search for the Origins of His Evil^[1].  Rosenbaum found that the more he studied, the less he understood.  His most interesting discovery was that scholars were reluctant to actually see Hitler as evil.  A few scholars used terms like “the eruption of demonism” or “near ultimate evil,” but these were in the minority.  Most sought some psycho-social-biological reason; some clear aberration that happened at a point in time to turn this shy, failed artist and one-time homeless man into a mass murderer.  It was simply unbearable to think of anyone doing such deeds without a cause to explain away the behavior.  Let me share with you a few of those scholarly explanations.

A frequent theme is Hitler as victim; he suffered from that most terrible of all contemporary maladies, low self-esteem.  Hitler’s deeds, Alice Miller believes, can be traced to brutal corporal punishment by his father.

Hitler’s mother takes a hit.  Eric Fromm says that Hitler had a “malignant incestuous attachment” to his mom.  Fromm believed Hitler’s hatred for Jews was an unconscious desire to destroy his mother.

Another scholar believes that Hitler’s father may have been the result of an affair between his mother and a mysterious Jew, and that Hitler was driven insane by hatred of his half-Jewish father.

Then there is the germ theory:  Hitler had encephalitis, or he had syphilis, and became mentally deranged.

The most bizarre theory, though, that I ran across was that Hitler supposedly had a missing left testicle, and perhaps had a malformed penis.  Well, that would certainly be reason enough to kill 6,000,000 people.  It appears that one of Hitler’s classmates who was interviewed propagated what is known as the “billy-goat bite story.”  According to the classmate, Hitler was trying to urinate into the mouth of a billy-goat, and the goat, offended, took a bite out of Hitler’s penis.  This book, incidentally, was widely and respectfully reviewed.

Rosenbaum says that the scholars who knew the least seemed to defend their theories the most fiercely.  We need an explanation, or else we suspect that we, too, might have the capacity to torture and to kill.  This possibility is just too much to take in, and yet we have to wonder.  We all know the pictures from Abu Ghraib, which shocked our nation.  Our soldiers did this?  These good American kids from homes fairly similar to ours? 

Many of you have probably heard of the Milgram experiment, which took place at Yale in 1960.  Stanley Milgram, the researcher, planned to visit Germany and perhaps identify what might constitute the “German character” that would have caused this civilized country to descend to such horrendous acts.  He knew that ordinary people could succumb to barbarism under stress, and so before going to Germany, he developed some experiments to try out here at home. 

So these ordinary citizens—people like you and me—were recruited from the streets of New Haven, Connecticut.  They were told that they were part of some scientific research of great importance.  They were asked to slowly interrogate subjects with questions, and when the subject answered incorrectly, to give that person an electric shock.  As the subjects missed more and more questions, the voltage was to be increased.  The subjects began to protest and then in fact when the voltage was increased more and more, began to scream and beg them to stop.  When the citizens hesitated to inflict pain, they were told that they were serving science, and that they should honor the agreement they had made.  In the face of palpable, severe suffering that they thought they were causing, 60 percent of these citizens increased pain to the highest levels.  What the citizens did not know, of course, was that the experiment was rigged.  The subjects were not being shocked but were acting.  Dr. Milgram concluded that he had no need to go to Germany to discover “German character.”  There is no international boundary for such behavior.  I might add, no class boundary, no ethnic boundary, no educational boundary.^[2]

So what I am saying this morning is that these dark forces are alive and well in all of us.  The Devil is a projection of all we do not wish to own that is part of ourselves—part of being human.  It is not a problem for us to be angry, to be fearful, to have feelings of hate or revenge—but it is a problem to keep that part of our humanity in the Shadow; to be ashamed of it, to refuse to bring it out into the light.  That is when we get in trouble, because as I said a couple of Sundays ago, the subconscious always wins.  We human beings do have a choice—no, the Devil didn’t make us do it, the Devil doesn’t make us do any given act—but if we are not aware, if we do not do the psychic work to make ourselves aware, then we will allow those dark forces to have their way.

So are we “fallen,” as traditional Christianity teaches?  Yes, I think we are, if we consider that no one of us is clear and clean and perfect all over the face of the earth.  No, not one—“We all fall short of the glory of God,” as my grandmother used to say.  And yet the Fall has been referred to by some theologians as “the fortunate fall,” for it is a fall into consciousness.  The story of Adam and Eve and the apple and the snake is a story about choice, and in that ability to choose lies all our splendor as human creatures.  We can reflect, we can decide, we can choose.  We have become as gods and therefore have been thrown out of the Garden of Eden, the garden of innocence.  With that evolutionary change in status from animal to human comes moral responsibility. 

St. Paul famously said in Romans, Chapter 7, “For the good that I would, I do not: but the evil which I would not, that I do.”  The scripture may or may not be familiar, but surely the sentiment is.  Have you ever been unkind or mean-spirited and then looked at yourself, looked at the person who behaved that way, and asked yourself, “Who was that?”  We all think we are the CEO’s of our personhood, and then we discover all these autonomous personalities who can leap out at any given moment.  “That’s not me!” we say to ourselves.  Actually, that is us.  We need to acknowledge all that we are, and we need to invite continuous dialogue among all the parts of ourselves, or our less-than-conscious impulses will drive our behavior.

I have noticed that when I am feeling most judgmental of others, that is when I am feeling most insecure.  Let us take misconduct among clergy. It was easy for me to become condemning last year when one of our downtown ministers was found to be stealing from his church.  He is gone now, and facing a jail sentence.  Rather than judging him, it would have served me better to reflect on the times in my own life when as a clergyperson I felt needy, the times when I felt empty and tried to fill that emptiness in inappropriate ways.  We all skate on the thinnest of ices as we cope with the yearnings of our souls.

I want to speak of the dangers of ideology.  Because not knowing, because uncertainty makes us feel so vulnerable, we are all susceptible to glomming onto ideas or concepts as if they held a concrete reality—which they do not.  We think we will be saved, made secure, by some movement or other.  Any ideology—whether it is capitalism or Christianity or Marxism or whatever—any system of ideas is humanly formed and arbitrary and should be subjected to doubt and questioning. 

In fact, most evil is done in the name of some greater good.  What the Nazis did, they could not have done so efficiently had they not thought they were serving some higher order.  The problem with any fundamentalist stance is that it puts goodness in a box and wraps it up.  The way can no longer be questioned.  Some people are in, others are out;   we are good, they are bad.

When we begin to think of ourselves of virtuous, that may be the first sign that we are about to fall from grace.  It goes something like this:  “I’m doing great—wasn’t I?”  One of my favorite Jungian authors is James Hollis, and in his book Why Good People Do Bad Things, he gives a series of questions that help us get at the shadow side, that help bring to consciousness those understandings we’d rather not look at.  Let me share a few of those questions with you this morning.

First, he says, since we all aspire to virtue, what do you consider your greatest virtue?  Is there any time in your life when that virtue has been harmful to others?

Second, what annoys you most about your partner or others in general?  He quotes his sagacious wife as defining a committed relationship as the act of “finding someone you can annoy for a very long time.”  Is it not possible that we chose that person because of that very annoyance?  Perhaps it is easier to blame another than to deal with our own shadow. 

Third, how do you repeatedly undermine yourself?  Where do you flee from your best, your riskiest self?

Fourth, where do Mom and Dad still govern your life?  (Not literally, but through a set of messages that you have internalized.)

Speaking of Mom and Dad still governing your life, let me tell you the story of a woman I know, a business acquaintance.  For years she was preoccupied with taking care of her ailing parents.  Every time I would see her, she would speak of their illnesses, their medical appointments, their frailty.  She also had a boyfriend, who was last on her list of concerns since, after all, she was a dutiful daughter and responsible for her parents.  This went on for the 10 or so years that I knew her, and then the parents died—both of them, first one and then the other not too long after.  I thought, “At last, she will be able to make a commitment to her long-suffering boyfriend.”

So I asked her, “So are you and Steve going to get married now?”  And she said no, that they had broken up. She really did not have all that much time to be with him anyway, because her next door neighbors were elderly and needed her care, so she was involved with taking them to the doctor, helping them get their meds.  How much was she choosing her life, and how much was she living out of a pattern she had been given?  To live in the shadow without awareness is to forego your full humanity, your splendor as a human being.

Bringing the dark side into consciousness means not putting the blame “out there”; no, Scott McClellan, you were not misled by the administration, you consciously misled others—lots of them—over and over again.  Living with awareness means that you will be less likely to wound the one you love, to betray your friend, to be unkind to the stranger.  You will understand in all humility that we share this condition of fallible human flesh; that we want to do the good and often fail at doing so.  When we place ourselves above people, and judge them as Other, we tear out a part of our own human heart.

It is all too easy to remain entangled in the very thing we wish to flee.  It is not the Devil, it is not others, it is not Mom and Dad; it is our own unwillingness to do the hard work of growing up, of accepting all that we are, of making the choices that would set us free. 

Sometimes we are visited by grace, in one blessed form or another, and we come to understand that we are not determined by our history—we are not, and our country is not.  We come to see that we are holy stuff, made to choose, called to bless the world with the uniqueness of our life; our one life that is like no other, a life that never has been and never will be again.  Though we are fated to live in Mystery, we are able to stand as witnesses to the truth: that new choices can be made, that love can heal, and that what is partial can be made whole.  So be it.  Amen.

PRAYER

Spirit of Life, we confess that too often we have been content to stay in the shadow, because waking up asks too much of us—too much energy, too much time, perhaps too much hope.  It is easier to stay in the same patterns, even when we are hurting others and hurting ourselves.  We pray for strength and courage to say yes to all that we are, that we might become all that we were meant to be.  Amen.

BENEDICTION

Quoting from the poet, William Stafford, “It is important that awake people be awake.” May you have the courage to be awake, that you might live your life fully and bless the world.  Go in love and go in peace.  Amen.

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Copyright 2008, Rev. Dr. Marilyn Sewell.  All rights reserved.