Freedom’s Veteran’s

A Sermon Offered at the Unitarian Universalist Church

By Rev. Hilary Landau Krivchenia

On November 10, 2002

Readings

Ralph Waldo Emerson from Politics
We know how much is due from us.  The very strife of trade and ambition are the poor amends, the fig-leaf with which the shamed soul attempts to hide its nakedness. Each of us has some talent, can do somewhat useful, graceful, formidable, amusing, or lucrative. That we do, as an apology to others and to ourselves, for not reaching the mark of a good and equal life. It does give us the tranquility of the strong when we walk abroad. Each seems to say, `I am not all here.' Senators and presidents have climbed so high with pain enough, not because they think the place specially agreeable, but as an apology for real worth, and to vindicate their manhood in our eyes. This is their compensation to themselves for being of a poor, cold, hard nature. They must do what they can. Like one class of forest animals climb they must, or crawl.

We live in a very low state of the world, and pay unwilling tribute to governments founded on force. There is not a sufficient belief in the unity of things to persuade them that society can be maintained without artificial restraints, or that the private citizen might be reasonable, and a good neighbor, without the hint of a jail or a confiscation.  What is strange too, there never was in any man sufficient faith in the power of rectitude, to inspire him with the broad design of renovating the State on the principle of right and love.

Ernest Benn wrote:

Liberty is being free from the things we don't like in order to be slaves of the things we do like.

George Orwell From Animal Farm

"Is it not crystal clear, then, comrades, that all the evils of this life of ours spring from the tyranny of human beings? Only get rid of Man, and the produce of our labour would be our own. Almost overnight we could become rich and free. What then must we do? Why, work night and day, body and soul, for the overthrow of the human race! That is my message to you, comrades: Rebellion! I do not know when that Rebellion will come, it might be in a week or in a hundred years, but I know, as surely as I see this straw beneath my feet, that sooner or later justice will be done. Fix your eyes on that, comrades, throughout the short remainder of your lives! And above all, pass on this message of mine to those who come after you, so that future generations shall carry on the struggle until it is victorious.

"And remember, comrades, your resolution must never falter. No argument must lead you astray. Never listen when they tell you that Man and the animals have a common interest, that the prosperity of the one is the prosperity of the others. It is all lies. Man serves the interests of no creature except himself. And among us animals let there be perfect unity, perfect comradeship in the struggle. All men are enemies. All animals are comrades."

Sermon

Tomorrow is November 11 – Veterans Day – what was once called Armistice Day.  It began in 1918 in England and France, when unknown soldiers were buried to honor those who had died in war and to plant the hope that war had ended for all time.  It was done – as the Veteran’s website says – at the eleventh hour, on the eleventh day, of the eleventh month,. The eleventh hour is a time of dread and promise.  In 1921, The United States followed suit by burying an unknown soldier at Arlington National Cemetery.  It is important to honor every year the lives and deaths of those who have fought in the world’s battle’s – not because war is the only answer to our conflicts—it is not – but because these are the people who have given their lives to serve the only vision we, as human beings could hold in their time.  People who gave their lives while humanity struggled toward better answers through the smoke and fire of history.

Today I seek to honor those people – people in my family and yours – who have served and suffered and died.  But also I claim for every one of us – that we are all, in fact, veterans – we all in our bodies, our inheritances, our freedoms, our prisons, our hopes and our despairs -- carry the scars and the medals of all the world’s struggles. 

Here in America – and I suspect in many nations – we speak of freedom – of our battles to preserve it, to engender it in other nations, to exercise it.  Too often – in the face of tyranny – humble individuals have been forced to rise and drive back that tyranny – to reclaim freedom. 

We are all Freedom’s Veterans.

What is this freedom for which we have killed and for which we die? 

In all probability, there are as many answers to that question as there are people to answer it.

Political, personal, religious, intellectual, social, economic – These freedoms can be established within society – we can try to legislate, promote, and protect them.  But -- how can you legislate them into existence?  It is easier to legislate away freedoms – easier to create restriction than to create openness.  Easier to repress – easier for the force of fear to rule.  Fear and freedom live always in tension.  Political, personal, religious, intellectual social, economic – these freedoms are the lifeblood of a healthy society – and yet they are completely contingent -- they depend upon a constant attention and devotion.

Thomas Paine who sometimes attended the very first Unitarian Church in England sais: “Those who expect to reap the blessings of freedom must undergo the fatigues of supporting it.”  As the folk song goes – freedom is a constant struggle.  Freedom is a work between us and within us.  Every freedom we want society to insure arises from a deeper freedom – one born in each person – a freedom that may grow and flourish or die in the heart and mind.  

     Freedom comes into existence only as people are capable of imagining it first – and therefore the laws of any land change only as the people are able to envision changing – and then only remain changed as the people are able to sustain that vision.  We can only ensure, legislate, create – what we can first conceive in the mind.  Emerson said that the state exists to educate the wise – to foster wisdom.  Even now, when we look at the best of our public school system we can still see the traces of this belief – nourished by earlier Unitarians – like Elizabeth Peabody and Horace Mann – the belief that the state that would be free owes to each person, to every soul – the tools of freedom – education, social awareness, the power to reason, the support of the search for knowledge.  Each state supports a military to ensure freedom from foreign tyrants.  The state which supports real education affirms that freedom begins within the nation – first – in the strength and wisdom of the citizens.  When our schools fail in this it is seldom the teachers or the advocates of education who have failed – it is because the state itself fully understands and chooses not to fund the power and freedom born of reason and knowledge.

Jacob Needleman, in The Soul of America, calls the creature of habit and fear, the socially conditioned self.  Imagine the society created by people who live free in reason and knowledge rather than habit and fear.  Sir Karl Popper called this emancipation through knowledge.  It is not sufficient – this freedom beyond the socially conditioned self -- but it is necessary for all other freedoms.  

What is this self?  It might be the happy slave, the submissive wife, the non-voter, the rampant consumer, the one who believes that only the Christian speaks with God or only the Muslim, or the Jew.  The socially conditioned self might be the one addicted to drugs or television, the one who worships the dollar, the power ranger, power broker, compulsive lone ranger, the rocked out, numbed and plugged in, the Obsession of Calvin Klein, the citizen of the world of Ralph Lauren.  The socially conditioned self hates abortion but gets one seeing no other options, yet continues to condemn those others who choose.  The socially conditioned self is formed by choice – yes – but by hapless and unseeing choice.  Like the child given a choice between the blue or the green outfit who does not quite imagine yet nor remember all the options waiting in the dresser. 

Needleman says that independence/self-determination means the submission of the physically and socially conditioned aspects of the self to the interior power of conscious self-hood.  He’s really echoing Emerson here – this is Character – this strong, centered free person – whose freedom begins within and radiates outward.  This person is neither rigidly individualistic nor mindlessly absorbed by the group.  This is not a social mask – but an authentic self.  Emerson is not speaking alone here – this is the voice of the Enlightenment – the most enduring – though at times distorted voice – the champion of the authentic self – speaking with Thoreau, Whitman, Kant, Jefferson, and Lincoln – who may have disagreed on many other things but would have been of one voice in this – Whitman said:

“I hail with joy the oceanic energy, the demand for facts but woe to the land in which these things do not tend to ideas.  So must wealth, science, materialism – even this democracy unerringly feed the highest mind.”  The authentic self is the highest mind of which he sang.  The authentic self is free of both reactive, irritated, isolated individualism and free of the mob and market.  The authentic self is free to choose to be fully alive – to be alive to be choosing.  Not a ghost living among ghost images but a real person able to see through illusions to what is real.

Again – here’s a concept to be careful with – too often the notion of a transcendent world – a world of meaning -- is the notion of that which is otherworldly – pure and ideal. I mean no sleight of hand --what is real is here – embodied – it isn’t maybe Maybelline.  It is a human face.  In the case of the child given the choice of blue and green outfits to be fully alive and alert is to suddenly awaken to the rest of the wardrobe – above the choices that were offered.  We are seldom given more than hints – certainly we are seldom taught our wider choices in school.  There’s too much fear that we might actually exercise them.  Popper called this exercise a critical realism – the ability to think and reason beyond force of habit and fear into freedom and reality. 

I saw an ad on television this week in which a young woman is eyeing a pair of shoes.  She gazes into the store window and slowly pulls out her credit card.  She wants the shoes – they sing her a siren song.  Then her eye is caught by a sign for purchasing a home – the message is that she’s remembered what’s really important and she is saving up for the important stuff, the real stuff.  We are seldom given more than hints.  What about the woman who puts the card back in her pocket and envisions moving into a co-housing settlement, where there’s wind generated electricity and sun-heated water.  We have a cultural expression – thinking outside the box – but it’s never really meant to go too far.  What about the woman who buys someone else a pair of shoes?  Or who buys a set of paints and renders a work of art.  Or scrawls a picket sign.  Or teaches a child to paint.  Or paints a house – a house for someone else.  We are not meant to think too far – that would be an unthinkable freedom.  It would be a burdensome freedom – in some liberating way. 

Needleman – at one point rhapsodizes that, for all one may be inspired by the words and the struggles of Lincoln -- it is the face of the man that will, finally, draw and inspire – a face drawn by care, work, and intelligence.  A face bearing the noble scars and etchings of life. 

No, the way of freedom is not easy – and, as the animals illustrated – inner and outer freedom – freedom within and freedom between are inextricably linked.  One tyranny will be replaced by another.  Our vision is blurred within hours of victory.  The just are assassinated.  Reconstructions are lost and abandoned.  Struggle continues.

Yet, once freedom is recognized and treasured – on this bone deep level – it is never in isolation -- we are all connected – not by fibers delicate and invisible – but like the iron chords of fate.  Even for Emerson the individualist – freedom and character would create in the soul a deep love for what is real and what is real is that we are connected and our destinies are linked.  The existentialists preached this – Jean Paul Sartre said that freedom was a burden – for all of reality was powerfully enmeshed. Once we recognize the nature of freedom we see that no one’s freedom is greater than that of the least free.  Sartre said: Man condemned to be free carries the whole world.  Carries the whole world.  My freedom is in your freedom and yours is in mine.  This is what we don’t learn in school.

Do Not Listen – cried the old Major – to those who would say that human and animal destinies are connected – nor Black and White, Male and Female, Vietnamese and American, nor Christian, Jew, and Muslim, nor Palestinian and Israeli, nor American and Iraqi and on and on.

The chords of a common destiny bind us all as the Rev. Martin Luther King said.  Freedom begins when we begin to be creatively maladjusted to one another’s suffering – when we see that our destiny is in our hands -- joined.

At the same time there is a danger that we may underestimate the power of the myths around us – the myths to consume, destroy, dominate, control, the vague and golden future and on and on.  Popper says that the society that believes strongly enough in the apocalypse will bring it about – it is no mystery waiting to be revealed – but a script waiting for actors to embody it.  The free person knows that these are human forces – strong ones and yet merely human. 

Looking through history it is only those who can see freedom and then are willing to risk for freedom who can press freedom forward for all other people.  But first freedom is seeded within.  So, freedom begins within each person – and I don’t mean this in some indulgent way – I don’t mean that I might print up a bumper sticker that says my freedom first – or visualize freedom.  Freedom radiates from the inside out.

From the inside out.  In September, I spoke about the ability to Listen Mindfully – to listen with freedom – to shut down the static in the head and simply hear.  It takes work – this mindfulness – it takes, perhaps, that critical realism that Popper spoke of.  These words I speak here – are my words.  They mean something to me – even enough that I share them with you – but first you have to know they are mine.  Then to realize that you may respond to these words.  If you are not mindful you will not hear these words of mine – but only your reactions.  No new doors will open for you.  Caught in ancient hearing or not hearing.  Caught up in your own static so that you hear not what I say – nor what I mean or hope for – but only what you hope or fear that I mean to say.  Two weeks ago I talked about mindful speaking – so that you can calm your heart and mind before you speak.  I spoke at length about the tension in a kitchen over the use of cilantro – but it was all simply to say that the freedom to say what you really mean – not to fly off the handle – real freedom of expression comes from knowing your interior well.

This place, this time is for that – to hear – against this voice and against the silences – the voice within.  Are you truly free to hear and speak creatively – with awareness?  Do you really know what you hope and know what you need.  Beyond the fancy shoes, beyond the inauthentic self – what you truly need.  This parcel of land or peace, this bale of cotton or justice, this high-rise office building or fair housing, this job or that meaningful task.  Do you want to win more than you want what you really want and need?  Do you win by force?  Do you learn by shouts or fists?  Here we leave room – we make room, we call upon the sound of your own conscience.  That is freedom.  Do you want to win more than you want what you really want and need?  How free are you to enjoy, to create, to foster what you really need – versus the only way you have always imagined it.  This takes a fierce attention.  It is a practice like that which trains the hands or the voice for music.  Remember the hermit who has found perfect peace and equanimity because he is alone?  The moment someone disturbs his perfect peace he is at war in himself and with the world again.  Our worst tyrants live in our own heads and hearts.  Triggered by a million things outside of us.  Freedom from those takes a mindfulness – an awareness that absorbs and liberates. 

Mindfulness of hearing allows the mind to truly know, observe the world.  Mindful speaking allows the voice freedom to express the deepest and best that we each have to offer. Freedom here arises, again, first in the self – as Emerson, Popper, Sartre, Kant, as Jefferson claimed – in awareness, knowledge, understanding, in mindfulness of being.  In mindful being – like mindful hearing and speaking – we are freed again from habit. Every action we take rises from real choice.  I knew someone who’d had multiple surgeries as a child and had a fear of doctors and people in white coats.  He would feel his stomach just drop when he saw them.  Finally he thought enough about it and realized – in his heart – that he was grown up and safe now – he ceased being afraid – he was free.   

We were born for freedom but live always on a tenuous edge.  All around us the myths coagulate – of saviors, heavens, final solutions, simple formulas, bipartisan answers – the meagerest inheritance of history.  Fear and freedom live always in tension.  The founders – favored and flawed knew this tension and built it into law.  This week, our nation voted in a daunting loss of checks and balances.  Yet we are not slaves to the past, we are agents of the future.  Furthermore, other nobler jewels have been handed on to us.  Rough won and hard kept.  Yet here is the core of our faith – through history – to think freely beyond the bounds of any book, un-coerced, un-intimidated.  Here we call upon the hearing of your conscience.  That is freedom.

That was the promise of American freedom and the vibrance of a land conceived in but that could move also beyond the Enlightenment – that could engender the freedom of the individual within the freedom of community.  These are our promised inheritances – only promised – they must be attained and re-attained in every mind and heart, in every school and church.  Freedom is not just space and economic power – not only license and choice – it is the ability to choose well – to reason and to keep generating greater freedom.  This is our inheritance not to squander -- in America, there is no glory to defend if we loose this deep freedom – no land of the free where the free cannot think.  This is not the freedom that our governments easily grant you can see from the repression that so hastily followed the Second World War.  Our freedom is one we must exercise to keep – exercise in partnership with one another. 

When we honor those who fought – in WWI, in WWII, in the Civil War – when we honor those veterans – this is the freedom – deep inside them, that they thought they were fighting for.  This was Franklin’s freedom, Jefferson’s freedom, Emerson’s freedom, Susan B. Anthony’s freedom, Florence Nightingale’s freedom, Roebling’s freedom, Louisa may Alcott’s freedom – Olympia Brown’s freedom and on and on the list of Unitarians and Universalists goes.

This is our fire and our hope – a freedom that can conceive of answers to the world’s suffering beyond the hazy answers even of the glorious past.  There is no us and them – no perfect tyrants or saviors.  Remember the president who called this nation a million points of light?  It was the poet W.H. Auden who sang – “Yes, dotted everywhere/ Ironic points of light/ Flash out whenever the Just/ Exchange their messages.”  Not points of light like holiday lights but flashing illumination – bright reason – blazing freedom.  No light divides the heavens from the earth – they are one.  There is no promise that freedom endures – beyond the promise we make together – there is no divine hand in history waiting to form our path through the sea or calm the flood. 

There is no divine hand but our own.  That is the lesson of this faith.  As this is a place that cherishes freedom let us serve that freedom in love and courage. Let us take it into the open – for it is one salve needed by an aching world.  Let us offer this faith as a reminder of the truths – often lost – upon which this country hoped to be founded.  Let us honor the veteran’s of freedoms struggles – each one of us – all who have lived and served before and risked all for freedom and paid our price.  Let us make our lives and our chalice – this church a beacon by which any may come and witness freedom – any may come witness and participate in freedom and be heartened to go forth again and again to build it with human hands.