Containing Multitudes
It has not been a week for good news, has it. So many difficult events have been reported to us from around the world: on-going attacks in places like Nigeria, Afghanistan and Egypt – a passenger plane shot down over the Ukraine seemingly by a missile – the Israeli invasion of Gaza: and nearer to home several serious announcements of the possible abuse of young people in faith settings. Pope Francis this week reported the result of his request to his advisors as to the extent of the problem of Catholic priests abusing their power over children. The pope described how his advisors had attempted to re-assure him that no more than 2% of clergy were engaged in such behaviour. But Pope Francis can do the maths like the rest of us and worked out that this means that an estimated one in fifty Catholic priests, bishops and cardinals are potentially involved in such sexually abusive behaviour towards children in their care. The pope expressed what most of us would probably say: “I find this situation intolerable”. In the same week Justin Welby, Archbishop of Canterbury, expressed his concern that such abuse has been under-reported in probably every institution in the land, including his own Church of England and that victims of abuse who do dare to speak up have been poorly dealt with. News continues to emerge of the long term suppression of information about a possible paedophile ring centred in Westminster. This has not been a good week for news.
And when I hear difficult news one of the problems for me, and I don’t know if this is the same for you – but I really struggle to understand how people can behave so very, very badly towards other people. So in this address I am exploring ways to come to terms with our complex and contradictory natures as human beings. If this address has a message it’s that all of us are fragmented beings with many different sides to us. The more conscious we are of all these different aspects of ourselves the less likely we are to damage other people.
I wonder if you remember when you first became aware of what happened in Europe during the Holocaust of World War Two? I remember my shock, my disbelief and then slow understanding of some of the Holocaust’s horrors. I also remember exploring the issues of the cold blooded cruelty and the systematic annihilation of fellow human beings in my own mind, hardly daring at times to read just what depths of depravity we humans can sink to. And I remember at some point having to ask myself ‘what part might I have played in this ghastly time if it had been my misfortune to be alive then; would I have had the courage to stand up against such injustices?’ Self-examination for most of us probably brings the answer that in truth we cannot know how we would have behaved, followed by an acknowledgement that in the wrong circumstances at the wrong time many of us would have at the least condoned evil acts, or committed them ourselves. Russian writer Alexander Solzhenitsyn explores this potential within each of us when he writes that
“If only there were evil people somewhere insidiously committing evil deeds, and it were necessary only to separate then from the rest of us and destroy them. But the line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being. And who is willing to destroy a piece of his own heart?”
The word evil is not one you’ll often hear in a Unitarian setting. Our tradition tends to emphasise the good; traditionally Unitarians have not accepted the doctrine of ‘original sin’ – the idea that humans are born sinful. But a brief scan of world events reveals our human potential for truly terrible behaviour and somehow we need to make sense of that. One path is to describe it as evil – as something over there, different from us – those are bad people, we are good. But another more psychologically accurate view acknowledges the truth that each and every one of us has the potential for just about anything given certain circumstances. We need then to recognise that within each of us is the potential for behaviours that could be described as good and evil as well as a host of possibilities between those two extremes.
A story from the native American tradition attempts to explain this:
A grandfather is telling his granddaughter about a fight that is going on inside himself. He described it is as though the fight is between two wolves. One is evil: Anger, envy, sorrow, regret, greed, arrogance, self-pity, guilt, resentment, inferiority, lies, false pride, superiority and ego. The other wolf represents good: Joy, peace, love, hope, serenity, humility, kindness, benevolence, empathy, generosity, truth, compassion and faith. The granddaughter thought about it for a minute and then asked her grandfather, “Which wolf wins?”
Her grandfather simply replied, “The one I feed.”
This story makes sense to me but I don’t think I would use the word evil to describe feelings such as ‘anger, envy, sorrow, regret, greed, arrogance, self-pity, guilt, resentment, inferiority, lies, false pride, superiority and ego’. I think these are simply quite normal human emotions and experiences. These are ordinary human states that most of us will find ourselves in from time to time – but yes I’m with the grandfather when he speaks of what we feed. I know how a small feeling in me can build up because I focus upon it. I’ve known some bitterness and resentment build from small beginnings to a major blockage in my life, because I’ve just not been able to stop myself from thinking about it. And I’m also aware of ways in which supressing an emotion – pretending that I don’t feel a certain way – can also build up, almost like a pressure cooker and then a sudden outburst, triggered by something quite small, can suddenly erupt. And then I’m taken aback by a feeling’s intensity be that in myself or in another.
And if we humans do manage to push a feeling or desire deeply enough into our unconscious there is always the possibility that we will then project that desire out into the world – hence the relatively frequent surprise announcement that some worthy church leader who has spoken so fervently about the importance of marriage has been conducting a hidden affair.
My favourite version of that scenario was Prime Minister John Major who spoke earnestly of family values and the sanctity of marriage and was then found later to have been having an affair with Edwina Currie one of his Cabinet ministers. It was funny but don’t we all have something of that ability to delude ourselves somewhere in our natures. Don’t we all have our version of Edwina Currie lurking somewhere in the background of our lives?!There are very few of us I suspect who know ourselves in our entirety. We are all to greater or lesser extents fragmented from ourselves; we are far more complicated than we generally suppose.
I have my colleague Bill Darlison to thanks for this example from literature. Bill contrasts Tolstoy’s ability to describe so sensitively the human condition with his indifferent treatment of his own wife and family. He quotes from Tolstoy’s last work Resurrection: “One of the most widespread superstitions is that every person has his or her own special definite qualities: that he or she is kind, cruel, wise, stupid, energetic, apathetic, and so on. People are not like that. We may say of a man that he is more often kind than cruel, more often wise than stupid, more often energetic than apathetic, or the reverse, but it would not be true to say of one man that he is kind and wise, and another that he is bad and stupid. And yet we always classify people in this way. And this is false……..Every person bears within him or herself the germs of every human quality, but sometimes one quality manifests itself, sometimes another, and the person often becomes unlike him or herself, while still remaining the same person.”
American poet Walt Whitman states cheerfully in his long poem Leaves of Grass:
“Do I contradict myself?
Very well then, I contradict myself.
(I am large, I contain multitudes.)”
We all contain multitudes – multitudes of possibilities for ways of being human. May we each in the week ahead seek ways to know ourselves a little better and in so doing find some compassion – compassion towards both victims and perpetrators of dreadful acts. Through that we might make small steps towards healing human fragmentation and recognise that we are one people living in one world, a world containing multitudes.
Rev. Sarah Tinker
Sermon – 20th July 2014