First Unitarian Society of Minneapolis

Of Price and Value

What do I need right now to be happy? This is one of those eternal questions that has no final answer, only a continual dissolving effect on the unconscious assumptions that structure so many of our impulses. Part of the Buddha’s wisdom, Sharon Salzburg suggests, lies in the recognition that what is necessary for happiness is more likely to be found in the freedom of letting go and the connections forged by giving to others, than it is in the accumulation of things or power. The cultivation of generosity is the first step on the path toward spiritual maturity, freedom, and genuine happiness. This is obviously a counter cultural message in American society these days. Even the quest for votes and delegates that characterizes our political process represents a kind of grasping, a need to accumulate and hoard. This process serves other purposes, to be sure, but it does not contribute to an overall climate of generosity. Ask Hillary, or Barak, or even John McCain, what any of them needs in order to be happy right now, and I suspect that the answer – perhaps after ‘several hours of uninterrupted sleep in their own homes’ – is likely to be formulated in terms of polling numbers and upcoming primaries. And of course, for those of us who are following their political fortunes with investment in our next national leadership, the same cravings are at work. What do I need right now in order to be happy? I need these elections to have the outcome I prefer; I need the clear majority of my fellow citizens to agree with me about the direction of our country.

It is easy to be captured by this perspective, for much depends upon the choices that America makes in the next ten months. And yet, paradoxically, democracy is designed to function best in a culture of generosity, where people make decisions not exclusively on the basis of their own personal, short-term interests, but on what they think is best for everyone as a whole, even if that might involve some inconvenience for themselves. Folks would no doubt still have differing ideas about what constitutes the general good, but the discussion would take place on a different level – one that might call us all to a nobler and more generous way of thinking. And all of us long for the leader whose integrity and self-confidence will tell us the truth about our situation, and his or her vision, rather than parroting what the polls say will reap the most votes.

Without taking anything away from the importance of the question in its personal form, it is also interesting to ask it collectively. What do WE need right now in order to be happy? Keith Ellison suggests that our collective happiness lies in a politics of inclusion, tolerance, and generosity; in the confidence that there is enough, if we are willing to share. Our ability to let go as individuals, to share and not to hoard, not only gives us inner freedom and confidence, but also creates a culture in which people are more trusting of one another, and willing to accept individual differences. The politics of generosity is not primarily about money, but rather about who belongs, whose ideas count, and what it means to be citizens and neighbors.

That question, of what it means to be citizens and neighbors, has implications for our collective future in this congregation as well, and it is this of which I wish to speak this morning. I always find it helpful to gather with my colleagues who also serve as senior ministers of larger UU congregations, as I did last week, because our conversations serve to stimulate my own thinking about the work of this Society. This year, I came away with a couple of interesting ideas, one of them from UUA president William Sinkford, who usually meets with our group for a morning or afternoon while we are together. Speaking of the UUA’s anti-racism work, and noting the changing complexion of our UU Sunday Schools, where mixed-race and foreign adopted children far outnumber the non-white adults in our congregations, Bill posed two questions for churches to ask themselves. "What can this congregation do to prepare for a multi-cultural future?" was one, and the other was, "How can this congregation present itself as a faithful ally to communities of color?" I like this approach, because it seems to me that while answering these questions will inevitably draw us into renewed awareness of and struggle with the white privilege inherent in our culture, they do not begin from a point of guilt, and they do not seek self-serving cosmetic changes in our membership just to make us feel better. I think that FUS has been trying, with some success, to present ourselves as a faithful ally to communities of color, though there must be much more that we could do. In this context I should mention that the generous folks at last night’s FUS service auction gave outright enough money to buy an automatic external defribulator for our congregation – a medical device which might one day save the life of someone in this room who experiences a cardiac episode. This is of course wonderfully helpful, but it’s not the best part. We actually asked for, and received, enough funds to buy an AED for ourselves, and one for Holding Forth the Word of Life, our partner congregation in North Minneapolis, as well. And that, I would like to think, is the kind of faithful ally that President Sinkford has challenged us to become. I also think that it would be very interesting and very useful for us to ask ourselves how we might go about preparing this congregation for a multi-cultural future. I don’t have any solid answers to that question yet, and I would love to have some thoughtful conversation about how best to address it.

The other set of ideas that arose during my week with the colleagues was a clarification of the four dimensions of our Strategic Planning understanding of the Society’s purpose. As you may remember, we have said that the four things we must do in order to fulfill our reason for existing are inreach, outreach, service, and education. Each of these elements is important enough that we cannot put it on hold for the sake of the others; if we were to cease doing any of the four, something vital to our integrity as an institution would be lost. This is part of what makes planning in an organization like ours complex; we need to keep our balance among these four priorities, and each one of them makes important demands on our resources and energy. We also recognize that that there are foundational strategies like facilities maintenance, fiscal management, staffing, and other support functions that must happen in order to keep the four dimensions of our purpose thriving, but that are not in themselves our purpose. While we want to be responsible stewards of our resources, and manage them in ways that demonstrate our values in practice, nevertheless our reason for existing is not to operate buildings, endowments, or computer networks.

You might imagine that anyone who goes into the ministry is fond of words, and with regard to most of my colleagues and myself, you would be correct. We delight in words, the bigger the better, and so our challenge to ourselves and one another is always to try to say what we mean as simply as possible, in the kind of language that ordinary people can remember and use. Several of my conversations this week helped me to do that with regard to those four dimensions of our purpose, so here’s what I think. Inreach is anything that builds connections among our members. Outreach is anything that spreads the values or enhances the reputation of Unitarian Universalism or Humanism beyond this congregation. Education is anything that moves people toward spiritual maturity – whether they be children or adults, whether they be within or outside the membership of FUS. And service is anything that makes life less hard for identifiable individuals – again, inside or beyond our own membership. It seems to me that this offers a fairly simple test of any activity that seeks to claim a share of this Society’s time, energy, or money: Does it build connections among our members, move people toward spiritual maturity, make life less hard for identifiable individuals, or spread the values or enhance the reputation of our movement? If not, we should think hard about why this institution would invest in it. It might not be a bad thing, indeed, it might be a laudable activity. But it might not be ours to do. And as many of you have heard me say before, I tend to think that the most effective way to build connections between members is for people to work together on the other three dimensions; spreading our values, becoming more spiritually mature, or making life less hard for others. These are the substantive contributions and transformations that most of us long for in our lives, and hope to find in our religious communities. They are the gifts that humanists like John Dietrich and John Dewey and Kenneth Patton have always insisted we could still have, even when the myth of a self-conscious, anthropomorphic god has lost all credibility.

The spirit of generosity is key to each of these purposes. It is, as the Buddhist teaching suggests, essential to the quest for spiritual maturity. It is what moves us to make the lives of others less hard, through the gift of service. The generosity we demonstrate is what makes our values credible to those outside the institution who observe us in action, and it is what makes us open and accessible, so that we can form the connections with others that build true community. In short, without generosity, none of our reasons for existing as a congregation can be fulfilled. Now, as Carmine Coyote suggests, generosity can take many forms, not all of which are about money. Leadership is, in its essence, a practice of generosity; for where generosity is not present, it degenerates into the mere exercise of power, and does not contribute to the larger well being of individuals or communities. So let me say a word about both money and leadership, which is that if FUS is going to fulfill the purposes for which it was founded, and for which we have given it our loyalty, it needs both, from us. There is nothing that is going to be done by FUS, apart from what we do by way of our contributions of effort and dollars. My large church ministers group tries to remember this about our role in the association. Whenever we catch ourselves saying, "The UUA ought to do this," or "The UUA shouldn’t do that," we remind ourselves, "Hey, the UUA is us!" The same is true of this congregation; FUS is us. Our generosity as a covenant community can never be greater than the generosity of our members, and the leadership that we offer in the city and the world will never be larger than the leadership that our members practice. So let me make a suggestion. If it has been a while since you got one of those calls from the Stewardship committee, inviting you to a dinner or a dessert or a discussion of some sort about your role in fulfilling the purpose of FUS, do one of two things. Either call up Roger Clemence, or Will Hegeman in the office, and say, "Hey, I have some thoughts about my place in this place, and I’m ready to reconsider my pledge, and I would like to be part of a conversation about that." Or else, just stop by the office and pick up a new pledge card, and help us move to a new level of generosity as a community, by moving to a new level of generosity yourself. The first option is more fun for us, but if the second is more efficient for you, that works for us too.

A lot of folks know the definition of a cynic as "somebody who knows the price of everything, and the value of nothing." It’s true; you can know a great deal about prices, and still have no sense of what is really valuable. And it seems to me that if church isn’t about helping you to make that distinction, I don’t know what other cultural institution’s job it should be. For myself, I want a church that reminds me that generosity is not just about paying the institution’s bills and funding its programs – generosity is about the well-being of my own soul, about my journey on the path toward becoming a real grown up, someone who understands the importance of making my actions congruent with my words, and my words congruent with what I most deeply hold dear. I want a church that demonstrates in its collective institutional life the freedom that lies in the ability to let go, and to live generously in a larger community, so that its gifts touch lives beyond its walls. As the clever mastercard commercials illustrate, many things have prices, but those which are of greatest value are priceless. What any of us can give to and share with others is a function of our generosity of spirit, and that is what we strengthen each time we practice letting go. I want a church that recognizes the necessary dimension of generosity in true leadership, that invites all of us to become generous leaders, because that is how we are going to create the politics of tolerance and inclusion, and ultimately change the world.

Without a spirit of generosity, humanism itself becomes a joyless philosophical bickering, that knows nothing of the distinction between price and value, and has no power to transform people’s lives. For it is when we have the courage to let go the old myths of salvation, with its rescue and rewards, that we become free to imagine a new world of values on a human scale. Then when you reflect upon the question, what do you need right now in order to be happy? you do not look for the answer in some form of cosmic approval, or special exemption from the realities of life. Sharon Salzburg concludes, in her meditation on generosity’s perfection:

It is not, as Keith Ellison reminds us, that we can afford to be careless and wasteful; generosity does not lie in making everything disposable, but rather in the sharing that assures everyone of having enough. That is what we want to practice until it becomes natural to us; that is the kind of people we hope to grow into; that is the kind of community we aspire to build. The opportunity for the practice of generosity is always at hand. The famous free-thinking orator Robert Ingersoll once wrote, "While I am opposed to all orthodox creeds, I have a creed myself, and my creed is this:

Happiness is the only good.

The time to be happy is now.

The place to be happy is here.

The way to be happy is to make others so.

This creed is somewhat short, but is long enough for this life; long enough for this world. If there is another world, when we get there we can make another creed. But this creed certainly will do for this life."

Robert G. Ingersoll

It is time to turn our face from the up-scale privacy and quiet privilege of Lowry Park, toward the larger urban community of which we are part, with all its noise and demands and complications; to take our place as one of the institutions with an investment in this city’s future. It is time to take the chance of making it easy to find us, radicals, free-thinkers, liberals that we are, and to cease hiding in our unobtrusiveness. If we do that, we will be asked to define ourselves, to say what we believe, to hold our ground in the face of others’ bewilderment and even hostility. I think we have the knowledge and the conviction and the strength, and most importantly the generosity of spirit, to do that. Moreover, if we do it – if we put ourselves and our beliefs out there in the public square – I suspect we will find, as I have, and I know others from this Society have, that many other people will be glad of our company. They may not all share our ideas about the Bible or what happens after we die, but a lot of them share our passion for integrity, for learning, for connecting, and for making the world we share a better place. More than you might think also share our questions, our commitment to freedom of conscience, and our trust in the power of human understanding enlarging itself. We cannot afford to isolate ourselves in our own small comfort; that is not what we need to be happy, and it is not what the world needs from us.