Sermons by Rev. Don W. Vaughn-Foerster
Any Human to Another
Rev. Don W. Vaughn -Foerster
Unitarian Universalist Church of Sarasota, FL
April 29, 2007
The tuning up time just before a symphony concert always sets me to reminiscing. In my school years, I played in such organizations. At one time I pretty much defined life itself in orchestral terms. The sound of sustained "A's" from strings and clarinets, the scale runs and arpeggios from horns, trumpets, and trombones: these always remind me of my earlier philosophizing during the rehearsals and performances of my youth.
In those days, one of my basic ideas was that human life is like a symphony orchestra. As the orchestra is made up of different instrumentalists, each a virtuoso in his or her own right, so is human society made up of individuals who are (or should be) virtuosos in life. As the orchestra requires a score (the work of a composer and an arranger) if there is to be any mutually accomplished music, so human society requires a set of conventions, preserved as heritage and arranged into an identifiable culture to guide individuals in the most harmonious playing of their parts. As an orchestra requires a conductor to direct and elicit the best performance, so human society must have leaders to coordinate and facilitate the most caring and constructive expression of collective life. In short, as an orchestra is a network of diverse parts, functioning together to create music, so society is a network of different people connected together to create an inclusive human world.
The comparison is not exact, of course. Human society requires a great deal more flexibility and must make more allowance for variations in competence from its members than does an orchestra. Furthermore, the "human" in "human being" resists too much interference from maestro and autocratic leader alike. There are times, perhaps, when a city or nation can be elegantly directed from a central source, but, ordinarily, people, especially in a democratic society, insist on their own right to improvise and, at times, aimlessly to play scales or to make rasping noises while others are seeking harmonies. Much of the time most of us play out our lives in smaller, more unpredictable ensembles: the jazz group of the family; the rock groups of our various clusters of friends; the duets of comradeship, mating, and marriage; and solitary practice out in the woodshed rehearsing the music we wish our lives to be. Our lives are too variegated and unpredictable to be always performed as if in concert on stage and in formal dress.
Human society, however, must be capable of enough harmony to make being part of it worth the effort. The principal thing to keep in mind is the quality of our human connections. They are the substance of what I have been alluding to as orchestra and ensembles -- the persons and groups through which we relate to create, collectively, the overall web of human relationships which forms our human world. Intrinsic to our "making beautiful music together" is how well we protect the integrity of our mutual connections. If this is not done, life becomes a progression of sour notes and clashing inharmonics.
By human connections I mean something similar to the resonance that occurs when two different notes, well-played and true, are sounded together and a liveliness occurs that is more than either of them taken separately. I mean that spark of energy which leaps from one person to another when they grasp the reality of being together. When I meet you and you meet me and we acknowledge it in any way - in friendship or in hostility, in love or in disdain - we are connected. A resonating mutuality, a harmony or disharmony of selves, arises where, before, we had been separate, unconnected units. We become real to one another; we are connected by the human in us. This connection impels us to "spring" into human life.
This can be a difficult springing. I don't think being connected with life was always as hard as it seems today. Human beings once lived mostly in a world that seemed preponderantly non-human, or at least trans-human: a world of nature in which rocks and seasons, temperature and animals and the like had a reality of which we are seldom reminded today. In those days, people spent more time contemplating and responding to their connections with the non-human world, meditating on their fairly secure or predictable connections with things and creatures that held still for them to relate to on that world's own terms. Nowadays other human beings comprise most of our world, most of our connections with reality and with things outside ourselves. Now, people are the main creatures and things we encounter.
This is at once the glory and the peril of our lives because people do not hold still for us. They are not static in the same way rocks or flowers seem to be. They are harder to train than dogs and cats and parakeets. They are not inanimate like a violin or a trumpet. We cannot pour our attention onto them at our whim and connect with them simply according to our liking.
Rather, each person is his or her own dynamo generating his or her own energies and desires that get directed at us. And we, as dynamos ourselves, inevitably respond in some way. This is what makes the web of our human connections (our human society) so intriguing and disconcerting. Each of us is a pulsating point of human energy flashing on and off, according to our own impulses and responses. Like flashing intermittent beams, we create a human connectedness that is easily seen, poignantly felt, but hard to capture, organize, and preserve - a connectedness that is hard to pin down. It all seems so real and so urgent - and yet so transitory - that we have great difficulty understanding what others want from us and what we want from them. Nor is there one, single maestro who can answer these questions for us.
That is why we must give great care to the quality of the connections we make. The very transitoriness (or seeming transitoriness) of our situation makes it profoundly important that we do as well and as fair with one another as we can. We are here for the present moment or for our present lifetime (which is itself but a moment in the infinite time of the universe) so it is imperative that what we do together be as near the heart of our human reality as we can make it. Our human reality is a mutual reality. We need one another. In spite of what we may do to one another, we need one another. It is imperative that we honor well that need.
Of course, this isn't news. Many of us realize all this and are trying to live up to this mutual reality. But we get mixed results at best. A prime example of how we muddle our attempts to be human together is how our traditional American respect for self determination can become on the one hand a cancerous individualism or on the other hand a cancerous clannishness. Rather than mutual respect, these turn out to be more: "Each one for himself or herself" or "Since my group wants it this way, this is the way it must be!" These attitudes have created a public policy that literally leaves many of our fellow human beings out in the cold - jobless and hungry. Whatever the moral and spiritual intent of the modern emphasis on individualism (an emphasis that has come from both the right wing and the left wing), the practical social result has cast a lot of people onto the public streets or into private hells. The homeless are all around us; the unemployed, like the Biblical "poor", seem always to be with us. Ignoring the ancient prophetic call to care for "the widow and the orphan", business corporations, politicians, and social elitists tend to pursue bottom line policies that create ever more widows, orphans, and a host of other kinds of poor and dispossessed. Many, who are infected and diseased, die while waiting for medical treatment that is going to less seriously ill, more affluent patients. More emphasis on private rights and personal freedom has not noticeably reduced the number of manipulating, self-serving people who treat others as objects, not persons. This seems true in every area in which we seek to change society for the better: politics, race, economic justice, etc.,.
On the more personal level, this is, also, true of most of us much of the time. It is so easy to fail to live up to the expectations we lay on one another - and on ourselves. It is just too easy to disparage and condemn others before we fully understand why they have upset us. Although for some there seem to be more personal alternatives nowadays, the quality of personal lives and group life still seems as jagged as ever for the many.
I have no objective proof for this last remark, although it has been my pastoral experience to see people increasingly cast into their private hells or into social desolation. My suspicion is that, on the existential level, instead of improving, life collectively has worsened. The playing of our social score is, certainly, as much characterized by bad intonation and squeaky reeds as ever. Perhaps there are just too many ill-prepared players on every level of society.
The problem is not that people don't realize that their encounters should occur as honestly, genuinely, and sincerely as possible. We all know that. We know that trust, the main prerequisite for healthy human relations, can be built in no other way. We all want to trust and to be trusted. We want a trustworthy world where we can expect everyone to play in key and on pitch.
No, the problem is that, in spite of all we know, we do otherwise. How else can we explain the observable phenomenon that increased emphasis on interpersonal openness often results in rupturing or weakening personal ties? How can it be that rigorously honest remarks can be used like knives to cut away at another person's confidence? ... or that supposedly loving actions can undermine another person's self esteem -- as when the most psychologically tenuous moments are chosen to spell out another person's gravest faults? Actually, given our facile capacity to miss the inconsistencies between our intentions and our actions, such things should surprise no one. Too often the reality is: when we think "openness" but act manipulatively, when we seek to be trusted and yet violate the trust of others, when we strive for sincerity but mouth artificialities - when we fail to be fair and caring at the same time - we do so because we are blinded by a basic misreading of our own part in the human connection.
Our biggest problem may not be that we are particularly different - or even competitive - in our desires. Rather, it may be like the husband and wife at breakfast. The wife said to the husband, "Why do you always smack when you eat cereal?" He replied, "I don't smack when I eat cereal. You're the one who does that." The wife responded, "Maybe I do, but you do it, too!" At this point, the husband turned to their teenage son, also sitting at the table, and said, "Your mother and I suffer from irreconcilable similarities." Some of our biggest problems arise not because we are so different but because we are so alike!
Yet it remains that irreconcilable differences and irreconcilable similarities to the contrary notwithstanding, when we start with the imperative of needing others and needing to be needed (the imperative of our mutuality) and keep that straight, then sincerity, genuiness, honesty, and trust do fairly bubble forth. The poem by Countee Cullen is right on target here. In our human heart we quicken to humanity around us.
Where we go wrong is when our needing imperceptibly shifts from being a need for human response to being a demand for our own fulfillment. Then, the healthy basis for connecting with other people becomes distorted. We shift from needing friends to demanding followers or servants, from being mutually interdependent, subjective persons to being disconnected "things" trying to use each other. Our mood moves from that of sharing to taking and controlling. We become fixed on our own desires and desensitized to the needs of others. How much vagrancy, divorce, and other "poor-me-isms" can we mark up to this shift! How much commercial and governmental dishonesty!
People's "needs-become-demands" are one-way streets. This is where the prima donna complex comes from. "Needs-become-demands" make everyone in the orchestra want to be the soloist, with the other players only backing them up and, paradoxically, even at times playing the solo for the prima donna, but letting the prima donna take the credit. "Needs-become-demands" only serve to damage our human connection. It is one thing to need love; it is another to demand it. It is one thing to need friendship, beauty, cooperation, loyalty, trust. To demand these of any other person or creature, however, taints the response from the beginning. To demand pushes us toward winning capitulation rather than eliciting honest response. That has got to have a sour note in it whether the demands are made by a spouse, an employer, a minister, a teacher, or a friend.
This is where the quality of our web of human connections is determined. What matters is how each connecting strand starts to spin outward from us. Are we needing human response? Or are we demanding that someone else fulfill us? If our impulse is to demand, we cannot truly give. If we cannot give, then (we have it strongly taught in our tradition) we cannot get back and we cannot be together as mutually enhancing beings.
Even so, it is to the glory of our human potential for love and wisdom that things can, and do, go well - sometimes superbly well! The spark does leap! We do find mutual fulfillment in one another. We do harmonize. There are friends we trust, or we could trust if we would. Parents and children, husbands and wives, lovers and friends can and do strike mutual chords that make life full and joyous. Even our religious societies can sing with trust, hope, and love. Deep within us we have, if not all the necessary skills, at least some of them. And we certainly have the prerequisite hunger to play well in our human orchestra and in the ensembles that make it up.
Once we grasp the fundamental place of our need to be instruments of one another's meaning and fulfillment, the beautiful harmonies begin to come and we begin to develop the skills needed to play our human part. For, then, we understand that we get nothing unless we give! As Countee Cullen put it in his poem: we have to bring our human beingness to bear on one another "to fuse yet mingle, diverse yet single" if we are to create a truly human world.