Universalist Unitarian Church Santa Paula, California

A Song of Songs
by Reverend Carolyn Price

American Buddhist Pema Chodron has said:

A dark age. An age marked by human suffering and evil, which is the topic of this morning’s sermon. Some Unitarian Universalists recoil from this word: evil, almost as quickly as from the word God. There are good reasons for this, which I will talk about in a moment. But let me begin by stating clearly what I mean today when I use the term "evil".

I believe that there are forces in this world which uphold life, sustain it, grow it, and recreate it. These are the forces of good. We know these forces. They exist in us and in the world. They are in the urge and to grow and to flourish that is shared by all forms of life. Made manifest in the human desire to love, to find truth, and to create beauty. these forces give joy to our days and hope to the dark nights of our souls. We know these forces. But we know as well the forces of evil. These are the forces that diminish life, damage or destroy it. These forces destroy love, and freedom, and trust. They exist in us when unwitting prejudice distances us from another human being, making that person feel unwelcome or less whole because of their difference. They rise up every time we act in ways that destroy the goodness and the diversity of life. The classic example in theology is the Shoah, the Holocaust, when evil grew and spread over the face of the earth in horrible ways, and somehow, someway, no one stopped it until 6 million innocent human beings had died.

It is important to remember that the forces of good and evil do not exist as separate poles but as locations on a spectrum; as part of a continuity of forces which shape and define human life. This continuity, this spectrum, can be difficult to describe because it defies dualistic categorization, something we are so partial to in the west. In other words, there is no simple formula to say one thing is good, and another evil. Either/or language falls far short, and even this/and language is sometimes not enough. As with so much of human existence, the complexity of forces which give shape to our brief lives defies easy or final understanding. Part of our heritage as a people of liberal religion is to keep a critical eye toward truth and meaning, to remember that revelation does not come in a final form and that we do not now, nor are we likely to ever, know all that there is to know.

Our aversion to the notion of evil is in part a legacy from those who have gone before us. When we were Universalists some 300 years ago, the predominant religious thinking was Calvinist. It said that all people, except for a very few who were chosen by god before birth, were born sinful, terribly, terribly evil. As Universalists we said no, god would not do that. We said that the god of our understanding was a god of goodness, a god whose love was mighty and universal, who offered hope and salvation to every person. And our Unitarian forebears followed, saying no, human beings were not born evil, but born in goodness, in the very image of god.

But let’s consider for a moment what it would have been like to live with that Calvinist doctrine. Imagine being a child, a young adult, a parent, spouse, or grandmother trying to make your way in the harsh world of early America. Imagine being told, often and loudly, that no matter how hard you tried you could not alter the evil within you or change your fate. How lovely must have been the different voices of the Unitarians and the Universalists; how beautiful their songs. Let us keep those songs in our hearts today, in memory of the best thinking of these religious people whose intellect and hope we inherit.

And yet our forebears did not say, nor do most of our modern theologians say that evil is not real or present in human life. It was the great Universalist Hosea Ballou himself who said that "hell is the evil we create on earth.²" But to this day we have been criticized, as a liberal religious tradition for not having a clear theology of evil.

One of our ministers who is well known not only within our movement but within this country and the world is William Schultz, past President of the UUA and now Director of Amnesty International, USA . Schultz has said that if he could do one thing to "disabuse our UU ministerial students of any lingering pieties, he would take us to the slums of Calcutta.³" He said that "Once they were acquainted with evil as reflected by such immense poverty … no one could ever again preach about the dancing leaves of fall.⁴"

I hold a great deal of respect for Mr. Schultz, but I do not think that Unitarian Universalists, those of us preparing to be ministers or otherwise, need travel to Calcutta to become disabused of any lingering pieties. There is plenty of evil – if we remember that by this we mean that which diminishes or destroys life – incarnate closer to home. It runs through our rivers, our air, our cities, and our own neighborhoods. This too is a song worth keeping, a melody perhaps to underscore the great lyrics of hope and courage which are our legacy.

I can tell you of a trip to a Calcutta not far from where we live. Last summer for more than three months I worked at a Veterans Hospital among the chemically dependent, impoverished and mentally ill survivors of the Vietnam War. I should tell you that these men were not, as a rule from the well-educated elite chosen officers and gentlemen who comprise the center of the military’s power structure. I should tell you that many of them had done hard time in prison, often because they had violently harmed another human being. A few had committed murder. Many had committed robberies, and almost all had driven cars while under the influence of heavy mind altering drugs. So it might be tempting to think that indeed, there was something evil in these men that was made manifest in these moral acts of violence, drug abuse, and criminality. To an extent, this is true. As UU minister Richard Gilbert has said, "the line between good and evil runs right through the middle of each human heart.⁵"

But what is also true is that almost all of these men were homeless, desperately ill, and afraid. They had all served in Vietnam. Many had become addicted to psychotropic drugs there, more than occasionally at the hands or orders of their supervising officers. Most came from homes of multigenerational poverty, addiction, and abuse. Things were not as simple as good or bad.

Over the summer I grew to understand the link between growing up in an impoverished and violent family system, often multi-generational, and the act of going off to war at the earliest possible age. This is not something I’ve read much about. And maybe my experience is unusual. But I don’t think so. There were too many stories of childhoods marked by hunger, fear, poverty and violence, usually without a father or – worse – with a cruel, brutal male in the picture. I heard stories about what parents can do to their children that I have not yet been able to repeat aloud to anyone. I won’t repeat those stories here, except to say that I have spent time counseling adults who were raised in violent homes, and I had never heard any stories like some of those I heard last summer. I become acutely aware of my own privilege, growing up white, with two parents in a decent neighborhood, always with enough of what it takes to live a decent life. I realized that there is a tremendous difference in growing up in an alcoholic/addicted home, even one marked by violence, when that home is owned by white people in a middle class neighborhood, and a home which is rented or perhaps only squatted in within the ghettos of Los Angeles or Chicago or New York. No wonder going to war looked good to these men.

But whoever coined that phrase war is hell, knew what he was talking about. The men at the VA told me, in graphic, soul-changing ways what war can do. I served as staff chaplain for the PTSD (post-traumatic stress disorder) and the Dual-Diagnosis (addiction coupled with mental illness) groups. I listened to these men describe the terrifying nightmares that haunt them in broad daylight, dreams that they cannot tell whether they are real or imagined, if they are happening now or 30 years ago in the violent jungles of Vietnam.

When they finally make it to the hospital these men are usually profoundly alone and ill. Many do not make it, and die under a freeway bridge or in a violent crime or of an overdose. This unintended but very real consequence of war has created an entire population of damaged men and, increasingly, women, many of whom will never live truly normal lives again.

And yet, every day, even when I thought I could not possibly face another descent into this hell of suffering and violence, I heard in the stories of these men and in the echo in my own heart, the will toward the good, toward life, and toward wholeness. I heard it in laughter, in hilarious though all too brief moments of relief from the ravages of memory and pain. I have to tell you that I heard more swear words this summer than I have probably heard in my entire life. When I left I said that if and when I catch myself swearing a blue streak in the pulpit, I will know who to thank. And we all laughed.

Over the summer, I watched these tough, middle aged men learn to touch and then to hold onto to each other, to another human being who had been there in that living hell and had somehow made it home, only to find another kind of hell waiting. Watching this holy spirit of human love and forgiveness rise in them, soldiers all, and give them peace was worship to me. To this day I cannot neatly separate out the goodness and the evil which filled the Addiction Treatment Unit, those forces that gave strength to life and those which robbed it, often violently and cruelly, of its worth. I no longer doubt that society plays a role, that our country’s complicity in the power struggles of the modern world contributed mightily to the shape of this Calcutta on American soil.

An afternoon in July stands out. There was a group of about 12 men, who took turns telling stories of some of their worst memories of Vietnam, which some of them had not spoken of for thirty years. I listened as several men confessed how when they first got to the jungle, they didn’t want to kill, how they pointed their guns away, until their unit leaders struck them, or gave them drugs, or screamed at them until they used their guns, used them on people who had been demonized as the enemy. And then, a few said, they learned to like killing, to make a game of it, until finally they killed women and children, who were no longer real to them, from the door of their helicopter, to add to the count, to pass the wretched time. But when they said this aloud, three decades later, they were no longer proud. The punishment of living with what they had done for all those years was far greater than any imagined eternal damnation. As they spoke rough and terrible pain wracked their bodies and wracked the souls of all of us in the room. There are things in this world, I believe, that somewhere in the far places of our minds and hearts we suspect to be true, but which when we finally experience the fullness of knowing them, give rise in us to a song of suffering that awakens the pain of all the ages, of all the damage done by human beings to ourselves, to one another, and to life itself. And when this happens, and we see our own part in the hell we put each other through here on this earth, then, I believe, we finally can begin to see another way, a way beyond the sorrow and pain.

And so, that afternoon, I watched as one by one the men rose from their seats to give comfort to one another through the powerful force of human touch. They stood for a long time, arms wrapped around each other, with tears of understanding. And silent songs of joy rose from out of that suffering, rose and rose into an endless song of hope embracing all the generations. Afterwards, some of these men said that because of what they had done, even though we in the room could forgive them, they knew that God never could. And – how wonderful to be a Unitarian Universalist then and to be asked to speak of god – and to tell them of the god of my understanding: the god of soldiers, the poor, the addicted, the abused, and the oppressed … How wonderful to tell of a god who does not exist to punish, but desires for them only a life that is full and good and whole. Oh, to speak of that god who did not cause the pain of those terrible childhoods, or the soul breaking hunger of poverty, or the violence of war, but who was with them, always with them, with them even when they suffered, with them, with a love that has no end. Some of these men had never heard of such a god, though they had been religious all their lives.

Imagine for a moment meeting this god for the first time. Imagine it as if you had never known before, not even in your dreams, because you had stopped dreaming of it before memory began – of meeting this god of love and hope and courage. Imagine believing as if it were your birthright that a decent life was meant for you, no matter how far down the wrong road you had gone. As Unitarian Universalists, as those who cry freedom for all the earth’s people, imagine and remember the gift of this god. I am grateful to those men for teaching me so much, for reminding me that the web of life, which many call the kin-dom of God, embraces all people, binds us one to another and to all life, but to none perhaps more than those who suffer with less than a decent life and who struggle to find beauty in a broken world.

My chaplaincy at that hospital is over and I will not speak or sing of the dancing leaves of fall in quite the same way ever again. And yet, I believe with Howard Thurman, Hosea Ballou, Jesus, Buddah, Theodore Parker, and Martin Luther King Jr. that life will have the last word. The world that our religion and so many religions have hoped for and worked for – that ageless and beautiful vision of the earth made fair with all her people one – is still an abiding vision, a song yet deep in our hearts.

So yes, Reverend Shultz, we do need to go to Calcutta, especially perhaps those of us who have known more in our lives of goodness than of that which diminishes life. But let Calcutta, each in our own way, be those places we come to know where the songs of suffering have drowned out the ancient songs of hope. Let us go there and search and search until we discover that still small place within us all where the songs that formed us, that form us ever anew, rise endlessly in a cacophony of suffering and joy, despair and hope, evil and goodness, loneliness and beloved community, war and peace. For in that stillness, beyond the place of suffering, perhaps at last we will hear the primal song, the song of songs, the song that sings at the heart of life, sings and sings, as it was in the beginning, is now and ever shall be, world without end.

Amen. Shalom. Peace.

© Carolyn Price, 2004.

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