Living Ethically

Events of the past 2 years have caused me to feel… adrift. Things I thought I could count on, things I didn’t even know could change have changed. What does it all mean? What can we believe in? What matters? One particularly challenging day I was asking myself those questions and I realized- living ethically seems to matter. What a relief it is to hear about the actions of ethical people on the news, to deal with people living ethically in my own life, and to use ethical principles to guide my own actions in this quixotic world. Over the course of my life my views about whether or not there is a god and other metaphysical questions have changed, but In the Unitarian Universalist church I grew up in, it was clear that no matter what else you believe, what we humans choose to do… matters.

We see what happens when folks abandon ethics and instead seek only personal power, wealth or comfort. Acting from an ethical core seems to matter. It matters to me- I know I feel like I am standing on solid ground when I try to live ethically. And I believe that it makes a difference in society that there are people who deal ethically with one another, even on days when it feels like we are the only ones. No matter how lost we feel, we can, in the words of Anna from Frozen 2, “do the next right thing.” In case you don’t have small children in your life, this song comes at a low and desperate time for our heroine who decides to:

“Just do the next right thing
Take a step, step again
It is all that I can to do
The next right thing

I won't look too far ahead
It's too much for me to take
But break it down to this next breath
This next step
This next choice is one that I can make”

A lot of folks have found themselves feeling hopeless and desperate, and this children’s song has resonated with this moment we are living in now. It’s increasingly clear that we are not going to wake up one day and find ourselves in the world we were living in February of 2020. Some things are lost, and some are irrevocably changed. Still, we can do “the next right thing.” By living ethically we reduce our footprint, our harm in the world, and also shape the society we are building together in our rapidly changing world. If we want a society where people tell the truth, and deal honestly and fairly and compassionately with one another, the best we can do is live ethically ourselves, to “be the change you want to see in the world.” Living Ethically is part of our mission as a congregation, because we believe that our ethical action matters, it matters to our own sense of integrity, and it matters to community.

The trouble is that our choices are very rarely perfect, and we have all had to make many imperfect choices since Covid spread to our communities. I was looking for an example that we could all relate to, and I thought about our choice to mostly be online since March of 2020. We made the choice originally, (can you remember back that far?) because we wanted to slow the spread, to “flatten the curve” as we said then. To make sure that everyone who needed hospital care could have it. In spring of 2020 the UUA recommended that we worship online until May of 2021 to protect the most vulnerable- the folks who are immune compromised, those without access to medical care, those essential workers who were exposed daily. That was not an easy choice. We love being together in person. We miss hugs, we miss ordinary conversation over a cup of coffee. We miss singing loudly together. We know that some of our members don’t have good computer or internet access, and we know that some folks have such zoom fatigue that our online services are draining. Month after month your board of trustees agonizes over this choice- knowing that there were people who had been vital members of our congregation whom we are no longer able to support with worship or fellowship. We know how lonely this time has been for many- and wonder what ministry we can offer to people who need us in this lonely difficult time? So we did other things like our phone tree calls, and small outdoor gatherings, and gift bags, and we started putting a letter in the mail each month so folks would know we were thinking of them. But any choice we made involved giving up hard things, and risk and loss. There was no perfect choice, only hard compromise with reality.

But, as Lynn Ungar says in her poem:

… you have to choose.
It’s all we have—that little rudder
that we employ in the midst
of all the eddies and rapids,
the current that pulls us
inexorably toward the sea. 

The fact that you are swept along
by the river is no excuse.
Watch where you are going.
Lean in toward what you love.
When in doubt, tell the truth.

Ethics are “that little rudder” – the choices we make even when there is no good choice. The boards of both churches revisit their decisions every month, and were working hard toward a hybrid worship, and were beginning to gather in person when the delta variant set us back. We knew many of us were vaccinated and that the risk to ourselves had gone down, but what about our children? Delta had much more serious consequences for children than previous variants. At the same time we heard the frustration and longing of folks who wanted to come back together in person. Your boards talked and wrestled and struggled, and finally decided that the UU thing to do was to protect the most vulnerable and to involve data and science in our decisions- that is why we use the “covid act now” website each week to decide. We saw communities across the country decided they were “done with Covid” before Covid was done with them. So we decided to use the data instead of community social pressure to decide.

This week in Bradford County (where the Athens Sanctuary is) the ICU is 94% full, in the “critical” range, the most full hospitals have ever been in our county. And cases are as high as they’ve been all year, as high as last spring, and so here we are on Zoom, our sanctuaries empty again this week. We could have done otherwise- there was no one right choice here, it was a choice among hard things. Other people, other churches have made other choices. 2 ethical people using conscience as their guide can make 2 different choices.

In his book “The Righteous Mind” Jonathan Haidt lays out research that shows that as much as we think we make our decisions based on data or reasoning, our decisions are actually based on a kind of moral intuition, which I suppose is the same as a conscience. Intuition is a form of cognition that helps us make the million decisions we must make every day as quickly as we need to make them. Haidt tested folks of different economic classes from different parts of the world and found that our consciences do not tell us all the same thing. Even within our UU congregations, different people are making different choices about when and where to mask, whether to get vaccinated or get boosters and when, whether to worship indoors and when. Haidt shows that even when we are all following our conscience closely, we come to different decisions.

In my experience the folks, like you, who show up at worship week after week are already committed to an ethical life. I trust that each of us is doing the best we can to follow our conscience and make ethical choices. My job as your minister is not to convince you to follow your conscience and live an ethical life, I suspect you are doing a pretty good job of that already. Our job here as a community already committed to ethical living is to support and encourage one another in making those impossible decisions in confusing times. To grow as ethical beings we don’t need to become more perfect, more strict in our ethics, I believe we need to become more humble, more compassionate, and we practice living our humble compassionate ethics all our lives. As the story "Birdsnest" taught us this morning- “The 3-year-old knows it, but the 80 year old still finds it very difficult to do.”

To live ethically requires humility, knowing that there is almost never a perfect choice, and yet choosing what we feel to be right, nevertheless. Humility is our antidote for judgementalism. I think when we look at the news, when we see angry people storming school-board meetings to share their views about mask mandates with that righteous judgementalism, we can see the harm that kind of righteous anger does to our communities, to our families, to our society. Such scenes teach us the importance of not letting the ethics that are guiding our own boat become rigid, become judgements on others. As the Christian scriptures advise “Why do you see the speck in your neighbor’s[a] eye, but do not notice the log in your own eye? “ [Matthew 7:3]

We are imperfect, all of us. Most of our lives we live in morally grey territory- all beings eat other beings to live. All of us who walk step on other beings. Every time we speak, we risk saying something that will later turn out to have been untrue, or hurtful. Living ethically as Unitarian Universalists is not about once and for all adopting a moral code and resting into the righteousness of that code, Living ethically requires humility and empathy for others.

Humility is also an antidote for identifying too strongly with our surface goodness, “I recycle so I’m good”. If I believe that I must be perfectly good, I put myself in an impossible position. How could I admit to myself that I ever made imperfect choices? How could I grow if I couldn’t be present with the reality of my own imperfection? How could I do the hard inner work of, for example, addressing my role in systemic racism, without first being humble, without first admitting that there was room for me to grow?

Knowing that we are imperfect, can we hold that imperfection with compassion? To go back to our example, we know our choice not to worship in person is imperfect, we know people are lonely, we know humans need to be together in person for their mental health. And if we hold our own imperfect selves with compassion, can we extend that compassion and empathy to others? Yes, other churches are meeting in person right now, in the same towns where we are on zoom. I bet their leaders also agonized with their decisions. My Facebook feed is filled with ministers agonizing about their congregation’s decisions about whether and how they come together in person. We may disagree with their decision, but we are all different, our consciences tell us different things.

Let us not fall into the habit, as have so many religious groups, of believing that part of living ethically is policing others. This creates a rigidity and combativeness that has become destructive in our time. As Haidt says in his book ‘The Righteous Mind”

“No matter how good our logic, it’s not going to change the minds of our opponents if they are in combat mode too. If you really want to change someone’s mind on moral or political matter, you’ll need to see things from that person’s angle as well as your own. And if you do truly see it the other person’s way – deeply and intuitively – you might even find your own mind opening in response. Empathy is an antidote to righteousness, although it’s very difficult to empathize across a moral divide”. [Haidt p. 58]

In Sunday school we used to say as we lit the chalice “we are UU, people with Open minds, helping hands and loving hearts.” As we commit ourselves and recommit ourselves to living ethically, let us do so with open minds and loving hearts, with Humility, empathy, and compassion, our own UU way. In this time of hard choices, we know that striving to live ethically helps ground us in our own spiritual journey and shapes the future we are all growing into together. Living Ethically means being present with the reality of what is and doing the "next right thing"