“After Ecstasy, the Laundry”

Rev. William F. Schulz

Sunday, 1 April 2007

Rev. Shana Lynngood:  The morning’s guest is the second in our series of “Bills.”  In addition to his wonderful sense of humor, which you’ve already heard this morning, and in sharing his own words which I read in the back of the hymnal quite regularly – his opening words, if you didn’t recognize them, are in the back of our hymnal with, of course, attribution to him.  Rev. Dr. William F. Schulz served as President of the Unitarian Universalist Association from 1985 to 1993.  When he left that position, still not done doing good in the world, he became the Executive Director of Amnesty International where he served from 1994 to 2006.  Now, he is doing what I’m thinking of as shuttle diplomacy between Washington, D.C., Boston and New York City since he currently serves as a Senior Fellow at the Center for American Progress here in Washington.  He also is a Fellow at the Carr Center for Human Rights Policy at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government, and serves as an adjunct professor at The New School in New York City.  Rev. Dr. Schulz’ visit is made possible by our All Souls-Beckner Advancement Fund which was founded by members, Earl and Meta Beckner in 1973.  When they established the fund they wanted it to enhance the influence of All Souls in the D.C.-Metro area, to help make a community of the church and its surrounding environs and to foster human rights and dignity.  And so, for all of those reasons, it is a good fund to help us hear the words this morning of Rev. Dr. William F. Schulz.

Rev. William F. Schulz:  Thank you, Shana.  Thanks to all of you.  I appreciate Shana’s introduction.  I’ve become wary of introductions since learning of an introduction that was provided to President William Howard Taft who was the last Unitarian President and a member of this congregation when he served in that position.  President Taft was introduced by an industrial magnate of the day named Chauncey DePugh.  You’ll recall that President Taft was a large man and, in his introduction, Chauncey DePugh said, “Ladies and gentlemen, President Taft is pregnant.”  And President Taft, apparently with a sense of humor said, “Yes, it’s true.   I am pregnant.  And if it is a boy, we shall name it after me, and if it is a girl we shall name it after my wife, Helen.  But if, as I suspect, it is nothing but a bag of wind, we shall name it Chauncey DePugh.”  [Laughter]  So thank you, Shana, for not requiring me to name anything after you.

When I ended my term as President of the Unitarian Universalist Association, in 1993, as Shana said, I vowed that I would never preach in the pulpit of any minister who had not been kind to me when I was President.  That automatically eliminated fifty percent of the congregations.  But not All Souls because, of course, David Eaton was a dear friend of mine in whose memorial service I was honored to participate, and because neither Rob nor Shana were in our ministry when I was President, so they had no opportunity to offend me.  So it is therefore a real delight to return to this historic pulpit and especially to see the life and power that you and your ministers have breathed into these old walls.

Now, as you can imagine, my twelve years as Executive Director of Amnesty International were years of great opportunity and privilege for me, the privilege, for example, of being insulted in the nicest possible way by the famous actress Lauren Bacall at a high-falutin dinner party on the Upper East Side.  I’ll clean up Ms. Bacall’s language, but this is what the conversation went like.  “Dahling, aren’t you that dear little human rights man that people have been tittering on about?”  “Why yes, Ms. Bacall, I suppose I am.”  “Dahling, may I sit with you at dinner?”  Me, swooning:  “Why Ms. Bacall, I would be delighted.”  “Well you see, Dahling, I wouldn’t ask you, but, frankly I don’t know another friggin’ soul here.”  [Laughter] 

Or perhaps, perhaps more to the point, the opportunity to greet Wei Jing-sheng, the father of Chinese democracy on his arrival in America after 17 years in prison, or the opportunity to work with Gary Gauger and several others of the 123 people convicted of capital crimes in this country, sentenced to death and subsequently exonerated.  Or the opportunity to go into the refugee camps in Darfur, Sudan, to meet those terrorized out of their homes, and then into the state offices in Khartoum to confront the government ministers who had ordered the terror.

So my twelve years at Amnesty were years of remarkable opportunity and they were also years of great achievement for the larger field of human rights.  I participated in a conversation with a group of professors at Syracuse University shortly before I left Amnesty and someone asked them whether over the course of the last 200 years human rights had gotten better or worse.  And with one exception the professors all offered abstract reasons why the human rights situation was worse today than in 1806. 

I listened to all this moaning and finally I said in my customarily tactful way, “Are you guys nuts?!”  I said, “Why just in the twelve years that I’ve been with Amnesty, we’ve seen the creation of the International Criminal Court; we’ve seen war crimes tribunals for Rwanda, Bosnia, Sierra Leone.  We’ve seen the Truth in Reconciliation process following apartheid in South Africa; we’ve seen the ruling by the British Law Lords in 1999 that tyrants like Augusto Pinochet could be held responsible for their crimes of torture in any country in the world.  We’ve seen successful civil suits in this country against torturers who had taken up residence here thinking they would retire comfortably.  We’ve seen a majority of countries in the world that have abolished the death penalty.  We’ve even seen the Supreme Court rule the execution of juveniles and the mentally retarded unconstitutional.  And you don’t think that we are better off today than when the slaveholder, Thomas Jefferson, could get elected President.”  [Applause} 

Well, these were a bunch of professors; it didn’t shut them up for an instant.  But, remarkable as these achievements have been, human rights still, of course, face enormous challenges and, ultimately, they are challenges that will be met, if they are met at all, not just by changes in American policy, in Iraq or elsewhere, but by the adoption of new attitudes toward the world around us.  And that, of course, is where religion comes in.

Now, as practitioners of a religious enterprise, all of us are called upon to grapple with such profound questions as: Why is there something in the world, rather than nothing?  What is the meaning of life?  Is there a God?  Why do bad things happen to good people?  These are very challenging questions; they’re questions I’ve been seeking answers to for more than forty years, and if Shana had given me a few more minutes, I would supply you the answers this morning.  [Laughter}  But the truth is that even the answer to the age-old question, “Is it more religious to sit in a pub and think of the church or to sit in a church and think of the pub?” [Laughter]  Even the answer to that is not self-evident.

In a way, then, going from my years with the Unitarian Universalist Association to Amnesty International where the kinds of questions we dealt with were a bit more concrete, questions like:  How can we get the Chinese to stop torturing fifteen-year-old Tibetan nuns?  Going from the contemplation of religious questions to questions of human rights is a little like traversing the reference points referred to in the famous Zen saying, “After ecstasy, the laundry.”  And yet, the struggle for human rights and, more broadly, for social justice, is in very profound ways a religious struggle, spiritual calling.  Over and over again I found my work at Amnesty profoundly informed by my Unitarian Universalist faith. 

And that’s what I really want to talk with you about today – why Unitarian Universalist values matter so much to the world at large.  Because the truth is that we are witnessing today an enormous struggle in the world between those who would close down culture, who would insist that there is only one right way of thinking, and those who would keep it open.  Between those who would resort quickly to violence and those who would resist it as long as possible.  Between those who welcome the pre-eminence of one nation and those who give their fidelity to the common interests of the globe.  It is, in short, a struggle between those with a parched vision and those with a generous heart.  And Unitarian Universalism, for better or worse, has always cast its lot on the side of the generous heart.

At the center of a Unitarian Universalist’s faith is the conviction that truth takes many forms, that no single person is ever always right, that there is no necessary correlation between wielding power and possessing wisdom.  Osama bin Laden doesn’t believe that, but neither does Dick Cheney; he doesn’t believe that.  President of China Hu Jintao doesn’t believe that; Pope Benedict doesn’t believe that; Robert Mugabe doesn’t believe that; Bill O’Reilly doesn’t believe that.  Judge Judy doesn’t believe that, but it is true!  [Laughter and applause]  Now sometimes, I admit, I wish it weren’t true.  Sometimes I wish the secret of life was a lot simple than it is.  The Chinese philosopher, Hung Tzu-Ch’eng, once said, “Only those who can appreciate the least palatable of root vegetables can possibly know the meaning of life.”  Well, I wish it were that easy.

“What is a human being,” asked the Danish novelist, Isak Dinesen, “What is a human being but an elaborate machine for turning red wine into urine?”  [Laughter]  I wish that was all there was to it.  But I’m afraid that my sympathies lie with the rabbi who, upon his deathbed was asked by the head elder to reveal the meaning of life before he passed beyond it.  “Life,” said the rabbi, “Life is like a river.”  And those wise words were passed on down the row of elders, “The rabbi says life is like a river,” until they reached the lowest of the low, the poor stupid schlemiel.  But the schlemiel was puzzled.  “What does the rabbi mean, ‘Life is like a river’” he asked.  And the schlemiel’s question was passed on back up the row of elders until it reached the head elder who put it to the rabbi.  “I’m sorry, good sir,” he said, “particularly at a time like this, but the poor, stupid schlemiel has asked, ‘Well, what do you mean, life is like a river?’”  But the rabbi just shrugged, “So,” he said, “life is not like a river.”  [Laughter]

Truth takes many forms.  No single leader has all the answers and there is no necessary correlation between wielding power and possessing wisdom.  Had the United States adhered to that simple principle our country would not be shunned around the globe today by friend and foe alike and we would not be in the mess we’re in today in the Middle East.  [Applause]  Every one of us may sometimes be right, and we know for damn sure every one of us is often wrong.  Unitarian Universalism places affirmation of such modesty at the apex of its faith, at the center of its generous heart.

And then there is a second feature of that generous heart, and that is a recognition that what human beings share in common is far broader and more important than what divides us.  In the midst of the 1994 Rwandan genocide, a girl’s prep school was attacked by machete-wielding militiamen in the middle of the night.  The teenagers were rousted from their beds about 2:00 a.m. and forced to line up in the dining hall and they were ordered to separate themselves:  Hutu, on this side; Tutsi on the other, so that only the Tutsi would die.  But not one of the girls moved.  And a second time, the militia commander ordered them:  “Hutu over here; Tutsi over there.”  But for a second time, not one of the girls moved.  And finally one little girl, naturally terrified, timorously raised her hand, “I’m sorry, sir,” she said, “I’m sorry, sir, but we cannot separate ourselves you see, because, you see, sir, in this school, we are not Hutu, we are not Tutsi; we’re all just Rwandan.”  Little Rwandan girls, at which point every one of the girls was slaughtered.  But what a legacy they leave!  We are not Hutu; we are not Tutsi.  We’re all just Rwandan, just little Rwandan girls.

That sentiment is the most fundamental religious sentiment of them all.  The echoes of that young girl’s voice bespeak a graciousness for which the world is desperate.  In a magnificent essay she wrote called, “The Moral Necessity of Metaphor,” the novelist Cynthia Ozick quotes the famous passage from the book of Leviticus, “The stranger that sojourneth with you shall be unto you as a home born among you and you shall love him as yourself because you, too, were once strangers in the land of Egypt.”  And Ozick goes on to say that it is exactly because at some point in every one of our lives, we too, every single one of us, was a stranger in some land of Egypt, that we can identify with another.  That, in Ozick’s words, doctors can imagine what it is to be a patient.  Those who have no pain at the moment can imagine what it is to suffer.  Those at the center of power can imagine what it is to be outside the circle of power.  The strong can imagine what it is to be weak.  And we strangers can imagine the familiar hearts of other strangers.  I’ve never been tortured; I’ve never had my arms amputated.  But I know plenty of people who have.  And I’m compelled by my religious faith to make a metaphorical leap from my trivial sufferings into those of the hearts of strangers.  And what I find there is astonishing.  What I find is familiarity.  I find familiar hearts, not necessarily attractive hearts, not necessarily kind hearts, not necessarily admirable hearts, but familiar hearts, in every stranger.

I guess I was just naïve.  I guess I was just naïve,  but I never thought I’d see the day when hundreds of people were hunted down in this country, rounded up, imprisoned, shackled, denied access to their families, because of the color of their skins, the ethnicity of their names, the practice of their religion.  I thought that day was past in this country, but that’s exactly what’s happened to thousands of foreign nationals here since nine-eleven.  I never thought I would see the day when the United States government would imprison its own citizens and then try to deny them the most fundamental rights any U.S. citizen has a right to claim, rights that every one of us were taught we had in elementary school:  the right to a lawyer, the right to know what you’re charged with if you’re arrested, the right to confront your accuser.  I thought that day was past, but that’s exactly what’s happened to U.S. citizens Jose Padilla and Yaser Hamdi. 

I guess I was just naïve, but I never thought I would see the day when the United States would thumb its nose at the Geneva Conventions, Conventions we helped to write.  Thumb its nose at the Geneva Convention, as we’ve done at Guantanamo Bay and the secret prisons we maintain around the world.  And then deny the right of habeas corpus to prisoners in our custody.  I never thought I’d see the day when the Transportation Security Administration would construct a “no-fly” list to prevent certain people from getting on airplanes, but not tell us how to get our names off that list.  So far, the “no-fly” list has snagged a 78-year-old nun from Wisconsin and consistently snagged Senator Edward Kennedy of Massachusetts who is a terrorist only for the purposes of Republican fund-raising.  [Laughter and applause]  And I certainly never thought I would see the day when the President of the United States would unapologetically authorize torture.

Taken together, these actions constitute the gravest threat to human life since the creation of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights in 1948 because they threaten to undermine the entire structure upon which human rights have been built, the notion that we are trying to build a civilized world together in which all nations must abide by the rule of law.  You need not love your adversaries; you certainly ought not to allow them to hurt you.  But if you strip them of their fundamental dignity, if you forget the fundamental familiarity of their human hearts, if you deny that your enemy’s blood too flows red, you plunge the world further, even further, into barbarism and invite upon yourselves an even more horrific retaliation.  The second gift Unitarian Universalism gives the world from its generous heart is its conviction that what we share is far more important than what we don’t and that all blood flows red, even the blood of my adversaries!  And that, my friends, is an earth-shattering proposition, that my enemies, too, can bleed, can suffer.

But despite the depredations of the day, all is not lost because of the final feature of Unitarian Universalism’s generous heart.  And that is the simple conviction that history is not finished.  The future is not fated.  Every one of us has the power, and the responsibility, to build a more benevolent nation, a more hospitable people, a more welcoming world.  Somewhere in one of the great art museums of Europe, hangs a large painting.  The painting depicts Faust and the devil, sitting at a chess table.  Faust has already made his pact with the devil and now his face is contorted in anguish because he retains on his chess board only a knight and a king and the king is in check.  Well, one day a great chess master happened into the museum and naturally this painting caught his eye and he sat down in front of it and stared at it.  Fifteen minutes he stared, twenty, twenty-five.  And then, suddenly, he leapt to his feet.  “It’s a lie!” he shouted.  “The king and the knight have another move!  They have another move!” 

And that, my friends, is the final message of Unitarian Universalism’s generous heart, that no matter what religious orthodoxy may claim, no matter what political ideology may bluster, the future is waiting to be shaped not by inexorable fate, not by an angry god, but by human hands, either by our foolishness or our benevolence.  For it is not just the king, but the knight, not just the queen but the rook, not just the bishop but the pawn, not just the prince but the pauper, not just the powerful but every starving, lonely, frightened person in the world.  Every single person. Every single one of us, every single blessed one of us who has another move.  We all have another move.

If I learned anything from my days at Amnesty, it is this:  that no authentic person can live in the world unmoved by how immense is the tragedy of creation.  No pretty words from a pulpit can cover it up, no simple faith can fix it, no complex theology can explain it away.  It just is.  Creation is a tragic place.  Truly religious people know that, fear it, sometimes flee it but, more often, do their best to face it for they know that our job, we Unitarian Universalists know that our job is not to deny evil or heartache or death, but to keep companion with them, to keep companion with them at the same time that we keep companion with blessing and possibility and grace, losing our faith every single night, but gaining it again with the coming of the day.  That’s what happened to me for twelve years at Amnesty.  Almost every night, I lost my faith.  Almost every night. And gained it again, thank goodness, with the coming of the day.

That’s just the way it is with us human beings.  Fragile, flawed.  I was often tempted to wish it was otherwise – to never hear, to never hear – another story of torture, to never learn of another senseless killing, to never see tears again.  But whenever I wished for that state, I reminded myself of just one thing:  that in the ancient world a poetry contest was held each year and the third place winner was presented a rose made out of silver.  The second place winner was presented a rose made out of gold.  But the first place winner received a real rose, a living rose, that while it was far from perfect and didn’t live forever, spoke while it did of art and beauty and passion and power.  And who among us, my friends, who among us, if we had to choose, who among us would not choose the living?         Amen.      [Applause]