Tuesday, July 22, 2014

"It's not fair!!!"

Fairness is not the same thing as justice as we have described in previous articles. Justice is compliance with laws, regulations, and ethical codes enforced by those with the power in our society to punish misbehavior. Fairness, equity, has to do with right relationship, balance, and often is proportional in the sense of "to whom much is given much is expected."

My thirteen year old daughter complained to me that I was not being fair since I was asking things of her I was not asking of her eight year old brother. I said to her, "Listen Katie, you're 13 and he's 8. You're in eighth grade and he's in third. You're a girl and he's a boy. You play the piano and he's tone deaf. He picked up and got the snake out of the house and you wouldn't even touch it with a broom. If I was to treat you fair it wouldn't be fair. The only way to be fair is not to be fair. Now go do what I asked you to do." She relented and begrudgingly did as I asked, and I had a moment of clarity. Fairness, equity, is not treating people similar or the same, but rather treating them according to what is right, meaning, what is balanced.

Fairness, equity, is about relationship, not about laws, and rules, and codes. Fairness can only be determined bilaterally or multilaterally with all the stakeholders in the situation and relationship participating in the negotiation. What might be fair and equitable for some, may not be equitable for all.

Fairness is something we feel in our guts, in our viscera. It is the first thing that children complain about when they put words together in a sentence, "Mommy it's not fair!!!!" Freud said that it was the libido which makes the world go around, our sex drive, but I disagree. Sex is nice and an important drive to ensure the perpetuation of our species, but what we, as humans, want more than anything, is equity; we want things to be fair and when things are not fair we struggle to rectify the imbalance sometimes in tragic and vengeful ways.

On the spiritual plane there is no justice, equity, and compassion because there is no need. We are one with the all and become aware that we are not separate egos but part of everything and what happens to our brothers and sisters happens to us. Our well being depends on the well being of our brothers and sisters. On this plane of unconditional love, justice, equity, and compassion have no meaning. The concepts are moot, unnecessary, irrelevant, not needed. So, what surpasses the virtues of the second principle, is Unconditional Love. Until then, if nothing else, strive to be fair, whatever that may mean in all your relationships. It is hard to experience love if things aren't fair.


Story of the day - Justice is a concept. Muscle is the reality.

Of course, there is Linda Blanford, whoever she might be, who is quoted in the Sunbeams section of The Sun Magazine issue of June, 2014, as having said, "Justice is a concept. Muscle is the reality."

It made me chuckle to read the quote and it made me think, "Right on, Linda baby, might makes right." Justice is what those in power want it to be.

And then you think of Martin Luther King, Jr. and the civil rights protestors of 50 years ago now who taught us, as a nation, that we have unjust laws, even in the United States, the home of the brave, and the land of the free. So we are told by our rulers that in our democracy we should be grateful for our freedom, but then our names wind up on the no-fly lists, or we're driving while black, or just walking while black in New York City.

My wife says that I am too cynical and bitter and I tell her I am just realistic and she is wearing her rose colored glasses again.

The pastor preached this morning that people aren't perfect and we shouldn't expect them to be and if we are to have any peace we need to be compassionate and forgiving.

Ron Firbank, another person I have no idea who he is, is also quoted in the June, 2014, issue of The Sun saying, "The world is disgracefully managed; one hardly knows to whom to complain."

Good old Ron has got it wrong. I know exactly to whom to complain, but alas without muscle, as Linda said, they have no need to, and usually don't,  listen.

Monday, July 21, 2014

Story of the day - "Not actually"

Brigid was four and came into the kitchen as I was making dinner making stir fry on the stove. Behind me was the Hoosier Cabinet on which sat the cookie jar. Brigid asked me if she could have a cookie and I said she could after dinner which I was just making and we would be eating in five minutes.

As I continued adding ingredients to the stir fry I heard the top come off the cookie jar and I turned around and said evenly, "Brigid what are you doing?"

She said with a guilty expression, "Nothing daddy."

I said, "Yes, you are. You're taking a cookie."

She said to me very seriously, "Not actually."

I had to stop myself from laughing. Where, at age four, had she learned this word, "actually" and used it correctly in a sentence to minimize, if not eliminate, her culpability?

I can imagine God saying to any one of us, "And why have you polluted the earth with plastic water bottles, plastic shopping bags, and exhaust from SUVs, Hummers, and all sorts of combustion engines?"

And we, of course, would plea ignorance, saying we didn't know the consequences, and God will say, "But having learned the consequences, you have continued with your harmful ways." And we will say, like four year old Brigid, "Not actually." and we will each have our excuse about why we continued with the rape and pillage of Mother Nature.

I don't know if God, like me, will attempt to stifle a laugh at our naivete, but let us pray that He extends some matter of mercy for our sins, and treats us like innocent four year old children and not like responsible adults.

Mercy and repentance are appropriate at this time in the planet's history.

Dellarobia's son, Preston, goes to kindergarten where he has met a classmate, Josefina Delgado, who is a daughter in a migrant farm family from Michoacan, Mexico where the Monarchs usually go to roost in the winter time until flooding caused landslides that not only destroyed their traditional roosting site but also the village where the Delagados lived as well.

The Delagados had heard about the Monarchs on the Turnbow property from their daughter and came to visit Dellarobia hoping they could climb the mountain and see the butterflies. Only the daughter, Josefina, speaks any English and Dellarobia speaks no Spanish, so Josefina translates for the adults as Dellarobia learn their story. The chapter ends with this paragraph:

"They all sat quietly for a long time. Dellarobia had ridden out prayer meetings aplenty, but had no idea what to say to a family that had lost their world, including the mountain under their feet and the butterflies of the air." p. 103

Indeed what does one say in the face of ecological devastation. The grief is palpable but unspoken as it is so fresh and new as to be mind numbing and unbelievable. And yet, here, through the facilitation of their 6 year olds, they grapple with the phenomenon which they literally don't have the words to share with one another because they don't speak each other's languages, but even it they did, they would still find their words unsatisfactory in describing the enormity of what they have witnessed and lived through.

With hubris, human beings have been polluting the planet and Mother Nature is not pleased. Those of us old enough to have adult children and grandchildren and maybe even great grand children will not live long enough to see the consequences of our insensitive behavior but our grand children and great grand children certainly will, and we should be ardently praying for mercy, and as best we are able, repenting for our sins.

Sunday, July 20, 2014

Story of the day - Would you rather be right or be happy?

She said, "You made your bed so you got to lie in it. Don't look to me."
No, no, no he said to himself. It would be, is a big mistake, to look to her for anything, because she was so hurt, so closed hearted that she had nothing to share. It would be too risky like letting her guard down, taking a brick out of the wall that not only surrounds her but has ivy growing thickly all over the walls. She'd been like that all the years he had known her. She had been abused as a child and carried very heavy baggage which for the most part, went unacknowledged.

For 35 years she was never wrong about anything, never apologized, never, not even once, said she was sorry, and he had sucked it up to make the marriage work, but no longer.

"I'm not even talking any more about it. You just do what you want to do anyway!"

He'd never done just what he wanted to do anyway because he was too scared, too scared to rock the boat, and get her upset, and then there would be hell to pay for days if not weeks. In his panic, the Holy Spirit whispered to him, "This is no way to live. There is a better way."

So in his panic attack he stuttered, "Yeah, yeah, well...............you're right. I am going to do what I want to do anyway." He walked away and he knew it was the end. This was the very abandonment she feared, and her suspicion that he would one day abandon her turned out to be true. She would rather be right than be happy. She had backed herself into a corner and sued him for divorce. She couldn't chance his opposing her again.

And so it passed that they got divorced after all those years, and there is no mercy, not for his sins. There is no forgiveness in her heart, she can't afford it. Can't get blood out of a rock as they say.

Compassion, justice, equity? Not here, not in their house. Not in this relationship, not in this life time.

He turned it over to his Higher Power, God's will be done and all that jazz. Since the time he told me his story, he has gone to heaven, and she, she still resides in the hell of her own making. One day perhaps she may realize that she could have had peace instead of what she created which the children, now adults, have described as a dysfunctional hell on earth.

Whatever happened to mercy?

A word that we rarely use any more in contemporary America is "mercy". As a young boy, brought up in the Roman Catholic church, I was taught to perform "works of mercy" which usually are thought of as giving alms, visiting the sick, and helping people in need.

Mercy is an attitude and behavior that is based on justice, equity, and compassion. It usually implies a leniency, and flexibility in abrogating what might be considered "just deserts" or consequences for illegal, unwise, or immoral behavior. In other words, a person deserves a harsh punishment or consequences, and is shown "mercy" in the sense of clemency or commuting of the sentence.

Mercy can be based on an ethic of forgiveness or it can be based on charitable acts to ease the suffering of another whether self-imposed or the result of uncontrollable circumstances. Granting mercy also implies a superordinate/subordinate position in the sense that a person with power or more resources in a one-up position helps someone in a one down position.

A "you made your bed, now lie in it" attitude while it may be just, and equitable, does not seem compassionate and not merciful. To be granted mercy can be soul saving and restore one's faith in human kind, God, and the world, or it can be enabling that allows the person to continue in his or her dysfunctional ways. Paradoxically, granting mercy may not always be merciful, if the person's dysfunctional behavior is only likely to continue. On the other hand, granting mercy can sometimes be a miraculous, conversion experience that significantly changes a person's life. Often the giver of mercy cannot know the outcome, and certainly can't control it. Mother Teresa said that she and her sisters of charity did their acts of mercy in the streets of Calcutta with the poor and the sick to be faithful not to be successful. Whether she and her sisters were successful or not in reducing sickness and poverty in Calcutta was in God's hands. Success was none of her concern. She did what she did out of faith in Jesus' injunction "to love as I have loved" and her intention and motivation came from the desire to be faithful not successful.

Unitarian Universalists may want to adopt Mother Teresa's understanding so that our following our second principle of justice, equity, and compassion is not necessarily with the intention of being successful. Bringing about justice and equity with our individual acts, person to person, may not always produce the desired results because of circumstances we can't control, but we should be faithful to our principle because of what the practice does for the doer if not the recipient. We are called, all of us, but especially those of us with power and resources, to be merciful in what is rapidly becoming a cynical, hard, "I don't care" world. Extending mercy and engaging in acts of mercy is a manifestation of our faith in our first and second principles.

My Kind Of Church Music - Mercy, Mercy Me, Marvin Gaye

Saturday, July 19, 2014

Thought for the day - The pillage and rape of Mother Nature

"While on one level it seems like an important and reasonable thing to do, protect the habitat of the butterflies, human beings have been used to the idea for the last 2,000 years, and especially the last 200 since the advent of the industrial age that the environment be damned. It is there simply for the pleasure and the profit of human beings and God, in the story of Genesis, has given homo sapiens the permission to dominate Mother Nature to their will and to do with her as they would including pillage and rape."

David Markham, UU A Way Of Life, 07/19/14
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