“Justice Equity and Compassion:
Human Relations as Religious Pursuit”
A Sermon by Charles Blustein Ortman, November 7, 2004
Second in the sermon series of Unitarian Universalist Principles
This week we move into the second Unitarian Universalist principle: "We the member congregations of the Unitarian Universalist Association affirm and promote justice, equity and compassion in human relations." It has not been a quiet week in anyone's hometown; the presidential election has seen to that. Still, I feel ex-tremely fortunate that last spring when I set the schedule for this year, exploring one of our UU principles each month-that we'd be doing this one on the Sunday following the national election. But what could be a more perfect fit than the ideas of justice and equity and compassion in human relations, and a commitment to affirm and promote those ideals at this time and for all times?
So let's take a few minutes to look at the principle, word by word. What is justice? Webster talks about justice as being righteous; it doesn't say anything about being self-righteous. It's about righteousness, being in right relationship. Plato talked about justice; he related it to just about everything else-how one lives and moves through one's life. He said that to be just one must balance the many principles of the soul, and so we see that justice is about the balance in our lives. I would say that if each of our lives is balanced, then we are in balance with life around us, so what justice is about then is everyone looking out for the well-being and the welfare of everyone else. Justice is not about looking out for ourselves; that's self-preservation and it has nothing to do with justice.
What is justice? It's a principle, an aspiration. It's a vision of the world made more whole. Is justice ever a completed reality? I don't think that it can be. But I think it is a compelling principle and an instructive guide toward a world that is more whole and a reality that is more connected-with all of us being connected in it.
The word equity comes from a Latin root meaning level or even; it's from the same root as equal. Webster talks about equity as fairness, impartiality and justice, so these things are all related. Ken Collier, a colleague in the UU ministry who wrote a book on our Principles and Purposes, talks about justice as something that begins in ourselves, and equity as the vehicle through which justice goes out into the world. It is about commitment and action, the commitment and actions that promote justice.
What is equity? Well one thing that it is not, is it is not a Calvinistic principle pitting the saved against the unsaved. It's more of a Universalist approach: we are all in this together. If any of us is saved, we are all saved. Equity is about how society determines the value it ascribes to all its members, and if it is truly level, and fair, even and impartial, that same value can only be ascribed to all of us. Again, equity is a long way from be-coming a reality, but it is a guiding principle and provides us with a worthy goal.
Compassion is a word that is often abused in our culture. The root, passion, is often used to talk about things that are heated, or sexy, or fast or smart. Passion, from its Latin root, is about suffering. The prefix con means with, and so compassion means with suffering, suffering with one another, being together in our suffering. It's not about distancing one's self through pity or about participating from a distance through a far off charity. It's about being together in the midst of life; it's about being together in our suffering.
Mahatma Gandhi talked about suffering as the badge of human existence. "To be human is to suffer," he said. And then he defined suffering as the "pain in our life given meaning." Pain is a given in life, and when we give meaning to that pain, it is elevated to suffering. Compassion is a recognition that justice and equity can and must be our goals, because we are one and the same with everyone on this planet. And with the planet itself. That is our Universalist message, our Unitarian message. Pursuing human relations religiously is the journey toward justice, equity and compassion. Pursuing human relations religiously is not about achieving those ends; it is about being on the road, on the journey toward them. And being there on that road, on that journey, is the religious life. Being on that road is about aspiring to live a moral life.
And again, morality isn't anything that we can ever claim to have achieved. It has always got to be the goal. And I think we have to be very careful, when people are out there making claims about being moral, and then imposing those morals on others.
Let's take a walk through a couple of illustrations of how these three-compassion, equity and justice, might relate out in today's world. The first scenario is in regard to committed relationships. Compassion tries to lead us to understand the challenges and the problems that all people have when they are in committed relationships. We have all been involved in committed, primary relationships, and we know that it's not easy. We know it's a struggle. We know we need all the support we can get to live out our commitments to them. And compassion helps us to connect: we all struggle; we all need each other's support.
Equity helps us to provide that support by promoting an even ground upon which to be in committed relation-ship. Justice helps us to correct the inadequacies of the past so that all persons have the right to engage, and to be protected in the pursuit of loving relationships. There's nothing in any of this that defines who might be the participants in those relationships. There's nothing that stipulates that relationships ought to be heterosexual, or gay, or lesbian. We recognize that the longing and the need to be in primary committed relationships is a strong human need and that justice, equity and compassion help us to recognize that we don't have to engage in defin-ing who it is that other people ought to fall in love with.
Ethnic oppression provides another view of cultural oppression through the lens of our second principle. For those of you who read my Gazette column this month, you know that I am not willing any more to ascribe things to race, and to racial injustice in the way that we so often do. Just using the term gets in the way of the work we have to do. There is a human race, and we are all parts of that human race. We might come from dif-ferent cultures and ethnicities, but the race is the human race. So compassion then tells us that we are all of that one race. Equity tells us that all children deserve to be safe, in warm homes, that they deserve meaningful edu-cation; that young men should be able to walk down the street without being hassled, without being shot by passing cars, without being thrown into prison unjustly or even to be involved in the criminal system. Equity tells us that all families deserve the fruits of the culture's economics, deserve the benefits of the health and the medical systems within the culture, so that the life expectancies of all the cultures and subcultures might be level. Equity tells us that all of the opportunities that are available in our culture are available to all of us. And justice again helps us to correct the inadequacies of the past so that all persons might have the protected right to pursue the fullness and abundance of life.
And where we get lost is when a few people from various subcultures break through the boundaries. Somehow, they are held up as an example of how the racial divide has been conquered. It's a lie. We only need to look at the number of people who live in substandard housing. We only need to look at who and where the bad schools are and who is attending them. We only need to look at who dies when, who ends up in prison in the greatest numbers, and we can see that we're a long way from erasing that greatest problem that James Baldwin talked about in the last century, the color line.
Justice, equity and compassion are not just good ideas. They are religious ideals and they have been the ideals of religion from the beginning of time.
I'd like to say just a word about morality again, because it too is an aspiration. We are not going to accomplish morality in our lifetimes. Life is too very complicated on many layers. We try to assess the world around us and we don't pick up all the pieces. Unless we're trying to make those assessments and trying to bring justice to where there has been injustice, we promote the continuation of those failures instead accepting them, striving to do better and moving forward on the journey.
When people claim the moral high ground because they have heard the voice of God, my suspicion is that they have been talking to themselves and they are fooling themselves about who they're in conversation with. If God answers at all, and I suspect God does answer, God answers in silence, because if it were anything other than silence, we would not be free to make the choices to do the good that we are capable of doing in our lives.
Where all of this comes into play for me is in two ways-two ways that have both broken my heart this week, but that have also provided me clarity and have led me to a place of hope, showing me where it is that we need to focus as liberal religious people.
First, on Election Day, Tuesday, 22%--that's a number that we have heard over and over again throughout the week - 22% of those who voted to re-elect President Bush said that their vote was based on moral grounds. We have been talking for the last ten or fifteen minutes about moral grounds. And none of what has been said sounded in any way like the morality that we have been hearing about from the 22%. The supposedly moral grounds that were raised were about women's right to choose, about stem cell research, and about gay marriage, about controlling the lives and the loves of others. Those self-righteous assertions were called the high moral ground.
Because there was a vacuum into which these moral values were expressed in this country, and because there was nobody on the other side, including us, that had a clearly articulated voice and vision of what morality and religious life might more truly be about (justice, equity and compassion), that 22% was able to redefine morality and somehow get away with it. These same crusaders of the Christian Right turned their collective back on what we might call justice, and instead condoned the deaths of thousands upon thousands of Iraqis who died in the past three years because of an attack that they had nothing to do with; the hundreds, now over a thousand deaths of Americans for the same reason. They were able to ignore the content of those pieces of morality be-cause there was this phenomenal vacuum.
Our job as liberal religionists, our job as Unitarian Universalists, the goal of justice and equity and compassion in human relationships calls on us to envision a world that is filled with those values articulated in our second principle. It calls on us to communicate that vision. It calls on us to act on that communication. And it calls on us to clearly do that-not just within these walls-but out in the world. And because we were not out in the world, and because we were not clear, and because we could not say, "this is a matter of justice, a matter of equity, a matter of compassion," some other kind of morality-that I don't understand-won the day.
Second, the other part of what troubled me so much, and the part I have greater clarity about now, and the part that I feel hopeful in responding to is the role of fear in the last two years-the way that fear has been used in the campaigns in both political parties. The Kerry camp said this nation cannot survive and hold together through another Bush presidency. The truth is that President Bush has been reelected and we are going to sur-vive, we're going to pull together, and we're going to do it better than in the past. I hope that we will. I hope that we can be the loyal opposition, the honorable, loyal opposition that we are going to be called upon to be in the next few years. And the Bush campaign used the same kind of fear against the Kerry campaign, except that it had three-plus years of experience and expertise that the administration has gained in meting out the fear that it has promoted since September 11th.
We had a dinner party at my house last night. It was a Murder Mystery Dinner and it was set in 1920's Chi-cago, and all of the guests were dressed and in character as gangsters and mobsters. I was thinking about the role of mobsters in Chicago and in cities throughout the world. How it works is thugs go into an area and they create havoc and fear, and then they sell security. That sounded too much like what has been going on in our country.
Fear is a healthy defense when it is in response to a realistic threat. Fear is not, however, something that gives us the right to destroy the world around us in order to keep that little patch of ground upon which we stand. Because that little patch will just become smaller and smaller as we allow fear to take over. Fear is the greatest obstruction, the greatest obstacle to justice and equity and compassion. When we allow ourselves to be manipulated by fear we capitulate our efforts towards justice and morality.
We need to look fear in the face and say that our lives are about hope. They are about justice and equity and compassion. We need to step into that moral void and articulate a vision of a better and more loving world. We need to stand on the side of love and to say that this is where we take our stand. We need to take the actions that will bring justice to those who have not had justice. And we need to invite others into our visioning process, into forming our articulation of it, and into our actions to promote a world that is more just.
Liberal religion is not about a liberal political party. It's about a religious approach that is liberal. One that in-cludes reason and tolerance and freedom of conscience. That is not about limiting who we are as human beings. It's about expanding ourselves as human beings. We are not here to limit ourselves or one another. We are here to grow our souls together, and not just our own, but the world along with us.
So grant that we may be a loyal opposition to any religious views, all religious views that would define morality in any way that lessens the capacity of justice and equity and compassion in the world around us. And grant too that we might be gracious losers and gracious winners, determined and loyal, envisioned and welcoming of a world that invites our own yielding, our own acceptance, our own promotion of justice and equity and compas-sion in human relations and in the world.
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