Both/And
Rev. Diane Rollert
Unitarian Church of Montreal, 7 May 2023
Here’s my version of two truths and a lie. Which one of these three things is a lie?
1. It’s very easy for me to admit I am wrong.
2. It’s very hard for me to admit I am wrong.
3. I have a very clear connection with God.
Sometimes I do find it very easy to admit I’m wrong; and sometimes I find it very hard to admit I’m wrong. It depends on the situation. But I don’t feel I have a clear connection with God. I have a thirst for the holy, and I’m always seeking that connection. But it’s often very far away. You could say I have a very complex relationship with these two truths and a lie. I call it both/and thinking.
My mom’s been gone for almost 20 years now. I know next week is Mother’s Day, but I’m thinking of her right now. I do really wish she were around to talk to.
She was the one who taught me about truth. She taught me to be so truthful that it sometimes got me into trouble. Like the time when I was ten, and my friend Janet Hughs didn’t like the attention she was getting from a boy on the playground. She was too polite to tell him to leave her alone, so I did. Then all the kids, including Janet, got mad at me for being so direct. Thanks, Mom.
My mom would be shocked by how much the world has changed since she died. I wouldn’t even know where to begin to explain to her what’s happened in these twenty years. She spent a lot of her career studying the development of morality in children.
These days, truth seems to have fallen by the wayside. It’s as if the assurance that most people will reach a certain stage of moral development no longer exists. My mom wasn’t surprised when politicians lied. But she believed that there were facts and clear, scientific principles, as well as moral standards, that everyone could agree upon.
The Internet had already taken hold at the end of her life. She and my dad appreciated using email to contact family and friends. When my dad retired and took over the cooking, my mom appreciated the hours he spent searching for new recipes online. He printed them out on a dotmatrix printer. It was a more innocent time.
I think my mom would have been fascinated to study current shifts in the moral development of
children — and adults — as the Internet has developed and taken off into social media. She
would have been thrilled to see the proliferation of online support communities for people who
would otherwise be isolated, such as support groups for people who are autistic or have OCD, or
kids who are gay or trans.
But it would have broken her heart to witness the erosion of truth, to see how much misinformation has become a horrible virus, a dangerous Alice in Wonderland rabbit hole that people fall into. Together, she and I had watched astronauts landing on the moon. How dismayed she would have been to learn that there are now people convinced it was all a hoax. Or that here’s even a conspiracy circulating that the earth is flat —and it has a following of people who swear it’s true.
My mom was active in the Chicago teachers union and a great believer in the democratic process. I’m glad she isn’t alive to see what’s happened with the big lie about the last US presidential election.
I don’t think she’d be surprised that misinformation is being manipulated to stoke people’s fear of “the other” all around the world. She had witnessed the effects of Nazism and anti-Semitism as a teenager and young adult. In the 60s and 70s, she saw firsthand the fear that was preyed upon to incite white flight to the suburbs from the cities of Cleveland and Chicago. She knew from her mostly Black and Latinx students that they encountered racist hatred every day on their way to school.
But I don’t think she would have been prepared for how much truth has been twisted and how much fear has been accelerated as a result of our hyper-connectivity.
My mom taught me to be truthful. She also taught me that people are complex, that nothing is simple, that there is no one who is purely evil or purely good. She taught me that what mattered was more than just being kind. She said we were on this earth to make justice possible.
Her answer was to start by improving the lives of children, by helping parents and future teachers to understand the stages of a child’s cognitive and moral development. That way, she said, they would be treated with greater understanding and would then have a better chance of success in life.
My answer has been to become a UU minister. So let’s get back to those two truths and a lie. It can be both very easy and very hard for me to admit I am wrong, and I do leave space for mystery and for unknowable truths, even if my connection to God is not very clear. This faith calls me to be grounded in the responsible search for truth and meaning, and to be able to hold in my mind and in my heart what may sometimes feel like conflicting truths.
Here’s one quick example. I know it’s a heavy one on a day when we are about to enjoy the wonderful festivities of BidSunday. But perhaps this is the ultimate test of how to hold, at the same time, the beauty and the challenge of who we are as a religious movement.
I did my studies for the ministry at Harvard Divinity School, which is part of Harvard University. While Harvard itself was founded in 1636, the divinity school was founded in 1816 by some of our most famous Unitarian luminaries. People like William Ellery Channing, Ralph Waldo Emerson and others received their education and found their voices there.
Lately, Harvard University has been coming to terms with its shameful and long-hidden relationship to slavery. Over a 150-year period, some of Harvard’s presidents, leaders, faculty and staff enslaved more than 70 people.
Recently, Dan McKanan, who is the Ralph Waldo Emerson Unitarian Universalist Senior Lecturer at Harvard Divinity School, presented a powerful lecture about the divinity school and slavery that he entitled “Family Stories.” [You can find a link to the video and a transcript of the lecture here: https://hds.harvard.edu/news/2023/2/13/video-harvard-divinity-school-and-slaveryfamily-stories] school forty years after the abolition of slavery in Massachusetts. Many of these founders were abolitionists and opposed slavery. But they came from families that had established their wealth and privilege through the slave trade or slave-produced goods. These men lived in embarrassed tension with their own privilege.
Dan speaks of them grappling with their own sense of moral injury. “Moral injury,” he says, is “the distress that we feel when we find ourselves entangled in actions that violate our own ethical principles even though we ourselves did not choose that action.”
These 19th-century Unitarians in Massachusetts benefited from enslavement even if they didn’t directly choose to participate in it. It’s like all of us who are not Indigenous benefitting from colonization just by being here. That’s our moral injury to grapple with.
Dan remarks that some of the key early leaders of the divinity school exhibited significant moral courage in the fight to end enslavement, and yet they went on to bequeath the divinity school to white, privileged people like themselves. Dan ends his lecture by saying that it’s “up to us now to do this differently… to expand our imagination of which ancestors and which descendants count.” How? He argues this can only be done through some form of reparation and democratization that changes who has power over all of Harvard’s endowment.
I really think that Dan’s lecture is an incredible example of both/and thinking, of holding several truths about our own Unitarian family stories at the same time. These are stories we need to know, we need to share, and we need to reckon with.
My mom would have said that healthy moral development leads to the capacity to grapple with complex and difficult truths. Sometimes we can easily open our minds to new truths. Other times it can be hard to admit we’ve got it wrong.
We are human, a work in progress, hopefully able to continue to grow and develop, to grasp new truths, to build new relationships, to lovingly care for each other and still hold each other accountable.
And now I’m thinking of the Lyle Lovett song called “Church,” which tells a story about a preacher who keeps preaching, and preaching, and preaching. Everyone in the congregation is so hungry that they’re passing out, until finally, someone recruits the choir to start singing:
To the Lord let praises be
It's time for dinner now let's go eat
We've got some beans and some good cornbread
And I listened to what the preacher said
And the whole congregation chimes in:
Now it's to the Lord let praises be
It's time for dinner now let's go eat