Rev. Rod Debs January 6, 2008
Listen to the podcast at “Voices of Liberal Religion” (mp3)
Story: Aesop’s Fable “The Ant and the Grasshopper,” Peacemaking Version by Chris Larson and Martin Baker
When I was young, people used to tell me to do one thing and not to do another. They would say I was bad or good depending on what I did. But the best teachers didn’t tell me I was bad or good. The best teachers told me stories about life, and I learned how to behave from their stories. This is an old story: “The Ant and the Grasshopper.”
The ants in the colony worked hard all summer long in the withering heat, building a house and stocking supplies for the winter. The grasshoppers fiddled and chirped all summer long.
Winter came, and the ants were all warm and well fed thanks to their cooperative community effort.
However, they were a rather dull lot and developed cabin fever. Remembering how the grasshoppers’ serenade had entertained them as they worked, the ants invited the grasshoppers to fiddle in exchange for food and shelter.
They all came to realize that everyone has strengths and weaknesses. Ants are industrious yet mundane; grasshoppers are vibrant but don’t prepare for the future.
The ants and grasshoppers learned to share and respect one another’s strengths and to help one another. Everyone thrived and lived happily ever after.
What can we learn from this story?
I learned not to judge ants as good because they work hard nor to judge grasshoppers as lazy and bad. I learned that everyone can contribute to community if we learn how to love each other and to appreciate who each is.
Sermon: Emily Dickinson wrote:
“Tell all the Truth but tell it slant—
Success in Circuit lies
Too bright for our infirm Delight
The Truth’s superb surprise
As Lightening to the Children eased
With explanation kind
The Truth must dazzle gradually
Or every man be blind—”
This week in Iowa, candidates for U.S. president got preliminary feedback on how well they are telling the truth, all the truth, but telling it slant. Voters love feeling that the candidates level with them, really tell the truth. But we all know that if the candidates didn’t slant the bright light of their political views, voters of diverse perspectives would be dazzled. Every straight-on position would alienate some camp of voters. Being a politician, being political means to tell all the truth, the fundamental values that hold the candidate, but to avoid the blinding details, to tell it slant. Gently navigating the learning curve in a nation of great and passionate diversity. The learning curve.
Growing up in childhood involves stretching one’s mind and spirit, it involves learning surprising truths, as in the poem: “Too bright for our infirm Delight / The Truth’s superb surprise / As Lightening to the Children eased / With explanation kind / The Truth must dazzle gradually / Or every (one) be blind—” Some of us grew up with blinding dogmas, partial-truths and without life’s lightening being “eased with explanation kind.” From seeing unfortunate people in the world, as a child I feared being lazy or unwise in using my time and energies. The dazzling, lightening flash was that unhappy people were lazy and wasteful. So be afraid. Don’t be lazy and ignorant.
The original Aesop’s Fable of “The Ant and the Grasshopper” was harsh: “The ant worked hard all summer long in the withering heat, building his house and stocking supplies for the winter. The grasshopper thought the ant foolish and laughed and played the summer away. Winter came. The ant was warm and well fed. The grasshopper had no food or shelter, so he died out in the cold.” The story was lightening-harsh. Don’t be lazy. Don’t laugh and play when you could be building shelter for the future and stocking supplies.
The Peacemaking version that Chris Larsen and her brother Marty created, tells far more of the truth, I think. It tells that some work hard in withering heat, but it also affirms that others laugh and play. It concludes that when it comes to surviving life’s harsh winters, we need both ant and grasshopper gifts, we need both spiritual resources as well as material goods.
The lightening truth that if you’re lazy you’ll die, doesn’t tell it all. Life only seems longer when it’s all work and no play. The dazzling details don’t always communicate all the truth. Though food and shelter are certainly important, life has many gifts to be enjoyed with play and laughter. Sure, if you’re lazy you die. But if you’re all work and no play, you’ll die too. To tell all the truth, you have to tell it slant. The whole truth is that we need one another’s ant and grasshopper gifts, and we need to develop our own inner ant and grasshopper. “Tell all the Truth but tell it slant— / Success in Circuit lies….”
Recently, I’ve been interested in learning a couple of yoga stretching exercises, especially for my back. Years ago I learned some Feldenkrais stretching exercises often used in geriatric settings. Unlike calisthenics, Feldenkrais stretching is very slow and involves breathing in on the stretch, and breathing out on the return. There’s something about breathing in on a stretch that relaxes the muscles and allows them to lengthen. The calisthenics I grew up with involved harsh rather than gentle stretching with no attention to breathing and it seemed to tear the muscle tissue. There are those who say, no pain, no gain!
It seems to me that learning is a lot like these stretching exercises. Lightening harsh facts don’t tell all the truth. You have to see it slant, see the truth from many angles. Straight on is not the whole story. Rather, stretch your perspective in new directions, slowly, and breathe into it. See it slant rather than straight on.
One of the members of the UU congregation in Cedar Falls, Iowa, Kirby Sherman worked in the Batterers Intervention Program (BIP) as a group facilitator. The courts, judges would sentence those found guilty of domestic violence to fulfill a number of weeks of group counseling. When you sit down and listen to people, it’s amazing what you learn. One man said, “How am I supposed to control my wife if I don’t hit her?”
When I look at this question slant, I realize that this man sincerely feels that he is responsible to control his wife.
George Lakoff, Professor of Linguistics at the University of California, Berkeley, writes in his book, “Don’t Think of an Elephant: Know Your Values and Frame the Debate,” that our nation has two different models of the family and that these models provide two different metaphors of good government: a strict father family, and a nurturant parent family.
The fellow in the Batterers Intervention Program felt that he was supposed to be in control of his family in the strict father family model. Somewhere he had gotten the idea that he is responsible to be in control of the behavior of his children and of his wife. After all, he is the “head of household” on his tax form and according to the Bible and James Dobson! And it is the head—conscious intention that controls the body to behave itself respectably. We’re talking “control” in the strict father model, not negotiation and compromise of different perspectives, not influence, not exploration and experience, not trial and error and forgiveness and beginning again, but control.
The strict father model assumes moral authority resides in the male head of household. If the family members do not obey, the righteous father, the good and loving father is strict, which means the father punishes those he loves. Now the Biblical tradition of “spare the rod and spoil the child” is misused to authorize physical violence. The rod, in Hebrew times, was an iron bar used by shepherds to defend the sheep from predators, never for beating the sheep, let alone for whipping children and wife. To “spare the rod and spoil the child” is better interpreted as exhortation to protect children from harm, physically creating barriers against hurtful surroundings, against dogs and snakes, and by analogy, against bad influences and social pitfalls.
The reality that the Biblical “rod” was an iron bar which you would never beat your livestock with, let alone beat your children and wife, this knowledge is not part of our strict father family model. If a man is embarrassed in public by arguing spouse and belligerent children, the strict father sense of himself as a man and head of household—his masculinity is thrown in doubt. He feels society’s judgment that if he doesn’t have enough power to control the behavior and speech of his own wife and children, he is obviously too weak to battle those outside the family who would do them harm. If he isn’t strict enough in using the “rod” of punishment to control his own wife and children, then he isn’t much of a man. So he asks, “How am I supposed to control my wife if I don’t hit her?”
James Dobson has sold millions of books, in particular, his text Dare to Discipline, which instructs the strict father to teach children obedience through physically painful punishment, exercising his moral authority knowing right from wrong. In the Hebrew Scriptures, God punished “His” children for their sins by enslavement and captivity at the hands of conquering kings, and ordered genocide against God’s enemies; it seems clear that the divine patriarch has no qualms about using violence in punishment of his people to gain obedience. The strict father family model that authorizes violent punishment and control is deeply rooted in our culture. You’re supposed to control your family by painful punishment if necessary.
George Lakoff points out that our nation holds the strict father family model as one of two metaphors for the governing our nation. As a strict father, the President is the moral authority who by virtue of his position alone knows right from wrong and is responsible to exercise punishing control over the people domestically, and over subservient “child” states and enemies that refuse to obey. We’re not talking negotiation and compromise, here, but military violence and control. The “father” of the nation is the “decider” who dictates from absolute moral authority, without accountability, without emasculating subservience to constitution, to international law or treaty but according to his strict fatherly determination of the nation’s best interests. He will not be embarrassed by children or spouse who are argumentative, disobedient and not in control.
In contrast to the strict father family model, we also have a nurturing parent family model that can serve as our metaphor for government. Among nurturing parents, both men and women, moral authority is shared and diverse perspectives of the truth are negotiated with compromise, testing and reality-based experience as our guide. No one is an unquestioned moral authority. Nurturing parents are accountable to one another and to the community for effective strategies and successful outcomes, acknowledging mistakes, correcting errors, changing course and all without falling into the failure-strategy of domestic violence and abuse.
In the nurturing parent family model, and as a metaphor for government, violence and war are not proof of strength, but evidence of profound failure. Violence in the family and war among nations create more harm and solve nothing. But in the strict father family model, it is obligatory. “How am I supposed to control by wife if I don’t beat her?” How am I supposed to control other nations without using military threat and violence? This is the language of profound failure within the nurturing parent family model.
But George Lakoff points out that during times of fear, when we feel victimized and as helpless as children, families and nations long for a strong and strict father who will take control and demand obedience without qualms of corporal punishment or military violence.
The question I ask this morning is about stretching, the learning-curve: How best do we learn right behavior as family members and as nations? Do children and spouses and nations come to see the dazzling truth under the shock and awe of violence? Or does dialogue and listening better hone in on reality’s truths? Does telling all the truth, involve sharing many perspectives, hearing it slant rather than in your face with a big stick?
With my daughter’s periodic visits home, I have been feeling a steep “learning curve.” My eating habits have mirrored what is easily available in grocery stores and restaurants: processed foods with a long list of chemical additives that I’m told my liver has to work overtime to sort out. And for shelf life, much of the whole food nutrition is processed out and replaced by preservatives. Almost nothing I eat is whole food, raised organically and without pesticides. Katrina and her partner Alma work, in part, as organic farmers. Their “Bible” is Paul Pitchford’s Healing with Whole Foods: Asian Traditions and Modern Nutrition, Third Edition (2002), but they also live in community networks of organic farmers in Colorado and northern California.
When Katrina comes home, and even more so after she leaves and takes her culinary skills back to California with her, I face a very steep learning curve. I am dazzled by the lightening-bright truth that I love processed sugar, fat, salt, chemical additive preserved products. I can hardly find organic whole food at the store and when I do purchase it, I don’t know how to prepare it without adding sugar, fat, salt, chemical additives—well you get the point. Learning to eat nutritious whole foods is a real stretch for me.
I could rely on the strict father family model and let Katrina clean out the refrigerator and cabinets of all non-organic and processed foods, and obediently eat only what she dictates. I’m sorry, but that’s not going to happen. That’s not how I learn.
Years ago, my partner, Jeannette, read that we eat altogether too much meat in the standard American diet. She began preparing one meat-free meal a week. I learned to do the same when I prepared our family meals. Then we moved to two meat-free meals a week, three, then four, and eventually we bought no meat except weekly fish. But when I talk with my fellow Americans, I don’t say that we are vegetarian. I say that we normally don’t eat meat at home, and, like many Americans, we’ve cut back on our consumption of meat. I tell it slant. Meat-eaters who can’t imagine eating no meat can agree that eating less meat is a realizable goal. Eating less processed foods and more non-chemical whole foods is a doable process. It’s like slowly stretching, breathing and stretching a little at a time from wherever you are.
It’s also a dialogue. I don’t have to obey anyone’s dictates about cutting meat or dairy or sugar from my diet altogether, nor obey anyone’s dictates to avoid microwaves or heated oils, substituting carob and stevia in place of chocolate and sugar. In dialogue, I stretch myself a little at a time on the learning curve, and Katrina tells me the truth, all the truth, but she tells it slant, from angles I can handle.
The nurturing parent family model is a truly American innovation. The founders of our nation left England determined not to have any bishop, priest or king tell them what to believe or how to run a country. They wanted to enshrine the “right of conscience” in this new land, rather than monarchy and religious authority. They created constitutional democracy in government and congregational governance in religion as a repudiation of the strict father family model of England’s king, priests and bishops. No one was to have dictatorial moral authority, not President, not legislators, not judges, not bishops nor priests, not corporations, not the wealthy. The three branches of government and independent congregations would have to negotiate non-violently and without control over one another though we may all have passionate and widely diverse perspectives.
Those most gifted in these skills of political negotiations are those willing to tell it slant and to allow all the truth including others’ truths to emerge in the political process. It’s not about control. It’s about stretching—stretching to incorporate a broader vision of the general welfare and of the common good.
The Quaker Parker Palmer said it this way: “The great gift we receive on the inner journey is the certain knowledge that ours is not the only act in town.”
Ours is not the only act in town. Ours are not the only truths deserving to be taken seriously. Our American heritage is a testimony that no one has moral authority to justify controlling violence in the home or abroad. Though national fear might bring a helpless longing for a strict father to take control and exercise punishing violence, may we be courageous in engaging dialogue of mutual trust and support, stretching ourselves with others to wider truths.
“Tell all the Truth but tell it slant—
Success in Circuit lies
Too bright for our infirm Delight
The Truth’s superb surprise
As Lightening to the Children eased
With explanation kind
The Truth must dazzle gradually
Or every man be blind—“ –Emily Dickinson