First Unitarian Society of Minneapolis

Rev. Kendyl Gibbons
First Unitarian Society of Minneapolis
January 18, 2004

It was short notice, but I had the opportunity to be part of a meeting with Bill McManus on Thursday afternoon. As I worked my way through the more than 250 e-mails awaiting me when I returned from my week off and the latest meeting of the Ministers' Association executive committee, there was a note from the mayor's office, inviting the members of our downtown clergy group to meet with the candidate for Minneapolis's new chief of police as part of his interview process. Now I don't know whose idea it was, but this was a smart move on the part of both Mayor Rybak and Chief McManus; I am not well acquainted with either of them, but one or both has good political savvy. As many of you probably know, McManus was confirmed by the city council on Friday, and will begin his work here probably some time next month. It will not be an easy job; this city has something of a reputation for difficult relationships between law enforcement and the minority community in particular. In fact, I was a little concerned when I saw the invitation, that meeting with the clergy of the downtown congregations - largely white congregations, with primarily white ministers - would be a mistake. But a quick phone call to the mayor's office confirmed that we were not the only ones invited, and when I arrived at the meeting that afternoon, it was clear that Caucasians were in the minority, which was just fine.

Bill McManus seems like a nice enough guy; he gave the right answers to the questions he was posed about community relations, local policing, working with the officers' union. Asked about his own religious background, he replied that he was a practicing Roman Catholic, and would seek a parish with which to affiliate when he moved here, and that he valued the work of faith communities of all kinds in helping to promote safe and healthy neighborhoods throughout the city. It was an interesting group that assembled to engage in this conversation. There were many representatives of African American churches, and faith-based organizations, especially those that work with young minority men. These probably have the greatest concerns about the approach that a police chief will take, and model for the force as a whole. There were several members of the Somali community, including a religious leader, as well as an elder from the Mille Lacs tribe, and members of the Muslim community. I had my own question for the new police chief, but it didn't seem relevant to the general discussion, so I saved it for a quick private conversation after the meeting broke up. I asked Mr. McManus whether he was aware of the resolution passed by the city council last year, expressing serious reservations about the constitutionality of the USA PATRIOT act, and instructing that the provisions of that act not be invoked for local law enforcement, nor local resources expended in assisting federal investigations under its terms. He responded that he was not aware of the resolution - don't worry; I'm going to send him a copy of his very own - but that he was opposed to the violation of civil liberties on the basis of appearance or ethnicity. "Or because the federal government doesn't like somebody?" I pressed. "Or that," he answered, "I'm not into that."

Of course, it all remains to be seen; commitments and good intentions are easy enough at this point. But there was something about that meeting that seemed hopeful to me, on a deeper level than campaign promises and political posturing. There was a question that we who gathered were asking just by our being there; a statement that was made by who we were, and that was responded to by how Bill McManus and RT Rybak interacted with us - a question and a statement that I think has a great deal to do with our topic this morning, the exploration of reverence and duty.

Two other factors enter into my reflections on this issue. One is my memory of public attitudes toward the police, at least in my liberal corner of the world, when I was a teenager. I remember how horrified my parents were by the brutality displayed by the Chicago police department and captured on national TV during the democratic convention of 1968. For those of us coming out of the civil rights era, the war protests, and the middle class experimental drug culture, police officers were largely considered ignorant, reactionary, arrogant buffoons, prone to violence and opposed to free speech or anyone having a good time. It must have been an excruciatingly difficult era to be a law enforcement professional. That image has changed in the course of thirty years, especially since the visible heroism of fire fighters and police officers in the cruel and tragic chaos of the World Trade Center on 9/11. But in addition to that iconic moment, I have the impression that there have also been decades of efforts to recruit and promote minority candidates and women, as well as to educate all police personnel around issues of diversity and community relations. This is slow and painstaking work, but I think it has paid off in the way that cops - as chief McManus calls them - are viewed in our contemporary culture. This shift in perception also has something to do with our understanding of duty, and its connection to the virtue of reverence.

The other visibly striking thing about our meeting on Thursday afternoon was the prayers. People filtered in slowly, and the meeting got underway without much formal introduction, but it was inevitable that it would be suggested that we close with prayer. What was remarkable was that the room turned, almost of one accord, to the Native American elder, and others followed, so that our closing prayers were offered in Ojibway, Somali, and English. Only a few of those present understood the first two, and I'm pretty sure that the mayor and the chief weren't among them. Nor, I suspect, did some of the elder minority leaders understand much of the English, but in a way, that was exactly the point. What held the people in that room together in that moment was the pure value of reverence; you didn't have to understand the spoken words of the Somali patriarch to know that he was appealing for the welfare of his compatriots, for the city we share, and for the man who was taking on leadership of an important part of our safekeeping. His language was not mine, his culture is not mine, his theology is not mine, but his aspiration in that moment was, and in Bill McManus's bowed head lay part of the answer to the basic question we had all come to ask, which was, Will you hold us all in reverence? Will you honor our diverse expressions of common values? Will you try to understand our struggles, our accents, our differing modes of respect? Will you do your duty, and summon those who are accountable to you, to do their duty, with reverence? It may be that there is no one in our city today of whom this is a more urgent and crucial question than the chief of police.

In his discussion of the value of reverence in the culture of ancient China and classical Greece, Paul Woodruff emphasizes an important element of reverence as maintaining respect for others who have less power than one's self. This is somewhat unexpected, since the more common understanding of reverence has to do with what we experience toward that which is greater than ourselves. But I think that Woodruff has a point. The quality that I want my leaders, and the people who have authority over me, to have is reverence. This is not about whether they believe in god, or which god they may believe in, but rather whether they feel themselves accountable to some values, personified or not, that constrain them in their behavior toward those within their control. Or in other words, I want them to have a sense of duty, so that their exercise of power is not just about the limits of what they have the ability to enforce, but rather, as Woodruff says, "holds force and violence firmly in the service of the common good."

The concept of duty, it seems to me, is the product of this kind of reverence. Although it is an old-fashioned word, and one burdened with a great many disagreeable connotations, I am persuaded that it is a word, and a concept, worth resuscitating. If we could bring ourselves, and our candidates, to talk about our duties, rather than our self-interest, in the presidential campaign that lies before us, we could elevate the tone of the discussion considerably, and begin to grapple with its questions more meaningfully. Duty, as I am suggesting it be understood, arises out of reverence in the context of uneven power; it is in some sense what followers owe to a legitimate leader, but it is more importantly what leaders owe to their followers. Where reverence is felt, followers give their allegiance out of respect, shared values, and possibly out of admiration for the leader. Where reverence is not felt, duty is merely oppression; it is being forced to do what you would not otherwise choose to do, because of some threat, or the promise of a bribe. Ingersoll rightly condemns this kind of obedience as cowardice, not virtue, and says it is unworthy of us as human beings. It may be a hard choice to do our duty, but it is always a free choice, for as soon as we are compelled by anything other than our conscience, genuine duty and the reverence in which it is founded have fled.

At the same time, the truly reverent leader can never lose sight of the responsibility that followers have placed into his or her hands. Reverent leadership does not seek solely its own aggrandizement, but rather uses its power to serve the purposes for which it was created, and the greater good of all. This is why the choice of leaders matters so much, and that is why we so eagerly seek the assurance that those who would be leaders have this quality of reverence. It is not about what kind of hymns they like to sing, if any, or which church they belong to; it is a matter of their recognizing that in any morally sustainable system, with power come duties, and the more power, the greater those duties. Chief McManus got off to a good start by demonstrating his awareness that he must work to create consulting relationships among the community whose peace he is going to be laboring to ensure. There is a visible resemblance between the ceremonies of the police department, and those of the military that Woodruff describes in his discussion. That is because like the military, the police force is the group into whose hands we have entrusted the principle tools of violence. As Woodruff aptly observes, "The greater the powers that are put into your hands, the more important it is for you to develop inner restraints against the abuse of power." This is what we were looking for on Thursday afternoon; this is what we were asking: Is Bill McManus the kind of man who has developed in himself, and can model for others, his own inner restraints against the abuse of power? If so, his leadership will be a gift to the officers under his command, and to all the citizens of Minneapolis. If not, the tyranny of arbitrary violence and the anarchy of lawlessness are sure to follow; we have known this since the plays of Sophocles and Euripides.

But what about the rest of us? Most of us have neither the aspiration nor the opportunity to become the chief of police. What may we learn from the connection between duty and reverence? Paul Woodruff offers us one interesting example; he writes:

And, I would add, we have forgotten the deeper meaning of duty, which is also the expression of reverence. Voting is only one example, and this congregation probably needs a sermon about voting less than almost any other group you could find. But here's my point: if you are shocked by Janice, if you feel that she is despising and discarding something precious, then you have a sense of reverence, and a concept of duty. You understand that the ceremonies of power in a democracy are important safeguards of our freedom, even when the impact of individual ballots is vanishingly small. When the process of election is mocked, when leadership is content to operate by deception and force, then reverence is lost and hubris is at work, with tragic consequences to follow.

One can make the same kind of observation about a ceremony as small as the offering on Sunday morning, as Alice Blair Wesley has pointed out. What is collected in these baskets represents a small proportion of our actual congregational budget, but this ritual is a significant and hard won statement about our independence as a religious community. People suffered persecution and died that we might have the privilege of passing by the polling place twiddling our thumbs on election day, just as they did that we might gather with or stay home from this or any other religious institution we choose on Sunday mornings. They are long dead now, and what we decide to do can make no difference to them, yet the experience of reverence teaches that we have some kind of duty that is connected to our appreciation of these privileges. It is not our self-interest that we serve in fulfilling these duties, but reverence for an ideal. It is not that democracy or religious diversity are ultimate values in themselves, but rather that they are the best systems that humanity has yet been able to devise for the sustainable distribution and exercise of power. If we have reverence for the ideals of justice and freedom, then we have a duty to perform the ceremonies of democracy, whether we personally benefit from doing so or not.

The famous orator Robert Ingersoll, often referred to as the great infidel because of his open declaration of agnosticism, and his criticism of the traditional church, had no patience with supernatural claims, but he had a firm grasp on the concept of duty. Though he defended the individual's right, in certain circumstances, to commit suicide, he also rejected the idea that anyone could kill themselves "...without taking into consideration any duty that they owed to wives, children, friends, or society." Using the verbal conventions of his time, he said, "No man has a right to leave his wife to fight the battle alone if he is able to help. No man has a right to desert his children if he can possibly be of use. As long as he can add to the comfort of those he loves, as long as he can stand between wife and misery, between child and want, as long as he can be of any use, it is his duty to remain." Ingersoll held the human ties of love, friendship, and society in reverence, and found rooted in that reverence a concept of duty that once again directs us to the consideration of the less powerful. In an era that emphasized filial deference and a patriarchal family structure, he often spoke of the duty that parents owed to children, and fathers to their families.

As long ago as Confucian China, the sages taught that duty without reverence is hollow. In the Analects of Confucius it is written, "Without reverence, respectfulness is tiresome; without reverence, prudence is timid; without reverence, bravery is quarrelsome; without reverence, frankness is hurtful." With reverence, however, power is constrained to act for the greater good, and duty becomes not oppression, but the signpost guiding us to a better and fuller, more authentic life. Our own Unitarian sage, Ralph Waldo Emerson, urging the student ministers to whom he spoke to place more importance on the lived experience of reverence than on the pursuit of academic theology, put it this way:

May these legacies, gathered from all ages and among all the many creeds, make us more quick to recognize the presence of authentic reverence, and the duties to which it summons us, as well as its absence, in our communities, in those who would be our leaders, and most of all, in ourselves.

From Reverence Paul Woodruff

Reverence, not justice, is the virtue that separates leaders from tyrants, as the old Greek poets knew well. In episode after tragic episode, they show how failures of reverence destroy men who are trying to be leaders. Reverence is the capacity to feel respect in the right way toward the right people, and to feel awe toward an object that transcends particular human interests. When leaders are reverent, they are reverent along with their followers, and their common reverence unites them in feelings that overcome personal interest, feelings such as mutual respect. These feelings take the sting from the tools of leadership - from persuasion, from threats of punishment, from manipulation by means of rewards. This is because there are no winners and losers where there is reverence. Success and failure are dwarfed by the magnitude of whatever it is that they hold in awe together. Wordsworth recognizes this in his tale of boyhood races over water in the magnificent Lake District:

In such a race,

So ended, disappointment could be none,

Uneasiness, or pain, or jealousy;

We rested in shade, all pleased alike,

Conquered or conqueror. Thus our selfishness

Was mellowed down, and thus the pride of strength

And the vainglory of superior skill

Were interfused with objects which subdued

And tempered them, and gradually produced

A quiet independence of the heart.

A leader who uses persuasion, threats, and rewards reverently does so with respect for the followers. This usually requires two things; the leader does not deceive the followers, and the leader is open to persuasion in return. Openness and honesty are defenses a good leader employs against the danger of bad judgment. Leaders are especially vulnerable to bad judgment when they allow themselves to become isolated. Unfortunately, it is easy to resist this conclusion, and would-be leaders are often given to deceit or other devices that prevent them from taking into account the opinions of their followers. Their excuse is that they know more than their followers. This is often true; they do know more than their followers, but that is not excuse for not listening.

Why should soldiers march in step on parade? Why should their shoes be polished and their belt buckles shined? Why should their posture be stiff at attention? Why should their clothes be uniform, starched, and pressed? All of this belongs to a kind of military ceremony that may have had some direct utility in the eighteenth century. But why now? The answer is that drill and ceremonies are an essential part of leadership training. The leader to be acquires a command voice and comes to see the power of example as military demeanor is communicated from commander to troops. Most valuably, the leader in training finds that good commands are followed, and incoherent ones are not followed or are followed badly - that there are clear limits to what can be commanded, the effective commands must belong to the ceremony that brings leader and troops together. It is the same in real life as it is on the parade ground: effective commands belong to a common enterprise. Ceremony is a sign of reverence, and reverence survives outside ceremony in the field of military action.

Ceremony is present in many areas of our lives, such as the classroom and the home, but it is most obvious in the military because of the way in which elements of ceremony or ritual separate military from civilian life. (We have a way of not noticing the ceremonies of civilian life, unless we are observing cultures we think exotic.) This is because the military has two special reasons for cultivating virtue - military people hold the principle tools of violence, and they are severely hierarchical. The greater the powers that are put into your hands, the more important it is for you to develop inner restraints against the abuse of power.

The ceremony with which we surround ourselves in war is part of what makes warriors warriors and not bandits. It's part of what expresses the attitude that is essential to any orderly military force: that the violence they use is not in their own service, but in the service of something larger than themselves - even, in the end, larger than nations. A good army serves no single human master, but rather a principle of order and discipline which holds power and violence firmly in the service of the common good.

The same goes for non-military occasions. When I deliver a talk to a learned audience I ususally dress as a visiting professor does, with a tie and jacket, and the audience comes dressed for an academic discussion - that is, no tank tops or torn shirts. Here too there is a principle that is revered by all present, and it is related to order. Gathering in a room to talk about philosophy, we show implicitly our devotion to the orderly exchange of ideas, from which flows the duty of listening, and when speaking, of attending to the ability of the listeners to comprehend. Discussion, like an army, serves no human master, but harnesses the force of argument and the power of personality to the common goal of growing understanding.

From Robert Ingersoll:

It is impossible for me to see why any belief in the supernatural is necessary to have a keen perception of right and wrong. Every man who has the capacity to suffer and enjoy, and has imagination enough to give the same capacity to others, has within himself the natural basis of all morality. The idea of morality was born here, in this world, of the experience, the intelligence of mankind. Morality is not of supernatural origin. It did not fall from the clouds, and it needs no belief in the supernatural, no supernatural promises or threats, no supernatural heavens or hells to give it force and life. Subjects who are governed by the threats and promises of a king are merely slaves. They are not governed by the ideal, by noble views of right and wrong. They are obedient cowards, controlled by fear, or beggars governed by rewards - by alms.

Right and wrong exist in the nature of things. Murder was just as criminal before as after the promulgation of the Ten Commandments.