First Unitarian Society of Minneapolis

Rev. Kendyl Gibbons
First Unitarian Society of Minneapolis
February 8, 2004

Well, thank goodness that's over with - it will be another year before we again have to worry about how the producers of the Superbowl half time show are going to balance their quest for ratings against the nation's announced concern for the sensibilities of its children. While I suppose that most of us will recover without undue trauma from the image of Janet Jackson's briefly bare breast, and I further suppose that the Grammy awards will find a way to go on, with her or without her, this quintessential incident of popular culture seems to me remarkably apropos for this morning's topic. So here's my question; is Janet Jackson in disgrace? Is MTV, the producer of the half time show, disgraced? How about CBS, the station which broadcast the event? Do we even know what that would mean in today's world? If the so-called accident were genuine, one might expect Jackson to feel embarrassed; most of us would, I guess, to find ourselves unexpectedly more naked than planned on national television. A few weeks of tasteless jokes would necessarily follow, but people of either compassion or character would put the event behind them, and the performer would get on with her career. What is out of one's control cannot be grounds for disgrace. The costume designer, who presumably could have foreseen and should have prevented such a mishap, might be considered to be in disgrace, as having failed at some of the elemental requirements of his or her profession. But of course, the real speculation triggered by the whole performance is that the flash of breast was entirely deliberate, intended to shock, and to generate just such public attention as has, in fact, resulted. If that is the case, then does the concept of disgrace apply? Or is it indeed true that there is no such thing as 'bad publicity'? Personally, I am both cynical enough to suppose that Janet Jackson and Justin Timberlake, and even the folks at MTV, are laughing all the way to the bank without a blush to share among them - and also cynical enough to think that it scarcely matters. Having no very high expectations either of them or of TV in general, I am neither surprised nor disappointed. Where there are no expectations to be violated, there can be no grounds for disgrace.

This reflection leads me to ponder, however, on what is to be said of a culture so lacking in collective expectations that disgrace has become a status impossible to achieve. And this brings me back to Paul Woodruff's elegant meditations on the classical virtue of reverence. Reverence, he claims, consists of the capacity for three feelings; awe, respect, and shame. Awe and respect are easy for us to identify with, I think; who has not felt awe at the overwhelming powers of the universe, for both creation and destruction, or at the resilience of the human spirit to overcome tragedy? Who has not marveled at the majesty of mountains, the intricacy of snowflakes, the miracle of birth and the mystery of death? Respect, too, is fundamental to the very heart of our faith; respect for the inherent worth and dignity of every person, for the rights of conscience, for the interdependent web. We struggle with it sometimes, for this way of being in the world is not without its difficulties, but if Unitarian Universalism 'gets' nothing else, it surely gets that we must hold all others in respect, even - or perhaps especially - those less powerful or privileged than ourselves. Children must grow in wholeness and without fear; the voiceless must be heeded, the ignored attended to, and the oppressed set free. Even other creatures and species have a claim on our respect, the air and water, the land itself - all that is without power to enforce its own integrity, we are called upon to honor and protect. No one can make us feel these obligations, and arguments that it is somehow in our immediate material interests to observe them are easily disregarded by the callous. It is only the capacity for reverence that holds us spell-bound at the ocean's edge, or that makes us vigilant for the rights of illegal aliens, or protective of a centuries old grove of oak trees. These positive requirements of reverence are easy enough to understand. But what about shame? How is the possibility of disgrace connected to our experience of reverence, and do we actually want it to be?

Woodruff suggests that the feeling of shame is an element of what constitutes reverence; a person who is shameless, especially in a position of power or leadership, is without the reverence that would cause them to have either awe or respect as well. Now, I am familiar with a constellation of writings by mental health professionals and advocates of human potential, which criticize the use of the concept of 'shame', seeing it as a destructive form of invalidation of the self. Such critics would have it that shame is what is produced when individuals are persuaded that they in fact have no inherent worth, that they are in some fundamental and irremediable way flawed. The notion of original sin as it is commonly understood would be a good example. Such a conviction leaves a person with no alternative but to despise themselves, and that has all manner of painful and dysfunctional consequences. The lie that human beings are inherently bad or unworthy is a dangerous concept; it needs to be contradicted, and it has no place in an attitude of genuine reverence. But my inquiry is something a little different, I think; I want to know not so much about the internal experience of shame, but about its more collective and cultural manifestation, which is what I mean by disgrace. And I rather suppose that in order to experience this kind of dissatisfaction with one's own actions, there has to be sense of the inherent dignity and potential goodness of one's existence as a member of the human race.

For Woodruff, shame is the emotion that a reverent person experiences when he or she is aware of having done an action that violates the imperatives of reverence - of having treated someone weaker than themselves with contempt, for instance, or having exploited something powerful and holy for cheap purposes. It is this latter concern, I believe, that so strongly connects sexuality with issues of shame. Most of us can recognize the powerful pleasure and intimate bonding potential of our sexual beings as something awesome; a power that goes beyond ourselves at least toward another person and possibly toward the whole being of the universe. Whenever someone uses that power to manipulate others, or makes it artificial, the quality of awe and reverence is lost, and its absence, though often hard to describe, can be felt. I tend to think that there is cultural progress represented by the fact that our society no longer ascribes disgrace to the reverent expression of sexuality outside the strict conventions of marriage; such an enforced understanding of disgrace had many tragic consequences, one way and another. But, one is left to wonder, is there anything, anymore, that does constitute grounds for disgrace?

This question becomes the more urgent as it relates to the political climate of our times. In the realm of political reality, it would seem that there are actions that gain a person votes, and actions that lose a person votes; there are statements that augment one's popularity, as measured by polling numbers, and statements that decrease it. But are actions or statements that win greater influence always virtuous or reverent? Surely not. And are actions or statements that may have a cost in power necessarily shameful? Of course not. In fact, the kind of leadership we hunger for is that which will take unpopular stands when they are right, and speak the truth even when the truth doesn't poll well. That's the kind of voter I want to be, anyway - and I have more respect for a politician who disagrees with me on issues but demonstrates conscience and a consistent integrity in his voting record, than one who votes to support the legislation I want solely because the public has made it expedient to do so. It is actually only leadership that is based in reverence that is capable of experiencing disgrace, for disgrace is something more than the mere loss of popularity. To be sure, one may lose an election in disgrace, but it does not constitute disgrace merely to lose an election. Once upon a time, it was considered a disgrace to sell one's vote; today it is legislative business as usual. When did that happen? When did governing become about manipulating popular opinion rather than seeking the higher ground? I can't help thinking that the absence of reverence has something to do with it. Reverence for the law as an institution, and for justice as an ideal, for the notion of the common good, all transcending the whims and tides of public opinion - does that exist any more? And if it does not, or if only vestiges of it are to be found clinging to newly minted judges and freshman representatives not yet jaded by the legislative process, whose fault is that? I submit to you that it is ours, the voters'; that if you and I have lost our reverence for the democratic process, and our expectation of reverence in our leaders, we ought not to be surprised if such reverence as those leaders might have brought into our service evaporates in the arid desert of deal-making that the world of politics then becomes.

In that world, the only possible meaning of disgrace is loss of power, and that takes us straight back to the Greeks. In tragedies such as Homer's Iliad, it becomes apparent that reverence and disgrace are issues particularly for those in leadership, who exercise power. It is altogether too easy, when you are a famous and successful general, to make the assumption that you have no need to practice reverence; that your own strength and cunning have created your success, and there is nothing before which you should feel awe, no reason to waste time with anyone in less authority than yourself, still less actually to listen to them, and no cause to be ashamed of any act you can succeed in getting away with. This state of mind, of course, describes our old friend, the opposite of reverence, hubris. And it seems to me that disgrace, in the full meaning of the word, occurs when one who has been guilty of hubris is brought face to face with his or her human finitude, in such a way that both they themselves and the rest of the community must acknowledge it. True disgrace is both an internal and an external experience; it is what Woodruff would call the shame of recognizing your own failure of reverence, added to the widespread knowledge of others that you have overreached the boundaries of reverent behavior as well. The key is, that certain behavior is disgraceful, even when it does not immediately topple someone from power. In the play Antigone, the victorious king Creon issues a decree that his rebellious nephew's body is not to be given an honorable burial, but left to rot in the open, and be devoured by wild dogs. Creon has the power to enforce this decree, for there is no one who can openly withstand his will, even though many are appalled by this shocking failure of reverence. It is not this act which ends the king's reign, but Sophocles presents it as the sort of first symptom of the hubris that will, ultimately, doom Creon, and the chorus responds to it as a disgraceful abuse of power. And this, it seems to me, is what lies at the heart of the notion of disgrace, and why there can be no disgrace where there is no reverence.

It is not so much when power is lost that one is disgraced, but rather, when power is abused. Thus, I would suggest that the Watergate scandal resulted in the disgrace of Richard Nixon, for the covert burglary was clearly an abuse of presidential power. To the extent that Bill Clinton used the status of his office to manipulate a vulnerable young woman to whom he owed the reverence of respect, his behavior was disgraceful; nevertheless I would argue that seeking to protect the privacy of his personal sexual conduct was not in fact an abuse of the presidency; it was tawdry, but not in the end a true disgrace. As for the current administration, leading the nation into war, even an unpopular one, does not in itself constitute hubris, or the grounds for disgrace. Ironically, and we shall have to leave this verdict for the mills of history to grind for a while yet, seeking to control popular opinion with faulty or false information would, it seems to me, have all the earmarks of a failure of reverence, and a genuine disgrace.

To return for a moment to the example of Janet Jackson, inadvertently revealing immodest amounts of one's anatomy isn't necessarily an act of hubris or an abuse of power. One could make the argument that the costume itself and/or the performance as planned displayed a certain failure of reverence for the dignity of the female body and sexuality, in that it was less a display of genuine exuberant energy than a slickly cynical commercial package, but anyone who didn't know that in advance wasn't paying attention. What does, I think, amount to a true failure of reverence and thus a genuine disgrace, is if it was indeed a planned incident, kept secret from the producers and sponsors, calculated to exploit the shock effect and create notoriety. The problem is that a culture with a thin and fragmented sense of reverence has little capacity to experience or express a state of disgrace, whether around superstars or presidents, and this is very much the position in which we find ourselves. When failures of reverence create a stir, which is necessary and appropriate, we have precious little way of differentiating between that kind of shocked attention, and the glamorous admiration to which public figures are already accustomed - hence the adage about no such thing as bad publicity.

And yet, I cannot get out of my mind the admonition heard from various adults throughout my childhood, not as I recall often addressed to me, but observed about some we knew, or a figure in the news, who had done something shocking - "He - or she, or very occasionally, you - ought to be ashamed of him/her/yourself!" That statement was, it seems to me, an alert that something more than just foolishness or an arbitrary rule was at stake; in its essence, it was a statement of reverence, notice that a failure of reverence might have taken place, and that disgrace loomed as a potential consequence. In his book, Woodruff makes a case for the significance of small rituals of courtesy, etiquette and good manners as part of practicing the virtue of reverence. This makes sense to me, in that one of the few people I am aware of who would know just how to deal with either Richard Nixon or Janet Jackson is my beloved Judith Martin, aka Miss Manners. For her, it is the conventions of politeness that give us the tools for dealing with disgrace, the ultimate form of which is to drop someone from our social circle. This of course implies that we have a social circle to begin with, and that there are observed rules indicating who is within it or outside of it. Part of what creates such a network of acquaintanceship within any community is some implied shared sense of reverence for the same values. This allows for a differentiation between excluding someone from that network and expunging him or her from the human race. A culture confused about its sense of reverence often has difficulty with just that distinction, but one with a clear vision of what is sacred is able to offer the common human decencies - which are practices of reverence in themselves - while withholding both intimacy and vulnerability, as well as political endorsement in the form of votes.

Nor is disgrace an immutable condition, and part of the function of the inner experience of it is to motivate the disgraced individual to reassess his or her practice of reverence, temptation to hubris, and membership in the human race. When such a person demonstrates a more accurate perception of their place in the scheme of things, including the ability to treat those of lesser power with respect, reverence itself requires that he or she be acknowledged as a human being like the rest of us. Thus the capacity for feeling shame, when one has in fact committed a failure of reverence, is an integral part of what it means to live with and practice reverence. By the same token, in the absence of a sense of reverence, neither shame nor disgrace has any real meaning. If we believe that disgrace is still possible; if there are behaviors that can still shock us, or make us mutter under our breath, "He ought to be ashamed of himself," then we have a sense of reverence, however dimly apprehended, and I submit that our culture cries out for it to be cultivated. Well over a century ago, our own sage, Ralph Waldo Emerson wrote, "What greater calamity can fall upon a nation than the loss of reverence? [The word he used was 'worship', but he was using quite precisely in the sense of reverence.] Then all things go to decay... Literature becomes frivolous. Science is cold. The eye of youth is not lighted by the hope of other worlds, and age is without honor. Society lives to trifles, and when men die we do not mention them." He is right, I believe; it is through reverence that we make a society that lives to something more than the trifles of cheap publicity stunts, and call forth leaders who serve a vision of the common good rather than their own accretion of power. It is reverence that summons us to remember and cherish our dead, to honor our elders, and to respect the light in the eyes of youth.

Reverence has many concrete objects, but no absolute one; many things summon up that felt response of sometimes inarticulate awe, the sacred obligation of respect, and the awareness of the potential for shame. We need that third piece as much as the first two; we all need, from time to time, the reminder that we are not gods, and our community needs it as well. We desperately need to hold our leaders accountable for reverence in their power; we need to know that something matters to those in authority more than name recognition and staying on the winning side. "Above the generations," says our closing hymn, "the lonely prophets rise, while truth flares as the day star within their glowing eyes. And other eyes, beholding, are kindled from that flame..." That is what we want, in the end, leaders who are kindled souls aflame with reverence for a vision that burns also within each of us, lit with a reverence that shows and shames everything petty or selfish in us or themselves. Let us build in expectation of such a leader, and such a world, and let us live together in such reverent humanity as shall be the radiant token of faith above all fear and integrity beyond all shame. This is the hope that beckons us, and the promise our hearts have always loved.