"Ethics and Authenticity"

READING

From “Reality Bites Back,” an article by Rubén Martínez in the “Los Angeles Times” Book Review section March 9, 2008. He writes about the revelation that the book “Love and Consequences,” touted as a true story, was yet another fake.

“Just when you thought it was safe to go back to the bookstore, there’s a brand new entry in the memoir-that-turns-out-to-be-fiction sweepstakes …

"All this occurs at a moment when Americans demand ‘authenticity’ above all else. In electoral politics, candidates are ‘for real’ or they are not. In film, we want digital special effects to make the bloody mess more ‘realistic.’ On TV, we watch more ‘reality’-based shows than dramas. It is our obsession in literature, as well. The American novel is still steeped in realism and our appetite for the memoir – first-person writing from ‘experience’ – appears insatiable, scandals notwithstanding.

"It seems clear enough that only a society as distrusting as we are would be so obsessed with ‘keeping it real’ – from Watergate to WMD-gate, there’s a Big Lie for every generation of Americans alive today.

“The irony is that the more we insist on the ‘real,’ the more elusive it becomes, the more twisted the fictions and phantasms that reside not just in the minds of a few authors but in our collective pop psyche.

“Perhaps the greatest lie, then, has nothing to do with whether characters and narratives can be ‘fact-checked’ … but with the age-old American emphasis on the first-person singular, on stories that ultimately reinforce notions of radical individualism.”

SERMON

I haven’t read the books. Their flashes of notoriety were over before I even heard of them. But they left in their wake several critical reflections, including the one by Rubén Martínez, and at least one awkward apology on “Oprah.” What is it about our “appetite for the memoir,”[i] as Martínez describes it, that creates the market for these books?

This publishing scandal might not have caught my attention, but for the ethical dilemma it poses to anyone who writes or speaks from first-person experience. I took to heart the advice Ralph Waldo Emerson gave in his “Divinity School Address,” when he advised young preachers “to convert life into truth.”[ii] For Emerson, truth was first-person experience. Spirituality belongs to the individual. Emerson rejected the religion of doctrine and scripture and mediators of divinity. He also criticized the dutiful, dry as dust exercise of congregational worship, and yearned for excitement and immediacy. “Why should not we enjoy … an original relation to the universe?” he asked.[iii] Everything true was direct and firsthand, felt inside and reflected in nature.

To the young graduates of Harvard Divinity School, class of 1838, he advised, “The true preacher can be known by this, that he deals out to the people his life, – life passed through the fire of thought.” What is true is what we make of our experience.

Now if you were to speak to various members of my family, they would tell you that there have been times when I have made just a little too much of my life experience. What I remember always seems to be more than what the rest of my family remembers. And they would tell you, that even as a child I was an exaggerator. Whenever they’ve heard a sermon in which I tell some childhood story, or worse, mention something about one of them, they are quick to send back their vigorous refutations.

It’s too late now. Like all people who tell stories about themselves, I fervently believe my own version. It’s how I’ve turned my life into truth.

Emerson’s exhortations have instructed Unitarian Universalists to take our life experiences seriously and to trust our intuitions. What is true for us is all that really matters. This is why Ralph Waldo Emerson is often faulted for lifting human beings to new and even more self-absorbed heights. I have to wonder whether Rubén Martínez was thinking of Emerson’s influence on our culture when he wrote that “the greatest lie” is tied up “with the age-old American emphasis on the first-person singular, on stories that ultimately reinforce notions of radical individualism.”[iv] The tension between the individual and the collective has always been a dynamic of our faith tradition. We see it playing out whenever we have a congregational decision to make. Beyond the usual conflicts of democracy, however, is another ethical dilemma we rarely examine. It has to do with using someone else’s experience as our own.

We Unitarian Universalists seek out the truth of all wisdom traditions, a practice that encourages tolerance and religious literacy. And that is good. But it makes us vulnerable to the criticism that we happily cherry-pick whatever appeals to us and use it for our own purposes, without a full understanding of what it means to others. And that is bad.

The positive message our world religion banners proclaim to all the different people who come to this church is offset somewhat – at least for me – by the implication that these religions are ours to use as we want. Want to learn about Passover? Come in two weeks. Enjoy the Day of the Dead? See what we do with it. Feel like a Zen Buddhist? Try our meditation group.

I am proud of the diversity our community generates. Our intentions are sincere. Our teachers are well informed But we are not devout. And we risk offending those who do believe. Not everyone will understand why we have taken their holy ritual and turned it into an intergenerational lesson. Our search for firsthand experience can turn us into religious tourists without a holy land of our own.

We can trace this tendency back to Emerson too. Once he left the Unitarian ministry he became interested in eastern religion. He and his friends read Hindu and Buddhist texts and wrote about them in the Transcendentalist journal, "The Dial." Their explorations opened the way for religious liberals to seek out encounters with other faiths. This practice is still a core value for us, as evidenced by our religious education curriculum. Our sixth and seventh graders spend two excellent years visiting and learning about other faith communities.

Such learning is foundational to living in a pluralistic world. We need to know how to approach each other, to appreciate and respect difference. The ethical challenge for us is to distinguish the value of learning from the error of appropriating.

I know what it feels like to have my words plagiarized. It’s flattering, in a way. But then there is this realization that someone has claimed my experience – yes, even my family stories – as their experience. How could they know what it is like to be me? This unsettling dilemma is what Rubén Martínez describes when he says that our demand for “authenticity” has revealed our “greatest lie.”[v] When is being true to ourselves just another way of stealing what belongs to someone else? This yearning for experience, for something to sound or feel real, can turn truth into lies, first-person into thief. As people of faith in the tradition of Emerson, we have to be honest, first of all with ourselves.

We live on a delicate continuum between the individual search for truth and the collective values that keep us whole. I like to think I’ve followed Emerson’s dictum to turn my life experience into truth. My family’s protests have been good-humored and indulgent. I haven’t stolen their memories. But when someone else takes my story and uses it, or worse, when someone writes an “autobiographical” memoir that isn’t true at all, they’ve gone over the line.

Similarly, our interest in the diverse faith and cultural practices that give us the pluralistic environment in which we live, has got to be a good thing. Learning in the spirit of “Neighboring Faiths” or introducing the Day of the Dead and Zen meditation into our ritual life, or honoring our Jewish heritage by observing Passover – all good too. So long as we remember that each of these practices is holy to someone.

There are places in the Muslim world where non-Muslim tourists cannot visit. In all of Morocco, only one mosque, the Hassan Deux, is open to tourists – and only at certain times, with careful guides. What is holy to some people can be desecrated by others’ curiosity. Crossing that line is akin to stealing someone else’s family story for your own.

And yet, every culture that has had contact with others is changed by the addition of new rituals. From Christmas to Halloween, the most lively traditions result from this contact, creating layers of symbolism and custom. When we seek out new rituals and add them to our worship, we are doing what all groups of people do, not just Unitarian Universalist people. We are evolving all the time, perhaps in response to some current of truth that runs through all faiths, all rituals. And all people.

Emerson thought so. He believed that people could know the truth – all people – because our powers were strong and intuitive – and because the truth was universal, something that was part of nature and human nature. We are radically individual and participants in a common moral life, all at the same time. The tension between them is real, but so is our experience – it is holy even, whether it is ours or others; and when we live by that awareness, we have learned to be true to ourselves and honest about who we are: not always easy, but what our faith calls us to do.

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[i] Rubén Martínez, “Reality bites back,” in "The Los Angeles Times," March 9, 2008.

[ii] Ralph Waldo Emerson, “Divinity School Address,” in "The Portable Emerson." New York: Penguin Books,

1981, p. 83.

[iii] Emerson, “Nature,” in "The Portable Emerson," p. 7.

[iv] Martínez, “Reality bites back.”

[v] Ibid.