"How Good Do We Have to Be?"

The Unitarian Universalists have a big new preaching award and the deadline for submissions is March 1. I'd like to enter. Every time I sit down to write a sermon, I think, "I¹ll send in this one." But then I start writing and I realize it¹s not going to be good enough.

And nothing I¹ve ever written is good enough either. What it needs to be ­ is the best. I may be competitive enough to want to enter a sermon contest, but I¹m also conflicted enough to let the pressure ruin my performance. See ­ I¹ve already done it. I certainly can't submit a sermon about entering the contest!

The desire to be the best can motivate us to do great work, but it can also paralyze us with self-doubts and negative comparisons to others. If it¹s not the best, is it good enough? If we¹re not the best, are we good enough?

The problem with this thinking is that we convince ourselves that how we perform reflects how good we are. Modern attitudes reinforce this conviction every day. In our society, a successful person is not necessarily a good person. The best athletes or CEO's distinguish themselves by abilities that have little to do with how good they are. The best do not have to be good.

Most of us see our way through this moral confusion as we become mature, self-accepting adults. We grow tired of measuring ourselves against impossibly skewed standards, while veering out of touch with our own real virtues. As we become less motivated by competition, we realize that contentment is its own kind of success.

"You do not have to be good," writes Mary Oliver. Her soothing words offer simplicity and relief. "You only have to let the soft animal of your body love what it loves." Nature will carry on without you. Do what is in your nature to do.

Mary Oliver's words reassure us because they show that there is more to the world than our struggle for self-acceptance. We do not even have to be good ­ to know we are at home in nature. Sometimes that is all we need to know.

It's good advice for perfectionists and other tortured souls. But it doesn't teach us what to do once we realize that, no, we do not have to be good ­ we want to be. We want to be good. In our world, with its competitive values and lack of equality, we could easily forget why it matters or what it looks like. But deep inside we know.

According to A. Powell Davies, human beings have a great yearning for goodness. It is a yearning that affects us deeply. It is part of our nature.

What would happen, he asks, if we were "to live the lives we were born to live, to leave the caves of refuge in which our souls are suffocating and go out ­ out where the sky of truth is wide above us, out where the air we breathe is clean and we can breathe it deep, out where we belong in the world of the honest and the real." Goodness is calling us there ­ to a somewhat different kind of nature than Mary Oliver envisioned, though no less real or needed.

There is a vision of a better world ­ and a better way of life ­ dwelling quietly within us all the time. It poses alternatives, opens doors, softens hearts, widens minds. It has the power to make us better people.

To fulfill our nature as human beings, we need to learn what it means to have this capacity within us. "We are drawn to goodness," writes Davies. He says we are drawn to evil too. We have temptations of all kinds within us, and what we must learn is how to resist some and act on others.

What Davies sees in human behavior is that all too often the temptation we resist is the temptation to be good. We are a world of "almost good" people, satisfied with something less of ourselves than what we truly have to offer. Or too afraid of being disappointed.

And yet "almost good" is not good enough. Self-acceptance is healthy attainment but self-satisfaction is smug mediocrity. Davies insists that the temptation to be good is so strong that we never look good when we are avoiding it.

"So powerful is the temptation to be good," he writes, "that those who resist it nevertheless pay tribute to it, if only in hypocrisy and self-deception. Yet there are times, of course, when they see the truth. What they justify in moments of defiance rebukes them in the lonely hours of self-recognition and remorse. For people do not seem to themselves always the same thing, and self-love is always ready to turn itself into self-hate." It may not be easy to be good, but it is painful not to be.

When A. Powell Davies wrote "The Temptation to Be Good," memories of World War II were still fresh. Awareness of how long the world could stand by as whole populations were systematically wiped out gives a chilling twist to what it means to be "almost good." Davies had not lost his faith in humanity ­ far from it. Clearly he believed that humanity was capable of being good, even great, if we could overcome the obstacles we put in our own way. He challenged humanity to break through the obstacles and release the unlimited potential within us to make the world the good place it could be. Davies understood that we need guidance in how to do that. He tells a story that makes this simple point. "It is related of a certain traveler," he writes, "somewhere in northern Vermont, that after driving in uncertainty for a while, he became convinced that he was on the wrong road, and so, at the first village, came to a halt. Calling one of the villagers to the car window, he said, 'Friend, I need help. I¹m lost.'
The villager looked at him for a moment. 'Do you know where you are?' he asked.
' Yes,' said the traveler. 'I saw the name of the village as I entered.'
The man nodded his head. 'Do you know where you want to go?'
'Yes,' the traveler replied, and named his destination.
The villager looked away for a moment, ruminating.'You're not lost,' he said at last, 'you just need directions."

We may know where we are and where we want to go. But knowing how to get there is not always obvious. What it means to be good is to venture beyond what is familiar and comfortable, to step off well worn conventional paths into the unknown. Those who spoke out against the Nazi regime in Germany were ostracized, arrested, executed. It can be lonely and frightening to be good.

Even in less compelling circumstances, speaking out about an unpopular cause or standing up to the neighborhood bully can have consequences. If we want to be good ­ that is, if we want to learn how to push past the complacency of being "almost good" ­ and to grow towards our vision of goodness ­ we need guidance from each other. We need to see how one person made it from one strange place to another. We need to encourage each other that the path we are taking, unfamiliar though it may be, really is the right one.

Davies imagines the place in which people are moved to do good as a world that is "honest and real." He recognizes that people need to be in relationship to each other ­ be in community ­ to learn how to be good. We cannot be good all alone. We need "honest and real" interaction with others, who also seek to follow the yearning for goodness and know that they cannot do it without us.

It¹s the new year. Time to take stock, see how we're doing. While we contemplate many forms of self-improvement, all worthy, what if we also asked ourselves to work on being good? What if we resolved to take a few more steps down that uncharted path than we had originally planned? To see where we go when we try it together? Unlike our other resolutions, the temptation to be good is one we won¹t have to resist.

Davies tells us that the struggle for humanity is not between good and evil. It is between good and "almost good." The fate of the world rests on the choices made by ordinary people, who have the extraordinary power to lift us all closer to where we hope to be. Any one of us could do that. If we try. And if we do, we will know at last what it means to be good enough.

References used to prepare this sermon include The Temptation To Be Good, by A. Powell Davies (Washington, DC: All Souls Church, Unitarian), 1952, and "Wild Geese," from Dream Work, by Mary Oliver (New York: Atlantic Monthly Press), 1986.