The Promises We Make

I’m going to start today with a quote from Second Corinthians chapter three, verse six. It is a quote relevant to our exploration today of rules and covenant.

“…the letter kills, but the Spirit gives life.”

I mean the letter of the law is on a killing spree out there in the culture… you know what I’m talking about. Here’s the part worth grieving — we aren’t even bothering to pretend anymore that the spirit of the law matters. We aren’t even bothering to acknowledge that the law could have ever had a spirit, or ought to, or needs one. We seem content to watch the rodeo of argument rustling that passes as legal discourse and lament the ludicrousness of its outcomes. Let me say this plainly, if our law has lost its spirit, that isn’t a cause, that is a symptom. It is a symptom of a culture that has let its spirit die, a culture that is spiritually dead.

That’s alright, don’t go getting all gloomy on me. It’s true, but it’s not the end of the world, not the end of life… although, if we’re lucky it might be the end of life the way that we knew it… We know something about how to breathe life back into life. When we put love in the center, put the heart back in the right place, back in right relationship, it can start to pump again. It can revive that waning spirit, or birth a new one if the last one is too far gone.

That’s what we’re here to talk about today — the spiritual procedure for putting love in the center. It won’t surprise you that it can’t be a solo thing, it’s a community thing — a thing for which we require each other. Unlike Hammurabi — we aren’t going to find the ‘smartest’ person in the congregation and send them into a back room, nor the top three, or top five and expect them to come out with a written code that covers all eventualities. No, we’ve learned a few things since his time. So we have this concept of a covenant. It is a set of rules that we write ourselves, and those rules govern our behavior, they lay out our obligations and our rights within our relationships and community. Now, using covenant as a foundation for a religious or spiritual community, that is one of the things Unitarian Universalism is rightly proud of. And I’ve had my ups and downs with covenants — early on, I thought it was brilliant. Later, in the middle period, I was annoyed that they all seemed to come out too similar — it made me think that we should just take some smart, experienced covenant people and have them craft a really good one. Then, later, I realized that the process of making covenant IS part of what makes them brilliant. True, I’ve done enough of them that I can probably guess ninety percent of the covenant contents before the drafting starts — if I know the group. But that doesn’t matter. And when I’m in a group drafting a covenant, I don’t say we also need a rule about X, Y, and Z. Not early on, maybe toward the end if it isn’t emerging naturally — which it almost always does. Here’s the magic — if there is somebody in the group who struggles with X, it will often take the form that follows: they want the rights part of X for themselves and they are reticent or unskilled at the obligation part of X. That person is the one who needs to propose the covenant rule about X, and if you give them space and time, they almost always will. You see, this is their moment — the first step on the path to healing their issue with X. It is salient for them and they put it in there. And they are likely to be one of the first people in the group who get called back into covenant on that issue. You see, like magic. Their internal conflict, now made visible and salient to their community — as a tonic for healing that wound. Now, if I had handed down a covenant from the dias — weak medicine. That medicine is powerful because they made it themselves, they know what’s in it, and why. It is THEIR medicine, it addresses them, it heals them.

The other shoe’s got to drop though? Am I right? Can I get an amen? We made the medicine, we put it in the community medicine chest, but somebody’s got to take the medicine for it to work, and, almost always, that means that someone has to pull the medicine out of the cabinet and hand it to them. Maybe I’m being to metaphorical, maybe I’m beating around the bush too much… What I mean to say is this: covenants only heal when we are called back into them. This is the courage moment, the moment that takes you to the sticking place.

When one of your siblings breaks covenant, you deciding to let it slide is you deciding either that “they aren’t worth it” or that “you aren’t worth it”… I’ve got news for you, you are both worth it. We’ve got a conflict avoidant culture though, don’t we. We aren’t real big on the hard conversations — I’m going to invite you to look at them a different way. The hard conversations are what we owe each other and ourselves in our meager attempts at repaying life itself for the gift of life. Each of you is worth that trouble, each of us is worth that trouble.

I really resonate with Brené Brown’s approach to this subject — she talks about how toxic the culture of ‘nice’ can be in organizations. Everyone is nice — they are polite, like they are guests at a fancy party. But they aren’t at a fancy party, they are at work or school or church or government: and they are ignoring necessary conflict in the name of nice. Sometimes they mislabel this niceness as kindness. To which, Brené asserts: Clear is Kind. ‘What you just did was hurtful.’ or ‘What you just said broke our covenant.’ That’s clear. That’s kind. Nice sounds like this, “Oh it’s nothing, I’m sure you didn’t mean it.” No accountability, no repair, no healing… you see, that’s not kind, that’s toxic… that’s a refusal to dispense the medicine your community brewed just for this occasion, yes?

Alright, we’ve got some more ground to cover.

We need a certain kind of reliability and predictability in our relationships, but the truth is we’re often a bit stumped about what kind. What lies at the heart of our needs in this area? What kind of stability and predictability and reliability do we really need and what kinds can we reasonably expect? Which versions are compatible with what we know and understand about being human, about ourselves and others? In the reading we mentioned again, this concept of near enemies. The question of ‘what is the true virtue’ and ‘what are the imposter virtues that keep us stuck and toxic by masquerading as the real thing’. We might say that what we need is discernment, a type of wisdom which, when cultivated, can tell the difference between a near enemy and a virtue. Let’s see if we can’t till the soil a bit.

When it comes to our making and keeping of promises — given what we’ve already said about letters and spirit. I would argue that consistency is the near enemy of constancy. Let’s define the terms:

Consistency — The quality of always behaving in the same way or of having the same opinions, standard, etc.; the quality of being consistent. *

Constancy — The quality of being faithful.

You see, honoring the letter leans toward consistency — and those other two C-words we talked about last week: conformity and compliance. The letter of the law ask, expects, often demands these three C’s. For those of us who react negatively to the term ‘fascist’, it is this same connotation at the heart of that style of governance — an unrelenting emphasis on the three C’s: consistency, compliance, and conformity.

Yet, consistency still gets touted as the ‘conventional wisdom’ answer to the social questions of reliability, dependability, and steadfastness. We can see it in our media, when public figures are ‘called out’ if their ideas or positions or statements change — too much or in the wrong direction or perhaps just noticeably. Does this calling out account for growth and change and maturation? No, it doesn’t. And, of course, this is exacerbated when those same public figures change their ideas or positions or statements to suit the winds or political climate or vicissitudes of shifting circumstance. We don’t want wishy-washy, we know that’s bad and easy to spot. But, if we’re quiet enough, long enough we also remember that we also don’t want not-growing-up, not-waking-up, not-cleaning-up… these sources of change ought to be both sought and accepted. An opinion set in stone is almost certainly wrong in a world that is always changing… I suppose your willingness to swallow this last sentence is directly proportional to your propensity to see ‘change is the only constant’ as the nature of the universe… A perspective, and one that invites the introduction of the paradoxical opposite. Because so many things that are the inescapable foundation of our lives and our ability to be alive and stay alive — if those things are changing, they are doing so on a time scale so far beyond our own lifespan that they seem to be standing still. Sure, that mountain out the window was once the rock under an ocean floor — but it was that mountain when my great-great-great-grandparents were twinkles in their parents’ eyes and it will, in all likelihood, still be that mountain when my great-great-great-grandchildren are on their deathbeds. So all of this talk of us being made of stardust and everything being change all the time, it just doesn’t resonate with my experience of the world. With the stability I see manifest all around me… And so the paradox is revealed, and the time continuum and the concept of rate-of-change are some tools we can use to dig deeper into that paradox. And, there is our own research on people. Gallup, one of my favorite organizations and publisher of two of my favorite management books (1,2), has found that ‘people change, but they don’t change that much.’ Developmental psychology and meta-theorists like Ken Wilber have developed pretty elaborate and comprehensive systems for mapping what kinds of changes can be expected as we grow up and wake up in life. And yet, all of us who have parented or aunt-and-uncled or helped in the raising of children recognize that they are, ineluctably, inescapably, defiantly their own creatures… there are things about their way of being and their personality that are there from their earliest days and there at their deathbeds, if they’re still in good enough shape to express them. And there are other things, things that change radically — and watching those children develop those skills and grow through those changes is part of the blessing of being in their lives.

So Consistency — as an expectation — well, it sounds like it might be wisdom, but it is, in fact, a toxicity masquerading as health. If there is anything that doesn’t change, then nothing should — and then I don’t have to learn the difference between what changes and what doesn’t and that makes my life simpler. And it means that you’re confined to always be who you were, and never grow up into who you were meant to be — whether or not you even believe in such a thing. Consistency is the projection of hope into the past. I expect you to do what you’ve done before, how you’ve done it before, I’ve pegged that way of doing things to your identity in my own mind, and I expect that I won’t have to expend energy modifying or updating that identity or changing my opinion about you or having our relationship grow or change — which could be uncomfortable — so, you just stay like that and keep doing things the way you used to and we’ll be fine…

Consistency isn’t grounded in life — it is grounded comfort. In the expectation, neigh the entitlement, that we shouldn’t have to suffer. Not suffering is like not grieving — expecting not to do it, refusing to do it — well, that path has one certain outcome, when you refuse to do it, you get stuck in it. But then, you don’t understand why you’re depressed or anxious or despairing because you buried the reasons with your refusal to experience life as it is happening to you… So, you’re stuck. This is why the Buddhists, when teaching meditation, they ask you to let the thoughts and feelings arise, to experience them fully, and to let them pass without clinging. Because clinging is the second way to get stuck, the first being trying to stuff them down before they arise. And all of this coming up from what I like to call ‘the big uncertainty’ the ‘questioner of faith’ the feeling that you aren’t enough, the suspicion that you aren’t worthy to have all those feelings, that they might inconvenience others — who clearly matter more than you do… I know, friends, I can preach this stuff, but don’t think that I don’t struggle too… I’ve the same hobgoblins running around the hamster wheel in my head… For now, I’ve got them sitting quietly on the bench while I get some preaching done.

Constancy is the thing, is the virtue that we’re really seeking when the immature part of us asks for consistency. Not loyalty to a person or an institution or an organization but loyalty to love and to life and to everything beautiful and joyful and sorrowful that makes life what it is. We might call such loyalty faithfulness. If so, it might be a definition of faith that runs free of the fetters of traditional religious restrictions or creeds. I don’t think it is a coincidence that this definition of faith also circles back to our early discussion of the letter and spirit of rules. Faithfulness through constancy puts spirit first — they’re paired you see: the three C’s of consistency, compliance, and conformity are what you get when the letter of the law is all you can see or comprehend or value. You get dead culture, and as the anarchists would say, dead automatons instead of citizens. Faithful constancy that centers on love, that gets you a robust commitment to the spirit of law, to relationship-first covenant, to life and joy and sorrow, to showing up for each other and with each other. The path has other names, other aspects: radical self love and boundless compassion and ego death. Buddha Mind. Christ Consciousness. The Tao. Many words, one truth. Many fingers pointing, one moon.

To show up with our faith and our compassion and caring for each other intact, that is Constancy, and it is the right blend between the predictability and stability required for healthy relationships and the wiliness, unpredictability, and plain orneriness required to buck ‘conventional wisdom’ in favor of something better.

Amen and may it be so.

…Now, normally I’d sign off… but when I delivered this message to my congregation, it just didn’t land as solidly as I’d like and I got some earnest pushback against my treatment of consistency. So, instead of trying to rewrite the message, I’ve opted to append a bit commentary — to do my part to get us all on the same page before we part.

One caveat is that the second half of the episode is adapted from a dedicated article I wrote last summer called ‘Consistency is the Near Enemy of Constancy.’ Like all transplants, this one had some complications — that article was a part of a series on near enemies that included themes like hope, faith, and utopia. So if the second half felt disjointed from the first, it was, and that’s on me. I promise to keep honing my editorial skills. These topics are hard enough to grapple with, without my editing (or lack thereof) getting in the way.

Another editorial consequence was that the overall thrust of the episode just wasn’t as clear and cohesive as I would have liked — and thanks to Lou Sneed for asking this question. The other critical reaction was that it was a take-down of consistency, failing to acknowledge that it might have positive aspects, and for this one I have Keith Lovin to thank. And the criticism is just, in rereading my language — my ambitious work to dislodge consistency from the center, ended up sounding like throwing it out altogether — which wasn’t my intent — so let me clarify these aspects.

We’ll start with the constancy/consistency aspect first. What I was, and am, arguing is that if we recognize constancy as the true virtue, then we will get a healthier version of consistency. We will get a version of dependability and reliability that recognizes the spirit of the law — that is more flexible, more adaptable, more robust. I don’t mean to ‘throw out the baby with the bathwater’ — I’m not saying consistency is bad. I’m saying that centering consistency, that mistaking it for a virtue, has the kinds of negative unintended consequences of all near enemies. Near enemies have obvious and clear positive intended consequences, but they tend to be undermined — sometimes to and past the point of self-defeat — by the proliferation of their negative unintended consequences. Virtues, on the other hand, tend to operate more cleanly and clearly — we must hold them in tension and balance with other virtues — but they don’t contain their own internal poison pills. So, what I emphasized earlier in the episode was the various poison pills that happen when we center consistency — when we think that consistency itself is the virtue. This same analysis can be applied to the other two C’s — we could articulate how Compliance is a near enemy of Cooperation. i.e. centering compliance has the negative unintended consequences we’ve discussed, while centering cooperation produces a lot of compliant behavior — but of a healthier variety, with fewer side effects. Conformity is a trickier one — a clear single near enemy word isn’t coming up for me, so let me just ‘point at the moon’ — the negative opposite of the virtue conformity pretends-to is perhaps schismogenesis — the tendency to be different just to separate ourselves from each other, individually or collectively. So the negative opposite is being different for differences sake — and conformity is being the same for the sake of being the same. So perhaps the virtue here is authenticity — which will lead to healthy forms of behavior that conform and healthy forms of behavior that differentiate. But authenticity itself, isn’t a near enemy… it is a virtue. Now another near enemy to authenticity is the overly individualized approach to it — the ‘only I matter’ version — true authenticity is holistic, authentic to one’s biology, ecology, and culture — all at once.

To move on now to Lou’s inquiry — here are the few key points I wanted to weave together in this episode:

I want to encourage and deepen our collective capacity to use and apply the near enemy concept to challenges we face in our struggles to become more virtuous.

I wanted to highlight the spiritual differences between the spirit of the law and the letter of the law. Both as a mechanism to strengthen our willingness to invoke and use spirit, faith, and constancy as virtues in our lives, and as a wariness of instrumental legalism, intellectualized argumentation, consistency, compliance, and conformity as deservedly-suspect forms of conventional wisdom and common contemporary practice.

I wanted to drive home some important things about covenants:

1. They are best when they are made collectively by the community.
2. They are a form of medicine for collective healing, growth, maturation, and relationship.
3. They only function when we have the courage to call each other back into covenant. That is the rubber-meets-the-road moment.
4. We are, each of us and all of us, worth the effort and discomfort and courage and repetition that being called back into covenant takes.
5. We are worthy of hard conversations. Hard conversations might be part of what we owe the spirit of life in gratitude for life itself.

So, I’ll also confess to failing to follow another bit of Lou’s sage advice — just one sermon at a time… well, I’ll keep practicing.