Sermon by Rev. Kathleen McTigue, November 17, 2002
The Ellen Goodman column that I used this morning for our reading appeared at the beginning of 1997. Many of you will remember that for several years around that time, "civility" and its absence was a regular focus for essays, books, television commentary and so on. I began clipping and filing articles on the topic that caught my eye, and for about five years now the file has floated around as I considered sermon topics, but somehow a sermon on civility never seemed to grab me quite enough to materialize.
For one thing, by the end of the 1990s I was a little tired of the topic. For another, much of what was being said about civility seemed prim or patronizing, heavily focused on the rise of bad manners and four-letter-words and perilously light on the larger evils of our day, like the gaping chasm between rich and poor -- also a matter of civility, it seems to me.
Just as it appeared that the subject had been exhausted, September 11 occurred and a whole new spate of articles came along in its wake, declaring that we had all begun to relearn civility, to take greater care with one another because of our shared trauma. To whatever degree this may have been true, the new-found civility apparently did not linger. Predictably there was yet another spate of articles bemoaning the fact that we were back to our surly selves again.
But what finally prompted me into bringing forward civility as a sermon topic was not an article or a book, but an encounter with incivility that I had this summer. It was haunting in itself, but it also brought into high relief for me the questions that seem most important when we think about what civility means.
My pivotal encounter occurred when I was on a minor 'mission of mercy' in a Stop & Shop here in Hamden. A friend of mine in Durham was in a bind because her husband had severely dislocated his ankle. He was at home under her care, waiting for the swelling to go down enough for his doctors to determine next steps, and between his needs and those of her young children, my friend felt unable to leave the house for her usual grocery shopping.
So I had offered to pick some things up for her, and therefore landed in the Stop 'n' Shop, hurrying to squeeze in this errand between work and the deadline for picking up my kids. I hate grocery shopping as a general rule -- I'm not very good at it because I get boggled by the sheer quantity of what's out there, and I never seem organized enough to avoid trekking back and forth from one end of the store to the other. But I was in reasonably good humor this time because the list was short and I was, after all, being a virtuous human being and a good friend and neighbor by doing this little act of kindness. That was my frame of mind -- brisk and perhaps a wee bit self-satisfied -- as I headed toward the door with my shopping cart.
The door was blocked by a woman with a full cart of groceries and three young children at her heels, who had stopped right in front of the exit to chat with someone. I hovered expectantly for a moment and then said, "Excuse me!" in that meaningful tone we use when we want a response. Instead of simply moving aside a few feet she looked at me and said, "Oh, you're trying to go out the exit? Where do you think we're going? This is the exit, see? There's a sign right there that says "Exit", right? Well, we're going out the EXIT, that's why we're here." And she slowly and deliberately began moving out the door.
My surprise shifted pretty quickly into anger and as I pushed my cart out behind her I said, "Well, since you weren't moving it was hard to tell that you were leaving." And then I added, "I don't think you're setting a very good example for your kids." (I know, I know! I should have known better….) On the other side of the door she turned around, and in an almost conversational tone of voice, with these three very small children gathered around her, she said, "If there's one thing I can't stand it's a ___-sucker who can't mind her own business."
I was so stunned by the casual violence of the profanity that I was left speechless. I turned away from her and walked to my car and then had to just sit there and catch my breath before getting on with my life. The episode haunted me for days, as I wondered about the woman, about her children, about my own comments and reactions. And it brought forward with great clarity some of the questions giving rise to the whole debate about civility. How do our manners reflect our values? Are manners a class-bound anachronism, or are they essential to our health as a society? Does the rise of incivility signal a deeper and more ominous fraying of the social fabric? And so on.
A couple of years ago Yale professor Stephen Carter came out with a book that attempted to answer such questions, called Civility. In it he makes some valid points and helps to unpack the topic in a useful way. But Carter's basic answer is that only religion can save us. In his introduction to the book he wrote, "The key to reconstructing civility is for all of us to learn anew the virtue of acting with love toward our neighbors. Love of neighbor has long been a tenet of Judaism and Christianity, and a revival of civility in America will require a revival of all that is best in religion as a force in our public life. Only religion possesses the majesty, the power, and the sacred language to teach all of us, the religious and the secular, the genuine appreciation for each other on which a successful civility must rest."
I disagree with Carter that religion carries the only power that can move us toward greater civility. For all I know, the woman I met at Stop 'n' Shop is a devout church-goer, who simply lives with a large disconnect between her worship life on Sunday and her behavior in the public square. And for the many people who live out a practice of kindness and civility despite the fact that they have no interest in religion, Carter's assertion is bound to rankle.
It's hard to disagree that the religious teaching to love each other would help us build a civil society, if we took it seriously. But the need is really more modest than that. A basic level of mutual respect is what's needed. Our daily hum of civil society is sustained by respect for one another, and the willingness to show that respect in even the smallest gestures between strangers.
When the respect breaks down, we feel it. We feel it in the gratuitous hostility of so-called 'shock radio' and some of the most popular rap lyrics. We feel it when we're cut off, yelled at or flipped an obscene gesture on the highway. We feel it when the rude or indifferent sales clerk ignores us, when someone has a loud conversation on a cell phone next to us, when a stranger meets our sunny greeting with coldness. We feel it all the countless times when the words "please" and "thank you" remain unspoken.
The damage caused by these various acts and omissions is small, so small that it is easy to ignore. Our attention is drawn instead to the large calamities of our time, and it's hard to think why we should spend too much time worrying about manners -- even appallingly bad manners -- when much larger things are looming, like terrorist attacks or marching off to war. But what I began to wonder through that encounter at the Stop & Shop is whether or not it is accurate to divide our lives in this way -- into small indecencies that don't matter much and enormous ones that can damage thousands of lives.
If we look at it all very carefully, it seems much more accurate to say that it's all of a piece. The kindness or the disrespect we visit on one another in the little details of living are what add up, in the end, to the cadences and rhythms to which we move in the larger circles of society. Or, to put it more bluntly, we make peace and we make war every day of our lives, and these tiny, personal bits of war and peace cannot really be uncoupled from the large ones that rock nations. Clearly, they are not identical; but neither are they entirely separate.
Sometimes, those of us who are raising children can find ourselves repressing a shudder when we hear ourselves say something to our kids in exactly the phrasing and tone of voice used by our own parents a generation ago. "Mind your manners!", is one of those things we say. And yet even if we swore in the dim past, that we would never, ever sound like our parents, we go on saying it.
For most of us, the manners we're concerned about have nothing to do with tea party etiquette or which fork to use at a formal dinner party or, God help us, the proper way to curtsy to a Queen. They have to do with the small gestures through which we signal our respect, not only for each other but for the social fabric we are all helping to weave. We want our kids to learn to look people in the eye when they speak or are spoken to; to say 'please' and 'thank you' often and sincerely; to make the stranger welcome among them and go out of their way to comfort someone who is hurt. We want them to speak the truth in kindness, and to guard silence sometimes when an unkind truth doesn't really have to be spoken.
These are the kinds of manners we care about. And the reason we care about them has nothing to do with stilted form or maintaining some decorous pretense. It has to do with how we live together in kindness, how we treat the stranger, how we give and generate respect. It has to do with enacting, as well as we can, our vision of the society we want.
One of the ancient Hebrew proverbs says, "Death and life are in the power of the tongue". I suppose it was literally true for a royal few, back in the days when a king could holler, "Off with his head!" But it's true for all of us on a more subtle level. Sylvia Boorstein, in teaching about the Buddhist precept of Right Speech, once asked a group of students to raise their hands if they'd ever broken a bone. She then asked that people keep their hands up if the broken place still hurt them, and all the hands went down. Next she asked for raised hands if anyone still felt pain from something that had been said to them in the last year; nearly all the hands went up. And she asked, "Now keep your hand up if you still feel pain from something said to you five years ago….Ten years ago….Twenty years ago…." She says, "At this point many people still have a hand in the air. They look around at each other and smile sheepishly, but I don't think anyone is amused. It is a lovely moment of shared compassion, of being a witness to the burden we have all borne: carrying the pain of hurtful remarks."
The word civility is descended from an Indo-European root meaning "member of the household". By our small gestures of politeness we recognize that we live together -- not just with those we like, but also with those we've never met, and those who offend us or with whom we profoundly disagree. We're connected, and our behavior and language either strengthen or strain that connection.
In this sense I move closer to Stephen Carter and see the issue through a religious lens. If we take them seriously, all of our religions demand that our daily lives reflect the truths of our faith. Now, some might argue that Unitarian Universalism has suggestions rather than truths. But we do make some statements of faith that point us in a particular direction when we face our moral dilemmas. Our belief in the inherent worth and dignity of every person, for instance, would seem to mandate certain kinds of interactions in our lives that come perilously close to good manners and civility.
I want to return for a moment to the story of my encounter in the Stop & Shop. Because it happened at a time when my heart was heavy with dread about a looming war, it made very clear to me the ways in which our large and small violences against one another are inseparable. As I sat there in my car and let the shock of the woman's words leave me, I started to wonder, What just happened here? And what role did I play in it? In the story as I've told it to you, I am clearly the innocent target of someone's uncontrolled rage or frustration, randomly landing on me because I happened to be handy. But when I thought back over the few seconds of our interaction, the story became a little more complex, laden with questions.
I know that as I approached the door I was in a hurry. I spoke the courteous words, "Excuse me", but I am pretty sure that the tone of voice I used made it sound closer to, 'Hey, idiot!'. I know that when I concentrate or am under stress I scowl. So what was the view from the other side of the room, so to speak?
What do I know about this woman? Only that she had responsibility for grocery shopping, and had the care of three young children who appeared to be hers. What do I know about what triggered her anger? Only that she saw a scowling woman who seemed pushy, wanting her to move before she was ready. I know nothing else at all. Maybe she was on the way home to an abusive spouse. Maybe she had just lost her job. Maybe she's got a fourth kid sick in the hospital. Maybe she's been pushed around all her life and has learned too well how to push back. Maybe she's juggling kids and job all on her own, holding on by sheer guts and will without any help from anyone else.
These speculations aren't designed to let her off the hook; they're designed to help me see that I'm on a bit of a hook here, too. We all know perfectly well that we can't change the behavior we encounter in someone else; we can change only our own choices, our own speech, our own behavior. So there is a persistent questioning here for me. What might I have done differently so that this ugliness would not have come to life between us? What might I learn from this so that I can be more careful of my tone of voice, more attentive to the need for silence instead of retort, more gentle of the possibilities, the next time?
Many of you have read the work of Aldous Huxley. His books, especially The Perennial Philosophy, had an enormous impact on a generation of philosophers, ministers, sociologists and just plain folks. When Huxley was nearly seventy he was asked to distill his many years of thought and research into some final words of insight. And what he said was this: "It's a bit embarrassing to have been concerned with the human problem all one's life and find at the end that one has no more to offer by way of advice than: 'Try to be a little kinder.'"
It's not a very bold or sweeping piece of advice -- but then again, it's not so far from the ancient religious command to love one another. A small effort toward kindness would sharpen our attention for the details of gesture, gaze and tone of voice we bring to the world. It would help us grant the benefit of the doubt, refrain from the cutting retort, silently wish someone well instead of pushing back. It might even guide our workplace fairness, our vote, our larger national choices. Maybe, in the end, that's where the key to real civility has always been. "Try to be a little kinder". It seems to me a decent place to start….. Amen.