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The Cost of Freedom "Freedom is not free," said Martin Luther King, Jr. in 1959. Five years later, Malcolm X said, "The price of freedom is death." It took the force of law and the support of federal officers to begin the process of protecting freedom for people of all colors. Countless people have died for freedom to live—in accordance with their beliefs, their ethnicity, and who they are as individuals. Henry David Thoreau went to jail for civil disobedience, as have countless others before and since. He was free to break the law. He had recognized that he was not willing to go along with the law, which made him both free to think for himself and free to act. The government, then, was free to put him in prison, which undoubtedly restricted his freedom to act. He was no longer, as we say, "free as a bird." Our desire to make money is our own until our actions bump into some illegality. After a certain age, we encourage our children to wear clothes when they run outside and later even through the house. I remember when I was 12, my mother made me start wearing a bathrobe and sitting like a young lady. Boy, did she cramp my style! A great many of our thoughts and actions are influenced and regulated by social mores and legal restrictions. Place and time influence our thoughts and actions; place and time also serve to limit our freedom. Statistically, some neighborhoods have higher rates of crime, teen pregnancy, drug and alcohol use, or homicide. These things do not happen entirely at random. They happen at a fairly consistent rate from year to year according to the environment. Do teenagers choose to become young mothers? Perhaps, if that is their expectation, or if they do not practice birth control, or it’s very common among their friends for grandparents to take care of multiple generations. The choice is there, but the likelihood of making a particular choice is affected by multiple factors. In this decade, the idea of freedom brings up images of refugees in Darfur, genocide in Rwanda and Sudan, atrocities in Iraq, Abu Ghraib, and Guantanamo Bay, warring factions in various parts of the world who have fought off and on for hundreds of years, and now the recent dismantling of habeus corpus. Some of us wonder why we’re fighting someone else’s cultural war; some of us wonder why we don’t stop genocide in other countries. We read about it in the paper, hear it on the radio, watch the devastating images on television, rant about it among our friends, thank God it isn’t happening here, and set it aside. It’s too far away for us to take direct action, and letters to members of Congress seem to fall on deaf ears. If an uprising happened in our neighborhood, we would ask for help from law enforcement and military personnel. Without that protection, we would take up arms or join masses of refugees who seek safety for their families. But we’re not hurting enough to get very worked up about any of it. Freedom of any kind depends first on physical safety and access to food and water. We take security for granted, most of the time, and find that this is a good place to live. It is important to the American psyche to believe that we are more free than the rest of the world. This has become a foundation of our belief system. The early history of European settlement is one of people seeking freedom for themselves, often at the expense of native peoples or slaves or the wealth of forests, land, fossil fuels, and gold. We have slowly zigged and zagged our way to establish more freedom for more of us, though now we seem to be sliding back. We take freedom for granted until bit by bit it appears to be going away. We believe in theory that any child of any station in life can grow up to become President or a scientist or an artist. Franklin Delano Roosevelt, who did grow up to be President, said, “The basic things expected by our people of their political and economic systems are simple. They are equality of opportunity for youth and for others; jobs for those who can work; security for those who need it; the ending of special privilege for the few; the preservation of civil liberties for all. . . . Freedom means the supremacy of human rights everywhere.” In the United States today, we are grateful for our freedom compared to other places, even as some of our freedom has been compromised in the name of security. But a large question remains: Are human beings really free? Sociologists tend to think we are not. They like to say that society shapes the individual and the individual shapes society. For society to exist at all, individual freedom is not possible at all times or in all places. I do like to think I am a free woman. Free to select and to develop sermon topics. Free to deal with my personal problems and successes in the best way I know how. I was free to marry, have children, work at various jobs, divorce, go into ministry, remarry, and so forth. Many teenagers are free to rebel; adults are free to have a mid-life crisis. If we had lived in another time and place, our problems and solutions would be different. If we lived in another social position in this society, our problems and possible solutions would be different. This freedom to act calls for taking responsibility for my actions. There are legal, social, and natural consequences for doing things outside the norm. To act responsibly means that I choose not to be completely selfish, but to consider the good of the group or the environment. You could say that we are free to act so long as we conform to a certain moral code and body of rules or face the consequences. Speaking of consequences, prisons are home to 2 million Americans, and every one of us has probably done something that could land us in jail for a few hours or for years. My stepdaughter was arrested in a club on 6th Street for underage drinking even though she was over 21 and had her ID. She was just hanging out with the wrong crowd and they were all rounded up. There’s just not that much difference between us and some of those who got caught. The system is such that an entire industry has developed in construction, personnel, and support services for prisons. We can’t afford to reduce the prison population—it’s a growth industry. When a prisoner finishes a sentence and is released, the freedom outside suddenly requires a job, housing, food, transportation, and all the rest. Freedom comes with a cost. Ideas, values, and beliefs belong to us. Decisions are made in our own heads. Truth comes to us through tradition, knowledge, reason, and experience (usually in the form of hard knocks). Freedom to act would not mean very much without the freedom to think. Freedom to think also needs the freedom to act. We are free to attend school, but it may be inadequate to our needs or it may cost too much as tuition and fees continue to rise. We may decide to become engineers or lawyers or musicians, but we must have not only the financial resources but also the ability to complete the course of study. Thoughts belong to us alone--until they become speech or appear in writing. My son’s fourth grade teacher assigned Madeleine L’Engle’s book A Wrinkle in Time, a mixture of science fiction and fantasy. Two or three parents objected to its content because of their religious beliefs and their kids were allowed to read a substitute story. More recently, J.K. Rowling’s Harry Potter series of adventures generated calls for censorship among some concerned parents. Harry Potter attends Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and gets himself into numerous dangerous and sometimes violent situations. Should these books be allowed in school libraries? Should they be required reading? The internet has exploded old notions of communication and our access to information. There are continual efforts to block specific kinds of material from children and from non-consenting adults. Should we allow information about how to build a bomb or a biological weapon? Should libraries provide complete internet access to “consenting” adults? Television, movies, music, and art have added imagery to our interpretation of the printed word. New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani attracted a great deal of attention a few years back when he pulled city funding from the Brooklyn Museum because of a particular art show. Did he have the authority to do this? The responsibility? The readings I choose for Sunday morning are sometimes
-taken out of context Do I have the right to do that? In this church we invite a range of views with which not everyone agrees. Thus Chuck and I can do sermons about controversial topics. You have a right to disagree or let us know what you think. When I write for the paper or speak at a public meeting as a Live Oak minister, I represent the church and Unitarian Universalism. What I say or write will be in my style and from my perspective, but I would hope never to embarrass you or to mislead the public about us. You might call this self-censorship. But suppose someone wants to read a poem with explicit sexual imagery or one that contains language commonly known as four-letter words. If that person just comes up and reads it, perhaps to light a candle of joy or sorrow, we can judge its appropriateness only after the fact. Suppose the person brings it to me or to Chuck with the idea of listing it in the order of service and reading it on a Sunday. Do we have the right to say No? Do we have the obligation to consider its impact on the congregation as a whole, not just the individual’s freedom of expression? Yes, we must take that responsibility. So long as discourse is respectful, almost any topic can be considered here. But surely, you might ask, if we are free to think (subject to our capacity to think), are we not free to believe as we wish? Settlers poured into this country to set up their own little enclave of faith communities. We continue to fight battles in court to protect religious freedom by removing it from public places that have been built to serve us all. Freedom of belief is sacred to Unitarian Universalism. Back in 1568 the young Unitarian King of Transylvania reissued an edict of religious toleration that had actually been established by his mother when she was Queen. For a brief period, Unitarians enjoyed equal constitutional status with Roman Catholics, Lutherans, and Calvinists. Several theological debates followed regarding the nature of God. Francis David, court preacher, convinced the King and all of Transylvania that God is One, not a trinity. By 1595, the people of Transylvania had established 525 Unitarian churches. One of the legacies of these debates has brought us a Principle that affirms the Right of Conscience (and the use of the democratic process). But don’t let anyone tell you we can believe anything we want. We believe only that which body, mind and soul "convince" us to believe. Both the Unitarians and the Universalists, since long before they merged in 1961, have remained committed to individual liberty of conscience. The Universalists wrote a Declaration of Faith in 1790, stating their beliefs as a whole. They attached to it a “Liberty Clause” that allowed for individual interpretation and established that the statement would not be imposed as a creedal test. I believe in building bridges of understanding. Now, I may be near-sighted, and I may have rose-colored glasses, but I want to understand more about you; about God; about varieties of religious experience; and about the world around us. Freedom calls for courage to let people know what we stand for. To listen with new ears to voices that sound strange to us. To see one another as individuals.
To talk
about what’s really, really important in the depth of our hearts. Our freedom to think and to believe is a blessing continually fought militarily, legally, and religiously. We need to act as though we believe in religious freedom and spread the good news of Unitarian Universalism into the world. It’s important. None of us can claim to know all the answers, but we can approach one another with open minds and hearts across all the ambiguity of life. Building bridges requires teamwork. You project managers and educators and parents know this on a practical. We cannot cross the bridge until it is firmly anchored on each end. But I have to warn you. If you build a bridge, someone new is going to come over to your side. Will you see? Will you listen? Will you reach out your hand? Will you risk being changed? Let’s make this an ongoing challenge for this religious community. Let’s risk the possibility of transformation. Amen and Blessed Be |
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Copyright
©2006, Live Oak Unitarian Universalist Church.