Embracing Complexity: The Duality of Human Nature

Deeper than DNA, more fundamental than molecules or quarks, at our living core, we are wholeness and transfiguring love. We often forget that power, becoming lonely or resentful, comparing ourselves to others, acting out of our fears rather than living our glory. Occasionally we rouse from our trance to remember our wholeness. For a time we embody unsentimental love. We make efforts to wake others and to remain fully present ourselves. Our lives and our time here together are made sacred by our striving. [00:06:13]

If only it were all so simple. If only there were evil people somewhere insidiously committing evil deeds and it were necessary only to separate them from the rest of us and destroy them. But the line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being. [00:07:34]

Heckel also gave us the word ecology. Ecology. Thanks, Heckel. And he was a scientific racist. You know, the whole quote -unquote science of race. How do we account for the fact that people look different, have different kinds of features in different places around the world? Well, Heckel was an advocate of the theory that we look different because we came from different strains. [00:24:25]

That's not the problem, that he was incorrect about that. The problem is that he frankly believed that the science proved, well, what he already thought, that some races were simply inferior, closer to the animal, less human, resulting in deserving fewer rights. All that beauty he made, and then this ugly, ugly teaching. [00:25:01]

The halo effect is if you think somebody's really good at you know you know somebody's very good at something you then take their um take them as expert in some other field um michael jordan is a um is a fabulous basketball player and therefore you might actually follow his medical advice if he gets on a commercial all right we laugh but right this is what celebrity endorsements are all about. [00:29:12]

Three problems with believing that people have to be all sinner or saint. First, is that we will deny ourselves things of beauty. Beauty and wisdom. Because we tell ourselves, surely they can't really be beautiful and wise if their creators do something so wrong. Like, we feel a little uncomfortable, maybe, now, using the works of Ernst Teckel, or enjoying them. [00:31:33]

Number two, kind of the reverse, is that we will deny the truth of bad things that people have done because it's just so unbearable, that thought that we'll then have to toss out the good that they did as well. I see this happening. For example, Thomas Jefferson. Oh, is he tough. Especially, you know, he's kind of a Unitarian, and we claim him as our own, name districts after him and churches, and that's kind of uncomfortable now. [00:37:22]

We know that Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings had children, which is to say, in plain language, he committed rape over and over again. Whatever their relationship, he owned her. So, not exactly an equal relationship. And furthermore, they had many children, and they were his slaves, his own children. He enslaved his children, not to put too fine a point, not to put too fine a point on it. [00:38:54]

But what we can't do, what we cannot, must not do, is deny the harm he caused out of some mythical idea that then we cannot appreciate or use his music. Can we sit with the discomfort? Somebody makes beautiful things, the same person causes harm. Sometimes really serious harm, not just the trivial, more or less trivial harm that everybody does. It's essential that we not deny either of these truths. [00:40:50]

I spoke in the lead up to this service of saving our souls and this is what I mean not that our souls are immortal that's one of those questions on which Unitarian Universalists need not all agree what you think the soul is if there's any such thing at all but here's what I mean that who we are now and who we can become in the future. [00:42:52]

I want to continue it the sentence that comes after when he says you know there aren't evil people out doing insidious deeds and we could talk about that in a minute and just seek out and destroy and that'll solve the problem he says the line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being and then he says and who is willing to destroy a piece of his own heart. [00:45:27]

We embrace forgiveness for it opens us to hope. And again, I don't want to get into the question of do we forgive, forgive people like Sanger and Roosevelt and Jason Shelton and Ernst Haeckel, any more than I want to get into whether we should name schools after Paul Revere. You know, we don't have to forgive somebody and we don't have to put their statue in the town hall, in the town square just because we recognize that we're complex. [00:48:18]