The following sermon, from ten years ago, still represents my thinking today. It contains an interesting definition of spirituality that includes both feelings and behaviors. It draws on a general evolutionary framework. And I think it shows how spirituality can contribute to social action. Comments are welcome.
SPIRITUALITY AND SOCIAL ACTION
Karl E. Peters
Unitarian Society of Hartford
August 26, 2001
A few months ago a friend and I were having lunch and talking about our church and Unitarian Universalism. We noted the increasing interest in spirituality. My friend said that some people who were interested in social action were concerned about this. That got us into a discussion of whether spirituality and social action were opposed to one another. Some people seem to think they are. But we wondered if that has to be the case. Instead of either spirituality or social action, could we have both spirituality and social action? We thought the both-and was possible.
That lunch discussion is the basis for my talk today. For the past two months I’ve been thinking about what kind of spirituality might be harmonious with and supportive of social action. This morning I want to share with you my first attempt. I don’t claim to have any final word, but only want to suggest some things for us to think about together. Afterwards, I hope you will give me feedback.
Let me begin by offering some ideas about what spirituality and social action are. Spirituality is a fuzzy idea at best, but a common element in most kinds of spirituality is “connectedness.” To be spiritual means to be connected with a reality greater than ourselves.
This connectedness can take many forms. It may be to deeper aspects of our individual selves. It may be an interconnectedness with other humans in a common cause. It may be a sense of ourselves as part of the interdependent web of life. It may be the ongoing realization that we have come out of the stars and are a part of the greater, evolving universe. It may be the intuition that we are connected to other realms of existence with greater powers or an ultimate creator and sustainer of all that is.
All these ways of being connected take us beyond our individual selves to find meaning for our lives in some greater reality. This may not be all there is to spirituality, but connectedness to something other than ourselves seems to be an important aspect of spirituality.
Social action can mean any action that is intended to help others realize greater good in their lives. One way to talk about this is to say that it is good for all people to flourish by developing their own potentials. In order for anyone to flourish, they must be able to meet basic needs for food and shelter. They must be in good health. They must have access to education or training that will help them develop their potentials. And they must have the opportunities to express the potentials they have.
Injustice occurs when some flourish and others do not—especially when some flourish at the expense of others. Social action seeks to remedy injustice, so that all people can fulfill their potentials, both now and in the future. Furthermore, for many, social action means changing some of our human ways of living, so that all creatures on earth—nonhuman as well as human—can fulfill whatever potentials they have for living.
The basic idea is one of fairness. If I can fulfill my potentials as a human being, everyone should have the same opportunities that I do. I should not be in a privileged place in society—able to realize my life ambitions while others cannot.
This morning I’m not going to deal with specific instances of injustice. However, when I hear about injustice or read about it in the newspaper, I ask myself, what would motivate me to get involved? What would encourage me to reach out beyond my own private world to work with others for the good of others? Is there a kind of spirituality that will prompt me to become involved in some kind of social action for the well being of others, so that others can fulfill their potentials even as I fulfill mine? I call this the problem of moral motivation. What motivates human beings to act for the good of others?
For me, a first step as addressing the problem of moral motivation is to set my thinking in an evolutionary framework. This is the framework I’ve been developing in my thirty-five years of working on issues in science and religion. For me, evolution offers me many helpful suggestions for thinking about myself and the meaning of my life. I would like to share three of these with you now. I’ll call them lessons: the lesson of interconnectedness, the lesson of creative transformation, and the lesson of human moral ambivalence.
The first lesson is that our lives are set in a cosmic context in which everything is interconnected. As our responsive reading suggests, we have come out of the stars. In our bodies is the energy that that was present at the origin of the universe, and the atoms that were created in the death throws of stars exploding as supernovae. We also have evolved on planet earth, as a species whose DNA is mostly continuous with that of other primates and to some extent with all species of life on our planet. Our own being is intimately connected with all that has evolved. We don’t have to work at being interconnected. We only have to realize that we already are interconnected with other human beings, with all of life, and with the rest of the universe.
The second lesson from studying evolution is about Creative Transformation–the creative process by which things evolved. Our hymn this morning used the metaphor, “O Life that Maketh all things new.” When one looks at the history of the universe, of life on this planet, and of human societies, one realizes that our world has evolved through a process of transformation in which things are combined and recombined to form what is new. This is true even in our own lives. We are constantly, like it or not, being transformed as we daily interact with our world and with other human beings. To recognize this is for me the basis for a kind of spirituality—what I call the Spirituality of Creative Transformation. In a few minutes I’ll spell out in more detail what this means in relation to the problem of moral motivation, to why I should become involved in social action.
For now, I want to focus on the third lesson I have learned from studying evolution. It is that we humans have evolved to be morally ambivalent. We have the biologically evolved predispositions to be both moral and immoral, for example, to be both selfish and altruistic, to neglect the well being of others and to care for the well being of others.
I first came to realize this ambivalence when I read a book by science writer Robert Wright, The Moral Animal: Why We Are the Way We Are, the New Science of Evolutionary Psychology. Now, a lot of people in human history have recognized that we are morally ambivalent creatures. What evolutionary psychologists add is that we have evolved to have ambivalent emotions and behavior because they help us survive and reproduce. That is, they are adaptive. Wright shows that emotions such as anger, jealousy, and envy have evolved because they offer some adaptive advantage, some increased chance for relative reproductive success. So too have inclinations for love, patience, faithfulness, and peacemaking. Depending on circumstances, all these emotions and their related behaviors are biologically adaptive. However, we regard some as moral and others as immoral. This is what I mean when I say they are morally ambivalent.
Another way to talk about our morally ambivalent nature is to say that we have tendencies to be self-protective to the point of withdrawing from society and we have tendencies to want to care for others, which take us out into society to work with others for their well being. Two emotions related to these tendencies are the emotion of fear, especially the fear of strangers, and the emotion of empathy, especially empathy for those who are suffering. We have evolved to have both of these for good reason. Both are adaptive. And they often work together: I find within myself that, when the suffering of others connects with my feeling of empathy and urges me to help others, almost at the same time the fear of strangers kicks in to pull me back from becoming involved in social action.
Sometimes our self-protective feelings can feed a kind of individualistic spirituality that leads to withdrawal from being actively involved in the world. It can feed a turning within to uncover a deeper self. Or it can move some to seek special religious experiences in which they find their own self-affirmation because they are affirmed by some higher power or by a personal, loving God. There is nothing wrong with such spirituality. Many people need and benefit from it. Perhaps all of us need this kind of protective spirituality at some time or other. However, as helpful as it may be personality, privately, it is not the kind of spirituality that would move me to social action.
So what kind of spirituality would? I think it would be a spirituality that is grounded in the second lesson of evolution mentioned above—a Spirituality of Creative Transformation.
A part of my own religious journey involves my coming to think of God (or the Divine or Sacred) not as a being who creates the world but as an ongoing process of creative transformation within the world. For me the Sacred is an activity, and the word God is more like a verb than a noun.
One way I think about this creative activity is in terms of Darwin’s theory of evolution: on the one hand interactions within organisms, and between them and the wider world, produce new genetic variations. Some of these variations are harmful and are not reproduced. Others are benign and are simply carried forward from one generation to the next. Still others are advantageous, making an individual more effective at taking care of itself and reproducing. This Darwinian process is called random variation and natural selection.
Some thinkers apply this idea of variation and selection to the world of human thought. Philosopher of Science Karl Popper has written a book called Conjectures and Refutations. Popper suggests that new knowledge comes when thinking engages in a two-part process. For example, in trying to solve a problem we first make a number of conjectures as possible solutions. Then we begin weeding out those conjectures that don’t work to solve the problem. We keep conjecturing and refuting until we find a solution that works.
I suggest that you observe yourself thinking and ask if this is not how it goes. To me it seems like a dance—trying new things, selecting some of the tries—trying other new things—selecting some of those. And so on. Life and thought moves on creatively as a trial and error process, seeking to try ever-new genetic modifications, ever-new ways of thinking. This creative process is what I think of as Sacred or Holy. It is that which continuously transforms the universe, life, and ourselves. It is the process that has brought us out of the stars, up from the seas, with the capacities to think and to love. It is the Life that continually makes all things new.
Another way of talking about creative transformation as a two-part process is illustrated by biologist Charles Birch and theologian John Cobb, Jr. in their book Liberation of Life, pp. 180-182. They give the example of the creative transformation of a young graduate student.
“A brilliant young graduate student had almost completed his doctoral thesis after four years of intensive study and research. During this time he had devoted his efforts . . . to exploring the nature of the nervous system and particularly the brain in higher mammals . . . . He was fascinated. A whole new world of biology was opening up before his eyes. Furthermore, his studies had a significance that extended far beyond the nervous system. He was prying into the nature of life itself . . . .
“While he was still writing his thesis an opportunity came for him to present his work before an international conference of Neurophysiologists in the capital city of a large developing country. There for the first time in his life he was confronted with abject poverty, starvation, political oppression and torture—the whole works, as he described it. And all this alongside Western style affluence. He was shattered. What was he to do? The following possibilities occurred to him. He could return to his laboratory in the United States, complete his thesis and continue doing much the same experimental work . . . . He could make his new found concern for the poor and oppressed a major concern that would change the whole direction of his life. To give up neurophysiology and join the Peace Corps would be a head-on attack . . . .
“A third possibility was to accept the new insight and take it seriously without rejecting all that he had come to value in a scientific career.
“His growing concern for a world outside the laboratory led him to rapidly complete his thesis. He got a post-doctoral grant to continue his studies on the nervous system. His university authorities agreed to his request that he spend half his time only on research in neurophysiology. The other half of his time he intended to spend on learning about the wider world in which science and technology operated. This meant studying in a neighboring university where he could learn more about economics, politics, and also philosophy and theology . . . . All this of course reduced his chances of an early job in his chosen field. Others would gain a march on him while he broadened his understanding of life. That was a real sacrifice but he was willing to pay it. He trusted his intuitions that life was more that professional expertise and advancement. That is where he is now.”
Birch and Cobb go on to say: “In this example the contrast of the new insight with the old understanding was the occasion for the widening and deepening of our student’s thought. A way of thinking emerged which assimilated the new through the transformation, and not the rejection of the old. It is this third possibility that appropriately embodies the working of Life. To trust Life is to allow the challenging and threatening elements in our world to share in constituting our experience. It is to believe that they can enter into a creative interchange with what our past experience brings into the situation. It is to trust that the outcome of allowing the tension of the old and the new to be felt can be a creative synthesis which cannot be predetermined or planned.”
What Birch and Cobb say about trusting life as the process of creative transformation really speaks to me. I agree with them that it is a way of talking about what is Sacred or Holy, about God. But creative transformation also really scares me. That one’s life could be so radically changed by interacting with strange situations, by being open to the new and being willing to change the old. Yet, in the midst of my fear, I also recognize this as the way I can grow.
There are two kinds of growth. One is to develop along the same lines we have always been developing, to get better at doing some things in the same kind of situation. Such growth helps develop particular potentials we have already discovered inside ourselves. The second kind of growth is the discovery of new potentials for living—potentials we were not previously aware of. This can’t be done by simply doing more of the same. We need to become transformed to uncover new possibilities. This is what happened to the graduate student.
And this is what can happen to someone like me if I get involved in social action, if I put myself in situations I have not been in before and interact with people and problems that are foreign to me. In such creative interactions I can be transformed in ways that I could not imagine, and uncover new potentials within myself.
Uncovering and fulfilling human potentials. Near the beginning of this talk I suggested that this is one of the goals of living. I said that it is unjust for some to be able to fulfill their potentials while others cannot. I now suggest that it is possible for people, like me and you, to uncover and fulfill new potentials as we support others, who are suffering from injustice, while they develop theirs. There is thus a kind of spirituality that motivates me to engage in social action. It is the spirituality of creative transformation, of participating in a Sacred Creative Process, which continually creates the universe, and life, and human beings. This spirituality enables me to grow by calling me beyond my fear, by calling me in empathy for the well being of others. While some forms of spirituality may remove us from interacting with others in society, the spirituality of creative transformation calls us out from our private worlds to address in whatever way we can problems of injustice in the world. In this way one can engage in a spirituality that is supportive of social action.