INDIVIDUAL WORTH AND DIGNITY:
WHAT’S IT TO YOU?
Unitarian Universalist Church of St Petersburg – September 6, 2015 Rev. Jack Donovan SCRIPTURES When You Are Among the Trees ​
by Mary Oliver
Visit of the Wise Men, Gospel of Matthew 2
The Sum of All Reverence ​
by Walt Whitman (Hymnal Reading # 659)
SERMON Last Sunday. I offered for your consideration the suggestion that the phrase “the end of wisdom” could mean at least two things: one, it could mean the ​
cessation​
of growth in understanding and caring; or, two, it could mean the ​
continuation​
of growth in understanding and caring. I gave the concluding scene from the movie ​
Mr.Holmes ​
as suggestive of what the second end of wisdom might look like: an older person out in the fields under the great sky, on his knees in a circle of ceremonial stones, ​
bowing with grace and dignity in
remembrance, in reverence, and in redemption of caring relationship with
the wonder-filled circles of the mystery of life.
I think helping achieve this latter end of wisdom is the purpose of a church,
the development of faith and spirituality. ​
Faith​
is a traditional word for the
extent of one’s understanding of life and how to live​
.​ ​
Spirituality​
is a
traditional word for the extent of one’s caring for life. These two converge in
nourishing the individual and in shaping the community – the church without
boundaries.
The Covenant of the Unitarian Universalist Association holds to this vision.
Our congregations covenant to affirm and promote seven principles, each
principle corresponding to a stage of spirituality or spiritual development, in
line with the findings of both modern developmental psychology and
traditional human experience.
And our congregations agree also to consider all human understanding as
sources of faith, whether that understanding is from our own direct personal
experience, from the understanding of other individuals, or from each of the
world’s wisdom traditions.
It is for our congregations to ​
promote​
the journeys of faith and spiritual
development. It is for us to ​
take​
them, and to help one another.
1
Over this church year during Sunday sermons and in gatherings after the
service, I would like us to explore the steps offered by the principles and
sources to see how we might grow, asking of each one, ​
What is it? Why do
it? How take it?
Today, step number one – the inherent worth and dignity of every person:
What is it? What is an individual’s worth? What is an individual’s dignity?
What is inherent about worth and dignity?
After the service and a cup of coffee, come back in here, if you have time.
I’d like us to share other answers besides mine. This is after all a recurrent
journey we take together.
But to start, what is an individual’s worth? I’m going to avoid valuing life
with the distancing economic analysis of the price you’d pay to stay alive for
one more year. I’d like to start close to the beginning. When a mother sees
her newborn baby, what is it she feels?
Am I far off saying she feels a great flow of blessing, rising in joyful
epiph-any and symphony from the core of her being? Is she not filled with
a sense of the baby’s awesome worth? this child is worth her life – and the
risk of her life – and many sacrifices in her life.
And for what gain? For incalculable preciousness, alight with joy, laughter,
blessed tears, meaning, continuation, intimacy, love – so many elations, so
many moments to be spent with love incarnated, to learn about love
incarnated, to grow as love incarnated.
Lucky dads feel that, too, I know – and lucky families do, I’ve seen – and
lucky teachers, seen that also -- and all the lucky opened hearts of the world
– they feel it. That would be the first thing I would say about a person’s
worth. And already, individual worth seems so built into the nature of things
that the phrase inherent seems required.
And getting even closer to the beginning, what feelings does the newborn
baby itself experience when it is first held and cradled and cooed to and
wooed and snuggled and fed? It seems to me it is a call to some primal
sense of the worth of being – a call of welcome, of reverence, of wild crazy
love, of discovery greater than discovering America or Relativity, even if it’s
a discovery made 85 billion times before on Earth.
2
And wise people come to little children, and they pay homage to their
precious worth with gold, frankincense, myrrh. And they bring to your first
day – as they will to your last – kindness, companionship, protection,
patience, education, guidance, compassion, appreciation, celebration, joy,
love, and gratitude, for you. This is what you are worth. They try to clue
you in, saying, You are a child of God, lovely and loved in countless ways.
This child knows its worth from the beginning. So I am ready with Walt
Whitman to call the individual’s worth inherent, as well vast and creative and
divine.
This is the first step in spirituality - in caring for life – for the baby to care
about its own being, its own life with a sense of inherent worth. When the
baby lives with a feeling of inherent worth, it lives with dignity. No childish
shenanigans can take that away.
The baby’s caring can’t initially be for anyone other than itself – because
that is all it experiences at first. In time, it will extend its sense of inherent
worth to its mother, and to its father, and to those who love it. If it were
not for the mother and if not for the mothering of others, there would be no
child. In this realization there is also somehow an existential threat that
deepens the bond – the threat of absence, of loss, of grief unaccompanied,
of not receiving the call to flourish – these can negate even inherent worth.
As we ponder what the individual is worth, I think we must deal with the
reality that worth can be appreciated or depreciated. Not everyone
recognizes worth, inherent or otherwise, in every-one else. The wise see
you full of light, as a shining star. But there are powerful Herods in our
world who give not a vine or a fig tree for most of the children of even the
holy cities. When such a deficient perception prevails, many will not get to
feel much worth for very long. Great inequities coupled with great
depriv-ations are felt deeply, as Labor Day is to remind us.
That is when dignity might also die. If your worth is unacknowledged, you
are not being treated with dignity. And if maltreatment keeps you from
finding worth in yourself, if you are pressed to no longer take care of
yourself, or if you no longer have the will to cry out in insistence that others
take due care as well, then worth is denied and dignity dies.
So the sense of individual worth and its inherency are conditional. They
depend to a significant extent on the attitudes of the people and the
3
instit-utions you are dealing with and on the stages of spiritual caring they
are at.
I believe it turns out that, if the child is truly to feel its own worth, there
must be what I would call a mother’s heart to reveal it – whether that heart
be in man or woman – someone willing to pay the price for a child’s worth.
Research on school children says that if there is at least one caring person
continuously present in children’s lives, those children will have a sense of
self-worth to empower their lives. And in later life, in the absence of a
mother-kind person, by remembrance and gratitude you may be for yourself
a mother’s heart.
Perhaps to find the mother’s heart sometimes we need to look back past
our earthly mothers and fathers to what else has entirely invested itself in us
from eons past – for five billion years of evolving life on earth – for fifteen
billion years of sprawling energy alive with light beyond price. Think of your
worth, with all that compound interest from the heart of the universe.
The mother’s journey is the hero’s journey and the spiritual journey in one.
It began when the mother was a child herself, with her own childhood sense
of inherent worth. May it forever shine.
But let us not jump the labyrinth’s hedge to the end of the spiritual journey.
Let’s be content with acknowledging that what is inherent about our worth is
to a considerable extent ​
potential​
, waiting to be fulfilled on our way. And we
must find our way, by the trees, by a guiding star, back to our self’s hope of
worth fulfilled, of goodness and discernment, of filling full with light and
shining forth.
Having some idea about what a sense of inherent individual worth is, I have
to go on and ask, why bother promoting it in myself or others, and how. But
before I do that during this coming week, I need to hear what you think
about a sense of inherent worth as part of the journey of spirituality and
caring. Thank you for listening, and hope to hear from you after a cup of
coffee.
4
READINGS
READING FOR MEDITATION: ​
When I Am Among the Trees by Mary Oliver
When I am among the trees,
especially the willows and the honey locust,
equally the beech, the oaks and the pines,
they give off such hints of gladness,
I would almost say that they save me, and daily.
I am so distant from the hope of myself,
in which I have goodness, and discernment,
and never hurry through the world
but walk slowly, and bow often.
Around me the trees stir in their leaves
and call out, "Stay awhile."
The light flows from their branches.
And they call again, "It's simple," they say,
"and you too have come
into the world to do this, to go easy, to be filled
with light, and to shine."
READING BEFORE SERMON -- ​
from the Gospel of Matthew, chapter 2
In the time of King Herod, after Jesus was born in Bethlehem of Judea, wise
men from the East came to Jerusalem, asking, “Where is the child who has
been born king the Jews, for we have come to pay him homage.” King
Herod, frightened by the news, sent them to Bethlehem, having heard that
would be the birthplace of the messiah, saying, “Go and search diligently for
the child, and when you have found him, bring me word so that I may also
go and pay homage.” When the wise men saw the child’s star stopped
5
above a house, they were overwhelmed with joy. On entering the house,
they saw the child with Mary his mother; and they knelt down and paid him
homage. And having been warned in a dream not to return to Herod, they
left for their own country by another road. When Herod saw that he had
been tricked by the wise men, he was infuriated and he sent and killed all
the children in and around Bethlehem who were two years old or under.
6