“What have you produced for Me?” God asks in our reading. “What have you bought with your life?”
It is a question that can catch you up short. It is a question that can call everything else into question.
What have you bought with your life?
Rumi, the Muslim mystic author of the piece, was giving practical meaning to a theological point of view.
God created it all…the world with all of its beauty and all of its tragedy…and all of us as well…
What do we owe in return? And to whom?
What accountability do you have?
And whether you resonate with Rumi’s mysticism or follow a more this-worldly practice…”this is the day we have been given”… the accountability question asks what we owe in return. The question is what kind of responsibility comes with the gift of life.
And whether you feel accountability to whatever gods you know, or to your family, or to your community…to your race or gender-identity…to some idea or philosophy…or just to yourself…
That question: what have you bought with your life? That question can be a stopper.
Accountability is our spiritual theme this month, another new one for us. But accountability underlies much of theology. And, in progressive circles…well, you hear the term accountability more and more.
So…the basics. Here is the dictionary definition: “The fact of being responsible for what you do and able to give a satisfactory reason for it…”
Responsible for what you do.
The Romans built a lot of arches. Arches supported bridges and aqueducts, temple walls and doorways of all kinds.
Do you know how a stone arch is built? Well, you begin by creating a form for the arch…back in Roman times, a form made out of wood. Then you begin setting the stones…and these were often huge stones, weighing hundreds of pounds…one here…one there…and then another and another…until you reach the top of the arch. They didn’t use mortar. The stones were cut to conform to the shape of the arch. In the center, you place a keystone…which transfers the weight of the stones out, along the arch…rather than straight down. It is quite elegant, actually. But arches must be balanced because when the stones are in place, you remove the wooden form.
The early Romans had a tradition. Whenever one of their engineers built an arch, the engineer assumed accountability for his work in the most personal way possible: He stood directly under the arch as the wooden form was removed.
I don’t think many shortcuts were encouraged by those engineers.
Responsibility for what we do is part of accountability. But the definition goes beyond that:
“being responsible for what you do and able to give a satisfactory reason for it”
“Able to give a satisfactory reason for it.”
This is the question of who you need to account to. For Rumi it was God.
For many of us, our immediate answer to that question of who is “To myself.” “To Me.”
But it is hard to miss the individualism in that response. As liberal religious folks the tension between individualism and some effective sense of collective accountability is constant…it comes up again and again and again.
Many other faith traditions, especially indigenous and non-western traditions, shift the balance of accountability toward the collective.
The Rissho Kosei-kai(RKK) is a faith community in Japan that practices “engaged Buddhism.” The UUA has partnered with them for decades internationally. As UUA President, I visited with them in Japan several times, including speaking at their annual General Assembly in Tokyo.
We gathered in their major hall that seats 4,000 or so. It is huge. There were a few speeches from their leaders and I spoke briefly (in translation of course). We prayed. But the core of the program was testimony by a rank and file RKK member.
Their spiritual practice takes place in what we would call small group ministries and the expectation is that members of these groups will share their hopes and dreams but also their shortcomings and their mistakes…with a high degree of honesty…and in public.
The man who gave the testimony that day described…in front of 4000 people…in front of his religious community and all their leaders and foreign guests…he described his infidelity to his wife and the betrayal of his family…the process of his confessing and begging forgiveness and the process of being accepted back into family and faith. He described all of that, just as he had to his small group.
When he finished, 4000 RKK members rose in applause and appreciation of his practice of accountability.
It was extraordinary.
I often think about accountability as asking who you feel you need to talk with. Who do you need to give an account of your actions to?
That RKK member had agreed to speak his confession in public. But the community had also agreed to hear that confession. And to forgive those sins after sincere repentance…I’m using Christian terms for ease here…the RKK describe it somewhat differently.…They all agree to stay in relationship, having grounded themselves once again in a religious commitment to right relationship and a vision of Beloved Community.
It was so public but it felt like Universalism in practice.
People make mistakes…we all do…but the community…practicing a belief that each of us is already lovable and already loved…and also redeemable…yes that too…
The community is able to offer forgiveness and move forward together, not casting the offender out but working to reaffirm the values and the hope that faith can offer.
Universalism in practice.
You see, there is a theological dilemma for those of us who try to practice engaged Universalism…Universalism that engages the world.
You hear me preach the Unitarian Universalist Good News every week. We are all lovable…each and every one of us…and we are all already loved. God, the Spirit of Life…God loves us all. Because, for the Universalists, love is what God is and love is what God does. It does not depend on what we do. Virtue or even kindness is not required.
BUT…we make mistakes. We harm others unintentionally and sometimes intentionally…through anger or our failure to understand our power and privilege…we mistake our self-interest for some ultimate good…we harm others.
If God already loves us…no matter what we do…what does responsibility for those actions…what does accountability look like? Or does accountability have any meaning…if that love keeps flowing even when we screw up? Because screw up we do.
Accountability in community is where we can learn and grow and take responsibility for how our lives land on those we love and on those we harm.
Communities of accountability helps us move beyond our intentions and understand the impact of our living.
“I didn’t mean to offend you.” “But you offended me.”
“As a man, I did not mean to crowd out your voice.” “But as a woman, I felt silenced.”
“As a person of color, I did not intent to make you feel guilty. I was just speaking my truth.” “But as a white person, I felt shut down. Like I have to take responsibility for things I didn’t do and feelings I never had.”
Is this sounding at all familiar? I could go on…the examples are so easy to find.
Author and activist bell hooks writes: “Guilt leads to angry denial and inaction. Responsibility leads to grudging good works. The call to seek wholeness has room for acknowledging feelings of guilt (and anger and frustration), room for accepting appropriate responsibility and plenty of room for moving toward personal and communal transformation”
Wholeness. I think that is what accountability asks us to move toward. To give up finally… “the crazy notion that we can live separate and aloof from one another…”
As our responsive reading said:
“The world is not going to be saved by perfect or noble people. The world is going to be healed by people like us, like you and me. People who know both fear and pain, but still have the courage to love.”
The courage to love.
Even our sweet Universalist religious ancestors had a hard time dealing with the harm that we do to one another. They trusted that everyone was going to heaven…”no-hellers” the radical Universalists were called.
But they argued for decades about what happened to people who committed harmful acts…evil…in this life…
They would not go to hell…but certainly they would have to pay some price.
So, for decades, the Universalists argued about purgatory and how long people who committed evil acts would have to wait to get into heaven. Up to 50,000 years one minister argued.
There had to be some accountability. Right?
Love is first and most not simply a feeling. “I have decided to love,” Dr. King preached.
Love is a decision. It is a decision to care and to comfort…
But love is also a decision to confront and to challenge. It is the decision to call us to be our best selves.
Love is an invitation to transformation…opening us to conversion. That decision to love calls us into community. We do not…and this is critical…we do not therefore have to change by ourselves.
The progressive community has gotten the memo about accountability. Accountability to the most marginalized. Bringing the voices of the silenced into the center.
This is what deconstructing the culture of white supremacy and patriarchy has come to mean. That is the only way forward that offers hope for us all.
But I wonder…whether we don’t need a broader and a deeper accountability as well…in addition, not in place of…a kind of spiritual accountability to sustain us.
I wonder if, as we stand under that arch, under that arc of the universe…with those heavy stones of all the harm done hanging over our heads…
I wonder if we do not need some ultimate accountability to ground us.
I wonder if we do not need an accountability to love itself. I wonder if we should not be asking not only what our communities call for, what love itself calls for.
bell hooks calls this an ethic of love. Seems hard to argue with that…doesn’t it?
What would such an accountability to love look like?
Two things I think. Accountability to love would call us to compassion, call us to think and to act beyond a narrow self-interest. Compassion knows how deeply we are dependent on one another. Compassion can turn a narrow self-interest on its head.
This used to be the accepted role for the church. Cornel West describes it this way: the church…”held cold-heartedness and mean-spiritedness at bay…by promoting a sense of respect for others, a sense of solidarity, a sense of meaning and value which would usher in the strength to battle against evil.”
That can still be the role of this church.
An ethic of love…accountability to love can give us the clarity and the moral purpose to resist and battle against hate and violence.
Resistance is important…in these days…oh, my yes.
Tuesday we will hear results of an election that will in some ways measure the success of our collective resistance… to hate and to greed and to racism and patriarchy.
I need to say out loud that we do not know whether that resistance will translate into a change of our political leaders.
But there are so many new faces…women and people of color, veterans running. If feels as if our politics may finally have been shocked into catching up with who we are as a people. We need to support that change. We need to be accountable in that support.
But we need to be prepared for this election to go either way.
The barrage of violence and the hate filled rhetoric have taken a toll on many of our spirits.
But despair is not an option. Hopelessness is a privilege of the privileged. We will move forward. We must.
Tuesday evening, the church will be open if you want to watch the election results in community. We’ll do a simple vespers service and then be with one another as clarity emerges about what we will need to deal with now, what we will need to celebrate or transform, regardless of how the election goes.
Accountability can also point us, lead us, allow us and demand of us the change that we know must come.
bell hooks: “the moment we choose love we begin to move against domination, against oppression. The moment we choose love we begin to move towards freedom, to act in ways that liberate ourselves and others…
“ true liberation leads us beyond resistance to transformation.”
Beyond resistance to transformation.
And the tools that we need for accountability to love are…love itself.
The tools we need are compassion and companions.
Joanna Macy writes that we need weapons of compassion and insight because “compassion and insight can sustain us as agents of wholesome change.”
As people of faith, our accountability to love can give us the energy to transform even the hate we see around us, even the operation of privilege that we discover inside us.
True liberation, bell hooks writes, is the “testimony of love as the practice of freedom.”
Resistance to hate. Transformation. Liberation. Are these not accountabilities we can embrace? Even though they demand much of us?
What have you bought with your life?
The words of Maya Angelou:
We, unaccustomed to courage
Exiles from delight
Live coiled in shells of loneliness
Until love leaves its high holy temple
And comes into our sight
To liberate us into life.
To liberate us into life.
We are weaned from our timidity.
…
We dare be brave
And suddenly we see
That love costs all we are
And will ever be.
Yet it is only love
Which sets us free.
Amen
Prayer
Will you pray with me now?
Spirit of Life and of Love. Mystery that calls us into accountability.
God of our hearts and of our hopes.
Move within us and among us in these uncertain days
When so much hangs in the balance.
Help us be persistent…help us be stubborn even…
Help us be faithful in answering the call of love.
Help us welcome the truth even when it is
Uncomfortable.
Help us find commitments that we can sustain
Even when the world turns our way so slowly,
Even when the world turns its back.
May we be good companions to one another
On this journey. Accountable in word and in deed.
May we find that our commitment and
Accountability to love open us to new life
And may we discover
That the Beloved Community can be here…
Can be now…if we, together, make it so.
Amen
Topics: Accountability