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Reading: Matthew 6:19-34
Story: The Caged Parrot
While travelling alone through some rough terrain, a man called Mitali stayed the night at a wayside inn. Tired from his journey, he went to bed and was on the point of falling asleep when he heard a voice calling, ‘Freedom! Freedom! I want to be free!’ from the courtyard below his window.
‘Someone must be trapped nearby,’ thought Mitali. ‘I’ll go to see if I can help.’
He descended to the courtyard and looked around, but he could see nobody. Thinking he must have imagined the voice, he was about to go back to his room when he heard it again: ‘Freedom! Freedom! I want to be free!’ But it wasn’t coming from a person; it was coming from a parrot sitting in a golden cage.
‘How cruel,’ thought Mitali. ‘No bird should be imprisoned like that.’ He walked over to the cage and opened the door. ‘Off you go!’ he said to the bird. ‘You can go free now.’
The parrot sat on its perch, calling out ‘Freedom! Freedom! I want to be free,’ but it didn’t move. Mitali put his hand in the cage, but the parrot cowered away, all the while calling for freedom but making no move towards the open door.
Gently taking hold of the parrot, Mitali tried to drag it through the cage door, but the parrot resisted mightily, pecking at his would-be liberator’s hand until the blood flowed copiously. Undaunted by the pain, Mitali finally released the bird and threw it up into the air. ‘You’re free now, my friend. Go off and enjoy your liberty!’ The parrot flew off, and was soon lost to sight in the darkness of the moonless night.
Feeling very pleased with himself, Mitali went to bed. ‘Captivity is wrong for man and beast,’ he thought. ‘Birds should be free to fly; they shouldn’t be forced to sit in cages for the entertainment of human beings. At least I’ve helped one creature to escape to freedom.’
He slept very soundly that night.
With the dawn he awoke, and he smiled as he remembered his good deed of a few hours before. But then … … … he heard the voice one more. ‘Freedom! Freedom! I want to be free!’ ‘The parrot hasn’t gone very far,’ he thought. ‘He must have perched on a nearby tree or a rock. Perhaps he is sitting on the roof of the inn.’
Mitali went down to the courtyard to have a look. But the parrot wasn’t perched on the roof of the building. Nor was he on a nearby tree, or on a rock. He was back in the cage, shouting for freedom, and the cage door was open.
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When I came to Dublin in the autumn of 1996 I was filled with excitement and anxiety. I was excited because I was embarking on my first full-time ministry, but I was anxious because I realised I would have to preach, at length, for at least thirty-six Sundays every year. What on earth was I going to talk about? In more conventional churches it’s relatively easy: there’s an annual cycle to follow, and a lectionary which systematically works through the Bible, so, many sermons are just explications of the biblical text. What’s more, conventional sermons are quite short. When I was in the Catholic seminary in Rome, I was taught that a sermon – or homily – should be about seven minutes long, which is a reasonably easy amount of time to fill.
But Unitarian sermons are longer. In Wakefield I had been used to preaching for about twelve minutes, but when I came here I was informed that the congregation had come to expect a sermon of at least fifteen minutes. What’s more, with no lectionary to generate subjects, and no clerical magazines to generate ideas and sermon outlines – other denominations have these – I was concerned that I’d never be able to come up with enough themes to provide a reasonably varied diet.
In addition, Unitarian congregations are not as compliant as more mainstream congregations. They have more than their fair share of articulate, intellectual people who won’t tolerate ill-prepared, badly thought-out waffle, and who are well able to challenge a preacher if they think he or she has got it wrong. Unitarian congregations are also very diverse, with agnostics, atheists, Christians, Buddhists, Jews sitting side by side. So there are very few shared theological assumptions. How does one appeal to all these different sections? One answer is to avoid those topics which might cause contention and stick with ‘safe’ issues. Preach about things few liberal minded people could disagree with – environmental issues, gay and lesbian rights, freedom to make up one’s own mind, historical figures who have contributed to our movement and so on. Contemporary religious issues are always a godsend in these circumstances – the current argument in the Anglican Church about women bishops, for example, will provide non-conformist preachers with plenty of sermon material, as will any papal announcement, particularly if these involve sexual matters.
Such topical preaching has its merits but while it speaks to the discriminating intellect, it says little to the soul. It doesn’t really address those issues which all human beings have to come to terms with, sooner or later – purpose, death, destiny, failure, forgiveness, hypocrisy, anguish, despair to name just a handful – opting instead to comment rather than to probe, to look outside at society rather than inside the individual.
‘Everybody wants to change the world; nobody wants to change himself.’ So wrote Leo Tolstoy, and while I too wanted to change the world, I was becoming more and more aware that this would never happen without radical changes taking place in the individual. But how could this be addressed, given the disparate nature of the Unitarian congregation?
Erich Fromm helped me towards the answer. In 1999 I devoured Fromm’s principle works – Fear of Freedom; The Art of Loving; The Art of Being; To Have or to Be; and The Sane Society, and I realised that he was exploring the relationship between the outer world of politics and the inner world of the spirit in precisely the way I needed in order to speak to Unitarians in a meaningful and challenging way.
Fromm was born in 1900 in Frankfurt, the only child of Orthodox Jewish parents. He was originally a student of sociology, gaining his PhD in sociology in 1922. He then trained as a psychiatrist, and opened his first clinical practice in 1927. When the Nazis took power in Germany, he moved to Geneva, and in 1934 he moved to Columbia University in New York. Thereafter he taught in a number of universities, maintaining a psychoanalytic practice all the while, and writing many books, some of which were to become bestsellers. He died five days short of his eightieth birthday in March 1980.
Fromm was not a religious thinker in any conventional sense. Although Jewish, he did not practise, and he would probably have called himself an atheist. He was heavily influenced by both Marx and Freud. A Marxist Freudian atheist. Just the kind of thinker who would go down well in a Unitarian congregation!
Indeed. And the reason is simple: as a sociologist and Marxist Fromm was aware of the importance of political and economic factors in shaping the values of the society in which we live; as a Freudian, however, he was equally aware that the individual person has an interior life which needs to be acknowledged and nurtured. Unlike many of his Marxist colleagues, Fromm did not believe that progress in human welfare depended entirely upon a revolutionary transformation of the economic structure. The change from capitalism to socialism, while desirable, was not sufficient. There had to be changes in the individual; we had to be transformed internally, if society was to be transformed in any meaningful way.
The external transformation of society is politics; we Unitarians do that rather well. The internal transformation of the individual is spirituality; we do that rather badly. We claim that an individual if ‘free to follow his or her own spiritual path’, but we don’t offer much in the way of guidance along the road. Fromm showed me that the two could be married, that the spiritual dimension of the human being could be explored without having to make theological assumptions; that it was possible to talk about spirituality without necessarily having to talk about God. Fromm made no theological assumptions; he didn’t concern himself with the existence of God, whether God was Trinity or Unity, the status of Jesus, the nature of the church, life after death, or any of the dozens of subjects which seem to dominate the religious agenda. Fromm asked only one major question: how can a human being live a fulfilling, socially productive, non-alienated, happy life? His books contain his answers to that question and I want very briefly to outline some of his conclusions.
What the reader finds so startling is Fromm’s insistence that the answers to this major question have been given already, and given numerous times by countless individuals. People such as the Buddha, Lao Tzu, Jesus, Meister Eckhart he called ‘masters of living’ and he quotes liberally from them in his work. These great religious figures knew how we could live fulfilling lives, and we would do well to look at what they have to say. And remember, this is from a Marxist Freudian atheist!
Fromm contends that there are two possible orientations of the human psyche, having and being, and that the acquisitive society in which we live is based on the former. (Jesus called this polarity ‘mammon and God’.) ‘You are what you own’ is the slogan that meets us everywhere, and not just in the facile but pernicious advertisements which assault us daily, exhorting us to consume and be happy, but even in areas such as our education system, which we blithely assume is ideologically neutral. We treat education as a commodity, as something to get more of, and we value it, not because it is potentially life-enhancing and liberating, but because of its potential cash value.
‘Having’ infects and defines our personal relationships too. On the Late Late Show on Friday night Dionne Warwick sang ‘What the world needs now, is love sweet, no not just for some, but for everyone’. It was in honour of Valentine’s Day, and the hope of this song – and dozens like it – is that everyone can have the experience of ‘falling in love’. This romanticised notion of love, the passive, effortless, fleeting emotion, which dominates our culture, has little to do with what Fromm – or Jesus, or the Buddha or any of the Masters of Living – meant by love. In his bestselling book The Art of Loving, Fromm explains that love is not a feeling but a process which constantly calls upon our deepest personal resources; and it is something we have to learn to do and which inevitably involves personal sacrifice. Love in the having mode is possessive and selfish; it views people as objects to be owned. But, to enter the ‘being’ mode requires that we give up our egocentricity and selfishness. Fromm reverses the slogan of the acquisitive society and tells us, as every great spiritual leader has told us: The more you have, the less you are. ‘Only when we stop finding security and identity in what we have by sitting on it, by holding on to our ego and our possessions – can the mode of being emerge.’
And these things are not just relevant to our personal growth. We can never attain peace, locally or globally, while we continue in the ‘having’ mode, which is why so much of modern politics is based on a delusion. Greed and peace are antithetical, and those political systems which promise us only an increase in the gross national product or ‘more wealth for all’ will never be successful in liberating us from our profound alienation and unhappiness. Even communism and socialism, which began in the radical humanistic spirit proclaimed by Fromm, have degenerated into attempts to bring the bourgeois, consuming lifestyle to more people, instead of attempts to change our basic orientation to things. Tinkering with the system will produce nothing radical: we will simply keep shifting the manifestations of our despair from one arena of conflict to another.
Nor can the mode of being emerge while we carry around illusions about ourselves. In a recent interview a famous actor was asked the question: What trait do you most deplore in yourself? He answered, ‘A tendency to procrastination’. The next question was: What trait do you most deplore in others? ‘Man’s inhumanity to man,’ was his reply. Isn’t that just typical of us all? My faults are pretty trivial. Other people’s are serious. Fromm says that while we persist in this delusion we will never get anywhere, personally or socially. We all unconsciously rationalise our bad traits; greed, hate, fear, possessiveness, narcissism, destructiveness, sadism, dishonesty, indifference, desire for dominance. We need to become aware of these things within ourselves, ‘a process which is often very painful and may arouse a great deal of anxiety’. He goes on:
It requires that we become aware of being dependent, when we believe that we love and are loyal; that we become aware of our vanity, when we believe ourselves to be nothing but kind and helpful; that we become aware of our sadism, when we believe that we want to do for others only what is good for them…In short, as Goethe put it, only if we can ‘imagine ourselves as the author of any conceivable crime’, and mean it, can we be reasonably sure of having dropped the mask and of being on the way to becoming aware of who we are. (Fromm, E., (1993), The Art of Being, Constable, London. Page 170)
Connected with ‘being’ and ‘having’ and lack of self awareness, is the whole issue of freedom. We in the West may be politically free, says Fromm, but while we are operating in the ‘having’ mode we are not free at all. He quotes the Grand Inquisitor in Dostoevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov, ‘The human being has no more pressing need than the one to find somebody to whom he can surrender, as quickly as possible, the freedom which he, the unfortunate creature, was born with.’ (Fromm, E., (1997), The Fear of Freedom), Routledge, London and New York, page 130 Like the parrot in the children’s story, we shout about freedom, but we are really frightened of it; we allow others to do our thinking for us; we allow others to set the agenda for our lives, to tell us how to live, what our values should be. We give ourselves over to a guru, a religion, a philosophy, a lifestyle and live non-creatively on other people’s terms.
When I came to Dublin I was somewhat reluctant to tackle the issue of individual transformation for fear of offending someone’s metaphysical belief system. Reading Fromm I realised that these things could be approached in a purely secular way, that ‘beliefs’ about God, and Jesus, and miracles and the like were really an irrelevance, if not an actual impediment. A Marxist Freudian Jewish atheist taught me that Christianity’s search for redemption, Buddhism’s search for enlightenment can be translated into the common human quest for what Fromm calls ‘authentic existence’. I believe that when our Unitarian churches begin to address this common human quest for internal transformation, instead of busying themselves exclusively with externals, they will be making a significant and quite revolutionary contribution to the spiritual life of our communities.
14th February 2010