The Most Important Virtue

A few years ago, as part of a question box sermon, where people in the congregation submitted questions they would like me to address from the pulpit, someone asked me, “What do you consider the most important virtue a religious person should seek to cultivate?” 

I love this question!  I think I’ve probably written four different sermons with four entirely different answers in response to it over the years.   And while I’m not sure there is any such thing as “the most important virtue” in life, it would be fascinating, I bet, to hear the various answers we each would come up with for this question, and the rationale each of us might supply for choosing a particular virtue as being “most important.”  

The most basic definition of virtue is “a good habit or a desirable trait”, “a building-block of one’s character.” 

That we live in a world that is in drastic need of improvement and transformation goes without saying.  But too many of us, I think, tend to undervalue our own potential as change-agents in the world.  We tend to believe that the world is changed only by miracles or by huge acts of heroism, performed by people who are greater than us, larger than we are in spirit and in influence.  We forget that the world is transformed and made new everyday by common people living out the most common of virtues: like loyalty, commitment, honesty, trust, and caring.  Small virtues, the kind we are all capable of contributing.

One of the best kept secrets of the saints and the prophets of history is that great lives and great accomplishments are usually gained through the consistent discipline of character more than through charisma, that little graces and small virtues multiply over the years to produce a life of integrity.  Those who would impact the world must begin by improving the tiny territory of their own souls.    

Prophets of all cultures and traditions have always understood the power that these little graces unleash in a human soul.  The elegant simplicity of a Sermon on the Mount puts to shame every Summa ever written by the clever theologians of history.  No theology in the world makes any sense unless it is first a theology of the possible and the practical.

And so, when I speak of “virtues” this morning, I posit that at the heart of all faithful living there sounds a clear and unending summons to those practices of common decency that enrich our humanity and ennoble our spirits.  I posit further that these traits are recognizable and even undeniable when we meet them in the actions of others, and when we act upon them ourselves.  In the end, they constitute not only the stuff of religious living, but, I would claim, the stuff of civilization itself.

How you see it, of course, depends partly on how you define being “religious.”  People who think religion should be a highly devotional business, for example, might claim that being “pious” is a big part of religious living.  But I doubt that very many Unitarian Universalists would list “piety” anywhere near the top on a list of their most important virtues.  In fact, I doubt that most UU’s could even define piety, so foreign is it to our understanding and practice of religious living.

Just for the exercise one day, I started to make a list of virtues that I thought were essential to religious character development – virtues which most everybody claims to admire, ideals which most everyone aspires to, and which universally seem to exist in symbiotic relation to religious practice.  That is to say, religion at its best is informed and enriched by these virtues, and these virtues are, in turn, the hallmarks and products of a rich religious life.

My list began with the three great virtues of Faith and Hope and Love that Paul proclaimed in his great letter to the Corinthians as foundation to all others, and which traditional theology labels as the “cardinal” virtues.  To these I added Fortitude and Honesty, Courage and Trustworthiness, Modesty, Tolerance, Kindness, Compassion, Empathy, and Loyalty.  Other virtues I added included Humility, Wisdom, Justice, Respect, Equanimity, Forbearance, Serenity, Self-awareness, Self-Respect.  A sense of appreciation, a sense of purpose, a sense of wonder, a sense of humor, a sense of the sacred.  Gratitude. Integrity.  Caring.  The ability to forgive.  The ability to befriend.  Patience.  Prudence.  Discipline.  Joyfulness. 

My list of essential virtues was getting longer, and the more I considered it, the harder it became to see any one virtue as being more important than all others.  I hasten to acknowledge that I myself wrestle fiercely with every one of these ideals on different days.  I feel the imperative of each of them in my own life and in the lives of my friends and increasingly in the life of my culture.  The people I love and admire the most are people who incarnate many of these virtues, who model these gifts and make them real for me every day; who shine them forth from their own bright souls and in the process encourage me to reach just a little higher in my own striving to become the person I hope someday to be. 

And still the list rearranges itself in priority ranking from day to day, and from year to year, it seems.  We value most those virtues that we need the most at any given time.  On many days I agree with Paul, that Love is the greatest of these, the virtue from which all others flow and take their impetus. 

But there are other days, when my ministry teaches me the centrality of Hope above all, for example.  Hope that conquers fear; Hope that perseveres over despair, that enables people to win out over disease and loss;  Hope that ennobles people to climb up out the cellar of their own broken dreams and walk fearlessly toward a new tomorrow.  There are days when I can truly say that Hope, above all, is primary to the human soul.

There are days, too, when the Prophet in me wants to make equal claim for the primacy of Justice, the absence of which is the most soul-deadening dynamic in today’s sorry world.  Other days, the Poet in me holds up the Sense of Wonder and the Sense of the Sacred as the most important virtues for religious people to cultivate in themselves.  From these will grow whole gardens of graceful living.

This week, however, I am inclined to suggest that it is another virtue altogether that is the taproot of religious life.  I don’t care if you are a Buddhist or a Bahia, a Catholic or a Confucian, a Unitarian Universalist or a Moslem, a Jew or a Pagan, a Humanist or a Theist – there is, I believe, one elemental virtue without which you have little or no claim to religious living.  That virtue is Generosity : that is, “open heartedness” or “the ability and the inclination to give of oneself – to others, to the world around us, to the Divine Communal Spirit in which we have our being.” 

Generosity.  It may seem a surprising choice as the most important virtue of religious living, but this week, the more I think about it, the more I am persuaded that Generosity really does go to the heart of it.  What being religious is about, what being human is essentially about, what being in community and in relationship with every other living system on the earth is about. 

Further, I want to suggest that Generosity is inextricably bound and partnered with another virtue which precedes it: Gratitude.  Generosity in human nature is grounded in Gratitude.  Let me say more about how I see the connection between the two. 

“For what do you have that you did not receive as a gift?” the Scripture says.  “And if then you received it, why do you boast?”  We participate in a great mystery, you and I.  Every one of us is the recipient of the unfathomable gift of Life, a gift beyond all our ability fully to comprehend or appreciate. I believe that the appropriate human response to the gift of Life is that of abiding Gratitude, and that open-heartedness, Generosity, is the most human expression of that Gratitude. 

What does a generous soul look like?  How does generosity operate?  My UU colleague, Rev. Phyllis O’Connell tells one little story illustrating what a generous soul looks like.  She writes,

“A one-paragraph newspaper article describes a subway platform during the rush hour at Grand Central.  A train pulls in; a well-dressed woman who has just left the train realizes she is holding only one of her leather gloves.  She looks back into the train and spots the matching one on the seat.  It is obviously too late to dash back in to retrieve it, so with a cavalier shrug, she flings her arm out and, the doors about to close, tosses the remaining glove onto the seat alongside its mate.  The doors shut, and the train pulls away.

“This woman, instead of holding on to the remaining glove, a useless reminder of her accidental loss and feelings of frustration and anger, with cavalier abandonment tosses it into the train next to its mate.  Whoever finds them, finds a pair.  What panache, what a gesture!”  (Quoted from the newsletter of the Melrose, MA UU Church, Jan. 1992.)

I suggest that most of us might not yet be so conditioned to act from generosity that our split-second impulse would be to throw the other glove before those doors closed.

Of course, we know that Generosity can be conditioned out of us.  We can be taught to be selfish.  We can be inhibited from expressing the love and the appreciation of life that is inherent in every human soul.  I will admit, it is hard to look around our society on some days and listen to rhetoric that is fashionable at the moment and still conclude that we are by nature generous creatures. 

We can be stifled in our natural inclinations to sing and dance the creation that lives inside each of us.  But I don’t think that the Gratitude within us is meant to be withheld.  I think – no, I profoundly believe – that our humanity is most truly expressed in the act of Giving.

In Sam Keen’s book, Hymns To An Unknown God, he quotes a wonderful story by Ray Bradbury that illustrates the connection between Gratitude and Generosity.  Bradbury reports a conversation in an Irish pub with an old man.  The old man says,

“It’s an awesome responsibility when the world runs to hand you things.  For instance: sunsets.  Everything pink and gold, looking like those melons they ship up from Spain.  That’s a gift, ain’t it?… Well, who do you thank for sunsets?  And don’t be draggin the Lord into the bar now.  Any remarks to Him are too quiet.  I mean someone to grab and slap their backs and say thanks for the fine early light this morn, boyo, or much obliged for the look of them damn wee flowers by the road this day, and the grass lying about in the wind.  Those are gifts too, who’ll deny it?

“What befalls chaps like us, I ask, who coin up all their gratitude for a lifetime and spend none of it, misers that we be?  One day don’t we crack down the beam and show the dry rot?… But for the lack of humbly thanking someone somewhere somehow, you’re getting round in the shoulder and short in the breath.  Act, man, before you’re the walking dead.”  (Ray Bradbury, Green Shadows, White Whale).

Sam Keen’s advice to avoid becoming “the walking dead” is to act by giving the world your thanks and your blessing, and in the process to express your generosity.  “Make a ritual of pausing frequently,” he suggests, “to appreciate and be thankful.  Bless the food that nourishes you.  Bless whoever loves you in any way.  Bless the gifts and the talents that call you to create.  Bless the colors, one by one – the primal blue, green, yellow, red, and all the pastels and mottled mauves.  Bless old friends.  Bless little children and ancient parents…. Bless especially Bach and whoever else causes your heart to move in rhythm.  Bless those books that have blessed you.  Bless sleep and waking.

“Notice,” he says, “that the more you become a connoisseur of gratitude, the less you are the victim of resentment, depression, and despair.  Gratitude will act to dissolve the hard shell of your ego – your need to possess and control – and transform you into a generous being.  The sense of gratitude produces true spiritual alchemy, makes us magnanimous and large of soul.”  (Sam Keen, Hymns To An Unknown God, Bantam Books, New York, 1994. p.74-75)

In truth, I have never met a religious person (by my definition) who was not first a generous person.  And I have never met a generous soul who was not in the most profound sense truly religious.

These words in closing by the Unitarian poet/preacher Max Kapp,

a prayer of gratitude:

“Often I have felt that I must praise my world

 For what my eyes have seen these many years.

And what my heart has loved.

            And often I have tried to start my lines:

                        “Dear Earth,” I say.

                        And then I pause

                        To look once more.

                        Soon I am bemused

                        And far away in wonder.

            So I never get beyond “Dear Earth.”

As I mentioned earlier in the service, on Wednesday of this week I will celebrate my 30^th Anniversary in the ministry.  I was ordained a minister at University Unitarian Church in Seattle on April 22nd, 1979.  I was thirty-two years old.  It was the second happiest day of my life.  There were 40 ministers present, and 350 in the congregation.  My sister Nora was part of the service, and so was my brother Hank.  And my Dad was there.

For the thirty years since, I have been privileged to be a parish minister serving six Unitarian Universalist congregations, three small ones, two medium sized, and one large one. 

Thirty years in ministry can be counted in several ways, I suppose.  A minister’s life is counted most accurately, perhaps, by a calendar of Sundays.  By that count I have been a minister for the last 1,560 Sundays.  Over the course of those 30 years, not counting eulogies,  I have preached some 1200 sermons – there were some years I didn’t actually record them; my earliest sermons were written out longhand on yellow legal pads, then I used an old typewriter for many years, and only the last fifteen years on computers.

I’ve delivered those sermons in 32 states, 5 Provinces of Canada, 3 countries, once in Paris.  (At say, twenty minutes per sermon on average, that comes to something like 36,000 minutes or about  600 hours of flying time in the pulpit, and maybe 4000 hours of writing time.) I’d estimate maybe 2000 hospital and nursing home visits.

I’ve dedicated two new church buildings, offered a prayer at one governor’s inauguration, gave one high school invocation, gave the opening prayer at a town meeting once, officiated at a funeral for a little girl’s pet gerbil once, and I’ve done two house blessings and one blessing for a new roof.

I’ve visited seven jails and one state prison, and one juvenile prison.

I’ve officiated at about 350 weddings and services of union: in churches, in parks, in country clubs, on mountaintops, on boats, in woods, once in a hospital room.  I’ve dedicated, christened or named some 400 babies and toddlers.  I’ve been present at the moment of death for eleven people.  And I have memorialized or buried 224 people. 

I’ve participated in about 411 church Board Meetings plus, conservatively I would estimate, about 2400 church committee meetings. I’ve mentored six intern ministers.  I’ve lived through 40 annual pledge campaigns, counting three years when I was ministering to two congregations at one time.  Those are the numbers.

For most of these thirty years as a parish minister I have counted myself a blessed man, doing work that I usually love to do, with people I usually love to be with.  Some years have been more rewarding than others, some years have been hard, a couple of years the ministry occasionally broke my heart, always I have felt privileged to call myself a Unitarian Universalist minister.  I thank you as I thank all the congregations that have called me and entrusted me with their ministry.  And I thank especially my wife and partner Patricia through 24 of these years, without whose love and support I could never do this work.