Sermon Against Decency

A few weeks ago, I wrote about the moral imperative we all have to learn ordinariness.  I wrote about finding humility and communion by arriving at our most "common" self, a self that has moved away from pure ego and into a meaningful relationship with her spirit, her work, her family, and her neighbors.  I wrote about learning to value the down time between our moments of high drama, learning to accept our flawed nature, and learning to love the long, well-trodden road that connects our everyday miracles to the great miracles of history and mythology.

But I want to be clear.  When I speak of the "ordinary" man or woman, I do not speak of the complacent man or woman.  I do not speak of the resigned or disengaged man or woman.  It's not enough to be nice.  If I sound mad, well, I am a little mad.

We often act according to our "common decency" which includes things like saying please or thank you to the grocery bagger at Kroger or returning a lost Labradoodle to its worried owner down the street.  These small gestures matter and count as ways of celebrating our ordinariness.  However, they strike me as the tiniest embryos of real, sustained kindness and engagement, not the end but the unfertilized seeds of a means to an end.

Last night my fiancee and I had dinner with friends.  After a few glasses of wine, the conversation took a turn: why, our friend asked, is it so difficult to find a community of people--outside of a church community--who want to have serious conversations about serious things, who want to create change in their hearts and lives?  Indeed, I said.  In most of my secular "communities", with the exception of writer's workshops, seriousness and sincerity in conversation are greeted with ironic distance or visible discomfort.   Sanctity is impolite.  So is real political engagement.

Things can get too serious, of course.  Whenever I veer into pretension or earnestness on a topic, my brother asks, "Should we get a scone and coffee and talk about our feelings?"  And he laughs.  Many times he's right to do so: silliness and levity are sacred too.

But I think most of us behave socially and professionally from a place of fear.  We do not want to ruffle feathers or embarrass people (even when they've embarrassed themselves).  We do not want to risk directness or vulnerability because we might not get the next invite or accolade.  We smile and nod our way through offenses of the mildest and most violent sorts. Smile, take another peanut.  Nod, order another beer.

Stephen Dunn has a poem I love called "At the Restaurant":

Six people are too many people
and a public place the wrong place
for what you're thinking--

stop this now.

Who do you think you are?
The duck a l'orange is spectacular,
the flan is best in town.

But there among your friends
is the unspoken, as ever,
chatter and gaiety its familiar song.

And there's your chronic emptiness
spiraling upward in search of words
you'll dare not say

without irony.
You should have stayed at home.
It's part of the social contract

to seem to be where your body is,
and you've been elsewhere like this,
for Christ's sake, countless times;

behave, feign.

Certainly you believe a part of decency
is to overlook, to let pass?
Praise the Caesar salad. Praise Susan's

black dress, Paul's promotion and raise.
Inexusable, the slaughter in this world.
Insufficient, the merely decent man.

I am haunted by those last lines.  They sit there at the end of the poem like dirty silverware on clean linen.  They serve as both reprimand and a vague call to action.  But Dunn has revealed a hard truth in them.  Insufficient, the merely decent.  In so many aspects of our life we are counseled into decency, into the bare minimum.  Teach commas and fractions, teachers, but don't ask your students to have morals.  Vote, citizens, but keep your voices down.  Sing and dance, entertainers, but for God's sake don't go all Brad and Angelina on us now.  Ladies, compliment each other's earrings, praise any weight loss, but keep your brains to yourself.  Ask your acquaintance how his day was, but don't listen too closely if he gives you a real answer.  Don't, for the love of Christ, do something gauche like actually hug him.

Yes, we must admit our ordinariness.  We must keep irony as a handy tool on our belt to steel us against dogmatism and too much gravity.   But, as Nelson Mandela reminds us, who are we not to be "brilliant,  gorgeous, talented, and fabulous"? Who are we not to talk seriously with our friends and lovers about serious things?  Who are we not to put our money where our mouths are?  We could look to Jesus here if we chose to, or any other spiritual galvanizer.  In the story of Jesus we have a God who chooses to become human, to become common, to become ordinary, to become flesh and bone and bacteria.  But we also have a man of more than mere decency.  We have a model of extraordinariness in his capacity to deny decency when it impeded compassion and active love. The same Jesus who ate with sinners and tax collectors, the ordinary folk, also rebuked the Pharisees in Matthew 15:6, "You have nullified the word of God for the sake of your tradition.  Hypocrites," implying that his new, radical love trumped common decency and the politeness of the day, in this case the washing of the hands before eating.  The same Jesus who worked as a carpenter also walked on water.

Many of our most powerful myths remind us that we can only serve others and the world when we recognize our commonality and live up to our gifts.  In many of the Greek myths, humans receive a warning to recognize divinity in disguise; the beggar and the goddess might share the same skin.  These stories tell us we must live in the abstract border between the binary opposition ordinary/extraordinary.We can be both things at once, and we should.

Amen.