What If Heritage

It is important for us to recognize and honor our heritage. However, sometimes we can wish our heritage was a little different than it was. We can wish that at certain moments our ancestors had made different decisions than they did. We can often wish this of ourselves. To live with a sense of wholeness, do we have to eliminate regret?

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Sermon

Rev Joe in a black robe and rainbow stole looking like he's casting a spellWhat If Heritage: On the Importance of Regret

Rev. Joe Cleveland

October 15, 2023

Unitarian Universalist Congregation of Saratoga Springs

 

Many of us started attending a Unitarian Universalist congregation because we disagreed with or wanted to reject some aspect of the heritage or tradition of another religion.  Maybe the church you grew up in had a heritage or tradition of preaching that if you didn’t believe a particular thing in a particular way that you were going to Hell.  Or maybe they couldn’t let go of a tradition that didn’t allow or accept anyone who wasn’t heterosexual and cis-gendered and fit into rigid binary understanding of gender.

One of the things I love about Unitarian Universalism is that it values transformation and evolution and growth.  We want our tradition to be, as our hymnal says, a living tradition.  Our Unitarian and Universalist forebears, as well as our Unitarian Universalist forebears, so often have strived to change and grow our capacity to be open and welcoming.  And this has meant taking a look at our heritage and traditions and re-evaluating them.  There are things that Unitarian Universalists look back on in our history and heritage and wish different choices had been made.  

For example, thirty years ago, at the General Assembly of the Unitarian Universalist Association in 1993, a Thomas Jefferson Ball was held and everyone was encouraged to wear period clothes to celebrate Thomas Jefferson, who attended Unitarian churches.  The Unitarian Universalists who identified as Black didn’t really feel welcomed by this – what period costume should they wear?  Objections were presented at a general meeting session and the organizers considered them and decided to go ahead with the Thomas Jefferson Ball anyway. 

I love Unitarian Universalism and this is an embarrassing story and I wish different choices had been made.

It’s hard to look at our heritage like this, and it’s really important that we look at our histories and heritages this way.  It is important that we hold our heritage and our beloved ancestors in love, and it’s important that we don’t ignore or get defensive about those moments when different choices should have been made. 

Maybe this is difficult because so often we feel encouraged – pressured – to have no regrets.  Try this: If you have a smart phone with a music app on it – Apple Music, Spotify, Pandora, Bandcamp, whatever – take it out of your pocket or purse.  Open up your music app and then touch the search function, probably a little magnifying glass icon.  In the search field of your music app, type in two words: “No Regrets.”  How many songs come up for you?  It’s a lot, isn’t it?  All those songs titled “No Regrets” – it isn’t one song that is being covered a zillion times by all those different artists.  It is a zillion songs with the same message.  It’s not just one genre, either – it’s kind of all of them.  And if you searched in different languages, you’d find songs about living with no regrets from all over the world.

Ok.  Double-check that your notifications are turned off or that your cell phone is set to ‘stun’ and put it away now.

I’d imagine that it must feel pretty, what, powerful? Reassuring? Brash? to feel no regrets at all.  I don’t know that I can really imagine what that might be like because how can you not have regrets?  James Baldwin observed that, “Though we would like to live without regrets, and sometimes proudly insist that we have none, this is not really possible, if only because we are mortal.”  Living a mortal life, how can we not feel some what if’s and if only’s?  

I recently read a novel called The Midnight Library which I think our Book Group read a while back, right?  In the novel, the main character, Nora, gets a chance to explore multiple possibilities for her life.  She explores what her life might have been like–what it might be like–if, at different points in her life, she had made different choices.  She doesn’t visit just a few “what if” lives – you get the impression that she visits perhaps even hundreds of lives.  At one point, and I apologize for any spoilers here, –at one point in the book she gets a bit lost.  She explores so many possibilities that she loses her sense of direction or self.  The librarian of the Midnight Library, who has been a sort of sage advisor or guide for Nora says this:

“You are forgetting who you are.  In becoming everyone, you are becoming no one.  You are forgetting your root life.  You are forgetting what worked for you and what didn’t.  You are forgetting your regrets.”

I am a little fascinated by this.  Up to this point, it has seemed like the whole goal has been to find a life with no regrets.  In the library, there is a Book of Regrets which is basically toxic to Nora, but as she begins revisiting moments and decisions in her life, the Book of Regrets shrinks.  But now, getting rid of regrets is a problem.  Nora is lost and what can help guide her back to herself are her regrets.  

What if we need our regrets?  If I want to know what someone really values, if I knew something about their regrets, I would know about their values.  I think that it’s our values and the relationship we have with them that really define who we are.  In fact, it’s when I can have faith that it is natural for humankind to regret hurting others or causing pain or distress to others that I have the most hope for humankind.  When a person or a people can hurt other people and not feel regret, then something is going wrong.

The writer Daniel Pink did a bunch of research into regret and came out of it with a renewed hopefulness:

“After a few years immersed in the science and experience of our most misunderstood emotion, I’ve discovered about myself what I’ve discovered about others.  Regret makes me human.  Regret makes me better.  Regret gives me hope.”

Maybe it’s a little shocking or surprising to hear regret linked with hope.  that is not the way we usually think or feel about regret.  Regret feels negative, and we resist ‘negativity.’  Regret is also an uncomfortable emotion to feel, and we resist discomfort.  

I think we also resist it because in this country we have a tendency to believe that only bad people do bad things.  As the rabbi Danya Ruttenberg puts it, we can get defensive about the possibility that we should be regretting something when “we believe that doing a harmful thing is the same thing as being a bad person.”  This is how we can get defensive when it comes to acknowledging evidence of racism, for example. 

Last spring, the Mayor of Saratoga Springs introduced a resolution on restorative justice that included an acknowledgment “that Saratoga Springs has supported and allowed racism and hate in areas of housing, employment, law enforcement and other areas of formal and informal life during its history” and went on to include an apology for this.  In response to this resolution being included on the City Council agenda, the local Police Benevolent Association issued a statement objecting, saying: “The members of the Saratoga Springs PBA dispute and deny any false idea that its members are racist or allow any laws to be applied in a racist way or based in hate.”  It feels to me like that objection is rooted in a feeling that the police department personnel are being accused of being bad people, even though that accusation is not in the resolution.

In his book, The Power of Regret: How Looking Backward Moves Us Forward, Pink encourages us to use a different framing when we experience regret.

[. . .] framing regret as a judgment of our underlying character–who we are–can be destructive.  Framing it as an evaluation of a particular behavior in a particular situation–what we did–can be instructive.  

This makes sense to me when thinking about individuals.  If we get bogged down by regret, if we go over and over our regrets excessively, this can lead to depression and anxiety and adversely affect your hormones and immune system. The writer for The Atlantic Arthur Brooks confesses that “For me,” he says, ruminating on regret is “anathema to sleep.”  But if you can achieve some distance from a regret, and with that perspective allow it to be a guide to what you value and how you want to act on those values, regret can be a practical and spiritual asset.  

The science and his research tells Dan Pink that

Regret is not dangerous or abnormal, a deviation from the steady path to happiness.  It is healthy and universal, an integral part of being human.  Regret is also valuable.  It clarifies.  It instructs.  Done right, it needn’t drag us down; it can lift us up.

And perhaps this also works when thinking about heritage and histories beyond ourselves as individuals.  Honoring our heritage does not mean striving to simply repeat it or whitewash it.  Honoring our heritage means being honest about it and learning from it.  The organizers of that Ball back in 1993 and the leaders who spoke out against it sat down with each other and listened to one another.  Over the years they became close friends and colleagues and that Ball has become a moment in our UU history and heritage that we have learned from.  We honor our heritage when we take it as an opportunity to transform and grow.  As the new statement of UU values and covenant says: “Openness to change is fundamental to our Unitarian and Universalist heritages, never complete and never perfect.”  

What if our heritage is learning to appreciate regret as evidence of our yearning to be better humans?  Our yearning to be generous?  Our yearning to be loving? Our yearning for every person’s right to flourish with inherent dignity and worthiness? 

May it be so.

 

Resources

On the subject of the Thomas Jefferson Ball:







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