Goblins, Ghoulies, and other Evil-doers

Rev. Mark Stringer

First Unitarian Church of Des Moines

October 27, 2002

 

It was probably late in the afternoon on the fifteenth of September when I decided the title for this morning’s sermon.  I know it was the fifteenth because that is the monthly deadline for the newsletter. I looked ahead to this October 27^th Sunday, recognized that Halloween would be right around the corner, and decided that evil would be a topic worth discussing from the pulpit. 

 

Little did I know at the time that the ensuing weeks would bring a series of terrifying murders in the Washington, DC area that would make the topic of evil even more timely. As the mystery and horror of the sniper killings held a community and a nation in its grip the past few weeks, each of us, no doubt, wondered who could be capable of committing such crimes.  Who could be so calculating and so random at the same time?  Who could be so unfeeling as to gun down people going about their daily lives…mowing the grass, sitting on a bench, walking to school?  There could be no doubt about it: These acts of violence were truly sinister.  As the search for the culprit neared its dramatic conclusion, I joined millions of Americans who could not turn away from the pursuit.  I think I hoped that once the killer was revealed, I would be able to find some meaning in what seemed to be utterly meaningless. But, now that the alleged perpetrators have been caught, I still find it nearly impossible to make sense of any of it. 

 

As the profiles of the snipers began to surface, the networks and newspapers displayed three pictures of John Allen Muhammad, the 41-year-old Gulf War veteran who would be charged along with John Lee Malvo for the killings. One is a picture from Muhammad’s military career.  He looks proud, determined, focused…how we would expect a man posing for a military picture to look.  The second is a picture that looks like a mug shot, probably taken when Muhammad was previously in police custody, perhaps for another crime.  Regardless of the subject, mug shots like this one almost always feature the same characteristics: a glazed look in the eyes, facial muscles that seem paralyzed; if there is any expression at all it is usually a frown.  One can rarely detect any spark of the divine in these pictures.  They are typically ghastly portraits of a human being devoid of feeling, apparently dead to the world…in a word, inhuman…which can easily lead viewers to separate themselves from the subject, seeing in the picture something alien and therefore capable of atrocity in ways that they themselves could not be.

 

But the third picture of John Allen Muhammad I have seen is the one that I can’t get out of my mind.  Far more telling to me than the military portrait, or the mug shot, this picture shows him with his arm around his “stepson,” the teen who allegedly would become his companion in an historic shooting spree.  In this picture both Muhammad and Malvo are smiling…big, broad, smiles.  Loving smiles.  The kind of smiles that we love to paste into our own photo albums.  The kind of smiles for which we all would want to be remembered. That two people who would participate in such violence could share a loving embrace like the one in the photo seems difficult to imagine… but there the picture is, being broadcast and printed for the entire world to see.  These smiles both taunt and instruct us, saying the face of what we might call evil is not all that unlike our own. 

 

I admit, when I first saw this third photo I felt deep sorrow and tears gathered at my eyes. I was sad not only for the victims of this smiling duo and their families; I was sad for the pain these two must have been carrying within their hearts in order to carry out these crimes. I didn’t see evil in this photo.  I saw two humans before they lost their way…before they were led down a path of destruction by what I have to believe was a battle with some kind of mental illness…a warped view of their lives that enabled them to trade their humanity for a yet to be revealed goal of power or revenge or destruction.  Was what these two did evil?  I think most of us, if not all, would agree that the random killings of innocent people fits the category of evil. And yet, “evil” as a concept is not all that easy to pin down, particularly as we may try to use it in other contexts.

 

Shortly after the September 11^th terrorist attacks President Bush was quoted using “evil” not as a modifier, but as a noun.   He said, “Today our nation saw evil, the very worst of human nature.”   He didn’t just talk about us seeing “evil acts,” but “evil” itself.  Most of the country seemed hungry for some kind of label for the unthinkable horror that we had all witnessed and “evil” quickly became the buzzword.  Perhaps many latched on to the word because it helped explain that which seemed unexplainable.  To refer to what had occurred as “evil” was to indicate that it was somehow beyond the pale, outside the realm of reason…a bogey of the mind or a bad dream, an aberration that needed to be wiped out much like we would attempt to wipe out a virus from our bodies or a cockroach infestation from our homes.  And who could argue that the attacks had not been evil?  After all, over 3000 people had perished…over 3000 people who were simply going about their daily lives, doing their best to live their little piece of this wretched and magnificent life. 

 

And yet, in the midst of all the ensuing “evil”-speak of the past year—talk of “evil empires,” “evil axis,” “evil-doers,” and such—it seems to me that something is being left out of the discussion. Just what are we talking about when we talk about “evil?”  Is there a trustworthy definition of evil, one that is more universal than just whatever doesn’t match up with our personal beliefs?  I think this is an important question because the word “evil” carries about as much baggage these days as the word “God.”  With so many different understandings of both these words, to use them indiscriminately, as though we all know what they mean, is to attempt to simplify something that is far too complex to be simplified. 

 

Many, including our fundamentalist neighbors, would say evil is a supernatural force that organizes life according to wicked principles. I find it difficult to get my mind around that idea, though, likening it to a description of life as just some demonic stage play directed by Darth Vader.    In my experience, life has seemed too random to be organized for good or for bad.  Life just is. I know there are many who feel otherwise, but I find little comfort in the notion that there is some constant heavenly or subterranean battle between good and evil independent of human action and influence.  That notion seems as irrational to me as the athlete or warrior celebrating his victory by proclaiming God’s goodness, all the while, refusing to acknowledge that if God blessed him, he/she/it damned his opponent.

 

Historically Unitarians have had difficulty with this kind of thinking as well.  In the 19^th century they rebelled against the prevalent Calvinist notion of the time that claimed people are born damned and require salvation.  Instead the Unitarians proclaimed that people are born good and if they do evil things, society itself is to blame and all of its citizens are indicted. This very point was echoed by Albert Camus in the 20^th century when, responding to the horrors of the Holocaust he wrote, “Every society has the criminals it deserves.”[1]

 

I find that Camus’ statement fits well into my understanding of a liberal religious worldview, which is based on the belief that the way we choose to react to what life brings—in other words, how we give back to life—is far more important than what life hands us. Each tragedy we endure, each mistake we make, each joy we experience and each triumph we achieve is only as horrific or as beautiful as the action that follows.  Accepting responsibility for our lives in good times and bad, and doing our best to see that our companions on this earth are tended to as well as we are, is both the challenge and the promise of a liberal religious faith.  It is the challenge because if we forget that we are tied to one another, we will inevitably pay the cost of our disregard.  It is the promise because only when we accept responsibility for our actions will we learn that transformational power is always in our hands: we should not stand around waiting for salvation that can only come when we engage in this life ourselves, on behalf of our interdependent lives and this planet we share.

 

So if evil is not a supernatural force, then what is it? Is evil cruelty?  If so, we’ve got a lot of evil children in our midst, and adults, too.  Is evil simply a general or specific disregard for a universal ethical code? I could buy into that description were it not for the fact that ethics seem to get so diluted in the complicated workings of international politics, including our own U.S. foreign policy.   Until most of us can agree to this theoretical ethical code, evil, at least as President Bush has been using it, will remain devoid of any real meaning.  For example, if the fact that over 3000 innocent people were killed on September 11^th of last year is evidence of evil, then how are we to describe the over 3700 civilian casualties tallied after the first nine weeks of the U.S. invasion of Afghanistan?[2] “An eyewitness account reported in War Times described an Afghan family that had sought refuge in a farm 50 miles away from Kandahar.  ‘One evening while they were sleeping in the barn, US airstrikes killed 19 family members.’  A survivor described ‘the scene where they were running with their kids in their arms, dodging bullets left and right, while they had balls of fire falling down to the earth….’ These people were not Taliban supporters.  They weren’t Al Qaeda fighters.  They were simply Afghans trying to stay safe in their own country.”[3] Sound familiar?

 

I’ve come to understand that “evil” as it is currently being used by the White House is the descriptor for whomever or whatever seeks to destroy our American sense of security, no matter how presumptuous it may be for us to claim the right to be “secure” while most people in the world live lives of unbridled turmoil and need.

 

This is not to say that “evil” is not a useful term.  Throughout history, leaders both secular and religious have used “evil” to intensify a distinction or conflict between themselves and another people or perspective, oftentimes for nefarious ends.  To label someone or something as “evil” is to create an instant polarity.  The speaker automatically represents what is good and the other what is the absolute opposite.  Clearly this is what President Bush had in mind when he described his three-nation “axis of evil.”  He was seeking to intensify the contrast between the United States and these countries…to define where we stand as a nation (or at least where his administration stands) and to make it clear that there was no real middle ground to be sought.  It is either our way, or the proverbial highway.  In this case at least, I have to believe that, internationally speaking, “evil” was a term more convenient than useful.  In fact, I would contend it wasn’t really useful at all.  It was convenient because it made discussion between our countries unnecessary, and it was convenient because it sought to bring comfort to those ever-anxious Americans who would prefer to believe in black and white explanations for multi-colored realities, no matter how unrealistic.

 

20^th century liberal theologian Henry Nelson Wieman has provided a framework to talk about evil that I have found helpful, particularly as our administration threatens to send our military into battle.  Wieman said that in order to understand the nature of evil we need to see it contrasted with good.  For Wieman the highest form of good, the standard and guiding principle in dealing with all problems, was whatever “sustains and promotes the release of that kind of intercommunication” that he called the “creative event” or “creative interchange.”  Creative interchange, as I have mentioned from this pulpit before, is more than listening, more than dialogue.  Creative interchange is the result of mutual commitment to interaction that is grounded in expectations of transformation…without certainty of the outcome.  It’s the kind of interaction that our free and democratic church and our free and democratic nation should serve to accommodate. This kind of interaction, which can only occur when the conditions are right and when those involved in the exchange are committed to understanding and to growth, and therefore to the increase of community between them, is what Wieman called absolute good and he believed it to be the locus of the divine.  If God exists at all, here is where we will find it.

 

In contrast, absolute evil, then, is anything that obstructs creative interchange, and consequently obstructs creative good.  Evil for Wieman, therefore is whatever removes us from the exchange, whatever keeps us from transformation.

 

I think Wieman would view our president’s mission to eradicate evil from the world as a sardonic joke, because the crusade is based on the idea that we hold the truth and others must accept our vision. Not just our chosen enemies, mind you, but our allies as well.  In fact, our unwavering commitment to our own self-righteous stance is in itself evil because it stands in the way of real creative interchange.  This is not to say, of course, that other countries do not also contribute to the obstruction of creative good.  Indeed, no one would confuse Saddam Hussein with Henry Nelson Wieman.  And violence may in fact be necessary as a last resort in national defense.  Nonetheless, our position as a world power demands that we make an explicit commitment to cooperation with our allies and adherence to international law and United Nations’ resolutions and process.

 

I must admit, in light of our President’s apparently voracious appetite for warmongering, I find it difficult to muster much hope for our country in the immediate future.  Nonetheless, I continue to sign petitions, to contact my representatives, and to look forward to the day when we might experience a regime change in our own country.  In the meantime, here is some good news.  Creative good can never be destroyed, only obstructed.  The obstruction to good will only be removed, however, with the development of what Wieman called “emotional maturity.” We all share the responsibility of developing this emotional maturity so that we will all be able to withstand the suffering involved in acknowledging our own compliance with evil.  This maturity develops according to our willingness to do the following:

--to sacrifice

--to accept criticism

--to determine beliefs according to evidence rather than desire

--to correctly appraise our own culture and institutions

--to keep open avenues of communication between ourselves and other individuals, cultures, races, and classes

--to assume responsibility for consequences of our commitments and choices

--to participate in a group not as ultimate recipients of service rendered but as agents for the realization of creative good

--and to reject every basis  for ultimate security and stability other than the creative process itself.[4]

 

These strike me as a great list of guidelines on how to be a better family member, neighbor, church member, and citizen.  They are wonderful guidelines for life itself.

 

When we see can see evil as the obstruction of creative good and when we can develop the emotional maturity to overcome it, we can more easily recognize the truth of a Cherokee story with which I close this morning: 

 

An old Cherokee was telling his grandson about a fight that is going on inside himself.  He said it is between two wolves.  One is evil, anger, envy, sorrow, regret, greed, arrogance, self-pity, guilt, resentment, inferiority, lies, false pride, superiority and ego.

The other is joy, peace, love, hope, serenity, humility, kindness, benevolence, empathy, generosity, truth, compassion and faith.

The grandson thought about it for a minute and then asked his grandfather, “Which one wins?”  The old Cherokee simply replied: “The one I feed.”

 

Closing Words (Albert Camus)

“This is the wager of our generation.  If we are to fail, it is better, in any case, to have stood on the side of those who choose life than on the side of those who are destroying.”