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My son Matthew and I are both what are called ‘artistic personalities.’  This is one of those labels that’s like a rug; you sweep a lot of dirt under the nice pattern.  Anyway, if you remember any high school chemistry, you’ll remember that sometimes when you combine two substances, you can make fire, explosions.  Well, combining artistic personalities in one family, as is the case with Mattie and I, can recreate that high school chemistry experience.

The hardest part about the arguing, the conflict, for me is this:  I always question my worth as a parent and sometimes as a person when I argue or fight or just have a conflict.  How many of you do that, too, at least sometimes?  Yeah, I find that it’s the hardest part of conflict with people.  Differences of opinion seem just fine by themselves; our free thought heritage teaches that differences of opinion should be embraced and cherished.   Well, here’s an obvious point but a point I don’t always remember; the stuff that gets taught, gets taught because we don’t naturally know it.  Naturally, I think it’s hard for us to separate our sense of worth from our sense of agreement with others.

One solution to disagreement for Matthew and I is to play music together:  he on the violin, me on the piano.  Sometimes we play in rhythm; sometimes we even play in the same key.  But there is something that we do together; we give our music to each other, and if the keys are different, this difference highlights the act of mutual, unconditional acceptance of one another that happens when we play music together, or play anything together, really.

Now what I find especially interesting is the way our play also restores my own sense of worth as parent and as person.  It seems as if our sense of worth relies upon the acceptance of others; to feel worthy, we have to be given to, certainly, but even in our giving there is acceptance.  When we give a gift, we desire the other person to accept it.  We desire this acceptance very much.  I want Mattie to give me his music, but equally I want, equally I grasp, for him to accept my music.

I think all relationships have this playful character of giving and receiving.  Some of the playfulness arises from the spontaneity of it; who has ever received the most wonderful gift, in surprise?  Who’s ever given one?    But some of the playfulness also arises from the delightful way the notions of ‘giving’ and ‘receiving’ slip through one another.  To me, they are like the sunlight when clouds move swiftly across the green farm fields.  They are facets of one truth.  And that truth, I believe, is acceptance.  When we give to another, we have brought that person into ourselves to assess what it is best to give.  When we receive, we bring the gift of the other into ourselves.  So in the play of giving and receiving, there is this mutual bringing into ourselves of the other.  This is what I mean by acceptance.

Now this conclusion brings us our topic for this morning:  the first three principles of the Unitarian Universalist Association.  I will repeat them; first, the inherent worth and dignity of every person; second, justice, equity and compassion in human relations; third, acceptance and encouragement to spiritual growth in our congregation.  I don’t know if the order of these principles has any philosophical meaning, but even a mere listing of principles suggests that the first principle is in some way the fundamental one.  In our individualistic culture, it is auspicious to see “the inherent worth and dignity of every person” listed first.  Such a listing encourages our American tendencies to see other important moral and religious truths as flowing from individual dignity, or individual worth.

But of course I’m a freethinker, so I won’t do that, just to be contrary.  I doubt our cultural habit speaks the truth.  I want instead to see ‘acceptance’ as fundamental, and build meanings for individual worth upon relationships.   If we want to understand the first three UU principles as facets of one wisdom, can that one wisdom be play, intimacy, acceptance, rather than individual worth?

Our Whitman reading is helpful here, I believe.  Whitman is often remembered as the great 19^th century expositor of American individualism.  His ‘Song of Myself’ would seem a good example; if the title alone doesn’t raise eyebrows, how about the first line, “I celebrate myself, and sing myself”?  But afterwards, Whitman describes a sense of individuality whose inception comes from the world.  “My tongue, every atom of my blood, form’d from this soil, this air, born here of parents born here from parents the same.”  Whitman’s ecstatic experience of his own unique personhood reveals how all personhood begins with all the others that make up the world. “What I assume you shall assume, for every atom belonging to me as good belongs to you.”  An individual is another place where the rest of the world lives.  Each actuality contains the universe, my favorite philosopher Alfred North Whitehead once wrote.

If each actuality contains the universe, how does individual worth arise?  Our story for all ages shows us how:  individual worth arises from the way others accept us and the way we accept others.  The story is ostensibly about the first principle, the inherent worth and dignity of every person.  Seen in this light, the story is another Good Samaritan story.  But, for me, the story really expresses how compassion evokes our individual worth into being.  Yammani is the protagonist.  In the end, who Yammani becomes depends upon how she gives to others and how she receives from others.  She becomes again the great storyteller because she tells the truth to the people.  She becomes wise because she gives freedom to the Soji.  She becomes a Soji herself because she is accepted as one of them.

But if my message is that individual worth arises from acceptance, then am I saying that individual worth depends upon whether other people care for us or not?  Individual worth is about being popular and liked?   I am saying that life sometimes feels this way.  And while individual worth is not a popularity contest, it can feel like a popularity contest for reasons that are so important, reasons that lie close to our sense of meaning.  To feel worthy, we have to feel accepted by something.  To feel worthy, we have to feel this playful give and receive with something.

When we assert, when our culture asserts, that individual worth is just there, that can be good for political reasons.  When we defend voting rights, gay rights, rights to self-expression, we don’t need to examine the basis of individual worth.  Our sense of the inherent worth of the individual should rise in our throats, should ring across the land like a hammer and a bell, and demand that gays have the right to marry, demand that each person living in this country have free access to good medical care.  But when Aristotle began his Politics with the line “Man is a social animal,” he does not follow with a tabulation of the rights of the individual.  He follows by saying that the worth of any human individual depends upon how the society forms that individual.  So there’s the big issue these three UU principles raise; individual worth is so important to us, acceptance by others is so important to us, how can we reconcile them without turning life into a popularity contest?

So I want to tell a sailing story.  I’ve told it before. Once I had a morning of the most perfect sunfish sailing.  The hot sun shone bright upon the leaping green-blue water so that diamonds of light flashed and danced with the leaping waves.  And I, too, in my little boat, leaped and danced with them.  I was accepted; I was not just a lucky observer watching a beautiful summer scene, I was a part of that beauty. I gave my gift of skill with boat and wind, which sun and light and beach accepted, and I accepted the gift of wind and wave and hot sun.  What happened to me was, I played.  I played with sun and light and wind and water.  Never have I felt more like myself in that morning, never have I felt more worthy, adventuring south in my boat, the world and I accepting one another.

We need acceptance to be worthy, yes, but not always the acceptance of our culture or even of other people.  What we really need in the end is the acceptance of the world, or if you prefer, the cosmos.  The feeling of individual worth follows from experiencing someone or something out there giving to us who or what they are, and that someone or something receiving from us who we are.  That’s how I felt on my sailboat; the wind, the water, the light, and I, together we gave and we received, and in our play we made a single moment.  It is this activity of mutual giving and receiving – it is play – that forms individual worth, play not just with our culture, not just with other people, but with the wider world.

Play needn’t mean sailing, or running around like a 7 year old.  Walking is playing, conversation is playing, art is playing, reading is playing.   Play is this activity of mutual acceptance or, the way I like to put it, the gift of play is intimacy.  Who has ever laughed with another?  What happens?  You live now inside one another.  Who has ever said, I must paint that sunset, I must write a poem about the aroma of a September apple?  What happened then?  The apple lives inside of you, and you, a little bit, live inside the cells of the apple.  This is intimacy; through play we bring the life of others into ourselves.  We establish our worth by holding in ourselves the life of others, and in giving our life to others.

The first three UU principles speak of affirming individual worth, compassion in human relations, and acceptance of one another.  Here is my re-working.  Play.  Play with others, play with the world.   In the intimacy of play, you will find your worth.

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