"The Builder’s Creed" - the Reverend Alison Hyder

August 30, 2003 - the Unitarian Universalist Meeting House of Provincetown

There are times when I look at what human history has been and I say, oh, okay, there have always been people like us who get a momentum started, and then it dies down and nothing becomes of it. Ant it’s a hundred years before those thoughts are resurrected. But there’s a little voice in my ears that insist that I continue. It insists that something really important is happening here, something that is going to have an effect here for years. Something that is going to make a significant change in the world.

MEDITATION: by Max Coots

It’s the little deaths before the final time I fear.
The blasé shrug that quietly replaces excited curiosity,
The cynic-sneer that takes the place of innocence,
The soft-sweet odor of success that overcomes the sense of sympathy,
The self-betrayal that robs us of our will to trust,
The ridicule of vision, the barren blindness to what was once our sense of beauty -
These are deaths that come so quietly we do not know when it was we died.

READING: “The Builder’s Creed”

I watched them tearing a building down
A gang of men in a busy town.
With a yo, heave ho, and a lusty yell
They swung a beam and a sidewall fell.
I asked the foremen, “Are these men skilled?
The men you’d hire if you had to build?”
He laughed and replied, “Oh, no indeed.
Just common labor is all I need.
I can easily wreck in a day or two
What builders have taken a year to do.”
And I asked myself as I went away
“Which of these roles have I tried to play?
Am I a builder who works with care
Who measures life by a rule and a square?
Who gives to his neighbors the best that he can,
Who builds to the scale of a kinder plan?
Or am I a wrecker who walks the town
Content with the labor of tearing down?”


SERMON: “The Builder’s Creed” - Rev. Alison Hyder

Labor Day used to be a holiday to honor the working class – to commemorate and celebrate honest labor, hard duty, the people who farmed the land and dug ditches and spent their lives in factories making carburetors and pillowcases and packing boxes. It lifted up the common man and gave dignity to washerwomen and shop girls. Now, of course, it is more symbolic of barbecues and traffic jams, as people try to get in one more vacation before the colder weather interferes with our plans. With more and more people working from home and carrying – and answering – cell phones at all times and hours, the separation between work and leisure time is eroding. People are expected to be on call, alert to their work, 24/7. Are our jobs more fulfilling, more worth the while - more respected? Or are they simply more demanding?
Whether we are accountants or midwives, building roads or building up our congregations, we each face the same challenge. How do we give our efforts purpose and meaning? What will be our legacy to those we love, and to our communities? How are we using our gifts of skill, of intelligence, of sympathy?
Michael Josephson, in a commentary on Los Angeles Radio Station KNX 1070: said, “I’ve spent more time than I’m proud of tearing things down, usually in the name of honest criticism and constructive analysis. I used to pride myself on my ability to see the flaws in arguments, ideas, and even people. When others said I was being negative, I’d reply that I was just being realistic. When others would get excited about some new idea, I was more likely to look for ways to burst their balloon than to help them launch it.”
Josephson read “The Builder’s Creed,” which asks,
“Am I a builder who works with care
Who measures life by a rule and a square?
Who gives to his neighbors the best that he can,
Who builds to the scale of a kinder plan?
Or am I a wrecker who walks the town
Content with the labor of tearing down?”
And he concludes, “There are different ways to use intelligence. The easiest is to be a sideline cynic dismantling, criticizing, and warning. It’s harder to use critical analysis not as an end point, but a beginning. A builder sees problems as challenges and seeks solutions; a dismantler sees problems in every solution. A builder sees flaws and tries to fix them; the dismantler sees flaws in every fix. We need more builders.” [quoted by Rev. Jane Bechle, “We Shall Rise From the Ashes,” 9-23-01, Pacific Unitarian Church]
There is such a thing as constructive, honest criticism – or maybe we should say, critique. Telling an employee how they could be more effective, letting a friend know the effects of their appearance or actions on other people, teaching children or immigrants the culture’s norms of manners and safety can be a kindness. Some jobs, like acting or research, include regular peer comment or review. But the point of all of these communications is supposed to be positive and helpful, if not plain loving. The speakers are supposed to have examined their own motivations and feelings so as to come from a place of concern and healing. The point is not to wound, but to nurture.
Far too often, however, criticism is a weapon of competition or malice, used only to make the speaker feel superior. It’s mostly thoughtless cynicism masking as wit, as opposed to cruelty, but such comments – whether overheard in a crowd or “shared” at a dinner party – can cut deeper than the hate-filled rhetoric of a bigot like Fred Phelps or Jesse Helms. You always hurt the one you love, because those are the very people who trust and depend upon you. Your words matter. And so no matter what you do for a living, or how you spend your days, your choice is always between being constructive and creative and loving to other people, or making the world a sadder and lonelier place – for others, and for yourself. Because eventually, inevitably, negative people drive other folks away.
Sometimes, however, we are our own worst enemies. Whether we are replaying childhood messages of inadequacy, or comparing ourselves to other people, it’s likely that most of our criticism is heard between our ears, and not by them. Society resents people who are openly boastful and complacent, but only seems to encourage our tendency to downgrade and criticize ourselves and measure ourselves against others. So we look for the worst. And then, of course, we find it. And we brood and worry and get more and more insecure.
Baltimore city school teacher Lelane Schmitt used to come home from work frustrated and discouraged at her failings. Three students in particular challenged her power. Eventually, though, Schmitt realized that the problem was not her students, but her own focus. “I recognized that the time immediately after school, when I puttered around the classroom preparing for the next day, was positive and productive. Minutes after, though, as I walked to my car and began to drive home, episodes from the day would float through my thoughts, and in each episode I would see something I’d done ‘wrong.’ By the time I got home, I was convinced that I had failed and that I was a mediocre teacher at best.” Her husband grew weary of hearing her sad tales. She faced each morning with anxiety. Schmitt decided to counter this destructive pattern of self-denigration. Each afternoon, before she started her drive, she wrote on a special pad three or four examples of ways she had been a good teacher that day, no matter how small the example seemed at the time. At every stoplight, she would read over her list. She learned to block the negative messages and began to see herself as an effective, affirming teacher. Sharing these new kinds of thoughts with her husband improved Schmitt’s communication and her marriage. Plus, she says, “The daily ritual reinforced the self-confidence I needed to begin each new day with my first-graders. In the classroom, I was eager to be with my students and full of energy for all the acknowledgement children crave. I was choosing to affirm myself.” [Meridians magazine of the Traditional Acupuncture Institute, Columbia, MD, Autumn 1997, pp 26-7] By shoring up her own foundation, Schmitt was able to build a stronger and more affirming climate for her students throughout all their moods and demands. She could see what was possible, and not focus on the things that could go wrong.
Schmitt developed her new strategy through a small group workshop. The group allowed her to brainstorm, and they helped to give her the perspective to see the pattern she had made and isolate her destructive behaviors. They sympathized with her insecurities, but they didn’t validate them. Instead, they dwelled on constructive responses that allowed her to grow in purpose and power.
Unfortunately, some people work in environments that are competitive and hostile, where people form cliques or try to prevent others from succeeding. Even our relatives and friends can be jealous and resentful, denigrating us and encouraging harmful and excessive behaviors. We may have been that kind of friend, ourselves, whether through insecurity or immaturity or a simple lack of imagination. After all, our culture sure doesn’t promote tenderness or serenity. We are not taught how to find inner strength, or encouraged in a simpler lifestyle. Cultures require a certain degree of predictability and conformity to be stable. And of course, the marketplace influences us and molds our desires.
And that is why our relationships are so important. We need to find, or build, or at least envision, a community of people dedicated to healthy, creative, constructive behaviors, to optimism and to actualization. Many professionals belong to peer review or support groups. Like most ministers, I have several, both of clergy and of members, to help me be creative and positive and effective in my ministry, and they are crucial to my health. For a lot of people, AA and other 12-step programs serve a similar role, by encouraging and expecting their growth and health.
Being able to be honest and open with others is incredibly healing. Speaking out loud is powerful. All of a sudden, these thoughts and feelings and concepts become more real, more concrete, three dimensional, somehow. And therefore they are easier to assess, realistically and constructively. Secrets shrivel in the open air, their power lessened. Fears are confronted, and dreams validated. I can’t tell you how many times people have left a counseling session with me, happier and lighter just because someone heard their story.
But validation is important to more than our mental health. We have the choice to encourage and envision a better society, or to complain and criticize and tear things down. Change is seldom achieved in isolation, but within a network of support and enthusiasm. As Helen Keller said, “The world is moved along, not only by the mighty shoves of its heroes, but also by the aggregate of tiny pushes of each honest worker.” Behind every great idea, every bold movement, are a hundred hopeful dreams.
Journalist Malcolm Gladwell reports, “…We are inclined to think that genuine innovators are loners, that they do not need the social reinforcement the rest of us crave. But that’s not how it works, whether it’s television comedy, or, for that matter, the more exalted realms of art and politics and ideas.” Most of the major schools of philosophy and religion have been “part of a movement, a school, a band of followers and disciples and mentors and rivals who saw each other all the time and had long arguments over coffee and slept with one another’s spouses.” In fact, new ideas and concepts “tend to arise out of social interaction – conversation, validation, the intimacy of proximity, and the look in your listener’s eye that tells you you’re onto something.” [Malcolm Gladwell, “Group Think” The New Yorker, Dec. 2, 2002. Gladwell references Randall Collins,The Sociology of Philosophies, above, and Jenny Uglow, The Lunar Men, below]
These associates don’t have to be from the same fields or backgrounds. Jenny Uglow relates the story, Gladwell reports, of

a remarkable group of friends in Birmingham, England in the mid-18th century. Their leader was Erasmus Darwin, a physician, inventor, and scientist, who began thinking about evolution a full fifty years before his grandson Charles. Darwin met, through his medical practice, an industrialist named Mathew Boulton, and later, his partner James Watt, the steam-engine pioneer. They, in turn, got to know [the Unitarians] Josiah Wedgwood, [who developed] the famous pottery, and Joseph Priestley, the [Unitarian] preacher who isolated oxygen and became known as one of history’s great chemists, and the industrialist Samuel Galton (whose son married Darwin’s daughter and produced the legendary nineteenth century polymath Francis Galton) and the innovative glass-and –chemicals entrepreneur James Kier, and on and on. They called themselves the Lunar Society, because they arranged to meet at each full moon, when they would get together in the early afternoon to eat, piling the table high, Uglow tells us, with wine and “fish and capons, Cheddar and Stilton, pies and syllabubs.” Their children played underfoot. Their wives [gathered] in the other room, and the Lunar men talked well into the night, clearing the table to make room for their models and plans and instruments.
When they were not meeting, they were writing to each other with words of encouragement or advice or excitement. This was truly – in a phrase that is invariably and unthinkingly used in the pejorative – a mutual-admiration society. “Their inquiries ranged over the whole spectrum, from astronomy and optics to fossils and ferns. One’s person’s passion – be it carriages, steam, minerals, chemistry, clocks – fired all the others.” …Darwin, in a lovely phrase, called it “philosophical laughing,” which was his way of saying that those who depart from cultural or intellectual consensus need people to walk beside them and laugh with them to give them confidence. But there’s more to it than that. One of the peculiar features of group dynamics is that clusters of people will come to decisions that are far more extreme than any individual would have come to on his own.

The Lunar men prodded each other to action. They were active in the campaign against slavery. Wedgwood built a model factory town for his employees, which included schools and clinics. He, Watt and Darwin pushed for the building of canals to improve transportation. Priestley invented soda water and the rubber eraser, and discovered oxygen, carbon monoxide, and ammonia. He eventually emigrated to Philadelphia, where he helped to found the first American church designated as Unitarian. In their friendly competition, the Lunar men encouraged each other to take risks and aim high.
With the right kind of community you can create an environment both safe enough and stimulating enough to make great ideas possible.
And that is one reason that we come together here. We are looking for a place where we can test our ideas against the beliefs of others, and honor both our doubts and our commitments; where we can grow into new skills or find another channel for our creativity or our passions. We need to be with others who struggle with issues of evil, of injustice, of suffering and despair. And we need to know people who answer hatred with compassion and strength, and who live their convictions into existence with beauty and courage, so that we, too, can build a life of purpose. This congregation, this Meeting House, is a home for our dreams. Our love fashions the walls, and opens up the windows to the light of wisdom.
Maybe you struggle to forgive someone, or are challenged by a frustrating or unpleasant relationship. Every problem offers an opportunity, even if it is only in your own attitude or approach. Each one of us has the power to heal, and not to harm; to raise hopes and inspire confidence and harmony in our friends and in our communities. We need more builders. Together, we make the positive possible, one heart at a time.
Let us give thanks for this work, and for each other, as we sit in silence together.

CLOSING WORDS: by A. Powell Davies

The world we know is passing: all things grow strange; all but the stout heart’s courage; all but the undiminished luster of an ancient dream – which we shall dream again as [so many] have dreamed before us,
pilgrims forever of a world forever new.
And what we loved and lost we lose to find how great a thing is loving and the power of it to make a dream come true.
…after us there is the Promised Land, strong from our sorrows and shining from our joys, our gift to those who follow us along the road we build singing our song.

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